Oral History Program Robin Denise McCann Phelps Interviewed by Amber Phelps 18 June 2008 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Robin Denise McCann Phelps Interviewed by Amber Phelps 18 June 2008 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Phelps, Robin, an oral history by Amber Phelps, 18 June 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Robin Denise McCann Phelps. The interview was conducted on June 18, 2008, by Amber Rae Phelps, in Robin’s home in Layton, Utah. The interview concerns her recollections and experiences growing up in poverty and how education helped her break away from the “class cycle” that some members of her family still live in today. AP: Where were you born? RP: Cleveland, Tennessee. AP: And on what date? RP: December the 7, 1957. AP: And who are your parents? RP: Don McCann and Joyce McCann Schnneitman. AP: Okay, Um. We are going to do our interview today on class conflict and the class cycle of American history. Um, what class do you believe you grew up in? RP: I was a member of the working class poor. AP: And when do you think you first new that you were poor? Around what age? RP: Probably second grade, third grade. About seven or eight. AP: Okay, What were some of the characteristics or experiences that you had that made you believe that you were poor? RP: Well, my parents were hard working people. My father was, really, a work-a-holic and still works hard today. But they married as teenagers and they weren't educated, so the skill that my father had, um, he worked hard at it. And also he didn't believe in having debt. So, what property we lived on had to be paid for, we never had a house payment or a 1 mortgage growing up. The house that we lived in was really a two room shack. There was a kitchen, but no running water. Urn, and the extra living room had a fold-out couch my parents would sleep on that and my brothers and I would sleep in a baby bed or crib. Um, my parents, my father, every evening would carry water from either a spring, that was a couple of miles away, or he would go to my grandparents' house and he would carry water in a big, five gallon, tin can. And I just remember, um, when I was five and old enough to start helping with dishes that we would heat a pot of water on the stove and pour that in a pan and you would wash your dishes in that and you would rinse them in a pot of fresh water and then the next day the rinse water became the dishwasher and we bathed with sponge baths in the kitchen until summertime, then we would maybe get to go swimming or play in a creek or something like that to get clean. So, no bathroom facilities in the house, we had an outhouse. Um, I grew up in a community that was extremely poor, um, lots of drug addiction, um, we had living on both sides of our property, my family owned maybe a couple of acres, but on both sides of our property we had bootleggers. Um, and so having bootleggers on both corners of your property often times intoxicated men would walk through the back of our property line. So growing up my mother was very, very protective of me and I wasn't even allowed to play in the front yard without permission. Um, I was never allowed to roam in the neighborhood and our parents car-pooled us to a different school, actually, as well so that we weren't in a school that had so many problems; we used our grandparents' address. You know my family worked hard, when my third brother was born my father built an extra room onto our two room shack and it became a three room shack and now my parents 2 had their own bedroom. And, um, me and my two brothers would sleep on the fold-out couch then and having cupboard space or closet space those kind of things, wasn't accessible in this particular house and so we had a coal burning stove. We did have electricity. Um, at night my father would tuck us in. He would pull open the fold-out couch and me and my younger brother would be at one end and my older brother would be at the other end. And my father would put one blanket down and then, because we were short on blankets he got all the clothes in the house and he would put the clothes on top of the blanket and then he would put another blanket on top of that and sort of tuck it in around us. And that's what we used to stay warm in, because during the night the fire would go out and, uh, it would be pretty cold in the winter time and, uh, my dad would get up early in the morning and build a new fire in the coal stove and get the room warm before we would have to get up and go to school. My younger brother and I said that we got the bad end of the deal because my brother's stinky feet were always pointing toward our heads growing up. But we didn't really realize we were poor at the time. And, uh, we had close relationships with grandparents and cousins. Um, and so we really, at that point, I really didn't realize that I was poor. When I was in about second grade my mother had stepped on a nail and we didn't have health insurance so we weren't ever able to go to the doctor and get health care. And, uh, her foot was swollen and she probably needed medical care, but didn't have it, and she was in bed. We didn't have a telephone and I got sick at school and the teacher had to drive me home and of course we even lived out of the school boundaries, um, but the teacher drove me home. And walked inside our house and because my mother had been in bed for a week our house wasn't as tidy, my parents were very proud people, and so, 3 you didn't have people over unless your house was in order and everything was cleaned and picked up. Um, things were not in order and I remember my mother being very embarrassed and humiliated and ashamed that we were poor and that this teacher had come into the home when it wasn't looking very good because she was sick and in bed and couldn't afford to go to the doctor. Uh, and that was probably the first time I really recognized that there was, maybe there was something different about my family, that we were poor. Um, because my mother's reaction to that. And then as I got older that became clear to me, but I probably didn't feel the effects personally of poverty, really, until I started the junior high years of about sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, when it became important to dress a certain way or have clothes, and of course I didn't have access to that. Um, so during those years I increasingly realized that I was poor and didn't really have anything. I remember my mother's relatives coming to visit and my uncle bring his new wife to our home and again, you know we had, we had four rooms by then, I guess it was a four room shack, when they came to visit, still no plumbing; it was like bringing a city girl to the country, and I remember my parents being very embarrassed that she was going to have to use an outhouse. I think she just thought it was pretty novel that she was coming to see hillbillies and that probably everybody in Tennessee had an outhouse, when, in fact, they didn't. Somewhere in my elementary years, probably around fourth grade or fifth grade, um, my father dug a water line. The water line was very long out to the street, um, I would say he dug about half a mile, maybe more, to pipe water to our home. Uh, and it was a huge event when we could get cold water in the kitchen, uh we never had hot water, but it was a big event when we could finally get cold water on tap in the kitchen. 4 Um when I was in the seventh grade, tragedy struck our family. Our house burned down, we lost literally everything. We were incredibly blessed that none of us were in the house, but the house burned and everything was lost and you couldn't really make out anything, even the contents in the refrigerator were gone, disappeared. That was a pretty traumatic thing for my family. Um, we were blessed in that my father had five thousand dollars of home owners insurance and we did own property. Also, during the time one of the bootleggers had passed away and my father had acquired his property so that another bootlegger wouldn't move in beside us and so, uh, my father built us another home. Again, he was a very, very hard worker. We lived with my grandparents, um, and I think, again, I was about the seventh grade; you were very sensitive about what you wore and those kinds of things. Because my family was hard-working and very prideful accepting things was not an option. We were not a welfare family. As a matter of fact, uh, it was so extremely so, that we were not the welfare family that there were many winters that we actually were hungry, uh, because the industry that my father worked in, every year after Christmas. AP: What industry? Sorry. RP: He was an upholster. He upholstered; built furniture. And the industry would really disappear because nobody buys furniture after Christmas and he would be laid off. Um, those were really hard times for our family, but we were never able, other families would go get food stamps, but not our family. We had to rough it through, because my father would not receive help. And so watching my father sort of not ever receive help, not ever wanted to get assistance that way sort of really made a mark on my mind in some way that it was wrong to receive. So when our house burnt down, we had nothing, um, we had 5 to receive. And, um, that was extremely hard on me, personally; I don't think it was as hard on other members of my- brothers and sister-but people would bring clothes and all sorts of furniture items and donate those to our family, which was very helpful, and you would think that I would have been very grateful, but I would go to school and friends would come up to me and say "oh, Robin you have on that dress I gave you!" and they would be excited and I would feel extremely humiliated and embarrassed by that. So I would always try to figure out where clothes had come from and try to pick clothes that wouldn't have come from my school friends and I really had a hard time all the way through college, if anyone would buy me something and it wasn't my birthday or Christmas I was extremely uncomfortable, even just with gift from boyfriends or friends, I had a hard time accepting anything. I look back on it now and of course my friends were just thrilled and excited that they could help, the whole school pulled together, they raised money; but for me it was the most humiliating experience to try to receive assistance and help during that time. Um, when my father built the next home, again, it needed to be paid for. Uh, but it was still in a very impoverished, criminal, drug-infested, kind of neighborhood. But, it did manage to have hot and cold water and a bathroom, uh, and so actually, in the long run, it probably was a good thing in that we now had a home that was at least standard. When we lived in the other home I remember having cousins who lived in the housing projects, actually. I used to beg my dad for us to live in housing projects because to me, the housing projects seemed to be like rich people. Uh, I thought they had much better living than we did. And my father would always say "we can't live there because we own our property." But to me, 6 it was like sell it and lets move to the projects, because those people have hot water, cold water, and they have a bathroom, they all have bedrooms, and we don't have that. AP: So, when, did you ever, in those situations, did you make a conscious decision that 'I don't want my future family to live like that?' RP: Well, my father...I...my father was a work-a-holic, and I was sort of like him. My mother worked hard as well, but she was a homemaker. But, I was a hard worker like my dad and my dad used to always say to me "someday you're going to grow up have something," "someday you're going to live in a nice home," and sometimes when we would drive through nicer neighborhoods he would turn to me and say "someday you'll have a nice home like this." So, really my father instilled in me that I could do better and that I would have better someday. He didn't really tell me how to go about doing that, but he sort of instilled the hope that I could do better and he repeated that to me on many occasions. AP: When did you get your first paying job? How old were you? RP: Well, when I was fourteen, I was in high school and again I needed to wear clothes that everybody else wore, that weren't hand-me-downs. So, I was tired of relative's hand-me-downs, so at fourteen I went to town and start applying for jobs. I lied and said I was sixteen. I got hired at a pharmacy working in a restaurant at fourteen and uh, for a couple of years. When I turned fifteen, the pharmacist leaned over and whispered in my ear "congratulations Robin, you are finally legal" and he thought that I was turning sixteen and that I was finally legal to work in his shop, but essentially I was fifteen and still a year away from being legal. And of course, he gave me more responsibility after that. I went to work in the shop in the pharmacy; literally I was working in a pharmacy at fifteen. Good thing nobody ever audited his records. But I started working and I worked hard so I could 7 get myself to the dentist and take care of my dental needs. Take care of clothing, get myself a car, and just do the typical things that high school kids did. And, worked two jobs to go to college and just worked hard ever since then. AP: When did you make the decision to go to college? Do you remember how old you were when you thought I'm going to go to college?' RP: Uh, because my parents didn't push education too much, um, I didn't really think about college probably until close to maybe the very summer after my junior year. Maybe, I had friends who were talking about going to college so I began to think about it just a little bit. But I think the thing that really pushed me to college at that time is that I converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the missionaries there said "you've got to go to BYU." And, uh, I thought more about college, uh, and decided to go ahead and apply; didn't know how to do very much of that, but I figured out how to apply and how to apply for financial aid. I got accepted at BYU in Provo and I got accepted to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. My parents wanted me to go to Knoxville because it was closer to home, but I chose to go to BYU Provo. AP: Was it hard for you to leave your family and was it hard for them to watch you leave? RP: Well, um, they didn't want me to go and opposed it and actually forbid me to go. I did graduate from high school at seventeen and I suppose legally they could have stopped me from going. They didn't want me to leave home and be-they did not approve of my choice of religion. I grew up in the Protestant south; the Bible belt, where everyone was Baptist or Church of God and so to them I was joining a cult. And, um, they opposed it. My parents eventually forbid me to even speak about it. So I just didn't speak about it with them anymore, I just continued to work two jobs and I got financial aid, um, two or three 8 days before I was to leave to go to BYU Provo I started packing my clothes and my parents said "what are you doing?" and I said "I'm leaving Monday and going to BYU Provo." It was difficult for me to go because my mother had had health problems and she had been in and out of the hospital so, it took a lot of courage for me. It was agonizing actually to leave home, uh, because I had been the oldest daughter, I was very responsible for younger brothers and sisters, who called me "mamma." So, it was really difficult for me to leave my family. But, it was the best thing I ever did in my life. AP: So what universities did you end up going to and with what degrees did you receive at those universities? RP: I graduated Brigham Young University with a Bachelors degree in sociology and a miner in psychology. Um, and graduated a few years after that with a Masters degree from the University of Utah with a master’s degree in Social Work. AP: When you look at your family's circumstances now in Tennessee, your brothers and sister and your parents, do you believe that your education has helped make the lifestyle you live now possible? RP: I think education is the key out of poverty. When I look at brothers and sisters and um, there are nine of us total now, most of us are an adult, but the higher the education you have financially the better off the families are. So, some of my brothers and sisters still live in low economic situations; even though they are hard workers. Um, and they work very hard and some of them work harder than we do; it's just their jobs don't pay as much. My sister in her later years got a nursing degree and of course that improves her income. So, you can look at my family and look at education and the higher the education the more income people make in my family. Half my brothers didn't even get high school diplomas 9 and they make less than those who get...who have high school diplomas. So, the gamete is sort of there in my family and you can see it based on education. AP: Okay, not many people break away from the class cycle, usually if you are born into working class you stay in working class, if you are born in wealth you stay wealthy. Do you believe that if you hadn't finished your education that you would still be in that working class today? RP: Yes. I would probably still be working in a factory and pretty much... I think that I, because a lot of factories now are required to have health insurance, well that's changing, when my father was working in a factory they didn't have health insurance, so I think I would probably not ever have to be that poor again- with not having health care, adequate housing, heating, no water, no plumbing-I don't think I would have that circumstance, but, um, certainly I wouldn't have as many opportunities as I do now. AP: How important do you think education is? I guess you have already answered that... RP: It is vital. It gives economic stability in your life and providing for you homes. I think the education you have the more it increases your earning power in society. AP: Okay, thank you so much, Robin, for your time in this interview. RP: You're welcome. 10