Oral History Program Margaret Rostkowski Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 8 August 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Margaret Rostkowski Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 8 August 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: Rostkowski Margaret, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 8 August 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Margaret Rostkowski with her granddaughter Circa 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Margaret Rostkowski, conducted on August 8, 2019, at Weber State University, by Lorrie Rands. Margaret discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Tyler Brinkerhoff, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: Today is August 8, 2019, and we are here at the Stewart Library at Weber State University, with Margaret Rostkowski, interviewing her for the Women 2020 project here at the Stewart Library Special Collections. I am Lorrie Rands conducting the interview and Tyler Brinkerhoff is with me, and it is about 10:10 in the morning. MR: Thank you, Lorrie and Tyler, thank you. LR: Thank you so much for your willingness to sit and do this, I’m very appreciative. Let’s jump in with when and where were you born? MR: Oh my, January 12, 1945, in Little Rock, Arkansas of all places. My dad was stationed there during the war. LR: Ok. So obviously your mother was with him? MR: Yeah, and my brother. LR: So your father, was he drafted? MR: He was a physician so he was based at Camp Robinson, which no longer exists but it was the staging area for a MASH unit going over to Italy. They weren’t called MASH units yet, but that’s what they were, and they were putting those together. They also had returning soldiers and they had German POWs. My dad 2 told us some stories about them, because he spoke German so he had some experiences. My family’s all from the Kansas City area so they weren’t too far from home. LR: Ok, how long did your father stay in the military? MR: He was demobilized in the fall, they left, and eventually came here two years later. So I was two when I first hit Zion. LR: So you don’t really have a lot of memories of Arkansas? MR: No. Of Arkansas, no. LR: So what brought your father here? MR: It was interesting, the family had lived in the Kansas City area for years, some had come pre-Civil War and were there during the times that Kansas was called Bleeding Kansas and there are family stories about that. But one of their aunts said, “You should leave here, you should go west,” and they really wanted to go to Seattle, but there weren’t any job openings there. The brother of a friend, a fellow doctor, was here and recommended Ogden. My father had actually come through Ogden on a troop train during the war and remembered the mountains. He came through in April and remembered the beautiful, beautiful trees, everything was in bloom, and the mountains, the snow on the mountains. So they came. He was the first pathologist at St. Benedict’s Hospital. The nuns had just started the hospital at the request of the military. The military had said to Ogden, and this I got from Katherine McKay, “Fathers, you need another hospital,” cause the only hospital then was Dee Memorial, and so the sisters came. I think what incredibly brave women there were, they bought that property, there was nothing 3 up there on the hill at that point, it was just a hill. Bought the property and started the hospital that is now Ogden Regional, and my father was the first pathologist. LR: What was his name? MR: Ralph Carlisle Ellis. E-L-L-I-S. C-A-R-L-I-S-L-E. Ralph Ellis. We lived just a couple blocks away, actually two doors from where I live now, close to the hospital so he could walk to work. I had a wonderful childhood growing up here, playing in what’s now Mount Ogden Park and going up Taylor Canyon. Mother would say, “Just go,” and we’d disappear. It was really great. LR: How many siblings did you have? MR: I have an older brother, John, and a younger sister, Carlisle—C-A-R-L-I-S-L-E— that’s a family name. She’s in Tucson. My brother is in Salida, Colorado. So we’re all westerners, born and bred. LR: That’s not a bad thing. So growing up there on the hill, that’s awesome, where did you go to elementary school? MR: Polk Elementary. Go Polk! LR: Really? What are some of your memories of Polk, and just going to school? MR: Well, it was then just the old building, they didn’t have what I call the new building, but it’s now sixty, seventy years old. I have so many memories of it, we walked to school. We moved later out to Buchanan, and it was the last street in town, dirt road, nothing but mountain, and we’d walk down the hill and bag. There was no lunch program so we did a lot of walking. Wonderful teachers, Mrs. Robins, my first grade teacher, I remember her. I was talking to a man this morning in the park, a man I meet, we all have dogs and we go play in the park: 4 he went to Polk school and we just happened to make that connection. Mrs. Robins had this great big blue book and I think it was Dick and Jane and I remember thinking, “I will never learn to read, that looks way too hard,” and this wave of anxiety swept over me. I was already an anxious person, but I did learn to read. I had incredible teachers there, and good friends. Like so many children of that generation, I remember so clearly going out in the hall, putting my head under my coat, getting ready for the bombs to drop, and wondering if I could get home to Mother in time. That’s a memory I have and I think now that children are doing a different kind of drill and I’m sure they’re just as frightened as I was. That’s a very, very deep memory in me. Mrs. Robins, Mrs. Croach, Mrs. Strand, all these names, it’s clear. I don’t remember my junior high teacher, but my elementary. So many people are that way, they remember elementary, but not some of the others. Miss Hardy, who was just a fixture of Ogden. Tall woman. I remember her telling the story in sixth grade of how Abraham Lincoln, every night, would walk from the White House to the hospitals and he would sit with the wounded soldiers, both Union and Confederate, and then he would walk home at night all alone. She started to cry as she was telling us the story and I just remember being embarrassed for her, but also very touched. I probably thought she knew Abraham Lincoln personally. But that may have been where my love of history started, was a story like that. So the power of teachers I think came into me at Polk and seeing those really, really fine teachers that were there. Polk has been such a foundation school for the district, it’s the oldest school building in Ogden and still very beautiful. They’re 5 going to redo it, I think, with the bond money. There was talk of tearing it down, just like Ogden High. But they learned. But all of us went there, my children went there, my grandchildren went there. So it’s been a family school for years. TB: Beside the school, what were some of your other favorite childhood memories growing up in that neighborhood? MR: Going up Taylor Canyon. There’s a mine shaft up there, my brother used to go down in it, I didn’t, I already had claustrophobia, I remember that. I remember the rattle snake in the backyard, the skunk in the backyard. We played up there all the time. We always had a dog. I remember the wind used to come out of Taylor Canyon like crazy at night. Still does. Still bothers me, I know it bothered my mother, I think it bothers me just the same way. I remember riding our bikes to Rainbow Gardens to swim in the swimming pools that were there, indoor pool/outdoor pool. My brother and I went there, that was fun. We all went to Sacred Heart Academy because there was a kindergarten for everybody, and that was down on 25th Street, where that big plot that is now that medical plaza, that was beautiful Sacred Heart. I remember that being very important, and the nuns and they were wearing the full habit, and of course the nuns were at St. Benedict’s, too, and I really remember them. We would go over a lot and they loved us, they loved the doctors’ children, and they’d take some of them to the kitchen and get cookies and stuff, that was a real bond place for us. The Christmas parties they used to have for the staff and children and they were beautiful women, and now I 6 understand how incredible they were to be here, in a climate that wouldn’t have been friendly to them for many different reasons. My family is not LDS, we went to the First Presbyterian Church, my parents were both very active there. I remember the old church down on 24th and Adams, I have just a faint memory of that church and then lots of memories from the one up on 28th and Quincy. That was an important part of our lives. My parents, I know, believed that, they kept us busy, because the thing I hear so often from non-LDS children is it’s hard growing up because the LDS kids go to Mutual and all those things, so we did Scouts. I was a Girl Scout, my brother a Boy Scout, we had church activities. I think in ways we were a little isolated up there, I remember playing with my sister in the backyard a lot, we played pioneers and played with the dolls and we always had animals and I think we were busy, but I never felt that loneliness cause I couldn’t go to Mutual, there were other things in our lives. I don’t know if you want this in, but one night, parents of one of my friends came to the door and I let them in thinking they were just here to visit and they were missionaries. My dad was well known in town and he was an Elder in the Presbyterian Church, which is something different than the LDS kids, and they had their Book of Mormon and my dad had his bible and they went mano a mano. I remember that. I’m still kind of nonplussed that they would do that, that they would take someone who’s so obviously happy where he is, but I guess that’s what happened. It was a little harder then to be non-Mormon here I think than it is now. I was asked once, “Will all the non-LDS kids raise your hands?” This was in Utah history and the 7 teacher framed it as, this is seventh grade, “We just want to know, because you may not know all the...” I think there were three of us in the class. I never felt discrimination, I had LDS friends, I know my parents did. My father did say once it was difficult being non-LDS here in the medical societies and those things, because most people were LDS. I think the climate was very different then. All in all we really had a wonderful growing up, my brother said recently, “It’s a great place to raise children,” and I think we all really had a happy childhood. LR: So, on those lines, who were some of the women you looked up to as a young girl? MR: Definitely my teachers. The nuns, Sister Mary Margaret, I don’t know what her title was, but she was the head of St. Benedict’s Hospital. A powerful woman, my dad said, not always easy to work with, but oh boy, I can remember her and I think there’s a picture of her over in the lobby at Ogden Regional. Can you imagine negotiating for that property and building that beautiful building as a woman, as a Catholic, in this society? I just think she was incredible. Sister Benora—B-E-N-O-R-A—was in the lab with my father, I remember her very clearly. I remember Doris Krauss—K-R-A-U-S-S—who was a prominent Presbyterian. Ruth Muller was an Elder in the Presbyterian Church, back in the 1950s. Apparently the Presbyterians first started selecting women Elders in the 1930s, which is quite early. I am now an Elder in the Presbyterian Church, never thought I would be, because those women I really looked up to. I had some great-aunts, back in Kansas City. My mother’s mother died very young, she died at forty-nine, so I never knew her, and my mother always 8 just talked about her with absolute devotion. Those aunts kind of took her place, I think, in my mother’s life and in our lives and I loved going back and visiting them, they were just wonderful women. One of them was a single woman who had a career as a secretary. My father’s aunt was an executive secretary for one of the big men in Sinclair Oil, so these were women who had gone out, didn’t marry, didn’t have children, but had careers. My grandmother, Margaret, who died so young, was a teacher and earned forty dollars a month before she married and then she had to quit. I’ve always told that to my students, that in the old days women could not be teachers and be married. I have a scrapbook of everything in the newspaper when Queen Elizabeth was crowned, I admired her. I just thought she was great, and I’ve read books, I read all the Landmark Books that were history, little history books for children. I loved the books about women, Betsy Ross, who we know is really important, Sacagawea. I really always loved the stories of women in history. There were some, not as many as there should have been, but there were some. My mother always said, “The girls will always have the same education as John, the girls with have an ability to earn their own living.” Her mother was a feminist. My mother remembers one of the lieutenants of Margaret Sanger had dinner at their house in Kansas City; Margaret Sanger, the head of Planned Parenthood. My mother worked at Planned Parenthood for years, we always kept bail money on the side cause that was back in the days. My mother had a profound influence I think on all of us, in terms of, “You will have an education, you will be able to take care of yourself, you will do what you want to do.” Girl 9 Scouts was certainly really important to me. I had my own Girl Scout Troop later on, and that was a lot of fun. LR: What was your mother’s name? MR: Charlotte, and her maiden name, I will spell: L-E-U-E-N-B-E-R-G-E-R. Leuenberger. LR: Ok, thank you. So, you’ve already answered this, but I want you to expand on it a little bit. It sounds like you were encouraged to pursue an education— MR: Absolutely. LR: Your mother made that a priority for not just your brother but for you as well. How do you think that that influenced you in what you would later do? MR: I just think there was never a question that, and school was always really important. Some interesting things happened to me in elementary school, that I was just thinking about this morning, that kind of influenced what happened to me later in my education. I was a pleaser, I’m a middle child, so you know what we do, and I’m the oldest daughter, so that’s kind of a trap. Are you a middle child? LR: I am a middle child. MR: So you know. What are you... brother or sister? LR: I have an older brother and sister and a younger brother and sister. MR: Ooh. You really are trapped. Right in the middle. LR: Right in the middle. MR: My sister was the baby and she has horror stories, if you were interviewing her, oh you would be in tears about the tragedy of her life [Laughs]. In fourth grade, 10 we had a girl in our class, and I won’t give you her name in case anybody reads this, who I know now was really very, very limited in her abilities. Our teacher was an older woman who had no concept of really how to teach anymore and she would send me to the back room with this girl to teach her math. It was horrible, this girl was incapable of learning that. She hit me once, and I think back now, “Why didn’t I tell somebody?” So I missed out on some math stuff. I’ve always been terrible with math, classic math anxiety, I got to algebra and it was a horror show. When we moved from here and went to Seattle which is where they did want to go, I did seventh grade here and then we moved. My parents decided that the junior high that I would have gone to was not top notch, and so they put me in a private girls’ school, and that had an incredible impact on me. It was a college prep school and really high powered and I got a superb education there, except in math. To this day, when I start facing anything in math, I get sick to my stomach. I want to take algebra, I want to prove to myself I can do it before I die, that’s sort of my goal, but it’ll probably be horrible. I tried to help my grandson with it and it was really awful. I remember ninth grade being a time when the world sort of opened to me in terms of history and literature. I just started to get so excited about things that I wanted to learn and I think I’ve always wanted to learn. I think that’s partly just having books around as a child and taking trips. Our parents took trips. I had a cousin who graduated from Annapolis and we all got to go back and go to Washington DC and San Francisco. We’d go to San Francisco on the train. I had 11 a privileged childhood in a lot of ways, and I just had a sense of a big, big world and a wonderful world. I was really excited to learn and there was never any question that all of us would do something with our lives and have an education. My mother died at ninety-one clear and sharp as anything, reading all the time. She went four places—Smith’s Food King, have her hair done, church, and the library. She had books, always and was reading right up to the end. My dad, he died a lot younger, but we’ve just always been a family of books and learning. I go back to that fourth grade when I think it was terrible that that was done to me, but I think because of that my parents sensed that I needed a better education than I’d get in a public school, which is too bad. LR: So when you were in the seventh grade, your family moved to Seattle? MR: Yeah, right, the summer after. LR: Ok, so how long were you in Seattle? MR: We lived there about ten years? My parents divorced when I was in college. 1966 they divorced, then we’d been there about ten years. My mother eventually came back here because she had friends here, she loved it here, and then I moved back here. I didn’t talk about college, but I went to the University of Kansas for my Master’s degree in education and then came back here after that. I went to college at Middlebury in Vermont. I was already beginning to write a lot and loved writing, I was editor of the high school literary magazine, I was writing poetry. That’s why I didn’t want to do that. I was writing in history classes and I had really good teachers there, fine teachers. All women, really bright, wonderful women. I look back on that and I think, this is really awful to say, but in those days, if you 12 were really, really bright, you went east to college. If you were a notch down from that, you went to a California school like Stanford, where my sister went. I don’t think that was a step down, but we thought it was, cause we went east. My best friend went to Vassar, I went to Middlebury, that was just it, you went east. The people that really weren’t top drawer went to a state school. I look now and I think, “That is so incredibly stupid.” Nobody around here knows Middlebury, it doesn’t mean squat. Now if you were in the east, it would. But that whole status thing just meant nothing. At the time I didn’t realize that, but I had taken a creative writing course and the wonderful teacher there had recommended Middlebury as a great school for writing, and it was. But I majored in history, so there you go. I think history is the place you learn to write, you learn to think, you learn to reason, you learn to evaluate sources, you learn to present argument, I mean all those things now we know are so important in life. At the time we didn’t. TB: Going back to some of your experiences, you mentioned growing up in the Presbyterian church. What was it like, the church services, being a child and a young adult growing up in the church there? MR: What an interesting question. I don’t remember the services per se, they just were what they were. I always loved the music—and this will come in really important in my current life. I do remember the minister, I was best friends with his daughter. I remember Christmas services being incredibly wonderful, I remember Sunday School and some wonderful teachers that I had. We had a wonderful Christian education program with great books and really good stuff. Some of my books are still there in the library at the church. Presbyterians are all 13 about education, that’s another thing that I think influenced all of us because my family, they’re what were called ‘Cradle Presbyterians’. Princeton was founded by the Presbyterians, it’s just heart and soul part of that church. I think that was another influence on me. The music was important. My mother led the children’s choir, I sang in the choir. So many kids then in the church. Then when we moved to Seattle we went to a Presbyterian church there. It was just sort of part of life, really important. I left the Presbyterian church and attended Quaker meetings for some time, here in Ogden and in Kansas, but there are no Quaker meetings around here. There’s one in Logan and one in Salt Lake. That’s a long drive on a Sunday morning. I think my heart is still with the Friends. To me, I think they are the ones who most deeply lived out their faith. They were so important in the abolitionist movement and the Women’s movement and the peace movement. I love the silence of the Quaker meeting. But there’s no music and that’s one of the drawbacks. Music is really important to me. I’m very proud of the church now. It’s taken some real moves toward equality. The Presbyterian church is very democratic, it’s like Congress where you don’t have a leader, there’s no bishop. Presbyterians back in Scotland said, “No bishops, no kings. Up yours, Mary, Queen of Scots.” Excuse me. Don’t put that on tape. Recently they voted because they used to have a clause that said Elders and clergy had to be celibate or married. They have removed that now, so congregations can decided for themselves if they will perform same-sex marriages and if they will take clergy 14 who are not celibate or married. That’s a big move and has torn the church apart, as it has many churches, many denominations. But the church I attend, 1st Presbyterian here is solidly on the side of that. So that’s really important to me. Very open and accepting. A lot of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Presbyterian. Go guys. “No kings, George III.” TB: You mentioned going to visit your aunts. What were some of your experiences like there as you would visit them? MR: There was a lot of talk about family and relatives. I remember visiting my Aunt Irene, I’m named for her, my middle name is Irene, and my granddaughter’s middle name is Irene, so it’s being carried on. She was a secretary in an art gallery and I remember visiting there and seeing her at work and thinking of her and she was always dressed very professionally and I was really, really impressed with her. Auntie Nell on the other hand had married and had four boys and I think was quite a bitter, older woman and I remember her very deeply. They were a part of my life for quite a while. As were my parental grandparents and we visited them a lot. My grandmother used to favor my brother. She was one of those that my brother was the king and my father was the king. I loved going back to Kansas City. I remember driving to Kansas City in a station wagon with no air condition in the middle of the summer. We were hearty folks back then, and John and I were sitting in the back seat, my sister was sitting between our parents. You look back and think, “Holy Hannah, they did that?” No bucket seats, and I think we occasionally had an air conditioner on the side of the car in the car window. It was just awful, but it was sort of the home base for our 15 family. As I said, they’d come there before the Civil War. One of them fought in the Civil War, an immigrant from Ireland, he and his wife, they were in Illinois, he fought in Illinois with the Illinois regiments and then moved to Kansas. So we go way back here and that was sort of where I felt that sense of family and stories. I’m sort of the keeper now of the family stories and picture and that’s the writing I’m trying to do right now is about those people, cause I want the next generation to have it. Nothing spectacular in our stories, just stories. Kansas City was where that was, and we enjoyed going back. My grandfather, whom we loved, the one I knew, my dad’s father, was a teacher. He was a teacher of manual arts and this is an important thing. According to the newspaper article when he was awarded something, he was the first manual arts teacher in the country to allow girls in his class. He became then an assistant principal, but I think he always missed the teaching. One summer we drove back east with my dad, my mother stayed home with my sister, and then he left us there and my grandpa taught us how to use the lathe and how to use the forge. We made some things on the forge, I still have a rolling pin I made on the lathe. I loved that, I loved woodwork, it was so much fun, and he was so patient and there we were, the two of us together. LR: What a great memory. MR: Yeah, and I have a little doll that I made. She’s round and then I painted her. Then they put us on the train and my brother and I came west on the train all by ourselves. I look back now and think, “Would you do that now?” But we had a room and I remember my grandpa talking to the negro porter as he was probably 16 slipping him one dollar and saying, “Now, you take care of these children,” and my grandpa said, “He’ll take care of you if you have any...” I think that’s just an amazing thing that he did that. I remember it so clearly, I just love traveling by train. So that was a really fun memory. Family, it’s been important. Now I have four nephews and two grandkids and we’re very close, the whole family is close, and get together whenever we can. They love coming to Utah, this is home, and even the boys who didn’t grow up here love coming, the nephews. Best skiing in the world, I tell ‘em. Strap on those skis. LR: So, I want to jump a little bit to your college. Why did you decide to major in history? MR: I went in thinking I would major in English. LR: Ok. As I was reading your bio I know of thought English. MR: “Must have been an English major.” LR: Yes. MR: Hollis McKinn Steele. S-T-E-E-L-E. Taught that beginning history class, extraordinary man. He would lecture, and I think I threw them away, but for years I had my notebooks. Just fascinating. I loved it, I just fell in love with history. I’d always loved it, I mean I was reading the Landmark books about American history, and that was I think, always just what I loved. So I majored in history and then I majored in Middle Eastern history. When I was fifteen, I didn’t tell you this, I went on a trip to the Middle East with one of the pastors at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle. We went to Egypt, we went to Jerusalem, and I began to think about the whole Arab/Israeli thing and thought, 17 “There’s justice on both sides here,” I’d read Exodus and it just changed my mind. I loved Egypt so much and so I decided to major in that history, and Dr. Steele, that was his area. A lot of people said it was the toughest major at Middlebury. I wrote a thesis, and we took comps, these huge exams at the end. It was really a hard school. I did take quite a bit of English at the same time, I was thinking English novel and American Lit and all of those things. We had a great American Lit program there. We had pencils that Henry David Thorough had made in the library, stuff like that. You know, New England, they’re that way. It was really interesting and it was a really good education. Then I graduated and thought, “What do I do now?” I can teach or whatever and I’d had a steady boyfriend and we broke up, so I came back. My mother was living in Kansas at that time, she lived briefly there after their divorce. I’m glad I went to Middlebury, it was a new experience, I’m glad I had the experience of living in the east. I could never live there now. I went back recently, I still have a really good friend, a roommate at Middlebury who does something called “Alumni College.” It’s a fall thing where they bring back graduates and we’re there for four days and take courses and it’s fabulous, I went back and really had a good time and it was fun to be back there. But I could never live there. For one thing, the wide open space, I mean, we can see into Nevada here and things like that. A lot of people there were easterners and they’re so, “Oh, I’ve been to Utah, I’ve been to Park City.” I want to say “That’s not Utah.” I mean it’s a part of Utah, but it’s not really Utah. One man had skied SnowBasin. He goes, “Oh, God, it was the best skiing I’ve ever had.” 18 While I was in college, I did a volunteer thing of teaching piano to some town kids. We didn’t call them “Townies,” other people do, other schools do, and I realized I really loved that. This is something I hadn’t mentioned, my grandmother Margaret was a pianist. I have her piano now, it’s almost one hundred years old. My dad played the French horn, my mother played the piano for high school musicals, which is really hard to do. She started me with piano when I was four, so I learned to read music before I read words. I’ve just always played and I realized I really loved playing, so I took lessons from a really couple of fine teachers, accompanied the college choir which was really tough stuff. But I realized how much I loved teaching, when I taught this little girl, so that was the direction I took when I left. Well I went back to KU, I was there a little with my mother for a short time and got a Master of Arts, in teaching which was kind of a crummy degree, but it got me so I could teach. Gave me the credentials, didn’t teach me a thing. These were eighty year old men and I would love to put them in a class of seventh grade boys and see how they could handle it, which is what I had when I started teaching. So I realized that that was something I really liked, so I taught for three years in Kansas, when my husband was in grad school at KU, in history. Trans- Mississippi West history they called it then. Isn’t that nice of them? The whole caboodle in one degree. I taught there for three years, American history, to eighth graders, and that was ok. But when we came here, I interviewed for a job and the vice principal said, “Oh, you can’t teach history, here history teachers have to men so they can coach.” I should have stood up and hit him, but I didn’t. 19 Then, “Can you teach English?” I said, “Yes, I really need a job.” So that’s how I started teaching English. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that just amazing? LR: Yeah. Kind of mindblowing a little bit. MR: I mean, 1970s, right, you could say things like that and get away with it. So I taught English for thirty-nine years and I loved it. I taught junior high and high school. And that’s a big jump, I don’t know if you want to go back to college. LR: I’m curious how you met your husband, cause when you left Middle...? MR: Bury, see out here nobody knows Middlebury. Started in 1800, it’s a really old school! LR: You said that when you left Middlebury you had just broken up with your boyfriend. MR: Yeah. I met Chuck in a history class at KU. He had Vermont license plates on his car and I saw them so I happened to say to him, “I went to Middlebury, are you from Vermont?” That’s how we met. We were there in Kansas and in 1973 all of the history professors around the country were young. They were in their thirties, forties. They had a long career ahead of them, so it looked really bleak. It’s kind of like right now, for getting college jobs, it’s really, really difficult. They had thousands of applicants go to the big conferences where they go to apply for jobs and there might be a job in Mississippi or some of those places where I don’t really think...so we decided to come back to Ogden. He took up picture framing, and then I got a job teaching school. He was born and raised Vermonter, French Canadian mother, Polish father. Interesting life, and we were together for nineteen, twenty years and divorced. But adopted two sons while we were 20 married. We’re still friends. But so we came back here, cause he liked here. We’d come out and visited a couple times and we just thought, “Where do we really want to live? That’s more important than what we want to do.” So that’s what brought us here. LR: When you came here, you got a job teaching junior high. Where at? MR: Washington Junior High. Which you probably haven’t heard of. Do you know where the airplane school is now? I call it the 9/11 school, it’s the one with the airplane, down on Washington Boulevard? LR: I’ve only been in Ogden for about a year or so. MR: Ok. I can’t remember what it is, but it’s 32nd and Washington. Washington Junior High was there and it was the nearest thing Ogden has to an inner city school. In the old days, here’s the lake, here’s the mountains, all of the junior high boundaries went like this. You had Highland, you had Mount Fort, you had Central right here and Washington. Then when they decided they needed a new school, they built Mount Ogden here and they drew the boundaries this way for Mount Ogden, and Washington was here, below Harrison. You get the picture? A third Hispanic, a third African American, a third White. It was a tough school. I took over in the middle of the year from a teacher who was part-time. My first day, I was called names, I didn’t know what they meant, by very large African American girls who scared the [whispers] shit out of me. I made it through that first four months, I don’t think the kids learned anything, I taught Utah history and American history, which I had taught in Kansas to wonderful little Kansas kids 21 from Gardner, Kansas, and met great teachers there. Every place I’ve been I’ve had great teacher friends. I came back the next year to Washington, and if you survived and came back, those kids loved you. I was there for five years and just loved it. The school was getting smaller and smaller, because all of the African American families were moving out to like Weber County, Roy High, those schools. We were down to 200 students and ten teachers. I taught Utah history and American history and I did the choir cause I could play the piano. I didn’t know anything about doing the choir. The Office of Civil Rights said, “You’ve got to close that school, it’s racially identifiable,” and I thought, “Why is it racially identifiable when Mount Ogden is 90% white? What’s the deal here?” They wanted to close it for years and they had a meeting down at the school and all the parents came and the superintendent said, “We should have closed the school a long time ago but it is such a community school, we hated to do it.” The parents would come to parent-teacher conference and we knew that they were going to go home and support what we had said, because they wanted their kids to get an education. Meanwhile, Ogden High was having a lot of racial trouble in the early 1970s. There were staircases that the black kids dominated that the white kids couldn’t go up, I mean, those were the stories we heard. They had some actual semi-riots up there, it was because the majority of the kids were white and the other kids, just didn’t have a place at that school. When I went to Mount Ogden, they moved us all and they said, “You’re going to be fine, we’re not going to penalize you or anything cause you’re new.” Well, you know, they did. They 22 didn’t do it right, they didn’t let the Washington kids have cheerleaders or have any of those other things. Here all of us are coming into a perfectly white and LDS school. It was really tough. I always felt I was interfering with the kids’ play time by asking them to do homework. Parents would say, “Well, you know, we need to go away for two weeks to Sun Valley, or to Hawaii, or to whatever, and so Johnny’s going to miss school.” That never happened at Washington. This was Title IX time, and I was in the League of Women voters and we were going around to these schools talking about Title IX, and I remember these couches sitting at the back of the room just thinking, “No, they’re not going to get in my gym. They’re not going to play on my field.” We said, “Excuse me, it’s the law.” I remember the first time the girls played basketball, and they were afraid of the ball, they would do this [blocks face] when somebody threw the ball at them. Ogden High’s girls basketball team is now one of the top, they take State often. The progress that has been made with Title IX, one of the best things we ever did in schools and education. I had one of my students at Ogden High played for University of Connecticut, Ucon, she was good. But those were a hard five years at Mount Ogden and I liked the teachers, we were very close, I’m still friends with a lot of them, and that was a really good experience that way. I remember talking to one of the other teachers from Washington saying, “Are you having trouble learning the kids names?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “They all look alike, and they’re all Tiffany and Charity.” We used to know Hispanic, African, White, and families, “This is so-and-so’s brother.” But these kids all looked alike and they had these names that all sounded the same. So we were really struggling. 23 LR: So, speaking of Title IX. What a great thing that you did. I appreciate it. I played high school basketball, so I appreciate that. How did you become involved with Title IX? Did you actually get it passed or was that a little after your time? MR: No, League of Women Voters—do you know about the League of Women Voters? LR: Yeah. MR: No, we just thought, “This is a time for us to help let the schools know about this new legislation.” It had already been passed. I just remember some of the Weber District schools that we were going to. I remember talking to the female coaches at Mount Ogden and Ogden High, they had a hell of a time getting gym time, getting field time. It was really tough. Now the PE classes are co-ed, everybody’s cool with that, it’s not a problem. They used to be separate classes, in the boys’ gym and girls’ gym. Cooking classes were just the girls. Now they’re full of the boys and the girls are in the shop and they’re in woodworking and they’re in auto mechanics; All those classes that they should have been. Grandpa Ellis would be proud. They did away with sewing, which I don’t know if that’s too bad or not, maybe the boys would have taken it. But it was a profound change in the schools, it really was. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? 1973, that’s not that long ago. But the League was right there, going in and saying, “Ok, you’re going to do this.” But I think all of those old coaches just had to die off before we got change, because they could maneuver in and make it so the female coaches were struggling. LR: Change is hard. 24 MR: It is, and you’ve always done it this way and that’s how it should be and, “Is a girl going to play football, for heavens sake?” Well, there’s one that is now. Isn’t there a place kicker? LR: Yeah, I think there is now. In college, or is she in the NFL? I shouldn’t speak, because I don’t follow that. Well, speaking of someone who actually took advantage of, and I had no idea of the battle that was fought for us to be able to do that. Basketball was important to me. I am extremely grateful for the work that you did. MR: At Ogden High, I taught AP classes and there was lots of work for the kids. Those female athletes would come in in their gym clothes and their hair is pulled back up and they had done their work and they had done it really well. Some of the other girls weren’t so sharp. I thought, “Don’t tell me that athletics gets in the way of academics. It goes together.” They were some of my best students, including this young woman who went to UCon. They were great, I had wonderful tennis players. Ogden High always had a great tennis team, both girls and boys, and I had some of the best tennis players in my class. It was interesting, cause I taught creative writing at Ogden High, and I would see what kind of athletes do writing. Distance runners, swimmers, tennis, but I never had a football player, and not many basketball players. I think there’s something about those distance events, those solitary events, when you’re by yourself. You know, you’re thinking. You’re thinking differently when you play basketball, when you play football. And I’m not downing it I’m just saying it’s a different mental thing. I really found that fascinating. So these girls, these tennis players, oh they were good. State 25 champions time and time again. Swimmers, too, they always smelled when they came to class of chlorine, which was kind of nice, and their hair was green. LR: So at Mount Ogden, were you teaching history or? MR: English. eighth grade, seventh grade. My last year I taught a French class cause they wanted French and so I taught first year French. Oh, one awful semester, I had to teach math. Oh, God, that was horrible! I mean, they were scrambling, and you have one solitary math class sitting here that needs a teacher and she has an opening. I taught geography once cause they said, “History is a social science, so you can teach geography.” Well, that was fun, I love maps. But, ugh, math. LR: Ok, you had mentioned when you were at Middlebury you were writing a little bit. When did you actually publish a book and why? MR: Why did I do that? Another life changing event. I did the Utah Writing Project in 1981. You’ve probably never heard of it. LR: You’re right. MR: Utah Writing Project. The National Writing Project was started by Jim Gray in 1976 at Berkeley, because he had gone out with a bunch of other university professors to the Berkeley school teachers. Do you know about the Berkeley schools, do you know about Berkeley, what kind of place it is? Imagine what those schools are like. They went out to teach them how to teach writing. These teachers sat there staring at them, and apparently they even threw things at them. Jim Gray pretty quickly realized, “Those are the people with the knowledge. Those are the people in the trenches. We need to find a way to bring 26 teachers of writing together. So he started the, what was it called? The something Writing Project there at Berkeley. The theory behind it, and that then was brought to Utah was, you get teachers together and they talk about writing, how they teach it, and they teach each other how to teach. The whole thing of it is you do a presentation, a demonstration, we call it, an hour lesson and you have the teachers acting as students. Afterwards you tear that lesson apart and you look at it and you say, “What are the theories behind it, what pedagogy supports this teaching? What did you notice about the lesson, what did you notice about this?” It is the most powerful thing, it is so incredible when teachers will get together and talk like that about their practice. At the same time they were writing, they had us write. So we would write and then we would be in response groups, we would read our writing to each other, so we’re teaching and we’re doing it. I did that up at Utah State. Another, a man that’s so important in my life, Bill Strong, he had gone to Berkeley, in like the second year out there and knew Jim Gray really well and brought it back to Utah. We were one of the earliest places to pick it up and he called it the Utah Writing Project here. I did it in 1981 and then came back to Mount Ogden and started teaching that way with my students, and I also started writing myself. In January of 1982 I started writing my novel, and that influenced my teaching for the rest of my career. It was the most profound change. I then became the co-director of the Utah Writing Project and then we had one here at Weber State, Wasatch Range Writing Project, that took in teachers from all five school districts around us. I think there’s somebody, William Pollet who’s in the 27 English department, I think is still carrying it on. It had federal funding for a while, but then lost it when they did away with...what were they called? Anyway, they stopped funding it and I think it’s probably on its last legs, which is a tragedy. It’s one of the best kinds of training for teachers. Not training, I don’t like that word, educating teachers. That’s the writing project. To my novel, I had Uncles in World War I and I always grew up hearing about them and I actually met a couple of them. Old, old men. Nobody died, but they were the brothers to my grandmother Margaret, who had died. There were ten children in this family of a school teacher, he was a school teacher, their father. They were poor as church mice, and I have photographs of my mother as a little girl, her uncle, and then the two girls, she and her sister sitting on either side. So I grew up with these guys as part of the family, and then I went to see the movie “Chariots of Fire,” do you know that movie? LR: I do. MR: You do. Runners, yes, athletes. Do you remember the scene when the two athletes get off the train and they’re loaded down? This is 1924 and they’re coming to Cambridge. They have their golf clubs and their tennis rackets and they’re loaded down and they come down off the train to get on a taxi, and there are two men standing there to help them. The camera focuses on them and their faces have been destroyed. One of them is wearing a brace that comes around and holds his teeth and scars all over him and the eyes are wrong and the two athletes look at them and they’re embarrassed. The two veterans say, “Here you go, governor,” they have the accent that’s not Cambridge. That kind of haunted 28 me, that scene, and then one morning I woke up and they were playing the theme from “Chariots of Fire.” Da-da-da-da-da, you know? I had this idea and I sat down and I wrote the first chapter of what became After the Dancing Days. The main character is a little girl named Annie, and then she meets this man whose face was burned and he had terrible scar tissue. If you ever get to see the movie “The Battle of Britain,” there was an actor in that who actually was burned in World War II and he’s in it as one of the pilots, and you see what happens when your skin is burned, it’s extraordinary. She has this friendship with him. That novel again, changed my life because, oddly enough, we adopted our first son right as I was writing that book. So life sort of got really busy. He was six when he came from Korea and so my husband would take him swimming every Saturday and I’d write another chapter. Then that summer I took him down to Polk school to a kindergarten and I’d write another chapter while he was there. The house went to hell, but then I saw a tiny little squip in the Salt Lake Tribune about the Utah Original Writing competition. It said there’s a young adult category, and I was deeply into young adult literature, reading books for my kids, cause I wanted to get them to read and there are great YA novels, written specifically for that age group. I thought, “Well, I’ll finish,” and I had a dear friend, who is still a dear friend and because I was writing on my old high school typewriter, which was not electric, she would take it home on her electronic typewriter that had a way to erase, make correct errors. I wrote my thesis, 100 pages, on my high school typewriter, three copies, carbon paper. So you make a mistake and then the footnotes at the bottom, oh, a horror show. So she would 29 type another chapter for me, and I carried it down to Salt Lake, I didn’t mail it, I didn’t trust the US Mail. My mother and I drove down to Salt Lake and took it to this wonderful building right next to the governor’s house and handed it in in a manilla envelope to this very cool, sophisticated woman sitting at the desk. Behind her was a stack of manuscripts and I said, “Oh, is that what you’ve gotten so far?” She said, “That’s what we’ve gotten today.” I thought, “Oh well. Here’s one little book, I’ll never see it again.” It won first prize in the young adult category. LR: Wow. Well, there you go. MR: There you go. From Ogden. And Governor Matheson, we went down for the awards. Do you know Governor Matheson, father of Jim Matheson? His wife just died, Norma. LR: Yes. MR: The award ceremony was in the top room of the governor’s mansion, in the ballroom. So we went up and all of these people, and Governor Matheson, so wonderful, he said, “I am so glad to see all these people from around the state. There’s somebody from—” What’s the town, way down southwest corner? “and from Ogden, and—” in other words, not just Salt Lake City. Cause he was from down south. Then the next year, After the Dancing Days won the publication prize, which is for a novel, or a book, from the previous year that hasn’t been published that needs some help to get published. $5000, to go to the publisher who will pick up this novel. Through a bunch of really nice connections, I got an agent, and that’s hard to do. She read my book and contacted Linda Zuckerman, 30 who was an editor at Harper and Roe and said, “You need to look at his manuscript.” First I had to do numerous changes, I had to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, for like two years to get it to where she thought it was ok. Then it was published, and then it started winning prizes because Harper was advertising it. They put it in all the publications, and so it got a lot of house, and it’s still in print. This was 1986, it’s still in print. I remember them talking, these are New York people saying, “We were just wondering, how to spend money, is there a newspaper in Salt Lake City?” Yeah. There is one, several,as a matter of fact. Ah, the ignorance of the easterner. So that’s really amazing, it was really a lot of lucky, lucky chances and being in the right place and seeing that little article and being in it. It’s had a wonderful life, it’s been published in England, where it did not do well, I think the English believe that World War I is their war and no one else should write about it. It’s been published in Germany, where it won a Reading Rat Award, and they said, “Don’t be offended, that’s like your—” What would we say? Bookworm! Kids in Germany who read a lot, they voted it number one. Sweden and French, France, and to get published in French is really hard. They don’t publish a lot of things. But again, that’s the war that meant a lot to them. Then I wrote two other novels, both of which are published, the second one by Harper and then the third one by Harcourt and neither of them did as well, but they’re still books I loved and meant a lot to me. The second one was about the Vietnam period, cause my students had asked me to write about that, they said, “We don’t know anything about Vietnam, our teachers won’t talk to us about 31 it, we never get there.” But that’s been a really interesting part of my life, and a lot of fun, and publishing now is so completely different, I mean, self publishing and that, I wouldn’t even try now. Actually my agent and my editor talked once and they said After the Dancing Days would never be published now. It’s a dark subject, war, it doesn’t have a really, really happy ending. It’s historical fiction, and historical fiction doesn’t sell well. What sells now is zombies and dystopias. Everybody writes dystopias. It’ll swing back, but meanwhile, I was published by the house that published Charlotte’s Web and that means a lot to me. One of my favorite books. Speaking of women, Charlotte. LR: So, you adopt your first child— MR: David. LR: While you’re trying to write your first novel. So how did you balance, besides your house going to, MR: Hell. LR: Thank you. How did you balance work and home life? MR: It was really hard. Once I finished up the novel in the summer...the third novel was the hardest one that I was writing during school time and that was really difficult. I was working with the same editor on all three books, she was really wonderful. She moved to Harcourt, that’s why I went there. But because I was writing about this backpacking country, down in the south, she didn’t know squat about that, so it’s really hard to work with somebody that knew nothing about your topic. She’s from New York, what does she know? Wonderful person, wonderful editor, but it was hard, it was really hard. We adopted our second son, 32 David was six when he came, he was an orphan from Korea. That was in 1982 when he came, and Diovanni came in 1989, he was from the Philippines, and he was eleven. So we adopted two older boys, and really tough times with both of them. They are now both wonderful men and wonderful fathers, they are great fathers, I have four grandchildren. But we’ve had some really, tough, tough times. Actually, that’s one reason why I haven’t taken on another novel, I think at that point I just kind of couldn’t, after that. Both of them have had problems with the law, both of their college funds that we saved for them went to lawyers fees. But both of them graduated from high school and David has a really good job at Williams International, building missiles to drop on Iraq, which I’m not happy about, and Diovanni is working hard, so it’s been great. I mean, I’m very glad we did it. I’m not so sure my husband was. He once said, “I’m not sure we should have done that.” But I’m sure. I remember David saying to me once when I was at Ogden High, “Mom, I wish you weren’t a teacher, you have to work so hard,” so they both sensed that. Having kids and working hard isn’t for everybody, but I had summers and I had the Writing Project. It really was a support because I had writing groups with that and friends that were involved with that. I don’t regret any of it, it was all good stuff, along with multiple dogs and cats. TB: Who were some of your favorite authors and why? MR: Oh, interesting, I’ve mentioned E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web. I think one of the finest books ever written. Extraordinary book. Louisa May Alcott, there you go, for a woman...Little Women, I reread that constantly, and that is still one of the 33 most profound books. I just think it’s just incredible. Her ethic just shines in that, and the transcendental philosophy which is so interesting. I read all the Anne of Green Gables books when I was younger. I actually got to go to Green Gables a while ago. I went to Orchard House and there were a whole group of us, about eight men and women and we all had the same look on our face. “This is Beth’s room, that’s where she wrote the book.” Same at Green Gables. Nowadays, Jane Austen is one of my very favorites. I think she’s wonderful. I read constantly, I taught mythology for years and every year we ended with The Odyssey. And that is, I think right up there with Little Women, in terms of a book I absolutely love. There’s something about that book that I find just breathtaking. I’ve always loved Greek mythology, but that whole story and the journey and coming home and the desire for home and the desire for strength of family, the father-son relationship. I just read an incredible book about The Odyssey and Athena is just one great woman. She, goddess that she is. So, that’s been a really important part of my life. Certainly Shakespeare. I mean, I always taught Shakespeare in school and go to the festival every year. I read a lot of contemporary writers. I’m sorry right now I haven’t read more Toni Morrison. We just lost her and I’ve not read much of her and I know I should. I’m constantly at the library, I’ve been on the library board and that is really an important place to me to keep up on new writers. So, American literature, but children’s writers I think are underrated and they group young adult and children together. Underpaid, the editors are underpaid, the agents are underpaid, the publishers are. But I think that’s some of the most important 34 writing being done cause it’s what starts kids reading. So very, very important. Right now the Ogden City school has no librarians in their school, in their elementary schools, they have just people to check out books, but it’s so sad, cause those are the people that can take books out to the kids and encourage them to read certain things. So, that’s another issue to worry about. LR: So, we haven’t really talked about your time at Ogden High. Not really. You spent five years at Mount Ogden, what led you to move to Ogden High? MR: I was told to go there while kicking and screaming, by Dr. Garner. What was his first name, I want to say James Garner. No, that was maverick. Dr. Garner was a great superintendent, great big tall Native American man from up in the valley. He called me one day, and he said, “Margaret. Brad Rogar, who’s been teaching creative writing at Ogden High, is moving to Weber State.” You know Brad Rogar here? LR: I do not. MR: He was teaching English here for years and did the literary stuff. He was doing the Literary Harvest, the school literary magazine. Dr. Garner said, “We want you to go up there because you won this award in poetry.” It’s not in poetry, but never mind. I said, “I need a minute to think about it,” cause I liked Mount Ogden, I loved the teachers there, I really liked junior high, I’d chosen junior high over high school. He said, “Well, I do hope you say yes because I’m talking to a group of parents this afternoon and I want to be able to tell them that you’re coming.” ‘She’s won this award,’ and there was stuff in the newspaper about me and stuff. So I sat there and cried and my son David still remembers when I cried and then 35 I said, “I guess I have to go.” So I went up and I was miserable my first year, I felt out of place and I missed my friends. I was teaching ninth grade and creative writing, because they had nine-twelve grades then. But after that I loved it and I loved that school. I was there twenty-three years. Once the ninth grade left, I taught tenth grade and then creative writing and then they gave me college prep English, and then eventually gave me the two AP classes, AP literature and AP composition. I taught mythology. That was my reward, every year, was to read The Odyssey again. Tough school, really a tough school, and in the 1990s everything changed when the huge migration started coming up from Mexico. Do you remember, were you in school around here then? TB: I was not. MR: There was one town in Mexico that people had started coming and they were sending their kids up, and they would come and live with aunts and uncles and stuff, they didn’t come with their parents. So we got this flood of kids who didn’t speak English. They were sixteen, in Mexico, and you don’t have to go to school after sixteen. We were just floundering for some years, we had very little ESL, English as a Second Language. We had one teacher, we were not prepared and it was really, really hard. Those are some of the best teachers in the world at that school. There were some that weren’t great, but there were some really fine ones. It’s just a great place to be, the loyalty was incredible, the kids to the school, and a lot of poverty. It’s from the railroad tracks to the mountains and you have the kids with the swimming pools in their backyards and the kids who are homeless. You just have everything at that school. Ben Lomond is a kind of 36 different school, that’s the other school in the Ogden district. It’s more sort of, this sounds terrible, but a little lower middle class, but it’s more homogeneous than Ogden High. When we first came, my first day there, the first assembly was opened with a prayer from the president of the seminary. I kind of went, “Uh... Mmm.... mm-mm.” I saw this woman marching up, she was this woman I knew from Mount Ogden, Jewish woman, and I knew, “That’s not going to last, cause that’s not going to happen again.” And it didn’t. The principal from Mount Ogden and vice principal both moved with me. I got the call first, but they were both transferred up. That was so illegal, but they’d been doing it, and getting away with it. That school then, and I’m sure now, fifty percent, it might be higher than that, limited English, and not all LDS. The faculty wasn’t all LDS. So a strong seminary program, very strong. I really loved it, and I loved the teachers. Ninth grade, tenth grade, I like those kids at that age. I once taught an English twelve class which was challenging, but I kept saying to them, “I’m all that stands between you and graduation, you have to pass this class to get your diplomas. Do the work.” Those tenth and ninth grade classes were not honors classes, they were mixed, which I really liked, so you had limited ability kids and then the really high kids, and I liked that mix. Did a lot of writing with them, a lot of writing groups. At that time they weren’t as regimented, now they are with the system where everybody has to be on the same page at the same time, completely takes all the creativity out of teaching. I couldn’t teach there now, the district has changed completely, once the 37 superintendent came in and just ruined everything. It’s going to take years to rebuild it. But I really loved all of the classes. Both my boys went through while I was there. David was in my creative writing class once, which was not great. I know once some people were visiting the school and a man came in and sat in my class and he said, “I’ve always wanted to teach here. People come here and they stay their whole career. They don’t leave.” So it was great, I really loved it, before, when our principal left, he was a great man and before they tore the building apart. LR: So before it was renovated. MR: I couldn’t have stood that, I had a wonderful little office. High school teaching is really great. I don’t know if you’ve heard any of the comments from El Paso, this one superintendent was talking Sunday night about this fifteen-year-old was the youngest one shot down there and he was crying. I retired because I thought, “If I ever want to do anything else with my life I have to retire.” I looked at my social security, looked at my bank, thought, “I can do this.” So it was a good career. LR: So it’s obvious, as you’re talking, how important teaching was to you, how much you gained from it. Is there one moment that stands out as just the highlight of your career? MR: Oh, golly. I did the Literary Harvest and I had a staff, they were all editors, and we worked as a group. I’m big on group work, I did group work all the time. Group discussions, talk about it, you know. The Writing Project fostered that and a lot of, “How do you work with groups? How do you help kids to work well in a group, how do you keep kids from dominating?” All of that, it takes time. People 38 would submit to the Harvest anonymously and then the kids, the staff would sit and read them and talk about them. I remember that year I had about seventeen kids on the staff, it was a big group, we were sitting in a big circle and we had some visitors from Weber State, they were visiting teachers, or student teachers. We started this discussion and I just sat there, I didn’t do anything. The kids ran the discussion. These teachers, the people were watching, and the person that was with them told me afterwards, “I didn’t know there were classes like that.” So that to me was the thing that I am proudest of, that I was able to do that work with them, because I think we need to work with each other, we need to talk to each other, we need to listen to each other. How do you talk in a way that you allow other people to have an opinion, how do you disagree? I sort of used Quaker principles, we set it aside and brought it back later, we didn’t vote, we got consensus on the piece. It really works, and it allows everybody to have a voice. I remember one little girl who was so shy, she would never say anything. I remember one day watching her just kind of physically gather herself and then she spoke and it was like an act of courage and will and everything else that she could do that and I was so proud of her. I think that’s the thing that I loved the most. Even in mythology where we had ninth grade through seniors, to get that spread to work with each other was good. The squirrely boys who want to read about dragons and sophisticated girls who wanted to write essays and the basketball players. LR: So I just had a few more questions, I have like three questions specifically. You had mentioned that you were involved with League of Women Voters back in the 39 day. Were there any other or are there currently, any organizations, community organizations, civic organizations that you’re involved in and why? MR: I still belong to the League, I’m not very active in it anymore, but I was registering voters at Night Out Against Crime Tuesday night when it was ninety-eight degrees in the amphitheater, and you know what, everybody’s registered. People walk by and say, “I’m registered.” They kind of do this [gives a thumbs up], and I think, “What’s that mean? I hope I know what it means.” I work with Weber Reads, have you heard about Weber Reads? LR: I know about Weber Reads. MR: Ok. I work with the teachers who write the lessons. These are all Writing Project teachers, so we’re still together. We’re doing water this year, which has been so interesting. We have elementary teachers through high school teachers and we have lessons, really little wonderful lessons in the elementary schools all the way up to analysis of Stengar’s book on John Leslie Powell. It’s just fabulous and every summer, I have a core of teachers—they used to get university credit, which teachers always need, but they don’t need it anymore, they’ve been so long, so they just do it for the love of doing it. This is our thirteenth year, we’ve been doing it since the very beginning. Next year we’re going to do pioneer women’s voices, cause they’re all women, so why not. That takes a lot of my time. Two other things. I am the organist and accompanist for the Presbyterian church, so every Sunday I do the hymns, I accompany two choirs, and I love it. I never thought I would be paid to do music, but I am, and so all of that’s paying off and it’s really fun. I love the choirs. I’m also on the session, and my portfolio is 40 “mission” which is, “How do we reach out into the community? How do we be the hands and feet of Jesus?” We do Family Promise, which is an organization here in town that takes homeless children and their families and houses them in churches for a week and then they move the next week to a different church. That’s been really interesting. We can have up to four families, fourteen people. We have classrooms, and we have a Christian Education building. Wouldn’t you know the Presbyterians would have a good education building with classrooms and a gym and that’s where they are. That’s been a big job but we see these women, and you know what, here it comes back to the same thing. Usually it’s women without partners. Sometimes we’ve had fathers and they’ve been great. Stuff happens. The last family, somebody stole $2000 from them and they lost their house. These are not people that are not trying hard, but so often with the women, it’s lack of education. They got pregnant young, they have children, they're working at Shopko and they’re probably making minimum wage, and it’s been a little distressing cause I think, “How are you ever going to get out of this?” But Family Promise helps them, they train them, they work with them, they help them apply for grants and things and family after family we see getting a house, getting an apartment, getting something. The focus is on the children and making sure that they are safe and cared for and the mothers and fathers can worry about something else. We feed them, we house them for a week, and we do it four times a year. That’s been really wonderful. 41 The other thing I do, which I love, is therapy dog work. I first started it with Jamie, who was a golden retriever, and we did it for seven years. She died a year ago. We had wonderful times, we went to the VA for four years. One man would sit in his wheelchair, clap his hands, and she’d run and jump in his lap. We had two men we loved and they both died so I thought, “I can’t go back and I think it’s hard on her.” So we went to the schools, we went to Mount Ogden and Ogden High to the special needs classes and that was so amazing. We had a couple of miracles happen with boys with autism who responded to her when they wouldn’t respond to any one else. I’m wondering, “What happens in their brain that makes it ok for them?” Cause she didn’t threaten them. She died a year ago May and five weeks later, my son David got me a puppy cause I was struggling. I thought, “Should I get a shelter dog? Everybody in my family does shelter dogs.” But therapy dogs, I wanted a dog I could walk off leash, a dog that wouldn’t kill my cats, and a dog that could be a therapy dog. So he got me another golden. She’s an English Cream, she’s white, she’s beautiful. She is so smart and next month she will be eighteen months and she can be a therapy dog. She had to test and people say, “Well, do you train her?” I say, “No, she comes this way.” Only a small percentage of dogs can be therapy dogs, because some dogs are too shy, some dogs are too aggressive, some dogs are too needy. But Kimmi and Jamie, both, solid, confidant. She would walk in the room and come up and put her head in your lap and say, “Hi, you’re the most important person in my life.” That is really fun, I love working with her and teaching her things. So that’s 42 been a neat part of my life, cause I love going back in the school, but I don’t come back with a load of papers to read. I walk out with my dog bowl. We also go to the airport, which is fascinating. I don’t know if you’ve seen dogs in the airport, but we get a security pass and we can go all the way down the concourses. To watch people’s faces, I just watch and if they smile I say, “Would you like to pet her?” They say, “Oh, can I?” They think she’s a service dog, and the children come running, the TSA people come out and one man said, “It’s already been a long morning,” and he was just loving Jamie. One Southwest crew, they were practically in tears. I think they must have had a really hard flight. The TSA people say, “We like when the dogs are here cause people are less stressed.” Isn’t that interesting? It’s a friendlier atmosphere. So I’m looking forward, I missed doing it, cause Jamie couldn’t do it the last couple of months. Ogden High’s floors are so slippery, she would fall and I could get her up. But Kimmi, it’s going to be fun to go back with her. So that music and Weber Reads and my grandkids. I have four great grandkids, two big ones and two little ones. Isn’t that great? The two big ones are both here. My son keeps saying, “Mom, rest. Don’t get too busy.” He’s always said that. LR: So, my next one before the last one is: how do you think education empowers women? MR: Oh my gosh, I just answered that didn’t I? LR: You did a little tiny bit, can you expand on that? MR: Well, it gives them choices, it gives them power. I mean education in the deepest sense, it gives you the credentials. If you have a high school diploma it means 43 something and if you have a college degree, it means something and it qualifies you to do certain things, you can get a better paying job if you have that in your hip pocket. But a good education, the best kind doesn’t mean you have to go to an eastern college or a private girls school, it means you have to be thinking and reading and writing and analyzing. It gives you those powers to be able to do that. I look at the world right now and I think, “What are these people thinking? Why aren’t they putting this together?” The superintendent from El Paso, who was saying, “Don’t do it again, no more, no more, we did not deserve this.” How can we justify what’s happening right now? How can the people in power make the decisions that they make? That’s education, that gets into a whole other area. Education gets you through the hard times of night, I always say that, the dark hours of night. If you’ve read The Odyssey and you can go there in your mind. I had to have an MRI once on my neck and I remember I got through it by thinking about The Odyssey, thinking about All Quiet on the Western Front. “Well, at least you’re not in the trenches in 1918, these people aren’t trying to kill you, they’re good people, hold still, don’t move.” I just think you have places in your mind you can go and things you can think about, whether it’s music or art of Shakespeare. I’m very careful about what I put in my mind, I won’t watch certain movies, I don’t watch zombie stuff. I’ve never seen “Silence of the Lambs,” I don’t want that in my brain. I’m kind of selective about what I put in there because I think it’s really important what we have there. I think about all those kids that read The Odyssey with me; they have that in their brain even if they don’t remember it. It gives you that ability to make a good living, but it also gives you the ability to 44 lead a good life, and to respond to things in a certain way, and to people and to situations. It’s so incredibly important. Thank God education for women is where it is now. I watched at Ogden High, they had a lot of programs for kids whose families have never had anybody in college and they don’t know the first think about Weber State, even though they just live blocks away. But bringing them on campus and showing them how to fill out the forms and how to take the tests, that is so important. These women in Family Promise really show me that when I think, “Oh, if only you could still go back to school, and maybe some of them will. Thank heavens for all the pioneer women that worked in women’s education. LR: Before I ask the final question, is there any other story or memory that you... MR: I’ve told you way too much, LR: No, what you have shared has been phenomenal. I’m very grateful for everything that you’ve shared. MR: I think those are really the high points. I’ve been very fortunate. LR: Well, thank you for everything you’ve shared, for me it’s been phenomenal. The last question and it’s a question that we have asked every single woman that we have interviewed is: how do you think women gaining the right to vote changed or influenced history, your community and you personally? MR: Wow. Well, right after women got the right to vote, America elected Warren G. Harding, probably the worst president we ever had. Has anyone ever told you that? The men said, “See!” Warren G. Harding was handsome. I think about that cause I think my grandmother, who couldn’t vote when we were young. When you look at countries where women don’t have the right to vote, I don’t think they 45 vote in Saudi Arabia, and you think of the things like Title IX, you think of a lot of things that have happened that have bettered...that’s certainly part of it. I mean, they’re half the population, they simply must be part of the discussion about what happens. Sadly, we don’t have enough women in government, in elected positions. That’s got to change in this country and I hope it does and it’s so interesting to me that it hasn’t happened more. Even here, in our community. I talked at the Night Out Against Crime to Lou Shurtliff, I don’t know if you know that name. LR: I do. MR: She’s probably one you interviewed. LR: She is. MR: She was at Ogden High when I was there, so we know each other and she’s in the League of Women Voters, she’s the only Democrat in Utah outside of Salt Lake City, and she’s from here. Beside the party imbalance, just the very few women that are in, and I think that’s a story that’s yet to be written, how important that’s going to be. Salt Lake’s had a woman mayor, Ogden has not. We have some very good women in the city council. Jan Zogmaister on county commission, she was really important to the libraries and the growth of the library system in Weber County. So you see some of these women bringing things in that are so important that shouldn’t be women’s issues, but often they’re what people would call “soft issues.” I think that’s part of it, I think they’re important on school boards. The whole question of “Do women and men think differently, do we have different values?” I don’t know the answer to all of those things, but I 46 think they do tend to speak for children, often. Not that men don’t care for children, but I think sometimes women, it’s a little closer to them. It’s hard to think of a world where women didn’t, but you can look around the world—Switzerland, the women just got the vote twenty years ago or something. You read about the condition of women in so many parts of the world is just horrifying. With everything that’s happening right now I think we’re in a very bad place. With climate change and all of that, you need to take care of Mother Nature. That’s another issue I think women should be a part of. There was an interesting thing on NPR this morning, that if you’re interested in climate change, it’s sort of a woman’s thing to hang your clothes out to dry. It’s sort of a man’s thing to make sure that your cars tires are inflated to get better gas mileage and I thought, “That’s... stupid. I do both of those, but come on people.” It was a silly kind of distinction. It’s incredibly important, and thank God for those women who did what they did and suffered the way they did. You know where the first woman elected in the country was from? Martha Hughes Cannon, right here in Utah. Brigham Young was a feminist. Susie Young Gates’ daughter was an incredible feminist despite polygamy, and some people think polygamy actually gave women some freedom. You have sister wives who can help take care of the children, you can go be a doctor like Martha Hughes Cannon was. Other parts of it, not so great. LR: How about you personally? How has being able to vote affected you personally? MR: Oh. I can’t imagine not being able to. To be told there’s something you can’t do that just seems, that just never happened to me. I remember taking my son with 47 me when I voted for the first woman running for vice president and I’ve lost her name. A long time ago I said, “I want you to see me mark the ballot for this woman.” So, to me, it’s just really important. I couldn’t vote til I was twenty-four, I think I missed the lowering of the age, it came right after. First president I voted for was Johnson. I haven’t been successful very often in electing the presidents I wanted, but quite often. It was great to have a woman run two years ago, and I’m just so glad to see all the women running now. So I think it’s just crucially important. We’re at a very difficult time in the world right now, I think the future is very much in doubt, with climate change and with, and I think we need every person, every bit of wisdom that we can get. For the future of my grandchildren. You know, I’ll be gone before things get really bad. You may not be, and it’s going to get bad unless we do some incredibly major things that involve some sacrifice. I feel people my age lived through the very best time, right after World War II, the 1950s if you were white and in a position I was in. It was wonderful. College was cheap, houses were cheap, cars were cheap. First car cost $3000, gas was twenty-five cents a gallon, it was just amazingly wonderful, that’s why I say I’ve been so fortunate. Things aren’t that way now and so I think everything we can do for children to prepare them for things. My granddaughters have got to be educated, and grandsons too. It’s scary. I don’t see much changing nationally. I just heard about the Supreme Court, which the majority of them feel that we should not have regulations of guns because of the second amendment. But the three women don’t think that way, on the court. 48 LR: Thank you. I am very appreciative. This has just been amazing. It’s amazing for me anyway. MR: Well, thank you. It’s fun to talk about yourself, you don’t often get the chance.