Oral History Program Elsa Gary Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 30 September 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Elsa Gary Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 30 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: Gary, Elsa, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 20 September 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Elsa Gary Circa 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Elsa Gary, conducted on September 30, 2019, via phone call, with Lorrie Rands. In this interview Elsa discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th amendment. Alyssa Dove, the audio technician, is also present during this interview. LR: Today is September 30, 2019, we are on the phone with Elsa Gary, who is in Salt Lake and we are in the Stewart Library. This is for the Women 2020 project for Weber State University. My name is Lorrie Rands, conducting the interview, Alyssa Dove is also in the room and present. Thank you, Elsa, very much for your time and your willingness. So let’s just jump in with where and when were you born? EG: April 1947 in Brooklyn, New York. LR: Okay, I don’t know a whole lot about New York and the boroughs there, so were you raised in Brooklyn? EG: Well, we lived in Brooklyn until I was six and then we moved to Queens, another one of the five boroughs. LR: Was there a difference? Do you even remember if there was a difference between the two boroughs? EG: Brooklyn was basically apartment living and Queens was more suburban. LR: Oh, I had no idea. Is it still that way? EG: Well, Brooklyn is still mainly apartments and brownstones, and at the moment is the ‘it’ borough in New York City. LR: Alright, how long did you live in Queens? 2 EG: Well, through high school. I spent my first year in college in Tokyo, which came about as a result of my father being an elementary school principal. He was asked to represent the American Board of Education in Tokyo for a year. So that was a phenomenal experience. New York and Tokyo are sister cities and the Board of Education in Tokyo had sent some principals, or teachers, to New York for a three-month period and my father had been asked to make a welcoming speech for them. He taught himself Japanese starting on December 8, 1941. He worked for the Army Corps of Engineers during the War and never had to go overseas but he was the only principal of a New York City school that spoke Japanese. He didn’t know at the time that this was kind of an audition for him, and he obviously did well enough to be asked to go. I went to school in Tokyo for a year and came back and went to college in Manhattan and after sixth months moved up to school. After that I didn’t really spend a lot of time living in Queens. LR: So what was elementary school and junior high school like for you? What are some of your memories of that in Queens? EG: Well, first of all, I always loved school. So memories are all pretty much good and positive. The elementary school that I went to, I believe it was larger than the college that I went to, although it was part of a larger university. The college was actually the smallest school I think that I went to. I was able to walk to school and it was a nice suburban neighborhood, kind of middle middle-class, some upper middle-class areas, and had kids on the street. It was a very pleasant place in which to grow up. 3 LR: Sounds like it. So you mentioned that your father was an elementary school teacher, what about your mother? What did she do? EG: Well, he was the principal of an elementary school. He had been an assistant principal over a junior high school, and before that, he was a teacher, which predates my memory. My mother was a stay-at-home mom as were all the other moms that I knew at that time. She worked as a school secretary until my older sister was born and then she became a stay-at-home mom and she didn’t return to work until I had graduated from high school. She then taught third grade in elementary school in Queens that was not the one that I went to. LR: Gotcha. What were your parents’ names? EG: My father’s name was Abraham and my mother’s Charlotte. LR: Okay. How many siblings did you have? EG: One. LR: Oh, was she older or younger? EG: She was four years older. LR: Oh, somehow I thought you were the oldest. Okay. The question of when you were a young girl, who were some of the women that you looked up to and why, you mentioned Helen Keller in what you wrote. I’m curious though, I know there’s one other you want to talk about but other than that, what about the women you were surrounded by? Like your mom, your aunts, or school teachers, was there anyone you were close to that you looked up to? EG: I mean, the family was very congenial. All of my aunts were stay-at-home moms, although there was an extraordinary story in my maternal grandmother’s family. I 4 don’t remember if it was her cousin, I think maybe it was my grandmother’s cousin, her name was Helen Myer who started out working as a secretary at a publishing company in New York. I think it was Penguin Books. She was at some point secretary to the president and she later became president herself. That was probably in the 1920s? So that was really extraordinary. I never knew her. But you know just as far as her as a person, she definitely would be somebody to look up to as a role model. LR: I would agree with that. You mentioned before we started there was another woman that you wanted to mention? EG: Yes, and that woman is Golda Meir who was an immigrant. She and her family came from the Ukraine to the U.S. She became an American citizen when her father was naturalized. When she got married I think she was about twenty-two, she and her husband immigrated to Israel and she became the fourth president and first woman president of Israel, and the third or fourth female world leader. It’s extraordinary, she was the first American woman to become president, obviously not of the U.S. I just remember her and her accomplishments. She became the minister of labor and then the foreign minister prior to her becoming prime minister and that just seems like a remarkable thing. It’s kind of interesting because when you look back, I pulled up a list of female heads of state going back to the 1960s; it was Sri Lanka, India, then Israel, and then many, many others, but a lot of them were third-world countries. The idea that there were women heads of state in Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Burundi, Rwanda, Haiti, Guyana, Latvia, Panama, Indonesia, Senegal, Peru, Mozambique etc. and still 5 here we are. As I told you my research says that Golda Meir was not at all supportive of other women so I sort of took her off my initial list. LR: This is going to sound like a stupid question—but why does that bother you that she’s not supportive of other women? EG: Well, there were many in business as well who rose up and occupied elevated positions but didn’t want to see any other women get there too. I think that’s why that bothers me. LR: Okay, that makes sense. Thank you for answering that. So as you’re growing up in Queens in the 1950s, was there anything that happened that got you particularly interested in politics? Because politics became something that obviously has shaped your life. EG: Well, my parents were staunch democrats. Adlai Stevenson was a beating democratic presidential candidate, I think he ran twice, and Franklin Roosevelt was kind of a god among men in our household. I just grew up with that being an important factor in our lives. LR: With that, I know you worked on some campaigns especially when you got out of college, but what got you involved in politics? Was there anything in particular or was it just something you did? EG: Well, first of all, living in Manhattan is very different than living in Park City. I moved from New York to California and California was also very different from New York. In New York, politics were in your face. Candidates were campaigning on the streets. I remember one really funny time when I was walking to the subway, this sort of odd looking man was handing out fliers. I was 6 in a rush to get to work, I was really busy and really distracted and he’s trying to hand me something. I kind of waved him away, and as I walked down into the subway station I heard him saying to somebody who was behind me, “Hi, I’m Ed Cox your congressman.” I felt like such a jerk having done that. Ed Cox served in Congress and then went on to become the mayor of New York and it was just kind of a funny New York experience. It was inescapable in New York, where in California it took a little while for us to find out who our congressman or woman was. So I think in New York I became interested and I had the opportunity to go to Los Angeles to work on George McGovern’s California primary campaign as a paid thing. That was an experience that I really enjoyed and wanted more of, so that was kind of the beginning for me. LR: Okay, McGovern was your first campaign, were there other campaigns after that or did you change what you worked on? EG: Well, that was my first and last political campaign that I officially worked on. Later on there were others that I helped out on in other ways, such as in donating money, and then of course Voterise is a full-time passion of getting young people, another underrepresented group, to register to vote and turn out to vote in Utah. LR: Okay. I am curious, you were in Tokyo for a year and then you came back to the states to finish school here. How was your experience in Tokyo, how did that influence your choices? EG: Well, it was fabulous. At first when my father came home one evening when I was a senior in high school and said, “Would you like to go to Tokyo next year?” I 7 just looked at him in horror and said, “No, I’m going to college with all my friends.” He said, “Well, that’s really too bad because we are going to go do that.” I was given a choice of schools that I went to, international Christian universities in Tokyo, and it was a school that a lot of the Japanese students who attended were children of diplomats and businessmen who worked overseas. In order to graduate, you would have to be bilingual. In order to attend for a year you didn’t have to be bilingual but you did have to learn Japanese, which I did. I actually lived with a Japanese family, which was a great experience. The school was on a trimester system, and my father was teaching at New York University over the summer and he couldn’t leave ‘til after his final exams were graded, whereas my school, the first it would be possible for me to attend started at the end of August. So they gave me a choice and my father said, “You can either go alone and start school on the 29th of August or you can wait for us and not start school until December.” I opted to go alone. I was sixteen years old, I had never flown, only place that I’d been out of the country was Canada, so that was a really big deal. The family that the school had arranged for me to live with didn’t get notification until the day that I was arriving, but somebody from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government came and met me at the airport and took me out to the family. The family had a daughter who was around my age who spoke some English. The parents spoke like a tiny bit of English and they had a housekeeper, who I got along with really well, who could communicate with me by gestures. That year was definitely life-changing. It gave me such a broader world view. I mean, this was in 1963, so the end of the War wasn’t that many years before and 8 Americans were still sort of, “Wow, what are you doing here?” But I went to school with people from all over the world and it was a fantastic experience and I asked my father before we left New York, “If I really love it there, will you let me stay and finish college?” He said, “Yes.” When I brought that up again, he said, “No way, you’re not staying here.” What happens is my parents left in June and they took three months and traveled to a lot of places from Tokyo to London, and I wanted to stay in Tokyo for as long as possible but then I left with a group of students from another university and we went to Hong Kong and several cities in India and then to Beirut, Damascus, and onto Baghdad—I could not get a visa to Iraq being Jewish—and then the last stop was Rome. At that time I was seventeen years old and just came back as a different person in terms of experience and knowledge of the world. Then I majored in Asian studies and took a total of four years of Japanese. LR: Wow, when you first went to Tokyo, was there a sense of culture shock? EG: Yes, when we left the airport, the person from the government and I, there was a huge like twenty-foot high billboard for Coke and that was culture shock. I was shocked to see that. The Japanese culture is obviously way different but it was wonderful to get immersed in that. Over Spring Break, my art professor took a group of students down to Kyoto where we toured lots of temples and other important art sites and the beautiful country. The people were wonderful and overall, it was a great experience. 9 LR: Awesome. So you went there in August of 1963, what was it like getting the news of President Kennedy’s assassination being out of the country? EG: Oh God, it was an awful moment. I was still in bed because it was early morning and the mother of the family came into the bedroom that I shared with her daughter and told me and it was just such an incredible thing to be told. Of course I just wanted to go find my American community, but they were wonderful about it. I mean, everybody was very distraught and I was sorry that I was not at home in the U.S. You know, just as being in the Los Angeles area on 9/11, my heart wanted to be back in New York. LR: Oh, I’ll bet, that actually makes sense. Thank you for sharing that. Moving forward a little bit, after you come back from Tokyo and you went to school in New York, did you graduate from that school in New York? EG: I did. LR: Okay, and in your little thing you talk about going through seven jobs in your first two years after college. EG: Yes, you could say that I really didn’t have an idea of what I wanted to do. LR: Right? What job did you finally settle on and why? EG: Well, I got one job at an advertising and public relations agency and it was as an administrative assistant to some of the executives on the PR side. They had told me about my predecessor and how he had been promoted to an account executive and that sounded like good potential and so I accepted the job and after three weeks I came to understand that my predecessor’s situation was really a fluke. Their largest client had a major trade show each year and the 10 account executive, that particular piece of business, had left the agency before the tradeshow and so they needed somebody in that job and so they promoted this fellow who preceded me. I realized, “Okay, well, that’s probably not going to happen again,” and after about a month I could tell that this wasn’t the right job for me, that I was going to get bored and unhappy and then the people that I was working for would get unhappy as well having me being unhappy. I went and talked to an HR person, although I think back in those days they called it Personnel, and she said, “Well, there’s this brand-new job in the media department and you should go talk to the media director.” I said, “Well, what is a media department?” She said, “Well, he’ll explain it to you.” So I went and talked to him and although he was impressed with my education, thankfully he said, “I don’t care if you can type, can you think?” I said to myself, “Oh man, this is my chance,” so I took that job and it turned out to be wonderful. This was in 1970, and a lot of my friends were doing things like working for the poverty program, Peace Corps sort of thing, and I’m taking a job in advertising. I felt a little bit uncomfortable about that but it was great job because the department was understaffed; that is a fantastic thing for a young person, to work in an understaffed department, because as soon as you feel like you can take on more responsibility the people you work for are generally very happy to have you do that. The more that I felt I could do, the more they gave me to do. Ten my boss was leaving to take a job at another agency and he asked me to come with him, so I left there and went to another agency and it was there through a friend of his that I ended up getting hired by the Media Buying Service. 11 It was just appointed by the McGovern campaign to go to California to work on the campaign. That was in late spring, well it was mostly like in May and June. Then they said to me that they couldn’t hire me full-time until they knew if McGovern was going to get the nomination and there would be a national campaign, and so I said, “Well, I can’t afford to be out of work so I will go look for a job. If there is a campaign, and I don’t love my job, I will leave it and come back to work on the campaign, and if I do love my job then I won’t do that, I’ll just stick with my job.” It turns out obviously, that he did get the nomination and the agency that I was working for, which was well-known for its creative brilliance, had a four-day work week. It was Monday through Thursday, 8:30 to 6:00, and we had Fridays off except every Friday there was one person in each department. So I was able to go work on the campaign on Fridays, which meant I didn’t have as much responsibility as I would have if I were working full-time, but I did get to be the one who decided which TV commercials to run and what programming, matching the content of the commercials to the audience of the program. That was an exciting opportunity and I really liked it. I really liked the agency that I was working for so I stayed there for another year until I decided that media jobs at agencies weren't particularly well-paying. There was more many working in sales for broadcast companies who were selling commercial time whether it’s television or radio or print sales. I decided, “Okay, what I would like to do is move over to the sales side.” At that time, all the broadcasting companies were hiring one woman because they had to, not 12 because they wanted to, so it was a question of when. A job opens up at ABC, she had recently left the company and so they needed to replace her with another woman so that they would have their requisite one. I was fortunate in having this great mentor who was a woman who was already a sales manager at CBS and she really helped me. She said, “Look, I’ve interviewed everyone you’re going to be competing against so let me tell you a few things. Go in and say what you have to say and keep talking until you’ve said everything that you want to say, because if you stop and just let them ask you questions you’re going to sound like everybody else.” I took that advice and it worked and I made the move over to what they call ABC spot sales in New York where you are selling for commercial sales for the season that ABC owned and for markets outside of New York. When I was hired I was told, “You will be in New York for up to a year and then we’re going to send you out to one of the television stations so you can learn how a station actually works. The four other markets were Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. I really didn’t want to go to Detroit or Chicago and I really did want to go to San Francisco, but the job that came up and that I got was in Los Angeles and that’s how I happened to move to L.A. where I spent about forty years. So I went to work for the ABC Television and that was a really interesting and good experience in terms of growth and then I’ll leave it there because I don’t know where you want to go next. 13 LR: Right. So it seems as you walked through your experiences and jobs before that, and this seems to happen a lot, every job you took before that was in preparation for this one job that you spent a long time at. EG: Well, I didn’t spend that long there. I was there from July of 1974 until February of 1977, and that too was a situation where the one woman at KUBC had left a job at a radio station and so I was the one woman at the station and the rest of the sales staff was all male, as were all the managers. There was actually a senior executive in the company who had been known to make the statement more than once that there were two places for women in broadcasting, “getting coffee and getting laid.” Not many people were quite as up front about it, but that was kind of the atmosphere at that time. It did change greatly and several years later every station had multiple women. Now, women are at least half or more than half of most sales staff and have management positions, but back in my day, it was just at the very beginning. LR: As I’m reading over your previous answers I realized that during this time you met your husband and started a business with him. Would you talk about that a little bit? EG: Sure. He had been in radio in an office in New York but we didn’t meet until we were both in L.A. We were introduced by a mutual client, and when I asked her what he did she said, “He’s in radio sales.” I said, “Oh, I don’t want to meet him. I’m surrounded by those guys all day long.” He sort of felt the same way about meeting me. So she was moving to New York, and she was living with me for like a few weeks so she didn’t have to pay rent and she said, “Oh, I really want you to 14 meet him,” and I was less than enthusiastic. She asked him out for a drink just to say goodbye and he said, “If you want to bring your friend, like okay.” So I showed up like half an hour late because I really didn’t want to go, and it was just one of those things, we just instantly clicked and had a lot in common. He was a general manager of a radio station of New York at the age of twenty-nine, which was very young, and then he decided to make a move to Los Angeles ‘cause the company that owned the station that he was working for, he and the management just did not get along all that well, which had to do with politics. He was working at a station that he wasn’t really that enthusiastic about. It was a background music station and he felt that format wasn’t really that effective for advertisers, so he decided that he wanted to go off and do something else but he wasn’t quite sure what. He tried a couple things, including syndicating motorcycle films to television stations, and finally decided that he wanted to start an ad agency so that the answer to advertisers’ objective didn’t have to be the one station that he was working for it could be whatever he believed would be most effective for them. He started and got a couple clients from his people who had been clients of his while he was at the radio station. At that same time, the station that I worked for had grown from number three to number one in the market and ABC had just come on very strong with great prime time programming and our news was very strong and so the station was just overall number one in every demographic except for the fifty plus demographic. So selling the station, I mean, robots could’ve done it, and the only problem was the station was like sold out a good deal of the time. So for me, 15 there wasn’t much challenge anymore and Dick and I had talked about joining him and I was getting bored with just kind of doing the same thing all the time, so I decided to do it. When I told my boss and then the general manager, he said to me, “Well, I always had the sense that you were going to go off and do something else. You have to ask yourself ‘if it doesn’t work out can I get back what I had? In your case, absolutely you can. If not here, then one of the six other television stations in the market.” He said that he had contemplated doing something else as well, which he ended up doing. He said, “But for me, the answer to that question is ‘not necessarily, because there’s not the same opportunity.” If you have seven television stations in the market and each one has seven or eight sales people, that’s a lot of jobs. For him as a general manager, there are only seven of those jobs in the market. Anyway, we figured out one day that Dick’s little business could support both of us and so I decided to do it and that was the beginning of a forty year adventure. LR: What was the name of your company? EG: It was called the Gary Group. We started out doing a lot of direct response advertising where all the commercials had phone numbers in them because he did a lot of that kind of business when he was in radio. It’s good in the sense that you know very quickly if it is working. If the phone doesn’t ring then you need to either change the commercial or just get off the air or perhaps the offer was not strong enough. Anyway, we did that for a while and then a serendipitous thing happened where Dick ran into his former boss in the bank, George, and he then 16 introduced us to somebody that he was working within the music promotion area, so that was our entrée into the music industry and that grew. We ended up having a lot of different kinds of clients, we had a southern California ski area for many years, but music kind of took over our business and we became the leading agency to the music industry until the industry went through dramatic changes starting in 2007. First it was Masters, it was iTunes, then later on it was streaming, but our business had been based in promoting new CD releases and then people stopped buying CDs so we had to diversify and that was something that we had somebody else in our company take the lead on. But having our business for forty years, I think it really brought out the best in both of us in terms of developing new skills, not necessarily developing them but discovering them. It was very challenging and we had some good years, tough years and then a number of very good years and tough years. So it was a really interesting period and dominated obviously, my working career. Then when we decided to pull back, as somebody else was taking the company in a different direction, we had bought a place in Park City a number of years ago and then we decided it was time to leave Los Angeles because it’s become really unlivable and traffic. It sounds so cliché, but traffic became so awful that just as an example, one of our clients were in Burbank, we’re from Santa Monica, you went at 9:30 in the morning you took twenty-five minutes, if you did it in the afternoon it took two hours. So it was time to go. LR: I was going to ask how Los Angeles changed over the forty-year period you were there. 17 EG: Well, when I first moved there you didn’t have to lock your cars, you didn’t have to lock your doors, I thought it was paradise. For the first bunch of years the air was really bad and then there was one day I was driving somewhere in the San Fernando Valley and it was a clear day and I said, “Oh my God, there’re the mountains. I never knew they were there before.” But the air did clean up and that was greatly improved but basically the traffic just became worse, and worse over the years until now we don’t enjoy going back there, which we do very rarely. There’s lots of ways it hasn’t changed all that much. We lived in Malibu and Dick was already there, and when I first moved to Malibu it was just a very nice, laidback, beach town. Yes, there was a celebrity contingent but it was just a pretty cool little town. Well, it is no longer that. It’s a scene that everybody imagined that it always has been but it wasn’t, and so it’s just not a place that we really want to spend a lot of time. LR: That makes sense. Okay, I’m getting confused about what your husband’s name is, so what is your husband’s name? EG: Dick. LR: Okay, because I kept hearing George and I didn’t think that was his name. EG: No, no, George was his boss. George was the one who connected us to somebody in the music industry and we all got into a little venture together and that’s what got us started in the advertising side of the music industry. LR: Okay, now I’m on the same page. So what year did you get married? EG: We got married in 1978. 18 LR: Okay. Alright, so you spent almost forty years in Los Angeles and came to Utah, besides the fact that you had purchased the property in Park City, what drew you to Utah? EG: Well, initially skiing drew me, us, to Utah. Of course what they say in Park City is, “You come for the winter and stay for the summer,” and that’s true. We had a ski condo and never came up during the summer, I mean, it’s beautiful in California in the summer, who needs to leave there? But we did come up here for the summer and found it to be entirely wonderful and so then we decided to look at buying a house instead of having a condo so maybe we could work up here sometime. We ended up doing that and continued to just go back and forth between L.A. and here. Then we just grew tired of the Los Angeles life and traffic and we sold our house in December of 2014, Pepperdine University bought it. We lived across the street from Pepperdine, and they were very kind and gave us three months where we could just stay there. As that time grew to a close, came to a close and we just moved up here permanently. For many years, we wondered what would it be like to get up in the morning and have nothing specific to do? The truth of the matter was we couldn’t imagine it and it didn’t sound all that appealing and a friend of ours who’s a cardiologist said, “If you’re thinking about retiring you better have a plan,” because when he worked as an intern, or resident, he said, “We saw people every week coming in having heart-attacks who had recently retired, and so you better have a plan for your life,” which we didn’t. Then all of a sudden the feeling that we just needed to do something in the voting; we had worked for Rock the 19 Vote, they were a client of ours in Los Angeles. People who started it were in the music industry so we were familiar with what they did and helped them with their marketing. In 2014, only 8.1% of Utah’s eighteen to twenty-nine-year-olds voted. The national average, which was low, was 9.1% and Utah was 8%. So we found our calling and I’ve never had the opportunity to think about, “What are we going to do today?” LR: So starting Voterise just kept you busy. EG: Oh at seven days a week, if there were forty-eight hours in a day we could use them. LR: Okay. In your little answers here, you didn’t talk a whole lot about how you started Voterise and what Voterise is, so will you? EG: Voterise is an organization that is dedicated to increasing voter registration and turn out amongst young people and other under-represented groups in Utah. LR: Okay, and when you say under-represented groups, what are you referring to? EG: Hispanics, Native Americans, other minority groups, LGBTQ community. Then we decided to focus on, given the historic element of the year 2020, women’s voting and especially to women in Utah. I mean, since the state has such a unique history with women’s voting—we thought that focusing on women for the 2018 and the 2020 elections made a lot of sense. It’s not that men don’t need attention, they do, but part of our general registration work, we created something called the 2020 Challenge where we are recruiting a thousand ambassadors, primarily women but men are most welcome as well, to each commit to registering twenty women, so that would be 20,000 by the 2020 20 election. The other part of that is that the U.S. Census data, voting data, for both 2016 and 2018 showed that there were approximately 300,000 women in Utah who are citizens but not registered to vote, so that’s a pretty large target. We want to close that gap, and that includes the youth sixteen and seventeen-year-old girls who are able to pre-register to vote. The male number is pretty close to that as well but given the significance of 2020 for women, we decided to focus on women. LR: Right. So the HR 16, creating a Utah Women’s Voter Registration Day. You said in the beginning, before we turned the recorder on, that it will mark the first time—how did you put it? EG: There is a National Voter Registration Day and it’s on the final Tuesday of September, so it was last week on September 24th, but nowhere in the country was there a Women’s Voter Registration Day. So HR 16 created a Utah Women’s Voter Registration Day, which will be celebrated on February 14th—we wanted to avoid Valentine’s Day but it didn’t happen that way. February 14th commemorates the anniversary of the first vote by women in the modern United States, which was in Utah in 1870. February 12th was the date that the legislature approved the bill granting women the right to vote and Wyoming had done it actually in December of 1869, so technically Wyoming was the first state to give women the right to vote. It was still a territory, but Wyoming didn’t have an election until August of 1870. In Salt Lake there was a municipal election two days after the legislature voted to give women the right to vote, and that was the municipal election on February 14th so the significance of February 14th. 21 LR: That’s really cool. EG: It is really cool. LR: Let’s see, I’m curious how you would define feminism? EG: I think feminism is a movement to achieve equal rights in all categories for women. It’s not necessarily women over men but it can no longer be men over women. LR: Okay, I like that, it actually makes complete sense. How do you think education empowers, not only women but just people in general? EG: For one thing, I think it helps to find opportunities. Education opens the doors to a lot of things that might not otherwise be possible. Obviously it gives people qualifications for jobs that they would not otherwise be able to get, that’s obviously really important, but just the things that you become open to or aware of, you might not without education. LR: I would agree. EG: I think back in when I was growing up in the 1950s and most women, well I don’t know if it was most, but in my environment, most women were stay-at-home moms. To me the example that was set, like this is what you’re expected to do, “Yes, you go to college,” that was like automatic, “But then you have a family and you are a homemaker and take care of your kids,” and that’s about what was expected. In my generation it became more about what it is possible, and I think that’s the same thing with education it just opens the door to possibilities. LR: Thank you. Before I touch on the final question again is there any other story or memory that you’d like to share before I finish up? 22 EG: No, I don’t think so. I really, really liked your question about defining courage. As I said, it’s not just the absence of fear but the ability not to be paralyzed by it, and it was amazing to me when I was in a period of just getting into meditation for a while, which unfortunately I haven’t stuck with, and I had this experience that just was a huge, “Wow! I can’t believe I just saw this!” I told this little story in my written commentary but it was a major moment that has helped me so much in different aspects of my life. Just being in a situation that was really, really scary and really, really dark and I was totally afraid to move and taking one step and having this path in a forest just light up. That to me was a real revelation that like when you’re frightened of something and you just are so afraid, if you just take the first step it gets easier. That was important because there had been a lot of things that I’ve done both when we had our own business and now in Voterise, where I was not necessarily like comfortable doing something and very nervous about doing it, and then just as soon as you start, as soon as you say yes, as soon as you utter the first word, it just gets a whole lot easier. It’s really been very useful for me. LR: Awesome. Well, thank you for reiterating that. So the final question about how do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped and influenced you, history, and community, you talked a little bit about how it influenced you personally, but as time has gone by since what you’ve wrote, as you’ve spent so much time working with Voterise and helping women get registered to vote, how has that shaped the way you view voting for you personally? 23 EG: Well, for me personally it’s never been a question. I voted for the first time when I was twenty-one and I’ve never missed an election. It’s our voice so unfortunately sometimes our voices don’t prevail, but what’s the alternative? You have to vote. People say, “Well, you know, I’m not interested in politics,” especially young people, but politics unfortunately affects everything. It affects the air that you breathe, it affects your healthcare. I mean, there’s hardly a way in which you’re not affected by politics so you might as well participate in it and help elect people who feel about important things, issues, the way that you do. In 2016, obviously this very positive female energy just kind of erupted in the country, and I was at one of the state conventions and was told by a county party chair that so many people had approached her and asked like, “I really want to make a difference, what can I do?” That was part of what caused us to create the 2020 Challenge, “Great, you want to do something? You want to make a difference? Help us get people registered,” and it’s been a positive force and we now have ambassadors, that’s what we call them, ambassadors, at a number of high schools and it’s fantastic seeing these girls get involved and register their fellow students and be committed to doing this and excited about doing it. Of course Parkland changed everything in terms of bringing youth back into the process. Both Dick and I lived during the Vietnam era and young people making a difference and being at marches at Washington. There hasn’t been that kind of energy until Parkland. It’s horrible that it took something like that to reinvigorate young people but the result of it is positive. 24 LR: Right. I know when I was watching one of the rallies that they were doing after Parkland with a lot of those young survivors, I marveled at this generation that’s coming up and the change that is happening because of them and it gave me a lot of hope. EG: Yeah, it does. I mean, hopefully that activism will continue. It is a cyclical thing, depends on how things are going in the country, but if there is a lot to be accomplished then they are very key to it. LR: Right, I agree. Well, I want to thank you for taking time this morning to share more of your story and I really appreciate it. Elsa Gary’s Written Responses to the Oral History Interview Questions: When you were a young girl, who were some of the women you looked up to? (Why?) Although I don’t have total recall since it was decades ago, one woman still stands out in my mind: Helen Keller – Why? For her phenomenal accomplishments in the face of devastating challenges. Born in 1880 in Alabama, Helen was left blind and deaf by an unknown illness result, she worked with a dedicated 25 teacher, Annie Sullivan, with whom she had an almost 50-year relationship. Anne Sullivan taught her to communicate by spelling words into the palm of her hand. After attending the Perkins Institute for the Blind followed by several schools for the deaf in the Northeast, Helen was admitted to Radcliffe College at Harvard University. She was the first blind and deaf person to receive a BA degree. In addition to becoming skilled at using braille and sign language, Helen was determined be able to communicate with people using standard methods. She learned to speak and became a lecturer on her life experiences and mastered reading lips in order to “hear” others. She was the author of 12 books including an autobiography, visited 35 countries in an 11-year period, was an advocate for people with disabilities, and became a political activist and was a founder of the ACLU. She died in 1968 having lived an extraordinary life that was of service to so many. How do you think the role of mothers has changed? My mother was typical of the 1950’s. She worked as a school secretary until my older sister was born. She then became a stay-at-home mom and didn’t return to work until I had graduated from high school. Many of her desires and needs were subjugated to those of my father who worked three jobs. She and the moms of my friends were examples of what was expected. 26 The feminist movement emerged when I was in college which gave me a very different perspective. I took a path very different from my mother’s and have worked consistently throughout my daughter’s life and believe that I, along with a significant percentage of my peers, serve as examples of what is possible. Instead of first and foremost pursuing the goal of getting married and having a family, our daughters have been encouraged to find their passions and pursue their dreams. For most, that also includes marriage and a family but my daughter is leading an adventurous life involving world travel and the establishment of her own business in another country. Were you encouraged to pursue an education? Yes. There was no question about going to college. It was as automatic as moving on from kindergarten to first grade! What were your career options once you had your degree? I majored in Asian Studies at Barnard College, having spent my first year of college in Tokyo. (This came about because my father, a principal of a New York City elementary school, was selected to represent the NYC Board of Education in Tokyo for a school year). I was anxious to get out in the work world and initially imagined myself working for the United Nations or for a Japanese company but there were obstacles to both. U.N. jobs required fluency in 3 languages and I had only 2. Back in the late 1960s, Japanese companies were not sources of great opportunity for 27 women. Beyond that, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do and ended up going through 7 jobs in my first 2 post-college years! What were some of the challenges you faced while obtaining your degree? Actually, there were none although occasionally I did feel intimidated by being amongst some of the brightest young women in the country. What was your first job? a) After graduating from college, I took a job as secretary to the Publicity Director of a New York publishing company…an entry-level position but in an industry that I thought I’d be interested in which was the case. b) However, after a few months, I received and accepted an offer for a job that I had interviewed for prior to graduation in the Department of Ichthyology (Fish) at the Museum of Natural History. The Chair of the Department was building an index of the literature that had been published in the field over the previous 10 years and much of it had been done by the Russians and the Japanese. The Department hired a Ph.D. candidate to translate the Russian work and hired me, with my limited proficiency in Japanese and total lack of scientific background, to translate the Japanese literature. 28 I didn’t fare too well and it took only a short time for them to realize that they needed a native Japanese speaker. I then returned to the publishing company as they were happy to have me come back. c) Next up was a stint at the American Host Family Program which arranged for European teachers to spend a month during the summer with an American family. This was primarily an administrative job but did give me the opportunity to travel to Amsterdam and London. The owner also suggested that I should move to California where they were based and that had great appeal to me but I was anxious to find a different type of work. He helped and through his connection to a California Democratic State Legislator from Orange County, he arranged a job for me as researcher for the California State Assembly. This was a very exciting prospect to me but sadly, I arrived in Sacramento on Election Day, 1968 to find that the Democrats had lost the Assembly for the first time in 12 years and thus also their hiring power. I was 21 years old, totally new to California, and without a job. After spending a few weeks in Southern California, I took a bus to San Francisco and began my job search there. I was told multiple times that if I wanted a GOOD job, I should go home to New York as people were so desperate to live in SF, that they would take ANYTHING. I got a job working as an assistant to a professor at Stanford Law School who had previously been the Head of the Anti-trust Division of the Department of Justice under President Johnson. He had active correspondence with the 29 anti-trust reporters at the major newspapers and by the time I typed his final exam in the spring, I felt that I could have passed it! I definitely learned a lot and thought briefly about applying to law school. But after working for another law professor during the summer session, I returned home in pursuit of “a career”. What was your motivation to go into your chosen field? a) Back in New York, my next job was at an advertising/public relations agency as an administrative assistant to several PR executives. I found that the advancement potential they had discussed during the interview was actually unlikely and I felt that this was not a good situation for me. I decided that I should leave rather than become increasingly unhappy and make the people I worked for unhappy as well. I was sent to talk to the someone in Human Resources who told me about a brand-new position on the advertising side in the Media Department. When I asked what a Media Department was, she suggested that I talk to the Media Director and that he would explain it. My interview with him changed my life. He said “I don’t care if you can type, I want someone who can think!”That was IT for me and I felt that whatever it was that he wanted me to think about, I was on board. This was the opportunity I was looking for as the job was challenging and satisfying. It was a small and understaffed department which, as I came to understand, meant that as 30 soon as I felt I could take on new responsibilities, my bosses were happy for me to assume them. Advertising wasn’t a field that I actively chose…I felt like it chose me! After what was a successful period for me, my boss, the Media Director, left for another agency and asked me to come with him which I did. After a year at the new agency, he introduced me to a friend of his who owned a media-buying agency which had just been appointed to handle the media for the George McGovern presidential campaign…first the California primary and then the national campaign if he became the nominee. He asked me if I’d be interested in going to Los Angeles to work with the McGovern California agency’s media buying team, an opportunity that I jumped at. I was offered a full-time job on the national campaign beginning after the Convention if McGovern prevailed. However, I needed an interim job and so I said that if I found a job back in New York that I loved, I wouldn’t be able to work on the national campaign, if I didn’t, then I’d work temporarily and join the campaign. I did find a job at a fabulous agency that had a 4-day work schedule so I was able to work on the McGovern campaign on Fridays in a more limited capacity. The McGovern experience was my first involvement with a political campaign. Carl Ally, Inc. was known for its outstanding creative work and the 18-month period that I spent there was the springboard to my next endeavor in the advertising arena. Media department jobs were not especially well-paying but media sales jobs were. This was at a time 31 when broadcast companies had just begun to hire a token number of women in sales departments…not because they wanted to but because they were legally required to. I decided that a sales job would be my next pursuit. Fortunately, I had a great mentor, one of the first (or perhaps the first) female sales managers in New York. When a sales job opened at a major network’s owned-and-operated station group to replace a woman who had left the company, I decided this was my time and she helped me prepare for my interview and advised me on how to differentiate myself from the competition. I was offered the job and told that I would work in New York for up to a year, and then be sent out to one of the other 4 stations that the group owned at that time. I felt very fortunate when 7 months later, I was moved to Los Angeles, again replacing a woman who had left the station. When was there a time that you were brave at work? Working with an otherwise all-male sales team, I differentiated myself from my male colleagues by developing my own approach to client relationships. Rather than wining-and-dining clients (I did do some of that), I took a less-entertaining, more service-oriented path and was always scrupulously honest in my advice…sometimes suggesting that clients not buy advertising in programs that were priorities for the station but that weren’t necessarily best for their clients’ products. It created trust and 32 resulted in relationships that were good for both the station and my agency clients. As a result, my largest agency client (J. Walter Thompson) became the #1 billing agency on the station which was key to establishing my position as a highly-effective and successful account executive. The station rose from #3 in the market to #1 for all key demographics (within the all-important 18-49 year-old age range and sales became a less-challenging proposition. I soon became somewhat bored and, at the same time, my future husband became dissatisfied with his position in radio and decided to start a business of his own. He experimented for a few months and then settled on opening an advertising agency. A few months after that, we decided that his fledgling business could support both of us and so I boldly took the leap and left what was a very secure situation. The station General Manager told me that he always felt that, at some point, I would leave to move on to something else. He encouraged me to take that chance because “if it didn’t work out, I could certainly get back what I had”. Given that there were 7 television stations in Los Angeles with sales staffs of 5-8 people, I could have numerous opportunities. He also said that he often thought about leaving to start something new but he wouldn’t have the same odds as there were only 7 General Manager positions in the market. Starting our own company was a grand adventure but I soon faced situations that, as an equal partner in the business, I didn’t expect to encounter. Examples: At a meeting, a client asked me a question about 33 television advertising which was entirely in my area of expertise. I gave him my recommendation and then he turned to Dick, my husband and partner, whose broadcast career had been in radio, and asked for his opinion. Fortunately, Dick was quite what is now called “woke”, and responded by saying that I was the expert on this subject. At another meeting, the same client asked me to go out and “xerox” something for him. Again, Dick responded very quickly and said “No, here, give it to me. I’ll do it!” However, as the years went on, important societal advances took place and having our own business provided me the chance to develop in unexpected ways. I never thought of myself as a “creative” person but found that I did possess capabilities that enabled me to be an active participant/director in the development of advertising and promotion campaigns in addition to leading our media team. Our company had a great track record in hiring and promoting women and there were no more issues about what was or wasn’t “women’s work”. We ran our company for 35 years and it was a demanding but very satisfying experience. However, most of our clients in the later years were in the music industry and when downloading and streaming changed just about EVERYTHING, we decided to pull back and turn over the reins to someone else to diversify our agency. My husband and I then decided to move to Park City where we had had a second home for 25+ years and begin a new chapter in our lives. 34 Some would call it retirement, but we knew we were not ready for that. Taking another brave step, in 2016, we started VOTERISE which opened a whole new world to us. In terms of personal development, it has allowed me to take on new roles and do many things for the first time. The VOTERISE 2020 CHALLENGE is an example of that. It has been exciting and gratifying to have initiated the creation of the first Women’s Voter Registration Day in the nation. Our resolution, HCR 16, creating a Utah Women’s Voter Registration Day to be celebrated on February 14th, marking the date in 1870 of the first vote by women in Utah and in the modern United States passed unanimously in both Houses of the Legislature during the 2019 Legislative session and was signed by Governor Herbert on March 25th. As a woman, how do you define courage? I think that for a woman it often involves (although much progress has been made) the willingness to break with tradition and step outside what were typical female roles. However, I prefer to look at it in a broader context. The following expresses something that I experienced during a meditation and which has had a significant impact on my life especially in my current endeavors: 35 Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability not to be paralyzed by it. During the meditation, I saw myself in a dark forest at night. I was stopped by fear and unable to take even one step. But then I forced myself to do so and the path before me lit up. I came to understand that once you find the courage to take the first step, the fear is dispelled and the way forward becomes clear. How did you balance your responsibilities between the workplace and home? My husband and I were fortunate enough to be able to afford fulltime in-home childcare when our daughter was very young. Once she was in elementary school, we had a series of European au-pairs who lived with us and took care of her after school until we returned from work. Most of our evenings and all of our weekends were devoted to spending quality time with her. We had opportunities to include her in business travel and, owning our own business, we also had flexibility that wouldn’t have existed if we had remained in corporate jobs. What does “Women’s Work” mean to you? Anything that a woman wants to do! There should be no distinction. The age of woman’s work consisting of childcare and home management is long over. 36 Here are two examples of courageous women taking on roles that were typically considered to be “Men’s Work”. I recently saw the excellent documentary “MAIDEN” From Rotten Tomatoes: “MAIDEN is the story of how Tracy Edwards, a 24- year-old cook in charter boats, became the skipper of the first ever all-female crew to enter the Whitbread Round the World yacht race in 1989. Tracy's inspirational dream was opposed on all sides: her male competitors thought an all-women crew would never make it, the chauvinistic yachting press took bets on her failure, and potential sponsors rejected her, fearing they would die at sea and generate bad publicity. But Tracy refused to give up: she remortgaged her home and bought a secondhand boat, putting everything on the line to ensure the team made it to the start line. Although blessed with tremendous self-belief Tracy was also beset by crippling doubts and was only able to make it through with the support of her remarkable crew. With their help she went on to shock the sport world and prove that women are very much the equal of men” Although this took place 30 years ago, it is still (sadly) relevant today as sexism remains a rampant and destructive factor in our society. · Amy McGrath - Amy McGrath was a Marine pilot and was the first female Marine Corps pilot to fly the F/A-18 on a combat mission. She served in the military for 20 years from 1997-2017, during which time she flew 89 37 combat missions bombing al Qaeda and the Taliban, reaching the rank of Lt. Colonel. When Amy was 13 years old, she dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot, but women were not yet allowed to serve in combat in our military. So, she wrote to her elected officials to ask them to change the law. She never heard back from her senator, Mitch McConnell. She is the mother of three young children and is now seeking the Democratic nomination to run in Kentucky for the U.S. Senate…against Mitch McConnell! How do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped or influenced history, your community and you personally? History Prior to gaining the right to vote, state laws often restricted women’s rights in many other areas: they were prohibited from owning and inheriting property, signing contracts, serving on juries to name a few. Work outside the home was limited to the service industry at very low wages. Economic security came through marriage and childbearing was considered a marital duty. The ratification of the 19th Amendment brought with it progress in many aspects of life such as job opportunities, increased wages, education, and birth control. The right to vote gave women a voice and power to help elect candidates who would be mindful of their needs and enact policy that would benefit them. Women voted and later ran for office 38 to improve both government and their own lives. Unfortunately, the right to vote for women of color existed primarily/only on paper. It was not until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, that it became a reality. Sadly, a 2013 decision by the Supreme Court in the Shelby County v. Holder case opened the door to state laws restricting voting throughout the nation, a major step backwards in the fight to eliminate racial discrimination in voting. Community & Personally I grew up and voted for the first time (voting age was 21) in New York City. The country was embroiled in the Vietnam War. The 1960s-70s Women’s Liberation Movement, with leaders such as Betty Friedan, Kate Millet (a professor at Barnard College), Gloria Steinem and others, was inspiring young women. Passion and protests characterized the time. Looking back, the Women’s Suffrage Movement must have seemed like ancient history. I’m sure that I didn’t realize the degree to which the Women’s Lib leaders were standing on the shoulders of the Suffragettes and the extent of the debt we owed them and still do.