Kate Stewart: Today I'm here with author Jay Jones, who has his first book coming out, and the title of it is A Bilagáana Boy Among the Navajo. So welcome, Jay.

Jay Jones: Thanks, Kate.

Kate Stewart: Before we go any further, I'm going to give a full disclosure that I helped Jay with writing the book. He came to me when he had a draft and needed some help with revising it and getting it ready to publish. So, I'm very familiar with this book. I know it well. I've read it many times.

Let's get started. And let's see, the first question I wanted to ask you is, just so our listeners know, what's the general gist of your story?

Jay Jones: Well, the title, as you mentioned, is A Bilagáana Boy Among the Navajo, or I guess an appropriate subtitle is, How Did a White Kid Come to Live on the Navajo Reservation? Because Bilagáana means white person in the Navajo language.

My memoir chronicles my four years living on the reservation, the Navajo Reservation, beginning in the late 1960s, when I arrived there at 7, almost 8 years old. My mom and stepfather worked for the BIA, or Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is how I came to live there.

Kate Stewart: Right. So that's, and how many years were you there total?

Jay Jones: About right at four years.

Kate Stewart: Yeah. So, I think it's interesting that your book it really focuses in on those four years. It's a slice-of-life kind of memoir. I wanted to ask you, why did you feel the need to write this story, to make it public, and to go into such depth about that time in in your life?

Jay Jones: Well, I knew I had a unique story, and for the last 30 years I kept telling myself, I'll write a book about what I went through, and it was just a matter of time before I finally decided to move forward. Another was that I figured no one cared or would want to hear about my life or events on the reservation, and that probably stemmed from my insecurity and guilt talking to me about how I was treated as a kid by my parents, and I never really shared anything with anyone.

So, I guess part of it, too, I wanted to also tell readers out there that despite dysfunctional families and situations that you have no control over, you can still overcome them. Stay strong to yourself and keep being persistent to what you want in anything.

Kate Stewart: Yeah, it's a really great message. So, when you decided to write it, and you just sat down at your computer, how did you approach that? Did you have a method for telling this story?

Jay Jones: Right. Yeah, that's a that's a really good question. And I tell people, you know, I always never really considered myself a writer and had no idea how to how to begin thinking about writing.

But somewhere in the early stages I was doing some Google searches and came across an article on memoir writing that said, “Just write down 50 stories you want to share in your memoir.”

And I thought, Okay, that's easy. I knew many stories that I could easily recall, and over the course of about two hours, I wrote about 46 stories, not didn't quite make 50, but 46 stories, just one sentence of each thing that I wanted to cover on a yellow pad. I just wrote out one sentence. It only took about two hours, and I didn't quite come up with the 50. But it was a good enough start.

I guess the next step was just that I began writing out descriptive details in a word document about each story in chronological order. The order wasn't exact, but the timeframe was close enough, and I just kept writing it this way, and as I did, more and more details kept coming to me.

Kate Stewart: And I guess you did a little bit of research, too. Did you look up things about your time there that you hadn't remembered clearly?

Jay Jones: There were a number of places, different locations in Window Rock and throughout the reservation and in Gallup, which was the nearest town we did most of our shopping and errands, doctor's appointments and stuff in. But yes, I relied on Google to help me with a lot of that. And of course, you know, newspapers’ archives like the Navajo Times, they just solidified the stories that I recalled, and I was able to pick up more information just by doing research here and there on what I remember, and incorporated it into the stories.

Kate Stewart: I know a lot of this story is, I would say, can be a little bit hard to read, maybe painful. I'm sure it was painful for you to write, because I guess we would imagine a typical white kid showing up on a reservation and connecting with people, learning from them, having this wonderful positive story.

But your story isn't always positive. I know there are incidents where you were bullied, and you were also going through abuse stuff at home by your stepfather. So, how did you write about those difficult things? How did you decide to approach them?

Jay Jones: Yeah, I was. I guess I was just honest about them and what happened. You know, the entire story, the entire memoir is completely true. I mean, I knew I could change people's names in the memoir, but I wanted the reader to know the full effect of what it was like living there. I knew as a kid much of the bullying came from how Navajos were treated by the white man in the past, and I was in a place and time to just to have to deal with some of those repercussions. The Navajo are fine people, great people. I have strong regard for them, and what they have overcome in the suppression of what the white man has done to them. But overall, I just did my best to endure living among them, and you know, just wanted to be honest about what happened living there, you know, during my time as a kid.

Kate Stewart: Yeah. Can you talk about some of the really great experiences that you had there that you enjoyed?

Jay Jones: Oh, there were quite a few, without giving too much away, I guess I'd have to say the many trips I took. There's a character in the book called Grandma Begay, my next-door neighbor or neighbor who lived across the street. His grandparents still lived just like they did 100, 150 years ago, out in a hogan, way out in the sticks, out in the boonies, and I went to their location several times. I only documented three times in the book only because there's something bizarre happened on those three occurrences, but there were other times where I went there, and it was pretty much uneventful. But Grandma Begay was just the mellowest, easygoing person you'd want to be around. She was just very receptive and comfortable with me as a white boy, and I would say that that was something I enjoyed writing about and look back on.

Along with I learned to ride a horse from Dean Jackson and participated in a rodeo in Winslow. Arizona. That was really something I enjoyed, writing about or experiencing, but just being a kid hanging out on the reservation, too, just riding my mini-bike or sledding during the winter.

Kate Stewart: Yeah, yeah, some of those are really…

Jay Jones: There's some fun stories.

Kate Stewart: Yeah, they're fun to read. Did you ever, when you were going through and writing, did you ever have writer's block or difficulty getting the stories down? I know some people get discouraged and think, oh, I'm never going to finish this, and they stop for periods of time. Did you ever go through that?

Jay Jones: There were many times, but I was in no hurry to get it finished, and really didn't get serious about writing it until maybe 2018 when I retired. Although I had 46 stories to share, writing them really proved challenging. You know, I wrote out everything I could recall about the events, and knew I'd come back at a later time and rewrite it.

But if I was on a roll in my writing, and the thoughts were coming easy. I just kept going, because, you know, writer's block is going to come, you're going to sit down one day, and it's just some stuff just won't happen.

But the most important part, really, is just to write and write and just get it all down. You know, I didn't focus on the grammar or punctuation, as you know.

Kate Stewart: Right.

Jay Jones: I mean, I just knew that it could be fixed later and after many rewrites. I planned to work with an editor that would work with me to make it more of a flowing story that readers would like, and thanks to you, it turned out that way. It turned out good.

Kate Stewart: It was fun to read from the beginning, but it was great to see how you improved it over time.

Jay Jones: Yeah.

Kate Stewart: So, I was wondering, too. I know a lot of people when they're writing in a certain genre like memoir in your case, they look to other books to kind of see what other people have done on similar topics, or just similar styles. Were there any that you looked at as kind of a model?

Jay Jones: Not no, not really. Not memoirs.

Kate Stewart: No, you just…

Jay Jones: But I mean, since I've written this, I've become more interested in them, and you know I've been inspired and enjoyed reading one.I just finished a couple months ago was called Cloudwatcher by Nancy Atkinson. Nancy’s story’s theme, is kind of similar to mine even though she was younger. She was a white girl that lived on the Navajo Reservation in the 1950s, when her father ran a trading post and a tourist store on Route 66. It's a really good story, and I like that.

But overall, I guess I like nonfiction. And you know, big into psychology, self-help, motivation, inspirational stuff. Right now, I'm reading probably one that a lot of people have read is Solito by Javier Zamora. Another good one, where he was a kid about my age, 9, 10 years old, who came from El Salvador to the United States illegally. But it's kind of an interesting memoir as well.

Kate Stewart: Yeah, that sounds interesting. I should note that down. Were you ever concerned about people reading it and finding these things out about you, or, I guess there probably weren't too many people who are still around who are extensively mentioned in your book. Do you think was that ever a concern that they'd be offended or upset about by something you wrote?

Jay Jones: I really wasn't concerned about the people I wrote about in the book, because most of them… those that are in the book. I tried to find them, and they're long gone, and this took place so many years ago. Many of the characters are all deceased now. But I wasn't that concerned about the people that knew me. But there, but really about being honest about people that I know today, what they would think. Because I bared myself and my insecurities in the memoir. And now, as the book is released, I wondered today, I wonder what people will think as my friends and neighbors are asking, “Oh, Jay, I heard you wrote a book,” and it's like, “Yeah,” I said, and then I tell them I hope you might read it and enjoy my adventure, and knowing that hopefully, they'll learn something new about me, too.

But yeah, not the characters of the past, not worried about, but those today, you know, I just kind of wonder, well, what are they going think? You know you just don't. You don't know. I know I'll probably get some criticism about something in the book. But I'm not taking anything personally and won't lose any sleep over what people might think about it.

You know, today I have the self-confidence and security that I just didn't have before. So you know, it is what it is.

Kate Stewart: Yeah, well, I think everybody, every person who's written a book worries about what people are going to think.

Jay Jones: Oh, yeah. No question.

Kate Stewart: It's it is a common feeling. I'm curious how did the process of writing a memoir, do you think it changed you as a person? Or do you think it changed how you looked back on your life in kind of a different way?

Jay Jones: Yes, when I left my teen years, I knew I had a pretty abnormal childhood, and what I experienced could have broken many, many boys, you know. I went through a lot and somehow managed to come out of it. But I really wanted to get on living with my life, and was so focused on doing so, I never really felt sorry for myself. I just went on trying to make a life for myself. I always think back, I could have easily probably become a criminal or a big-time drug user, just based on suppressing my inner pain and guilt of the crap that occurred. But I just kept my self-talk positive, and I just kept overcoming the challenges and the problems that I faced on a daily basis, and just tried to rid myself of the insecurities laid on me by my parents and some of the Navajo there, and it probably wasn't, Kate, until my forties that I that the ice began cracking, and I needed to try to forgive everyone. That's kind of how I look back on it, how things transpired. I guess writing the memoir really helped to solidify that, and just forgive all of those of the past. You can't belabor it, and just to just move on, you got to do that.

Kate Stewart: Yeah, that's interesting. I think for a lot of people. It's kind of a therapeutic process to write a memoir.

Jay Jones: I agree.

Kate Stewart: If there's something pretty traumatic in it, a lot of people tend to come out of it kind of healed afterwards after just telling it and getting it out there in the open.

Jay Jones: Yeah, exactly.

Kate Stewart: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about you know how the steps of your decisions and how you decided to get your book published.

Jay Jones: Yeah, that's that was a real challenge, really interesting. Like everyone that writes a book. I really wanted a traditional publishing deal knowing that my story was as good as anything the big publishers could put out, and I was, you know, I knew if they read the transcript, they would, it would probably go. It would fly. But you know, over a six-month period, I queried around 140 literary agents, and maybe 25 publishers that accept manuscripts from authors or author submissions. And I received 0 responses. I mean, I was like dumbfounded. I mean not one, not one wanted to see the manuscript. So, I was surprised. And then I realized, well, memoirs like mine are, even though it's a good story. It's a tough sell for writers and literary agents are mainly interested in celebrity or famous people.

Kate Stewart: Right? Yeah, yeah, it's really tough to get a memoir published when you're not super famous. It's a hard thing. Doesn't mean it's not worth reading or writing. I think there is kind of a market out there for the memoirs of ordinary people who kind of live through really interesting, extraordinary things.

Jay Jones: Right, right. Yeah. In the end, I decided to self-publish. I don't have the knowledge or experience to self-publish, and I didn't really want to learn it. So, I hired a one-stop shop publisher and someone that could work with the e-book and print version and format it and do the cover design and the metadata optimization. And the big thing for me is, I wanted global distribution, so it'd be available anywhere in the world.

I went to these one-stop publisher companies, and you know, that's a do it your all kind of thing you have to. You know, you have to pay them. They don't work for free. But they did the whole thing for me, and then, the end result, I'm very happy with the outcome.

Kate Stewart: Yeah, yeah, it looks fantastic. I'm holding a copy of it right now, and I love the cover, and the layout looks fantastic, and I know it's a great story. I'm just so happy to see the finished copy, you know. I’m just so happy to see a finished copy.

Jay Jones: Right? Yeah, I took that picture on one of my trips there.

Jay Jones: It turned out pretty good. And one of the other things, too, is, you know, in the publishing process, I wanted to get some editorial reviews right away and I went to one of the really most popular editorial reviews called Readers Favorite and was able to get four 5-star reviews from them, and I stuck their logo on my book cover. Hopefully that'll inspire some people to know it's that it's worth looking at.

Kate Stewart: Yeah, for sure. You mentioned that you went back, I guess you've gone back a few times in recent years to go see Window Rock and that area. What was that like to go back? I know you wrote about it a little bit at the beginning.

Jay Jones: Yeah, it's well, it's not the same, you know. I don't know. To me, it just everything seemed a little bit more depressing. It's kind of run down. Everything is still there. I don't know how to describe it. It just is kind of drawing a blank right now, but it was good to see the sandstone formations, which are very attractive, and Window Rock. But the Navajo are still struggling. Their poverty is immense there and alcoholism is still prevalent, not as severe as it was what I saw in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. But you know, you can't help but feel for them. But there's so much beauty, and if you just drive around there, and so many incredible sights to go see from Monument Valley to Canyon de Chelly and Window Rock and Shiprock, and all the other places. It's just cool to be there.

Kate Stewart: Yeah, yeah, it's an amazing place for sure. So, I wanted to ask if you, hopefully, there are people out there listening who are working on their own memoirs or thinking about it, and I wanted to ask if you had any advice for them now that you've gone through the whole process.

Jay Jones: Yeah, don't wait as long as I did, you know.

Kate Stewart: Yeah.

Jay Jones: I would say, get started. Don't listen to other people if they try to detract you. People will say, “Oh, you can't do that. You don't know what you're doing, or you don't know how long it'll take.” If your inner self-talk is saying, you can't do it too. Don't listen to it, you know. Just if you have a good story and something that you want to share, you know. Begin like I did by writing down just 50 events that you want to document. It just takes to write out one sentence, it just took a couple hours to write down 46 for me, you know about things I wanted to talk about or cover if necessary. You may need to research the details and dig out old photos or scrapbooks to rekindle memories like I did. Talk to people if they're still around, you know, and what they remember. Work with a coach like you. I know with the book coaches nowadays, they can help motivate and inspire people a lot more, and then just keep writing and rewrite and fine tune. Get the editorial help and figure out how you want to publish it. You may not have an end date in mind, but it gets closer as you get finished, as you get towards the end. But just keep persisting at it, and it'll all evolve. But you know, don't wait to get started, I think is the main key.

Kate Stewart: Yeah, yeah, I think that 50 stories method is really interesting. I think that is a good way to just get the juices flowing to see what you have.

Jay Jones: Yeah, I just wrote the 50. They weren't in any order. I just wrote them out. I want to talk about this thing I did or that thing, and I just wrote them out. And then, after completed, then I decided, okay, I'll start trying to get it in an in order that that they occurred. It wasn't precise, but it's it was like I said, close enough.

Kate Stewart: Okay. I know you have some events coming up to do talks and readings. Could you talk about those?

Jay Jones: Yeah, I've got I'll be doing locally here in the Tucson area. Well, first of all, I encourage our readers out there if you'd like, you can go to my website, I have the entire first chapter of the book on my website. My website is my name Jay Jones, J-A-Y Jones author, all run together, .com. So jayjonesauthor.com. You can read the first chapter, and there's a lot of other good information there.

But locally, here in the Tucson area at the Barnes and Noble store, I'll be doing a book signing on Saturday, May 10, from noon to 3 and that's the Barnes and Noble on La Cholla, and at the Barnes and Noble store on Broadway in on June 14th That's from noon to 3. So May 10th at the westside Barnes and Noble, and then the other one is on the eastside Barnes and Noble on Broadway on June 14th. I'll be there to sign copies and talk more about my story and that kind of thing.

Kate Stewart: That sounds really fun. Hopefully people will be able to come out and see it. Well, is there anything else you want to leave us with before we wrap up?

Jay Jones: No, I just like I want to thank you for you know the time and energy you put in my project. And I certainly couldn't have done it without your help, I mean especially the flow of the story turned out turned out better than I probably would have done on my own, or I'd probably have to spend another six months to a year to get it going good. But I think you did a phenomenal job, and I thank you for that. And hopefully our readers will get some inspiration from it. Like I said, part of the reason I wrote it was just that if one per persists and overcomes any kind of obstacles, you know, it can happen it. Things like this will come forth to fruition.

Kate Stewart: Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, thank you for being here. I just want to encourage anybody, if you're interested in Navajo history or memoirs or books about the Southwest, I think this is a phenomenal book. So, thanks for being here and talking with us.

Jay Jones: Thank you, Kate.

Kate Stewart: Okay, great.

Kate: Okay, we're back. This week is National Library Week. I'm here with my mom today to talk about her long career in libraries and all the things that she has done as a librarian, which is quite a lot. So, thank you for being here, mom. Thanks for coming back.

Mom: Oh Kate, you know I'd do anything for you dear. Especially talk about libraries since that's something.

Kate: I know, there's so much happening in library world right now.

Mom: Well, that's true.

Kate: The stakes are high, I guess.

Mom: The Stakes are very high. have something precious to we have to defend access to libraries funding. Yes.

Kate: Yes. So, the last time I interviewed you, you talked a little bit about how you started working in libraries in high school and in college when you were at OBU. Want to say anything more about that before we go on to other stuff?

Mom: Yes. No, I'll just say that you're right. It was ninth grade when I realized I could get out of study hall by volunteering to be in the school library. In this time when we were together before, I did talk about how that was my first introduction to a banned book, though the phrase banned book wasn't used, but I found out about books that weren't allowed to be put on the shelf because our high school librarian didn't think they were appropriate for kids.

And then my work study jobs, both at OBU and at University of Oklahoma. OBU was in the regular, they just had one library, but at OU, I got to work there in the physics library. These were both work study jobs. So ,they were good exposures to me about libraries and how they work and how different they are, even the idea that there were these specialized libraries within the departments at OU was eye-opening to me when they took me over to the physics building, to the physics library. But, I still didn't think much about library as a career. It never even dawned on me to think about that. That happened much later in life. It actually, in midlife, when you kids were getting pretty much older.

Also, during that time when I was young and married, we would go back and forth to your visit your grandparents in Lubbock because your grandfather was in library work and had been the director of the library in Muskogee, Oklahoma. And then when he transferred and got a job out in Lubbock, and he was the head of the city-county library there. When we would visit them, I would see these journals around the house. Maybe you remember them too. They were always stacked up on the coffee table and on that hearth of their fireplace, which I don't think they ever ,can't remember there being much of a fire.

Kate: Too hot for that there.

Mom: But he always had stacks of American Libraries and Booklist, Library Journal too. But I didn't and I would look through them all the time when I was there, and I loved looking at American Libraries because it had photos of libraries around the U.S., and it had little articles about what they were doing and I loved looking at Booklist and looking at book reviews and then and that was when you were just a toddler and in grade school and then here to think that you grew up later and were a contributor to Booklist for how many years?

Kate: You mean Library Journal?

Mom: That’s right, Library Journal?

Kate: Yeah, I wrote book reviews for them for a long time. At least ten years, maybe more than that.

Mom: Yeah, you did. Yeah, and at the time, mean, just think about that connection of seeing those at grandpa's. And one time he actually mentioned to me, you should think about being a librarian, but it just seems so distant and far away and unconnected because at that time I was just a full-time mom to the three of you. And I didn't have any thoughts of even returning to the workforce.

That did happen later when you were in fourth grade and I, at that time when your dad and I were separating, I had to think about getting a job and at the time I couldn't think of any possible job I could do other than maybe being somebody at the checkout at the Safeway.

But your fourth-grade teacher was married to a children's librarian at Kansas City Public Library. And he told a few of the PTA moms that they were having trouble filling a job down there. I was desperate at that point, and I knew it was part-time. So, I applied for it. I told him I would apply for it. I think he is the one who recommended that I would be okay for the job, which turned out I really wasn't very good at the job. But it was something for me to do and it got me. That was like what kickstarted me getting back into working in libraries and figuring out how I could become a librarian. And that job was working in the children's library.

I was actually collating book reviews on children's books. When I think back about how it was for their selection committee. The selection committee was made up of the children's librarians at each of the branches in the Kansas City Public Library District, and they would meet once a month. They would be, they always got this great selection of free books that were sent from publishers, children's books. So ,I was opening up those boxes of these sample books from publishers and making a little card for each one of them, a 3x5 card and filing it alphabetically. And then they had all of these review journals like Kirkus, and I can't even think of all the titles, but there were probably four or five or six of those. And they would have already read through them and checked off the ones they were interested in. So, I was to look for that book within the pile that we had that came from the publisher and write down whether the reviews were positive or negative. I would put plus or a minus, which issue of which review journal it had come from and stick those inside or have them inside the book covers. And then when they met, they would pass around the books and actually look at them, read them and evaluate how they scored. And that was how they made their selections.

Kate: Wow, okay. That's interesting.

Mom: It's well when you think back to work that was involved.

Kate: Oh, I know. I remember one of my first library jobs, I remember I would help out with a little bit of that, like look through book reviews. The librarians would pass them around and like do check marks on which ones they were interested in, and I would read through them too. It was fun.

Mom: As a staff member, mean, later when I was working in a library, we passed around the journals, I would be looking at the reference books or the audiobooks when I had that collection for reviews. But you know, there was no other way to do it than by print. And you had to move that journal along. People would come to see what was stuck on your desk that you haven't finished and moved along, because we all had to share it.

But when I listen now and hear about the controversies that go along with children's librarians and what's in the library and what parents approve and don't approve and all of that controversy. And then I think back to those women that came together once a month and passed around the actual copies and read them and did personal selections for what would be appropriate for the children in their neighborhoods, at their neighborhood libraries based on their income or based on maybe the ethnic races that attended that. It just, I don't know. I just think that was kind of like the glory days. But then they really took their jobs so seriously. They really were nurturing these little minds and they wanted everything that they had on their shelves to be something that could add to their childhoods in some way.

Kate: That would have been around, was that like ‘88-ish? ’89?

Mom: Yes, that was late, very late ‘80s. The only problem with me was I was so slow and was such a slow typist. You was that, that the librarians.

Kate: They told you you were slow.

Mom: Yes, I was too slow, and I had to speed it up. And I, that's when it kind of fell into place that, I'm a cog in their wheel. Yeah. This is not just for me, know, own enjoyment. So, I had to adjust to that.

But the thing is, from that position, my friend Jan, who you've also interviewed, who was a children's librarian, she was going to take a library course. And it was through Emporia State. And they had just started, that was a library school that was just about to be discredited.

Kate: Oh no.

Mom: It was like one year away from losing its accreditation. So, they had done something kind of risky, and they brought in a new group of faculty. I'm trying to think, from Syracuse, New York. And there were three or four of them, maybe more, at least four, that came from Syracuse with this new idea of how they were going to kind of revamp library school. They were going to come in and teach management skills. They wanted to teach how to do community assessments. They were going to try to elevate the status of a of a librarian to being a real profession. The whole issue we talked a lot about what makes a profession and how is a profession differentiated from just a job, that this is actually a profession.

It was bringing in this whole new idea of how to teach library skills and teach people to go into libraries with a different maybe perspective than they had in the past. And a part of that also was that they did distant learning. Instead of, which really was a boon to that department in that small school. They doubled or maybe even triple the size of their student body without any having to add anything for the infrastructure of the school to support that because they were, this was when distance learning, I think was even first being born as a phrase. And so, they would send their faculty, they figured out which large locations, metropolitan areas did not have a library school close to it.

Denver was one of the places. I know for sure in Kansas City, I mean, though Emporia was about, I don't know, three-hour drive away, but because I did have to take some classes on campus, but they were sending their faculty up to run a weekend course. You'd go on Friday night, get introduced to go back and spend all day Saturday there. And then you'd go back Sunday till noon and then you'd be given assignments.

And we were in little cohorts of groups of people that you would work with. Then they'd come back in like six weeks, four weeks, six weeks, and you'd meet again for another long weekend, and you would do your projects that present your projects that you had been working on. Jan had learned about that and she, I believe, had taken one class and said, you ought to do this, come with me, let's do this, we could do this together, because she was newly divorced too.

And I had been looking around the library enough to realize while I was down there, if I wanted to get into a position that could pay well, I was going to have to get a master's because it was either you needed a master's or you needed 15 years’ experience. And my 15 years’ experience had been spent in the kitchen. So, the only way I could sort of launch myself into getting in, making it a career and a profession for me. I thought there's no way I'm going to get into graduate school, but Jan said, “No, you don't have to do the GRE or anything. You can just, as long as you pay tuition, you can go. And later, we'll worry about that later.” So, it was true. You could take, I think you could take maybe 12 hours before you had to then take the GRE.

I also at that time found out that Kansas City Public would pay a little bit of my tuition if I, you had to keep like a C level. I applied for that and nobody else, maybe one other person was doing that. And she was doing it with the library school in Columbia. And I was doing it at the one in Emporia. This was a program that they offered. They had the funding, but people didn't really take much advantage of it.

I did it, and it worked for me. I was able, I eventually moved out of the children's department and over into what they called information services, which today you would know as reader's advisory. This was also when the Kansas City Public Library was transitioning from the card catalog to the online catalog. So that was a big deal, was teaching people how to use the online catalog. You had to be ready the minute you saw them huff and puff and get ready to jump up, make it easy for them and show them they could still search by the same parameters they did before by the topic or by the author or by the title, and they could do it from one spot and they could hop back and forth. You tried to walk them through that frustration.

And for a while, I remember your grandpa talking about that too, what they had to go through that down in Lubbock at the time. And people just didn't trust the computers. But anyway, so I was pretty good at that because I had been doing so many things with you guys as you were growing up with the different groups that you were involved in, scouting and Sunday school and things like that. I was pretty good at giving instructions to people that were feeling frustrated.

Kate: They were just like children.

Mom: Like children that needed a nap. Yes, I had to talk calm and be totally free and tell them what a good job they were doing. So, I really kind of thrived in that. found a niche to be in, I guess. Plus, I loved dealing with the questions that people asked. That just was interesting to me to be able to figure out what their source was that they were really looking for.

So, I spent a couple of years there, and I even did a job share there with another gentleman who had a preschooler that he wanted to be home with. We had to write up our request to do this. But we wrote up a request where we actually shared a desk, we shared a collection, we shared a budget. And that was my first collection that I actually got to nurture along, and that was audiobooks on tape.

He and I shared the collection of that. I did literature and poetry, and he did the nonfiction and business. We shared a desk and when they would write us in on the calendar, they would just use both of our initials and he and I would figure out who was going to cover on which days. Because my schedule could shift according to what classes I was taking. Then the big hump came when I had to take the GRE to actually stay in library school. And I don't know if you remember, but I took a course at UMKC to prep me for that, which was worth every dollar I took. And I still barely went through by the hair of my chinny chin chin with being able to get in. But also at that point, see, I had had like three classes or maybe four, maybe three, and I'd had an A in all of them.

And so, they didn't care. So anyway, that's why I was able to stay in at Emporia. And actually, I probably started there around ’89, and I really did not expect to finish before your brother finished high school. I thought he’d be out of high school before I finished that master's, but I was out in May of 93. So I beat him.

Kate: One year, I I guess I must have been in. I think it was eighth grade.

Mom: I thought you had one year with Austin with Nick in school.

Kate: I did. But yeah, but when he was a junior, I would have been in eighth grade. I remember going out to him for you for your graduation.

Mom: Okay. After my graduation and the very first thing we did…

Kate: You got a new car. Or maybe that was when you got a new job.

Mom: Yeah. When I got a full-time job, because at that point I was still well, actually, my job share had ended. And, and so I didn't have a job, there was not an opening at Kansas City Public at that time. And so that was when I also at that point, my Cobra insurance had ended. I needed to find a way to have insurance for myself. You guys were still covered under dad. I had been on the graduate student insurance at Emporia State. Somebody had talked to me about, take some graduate courses at UMKC. That's when I took that course in archives and one in special collections. Because the way they did their graduate, for graduate students, you could have student insurance under the graduate school program, and it would cover you for the whole year, not just while you were taking courses. Though for undergraduates, it was just the semesters that you were taking courses. And I was curious about that, and they said, “Well, because graduate students sometimes have a semester off for a project or something.” So that's why they covered them yearly. So that was my stepping-stone for one. I had my catastrophe insurance through UMKC. And that was a really good program for me because of those classes, because when I did the special collections course, we toured the special collection libraries there within Kansas City. We went to the Linda Hall. Remember the Linda Hall Library? Science and technology library. We visited that. We went to the Clendenning. That was a library of history of medicine, which was fascinating. And then we to Kansas City Star Library, the Marr Sound Archives. It introduced me to a whole kind of level of libraries that existed that weren't public. It never even really crossed my mind, you know, to do. That was a good experience for me.

Also that summer, I ended up signing up with a service there in Kansas City that placed people part time or just not even part time, but almost like, what's less than part-time, little short job. Temp jobs. Yeah, that's it. So they had temp positions at law libraries to kind of go in looseleaf filing. And I was vaguely, vaguely familiar with what the phrase looseleaf filing. But that job was at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, another special library that we didn't even know existed. That was way downtown in Kansas City, really like on the 10th or 12th floor of a huge building down there. And that was exciting for me to be driving into Kansas City and taking that elevator all the way up into that library. It was just me and really one other person much younger than me who ran the library. But I spent that whole summer working on the Commerce Clearinghouse collection. They were like the insurance laws for all the state. And they had so many piles, these packages would come in for the loosely filings of how to keep those laws, law books up to date. The one person working there never had time to work on it. Because once you get interrupted by a phone call, finding where you were when you left off, just doesn't work. You just kind of have to work straight through because you're the way you're collating things. That was a very much a learning experience and very boring, but it paid ,and it was something I could put on my resume. So, so I did it. It's like when I used to tell your kids to do one hard thing a day, that was my one hard thing to do for that year was all that looseleaf back filing.

But then the job came open at the Johnson County Library, and I have a feeling that could have been kind of a temporary position maybe for somebody that was on leave or something. But anyway, I got hired to do it. I had done some training in real reference work at Kansas City Public, but I'd never really been alone on my own at the reference desk before that. But I was getting used to learning different reference sources and the kind of the standard by which you do reference. I learned that at Kansas City Public because they would let me go upstairs and kind of was like kind of partially training me, I guess, in case a job came open. Anyway, I learned so much more about it when I was at Johnson County. And Johnson County was a perfect position for me because it was just, what would you say?

Kate: Two blocks from where we lived, the Antioch Public Library.

Mom: We had to cross a vicious highway to get there. The other thing I loved about that job was that kids from your grade school would come by there after school. And it was their hangout. And I knew their names. I knew who they were. And I looked at them so differently than the other staff that was at the reference desk. These would be like the sixth graders who were finally allowed to walk to the library after school. And they would be rowdy at their desks, and the staff would be rushing around trying to shush them. And I was thinking, but wait, I know these kids. They're nice kids.

Mom at the Johnson County Library in the 1990s. ©Mom

Kate: Remember when we came for the Russian timeline? We'd have all those books out there. All the ninth graders came together.

Mom: Yes, yes. And see, and that was the other thing. Yeah, all the ninth graders who had to do make their Russian timelines. And now I knew when they were coming. “You're doing your Russian timeline. Well, who do you have? “And I could take them right over to our Russian encyclopedia. And I loved it when they came in with different assignments, because they would have been the assignments that I knew you all had had. So, I had been connected to those kids as they came in. So that was really, really a fun time for me when I was first getting acclimated to working reference and that it happened to be in a library in our neighborhood was really kind of fun for me.

And then they had some collections there. Their librarian, their director was from Minnesota, and she had some really good ideas that she did with that library. One of the things was that she really was trying to find ways for that library to fit into the county community because it was a county library. Kansas City Public had been a city library, but even more than a city library, it was a library's district that was tied to the Kansas City Public School District. That was, its boundaries or the school district boundaries. It wasn't even so they had a smaller district than if they had been the Kansas City city district-wide library.

Kate: I didn't know that. Okay.

Mom: How that would work. That would have been the boundaries of the city, and they would their tax base would have come from everybody that you know, paid a tax who lived in Kansas City area, but Johnson County was a county-wide library. And it surrounded Olathe, which was our county seat, because Olathe stayed a city library. I always refer to them as the whole of the doughnut. We surrounded them. It was a very big library with a lot of branches. When I joined that library was really at a peak time of growth. Also, it was a highly educated population that lived there. So, you didn't have to think up programs to get the people to love you at the library. The people demanded programs. The people, the population there picked up the library and carried along because of the amount of use it gave the library, the support they gave the library, and it just was an amazing place to work.

And they had such an extensive reference collection. Kansas City Public had an old reference collection that was very academic and very educational. It was a wonderful place to start, but Kansas, but the thing that was different about Johnson County was what they had in the area of business. Your interviews that you did with your dad about working at Marion Labs and Ewing Kaufman. The Kaufman Foundation was really ramping up a program that they did there for entrepreneurs, a program that people applied for. And this was a big push, maybe with small business, maybe there was federal funds that came down to push this idea of small business and getting local businesses going in America. The Ewing Kauffman Foundation did a great entrepreneurial program.

And a part of that was that these people had to write up, they had to come, I believe, with an idea of a business they wanted to start. Maybe that was part of getting into the program, but while they were there, they learned how to write a business plan that they would then take to a bank to try to get a business loan. They started a program, and I don't know who reached out, which way, it was the library that reached out to them or them to the Johnson County Library, but they started a program of having these people come over and learn to use our reference collection and all of the resources that were there to help them learn how to analyze their population of who their customers would be, where they lived, what their incomes would be. They needed to be able to look and see who their competitors would be. And so we needed business databases, business directories that would give information about other, all the businesses within an SIC code, their business kind of identification number for the type of business that they did. And they needed to be able to research who are my competitors and what's their territory and how close I to where they are, things like that. And what things are these, people that live in this county and in this area, what are their interests?

We had all kinds of directories and books that gave kind of statistics on leisure activities for people in this area. How many own pets, you know, how many go to the movies? It was all guesstimates. But the fact that it came from a book and a reputable book with a citation, it could go into their business plan. We had a wonderful business librarian there who was just so generous in how she taught us how to use that collection. And then I got a wonderful librarian there that did their federal documents, their documents librarian, who's she did a little program she called a docs chat. And I don't, it may have been, don't remember how often it was, but it was before the library opened and we would go into the federal documents collection where things have a whole different way that they're put on the shelf. They're not by topic.

Kate: They have their own call numbers.

Mom: Yes, they're instead of being put on the shelf by topic, they're put on the shelf by the agency that produces that document. And she would take us within an area, and we would be looking at what the Department of Interior would be in that area. Well, what do they produce? You know, what are they collecting about Americans and what are they producing? Why would you, what would, if you were, I don't know, I can't, it's hard for me to come up with a good example, but the fact that we then had to begin to think about if somebody come in and asked particular questions about whatever, and maybe it was something that the feds collected and had done an analysis on which department would collect it. mean, we could use the catalog, but still.

When you're in a collection like that, you always want to look what's came before and what came after this document. What are things that are related to it? That was a wonderful education for me to have this woman at, and she turned out to be my manager. And then while I was doing all of this, and this was me just as a general reference librarian, Johnson County also had developed a little subset of documents called, for local government documents because this county had about 23 little cities in it. They were they had an area it was called Urban Affairs Information Services and was the Urban Affairs collection where we collected the city codes, city planning documents for these little cities and then a collection of resources like things published maybe by the Urban Institute or International City Managers Association or National Association of Counties. Documents that they produced were shelved in that collection. Well, it seemed to me like a boring area. I didn't know really what was in there. And it also seemed very confusing to me. But the girl who had it, the woman who'd had that position, she was quitting and was going to go, I don't know if she was going into business for herself, but she quit pretty quickly and they opened it up to other people on our staff and nobody applied for it. And I was the newest person there. I'd probably been there about four or six months, maybe six months, maybe I just passed probation period. I just thought, and I still think I was sort of in a temporary position, but I knew even though it seemed so overwhelming to me, I knew I better try this. I better go for this because it's permanent. And so, I did. I knew nothing about it, but I got it. It scared me so much that any time I was not on the desk, was in those stacks of that collection, pulling every single thing off the shelf, looking at it, seeing who published it and what was in it. It was kind of maybe a four shelf, five shelf area. But I was desperate to not lose this job. I was desperate to figure it out. And I turned out to be something that I just loved doing.

The librarian there, our director, because I was new in that position, she set up a day with me where we went around and visited every county agency in Johnson County. And she took me into the director's office of that agency and introduced me, and I was to be their liaison. That if that agency had any questions, they needed any like census data, if they were writing a grant and they needed information about kids of a certain age range in the county, what their needs were or anything like that. They could call me or email me and then and because I had this kind of little plus, I could get out of whatever I was doing because that came first.

One of the things that really dawned on me as I was working with county agencies and while I was working with that collection was every month, I would get these publications, one that came from the ICMA, International City Managers Association, and one that came from National Association of Counties, NACO. They were little booklets about, and you could see what they were doing from their association level. They were trying to create data and information that would be interesting to people that worked in those positions. They always add a little section of good ideas from other counties and good ideas from other cities. What programs they done that were successful and how you could replicate it. I would always flip through these before I would put them out on the shelf and see what things were going on.

And what dawned on me that I thought was so unfair was that they always had libraries listed under leisure services. They would have things that dealt with utilities or wastewater, I don't know, different agencies, the human services agencies, and here's leisure services, and there are libraries and parks. I thought it seemed so labeling, because leisure just meant it was for fun. And leisure meant it was for the weekend, or it was for after five. And yet, in my position there of working, you know, as a liaison between the county offices. For me, the library was what you did at work while you were at work, while you, to make your work better, to make your work more efficient, and it just always, in fact, I even wrote a letter. I know I remembered arguing with them about putting libraries with leisure services, but it was trying to change something.

Kate: They thought of people going to get their romance novels, right? That’s all they do at the library.

Mom: Yeah, that's all they do is they get their, you know, their book of the month thing or travel books. And I want them to be getting their statistics, their policy.

But another wonderful thing that happened to me while I was there at Johnson County, and this was in the ‘90s toward my end of my career there was our library had one position that worked directly under our director who was the grant writer for and so anybody within any department within the library that wanted a grant, she would be the grant writer for that. And you had to kind of go through her. I don't know if this happened through her, if either she wrote the grant, but I have a feeling that that's not what happened, that what happened was it was a juvenile justice grant. And you would never, mostly when you're in library land and you're looking for grants, you're looking at things from American Library Association or IMLS or something like that. And suddenly here comes a grant from the juvenile justice department.

And there was a big push in the ‘90s for juvenile justice and to try to change the lives of kids that were maybe on a path toward becoming criminals or ne’er-do-wells that might be in the system later and at a more expensive time to house them for many years. They were trying to capture these kids and find out what they could do when they were younger to turn their lives around and to avoid that kind of a future for them. I think it was the juvenile justice department at our county that came. One of the ideas that they had was in Johnson County that there wasn't a clear source for parents to turn to when their kids began to sort of act out and through that the county that we lived in they were, I think, maybe a little soft on kids, or maybe more so than if you had been across the county line in Kansas City and you were picked up. But they wanted a resource, one spot that parents could go to, to get information. They came to the library to say, “Could you create this if we get the grant?” The people above me orchestrated all of this, and they got the grant and when it came time to do it, I was asked if I would work on it. This was really kind of over my head. But I did know as a mom that when you have an issue, sometimes you don't want to ask your best friends like how do you handle this?

Kate: And you had some experience with a child who was in juvenile justice or whatever.

Mom: Well, a little bit. When you're dealing with teenagers that can run faster than you, and you don't want to talk about it necessarily to your best friends because you don't want your family's laundry out there wherever you see it. I really took it to heart. What I got to do was to go down, first of all, and meet with the juvenile justice office in Johnson County and meet with the social workers that were in there and talk to them about, what they had was a gigantic filing cabinet filled with pamphlets from different organizations. And they were filed under different topics. I spent a day down there going through that to see what kinds of things they collected, who produced this kind of information.

Then I also, I started thinking about it from every perspective of it's not just the parents that need information, but it's also the kids that need information, and it's also teachers, you know, maybe that need information. So, from this was born this website that we created, and I pretty much I worked on that by myself at the library with the help of county agency people. And I had a lot of time off the desk to do it, which was kind of a hard thing at work because not everybody that I worked with thought it was fair that I wasn't on the reference desk as much as I used to be. But they ended up using some of that grant money to hire somebody to come in part-time and work my reference desk hours, because I really was working on this around the clock.

I came up with a website, we called it jocofamily.net and the JoCo, Jo for Johnson, Co for County. But our library's website was jocolibrary.org maybe. We got the URL. I didn't even know how that was done. They hired somebody that I worked with on creating the website. I had time to work with him. I could tell him my ideas, and he could make it work, which was wonderful. And slowly began, I learned how to populate this. The other day, because you told me you wanted to talk about this, I went on, that website doesn't exist anymore because when the grant ran out, they didn't keep the project going but you can find it on archive.org.

Kate: It is? Yeah, that's cool. I'll find it.

Mom: You can see the website, and I had it arranged that when you first came to it you selected which entry point you wanted and whether it was parents, for students, or for professionals. And I ended up having the whole section in there for kids. Besides parents, mean, one of the biggest issues I thought was kind of a glossary of terms that once your kid gets picked up for something and you're suddenly put into the position of having to deal with people in juvenile courts, in the juvenile system, they throw a lot of acronyms at you and a lot of phrases. You know, is your kid on detention or is your kid on diversion? And you don't know what the difference is. The first thing I started with was kind of a glossary. How to spell out what you might be coming, those phrases that you need to know what they mean, but you don't know who to ask what they mean. And then for kids, I put in the same kind of things, but also information about teen suicide, also information about becoming, I forgot the phrase, but if you want to get your independence from…

Kate: Being emancipated?

Mom: Yes, emancipated, you could, what's the process of becoming emancipated because kids that want to run away, that's one of the things they're thinking about. I also had an area where they kids could ask questions, and it was anonymous when they went into a little form and all of those questions, and I got a lot that kids asked, went down to the juvenile court system and they created the answers. I didn't do any of those answers.

But being able to work on that resource was so good for me because it really made me think about how is information organized so that the user can find what they need and how do you make it the easiest for them to get to. So, that was a huge growth experience for me was to, well, for one thing, learning all about urban affairs, local government and collecting local government documents and working, doing research for county agencies and then putting together that website was a really pivotal time for me. And then, then I ended up deciding to, this was when you guys were all, Nick, our oldest, had brought my only grandchild at that time out to Oregon.

Kate: Before you go, can you talk about when the library moved to that new space?

Mom: Yes, that was amazing, wasn't it?

Kate: Yes.

Mom: To be part of that, how you move a library is very interesting.

Kate: Yeah, and that used to be like a big box store. I forget which store.

Mom: It was like a Best Buy or something like that, I forgot the phrase, but it was kind of a local one and it was it was just one big vacant square building.

Kate: Because I guess the Antioch Library was like the central library, right? But it was pretty small. It wasn't that big of a building.

Mom: It had been very small, and they had a little annex building where all of the area where the books were processed. What there's a name for that.

Kate: Like tech services?

Mom: I'm losing my lexicon of library terms. The tech services was in another building, and you had to, you know, like run in the rain or through the snow or ice back and forth. And they weren't face to face. So, if you had a question about a collection, you either had to call them or run over there. They want to everything in one area. They were they were looking for land ,and land was very expensive because the county was just doubling, tripling, they were growing, growing, growing. And where could be that it wasn't on the outskirts but could sort of still be in the center of the population area?

I don't know who it was, if it was our director or who, but got this idea that maybe we could do something with that big box store that had been sitting empty for so long. It really became a beautiful setting when they finished. Nobody could not really picture how is this ever going to look like a library. But it did, and it actually was featured, I remember, in an American Architectural Digest. It was on the front page of that, what they had done to kind of pop out the front part of the building. It also was where it was located was on a very busy street, but it had a big parking lot in front. It was sloped. I remember that was an issue for how to make an ADA when it was sort of sloped area, you know, to have ADA parking.

But also, there was a park right behind it. And of course, you didn't ever see the park because that was a big box that you were in. Well, they pulled out the back of it and made a huge floor to ceiling window, and that was like a reading area where you could look out and all you saw was the grass behind you. They structured the parking lot so that there were no cars in that area where that window was. A car might drive by, but it didn't park there, so you had this beautiful green view and where they put chairs. And I think that was also the area where they had art hung up on the walls to do art exhibits around that area. It came in way under probably what they had originally budgeted because it already had all the utilities to it, and the structure was there, and the structure was sound enough that they could just add onto it to create kind of tall ceilings and big light. I don't know if you remember when you walked in, there was a huge area that they blew out the ceiling with a big skylight that brought in light.

Design for the new Johnson County Central Resource Library upgrade in 2021. Courtesy of the Johnson County Library.

Kate: That was really nice too.

Mom: It was amazing. And though it really had the touch of the 80s with all of the purple and green, kind of purple, turquoise shades that were in it.

Kate: Yeah, I'm trying to think what year that was. I think it was when I was in high school.

Mom: Yeah, it was before you graduated. It was right on the cusp of, because they had started looking for that land, you know, and I had gotten my job up there, which, well, that would have been in ‘94. I got my job there at Central. So maybe you were a senior or maybe it was when you came back home from college.

Kate: Well, I feel like no, was in high school because I remember it's probably my, I remember going my senior year when the internet was like this new thing. And you brought home that like Newsweek article about the information superhighway.

Mom: Oh I did?

Kate: Yes. And I don't know if you remember this, you made me go to work with you to use the internet for like the first time. And you put me in this room with a computer and you were like, here, use the internet. And I didn't know what to do, what I was supposed to do.

Mom: Well, I was always bringing home things.

Kate: It's really funny. Yeah, I think I remember that room, too, they had like a reference, phone reference room, whatever that was called with a huge, that ginormous lazy Susan with all the reference books on it. That was so cool.

Mom: Yeah, the gigantic lazy, that was that's where we had phone reference. There were four stations around a huge wheel that was filled with.

Kate: Like double decker. I don't know, it was neat

Mom: Two shelves of reference books so that you could spin it to get what you needed. was and I think somebody that worked for the county made that for them. It was special for them. And then we were moving that library. I remember they had some company that came in that wrapped the shelves while they maybe that what they did was they had shelves on wheels that they pulled up next to the shelves, shifted the books over, wrapped them in like gigantic heavy-duty saran wrap on big trucks, hauled them down, and then they rolled them out and you could shelve. So that was how they moved the books, and that numbering system for that I know had a lot of complications built into it so that when you pulled them off and put them on a shelf and rolled them and pulled them back off, they were in the right order. I think there were some goof ups with maybe some of that based on which staff member was taking them off and putting them on and didn't quite understand the direct order, but everybody was involved. Everybody had to be on hands on deck for that move. It was quite a kind of little bonding experience.

And then the funny thing about it that people that did that, they ended up having the architects and builders, they ended up kind of being the favorites of the library community. Every time a branch was built, they were called in. And every time they always had the same complaints at every branch that the children's area wasn't insulated enough from the rest of the library. It was noisy and that the skylights always leaked.

Kate: That’s funny.

Mom: But, yeah, but then I just jumped ahead and told you that I ended up moving out to Oregon. About you and Austin were off at college and nobody was coming home to the big house. So, I was ready to move on and have an adventure of my own. It involved me quitting and selling the house and moving out to Oregon and restarting out here.

And I did have the foresight when I came out, before I left Johnson County, to photocopy, see, at the time I would have said Xerox, because we didn't say photocopy, all of the pages of the American Library Directory for Oregon. I brought out that section with me when I came, which was a wonderful little directory that told you everything about a local library. I don't know how often it was updated, but it gave even the names of the director, how many staff they, how many reference, how many were part-time, what the budget was, how big their collection was, what their specialties were, if they had any specialties. And see, there was even a time in my life when I filled out some of those forms when I worked in different libraries. You would have to, they would use staff to send back the data.

But anyway, I brought that out with me not really knowing if I was going to get another library job out here, but it turned out that I did. I was out here for about maybe close to nine months when I realized I was going to have to get a job for me to stay out here. I ended up walking into a library that wasn't too far from where we lived. It was a Clackamas County Library and talked to the man on staff there about what jobs and library jobs. And at the time, he got excited to find out my experience and that I was new to the area because they needed an on-call. That's about the first time that that ever worked out for me, where you just walk in and talk to somebody about it and they say, yeah, come on down. Well, I did get a job with them. It took a while to go through the parameters that you have to go through to get hired on it at their county. But I did get an on-call job, which I worked regularly in two different locations that they had. Always the worst hours, always Saturdays and Sundays and evenings. But it worked out because then I could be to be with Audrey and Hadley during the day if Nick and Beth needed help with them. So, that worked out for me.

And then I gradually added a part-time job down at Woodburn, which was another little town. It was about a 45-minute drive, but it was a great, I loved that little library. That's when I really began to be introduced to the different kind of ethnic groups that were here in Oregon, because that library sometimes when I was there in the evenings, I might be the only person in the library besides maybe one other staff member that spoke English because they were either Spanish speakers or Russian speakers because it was a very populous Hispanic town. And also, the Old Believers moved into that area. I really loved working at that library. It was a library that was really used by the kids in that community. Nights and weekends it was packed with kids and there would always be a few of them that were really there to do their homework, and they would come up and you'd have an opportunity to really help them work on a paper, maybe you know an essay they were writing or something like that. I really loved that part of that job.

Then I had just added on a third part-time job at Wilsonville when I had applied for a job at the State Library and that came open. I ended up spending more than a decade working at the State Library. And that was very similar, in a sense, to the job I had at Johnson County because I was working with state agency employees. So, at the State Library, the portion that I worked in, they worked on what's called an assessment, and that was codified. That was part of state law, so we didn't have to worry about losing money for our portion of the library. But the group that worked in reference there and collected the documents that the state produced, state documents, state reference, each agency paid a little assessment fee. It was called Government Research Services was the portion I was in. They may have changed the name by now, but they paid a little portion to fund us, and it was based on the number of employees they had, the number that were registered to use our services and then the amount of usage that they did. We licensed databases for them to use. I was introduced to a whole extra raft of even legal databases that I hadn't been used to before when I worked there, but it was still the same kind of position where these are people at work that are writing policy.

They’re maybe looking up… I remember one request I had that came from someone that was working in a senator's office, and they wanted samples of laws, gun laws that had passed easily in other states. And so, the kind of questions you got, you really took a lot of thought and research and how do you know I can find out what passed, but now I have to find out what passed easily.

Kate: I guess you're sort of like the, or did they have something like this? I was thinking about like at the Library of Congress, how they have the Congressional Research Service, you know, that's the kind of stuff you were doing, like at the state level.

Mom: Yeah, they also have a legislative admin that really does that for them. But theirs is more probably based on a lot that has to do a lot of what they do is like the cost of the law if it comes in. Analyzing and helping to write up the summary statements and things like that for a law. But they also do research. But this was, it all kind of fits in together, I think. Each area complemented the other to be able to give people that are working on the issues that your state's dealing with. One of the first questions I had when I got here was somebody from transportation that wanted me to find articles about concrete and how the effect of salt water on concrete because he was working on bridges all along the coast where you can have that water that's a mixture of fresh water and salt water, and the deterioration rate. I mean, all kinds of things from public health. It was just fascinating. And every day, it was something new. And every day, part of it was doing research for them. Part of it was teaching them what databases were available and how to use the databases.

I just always felt like people don't even realize, and it breaks my heart today when I hear what's happening to federal employees, because just like state employees, but on just a broader level, the good work that these people do for their communities, their state, their constituents, these agencies. They're all there in every part of your life. I mean, every part of your life. What I mean is throughout the day, things that your state or your county or your city provides for you, you touch every day. When you turn on the taps in the morning and you have clean water, to when you can drive over a bridge that doesn't fall down, to when you can flush your toilet and it works, or you get your food stamps when you need them, or you can open up a fresh case of strawberries and not get some kind of illness from them. The way they can so flippantly let these people go today and not try to protect those jobs just breaks my heart because it's like, they're not the ones that are extra or using up. They have nothing to do with the financial issues.

Kate: It's not wasteful to have them employed.

Mom: Yeah, actually, they're the ones that are saving because they are so efficient. And these are people that really, they're in their jobs because they love their job. There's something about it that they're drawn to. So that was my job at the state.

Mom’s last day at the State Library of Oregon with the grandkids, 2016. ©Mom

And then right as I was finishing at the state, I ended up getting a job over at Willamette Law School Library. I was probably there for five or six years, and that was part time. that was because the law school was so close to the state library, literally just two blocks away. I could leave my work at five or five till five and be over there at five o'clock and stay till nine. I. But it wasn't a tiring day.

Kate: It must have been a long day.

Mom: But it wasn't a tiring day.

Kate: That work was pretty easy to do sitting on the desk.

Mom: Mainly it was pretty easy. When you got a question, it was really hard. The thing I loved about it was the person who hired the student workers, because there was always a law school student, and they had to be a 2L or above. So they had to have already had one year of law school under their belt before they could apply for that job. And they were over at the checkout desk, which is also where the books that were on reserve were kept. If I was stuck with helping a brand-new student, they were always there to help. But most of the time, it was kids that would walk up to me, I remember this, walk up with their laptop open to page on Amazon books and ask me, do we have this book in the library? And I would say, “Yes, we do. And let me show you how to use the catalog. And while we're using the catalog, let's bookmark it on your computer, on your laptop, so you'll know what we have in the library. Now let me show you how to find it.”

And I got to know, I got to do a lot of really interesting work there for one of the law professors who did not want his class to use online resources. He only wanted them to use text resources. When they would come in, I would always say, “You're so lucky you've got Dr. Harry because he wants you to go to the shelf. Let me show you where the law is.” Or it could be even just looking up something in a law encyclopedia. But if it was a law that we were looking up, I could always say, “Now, when you're working on that issue, you're going to want to look before and what's after. Where does what you're looking for fit into the whole of what you're looking at?” Otherwise, they're just looking at something that pops up as a paragraph on a screen and they don't get the breadth of the breadth of knowledge.

Kate: The full context, yeah.

Mom: The full context. I'd say, “You're so lucky that you have to go to the shelf and look for this.” Even though I think they didn’t think they were. But you could talk it up, you know, on your way. And so, I learned a lot. I kind of had to scramble, you know. And I ended up putting together a couple of LibGuides. Remember LibGuides?

Kate: They still use LibGuides.

Mom: I ended up making a couple of Libguides for them on Oregon law. And I forgot what else but doing that really makes you, the librarian, do your own research and figure things out. So that was also a really good position for me to have toward the end of my career.

Then after I retired, well, we got a new director there who did not want to keep those of us who, because we had a lot of part-timers there. I think about four of us that filled in for nights and weekends and gradually got rid of all of them. But anyway, I was just glad to be able to, to get to have that experience during my life. My life as a librarian.

And then at the very end after I retired, I'll just throw this in a little fun thing I got to do. The year I retired was the year that granddaughter Willa was in fifth grade. I asked her mom if she would mind if I volunteered at Willa's school one day a week, and she said, “No, have at it.” And I ended up volunteering in her school library. I had Wednesdays with Willa. It was a good almost hour and a half drive to get there from here, where we lived, to get out to her little school, which was through her town and out in the country. I wanted to be there when school started, when the kids first came in and came down the hall. I would stay in this school library until maybe the last 45 minutes of her day. And then I would go in her classroom and do some things with her teacher or for her teacher. Or her teacher would have things in there. But I was there on Wednesdays because that was the day that she had library. So, she and I could wave while she was in the library.

And that was very eye-opening to me to see what school libraries in Oregon were like. Very kind of heartbreaking to see that they, in her school in particular, you know, she didn't have a librarian or library staff member that read to them. I don't think I hardly ever heard her read a story to the kids. She mostly put in little videos that they watched. And it was really a madhouse of getting books back on the shelf in between classes, having all the fairy books in one section, all the dog books, all the cat books, the dinosaur books, the Minecraft books, you know. It wasn't just simply reshelving, you had to think, okay, now where do the fairies live? But I loved seeing the kids, and I loved, I was glad to get to be there and even see how that level of library works also. So that is my life in libraries.

Kate: Yeah, well you also worked at Salem Public for a little bit too.

Mom: I did, when I retired. Yeah, was on call down there. It was like, okay, one more thing.

Kate: You just can't quit.

Mom: Yeah. I wasn’t quite done.

Kate: Were you kind of bored with retirement?

Mom: I was. Yeah. Yeah, so I did. I got a job down there and they were a librarian, a great deal of flux when I was down there. And I moved down from being on the reference desk to also being at the checkout desk. And I wasn't really good or fast at making change. So, I did work down there too. That was the finale.

Kate: Can you talk about now what you're doing with this vote coming up that will fund the libraries?

Mom: Yeah, I've been campaigning for a library levy that's going to be voted on here May 20th special elections and it's a levy. It's an option, local option levy. In Oregon, property taxes back in ‘97, there was a Measure 5 and then Measure 50 . Maybe it was Measure 50 and then Measure 5. That really limited completely the growth that property taxes can have. They can only grow at 3%, I guess, a year. And even though your house value can grow dramatically and plus our population has grown dramatically since ‘97. And so, the services that our town, our city that funds with, that funds those services with general funds and general funds, property taxes are what funds, general funds, there's just not enough to support, not enough general funds. We're about 13 million short for city services such as libraries and parks and our Senior Center 50+. So, I've been campaigning and working by the guy who's been heading up the library part is my old boss the old state librarian.

Kate: Who used to work for my grandfather, right?

Mom: Right. His first job out of library school.

Kate: It was so funny, yeah.

Mom: He was in Lubbock. The threads that run through library land. Was that he, yeah, his first job out of library school.

Kate: Yeah. That was it in Lubbock?

Kate: He was the business manager. And I don't know where he, he went from there, what his next position was after that. But yeah, then I bumped into him out here. I'm sure we probably met him at some time when you were real little.

Kate: Yeah, we might have. I remember him taking us. I remember they had a wonderful collection of like puppets for kids. I don’t know if you remember that at the Lubbock Public Library. That was fun.

Mom: I do remember we went down and see the puppets because their children's librarian had written a grant to do this puppet library program and didn't really think she'd get it. And then she did.

Kate: Did they have a whole puppet theater or something? It was really elaborate.

Mom: Yes, they probably that was part of the grant was having that elaborate theater belt and then doing the puppet program. So, she had these beautiful puppets down there. Grandpa took us down to see the puppets. And when I mentioned that to Jim, he said, “Oh yeah, I remember the puppet grant. So I have a feeling.”

Kate: He must have been there at that time.

Mom: We probably got to meet him. But anyway, so now I'm working with him again on this library levy. I've been doing that on Saturday mornings. I've been down at the library where we're handing out information and reminding people to turn in their ballots, hopefully. They're voting yes for the levy. We'll see what happens on that. Kind of a bad time to be asking people for more. But if they don't have more, they're going to definitely have a much, much.

Kate: They’ll have to cut back hours or something.

Mom: Our library has the fewest number of hours of any of any city our size in Oregon, well, fewest staff. It's way cut back already. We're not open past five during the week. We're not open on Sundays or Mondays. Even getting Saturday hours was kind of a miracle you know. And the bad thing about it is they did have a bond that totally rehabbed this library and allowed them to really update and upgrade the community rooms that are down there. Plus, we now have study rooms, which are small rooms that we never had before. And now they're not available on Sundays, on Mondays, or in the evenings, which impedes community groups meeting.

It's just such a such a tragedy. But trying to convince people is sometimes pretty hard to do. I miss the old days of Johnson County when, I mean, it was no problem to get funding for the library and all the libraries that they've been opening out there. So, it's going to be a real tragedy if it doesn't pass because they've already, city council has already said for sure they'll be closing. It'll be much reduced hours and much reduced staff.

Kate: Yeah. Well, that's fingers crossed it passes. Before we go, I wanted to encourage anybody listening who has heard about the cuts to the IMLS, which is so important. That's the Institute of Museum and Library Services that funds all kinds of library stuff across the country, including, it funded my most recent job in libraries. And it's really heartbreaking to see how that's going to affect libraries that everything from internet service to funds for rural libraries to stay open that hardly have any money. All kinds of things, so please call your representatives to encourage them to fight to restore that funding because and for those people to get their jobs back because they cut 80% of the staff at the IMLS, who are the people who run the grant programs.

Mom: Yeah, it really is a tragedy. It's heartbreaking, honestly, to see what's going to happen to these institutions. they honestly, the internet has not replaced it. If anything, the internet's made your ability to find what you need clearly and accurately and quickly even harder.

Kate: It is. That's true.

Mom: I really feel like the dependency on our online researching, which we call researching, looking it up on Google, or getting information from your social media apps and all, is not honestly, in some ways you could, people want to say, it's broadened my life. Well, if you really want to broaden your life, visit the library because that's where we don't filter. That's where you're the one who's in charge of what you're going to be looking up and asking for and researching. And when you use social media and you use the internet, you have blinders on. Those blinders are put on you by the very thing you're looking at.

Kate: Those corporations that only want you to see certain things.

Mom: Yes, and so without our library, we're just, to me, we're losing a place of sanctuary and even a place of renewal. I've always thought of libraries as a place for community renewal and personal renewal.

Kate: Yeah, I was thinking recently about how still to this day, every time I walk into a library, especially public library, I feel so happy. It always brings me a lot of joy tjust o walk in.

Mom: Look at all I have before me.

Kate: What will I find today?

Mom: Yes, I agree 100%. I'm so glad you grew up to value libraries and be a part of them.

Kate: I didn't realize how lucky I was as a kid. Like when you started working at public libraries. You would bring home books for, especially me. I don't know if you did this for Nick and Austin, because they weren't quite reading the way that I did. But you brought home books for me every single day, pretty much. Like a whole stack.

Mom: I never came home empty handed. even for Austin, who wasn't a reader, I would bring home music CDs. Drumming CDs, something like that.

Kate: I didn't realize how amazing that was until I went to college and realized, oh, I have to go to the library myself and look things up instead of just calling you to bring me home something I wanted or needed.

Mom: Well, still your big brother often calls and says, “Can you help? I'm working on the project. Can you find me some information on this?” And I say, “Yes, give me the details.”

I'm so happy that we all, I think, I'm lucky because you've all grown up to be curious, you’ve all grown up to be self-reliant. And I really think that that started with your experience of having libraries in your past.

Kate: Yeah, for sure. Well, thank you. This was really fun.

Mom: It was fun. I always like to view about libraries.

Kate: Which I know I'm thinking, boy, we've done this for decades, the library gossip, the stuff all the time.

Mom: Well, all right. What did Greg say about us?

Kate: We're like a medieval guild.

Mom: The Medieval Guild.

Kate: Of librarians.

Mom: You’re part of it, your family guild.

Kate: All right. Thank you.

Kate: Okay, I'm here today with my dad, Bill, and my stepmother, Lorie. Today we're going to talk about how they both worked for the company Marion Labs, which was a pharmaceutical company in Kansas City and they had long careers and did quite a bit. We’re going to cover a lot of that. But first, I'm going to start with Lorie and her background in math and how that all started.

Lorie: Hi.

Kate: Thank you for being here by the way.

Kate: You're welcome. It's fun to visit Tucson. So, you want to know how I got into math?

Kate: Yeah.

Lorie: Well, I went to an all-girl high school where I was only good at two things, languages and math. So, I thought, you know, maybe I'll just study math when I go to college. My mom was a teacher, so I figured I'd be a math teacher.

Kate: How did you deviate from being a math teacher, then? I'm curious. Well, let's go back to college first, because I know you went to college in Kentucky.

Lorie: Yes, I went to Eastern Kentucky University. It's maybe 20 miles south of Lexington, primarily because my best friend in high school went there and we each told our parents that the other one was going there. That's how we ended up both going there and being roommates. She was in accounting, and I was in math. It ended up that my background from high school prepared me really well, and so math was kind of easy. And I decided I would do math and biology. I was going to be a 7 through 12 grade math and biology teacher.

It was really interesting. Math usually went with physics and chemistry and computer science. It did not go with biology. So, I had no electives. Everything I took was required. When I got to senior year, I didn't have very many hours left to take so I could do student teaching in the fall and leave only about eight hours left to complete, which meant I could take graduate level classes and get graduate level credit. I thought, okay, that's a good way to do it. I student taught in the fall, math. And then when it came up to the spring, I took some graduate level math classes and realized I did not want to get a graduate degree in math. Too theoretical. I didn't like that. But, in order, to keep your teaching certificate active in Kentucky, you had to start a master's in five years and complete it within ten years.

Because of all these classes that were required, and how I had to take those, I didn't take a junior level statistics class until my final semester of my senior year. The teacher asked me, “What are you doing?”

And I said, “I just couldn't fit it in.”

He asked, “Why not?”

I said, “Well, because I had math, and I had biology, so it didn't fit.”

And he said, “Wait a second…you got math and biology? You need to go into biostatistics.”

I said, “I didn’t know what that was,” and so he explained.

I actually had to teach statistics, probability mainly, in the high school where I student taught. I was learning the lesson the day before I was teaching the students. That school was called the Model Lab School. It was attached to the university and all the university professors' children went to the school. If they had known I was learning the lesson the night before their students were, I don't know what they would have thought of that.

But, anyway, I said well, that's interesting. I had already applied to Iowa State in math. That's where my dad had gone to school. I was born in Ames, Iowa. That's where my mom and dad met while he was in school, and she was teaching elementary school. So, I wanted to go back to Iowa State. We had visited every year on our travels to my grandparents, sort of like how you guys knew OU because of all the history in your family.

I said well, I better switch my classes over to statistics, because I realized they had a statistics school. What I didn't realize was that it was one of the best statistics schools in the country. It wasn't biostatistics necessarily.

And a little side story kind of interesting, is about my roommate who was in accounting. We were both going to school in southern Kentucky. She was an accountant, very good, very smart, and she was trying to get a job with one of the big eight firms around the Cincinnati area. Because she went to a quote unquote “south” school, she was getting interviews, but she couldn't get a job. So, I asked my statistics teacher, when I was taking that junior level class, where had he gone to school? He had attended Southwest Louisiana State. And I said, “Okay, my roommate's having a lot of trouble. What about a statistics school in Louisiana versus Iowa State?”

And he said, “I think you better go to Iowa State.” So, I switched everything over to the statistics department. And to my surprise, I got a teaching assistantship, which paid my first year of grad school. So, it was like ‘woohoo’, and that's how I ended up getting a master's in stat.

Kate: Okay, so did you finish that in two years?

Lorie: Sort of, but not exactly. I was done with all my classwork. But to graduate you either had to do a thesis or you had to do a thing called a creative component. I hate to document all this, but I think he's passed away now. My major prof that was kind of guiding the stuff. He was number one, he was British, but he was not the best communicator in the world. He would change his mind a lot and trying to find a project under him that would stick was very frustrating.

So, I got this project lined up with another department and tried to do a creative component approach. If you did a creative component, you had to take a little bit more coursework. So, while I was doing that, I actually got a job at the University of Iowa on a grant for a year. It was pretty neat because it was biology related. If I can remember right, this is a long time ago. It was psychosocial intervention for cancers that would either functionally or physically debilitate you that people would withdraw from either relationships or society, because of these cancers. Would this intervention, psychosocial intervention, help them get back into society kind of thing. It was for a year. So, I did that and yeah, it was really interesting.

We used punch cards and had boxes of these punch cards. Wherever there was determined to be an error on the punch cards, what are punch cards? 132 character long, I think, something like that. You’d have these wide, long boxes about three inches high of these punch cards. You'd look down and see all these little black dots. Those were where a QA person was going over the data entry and would take actually a black magic marker and put a dot over whatever that character field was, like 80 or 130 or 12. Then I'd have to correct all those. There were case report forms and protocols and a whole kind of thing that was a lead into the career at Marion Labs.

Kate: So, what year did you graduate?

Lorie: 1977.

Kate: And how did you get the job at Marion Labs?

Lorie: Well, that was interesting too. I was so tired of applying for jobs, I would write a letter and mail it in an envelope with a stamp. You know, there were no...

Kate: Would you look in the want ads, or back of the journals?

Lorie: In the back of American Statistician, is that what it was called? Something like that. Anyway, there were these publications in statistics that would sometimes list the available jobs. It was paper, and it was what you could find. And I was just so tired of sending these applications out with a cover letter and a resume and all that kind of stuff. So that when it was determined that I was going to go to Kansas City, Missouri, I just I just took a phone book. I guess it was for pharmaceutical and maybe chemical companies pages out of the phone book. I dropped my finger, one on each, and said…those are the two I'm going to send. And one happened to be Marion Laboratories, if you can imagine.

And I was still in Iowa City at the time. And they called and said, “Can you come down?” And that's a funny story too, actually. They said, “Can you come down next Thursday at such and such a time?” And I said sure, and they said we'll mail you a confirmation letter. I said, okay fine. Well, they had already told me what day and what time so that's when I went. Their confirmation letter had a different day and time on it.

Kate: You didn’t get the letter in time?

Lorie: I don't think I looked at it. Because I knew what… I mean I just looked at it, oh that's a confirmation. I didn't pay any attention to it. Oh, the 13th was Tuesday, not Wednesday? or whatever and I was a day late.

Kate: Oh no.

Lorie: So, they called me. I was at my little office at University of Iowa, and they called and said, “Is there a problem?”

I said, what you talking about? And they said, “I thought you were coming for an interview.”

I said, “Yeah, I'll be there tomorrow.”

I mean it was only a few hours’ drive, and you know, they said, “Well, you're supposed to be here today.”

I go, “Oh no!”

And yeah, it was like really weird, because they said, “Okay, I guess we'll see you tomorrow.” So, I went, and they must have thought I was a real ditz, but they offered me the job.

Kate: So, what was your job title when you first started?

Lorie: Oh, that was interesting. Okay, so when I got there, Marion Labs, I mean it had quite a few products and whatever, but another person and I joined the department the same day and we made the department size five. Very small. There was a manager, a programmer, a data entry operator, and they called them secretaries then, the admin and I joined the same day. And I was called statistical programmer. Okay, it wasn't a statistician. They didn't quite have that job. So, I was a statistical programmer.

But it was all the same thing. And it was very interesting, because we had a little cubicle office, but to do any programming work or analysis work or whatever, you went to this little bank of computers and you had...

Kate: That were enormous?

Lorie: Well, the computer was enormous. The computer was like an entire room on one floor and the room under it, because it had to be cooled. It was so huge that the cooling mechanism was the floor under the computer room. So, you never saw that. This was like a terminal. Big, it wasn't like a laptop or a tablet. It was a big terminal.

And to do the kind of analysis that we did with this program called SAS, Statistical Analysis System. It wasn't located there at the company. We had to dial-in to Cleveland.

Kate: Oh wow.

Lorie: It was analog dial up or whatever. We had to do dial up and set the phone in the little cradle and all that kind of stuff. And we were actually programming this system that was in Cleveland, Ohio. And then you could look at it online. You could look at all your code and you could look at the results and all that kind of stuff, but when I could print out the results. It would print out on that computer paper with the holes all the way down the side that would feed through the printer like a foot and a half wide. But if I did a graph, and we did a lot of graphic stuff, I had to drive to downtown Kansas City to pick up the graph, because that's where the printer was that would print it out. And this was all I started there in ‘77.

Kate: How old was the company by then? Was it started in the ‘50s?

Lorie: I thought it started in the ‘50s basically, because Ewing Kaufman was really a salesman and he would find a product, a lot of times, in other countries like Japan or something and bring it in and develop it in his garage or basement pretty much to sell to the U.S. market. So, they were things like Oscal Calcium.

One that had to have a new drug application, Silvadene, was for burns, a burn cream. That one had to go through FDA approval. There were a whole bunch of others. But they had some other side companies at the time I joined. They had stair, what was it? It wasn't called stair glide, but stair lift, no, chair lift. You would sit in this chair, and it would push you up if you couldn't stand up. They had those. They had an eyeglass company attached to them and different stuff. But yeah, it started in his basement way back when with mainly marketing, sales and marketing.

Kate: Yeah, and so in those days he was around all the time, right?

Lorie: Oh yeah.

Kate: So what was he like? I know he became this famous philanthropist and was really big into Kansas City, but I wondered what he was like as a boss, I guess.

Lorie: Yeah, he was the owner, so he didn't have any contact as far as how you were doing your job or how well you were doing your job, but he cared deeply about the employees and the company. When I joined, I was NM00947, so I was number 947 into the company when I joined. I still remember my employee number.

He was a small man, actually, and he would walk around with his bodyguard named Blanchie Blevins. Blanchie was a real big burly guy, but he would come around and he would pop into your office or your cubicle or whatever and Blanchie would be standing there and introduce you and then Mr. Kaufman would sit down, and he'd say, “How's it going? What's going well with the company? What isn't? Is there anything I need to know about in terms of your liking to work here?” and what have you.

We were small enough that we'd have company meetings on the floor of one of the manufacturing areas. It wouldn't interfere with the sterility or anything like that. But they put donuts out in the parking lot. You'd pick up donuts and coffee as you came in and then we'd all just stand in the corner of this big warehouse-like area and listen to Mr. Kaufman and the different directors of the marketing and sales and R & D and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, he would drop around. He wanted to know what was going well and what wasn't going well. It was pretty cool.

Kate: That was really cool.

Lorie: Sorry, my phone is telling me ESPN stories.

Kate: So, what were the first things you worked on there when you first started?

Lorie: Okay, yeah, there were several things, because this was not just the clinical trials on people. It was also lab stuff, too. We had diagnostics. So sometimes I would work on something like maybe a blood test or something that could diagnose something. Also, there were animal labs there. I got to go down into the animal labs in the pre-clinical stuff and see how the experimenting units were actually set up, like cages on a wall and which animals could you categorize, older animals, younger animals, this kind of whatever. And so that was kind of interesting, as well as clinical trials.

Lots of different product, but the main thing was Cardizem. You know, that was a calcium channel blocker, mainly for blood pressure, but, you know, we actually looked at it, and Bill can talk about that later, for other indications, they call them, for things to treat. It was so fun, but it was so amazing, too, to think about it.

Like our little five people putting together a new drug application for a blockbuster drug was pretty amazing. And we were right next to what they call the regulatory department. So, that's who puts together the file that goes to the FDA. It was all paper. It would go up in like at least one or two semi-trucks. So, it was just volumes of paper we were putting together. And I remember for the original Cardizem application, cutting out pieces of graphs and regulatory would tell us, you know, what the margins had to be and how to stick that graph in and we would actually tape it down.

The word processing people would set it up to where they'd know where to leave what space for our little graph to go and we'd review everything and then they'd eventually print it all off and send it on up and then by the time we ever left the company, everything was electronic, you know, and the FDA would get all the data to do their own either spot analyses or whatever they wanted to do.

You know, it's not just accepting everything that the company says, but before that, there's a whole lot of interaction through other departments with the FDA. You would take a team up, there'd be statisticians, there'd be clinical people, there'd be marketing people, regulatory people, all talking to the FDA to make sure everybody was on the same page of what was needed and what was sort of practical to be able to see if the drug was going. And I mean, so many drugs you try to test and evaluate, and they don't pan out. Early on studies don't pan out. And so, I think what people in general that are against the cost of pharmaceuticals in the U.S. don't understand is one out of millions pops through as something that actually can be developed and sold.

Kate: It takes a lot of time.

Lorie: It takes a lot of time, and it takes a ton of money. And you only get a certain amount of patent life after you get on the market. You don't get the full 17 years. So, it's tough, and then it'll go generic. It's an interesting business. We always felt like we were really working for the good of mankind to tell you the truth.

You didn't ask, but you might want to know that at a certain point, I switched over to the regulatory department because your dad and I were in the same department once we got married, or actually, before we got married. It wasn't a good thing, but also wasn't probably going to work. So, I went to regulatory, which they were happy that they had a statistician amongst them. But statisticians were very happy that the regulatory and the marketing type people had a statistical voice they had to listen to, too. But when I did that, then I wasn't doing the statistics anymore. It was more leading the product through the regulatory process with the FDA and stuff. And my big claim to fame was Nicorette and NicoDerm over the counter.

Kate: That was a big deal, that in the 90s, right? Maybe early 2000’s?

Lorie: ’98? I'd have to think back. It could be ‘98, ‘99 that we got Nicorette over the counter, but to put Nicotine over the counter was a really big deal.

Kate: Yeah, I'm sure it was.

Lorie: And then NicoDerm followed. NicoDerm was a little tougher because of a transdermal patch. The other was gum.

Kate: Okay, so what were some of the things you really liked about working there in those first few years?

Lorie: Me, okay. What did I really like? I liked how small the company was. Everyone knew everybody, okay? And the departments were real teams. Nobody was better than somebody else, you know? And everybody was working to do what we needed to do, which was to write the best protocols to, I'll say at this stage, test the product in humans, okay? We'll leave the preclinical stuff behind. But say we were in phase two, three, whatever, and putting together the appropriate file for the FDA. Everybody's on the same page, everybody. I mean, working to a deadline and all that kind of stuff was the team spirit thing, it was really, really fun. I would say that was the coolest thing in the beginning.

Let's see, what else could I say? I could say that I didn't appreciate my 45-minute drive to the company from where I lived. But you get used to that too. You did a lot of thinking during your 45 minutes.

Kate: What about that, do you want to talk about, you got a raise at some point, right?

Lorie: I got a raise? I did get a raise.

Kate: You told me that story about how they said they got you for cheap.

Lorie: Yes, I did get a raise. Yeah, yeah, yeah, guess I can share about that. So, I can put this on here just to put, whoever listens to this, put it in some kind of perspective. Okay, so I was really excited that I was hired by this pharmaceutical company in Kansas City where I had been at the University of Iowa before on a grant project.

And I got hired for $12,500, no, I was making $12,500 a year for my one year in 1977 at University of Iowa. And Marion Labs hired me for $15,000. And I was like, woo-hoo! You know, I'm into big money now.

And it was good, it was good. And I worked real hard. I was their only statistician besides my manager, who was a statistician as well. Working really hard, primarily on all this project I talked about plus Cardizem. And then it was time for the annual review. And I ended up having a boss that really went to bat for me, believed that I was doing a good job. And so, I don't remember how much raise I got, but I got a good raise, and I was like, woo-hoo! I may have even gotten a bonus, okay, in addition. And, I said, “Wow, that's amazing.”

He goes, “Yeah, well, I'll admit, we got you for real cheap when you came here.” And so that was at the age of sort of women versus men's salaries. And men were the family breadwinner and what have you. And my boss, it was very interesting. That was ‘77 to ‘78.

In ‘79, I had my first child. My boss had never worked with somebody who went off and had a baby and then wanted to come back to work. He was like, “I don't know. I don't know what the rules are. I don't know.” And so, I ended up getting three months off, but only six weeks of it was paid. And I was allowed to have an additional six weeks, but it was at the risk that that job might not be there when I came back. So that was the, that was the 1979 era of women working in big pharma.

Kate: Yeah, okay. Well, Dad, why don't we talk about you started there in, was it, 1984? That sounds right. You were coming from an academic professor job. This is very different environment.

Bill: Well, I don't know. Maybe I've already told you, but I was so worried about getting tenure. You work at Oklahoma State. You work six years, and then you come to this point of getting tenure. And that would protect your job forever if you wanted to stay there. And so, I don't know, like maybe half the people would get tenure.

So, I thought, you know, this is crazy. If I don't get tenure, I better be ready to be fired and have another job. So, I started looking around, and lo and behold. Lorie was talking about how we would look in the American Statistician little magazine, and they would have ads in the back of jobs. So, Marion Lab had an ad there. And your mom's family lived practically in Kansas City. So, that was a pretty neat place to live for us.

So, I applied there. And I couldn't believe it because I think they were offering me something like $35,000 a year there and various kinds of breaks. They were helping me find a house, all kinds of stuff. In the meantime, I think my salary back in Oklahoma State had made it up to, like, $18,000 or something. So that was so much more. I went ahead and accepted it. It's like the day after I accepted it, the chairman of our statistics department walked in and offered me tenure. And I had to tell him, well, I'm not going to do it.

And I went off then to work at Marion Labs. And boy, was I lucky on that, because I think they had gotten approval for a, was it a tablet formulation or something like that?

Lorie: Probably twice a day tablet for Cardizem.

Bill: I think it had to be taken even more than that.

Lorie: It was probably three times a day.

Bill: Because when I came, they were working on a tablet, not a tablet, but a, what do call it?

Lorie: A capsule.

Bill: It was to be taken twice a day. That was a big deal in that time. If you could take the formulation in the morning, but when you went to bed, then that was real easy for people and so, man, I worked on that like crazy for everything. And like Lorie was saying, we had a team, and we planned out all the studies, and then I had my method of analyzing stuff that was was, in a way, was kind of simple compared to what I had gotten to teach at Oklahoma State, but it was fun. And it was nearly always successful with that drug.

Lorie: Yeah, I want to add something here that Kate may or may not know because it's pretty fun to this discussion, right here. But Bill was talking about applying to Marion Labs. Well, I was there, okay? So guess what? I interviewed Bill for his job.

Kate: Oh you did? I didn’t know that.

Lorie: I didn't think you knew that. Okay, so we were, you know, interviewing and again, it's a team thing for the interview. It was really neat. You know, we would have an agreed on sort of categories of questions, trying to figure out the best candidate.

And I remember we all heard that we were going to have this professor come in to interview. Most of the people weren't. And this is kind of a cute side story, but here comes this professor. And if I remember right, he came in in beige slacks and a navy-blue blazer, where almost everybody else came in in the dark suit, you know, kind of thing. But it was unbelievably refreshing when he got to me. It was my turn, he comes into the office, and almost all these other guys were like, “Well, now, much salary should I ask for? What's your salary?” You know? Like duh-duh-duh.

But I'm like, “No, we're not talking about that, you know.”

“But that's what I want to talk about.” Bill came in and we talked about stuff, and he wanted to know how these teams worked, what kind of a process was there for developing a protocol or doing an analysis and he was real into the analysis part.

And he said, and I just was so impressed, he said, “Well, like, if we're analyzing the data, do we have to do like little simple t-tests and stuff or can we, you know, do powerful statistics that will really show, you know, how the drug is performing and stuff like that?”

And we talked about how you had to gain trust with your team. You didn't want to overwhelm with the wow factor, you know, but once they trusted that we're all on the same page, yeah, do the right, do the best statistics you can for the way the protocol was written. He was the only person that asked that kind of thing. And I have no idea about the other people, what they kind of got out of that particular interview, but they ended up hiring him.

And then as we worked together, it was really funny, as we worked together, he would help me with my statistics. And I would help him with how he wrote up the report.

My brothers and I on a visit to Marion Labs, 1984. ©Mom

Bill: Our department was in this little corner room, large room of a building and the chairman had a great big corner office and Lorie had a great big corner office. And lo and behold, they gave me a corner office. And everybody else had their offices in between, which were nice.

Lorie: I had nothing to do with that decision.

Bill: They were nice, you know, but not like the corner offices. And then the fourth corner was the entrance into the place.

Lorie: I think we all went later down to cubicles as the company grew though.

Bill: The thing that I did my whole time was when I was thinking about something, the best way to do something, I would get up and go down and find the coffee pot, wherever it was, and drink coffee.

Kate: You had some machine, didn’t you, where you could. I remember you taking us to the office, and you had this big machine you were excited to show us the coffee machine.

Bill: I don’t know, they kept changing.

Lorie: You always got French Vanilla.

Bill: We had these little, tiny cups so you could drink your cup in two seconds, but at any rate it was …I don’t know, but when I first started I thought that there was an actual coffee pot somewhere.

Lorie: I don’t know, it may have been in somebody’s office, maybe illegally.

Kate: So, what was after Cardizem? What was what else did you work on?

Bill: I'll tell you I hardly worked on anything else for a long time because after we got the twice a day formulation approved, then lo and behold, they started working on one that was once a day.

Lorie: Was that 360 milligram?

Bill: Well…

Lorie: I don’t know. There was one where we put the application, wrote it, all locked in a room, the whole entire team. We had all this data, wrote it all in one day and then submitted it, it was like unbelievable. But I don’t know.

Bill: But then after that, somehow, I got to working with some people at the FDA about how to analyze drugs that were two different, capsules that had two different, capsules that had two different drugs in them.

Lorie: Combination.

Bill: And so that was a big deal for me because then we decided to do a formulation that had Cardizem and Hydrochlorothiazide was a really big, both of those were big drugs for high blood pressure. And so, I worked on that a lot. And I remember being so thankful. They made me, I think I was the actual team leader for that. And we did several different clinical trials and every one of them was a success.

And we had everything all set to send in. And at the same time, that once a day formulation was approved. And the marketing department finally decided they didn't want the combination to be submitted because it would cut down on the sales of the once-a-day formulation. So, I don't think it ever went in.

Lorie: No, it didn’t go in, and I have always thought of this you know in the Raiders of the Lost Ark, the last scene where they have the Ark boxed up, and it’s wheeled down to the lowest level of storage in the back corner, and I always feel like that’s where the Cardizem and Hydrochlorothiazide combination NDA, New Drug Application, might even be residing this day.

Bill: After we, our company Marion Labs combined with what was the other company? I've forgotten.

Lorie: Oh, we merged several times. Marion Labs first went with Merrell Dow, and we became Marion Merrell Dow.

Bill: Yeah. And they had some other drugs, so I kept working on different drugs afterwards. But none of them ever seemed to succeed. I'd work a long time on one, and then it would turn out it never came.

Kate: What was the one I remember you telling me about, for people who had cancer that helped their red blood cell count. Do remember that one?

Bill: No, no.

Kate: Okay.

Bill: Could be, I don't know.

Lorie: I don’t think we worked on cancer drugs.

Kate: Well, it was to help with the side effects, I guess, from cancer treatment, like from chemo.

Bill: Yeah, I don't remember.

Kate: Maybe I'm making that up.

Bill: There were some strange diseases that I had never heard of before that I worked on some drugs, but I've forgotten.

Lorie: Yeah, when I went over to regulatory, we had teams over there within regulatory that worked on different categories of products. And so, I had a group, and I love acronyms and so ours was CBDA. It was like Cardiovascular Biological Dermatologic Anti-Inflammatory. Let’s see, Anti-Inflammatory and Anti-Infective.

And then you were working from your side with some of those teams. There was a drug, a lot of our drugs started with A’s, and if I remember right it was trying to help against organ aging. They would show us a heart in a smoker, and it looked really like roast beef, like really cooked looking, and there was a drug, it started with an A, and so you worked with other things that had something to do with blood cells, red blood cells. I can’t remember the name either. I thought I’d never forget that stuff.

Kate: Well, how did, I guess when the company was bought out, how did that change things?

Bill: Well, when we were first merged, it was kind of like our Department of Statistics sort of was taken over by Merrill Dow's department. They had a couple of really good statisticians working there. And one guy became the, I've forgotten his name, became the, what is it? The chairman of the department.

And our chairman got another position, but I don't know what he was doing. He was always just trying to move up in the company, and I didn't see him much anyway.

Lorie: And I think the main statistics area, and I could be wrong. I might not be remembering this right, of Merrell Dow was around Indianapolis, because I had to Indianapolis several times. And there was a place up like Michigan or someplace that was where Dow was, Dow Chemical and what have you. So, all of a sudden we weren’t Marion Labs in this location. There were multiple locations, and we’d have to travel more, and stuff like that.

Bill: But they did make the R&D department where we were. So, all of a sudden, our statistics department was twice as big, really. Where we used to have the programming group in our department, it became another department. And so, they sort of did beginning programming to get everything entered into various data pieces that you could use. And we also had programmers, but everybody was involved in doing the analysis of different kinds of studies. There were other things going on.

Lorie: And then after Merrell Dow, we merged with Hoeschst and Roussel and we became Hoechst Marion Roussel. So, all of a sudden, now we're international French company and German company and again, many more locations. And then after that, it was gonna be Aventis Pharmaceuticals and I can't remember if it was Hoeschst Marion Roussel or Aventis, but I was thinking it was Aventis, that was really interesting was going to, and Bill can kind of talk about a bit how he left the company for a while and came back.

But while he was still at the company, before he had first left to try something else, I remember them really looking at how they were going to particularly regulatory set this up and they came and told me that they were considering moving me to New Jersey, that that they really wanted me there. And I said, “Well, we've got this family of six kids, and what have you, and I can't just tell you yes or no.”

“You can't mention this to your husband.” And I said, “Oh yeah? Yes, I have to. Don't you understand?” And it was so weird trying to convince them that he had to know that because they did not want this to leak out that they were looking at this merger thing or buyout or whatever you wanted to call it. It seemed like always mergers.

But finally, we were able to talk about it. I was able to pretty much say, “I don't want to do that.” And then after Aventis, or at the time of Aventis, I guess I should say, they actually sold the R&D component to a contract research organization called Quintiles. So, all of a sudden, we were part of a contract research organization, meaning that you're carrying out work for other companies that tell you what to do.

Bill: And so, when that happened, it was kind of like they always wanted me to stay, you know, I'd have some senior title but not be a manager. But once we became Quintiles, then there wasn't, we didn't have nearly the power for doing things. All that would happen is another company would plan everything out, and then it would be our job to conduct it as fast as possible.

Lorie: And he means mental power.

Bill: Right. And so, there was another company in town, I don't even remember what they were I can't remember the name.

Lorie: I can’t remember the name either.

Bill: That was a contract research company, and they were looking for a manager of the statistics department, so I took that. And for about a year I had this great time with that. I hired all these people that I knew all over the place and had this wonderful statistics department. At least I thought it was great. And we did stuff as fast as you could basically, had it all planned out in advance and so on. And then lo and behold, I reached this point where our best programmer was working on a really important study.

And it was supposed to come in with this about, I think it was about two weeks before he planned a vacation, okay? And I thought it was all beautiful that he could easily do this thing in probably in one week. So, this would work great. And then this was right in the middle of the summer. He could take his family to Disneyland. So, it was a really big deal for him to get this vacation. And I was so intent on it, that when we discovered that this company, in running the study, it was coming in two weeks late. So, we would get the data right when he, our best programmer, was headed out to Disneyland. Then the lead, the head of the team, that was working on this.

Lorie: It was your project manager, I think.

Bill: He came in and he just argued with me forever about how this couldn't happen. But you see, his wife had a job elsewhere and she had her vacation set at that time. And it was, I think it was at the end of August so that his kids would be back in school afterwards. I just refused and said, we'll put somebody else on it, but this guy wouldn't take it. And so, we finally figured out, I was forced to do this, was that the programmer could do it in a week. His family would go out to Disneyland. He would get this job done in a week and then he would go out and spend the last week with them. And I thought that was just terrible that we ended up with that. But I was kind of forced to by whoever I was reporting to. And then, lo and behold, they had me come in and gave me a review of how well I was doing as the manager. And because of this one fight I had with this guy about our programmer, they gave me this horrible review. It was the first time I ever met with the head of the, I guess…

Lorie: HR? Is that what you mean. Or your boss?

Bill: The boss.

Kate: Oh, That’s right. You said you never got to talk with him.

Bill: I guess. So now here I am, and everything was all focused in on that one horrible thing we had because that project was late. He didn't seem to understand all the people I had hired and everything else. So that just pissed me off. So, I found there was a department back in Quintiles that thought they could use me. And so, they hired me back. And I did that for about a year, but they didn't ever find a good thing for me. So after about a year, I went back to the same department, which had changed rather dramatically, and now I was reporting to people that used to report to me and stuff like that. But it was okay. I was alright with that, but again, they didn't find a very good use for me.

Lorie: Well, the most horrible part, in a way, was that he left for one year. Did all kinds of good stuff. But when he came back, they absolutely would not reinstate his seniority, so he was back to two weeks’ vacation. Instead of, you know, like 20 years of...

Kate: That’s too bad.

Lorie: Yeah, so anyway. So be it, so be it.

Bill: I lost some money as well, but that’s alright.

Kate: Alright, so to wrap up, I'm going to ask about what I considered the best part of your job, which was the fact that Ewing Kaufman, the owner of Marion Labs, also owned the Royals. And we went to quite a lot of Royals games growing up, so I wanted to ask, how did all that work? Getting tickets and all that. Yeah, let's start with you, since you were there in the early years,

Lorie: So, I joined there in August of ‘77 and what I recall is that, you know, there were less than a thousand employees and Mr. K, that's what we called him, Mr. K would provide to the company. He believed in if there were profits of the company, everybody got to share. So, he wanted to share the Royals as well. He was very proud of them. And we would get something like tickets once a month, and I don't remember if it was two or four or if your family was five, you'd get five. I don't quite remember, but when I first got tickets, I remember that they were up in the loge level which is, you know, above even above the good seats and right by the broadcast booth and all that kind of stuff and stretched out to each side, and they were really nice seats.

I don't remember if it was two four five tickets but they, you know, it wasn't like the whole company went at the same time. Different people would get tickets at different times so that home games had a few of Marion people at them, and it was really fun. And then as the company grew, we didn't get those loge seats, but we still got some tickets once a month for a while down in the lower level out to the sides.

And then sometimes, when the company got a lot bigger, there would be Marion Night at the ballpark. And of course, we were on the big screen and, all of that kind of stuff. And we would all be in a section that was kind of closed off to other people that had a little gate. And yeah, so it was really fun. But then we started, you know, growing too big, having mergers, and the complementary baseball tickets kind of went away. And then Mr. K died too. I didn't look up what year that was.

Kate: I think it was the early ‘90s.

Lorie: That was really sad when that happened. That's kind of the part I remember and there was opportunities as you moved up in the company if you got to certain level. Sometimes certain departments would have suite tickets and Kate remembers going to a game in a suite.

Kate: I do! We did that once. It was like very exciting.

Lorie: It was different to watch a game from a room.

Bill: Well, Lorie remembers how everything worked. I just have strange little spot memories. And the thing I remember the most is that somehow, we had tickets to be in one of those suites. And it was right at the start of the year. And we went out on a really cold night. There weren't very many people there at the game, but in our suite, we had heat and so it was really nice besides little things to eat and whatever and so for about two or three innings everything was great and then, somehow, the people out in front of us discovered that if they got up right next to our window that it was leaking heat and they would warm up and so we ended up with about 15 people all stacked up right in front of us to where we couldn't see anything but the outfield. So.

Kate: And you got to go to the World Series. 1985.

Bill: Yeah, we had two tickets. I think Lorie was saying I think we got to buy them which was wonderful because otherwise you couldn't get them, and I always remember that I decided that well, I'll take Nick. We went out to see a game. They were playing the Cardinals. It was a close, good game to see.

Kate: That was a really crazy game, wasn't that the...

Bill: The Cardinals ended up winning that particular game. I think the Royals won the World Series.

Kate: They came back the next night.

Lorie: Think they won on a really weird play. A really weird, questionable play

Kate: I was in bed, supposed to be asleep, but then I heard you screaming and cheering at whatever, 10 o'clock at night. We all got up.

Bill: Well, that was the thing. I mean, we became Royals fans, but I think it was more for watching TV, because you could see them play every night on TV in those days.

Kate: You didn't even have to have cable.

Lorie: I mean, everything was Royals, Royals, Royals, you know, and then, my gosh, ‘85, we did well.

Kate: It was a miraculous year.

Lorie: Super fun. And we're still Royals fans, that's why we're here with Kate.

Kate: We just went to some spring training games. Yup. In Phoenix.

Lorie: Yeah.

Kate: Alright, well, that was a treat. Well, thank you for doing this interview.

Lorie: You’re so welcome.

Kate: Okay.

A few weeks ago, I got invited to write an article about a woodworking group, the Desert Woodcrafters Association in Tucson, for the magazine American Woodworker. They asked me if I could come to one of their meetings and I asked, “Can I bring my microphone?” And they said, “Sure!” So I headed off to Flowing Wells High School in Tucson on a Saturday morning to learn more about this great group of woodworkers who do so much to give back to the Tucson community.

A lot of the members of the Desert Woodcrafters also belong to the Southern Arizona Woodturners Association and Xerocraft, which is a Makerspace in Tucson. They talk about all three groups, so that can be a little confusing. There’s also quite a bit of background noise because we were in an auto body shop at the high school and I recorded some of it during a break in the meeting. And these guys are a very chatty group with a lot to say!

Kate: Can I get your name?

Jim: Jim Payne.

Kate: Okay, so you're the president of the Southern Arizona Woodturners, right?

Jim: That’s correct.

Kate: Can tell me about how you all got started? And when?

Jim: I know that years ago they used to meet at Raytheon. A lot of these guys are ex-engineers from Raytheon. Or ex-employees or used to work out there. I'm not sure how we got here because Ken Tower was the ex-school teacher from this school. That's how we got in here. I don't know why they left Raytheon. But originally that group of turners, mostly woodturners, started out there.

Kate: Okay, so explain to me what do mean by wood turning? What does that mean?

Jim: Wood turning has been around for a really long time because if you look at old chairs and stuff, they have the spindles. Spindles on the legs, spindles on the back. All that stuff is usually turned, even if it was turned by hand.

Kate: So, it's all by hand, no?

Jim: So now we have machines that you can put it between, turn it on, and then can still have to do the shapes. You can decide on the shapes and the angles and all that kind of thing.

Kate: When did you start doing this kind of work?

Jim: Well, I took all this stuff in high school. I actually went to school here in Flowing Wells.

Kate; Oh you didi? Okay

Jim: In fact, when I went to school here, this was my wood shop. We're meeting in now, this is now the auto shop.

Kate: Do you remember your teacher?

Jim: I do. Mr. Bausch. Ken Tower came a couple years after the high kid. After I left, I wanted to be a woodshop teacher. But I just never finished. Back then you had to go to either NAU or ASU.

Kate: To become a teacher.

Jim: I started in high school. I went to Pima for a years, thinking that I was going to continue, but just didn't. Then got married, had kids, all the wood shop stuff got pushed to the side and all of my kids were leaving, and I got time, my daughter got me a gift certificate to Woodcraft. I went up there and here. It was just hard. I live right around the corner. So, it was hard for me to drive to Raytheon and to go to a meeting.

Kate: Yeah, that’s pretty far.

Jim: I'd heard about it, but I've been I think involved about ten years now. When I saw the sign that said they meet at Flowing Wells High school. So I came here.

Kate: That's great. So, what do you like about doing this?

Jim: Just the people.

Kate: That's why you come?

Jim: People who ? and then we'd branch out and see all these other people. I now play Santa Claus at Christmas time. To go to the schools, so it's just fine people that are, like the same stuff you do.

Kate: Yeah, you learn from them. What kind of things do you learn from each other, I guess, at these meetings?

Jim: I'm sorry. You want to sit here? I mean, we have different demos. Most folks have a demo. This one just happens to be on child safety because we just finished with Christmas and stuff that’s, how you determine how big and all that kind of. But we usually have something to do with wood. Last week, last month here, we did what's called a one board bowl, and that's where they were talking where you cut it out on a band saw and then stack it up and glue it. It's just, it's endless in what things we can do with wood and now we're even, we even started another club that's an offshoot of both of them that does CNC, 3D printing, all the new stuff that kids are involved in.

Kate: So, there's no woodshop anymore at this school, or most schools.

Jim: They took it away.

Kate: I'm kind of curious if this is kind of a dying thing among younger people?

Jim: Yes and no. I've gotten a better faith of the younger kids. I started doing the culinary arts stuff with the teacher over here and the kids are just awesome. And I've gotten involved with the ag program out here, and those kids are really awesome and they have a lot of shop stuff out there. It's just great to see young people interested in stuff that needs to be done and knowing that they're not going to college and learning a trade. We've actually had kids come either in the morning or in the afternoon. We used to come and turn pens and stuff, teach kids. And it was on their own time.

Kate: On Saturdays?

Jim: They would come and learn how to do wood stuff.

_________________________________________________________

Kate: Okay, so your name is John. So, tell me how you got started with woodworking.

John: Well, my father did a little handy work around the house. And I just, he wasn't very good. I had a couple uncles build houses. But you know, I just was always around do-it-yourselfers. Because this was back in the ‘50s and ‘60s where things were do-it-yourselfers.

Kate: Where did you grow up?

John: Where did I grow up? Upstate New York.

Kate: Okay, so you're retired.

John: Yeah, and so I didn't do any woodworking until, actually, I guess I got married and had a place. Little things need to be done. And then it just progressed until more. I don't make anything big anymore. All my big stuff I made, tables, we don't need anymore. But now it's all little stuff. And now it's all giveaway because we don't need anything else at this point in our life.

But what I did do is back in New York, I taught woodworking to girls. It was called the Girls’ Club at the time. It's now called Girls Incorporated. They wanted a part-time woodworker to teach girls how to build things. So, what I started is I had third graders. They started with me, and we started little tool, little cutting, and a little saw, and a little drilling. And I had these girls progress up to 17 years old when they graduated high school. They were making Adirondack chairs and things. The same kids that stayed with me. And some kids were newer every year. So, I started that program over there and kept it going for quite a few years. I was with them for maybe twelve.

Terry: That’s how John got all this gray hair.

John: Yeah, really. 12 or 13 years. And I was all self-taught. I didn't have any special training. I continued with it. And so I don't know now I'm course no longer in contact but, you know, but these kids are probably have some basics on how to do things. I remember them being more confident. The whole idea was to build girls confidence to do things, and woodworking was a non-traditional girl's, woman's tool.

So, this is what we did. Like I said, we had a room, and I had seven or eight kids out of an hour a day, two hours a day teaching them how to do things. And I just had to break it down to them to be simplified that they could understand it.

Kate: So, then you, when did you move here?

John: Moved here about fifteen years ago or so. I sold all my woodworking tools back in New York. Back in New York, I had tools and I had nobody else. I was not in a club. I was just making things, doing things. And so, since the tools were out in the garage and rusted, I just left them all behind. Came up over here, moved to here, and my mother who did live a long life, well, she needed a present. What do you get somebody who's 90 or 85 years old? So, I said to my wife, “Well, I could make her something, but I have to buy a tool. I don't have any tools. Have to buy a tool.”

“Okay, well, yeah, buy a tool.” Anything for I don't have to make a decision, my wife thought. Bought one tool, bought another tool, bought another tool, then bought a Shopsmith around the corner.

And then I said, okay, I used to turn back in New York. Let me see if there's a club here and there was a turnings club here and that's why I started coming here to this to these clubs because I got the help because if you don't sometimes know what you're doing, like for example, if you don't know if your tool is sharp or if it’s you that's making the mistake. It could be your tool is dull and that's why you can't do this certain thing.

So, this is where getting help comes in and that's where the club came in. This club has helped me with that and then I got some lessons from one of the members and then just the conversation. Also, I think the clubs help with the challenge. Well, that's kind of nice. I never thought of that. I'll go home and try that, or I'll look at that I'll talk to that person more about it I think that's what the club is doing for you.

Kate: Yeah, that's great. So that's what you like best is learning from other people?

John: Yeah, yeah and I like also teaching back because I also belong to a place called Xerocraft, which is a makerspace where we have tools, and I like when somebody comes in and says, “I don't know what to do. I want to do something.”

Like, we have a young lady she's about maybe 25 and she comes in and she works with younger kids, and she wants and she wants to build something so, “What do you want to build?”

“I don't know,” she says. “But I want this. I want this.” So she, you know, she's learning tools, and I like teaching her because then she gets more confident.

Every couple weeks she comes in. It's like, “Well we're going to use a nail gun today.” Alright, a nail gun, that sounds kind of interesting. A nail gun is kind of a fun tool to work with. She nail gunned all her little ornaments on this tree she was making. I like to give back in terms of teaching that part.

Kate: That sounds really fun. Thank you.

John: That's all I got. Talk to him.

Terry: I was an engineer at Hughes Aircraft. What's your name?

Terry: Terry Glover.

Kate: Oh, sorry. I know your wife.

Terry: Do you? You know Pat?

Kate: From the League of Women Voters.

Terry: Oh, yeah. So, when I was at Hughes, we had a club called the Woodchippers. And this club was actually founded in like ‘89. Sam is our historian, and he has the details, but there was a member who was an owner of a Shopsmith store. And then they met there originally. And when he sold the store, the store went out of business, they came to you and asked us if we could host them. So that was about, I don't know, the exact year, again, Sam has the actual history. He was our historian for a while. So, that was in the early 90s.

And then in 2005 is when a few of the Desert Woodcrafters members came to me and asked could we also host them, host another club that focused on turning. And that's when the Southern Arizona Woodturners Association began.

Kate: This group was earlier?

Terry: They were 2005 and like I said, Desert Woodcrafters been together since the late ‘80s. I believe it's ‘89. I have the logo with the actual founded in date that I can send you if you want. Anyways, so Sam's art has probably the most history. He and Dennis Coyle, who's out on sick leave right now, were actually two of the founding members. So that'll give you some background. Okay? All right.

Kate: Okay

____________________________________________

Kate: Okay, so I'm here with Curt. So, when did you first get into woodworking? Or woodturning, I guess.

Curt: Well, woodworking itself was back when I was very young. We did stuff around the house, but my uncle was a woodshop teacher and so, he would always have woodworking things to do when I was around. And the one thing that he got me interested in was an aspect of woodworking called marquetry, which is essentially making a picture using thin pieces of veneer.

And it's similar to inlay, only, it's very thin. And so, I did that. I used that for a lot of different things up until, well, kids came along. Then all of sudden, woodworking, all that other stuff went on the backburner until, pretty much, until I retired. One of the things that I had said when I retired, I wanted to learn how to turn pens. So went to some classes, learned how to do that, kind of got into very rudimentary woodturning. Then I kind of expanded back out to some of the things that I used to do when I was much younger.

Kate: Okay, are you from Tucson? Or did you move here later?

Curt: I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and moved here in 1982.

Kate: So you’ve been here a while.

Curt: And the one thing that, one of those expansion type things, is the person who was cutting the doodle boxes, the laser cutting them, said, “Okay, I'm done.”

And they were looking for somebody to do that. I'd never used a laser cutter before. Very familiar with computer stuff but not using laser cutter. So I said, “I'll give it a try.” And now that's the thing I enjoy doing is the challenges of trying to figure out the ways to make it work.

Kate: How does that work exactly? I’ve never seen one of those before.

Curt: Basically, it's a laser that is pointed down and it's on three axes. I mean, the X axis and Y axis and the Z axis, and it basically uses the X and Y that Z is just to focus it getting it the right distance away and then it just, based on what the computer design is telling the laser head to move, it moves along the whatever.

Kate: Whatever you tell it to?

Curt: And burns through it. It's actually burning through it. Whatever you tell them to do.

Kate: So how do you, what's the computer stuff look like? How do you enter that in?

Curt: If you think of a lot of the design software like Adobe Illustrator and so forth, you can create, manipulate and so forth to get a pattern and then in our case we import it into LightBurn which is an allay set of software that converts that into essentially the instructions that go to the laser cutter to tell it what to do.

Kate: Okay, what's your favorite kind of things to make?

Curt: Typically, it's small items. I'm not a furniture maker. I don't have the tools for that. I don't have the space for that. Goodness knows I've made hundreds and hundreds of pens now. But like I said, a lot of small stuff. Now, I've been making some cutting boards because I've a bunch of leftover wood here. Some toys. I think I just found a source for the little 3D puzzles that are just like you stick together and they make like a dinosaur, or they make. And I can put the pattern in, and I can cut one of those in a couple of minutes and instead of paying the 25 or 30 dollars that, you know, to get it commercially.

Kate: That's great. Did your family like it? Did you give stuff to your family?

Curt: They’re done with me. There's the things that I can make, you know, that they've wanted. They've gotten, you know, my youngest daughter wanted a, what appears to be a three-dimensional looking cutting board. Never done one of those before, but, you know, I said okay. I'll work and put one of those together.

The biggest thing that I get requests from the family really is more my wife wanting me to cut out templates for her quilting stuff. She goes, “You can make for next to nothing something that's going to cost me 25 bucks at the quilting store.”

Kate: That’s great.

Curt: Well, and then, of course, with her, as soon as she get one and she sees how well it works, then she shows it to all of her quilting buddies and all of a sudden, I'm making a dozen of them.

Kate: That's nice, that's nice. They should make you something you could use.

Curt: Oh, they do.

Kate: That’s great. Okay, well thank you.

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Kate: When did you start doing woodworking?

Bob: Well, I started with my grandfather when I was when you were a kid. But when I retired and then moved down here, I started to get excited about woodturning, lathe turning. And somebody told me about the meeting, next week's meeting, the SAZWA. And so, I came down to that meeting, met a gentleman that teaches, kind of a professional turner. And so, I met him the next day I was out at his house, and for three years I went to continuous classes with him because I just loved it.

Now, I'm kind of where I want to be with that, but I also joined the DWA, this meeting, just because of the different computer work they do and I'm terrible at computers. So anyway, but I ended up, they ended up kind of drafting me to go down to Xerocraft where a lot of the guys volunteer, and most of the guys go down there and do, and I was brought down there because they needed somebody to be their fire safety manager. I'm their volunteer fire safety manager now, and it sounds like next month, I'm going to be giving a little demo on extinguisher maintenance for this group because we're discovering though all the things that I found at Xerocraft that were wrong and dangerous a lot of the guys have those issues in their shops to.

Kate: What do you think are some good fire safety tips for anybody who is doing this kind of stuff? I mean, I know there's a lot, but do you have any really important ones?

Bob: My gosh, well, Everybody, most people have a fire extinguisher available in their woodshop, but they don't realize that you have to do things to it. You have to have them checked, but you have to turn them over. And I do the ones out at Xerocraft now on a monthly basis. I turn them over and use a rubber hammer on them to loosen the powder up so it flows in there rather than being chunky. Extension cords are terrible in woodshops and Xerocraft had a large issue with a lot of extension cords too.

Anyway, that, and then the other gentleman mentioned the flammable finishes that people use. Anything linseed oil based doesn't need to be lit on fire if it's in a somewhat non-contained it can just self-ignite.

Kate; Oh wow, okay.

Bob: Anyway, there's things like that and just the amount of sawdust that is gathered up into anybody's woodshop.

Kate: It’s flammable.

Bob: And not only that but it's bad to breathe. The dust control is really important in a shop that you're using a lot.

Kate: Thanks. Those are great tips. So, what kind of stuff do you like to make?

Bob: I've done hundreds of wood turnings. I'm not in this for money. I give it away to friends. I've also done a lot of cutting boards, multi-dimensional cutting boards. I'm not really into furniture making unless.

Kate: It seems like most people here aren’t.

Bob: Well, we have one of the guys is that he wasn't here today, but he and he's into the old-fashioned things too. He does with hand planes to finish them. No, I'm just about interested in anything. I decided I wanted to get into the computerized stuff, and I bought a really nice computer CNC machine, and then I detested using it and it wasn't successful, so I actually sold it to Jim and his son for a lot less than I paid for it but because it just wasn't my thing because you're standing and watching it do the work. I want to be the one that's making the sawdust. That's what I did. I learned to, watched my grandfather cut the tip of his finger off with his table saw when I was about eight years old.

Kate: That must have been scary.

Bob: I've always been into safety. In 34 years in the fire department.

Kate: Where were you a firefighter.

Bob: Up in the city of Renton, Washington.

Kate: Winton?Bob: Renton. Renton. Right next to Seattle. It's where a big Boeing plant was and things like that. Wonderful, absolutely the best career for me that I could ever have.

Kate: Yeah, interesting.

Bob: I retired after 34 years I was a station captain which was what my goal was from the beginning. I wanted to become a captain just because I respected the people that taught me in the academies.

Kate: That's great. Now you can use those skills now even when you're retired.

Bob: Well, yeah, and that was, I didn't realize that I was going to do that. Terry Glover was the one that talked to me when he realized at one of these meetings that I had the history and he said, “Well, do you have certifications?”

And I said, “Well, yeah, but they're all expired.” So, but I still had the experience and so, I'm really happy that they invited me out there because there was some serious hazards.

Kate: What was the group they said where they burned down. The building burned down? That ghost something? Did you hear that guy say that?

Bob: No, I didn’t.

Kate: He said there was some makerspace group where their building.

Bob: That was some other town. No, no, it wasn't here. But yeah, mean there's, there was several areas that I discovered that were hazardous and there's still some things that are not fixed yet. Not necessarily the fire hazards, but they're in a historic building down there. It's over a hundred years old. And so, the exiting in the basement is not what it should be. It doesn't have panic hardware and things like that. So, they're working with the building owner to try to get that taken care of. Every week that I go down there, I inspect and make sure that there's nothing blocking the exits and things like that.

And there was batteries were dead in emergency exit lighting and things like that. You don't know that because they'll work if the power is on, but as soon as the power goes out, they have a little test button. So, I go around every month and I put a ladder up underneath them and push the test button and just stuff like that. It's basic stuff from a fire perspective, but not from the Xerocraft perspective. They didn't have anybody that was.

Kate: They weren’t thinking about that.

Bob: So anyway, it really makes me feel good and then Adrian and Bud, they're there. I'm out there on Wednesday because that's one of the days that they're all out there, too.

Kate: Yeah, you like to see them again too. Like a club.

Bob: Yeah, it's like the coffee table at the fire station. Yeah, just but everybody there has different background. see them again too.

Kate: Yeah, different skills.

Bob: That's the amazing part because I got nothing in computer work and Adrian is a computer wizard and he's an electronics wizard too. And Bud is the same with electronics too. So anyway, that's about it. It's just a good place where those of us that are getting on in years can get together and feel like.

Kate: You’re doing something. You’re accomplishing a lot. Well, thank you.

Bob: You're very welcome.

______________________________________

Kate: I'm here with Bud, who's the president of this group. So, I've been asking everybody when you first started doing woodworking.

Bud: I come from a family of urban barn raisers. So, in my youth, I was basically the gopher. Go get more nails, go get boards. Never allowed to actually participate in anything. And by the time I was old enough to do that, basically all the people had built on their additions or garages or whatever. So, I never actually got to go do anything. So, I became.

Kate: You just got to watch.

Bud: I just got to watch. But I got into woodworking seriously when I retired about ten years ago. I live in a retirement community with a woodshop there.

Kate: Where's that?

Bud: Quail Creek is the subdivision down in Green Valley. Not knowing anything, just joined the club, had a couple of projects I wanted to work on, and had all sorts of mentors. So, I was able to learn from an experienced cabinetmaker, an experienced home builder, people with all types of skills, experienced lathe runners. And I just enjoyed it. And because I was retired, I had time to join the board down there and try and figure out how we're going to get the club to grow and move forward.

Kate: They have their own board and everything.

Bud: Yes, for that club down there, right. And when I was there, I just heard from other members of that club about the existence of Desert Woodcrafters and Southern Arizona Woodturners. So, we would carpool up here on weekends and participate in the club. And frankly, I joined with these clubs and stayed with these clubs because of the camaraderie of the organization. I just found a bunch of people I just really enjoy spending time with and working with them. I always love doing charity work, volunteering, and the fact that these clubs do so much charity work just.

Kate: It’s really incredible.

Bud: That really drew me into it. I'm not too sure I do any of them very well, but I do a little bit of everything.

Kate: So how long have you been president?

Bud: 15 months.

Kate: Okay, how long is your term? Is it two years?

Bud: It's a one-year term, but whoever is in the position gets re-elected. It's a, yeah.

Kate: So, you have other positions too, you have like a secretary and treasurer and all that?

Bud: Yeah, so our board consists of four named positions, so president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer. And then we have three people in ad hoc or open positions. One of them doesn't really have to stand for reelection because the past president gets punished by being an open board member for the next three years just to carry forward some continuity in the group. So, Frank is our past president. He's always in coaching me through whatever he's done in the past, what's worked well or not well.

Kate: You run the meetings here.

Bud: Basically, run the meetings, make sure the other board members are getting their job done. For some reason, it's always been the president doing the budget rather than the treasurer, so I get to do that. And then coordinate with the Southern Arizona Woodturners on what we're doing.

Kate: Okay. So, what do you like to make?

Bud: I tend to dabble in the 3D arena. I've got access to a CNC machine, do a lot of CNC work.

Kate: What does that stand for?

Bud: Computer numerical control. The software is called, it's a CAD CAM program, typically engineering work. They've come out with versions that are oriented towards woodworking. So, it's CAD for the design CAM is the what do want to tell the machine to do and then after that there's a machine control step that actually takes your instructions and feed it to a machine, actually do the cutting. So, I do a lot of two-sided 3D work.

I'll use an example I've got three grandchildren. All of them play soccer. So, one Christmas I decided I was going to make them each a bowl but I did a soccer ball motif on the inside and outside of the bowl so they've got a bowl which when you're looking at it almost looks like you've cut a soccer ball in half.

Kate: That’s fun.

Bud: And that dragged me into I now teach CNC classes both at Quail Creek in the community but then also an organization that a number of us belong to called Xerocraft which is a city of Tucson makerspace.

Kate: What do you teach? You teach the computer stuff?Bud: I teach the software side. I show people how to use the hardware, but we've got more experienced people on building and repairing hardware.

Kate: Yeah, so what else, I know Xerocraft, do woodworking, what other kinds of things. They do a lot of different.

Bud: So Xerocraft’s pretty much, it's called a makerspace, sometimes called a hackerspace. But, so, woodworking, metalwork, welding, they have a radio station, jewelry studio, sewing classes, cooking classes. It's pretty much every kind of shop that they should have in high schools or make available in high schools but don't have. So it's open to the community. I'll say half, half of the staffing or more than half of the staffing for woodlays, metalways, and general woodworking come from our two clubs. There's a lot of intersection.

Kate: How much does it cost to join Xerocraft?

Bud: Xerocraft, you can do monthly. I think it's $60. We have quarterly and they have annual dues. A little bit expensive sounding, but it gives you access to every one of them.

Kate: You get to do everything?

Bud: Every one of the shops. So, if you've got a project that crosses all of the shops, they have 3D printing, vinyl cutting, laser engraving. It’s a true bargain. I know a number of the people that I do CNC work from will join for a month and they'll save up their projects for a half year and they'll come in, and they'll hit most of the shops to get it done.

Kate: Yeah. What does your group cost to join? This one, the Desert Woodcrafters?

Bud: We’re $35 a year for a membership.

Kate: That’s a good deal.

Bud: It is a deal for a year, and there's an awful lot of knowledge you can get for $35. And then, again, to me it's the camaraderie of the members and getting together, sharing what they know.

Kate: Yeah, how many members belong to the group?

Adrian: 30?

Bud: We have 40 for us and about 60. And if it's not, 40 plus 60, so there's probably 80 between the two clubs.

Kate: That's great. It’s a good group.

Bud: Yes it is.

Kate: Okay, is there anything else you want to tell us about being president or?

Bud: No.

Kate: No?

Bud: You should talk to Adrian Barton about being vice president. That is the hard job. I just have to run the meetings. The vice president's in charge of getting all the demos set up and finding demos that are interesting, but more importantly not only interesting, but can get done in 20 minutes and be meaningful. It's probably the tough side of it.

Kate: You think you have the harder job.

Adrian: Yeah, nobody wants to be vice president.

Bud: Nobody wants to be vice president. I wouldn't be president except he said he'll be vice. He volunteers to be vice president if I'll be president.

Adrian: We're in our second term.

Bud: We're in our second term, and I'm sure we'll get elected for a third term.

Ken: The other club has a two-year limit. This club says you could be a lifetime member.

Kate: Lifetime president?

Bud: Yes. Stay as long as you want.

Jim: They flex the years to it. They don't have any volunteers like this year.

Adrian: How long have you been treasurer?

Jim: This, probably now forever. Five or six or seven years now. And I only did it temporary because the guy got six.

Kate: And then now you're for life.

Bud: Yes, treasure for life.

Ken: And that's the only reason you're the president is because you're the only one that didn't say no right away.

Jim: He said, I'll put your name on the list. Well, my name was the only one.

Ken: Yeah, but you're doing a good job. Much better than in the past.

Kate: Good, that's good to know. Adrian, how did you start getting into woodworking?

Adrian: I've always been into woodworking.

Kate: Since you were a kid?

Adrian: I never had work the time. But in my previous career, I didn't have much time. So I made some very nice pieces of furniture. It didn't just take me a year. Because I'd get one day a month or something. But once I retired, I got into all kinds of stuff, and I had no idea that I was going to be 3D printing. I mean that was.

Kate: It wasn't on your radar.

Adrian: And laser stuff. That hadn't even crossed one mind.

Jim: Yeah, I remember coming to a meeting one time and Terry Glover saying, you know, we should have a CNC offshoot of the club so we can do CNC work. Adrian decides, well, okay, so we've got CNC, the same technology is used for 3D printers, we should get into 3D printing. So now we engrave half the stuff we send out to other organizations.

Kate: So, you're a former engineer, right?

Adrian: Engineering technician.

Kate: Okay. So does that help you in?

Adrian: Oh yeah. I was a controls guy, learning the new controls was relatively easy. But if I had to do this professionally, I'd be in trouble.

Kate: Why?

Adrian: Just because there's this stuff. I get that over my head a lot. A lot of times.

Bud: and he's being modest. He gets in over his head, but then he goes off on his own, he figures out how to do it, and he ends up teaching the rest of us.

Adrian: Yeah, but because it's not a million-dollar project, it's okay if I get in over my head. But if I was back to what I used to do, you know working on five to ten million dollar pieces of machinery and I'm in over my head. We're all in trouble. Yeah, that's a problem. Yeah.

Kate: Yeah, I like when they were talking before about mistakes, you know. You can fix your mistakes, I guess. It's a good lesson. So what kind of stuff do you like to make?

Adrian: Well, we've been doing cutting boards and charcuterie boards. It's the latest thing. I've got a bunch of, I’m going to call it scrap. It's just rough-cut walnut that I've had for years. So, it's not good for furniture because it's all twisted up. So, small projects. I want to do some beads of courage boxes. Just finding the time. And then you want those to be good quality because it can’t just be nailed together like a birdhouse. Because some little kid is going to be. It's dealing with other things.

Jim: Yeah, it has bigger problems, yeah. And particularly since some of those kids end up using the boxes as a, in the worst-case scenario, some of the kids who don't make it, their parents will use the box as a memorial for the beads and other items that they want to maintain. So, it's gotta be good work.

Adrian: I've seen some of the stuff that Ken's turned out, t the beads of courage.

Kate: Ken should come over here. So, Ken is, I heard that you were a woodshop teacher?

Ken: Yeah, I was the woodshop drafting teacher here for 30 years.

Kate: So, how did you get into doing that work?

Ken: Well, I was working this dead-end job in a machine shop after I graduated from college, and I came home all grumpy every day and my wife said, “You know, you need to make a change.”

We had a friend who taught auto shop in Seattle, and he said after I graduate, “You got all the skills. You teach any of the shop classes.”

And I said, “I can't teach auto shop.”

He said, “Yeah, but you can teach woodshop, or you can teach drafting. You have a degree in architecture. I mean good grief.” I went back to the NAU and got my teaching certificate and then I got hired here, and I just stayed here forever.

Kate: Yeah. So, what did you like about teaching?

Ken: Well, teaching was great fun because you never, there was no routine or rut. You didn't do the same exact. If you thought you were going to do something that day, then there was a pretty darn good chance that you were going to up a little different stuff because something happens, and kids ask different kinds of questions, and everybody wants to make something different. You had to be able to be able to help them do whatever they were in the middle of.

Kate: Yeah. So what year was that when you started?

Ken: ’79.

Kate: Oh wow.

Ken: And then when I retired, a neighbor. I think he knew my son. Anyway, he contacted me and said, “How about you come down to the woodworking club that meets at Raytheon?” Okay, sounds like something to do. And then I found out, you know, there's a bunch of great guys. You can share ideas, and you can make stuff and maybe every once in a while you win some money. This is just fun for old guys like us.

Kate: So, you taught for how many years?

Ken: 30.

Kate: 30 years.

Ken: That's sort of the magic number. If you can do 30 years, you get a full pension.

Kate: Yeah, what did your students, what did they like doing? Did they have favorite things, or projects?

Ken: We made a little bit of everything. In the advanced class, I always had them do a group project and this neighborhood is lower middle-class stuff, and they didn't have the opportunity to make anything expensive. But as a group project, we made cedar chests, and we made armoires one year. We made these decorative ice boxes, and big pieces, and we sold them. And it funded the after-school activities. And then they got to find out what a really nice piece of furniture looked like.

That that was then after the maybe first whole semester. After that, they got whatever they wanted to make. I had some people donate wood and stuff so, my last three years I never charged them anything for it. They could make anything they wanted. It was completely free because I had been building up piles of everything people would donate. By the time I retired, I still have big piles of stuff but we used most of it up.

Kate: Okay. So there's no woodshop class now. What happened with that?

Ken: No. After I retired, I don't think they looked very hard, but they hired the guy who built the sets in the drama department, and he just wasn't up to the job. They finally kind of.

Kate: They just phased it out?

Ken: The enrollment started to dwindle, and finally, they closed it down.

Kate: Okay, are there other opportunities for kids to learn somewhere else, like outside of school or?

Ken: In woodworking there is hardly anything left. CEO had a carpentry program the last I knew. And JTED has a carpentry program through Sunnyside. So, there are some opportunities, but you've got to look hard. The kid has to want to move in that direction. They don’t just get to go to school and then they can just sign up. Now you actually have to plan ahead.

But they can, and then some schools, this one has a powerful automotive program, and they have photography, and they have junior ROTC is a big deal here. Each school, if they can find a teacher, that's the key. They have to find somebody that wants to run that program, and they want to do good things and if they do good things the kids will hear about it. And they’ll come on in.

Kate: During this meeting, you were showing some things. Can you explain? Explain what those are?

Ken: Everyone has a role. One of my roles. I've been kind of backing off. I've done the beads of courage and I've done the purple heart pens. I'm backed off from that, and they’ve gotten some other people involved, but they still want me to do the show and tell.

Kate: That was show and tell. Okay.

Ken: Yes, I guess I do a good job on show and tell. Basically all I do is I try to look at every one, and say something good about it, because otherwise people won't bring things in. And it's not hard to say good things about things that we saw today. That one jewelry box. He spent a lot of time and a lot of effort on that. He needs to get a pat on the back. He's an experienced woodworker. He's brand new to the club. But you can tell he's done work a long time. And then everybody does different things. Sometimes it's a toy, sometimes it's something a little more serious.

Kate: What were those things that you were showing over there? What was that called?

Ken: Well, that's the president's choice.

Kate: Like an assignment, kind of?Ken: So, Bud chooses a project. Like in February, it had to do something, woodworking had to do with love. So, there were a lot of heart-shaped things. Next month, he works really hard for the Christmas party to get donations from the vendors. Now he says, “You know, we need to use them that the vendors give us and then give them some props, because they're donating hundreds of dollars worth of stuff that the vendors give some props because worth of stuff. The least we can do is use it, and send them an email saying thanks.”

Well, this was the main thing, was the two by four contest. We do that every year. But other people brought in pens that they make, and other people brought in, it was a Beads of Courage box. And gosh, I can't remember, but everything's welcome.

Kate: What was that thing called that somebody won that toy and then that person has the bring something back?

Ken: That's the bringback.

Kate: The bringback. That's what that was called. Okay.

Ken: If you win that drawing, you get whatever the person brought back from last month that won from that drawing, and then you’re required to bring something next month to donate. I always thought, well, this is pretty easy to do. But we had a guest turner in the other club three months ago, and she’s from San Diego, and her club, their club, they simply refused to bring something back. And I thought, why is that? They don't want to participate. But she said, “We tried, and we tried, and we finally gave up. So, we don't do that.” And I looked around our club and I said, “We got better people than they got.” I guess.

Kate: Do you belong to any other groups? Xerocraft and all that?

Ken: I belong to the turners’ club as well as this one. They need me real badly because I have the keys to the shop.

Kate: That’s right. I figured it was you.

Ken: That's really my only qualification. I go to Xerocraft only when I want to use their skills. Somebody wants something like a cremains urn, something that I have to make periodically. And so, I'll lay it out, and before I’ll assemble it, I'll take it down and John Nicholson, he's the best. He'll look at it ,and I'll have sort of written out what it needs to say but he’s going to put a nature scene on there, along with the name and the dates kind of thing. He goes on that laptop and in about five minutes he'll have something and say, “Well how do you like that?”

And I go, “Oh boy, that's just great.” And then he'll burn that. It'll take a day or two and then I'll put the urn together and we’ll give it to the person.

Two years ago, we had kind of a run of members that were, anyway, I had to make four in a row.

Kate: That's a nice special thing to do.

Ken: Yeah, we're all older guys. This is going to happen to all of us. And we used to make American flag boxes for that same thing. We've stopped making those. But if somebody requests something, then we will make it for them and we will not charge them.

Kate: That's wonderful. I'm so surprised to see this big list of all the projects you do in the community. It's such a wonderful thing, I think, especially for kids to see something handmade. You know, that's really unique and special.

Ken: Well, you know, when they get a little toy for Christmas, get to take it home. That's fun when the kid picks up the toy, he thinks that he's just going to play with it then and there. And then they get to take it home? The teacher usually says, “You know, you get to take it home.”

And they get this huge smile. And they just can't believe it. They say, “Really?” What happens to it after that, I don't know. But they play to heck with the toys. They play hard with those toys.

Kate: Well, do you have anything else to tell us?

Ken: No, no, no, you're doing great.

Kate: Well, thank you.

Ken: I don't know what you're going to do with all this. You'll have your kind of fun.

Kate: Yes, I will.

Thanks again to all the guys that I interviewed from the Desert Woodcrafters Association. If you're interested in joining this group, their website is desertwoodcrafters.com. They have a fundraising luncheon auction coming up on April 5th that everybody is welcome to go to. The other groups that were mentioned in this interview include the Southern Arizona Woodturners Association. Their website is sazwa.org and Xerocraft, which is spelled X-E-R-O-C-R-A-F-T dot org.

If you don't live in Tucson but you're interested in joining a woodturning group, you should check out the American Association of Woodturners at woodturner.org. So thanks again to everybody who let me interview them. They were a terrific bunch of people who are so fascinating. I knew nothing about woodturning or really wood crafting in general besides the shop class I took in seventh grade. So it was really exciting and fun for me to get to know these people and to see what they do.

Kate: Okay. Today I'm here with Jan, who is somebody I have known for a very long time, I think since I was around six years old, and Jan is a retired school librarian and now does a lot of political activism. We're going to talk a lot about that stuff today. Welcome, Jan.

©Jan Bombeck

Jan: Thank you.

Kate: The first question I'd like to ask is, I know that you grew up in Prairie Village, so I wanted to ask you to describe what that was like. What that area of Kansas is like.

Jan: Well, it's nothing like it sounds. It's not a town. Well, I guess it is a town kind of on the prairie, but it's just a suburb of the greater Kansas City metropolitan area. It was originally, I don't know what you call it, set out, made up by a guy named J.C. Nichols, who built and developed the Country Club Plaza, which is in Kansas City, Missouri, which is very fancy elite shopping district, and Prairie Village was kind of like his baby after World War II. The guys were all coming home from the war getting married, having families, and wanted a place to live that were nice, inexpensive homes. So that's basically what Prairie Village was. The history of that which I have kind of learned more as an adult, of course, is very white. It was pretty white when I was growing up, and I never really thought about it too much. There was a lot of redlining involved. My dad got a, what do you call it? Where you're get alone because you were in the service.

Kate: Oh, yeah, like a VA loan?

Jan: VA Loan. Yes. And those were available to a lot of people, but not so much if you were black or person of color. That put them at a disadvantage for buying these homes. Everybody that I grew up with in Prairie Village was white. I don't think there were any. There was a little boy who was family was from China in my elementary school, and nobody. Well, I guess he went on to middle school and high school. In high school, I think there were a few more diverse people. A lot of, I was friends with a lot of people who were Jewish, but not. In fact, they used to call my high school, “the Synagogue on Mission Road,” because during the Jewish holidays so many people were gone.

Kate: Wow, I didn't know that. Okay, that was East, right?

Jan: Shawnee Mission East. Again, you know, you've got things going on that I wasn't aware of as a child. People who were Jewish weren't able to. There were, what do you call them? Things in the contracts in like Leawood. You couldn't buy a house in Leawood if you were Jewish.

Kate: Wow, yeah.

Jan: So, a lot of people who were Jewish bought homes in the Prairie Village, Mission Hills area.

Kate: I see, okay.

Jan: I ended up going to school with a lot of them, but that was the only diversity that was in my life, and but it was the typical Leave It to Beaver existent. My mom did not wear a dress and pearls, but a lot of the women, most of the women in my neighborhood, I can't even remember anybody that worked. I mean, there were people that kind of worked, the lady across. Well, I should say kind of. It was hard. She sold real estate, but she didn't do it full-time. So, my friends, you know, were in daycare. Everybody pretty much stayed home. My parents bought the house when I was a year old, which was like 1952.

Kate: Where were you born?

Kate: I was born in Kansas City.

Kate: Okay, over on the other side.

Jan: Yeah. I was born in the Missouri side. My parents, when I was born, lived in a little tiny town down in the boot heel of Missouri. It's called Mexico, Missouri.

Kate: Yeah, I've heard of that.

Jan: Have you heard of that?

Kate: Yes, I've seen the signs on the road.

Jan: I have no idea where they got the name, but they lived in Mexico for about the first well, my first year, and they back to Kansas City for me to be born. I guess they thought the doctors in Mexico weren't good enough or something. My parents were both from the Missouri side, Kansas City, and so she came back to have me. I don't know where I was born. Saint Mary's Hospital, I think, Kansas City, and then they went back to Mexico and then my dad got a job offer up here in Kansas City, so they moved back, and both their families were back up here. So I think it was.

Kate: Okay, that makes sense. Yeah.

Jan: They bought. They actually lived on the Missouri side for a little while, and then they bought the house in Prairie Village.

Kate: What did your dad do?

Jan: He graduated. I don't know how, well, kind of I know how he got this job. He graduated from MU in journalism with an emphasis on advertising, and he got a job with a company in Mexico. It was called the A. P. Green Fire Brick Company, and they made fire bricks. I'm not even sure what fire bricks are. He worked in their advertising department, and I always remember a story he told about getting the job. They asked him what his hobbies were, and he said, “drinking.” And they hired him.

Kate: Oh, my God.

Jan: I guess in the early fifties that was an acceptable.

Kate: That was fine. Yeah.

Jan: But he worked there, and then his uncle had an insurance agency up here in Kansas City. He moved back up here and worked, and from the time I can remember, he always sold insurance.

Kate: Okay, alright. So he was. He didn't go into journalism.

Jan: He did not use his degree. No.

Kate: Okay.

Jan: He had great handwriting, and he used to print out all the covers of my reports for me, and he could make it look really, he had graphic arts kind of ability. But he never specifically used his degree.

Kate: Your mom went to MU, too, right? Also in journalism?

Jan: That’s where they met. They both met in journalism school.

Kate: Okay, so you have two sisters? Right?

Jan: Well, yes, kind of. I have, well, one of them has died.

Kate: Oh, okay.

Jan: And I acquired one. My mom got remarried when she was 78.

Kate: I see. Okay.

Kate: He had a daughter. So I kind of have a stepsister that I acquired later in life. But we’re really close though.

Kate: Yeah, that's nice.

Jan: Growing up in Prairie Village, I had two sisters.

Kate: Okay. What were they like? Were they younger than you?

Jan: Yes, I was here first.

Kate: You were the oldest.

Jan: I don't know. They were annoying.

Kate: I should have known. Yeah, that's always the answer.

Jan: I was a little bit older, because when my sister Kathy was born, I was five and when my sister Nancy was born, I was six.

Kate: I see,

Jan: so they were closer together in age and kind of through life, they were just kind of closer, because they were closer in age because I was always five years ahead of them in school. So, we didn't go to the same schools and we actually kind of got closer as adults and did things together and took some trips together. But, when they were younger, they fought with each other all the time. Oh my God, they were always fighting.

Kate: You stayed out of it?

Jan: I was enough, you know, older.

Kate: Yeah, you were off.

Jan: Hanging out with a boyfriend or something. I remember one time, I had a guy that I was going out with, and he wanted to come over to the house and see me. My mom was at work, and I knew that she didn't want him to come over when she was gone, and so I paid my sister Nancy 50 cents to go to the swimming pool, but of course.

Kate: Did she question that at all?

Jan: Well, kind of, because she ratted me out later and told Mom that Bob had come over to the house, and I paid her 50 cents to leave.

Kate: Oh, wow.

Jan: It didn't work out well. My mom went back to work, too, when I was like fifteen, and I was in charge of Kathy and Nancy while my mom was at work, because she wrongly thought that I was mature enough to watch them, and I didn't. She'd always leave us a list of stuff to do, and I would never do any of it, and I wouldn't make them do it, and then they'd be mad if I told them they had to do whatever their job was on the list, so it didn't work out well.

Kate: What was your mom doing?

Jan: She worked at a real estate office as like a secretary.

Kate: I see.

Jan: Again, she did not use her journalism degree.

Kate: Yeah, yeah, she didn't, either. What elementary school did you go to?

Jan: I went to an elementary school called Prairie, which has a cool history. When I was going there, it had pictures on the walls. It started out as a room schoolhouse back, I think, 1800s. I think it was actually in a different spot than where the building was that I went, but the building that I went to was a really neat building. It had hardwood floors and cool little window seats, and it was built, I think, in the early or maybe late forties, early fifties. It was a neat building, and then in the last I don't know, twenty years ago maybe, it burned down, and so it's in the same spot. But it's not the old, cool, building.

Kate: Yeah, it's not familiar to me. Yeah, I don't know if I’ve heard of it.

Jan: It was big fire, I mean, I don't remember exactly what year, but I had kids by then. It was twenty, thirty years ago. I don't remember, but it was a neat school to go to, and we walked. You know I've been talking about in this cold, cold weather. First of all, they're closing schools, and I don't remember the schools being closed too much. It was just like it's snowing, get up and go. Get your boots on. The girls couldn't wear pants to school, and so, you'd have to wear a dress. But when it was so cold you’d wear pants under the dress and then you get to school and go back in the coat closet and take off your boots and take off your pants, and then we're in your dress. I remember, I don't know, it was probably five or six blocks from my house to the school. We just walked in the snow. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, uphill, two miles. I don't remember being driven, and I don't remember a bunch of snow days.

Kate: Yeah, you must have just toughed it out.

Jan: Well, you know, and now the districts are so big they've got to consider. I don't know areas of, that don’t.

Kate: The buses and stuff.

Jan: Yes, buses and things like that.

Kate: What did you like in school?

Jan: Well, I liked reading.

Kate: Yeah, that makes sense.

Jan: I always, if I liked something I would do really well in it, and if I didn't like it I would do really poorly in it, so, I got mediocre grades. I was never one of those kids that got straight A's all the way through school. But I always liked to read, and my mom read out loud to me, always. I can remember the first book really loving my mom had read me Heidi, and I just loved that book. I had a copy of it, and I remember reading it underneath my desk, like in third grade, when we were supposed to be doing something else. I think that was kind of when I first started really loving being able to read on my own. But my mom always read to me even, I remember when I was 17 she read me a book called Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.

Kate: Oh, wow!

Jan: She would do stuff around the house. She wasn't, well, maybe she was working part-time then. I don't remember. But in the afternoon, we had a screen porch, and we'd go sit on that porch and she’d read me that book. Obviously, I could read myself. But that's why I love Audible books, I guess. Because it’s like having my mom read to me.

Kate: Right.

Jan: But I think that contributed a lot to my love of reading. I hated math. Hated, hated, hated math. I did horribly in math. I still count on my fingers, sometimes, when I’m doing math. I think I have some kind of math, learning disability that nobody ever addressed back then. Everything else was okay. I didn't love school, but I didn't hate it, but reading was always the thing that I did well in.

Kate: Yeah, did you have any influential teachers?

Jan: Um, no.

Kate: No?

Jan: I had teachers that I disliked. A second-grade teacher was mean. She had the kids come up with a punishment jar, and then, when you were bad, you had to draw a punishment out of the punishment jar.

Kate: Oh, wow.

Jan: And the punishment might have nothing to do with the severity of your offense. I remember I was probably talking, and I had to draw a punishment. My punishment was, I had to sit in the corner the whole day, and not do any work, and then stay after school and do all my work. You know that totally wouldn't fly anymore. But I was just devastated. I remember going home and crying and crying.

I had a fifth grade teacher who yelled at the class all the time, and her name was Vivian Dunlap. A friend of mine and I used to call her Vivian volcano, and we would say she was erupting.

But and then my sixth-grade teacher was a man. It was the only man I ever had, and I really liked him. But looking back at the things that happened, it's just bizarre. If the boys in particular. I don't remember he ever did this to girls, but if the boys were bad, we had those desks that had the part in it where you kept your books with a little lid thing that opened up the chair was attached to it, and he'd go over and take their desk and flip it over and flip them out of the desk on the floor. And he'd leave us outside for recess,

and we’d be out there for maybe a half an hour, and I don't know what he was doing. But we'd just be out there running around on the playground with no adult supervision, and finally he'd show up and bring us in. So, things were a little bit more loosey-goosey back in the fifties and sixties. But I liked him. He was a good teacher. He was funny, but I would say I didn't really have a teacher that I felt was like totally like somebody who really influenced me, my life and gave me a love of learning until I got to Johnson County Community College.

Kate: Why don't you explain how you ended up there.

Jan: Well, my parents, my mom wasn't making a lot of money being secretary for a real estate company, and my dad's insurance company was doing poorly, and they didn't have a lot of money to send me to KU. A lot of my friends were going to KU or K-State and they just said we don't have money to do that. My mother, probably something in the paper, heard something on the radio that they were starting this new community college. It was called Johnson County Community College. She said, “You can go there.” And it's kind of inexpensive. I don't remember what it was. Something ridiculous, like $15 a credit hour or something. She said we can afford that.

We got in the car and drove by, and the community college had purchased an old grade school that was no longer being used. And it was kind of a cool building, but I thought it was hideous. My friends were going away and decorating their dorm rooms and joining sororities, and I thought, I’m stuck in this old, dilapidated grade school.

I was so depressed, but I went ahead and enrolled, and I can remember the first couple of classes that I took. It would have been 1969. The teachers were just on fire with enthusiasm. I mean, the classes I took in humanities and social science. They kind of had a theme for the whole program was creativity, and how people were creative, and what defined creativity, and everything we read had a link to that creative. The teachers were just so exciting and so excited to be there. I think they were thrilled to be part of this new kind of education program in the in the county. And of course, now it's a huge, huge campus out at, further south, and they have all kinds of programs. They have culinary programs and dental hygiene programs. And it's still a two-year community college. But I think they still have really excellent teachers. But it was so much fun to be there the first year, and it was, you know, crazy things going on in 1969, kind of like now. But it was really a good experience.

Kate: Did you know, then, that you wanted to be a teacher? Or did that come later?

Jan: Oh, that kind of came along, I don't know, I think with my social consciousness. I decided I wanted to save the world, and I was going to teach in an inner-city school and save all the black children from I don't know what. But that was kind of like my social consciousness.

Kate: I see. So that's how it came about.

Jan: Right.

Kate: So, you went there for two years, and then you went to that little school.

Jan: Then I got into a local school. Still, I still couldn't afford to go away. And I went to a school called Avila, and it was on the Missouri side. It had been a Catholic school. In fact, when I went there, it would have been 1971, ’72, there were still some nuns who were teachers. But there were people who weren’t nuns, too, but it was. It was good, I mean, I got some credits and got to stay home, and I got a loan and a grant to cover my tuition there.

Then for my senior year, I got married this summer after my junior year, and my husband and I both went to K-State. He'd been at K-State, so I transferred all my various credits to K-State and did my senior year and my student teaching and stuff at K-State.

Kate: Was Rick from that area, too? From Johnson County somewhere?

Jan: He was. Yeah, he went to Shawnee Mission East.

Kate: Oh, he did so. You already knew him in high school?

Jan: No, I didn't know.

Kate: Oh, you didn't know him. Okay.

Jan: I don't know if you know, but back then and still, I think the classes are so big. There were like 650 people in my graduating class, and he played on the basketball team. So, I kind of knew who he was. I mean, I had seen him. But no, we didn't know each other. I didn't know the person I sat next to when I graduated.

Kate: Right.

Jan: I remember thinking, well, he must have been in my homeroom class, but I don't remember him. With that many people, it's kind of hard. But we met. He went to Johnson County Community College, his first year, and so that's where we met.

Kate: You met him there. I see.

Jan: Yeah, and then he transferred to K-State. Well, I guess he just went there one year. He transferred K-State his sophomore year, and we dated our sophomore and junior year, and then got married.

Kate: Alright. So, you finished at K-State, and you majored in education, is that right?

Jan: Yes.

Kate: Okay, and then you start teaching.

Jan: Yes, I got a job. Well, you know, I don't know how it is teaching. I think that places kind of are desperate for teachers now, if I get that feeling right. But back then I think teachers were kind of a dime a dozen, and it was hard to get a job. Shawnee Mission was really hard to get into. You had to have experience. They weren't going to hire you fresh out of college. They could afford to hire more experienced people. So Shawnee Mission was hard. I remember I interviewed at Olathe. I interviewed at a school district which later turned into Blue Valley. But it was Stanley School district at the time.

When I interviewed in Kansas City, Kansas, they were the only one that actually offered me a job. And I had done student teaching like in first grade and wanted to do the little guys. But they offered me a job teaching sixth and seventh grade science at a school called Argentine Middle School in Kansas City, Kansas.

I remember, I went home and called my mom and told her I'd gotten a job, and she said, “Oh, that's great! Where is it?”

And I said, “Well, it's in Kansas City, Kansas. I'm going to be teaching sixth and seventh grade science.”

And there was this long pause, and she said, “Didn't you flunk weeks of high school biology?”

And I said, “Oh, they don't know that. They don't care.” But I hope that was probably true. They just wanted a warm body. But it was interesting, and it was definitely kind of an initiation by fire because it was a different cultural neighborhood, obviously, than I'd grown up in Prairie Village, because the school was about a third white, and a third black, and a third Hispanic.

I just thought I was going to go in and fill those kids with a fire of learning, and they would want to, I don't know what I thought they'd want. I remember saying to him one time, “Well, don't you want to go to college?”

And they just looked at me like I was nuts, and they said, “Well, I don't know.” Like their families, their uncles and aunts and parents hadn't gone to college, and they loved those people and respected them, and they just didn't really see college as something that fit in with their whole culture, kind of. I don't know. Maybe if they had someone in their family, or if they met a teacher that inspired them. But it wasn't me. And I was so young. You know, I was just 22, 23. I think I could go in. Gosh, I could go in now with a lot better understanding of all of it.

Kate: Yeah. What kind of science were you teaching?

Jan: It was just general.

Kate: General science. Okay.

Jan: They had, I don't remember. The curriculum was kind of loose. You could kind of teach whatever you wanted sort of, but they had these kits you could get like you could study bones, and the district would send you these kits with boxes with all different kinds of bones. And the kids are. We got cat skeletons, and they had to lay them out to make it look the actual skeleton and get another unit called batteries and bulbs, and they had all kinds of wires and light bulbs, and that we talked about light. It was very hands on. It was kind of cool.

I thought to be a great, wonderful, interactive science teacher that we needed pets. Some girl brought a bird that her parents didn't want, and we had a bird in a bird cage, and I don't remember how we got the guinea pigs, but we had two guinea pigs. The bird got out of the cage and flew around the room, and the kids jumped up on the desks and chased the bird around to try to catch it, and the guinea pigs had sex in the cage, and the boys were hysterically, well, everyone probably was hysterically laughing, so I had to take a towel and throw it over the cage. So it was an adventure. I’ll tell you it was.

Kate: Yeah, never a dull moment in middle school.

Jan: Yes, yes, middle schoolers. Oh, my gosh! Probably the hardest group.

Kate: Yeah, for sure. So how long were you there? How many years were you there?

Jan: I was just there a year, because they kind of, I don't know whether they do it by enrollment, but they decided they didn't need science teachers and the other guy had been there longer than I had, so I was out. I mean, I wasn’t of a job. They found a place for me at a grade school which I was thrilled about.

It was further north. It was again, a similar neighborhood, similar socioeconomic area, and I taught second grade the first year. I taught it, and it was a Title I position. They got money from Title I, and I team taught with another woman, and then I did some kind of math tutoring, again, a subject that I was so well prepared to teach. But I could do basic addition and subtraction.

Kate: Yeah, at least they were young enough you can handle it.

Jan: I did second grade Title I, and then they got rid of the Title I position and there was some kind of cuts to the program and then I taught third grade, just as a straight classroom teacher for a few years. It was interesting again, it was an interesting dynamic for which I was not prepared, having grown up in Prairie Village.

Kate: Right, yeah.

Jan: I remember we had, it was a dental hygiene week, and I had a student from the dental school come and talk to the kids. And he said to them, asked them, “So, why do you have teeth? Why do we have teeth?”

And the kids were raising their hands, and they said, “To chew! To chew!”

He said, “That's right, to chew, and there's another reason we have teeth, too,” and nobody could come up with it. He said, “Well, it's to talk.” He said, “Your teeth help you form your words and make the sounds of letters and things.”

This one little boy, I can still see him. His name was Harold, front row. He had his hand up waving around, and the guy called up, and Harold said, “My dad ain't got no teeth, and he can talk.”

Kate: Oh, God.

Jan: Oh, my God! But it's kind of those kinds of things that were always going on that were kind of foreign to me. It was an interesting experience.

Kate: Yeah, for sure. So, you were there for, was that four years total? Or three?

Jan: Four years, total, one at Argentine, and three at, it was a school called Lowell Elementary School. And then I got pregnant with Laura and had to quit and stay.

Kate: So, what was that like that transition to being from working to being a stay-at-home mom?

Jan: I'd kind of had it with teaching.

Kate: So you were glad to.

Jan: I had been thinking about quitting, anyway, and maybe selling sheets at Dillard's, or something that was restful. I still kind of feel like I was lucky to want to stay home.

Kate: Yeah.

Jan: Because, I was fine. I mean I was, I didn't want to do nothing. I never did nothing.

Kate: Yeah, yeah, you're busy all the time.

Jan: I’m a joiner person. So, I would join a group at church, or I joined a group called La Leche League, which was, women that helped other women nurse, and I nursed both my kids, and so I didn't. I did volunteer things, but I didn't work-work, and I didn't have a a burning desire to have a career. I mean, I think women should 100% have careers, 1,000%. But it it's tough.

My daughter-in-law has a super high, I wouldn't say high. Well, high pressure in some. She's a corporate executive for a company, and flies around the world, and in theory, I'm a hundred percent supportive of that. But it's hard, you know. She has a baby, and it's hard to juggle everything. So, I think the fact that I was not finding a way for a career, that I was happy to be at home, that I was okay with it, and okay with the things I was doing and the friends I made on that level made it a little bit easier. And then, later on, when I decided to go back to work, my kids were older, and it was somewhat easier.

Kate: So, when you were, when they were little, I know you read to them a lot just like your mom did. I was wondering what? I'm assuming you read, Heidi. But what else did you read to them?

Jan: I read Heidi to them. I remember reading, well, just picture books. We'd go to the library and get stack of picture books and just kind of discovered favorite authors and things through that. And some of them I remembered as a kid. But we loved Bill Peet. You remember the Bill Peet books? Did you ever read those?

Kate: I don't know. I don't think so.

Jan: He wrote like, I don't know, 50 different picture books. When I was librarian, we used to. I used to have the kids read those. So, I read those to the kids and lots and lots of picture books, you know, like Make Way for Ducklings, and all the kind of classic picture books. Then, when they got a little bit older, and Laura was really good at listening, she'd let me read. I remember when she was three or four, she would sit still for a chapter book.

Kate: Oh, wow.

Jan: And I read the Little House books.

Kate: Oh, yeah. I remember Laura talking about those. No, I remember that Laura, one of our teachers, was reading us one of those. And Laura had already, already knew it, I guess, because you read it. Laura told what was going to happen and kind of got in trouble for it. It was some dramatic moment.

Jan: Some spoiler.

Kate: Yeah, maybe when there was a plague of locusts or something that comes?

Jan: There was.

Kate: No, no, yeah, that might have been. Laura knew it what was coming. That's funny.

Jan: Yeah. But I read those and the book that Joe always credits to like kind of getting him started reading on his own were The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Kids love that book, and I read that to them. And then there are other books that go along with that. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. And I'm not a big fantasy person. I can only take so much of centaurs and magic lions. So, I read them The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Joe oh, my God. He loved that book, and he won. Then we read. The second one, I think, was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and I was done, and he wanted me to keep reading more and more and more, and I just said, “You know, here's the next one. You read it.” And he did, so. I read them A Wrinkle in Time. I remember that was another one I read them, and then just I don't know. I remember reading Brighty of the Grand Canyon, and I'm trying to think of other ones. I can't remember what we just. We always had some book we read, what's the guy, Where the Red Fern Grows. We read that.

Kate: Oh, yeah, that one's pretty sad.

Jan: There was always, you know, we always had something we were reading. Yeah, I read our Secret Garden, and The Little Princes.

Kate: Oh, yeah. That was one of my favorites, Secret Garden.

Jan: Yes, that's a great book.

Kate: So, I know you were involved in Girl Scouts, too, right, with my mom.

Jan: Yes, your mom.

Kate: That's how you met, right?

Jan: We were, well, neither one of us were working full-time, I mean, and I was doing some stuff with PTA, and they were having a carnival, and they said, “We're going to have a cakewalk. You need to put tape squares to the floor in the gym. So here's a woman, Alice Stewart.” So she helped me tape squares on the floor. So, your mom and I were taping squares and just got to talking and realized we both had think you and Laura were in second grade, maybe because you went to first grade at Arrowhead, didn't you?

Kate: No, I went to first, was when I started at Crestview.

Jan: Okay, maybe you and Laura were, it might have been first grade, and so, we said, “Oh, we've got girls, you know. Wouldn't it be great for them to be Brownies?” We thought we could do that. We can have a Brownie troop, so I don't know what we did jump through the hoops to get certified to be Brownie leaders, and started the Brownie troop.

Kate: Yeah. That was fun.

Jan: You, and Krista and Megan Loftus and, trying to think who else was in that? Jill? What was her name?

Kate: Jill Liles.

Jan: Liles, yeah.

Jan: So, it was a fun, fun group. I've helped with Madeline's Girl Scout troop.

Kate: Oh, really? Okay.

Jan: And I mean not help, I shouldn't say helped. I have attended meetings where the moms were supposed to come. I think I told your mom that I was horrified. Horrified!

Jan: Oh, really?

Jan: Oh my God, those girls were terrible. They, for like half of the meeting, at least all they did was scream all over the house, and they were jumping on the furniture and jumping on tables, and it was all I could do to say, “Sit down!”

Kate: Yeah.

Jan: “Quit screaming! Quit running!” and I don't know what. I don't know what these parents. I said, “Alice and I would not have put up with this.”

Kate: We probably did a little bit of that. I don't really remember.

Jan: Well, yeah.

Kate: I remember we met at school, I guess, after school in the cafeteria.

Jan: We met at your mom’s house.

Kate: Well, I remember we did meet at the in the cafeteria a little bit. Yeah, I don't know when we did that. But yeah, we also met at my house.

Jan: Right, but there was not a lot of running and screaming, I'm sure. I mean that, you know. Sometimes we let everybody out in the backyard and play or something, but no one was running and screaming in the house. Som it was interesting. But Madeline. quit doing Girl Scouts I think this year, because she had some other stuff. She was doing soccer and dance, and she couldn't do it all.

Kate: Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. So, how did you decide to go back to work?

Jan: Well, I had my degree in elementary education, and when Joe started first grade, I think it was, I thought, well, I have nobody at home all day long. Maybe they could use some help at school. And that's like I said, kind of how I met your mom. There were just some different things that they would say, “Oh, this person needs help,” or “that person needs help.” They said, “Well, the librarian needs help.”

And I said, “Well, I can do that. What does she need help with?”, I went in and talked to the lady who was the librarian, and she said, “Well, I need mostly help just shelving books,” and back then they had a card catalog, a card that got made for each book. Multiple cards for each book, and you were supposed to file them. And of course that was a never-ending task.

Kate: Right.

Jan: It never got done completely. I helped with that and helped just different odds and ends type things. But I was there, and she didn't always have a class, and so, we'd talk when she didn't have a class. And when she found out that I had a degree in elementary education, she said, “Oh, you ought to get certified to be a librarian.”

Because there are lots of part-time jobs in the Shawnee Mission district, and there were people that just worked like or days a week if it was a smaller school as a librarian, and I thought well, that would be great, because I’d have the same schedule as Laura and Joe, and I wouldn't have to work every day and be something that I liked, because.

Kate: You liked the libraries. Yeah.

Jan: Yeah. So, I looked into going back and getting my certification. It was through Emporia State University in Emporia, that library certification program, and so I enrolled in that and started taking classes.

Kate: Yeah. So where did you? Where was your first library job?

Jan: I got a job. Well, in the meantime, after I'd started this library certification program, I got divorced, and so I had to get a full-time job, and for a brief period of time I worked at a law library downtown, and that was horribly boring, but kind of interesting. But the whole time I wished that I, well, and I worked, to backtrack a little bit, I worked part-time at the Kansas City, Missouri, Public Library in the youth services area. And so, I did that for a while, too.

Kate: Was that at Plaza?

Jan: Yes, and I your mom kind of helped me get that. I think she put in a good word for me when I was applying for that. Because she worked at the main downtown library. But so, I worked there for about at the Plaza Library for about a year, and then I got divorced. Then I got the full-time job at the law library, but I always wanted, you know, my true love was kids’ books, not law books, and so, a friend of, well, it was kind of a weird deal. I had told the principal at Crestview that I was looking for a library job, and she mistakenly thought that I was certified. I was not completely certified at that time. But I knew that the Shawnee Mission district occasionally hired people on provisional certification, but I just told her. It was Mrs. Martin. Remember Mrs. Martin?

Kate: Yeah.

Jan: I told Mrs. Martin, “You know, I'm going to library school. I'm looking for a library job. If you hear anything, keep me in mind.”

And so, she was at some kind of principals’ breakfast a couple days before school started, and this librarian had unexpectedly quit, and they were looking for a librarian, and she said, “Well, one of my parents is a librarian,” which I technically wasn't. But anyway, that principal called me and had me come in for an interview and wanted to hire me.

And then, when I interviewed with the library head person, when he found out I wasn't certified, he said, “Oh, we, you know we can't hire somebody that's not certified.” So, I was broken-hearted and went home and cried. But that year they had so many people apply for library positions. They had so many openings that they finally were desperate, and called me back and said, “Well, we'll hire you on provisional certification.”

Kate: Okay.

Jan: That was at a school called Dorothy Moody School, now closed. It's out kind of like alternate 69 and 103rd Street. The kids that go to Dorothy Moody went to Shawnee Mission South. So, I was there for 13 years, and it was a great job. The first couple of years were hard, but after that, it was good, and I just really, really loved it.

Then, they, their enrollment changed, and they went part-time, and since I couldn't do part-time financially, I transferred to a different school, Ray Marsh was the name of it, and it was out in the Shawnee area. The kids that went to Ray Marsh went to Shawnee Mission Northwest, and it was a great school, too. I was there for 13 years. So like, 26 years total.

Kate: Wow, yeah, that's great.

Jan: Then I quit. I retired in 2017.

Kate: I guess, well, you were there when they transitioned from having a card catalog to computer.

Jan: Oh, yeah, like in my third year, yeah.

Kate: How did that go?

Jan: It was great. I was glad.

Kate: Loved it.

Jan: Catalog. Oh, my God, it was a mess! You remember that movie about the kids that all have detention.

Kate: Oh, the Breakfast Club?

Jan: The Breakfast Club. And they trash the card catalog in the library.

Kate: Yeah.

Jan: And they, you know, that card catalog was pain in the neck, because every book that you got you got like four cards that went with it. You got an author card. You had a title card. You had sometimes multiple subject cards, and you had to file all of them. You know, you had to file the title card alphabetical order by title. Then you had filed the author card alphabetical order by author, and nobody had time to do it all. And it was boring, and it got put off. When I got my job at Dorothy Moody there were boxes and boxes of unfiled cards.

Kate: Oh, wow.

Jan: Up in the librarian's office, and I said, “What is this?” Well, she just didn't like to file them. So, the card catalog in that school was like totally inaccurate. And the other thing would be, you know, if you wanted to read Frog and Toad Are Friends, you could look it up in the card catalog and see that it was by Arnold Lobel. And you should go look in the L's to find it. But you didn't know if it was there or not, you know. You could go over to the L's, and it wouldn't be there, and well, too bad you wasted your time, you know. So, it gave no indication of whether it was checked out or not. The online was just great. It was wonderful. The only thing the card catalogs are good for, is for tables in people's living rooms.

Kate: Right. People put other things in them now.

Jan: That's right.

Kate: They put wine bottles in them, I think.

Jan: Yes, yes, so I was, totally embraced the change, because my card catalog was a mess. And even if it had been up to date, there were so many things that it didn't tell you, you know, like I said, the main thing being whether or not the book was in. You could have a card for it, and it could be checked out, and you have no way of knowing.

Kate: Yeah, yeah, that must have made it a lot easier.

Kate: Were there other changes, like big changes over time?

Jan: Oh, yeah. Well, there were big changes all the way through, and it always had to do with no money, you know, when I first.

Kate: Even in Shawnee Mission, huh?

Jan: Oh, yeah. Well, you know, it goes from the state.

Kate: Oh, that's right. Yeah. You were there, I guess. Were you there during the Brownback era?

Jan: Yeah, yeah. And so, everything just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Not quite as bad as going on now, but there were still things that they looked at and, you know, we managed. But a friend of mine said that we were librarians in the golden years, because I had a really good budget. I had a part-time aid, we had what was called a processing department. When you ordered your books, they went to an office and they put them into the database, and they put spine labels on them, and they put little, you know, little scanner, the barcode, you know. They did all that. So, when the books came back to my school, they were just ready to put on the shelf.

Kate: Oh, that's great.

Jan: And they had what they called a graphic arts department, so we could send, we have old book covers. They'd make them into puzzles for us. We had a visiting author program every year we had an elementary author and middle school, high school author come visit and the kids got a chance to interact with them. I don't remember who came to Crestview. Oh, the McKissacks! Do you remember them? Anyway, there were a couple of authors that came across you.

Kate: Yeah, I do remember some coming. I don't remember who they were.

Jan: There were so many good things, and each year a little bit more went away. We lost the Graphic Arts department. I lost my aide. They lost the processing department, so we had to process all our own books. Worst thing that happened was the year before I retired, they decided that, they didn't want to call it a library anymore.

Kate: Oh, okay.

Jan: Wanted to call it a makerspace, and there was a huge makerspace revolution.

Kate: Yeah, yeah.

Jan: And which, I was fine with makerspace. I just thought that it should work with the library. You know, that you should have a library, and you should have a makerspace. And if the teacher was studying flight in science that you could go to the library and research flight, and how flight works and read books about flying, blah, blah, blah, and the librarian would do that part of it, and then you could go to the makerspace and make an airplane, or you know what I'm saying?

Kate: Yeah.

Jan: It all worked together, and that the makerspace shouldn't replace the library.

Kate: Yeah, yeah, it really has nothing to do with it.

Jan: Right. And I mean, I think that the research component could be the librarian, and the making component could be the makerspace. Everybody could work together. But to say that it should be a makerspace and not a library. I mean.

And they spent all this money. I remember there was a friend of mine who was a librarian, and they bought a sewing machine for her library, and she was just practically in tears. “I don't know how to sew,” she said, and I just had could not visualize elementary school children with a sewing machine.

That was kind of the in thing to do, and the year that I retired, they decided to rename the libraries instead of calling them libraries, they were going to call them Innovation Stations.

Kate: Okay.

Jan: So.

Kate: Did they hire anybody to do the makerspace part, or did they just expect you to run it?

Jan: They expected the librarian to do it. And they also started hiring people that weren't certified, which I was hired on provisional certification. But I had an inkling as to what was going on. When I retired, the woman who replaced me was a second-grade teacher who didn't know anything about the library. I mean she probably wouldn't know Ramona if she bit her, you know. I mean, I just. I just thought it was wrong.

Kate: Yeah.

Jan: To me, being a librarian-- and I don't mean I don't want to embrace change like I said I was, embrace the whole online card catalog. But I just thought to me a person who's a librarian ought to have a love of reading, that that's a huge part of being a librarian. I mean, there's the research part, and there's the author study part. But to me, I always tried to get the kids excited about reading. Excited about books.

Kate: Did you ever get to take them to that children's book festival in Warrensburg?

Jan: Yeah.

Kate: You did? Oh, that's great.

Jan: It was so much fun. That was a that was really a fun experience. And there's a place in town called Reading Reptile. Do you remember that?

Kate: Oh, vaguely, yeah.

Jan: They had an author visiting author program every year that was just great, and I did not take the kids. But I went as an adult, and we got to hear authors speak, and they have a place that they have expanded to. It's called the Rabbit Hole. You probably haven't heard of it, but there was a big article about it in the New Yorker.

Kate: Oh, yeah, that new museum, kind of place?

Jan: Yes, yes, same people that had Reading reptile started this Rabbit Hole. If you ever.

Kate: I would love to go there sometime.

Jan: You'd love it, you would love it. They have whole rooms devoted to Frances or, you know, the what's that? Good Night, Moon. And they have life-size characters, and they have all kinds of little chutes and ladder things to go through in the museum.

Kate: How fun.

Jan: Pete, Pete and Deb are the guys, the people that own it? They'd be they'd be somebody interesting to do a podcast.

Kate: Oh, yeah. Good idea. So what about? I was going to ask you, too, about? I mean, there's so much backlash going on now with trying to ban books, and I wanted to ask if you had to deal with that at all in those days.

Jan: You know, not really. I did, every year I did a unit during Banned Books Week. ALA

Banned Books Week every year. I did a banned books unit with my sixth-grade class, and they loved it. They just loved it. They came up with ideas of why a book might be banned. We had to talk about what the word banned meant, and then we came up with a list, and they were always kind of tentative at first, like, “Well, bad words.” And I’d write that down. “Bad words” and “blood and guts,” and I don't know. But they always came up with really good lists, and then they somebody whisper, “Well, like kissing.” I'd say, well, kissing could be part of it. But nobody wanted to say sex. But finally, something like, “being naked.” So, we'd come up with a big, long list of things that people might be unhappy about kids seeing or having in a book and then we talked about the first amendment, and I explained to him what the first amendment was, and I always tried to make it. First amendment doesn't cover everything when you're in sixth grade. You know, your say so about what you read. But we just talked about that kind of thing, and then, I got books that had been challenged. And there was, ALA has a whole list. If you go on their website now, they'll give you a list of books. And there was a big, thick book that had challenges for adult and kids’ books, and then it would say why they were challenged. And it was always just, the kids were always kind of astounded about it.

Kate: Yeah.

Jan: “Well, why would they care about that?” they'd always say to me, and there were things that the kids would say, “Well, do they think if we read about somebody doing drugs that we're going to do it?”

And I said, “Well, yeah, that's kind of a fear.” I'd hand out all these books that had been challenged, and you know they were like Junie B. Jones and Harry Potter and Shel Silverstein and all the books that they liked.

Kate: Right

Jan: A lot of them had in different places around the country had been challenged for one reason or another, and we just talked about why it had been challenged and what they you know what they thought about that. And for the most part, they thought they were stupid reasons. There were things like, oh, I'm trying to think, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. Do you remember that book? It was about the donkey who finds a magic pebble. He turns into a rock, and he can't unturn himself because he has to be touching the magic pebble to make it work. The police are involved in the story because his parents can't find him, and he doesn't come home because he's a rock, and the guy who wrote the book, all the characters are animals. Sylvester is a donkey, and so they get the police involved in looking for him, and the police are pigs.

And you know. So, we talked about how people who have certain jobs, like, if your father was a police officer, maybe you'd think that having a police officer portrayed as a pig was offensive to you, or maybe I would think it was offensive to have all the books in the fairy tale section about princesses, and they were all sitting around waiting to be rescued by princes, that I thought that was offensive.

But at the end of the whole book, the whole series, I read them a book called Mexicali Soup. Did you ever read that?

Kate: Yeah, that's familiar to me. Yeah.

Jan: About a family who, well, kind of like stone soup except backwards. A family, Hispanic family, that has this wonderful soup that they love, and they find out the mom is going to make it for dinner, and so they're thrilled. But each one of them goes to the mom during the day, and says, “Oh, I love Mexicali soup, but, you know, I don't like tomatoes. Could you leave the tomatoes out?” And, “I love Mexicali soup, but I don't like garlic. You always put too much garlic. Can you leave the garlic out?” So, as the day progresses, each person in the family, and there are about ten kids and the dad all go to the mom and say they love the soup, but could she just leave out this one ingredient? So that night for dinner, the mom goes in the kitchen, brings bowls out, and everybody has a bowl of hot water.

Kate: Yeah.

Jan: And they’re like, “What happened?” And she says, “Well, I just left out the garlic that Jose didn't like, and I left out the tomatoes that Pedro didn't like, and so, this is what you've got.” And so, we talked about how everybody might have a personal thing that they didn't like. But if you took all those things that each individual person didn't like and took it out, the part of the library is the fact that it reflects lots of different ideas that different people have.

Kate: Yeah, that's a great lesson.

Jan: It was a great lesson. I loved to teach that. Somebody asked me one time, “Well, how did you get away with that, you know, doing that? Didn't you get in trouble?” And I said, well, I think we didn't have a specific curriculum for library. We had some general things that we had to teach, but other than that we could kind of do units. If I wanted to do a unit on Gary Paulson, I would just do it, and so I didn't have anything specific that I had to teach. This was just something that I enjoy. I don't think any kid ever went home, and when the parents said, “What did you do at school today?” They said, “Mrs. Bombeck did the most fascinating lesson on banned books.” They would just say, “Oh.”

Kate: They kept quiet.

Jan: I mean, I don't think I think the kids liked it, but I don't think they would have gone home and like, expounded on it.

Kate: Yeah, that's funny. You didn't have too many parents complaining about it.

Jan: I didn't. Nobody cared that I did the lesson. Nobody, you know. Occasionally, there were parents that wanted something specifically not given to their child. Like, they would say, “Oh, you know, Tyler is scared to death of those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and he keeps bringing them home, and he, you know, it's just, he can't sleep, and so, can you kind of watch and keep an eye on him during library, and don't let him get anything super scary.” So, I was fine with that, you know.

Kate: Yeah.

Jan: If he came up with a Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, I just said, “Tyler, your mom said that those are kind of scary for you, and she'd rather you pick something else”. So, I was fine with that, and I think I told you about the little kid that thought he was being abducted by aliens.

Kate: Oh, yeah.

Jan: I did a lesson on the nonfiction section in the library and told him everything there was real, and he found a book on aliens in the nonfiction section, and told his parents he'd been abducted by aliens, and they didn't want him to get any more alien books. But I was fine with doing things like that.

Individual parents, but nobody ever really said, “I don't want.” There was a formal complaint that you could fill out, and nobody ever filled that out. And part of the formal complaint, too, was, “Have you read the whole book?”

To me, a lot of times, if you take certain things out of context, you might think, “Oh, my God!” Well, I wouldn’t, but somebody might think, “Oh, my God, that's terrible.” But if you read it in the whole context of the book, it makes more sense.

Like, I remember there's a book, My Brother Sam is Dead. Did you read that in fifth grade, on the Revolution?

Kate: It was familiar. Yeah, I might have.

Jan: The Revolutionary War was kind of supposed to be covered, I think in fifth grade.

Kate: Oh, yeah. Okay.

Jan: It was a book about boys, and the family was torn apart by the Revolution. The dad and one of the brothers was for the King. They wanted to stay a colony, and I think it was the younger brother joined the Revolution. I don't remember the whole story. Somebody was dead, one of them. Sam.

Kate: Sam!

Jan: But there was cussing in it, and you know, I remember talking about, “Gosh, if your brother died, or if you were in the middle of a battle, sometimes people cuss, you know.” It wasn't just cussing for no reason.

Kate: Yeah, yeah.

Jan: Sometimes I think it's in context, you know. I told them, “I wouldn't want you guys just to be cussing here in the library. But if you're in the middle of a battle where people are getting caught sometimes people cuss,” you know, so I don't know. We just talked about different kind of situational ethics.

Kate: How did you choose which books to order? Did you have a method?

Jan: There were kind of three things I thought about. I thought about what the kids liked. There were always series, or, like captain underpants or that they were just all hot to read. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and if there were books, too, that I know kids like the topics about race cars or aliens or cookbooks. Kids loved cookbooks. So, I would order things that I thought the kids would like, even if they weren't terribly scholarly or wonderful, and I would order the things that were scholarly and wonderful, like the books that had won the awards, the Newberry and Caldecott and William Allen White nominees and winners, and then I would order things that I knew the teachers were using in, that they had planned. So, it's kind of those things I thought about.

Kate: And then when you're getting rid of stuff, I guess. Did you just go by, you had records of what had been checked out.

Jan: No, I didn't care. If it was really ugly, I was gonna get rid of it.

Kate: If it was aust falling apart, or?

Jan: Well, you know, and it was hard, too, when we didn't have any money.

Kate: Right.

Jan: Yeah, because I did. You couldn't always go by if it was falling apart, you know, if it was falling apart but everybody just loved it, I had a hard time getting rid of it, because I knew I didn't have any money to reorder.

Kate: Yeah.

Jan: On the other hand, if there was a book that said, “Someday man will go to the moon,” you know, I wouldn't keep that because that wouldn’t last a week, so I'd look at the copyright date. I'd look at the cover if it was a really boring, ugly cover. Nobody would check stuff like that out. So, those were things I looked at. I kind of had a feeling with my collection of what got checked out, so I did never run any specific list. I think the public library did, but I had a pretty good feeling from, you know, checking things back in and looking at what things got checked out and what didn't. If things were dated and old, and things like computers and things like that got dated really quickly. A biography about Abraham Lincoln didn't so much. It was was old and ugly.

Kate: Right? Yeah, did you have to deal with-- I know this has happened when libraries and people get rid of books and people find them in the dumpster and get all enraged that people are throwing them out.

Jan: We had a process of that, and there were. I kind of quit having parents help me with it too much, because they would get enraged. Not enraged, but.

Kate: Upset.

Jan: They would just say, “How can you get rid of these books?” You know, I'd worked in libraries where nobody ever got rid of books. They were just, it gets to be too, I don't know how to say it. The shelves are just crammed with stuff, and the kids can't look through it.

“That's terrible. It's a wonderful book, you know. You ought to keep them all.” Well, you can't keep them all, because the shelves just get crammed with stuff. And the kids, they're too crowded. They can't even. They don't even know what to look at, you know. So sometimes, if the shelves are a little bit more open and you could put books face out so they can see the covers, it just makes it more appealing, and you can't keep everything.

But there was a way that we had to do it which bypass, just take them out and throw them in the dumpster. We had to scan them and remove them from the system. And then, once we did that, we marked out anything inside of it that had to do with Shawnee Mission School District with a marker. So, I let kids that were in Library Club help me do that. They thought that was great, and so if anybody found it, they technically wouldn't be able to know where it had come from. The likelihood of them finding it was not great, because we didn't just take them out and throw them in the dumpster even after that. They went to the warehouse, and then the warehouse did something with them. I think they had warehouse sales that people could come buy the books. That was not so public that people knew that they were. We didn't just put them in a pile in front of the school and burn them, or anything.

Kate: Yeah. So, you had Library Club. That sounds fun. I don't think we had that.

Jan: Oh, it was great. Library Club was so much fun.

Kate: What did they do? Did they help you out?

Jan: Yeah, they just helped me. They did things like help me sharpen pencils and go through the markers and throw out the ones that didn't mark anymore and help me straighten the shelves. Straightening was always a thing that needed to be done, because, you know.

Kate: Kids get ransacked.

Jan: Yes, and the area, the race car area or the cookbook area looked like a bomb went off in it. So, I just have, they didn't have necessarily put them in order. They just had to push up the bookends, and, you know, make it look like, and I don't know, they would help me dust the shelves and water plants just like little odds and ends things.

Kate: Yeah, that's nice.

Kate: Did you guys have Book-It when you were there? Did that go away by the time you were?

Jan: We did not, but I remember that. That was the pizza.

Kate: Yeah, we did it. Yeah, yeah.

Jan: I used to go up and take Laura and Joe over to that Pizza Hut across the street and get a personal pizza for lunch.

Kate: Guess it went away at some point.

Jan: I guess it did, because I don't remember doing that with the kids.

Kate: Hmm, okay. So I guess, when did you retire? That was.

,

Jan: I retired in, well, the end of the 2016 school year, so technically in May of 2017 was my last.

Kate: Just in time for the Trump years.

Jan: Well, that was a reason. Actually, I remember the night that he won, thinking that this kind of cemented my desire to retire, that I retired to save democracy. We can see how well that's going!

Kate: Yeah.

Jan: And my son and daughter-in-law moved back to Kansas City from California with my granddaughter Madeline. And so, I thought, well.

Kate: That made sense.

Jan: Yeah, so that was when I retired.

Kate: But you got involved in political stuff, I guess before that that was back in 2008?.

Jan: Yes, we were very involved in the Obama campaign in 2008. My sister was really active in that, and she drug me. And she said, “Well, you need to come to Missouri because Kansas is a lost cause.” And Missouri, she lived in Harrisonville at the time, and had a bunch of people living at her house that were from the Democratic party, the national Democratic party sent them out to organize the area and knock doors, and so I would drive down to Harrisonville. It's about a 45-minute drive every weekend and stay with my sister, and have Obama camp and we’d go out to knock on doors and do stuff to, and that election went well.

Kate: It did, yeah. So, these were all like young younger people who had come out.

Jan: Yes, they were all because I was probably how old was I? 40 plus and yeah, in their twenties, and they come from all over the country, and they just got people in the area that would be willing to put them up for a while and let them live while they did their political organizing.

Kate: Yeah, so you did door knocking, I guess, in that area. That was the first time you've done it, really?

Jan: Yeah.

Kate: What was it like?

Jan: You know, I mean, I don't know. There are people that are super intimidated by that, and I'm not. I was not afraid to go up and knock on somebody's door. I don't. I just wasn't, but it was Cass County, Missouri, which is a rural area. And actually, I think I'd be more afraid to go back down there now than I was in 2008. There were a couple people that were a little bit hateful. A guy told me that Obama was a baby killer. I remember that. And there were some areas that were suburban-ish, like neighborhoods. And then there were other areas that were kind of out in the country. I remember kind of going down dirt roads and people with dogs tied up in the yard, and things like that. But so, it was kind of an interesting area, and it was just fun. We just all bonded and had a good time.

Kate: Did you campaign for Hillary, I guess, when she was running?

Jan: No.

Kate: Oh, you didn't.

Jan: Well. When Hillary was running against.

Kate: In 2016, I guess it was.

Jan: No, I did not actively.

Jan: I obviously voted for her. You know, I was teaching. Well, I was teaching in 2008 too. But nobody really recruited me to do anything.

Kate: Yeah, okay.

Jan: And so, you know, I had bumper stickers and yard signs and stuff. But I didn't do any active canvassing. The next time I actively canvassed was for, well, I helped a friend who ran for state. He's a state representative. I helped him, and I helped his wife ran for school board, and I helped her. So those were some local things that I did. And then the next really big race that I worked at a lot was Cherise Davids is our state representative in congress, and she was running against a guy who was a longtime Republican, mean person. But he'd just been in for a long time, and nobody particularly liked him, and so, anyway.

Kate: That was in 2018, right?

Jan: Yes. And nobody really. I mean she was. I don't know kind of underdog, I mean, he'd been in a long time, and she, I remember I really liked her, and I said something to my son about. I thought she was really good, and he said something about, “Well, a native American kickboxing lesbian is not going to win in Johnson County.” I said, “I don't know. Give it a try.” And she did. I think she's people really like her. She's a very, you know. I worked a lot just directly with her because I worked with her primary, and it was we had a little office over in Kansas City, Kansas, and everybody was just scrunched together in that office, the volunteers and Cherise, and so we all got to know each other really well. She's just a really nice, nice, genuine person. And she's nice to her mother, too, which is so important. Her mom is great.

Kate: Does her mom live there, too?

Jan: Her mom lives in Kansas, the Kansas City area. Her mom was it was in the army.

Kate: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Jan: As a kid, they kind of traveled around. But yeah, she's just a nice caring person, which we need more of in government.

Kate: Yeah, she's responsive. I know that. Sometimes it's rare.

Jan: Yes, the only thing that I wish, and I know it's super hard. I don't know that I'd be able to do it, but I think she tries to make everybody happy. And I guess, in this environment right now, I wish she was a little bit more like AOC, you know, give them hell, but I think I don’t know, that's hard when you're trying to, you have a constituent base like we've got here in Kansas, which are a lot of people who are conservative, and they voted for her, and if she just, I don't know.

Kate: Yeah. So, her district covers, I guess it's Johnson County, and what else? There's a few other counties.

Jan: Part of Wyandotte County, I think.

Kate: Okay. Yeah.

Jan: Because they've changed. They gerrymandered. It was all of Wyandotte County, but they took a chunk of Wyandotte County and put it in a different district. So, it's part of Wyandotte County, all of Johnson County, and I think, part of Miami County, which is south from us.

Kate: Yeah, okay, in this past, or did you campaign for Biden, too? Or.

Jan: No, I did not particularly. I mean, like door knock. You know it, since when I worked for Obama, since I worked for Cherise too, and not that the national election isn't super important. But I think I've come to believe that local things are more important. I've worked quite a bit with all different kinds of local people, people running for city council and mayor, and a lot of the people that I met during the Cherise campaign, you know, they've since then gone on to run on their own. A friend of mine ran for Mayor of Mission, and she's now the Mayor of Mission. Another friend of mine is the Mayor of Lenexa, and various city council seats, and a lady that I worked for last year ran for Johnson County Board of Commissioners and won, and she's just great. So, I think, not that you can't influence what happens on a national level, but I think local stuff is important.

Kate: Yeah, for sure. That's great. It seems like a big change has happened in Kansas like with the governor.

Jan: Well, right now.

Kate: Well, I guess I mean from a few years ago, when the yes, I forget her name, the governor who won.

Jan: Democratic Governor, but and I kind of try to keep track of what's going on with the state, too. But I know she vetoed a bill, I think it was just last week on gender-affirming care for trans kids. But then it went back in the, I don't know all the details about exactly numbers that have to happen, but they approved the fact that you they didn't want to have gender affirming care for kids.

Kate: Yeah. Oh, yeah. They overrode that veto.

Jan: Right, and then they overrode her veto.

Kate: That's sad.

Jan: Yeah, so it's bad, bad. So, we've got a Democratic governor, but we've got Republican, you know, and Senate, and so sometimes her hands are tied with what she.

Kate: Yeah, that's how it is in Arizona, too. It's kind of lots of, lots of log jams, I guess.

Jan: And I don’t understand these people that are voting for a Democrat governor, but then they're voting for Republican representatives, and the, I don't know. It doesn't make sense.

Kate: Yeah, it doesn't. Yeah. Same thing.

Jan: Yeah.

Kate: I guess in in your retirement you started this group about diverse books, right? I wanted to see if you could talk about that a little bit.

Jan: Right. A friend of mine and I decided that, like I said earlier that they that we both grew up in Prairie Village and went to Shawnee Mission East, but it was kind of like my ex-husband. We didn't know each other. I think she's two years behind me. But we met. How did we meet? Oh, she was a school librarian, and so we met doing that, and we both retired about the same time, and she read a book called Waking Up White by Debbie Irving, and she said, “Oh, you've got to read this book, it's great.” And it kind of mirrored our lives in Prairie Village, too, that we lived in this little white bubble, and didn't really realize we were living in a white bubble

So we read the book, and then the author was going to be at a conference called White Privilege Conference that happens every year. We decided we wanted to go to that. So we went, and we met a man during a lunch break who was from St. Louis, and he said, found out we were school librarians, and he said, “Oh, you ought to talk to these ladies in St. Louis.” They started a group after Michael Brown was shot in St. Louis. They decided that the community needed to come together and talk about race. And so they started. This organization called We Stories, W-E S-T-O-R-I-E-S. And it was to help parents talk to their kids about race using children's books, children's literature. We thought that sounds great. So, we actually went to St. Louis and talked to these ladies and decided we wanted to do the same thing in Kansas City.

We started an organization called, we called ours Starting with Stories, and they based theirs on groups of parents that came through like cadres that came through and had you gave them a bag of books that kind of corresponded to the ages of their kids, and then they had meetings in people's homes, or at a church, or someplace to talk about talking to your kids about race, and what books they were using and how they felt that it was going. And just kind of, we had a lot of resources. We had a great website.

And you know, I think at the time we were doing this, which was four years ago, and I don't know if it get any more traction now, but we had trouble getting people to commit to being in the program. You know, it wasn't that they were averse to the information, but they didn't want to come to somebody's house and talk about it once a month.

Kate: Yeah.

Jan: And so it never really got off the ground. But we read lots of great books, kids’ books, and books, and I felt like we had a lot of good information to give to parents, and there's still some organizations out there doing that. The one that we kind of dissolved our organization last year, and the one that we gave our remaining money to that we had in our bank account is an organization called Embrace Race, and I think they're from Boston, I want to say, but I'm not sure. But it's pretty much all online, which is probably better than wanting people to drag themselves out for meetings, but they have all kinds of great webinars. You had asked me to come up with some titles of books, which I did. But they have lists of books, they have, their website is fantastic. And they have all different things. That you can do you know the theory behind what we were doing, and what the other people were doing, and what Embrace Race is doing is that talking with your kids about race is really important, and if you ignore it, it's not good, because the kids recognize as early as six months old kids recognize racial differences.

Kate: Okay.

Jan: And you know you're always saying, “Well, this is the blue block, and this is the green block, and your dress is yellow. But oh, my God! Don't look at that person and ask what color their skin is, because that's just inappropriate.” And then the kids kind of think, well, we can't ask about that, and that kind of shuts any kind of communication where they're noticing those differences anyway. And the fact that their parents won't talk about it is weird, and it is kind of hard to talk about. We always kind of equated it to talking about sex, that a lot of parents don't know where to begin or how to bring it up, and using a book helps. You know, you can say, “Oh, look at, you know, that person is a different color.”

Or with the list of books that we had, we kind of always had them divided. We had books that were specifically about race and racism, like some kid that couldn't use the public library because he was black, or a family that had to use that Green Book. That was a book that showed them where they could stay safely. That was so specifically about racism.

But then we had a lot of books where we called it race was just incidental. There was a book called The Big Bed. It's about a family that the kids all want to sleep with the mom and dad until the bed gets too full, and then the kids say, “Well, Dad, you can go sleep in the other room. You can sleep by yourself.” But it's just kind of a cute funny book, but the family just happens to be black. So, it's nothing about race. Race is never mentioned. They're just black characters doing regular stuff. And so, we had books like that. And then we also had books that were specifically about racism. We had a lot of biographies about people. To people of color. We didn't just do black. We had Asian and Hispanic and things like that. So, you know, I don't know. It's specifically sad right now that so much DEI is being removed.

Kate: It is.

Jan: And I think it's important.

Kate: It is. Well, what I'm kind of curious. What advice would you give to somebody, whether they're a school librarian or facing issues in their library, or somebody wanting to get involved in politics. Would you want to tell them anything?

Jan: Never give up, never give up. You know, I just, I don't know. I just feel like people say, “Oh, well, I'm just sick of listening to the news. I just can't stand to listen to this anymore. This is just terrible. I'm just not gonna listen. It's too upsetting.” And I think, well, obviously, you are an old white woman, because

Kate: That's what those people are saying.

Jan: If anything drastic, I guess, if my social security check gets taken away, that would be something that would be drastic for me, personally. But you, know I'm not employed by the government. I don't have a DEI position. I am not a farmer. There's nothing that's specifically happening in my life. I just feel like it's important.

There was something that Dr. Fauci, remember the guy during COVID, said. He says, “I don't understand how to explain to people, explain to you that you need to care about other people.” And I just feel like I care about what happens to people who, I have ladies that come clean my house who are Hispanic, and I don't know if they're here legally or not. I've never asked, but I mean, I worry about them, and I think about their families, and you know, I think about people.

I have a good friend who is a civil rights attorney for the federal government, and she's just a wreck right now. People are quitting, and union presidents are in the bathroom crying, and you know there are lots of people who I know then care about that, I just think we need to keep working. If we just give up and turn off the TV, I don't know, that just lets let's other people win. I just think you need to. There was something. What did somebody have on. It was this great quote that was, I don't know if I took a picture of it or not. Oh, here it is.

It says, “To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity, either by false security (they don't mean me) or by despair (there's nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.” And that's by, she's a poet, Audre, A-U-D-R-E. Lorde, L-O-R-D-E. You know her.

Kate: Yeah, oh, that's great.

Jan: I don't think. I mean, you know, I have a friend that said, “Oh, I couldn't possibly call my state rep and senators. I just, I'm, I just hate to talk on the phone. I just, that stresses me out.” Okay, well, that's okay, you know. Let somebody else who isn't. But you can do something. You can donate money, you can, you know.

Kate: You can email them.

Jan: You can email them. Yes, some friends and I are organizing a citywide march. We're calling it March for Democracy.

Kate: Oh, that's great!

Jan: So, we're planning that for the end of March. But, you know, there's always something that you could do. You can join groups. You can donate money. I don't know. I just think giving up and sitting around wringing your hands is not appropriate.

Kate: It’s not the answer. It's hard, though. Yeah, it's, it seems like it's getting harder and harder to keep going sometimes.

Jan: And I think, too, civil rights people didn't quit.

Kate: That's true. They didn't give up.

Jan: The suffragettes didn't quit.

Kate: Yeah, yeah. I know.

Jan: I mean some of the things that happened, and I don't know where I read this. I keep reading inspiring things that you know, we fought a king, you know.

Kate: Right. Sam! Sam fought a King, right? Or his brother did.

Jan: You know we fought segregation. We fought Nazis during World War II. Our history is a history of people that fought for stuff and didn't just sit, wring their hands and say, “There's nothing we can do about it.”

Kate: Yeah, that's great. You’re right, you’re totally right. Well, why don't we end on that? We can be inspired!

Kate: It's fine.

Jan: I keep trying to find things that are inspired.

Kate: That's good. That's a good idea. We should be looking for those inspiring quotes.

Jan: I saw a great sign at a political protest the other day, and it said, They're eating the checks. They're eating the balances. They're eating the democracy of the people that live here.

Kate: Oh, that's really funny. That's a great one.

Jan: So I'm not going to let him eat the checks and balances. I'm going to fight.

Kate: Yeah, good. Good for you. Okay, well, thank you. Jan.

Jan: Yeah, this is terrific.

Kate: Okay.

I’ve been thinking about local news a lot lately. You have probably heard about a lot of newspapers closing across the country or being bought out by media conglomerates that slash the newsroom staff and mostly just want to show us ads instead of actual news.

For many years now, my stepmother has been helping out with proofreading the Lake City Silver World newspaper in Colorado. Every Wednesday night, she gets a hard copy draft of the paper and checks it for spelling, grammar, and typos. The work of keeping this small-town weekly paper going has been a true labor of love by several people in Lake City, and most of all, by Grant Houston, who founded the paper in 1978 and still keeps it going to this day. Grant has done an enormous amount of work over his career documenting the history of the town as it happens and also preserving the past through his work at the Hinsdale County Historical Society. Usually, he’s the one doing the interviewing, but I really wanted to hear his own stories about his life and work documenting a small town every single day.

Recent Issues of the Lake City Silver World

Kate: Okay, I'm here with Grant Houston, who is the editor and publisher of the Silver World newspaper in Lake City, Colorado. Today, we're going to talk a little bit about his early life, how he got into the newspaper business, which I'm really curious about. So welcome to the podcast, Grant.

Grant: Thank you for the invite.

Kate: I know you were born and raised here, right, in Lake City?

Grant: Born in Gunnison and came here when I was six weeks old.

Kate: Oh really? Okay. So, your parents were from Gunnison?

Grant: No, dad was a game warden and was stationed in Gunnison.

Kate: I see, okay.

Grant: And they were so lawless in Lake City that they said we better transfer you from Gunnison to Lake City.

Kate: Lawless? Okay.

Grant: All those Texans and some Arizonans were catching too many fish and poaching animals regardless of whether it was hunting season or not. I think it's interesting because dad was in on that cusp as Lake City changed from a backwater mining community to a tourist town.

Kate: I see, that was in the 50s right?

Grant: Right, and the population was increasing.

Kate: So, then the mining. I know that that declined. Did it decline in the ‘30s?

Grant: Probably declined after 1900. By 1910, we were pretty well over with. I think I've told you, Lake City had great expectations in the 1870s. But they weren't realized. We didn't live up to those expectations. The ore here wasn't as pronounced or readily mineable as they thought. So, a lot of that in the 1870s was pure promotion, and we didn't live up to it. So, a brief period in the 1870s when …

Kate: Like a boomtown?

Grant: When we were the boomtown.

Kate: Bust immediately?Grant: But we never lived up to expectations.

Kate: Okay, I see. By then, the 50s, I've heard stories about, you know, I guess it was would have been pretty cheap for people to move here then, land and property.

Grant: Abandoned houses. You could have just picked a house along Main Street.

Kate: You could have just grabbed whatever you wanted. So, your parents moved here when you were a baby.

Grant: 1955.

Kate: 1955. Did they move into this house? I heard you grew up in this house.

Grant: No. there was a game warden’s house. It's where Wee Care is today on Henson Street.

Kate: Oh yeah, I know where that is.

Grant: But they've torn that down. None of that exists now. But there was a cabin there that was seasonally occupied by game wardens and then enlarged for my dad and his family, and that became his year-round residence starting in 19, probably, 56.

Kate: What was it like for you as a kid to be here?

Grant: The local kids had their parents were those who were poaching year-round. It was more the visitors from Texas that were catching too many fish, but the locals tended to get subsist throughout the year by poaching. So, in first grade, I came home and asked my parents, “What does fuzz mean?” Because they were calling me the fuzz's son. They correlated that with law enforcement, when in fact, Dad was a game warden. He had a lot of empathy. If a family really needed that meat, he would look the other way. But if they were just trophy for an antler or a head, he didn't have much patience for that

Kate: So he would go after them.

You can see the transformation that's going on. Lake City never had a resident game warden until my dad. So, look at the transition that's taking place at that point. Population’s increasing. Summer is increasingly popular with visitors from Texas and adjoining states. So, a game warden was a necessary component of that.

Kate: Yeah, that makes sense.

Grant: They started the school here. My mom started the first kindergarten. They hadn't had a kindergarten until then. So my mom, Betty, was the kindergarten teacher. I think there was probably seven of us in that initial kindergarten class in 1960s. I would have been five.

Kate: Did she have a background in teaching?

Grant: Yeah, she had some, a degree in it eventually. But at that point, I think she had just a lot of classes. It was a bit of a radical concept. It was held in the old schoolhouse, which they've now torn down. They made room in part of the high school room. One of Mom's first deals was to take empty cans, and we played supermarket and were not very quiet.

So, she immediately had problems with the other teachers about us rambunctious kids.

Kate: You were too loud.

Grant: But again, don't you see that as the change in Lake City that was going on, the very first kindergarten. They may have had one at the turn of the century, but certainly nothing generations prior to my mom suggesting that, and now it's an essential part of the school program. You have preschool and kindergarten. It's just taken for granted now, but it was a little bit radical at that time.

Kate: Where was the school then?

Grant: Same location that it is today, that's 6th and Gunnison Avenue, is where that's located.

Kate: I guess at some point, didn't the high school was that moved or they made the kids go to Gunnison?

Grant: Right. At that time, though, it was a first through 12th grade, and there were all of 19 students, so, a very, very small school at that rate. As the school grew, and they outgrew that space, they began sending kids to Gunnison, and they would commute. It started with high school in about 1967, and then it was increased to also include middle school, and there was a bus route at that point. A bus went from Lake City and picked up students along the way and ended up in Gunnison and then brought them back.

Kate: That would be a long day, I guess.

Grant: That would be a long day.

Kate: You did that too when you were in high school?

Grant: Yeah, minimally, not a lot. My folks then,nDad stayed as the game warden here. They were eventually divorced, my parents. Dad stayed as the game warden, and Mom and I would move to Gunnison in the winter.

Kate: So, you just lived there?

Grant: I was a Gunnison student from the seventh grade through high school. My first, kindergarten through sixth, though, was a product of the Lake City schools.

Kate: Was that like a big change to move up there?

Grant: Yeah, tremendous. I was just used to the small town.

Kate: New kids,

Grant: Right. it's so

Kate: I didn't realize it's so much colder up there than it is here.

Grant: You see what it is lately?

Kate: Yeah, it's crazy how cold it is up there.

Grant: My cat has missed me while I was in Montana.

Kate: Clearly, yeah.

Grant: You are the nicest cat.

Kate: You graduated in the 60s, I guess, or no, 70s?

Grant: 1973.

Kate: What did you do after that?

Grant: So, I edited the school newspaper in my high school year, La Remuda, and that came out once a month, and it seemed like an hellacious amount of work, Kate, to put out maybe an eight-page paper once a month. I said, “How would you ever do anything bigger than that?”

So then, after high school, I entered Western State, which was a college at that point in Gunnison. They immediately drafted me to edit the paper there. So, I was the youngest newspaper student at school. I had only just started, and so for my sophomore and junior years, I was the editor of this Top of the World, which had a long history. It was 50. We had the 50th anniversary while I was down there.

Kate: How did you get interested in doing the newspaper stuff in high school?

Grant: Even here, we had a newsletter that was put out when I was in sixth grade. They asked me to write a story, and I enjoyed writing that story so much. So really, my journalistic career dates back to sixth grade in Lake City, and they were doing it on a mimeograph thing. You remember that?

Kate: Just for the school or for the whole town?

Grant: Just the school, and that was the Slumgullion Gazette.

Kate: That’s a great name.

Grant: So, look at my trajectory: Slumgullion Gazette, La Remuta in Gunnison, Top of the World at the college.

Kate: You just kept going.

Grant: So, you can see I've done this the majority of my life.

Kate: That makes sense. I heard that there was no newspaper here for quite a while.

Grant: The last the newspaper went out in 1938, and that was the Silver World. It had started in 1875 and was the oldest newspaper on the Western Slope.

Kate: Oh wow, okay.

Grant: So, that's quite a loss when that happened. But look how low we dipped. If I told you that, you know, that mining was pretty much over by 1910, that paper struggled along until ’38 but saw the beginning of tourism, though. It was reporting on tourist events by the time it went out of business.

And then, there were several short revivals. There was a short revival of the Lake City Tribune in 1946, and that may have lasted a year or two. Then a guy by the name of Jim Bishop started the Lake City Pioneer, and that would have been in July of 1976. It was weekly, and it operated until 1979. So, say, there was two papers there for a while. I had started the upstart Silver World in 1978.

Kate: What made you want to do that?

Grant: Well, I think it's part in history. There was a need to document how the town was changing, and it was an important time in the town. Those ‘70s, we saw a big influx of capital, and there was a fair amount of investment going on here. I was interested in documenting that.

Kate: This other paper that was going, how was it different than what you wanted to do? The Pioneer, I guess?

Grant: They primarily promoted history in that, which I do too. I like history as well as the next person. But I thought I could cover better the current events that were going on. It was a big deal to become the county, the official county newspaper, so then you get legals. So, I did that after a year. You had to be in publication for a full year, and I accomplished that in 1978.

Kate: Where did you work out of here? Was it the same place you are now? The same spot?

Grant: Yeah, I started that paper in the exact same, I've expanded a little bit now, we're a two-office outfit. It was a one office for a long time. So, what you would do, you'd have a manual typewriter, not even electric at that point. Type out those stories, rip out that page, and throw it on the floor. I can remember the floor just covered with crumpled papers. Type it up, hand type that article, whether it was a local items, or a report on a commissioner's meeting, or a town meeting, or a flood that had occurred.

Then on schedule, every Thursday, you'd truck it, you'd go down yourself to Gunnison. The Gunnison Country Times allowed me a space down there, and they had people that typed up the articles into a printable format. We'd wax it. It was a hand wax deal. I never got in on hot lead. I never did that at all. I've always been on the cold, paste-up deal. You'd have a separate machine for the headlines. You'd have halftones that the pictures were turned into.

So, it was a long day. Imagine this. You show up with your sheaf of papers. You'll hand it to the typesetters. You start the layout. You've got your blank pages. You send off the halftones. You think about the headlines you're going to do and then use hot wax to paste it onto those pages.

Kate: Wow, okay.

Grant: Then you get it done, and they turn it into a negative the whole pages then they I'm not even sure what that process was. But then it was onto metal plates that went on to the press. You print, how many, ever a thousand? Fifteen hundred? Then you've got a stack of it, and then you've got the address a graph and the papers are individually addressed to Stewart in Lake City at P.O. Box whatever.

So, look at the long day from the start when it was just the sheaf of papers to it getting labeled and bundled.

Kate: All that process in one day.

Grant: One day.

Kate: What day was that still Thursday?

Grant: Thursday, and I think we were always a Friday publication. It's phenomenal what we could accomplish in one day. That was a long day, and I'd be back after dark. Then you mail them the next day and distribute them.

I had paper boys when I first started the paper, but that didn't last very long. The post office did a good job, and we also had over-the-counter sales.

Kate: You were doing this basically all by yourself? You were writing everything yourself?

Grant: Pretty much. My mom was alive at that point, and she was very dedicated. She would do the proofing for me down there. I've still got the stool that she would sit on down there and then as the paper grew, then I had an associate or two and some reporters.

Kate: When you were first starting, I guess you were really young, right? You were just right out of college.

Grant: Yeah, I was 23.

Kate: But everybody knew you here, I guess.

Grant: Because you'd grown up here.

Kate: Did anybody, did you have any problems when you first started, or were people excited to have another paper?

Grant: I think they were relieved to have a paper here. I was a bit naïve, and I didn't realize the tensions that would result from covering meetings that were contentious meetings. I was probably a little bit naive in that sense, but you just learn as you go.

Kate: I'm curious about being that you grew up here and people know you, but you have to go report on these political, like the town council and those kind of meetings.

Grant: And try to be impartial.

Kate: Did you ever make anybody mad?

Grant: Oh yeah, constantly mad.

Kate: All the time?

Grant: But I was a little bit used to that from the college paper.

Kate: You dealt with that too.

Grant: So see, I had some experience.

Kate: Yeah, and you worked really hard to be impartial and nonpartisan,

Grant: Get both sides of the picture.

Kate: Well, what in those early days? Were there any big stories that happened that you were really proud of?

Grant: We won a lot of awards right from the beginning in that small newspaper category.

Kate: I saw that in the office along the wall.

Grant: If you ask me what are the biggest ones that I've ever covered. When our sheriff was killed. He was shot in 1993.

Kate: Wow, I didn't know that. I don't think I've heard that story.

Grant: Obviously, that was big, and then the people that shot him, there was a big search. They searched all the houses, and they later found them dead.

Kate: That sounds like a huge story.

Grant: I'm thinking about other big stories that I covered. Alunite, there was a proposal that they were going to mine alunite in Red Mountain, which would have essentially leveled that 13,000-foot peak down to nothing. So, there was a big controversy there, and we came out against that. That's one of the few where I didn't try to be either way, although we would report the meetings regardless. But there was a huge citizen effort to not to have that, and yet there were people in Lake City that looked at it as a promising economics on a year-round basis. That was a bit controversial. Environmentally, it would have been a catastrophe. Can you imagine mining that, building, and that whole mountain down?

Kate: That would be terrible.

Grant: So, that was a big event as well. Our bank opened in 1982. We hadn't had a bank since 1914.

Kate: Wow. Did people have to go up to Gunnison? Oh my gosh.

Grant: But see again, the trajectory that things were increasing. That was the need for a newspaper is to cover all that. The old school was quickly outgrown. There was a controversy, and I was in on that, that we ought to preserve that old school building where I went to school. That was ultimately rejected, and they tore it down and they built the new school at that location. It's been enlarged at least two or three times since then, most recently with a gymnasium.

Kate: It's a great school now. It’s really nice.

Grant: See how important it is to have a paper that we can look back on any of those years? We can look back through the stacks, and that we hopefully have adequately covered those big changes that have been happening here.

Kate: It's true. It's amazing how detailed your paper is for a town of this size. I know that's because you work so hard on it.

Grant: I'm kind of an historian.

Kate: You are.

Grant: You're trying to get all the facts in there.

Kate: Does that ever kind of wear you out to write so much? I mean, I find writing to be kind of, I love it, but it's exhausting, you know?

Grant: Yeah, I genuinely like it. There's some things I enjoy more than others, and I like these personality features a great deal.

Kate: You always do such a good job with all that, and then local items.

Grant: It's kind of a science in itself. Local items is easy to write because it's just snippets. It doesn't have to have a beginning, and a middle part, and an ending. You get, for the amount of space, you can throw in a lot of material there, provided you're inquisitive and you go out and try to round this up. So, if Lorie Stewart burned her pot roast, see, that could end up.

Kate: It could be news.

Grant: It could be in the local items right there.

Kate: I know, I think it's really fun to read through those and to see what people are doing.

Grant: No great literary talent there

Kate: But they’re fun.

Grant: But you pack in a lot in a minimal amount of space.

Kate: Let's see, when did you start using computers and stuff to do the paper?

Grant: Okay, so up to that point, you know, I've been going to Gunnison with my sheaf of hand-typed articles. We had to because we were just aping what the Gunnison paper was doing. I want to say that was about 1986 that they switched to Macs. So, we got a Mac then.

Kate: Yeah, you just did what they did.

Grant: So, I think from about 1986. Of course, there's been revolutions in computers since then.

Kate: That made it easier to do for you.

Grant: Yeah. Although it came with its own challenges.

Kate: Issues, yeah. There’s still a lot to learn.

Grant: When the computer doesn't work, the program gets contaminated. To the point where we could also scan in photos, so no more PMTs of a photo, that's turned into dots. Now, we're scanning it on the computer and building copy, flowing it around it. Revolutionary, great fun. We do all that stuff that we would have normally gone to Gunnison to do.

Kate: Yeah, and you just send it there now electronically and just go pick it up.

Grant: We haven't figured out how to electronically, to have the hard copies delivered. So, we still, and in fact.

Kate: It still takes some human power.

Grant: That's why I scheduled my return yesterday. I was just right on time that I could bring the papers back.

Kate: Yeah, that makes sense.

Grant. But you have some scary road conditions at times.

Kate: Have there been times when you haven’t been able to get it because of a storm or something?

Grant: I think they shut the road once. I can remember one time, and that would have been about 1980s. But no, they have good road maintenance here.

Kate: They do.

Grant: You just have to take it slow.

Kate: Well, what do you think is the hardest part of running the paper for you?

Grant: Economically, a lot of times, the ads don't equate to making a money-making event. But again, if you're set in your mind that you're doing a service and recording things for history, that's almost secondary. But finances have always been a challenge, how to make that paper pay for itself. Subscribers have always been very loyal to us. We've never had any trouble with subscribers. But the ads, that can be pretty hard to come by. We run papers that may have as little as 17 % ads. Whereas, I think if it was a money-making outfit, you ought to have probably half. But we would rarely, and I don't like the looks of that, if it was half ads and half pictures and articles, it doesn't come out very good. It looks like a shopper to me.

Kate: I can see that being a struggle because this town is so small, but I guess what I'm kind of curious is like the percentage of people who subscribe from out of town. Is that quite a lot?

Grant: A good percentage. Of course, now we do it online, so there's people that want it instantaneously. If you like the hard copy and the smell of ink, it could take two weeks for it to get to a place like Phoenix or Tucson or heaven forbid even further afield. We have a fair number, maybe. This is off the top of my head, maybe seven or eight hundred that are mailed hard copies. We did that this morning. We labeled those. The labels are now produced in the office, and then maybe three or four hundred that are electronic that are sent out, and then over-the-counter sales as well.

Summer residents have always been very loyal to the paper. If you were here for two weeks or three months in the summer, they invariably would want to get the newspaper. That was important to me at an early point that I could count on subscribers. I think we were only charging ten dollars, eight dollars a year.

Kate: In the beginning?

Grant: And now we're up to like fifty. But look at the cost of postage.

Kate: You should probably be raising it.

Grant: No comparison to what it was in 1978.

Kate: It's much more expensive. Yeah, there's so much work to be done to make it happen. There's a lot of angles to it. What's your favorite part of doing this?

Grant: Getting to know people, and you can be nosy and ask questions.

Kate: It’s a good excuse to be nosy?

Grant: And think about the variety of what running a paper is. Now, tomorrow there's a basketball game in our new gymnasium. So, A, It's good to encourage those kids. B, It's fun to have a sporting event to cover. All those years, I didn't have any experience in college or high school. I had sportswriters, so I'm not I'm not a good sportswriter, but I'm a tolerable sports photographer.

Kate: You still go and do it?

Grant: I'll have that camera out and make some rough notes and then maybe ask the coach to help me as far as writing what the, who did a spectacular, I don't even know what you call the various jumps that they're doing. But I never had any reason to, and even in high school, I had a sportswriter. One of my best friends was my sports editor, and he made a bad estimate once in which he said that our local Gunnison team was going to lose, and the coach was so outraged. This is where you're getting beginning to get education on how to run a newspaper. So outraged that he asked, he demanded that my sports editor stand in front of the school and eat that piece of paper.

Kate: Really?

Grant: They did lose that game, as I recall it. He and I were the best of friends, and we often recalled that. But those coaches who were godlike at that time, you didn't question it. He was a good sport. He ate that piece of paper with the estimate that we were going to lose, so see, that that's a learning experience. I've learned the hard way on how to, so we don't usually make estimates on who's going to win or who's going to lose.

Kate: Did you have to take a photo of it and put it in the next issue?

Grant: I think we did. I think we were in that picture.

Kate: That’s funny.

Grant: All education, Kate, are you learning from all these experiences?

Kate: Let's talk about the Historical Society. This is, it's the County Historical Society, right?

Grant: And town.

Kate: And town. Okay. When did you get involved in that?

Grant: Well, not me personally, but in the ‘50s, we began to see an outflow of historic artifacts. The one that broke the camel's back was the old Silver World printing press. The one that was used for that very first paper in 1875 was sold or bartered to the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.

Kate: Really?Grant: It had managed to stay here from 1875 until about 19, maybe, 60 or 59. Old timers in Lake City were outraged. We were losing our heritage. So, I kind of grew up hearing the bemoaning about the fact that our heritage was disappearing. The Women's Club, even in the 1950s, started a small museum. It didn't go through because that's contingent on who's the officer at the time. So, old-timers talked us into starting that Historical Society in 1973, which is kind of late. They should have done it much earlier than that. Another fellow and I, Tom Ortenburger, we were the co-founders of the Historical Society.

Again, very naive and just pennies. Didn't have any revenue really coming in. So, you start collecting, and then you start begging for a space where you display it. Real estate, even at that time, was hard to come by, and we really blossomed in about 1988 when we bought, we were able to through a fundraising drive, to buy our current location, which is a stone historic building. So, not only is it a roof over your head, but you're preserving a worthwhile artifact.

So, it gives me a lot of satisfaction. Things that wouldn't be here now, Kate, are because we tend to be hoarders.

Kate: Yes. It's true. You have to be.

Grant: Whole households, we've out whole rooms and taken it over to that museum. Paperwork, think archives, think of newspapers. We've got collections of everything that you can name, mining machinery.

Kate: Did you ever get anything back that had gone away outside of town?

Grant: Occasionally, but then that's harder.

Kate: Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Grant: There's no way to get that printing press back. We still salivate over that. But it's pleasing to know that we've saved things that wouldn't be otherwise, and I've had a lot of support. I can't take any credit for it. I've kind of directed how it should grow and enlarge. But great citizen support, primarily not from the year-rounders as much as the summer people.

Kate: They like to help out there?

Grant: They volunteer to run the museum. They volunteer to catalog things. They set up exhibits.

Kate: What are they interested in? I'm curious, the out-of-town people, what are their favorite parts of the history?

Grant: Things that they like to focus on, mining, obviously. They like the mining history. They like the boom days in Lake City when there were 37 saloons. There are people that were probably watching Gunsmoke as kids or even as adults. So, they're reliving what they had seen on television, only being able to touch it. There's a tactile aspect to it here.

Kate: Yeah, for sure.

We bought and traded to buy that original building, the stone building we're in now for less than $100,000. That would have been about 1988, and we've grown to the point now we're restoring this railroad car.

Kate: Yeah, I saw that.

Grant: That was used on the Lake City line, and it's probably going to cost close to half a million dollars. Just that one artifact. Look how we've grown in those years.

Kate: You have no trouble raising the money?

Grant: It's always a challenge. Yeah, it is. But again, those summer people.

Kate: They bring in the funds.

Grant: They tend to be the funds. We've also spearheaded preservation efforts outside of the town. If there was a falling down mining building, we've jumped in and done that. So, there's a number of buildings, not only in Lake City, but on the outskirts and further afield in remote areas of the county that wouldn't be there now if it wasn't for those early preservation efforts.

We've encouraged publications. There are publications on historic homes of Lake City, recipes of pioneers, cemeteries, who's buried in our cemeteries. We've sponsored those publications. So that's the literary aspect of it.

Kate: Yeah, that’s great. I feel like the most famous story here is Al Packer.

Grant: Which we get tired of actually.

Kate: Everybody knows that.

Grant: We get tired of that. Although we have an exhibit that's year-round on just Al Packer.

Kate: I'm curious, what are your favorite more obscure stories or history moments in Lake City?

Grant: Well, Susan B. Anthony was here. She came trooping through here in September 1877 because this was a promising mining town and actually spent the night and lectured the next day on the importance of giving the women the right to vote.

Kate: To the miners?

Grant: It went to election in 1877 and was defeated. It was a little bit,\

Kate: It was a statewide thing about women getting the right to vote?Grant: All the counties in the state in 1877 voted on it. Can you guess the county that the sole county Kate that passed, that women ought to get the right to vote?

Kate: Was it here?

Grant: No.

Kate: Where?

Grant: Boulder.

Kate: Boulder. Well, that makes sense. I should have guessed that.

Grant: Which is traditionally the most liberal county in the state. Don't you think even in 1877 that was the case?

Kate: I have a question. I thought maybe you might know this. I was walking a few years ago around the Pete’s Lake area, and I saw there's like a little road, and it's called Slaughter Gulch.

Grant: Slaughterhouse.

Kate: I just wondered how did they get that name? There was an actual, there was a slaughterhouse?

Grant: There was a slaughterhouse down there. You had the ranchers selling their cattle in Lake City. They had to be processed before they went to the market. So, we had a number of slaughterhouses, and they all ended up toward that end of town. That Gulch recalls that.

Kate: I was curious because I thought it just said Slaughter Gulch, and I was wondering if it was somebody's name or actual slaughtering happening there.

Grant: Going back to fascinating newspaper stories that I've been involved in when they dug up the remains of Packer's victims.

Kate: When did that happen?

Grant: So that would have been 19 ... Don't get old, Kate. ’89, I want to say. There was no consensus that they were actually buried there. There had been a memorial since 1923, but some of the locals said, “Oh, there's nobody buried there. That stone is just on a vacant spot of property.”

So, an archaeologist, a forensic expert from George Washington University, Dr. Starrs, came up with a crew of archaeologists that summer dug down four feet and found large flat stones covering a shallow grave with the remains of those men.

Kate: So, they were there.

Grant: Under there. Five, four skulls, all with multiple insults from either a hatchet or a knife, and arm bones and leg bones where the skin had systematically been scraped off. No teeth marks, Kate, in case you were wondering whether it showed teeth marks, like an ear of corn. But the flesh was systematically removed.

Kate: Well, what did they do with the bones?

Grant: They were reburied. They analyzed those and they could tell the age and their health. Then after that, they were returned and reburied at the same spot.

Kate: Wow, you know, that must have been when I started coming out here as a kid was in ‘80s, and I remember there was this big interest in Al Packer. There were Al Packer t-shirts at the store.

Grant: And there still are probably.

Kate: I'm wondering if that was why, it was because that happened.

Grant: I think it probably was an outgrowth of that. We have a collection of t-shirts at the museum just for modern history.

Kate: Good, I'm glad you saved those.

Grant: Some of them were quite clever.

Kate: We had some of then. They were funny. One was like a cereal box, I don’t know if it was Wheaties or something like that.

Grant: We had Packer Days at that point. That was a Chamber of Commerce event where you would eat hamburgers fashioned in the shape of a human being, and there would be a coffin race. See, but.

Kate: Why did they stopped doing that?Grant: The interest is waning. So, it's interesting how, and maybe it'll come back again in the future. But after that exhumation of those victims, it was a wildfire.

Kate: Well, so what do you, I mean, there's been a lot of changes in this town. Do you think have been? I mean besides the tourism stuff, are there any other big things that you think are important that have happened?

Grant: Well, the water and sewer system has been totally revamped. We had a very inadequate sewer plant for years. It's marvelous to look at the improvements that have taken place in that length of time. There's going to be a separate addition to the courthouse that will be breaking ground, and we'll have a picture of the commissioners with their shovels. But you'd like to think there's a trajectory of improvement, and I'm always the optimist.

Kate: Okay, that’s good.

Grant: Not the pessimist, Kate.

Kate: Have you thought much about the future of the paper, and what would you like to see happen with it?

Grant: I'd hope it would be continued.

Kate: Yeah. You want to be on that? Do you have any thoughts?

Grant: I don't. I don't have any thoughts beyond that.

Kate: You just want to see it going strong.

Grant: I turned 70 in April. I can't do this forever, Kate.

Kate: I know. I heard you kind of want to retire.

Grant: Other things I'd like to do.

Kate: What would you like to do ideally?

Grant: Well, spend more time in Montana for one.

Kate: You want to be up there?

Grant: I have a good feeling with my dad and I weren't really close. See, they were divorced. I stayed here in Lake City.

Kate: When did he move up there?

Grant: He moved there in the mid-90s and had a good retirement and really enjoyed that. So, the fact I didn't spend a lot of time with him as an adult, I kind of enjoy being immersed by his house and surroundings up there. I don't know how long that will last, even this past week I enjoyed that.

Kate: Even though it was cold. I guess you're used to that.

Grant: And the fire, you always have a fire going on.

Kate: Well, is there anything else you want to tell us?

Grant: No, I hope I haven't rattled on too long.

Kate: No, that was a good run.

Grant: Did we cover enough that you can come up with something?

Kate: It's nice to learn all about the early days of the paper. That's what I was curious about.

Grant: That gives you a taste for what I've been focused on all these years.

Kate: Well, thank you.

Grant: The other thing is, okay, so the paper goes out in 1938, and then there's a couple of brief revivals. Then if, as an historian, what you want to be aware of is there was a Lake City News column in the Gunnison paper. Every week, there would be, and it was kind of a coup to be asked to write the Lake City News column, and they paid a moderate amount for that. But those women who wrote that, that's our only good history now is to look back at Lake City news columns.

Kate: Just that one column. That was weekly?

Grant: That was weekly, and it was real folksy, even more so than anything I would do here. That's an important historical research element now.

Kate: I didn’t know that.

Grant: I've got a pretty much a full collection of Lake City news columns that were written.

Kate: You’ve been collecting them.

Grant: They talk of a mine was opening, or a house burned down, or a family moved in, or a family moved out, or you can trace the summer residents as they begin to show up.

Kate: I do have one more question. I've been curious. Do you know how the Texas people started coming here? Is there somebody from Texas who first came? Or what the draw is, why so many people from Texas like to come here? I'm just kind of curious why that is.

Grant: So, you have a guy by the name of Richard Wupperman, and Hildegard is his wife. They're well-to-do Texans. They live in Seguin, and they started coming up, and they bring their Pierce Arrow in the 1920s. The roads were so bad, they had to strap that Pierce Arrow onto a flatbed of the train and then offload it.

The roads were so bad, he just stayed around Lake City, and he loved the fishing, so he would go on the train. The train was in such poor shape at that point and didn't have much customers that it would drop him off at a certain spot and then agree to pick him up that evening with his mess of fish and bring him back to Lake City. They brought their maid from Seguin with them, and they’d cook up large messes of fish, and then they invited their Texas friends.

Kate: I see. That’s how it all started.

Grant: So, you get the idea. That may be a little oversimplification but that's the one I would point to.

Kate: He was the first.

Grant: And they bought an old derelict Victorian house, fixed it up. It was the start of a number of people that hadn't thought old houses had any future. But Wuppermans did, and so there's Wupperman Campground at Lake San Cristobal named for that couple. He died in 1949, and she continued, died in the 1970s. But I think there's your start of Texas predominating here.

Kate: Yeah, that's interesting. It seems like predominantly Texas, and I mean for my people I know, Oklahoma.

Grant: And fairly easy to get here, I guess, or maybe the roads allowed it. I think the challenge was Slumgullion Pass probably because that wasn't even paved until then.

Kate: Yeah, they would have been coming from that direction.

Grant: Yeah, they came over Slum and that wasn't paved until the 1980s, entirely.

Kate: Maybe they went all the way around. That's interesting,

Grant: In the ‘40s, would have had gambling was going on here. You would have had slot machines. The state hadn't extended its laws to remote places like Lake City. I think that was an attraction. You were coming back to a very remote part of the Old West here that you wouldn't have gotten in Colorado Springs or Pueblo or any of these others. But these small little remote towns, it took a while for society to get here.

Kate: I'm curious too about when did that,is there an official rule that there cannot be any chain businesses here? Or it just never happened?

Grant: I just don't think it's ever happened. I don't think there's a

Kate: For some reason I thought that there was like a local law or something.

Grant: No, I don't think so. I just don't think the money's to be made here. It wouldn't appeal to a franchise.

Kate: Why do you think Lake City hasn't quite had the same boom and development that other places?

Grant: I don't think we can take credit.

Kate: Is it just the geography?

Grant: It's 97 % public land, the county. You can only develop 3 % of this land. That's the whole thing.

Kate: That’s a really tiny amount.

Grant: We can't take any credit for no sprawl here. The land doesn't exist. That's the whole reason, so it's just the geography and the land distribution. That's very important to who we are in the past and who we are today.

Kate: I also read that Hinsdale County is the most remote county in the 48 states. Have you heard that?

Grant: Yeah, I have.

Kate: Do you know how they figured that out?

Grant: I think we reported on that. Distance to a major metropolitan area. That may be oversimplified. I can't remember. We reported on that at the time.

Kate: Did they mean Gunnison, is that the nearest? Or do they mean Denver?

Grant: Or Grand Junction.

Kate: Something like that. Okay, that makes sense. I thought it maybe had something to do with the fact that there were no, there's no stoplights in the county, right?

Grant: I think it might have something to do about areas that don't have a single road in them, the amount of remote, open land, and there's no roads there.

Kate: There's a lot of that here.

Grant: Yeah, a lot of that.

Grant: So you could see why we'd be in the top of the list.

Kate: Did you do a lot of hiking and all that stuff?

Grant: Yeah, as a kid. As a newspaper type, I don't have the time.

Kate: When you were younger, what were your favorite places to go out?

Grant: I like digging old bottles. So I got, there's the history element again. That that was really early. I liked to innertube, where you'd have an innertube in the river, and you'd go down to the bridge that you're going to cross. You didn't want to go under that, ideally.

Kate: Wow. That water must have been really cold.

Grant: Yeah, that was real refreshing, and you'd start up right below the falls. There's an upper falls here, you know.

Kate: That sounds fun.

Grant: Then very shocking when you hit Henson Creek because you can imagine how cold the water in Henson Creek is, and when that meets the Lake Fork, that was very exhilarating. That was a big thing for us as kids. We had all had innertubes, multiple inner tubes.

Kate: That’s funny. That sounds like a great childhood you probably had running around here.

Grant: Yeah, it was good.

Kate: Very idyllic.

Grant: A little bit of a challenge once I went to Gunnison. That was a lot more people than I was used to. Yeah, didn't get to go out much in the winter.

Kate: I'd come back up here on the weekends even when I lived in Gunnison.

Kate: You did, to see your dad.

Grant: Okay, Kate. I hope I haven't chatted on too long.

Kate: Oh, you haven’t.

Grant: You were very gracious.

Kate: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Kate: All right, today I'm here with my dad at his cabin in Colorado, and we're sitting by a crackling fire, drinking coffee. For this interview, we're going to focus on my dad's life in math minus his career as a statistician at Marion Labs, because we're going to talk about that later. But all the other stuff we're going to talk about today. So, thank you for being here today, Dad.

Dad: Okay, it might be a lot of fun.

Kate: Okay. So, the first question I have is, do you think your gift for math was inherited and if so, who did you inherit it from?

Dad: Yeah, I believe it was probably inherited from my mother that when she was going to school, her best subjects were math and art, and so she was able to teach me quite a few things that helped me in school. She knew when we were trying to memorize how to add things up and multiply and divide and all that. She knew how to help me on those. So, I knew a few tricks like anything that's divisible by nine, the integers of it will add up to something that's divisible by nine, and usually that's nine itself. But a lot of times might be 18 or 27 or something. That was a trick that I knew, and other kids didn't have that. I don't know, I just liked it and so, it was easy for me to do that.

My dad and grandma at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa in the early 1980s. ©Mom.

Kate: And her dad was an architect, right?

Dad: Yeah, he probably taught her some stuff. Somehow, I would say that that my mom was his favorite, but he taught her his best things, which were math and art and how to draw and stuff, so mom knew all the all the tricks to teach us how to how to draw something that looked like it was three-dimensional as opposed to you know what normal kids would draw. We were all pretty good at that. Silvia became the artist in the family, whereas I became the mathematician.

Kate: It makes sense.

Dad: And I, Renee, I don't know what to say she became.

Kate: She's a gardener.

Dad: She did. She's a gardener.

Kate: She got that from your dad, I think.

Dad: She got all the cooking experience that my mom developed.

Kate: I know your whole family loves to play games like card games and chess. You learn that at an early age.

Dad: Well, I'm sure we most of us got how to do it sort of thing from my mom. I think she taught my dad how to play chess. What he knew how to do was play checkers. I learned that from him. And then I learned chess at an early age because they were playing that, and I would watch them and I just kind of learned what they were doing and developed that.

Later, when we lived in Muskogee, and I was probably 10 or 12 years old, my dad decided to have a chess club at the library. So, on Saturdays, we would meet there and play chess, and he would show everybody things about it.

He had the janitor make this big board that stood on legs. And it was a chessboard, and it had a hole in the middle of each square so that he could take these pieces that the janitor had put screws in the bottom and put them up on the board, and everyone could see. And so from that, it's kind of hard when you're trying to teach somebody how to play chess, you truly should start with just a few pieces and simple things that you can do. He would show a lot of those things where maybe you just have a pawn and two kings and how to get the pawn down to become a queen at the end, and what to do with that, or how to make a checkmate if you just have a rook and a king versus another king, and things like that. Once you know that kind of stuff, then it's good to memorize certain openings that are known to be really good for you and how that plays out. He would always have one or two things that he was going to show, and he'd do that.

Then we'd play against each other. For a long time, I was sort of the best player, but then all of a sudden, this guy, Ed King, came along and he really studied chess. All of sudden, after a long time with that, he became really the best player.

Kate: That's funny.

Dad: We had a thing where Tulsa also had a chess club of some sort like this. We had several matches where we would drive up to Tulsa with several cars. Then we'd set up, and we'd play typically a match is that each person plays one other, and then you score from that. Typically, it would be if you win, you get one point. If you lose, you don't get any. If it's a tie, you get each get a half, and then you add all that up for the team. I think we lost every time.

Kate: Okay. What about all the card games you played?

Dad: Yeah, Mom liked to play cards, so she taught me several little kids’ games, which I knew, and I could teach you guys at some point.

Kate: Yeah, we all learned those too.

Dad: But the best thing was that when I was four or five, we were living in this, I always remember that house a whole lot because I knew every corner of it and stuff, but we were living in this house where we had a card table that we could put in the living room and play bridge. But to play bridge, the main person they knew how to play was a cousin named Gerald. He would come over and there were only three of them. There's a way you can kind of play bridge with three people, but it's not very good. So, they taught me how to play bridge.

Kate: How old were you?

Dad: I was five, six, right in there. Now, I would always play with my mother, and she knew all this stuff that I would learn from her. She taught me how to play the cards well, and then how the bidding was supposed to go and all of that stuff. Another thing we would do is sometimes we'd get my grandmother to play with us. But my grandmother could just barely play, so I found myself teaching her how to do things.

Kate: Yeah, that’s funny.

Dad: But at any rate, that was the bridge thing and the chess. Those were the two best games. Later, when we were older, we started getting boxed games. I think Monopoly was my favorite, and we would play Monopoly with Joe and Bill Lunn and all three of us as kids, and it was just a nice game. Then from that in terms of games, I started realizing there were these war games you could get. I would play those with Joe, but also, I would play it against myself all the time trying to figure out the best way to do things.

Kate: Those are with the little soldiers?

Dad: Well, the war games were with just a map, and they would put this hexagonal pattern on it so you could move from one hexagon to another.

Kate: Oh, okay.

Dad: It would just be a little square of, here's a cavalry unit, and it is worth two points in strength, and it can move six of those, or you might have an infantry unit, and it can move, say, three. Then you might have an artillery unit, and it could move two, but it could hurt somebody from a distance. To find out how much you hurt somebody, you would roll the dice. If you rolled something like a six, then that was terrific, and you would get the maximum hurt on the other side to try to reduce their unit to nothing. If you rolled a one, that was no good, stuff like that.

So any rate, the first game I got was Waterloo, and it was probably the most interesting game of any to begin with because it had the French under Napoleon, and the first army he bumps into are the Prussians. You would have that fight, and then the British would start arriving, and then you'd have to fight the British and that whole setup of how that worked. I worked at that a long time trying to figure out what was the way that the French could win this thing because they were outnumbered. Ultimately, I finally decided if the British and the Prussians were smart, you just couldn't beat them. But I must have played that a zillion times.

Then, the next game after that was Stalingrad. This was the thing of World War II.

Kate: Cold War era or World War II.

Dad: And the Germans and the Russians and working that out. That one, the Germans had the best army for sure, and they would start on the attack. But then, the Russians started getting reinforcements and training, new soldiers and stuff. They would ultimately have the real powerful army, so the Germans had to win rapidly, or they would lose out.

Then there became other games that came along, but I don't think any of them were quite as good. Like there was Gettysburg, and I forget, several others. But any rate, that gaming thing got really pretty good there, and so ultimately you know that that kind of gaming shows up on a computer. People are playing that sort of stuff there.

Kate: Let's go back to when you were in elementary school. What do you remember about math there besides your mom helped you a lot, I guess, probably with that?

Dad: I don't know.

Kate: You don't remember that too much?

Dad: I don't remember at grade school a whole lot. It seemed like so much of it was memory, and knowing what you were doing with that, how to add and multiply large numbers. In fact, I still find myself doing that when I'm working one of these little logic puzzles in the morning. Some of them involve multiplying numbers or adding them or something, and I still have, go back to square one, how I used to do it, as opposed to getting out the calculator and using it.

Kate: Well, what about high school? I know there was some influential math teachers.

Dad: Yeah, in high school. Well, all along I had some teachers that were the math teachers. I remember in third grade, the teacher I had there liked math a whole lot, and she got me going. But when I got into high school, the first math class you took was geometry in, I guess it was 10th grade. I absolutely love that because all of a sudden, it wasn't so much just numbers as it was logic that we had to spend an enormous amount, most of our time knowing what the axioms were and then what the logic was that would enable you to prove something from the axioms and all of that. I just love that. We got to where we did more and more with that.

I was telling you the other day that the teacher at the end of the year had these things for us to try to prove that were really, really hard. The one I remember was that if you have any four points, you were supposed to draw a square through them so that each point was on one of the sides of the square. And I just, I always had that problem in the back of my head, and then I finally had a teacher when I was in college that when I told him about that problem, he went over and got this book and showed me the solution, which was really hard. It isn’t something I can remember how to do.

But at any rate, that was Mr. Rivers. Most of the people, for I don't know what reason, they just hated geometry. But for me, that was really the best math class I ever had in high school. But then the next year, we did algebra, and the year after that it was kind of like what we call second-year algebra.

Kate: Like trigonometry or something? Or that comes later?

Dad: Yeah, I think maybe we had some trigonometry in that too. Trigonometry was just kind of onward with geometry.

Kate: So, you went to college at OU in Norman, and I know you didn't think about majoring in math initially, right? You were kind of interested in.

Dad: Well, yeah.

Kate: You did? Okay.

Dad: I think the thing was, to get into college, everybody had to take these exams. I've forgotten what they were called now.

Kate: Like SAT? Or ACT?

Dad: Yeah. So, there was, there were two that most universities had started out using one of them. And then the really good one started in with, I think it was the SAT. You took these tests to get into college. When I took it, I would always score almost perfect on the math side, but the other side, I was just sort of normal. I thought I could get into some college like Harvard or Rice was a really good one, and so on. But they wouldn't take me because of my lousy word.

Kate: Like the English part?

Dad: The English part, yeah. So, I didn't make that. I went to University of Oklahoma. Any rate, that was pretty easy for me to get into, and so when I got there, I wasn't totally sure what I wanted to major in. I knew there were three subjects I liked, that's math, history, and philosophy. I always made sure that I plenty of those classes so that I could go on into a master's program from that.

But there were several teachers that were really good in math. I've forgotten their names. One just, he didn't really have a PhD, but he was real close to getting it. He taught a lot of our classes, and he was just so clear in explaining everything that it was easy to learn from him. Then there was this other guy that everybody liked tremendously because he was sort of funny, and I don't know that he was that good in math, but he kept your attention just because there might be a joke here.

Those people taught math pretty well. I started out, I forget, some sort of advanced algebra, and then we went into calculus which was really a continuation of algebra in many ways. Then there were some other things that were kind of like geometry in the things that you proved with it all the time and stuff like that. At a certain point, I took a class in probability, which I really, really enjoyed.

In the meantime, I had taken some philosophy classes, and one that really got to me was a logic class. We had to take these tests every week, and I always scored perfect on these logic tests. I thought, man, this might be what I need to do, is go into philosophy.

But there were lots of other things where we were looking at what the philosophy of the Greeks was and on and on. It was more of, the class involved memorizing a whole lot of stuff. Then likewise in history, I took several different kinds of history classes, and I enjoyed them. But again, the work in them, and for me at least, was more of a matter of memorizing things for tests that would ask what happened here.

The one history class that I liked the best. The first year in college, there was this guy who had this special class for what were considered the best students, and I got into it. You would go over to his house once a week, and each week, we were supposed to have read a book that he would give us. Well, he would assign us, and we'd have to go buy it, so it was kind of an expensive class. But anyway, we had all these paperback books that we were reading, and he went through American history from the early times when the colonists came over until, I don't know how far he went. Maybe he made it to World War II or something like that. But each book was about one of those periods.

The thing about it that was so interesting is that it wasn't just a matter of memorizing what happened at that period. There was always a theory of why it happened behind each one. We went through all these different books that would then give us a period of time, and then he would explain to us different theories of why that would happen. So, that made history really interesting, but it didn't continue that way. The rest of the classes I took were pretty much read this, here's what happened, and then make sure you have it memorized for a test.

I had to choose finally what I was going to do. I picked math just because I thought in many ways, I thought it was easiest for me that the logic part of it and all of the proofs that you had to do, all of that sort of stuff just sort of fell into my lap. I just thought that was easiest. For a long time, I was considering that maybe philosophy would be in that period of time or would fit well.

But, I finally decided on math, and I spent a long time on trying to do stuff there at the University of Oklahoma. I got a master's degree in a couple of years. Then I kept taking classes and trying to decide if I was going to work on a PhD, what area I wanted to be in, and which professor to work with, and stuff like that.

That's where I got two professors that really had an impact on me. One did all of the probability-type classes, which I found interesting. But a lot of it applied tremendously to these games that I had been playing, and I enjoyed it. He had gotten his degree at Oregon State. It was really hard to get anything in probability or statistics there at the University of Oklahoma because they only had a couple of professors that knew anything about it.

Then the other one was this, I took a class that was survey sampling from this other guy who had just come there. He had been there like a year, and he had gotten his degree at Florida State. He's the one that I started playing bridge with, and he knew a whole lot of things like a new bidding system for me to learn and how to play cards especially well and stuff like that and so, he was great on the bridge part. I also enjoyed the survey sampling and getting it figured out.

I decided, well, in order to get a degree, I'm going to go to either Florida State or Oregon State.

Kate: For statistics specifically?

Dad: Yeah. I don't know why, I think you mentioned the other day that maybe I decided because I liked Oregon as a place to live.

Kate: Because it had mountains, probably.

Dad: Yeah, that I would go there and get a degree in statistics, and I could make some money there, that the graduate program there, I was able to get into a thing where they let me teach math, beginning math, like algebra and stuff and get paid pretty well for it.

Up ‘til then, your mom had been working and adding to what I would, the little amount I was making as a graduate student so that we could live. I remember one of the places we decided to live was a married housing area where each building wasn't any bigger than this room here. It had been built back when my parents had been there, and my dad was finishing his degree.

Kate: This is in Oklahoma? In Norman?

Dad: In Oklahoma, yeah, when we were in Norman. We had lived there when I was like two years old.

Kate: That's really funny.

Dad: Yeah, so It was the same place. But then when we moved to Oregon, there was a married student housing area that we could be part of and join. That's where Nick was born. Then I was making enough money as a graduate student that I could support us, and everything was cheap enough there that we could live okay. Your mom became a full-time mother with all the stuff. I think she taught Nick so much stuff, it's kind of unreal in the early ages. He could talk when he was one year old, you know.

Kate: With full sentences and everything?

Dad: Yes, with sort of the whole thing. We thought he was going to be a genius. I think it was just a matter of his being taught a lot. I don't know.

But any rate, that's where I did a lot of study in statistics. I had to catch up with a lot of people because most of the stuff that I knew was pretty much probability. And statistics, you have all this stuff involving experiments, so that was kind of part of it.

Kate: Tell me about that thing where you wrote those papers. That guy?

Dad: Yeah, ultimately, after getting my master's in statistics, then I started working with this one guy. I don't know exactly how we got going. I don't know if he was that great of a statistician logically, but he was really good at knowing all these different ways of doing statistics. He taught this final class where you learned all these different ways that you could do estimation and hypothesis testing and stuff. It was a really, really good class. I just kept kind of working with him. He paid attention to what was going on in statistics at the time.

There was this really famous statistician in England whose name was David Cox, and he developed this thing that was being used in clinical trials a whole lot called the Cox Model. It had to do with survival data, where you would have an experimental unit, give them a treatment, and see how long they lived. That length of time was the survival time. From that, then you would try to prove different things about the treatments.

He had somebody he was working with that was was doing experiments with fish there and would see how long a fish would survive under, with a certain thing in the water. I picked up on that as let's see if I can do something with that. The thing was that the survival time instead of getting, you when you have a human, usually you could pretty well say, okay, this this person survived 322 days and get the exact number of how long they lived. Whereas in this setting, what was happening was they basically just had that a fish survived a short amount of time or medium amount of time or long amount of time.

The thing about survival data is when by the time you got to the end of the experiment, you wouldn't run the experiment ‘til everybody was dead. At the end of the experiment, there were these people that we called it sensor data. They survived to a certain amount of time and then this experiment ended, and they were censored in that we wouldn't know how long they would survive.

I applied this thing Cox had developed, this model, we called it the Cox Model, and he had a way of analyzing the data at that time the method a lot of people were using was the maximum likelihood estimation. That involved a thing you could do called a likelihood function from the experiment. Then from that, you could use the data to form this function that would estimate, well, show you a function for the parameters, and then you maximize that. That would be your estimate. Then there was a way to get the variability of the estimates and do different things with the data involving that, hypothesis testing, and then, I've forgotten all the words here, but there were several different things.

I started doing that with this, what we call grouped survival data where it was just the low, medium, and high. I started applying that. It was so, it was popular and everybody wanted to know stuff about this that we were able to get publications. I had these publications before I even had my thesis finished. The first one was in America. There was this really popular journal called Biometrics. Just how to do this using the Cox Model on this kind of data was really interesting to people. We immediately got a publication with that. It was he and I, and he had this other student that was doing something related but not. It was me that basically had the thing that was published.

Then one of the really early publications that had been started by this guy named Ronald Fisher, who was considered one of the very beginning people that developed statistics, it was called Biometrika. Part of what I did, you could develop the efficiency of using a Cox analysis versus the maximum likelihood analysis. Cox had this way of just throwing away part of the data that wasn't very important but was unusual to do. I could develop the efficiency of doing that. Turned out if the effect of the treatment compared to a control was very small, that it was a really good way to do it. If it was really big, it wasn't very efficient. However, if it was really big, you could see it immediately. It was obvious, you know.

People were really interested in that thing. I had these two publications almost before I did anything. Then when I started looking for a job that helped enormously and my major professor, Donald Pierce, had gotten his degree at Oklahoma State. So that was one of the places that I applied to. And bingo, they immediately accepted me. I went ahead and decided, well, I'll go there. I'll be back close to all my people in Oklahoma that I know. That was a really good place for me to start.

I finally got my thesis completed. It was a real pain in those days because in order to write a mathematical statement and use a lot of strange symbols, you couldn't just do that with a normal typing thing. You had to get this special typist that had a typewriter that could come up with all these symbols. It wasn't like it could just be done on the computer. I had this lady that was struggling with my thesis to write it out. And finally, I said, okay, this is enough of this, so I just accepted what she wrote. Then when it was all done and I had my degree and stuff, I looked at that again, and the very first page had a mistake in it, you know? So, it was kind of oh well.

Kate: Did you start using like mainframe computers around that time? Is that how you were doing your data?

Dad: When I went to Oklahoma State, they had a way of using a computer where they used cards.

Kate: The punch cards?

Dad: The punch cards. You had to spend a lot of time creating the cards then to put in the computer, and then it would do stuff with it. I didn't I didn't work on that. But there was an old guy who was kind of our computer person who did, and he showed me some stuff while we were there. It's kind of nice.

Kate: You started teaching there. I know you had to teach a lot of classes.

Dad: Yeah, the very first year they were really mean to me. There was this business statistics class that had just been started that the business people had to take a class in statistics. I had four sections of business statistics to teach, and each one had about, I don't know, 150 people in it.

Kate: Oh God, yeah.

Dad: We would meet in this great big auditorium, and I would have to have everything all set up to where I could put it up on a screen that I could sort of write on and show them things or have something already prepared to put up there.

Kate: Oh, the birds came.

Dad: The birds have arrived on our bird feeder. So, any rate, I did that and I always laughed about it with your mom that what the thing was, I'd be somewhat prepared but not too good for the very first lecture to a section, and so it would take me a long time to get through it. But I could kind of do all right with it. But then I knew all of the things that could go wrong. The second lecture went through beautifully and ended in the right amount of time. Then, the third lecture was one where I started forgetting what I had told that class versus what the previous class I just told. I would get through really fast, and I'd probably forget to tell them things. The fourth was really bad, I think. Where it took me 45 minutes on the first lecture, I might do the last one in 30 minutes and still wonder, what did I forget to tell those people? I told the, what was he called? Our, the leader of our department?

Kate: The chair?

Dad: Chair. He had some other name we gave him. But I told him this problem and how this class, it was really hard to handle so many sections.

Kate: Did you have grad students helping you?

Dad: Yeah, I did.

Kate: They did all the grading, problably.

Dad: That was the long part, was to get the grading done and to decide who passed and who didn't know. It was always a tragedy to flunk somebody. I always felt really bad.

When I was in Norman, I had a summer section to teach there that was basically algebra and calculus, and there was like two or three classes all that had to be done in a couple of months. It was for military people. So, I had several people from army, some from the Navy, maybe a couple of Marines, an Air Force guy, that sort of thing. I remember it being that the ones that got into this class were really pretty sharp, and they could get right through it no problem. But I had this one guy that just couldn't seem to get anything. And even the other students knew that and were trying desperately to help him. But in the end, I had to flunk him, and that just seemed so terrible at the time.

But when I got to the end of my six-year career at Stillwater and Oklahoma State, I reached this point where you had to get tenure, and the rest of the department had to vote that you would you had tenure. Then you basically could stay there forever. I wasn't all that sure that this thing, this tenure was coming because of the way they never told me anything about it.

So, I started applying for jobs, and the one in Kansas City working for Marion Labs was really interesting to me that it had all to do with clinical trials, which is one of the major experimental areas. I had been working, teaching a lot of stuff about experiments. So, that was especially interesting. And lo and behold, I would make twice as much money if I went there, and was in Kansas City, and they were going to help me move there, pay for my move and give me sort of an initial extra salary, couple of months, so that I could put a down payment on a house.

Kate: Wow, yeah.

Dad: It just looked really, really good to me. And then lo and behold, I finally accepted the job and like two days later, the chairman of the department came in and said, “Well, we voted and you have tenure.”

Kate: Of course, yeah.

Dad: So, I had to tell him, “No, I've decided I'm going to do this other thing.” I asked him how much they were going to pay me and, you know, it turned out about half again. That's what I was going to get. Plus, we had this little house there in Stillwater that I don't know that we were ever going to get out of. Do you remember that house?

Kate: Yeah, the little white house.

Dad: Yep. In Kansas City, we were going to have quite a bit better house. So, it was there were just all kinds of.

Kate: Lots of perks.

Dad: Improvements. I couldn't resist doing that. In many ways, it was really fun because the stuff that you do as a statistician working for a pharmaceutical company is to help design a whole lot of clinical trials and then do the analysis of what you get. Then sometimes you get to deal with the FDA and what they thought was important versus what your company was doing and stuff like that. It was really, really good. I enjoyed that.

Kate: Yeah. We'll talk more about that later. But I did want to ask about you wrote a paper there. I think this was when I was in high school, maybe, or college, I can't remember. The Groundhog Day paper that you got published.

Dad: Yeah. There was this journal that some guy had just started that was about applications of pharmaceutical, well, of statistics to pharmaceutical, especially clinical trials. It was fairly easy to get some kind of a publication there, so one of them was this thing that I called Groundhog Day, and it was just that in thinking about analyzing a clinical trial, the hypothesis test would have the placebo be the same as the treatment so that there wouldn't be any difference. And so, you basically were thinking about repeating that over and over again by the way you randomized the experiment. But each time it came out exactly the same and so, it was kind of like Groundhog Day.

Kate: Like the movie.

Dad: Then I showed how you could do some analysis of that real simply.

The thing I found most interesting when I was at Oklahoma State is I discovered if we were using this method of experimentation where it was always some kind of treatment versus what we called a control. At that time, the control basically was that nothing happened and the treatment would make something that you were measuring change. The hypothesis was always that the treatment didn't change anything, so you would get the same result as a control. We were always causing or calling this cause and effect. The treatment was supposed to be the cause that you were going to show. And the effect was the thing you're measuring and how it changed.

I just said, at a certain point, I wanted to talk to the class I was teaching about cause and effect. I wanted to know something about what's the history of that. I went back and started looking up all kinds of things that, you know, we had a pretty good library at Oklahoma State. I was just sure that cause and effect must have been first introduced by Aristotle. That seemed like the most likely thing. I knew that Aristotle had done some stuff related to cause. That was something I had studied long ago when I was thinking about possibly going into philosophy.

I read through all this stuff that Aristotle had written about cause and it turned out all he only had done truly was to just categorize cause into four different kinds, but he didn't really talk about what it was they have a definition of it.

And then, oh gosh, there were so many philosophers along the way. I'm sure I didn't look up everybody. But lo and behold, I could look at some of the stuff that Galileo did, and it turned out that he had a definition of cause and effect that was something that made sense, and it was real close to what we were doing in statistics. It didn't have a whole thing about randomized experiments and stuff like that, but it had defined, at least, that cause was something that if the way he said it was that basically cause was something that if you removed it, then you'd lose the effect. So, cause you'd see the effect. If you removed it, you wouldn't. So it was a comparison of a treatment to a control, basically. Or a cause to a placebo or something like that.

I could start a class and talk about a definition of cause and effect and what it was. Then we started into experiments. There were lots of different experimental designs. That was my favorite class to teach. The students were all graduate students in other departments who were being asked to do experiments.

Kate: Oh, so they needed to know how to do it right.

Dad: We would show them lots of different experimental designs and how to analyze the data that you got back from that. That's where I got this thing from this old professor that I liked a lot. He came in one day and gave me this box and said, “You can use this, in teaching your experimental design class.” He said, “These are a whole bunch of little egg timers.” They were egg timers that probably cost 25 cents in that day.

He had these little stacks of cards that he had cut up and put a rubber band around and they were just tall enough with the stack that you could put the egg timer on it, and it would be leaning a little bit. It turned out that he showed me that it would take close to three minutes, say, for the egg timer to run so that you knew you were boiling an egg. You wanted to do it three minutes and then take it out, that if you lean the egg timer a little, the thing would run slightly faster. It made this wonderful thing to have experimental designs in that you could start with the simplest experimental design where you're just comparing a treatment to a control. You could take and randomize which ones were going to be standing straight up and which ones were going to be leaning and compare them. You could run the experiment in something like three minutes because you give each student an egg timer and the decision and the randomization we would do, and you'd see the result of who was going to have one straight up and down and who was going to have one leaning over and make a comparison with them.

It was such a small difference that nearly always when you're teaching this class, you'd have a way of analyzing the data afterwards. You wouldn't have shown anything that was experimentally allowed as a final result showing the right thing, so it would just be no good. But then you'd start getting these different experimental designs. Like we'd look at all the egg timers and put all the ones that had the most sand in them in one group and all the ones that had the least amount of sand in another group. Then randomized would be a randomized block design, and the blocks were the egg timers to begin with and how much sand they have. Then you could tilt some of them within a block and some of them within the other block, do all this randomly, and then see the result. All of a sudden, it started turning out to be experimentally what we were calling, I don't know, okay.

Kate: Okay, let's go back to the Groundhog Day paper. You were going say something else about that?

Dad: Well, the idea, when I saw that movie, I realized that in terms of cause and effect, that it related as to what they were doing that the star there lived through a particular day in a certain way, and then he woke up the next day, and he was starting all over again with that same thing.

He actually got a chance to change things in the next day as to what he was doing, whereas everything else was exactly the same. So, he would change things and think that he had done something that would make things really different, and then the next day he would wake up and lo and behold, nothing changed.

He was, it says, compared to the first day, he would change something and see whether it made a difference, and he could compare them. Lo and behold, he'd wake up and do the same thing. He tried all these different things, and nothing seemed to work until finally, he lived this really perfect day in terms of the moral structure of what he did and everything. Lo and behold, he finally changes it to the next day that's really different. It was like the perfect definition of cause and effect.

I can use that as talking about how you compare one thing to another and then the definition of cause and effect. Then, the hypothesis test that we would do would essentially be that there was no cause, and you would then compare things to what you would expect if there was no cause and see if you got something dramatically different or not. Any rate, it was kind of fun to do, and they seemed to like the paper, so I got it published early on in this little journal.

Kate: Is that kind of how you did your clinical trials? Did you keep doing them over until you got a certain result?

Dad: No.

Kate: You would do it once, and that would be it.

Dad: You just have the cause and you apply it and then you see what the result is, and then you have a hypothesis that there's no effect. If the result is really unlikely, you calculate the statistical significance by how likely the thing is.

If it's really unlikely and more towards what would happen if there was a cause by the treatment, then you finally say, no, I'm going to reject that hypothesis that there's no effect and you have finally the effect. But it's interesting how all those things relate and kind of good.

For a while, you know, especially when I was in Kansas City, I didn't worry about getting any publications. When I knew I was about to retire, there were two papers I wanted to get published, and so, lo and behold, this new journal was just the perfect place for me to get published. So, I did that, and then that was kind of the end.

We were able to retire early. There were lots of things that the original company, the Marian Labs that Lorie and I belonged to, did that we were able to gain a lot of retirement. So, we retired, and we hardly had any worries except we found that

the major cost was the cost of medical insurance. We had to struggle with that. Missouri had a special thing that we could do that cut the cost about in half. Then when we moved to Colorado, they had something similar that we could do, and other states didn't, so I mean, It was really kind of a problem. But once we got old enough that we got Medicare, my gosh, then that was the thing. Another thing that we were able to do is you're always hearing how you should wait till you're 70 years old to start your Social Security.

But actually, you can start it, I think it's when you're 62, perhaps, something like that. The thing is that they increase the amount that Social Security will pay you if you wait longer, because they don't expect to have to pay you so long, because you won't live that long.

But what we did is we had enough money to basically survive okay. We started Social Security early and took essentially all of it and invested it. And it was a good time for investment. Stocks went up in value and stuff. The money we made doing that, I think, was greater than if we just waited to take our social security later.

Kate: That's interesting.

Dad: Now, if it had been a bad time, then maybe that wouldn't have made much sense. And we were real lucky in our first, when before we retired, we had a management company that handled our investments and did all these terrible things where we lost money. It looked like some of them were illegal.

Kate: Wow.

Dad: At any rate, they went out of business after a while, but we shouldn't have been with them at all. So, then we moved to this other company and had this lady, Jan, who was our investment lady. She was really smart, and everything that they did helped us tremendously. That was our major thing for our retirement. We were really lucky in that.

But you wanted to know, you know, what, what do I do nowadays? I do these little puzzles. There's one a day. If it has something involved, you know, where you, in order to solve it is, it's totally a logic thing or a math thing, I can do those really rapidly. And that's kind of fun in a sense that I, it makes me feel like, okay, my brain is still here. But if it's a puzzle that involves words, usually definitions of what word means this, just sort of like a crossword puzzle.

Kate: See, that's what I like. I like those things.

Dad: That's where I have lost so much memory from my epilepsy that I don't know that many words anymore. When you ask for a definition, here's the definition, what word is that? That is the worst thing that I could possibly do. So, I've never spent any time with it.

But at any rate, it makes me say, okay, I can't do this very well. Let's work on these a while. Let's see how much I can get.

Kate: You’ll try.

Dad: But I can't really get one of those. Just asked Lorie, and she seems to have the memory of words like crazy and bingo, she knows the answers.

Kate: And you also do Sudoku a lot. Do you do that on?

Dad: Well, I used to.

Kate: Oh, you don't anymore? Okay.

Dad: Every now and then one of the puzzles is a

Kate: You just stick with your daily puzzle calendar?

Dad: Yeah. I used to do that, and you can play bridge on …

Kate: Your phone?

Dad: Or your computer. Where you have one part, one player, and then the other three players are all done by the computer automatically. I like doing that. But I haven't been doing those kinds of things recently.

Kate: Yeah, you still play a lot of in-person games. Like we just played Mahjong the other day. And I know you play bridge and …

Dad: Yeah. Well, bridge, that was kind of interesting. Lorie didn't really know how to play, and when we moved here, there were several people that that wanted her to join and play bridge. So, I taught her how to play and she steadily got better and better at it. And she has this group now of the four of them and they love to get together. One of them even moves to Texas in the winter, and they can do it by computer. So, they play bridge all the time. If one of them is not there, then I might take over that spot to keep their game going.

But then we play with the Lunns, that they know how to play. Of course, it's really kind of funny when we're with the Lunns because Joe absolutely loves to play bridge and wants to do it, you know, and Marsha had sort of learned from him. But she gets so tired in the evenings. I don't know if you've been around, but it seems like she gets up early, does all this kind of work, and then by nine o'clock in the evening, she's going to sleep on us. If we try playing bridge together early.

Kate: Yeah, I know we need to start early. But you’re a night owl person.

Dad: When you're with them, what always happens is they spend an enormous amount of time on the, what's the word, pre-dinner food.

Kate: Happy hour?Dad: And then the cooking, so we probably won't have dinner until eight or nine o'clock. If we try to play bridge, it's super late. That's the wrong time.

Anyway, Lorie learned how to play pretty good, so she's got it all figured.

Kate: You know who's starting to get really good at hearts is Will.

Dad: Really?

Kate: Yeah, Will and Sofia now play. And they really like it, which I thought was kind of funny.

Dad: Well yeah, that's got a plan to it.

Kate: It’s a genetic thing, think. What about, I wanted to ask this last thing about how you eat M&M's?

Dad: Yes. Really?

Kate: You have a method.

Dad: Yeah, well.

Kate: And you used to have peanut M&M's on your desk at work. Remember, everybody would come to you to talk to you because they could get some M&M's.

Dad: My favorite thing was for a long time, M&M's. There's six colors now. You know, the thing with the red was a problem for quite a while. But they seem to have a dye now that's safe. So, there's six of them, and I just get a cup of M&Ms and start eating, and I want to end up with the largest ones. I don't know why they taste better to me. Maybe they have more chocolate in them or something.

Kate: Yeah, maybe.

Dad: And also, I like having all the colors there. So, whenever I see two of them that are the same color, then I eat the smaller one of those, but make sure I don't eliminate that color. So, I keep working my way down until I get to the final six that are all different colors and the biggest ones.

Kate: The biggest. Okay.

Dad: And then I just eat them by the smallest first.

Kate: Oh my God. Alright. Well, Why don't we go have some M&Ms?

Dad: You could.

Kate: Thank you for telling me all these stories.

Dad: Okay. Well, if you want to come back again.

Kate: I'm sure I will.

Dad: I can tell you some more things about my family.

Kate: We’ll do that.

Dad: Growing up and stuff like that.

Kate: We’ll do a lot of that, yeah. There's a lot to tell.

Dad: Okay. And then how I met your mom, and some of that.

Kate Okay. Alright.

Welcome to the Pass it On podcast. I'm your host, Kate Stewart. On this podcast, I interview people that I admire because I think we have so much to learn from them. These times call for all of us to step up and pitch in in whatever way we can. But for now, pull up your lawn chair to the fire pit because it's story time.

Senior Lunch welcome table, 2025.

Kate: A few weeks ago, I decided to get out of my comfort zone and try something new. I've been going to Lake City, Colorado on vacation since I was very young, and my dad and my stepmom decided to retire there almost 20 years ago. But I had never visited them in winter over those 20 years if that tells you anything about how I feel about cold weather. But I've been thinking a lot about my own survival skills, and I've been wondering, would I be able to make it through a harsh winter again if I had to?

My dad has always said that winter is his favorite season in Lake City. He enjoys the quiet and the slower pace of life, and he tends to the fires in his two wood stoves every day. He reads a whole lot of books, and he plays a lot of Sudoku, and my stepmom cooks and bakes nearly every day. They both watch a lot of football, too. But most importantly, they like to spend quality time with their neighbors in this very tiny little town. Lake City has only 400 year-round residents and it's located in Hinsdale County, which is thought to be the most remote county in the lower 48 states. I don't know how they calculate that. It may have something to do with the fact that there's no stoplight here. The elevation is 8,672 feet, which makes it difficult for many people, especially the elderly, to get enough oxygen. The steep mountains surround the town on all sides and Lake City has staunchly prevented chain businesses and unchecked development, unlike a lot of more famous towns on the Western Slope.

Over half of the population of townies here is over 65. They are extraordinarily tough, independent people who know how to survive cold weather and living in such a remote location. When I got here, my stepmom asked me if I wanted to go to Senior Lunch. “What's that?” I asked. She explained that it's a special lunch at the Armory for senior citizens that takes place twice a month on Fridays. It's five dollars to get some great food and have some great conversation with people from Lake City.

Did I want to go to Senior Lunch? Heck yeah, I did! She also told me that Senior Lunch was part of a new slate of activities for seniors in Lake City called Senior Connections. I had to ask, how did this get started? Who was involved in making it happen? Is this kind of thing really working here? I decided to bring my microphone with me to Senior Lunch to record some interviews with the people who helped make this happen. I also wanted to find out what kind of difference it's making in people's lives to have some good old-fashioned, in-person fellowship. The background noise in some of these interviews may make it difficult to hear what they're trying to say, but I wanted you to feel like you were right there with me at the Armory. So grab a plate and sit down, because we're going to Senior Lunch.

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Kate: Okay. I'm here at Senior Lunch at the Lake City Armory in Colorado and I'm talking with Lori, who is one of the people who helped start Senior Connections. So welcome Lori.

Lori: Thank you.

Kate: So, let's start. How did Senior Connections get started?

Lori: This was the brainchild of Cheryl Tate. There were group of us that felt like there was a part of our community in Lake City that was not being served, that would be the senior community. We did some research within the tax roll to find out what percentage of our population fell into that category. It was at least 50% of our population. We were trying to figure out how can we reach these folks. We knew a lot of them were kind of shut in, maybe not participating in things in the community.

Senior Connections came together. We had a group of ten volunteers, no money, but a vision to make something happen for this pair of folks. Through lot of work with volunteers and donations and things, we got the first meal off the ground last summer, then it's just kind of grown from there. The town has donated the use of the space for the dining and the kitchen, which was huge because we needed a place to meet. And then it started out with just maybe 20 people coming. They were a little bashful, I think, to come and participate because they weren't really sure what this was.

Then as it has evolved through the fall and winter, we now have 50, 60, 70 people coming to lunch, totally enjoying the fellowship. They come early, they stay late, they laugh and visit and just have a wonderful time ,and they have a really great meal because we have a really good cook. So, it's been super fun to see this evolve, and it has really taken off, and we hope to do bigger and better things in coming year.

Kate: What are the other things you have available now?

Lori: So, right now the Senior Center is open during the week. We have different activities scheduled, but people can come in anytime and grab a cup of coffee, have a snack, just visit with someone. Or there are puzzles, games. Some ladies come to knit on Wednesdays. There's a ladies' bridge group on Thursdays. There is senior walking in the Armory, and then next week we're going to be starting a Silver Sneakers fitness program for the older adults just to help with balance and flexibility and things like that, because we have seen that the number one injury in this age group is falls, and sometimes those are very debilitating. We want to be able to help some folks to stay more independent, especially in this mountain community that's really important, because we’re far away from anything. Independence is a really big thing here.

Kate: Yeah, for sure. You have to be tough to make it through the winter here.

Lori: Yes, yes.

Kate: You take the money when people come in for lunch. the check-in person. And you're going to do senior--

Lori: So ,it's five dollars a meal and then we kind of get them lined up for the next meal. We try to keep it on the second and fourth Friday, just for that consistency. And then we get to visit and people come in so that's really fun.

Kate: It seems like a good group, like people know each other pretty well.

Lori: It is.

Kate: That's terrific. Okay, well thank you.

Lori: You're welcome, thank you.

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Kate: All right, I'm here now with Greg, who is a County Commissioner of Hinsdale County and one of the people involved in getting Senior Connections started. What was your role in that, in the early days?

Greg: I was approached by Cheryl Tate. This was back a ways ago in 2024. I think she approached me, it was multi-faceted, was my being a county commissioner and using that kind of influence. As well as just being someone that's been locally involved in the community for 25-plus years, and an idea that I could probably reach out to a lot of people. I believe the impetus was for me to bridge the gap between Public Health and this group that was loosely-knitted, formed a committee. That's how I got involved. I was asked to conduct a survey that really narrowed down on what the greatest needs of the senior community was.

Kate: What's the connection then with the County Public Health Department?

Greg: The County Public Health Department had someone working and doing senior coordinating, putting together senior lunches and stuff like that. At the time of the inception of this idea, they felt there was a disconnect within Public Health and that they weren’t being served properly. They being seniors in our community, and that maybe more needed to be done. I went through that position with Public Health because I had great relationships with them already. I just saw what they could do and what we could do as a county or what we could do as a city to bridge that gap.

Kate: That's great. What else besides, you come to Senior Lunch sometimes?

Greg: Yeah, and so the main part was...

Kate: But you're not a senior citizen, right?

Greg: I'm not a senior citizen. I'm, you know, quickly approaching, I suppose. By definition, 55 in some places, but we're going with 60. That's kind of the number we use.

Kate: Cut off, okay.

Greg: My connections, like I said, would be trying to get funding from the county, being an advocate within the county board, and making sure that those needs are met, and that they've got a seat at the table. Once again, them being the Senior Connections group, and that through me, they had a better voice in the county. I know they're trying to get more input from the town. I think they've got good reception from the town, but no one quite as involved as me, I would say, at that level, where I'm continually asking for funds to be donated to the Senior Connections program, working with—

Kate: And they keep saying no? They don't want to?

Greg: The county or the town?

Kate: Okay.

Greg: Which one says no?

Kate: The county?

Greg: Oh no, we're saying yes. Everyone's donating money.

Kate: You're getting money from the county? I thought it was just purely donations.

Greg: Oh no, nope. The county has dedicated funds as well as the town.

Kate: I see, okay.

Greg: Yeah, and the town, a lot of it's in-kind through this building without charging rent.

Kate: I see, cool. How do you think it's helping people be healthier? What’s the connection with the Health Department?

Greg: It’s huge. That in and of itself is the reason to have it. Socialization is the big part. I can't say because I wasn't paying attention so much two years ago, let’s say, as to what was happening within the senior community. But I know this wasn't happening. I know people are getting home delivery of meals. I'm going to go back a little bit. COVID affected everything with the program because they used to have a senior in-person meal program through Public Health that took place at the Baptist Church, but that went away. It never got reinstated, so the Senior Connections team, committee, group, whatever you want to call them, they just pushed and pushed to create more. Beyond socialization and people getting a very nice meal at a great price, this is putting local community members to work.

Kate: You're paying them?

Greg: Yep, people get paid, our chef.

Kate: For the cooking and stuff?

Greg: Our volunteers, or there's some people that are volunteering. Some people have a somewhat very minimally paid position within the kitchen. I think that people getting out, especially in the winter, is huge. I’ve never seen anything like this in my 28 years here. We used to have different functions that took place here at the Armory, big get-togethers, big potlucks. Those went to the wayside, too. This what's going on two Fridays a month is huge. It's not just for the senior citizens, other people involved that you can see. There's people from all ages here, mean, not too many young folks, but we will have people involved in the school. It's also going to benefit summer residents as well.

Kate: I heard that you go outside in the back, right? Tables back there.

Greg: Because it started during warmer weather, and we had the yard back there was filled with people. It's a good place to push time, effort, and some fun.

Kate: Alright. Well, thank you.

Greg: Of course.

Kate: Yeah, it's really fun.

Greg: Yes.

Senior Connections sign, 2025.

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Kate: Now I'm here with Rick, who today was our waiter. He was bringing us all of our food and drinks and was very on top of it. So how did you get involved in Senior Lunch?

Rick: Well, years ago, I don’t know, ten, fifteen years ago, we had a very active senior program here. I say that, but there was one lunch a month in the summertime. I honestly don't remember how I got started on that. I do remember. There were some older folks, and we were running EMS at the time. I had a connection with some of the old guys. I would go and just kind of help serve and sit with the old guys and chit-chat and stuff.

And we had a fond, we all love cobblers and pies and ice cream, so it worked out really good. That kind of started, then over the years, I think we just quit having a viable senior program. Last February, I think a group of eight of us got together. A local lady, Cheryl, was kind of the, she's got a real heart for senior programming. Her folks had a tough time.

Kate: Oh, I see.

Rick: And they moved out of state. When her folks passed on, I think she thought, we're not going to do that here. She got a group together and here we are, a year into it. I think it's been a learning process.

We've had some several people have stepped up, really have a heart for them. So it's very fun. The best part to me is looking in here and seeing folks that have turned sideways in the chairs and they're laughing, people across the table laughing. And the other remarkable thing is in a community of 400 people, there are people that don't know other people. It’s bizarre.

Kate: Yeah, they don’t know anybody.

Rick: Some of our folks are getting older. It's very concerning because their health is really slipping. At least this way, we'll see them at least twice a month. And we can see if they're not looking good or if they're not feeling well and stuff. It gives us a chance to get eyes on everything and see how they're doing and stuff. Which is important.

Kate: Are there some people, a few people who just never come to anything?

Rick: Yep.

Kate: You think they don't want to participate?

Rick: There's a misconception that this is a charity lunch. It's not. That was not the intent at all. If people don't have the money, five dollars for lunch, they don't have it. That's fine. Nobody's going to say anything. It's not a problem. It's not for charity, it's for the socialization.

Kate: They're not starving.

Rick: The older community actually has quite a high suicide rate.

Kate: You mean here specifically or in general?

Rick: Nationwide. Fortunately not here.

Kate: I was going to say, I hope it's not happening here.

Rick: It's the socialization. But we have people that really isolate themselves for various reasons. That was probably our primary thing. I think some of the original group thought oh, our biggest need is transportation. Oh, our biggest need is nutrition or something. But I think our biggest need is the connectedness to the community. That's their biggest need, that everyone feels a connection. I'm excited about our, we’re looking at a intergenerational program.

Kate: Oh, okay.

Rick: That would be having kids from high school. Ben?

Ben: Are you interviewing?

Kate: Yeah.

Ben: Right now? Is it online?

Kate: Not yet, no.

Ben: You need to come back because Vickers…

Kate: Oh, I know. There’s a lot of people.

Ben: There’s an amazing amount of history.

Kate: I think Lake City should have its own podcast. Somebody needs to interview everyone.

Ben: Well, it should.

Rick: The high school kids are going do this.

Kate: They are? Okay, that's great. Really?

Rick: I'm excited about that. And we're going to pair up some of the kids.

Ben: Wow.

Rick: And start doing some interviews. There are people that have experience in the mines back in the day. There are people that have military and stuff. There's a lot of stuff that can be lost if we don't capture and to get the kids back connected with some of them as a whole. I'm excited about that.

Kate: Cool, okay. So, the greatest need was for people to come together in person.

Rick: And, of course, we deliver or they can come out and get it to go. I have about twenty years in EMS. And then Lori and I ran for together here for about twelve or thirteen years, my wife. I'm a reserve deputy, and the wildland fire is, I've been doing this for about ten years. My background is in forestry and education stuff. So anyway, this is just kind of…

Kate: A special thing?

Rick: The next phase I guess. It's doing something. It feels good.

Kate: You mentioned the intergenerational programs. What are those going to be like?

Rick: Through Public Health they have an intergenerational program coordinator. We talked with her early on. She's a new hire, and I believe it's a new position. We're going to, of course, if the kids aren't interested, we’re not going to force them, you're going to go even if you don’t like these people. But we do have some kids that actually come up to me and ask about it. They want to blend the technology stuff and do some podcasts.

There's a couple of them, think we'll get a couple of them here on Fridays to do music. On the off Fridays, there's too much going on with the meal. But we had one of the senior men, a real classical guitarist, and he was in here one Friday. This room has great acoustics. I talked to one of the girls, 18-year-old girl who sings, and I think is going to a music college. Got a guy here in town that plays guitar a lot and he's off on Fridays and they perform together. They're going to come in on a Fridays and do some music and that's very cool.

We have other things in the summer when there's some of the out-of-towners are here. We have four tables of bridge in here on Thursday. They're in here for I think like four hours. They draw and they rotate who's hosting. They come in early, and these are all the, it's pretty fun. And we have exercise programs. Some of the ladies come in here and just put puzzles together. And that would typically be on Wednesday and Friday afternoon. And then we have ladies that like to knit or work on quilting squares.

Kate: Got a call?

Rick: No, it'll be a deputy tone. And then Lori's starting the exercise program on Wednesdays and Fridays. So anyway, it's just going to grow. Certain things we realize we don't do. It's just not time. We can't do transportation. We can't do those things. That's okay. That's not what's critical is what we saw today. This was a very vibrant lunch today.

Kate: Yeah, it was packed.

Rick: I think probably the best one we've had.

Kate: Really?

Rick: It was a little more energy. Not to mention it was absolutely full to a chair. That was very awesome, very awesome. And then we maintain, I don't know, we'll see what the final count was. We deliver usually about sixteen lunches, I think. Some people come and go. I don’t know, I wasn't out there but we've been feeding about 65 in the off-season. During the on-season, I think we had like 90 to 100 so that's a lot in a community this size. That's a lot of folks.

Kate: It is, yeah. It's great.

Rick: So anyway.

Kate: Is that it? That's the story?

Rick: I guess that's my story.

Kate: Okay, thank you.

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Kate: Okay, I'm here now with Anne, who is the cook for the Senior Lunch. So, how did you get started in being the cook here?

Anne: The grassroots organization that started Senior Connections asked me to be the cook because of my reputation cooking at restaurants and doing catering. For a while before we had the cafeteria at the school, food was brought in for school lunch.

Kate: Oh wow, okay.

Anne: I'm fearless, and I'm easy to work with and flexible. So, I was perfect for this job.

Kate: Cool! What kind of stuff do people like to have for lunch?

Anne: Well, it seems like today was ham and sweet potatoes and green beans, which is very straightforward. I don't think curries and lentil stews are very good.

Kate: Not very popular?

Anne: Yeah, they don't get the draw, but people enjoy it when we have them. I really feel like it's important to feed everybody healthy. We have one man who's gluten-free and dairy-free. We accommodate him, and I'm trying to get more people who have dietary restrictions because the really important part of the Senior Lunch program is the mental health benefits that everybody gets. To me, anybody who lives in Lake City likes to spend time by themselves.

Kate: That's why they're here.

Anne: Yeah, and they're probably a little bit strange. Gathering together occasionally is so good for us all. Some people, have everybody has an excuse of why they can't join. I want to knock that one of dietary issues out.

Kate: You'll make anything that people need?

Anne: Vegetarian…

Kate: You can make special things for people when they come?

Anne: Yeah.

Kate: Okay, that's wonderful So you what do you get out of doing this personally? It must be a lot of work. You have to get here early and get all the food and all that, right? That must be a lot of work.

Anne: We have working equipment in the kitchen now, so we have a new refrigerator. I can come straight from the Country Store where we get the food here with the groceries now. Before, I was taking some of it to my house, and finding room, and doing some prep there. Now that our kitchen's fully functioning, it's great here. I love feeding people. That's my love language. So, I'm doing a lot, cooking for people without it being organized. And here, this is great. Everybody comes to one place. I've gotten to know a lot of the seniors. It's a challenge. The first meal we had, I don't know if I really cooked a meal, a hot meal for 60 people or however many it was that time. The more people we have involved the less it is per meal per person for food costs. Today, the food cost was way less than the five dollars a plate people paid. This is just perfect for me because it's a challenge. It's exciting. Can I pull this off? Is this just the right amount? You know?

Kate: Yeah. You let people take leftovers home, right? They just take what they want?

Anne: Yeah.

Kate: That's terrific.

Anne: We try to have it be a portion just for the lunch, but we also do delivery and grab and go

Kate: So, whatever works for people.

Anne: All the volunteers, I think have such good benefits from being involved. One of my friends just started delivering the food today, and she's going to be great to see people who don't get out much might also need ice removal or snow removal from their front door.

Kate: They can check on them?Anne: Or trash taken, or she can have her eyes out for any other issues.

Kate: That's a good idea.

Anne: I mean, this is such a small community and a lot of us need a little extra help, but most all of us don't want to ask for it. There's a lot of people who have one or two friends, and then they know everybody else, but to have an extra layer of community support throughout, I think is really good. We have a new Senior Coordinator, Brooke, who's amazing. Both of us think that if we can bring a cross-generational variant into it, connecting the school with the seniors, that that could be really special. A lot of the kids don't have grandparents here or cousins or family. Besides their parents, they don't have other adults in their life besides their teachers who are caring about them. I think before Christmas, the preschool came over and did letters to Santa and they sang a song for the seniors.

Kate: Oh, that’s nice. That's fun. That's a great idea. Thank you. Thanks for talking to me.

Anne: Yeah, definitely.

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Kate: So, now this is a few days later after Senior Lunch and I have the chance to talk with Brooke, is the Hinsdale County Senior Resource Coordinator and Health Educator. Is that right?

Brooke: Yes.

Kate: Okay.

Brooke: That about sums it up.

Kate: Thank you. Thanks for talking with me. I know that you're pretty new at this job that you just started a few months ago. I wanted to ask why you wanted to apply for this job and what appealed to you about it?

Brooke: So, my move to Lake City was kind of a quick deal. I wasn't planning on moving here until about a month before I did. So, I was scrambling, and I saw this job pop up, and I was in talking to the county office, and they were like, you should go for it. But when I set out, and I said I want a job where I can make a difference. I didn't want just, you know, any regular job, I guess. It kind of just felt right.

Kate: Yeah. Have you done this kind of thing before?

Brooke: I have not. I worked at a chiropractor's office for a number of years, and most of the clientele were our elderly community members. I mean, I feel like that gave me a lot of just interpersonal communication skills that with this…

Kate: This group?Brooke: Yes, this group, this population.

Kate: What do you like most about this job?

Brooke: Well, really everybody is so excited about what's happening up here in Lake City, and so that's just really encouraging. And to be around just a lot of energy, and they all have a good focus on what they want to see done. It's just nice to be around such positivity and trying to help get something off the ground.

Kate: Yeah, that's always fun. Besides Senior Connections and all those activities that are happening at the Armory, what other services are available for seniors through the County Health Department?

Brooke: With us being so remote, we really kind of have a hard time retaining good people up here for home health care, and just the lack of housing is kind of a barrier as well. We are able to offer some homemaker services. That's like light housework, and we can get people to where they need to go. It's pretty minimal. The region, we work through Region 10, has six counties I believe they're working with. The funds are pretty limited, but the most hours they'll approve is about six hours a month. But sometimes, that's just what people need just to get them through it and get them over that hump of needs if they don't have other outside family or friends willing to help. We just got that going again. It's been a challenge from what I hear. I was glad to actually get a homemaker willing to work. We also have a food bank up here. Other than that, it's pretty limited.

Kate: Yeah, I get it. We heard from a lot of people at the lunch that said that more and more people were starting to come that people were initially, I think the word was bashful, and that it's become a more known thing and more popular events are happening. I wanted to ask if you ever have a chance to talk to somebody who doesn't want to go, what do you tell them to try to encourage them to come? Or what do you think has been a successful approach to get people to come?

Brooke: Light badgering. Really, it's when their neighbor comes or somebody they know, and they can come along with them. I don't think anybody wants to just walk through that door by themselves because you are kind of walking into a room full of people. So, that's been beneficial, and we have a couple of members on the Senior Connections Committee that just really like to call people a lot. Sometimes they can only resist for so long, or you just kind of wear them down, and then they're there. They realize it's not so bad and that they're actually enjoying themselves, and maybe this is a good thing. That's fun to see.

Kate: Yeah, it becomes a habit eventually.

Brooke: Yes.

Kate: Yeah, that's great. Well, what else? I have another question, I guess, is kind of random. This is the first time I've ever been here in winter, and my dad always talks about this is his favorite time of year. I've always been a little baffled by that. What do people do in general here to get through such a long and really brutal winter? Because it is, realized, you know, the nice weather here is only like a few months, I guess. I don't know. It's just a whole lot of winter, and I know it's really tough for people. I kind of wondered what other things people do to get through it. I guess you haven't been here too long.

Brooke: No, this is my first winter too, but I know a lot of people enjoy the cold weather, which sounds really strange. You've picked a really fun week to be here. This is as cold as it's been.

Kate: I know.

Brooke: This is brutal cold.

Kate: There's a polar vortex.

Brooke: Yeah, it's across the United States. I mean, at least I could feel not so bad about that. It's not normal weather. But I guess you got to find indoor activities, and that's what we're trying to get going to besides just the lunches. I'm not sure if other guests had commented on what we're doing with that. But you know, we've got Silver Sneakers starting up this week and we have other time set aside just for indoor deals like games and crafting and there's all sorts of those kind of things.

But I think too, just having a dedicated space for those kinds of things. Having the senior center open, we have it open 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday through Friday. So, if we could just schedule a bunch of stuff in, that's what I'm trying to do right now. Just just fill it up, and if nobody comes, nobody comes, but at least there's the opportunity to get out and not be isolated in your home, especially when you can't be outside.

Kate: Yeah, for sure. I recently went to dinner to friends of my parents who live across the street, and that was really fun. There were a few neighbors there. I think that it's really great that people stay connected that way. I realized too that my stepmother is texting her neighbors all evening. Even though they live right next door, they still check in with each other, it seems like basically every day. I thought that was really sweet.

Brooke: Yeah, that is.

Kate: It's nice to see that people really look out for each other here in the winter and make sure that everybody's okay. So, that's nice.

Booke: Yeah, it is. It's a special place up here. That's for sure.

Kate: It is. Well, that's all that's all I have. Do you have anything else you want to tell us?

Brooke: No, no.

Kate: Okay. Alright. Well, thank you. I really, really appreciate it.

Brooke: Yeah. Thank you. I'm looking forward to hearing this.

Kate: Thanks.

_________________________________________________________________

Kate: I hope you enjoyed this very special episode. I know a lot of us are suffering through a polar vortex right now, but I hope that wherever you are, you're not letting your heart grow cold despite everything that's happening in the world right now. If you're an introvert like me, I encourage you to get out of your comfort zone, join something new, and make some new friends. I know that you won't regret it.

You've been listening to the Pass It On podcast. This episode was produced by me, Kate Stewart. The song you're listening to is opened up by Austin Stewart, my brother, from his album, Shake It Out. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you learned something useful, and I hope you pass it on.

In this episode, Hadley and I listen to my mom talk more about her favorite Southern writers like Eudora Welty, segregation in Liberty, the death of her cousin Benny when she was in college (keep your tissues close at hand), and working at the State Hospital in Norman (aka Oklahoma’s Cuckoo’s Nest).

And by the way, we’re now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts!

Mom at OBU, 1968. ©Mom

Kate: Welcome back to the Pass It On podcast. And this is part two of the interview with my mother. And we're back! My mom's here and Hadley's here. So welcome back.

Mom: Hello, hi. I'm glad we're here.

Hadley: Hi everyone.

Kate: When we left off, you were talking about going to the library and looking up stuff about some of your favorite authors. I wanted to ask you what other books for you or made a difference in your life at that time?

Mom: Well, at that time, I did a lot of reading of Southern authors. I was very drawn to the genre of Southern literature. And I would say my favorite, I had three favorites, Steinbeck and Faulkner. Faulkner in particular, I was very drawn to because of all of the people he wrote about within Yoknapatawfah County. Because I loved that part that Southern writers will do where they write a lot about big families and also the intensity with which they can do descriptions.

It really reminds me many times of like you're just listening to a story being told on the front porch when you're reading Southern literature. And that particularly was kind of true for Eudora Welty, who I just fell in love with her work. And I fell in love with the book, Delta Wedding, I think was the one I fell in love with first. Then a lot of her others were really short stories. But Delta Wedding, because the girl, the little girl in the story, her name is Laura, and I think in the story she's about eight, I'm not sure. But she's put on this train called the Yellow Dog that rides through, I guess through Mississippi. And she's going down to her cousin's house for a wedding. They live kind of like in a plantation. She's going down there to attend the wedding of her older cousin, and she's put on the Yellow Dog.

Her mother has just passed away, so she's riding this train down and she's greeted by all of her cousins. And there's boy cousins and girl cousins, they're all different ages and she's absorbed into this big family. And the story mainly kind of takes place during the preparations for the wedding. And Laura is not allowed to be in the wedding because her mother has just passed away.

That was poignant to me to know that because that was kind of how my life was. It wasn't really that there were certain things I couldn't do because my mother was no longer living. When I did get married, and I got married in May, the first thing when we set the date for May, my grandmother, who's my mother's mother, the first thing she asked me, is that the date that your mother died?

Because, and it wasn't, I was conscious of that, but to think that grandmother was conscious of that too, you would not get married on the same day that your mother died. Like that day had to be set aside and reserved and honored. And knowing that about Laura, the little girl, that she couldn't be in the wedding because her mother had just died. So much about that book reminded me of how I used to feel.

When we'd take the Katy train down to Oklahoma and I would be absorbed by all of my mother's family that lived there. There were cousins, a great-uncle and his family and his children, my great aunt that lived up the street from my grandparents. And there were aunts, old aunts, and the story in Delta Wedding too. So, there were so many kind of parallels for what it felt like to be in Oklahoma, sort of a Southern state with some Southern atmosphere around it. You know we always had sweet tea and my grandfather would sit at the big table and shake the ice in his tea. When his tea got down, he would shake his glass so you could hear the ice shake, and that was the signal to pop up and get the tea.

Kate: Oh my god.

Mom: You know, but without, he didn't ask.

Kate: You just did it.

Mom: He just had to rattle the ice. That was the signal that he needed tea. The big Sunday dinners and there were protocols, manners that were always, always kept. When we lived there, it was just like expectations of being one of a member of this family when you were in that town. Your behavior was sort of modified maybe.

Kate: Was he from Texas too? He was, right?

Mom: Who's he?

Kate: Your grandfather.

Mom: No, he wasn't from Texas.

Kate: Okay, I thought he was.

Mom: Well, he went to Texas to work in the oil fields and that's where he met my grandmother.

Kate: Okay, I see. Okay. But he was from Henryetta?

Mom: He was brought up in a little town, I have to think of it, in Kansas. And in fact, I spent a long time on one of those newspaper databases where you can read articles online from the past in full text.

All I had to do, they had such an unusual last name, I just had to put in that last name, I learned so many things, intimate daily details about their lives. You know, when they went on trips, when somebody came to visit them, what things they entered in the county fair. Everybody entered something in the county fair, all the way down the family. Even my great-grandfather, always, each time, entered.

I guess it was apples, apple trees that had been grafted. His grafting on different fruit trees were always entered into the county fair. My great-grandmother and my great aunt had all kinds of entries in the food area for pickled this and canned that and pies and baked goods. It was just where you learn more about what they did in their daily lives in those old-fashioned newspapers like that.

Kate: Yeah. That's so cool.

Mom: Yeah, so those particular authors of Faulkner and Steinbeck, but especially Eudora Welty. She could describe every flower in a yard in detail. And it was just such a lush description to me.

Kate: The magnolias.

Mom: And Magnolias. She had one short story, “Why I Live at the P.O.” where they refer to their grandfather as Papa Daddy. And I just loved that phrase of Papa Daddy that's used all through that short story.

Kate: Yeah. Speaking of your dad, you also, you had wanted to talk about this and we forgot to touch on it, about your dad's opinions of the country club in Liberty when that started.

Mom: Yes, that little town I grew up in was so segregated and at times things went on in that town that I was totally unaware of, and is something that you don't realize until you look backwards to see. So, it wasn't just the schools, you know, when I was growing up that were segregated until my fourth-grade year. But our movie theater was segregated. The black children were only allowed to sit up in the balcony. And I don't recall that they ever could come down and purchase candy. Maybe they did, but I was not aware of that. But I knew that we didn't go up in the balcony. It was reserved for them. Because I remember the first time I went, I wanted to go up in the balcony. And somebody told me, “Well, we can't go up there. It's not for us.”

But my little town did not have a roller rink, and it did not have a swimming pool, and we had to go to other nearby towns to go roller skating or to go swimming in a public pool. Finally, I think it probably happened, I'm not sure exactly what year this happened, I probably was in grade school when some families, wealthier families in town, came together and built a country club. And it mainly, as a country club, all it had was a pool. It was like a swimming club. It may have been more, it had a pretty modern design for the clubhouse. So, it must have been maybe in the ‘60s. Well, it was in the ‘60s, I'm sure, very, very early ‘60s, maybe late s that that was created.

All my friends that I knew belonged to the country club and they had a swim club, and they went swimming there. The only time I could go swimming was if my mother took us over to this nearby town for that, to go to the pool. So, I remember begging my dad, “Why can't we join? Why can't we please join? Please, I'll be good. Please, let's join the country club,” so I could swim in the summer with my friends, and he kept saying no.

And finally, at one point, he said, “I will not join a club that is not open to everybody.” And that statement that he made, just really made me stop in my tracks and think, because that had not occurred to me that it wasn't open to everybody. I thought it was just strictly open if you could pay for it. But when he said, “I will not join a club that's not open to everybody,” it made a difference to me, sort of, in how I felt about it after that, you know. I realized it wasn't so much a financial decision as maybe a moral decision or stance that he was taking.

Kate: Yeah. Then when you, so you had a housekeeper who was black who helped out when your mother was sick. And then you were telling me that she invited you and your dad, was it just you and your dad to go to the AME church, or your sister? That was after your mom died?

Mom: I did, yeah, and my older sister. That was right after she passed away. It may have been weeks, within weeks, because I remember we still had people that were bringing food to the house and things like that. We hadn't gotten to the point where we were figuring out how.

Though, you know, she'd been sick for a long time. She was in a wheelchair, and he had made a little board that went across the arms of her wheelchair so she could do mixing bowls on that. She was shorter than the counters, so my sister would usually be in the kitchen with her and would be helping, but she could make salads, and she could stir things and give directions and all. It was a thing that they did, and I was never really much. I did dishes, but I didn't help cook.

So, it was another thing that I would sit in the living room and listen to them talking in there while they were preparing things together. But then toward the end, you know, she's very ill and in bed. And I don't even know what we did for eating during those days. Maybe people were just mostly bringing us stuff. But Mrs. Gans, who was our kind of housekeeper or house helper during those years, invited us to go to a dinner at her church.

That was a very big deal. My dad said yes, and I was worried about going. I kept thinking, “Are we going to be welcomed? Should we go?” And he was so open about it. Yes, we should go, and it's important to her that we do. And she was there waiting for us when we went. And I remember dressing up. We all dressed up for it. It must have been something special that her church was doing as a celebration, it would be my guess. It was why they had such a big dinner down in their church basement. But we were the only white people there. And I remember being so surprised at how many people there knew us and knew my dad.

Kate: Knew your dad!

Mom: But they knew us too because my mother probably had their children in school, because she taught music. And so, she would have had those children in school. it was such a clear memory for me when we did that.

Kate: Can you talk about at the courthouse in Liberty? There's a water fountain that's like a memorial kind of thing. Do you want to talk about that?

Mom: There is. Yes. There is a water fountain. That fountain was called the Freedom Fountain, except I think I always refer to it, I think most people refer to it as the Water Fountain Memorial. That's up at the courthouse, which is in the very middle of the square. And I was not living in Liberty when this was created, and the group that came together to create it.

I believe it may have been. The old school that I went to in fourth grade, the year that we integrated was called Garrison and I think it's possible that this idea for this fountain and support for it came from that school was turned into an African American museum and meeting spot too because it was no longer used as a school and it's a historic building. I'm pretty sure it was able to get historic designation. It would always be preserved and also then be eligible for probably different kinds of grants, also.

I think the idea for this fountain came out of that, but it was a fundraiser. You could buy bricks and have engraved around the bottom of the fountain. And it was a fountain that you could use from outside of the building, it's kind of on a little plaza area just outside of the door on the north side. But it was built because there was not a water fountain that I [remember], there may have been one in the basement, but I think the regular water fountains within the courthouse were not available to everybody else, were not available to all people, only to the whites and black people were not allowed to use them.

So, this was done as a memorial, though see, it took how many years because it didn't happen until around 2000 that this was done. Different people were buying bricks and having them engraved. I wanted to do a brick myself. And I can't remember now how much they were, but I got two other people for my class that I graduated with in high school.

Kate: Is this your two Rejects?

Mom: Well, it was one Reject. One Reject and one of my friends Danny. Danny who I ran around with in high school. He had a car, for one reason, but Danny was an artist and he would draw political cartoons for our little high school newspaper while I was writing my little free verse column.

The three of us went together and put our money in and we decided to dedicate it to Topsy. And Topsy had a different name than Topsy, though I don't know what that name was. I only knew it as Topsy. But he was our crossing guard, or one of the crossing guards that we had on one of the streets about a block away from the school. Topsy would cross the kids there.

Kate: This was the same guy who helped your mother with the piano? Or this different guy?

Mom: No, that was a guy named China.

Kate: Okay. That's right.

Mom: Like that was China Slaughter. This was a guy that went by Topsy in our town. And so, we went together and put in our money, and we were kind of doing it anonymously. I mean, a lot of people would say, you know, the family name of who put the, put the money in on the brick, but we, we dedicated the [brick] to Topsy. To Topsy from Liberty School Children, because he had helped so many children over so many decades that it just seemed right to me. And so, the three of us put our money together and that every time I go back, and now as Hadley said, she's seen it. I like for my grandchildren to go see that brick if I can.

Kate: If you could find it.

Mom: Always takes me a while to locate it, yes. But that was special to me that we did that. We didn't make a big deal out of it, we just did it.T

Topsy’s Brick, Liberty, Missouri, 2021. ©Kate Stewart

Kate: Yeah. I know we should also talk about the bench at the church that you got.

Mom: Well, we did have a bench put in at the church. My sister and brother and I put the money in together. It was dedicated to our parents. For me, it was a very healing act because my mother and father are buried in two different cemeteries. The plan was when my mother passed away in the ‘60s, my dad bought a plot for himself there. He bought three plots actually.

But then, later on, a year and a half later, he married my stepmother. And when it came time for them, I kind of always figured she probably was not going to want to be in that space, that near where my mother was buried. Because they built a new house because she didn't want to live in a house that we had grown up in and got all new furniture.

She wanted, but you know, I understand that. She wanted new things for herself that belonged to her. Create her own life. And so, she did. When he passed away, my dad passed away, she had him buried in a different cemetery, and actually in a different county. It did bother me that they weren't together. So, my sister and brother, who did not care as much as I did, far moved on in their lives, but we went together and had a bench created and dedicated to the two of them. And so that was a very, I guess, peaceful, peacefully felt like a healing thing to me to have a spot where I could see their names together.

Kate: And you told me that they were fundraising for the chapel at the college at OBU. And she didn't want her name on the pew or whatever it was, or the benches.

Mom: Yes, yes. She didn't, no. I've always kind of wondered how she would have felt about that, and in fact, well, the cemetery that she picked, the cemetery where she was going to be buried. She and my dad made that decision, and I think they rode around and looked at different locations, and she picked this when it was fairly new. It was real close to his office, but she picked it mainly because it was not a cemetery that had upright stones. They were all just kind of plaques that were flat to the ground. So, everybody's was the same size and kind of the same.

Kate: All modest.

Mom: There were no memorials. In other words, there were no memorials. And that's what she was very much against anything that would look like a memorial. She picked that, where she was. So, what was the question you asked me?

Kate: About when they were doing the fundraiser at OBU.

Mom: Oh, about how, so going back, years when I was young, and we were visiting my grandmother, we went over to visit OBU in Shawnee because they were building a new chapel there. My parents were very interested in seeing the chapel. So, we went through the chapel as it was being built and actually, we met with the president, Dr. Raley, I remember we all went into his office and sat in these green leather chairs, visited with him. And I was told before we went in that I was not to swing my legs when I sat in the chair.

Kate: Why?

Mom: Because I had a horrible habit of sitting down and immediately swinging my legs. I was not to swing my legs and sit very still.

Kate: Oh my.

Mom: But we went over and looked at the chapel, and it was just in the throes of being built and it was also going to be like an auditorium and used for different kinds of present musicals and guest lecturers and performance hall. So, it didn't have pews in it like I was used to. It had theater seats. They were, as alumni, they were invited to purchase seats and have their names put on the back.

And my mother, I remember them having a discussion about this and my mother agreed that she would donate money, but she did not want their names put on the back of the seats. They wanted it to be an anonymous donation. Just the whole idea of doing anything for show, she just was adamantly against.

Kate: Yeah. Yeah, what's that Amish word you were talking about, that Richard uses?

Mom: Hockmoot.

Kate: Hockmoot!

Mom: Hockmoot. He would say to me, would your mother say that was hockmoot? So, she was very much not--

Kate: Verboten.

Mom: Yes, being hockmoot was being verboten.

Kate: So, since you were just talking about OBU, let's go back to that and move ahead. And I remember this story about the very first day you were at OBU or around that time when you met this woman or girl when you were walking into the chapel, I think.

Mom: Yeah, when I, OBU had a really long, strong tradition of orientation for freshmen like we had to wear freshman beanies. I have a feeling we wore those for two weeks. It may have only been one, but it felt like maybe it was longer, but and during those weeks we had to defer to the upperclassmen, and you had to memorize certain things about the school. Cheers and songs and different customs and things, and it was a way that it was a very old tradition because I remember my mother talking about when she went to college there, they had the same a lot of the same things, many of the same things were still going on when I went how many years later.

We had to attend chapel twice a week, and this would have been during that freshman week, freshman orientation, that we were walking over to the chapel and the way over, and I had kind of made this decision. It was like a conscious decision when I went down to school that I was going to know, I was going to meet some black kids, and I wanted to be friends with them. I made that decision.

It wasn't a thing that you could really do in Liberty. Though, in my senior year, we did hang around some black kids and went to some barbecues at their homes and some parties. But we had to have permission from our parents. I knew that we were kind of on the cusp when we were doing that. It wasn't really a socially safe thing to do, though we wanted to do it. I mean, we were really, the three of us who called ourselves the Rejects, really had this sense of injustice, you know, toward the blacks in our town and really wanted to change that. We felt we were really taken up with the ideals of the ‘60s, I guess.

So, when I went off to college, I took those ideals with me and was going to do what I could to broaden my friendship circle, I guess is what I'd say. So, walking across campus, I saw a girl who also had, she was black, who had a beanie on. And I didn't, I really knew my roommates, and that was about, my one roommate, and that was about it because this was the first week. And so, I remember it being cold, though how could it be cold? Because we probably would have, maybe it wasn't cold. Maybe the wind was just blowing because I remember holding my books. We didn't have backpacks then. You walked around carrying five or six books wherever you went.

But anyway, I went up to her and just said, introduce myself and ask her what her name was. And she said her name was Parthenia. She was from Greenwood, Mississippi, I believe. That was the town she was from. And I was so amazed because she had come further than I had to go to college there, way out of state. And I thought at the time, I remember thinking, what a leap for her, to make a leap that far to go out of state to school and starting fresh with that. Anyway, we became fast friends and her name was Parthenia. She said her name was Parthenia, but at the time she said it, I could hardly understand the word, and I kept thinking, “How am I ever going to remember this name?” The only word close to what I knew was Parthenon so I thought I'll have to think of Parthenon whenever I see her. But it didn't take long, it was probably within a month she had been given a nickname of Polly.

So, the whole rest of the time I was at OBU, her name was Polly. But I just remember that friendship that I had with her. We were in the same dorm. And many times at night, I would go up to her room and sit. And we would work on our homework together and talk. And we did become really good friends. And I do have a couple of letters down in my big box of treasures because in the summertime, Polly would write, and I would write to her when we would go home over the summer breaks.

Kate: Was OBU segregated before or was it always integrated?

Mom: I don't know at what point it integrated. When I was there, it was integrated. They did not have a football team, but they had a very strong and active basketball team, and I'm sure, like Parthenia's older cousin, Polly's older cousin, was there on a basketball scholarship. And a lot of black kids were there on basketball scholarships. So, it would be interesting to go back and see. Or if you could find any documentation on how that decision was made and when it was made to integrate.

Kate: Yeah, that's interesting because it would have been like a private school.

Mom: It was a private school. I mean, that's why I could go there. I didn't have to pay out-of-state tuition, you know, even though I was out of state. And it had most of its funding came from the Oklahoma Baptist Association and other Baptist churches and such, I guess, donations.

Kate: And you, I guess this was your freshman year when you dated a guy who was black that you knew from college.

Mom: I did. I didn't, well, I would guess that was probably more toward the end of my first semester there. I met this boy named Paul, who was a friend of Polly's, and he was from Texas, College Station, Texas, and he was there on a basketball scholarship.

And I went out with him just a few times, not very much, but a few times. My father did find out about it and was upset about it. And he asked me to go to talk to the dean of women, who was somebody he knew from his, when he was a student there, a friend. I can't remember what she said. I do remember going to see her.

But my dad wrote me a letter, which I still have. It's down in the box along with my letters from Polly. That just was this long explanation about the crux of it was that we should stick with our own kind. The birds out, if I would pay attention and watch the birds, I would notice how they all came to the same feeder and they all came to the same birdbath but when it came time to make nests like went with like.

I remember being so angry and frustrated but, you know, it was. That relationship didn't really last a long time. And I think I had told you before about the deep division and change I felt when Martin Luther King was assassinated. That was just like a heavy, dark veil that just fell over our campus. Because up to that time, the little group of people that I ran with had really worked, I don’t want to say worked hard, but we had integrated. And we were, it was almost kind of seamless going in and out of each other's dorm rooms, sitting together when we ate, being in class together, making jokes together, and going out, doing things together on kind of our little area around the campus. None of us had cars. We could only walk where we went.

But, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, and I must have been in class when we heard about it, when it occurred. I don't even know what day of the week it was now when we would look back on it, but I do remember being out of the dorm and walking back into the dorm and there was a whole circle of kids, black kids, that were all sitting together. They all had their dashikis on. I remember that, too. And the sense of that circle, the way the circle was made, it was like there was no room for anyone else to be in it. And it was kind of like that grief, that experience belonged to them, though our school did have several kind of memorials where we all came together. But I remember that the sudden shift of feeling on the outside, not on the inside. You know, almost like it was their grief, not our grief, you know.

Kate: Yeah, everything changed. That was the spring of your freshman year.

Mom: I think it was my freshman, it feels like my freshman year when it happened.

Kate: Let's, do you want to talk about Benny?

Mom: I can talk about Benny.

Kate: Because that was the next fall, right?

Mom: That was the fall of my sophomore year. Yeah, my cousins, when I talked about my love of going to Henryetta, and you know, part of my going to college down so close to Henryetta was that I could on weekends go over and be with my grandmother and stay there, take my laundry. And it was like a sense of I had a place to go home like other kids had a place to go home. I did too.

At that time in my life, I felt more at home at my grandmother's than I did in my own house back in Missouri, you know, because it was a new house with a stepmother in it. So, I loved going to my grandmother's on the weekends. And there was a girl in the freshman class that went back who was from that town, and she had a car and would go back on the weekends. Often I could catch a ride with her if I arranged it early enough and would go back and forth. So, I was still very connected to that, family over there, even though I was a college student.

But the news, Benny was a senior in high school, and he was one of my cousins that I was very close to and had so many adventures with in the summers that I was down there at my grandmother's. And very close to that family, to my aunt and uncle, all of my cousins that were there. But I was in my dorm room, and I don't know why I was there on a Saturday afternoon. That was kind of unusual that I would have been there because I remember the rest of the dorm seemed empty.

But the phone rang, and I went out in the hall, and it was my Uncle Bill calling who was also an uncle to my cousin. He was the brother of my mother and the brother of my cousin's father. He called and he was, I could tell right away something had happened by the tone of his voice. And he just said that he had some really sad news to tell me, and that Benny had been killed that afternoon. He had died in an accident.

It was an out-of-body experience where everything around you stops, and you're listening, but the words don't quite make sense, and you don't know how to react to them. So, I don't think I hardly said anything back. I probably just kind of said, “Okay, okay, okay.” And we hung up. And you know, it may have been in the morning that he called. It could have been late morning when all of this occurred. Because my immediate thought was, “How do I get there? How do I get to Henryetta? How do I get there to find out really what happened and to be there?”

I went running over to the freshman dorm to find the girl that also lived there and had a car to see if she would take me over there. And it turned out when I got there, her roommate just almost kind of yelled at me and said, “She's not here! She's gone. One of her best friends just died, and she's gone.”

I just said, “Well, that's my cousin.” And then I felt so stranded, so far away. And there wasn't like a grown-up to say, “What should I do next?” But there was an older girl that I was very good friends with who had a car. And so, I went to her and asked her if I could borrow her car. And so, I did. I was able to borrow her car and drive over. And probably, I don't know how far away it is, but I'm going to guess an hour, hour and a half. I'd have to look on a map now and see how I got there, what the directions were. But I drove over there in this borrowed car that I'd never driven before. I remember being so nervous about that too. And it was the kind of drive where you can't make your brain work very well because you're like in a fog as you're doing it.

I went directly to my grandmother's house, and my uncle that had called me was there in the living room. My grandmother had been given a sedative. She had been put to bed and was given a sedative. And he said to me, “You need to go on over. Nellean would like to see you.” And that was Benny's mother. And to get from one house to the other, I just had to walk out my grandmother's through the house and out the kitchen door.

And through the backyard and over the alleyway and through his backyard and in his kitchen door. Their houses were just almost identically back-to-back. It was just this alley that separated. And I feel like when I got there, I knocked on the door and a stranger answered the back door. It was probably somebody from their church because the house was just packed, just filled with people.

And then I probably said who I was to whoever let me in the back door. And they guided me through the kitchen. They had these big swinging doors between the kitchen and the dining room and walked through the swinging doors and there was my aunt sitting in a chair. And she was just surrounded by all the women in her church had come and gathered there, just surrounded by people. And when I walked in, she just jumped up

out of the chair and walked over and just put her arms around me, you know. And I was just kind of in a state of shock, observing.

I don't know what happened after that, but I do remember going back to my grandmother's and going back in the house, and there probably was some food there. I don't think I spent the night there. I think I had to go back to the dorm, but I think I went over and probably ate something and my grandmother or somebody there in the house told me that Benny would be up at the funeral home and that I should go up and see him before I left.

Okay, I should probably interject here and let you know how the accident occurred. Benny was a senior in high school that year and these boys, my cousins, they had been working since they were like eight or nine years old on Saturdays either at my grandfather's wholesale grocery house, and then as they got older, their dad took over the family lumber yard in town. They started working at the lumber yard. So, they spent every Saturday working at the lumber yard. Benny was taking a load of wood in a pickup truck, making a delivery, and he had loaded the wood. And I don't know how much wood there was, anything like that. I just know that something happened, and the wood shifted. This is my understanding, my memory of, or what I think I was told was that the wood in the back of the pickup shifted. And as it shifted, it shifted the weight of the truck and it, I think an axle broke and like the wheel came off, and then the truck just rolled.

I think the person that had purchased the wood was following him in their car. So, they'd come into town to make the purchase, and they'd loaded the wood in the back of the truck and Benny was making the delivery and the person was following in the truck and saw the accident happen. And he was taken into the, probably was killed instantly from the, because this truck was at a time when very few cars really had seat belts and this was an old, old, truck, you know, probably from the ‘40s or ‘50s that wouldn't have had seatbelts in it anyway. But so he was, I think, probably killed instantly from the accident.

And he was taken into the hospital. His aunt from on his mother's side, his Aunt Bert, was the nurse on duty. So, it was really an awful thing for the whole town and for everybody involved. But when I had left my aunt and uncle's house in this kind of stupor and gone back through the backyards, back to my grandma's, and probably ate some dinner there, my grandma said, she said, “You should go up and see Benny. He'll be up at the funeral home.” It all had happened that fast.

Kate: Did it happen that day? Or the day before?

Mom: This is my memory that it all occurred, it all felt like it occurred. I know it was dark by then. So, he probably had gone. This is just how I remember it, though it could be that it was the next day. But I don't know how I would have gotten back there the next day. Though maybe I did. Maybe I drove back the next day. Maybe I drove back to the dorm and then came back the next day in the car because I do remember being in their home, my cousin's home on Sunday morning, and all of us still being gathered in the living room, but my uncle wasn't sitting with us. When I looked around for him, he was in this little room right off their living room that we referred to as the music room because it had a piano in it and bookshelves and a piano. It’s where my older cousin played the piano, and there was a huge, big radio in there. And I remember seeing my uncle sitting in a chair with his head down to the speaker of the radio. And when I asked, you know, what was Uncle Frank doing, somebody said to me, he's listening to the church service. So, at the time that this occurred, their church was broadcasting their services on the radio, and he was listening to the radio, and that had been on Sunday morning.

Maybe that is the day that then I went back to my grandmother's because I'd forgotten that I said she had been given a sedative and was sleeping, so she probably was not, probably was passed out when I drove back, and so I didn't see her that day. But anyway, the gist of the story is that my grandmother did not want to go up to the funeral home, and I went up by myself.

All of this town is so small. The funeral home was literally a block or block and half from my grandmother's house. It was in the block between her house and the church. That was how tiny this little town was. So, I walked up to the funeral home by myself, and I remember my grandmother saying, “Tonight is for the family to go.” And she did not want to go. So, I walked up, and the funeral home was open and there was somebody at a desk, sitting at a desk when I walked in, a woman. And when she said, “Oh, tonight is only for the family.”

And I said, “Well, I am family. I'm Benny's cousin.” She had thought I was somebody from the school, you know, like a classmate. So, she said, yes, I could go on in. And when I walked into the room, he was, there was a casket up on a platform, I guess. Felt like there were legs under it, but maybe it had some fabric around it, too. I just remember the casket being there, and nobody else was in the room. I was in there by myself, and thinking about, “Can I do this?” Thinking, “Can I walk up there?” You know, I had to do it, but I was in there by myself doing it. So, I walked very slowly, you know, up to see him.

His face was very changed because of the accident. It was not the same, but they put a lot of makeup on him, and he probably had a suit jacket on. I can't remember what he was really wearing, but probably a suit jacket. But as I was standing there, maybe I sat down on the front row after that, after I had looked at him. The door opened, and in came my aunt and uncle and my two cousins, Benny's brother and little sister. And I remember my aunt was so, I think, kind of surprised to see me there, thought they'd be there alone. But I think grateful too that I was there.

My uncle picked up my cousin, Jan. I don't know how old Jan was at this time, maybe nine or ten, but picked her up so she could see into the casket and walked her up to the casket. And I was sitting there in the front row kind of watching. And I remember Jan with her arms around her daddy's neck. And I remember how she looked down and she said, “Daddy, will he have a new face in heaven?”

And Uncle Frank saying, “Yes, he'll have a new face in heaven.”

And then my cousin, Jimmy, he and Benny were just like twins. They were probably less than two years in age, and they just were just like twins. And he had just literally had the stuffings knocked out of him. He would not look up, and he did not want to go up. He wouldn't say any words and my aunt put her arms around his shoulders and asked him, “Will you come up?” And he wouldn't answer and wouldn't come up, but I feel like she put her arms around him and brought him up, but he never said anything. And I just, I think I just stayed back during all of this. I was just kind of an observer watching.

Then I probably left them and drove back to the dorm, back to Shawnee afterward. That was my second experience with a very close death. And it took place within, I guess, four years, maybe, four and a half years. And it just seemed so unfair to me. And it was just a few years after this, then that my aunt, my mother's, my grandmother's second daughter passed away. And I remember all of this feeling like so much had happened to our family.

Kate: And she also died of cancer, right?

Mom: They both died of cancer, and they were both about the same age. They were seven years apart in age, but they both died, I think around, right in that age range, you know. And my grandmother outlived both of these girls, and that was so hard on her to have. And there was a whole shift, a whole shift, like an earthquake that went through my cousin's family, well, through our whole family, but theirs in particular, there within Henryetta and the town.

I came back, my dad came down, drove down from Kansas City to pick me up at college, whatever day the funeral took place, and I went over to the funeral and spent the day there with him, and then he drove me back. My stepmother was there, too, and then they went back to Kansas City. I don't think that they spent the night. Maybe they did. It would have been a long trip if they didn't, so they probably did spend the night somewhere. Maybe there in Shawnee, so I'm not sure how all of that worked.

I remember how packed the church was. It was just overwhelmingly packed. I have a copy of the newspaper that came out, where the little newspaper had published a whole page full of articles and letters that kids from the high school had written about the impact Benny had had on them and their lives. I remember going with maybe with my grandmother out to the cemetery where he was buried and this would have been or maybe it was I just remember going out to the cemetery that fall, and somebody had put a mum from homecoming on his grave. So, it would have been somebody from school that came out and brought a homecoming mum. That's how I kind of had the feeling that he died before homecoming, which probably was in November, though I'm not sure. I'd have to go back and look at dates to put my timeline in order.

But it was years, years before we could start talking about Benny and the memories that we had of him. That took a long time coming, because it was like the thing in the room that you walked around and nobody went close to. And it totally changed the personality of his brother, my cousin, who had been like the class clown and the funniest kid I knew.

Just totally changed his personality. But that's what death does. Death that comes so young, so out of sync, out of the timeline that it should happen.

Kate: It's such a shock, yeah.

Mom: It was a shock for the town and for the family. And now it's a thing that whenever we're together, we always talk about Benny. We always do. He's the thing that's, that we, whenever I'm with those cousins, know, we always, he comes up, we revisit it.

Kate: Yeah. Well, thank you for telling us all about that. So, at OBU, I guess at some point you started going over to Norman.

Mom: I did.

Kate: The cool town.

Mom: I did, yeah. Well, I had a friend that I had been close with at OBU, and she ended up transferring over to OU and I would spend some weekends over there with her. And there was one summer that she, I think it was called VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, or if it had a different name before it became VISTA, whatever that name was, kind of like the Peace Corps here in the United States. She worked for them one summer, and the summer that she worked for them, she had to sublet her apartment. And she found two girls to sublet it and told me I could come too, so I could also be there. It was a two-bedroom, and it was within walking distance of campus. And I wanted to spend the summer there. I did not want to go back to Liberty. And so, I did, but I had to get a job.

And I ended up being a nanny for an art professor who had two little children, Eric and Kirsten. And I got to drive their big white Toyota Land Rover around Norman. And it was a stick. And I think that was maybe part of, it was a big deal for me to be able to drive that. It was a stick shift. It was a big thing that I felt like the children just rattled around in.

But that was the summer I stayed in Norman, and then I made that decision then that I wanted to move there and graduate from that, graduate from University of Oklahoma and not from OBU. It's kind of funny, but I felt like I did not want to graduate and have a school on my transcript that had the word Baptist in the middle of it. So that was kind of a part of that decision.

And so, I did go home. I mean, I did go back to school that fall semester. And I talked to my dad about it over my Christmas holidays, if I could just not go back to school, but could maybe move to Norman and get a job and get an in-state residency so I could get in-state tuition. And he agreed. So I went.

I borrowed, they were driving Volkswagens by then. They traded their Chevys in for Volkswagens, and I borrowed my stepmother's fastback Volkswagen. It was baby blue. Drove that down. My first time to ever have a road trip by myself. I remember my dad explaining to me, “Now all you have to do is watch.” He said, “When you're on the highway, the signs will be over your head, and you'll look for I-35. And whenever they shift, follow the arrows and stay on I-35, and you'll end up in Oklahoma City.” And Norman was just south of Oklahoma City. It took me straight there and it worked.

I went back and I feel like I was kind of staying, I hooked up with one of the girls that had been there that I had shared the apartment with that summer. She'd moved to another apartment, and I moved in with her for a few weeks while I applied for a job, and I got a job at the state hospital there where I worked full-time. That was my first full-time job. And I worked there for a year and a half before I met your dad.

Kate: You were there a while, guess before you met him.

Mom: Yeah, I was there for about a year and a half. And it was after I met him and after he and I were married that then, I started back on my degree and finished my degree then. It took me a little longer to graduate, but I did it.

Kate: Yeah. So, what was the state hospital job? I know you said that that was a big deal for you to work there.

Mom: It was a big deal. It seemed to me like the employees were all either college students from the university or older divorced or widowed women. And then there were a few doctors that came and went. But it was like its own campus. if you ever saw the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, that's exactly identical. It could have been the same. Could have been shot at the same hospital. They probably were built at about the same time and on the same sort of architectural plans.

Because when that state hospital was built, it was far out on the east side of Norman. But by the time I worked there, the main street just ran right to it, you know, and the town had grown up around it. So, it was no longer on the outskirts of town. But you did go through a big gate to get onto the campus with different buildings all spread out. They were called wards. The different buildings were called wards, and they were always referred to by their ward number.

It actually was a good job because it also had a component of education so you could sign up to take classes, which would get you out of working on the ward if you, and then they had a separate building for education where classes took place and you could go over there for a class that might last two to three hours during the workday. I took almost every class that came along that you could sign up for. And one of them was distributing medications. So here I was, probably 19 years old and giving out medications, and these were all prescription drugs.

Kate: You were like, what was her name? Nurse, Nurse Ratchet?

Mom: Yeah, like being kind of like a Nurse Ratchet. But the first six months I was there, I was working on the geriatric ward, which was very hard, very difficult, very labor intensive and very, very sad too. But our wards were locked. We would go in and an iron door would lock behind you.

At night, we'd sit and filled out the charts. You know, that was called charting. You spent the last 15 minutes or 20 minutes of your shift filling out charts. And I suddenly discovered that if you went to look through somebody's charts, there were the whole section at the beginning of the chart that would tell you about their history. It was called their pre-morbid history. So, the history that was taken before, was how it was, it was an actual designation as pre-morbid. So, it was before the history of their lives before they were committed to the state hospital. And I was so just, for me, I would spend a lot of my charting time reading those histories because it was like reading a short story.

You know, you were drawn into this person's life who, there were teachers there and people that owned businesses and all walks of life, you know, and I also remember that horrible feeling of that anybody could end up there. I could end up there. You know, I had no idea. It was such a peek into their past, but it also gave me such a different perspective over the people that I was taking care of to know that that they had had other complete and whole lives before something had happened that made them end up at the state hospital, especially in the geriatric ward. And after I completed my six months, your probationary period, then you could apply to work on a different ward. So, I did, and there was a vacancy on the TB ward. So, I worked the TB ward the rest, like maybe for another year.

But it was quite an experience. And the other thing that it was like going into another little town or another little world when you went to work because it was like its own community. The people who worked there, especially who had worked there for years, knew patients from all over the place. And I think they had their own newsletters where the patients might help write the newsletters. They had their own social life. They would have movies and dances on Friday night.

There was a building where dresses were made. They were kind of wraparound dresses all out of flowery material. But they all would wear these wraparound dresses, easy to put on and easy to get off. And the men all wore kind of khaki-colored shirts and pants. And there was a laundry. They could work in the laundry or work in the cafeteria, in the food service. There was a farm area where there was a garden. So it was, everybody kind of had a job to do that was there during the day if they were able to leave a ward. Not everybody was able to leave their ward.

That's the first place I saw a catatonic patient. I can remember that being, I think, when I moved over to the TB ward. There was a patient there that would just stand and say nothing. That's where I learned the word catatonic, catatonic state. We didn't work directly with the patients there. We were in an office area that had kind of a Dutch door where they came up to the Dutch door to get their food, their mail, their medicine, and their cigarettes because there were smoke breaks. So, they knew right when the smoke breaks were and the state provided them cigarette papers and little sacks of tobacco.

Kate: Wow, okay.

Mom: So, we passed those out. And they had little machines to roll their cigarettes. And there was a day room that we could see from the office that we were separated with a big plate-glass window. Maybe it wasn't glass. Maybe it was plexiglass if that had been invented by then. But we could see in there to see where they could play cards. But they were on some sort of medication that, my understanding was that for the most part, we didn't have to worry about catching TB.

And any time they sent mail out or received packages or things went back and forth, there was a thing called the autoclave that we would put certain items in that would then sort of sterilize them and sterilize the letters that were passed. If they had written a letter and wanted it mailed, we'd have to first put it in the autoclave before it could be mailed out. So, it wouldn't have viruses.

Kate: Germs.

Mom: I guess the virus or the germs on it.

Kate: Well, you really learned a lot there.

In this inaugural episode, my niece Hadley and I interview my mom about her early life in Liberty, Missouri, being a preacher’s kid, the integration of public schools in Liberty, the death of her mother from cancer, the hijinks of her teenage friends, “The Rejects,” and going off to college at Oklahoma Baptist University.

Kate: Hey! Today is December 29th, 2024, and I'm here with my mom and my niece, Hadley. I wanted to welcome you both to the very first episode of my podcast. Thank you for being here.

Hadley: Thank you for having us.

Mom: Yeah. Thank you, honey, for inviting us.

Kate: You're welcome.

Kate: I think we have a whole lot to talk about, and Hadley and I have a lot to listen to, all of your stories. So, we're going to start at the very beginning of when you were born in 1949. You were born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, right?

Mom: Yeah. Missourah, we say back in the Midwest.

Kate: Missourah, sorry. I did that wrong. And when did you move to Liberty?

Mom: I was just almost a year old. I looked myself up in the 1950 census and found out I was still living in Excelsior Springs. So, sometime during my first year after the census was taken, we moved to Liberty. My dad had been a minister there at a small, well, at the first Baptist Church and my mom, dad, and my older brother and sister lived in a parsonage right next door to the church. They have a lot of memories. My sister has a lot of storiess of being in the parsonage, which was an old two-story, kind of rambling house, but I have no memories of that, of course.

Hadley: What's a parsonage?

Mom: A parsonage is a house that's owned by the church and the families, the minister's family, can live there free. It was always kind of the way the church supported the minister without a big salary, but it always became a problem because ministers back in those days would go their whole lives and never have owned a home. So then, when they were too old to have a church anymore, then they were kind of out on a limb. So, that's something that changed during my lifetime, that churches started paying ministers more, and they were able to buy their own homes.

Kate: That's interesting. Where were your parents from?

Mom: Oh, my father was from Wichita. Well, the outside of Wichita. Little area of farming community in Kansas but moved into Wichita during the Depression when my grandfather had to give up the farm and he became a post delivery guy, postman. And my mother grew up in Henryetta, Oklahoma, a small town that was south of Tulsa, about an hour's drive south of Tulsa. And they met in college.

Kate: Where did they go to college?

Mom: Well, they both attended college at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

Kate: That's pretty unusual at the time, right? To go to college in the, they were there in the--

Mom: I’m being recorded.

Kate: That was my stepdad!

Mom: Yeah, yeah, that was very unusual.

Kate: That was in the ‘30s that they went to college?

Mom: Yes.

Kate: In the Depression?

Mom: Yes, yeah, it was unusual. I'm sure. My dad first went to college in Emporia. No, Ottawa, Kansas, and he went there first for, I think, a year or more, and then he dropped out and worked to gain or to earn money to then, because his goal, I think, was to go to Oklahoma Baptist University. It was kind of an up-and-coming college back then, and a very pretty school, also, very pretty school. Pretty, pretty brick buildings, and, my grandmother--

Kate: Oh, what was your mother like?

Mom: Well, she was a musician from when she was very young. She was driven, I think, to it because it wasn't that her parents were. So, it was something that I don't know genetically where it came from, but I think it did, because your little brother Austin was kind of the same way. And, she had a small baby grand piano. She took lessons there in Henryetta as a pianist and accompanist, and I know she played for the Rotary there. That little bust that I have in on our piano came from them.

Kate: Oh, yeah.

Mom: The Rotary gave her that when she went off to college, and she played at a lot of weddings. And she also sang, and I remember one time my grandmother telling me how it broke her heart that my mother would get up so early in the morning to practice before she went to school, and there was no heat in the house early in the morning, and she would be playing the piano in her winter coat with gloves that she had cut the fingertips out of so she could feel the keys.

Kate: Wow.

Mom: So, that was devotion.

Kate: Did she? I remember, did she want to go to Juilliard, or something?

Mom: Well, she got a--

Kate: What was the story?

Mom: When she graduated, she was offered a scholarship to an Eastman school of music.

Kate: Oh, Eastman. Okay.

Mom: And my father at the time really, he wanted to marry her. And he was really worried he might lose her if she took that scholarship, and my sister often thinks back to that. She thinks of my mother having to make that decision.

Kate: So that was after, already after she was in college, and they had met.

Mom: Well, she was a senior probably when that hit, was probably like going to graduate school. Instead of having her go off to pursue that, and it would have been in piano performance that she did that.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: I mean could have done that. But she made the decision. I know that he wanted to start seminary up in Kansas City, Kansas, Kansas Central Baptist Theological Seminary, and he drove her up there to look at the seminary and see Kansas City. He also, he entered a contest he would have been a senior in college and there he found out about a contest. I think the contest was sponsored by the Oklahoma Baptist Convention. That's how we would call it. It was statewide, and it was for writing an essay about some history of the Baptists in Oklahoma, writing a paper about that. But there was a money prize associated with it, and he really wanted that money to buy her a ring. So, he worked really hard on that. I think he spent most of the summer working on it, because I know he traveled around Oklahoma, and he did interviews in different churches. There was a women's group called the Women's Missionary Union. They called it WMU. And he went around to those churches and interviewed the women that were involved in that program to kind of get a history of that program in Oklahoma. And he wrote his paper on that, and he won the contest, he got the money, and he was able to buy her an engagement ring. And he was hoping that would change her mind to have that ring, and apparently, it did. It almost sounded to me when I was growing up like a story from the Waltons, or something.

Kate: Right, yeah.

Mom: A TV show.

Kate: So, what were your, you had an older brother and older sister. What were they like?

Mom: Well, they were quite a bit older than me. They were 13 months apart, and they were 7 and 8. My sister was turning 7. My brother had just turned 8, or turned 8 the month after I was born, so I didn't really. I don't have memories of them as children. And

I always thought I had always grown up, kind of thinking I was like an accident. The the accidental kid that showed up, and then I found out I was much older. My dad told me that that wasn't true, that he had started his master's, but hadn't finished it, and he really wanted another child, and my mother had said, “Well, if you finish your master's we can have another one.” And so, he did. He finished in this in the summer end of the summer semester, I guess, in ‘49, and then I came in October, so he always told me that I was his graduation gift.

Kate: Like, the reward!

Mom: Yes, the reward for finishing.

Kate: Another kid!Mom: And I imagine he had probably started it, and then just let it drag on because he was busy trying to support a family. But I always thought that, that really made me feel so much better when I learned that story. I don't really know.

Kate: You were wanted, yes!

Mom: Yes, but I always I did feel like I was observing another family rather than being a part of it, because the four of them, you know, especially my brother and sister, were always so close. You know, there are pictures of them, and they were little. They had cowboy outfits alike, and they slept in a room with bunk beds. When they were little, they had chicken pox alike. They played with the same kids.

Kate: So you were. You were observing your family.

Mom: I felt like.

Kate: As the youngest, yeah.

Mom: Yes, yes, but I observed everything, that they all seemed to make the plans and know what was going on, and I was the last to learn what was happening, or where we were going, or even why we were, why we were doing something, you know, and so I just, I felt like an observer as a young kid, not so much a participant.

Kate: And your dad was in World War II right?

Mom: Well, he was.

Kate: He was a chaplain.

Mom: Yeah, he was in the Army Air Corps, and he served as a chaplain in South Carolina. I guess there was a base there, so mostly.

Kate: So, he was gone? When your siblings were younger, or is that right?

Mom: Well, when we he moved out there when he moved out there, they he was at that time he was at a church way out in eastern, I mean western Kansas.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: Russell, Kansas, I think, was where he was living in, and so he went to the base, and when that happened, my mother went back to Henryetta with her two kids.

Kate: Okay, to stay there.

Mom: Yeah, for a little while until he got base housing, and then they moved out to South Carolina, and they lived there for a while, and I remember seeing an album when I was young, that had black and white photos of the base, and of my sister and brother on the base. It looked like that they maybe went to sort of a nursery school there, and aso they lived there for a little bit, you know.

Kate: Remember, we had that weird little organ in the basement that was like--

Mom: Yes, that was the pump organ.

Kate: Used by a chaplain or something.

Mom: Yes, that was.

Kate: Like a portable organ.

Mom: Yes, that was like a called a field organ. Yeah, because he had to be out in the, you know. He was always there at the base, but they probably, I know my sister. We have a picture of him where he was in his uniform. He's on a hillside, and you can see the troops are sitting on the hillside, and he's looking. They're sitting on the hillside. He's at, toward the bottom of the hill, and you can see that pump organ behind him. So--

Kate: It‘s right there?

Mom: Yeah. So, somebody was, you know. Somehow, he did outdoor services, and my sister said he did several services throughout the day on Sundays for troops from different backgrounds, different religions. And just recently we were talking kind of about him, and she had this story she told me that he black troops and the white troops didn't attend the services, I guess, at the same time, and that, but that an officer brought a group of black serviceman to him and wanted him to do a service for them, but he was wanted it to be kind of as a punishment, because these guys had been out late and had been drinking the night before, and so he was kind of forcing them to do this, and my father got very upset with the officer, and said, he said, “My services are never to be used as a punishment. I don't, this is never to happen again.” and he wanted to integrate the services. I remember hearing that too.

Kate: Yeah. So, you moved to Liberty when you were one. Can you talk about what Liberty was like since you spent your whole childhood after that there.

Mom: I did. I did. Yeah. Liberty is a little town north, kind of northeast of Kansas City. When I grew up it was very separate from Kansas City. Right now, now that the two, all the suburbs have just blended together, you wouldn't know when you ever crossed a city boundary. But it was very separate, and we referred to Kansas City as “the city” we always like. We're going to the city, and it was like a big trip. We got dressed up, we wore dresses and our little coats with gloves whenever we went to the city, had on our Mary Jane shoes. Occasionally, we might ride the bus with my mother to go in if she was shopping for something, but I remember mostly my dad would drive us. My mother did not want to drive in the city, so mostly my dad would drive us.

But I loved Kansas City when I was little it was very exciting to go there. Liberty seemed to me it was such a little tiny town, almost like a town out of the 1930s movie is kind of in my mind how I remember it, because it was a pre-civil war town. It had a courthouse on a square, with all the shops around the courthouse, and that was where we shopped. But it was a very, very segregated and very Southern town, and [15:00] black families didn't shop in in our stores or around the square. I've heard stories about if they needed to use a drugstore they'd have to go to the back of the drugstore, and somebody would come there to wait on them. And it wasn't until I was in 4th grade that the town fully integrated the schools.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: And I was trying to figure. I think it was probably around 1956, ‘57, maybe ‘56 when that happened. And at first, there was a small school in the in the black part of town that probably held all the grades, and then at some point, the high school kids

that could go to high school attended a school in Kansas City. They weren't allowed to attend the high school.

Kate: They had to go all the way there.

Mom: So, I'm guessing maybe someone in the in the community drove them. There wouldn't have been a bus they would have gone on. And then that the High school was integrated first, and then gradually it filtered down, and the grade school was left till last. And so that happened during my 4th grade year. And that was kind of a pivotal year in my life growing up, because the way it worked was the way our school handled it, our district handled it was they sent all the 4th graders to the school that was in the black part of town that had been Garrison School, and I thought I was going to another town. I had never been in that area. I didn't really know where it was. It seemed so far away. And now, as an adult, I realize that I can stand on the square and look two blocks and see that school. But as a child. I guess I just was unaware of that, and I and I had to ride a school bus. That was my first experience riding a school bus

But it turned out to be the best year I had, I think, especially in my elementary through middle school. That was my favorite year because the 4th graders were isolated from the big kids and the little kids. You didn't have to worry about being bullied by the big kids, and it was an adventure to ride the bus there, and it was an adventure to be in this whole new part of town, different houses, different families. There were chickens. I remember some of the houses around our school hearing the chickens and seeing the chickens out in the yard, and there were no chickens in any other part of Liberty that I had been in.

Just things like that. And we didn't have cafeteria in the school. We had to ride a bus over to the, it was called the middle school, but it'd be like the intermediate school, you know, to have a hot lunch. If you did that you missed your recess. So, most kids didn't do that, and since we didn't have a cafeteria with chairs in it, we had our lunch on the floor of the gymnasium. We would walk to the gymnasium, take our shoes off, line our shoes up, and pick up a big sheet of newspaper, big double wide sheet of newspaper, and lay that out on the floor and eat like a picnic. Then you'd gather up your newspaper and throw it away, you know, or get rid of it before you went out to recess.

And I remember that year, I loved my 4th grade teacher. And I remember she read Tom Sawyer to us that year. I can remember being on the playground, hot and sweaty and ready to go in after noon recess and saying to everybody else, “We can't wait to go in, because we get to hear Tom Sawyer.” You know, to hear another chapter of it.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: Yeah, that was very pivotal to me that she read aloud to us. And that's really about the only teacher. I'm sure there were other teachers that read aloud to us, but maybe because it was the story of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher and Huck.

Kate: It’s about Missourah.

Mom: And it was about Missourah. And then we took you kids there when you were little to see where Tom would look out his window and hear the catcall from Huck. Time to get up and go outside and have an adventure. Liberty was very segregated.

Kate: It was.

Mom: Watching that that change. I really lived through the late fifties, early sixties of watching how that town changed, and the kind of as an aside. My sister and I, older sister and I went back to Liberty. I think we were back there for a reunion, or to visit family or something, and went down to the archives to look through our old newspapers. Our old town newspaper from that time. I wanted to see if there were any articles that were written about this integration of the lower grades. I do know that when that happened, the teachers who'd been teaching at the black school were not allowed to teach at the white school.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: And I thought, well, were there articles, letters to the editor? I knew that there were a few kids in my class that didn't show up in 4th grade. Their parents sent them somewhere else, so I knew that was controversial as looking back on it, and I even knew at the time that we were doing, I felt like we were doing something kind of unusual that was happening in our town, and I was getting to be a part of that. But we looked all through the papers and could never find anything and while we were on that visit I was so surprised, but while we were on that visit, we had lunch with some friends that were longtime Liberty people that had stayed there. One of them was a teacher in the school, and we mentioned this, that we hadn't seen the articles, and she said, “No,” she said, “and that's why it went so smoothly in Liberty, because the paper--

Kate: They didn't want to talk about it, expose it too much.

Mom: They just they didn't want to give it space.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: Yeah, they didn't give it space. It was kind of like, we don't give it oxygen.

Kate: That makes sense, yeah.

Mom: Though I'm, you know it was talked about. It just wasn't recorded. Yeah.

Kate: Hmm!

Hadley: Do you, I don't know. I can't do the math in my head but your siblings. How old were they when you were in 4th grade? And do you remember, like them going to school if they integrated before you?

Mom: Yeah, they did they, the high school was integrated first. So, when they went through high school, it may have been about the time that they went through that it was integrated. And I know, I think, a year close to my main. Well, they were back-to-back in school, and I don't know what year this happened, but the, there was a black girl. Let's see. I can't think of her first name. Her last name was Slaughter, because our, China Slaughter, was her father, who was the janitor at my grade school. And she was either I don't know if she was valedictorian or voted something in her school, in the high school. It was like a very unusual honor, you know, not an unusual honor, but it was unusual that that this honor was given to her. It was really a cool thing to have happen. And I remember China very well, because he was the crossing guard at our school, but he also, because my mother taught music there, and she pushed a piano. She would have to take the piano from room to room. There wasn't one music room, so she would be the teacher who would come into the room, and while the other teacher would go out, I guess, and have planning time. China would help her push the piano from room to room. It was on a big set of rollers. So I felt like I knew him. I felt like he was a friend of mine personally, because he knew my mother.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: Yeah, I don't remember there being any issue ever talked about in in our home, you know, related to the integration. I just remember how I was afraid to go because it was a school I'd never seen or been to, and it wasn't a thing that my mother talked with me about. It was a thing my father did. I remember him sitting on my bed and prepping me for getting ready to go. And, how my same friends would be there and new friends to sort of talk.

Kate: So, your dad at that time, he wasn't exactly a minister, right? He was working for the association.

Mom: Yeah, he had a different role when he came to Liberty. It was called Associational Minister for two counties, Clay County and Platte County, and he had that job the whole rest of his life till he retired, which he retired the year you were born. So, from the late, early fifties, you know, like 1950 ‘til about 1978 is when he retired. He had that job. So, his job was to help establish new churches and support all churches that were already, and you know, going. And you know, he ran training sessions for them, and he ran a camp. There was a camp grounds that were donated. So, that camp he helped build that camp up and was always kind of in charge of that camp. That was a big part of our summers was his dealing with all the issues and the creek flooding,and stuff up at the camp and building new buildings.

Kate: What was the name of that camp?

Mom: New Hope. It doesn't exist anymore. The grounds were sold, but it was there for a number of years, a lot of years.

Kate: What was it like, I know you and your brother and sister refer to yourselves as preacher kids.

Mom: Yeah.

Kate: Whatever that term is. What was that like?

Mom: I think my sister thrived under it. She was the good child. My brother hated it. He just despised it, and so he really kind of acted out and rebelled against that when he was going through high school, and I was kind of middle of the road. I rebelled, but never openly, you know. I participated in all the church things that he expected us to, and that we did.

But our mother, it kind of shifted after she passed away, because she was, she really drove it. She was very active in our church. My father was not active in the church we grew up in because on Sundays he was always working in another church. He was filling in for somebody or helping take part in maybe a ceremony that might be going on if somebody was being ordained, or something like that, or he did fill in, reaching in. So, it was not very often that he was actually with us on Sundays. It was a thing that my mother orchestrated and had us all involved in.

Kate: Yeah. I've just always been amazed. You have all these Bible verses memorized and hymns and stuff, and can just rattle them off.

Mom: Well, that was a part of my.

Kate: Not really what we did too much, but.

Mom: Well, it's true, I mean you all were confirmed. But we switched churches by then, you know, and the Presbyterian church, a little more liberal and just so you know, and your dad had always said he really wanted that a part of your education, too. He wanted that a part of your childhood experience. He made the decision for us to go to join a church and to take you guys to it when you were younger. It was a thing that we discussed and consciously decided that you needed to have in your background. And it makes a difference when you're reading and you're older.

In fact. Nick told me, because your older brother told me when he did his semester abroad in college, and he was doing art history in Florence, I believe he was. He said he felt the difference between the other students he was with who could look at a painting and knew exactly what the story was about and who the characters were depicted in the story that was depicted. And he didn't know.

Kate: Right. Oh, he didn’t? That’s right, he wasn’t paying attention too much. That's right.

Mom: Well, he went through confirmation, and then he then he took. He's, you know he would. He said that was it for him and so he didn't go. You know he didn't grow up, and it wasn't the way your education in the Presbyterian Church was very different than what ours had been in the Baptist Church. You know, we were learning Bible verses every week, and being drilled on them and such like that. That it was just a part of what you did there. The culture.

Kate: Yeah. You spend a lot of time, I know, like your summers going to Henryetta and being with your cousins and aunts and uncles and grandmother, grandfather. What was all that like down there? That was like a whole other world there.

Mom: Oh, it was. To me it was just, you know, I'd never been to Disneyland, but I knew that Henryetta was better than Disneyland when I was growing up. We knew, yeah. When I was little, we always went with my mother. Well, we had the holidays there. That was the family events where when we drove in the car, and we’d go down and stay at grandmother's for holidays.

But the special times really were in the summer. We always tried to go right when school was out, hopefully the end of May. If school was out early, very, very, first to June because of the heat. It was just unbearably hot, just that much further south than us, and we took the train. We took a train called the Katy train. I have to think. It was like KTA. The Kansas, Topeka, and Atchison, something like that. Maybe Kansas City, Topeka, and Atchison. But anyway, we would take that train from Union Station, and it was not air-conditioned. So, the windows were down, and dust was blowing, and we had a little shoebox with our sandwiches in it. There was a little man that would sit at the back of the car that was like the, I don’t know what you would have called him, was like the guy that took the tickets, the ticket taker, but he also had a box of candy back there that would be melty, like candy bars, and I remember my sister and I would only get Paydays because they didn't have chocolate that would melt all over you. That was my first introduction to Payday candy bars was on the Katy train.

My grandmother would pick us up in Checotah, a little town where the train stopped the closest stop that it had to Henryetta and her big black Cadillac, and then later, her big Lincoln cars. That first air-conditioned car I think I'd ever ridden in was hers. But and then we go back to Henryetta, and Henryetta was where my grandparents lived, my great uncle and his family of kids, and my great aunt. And they all were involved in businesses within the little town of Henryetta, and my grandmother's big, she had a big Dutch barn house. It had four bedrooms in it, and two-story, big corner lot. She was always working in her yard because it because she lived on the corner lot. She thought it was so important that her yard look nice, because you could see it from every side.

Kate: That’s funny.

Mom: And so she worked in that yard early every morning.

Kate: I love her name. Her name was Willie Pearl.

Mom: Right.

Kate: And one of my nieces is Willa Pearl.

Mom: That's right. I know.

Kate: I love that she was named for her.

Mom: I did, too. I was just take so struck. Take learned that, you know. Yeah.

Kate: And she was from Texas, right?

Mom: Yes.

Kate: She was this very small, like scrappy kind of Texas woman who always made bacon every morning.

Mom: Oh, so scrappy, Texas. Every morning. Yeah, every morning. There's always a can of bacon grease on her. And she made gravy for her dog, for the dogs, dog food every night. She always had a little pan of gravy.

Kate: Like bacon gravy?

Mom: Bacon gravy. That's how you used it.

Kate: What was the name of her dog?

Mom: Tippy.

Kate: Oh yeah, Tippy, okay.

Mom: Yeah. Tippy.

Hadley: This is your great aunt?

Kate: No, her grandmother.

Mom: This is Grandma, Grandma Boerstler.

Hadley: Oh, your grandma.

Kate: Her mother's mother.

Mom: Yeah. Willie. Willie Pearl. Farmer was her last name. But yeah, and my grandfather owned a grocery wholesale house there with his brother. My grandfather ran the wholesale part of it, and his brother, my great-uncle, ran the business office, which was air-conditioned. It was a separate little office built onto the big old, kind of sandstone is how I remember.

Kate: It's right by the train tracks.

Mom: Yeah, right by the train tracks, because the train cars would pull up and kind of pull off the track a little sidetrack to pull up right next to the building where they would load and unload groceries, and my uncle, both my uncles, both his sons, worked as salesmen, until one of the uncles kind of branched off and made his own separate wholesale house out in Bristow, Oklahoma, and my other uncle, at one point inherited the family lumber yard, and the went off and took care of the lumber yard. But my cousins worked in the wholesale house in the summers from when they were ten or younger than ten.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: And I did, too, and I would go down there. My granddad always put us to work. That was a part of--

Kate: Being there?

Mom: Oh, yes, and it was just expected, you know, that that you helped out, and of any kind of family business, you are a part of it. And so, I would stamp tobacco, which I was in a little bit cooler room because the tobacco is kept in the cooler spot, but I'd have to open those cartons of cigarettes and float the stamps in a little dish of water, because they kind of work like decals and have to put them on the bottoms of the cigarette packs. And that was how they paid the tax. I didn't realize when I was first doing it that it was tax money. I just thought they were pretty decals and found out from my grandfather right away.

Kate: You thought you were just doing it for fun! For decoration.

Mom: I did, I found out right away that it was. You had to be careful and not waste those. It was money. It was worth money. And at first, I wasn't very good at it, and my stamps would float around in the water and lose their glue. And oh boy, did I get in trouble for that! Because that was wasting money.

But I just loved that part of my life because my grandmother would have us run errands for her. And at home, you know, it was my older sister and brother that were asked to do things. I was just kind of still, as I said, an observer of what was going on. But when I was at grandmother's, I was very involved, and helping her with different things around the house. She always was painting something. When I say painting, I mean, like furniture. It was like, open a can of paint, and you slap the paint on. She would have us work in the yard and pay bills for her. She'd have us run uptown with the check to pay because any store in town you could run a line of credit, and all I had to say when we were, especially when I got older, and after my mother had died, I did a lot with her where I'd be down there longer in the summers.

They had just changed the streets from being pull-in parking to being parallel parking, and for my grandmother she took such umbrage to that. It was almost like the town had done it just to thwart her because she could not parallel park her big old Lincolns that she drove, and so she would drop me off in front of a store with the check, and I would run in to pay her bill while she circled the block and come back and pick me up, and I can remember when I'd run in.

Kate: Didn’t they live like a few blocks away from that area?

Mom: What's that?

Kate: Didn't they only live like a few blocks away?

Mom: Oh, they did live a few blocks away. Yes, but she didn't walk uptown.

Kate: Oh. She Nnever walked over there?

Mom: Well, it wasn't like, people didn't exercise the way you think about it now, and for her, having a car was a status symbol. And it would be people who couldn't afford a car were the people that would walk downtown.

Kate: Yeah, okay, I see.

Mom: So, so much of what I learned growing up in Missouri and Oklahoma. A lot of it was so tied to status. And how you presented yourself. That was very important, so she would drive the car up, I'd hop out, but when I take it in, and I'd say, “This is for Ms. Boerstler.”

They'd say, “Oh, are you Ms. Boerstler's granddaughter?”

I'd say, “Yes.”

“Well, which one are you?”

And then I could say, “Well, I'm Anna Vena’s youngest.”

“Oh, I just loved your mother,” they'd say, and that would happen store after store after store, you know. I loved that feeling of belonging.

Kate; They knew who you were.

Mom: There was a place where they knew who I was, that because they knew who my family was, and I loved that feeling whenever I was in Henryetta. It always felt like home.

Kate: Yeah, and you had your cousins were closer to your age, right?

Mom: Yeah, I had two. I had four cousins in that family when I, in my uncle's family, and they lived right across the alley from my grandmother. So that was just wonderful to be able to run back and forth across the alley to me. That was kind of magical to be able to have family that close. And we'd spend the night with them, or they'd spend the night at grandma's, and I mean we'd be running around in the dark playing flashlight tag, or you know, in the in her big yard. The grownups might be out sitting under the trees in her lawn chairs. She had those metal lawn chairs that you could kind of rock in a little bit, and our job would be to be watering. We'd have that long hose, and we'd drag it from flower bed to flower bed and water while the grown-ups sat and talk in the shade.

Kate: And I know your cousins, was it Benny and Jimmy?

Mom: Yes.

Kate: Always like to play pranks, right?

Mom: Oh, they did!

Kate: Like wild boys.

Mom: They were the wild boys of summer.

Kate: Up to no good.

Mom: Up to no good. They always had gadgets, were inventing things. They both, they had the subscription to Boys’ Life, and there was always things in the back of Boys’ Life.

Kate: Oh, about how to build stuff?

Mom: Yes, how to build stuff or make things. And I remember one of my, one year when I got down there, they had made a harness and a parachute that they put on the cat, t throwing the cat off the roof of the house to see if the parachute would work. They had a wonderful--

Kate: Didn’t they have a zipline or something in the backyard?

Mom: Well, it wasn't exactly, yeah. We called it a monkey bridge. They had a tree house in a huge, tall, tall tree that just towered over their yard, and it was so tall it had a straight. It was very hard for me to get up there, because it was just a straight rope ladder that you had to get up, climb up to get there. So, once you got up to the top, you wanted to stay. But it was screened in, and it had the back seat of an old car was up there to be like a kind of like a little sofa or a seat to sit on up in the treehouse. And my uncle made a little box that would go up and down on a pulley that ran on an old lawnmower motor. So, it was a motorized pulley that this box could go up and down that you could put things in, you know, like supplies or tools, or magazines, or books, or lunches, or you know, the cat could go up and down in this little motorized elevator.

And then from that tree house to the corner of the yard, they had a, we called it a monkey ladder, but it was something that my uncle had learned to build when he was stationed in the Philippines during the wars during World War II, and they would use it. It was like three ropes that were you could walk on one rope, and you held on to the other two ropes as you walked. They would be like the points of a triangle, and then they wove another rope in between the sides and the rope that you walked on to sort of catch you if you fell, but it swayed back and forth. And the boys could just run across that rope. It was so scary to me, but they’d just run across it like lickety split, and they had the coolest backyard because of those things.

They had a big old metal barrel that my uncle had fastened to two ends of like a saw horse, and they had an old saddle over that barrel, so it was like a horse. You could get up on the saddle over this barrel like you were riding a horse, and you all actually had one of those when you were real little, because when we moved to Stillwater he brought one. Yeah, he brought one up to you all, and it was a real small saddle. He said it was a mule saddle that he had traded, done some trade for to get that mule saddle. I couldn't believe when he showed up with that, either, because it was such a deja vu for me.

Kate: It was awesome.

Mom: There was always so much activity going on over there.

Kate: Yeah. Well, why don't we talk about when your mother got sick and passed away when you were pretty young.

Mom: Yeah, I was. I think she, well, she got cancer. And I, as I look back, the timeline, pivotal was that she, it was breast cancer, and she had an operation. She had a mastectomy when I was in 4th grade, but I know that she had a lump, and our family doctor was watching it for a while, you know, so I think that she really became sick with it when I was in 3rd grade. And then, the operation happened when I was in 4th grade.

Kate: Did that happen in New York? Was that when you went there? Or was that later?

Mom: No, this was in Kansas City or in that Kansas City area where that occurred. I remember, when she was in the hospital, I was too young to visit. y\You had to be. Maybe you had to be ten or older, and I wasn't ten yet, or maybe you had to be twelve. I'm not sure what the age was, but you had to be a certain age before you could enter into the, back where the rooms were in the hospital, so I would have to stay in the waiting room. I remember sitting in there with a stack of Highlights Magazines while my brother and sister and dad would go back. But my dad figured out that he could call. I could call and talk to her from the pay phone in the waiting room, and I can remember, I don't remember if I was standing on a chair to talk on the pay phone. But I remember the pay phone feeling so high up on the wall. I had never used a payphone before, and it seems I didn't know what to say. I was out in the waiting room where it was filled with other kids who couldn't go back into the hospital.

Kate: They just left you out there?

Mom: Well, he came, you know. He came. He would go back and see her, and then he would come back and arrange the call, you know, because he'd have to put money in the phone and dial the number for it to ring in her room so I could talk to her while and while she was still in the hospital. Then we had my grandmother came and stayed with us when she first came home from the hospital. It was quite a while before she went back to school. I think that this happened during my school year, and it was quite a while before she could come back and start teaching again.

But I remember as we found out, as it came unfolded to me or revealed to me that she had cancer as when I was a kid, like 3rd or 4th grade. It was kind of a secret like a family secret, and we weren't to talk about it. And she didn't want anyone to know. And it seems like I remember them explaining to me. People at that time didn't know how cancer, somebody got cancer.

And it was a very fearful disease and felt like, you know, but what if you could get it from someone else? And also she was worried about losing her job as a teacher. If the school district knew that she had it, and I don't even know if they had medical insurance back then. I don't know at what point medical insurance became a common thing or a part of your workplace, you know, provided by your workplace. I never really knew about that, but then she was in pretty good shape up until about the time I was in 7th grade. At that point, the cancer had entered her bones. But actually, I think, what gave her a boost. I think that that gave her maybe a couple of years, like through 5th grade and in 6th grade

She did go to Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in New York City. A doctor that she knew there in Kansas City, I guess, had read about maybe a study being done, and she was willing to participate in this study, and so she was flown to, his is the first time for her to be on an airplane. My father had been because he had been on a plane during the World War II. But I remember this, the excitement of her getting to fly.

And we had an aunt and uncle and some cousins from Wichita that came and stayed with us, and they did it over Christmas. So, I remember that, they came just after Christmas. So, it was during Christmas break, and I think it was. I remember while they were there we went to see the movie Bambi, too. That was one event that happened during that time. This surgery was done by a doctor called Dr. Posianis and they had took out her pituitary gland. They thought that by taking out the pituitary gland it would slow the growth of cancer. So, my brother said it was supposed to give her about three more years, and it did, is how he explained it. So, she had that done in the winter. And then that summer we, my mom and dad and my older sister and I, drove to New York City because she went back for a checkup.

And at one point I did. It took me a while to even figure out how to spell the doctor's name, but later on in life, I did try to do some research on that doctor, and if there had been what the study was about, and I did. It took a lot of research, but did find the doctor listed and that this was a study that was done to see, but it didn't have good results. It wasn't like a promising results, but it was a.

Kate: Wasn't that doctor a woman?

Mom: It was a woman, which was very unusual, and it was, and my mother was so proud about that, that she had a doctor that was a woman. She, they made friends with a couple, a woman that she shared the room with, who were Jewish, and had been in the concentration camps. They made friends with the wife and the husband because the, I don't remember their names at all, but I know that they exchanged letters for a while afterward, after the first surgery that happened in the winter before we went back in the summer. And we met up with that family, and they had a daughter maybe close to my sister's age, and she took us, my sister and I through Greenwich Village. I remember that. I felt like in my mind she was Joan Baez.

Kate: Oh, my God.

Mom: That was how she looked, you know.

Kate: Wait, so how old were you then?

Mom: I was just coming out of 6 6th grade. Yeah, just out of 6th grade. So I was 12.

Kate: Oh, man, yeah. And this was in like, 1961 or something?

Mom: Yeah, something like that

Kate: Man, what a time to be in Greenwich Village.

Mom: I know, and well, I do remember that. Oh, West Side Story had just come out and I remember, as we walked the streets, looking for signs of the sharks in the jets.

Kate: Because they were real!

Mom: I really felt like they were real, and I was right there possibly see them.

Kate: Yeah. Oh, they’d just bust out into song.

Mom: Well, it was such an it was an amazing trip. I remember my dad well, because my mother was in the hospital having these, you know, checkups done, these checks done on her to compare. I guess you know, like what the results of that experimental surgery was. And I remember he took us to the United Nations and how he explained what the United Nations were to us, and I can remember standing outside the building, and seeing that statue of the gun that has, what would you call that?

Kate: Knotted up or whatever?

Mom: Yeah, it's the knotted gun. And being so impressed with that, and my father being so impressed and loving the fact that it was people from all over the world that came to discuss and problems that the world had in a way to get everybody's voice involved, and how we went into the to the room where you could put on headphones and hear what was being said in all these different languages. And it just, I don't know. It was very important. I knew I was seeing something really.

Kate: What an experience, yeah.

Mom: It really was, I mean, from our little town. To see an experience like that was pretty, very amazing.

Kate: And then you took me there later.

Mom: That's right.

Kate: In college. I don’t know if it was just me or maybe Austin was there.

Mom: Well, I think it was just you and I. That time we took the train down.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: And spent the day walking around, because to me I wanted to kind of recreate what I was, what I remembered seeing as a child, you know.

Kate: Did your mom ever have like chemo? Or just these surgeries?

Mom: Chemo didn’t exist then.Kate: It didn't exist yet, then?

Mom: No, she had treatments called cobalt treatments, and those were done in Kansas City, and we had, I remember we had our two-tone 1956 Buick at that time, and so after school. So this was probably during my 5th grade year, and part of, and maybe most, some of my 6th grade year, where after a few, maybe once a month, she would say, “I have to go for a treatment.” So, she and I would drive over after school, and the place that she went to was an office right across the street from the Kansas City Public Library, and I knew the library was there. It was huge. It took up one whole block, but I was not to get out of the car.

I remember going in with her once, and it was just, it was such a dismal kind of office where she was, with straight back chairs. I felt safer in the car, so I would often just sit in the in the car with the door locked with my homework and do my homework while she was upstairs while she was up getting her cobalt treatment

And the cancer, did change her in that she was very tired from it, and after teaching she always would come home and lay down before she'd get up to start dinner. I can remember that, too. It was a real shift kind of in family life during those years. And then during my, I think it was my 7th grade year that by then she was taking a, you had to take classes every once in a while to renew your teacher's license, and she was taking a class in Orff music which is interesting, since I have two grandchildren.

Kate: What did you say?

Mom: Orff. O-R-F-F.

Kate: I don’t think I’ve heard of that.

Mom: Well, it's interesting to me because that's what Sofia, and that's what our, my youngest granddaughter and grandson that they have in their school. It was, I don't know the first name of Orff, but it was like a music theory, a way of teaching, style of teaching music to children in it. I know it uses, uses a lot of folk songs from different countries, simple little tunes, and she was taking a class in that, and she fell. It was at wintertime, and I think my dad had to drive over and get her at this because she was taking this class at an evening class at, I don't know somewhere outside of Liberty. And he had to drive over and bring her home, and she was in so much pain that night. The doctor came to our house and gave her a shot of morphine. I can remember that. And then the next day an ambulance came without its license, its lights on, and came and picked her up and took her to the hospital, and she had broken her leg so her leg she had to have some surgery for her leg, but my father told us later that he was told that it shortened her leg, and she would not be able to walk again, you know, because her legs would be two different lengths, but she never did. She was always in a wheelchair after that.

So the last few years, couple of years of her life, we had a hospital bed in the house. But she stayed at home and then, so she passed away when I was 14, the last day in 9th grade, the last day of school of 9th grade. There weren't. The cancer was not. Now, I feel like I know so many people that go through that. But at the time it wasn't. I don't know if maybe if it was harder to detect. So maybe people did die of it, but we didn't know that's what it was. I don't know.

Kate: So how did your life change then, after she died?

Mom: Well, it changed dramatically. You know it was probably throughout my life the most frightening thing I'd ever been through.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: And it also seemed like a thing I was observing, you know, because all of her care toward the end all kind of took place between my dad and my sister, and we had a housekeeper then that that would help out during the day. And I was mostly just an observer. It seemed like during all that time, but that happened in the end of May, and then my sister was in college then, and was engaged, and she got married at the end of that summer and moved out, moved into married student housing at the college where she and her husband were enrolled in school, and my brother was, he was off at college, and he got married that fall. So, it went from kind of a family setting to just my dad and I for the next, you know. I remember how different it was to come home and nobody was there. Just me. It was a weird feeling, but it also was a freeing feeling of being alone in the house. I can remember that sense, you know.

And suddenly being able to do things without asking permission, seemed so, so different. I can remember my dad and I got really close during those years. We would go shopping together and pick out, TV dinners had just come out and TV dinners with desserts. They had just started adding a little dessert to the TV dinners. So, we would we go to the grocery store and get our cereal and milk, and then go over to the freezer section and pick out our TV dinners.

Kate: Oh gosh, that was all you were eating?

Mom: Well, it was a great deal of what we're eating. It's still, I mean, there were people that would bring us dishes and stuff, and I occasionally would try my hand at something in the kitchen, but I had never been the helper in the kitchen. It always was my sister that was relied upon to do that kind of things. I was a dishwasher and a dish dryer and putter away of things, but never somebody that mixed things or helped make things. That was always her role.

So, and we ate out some, but not a lot because there weren't that many restaurants to choose from, and restaurant food was never, to me as I grew up, considered as good as homemade food. You know. We just didn't eat out too much, maybe Sundays or after something special if we went to the city, went into Kansas City, then we might go to a cafeteria or something. But I remember those years as growing very close to my dad.

Kate: And you had some really good friends, too, right?

Mom: Yeah, I did. Yes, I did within a year. And yeah, I met a good friend that I'm still good friends with my sophomore year. I know I've told you this, that when I would go to school in the fall every year, I'd always look for the new kids because our little town was, to me, so boring. It was so routine, it was so well known it was over. It was just.

Kate: You knew everybody.

Mom: Like a rerun. It was just like watching reruns all the time, and I would always look for the new kid, you know, something exciting and new. And my sophomore year, here came the new kid from Gary, Indiana, who did not want to be in Liberty, Missouri. And so we forged a really good friendship because she did not want to, she wanted to go back to her hometown and was miserable, being there, and I was miserable as it was. So, the two of us together became really good friends, and still are good friends all these years later.

Kate: What kinds of stuff did you do together?

Mom: Oh, talked on the phone mostly. I remember that year, the year I turned 15, my father gave me my own phone line, which was very unusual back then. But he did, I did have my own little princess phone, so I was able to talk on the phone all I wanted, though, my friends were never in that situation because they had to still share their phones with their families.

Kate: Was this when you were still at your old house before you had moved?

Mom: Yeah, that phone was installed on our old house, so that was the year I turned 15. So that would have been the fall of my sophomore year. So she died in the spring, very end of school my freshman year. So, by fall, you know, he did a lot of things then. He said yes to a lot of things that he would not have said yes to if my mother was still there, I guess. And I can say that he really spoiled me during those, that was a sweet spot time of my life.

And then you know the story that he began dating. My mother had been my grade school music teacher. He began dating my high school music teacher and that was very different for me. But they ended up getting married my junior year and built a new home. So, we moved out of my childhood home into this new home, and my phone came with me. I already had the phone.

Kate: Tell us about when this, when you called yourselves the Rejects.

Mom: Yeah. Well, there were three of us that became really close friends the end of my sophomore year, and all through my junior and senior year. And we were sort of good girls, but we also were very rebellious, and we kind of embraced the sixties, I guess, is what you could say, and had our own little subculture, our kind of, you know how kids will do that when they're teenagers. They'll have their own language, their own jokes. We all were kind of rebellious against our parents, but not terribly, openly, badly rebellious, but just enough.

The way we became we started calling ourselves the Rejects is because, one of my friends had a little brother that was probably about 8th grade, 7th or 8th grade, and we really teased each other a lot. To us, everything was funny, and we were teasing him one day out in the driveway of her house. I remember he got so angry, and he just yelled at us. “You all! You're all just a bunch of rejects!”

And we just embraced that. We said, “Yeah, we are! You're right.” So, we started calling ourselves, referring to ourselves as the Rejects. And then, finally, we just ended up getting work shirts, those blue work shirts, and had our name, “The Rejects” put on the back of them in these iron-on letters that were kind of shiny, you know, rubberized letters, but they were the color of like a yellow pencil, that kind of yellow. I remember that, and they were in an arch on the back, and we would wear those like to school. Well, we do dances or and we were, do you know, going to things around town? The three of us together would have our reject shirts on, and I wore it to school a few times, but it really, really, really upset my stepmother when I had that shirt on at school.

Kate: Right, and she was very, very strict teacher.

Mom: She was an extremely strict teacher.

Kate: Choir teacher, right?

Mom: She was beloved by a lot of the kids, I would say. 95% of the kids in our high school just loved her because she was kind of a fashion maven, and very tall and thin, always wore dyed to match everything, and she was very kind of tall and elegant, and she'd never been married before. So this was her first marriage to my father.

But she really worked the music, this was vocal music, and she really worked the kids hard, but in contests, they would go to state contests and district contests. Her groups always got fours. You were ranked one through four, and her kids always came back with fours. And I was in her music group. I mean, when my mother was still living, she and my mother did know each other because they were both music teachers in the school system. And you had to try out when you went into high school, you had to try out audition for this and I was kind of pushed to audition for it. I didn't see myself as doing this, but music had been a big part of my childhood, and through my mother. And so, I did try out for it. There were four freshmen girls chosen for it. I don't know how many freshmen boys, but there were only four of us in there, so it was all upperclassmen to me, upperclassmen kids I didn't know. It was very nerve-wracking for me to be in this this class, this a capella class, and performed with them throughout that year. And then the end of that year we had to, or it may have been during that year, we had to try out for small groups, and so I was in sextet, small girls’ sextet, also, so I had to do sextet practice with her after school.

And I knew her because she had also attended our church, and when I was in 3rd grade, I had done a solo in our church, the Carol of the Questioning Child at our Christmas programs. She had been the angel that was saying, it wasn't exactly like a duet. But it was like a call and response, where as they as the carol of the questioning child I was singing out, you know, questions about Jesus’ birth. “Where was Jesus born today?” And she would sing out as the angel who would respond, “In a manger far away.” And we had to practice all fall for that program. It was a big deal in our church. It was like a whole service of music, and my mother was asked to have me do that solo by the woman who was the wife of the president of the college in our small town, William Jewel College, because her daughter had sung that same solo when she was a little girl, and so she wanted to hear it again at that Christmas program. So, they asked my mother if she would have me do it. So, I spent months practicing that at our home and then had to go down and practice with this music teacher, the high school music teacher, who then, it turned out years later, became my stepmother. It was just kind of ironic.

Kate: That was weird. Did you sing it from the balcony, or something like that? Or was she up in the balcony?

Mom: No, we were. No, we were on the you remember being in that church. It's a huge, big sanctuary. We were up on the stage.

Kate: Oh, okay.

Mom: Yeah. I was singing in a primary choir up on this stage we had little chairs, and so my little primary choir had a song to sing, and then everybody else was to sit down, and I was to remain standing, and then they were going to go into the Carol of the Questioning Child. And I'm pretty sure we were accompanied by my mother on the piano for that, and the little kid next to me didn't realize that I was going to be doing this, and kept pulling on my choir robe to try to get me to sit down. And I was yanking on my robes, saying, trying to whisper, “I'm supposed to. I'm supposed to,” you know, when we went into it. I had to do it twice. I had to do it once on Sunday morning and once on Sunday evening because so many people came to that performance. The church was just packed but it was one of the most scary things I think I did, had to do as a child.

Hadley: I want to ask what were like that you guys talk about to this day the Rejects. What were some of most famous Reject stories that you guys have?

Mom: Oh, my gosh! I can't believe you would ask me to share these!

Hadley: What's one that you guys always talk about?

Mom: Well, there was one where we got in trouble at a restaurant in our little town. It was kind of like a pizza place, and we went. We were driving around. My friend had a, I think it was we were in her car. And she had a Rambler, and we had been driving. You have to realize in the sixties was kind of a car culture. So when kids got the car for a Friday night or a Saturday night, they literally stayed in the car almost the whole evening, just driving around. So, we drove around the square, drove around the college, drove around, and you'd see other kids, and you'd wave in the car and maybe pull over and get out, and whatever.

But this time, we had stopped at this little restaurant and went in to use the bathroom.

We locked the door, and we stayed in there forever because we were putting on makeup and doing our hair and kind of horsing around. We called it horsing around back then, to horse around was kind of to goof off and be silly, and people kept knocking on the door. We were not opening the door, and finally one of the waitresses or something came over. I don't know if she had a key or whatever, but she was so angry at us and told us that we were causing a fracas. That was the first time we'd ever heard the word fracas, and so after that, we used that word as much as we could and always referred to that as the fracas or would accuse each other of causing a fracas just to make fun of the whole situation. But because of the word fracas, I remember they had a gravel parking lot, and when we when we drove out, my friend, who was driving stirred up a lot of gravel in the parking lot as we left.

And another one. I shouldn't tell this at all, but it was kind of how my little town worked. We had the college boys in this town were called squirrels because the college was up on a hill and was filled with trees, and so they were called the squirrels. And that's how you differentiated a town boy from a college boy was you'd say he's a squirrel, meaning he lived up on the hill in the trees. And so there were two boys that we knew that actually were from New Jersey and were students there, and we were out with them one night, riding around in the car, and they were older. We were in high school. They were older, and one of them had an ID. I don't know that they were 21 but, was going to go into a liquor store and get some liquor. And so as we drove, we dropped them off, and then we were driving around while they went in, the town policeman saw us and followed us in the car and pulled us over. Well, where they pulled us over was kind of a very main street of town right in front of a car lot. And the car lot had a string of lights that were strung on a wire in front of the cars, and they had us all lined up there while they searched the car.

Kids were driving by on the street and honking at us as they went by, and what had happened was, when we went around the block, I think we saw the policeman and we didn't pick our friend up. We just kept going, so there was no liquor in the car, and we were let go. But then we went back around and we met up, and it became a big story. Well, the thing is, when each one of us got home a few hours later, every one of our parents already knew about this incident, had been called. I don't know how they knew.

Kate: The police.

Mom: But either yeah, by the police or by kids that saw us. Or people from our town that saw us. But there literally was nothing you could do.

Kate: That's a real social network there.

Mom: It is, it is! There was nothing that you could ever do.

Kate: Rapid speed!

Mom: That would not get back to your parents. There was like no way things couldn't get back in this little town, you know, and that was a big deal for me, having a mother and stepmother that were teachers and my dad a minister.

Kate: What was that thing about, like a brick in the wall that you would hide things?

Mom: Oh, my gosh! I forgot about that. Yes, yes, on this little, on the way up the hill to this college, there was a little house that had a stone wall that was like a Civil War stone wall where the rocks were just laid together. They weren't cemented together. One of our friends, her older brother had gotten us a fifth of gin, I think it was, and so we were going to, but we had to have a place to keep it. It was a thing that was going to last a long time, but we had to have a place to keep it. But nobody could take it home.

So, I said, “Well, let's hide it in that wall up there.” So, we went up and ended up pulling away some of the rocks and found a place in there that we could make a little niche in the wall to hide this bottle. At that time, we were all in senior English. I think the name of the poem was “The Flower in the Cranied Wall,” or else that was a line in the poem. I think it was by Lord Byron. It could have been that, I should look that up and see. But we always refer to that as the flower in the cranied wall. Well, it turned--

Kate: The code name for the gin.

Mom: The code name for the gin was the flower in the cranied wall. Well, it turned out that that little house belonged to a guy that was a basketball player at the college, and was also a student teacher at the college at our high school, and somehow he heard about the flower in the cranny wall and he went out and got it. So we lost it. We lost it. Yeah, he found it.

Kate: Oh, that's too bad!

Mom: Yeah, it was too bad.

Kate: Since you mentioned poetry, I wanted to ask, you read a lot in high school I think, right?

Mom: I did. I remember asking for a typewriter maybe my junior year and got one. And I took typing my senior year. Actually, I wasn't going to. It never crossed my mind. I wasn't going to do anything that might make me end up being a housewife or an office worker, so I never took home ec in high school, even though all of my friends did, and they all have wonderful stories about their home ec classes. I kind of refused to take it because I thought that would, it was like getting a brand of you were going to be a homemaker. And the other thing was, if you took business or shorthand or typing, I thought well, that meant you were going to be a secretary, and I had far greater dreams for myself than that. I really thought I was going to grow up and be a writer. I wasn't going to do anything that would hold me back from that.

But then while I was in high school, and I guess somebody heard me say that. My friend said, “Well, aren't you going to college?”

And I said, “Sure!”

And she said, “Well, you better take typing because you're going to have to type your papers,” which never even occurred to me, because in high school you handwrote an essay. If you had a paper due, you handwrote your essay. It could be 3, 4, 5 pages long, but it was handwritten. And so I did end up taking typing. It may have been my junior year that I did that because I remember typing a lot of things I wrote during my senior year, and I ended up with a little column in our high school newspaper, which was sort of a free verse little column. I also worked on our student news, our yearbook too, so I had journalism classes and took forensics, things like that, and debate. I remember taking debate. I was terrible in debate. I didn't understand what I was even getting into.

But anyway, I was trying to. I was trying to plot out a different path for myself. And even shen it came time to pick college colleges, I applied to a local college or a college that was in Missouri. It was a state school in Missouri, and I just assumed I would go there because I was definitely getting out of town. There was no way. My sister attended the college in our local town, but there was no way I was going to do that. And suddenly, when I heard how many other kids in my class had applied at that college, it was just like, Oh my God, I can't have college just be an extension of high school. I have to go where I'm brand new and my life can be brand new, and I can meet new people.

I asked my dad about going to the college he had gone to Oklahoma Baptist University, which was in Oklahoma, because it was out of state, and you didn't have to pay out-of-state tuition. At the same time, I hadn't had the opportunity really to mourn my mother and the loss of her very much right after she died. It was more like I was kind of in a state of shock after that and did everything I could to keep myself from thinking about it.

I think which is why I was so close with my friends, and kind of bury myself and activities of involving them, staying busy, you know.

So, he was delighted that I would choose that, and so I ended up going to school down there, and I really know in hindsight part of that was to sort of resurrect her. To be in the same dorm where she was and the same classrooms there. There were new buildings that had been built since she had gone, but I knew some of the older buildings were the same ones that she had been in.

My freshman year, I was actually only in the freshman dorm for just maybe about a month because they had over overpacked, overcrowded that dorm, and I was staying actually in what was called a guest room which is where they put visiting professors or families, if parents came for the weekend or something, and it wasn't on a dorm hall. It was off of the parlor part of the building of the dorm, and it had its own bathroom, which was very unusual, because everybody else shared one in the hall, but they wanted to get that room available again. Kids enroll in school and can drop out, you know, and shifts happen within the first month or so. So, when a space came up in the upperclassmen dorm, I was moved over there with another freshman girl, and we spent the rest of the year in that upperclassman dorm.

But I knew when I was first there that I was in the same dorm that she was in. I didn't have any idea what room she was in, but I can remember walking the halls and thinking about her being in the same hallways and wondering if they had black and white linoleum all down that was what the halls were on all three floors were paved with or floored with. I remembered thinking, I wonder if that same linoleum was there, and it had such great woodwork. It was just a beautiful, beautiful dorm, and it was on the oval part of the campus. You pulled in and drove down a long oval. It was right on the oval.

I knew these stories of my mother going home on the weekends, and then on Monday morning when she was going back to school, my grandfather would make her ride in the grocery truck that was making deliveries from the wholesale house, and so she would have to ride back to college in the front cab of this grocery delivery truck. She was always so embarrassed about that. She just hated that, hated going back to school in that truck.

My father had also told me that this campus was surrounded with rock walls and it was kind of on the, I believe, the north edge of the town it was built in, in Shawnee, Oklahoma. And when he was there, these rock walls were sort of the edge of the campus, and he and my mother would sit out on the rock walls and watch the sunset and the sun setting in Oklahoma, and he had described this to me before I went to school there. Because of the dust in the air, these sunsets were beautiful. They were kind of probably like they are in Arizona. They're very red and fill up the whole sky. So they, I would do that. Sit out, being there.

And there were several people professors that were there that she had been in class with that that had gone on, and that remembered her and knew my father, you know, when he was there. But that's really why I ended up going to school there, I think. Because it was far away from Liberty.

Kate: There were a lot of rules there, though, for women. I was very shocked by this.

Mom: Oh, yes! Well, yes, it was very different than had I gone to the state school because women had a curfew. You also had to always wear a dress. Women had a curfew. It was either 9 o'clock or 10 o'clock on school nights during the week, and weekends, I think, was midnight. It may have been midnight, 11:30 or midnight, and

I ended up getting in with a really fun bunch of girls there, too, that were older than me because I lived on their hall, the hall of the dorm. But they were kind of rebellious, and I seem to always seek out the rebellious kids that are not coloring in the box, those that colored outside of the lines.

We ended up with sort of a little core group of these girls, and we all had trench coats. Trench coats were very popular by then. And a trench coat, I don't even know if you guys know what that means to have a trench coat, but it's a coat that you could wear in the rain, but it didn't have a hood on it, but it was waterproof, and was kind of an off-white canvassy color, usually with a belt that tied at the waist, and they were about the same length as a dress. So, we would wear those trench coats with our cutoff shorts underneath. So, that was how we would go around campus wearing cutoffs and not be in trouble was because we just would always have our trench coats on. So we were like a trench coat club.

Kate: And something about going to dinner, where you had to have a certain number of people.

Mom: Oh, of people, yes. Well, there were two places you could eat. One was in the girls’ dorm, where I was staying, and that was family style, and in order to eat family style, you had to have six people at your table. So, you would have to gather together as six people that would go down and eat, and everything was served family style for those six. We could also go over and eat in the boys’ dorm. In the basement of the boys’ dorm was another cafeteria where you just was like a regular cafeteria, so we always walked over there and ate. It was like the nice girls that went downstairs and ate family-style.

Kate: And actually, they had bed check, right?

Mom: Oh yes, they had bed check.

Kate: A woman would come around and make sure you were in your bed. That’s crazy.

Mom: Yeah, I know, I know. The lights would flicker, too, because lights were out like at 10:30 or something like that, and bed check was a little bit after 10pm. Maybe we had to be in at 9pm, and bed check was at 10pm. And each dorm, each floor, or every so many rooms. I forgot what they were called, but they were kids that this was their job, like their student work job. Kind of be the person in charge of that end of the dorm, and they would have to do the bed check at night.

Kate: Oh, they did it. Okay.

Mom: Yeah, yeah, where they would. And so this was at a time when girls wore falls, which were kind of like half wigs that would fit on the back of your head. And so everybody, or any girl that had one of those, also had a little form that it sat on on their dresser, and the form looked like a styrofoam head, a bald head, and so they would stick their fall onto the.

Kate: On the pillow. Yeah. Well.

Mom: They would see, stick it onto the head form with these little pins, and so if somebody was sneaking out of the dorm at night, they would borrow somebody's head and stick it in their bed with either the fall on it. Or if you rolled your hair with rollers at night, there were these little cloth caps that you would put over your roller so they could stick the cloth cap over it, and then they’d turn it sideways toward the wall, so it would look like they were asleep in bed.

Kate: How did you sneak out, like you just?

Mom: Well, you wouldn't come in. You wouldn't come in, and then your roommate would cover it for you. You couldn't sneak out. You'd have to already be out, you know. I mean, that didn't happen very often, but it wasn't. Or if or if you were in some other part of the dorm, you know. We had another thing that we did where we went up in the attic at night. This dorm had an elevator in it, the kind that I think you had one in your elevator at Vassar that had a --

Kate: Like a lever thing that you?

Mom: It had a gate that swung across.

Kate: Yeah, yeah.

Mom: And the gate had to be closed in order for it to engage, and it was notorious for people to take the elevator and leave the gate open, and then whoever needed the elevator would have to walk up and down all the steps to find it. But we would take the elevator up to the attic, and it was the older girls that knew about this part of the of the dorm that was an open space that the elevator would go up to, and when you got up there were lights in the attic, and it was a concrete floor that had painted stalls with room numbers painted on the stall.

Kate: Like for storage?

Mom: When you came to school, you could put your luggage up there, or your boxes that you moved in, and a lot of those had stuff that was left over, that kids had graduated, but never.

Kate: Just left.

Mom: Yeah. So, there was one little corner of the attic that was made up into a smoking corner that had old chairs. Kind of like reading chairs that had been drug over into this corner and crates and a lamp. And so there was kind of like a little group of us that occasionally go up there and just talk the night away, up there in the in the attic.

Kate: What happened with the phone incident?

Mom: Oh, my gosh! Well, kids played pranks.

Kate: Yes they did.

Mom: And so, this was a prank that was my roommate.

Kate: A pretty genius prank.

Mom: It kind of was, but it was long and involved, and I can't even believe that I got involved in it because it was so complicated to do. But my roommate who was from Oklahoma, she was the one that was the barrel racer, who was the Oklahoma state barrel racing queen one year. Her father worked for Southwest Bell, so she knew how telephones worked. You know the whole thing, and this is when there were no phones in any rooms.There was one phone in the hallway for every so many rooms, and if you were calling out or your parents were calling in, they would call that line, and whoever was around would answer it and then have to go look for the person and get them to come answer the phone. So, my roommate knew that if you unscrewed, well, the phones at that time had handles, one for your ear, and one for you to a speaker part that you spoke into. She knew if you unscrewed the speaker part of it, the phone. I didn't, most people don't even know that that unscrews, but it does, it unscrews. And she knew that there was a little disk in there that I guess was like the microphone that your voice went through to be amplified and go into the wires. She knew that if you took that out and put the phone back together. If you answered it, no one could hear you.

So, she got the idea that we should go around. This was at night, like in the deep, dark early. You know, everybody was asleep and the hall lights were off. The only lights that were on were the exit lights that glowed down the hallway. She had the idea that we should go around and collect all of those, and this was, I believe, on a Saturday night, so it would have been on a Sunday morning that people woke up and discovered the phones didn't work, so we went around and unscrewed those and collected all of them, and she had a Kotex box that we put them all in, and then we set them down in the front office of the dorm.

Kate: Oh!

Mom: Where the dorm mother spent her days sitting in this office, and we set them right down there on a shelf thinking somebody would find them. And so, then we went to bed. While we woke up Sunday morning in our room, we could hear all this hubbub out in the hall because people were discovering that the phones were ringing and they couldn't answer them, and nobody could call out. And it the situation, because it was on every floor in this dorm that was maybe four floors. It was a big deal, and they thought something was wrong with the phone lines. So, we're sitting in our room thinking, oh, my gosh! You know, we stirred up something.

Kate: Nobody figured it out, yeah.

Mom: Well, they didn't even know they didn't figure it out. And because they were just dealing with what was on the wall and what was not working on the wall, and so we hid in our room for most of the day, and then they ended up having somebody from the telephone company came out and figured out what was wrong with the phones and put new ones in all of them.

Kate: Oh, wow.

Mom: And it was maybe days later that they found the box down in the room. But that was like this horrible lie that we had to carry, the two of us. That it was us, and we couldn't tell anyone that we had been the ones that had done it. It was like a prank gone bad, you know that you couldn't get out of.

Kate: So you were never caught, or anything?

Mom: No!

Kate: Oh, my! Wow!

Mom: You know. Yeah, it was like, yech, an awful thing.

Kate: Felt guilty?

Mom: Oh, I still feel guilty. I don't even like telling you about it.

Kate: You've told me that many times.

Mom: Well, always under duress.

Kate: I know, I know.

Kate: So, what, did you have trouble in school with just like finishing your work? I remember you had problems with that or something, right?

Mom: You mean as a kid?

Kate: I mean you weren’t doing too well in your classes. No, I mean, like in college, like.

Mom: Oh, in college. Oh, well, I kept changing my major, you know. Yeah, yeah, I could never figure out what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be. And I did a lot of daydreaming, and I did a lot, and during that time I did a lot of writing it was, and I was really, I would have to say, during those years I was like. Today, maybe kids would call it anxiety or depression, but it came from feeling so angry about my mother's death. Feeling so angry about how it happened and then feeling so angry about my stepmother. So, those were like angry years where I was not a very good student, you know, for that reason, and then I was just unsettled. I had that horrible feeling of being unsettled and not knowing which path to go down, which direction to take, what was going to be happening next, and how to make it happen even, you know.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: So it was. I didn't want to go home, you know. I just didn't. I wanted to stay at school, and I went home that first summer, you know. But then after that, I always stayed at school for summer school. I knew that my dad and my stepmother were much happier when I wasn't at home, so I just tried not to be there.

Kate: Yeah, I remember you talking too about you didn't ever want to talk or tell new people about your mother.

Mom: No, I hated seeing that. Yeah, I also hated, I didn’t even want to say.

Kate: “The folks,” or whatever.

Mom: I would just say “my folks” because I didn't want to say. I did not want to say the word, stepmother. I just.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: It was like a painful word to say. It was to like a loaded word. I guess. Because it was a word that then was like, it had a story behind it, and I didn't want to say the story. I don't want to tell the story, so I just would say, “My folks are coming,” and leave it at that.

Kate: You worked in the library, right, at that time?

Mom: Yeah, I got a work-study job. And that really was like a pivotal thing for me to discover this. I mean, I had always been a reader before. And I did work in the library my freshman year in in high school.

Kate: Like your school library?

Mom: Yeah, yeah. Our school library. I was in study hall, and there was an older girl, I think, a junior or senior that was behind the desk, checking books in and out, which I thought, how does she get to do that? And it turned out that the that the librarian knew who I was. Because when I came into the library. She kind of ran the study hall because the study hall took place in the library. She came up to me and she said, “You're the last little Hall, aren't you?” And so she had known my brother and sister, which I didn't realize she did, and so she knew who I was, and so I always liked her. Her name was Mrs. Winkler, and she was an older lady with gray hair, and she limped. But I felt kind of loyal to her because she had been so nice to me.

I think I asked the girl that was working at the desk, “How do you get to do this?”

And she said, “Just ask Miss Winkler.”

So, I did, and she said, “Oh, sure, you can help.” So, I didn't have to sit at the table and be quiet. Suring study hall, I was able to shelve books and be behind the desk, and that was that's my story of how I discovered Catcher in the Rye because when I opened one of the drawers back there, I saw that book paperback book, and I was getting it out to put it back on the shelf, and the girl I was working with said, “Don't take that out. It has to stay in the drawer. Don't let Miss Winkler see you look at it. It's a bad book.” And so, she didn't use the word banned book because banned book wasn't a phrase that was used. She just said it was a “bad book.”

Kate: Bad, yeah.

Mom: And so immediately I was trying to figure out the title and what it was. And that summer it was over that summer. I think that my sister and I were in Kansas City at a drugstore, and I saw it in a rack of paperback books by the door, and she bought it for me, and I just. That's the year I discovered J. D. Salinger, and I read that book over and over and over again. Then I read every book of his I could find, and then my sophomore year in high school, I turned in a book report on it, and I knew I may be kind of pushing the limits, but I had such a cool English teacher. I was in the class that had the cool English teacher, and the other kids, other sophomores had the one that was real strict. I thought I did a really good book report on it, and he told me I did but that he couldn't accept it. He was sorry that he couldn't accept it, but that the other teacher would not accept it, and so it wouldn't be fair if he did. So that was like my second kind of introduction to what was a “bad book.” A bad book couldn't be accepted for as a book for your book report. I'll never forget that experience happening in high school, and how I felt about it. And then when I went to college because I'd had that experience, you know, I guess, which really wasn't much experience. Just had the word library in it. And I was applying, you know, for a work-study job. There was one in the library, and I was just, you know, we shelved books, and I had to do the 100s, 200s, and 300s. So that was, you know, philosophy and religion and psychology. And I was the worst, worst library worker for shelving books. My carts were always full. I was always getting a little talking to when I would go in. “You need to get those books out on the shelf! People are looking for them!” But as I was putting them back, I had to look at every one.

Kate: You wanted to look at them.

Mom: It introduced me to a whole new era, not era but area of thought and concepts and words and phrases that I never knew even existed. And the other thing about being in the stacks. These were tiny stacks because this part of the library had been built onto an old gym, and that was what the library was in and the stacks were very kind of compressed, so they were shorter. There were more stacks than there were floors in the building. It was attached to, you know, because they were shorter, and they had glass floors. It was the first time I'd ever seen that, you know, that they were so thick but they were glass, so the light would pass through, and just being in that kind of enclosed space and having all those books there, and it being a quiet space by myself, just was like I would fall into a hole and couldn't get back out of it, you know.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: But I did do that that whole year, and then well, I did that the whole time I was at that school, and I finally got to the point where I was able to work up at the desk, and I wasn't so responsible for my slow shelving. But and I the other thing I realized that was so cool about working at a library in college is that everybody studied there.

Mom: and everybody came through the library. So I got to see so many kids because they were coming through the library all the time. And I knew where the books were that were on reserve for certain classes, you know. Got to pull those reserve books out. But then I discovered the magazine stacks up in the attic. And so, once I discovered that, and once I discovered the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, that was such an eye-opener to me to discover those, and probably because I was shelving, you know, maybe, that that I discovered even what those were. I went through those year by year by year. And oh, I know another thing I did. Well, I was going to say that I went through those looking for articles, short stories that had been written by J.D. Salinger, that had not been published into books. But I remember at the school at the school bookstore, I got a book called The Catcher Casebook. And in fact, I think I might even still have that. But the kid. It was like whole sections, a little paperback book filled with reviews about, His writings by different, I don’t know--

Kate: Critics.

Mom: Critics. But it had such an extensive bibliography in it. So that was how I discovered that there were all these short stories he had written and published before he began publishing books, and because I knew that the stacks existed where the bound periodicals were, I could go in there and dig through them, and I would set up many weekends I would set up in the library in those stacks. They were so dusty and dirty because nobody used them. But I would be reading those short stories, because once you've read everything and there's nothing left. But you're still hungry, there has to be more. And that was a way to discover those.

Kate: Yeah, yeah. And what about the, something happened with Sylvia Plath when you were reading. I forget what it was.

Mom: Well, I was reading The Bell Jar. There's a section in The Bell Jar where, you know, where she had spent the summer working on a college edition of a magazine.

Kate: Was that Mademoiselle, or something like that?

Mom: Mademoiselle did that. I knew they did that college issue. I think it was Mademoiselle that did it, and in the story, you know, she's, they're doing a picture, a photograph of all the kids that had been there working that summer on the magazine edition. They were gathering them together for a photo, and she was late getting there. And when she walked in, they were all on a sofa. And she walked in late, and there was a vase of roses on the table, and she just picked up a rose. The character picks up a rose. I can't remember her name in the book now. Picks up a rose and sits on the arm of the sofa for the photograph, and I remember thinking. Oh, I guess I found out that she had worked on an edition of Mademoiselle when she was a student. And so, I went looking for that edition, and when I found it, there was the photograph that she had described, and there she was on the arm of the chair with the rose. It was like I had discovered this secret that nobody else knew what I found was what it felt like to me.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: Yeah, so.

Kate: You know how to find it in the library.

Mom: Well, yeah, that was the other thing. Well, it was such a miraculous thing to me to find all of these bound magazines. I didn't even know the phrase bound magazine until I discovered these and that that they would be preserved like that, and so easy to flip through and find, and it's just kind of the same way I felt when I discovered Granger's Index to Poetry, which I had never knew existed but once I did, it's like, every friend I had on campus, I had to drag them over and say, “Look at this! I can't believe this exists!” Because you could look up any word you could think of. You know, by decoding you had to learn to decode. And that was exciting, too, because It was like a secret code to be able to look at the citation and figure out what the year, the abbreviation for the book, the page number. It would show you where this poem was. It would always have, like the stanza, or the phrase that where it used the word in the poem. But then it would give you the citation to the book that they got it from, and to think, to me, when I thought of somebody, and it was like taking apart all these books of poetry and putting them together in a way that was findable. It was like now we would call it a database, but back then, that word didn't exist. But it was just.

Kate: Yeah. Somebody was doing all that work.

Mom: Somebody did it, you know, which I just thought was amazing, and to be celebrated, you know, I guess. But, so few people even knew it existed.

Kate: Yeah.

Mom: You know. So, once I once I discovered it, I felt like it was a I really had found a treasure.