Oral History Program Susan Marquardt Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 31 July 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Susan Marquardt Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 31 July 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: Marquardt, Susan, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 31 July 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Susan Marquardt 31 July 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Susan Marquardt, conducted on July 31, 2019, in her home, by Lorrie Rands. Susan discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Sarah Storey, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: Today is July 31, 2019. We are in the home of Susan Marquardt for the Women 2020 project at Weber State University. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting the interview and Sarah Storey is with me as well. Which do you prefer, Sue or Susan? SM: Sue, cause that’s what most people call me. LR: Alright. So then I will start saying Sue. Thank you so much for your willingness to sit and talk with us. Let’s start with when and where you were born. SM: Oh my goodness. I was born February 17, 1929. I had a big birthday this year. LR: Yes, you did. And where? SM: Madison, Wisconsin. My father was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. We left there long before I can remember anything, so as an adult I had always wanted to see something in Madison, Wisconsin. I had one picture of my mother holding me next to a lake, which I discovered they have all around up there. Anyway, I went to an Elderhostel, my first one. I said, “I want to go to Wisconsin,” so I did and got to see the city where I was born. That was fun. LR: You said your father was there to go to grad school. Where did you go after Madison, Wisconsin. 2 SM: I think he must have graduated that June, I’m not really positive, he’s a psychologist, so we moved to New Haven, Connecticut, he got a job at Yale. My brother was born there so he’s twenty months younger than me. I don’t know how long we lived there, but he was working for the Gesell Institute at Yale doing some type of psychological testing, then we went to Trenton, New Jersey. He worked at the New Jersey State Hospital in Trenton, and that’s where I started school and so did my brother. Went to Junior High School #3. We lived there until I was in the third grade and then we moved to Michigan. My mother told me at the time that my father didn’t like the way they treated the patients at the state hospital. That meant nothing to me, really, until I went to graduate school myself many years later and discovered there was a man who did exposes of how they treated people, with mental disabilities mainly, and how awful it was for many, many years. My admiration for my father grew and I found that was why we moved away from Trenton. He had been a high school teacher before he got his PhD, and so he went back to teaching, which was his real love it turned out, at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, which was a small town. We lived there for six or seven years, and we moved again because they’d hired a new president of the college. We had a lot of fun there, my parents were really big in the community, doing lots of things. We had a lot of friends and so I think we all kind of hated to leave. It was during World War II. When they hired this man as president to make money, our father was a purest of education I guess. You want to hear a little bit about Trenton before I tell you where else we moved? 3 LR: Yes, I’m curious as to the difference because you were in school in New Jersey until the third grade. How was it different in Michigan? SM: When we moved to Michigan, well, my father liked to live close to where he worked, so we moved close to the college, and we lived right in town. There were 6,000 people in Hillsdale at the time and he’d always wanted to live on a farm, my parents were both from around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I can remember traipsing along with my parents, and I was probably ten or twelve at the time, to look at farms that we might buy. We bought 156 acres just outside of town, and there was no electricity in this farm because it was World War II, so we couldn’t get electricity from the road down to our house. We called it Long Lane Farm cause it had a lot of trees and you went down there and got to the farmhouse, an old stone farmhouse. Some of my memories of that farm, we stayed going to school in town, cause we lived in town for a few years before we moved to the farm. If you took the same kind of geography and history that I did about the country, there were governmental lands given to settlers, and there would be a corner out of each farm and it was right in the corner of our property. My parents wanted me to go to school there. Well, I was in seventh grade and I didn’t want to leave my friends, so I’ve regretted it ever since, because it was a one room schoolhouse and it would have been such a neat experience to talk about, but I didn’t do it. My father, he must have read every pamphlet put out by the Department of Agriculture on how to work a farm. I mean, he didn’t know it, he’d never worked on a farm. But he had a good time, he had to milk cows every morning 4 and he took me down to the bank once and he asked me and my brother what we were interested in and I said I wanted to raise pigs. So he took me to the bank and he took out two loans, one for him and one for me, so we could buy a registered sow. I took care of those pigs, well, we only lived there a couple of years. My brother chose chickens and he’s now deceased, so he’ll never know I said this, unless you believe he’s watching. He was a failure at that. I thought he hated it. So I can remember I helped tend the chicken coops a lot. Anyway we had another long lane, walking from the farm house up to the barn where we kept the pigs and the chickens and all that good stuff. So I have fond memories of that. My father would go to auctions around there and he bought a horse and a buggy, and when my mother’s father came to visit, my father wanted to take his horse and buggy into town to the train station to pick up Grandfather. I don’t think he finally did that, he just thought that would be great fun and my grandfather would have loved it. But you know, nice idea. After he decided he couldn’t work any longer for this university college president, he looked for a new job and he got a job at Adelphi College on Long Island. So several years in the New York City suburb of Garden City, and we moved there and there was a blackout in that part of the country, because of World War II. So we had blackout curtains on our windows, which was about as close to the war as I ever got. It was a real culture shock for me because I was so far behind my grade in school in terms of what I had studied. For instance, they started algebra early. We started it in tenth grade in Michigan, I think it was eighth and ninth in New York. So I went to summer school that first year and 5 didn’t know anybody yet, so it worked out fine. I used to ride my bicycle from Garden City down to Valley Stream where the summer school was held, and I was back there a few years ago and I thought, “My gosh, this traffic.” You could no more get on your bicycle and whip down there now. But anyway, we all liked living there and it was when we moved to Michigan that they wanted to put my brother up a grade. He’s not quite as short as I, but for a boy, pretty short, and they wanted to put him in the second grade instead of the first and my parents wouldn’t let them, I remember being very relieved, cause I was two years ahead of him in school and I didn’t want him being one year behind. I don’t know if I ever expressed that to them, but anyway, they did it partly because he was so short. When I started kindergarten, to back up a little, in Trenton, New Jersey, mother took me down to the school in the fall, I was still four, I was going to be five. They wouldn’t let me start, they said I had to wait to my birthday, and my theory, since I got old enough to think about it, has always been that I was so little, she didn’t want me in with those bigger kids. So mother, who doesn’t give up easily, took me in on my birthday in February and they let me start. I’d already learned to read, cause she had to do something with me, and I got cheated out of half a year of kindergarten cause then they put me in the first grade. I’ve always kind of resented that, and I think they didn’t have rules as strict as they do these days. So I remained two years ahead of him. When we went up to high school, Garden City High School was very different from our prior schools. You couldn’t teach there without a Master’s degree and in 1944, that was not common. I had 6 some wonderful teachers there. I had a civics teacher, or whatever we called it in those days, who gave us a quiz every Monday morning, and we were responsible for anything she chose that had been in the New York Times the day before. It was great. I still can’t live without the paper. My children have their little machines, and Jane gave me a hand-me-down, but I didn’t care for it. So I don’t use it. LR: What a great way to get children civically involved. SM: Yeah. I had one extra challenge, maybe I didn’t tell my parents what I was doing because my father was the son of a Presbyterian minister and we couldn’t do much on Sunday, including study. So I never told him that by reading the paper I was doing part of my homework. I really don’t know if they would have stopped me or not, but I did that. Then, when D-Day came in Europe, the government expected that it was going to take them months and months to get all the GIs back, there were so many over there. So they put out a call for college professors to go over there and teach the GIs and have them get college credit so when they did get back here they could jump right in and not be as far behind as they would have otherwise. So when he did that, I was a senior in high school, I guess. The government acted much more rapidly than they expected, so instead of coming back at the end of the school year, he came back just before Christmas, cause I remember we got on the Long Island railroad and went to a Broadway show right after he got back and he was telling us all about his adventures in Europe. He was stationed in London. They had two schools, one was in France and one was in London, and he was outside London. They hired 7 somebody for a year to fill his teaching position in the US. The woman that had been replacing him was a friend of his, and a contract was signed, so then he had to find another job to keep bread on the table. My mother had gone to work during the war, she’d majored in music, and as a church organist, choir director, stuff like that. We took the train and I can remember him telling us about his adventures and the people around us on the train all being fascinated. His job was at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, so the family moved up there. My mother put me on a train to go to college in Ohio the day they took the furniture out, so when I came home for Christmas I had to change trains between two stations, from Penn Station to Grand Central Station. I can remember carrying my suitcase on the subway to get from one place to the other. Times have changed. When I got off the train in Hartford, my mother said, “I don’t know how you lifted that suitcase.” “Ah, I’m young and strong.” I always loved athletics and playing everything, but I was never a star, probably not even very good. I can’t really testify to that, one way or the other, but I know I was not the leader by any chance, but I loved doing it. When we lived in Trenton, New Jersey, we played lots of games in the alley, kickball and hiding something and everybody had to go look for it. I remember once in Hillsdale, I was sitting there having a long talk with my mother and I was really annoyed when somebody came up to the door and said, “Your son has just fallen off the roof at the park.” I was so mad at him. He broke his leg and mother needed to go see about him. I don’t know that we ever finished whatever that conversation was. I was always good in school, it was fun and the 8 teachers were nice to me, cause I was able to read hard things like that. But my parents were the kind who’d read, and I don’t know if either of you have children, but you read to them and it really makes a difference. I went away to college and my parents lived in Hartford and I would go home on vacations and I was a camp counselor at the Hartford Times Farm Camp. I’ll spare you singing the song that we all, my brother and I could sing it ‘til the day he died. “I’m so happy, oh so happy, here at Hartford Times Farm. We have bugs and skunks and mosquitos, whee! But I don’t care what becomes of me, cause I’m so happy, oh so happy, here at Hartford Times Farm.” They’d bring busloads of poor kids out from the city to this camp up in the mountains. I think each group stayed one or two weeks, but we’d stand around and if there were a lot of black kids who got off, we were delighted, because the other kids tended to have lice eggs in their hair. The black kids didn’t cause their hair’s so oily these animals didn’t live in their hair. We female counselors got to get in the river with them. When they got there the night before the nurse would put some kind of powder in their hair, to kill the gnats. That wasn’t as much fun as some of the things we did. I guess I grew up accepting people, no matter what they were like. I do remember once, in Hillsdale, in the small town of Michigan where we lived, I came home from school one day and at dinner I said, “We don’t have anybody living in Hillsdale who’s not white.” My father looked at me and said, “Well, what’s good about that?” You know, that was the best lesson I ever had, cause that was my attitude from then on, “What’s different about people who 9 aren’t white?” I don’t know if he intended it to be, but that’s all I ever had to hear. That’s one of my favorite memories of my father. Let’s see, back to college. Well, it was four years, went all four years, took the train home—rich people took airplanes in those days, but most of us took trains. I waited tables for four years in college. You make a lot of good friends and I married the head waiter. Which didn’t, in the long run, turn out to be such a good idea. I had a good time and joined a sorority and was in the sorority that my mother was in. My mother had gone to Denison too, and the sorority was in the same little house. It was a small house and you had chapter meetings there and a house mother who lived upstairs in the apartment. But anyway, when she was in school it was a local sorority, and I just happened to join this sorority, I liked the people that were located in that same house. Her sorority had to go national because she’d started college in Pittsburgh and joined a different national sorority, she couldn’t be in two. In fact, I came across a knife and a fork and her sorority pin from 1923 for the sorority she was in. I called them up and said, “Would you like, do you collect memorabilia things like this?” They said, “Oh, yes, we’d be delighted,” and told me where to send it. That’s been about two or three years ago and it’s still upstairs. I decided I better call them again and make sure they haven’t folded or something. I graduated from college, and I majored in political science, in those days we called it government. A lot of the other majors were guys who were planning going to law school. The last few months I’ve been trying to read the Mueller 10 Report, the one about the president. It’s a little hard to understand and I thought, “Wish I’d majored in Law.” But both my kids have law degrees. I played field hockey, loved it. Took tennis lessons and I never did get any good in that. Field hockey I loved though, and I went out for basketball. Well as you can imagine, I was hardly the star. But I’ll never forget one time when my teacher put me in to start a game instead of this girl, who was wonderful and never came to practice. I knew that she was doing that because I showed up all the time and eventually the other person got to play in the game. I don’t know if your mothers have ever told you that the girls could only play on the half the floor in basketball? The center could go clear up and down, but the rest of you had to stay on your half. Well, “You delicate little females” is the theory. I couldn’t even make baskets very well, so I was a guard. That was in high school, in Garden City. LR: I’m glad you shared that, I had not ever heard that. SM: Oh, hadn’t you really? Well, ask anybody that’s old like I am, cause I’ve occasionally mentioned it to somebody my age and they all say, “Oh, yeah, we remember that.” So it was in the west and in the east. LR: Geez. I’m glad you shared that. I have never heard that and I played basketball when I was in high school, and it was full court, cause you know, we can do that. SM: We sure can. Where did you go to college? LR: I went to Weber State, but I actually went to East High School here in Salt Lake. Before you continue, it sounds to me like you were encouraged to pursue an education. 11 SM: Oh definitely. I hear other people talk about deciding whether to go to college. I didn’t know there was an option. We never discussed that in my house. My mother had a Master’s degree in music, my father had a PhD, and that was it. Of course, I have a lot of ancestors who were ministers, on my mother’s side they were American Baptists, on my father’s side they were Presbyterians. When we moved, we’d go to the church service closest to where we lived. One time, my mother played in the Methodist church and the Presbyterian church. She played in one at ten o’clock and then she wouldn’t stay for the sermon, she’d go across the street to the other church and play for the eleven o’clock worship. I loved church, and as I say, school was always just there and expected and it would never have occurred to my brother or me to not go through college. My brother had a PhD in math. He told me once, when he was fifty years old, “You know, sometimes, I’m embarrassed to get paid so much money for having so much fun.” How many teachers, do you know, who would say that? But he really did. Math was my best subject, but I never could figure out what I was going to do with it, so I dropped it after one semester in college, I thought, “Better do something else.” LR: One more quick question before we move on. Who were some of the women that you looked up to as a young girl? SM: Oh, Eleanor Roosevelt, I’ve got her up on the board out there. Jane found me a card that was a caricature of her. I heard her speak. My mother was on the board of the League of Women Voters, wherever we lived. When we were in New York, they sponsored a speech for Franklin Roosevelt, when he was running for his 12 fourth term. Well, when it got closer to the time, mother found out that his wife was coming instead of him, but because she was on the board and had arranged this, I got to sit up on the platform with Eleanor Roosevelt, as did my mother. That was a highlight of my life, and so I’ve now been to two elder hostels at Val- Kill, which was her home in New York. I have several biographies on my bookshelves of the Roosevelts. LR: What did you do after college? After you graduated from college. SM: Got married. Well, the man I married had been in World War II, he was three years older than I was. He signed up in high school, the recruiters came to his high school, he was from Dayton, Ohio, which is where my children were born. When he signed up, they sent him to Kings Point for his basic training, which is on Long Island. But it’s Coast Guard, so they wouldn’t give him veteran status. He signed up to be in the Navy, which is where the recruiters came from, and just because he had his training there, they wouldn’t listen to him, and I’ll jump forward fifty years. Congress finally passed a law, ten or twenty years ago, changing that, so that those guys were given veteran status, but he had to work to earn his way through college. He was the head waiter when I waited tables all that time. So I graduated and I had gone home to Hartford, Connecticut at that point and he called me up and said that they were coming to get him, but not quite that way. LR: Right, but I actually understand what you mean. 13 SM: Yes, but if he got married he wouldn’t be eligible for the draft. So that’s what happened. His family came to New York and we met them there, and we got married in Riverside Church in New York, have you ever been? LR: I’ve never been to New York. SM: Well, it’s gorgeous. It used to be a Baptist church, it’s now non-denominational. It’s famous, and I had sung there in high school when I was in the chorus. They had a big festival where a lot of different schools went to this huge church and got to sing, which was a real thrill for all of us. I don’t know who listened to us, but somebody must have. Anyway, his father had gotten, maybe a Masters degree, and had been a school principal and athletic director for the city of Dayton. They knew that church and we knew that church, so we got married in that church. Then I moved to Dayton and we didn’t have any money, we didn’t save up, we hadn’t planned on all that. We lived with his mother for a while and she was a dear. That was not very private but she was very nice, very thoughtful, so I’ve always liked her. Then he got a job at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which is outside of Dayton, and worked there as a manufacturer's representative. Thiokol was one of the ones he was working with there and they offered him a job when they were going to start up Northern Utah Thiokol, so we moved to Ogden, Utah. We had built a house in Ohio, outside Dayton, which Bob had done a lot of the work on. Anyway, he gradually narrowed down from representing four companies to representing one and they wanted to transfer him out to the west. We bought this plot of land cause we figured we’d be back in Dayton within two years. That was in 1960. We never got back there. We visited 14 obviously, and he had a big family and we did lots of things with the family. What else do you want to know? LR: Where did you move to, here in Ogden? SM: 3650 Tyler. It was right across the street from where the seminary is now, which we felt was ruining the neighborhood, and it did from the standpoint of parking. People came and parked in front of your house if you lived there. We did have a large driveway. We had an acre? Maybe it was half an acre, an acre sounds awful big. It was a big yard. I learned how to fix the plumbing for the sprinkling system. I stayed home and did that, cause Jane was in the second grade and Bobby was two. I was at home for a long time, and doing lots of things. Jane was ahead of the Utah schools, having come from Dayton where the schools were top drawer. She came home from second grade one day and said, “My teacher corrected my pronunciation today.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “She said I said ‘stir’ wrong.” How could you say stir wrong? But I deduced from this that this woman was really annoyed with Jane because Jane was writing cursive and they hadn’t gotten that far. And I think that woman had it in for her, and she was only in that class for a couple of months cause we moved here in April I think. I went into the principal one time after one of those parent nights at school and I said, “I’m worried,” cause Jane’s third grade teacher at this point had written stuff on the board for the parents with bad spelling. I went into the principal, I said, “I was horrified.” He said, “Oh, but she’s so sweet with the children.” He didn’t care if she couldn’t spell, he probably couldn’t either. You 15 have those little funny things that happened in school, it’s not anything I ever made a big deal of, but I sure never forgot it. LR: It sounds like there was a difference in the educational systems between back east and here in the west. SM: Well, in the particular places that we lived but I don’t know if that’s typical of everything. One thing about New Jersey, there was a home for young women up at the head of our street, and my parents always got babysitters from up there. We always got someone nice and were always pleased, and years later my mother told me that those were all unwed mothers who’d been sent away so no one in their own neighborhood would know they were pregnant. But my parents weren’t bothered by that a bit, I guess they didn’t think I was going to learn anything from them at seven. LR: Back to Ogden, it sounds like you were just, I say that, and I don’t mean you were ‘just,’ but it sounds like you were a stay-at-home mom, raising your kids. What are your memories of raising your children in Ogden? SM: Well, it seemed to be a pretty good place for that. I was active in the PTA and all that kind of stuff. I had a Girl Scout troop for fifteen years up there, and the neighbors were friendly. I guess I was kind of curious, I didn’t know a thing about the Mormon church. I asked somebody if they were Christian when I moved here. We went to the Presbyterian church. I had a really nice older woman that I found who would stay overnight if we were going someplace. She just was so worried because we had to drive so far to church, maybe four miles. I don’t know if that was normal, but it certainly was farther than my neighbors had to go. The kids 16 made friends fairly easily, and I was not thrilled about the school cause I didn’t think it was as good as what they’d been in. I told myself, or told somebody, that if the kid’s smart enough they’ll learn enough to get by eventually, and that’s what happened. They both graduated from Ogden High School. We lived on Tyler, right by the campus of Weber State. My husband wanted to be there, you know I said he liked to be close to his work, but that was just a place to live. He worked out by the airport, I think at first. There were a lot of people that moved out there with Thiokol, so we had ready-made friends. We had a bridge club with three tables made up of Thiokol wives. Then it was down to two, then it was one, and then the vestiges of it got buried last year. I’m still here. SS: When you were young, you moved around a lot, and then you moved out here once you were married for your husband’s work. How did you feel about leaving, cause you weren’t in the west. So how did you feel leaving what you were familiar with and coming out here to Utah of all places? Was that a challenge for you, with your kids? SM: No, it seemed like an adventure. The fact that I’d moved myself, I knew it was doable. So I didn’t have any particular... I have to admit I did have occasional feelings about things, but you know, you find some rude people wherever you go if you look for them. I don’t think I looked, but anyway. And it’s rare, I’m not. I don’t mean to be complaining about that. But what you said earlier reminded me to tell you one thing. I’ve been involved in politics all my life, I have walked for people, been on the phone for people and gave them money and I even chaired 17 some campaigns for friends. Anyway, do you still have small group meetings when there’s going to be an election, in the neighborhood? We used to down here and then they got sort of put it in the schools. LR: It depends on the neighborhood. SM: Well, back in those days, I think everybody went and had these small things at people’s homes and it’s such a good way to get to know people. It’s a real shame, because we’ve had them up at the capitol building, when it was so crowded you’d have people sitting on each others laps. It was awful. The family across the street, had a whole bunch of kids and the father called me up one time and said, “Would you be interested in running?” I can’t remember what it was for, I think it might have been city council. He said, “You wouldn’t win, of course, but we thought it would be nice if you would run?” I managed not to scream at him. I was insulted. As it turned out I had other things going on in my life, I couldn’t have done it if I had been dying to, I wouldn’t’ve had the time. But I thought, “Boy, times change, thank goodness.” One time I was on an airplane coming back from somewhere and reading a book by Barbara somebody, she was a British economist, I can’t remember her last name. Anyway, we’d been flying for a while and the guy in the middle seat said to me, “Pardon me, but are you reading that book?” I said, “Well, yes.” What do you think I’m doing here? I didn’t say that part. He said, “I wouldn’t have thought a woman could read that.” LR: Oh my gosh. SM: My response was, I immediately ordered an alcoholic drink. “I’ll let him know I’m not of his type.” I don’t think I even wanted the drink. 18 LR: That is mind blowing here. SM: It is, isn’t it? LR: I’m curious, I did a little bit of research on you before coming, and you did some work in the juvenile justice system. How did you become involved with that? SM: Well, I was on the juvenile court advisory committee first. I was doing a lot of volunteering, I was doing a lot with Girl Scout and I had a mix-raced troop, which not many people had. You talk to people and you learn about what problems they have and so on, but I think it was serving on that advisory committee. I worked on the United Way, and I could give you a list of different organizations that I volunteered for up there. Then when I went to graduate school, I was forty-six. My field work was up at the Youth Development Center and the second year I was at the administrative office in Salt Lake and the juvenile court, so that’s how I really got involved and then they hired me. At one point they asked me to work in Salt Lake, because they were doing a lot of deinstitutionalization, which has sort of all fallen by the wayside in recent years. I commuted for a while and then I thought, “Well, this is kind of dumb,” so I moved down here and have been here ever since. I worked in the administrative office and I was the associate director because I’m pretty well organized. After I’d worked down here with Youth Corrections for ten years, one of the other directors was being fired from his job and so they assigned him to head up our division. Well, that would have been ok and I tried to help him and tell him things, and he was so nice and thanked me for everything I told him, and then totally ignored it. I finally couldn’t stand it any 19 longer, I just did so much more than he did and he was doing it wrong, so I went to the department director and said, “You’ve got to find me another job, I can’t do this.” So they put me in Services for People with Disabilities, and so I did that for the next ten years until I retired. I was the associate director there too. Juvenile justice is what I feel like I knew the most about and had the most to contribute and felt passion about. I knew all those people, and a lot of them were struggling parents and a lot were good parents trying to do their best. I went to one house in Ogden to visit this boy. It was just unbelievable, such a mess. He’d been telling me he had to help his father clean up the backyard and he said he would always be cleaning up the backyard, so when I looked at it, it was just awful. They obviously had no idea what to do and it was such a terrible house and then his sister got pregnant and the mother and I arranged for an abortion and then she wouldn’t go, so that was the end of that. She was like thirteen, maybe, and you knew there was no chance, being brought up in that kind of thing in the first place and then way too young too. I lost track of the family and I had no idea what ever happened. But if that child grew up, I bet she got in trouble too. That’s just how it works. I got into Girl Scouts cause my daughter was that age, and I was president of the Junior League up there. I enjoyed doing that, and I volunteer with them down here. They gave me an award a couple weeks ago, it’s called the “Golden Hanger,” like clothes hanger. I volunteer at Women Helping Women, which is like a thrift store kind of thing but they don’t pay for the clothes, they have to have a referral from some agency, and then they come in and they choose clothes. I go 20 the first Tuesday of the month for three hours or four. Anyway, they gave me this “Hanger” award. I don’t know if they’ve ever given it before, but it’s framed over there. It was for always showing up. Now, that’s kind of pitiful, that so many volunteers don’t always show up. I got another similar award at the Road Home recently, and for the same reason, cause I always show up. I have called once or twice maybe to say, “Can’t make it.” When I moved from Ogden to Salt Lake and I was fresh out of graduate school at that point, I volunteered at the Rape Crisis Center. I signed up in Ogden and never even got started. I had a suspicion that the director at the time wasn’t the best and was afraid of me, cause she never called me to do it, because I’d gotten a Master’s degree. I don’t think I was particularly imposing. I’ve done different things for the Junior League down here, helped with rummage sales, the Care Fair, all the medical services available to people and you just have to walk in off the street. At church I’ve been scheduling the soup kitchen, and we’ve been doing that since 1983, I think. I help line up the agencies that are going to volunteer and we just do it once a month. Right now everything’s in an uproar because of the homeless buildings that aren’t getting built. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing right now, but I’m still going in once a week. So that’s how it works. You learn one thing from another and like in social work, you get to go to different agencies and sometimes you want to stay there and sometimes you don’t ever want to come back. LR: I’m curious how you balanced your home life with all the volunteer work that you did. 21 SM: I did most of it mid-day, nobody was around. I’m pleased that my children do a lot of volunteering and so do my grandsons. I tell myself I have something to do with all that. Set an example. My mother used to volunteer for things, too, so it passes down. I was president of the ACLU down here, and that was fun. I enjoyed that. Because of the things I’ve done and also in church I was on a national board, so you get to go on all these out of state trips, so I’ve had a good time, done a lot of traveling on somebody else’s dime and it’s been a lot of fun. I have a list of fifteen things that I’ve been president of. LR: That’s cool. I have three more questions. First one is, when you hear the term “women’s work,” what does that mean to you? SM: Not much, cause I don’t think of much as women’s work anymore. I applied for one job at the juvenile court system that I didn’t get and the director, who I thought was a good friend of mine, he’d been my supervisor when I was in school, said, “Oh, but he’s been there so long.” I would have been a much better person in that particular job. Which I didn’t say. Women’s work, I just don’t even think about it. It sounds like a demeaning statement, I think, cause there’s not very much that is just women or having babies. I’ve known lots of women. Norma Mattheson, you’ve probably noticed died the day before yesterday, and she was so great and did so many things. When you volunteer for political things, you meet lots of neat people, some of them you never see again, but then some of them you hook up with. One time, I was elected to be an elder in the Presbyterian church and for many years, women couldn’t do that. I called my mother up and said I was approached to be an elder and she said, “Well, you 22 can’t do that.” I said, “What do you mean I can’t do that?” She said, “You’re a woman!” I said, “Mother, you’re twenty years behind, they did change that rule.” Takes people a while to catch on. Now our local board of the church, there’s many women on those. Sometimes they outnumber the men. LR: How do you think education empowers women? SM: Just gives you a whole lot of skills in whatever you’re working at, or studying. Interaction with other people, being able to talk to whomever you’re stuck with, or lucky enough to be around. It’s good to do, and you’re smarter. I’m a Democrat, and I’ve been so disappointed at the number of supposedly intelligent people who are cheering Trump on. My faith in the people in this country has sunk a little, which is sad. This is my opinion, I understand, but it’s a good experience and once you’ve gone to school and studied, you’re able to do all kinds of things, whether you studied that or not, you learn new things, you can contribute to your community, and I think that’s important. I feel as though volunteering is a calling. LR: Before I ask the final question, any other memories of volunteering, of working in the juvenile system, that you’d like to share, or I can be a little more specific. It almost seems like it was an accident, in a way, getting into the juvenile justice system. One thing led to another. as you said. I’m just curious how that experience affected you? SM: Well, I loved it, and it pleased me to see girls do well. Of course it’s hard not to have favorites cause you always have some who do everything right and a lot of extras and all that kind of stuff. But then you also learn patience with some of the kids who can’t. It develops your sense of caring and understanding of people and 23 the way they behave, when you see things like that. I met some really rotten parents. I remember one family, they wanted to have me shot cause their kid got locked up for thirty days. I don’t think he learned much from us, after that performance by his parents. But that’s the rare thing. Most people are appreciative, they really are. I have found occasionally that my assistant or somebody that I’m working with is not very kind to individual kids, I don’t mean mistreat them, their opinions of them. They’re very critical of these kids who grew up in a home and goodness knows what. But it’s rewarding, and I do things cause I enjoy doing them. SS: So when you were working with the children were you able to just leave it at the door? How did you juggle that? SM: You know, I don’t really remember a lot of difficulty with that. I just keep things compartmentalized as necessary. You drive yourself crazy if you take it personally. Especially when there’s no hope, when you don’t make a difference, whether there’s no hope or not. It’s hard. SS: Well that’s a great skill to have, to be able to separate. SM: Thank you. LR: That is a great skill. Before I ask the final question, what, who were some of the women you looked to as mentors, throughout your career? SM: Margaret Johnson used to be head of the Coordinating Council of Social Services up in Ogden, it probably doesn’t exist anymore. She was one of the influences that got me to go to graduate school. She left that job and went to the U to teach. Norma Mattheson has been one and Judy Buffmire, who you 24 probably don’t know. She was a legislator for a long time, and I was her campaign manager for part of the time. She’s now deceased. I’ve had some women ministers that I have looked up to greatly. It’s kind of mutual, they like me and I like them and we would be likely to call each other in terms of questions or suggestions. There’s the woman that started social work in Chicago. I can’t think of her name. You’ve heard of her. LR: Jane Adams? That might be the wrong name, but I know who you’re talking about. That house. SM: Yeah, she started that house, yes. That residential place. LR: I think I’ve got the wrong name but I know who you’re talking about. Let me just ask this final question and we’ll be done. It’s a three part question and it’s a question we’ve asked everyone we’ve interviewed. How do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped or influenced history, your community, and you personally? SM: Well, very positively in all aspects for all three of those questions. But for history, well, there have been some outstanding women, Golda Meir, and I lean toward politics cause that’s always been such an important interest of mine. Queen Elizabeth. I never could figure Joan of Arc out, so I haven’t spent much time admiring her, maybe cause I never read enough. People had to do it in order for the men to learn it was possible. So the more you have women in any kind of a leadership role, it was a real impact on society, because people are aware that you are doing whatever it is that you’re doing. Just like that man who didn’t think I could understand that book I was reading, the more they see women reading that 25 kind of book the more likely they are to finally figure it out and accept it. Some never do, but that’s true of everywhere. LR: Right. And how about you personally? SM: Well, I’ve just been pleased when I’ve seen other women get jobs. Dani Erer, one of the people I admired, she was staff at the ACLU when I was president. She’s so smart and I’ve been to classes that she taught up at the university and it’s a pleasure to know her. I see other women doing things that I think would be important to do, useful to somebody, and fun and I volunteer. So I get ideas from other people, and some from my mother, cause she did nothing like I do. It was a different day. LR: I want to thank you for your time and your willingness. SM: Oh, I’m glad to. I’ve written down some things I did, just give me a minute. SS: So, for women that are currently trying to get active in involvement and volunteering and making a difference, do you have any advice or pointers to put out there for the up and coming? SM: Well, I think if you start out just doing whatever little task is needed to be done, you show up every time, you end up being president. That’s a slight overstatement, but it’s true. People see that you’re interested and that you’re dependable and that you’ve got a brain, perhaps that helps, they’re a lot more likely to move you. Just like my job when they asked me to move down to Salt Lake and take over, cause we were trying to get kids out of institutions. The guy who had been the supervisor down there was opposed to it and he wouldn’t do what they asked him, so that’s why they asked me to move to Salt Lake and take 26 his job. I never saw him again, fortunately. I was the first woman moderator of the Presbytery of Utah, which is kind of like the top job, and I’ve done it three different times. The national organization of the Presbyterian church elected women and then it said Denver had one and then the nominating chair happened to know me, which is why I think I got asked, and I’ve done that three different times. It’s a lot of fun. Ten Thousand Villages, I helped found that I was president of that board. LR: What is Ten Thousand Villages? SM: It’s craft items that come from different parts of the world and they sell them and there was one down here for a lot of years, but the group of us that got it started moved on and it kind of eventually folded, which was too bad. They had one up in Logan, too. LR: And what was the purpose of it? SM: Well, my daughter bought this for me in Africa from a woman by the roadside who made it. It’s usually not a single woman, but they sell things from other countries and some from places in this country too, but from underprivileged groups, I don’t know if that’s the correct term, but people with not a lot of money and not a lot of resources. SS: Helps them get their product out so that they can build their economy. SM: Yes. LR: That’s awesome. 27 SM: Two of my friends were walking in Idaho and passed one of these places and got the idea and brought it back and we got together and got it going, it was fun. The Rape Crisis Center, I was the president of that, too. LR: The one here in Salt Lake? SM: Yes. Utah Correctional Association, I was president of that. American Association for Mental Retardation, Utah chapter, I was president of that. Lots of stuff. I’ve got a whole room upstairs that I’m trying to clean out. I may die before I ever, I figure I’ve only got ten more years, I need to get it done.