Oral History Program Deana Froerer Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 3 September 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Deana Froerer Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 3 September 2019 Copyright © 2022 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii 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. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Beyond Suffrage Project was initiated to examine the impact women have had on northern Utah. Weber State University explored and documented women past and present who have influenced the history of the community, the development of education, and are bringing the area forward for the next generation. The project looked at how the 19th Amendment gave women a voice and representation, and was the catalyst for the way women became involved in the progress of the local area. The project examines the 50 years (1870-1920) before the amendment, the decades to follow and how women are making history today. ____________________________________ 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 This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Froerer, Deana, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 3 September 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Deana Froerer 3 September 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Deana Froerer, conducted on September 3, 2019 in the Stewart Library at Weber State University, by Lorrie Rands. Deana discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Alyssa Dove, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: Today is September 3, 2019. We are in the Stewart Library on the Weber State University campus with will you say your name for me? DF: Deana Froerer. You can pronounce that anyway you like. LR: For the Women 2020 project here at Weber State University. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting and Alyssa Dove is working the camera. Deana, thank you very much for your willingness. DF: Thank you for the opportunity. LR: Let’s start with when and where you were born. DF: So, that's a long time ago. That was in the middle of nowhere in Kansas. I grew up on a farm in the far corners, the farthest reaches of anything normal, considering like airports and all that, near Dodge City, Kansas, in a little town called Spearville. All our roots were right there, so my grandparents and my parents and my aunts and uncles and cousins and my eight siblings. So I was the youngest of eight. That's how I got this name Deana, they were running out of names, and I had a sister named Dee, and to think with number eight they named me Deenah, not Dee. I was the end of a long line of a lot of people that 2 were very interconnected in a very small community out in the middle of nowhere. So I grew up on a farm. Classic. LR: Are you comfortable sharing what year? DF: 1965. LR: Okay, you’re only ten years older than me. DF: Yeah, I’m not that old. I’ve never been old. I’m the youngest, you never feel old if you’re the youngest of a long string of people. There’s always older people around. LR: So, 1965. The month? DF: January. January 27th of 1965. LR: You are the youngest of eight and you grew up on the farm. So, this is going to be a silly question. What were your parents' names and their occupations? DF: Well, Sylvester VanNahmen was my dad and my mom's name was Louise. That's this funny last name I commented on where I am now with Froerer, but that was a Dutch name, so V-A-N then capital N-A-H-M-E-N. My dad said VanNahmen and my mom said VanN-ai-men, so there wasn't even consistency on that. They were your classic farm family, so she kept the household running and he kept the farm going and between the two, four girls and four boys. They had four farmhands outside the building and four fannhands inside the building, and it was a very traditional growing up experience. LR: Were they a generation Kansas, I mean, were they from Kansas? 3 DF: Generally first generation. My mom was first generation, her dad had been born in Gennany. On my dad's side, he was second generation, but my grandmother had been through the Oklahoma land rush. Born in a classic dugout in Nebraska, they were just really "of the earth" people. Very much all farming roots. A lot of German and then a little piece of Dutch roots, which was very enlightening for me because I just never felt very Gennan. We had a long life of believing the story was, this VanNahmen was really VonNahmen and then when our grandfather came over he changed it to “Van” because it was easier for the Dutch to immigrate than the Germans, but that wasn’t true at all. We found the VanNahmens and they’re right on the Holland-German border, and we went to visit that and there are these wonderful Dutch people that are lively and not as stoic as my mother. But anyway, there’s some Dutch roots in us which, as funny as it sounds, that was a very happy moment for my sister when we found out that we weren’t just these stoic Germans, cause we didn’t feel it a lot of times. Growing up on the farm in Kansas, it's not luxurious, and Kansas it's just windy, hot, dry, cold, snow, or windy, bad weather every day. So it was a pretty rugged life. There wasn't a lot of income strata in this small town, it was a very German, Catholic community, so everyone basically had the same roots and the same look. In the center of the town was this beautiful Catholic church, and that's where all our social life rotated around and all out neighbors and everyone, that was the world of it. It was very, it was idyllic and also, not something would I like to go back to in terms of the weather, the limitations. It was small town America. Very small. 4 LR: What type of fanning did your father do? DF: Wheat and cattle. Dryland farming, so you don't care about irrigation and all that, it's just, if you had a good year in te1ms ofrain, you had a good year. If you didn't have rain, it was a bad year. A lot of adapting. He was raising eight kids in that situation, that's what I was always observing, was his ability to make it work. Cause you couldn't count on crops, and the cattle. You're very dependent on markets outside of your control. So that faith was underlying this whole community and really key in living with that all the time, cause everybody was living with the fact that cashflow may not be good this year. But we will find some way to get through it, kind of thing. So it was a very hopeful people, very faith-built, based people. Out of there you just learn that it's out of control. Much of life is out of your control, but roll with it anyway. LR: What were some of, as a young girl, what were some of the women that you looked up to and why? DF: Very small tight-knit community. I don't know that I ever thought of women separately from men, as people to look up to. Cause there was a lot of, there's gender equality, despite the fact that it was also very patriarchal and matriarchal requirements. There was a lot of strong people, just in general. One of the first things that came to mind was the family that owned the grocery store, called the “merc”. Zelma Knoeher was to me like the epitome of someone who had it all. They had access to the whole grocery store. They had more affluence, they were like the rich family. Their neighbors, the Petz’s that dad was a banker instead of a farmer, and those wives were involved. It was equal, like Zelma 5 worked in that store all the time, too. There wasn't a lot of women that were not strong. It just felt like they all had to be strong in what they were doing all the time. It was like Garrison Keiller used to say, "Where the women are strong and the children are something, slightly above average," I don't know. But the women were strong out there. So when you ask that, I don't know. I didn't think of anyone, there wasn't a strong sense that men and women, somehow, in my mind, had any greater or lesser quality, it was just what it was. LR: That’s great. DF: I've not been asked that before, but that sense of everybody had a role to play, nobody dropped the ball much out there. So even if you didn't have a lot of enthusiasm for what needed to be done, that added to the, "Stoic Germans would do it anyway" kind of thing. LR: So as you’re growing up on the farm, what were some of your responsibilities on the farm? DF: I drove a tractor, drove wheat trucks, fed the chickens, gathered the eggs. My brothers clearly, with four and four, they clearly had an outdoor role that was important. They had to go feed cattle and be much more. There were male and female roles, but there was not a point where, if something had to be done, you didn't mix those roles. One really strong memory that kind of illustrates how my dad wished it was, that my parents were gone at some point and it was calving season, so our cows were having baby calves. My next oldest brother, we're the youngest, we're the only two home at the time and he said, "You've got to come 6 help me, this cows having a problem, and I need help pulling this calf." In my mentality, it wasn't anything I was probably not even a teenager yet, eleven or twelve, and he's probably fifteen or sixteen years old. So I go with him out to our fa1m and you get these contraptions and you've got this cow having a calf and you're putting these ropes around, these cables, and you're cranking this to pull the calf, literally, because the cow can't give birth on her own. We just did it, you know? Here I am, I don't have a lot of history of functioning of all these body parts, but nonetheless, this was pretty obvious what had to be done, crank, pull, get it done. My dad came home, and he was so disappointed in my brother, "Why did you take her out there? She shouldn't have seen that, she shouldn't have been the one doing that." So in his mind that was definitely not something a girl should have been in, even though he fully expected him to take care of it. So that’s as much of a, I guess we would say, a gendered sort of nature that I ever saw in my dad, was that particular event was just too much. Maybe it was just my younger age, I don’t know what about birthing that cow, he was nervous I was going to get out of that, or not get. But the world was such that you just did it. LR: Right. What was it like, not that you have any comparison to any other place, but going to school in this small town? What are some of your favorite memories of school? DF: It was so small, 29 in my graduating class, I would probably name all 29, still have contact with them, so we were intimately knowing these people. One of two came in during high school, and I could name, Dan Wilcox comes right to mind, Dean Noaasz came in junior high, but most of us did everything together as part 7 of this community, practically since we were very little. You had your stream of church moments, like any faith does, so we did that together. We had First Communion, Confirmation, these sort of things together, so by the time you’re in school, you really know personalities and pecking orders become pretty clear. Over achievers, under achievers, certain families have certain natures or stereotypes, I guess. I was the youngest of eight, I was the VanNahmen family, so there was a certain expectation that went with that. You just lived it, you sunk into it, and we’ were oblivious. I think I was largely oblivious while I was there. I guess you'd almost say we were part of our culture. People couldn’t really escape almost. Al of us graduated from college. My cousin’s didn’t, but there was just a slightly different nature, my dad really pushed that, my mom didn’t not push it. That alone got us all to college. George Geisel was the youngest of the Geisel family, he was going to be the one to put on the beer parties. There was the family that would take care of putting on events, could put on a spaghetti dinner in a heartbeat, there was a lot of nature for people to compartmentalize and yet it made things simple. It was a very simple world, there wasn’t a lot of complexities or outsiders, per se. We were almost all on the inside of that circle. It feels like that made it easy to just do what we did. So we did everything, you were talking about Title IX. I was in track, I played basketball. We didn't have volleyball until right after I left high school. We didn't have musicals but we did have one, the junior play and the senior play, and we would do that. We had student government, I went through 'til I was president of student government just because that’s what I did, that was my world. Plus I played in band, sang in the 8 choir. We did it all. There was nothing else to do in this town. It was a very not distracting world, so school activities and church activities were integral. LR: Ok. You've kind of already answered this, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Were you encouraged to pursue an education? DF: So subtly. We joked that my mom and dad, their best ability was to tell us, "You can't do that. What are you thinking?" So we'd fight for it. So my dad didn't have the resources to send us all to college, but he had the farm, so he had the boys not only cut wheat but then become custom cutters and cut for other people. There was a swimming pool that was built when I was .... five years old in our town. I'm an Aquarius, so I'm a water person, but anyway, I worked there every summer as soon as I had my life guarding certificate, I put myself through college there. We all worked during college. That's back when you could work and afford college easily. So yes, we were given the tools. It was much more my dad than my mom. He wouldn't even say, there wasn't like mantra, "You've got to go to college," there wasn't any. They both had gone a little bit, neither had graduated from college. For whatever reason, they instilled that peacefully, very subtly. Like, "What are you going to do?" "I don't know." That didn't encourage or discourage, but my dad was always pushing the pieces together. That's what I look back and see his make sure resources are being built up. LR: Where did you go to college? DF: Washburn University of Topeka, Kansas. Have you heard of it? LR: Nope. 9 DF: Washburn, is often on a top ten list of weirdest mascots in American. The Ichabods. Washburn University Ichabod, so I was an Ichabod. That choice was pretty purposeful, I was the youngest of eight and Kansas has the university of Kansas at Lawrence, and K State University—Kansas State University in Manhattan. All my siblings, that I said went to college and got their degrees, started at the local community college, Dodge City Community College. That was just the path, and then they went to K State, KU, and Fort Hays. Another one went to Wichita State, so they spread out over the state universities, and I always had this nature to just try something; not follow their path. Mentally, it was just like, "I want to do something different, cause I know what that is, I've been here, I've been there, I've done that." So Washburn was left, and it was also in Topeka, which is the state capital of Kansas, and as I said, I was in student government and had that mentality, so it was like, “I want to be in Topeka, Kansas and I want to go there,” and then they have a law school, which Bob Dole was one of the graduates, Nancy Landon Kassebaum was the first woman senator in the US, so it had sort of a little cache for a Kansas farm girl, if you wanted to be in that world. So I thought I wanted to be an attorney, even at some point thought I wanted to be in politics, I don't know where that came from. I do know that Washburn was it, that was the one school left that no one else had gone to, so it was like my little nugget in the world. It's not a state school, it was actually at that time one of three municipal universities in the US, meaning it was owned by the city of Topeka, that's why it was called Washburn University of Topeka, Kansas. So it's kind of a cross between a private 10 and a public sort of mentality. So it had some taxpayer funding, but not a very big base. So I just put my mind on it, because it was different. So I did everything I could find out to get scholarships, I went to the campus tour and thought, "I want to work in that office," so first day on campus I went to meet the guy who ran the student affairs office and introduced myself and like, "I want to be one of your campus tour guides," and like, "We've already got enough hired," so then I went to talk to the dean who had recruited me and said, "Well, he said he wouldn't hire me, will you help?" I had that nature, if I wanted something, if I wanted to go a certain way, I kept pushing ‘til I got it. So Washburn treated me very well in that period of my life, because it was far away, four and a half, five hours from my home. I tried the dorms the first year. Unlike any of my siblings, I went into the sororities, cause it only had four sorority houses, it was just very unknown to me. I knew nothing about it, so that made it intriguing. I’ve always had that, I guess, nature to want to try something no one else could tell me how to do it, because they didn’t know. That served me super well, very well. You have four houses and they all have very different personalities, and I migrated to the one that had the least reputation, I guess you could say, for excellence, cause then I knew I could easily excel. I always looked for the easy way to get what I wanted. Back door and things. It sounds like a really lazy person. LR: I understand. DF: It was just a way of figuring things out. So that really served me well, I was right on campus, that house, by virtue of being an overachiever and being employed 11 on campus. I’d gone there, as I mentioned, to study political science and that instantly bored me, because it was like, there’s just nothing going here that really is challenging. It’s just like, “know this side or that side.” There was a lot of writing, and I like to write. My first business class was such a surprise, cause I’d grown up on a farm and we didn’t talk business at all. I knew what livestock was, we had “forty head out on the west place,” but I didn’t understand stocks and bonds and all those thigns and I was just fascinated, and I like numbers. So that first class with the dean from the School of Business, and Intro to Business that I just took cause I was intrigued, was a total game changer. I was like, “Oh, I so much like this better.” You know, it’s numbers, it’s got some direction, it's got some sort of measuring stick sort of thing to it, so I changed my degree very early on, dropped the political science mentality and then to business, and then economics, that came out of that. I’d never heard that word, we didn’t have any AP classes or anything in high school. So that big word was fascinating, and the professors there, I just migrated to their nature and it taught me a lot and then all the doors opened along the way, it just made sense. Then I wanted to get the heck out of Kansas and found out about their study abroad program to Denmark, so I went to the University of Copenhagen, back when there was still this thing called, “The East ‘and’ the West”, and so we were studying East-West business, and we travelled then behind the Iron Curtain at that time, to Hungary and Czechoslovakia. That just opened up a whole ‘nother set of doors mentally, about how big the world was. I wrote a paper on technology transfer that later got me to Stanford University to present at a 12 Pugwash Conference, which was this whole nuclear proliferation question, resulted in this still existing organization called Pugwash, which has always tried to sort out how we share information and technology. So, that world opened up doors. It was just fascinating, I was always having a good time, and first year dorms, second year sorority, third year study abroad, fourth year all these pieces were coming together about where to go next. The only place, out of that education, the only place I wanted to work, after understanding, going abroad and US money and banking system, was the Federal Reserve. I wanted to work for the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Reserve has twelve districts, and the one was in Kansas City, which was about an hour and a half from Topeka, Washburn. Occasionally their economists would come over to give a lecture, and I had them on my radar, “This is where I want to work.” I’d go listen to them, I’d hand off my resume, be polite because I was form a no name university, I didn’t have a master’s degree, I was nothing they were looking for. But I kept knocking. So I graduate, I don’t have a job, and my oldest sister lives in California—so I’d gone out there for this Pugwash at Stanford University, I’d been out there with my way paid, and I just stayed. I’m searching for a job, which at that time, Bank of America was big, interviewing. Had a job offer… was it Bakersfield? Yeah, Bakersfield. Edwards Air Force Base. So, I had opportunities, and I’m like, “Man, Edwards Air Force Base is out in the middle of nowhere, that’s going to be a fun, new job. Not.” So I’m just pondering what to do, the summer after my senior year, and the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City called, and I’ve always joked, they’re like, “Ok, we have this little pot of 13 money, it’s for research, it’s only until the end of the year, we don’t like you, we won’t hire you, you have to sit in the closet, we’re giving you no benefits, do you want the job?” I’m like, “Yes. I’ll do anything to work at the Federal Reserve.” So that was a door that opened up so many more doors after that. So this six month “pot of money” turned into a full time job at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in Economic Research. So I was from this no name school and I didn’t have a master’s, and everybody there practically had a master’s degree or better. Everybody’s in economic research, they’re research associates and I was a research assistant in the Money and Banking group. These are all beyond my capabilities, everything I was doing, in the sense that I had really no idea what I was getting into until I got into it, but it went great. I had the best time ever. So I got a job at the Federal Reserve which was my dream, in economic research, and huge data sets, this is when inflation had just been a big deal, it’s when the stock market crash of 1987 had just happened, it was a fascinating time. I was kind of a deer in the headlights as far as background, but I was winging it, that was kind of my forte. It went well, really enjoyed it. That’s how I ended up in Utah, actually. A nice young man graduated from Ohio State University, who was originally from Huntsville, Utah. He ended up working there in the same research department, with his Master's degree from Ohio State, and here I am from Washburn with my podunk economics business degree from a no name school, but that's where we met, was in Kansas City. We meet there, we're both working in kind of a pretty ideal situation, and once again, to shake it up, he had studied and worked in Taiwan, and I'd had this experience 14 in Copenhagen. It's like we want to go back somewhere else again, so we both were supporting each other. In college I had tried to get abroad to study after my senior year, doing the Rhodes scholarship, I was a finalist but not a winner, and Fulbright, and the Marshall Scholarship, all these big scholarships, I tried for those out of this Podunk school without success. So after I worked at the Federal Reserve awhile, it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to try again.” So I go for the Fulbright grant, and this nice guy from Utah, talked him into applying too. So we both, playing the odds once again, we found a country where the language requirement was virtually nothing. It was new so it had quite a few openings, and it was Hungary. The Berlin Wall was still up, but Hungary, Budapest, Hungary. I had travelled there in college, and so I had this one little link that I’d been there before. Then we made connections in Kansas City with the bank and with the University of Missouri there to a person that was travelling there regularly, trying to build a sister university sort of situation. So we got letters of invite from behind the Iron Curtain to come be Fulbright scholars. So we both applied to go to Hungary. We’re both working full time at the Federal Reserve and I won, and he didn’t. We got married so he could go along. It was great. So we got married and a week later we left for Hungary. We were getting along really well anyway, but that kind of sealed the deal. So that's how we ended up in Hungary. I was a Fulbright Scholar studying their system of housing finance. This was in August of 1989 is when we got married, we left the same time, and the Berlin Wall went down in November of 1989. So we landed just when the turmoil was just this roiling and exciting as it 15 could possibly get. The protests and the movements to "Gorbachev, take down this wall," was just said at that time, so the Reagan era was hot and happening about how we were going to change the world with democracy, and we were there! We show up from our national central bank, from the US, from the Federal Reserve, they were like, “Wow.” That was cache for them because they were about to try to figure out how to start a banking system, how to allocate—not just distribute goods, but how to allow money and market systems and banks to work. Their banks were just places to deposit money, they had a savings bank idea, but it wasn’t a bank anywhere like our financial system to move money, loan it here, while it sits there. So it was incredible timing while we were there and we wrote very simple courses, I taught a course on how to teach between the lines, how to understand the stock market, cause they had no concept of private ownership, so they had no idea that you could own a company, but they were moving towards that, that's the next big step they could imagine now, is they would start to have ownership. So teaching them what a stock quote was, we used three cereal companies— General Mills, Quaker Oats, and Kellogg’s—and showed them. In fact, I was getting the Wall Street Journal there, so I was literally showing them how to look day after day and see why the stock prices change, and by the little news story about Quaker Oats just got a new CEO or something, so they could see the news made prices change. It was so fun. So we ended up working with something called the International Training Center for Bankers, my husband and I both, it was a brand new French-Hungarian joint venture, they were all into joint 16 ventures, they wanted to get whatever knowledge they could and whatever resources they could from the West. So we worked there teaching and coordinating a conference for the US Agency of International Development. So here I am, I don't have a Master's degree yet, I'm just from a small time school in Kansas, but I happen to be over there and the US Agency for International Development is trying to figure out who and where to start to bring aid. The Wall was going to go down, "Who should we talk to, who do we know?" So it was called the International Conference on Housing Finance for Central and East European Countries. Through a very quickly developing network of people-we had people from Latvia and the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, Armenia, all these countries, they took like this, the so-called "housing ministers" from these countries and invited them to come to this conference. Jack Kemp was the head of the Housing and Urban Development at that time, and he was supportive and the embassy was supportive. So we put on this massive conference with four different interpreters and I was the coordinator for this conference right after the Berlin Wall went down about how housing works in the whole East Bloc. Cause you know, on the outside we didn’t know, it was like nobody really knew. So it brought all that together and it was a wild time. That was my Fulbright Hungarian experience. LR: Going back just a little bit, I'm curious as to having grown up in a really small town that you did, what was it like moving to a larger town to go to college, and then every time you moved it seemed to be to a bigger and bigger place? How did you deal with that? 17 DF: Never looked back. I never thought about that. I always loved learning a new city, whatever the community of the base of people I was in, I sink into people, I like people wherever I am. So I don't think so much about the place as the people and ... I see them as ... a gift right in front of me. It's like, "Oh, you're the one I get to know now." I'll roll with that. That was a nice progression actually. Going over to Copenhagen was quite a cultural shock, just cause I hadn't had that much of a change, so public transportation and little things like that, but I adapted. Just because that was kind of what we did, even right back to pulling the calf. It's like, "You do whatever needs to be done," figure it out. So I think that made it easy. I never really felt like I had to stress about a new place that much. LR: Ok. Did you face any challenges as you were going through college or when you first started into your career? DF: I hope I've expressed, I feel incredibly fortunate along the way. The doors opened, I feel like I had a strong radar sense about where to tum, and how to make things happen. I never was intimated by the structure ... that couldn't be changed. A lot of opportunism. A lot of reality, but also a lot of sense that if you want to get something done, you just keep watching. I mean like my 1110111 didn't want me to go away to a four-year university, why not just do two years? Go to the community college first. No. Then the same with going abroad in my junior year, she was like, "Just wait till you could go to graduate school." No, I'm going now, so, I think the fact that they always challenge us not to do it, always reinforced that, "This is my decision, I'm going to have to do it right." Sink or swim 18 sort of thing. So the challenges were there, but not insurmountable ever. Kind of a lot of crashes along the way. LR: I have a question: what were your career options after but you really kind of talked about that. So, you kind of answered this. But going to Hungary when you did and realizing that you were-were you there in November, when the Berlin Wall fell? DF: Yeah. LR: What was that like? We talk about that, I remember what I was doing here in the States, I was still in high school. But what was that like to be actually living in that history? DF: A little surreal. I mean, truly, we were teaching, when we first arrived with the Fulbright program, we were first assigned to Karl Marx University, so we started right out deep into Marxism as we could get. It was sort of a fairytale sort of thing almost, you walk into this beautiful building and huge statue of Karl Marx and you' re sort of going, "Wow, they really buy into this ... " So economically, that's what they were celebrating, and yet the people were clear, day one, the first tour guide you know, "Change money, change money." All those things, they were understanding economics from the personal point of view of bettering our lives and we were assigned housing in these classic concrete structures that characterized Communism, these huge towers of really crappy apaiiments. That wasn't going to work for us. So we start working the underground, the Black Market as it was called, for all goods, and got a wonderful apartment on one of 19 the famous hills of Budapest called Gellert Hill, right close to downtown and paying dollars, cause we had that advantage. So it was fascinating to be there then, cause we were there when they pulled down the statue of Stalin, but we were also there when you had to pay a few coins, forints, they were called, to get toilet paper in every bathroom, cause everybody had a job. Everything of Communism was still alive and well in tenns of that economic system of Socialism, and then everything was alive and well in trying to figure itself out in terms of moving to a market system. So it was a fascinating time to be there, and just example after example would pop up. Who had telephones and who didn't, and then all at once, brick phones, and the advent of cell phones, it was like, "They're going to totally skip all the phone wires in this country, they'll never need those." Because everybody would be able to go to a cellular phone. So many things about it, just said, "Wow." Probably the kind of the game changer was that. So we'd been man-ied in August. We were applying to stay another year, cause it was fantastic, and we were very fortunate, the embassy people were like, "Yes, we would love to have you stay, you have this housing conference going together," and then I got pregnant. And here we are in Hungary and that just was like, the hospital, the medical care, it was so amazing to have a reason to go in the middle of it. The first time I walked in the hospital, this cat goes running across the stairs and you're watching people where you just know they're going to die right in front of you cause they look so sickly. Then you walk through and there's these long wards and, this is where the women all had their babies, 20 and they stayed for two weeks when they had a baby and it's like "You shouldn't stay in there for a day! It's not sanitary." And we have a picture of my husband the first time they did any sort of blood test, and he's carrying the vial of blood and they tell him, "Go down there, take it this way." My husband's just literally walking, and sanitary is everything here, we would never hand the patient the blood to go drop it off at some lab, so it was a little like, deer in the headlights moment. So my husband had more of a problem with that than me at that point, he was like, "We'll just go back home and have the baby there." "Ok." It was just meant to be. It was great, but it was such another element of the experience, is that realizing what we were leaving behind. Then to come back, it's definitely colored. It was beautiful for my husband and I, because we had this first year of marriage, where we had no in-laws, we had no conflict of family moment at all, except for those that were brave enough to come and visit us. We just saw the world in a lot of poverty, we saw just how many people did without and we learned to do without. We learned to eat beans and rice and how to cook when you can't get ah old of just everything all the time. So it made us just more unmaterialistic, it really took that out of us fast, and when we came back and how many, clean snazzy gowns, the first OB/GYN clinic I went to, I'm like, "Overkill. You really don't need this much perfectly sanitary paper, over and over and over." I mean, it's nice. It was amazing the resources that we saw here. That's a lot of resources, they probably could have gotten by with a few less. It was good for us. 21 LR: So how long were you in Hungary then? DF: August of ’89 ‘til about July, June or July we came back, of ’90. LR: Ok. So, when you came back did you move back to Kansas? DF: No, initially we went to Florida. I had family down there. That’s were my first son was born, was in Florida, Pinellas County. We instantly found Florida unbearable, winter, summer, spring, fall, happened all at once when it was hot in Christmas, it was like, “Oh, this will not last well.” So we only stayed there about six months and then by next spring, we now had this young little guy, and it’s like, “Well, we want to be near family. Choices are Kansas or Utah.” Well, I had seen both and was easily able to pick Utah at that point, cause Kansas, once again, the wind, the flat, lack of scenery. I had no problem at all feeling that this was the place we should go, if we're going to be near family. But we moved here when he was about one, and that's when I finally went and got my Master's degree, from the University of Utah. We did consider Seattle, I’d gotten into the University of Washington, and worked with a professor there at the Federal Reserve. Could have gone there easily, but having the little guy was like, “oh, no, we’ll just go with family.” So we came back here after that, we moved every year for five years in our first five years, and after that we never moved again. We got settled in my husband’s family’s childhood home. That’s been a big part of our story, is that we’re kind of linchpin sort of thing in the family for holding that, for better or worse, very old but wonderful home, kind of the family home. So that’s kept us quite grounded, our kids have all been raised there. It’s worked really well for us here in Utah. 22 LR: So, having lived in so many different places, what was it like moving to Utah? Was it a very different type of place? DF: It’s always been good. We did ground ourselves, as I mentioned, I was born and raised in a German Catholic community, and I was very unfamiliar with the LDS faith, cause I didn’t grow up with it, I didn’t have anything to go off of that. M y husband’s family was pretty entrenched in it. Once again, I guess just being a counter-cultural person, it livened my faith, in terms of being Catholic. We did quickly meet people, where we live in Huntsville that were affiliated with the Catholic Church. There wasn’t even a Catholic church at that time, there was a monastery. So the monastery played a huge role in my peace and joy all these years. Still very connected to the monks. So it seemed kind of funny that I would land in Utah, and our home was actually almost the logistical center between the monastery, and then when they built the St. Florence Catholic Church in the valley, I’m centered right between the two, one mile basically either direction, a mile and a half, whatever it is. So that part of my upbringing carried here, that I knew how much I had community growing up and my kids had to have that too. If we were going to find that, we’d have to work for that a little more, cause it’s not as common as it was where I was growing up, where it was just a given, that we did that peacefully. LR: So when you went to the University of Utah, what was your master’s degree? DF: MBA. Master's of Business Administration, stayed with the business, emphasized real estate, even before I knew that the Froerer 's were deep into real estate, I 23 had an interest in that, it was kind of a good match. I also just hit a lucky window there, that there was a period of time, it was traditionally two or three years to get an MBA, and they were just test piloting whether, if you had an undergraduate degree, how much of that they would count towards the Master's, so like this letter comes and said, "If you take these two classes this summer, you can finish your MBA in one year." I'd be happy to take those two classes this summer and finish my MBA in one year! So that was just one of those nice package deals that all at once, in a very painless year when my son was about a year-and-a-half to two-and-a-half years old, I was just studying hard for a while. The MBA program was peaceful and short, had no problem there, and then there was a gentleman from Salt Lake who had just come back. This was after, in the 80s, there was this huge meltdown in the savings and loan industry, and there was the Resolution Trust Corporation, and they started the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation-actually didn't start it, but this was this whole government entity to guarantee loans. This guy Dick Pratt, Richard Pratt, had been a professor, sort of a part time guy at the U, and he'd gone off and been named, I think under Reagan, to be the chair of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage-he'd worked for Merrill Lynch, that was his order of events, so he had been head of mortgage banking for Merrill Lynch and then he got this job for the government as chair, when everything was a disaster with the industry, and he happened to be wanting to come back to Utah the same time I graduated, and some of my professors introduced me to him and I had just done this conference, 24 months earlier, in Hungary with the US Agency for International Development, and he 24 was all gung-ho, and though, "We ought to be bringing these people over here to learn how to do mortgage banking." So we found each other and started a company, so right after I finished my MBA, I became president of Richard T. Pratt Associates, and we started bringing people from the former Soviet Union to Salt Lake City, and we would give them these seminars on how to finance, homes. So we would take them out, talk about construction funding, and savings and loan organization, and he had all the contacts, so like the head of Goldman Sachs and he was with Freddie Mac, Fanny Mae and all these people were his buddies—cause it was pretty much a man’s world in that sector—and anyway, they would come out here every year and put on a big skiing conference called, “Mid-Winter” and bring out all these people to speak, so it was kind of a TED talk situation of the olden days, where they’d come together. I got right in the middle of that, and then this corporation formed so he could get consulting money and live in Utah and do a little bit of what he liked to do and have a business. So that just fell into my hands right out of the MBA program, it was pretty fun. Making money, started a company, was rolling with that. His daughter had been with Fanny Mae and she moved back, and at the same time was getting some recruiting opportunities in Utah’s very small economics market. I forgot to mention that I had worked with the Bureau of Economic and Business Research while I was going to the U. Thane Robson, I doubt you know him, he’s died some years ago, but he was the “Godfather of Utah economics” and when I met him, when I had just moved here, we just got along. He hired me right when I moved here and I worked on their publication, it’s now called the Ken 25 Gardner Institute, I don’t’ know if you’re familiar with that, at the U, but that’s nowt he economic institute that used to be the Bureau of Economic and Business Research. So wrote for them, I did research with them while I was doing my MBA, that’s how I got tied into this opportunity with Dick Pratt when he moved back. So that small community of Thane, there was guy named Kelly Mathews, who was the chief economist for what used to be First Security and became Wells Fargo, bought up by Wells Fargo, and Jeff Thredgold was the other big name economist and he was a PR economist for Key Corp. So I knew all of them very well and this opportunity arose with Key Corp. They needed a vice-president and regional economist to work with Jeff Thredgold he was the chief economist, and I didn’t have my PhD like all these other people did, but he didn’t really want a PhD, he wanted somebody that could do the public relations, do the writing in a down to earth kind of way, so I became a PR economist, basically for Key Corp. So I travelled for them across the northern half of the US. Their banks stretched from Alaska to Maine, and when he didn’t do the speech, it was too small a speech for him to think it was worth it, I got sent to give speeches to bank customers and at conferences. So I became a PR, public relations economist for Key Corp for a couple years. Lot of fun. I had not done that, but I had my three-year- old, four-year-old, and then I had my second daughter, she was born in the middle of all this. So I was a travelling mom with kind of a high profile job, it was challenging and fun. Then the banking crisis came along, I so everybody 1 got rid of their economists, so that job went away. “bounces” There was lot of 26 balancing, between learning, companies, and opportunities, to travel. So then I became a full-time mom! But I always taught, at Weber State, starting clear back in the 90’s, in the Economics Department. There’s a guy, Dick Alston, who’s famous, Richard Alston, for being a professor. He’s since retired, but, he was nice enough to let me get hired even though I didn’t have a PhD in economics so I taught here. I actually taught at the U, one year, I taught real estate finance. I taught at the University of Phoenix, graduate economics, before I came to Weber State. So teaching started in the middle of all that. That turned out to be more my passion, the teaching. The banking, the politics of corporate America, all that... often gets frustrating. Definitely a man's world, definitely a glass ceiling world. I definitely learned, working so close to someone who was chief economist for was the 20th largest bank in the US at that point, I had a lot of contacts. For what it’s worth, the simple things like what happens in the club house before and after the golf matches and things really were effective ways to limit the advancement of a lot of people. We understood that the glass ceiling was more like a glass bubble. You could not get inside that bubble, right? You could float around it, but to get into it was ... a rare and beautiful thing and very few people could do it well. Women, generally speaking, had a really hard time getting inside the bubble, especially in the finance, economics, business sector. So I was ok. You mentioned people, what they had to fight for their rights to fight for it. I just didn't need that fight, I didn’t want to take that on at that point. I liked the mom thing. The mom thing was good. 27 LR: So when you were working and getting your graduate degree, how did you balance your home life with school and work? How did you find that balance? DF: We didn't struggle too much. My husband, he's a wonderful person, we both just wing it. We wing it a lot. So he switched from jobs, and he moved into the family business so we had more flexibility. His father owned an appraisal company here in Ogden, so he moved into that when I became more corporate. Then when I became less corporate, we just switched around. We shared our child raising quite easily. He stayed closer to home when I was gone. In the beginning we did have an incredibly wonderful babysitter who came to our house, who we'd met through daycare. She's still part of the family, one of those people that makes it really easy to leave your kids. Their family became part of our family, that kind of thing. But no, we didn't particularly struggle with roles. LR: Ok. When you started teaching here at Weber State and then, now that you've been that for quite some time, how has it changed? Weber State University? DF: Maybe not enough. I just got elected to the faculty senate, their first adjunct representative, two of us got elected. I went to my first faculty senate meeting last week, and having been here, I think 25 years now almost, it's been a long time. Adjuncts are an amazing collection of people who walk onto campus, teach, walk back off, and have so little opportunity and insight to the bigger picture, generally speaking, cause there's no reason for them to delve into it, their reason to be here to do what they do, right? To come in and provide their expertise on some topic, but they don’t have much reason to think about what else is going on here. So it was just like this light going on in terms of, there's more adjuncts than 28 there are full faculty. There's more students impacted. l 've thought about it a lot, that's why I was motivated to run even when they finally said they would allow a non-voting adjunct representative. So we don't even, we can't vote yet. But maybe over time, this is a good step. Years ago there was actually a time when they lowered all the adjunct pay across the board, I think it was pretty significant. Maybe $3200 a semester down to $2700, it was like a $500 pay cut, that every course you taught, it was kind of a flat rate, back then. There was a sort of muffled uprising. There's no organized way for adjuncts to speak, to be heard. It was a tight economic time, there's no doubt that they had to find ways to cut, but that was a really across the board way to take down expense, to take down the pay about, at least 20%, I think. Even back then there was some nice people that I met as adjuncts, "We need some representation," and that was at least ten, fifteen. Point being universities are very amazing things and there's so much that goes here that's really powerful and it makes a huge economic impact, and your question was how has it changed? I guess we can be thankful it hasn't changed, cause it's still an amazing place with lots of things going on and it has a huge economic impact, but I don't know if the parameters have changed, really, that much. There are lots of professors, lots of adjuncts, lots of students, I don't know that the whole dynamic has really been fundamentally much different over those years. AD: What got you interested in politics in the first place? What made you want to run? DF: It’s a tough question to answer as to what got me interested. I don't think I got interested in politics ever. I got interested in the fact that elections were 29 happening and there was no one to vote for if you didn't agree with the majority party. The majority party was practically running unopposed, or what I would call powder puff candidate or something, just a name on a ballot. I saw that progression and there was this point, and so I ran in 2016 and 2018, right, the last two elections. So once for the Utah Senate and once for the House. That first time, it was a repeat incumbent and not, in my opinion, representing a lot of Utah values at all. So it was like, “Someone’s got to stand up to that.” And I didn’t think it would be me, I didn’t really have a deep personal interest in it, but when asked or encouraged to run or asked if I’d consider running, and I did look at it, I was like, “Somebody’s got to run.” So it was that sense that people deserved a choice, that we were just too long with the not even having to put up signs practically, they just got elected. So I just wanted to offer people a choice. With economics and business, it's not like I have great sense of every bill that moves through that house ... I had so little learning curve there to go on outside of regularly taking students on field trips so I knew the layout of the capitol. But anyway, it was just really that sense, "Somebody's got to run against them." I'm a numbers person, so ifl was really going to do it, I only thought of it like a business. It was like, "Ok, what have we got to do to do this? We're going to need this budget for this so I'm not wasting any money." It was interesting to me to take it on. I wasn't taking it on from a political view, I was taking it on from a, "I will not win, I get that, but I'm not going to do this half-heartedly. I want to make it not only a learning experience for myself, but for anyone who gets involved." I wanted to expand the opportunities for other people to make some 30 kind of difference. It was fascinating and fun. I didn't have delusions about getting elected, but I knew what numbers were. I knew what I was trying to do and we accomplished that, I mean that's all I wanted to do, for that person to have to run and have to speak and have to talk and have a decent conversation about how they said their things and, so people would know. Then they could vote. Utah politics, the numbers just aren't there, so that one we didn't stand any real chance, but we knew what we were shooting for and accomplished it, so when the second time came along, the numbers were better. Very slim chance, but I'd had 48% in that past when I ran the Senate district before and now this was a subset, a House district, and in those particular precincts we could add it up, how I had done. I was at a 􀀀ouse district, and in those particular precincts we could add it up, how I had done. I was at 48% in those precincts. Better than winning a lot of them, but overall, we add them all up, a few were not in it, you know, going to be new. But anyway, it was doable, right? Statistician, you can move things 3%. So that's what I knew, is that it was possibly, possibly possible to win and move that So that's what I knew, is that it was possibly, possibly possible to win and move that voting block 3%. Still not delusional. Still not delusional at all, but that was more engaging and I had the experience from the previous time. It seemed kind of a shame not to use it, and it was an open seat. And if you’re aware, it was previously held by a Froerer, so there was some name recognition going on there that was already in place. Name recognition is hard to buy if you don't have it, hard to build it. So once again, it was a business, and we ran it 31 pretty dam well. Election night, we were ahead. When it was over, we lost, but... Ok. Two hundred and seven votes. 16,000 people voted, it was the biggest voting turnout that district's ever had, way beyond anything it'd ever had, so we got people to engage. That was totally worth it. I did not mind not winning, we won everything in that sense of what could be done in the Utah district. LR: Would you ever do it again? Run again? Or was that two times the… two times enough? DF: My family made me do a video that week, cause I said, "I will never do that again." So they made me put it on video so that they could show it to me if I ever threaten to run again. Yeah, it's a lot of work. LR: I can imagine. DF: It really is. It’s very taxing and it’s fascinating, but in Utah, if you don’t run with the majority party, people are logical not to support you. People are logical not to put their neck out for you because they have no history of success to draw upon. So that's all we were trying to do was give them the hope, if we could move close to next time, to support someone that they didn't support before and kind of remain hopeful that it's possible. So I brought a lot of young people into it and I brought a lot, for me. It was an energetic, fun race, with good people and lots of volunteers that, especially the young people, had never done this before. It was more about the future than it was about the particular election for me. I wanted people to have some sort of sense of, “This can be valuable to engage in it.” So 32 we did that. It was fun. Two hundred and seven votes. Can you believe it? It was hilarious. LR: So, now we're kind of getting toward the ending part here. How do you think education empowers? DF: Once again I'm from a family where all eight kids went to college and so many other cousins, neighbors, and classmates didn't. So in my generation, I'm pretty sure, it's not so much the education that empowers, but it's the opportunity to know that if you take something up, you can try something you never knew about before, you can go learn it and become something you weren't before. So I think education empowers one to be the best version of themselves. That’s always my underlying goal, with all the students I teach here. I’m involved with Da Vinci Academy here very deeply, and if every person has some incredible something inside of them and that best version of themselves, that is my goal, so education to me is an opportunity to unpackaged that. We don't know what it is till you have more exposure to what all the world might wish of you to do, right? So people need to have time to explore themselves, self-exploration. I do a lot of that with high schoolers, and then tie in that what's actually going on in the job market, so I spend a lot of time trying to get them and people who have jobs talking to each other early on. Then just demand, right, the whole economy, what’s going on, and are jobs going to grow? What is the demand are jobs growing what kind of tech job, if you want a tech job, fits you, to align to what you want to study. Then opportunity costs, I think that’s a very undervalued concept. When we talk to high school seniors about, 33 “Oh, you should get a degree and it will pay off.” They can’t do that if they don’t’ have the resources, right? Don’t put them into debt illogically if that isn’t going to give them a payoff to stay out of debt and have a livelihood that matches the debt. So that big picture stuff was also part of the motivation I ran for office. Cause it feels like the legislature, a lot of, if you have a successful family, “University for all” makes a lot of sense. If you have a family that doesn’t have the resources right at the moment, you sent them into that or you disappoint them, “Oh, you failed cause you didn’t’ get that,” that’s just a terrible thing to me, because there’s so many ways to get education and training for the job market today that’s not university-bound for everybody. Education about education is probably find most profound. LR: Ok. Yeah. You mentioned the Da Vinci Academy. What are you? DF: Well that was a twist of this teaching thing. So I was on the Utah Council for Economic Education, back when I was in the banking industry. I was named to that Council, it was an advisory board to the State Board of Education here in Utah. I was on that advisory board with that other small circle of economists and people who think about things like this, we were tasked with writing the standards and objectives for a Financial Literacy introduction course in Utah a graduation requirement in general financial literacy. The state had a very high bankruptcy rate—this was in the late 1990’s, especially among young people, young couples. It’s like, “We’ve got to teach them before, we need to make financial literacy part of the graduation requirement.” So this state was one of the first in the nation to require a semester of financial literacy before you graduated. 34 I was on the committee to write the standards and objectives for this high school course. So we wrote them and I crossed paths with a woman named Jessie Kidd, who at that time, was the director of Da Vinci, and I had no ties to it at that point. So I was telling her, “I guess you’ll be teaching this in your school, interested in how that goes.” “Why don’t’ you come teach it?” Said this nice person, I said, “That’d be fun. I’d love to try it.” I’d love to teach it cause I’ve just been involved in writing it.” I wanted to see how it turned out; if it got communicated. So very, very part time, they used to call it “eminently qualified” or something, you could teach just very limited, like one of two classes, and they could license you. So I started teaching that at Da Vinci Academy downtown. I’ve been there ten years, I’m one of the… I’ve been there a long time, part time teaching financial literacy, and then I teach economics part=-time. There’s this very limited number of classes, but deeply devoted to the fact that it’s a school that serves a lot of kids who don’t fit into traditional schools, and it worked, three of my kids ended up graduating from Da Vinci. We got sunk into it and its arts and performing arts and its science and it served my kids well: one as an engineer and one as a nurse and now one’s in piano performance. So it worked for our family really well and it worked that I worked there. That’s where I do a lot of mentoring young people, I’m on the senior team and teach a junior level class, so I get to know students really well by their junior, senior year. It’s been a great way to impact the local economy through bringing business opportunities in the sense, I send them all out on informational interviews or job shadows and things, 35 so the network I have in community helps me to help them, and helps the community understand where high school students are: that they have ambitions and that they’re employable. It’s been a fun place, a lot of fun. LR: How do you think the role of mother has changed over the years? DF: Well, compared to my mom who was a coworker in the farmyard and this career I've had, with raising four kids, mine has been possible only because I’ve always been able to have a schedule balanced between my husband and I. That allowed one or the other of us to be pretty deeply involved all the time. So teaching at the school it always made it possible for me to be in the know and available to them. When I was off in corporate, he was working that job that could be done from home practically all the time, we worked a lot of weird and long hours after the kids went to sleep in order to make that work. So I don't think my mom could have imagined that much juggling of the outside world and the inside world. That's just my personal world. It's very hard to do it all, I think. Being a full time mom and a full time worker and a full time member of the community is a juggling act. Can't do it all, we just do what we can. LR: That is true. So, this is a question I have been asking everyone. What does the term, “women’s work” mean to you? DF: I'd just have to take that back to where I was even in the small town, you asked, which women I looked up to. A lot of human worth. I just see people ... not gender driven. Not, to me, that is not the quality that separates. I can appreciate that this is a project that you're highlighting women, I highly appreciate and fully 36 endorse it. I mentioned a little before we started the interview that ... so much of history has left the woman's story out of it, so I guess the women's worth is truly valid and because of men's worth being more the story. I'm certainly thankful that you're doing this so that that can be acknowledged in a more official and preserved way. So I'm a huge fan of that. LR: Right. I don’t think you quite heard what I said. Women’s work. DF: Oh, I see. I'm sorry. LR: But that was ... I'm not disappointed, what you said was really amazing, so ... but women's work. The term. DF: Oh wow. Work. God made them, he made them equal. I do a lot of teaching about why there's misery in the world, in economics and why places end up in a terrible state. Then you find out these little coop efforts to get money to women in a little village can make such a difference and it seems to me, that had to be so obvious, but I guess it's just infrastructure realities keep women pigeonholed wherever they might be pigeonholed on the planet. I'm so blessed that I didn't have those limitations put on me, and I really ever saw that I couldn't adjust and go around, like that bubble I told you in the corporate world. I didn't need that. I'm blessed, I didn't need the money or I didn't need the advancement at that point in my life, so walking away was not a loss. But I could also know that it would have been very hard to break into that world for the reasons of how well it was structured to protect who was already in it. So I guess, it's very unfortunate that there's classifications of who should best do things based on gender. I just could 37 not imagine that's the best way to run the world. I also acknowledge that it's largely, in many parts of the world, if not all, there's going to be those cases all the time. LR: You'll be happy to know most of the young women today don't even understand that te1m. They hear that term and go, "What do you ... can you please explain that term to me?" That makes me happy. DF: I wasn't supposed to help deliver the cow. That wasn't women's work. LR: Right. Do you have any other story you want to share before I ask the final question? DF: Inside of these stories I went from this to that to this to that to this to that. One thing that's really been the underpinning of all of it, is this little German Catholic community in that sense that people all knew each other, and united by faith and united by location. So I find that fascinating in my life that l’ve always sought to create that sort of situation. Whatever I'm in, it's kind of like, "Whoever's in this circle right now, they're supposed to be there." Because by location we've been brought together for some reason, so that sense of building community around the people I'm presented with, whether it be a classroom or a committee or whatever has been part of the reason I don't know who possibly suggested I be here, but I can say that, if I get a chance to work with people long enough to accomplish something, it seems so possible if you bring people together that if you believe that something can be done, you keep showing up, you know, that that’s sort of what I have learned in life. Keep going to the meeting if you think 38 something can be accomplished, and you see that in all elements of what goes on. You said it’s a university change, like going to that faculty meeting, you know that people have worked hard to make advancements to increase representation, to increase the quality of education here, the Teaching and Learning Forum, that didn’t exist at this university, right? It's when people come together, if they have a common cause and they stick with it wonderful things, amazing things happen. It doesn't matter whether they're male or female, it's just people with common cause and will hang with it, that's how change happens. LR: This final question is one that we have asked everyone, again. How did women receiving the right to vote shape or influence history, your community, and you personally? DF: Well, I wouldn't have run for office if there was no chance for a woman to vote for me, because I worked my butt off to get as many women as possible to shake my hand, talk to me, and know that I was legit. So it shaped my life from day one. At one point-there are political roots in my family. My grandfather was a county commissioner, I have a sister who's been elected as a Republican back in Kansas, I have another sister ran as a Democrat for the Utah, or for the Florida house. She was Bill Clinton's assistant press secretary his first term as governor, so my family has some nature to get into the political process, it's there. It's mostly been the women, although my grandfather, clearly in that time and era makes sense. But what are we going to do if we don't vote? I guess that last two times of running, I had no problem, many times, persuading people to vote, all they had to tell me is something they wanted to change and I said, "How can you 39 possibly expect change if you don't engage in the process of change?" So I don't know how we can undersell the power of the vote. Cause it gives people with a legitimate chance to move forward with something, if you believe in them, what they're saying, to make a change. So it's central. If we're claiming to take away the right to vote, we're going to take away the right to have progress on what matters to the individual. Hope you'll keep this up. 150 years, keep going! LR: It won't be me, but dam it, I hope it keeps going too. Well, thank you so much for your time and willingness to answer questions. DF: Thanks for the opportunity. It was pretty cool.