Annette Spillane Interview

Interview of:

Annette Busse Spillane

Summary: This is an interview of Annette Busse Spillane. Annette Spillane was born in Chicago, Illinois on January 31, 1938. She grew up in a family of five; herself, an older sister, her mother and father, and her great-grandmother. Her great-grandmother emigrated from County Clair, Ireland and had a strong influence on Annette growing up. Ms. Spillane lived in Chicago until she was 23 when she married and had her first child. At this point she and her husband moved into a suburban community outside of Chicago. Annette Spillane went to a Parochial school growing up, and then moved on to college after high school. She went to Mundelein College, just north of Chicago, where she majored in chemistry and took a minor in education. She then took a job as a teacher in a Catholic grammar school. After she married and had her first child she left her teaching job to take care of her children. After Annette's youngest child was five she went back to work as an addictions counselor and stayed at that job for ten and a half years. Ms. Spillane had eleven children and all of them have gone on to college.

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

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

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

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

VS: And where were you born?

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

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

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

VS:   And where was she from?

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

VS: Was she your maternal or paternal grandmother?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VS: You didn’t have any brothers…?

AS: No, I didn’t.

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

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

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

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

[Door bell chime]

AS: So….

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

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

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

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

VS: Where did you go to school?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AS: I’d be glad to answer that.

VS: A happier topic. [Laughter]

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

VS: And you said you got married at 23?

AS: 23.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[End of side A]

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

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

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

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

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

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

VS: How did you end up paying for college?

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

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

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

VS: Where and what did you teach?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VS: What kind of jobs did your husband do?

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

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

AS: Well, you know, I guess that’s a yes and no answer. I was certainly not willing and maybe not even able to be a part of any social parts of his job, which were pretty minimal. I did support him in the extent that I was at home working every bit as hard as he. I don’t think I really appreciated all he really did for us until I went to work full time to support myself. And maybe he didn’t appreciate all that I did at home either. So…and yet I feel to the extent that we did the best we could and we certainly did that.

VS: What kind of stuff did you do within the household? Like cleaning wise or…?

AS: It was never clean…never clean enough. I guess the best I could say for myself right now is that looking back at the disorder that evolved is a forgiving attitude of self. When I have grandchildren over and I can see how quickly things can get turned around, I looked at what it must have been really like with eleven children all under, you know, eleven or twelve years. They were all kind of little together and different things happening is that I…I’d say the best I gave my children was a reassurance that it was okay to reach out and do certain things. I wasn’t perfect at it and yet I think it was ‘Yeah you can do that’. There was a lot of adventuring out into worlds that um…I knew I really had no control over. And so they had different experiences. Sea Cadet kinds of things and a lot of camping experiences that stemmed from going out on a lot of camping as a group. They were able to do a lot of building. They were willing to use full sized tools at the age of five and I was willing to let them. I wasn’t afraid. There wasn’t a lot of fear ideas around those kinds of adventures. And so it was more of an attitude than it was an actual physical setting up of things. It was more letting them have their freedoms.

VS: And in terms of your daughters, did you push them in any directions towards activities?

AS: You know, I have to go back to my previous answer in saying how imperfect I was. I was certainly imperfect in there too. Um…at times I wanted to control that group, even though at times I wanted to say go out and do your thing. So they had a kind of a yo-yoing existence with me. And…I was glad they were bright. I recognized that in all the young men and young women, boys and girls. And yet I think at times, maybe because of my tomboyish, my closer association to my father as opposed to my mother, I favored the boys and that wasn’t a surprise to the girls. You know, later as they became adults and took more risks with me, they’d say mom that was no secret to us that you favored the boys over the girls. And for that I can ask their forgiveness. I guess that’s one of the major old lady tools that I am grateful for now. That all of my children say hello to me and then many of them do more than that. And so there’s a lot in these questions that I’m not answering because the question is not being asked directly, but I know how grateful I am that they are all alive and I’m alive and that we have a chance to heal some of these early wounds from some of this early pushing and pulling that we did. Some of that yo-yoing I did.

VS: And in terms of things like, I know we talked about education already, but um…say your daughters dating, and they would have done that in, ‘cause of their age difference in different decades. The eldest would start in the ‘70s, the late ‘70s, and um…the youngest into the ‘80s. Did you see any…did you put different standards on them in their dating life or were you even involved in their dating life?

AS: I think that there would be the difference, again, some of these related questions, is that in some ways I worried more about the girls than the boys, which is not real sane to think that way. But I know there was more of a concern about that control where are you and what are you doing. I think what I know from what they talk to me now is that there were a lot of um…um…issues of being around and part of big family and having so many brothers and so the brothers knew the boys and so that certainly had an influence on the girls of all the ages, whether it was the oldest, the youngest, or the two in between. That their brothers were out there and they were big strong brothers. And so there was more of influence from that in my opinion then there was of me on them.

VS: In terms of what they would do, in terms of like uh…for higher education or in the work world, did you have any expectations for your daughters?

AS: Well, I think I had this for all of them and certainly my daughters is that if they wanted an education they were going to be able to get one. And while that was my statement, it was really through the efforts of my children, who are still teaching me today, they are really wonderful teachers to me, is that they did the footwork. They got out there and got the papers, got the forms, filled out endless hours of questionnaires. My husband was the one who was their standby guide who would tell them about these monies and information, these tax returns and reports and all the things they needed to fill these out. I really had no hand in that. I really credit them, the children and he, their father with getting most of that going.

VS: Okay. Um…and in terms of opportunities for them, do you feel they had more opportunities to expand?

AS: I do. I do. And as soon as you said that, what comes to mind is that because of their being in a big family, again my opinion obviously, is that they had to learn how to make their way very early. And there was a certain attitude about there was really nothing impossible, they had you know grandmothers around them and grandfathers. If there was a problem, you found the solution for it. And I see that in many of the ways they live today, is that something needs to get done, they do it or until they find out. They don’t sit back and say oh I don’t think that’s possible. I think they’re very much into yes this is very much possible. I think they are very much into solutions. And that’s in whatever kind of jobs they have. And so I think that’s an attitude that came from each other and being in the family they were in and being in the neighborhood they were in, they were going to credit that to, is that there is nothing they can’t do. And I see that today in the way they travel, in the way they say yes to life, and the way they take the ups and downs of life and continue to always look for a way to live it and not wallow in it or get stuck in it. I see them really as our current hope.

VS: And jumping back, the Vietnam War, we spoke about it briefly, but is there anything else that you participated in with it? Like your children were a little bit younger, but did you do any active work…?

AS: No….

VS: …to help them?

AS: No. No. I—I…. Looking back at my, you know, activism career, it was very non-present. I had certain things I believed in and um…would stand up for on occasion that it would arise. Like I said, a soldier being maligned on the street.   I can remember that. Only recently have I become more active. And I’ve been to the Vietnam War Memorial and have felt some of the pain of that and yet I have no personal—personal meaning, that no one in my family was there in Vietnam. I did work though in the addiction field of many of our clients or patients were from Vietnam. I got a great appreciation for the post traumatic stress syndrome idea. I visited with the traveling wall. Very powerful experiences. Beyond that, no.

VS: Oh…when did you start going back to work and why did you make that decision to go back to work?

AS: I went back to work when the youngest child was five and it was out of sheer necessity. My husband and I had separated…that summer of 1980. And while he was again a constant and positive force of taking care of us, now there were two households to support. And so I needed to get to work. And so I had done some part time work prior to that in the addiction field working in a court system, a DUI system, driving under the influence and having to interview clients on a part time basis and come up with treatment plans for them. And so the next logical step was to work at a hospital.

VS: And…is that…when did you stop working?

AS: I stopped working in 1992. Um…my husband had retired. We had reunited in a positive sense. It was wonderful and he wanted to travel. So I had actually burned out of my job. I had loved my job. But I had always believed if you couldn’t give your patients the very best of yourself you didn’t belong there. Sick people deserve good help. And so the combination brought me to ask my husband, I said I would like to retire also. And he said, you come on home and so I did in 1992. And I’m so grateful because he died three years later. Is this kind of the close?

VS: Um…not really.

AS: Or do you have more questions? Because I want to say something….

VS: I have more questions. I have more.

AS: …before I…. Okay.

VS: I have some more kind of general questions. When did your last child leave the house?

AS: um…. Golly. The last children that actually left the house after my husband died, and Richard died in 1995, so we lived in a small family house. It had been small, four to a bedroom and he and I were there alone.   And so, as I say, they were so independent, so able to take care of themselves, some of them still in school doing their kind of thing. They were all out of the household in 1994 possibly, the year before he died. The neat thing is after he died, a couple of them kind of came back home for a while, two of the unmarried children kind of came back home. And lived in and out, they lived in an independent way. And yet I am very grateful for the grieving process to have them a little closer.

VS: And since the time that your husband died, what have you been doing…to stay busy?

AS: I do stay busy. I have a great…I am a very grateful person. I am part of a um…that I will tell you is a twelve step group. I am very grateful to be a part of it. It has helped me integrate my life in very positive ways, because if you read the twelve steps of recovery in whatever twelve step recovery that you may be part of, you will see how positive they are, they are all positive statements of living. I um…feel I live a very rich life, being involved with the children, the grandchildren and the um…and a little bit of the, I say the peace movement. I don’t want to maximize that because I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be honest. I’ve come to appreciate the Declaration of Independence so much more. I feel we all need to read it and reread it. And I feel I’m more tuned in to the outside world. I need to maintain inner peace at the same time.

VS: Can I ask you to pause for a second while I change the tape? Thanks.

[Tape 2]

VS: This is Tape 2 of the interview with AS. And um…within jobs or just living, did you feel you were pretty mobile, like you could make decisions uh…Did you feel like there were a lot of opportunities for you to go?

AS: I did. And certainly just referring to the work experience in the hospital, and it was a local hospital, it was only fifteen minutes on the bus, and that was important to me. And that was one of the reasons they gave me later on and one of the reasons they hired me, they said you are close by and you obviously need to work and we feel you will stay here. They ran through a bunch of people in my position that had left after a few months. And I realize as I stayed at the hospital working is that they needed a consistent person. I valued consistency and so I was able to be there every day and glad to be there and the opportunities that were in my job were enough to see the patients day by day. I found that stimulating. I found it exciting. I found it probably fitting in with some of my tom-boyishness is that each and every day was different. And while certainly I had to do like to lecturing and things like that, the patients themselves were changing in front of our eyes each day. And so that was a very stimulating environment to work for.

AS: Could I have risen in the hospital field? I had no desire to do that. I saw being a boss sort of thing and moving away from the patients not something I would like.   I probably would have had to have gone back to school because they were beginning in those late ‘80s, I started working there in 1982, is that I didn’t want to go back to school. I didn’t want to do some of those things. Leave those to somebody who wanted to do those things. And I found our hospital unit, as it grew, we became a very big unit for our area, while we started with eight patients and ended with about forty in our unit for a while, is that was not my desire at all. Where I stayed, I wanted to stay. And so I would say the opportunities were limited in the sense of rising, but I received you know regular work evaluations, I got good evaluations at work and I got raises accordingly. And so I felt I was well paid for what I did. And men and women were both doing my job and so I didn’t’ feel any adversarial women versus men situations. I had a good job situation.

VS: Uh…you lived, it sounds like, all your life in an urban setting. Did you ever feel like you could live in a rural setting or did you vacation…?

AS: I lived in what I would call a country situation on weekends. We lived out in the lake area. It truly wasn’t rural. And I early on could see that farmers worked seven days a week and I didn’t want to do that. And so a rural setting would not have been on my list of places or things to do. No. I’m just grateful I grew up in the city and not a suburb. I feel I had a more expansive view of the world. I grew up with street cars. I had those being able to transport myself anywhere in the city that my parents allowed me to go, a lot of freedom again. Um…I took subways. I went downtown and visited big libraries to do research for different school assignments and I am really grateful to live in the suburb I live in because it was attached to the city and I feel the children have taken advantage of that growing up, getting on those same els and subways and exploring the city well. So…I’m glad I live where I live and I’m more glad I grew up in the city.

AS: Did you take trips to kind of acquaint yourself with a rural setting? Like later in life with the children?

AS: I did because my husband interestingly, although he grew up in the city, he had one little farm experience he said of summer, he was ten years old and had lived on a farm, he loved the state fairs. I mean loved them. He loved Wisconsin, which is very rural, at least where we were driving to camp and etcetera and maybe the camping experience a bit of the rural setting. We lived more primitively. We lived all in a tent. All thirteen of us in one tent. And um…there were no faucets or running water and things and we had faithfully…my husband said they must know about cows. They must know about pigs. They must know how smart those animals are. We would eat dairy products in Wisconsin state fairs. It was just…I’m so glad he brought that experience to us. One of my sons currently lives in a farm setting. It’s wonderful to drive out there. My husband and I would take rides out to the…it’s truly the farming country. He loved it. He loved the peace that the fields and the birds flying over that field brought him. He never had any desire that I know of to live on a farm.

VS: And where does your son live now?

AS: He lives in a um…DeKalb County, which is very agricultural. Although it’s changing rapidly. Lots of land is being sold off and developed.

VS: Did you have any relatives that were true rural, like in your family?

AS: No. I think um…just looking back, and I know I’ll get a chance to talk about the grandmas, I don’t want to, you know, belabor that, but they were such an integral part of my life, is that growing up in Ireland I believe they were very much a part of farmland and valued the um…in Ireland, I guess, the meager living that it brought them. Yet the principle of hard work that they brought over from Ireland with them and you know, the Potato Famine and the horror of that. So much more than agricultural, but political. And they kept their wits about them. And I can remember one of the amazing little things my grandmother did and taught me, more by doing than by saying, but she used to say Annette if you have a pound of potatoes and your neighbor is hungry, you give them half a pound. And you feed your family with the other half a pound and then God will take care of you tomorrow.

VS: Um…did you participate in any feminist movements?

AS: No. I did not.

VS: Did you recognize certain movements throughout your entire life as being feminist?

AS: Yes. I remember, I think, again, it was a little more of bit being at Mundelein, it was an all girls college and it was right near the time, I graduated in 1959, close to that time in the early ‘60s, things just started coming unglued and certainly the church circle that I was familiar with, the constantly in that was starting to change drastically and of course, now the Vietnam War was happening and people were starting to protest, I was at home with a lot of little children. I am telling myself I was not involved in that movement. Women were struggling more and more for equal rights. I remember doing a lot of reading on that, but still not…I was busy.   And I did not pay attention to a lot of what was going on inside of me in a lot of these particular movements.

VS: Do remember what kinds of equal rights they were struggling for? And the general time-frame?

AS: The big thing that I thought of then was equal pay for equal work. I certainly knew I believed in that. Again, coming to a place where the women worked as hard as the men and the men worked with the women and did all kinds of jobs, is that that certainly was common sense, that they get paid for what they were doing.

VS: And in terms of women’s fashions, how has that changed throughout your life?

AS: Well, so many images come to mind from what my grandmothers wore. They always wore dresses. They always wore work dresses when they did the physical work of cleaning the house and cooking and all of that. They always wore a dress and put a hat on when they went out. I grew up wearing hats. Easter bonnets and even in early marriage which would have been the early ‘60s I had a wonderful hat with feathers that I thought just made me beautiful. I don’t wear hats anymore. I like my head free. I don’t even when I ride a motorcycle, which I don’t drive, but I like to be on the back of one occasionally, I don’t like to wear a helmet. I like the freedom of not doing that. I’m not saying that’s best. I’m saying that’s what I like.

AS: Uh…the fashion that has influenced me the most as I look back is that I pretty much wear uniforms day by day, black kind of exclusively inside and out. And I laughingly knew why. I grew up with religious sisters that wore back all the time. And I remember thinking when I was very young in grammar school thinking they can go anywhere in their black clothes. They don’t have to worry about getting dressed up. They just put on their black clothes. They can go to the dance. They can go to the dinner. They can go to the social event. They’re dressed.   And I know that has remained a strong influence on me. I think black is great and can go anywhere.   So it’s what I wear. And the most changed in fashion was seeing my mother begin to wear slacks. My mother always wore dresses. And then one day, she retired, she never wore slacks to work. And when she retired, and my mother lived to 93, slacks became the order of the day. And so I value my blue jeans that I grew up with.   And I value my slack and pants that women wore today and that I wore today.

VS: How do you feel that the styles changed for the general group of women?

AS: I like the fashions of today in that they are so eclectic, they are so individual. I see artistry in everyone’s life and in everyone’s person. And so they express it in different ways, in clothes. I think both men and women express their artistry. So whether they’re wearing black, cut-off jeans, things with holes, I like it.   I think the more the merrier. Even my husband is much, even a business situation he was in, if they wanted long hair, they could have long hair. If they wanted tattoos, they could have tattoos. You know, God bless. I’m grateful that for not putting a lot of emphasis on hair styles and on kinds of dress.

VS: And the technology for the household, how did that change throughout your life?

AS: I think the biggest things for me was going from the electric washing machines with the ringers where you were committed to that basements and you know putting your clothes in and out of the ringer and the rinse waters and pulling back up to the regular machines that we have today, the automatic machines. That was huge. I can remember when I got my first set from Sears. They were Kenmores from Sears and they lasted, I remember eleven years, the same washer and drier, which I thought I doubled the amount of wash I did. Seven washes a day. And the ease at which the children could be doing the laundry. I felt that if they could take apart their bikes and build buildings that they were doing at the age of six, then by the age of six, it was time for them to wash their own clothes, and that was probably the biggest help. That and getting a second bathroom in our house after the twins were born. It was wonderful. I really very much appreciate bathrooms.

VS: And marketing to women, whether through clothing or certain products, how do you feel it has changed?

AS: Well, you know, growing up with working women, and even my grandmothers worked outside of the house because they came from Ireland, they worked on the Southside for other families that had more money than they is that um…I think my pictures of people from the ‘40s and ‘50s were people with cute little aprons on, you know, looking very feminine in a kitchen. And that was never my view. My view was very double boilers and pots of coffee and get the bacon fried and then you went on and did other things. And I think that the advertisement magazines and other places, TV of course, um…geared themselves toward many faceted women in the clothes and the backgrounds and things they put in their ads.

VS: Um…jobs outside of the home, for women specifically, do you feel that it has opened up and like in what fields?

AS: Oh…in my experiences, mainly now through my children and grandchildren is that I think a lot of things are said to be opening, but I’m not certain that they are because of the abuse that comes verbally and behind the scenes possibly in some of the specific situations that I know about. I think it’s still the greatest country in the world. I hope it remains that way. I think as, again, we need to read our Declaration of Independence out loud so we hear ourselves and hear others. I think there is still a great patriarchal bully system. It’s around in a lot different fields. I think there is a lot of David and Goliaths going on. And I often think the Davids are correct, but I don’t always think they have their weight slingshot for the giant. I think we’re in a crucial situation in our country where I think we need to take a strong look at what democracy is and being a republic and what that means. We’re losing some very basic freedoms that very concerning me. I’ve lived my life. I’m sixty-six. I have very real concerns for not only my children who are now moving into their forties. Um…the youngest being thirty, but for my grandchildren, who reap the benefits of the freedom I’ve enjoyed.

VS: Do you have any specific concerns you’d like to talk about?

AS: I’m concerned about what we have taken the term “terrorism” and to what level we have taken it as an excuse for losing some of our basic freedoms. I am very concerned about some of this home rule freedom security system. I keep my written materials from some the peace walks I’ve been on etcetera in a folder so if they come to my door, I can say you don’t have to tear my house apart, here it is. Here’s what I have. The um…things that we will do in terms of terror often promote rage is um…I’m concerned of us mimicking the history of Germany in which they got to the children, such as the Brownshirts, which is something I would hear about as I began to do a little more reading as I got older. Get the children.

AS: I saw the movie Killing Fields. Movies have had a big influence on me. Don’t go after the family. Go after the children and have them go after the family. I’ve seen the reports of some of the African atrocities and how the children are encouraged to destroy family. That concerns me here in our country is that we cannot give up these freedoms. Some of the old quotes we oh that was just quoted. No, that’s an old quote is be careful of our long term goals so we don’t lose it through our short term goals. So I fear that the right to speech, free speech, is being greatly hampered. I’m concerned about the gigantic company control by different names. I’m concerned about the consumerism that’s going on in our country, hard to find things that are made in the U.S. of A. that look for them. I have to pay more for them. That’s okay because often, I’m very willing to do that. But I don’t use a lot either so I’m not knocking the people that buy more cheaply. So I have concerns. Yeah, I do.

VS: Um…when did you start having these concerns or was there ever a change?

AS: I think really the death of my husband finished a section of my life at that point, in 1995 and beginning more and more my children’s exposure to the outside world and having them talk. They began to have an influence on me. I saw my children, some of them going through very difficult life situation changes and standing on their own two feet and speaking up for themselves more and more, being something that was teaching me I needed to do more of that also. And don’t always have the background that many of my children have, but I feel I do know a little bit about freedom and about what I’ve enjoyed because of that. I do know I benefit from my husband’s involvement in the work field because I benefit by getting his pension money. And I think our children are not going to be allowed that. I think they will do a lot of things differently.

AS: And so, you know, I’m grateful today to be a single woman. I moved out of the widowhood. I took me about three years, I still miss him, my husband, that is. I am grateful for this opportunity to learn more about me. And I’m learning that, as I say, through the family. I’m learning that through the generational family. I credit that a lot with the grandmas. The “swirling grandmother energy” I call it. I’ve a re-appreciation of my mother and my father now that they’re both dead. Um…I appreciate through my church because I believe I can stay within an established church while not agreeing with the hierarchy in many situations. I believe the twelve step program and its positive attitudes toward living have also become more integrated in my life. So I am grateful, although I get lonely at times, is that I am grateful for who I am at this very moment.

VS: Do you have any concerns for women in the future?

VS: You know, I don’t know exactly how to answer that as simply as I might like to, as I do believe in the keeping it simple philosophy. I know I’m proud of the women in my family. I’m proud that my granddaughter is sitting across from me and her willingness to step out and go after what she very much believes in, what she is very much interested in, what I believe she very much loves, history and all that ramification. I think learning about history is a wonderful way to appreciate the country we have today, the positions we’re able to be in. My concerns for them, you know, would be the outside forces that I’m concerned about that I feel are taking away from liberties, will cause them to have to step up even harder and faster at great risk to themselves or submit and go more subtly downward. I haven’t given a lot of thought to that except for this question coming up. I think though they’re up to the task of whatever it’s going to take as women. I think they have great history preceding them, not history they’ve always agreed with, not history or actual life situations that were always easy, but I think they’ve learned from the good and the difficult as well as the bad. So I think they’re in for the long haul in a good way.

VS: And you mentioned the death of your husband as having a great impact and kind of an ending of a whole life. Were there any other kinds of moments in your life where you kind of just stopped and looked how you changed as a person?

AS: Well I think the big ones for sure the leaving of home and moving in to another life home with my husband, the birth of the children and the amazing creation of that. And again, repeating myself, the involvement in the twelve step program has been one of the most positive outside influences on me. I’m hopefully busy digesting and living each day. But I would say what comes to mind and continues to come to mind is his death.

VS: And um…women in your life, we’ll start with your family…What kind of impact…you lived with your great grandmother? What kind of impact on your life as a woman did she leave?

AS: She was amazing. Um…and I’ll start with this story real quick. I was asked to draw God once by, I was an adult. I was in my thirties and this women across from me asked me to do that and I started drawing and who I drew is God…as God, was my great grandmother. And I didn’t realize I was doing it until afterwards when Oh my God! She has stout shoes on like my grandma does…did. And I appreciate that idea today because God as a concept as a higher power is very important to me because I believe that that kind of energy, Godlike energy, creative energy, higher energy, is that which feeds me moment by moment. I am very, at times, very aware of how important that is to embrace the moment. And I saw my grandmother and my great grandmother and my mother doing that.

AS: And so those women, my mother in a more negative sense, but I struggled with my mom a lot. She tried to control me I thought. And my grandmas did not. I was mightily influenced by that. I was influence by my grandmother’s healing ability.   I didn’t realize it what she was, but she was a midwife in Ireland. I didn’t know that term. I just knew that she helped people have babies and she did in this country as well and they respected her, my mother would say. The doctors would respect her and I realized that healing energy is in my family. A lot of hands on. So that kind of influence very important. I saw my mother-in-law, she called herself a swinger, and she very much knew how to enjoy life in a different way. Traveled and encouraged children to do that. Try knew things, try knew foods. My mother-in-law was very important.

AS: My grandmother had an amazing ability to accept the death of children. Many of her children died before she did. And uh…she was able to get through that and still smile. She had a wonderful, wonderful smile. Certainly the women in my family. My mother was deaf and as I look back I see that incredible energy and when you talk about technology, she wore a hearing aid that had six batteries that weighed about a pound each and she carried that on her back on her special backpack that she hid under her dress and she would wire herself up. She almost looked like a walking time bomb to allow herself to hear a little. And she made her way in the world with that amazing handicap, I guess you’d call it. But she never called it that. She’d always say Annette you always learn more about people by watching them than by hearing what they do and what they say. And so those kinds of influences are big for me.

VS: Is there anything you would like to say in general about women’s experiences?

AS: You know, I’m grateful I’m a woman, even with all the tom-boyishness of my life, early life especially. I was always grateful I’m a woman. And whether that came from the creative energy of being able to look back and say wow, eleven children or it was more the influences of grandparents, grandmothers, my own mother-in-law, now to see my grandchildren. I think there is a, in my words, a hierarchy, a word I don’t like to use often and that is of being a human being. And there is just a wonderfulness to um…you know having lived these decades. I’m grateful for the decades I’ve had. I jokingly say to myself to learn my new phone number is its 9417. I hope to be 94 and I’m not sweet 17 anymore and I wouldn’t want to go back to any of those years. I’m grateful for the years I’m in. I’m grateful for the moment I’m in. I’m grateful for the day I’m in. I’m grateful to be smiling to Victoria across the table from me. Maybe she knows most of this. She has a great love of history and family history. She is, I call her my family historian ‘cause she does it a lot with not only her words, but her photographs. I hope she continues to do that. And I’m just grateful to be me today. So thanks.

VS: Okay. And uh…I have a consent form giving permission for other to listen to this interview and use it for scholarly research and if you are still willing to sign it…

AS: I will. I’ll be glad to sign it.

VS: Thank you.

AS: The scratching you hear will be of the pen.

AS: [Signing the consent form]

AS: Interviewee.

VS: And on behalf of Mary Washington College, I’d like to thank you for participating in this project.

AS: It was fun. Thank you.

VS: And best of wishes in the future.

AS: Thank you. Blessings right back.