First interview with Kathryn F. Clarenbach

Kathryn Clarenbach #466 Transcript

MA: [first part of the introduction is cut off] Clarenbach.

KC: 1987, you might add.

MA: 1987. Thank you Kay.

MA: Well, let's begin by looking at these

KC: Okay. I'll explain first what the photograph album is and why I have it. This actually is the album of my brother David. And um, he was killed during World War II in a plane crash; he was an aviation cadet. After he died my mother put together this album with pictures mainly of him. And by the time she finished it she thought wouldn't it be nice if she pawed through all the other old snapshots and put together one for each of us, which she did. Mine is buried someplace in the basement, but I am in enough of these so that it will refresh my memory. I thought it was such a good idea that I started doing it with my kids. And as soon as I had two and three I would have triplicates made of any 00:01:00photograph and started books for all of them. By the time they moved out I told them they were on their own.

MA: It was up to them to continue it, huh?

KC: Right, uh-huh.

MA: That's a wonderful-

KC: Well, I'm trying to...well, they're all labeled. Thank goodness. This is my mother's family, all except her youngest sister; so the two year old is my mother.

MA: Where was your mother born, Wisconsin?

KC: Yes, in Sparta. The same town I was born in. And her brother and two older sisters.

MA: That's wonderful.

KC: It's a good thing she wrote that. When my mother, well a few years before my mother died when I was visiting in Sparta, I uh, we hauled out reams of old 00:02:00photographs from a closet and I had her dictate to me who was in those pictures. So that I have some background.

MA: Yeah, pretty Important. Did she live in Wisconsin her whole life?

KC: Yes, mm-hmm, practically. During World War I my dad was stationed in Little Rock, Arkansas. And I thought my mother had never learned how to drive but she told me that (my mother and dad were married in Sparta but then they lived in Kendall which is a little town not far from there where my father had been a preacher and my mother had been a country school teacher and when he was, and my oldest brother Bob was born in Kendall, when she was pregnant with her second child, my mother drove with this four year old and a growing fetus, by her--otherwise by herself--from Kendall, Wisconsin to Little Rock, Arkansas. 00:03:00Over mountains and other such things that she said by the time she got there that ended her driving. She got there safely, but she was so miserable on the whole trip that she never drove again.

MA: Uh-huh, interesting.

KC: And they actually lived in Little Rock College, which is a Catholic college run by priests, so my mother was the only female around there. And they maintained warm friendships with a number of those priests for the rest of their days.

MA: And was your mother college educated?

KC: No. She started teaching country school in a really rural one room school in a community known as Summit, which is about, I suppose, 25 miles from Sparta. Much of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, I think one of the reasons my mother loved 00:04:00those so much and loved reading them to all of her grandchildren, was that it reminded her of her own experience in those days. And when we move into this photo album a few pages we'll see, I think, some pictures of, perhaps all of us, but certainly David and me spending time at this farm where my mother roomed. She was paid $28 a month for teaching school and I think room and board was thrown in, in addition to the cash income. But we used to visit that farm and just loved it. Sometimes we'd stay overnight and sleep in the barn in the hayloft, just for fun.

MA: Were the original people still there?

KC: Yes, the whole family.

MA: Did she ever talk about how she felt about the experience, what the work was like, about the payment? Did she feel she was fairly paid and what the work was like?

KC: Well we, she talked a lot about what it was like to teach. And she had such 00:05:00a range of ages and abilities. In fact during World War II, in Sparta, which is where I was born and where my parents did live, they moved there in 1920 shortly before I was born and then lived in Sparta the rest of their days. And Camp McCoy, now known as Fort McCoy, is located just a few miles outside of Sparta, so that during World War II there was an enormous inundation of military. In fact, they used to come there every summer from ROTC and CMTC. And my mother was a Gray Lady--

MA: A Gray Lady?

KC: --a Gray Lady during World War II. You're too young to know what that is.

MA: I don't know what that it is; I should, probably.

KC: Well, they were volunteer women who worked in hospitals and other military. I don't know that the ones who worked in canteens were ever called Gray Ladies, 00:06:00but they had uniforms that reflected that, so. In any case, I guess she was at a USO when this incident occurred. A couple of soldiers were quite drunk and there was, one of them was wielding a knife and there were fisticuffs or whatever and the local constabulary had their hands a little too full and all of a sudden my mother looked and recognized one of these men as having been a first grader in her Summit school. And she went over and called him by name he said "oh Miss Hubble" and he sobered up at once. [Laughs] And he apologized and that was the end of his misbehavior. So she must have had an influence on her students. She did, my mother did have one summer here at the University, must have been before she was married. She stayed in Chadbourne Hall, which, there was an old Chadbourne Hall where the high rise is now. And apparently that was a very 00:07:00exciting and wonderful experience.

KC: My dad had a lot of, he has a bachelor's and a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin and a law degree from Georgetown law school. Shall we wait for the airplane?

MA: Sure. [Pause] Okay.

KC: Well, I guess I mentioned that my dad had--

MA: A bachelor's, a master's, and a law degree.

KC: Right. And an honorary doctorate from Little Rock College.

MA: Wow.

KC: And I suppose in each case, their encouragement to all four of us to have as much schooling as possible, came out of their own experience. My mother was a great reader; she loved to write, she didn't have an awful lot of opportunities to write but she would write, for example, not only her own paper every year for 00:08:00Literary Club and papers for other organizations she belonged to, but frequently would ghost write my father's paper for Literary Club, which he would then stand up and read, but she would have the fun of doing the research and writing it. I think the fact that she didn't have an opportunity to go to school as long as she would have liked, made her value that experience. So that my, both of my parents, but particularly my father, used to line us all up, three of us were in college all the time that I was an undergraduate, which was a little bit of a strain on a country preacher and a country lawyer, financial strain that is. And in fact, he borrowed money from the bank to pay our tuition which was then $27.50 a semester.

MA: Oh my, what an example of inflation.

KC: That's right. In fact, there was a real student protest during one of my 00:09:00early years here when the Regents threatened to increase the tuition up to $32.00 a semester; they were successful, of course in doing it, but. Anyway, my dad always said I will see you through to a master's degree and after that you're on your own. He just assumed that there would be an after that and there was in each case.

MA: For all of you.

KC: My brother Gordon who is just older than I, and I got our masters degree at the same time here, in the same ceremony, he in Economics and I in Political Science and then after the war, he got a Law degree and I got my Ph.D. and my brother Bob, who was in dramatics and speech, did everything but a thesis for his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and by that time was kind of fed up. My husband did exactly the same thing at exactly the same age at Columbia; he had 00:10:00everything but his thesis.

MA: That's a frightening bit of information.

KC: Well, yes, yeah.

MA: How did, did you always know then, from the time that you were a young girl, that you would go to college? Was it kind of a given in your reality?

KC: Yes, I don't think we ever discussed it; the only question was where we would go to school.

MA: I see.

KC: And my brothers both had a couple of years at LaCrosse, which was a state college at the time, but I didn't want to go there. I remember a conversation about Lawrence College, which is now Lawrence University in Appleton, but I didn't even want to go and look at it. I don't -- I have no idea why. I just assumed that the University in Madison was where I wanted to go to school.

MA: Did you have any reasons? Just because it was the biggest school?

KC: I don't know that I ever thought through; I must have had some semiconscious 00:11:00reasons, I had visited a lot in Madison. I had friends here with whom I would come and spend the week. Our family would come here frequently from the time I was very, very young. We'd come just for the day and go to the zoo and look at the Capitol and my father would show us a lot of his old haunts. He was born in Madison and went to high school here and in fact, worked his way through the university by preaching in two little communities near here: Ironton and Cazenovia. He would hire a rig on Saturday and drive to these places, conduct two services on Sunday and then drive back. And apparently was paid enough to make out. When we would come to Madison as kids, he would point out where he used to play Hare and Hound chases out, and of course the way in which the city 00:12:00had expanded since his day, and of course it is even more so in the 27 years that we've lived here, but that was always kind of interesting.

KC: In fact, I was thinking a little while ago, of the kind of sense of history that particularly my father, at least I identify it in my memory, had, not only on trips that we would take, which I can got to in a minute, but in our little community of Sparta, which was just shortly over 3,000 population when I was in school there. Now, of course, it is a metropolis of some 6 or 7,000. And my dad frequently, if we were in the car going downtown, he would stop at the blacksmith shop or take us around by what was called just the square I think, I 00:13:00can't remember, where there was a watering trough and where the farmers would hitch up their wagons when they came in on Saturday. And he also took us to the, a flour mill that we had, a little creek that runs through town called Beaver Creek only it's called Beaver Crick, to see the feed mill and point out that these things wouldn't last much longer and that we should really become acquainted with them and know that they were, you know, on their way out. And so, this was similar to our visits to Madison or wherever we went, he would point out changes of things that had been different when he was young and that were going to be different pretty soon. On some of these trips, we did have some awfully nice vacation trips again when I was a kid. One summer, we had, one 00:14:00summer when I think I was about 12, we had an eastern trip for about 6 weeks or so and we went by train to - you'll see snapshots in there of Plymouth Rock and oh the Gettysburg battlefield - we went to Frederick, Maryland because our name was Frederick and one of my brothers purloined what today would look like a bumper sticker marking Frederick, Maryland, saw where some of the witches of Salem were persecuted. Wherever we went, my mother would try to fill us in on some historic information and my dad would walk us through. And I remember my mother loved to tell the story of having to intercede in what turned out to be a very unpleasant, I don't know if it was a real fisticuffs, but my brother 00:15:00Gordon, he would have been 14, and his friend from across the street, Doug Burnett, they had been absolutely fast bosom friends since they started kindergarten together, never had unhappiness between them and they were actually wrestling and fighting and my mother went out to stop it and to find out what in the world was going on. Doug said well Gondy said his dad was in the battle of Gettysburg and I know he wasn't and Gondy said he was too, I saw exactly where. I am sure my dad had pointed out where Wisconsin Civil War Union soldiers had participated and made it so real that my brother was absolutely sure he had to have been there.

MA: You really grew up with a sense of history.

KC: Yes, without really knowing that we were.

MA: Yeah.

KC: The earlier, when I was five or six, we had had a west coast trip and we had stopped to see friends in Denver and other places, and then took the train to Seattle where we got on a boat and went down to San Francisco, by boat. And my mother used to tell me that I was absolutely certain we couldn't possibly sleep on a ship or a boat. The only boat of my only experience was a little row boat on our lake at home and I didn't see how that many people were going to be comfortable on it. And then we had time in California and Yellowstone Park and all of the traditional things. I guess it was unusual - there were not a lot of families in our community who had the opportunity to do things like that. We did go almost every summer for a few days in Chicago, for quick few--we went to a 00:17:00World's Fair, but also my dad would time these visits to Chicago to coincide with baseball games. He was a Chicago Cubs fan and he would try to find a time when there were doubleheaders, so that he would get his money's worth. I would be scared for quite a number of visits. The idea of Chicago was just nothing but gangsters and shootings and I was very leery about going.

MA: How old were you when you first recall a trip to Chicago?

KC: I don't know. Probably about eight or ten I suppose.

MA: Do you have memories about what it was like?

KC: Yes, I do. My dad would drive to the, a garage in Evanston where he had prearranged the opportunity to park the car because he didn't want to drive in a great big city. He wasn't afraid of the bandits but he was afraid of the 00:18:00traffic. In fact, he was a terrible driver. I always maintain that he never really made the transition from the horse and buggy; he thought the car could take care of itself. [Laughs]. When he used to drive from LaCrosse to Sparta, which is about 30 miles, he had an office in LaCrosse for another job that he had, State Patrol and Probation Officer, and when anybody in Sparta knew that he was in LaCrosse for the day, they would try to head home earlier than they knew he generally did, so that they wouldn't get behind him on the highway, because he literally was stopped at least a half a dozen times when there would be a new traffic cop who didn't know his car thinking he was a drunk driver because he would watch the scenery and forget to stay in his lane. In any case, when we went to Chicago, he would then park in Evanston which I'm sure was a blessing for the entire metropolitan area. We took the elevated into town, into the loop 00:19:00and my dad and the three boys stayed at the YMCA and my mother and I stayed at the YWCA because those were the cheapest places in town. I guess my mother got dragged to the baseball games, although after we had done this a few times she would even beg off from going to the ball games. I got a little bored before the second game was over, especially if it lasted kind of late, but also sometimes my mother and I would, because we weren't staying with the men, would get up early. I remember one time we went to a morning matinee. We thought that would be so risque to go to a movie in the daytime. Oh I used to go Saturday afternoons to see the westerns in Sparta, but to go in the morning! When we walked in, maybe we only did it once, I can't remember, my mother said "Isn't it 00:20:00strange that all of these men are sitting around in the theater, why aren't they working?" To see men at a movie in the morning, of course, then when the gals began walking out on the ramp and shedding their garments in between, she began to realize why there were so many men in the audience.

MA: So it was a traditional matinee, but during intermission there was a burlesque show?

KC: Yeah, yes, and it was in the morning. And I have thought many times that my mother took me to my first, if not only, striptease. I thought for the wife of a Methodist minister that was going some.

MA: That's wonderful.

KC: I might tell you what the rest of my father's occupations were.

MA: Yeah, that would be good.

KC: He, I don't know which was his primary identification, but he was a country minister, a country preacher, who had as many as eight parishes at one time 00:21:00which he would serve. Four services every Sunday: one at 9:00 in Leon, one at 11:00 at Big Creek and in the afternoon it would vary from Angelo to Cataract, alternate. He would alternate afternoon services around and then Sunday evening was always Rockland, which was a little town about six or seven miles away. Then he would have some Wednesday night services and some maybe just once a month in some remote, more remote places. Actually as many as 8 parishes going at once. He would meet the people, he was never great at remembering names and faces--oh he would remember the individual but forget where they lived, and so when he would meet people on the street and they'd say "now when are we having services again", if he couldn't remember where they lived he would have to say "now let's see, when did we have it the last time?" and that would identify it for him. 00:22:00Mostly, his preaching was missionary work. He really didn't, wasn't paid enough; they'd give him the collection and that would be about it. It rarely covered gas and oil, so that it really was no source of income. He did have an enormous number of weddings, funerals, baptisms and such, simply because he was known throughout several counties and in many, many rural communities.

He and my mother used to be invited to country schools back in those days even when I was a kid. I say "even," as though it was only yesterday. There were still one-room schools, the consolidation movement hadn't....in fact it was a point of great discussion in our household. Both my parents thought that what would be gained in the education of the students would be a loss to the sense of 00:23:00community and the doing things together. So, I used to sometimes tag along when they would be invited to judge the forensics contests or give the graduation address at an eighth grade event, and it was always kind of fun. Again, another of the historic things.

Then my dad was a lawyer, again I have to call him a country lawyer, he called himself that, mostly pro-bono work, not by design, but because he always maintained that when a very poor client would go to one of the other attorneys in the community they could see that this was a nonpaying customer so they would be terribly busy and then say "But I think Frederick might have time, why don't 00:24:00you go and see him?" And I don't think he ever turned down anybody, certainly not because they didn't have money. Then he was a State Humane Officer, I think we have, I know we don't have such a one anymore, and in that capacity it was his job to investigate such complaints of people who were being unkind to animals. And so he would, and I remember many times going with him, he would sometimes work these calls on a farm where there had been a complaint in with other trips that he had to take. Or when we'd go on fishing trips, which was my mother's idea of a real vacation. She would pack up the 4 kids and my dad for a week and she'd stay home. And that was her idea.

MA: Oh, of course!

KC: And we loved going with my dad because he never paid any attention to whether we were clean or not and the only time we would bathe was when we'd go swimming in the river or wherever we'd happen to be. Mother said we'd bring home the luggage with everything neatly folded just exactly the way she had packed it. We hadn't even fished up pajamas or toothbrush or anything.

MA: Who did the cooking when you would go camping?

KC: Well, usually the county sheriff or his wife. My father was a past master at getting freebies and so he would stop in the jail and visit the, and often have business with parole or probation or something, I don't know, or he would manufacture some business, I guess, and he'd ask where there was a good place to eat or to stay overnight, many is the night we slept in jails and in actual jail 00:26:00cells. Frequently the wife of the sheriff or the wife of the jailer would notice finally that one of us was a girl and say "oh, I don't think a little girl should sleep here." I would be so horrified at being separated from the rest of the tribe that I did my best to insist that I stay there.

MA: Were you mostly successful?

KC: Mmmm hmmm, I was. So we often ate there but otherwise we ate inexpensive hamburgers and chocolate malts.

MA: I see. So you didn't bring food with you, or that kind of thing?

KC: No. I think we would have starved. After my mother died, she was 74, my dad stayed in the house for several years and he did manage to fry an egg and a few simple things but he never did really learn how to prepare a meal. I used to 00:27:00think he might suffer from botulism because he didn't wash things he just figured he was going to use it over again and it seemed unnecessary.

MA: With everything you've said about your dad, I see that humanitarian thread all the way through.

KC: That's right. And in fact, he had his office at home. I mentioned his office over in LaCrosse when he was, during the period when he was a State Parole and Probation Officer and that was actually his main source of income and his primary job. These other things he kind of sandwiched in, although they certainly took a great deal of time. Because his office was at home we all learned to be receptionists and message takers from, I suppose the time we could walk and talk. We had a steady stream then of people coming into our house who 00:28:00were either prisoners or trying to escape going to jail or bereaved people or, well, and a lot of poor folks. They weren't all poor, so we were exposed to this as normal. These were not exceptions, these were kind of the way people were and the kind of problems people had to live with, and then this would be the conversation at our meals.

My father was also a very political person. He had been in our State Legislature before he was married, elected from Kendall, I'm hesitant to say from the same district that our current governor served from in the legislature, but in a different generation of course, and he ran for Congress, for United States 00:29:00Congress when I was quite young, maybe 1924 or 1926, he didn't, he was not successful in his campaign. It's a wonder to me that he even....when I see snapshots now of my dad going out by himself, maybe the kids would be along, putting posters up on rural posts and had little, maybe one little leaflet or something, but compared with the way a winning campaign has to be run today it was pretty slender.

MA: What was your mother's role vis-a-vis all of this, when all of this was going on?

KC: Well, in the first place, she had to tolerate having my father's office in the house. They worked out an accommodation, by my father would stay up half the night. He would often work at his desk and he typed up his own correspondence 00:30:00until 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning. My mother got up at 6:00 every morning, in fact sometimes earlier than that, and would do her domestic chores. Well she got up early enough because she liked to write in her diary every morning before things got too thick. But then to have breakfast ready for four kids and herself and then to do the housework which we had a fairly large house and she worked just in ways that I never have had to work just to maintain the household. She did have some help, a cleaning lady, and then for some years we had what we called a school girl.

[Pause]

The school girls often stayed throughout their whole 4 years and really wanted 00:31:00to stay on longer. They thought they were learning a lot and were always treated not like hired help, but very nicely. My mother kept a very special eye on their wardrobe and made sure that they had the proper things. They would go home on Friday after school and come back either Sunday night or Monday morning. It did help her a lot to have somebody do the dishes or when we were very little, to keep an eye on us when she went out.

Now you ask what her role was. She, my mother always did my dad's expense account for his State Parole and Probation and kind of kept track of other reports that were due. She went with him to the Methodist conference every year, and not really out of a sense of duty. She didn't function like the typical minister's wife. In the first place, she did a lot of her own things. She liked 00:32:00to play cards and in those days it was verboten in the Methodist Church, and she didn't care what the rules were. She was a religious person and a spiritual kind of person. She went every Sunday night to the Rockland church with my dad. In fact it took me many years to figure out why I would be kind of down on Sunday nights, lonely, and I finally traced - no matter where I lived or what I was doing. I finally kind of traced it back to that Sunday night service when both my mother and dad would be away.

MA: And you weren't used to that kind of absence in the house?

KC: I should have been used to it, it happened every Sunday, but I didn't like it I guess. So when I had a family of my own I made Sunday nights very, very special. I never absented myself on Sunday night. I figured people were getting ready to start school on Monday morning so I always tried to plan something kind 00:33:00of special. Everybody would bathe and shampoo and clean pajamas and then we'd come downstairs and if it was fireplace weather we would read in front of the fire or do something to make it a nice, pleasant transition into Monday. Or, so whatever.

MA: And did that change your attitude about Sunday nights too?

KC: Yes. That's probably why I did it.

MA: I'm sure

KC: And my mother would have to meet people at the door. We had lots of marriages in our living room and baptisms, and she would witness legal papers, so she participated really in all of those things that my father did. But refused to teach Sunday School, well I shouldn't say refused, she did have a high school Sunday School class in the local Congregational Church, but not in 00:34:00any of my dad's churches. I think she was very wise, he had ultimately a total of twelve (only eight at a time), but twelve different parishes and if she had offered to do something in one of them, and then the other eleven would nag at her, that could be her life, but she was interested in a lot of other things. She was a very community-minded person. Band Mothers Association was very big in the early days, would have fund raising events like pancake suppers to raise money to make, to buy uniforms and instruments for the band and the orchestra. And there never seemed to be tax dollars for those things and the school did provide, we had a very good high school and a good school system.

My mother was elected to the School Board in a political election in the early 00:35:0020's, very soon after women were granted the right to vote. She was the only woman for years on the School Board. I used to be teased by my friends in school who said the reason why I was on the high honor role all the time was because my mother was on the School Board. I don't think there was a great deal of truth to that. My dad would get so excited on election night and he would phone down to the City County Building every half hour to see what the returns looked like and my mother was very calm about it. I don't know if she felt assured she would be re-elected, which she always was, or whether--

--well, she was a calm person. Both of them are very calm. I commented to my son the other day, in what connection I can't remember, I said that I don't think that my mother or father ever raised their voice to any of us and I don't 00:36:00believe they ever did. They never had to. In the first place, they didn't go around issuing commands and they had other ways of....my mother really would make Tom Sawyer look like a piker. She had an arrangement in our family three of us had blue eyes and three of us had brown eyes, of the kids we were two and two, so she found that a good way to create teams as good as any other. As it also turned out, I'm one of the blue eyed and my blue eyed brother Gordon was less interested in making his bed and picking up his clothes than the other boys were and so my mother knew that I would pick up any slack. So when she paired us off this way she perhaps knew more about us than the color of our eyes. In any 00:37:00case, she had a little chart in the kitchen and there was a whole series of things that we were expected to do and make our own bed and leave no clothes lying around and be down to breakfast by a certain time and then practice. I don't know how she stood it, my brother Bob played the clarinet, Gondy played the trombone and David a coronet and I practiced the piano and we would each practice simultaneously. She would find one in the basement and one upstairs one in the garage, the piano didn't get moved so I was in the same place. Each day, as a team, we would get marks on the chart, not as individuals and then at the end of the week the team that had the best grades or score would get to scrub 00:38:00the kitchen floor and the back porch, we'd divide that up and the poor losers would have to scrub the front porch and sweep the garage. So we vied for the opportunity to scrub the kitchen floor.

MA: What do you think you gained from all of this? What character traits do you have that you think came from these early years?

KC: I think caring about other family members, certainly, and enjoying one another. When we were old enough to be going to college and be home on vacations 00:39:00we would, the 4 of us, would do the dishes after dinner. In fact meals at our house, in my Frederick birth family, were very prolonged always. None of this coming in when you got around to it, with lots of conversation at the table so anyway, when we were older and home, we told my mother don't worry how long we sit at the table, you're not to touch anything when the meal is over and then we had this division of labor -- Gordon would clear the table, I would scrape and get things organized and then I would wash the dishes and Bob and David would dry and Gondy would by that time be able to put things away and we had it down 00:40:00to such a system that no one ever had to say, "Why aren't you doing this?" and we just did it, but we would sing quartets all the time we were doing the dishes. We all had pretty good singing voices, in fact my two older brothers did a lot of performing, solo and we all sang in choral groups so that we all had fun. So, even doing dishes would be fun; it wasn't anything that was a chore. I think there is some carryover in that. I think that with our kids that doing their school work or their political work or their community work were much more important than emptying wastebaskets or setting the table. It never would have occurred to me to drag one of our kids down from homework or studying in order to do some simplistic chore. On the other hand, we didn't hand out assignments, 00:41:00we just figured when something had to be done whoever had the time to do it ought to see it needed to be done and do it. I can remember saying that one time when Janet, my youngest, was applying for AFS (American Field Service) and she did go then to the Netherlands for a year, this committee of three women came here to see us in our native habitat and to evaluate whether it would be appropriate to send one of our kids and they asked me, "What were Janet's assigned duties around the house?" and I said "Oh gee, she doesn't have any, and neither does anybody else." When I tried to explain the system I think they thought I was making it up, but we had always functioned this way. Sometimes one or another of us, including me and my husband, would be over extended and simply 00:42:00could not do what we thought we were going to, or that was expected, and we would send out an SOS and drag in the help. You know, if I just had another meeting, and wasn't going to have time to finish preparing a meal, then I would sound off upstairs and say "Who can help? I need help!" and somebody would come. I remember a number of occasions when David had volunteered to do political addressing envelopes or something at a very young age, and it would get to be a much longer task than he had bargained for, and I would just sit down and say, "Here let me help," and if one of the girls came around they would say "Ok, I'll give you half an hour." I mean that we would see that the job got done. Those were all the kinds of things, and an interest in justice and caring about other 00:43:00people, not in a mushy kind of bleeding heart way, but in seeing what needed to be done and doing it. When there would be a death in our neighborhood or a fire in the community or something I never heard my mother say "I wonder what I could do?" She would go ahead and do--send clothing or dishes to a burned out family or have the little ones in a family where there was a death come and stay overnight just to be in an atmosphere that was a little different for children.

MA: Thinking back to the tasks and the woman from the American Friends Service Committee, did she ultimately ask "Well who does the tasks?" and did she assume that the task load then fell on you?

KC: No. I think we illustrated with some of these things, and that kind of put 00:44:00her mind at rest.

MA: It's a nice example of equality manifesting itself in the home.

KC: My husband set an example which a lot of men in households do not necessarily set. Now I'm back at the Eton Ridge household, the Clarenbach household. My husband was a cook and could and did do any kind of domestic chores. He was very neat and would never throw dirty clothes--I know people who complain about having to pick up dirty clothes from their kids or their spouse. That was never a problem here. I also liked to organize so it made it easier. I wanted children's closets to be accessible and available with sufficient drawer 00:45:00space. Each of our kids had a desk in their room and had whatever equipment was necessary so that it was convenient for them and easy to be organized and tidy. When they had no examples of disorganized people around, they just assumed that was the way you live.

[pause/break]

MA: You wanted to say more about your mother.

KC: I guess what I wanted to say was that while she did a lot of her own things I know that she wasn't totally happy, that she felt as though she were missing a 00:46:00lot in life. One of the reasons she encouraged me to follow my own professional leanings , etc., was again based on her own experience. She also used to tell me more than once, if you wait until you can afford to do something, you'll never do it. So don't be so provident. Now that is advice that I didn't follow as well as I should have, but I am offering the same advice to my children. She also said that she felt that if she had done more of the things she wanted to do, she probably wouldn't have had arthritis and high blood pressure and other ailments.

MA: She felt that she internalized some of her frustration? Is that what she was saying?

KC: That isn't the way she said it but, yes I'm sure that's what she meant. She also said, and my kids loved this advice and I passed it along to them, "You 00:47:00don't go on a vacation to save money." I used to say "Or to lose weight!" Those were some of her little pearls and tidbits. My mother and dad used to take vacations or little trips or do things separately from each other. My mother had trips to both coasts. For years she would save what she would call her cigarette money. There was a period when all 4 of us, my 3 brothers and I all smoked, and when we'd be home we'd have someone pick up a carton of cigarettes for each of us, so then my mother would put the equivalent, which in those days was about a dollar, into her little slush fund and would save that for her trips. She belonged to a women's organization called PEO and she'd go to state conventions 00:48:00for that and sometimes out to the the west coast. She had a couple of very favorite relatives who lived in San Francisco and she liked to visit them and other good friends scattered here and there, so she would go by herself for a couple of weeks and she belonged to organizations so she'd go out evenings for meetings and things that my dad had no interest in and didn't go to. He did a lot of his ministerial and other things by himself without her.

When Hank and I were married 41 years ago his experience with his parents in Missouri was a totally different thing. I don't think either his mother or father had ever, except his father going to work at the post office, had done anything that they didn't do together. They played pinochle on weekends with 00:49:00friends and went to church so that when I announced I was going to go do something that Hank wasn't involved in, he was absolutely surprised and kind of shocked at first. It took him several weeks to get used to the notion that I was going to go to places that had nothing to do with him.

You did ask me whether my dad ever had any emoluments, perks or honorariums for his church work and the answer to that is yes. He never charged, but if anybody offered him 5 or 10 or 2 dollars. When I was in high school I often played the piano or the organ for funerals that my father conducted. We had an old church 00:50:00organ down in our basement that you pump by foot and pull out stops and I could practice on that and then I had a couple of girlfriends who sang and we would sing duets of appropriate funeral music. When he had a funeral out in the country, in somebody's home, most funerals in those days were conducted not even in the churches, the real rural ones were in people's homes. My dad would offer to split his "take" with the musicians. But more often than not there was no "take" to split. When I had given up a whole summer afternoon, well more than that with rehearsal time and then going out there and hanging around, I finally made a business arrangement with my father that I would get $2 everytime I did 00:51:00it, whether he was paid or not, and he finally agreed. My dad played the piano, actually all 4 of us were somewhat musical, played an instrument and sang and liked to sing, and my father was quite musical. My mother, I used to say mercifully, did not offer to sing in any of the churches because my mother wasn't a singer and didn't play. In her later years she started to try to learn to play the piano and used to practice a lot, but it didn't take very well. My dad could play 3 songs on the piano-- Nearer My God to Thee, Rock of Ages and I can't remember what the third one was. Frequently he'd go to one of his Sunday services and there wasn't a soul in the crowd who could play the organ or piano 00:52:00so then he would go over and that was what they would sing that day.

MA: I was thinking about your mother, did she ever talk to you about what it was like when suffrage was passed in 1920?

KC: No, she never did. My mother died just the year that we had the first statewide Status of Women Conference in Wisconsin, 1974, and in fact, the very month of that conference which I chaired. I am sure had she lived beyond that, that the things that I was deeply involved in we would have talked about. I 00:53:00certainly did talk about them with my father over the years. My dad used to point out to me from the time I can remember, certainly in grade school, whenever a woman was doing something of special note or something unusual, he would call that to my attention, if he read an article. In fact, on our western trips that year that I was five or six, we went to Aimee Semple McPherson's tabernacle and heard her preach and almost got thrown out. My dad had taken little opera glasses so we could get a better look at her and an usher came down and told him to put those away, we weren't allowed to do that. We saw Amelia Earhart and read articles about Catherine Lenroot who was head of the children's 00:54:00fund or department or something in Washington, so he was always pointing out those things. My mother had 2 friends right in Sparta who wrote and published books, so women of achievement at any level were their friends, and people that we met and talked to.

MA: You grew up with role models or knowledge of role models?

KC: Yes, and had some wonderful teachers all through my grade and high school -- 00:55:00women teachers as well as a few men.

MA: Do you recall the women teachers?

KC: Yes. You are reminding me of another wonderful institution in our Frederick household. Because my mother had been a teacher and because she remembered how lonely those early weeks would be, she started, from the time my brother Bob started school, she would always invite his teacher or teachers to come for dinner at our house. By the time there were four of us in school, to invite each of our teachers, plus the one we had last year plus the music teacher and the gym teacher it finally reached the point where she just invited all of the teachers. Our house wasn't really big enough, big as it was, so they finally 00:56:00rented a place, a cabin or lodge, kind of a precursor to motels really, out on the outskirts of town, and made arrangements to rent the place and have them prepare the meal (Farrington's camp).

We always had all kinds of games at our house and sometimes we played something called coffeepot which was kind of like charades and cootie and games of various kinds anyway, we would have just a hilarious evening and a couple of the teachers I can remember speaking to me, wanting to be sure that even though we had acted foolish at home that I wasn't to carry this over into the classroom. I already knew that, I didn't need to be coached and yet they were unaccustomed to having fun and letting their hair down in front of their students. That became 00:57:00such an institution that I can remember a couple of years that my mother hadn't given it a thought and she'd get a phone call from some of the teachers saying "When are you having your party because we want to be sure to save the date?" That would then goad her into doing it, and that was kind of fun. Then over the year, if there were teachers that we especially liked, we would have them for Sunday dinner. That is something that we have done a little bit of as parents too, to get to know the kid's teachers personally.

MA: Bridging that gap between your personal life and education must have made it easier for you to go on also, that education a mysterious thing.

KC: That's right.

MA: What about religion? We've talked about your dad being a preacher, a parson, 00:58:00how did you feel about it? Did you consider yourself a religious person?

KC: I certainly was a "Sunday go to meeting" person. We for a variety of reasons, my brothers and I went to Sunday school, not in the local Methodist Church but in the Congregational Church, which was a block closer to our house. My mother had grown up in that Congregational Church, but I think the real reason that we opted to go there, and more of our friends went their than to the Methodist church, there were other churches in town as well.

MA: The Methodist Church was where your father preached?

KC: My father was a Methodist minister but he did not service the Sparta Methodist Church. I think there was always a little bit of competitive tension between whoever was occupying that pulpit and my dad. Now my dad stayed for 50 00:59:00years doing those country churches. He would go to conference every year. I don't know if you know how the Methodist Church functions, but the Bishop and the Regional District Superintendent assign ministers to parishes and they don't always have an option. So my dad would make a joke every year, gee he'd wonder if he was going to get Big Creek and Rockland back again or if somebody else was going to get assigned there because no one else would take it on a bet, and the churches did just kind of wither away after he stopped preaching. But the incumbent in the local Sparta church would be changed from time to time, maybe every 4 or 5 years or whatever, that's just the practice I guess of the Methodist Church. So with my father getting all of the many weddings, funerals, 01:00:00baptism, etc., often of people who went to the local church but who knew him and liked him, or he might have married their parents or their brother and sister so they wanted him also and whether there really was rivalry or whether my father suspected there might be or maybe he didn't want his kids blabbing all of the family skeletons. I don't know, but there never was any objection. I went to Sunday school, which I continued to do all the way through high school. We had a marvelous woman who moved to town when her husband died and whose family had lived there a long time who made our Sunday School really a Social Science course more than anything else so that this same gang of otherwise reasonably sophisticated girls we were segregated by males and females so these were gals 01:01:00and just wouldn't have missed and we'd prepare and think through what were going to do. Then I went to a Sunday evening young peoples' thing. I sang in the choir, I ushered, that was kind of unusual too when we were in high school the summertime head usher was the father of one of my friends, so for one month he would have girls usher and pass the collection plate.

MA: How did you feel about that when he did it?

KC: We thought it was great! We didn't really think about it as a revolution

Frequently all four of us kids were asked to go to the Big Creek 11:00 service with my father. We would go from Sunday School and walk the length of the main 01:02:00drag and meet my father at an intersection where he'd be coming from his earlier service so he wouldn't have to drive out of the way, and also he was never ahead of time. He never hurried and he always said about his services "they aren't going to start until I get there." So he would take his sweet time. Now that is something I didn't learn from my dad; my mother was always terribly prompt and ahead of time and I am always terribly prompt and ahead of time and have spent much of my life waiting for people who are not prompt. However, I anticipate that and always take something along to read or write or whatever. So we did go to that one Sunday morning service with my father quite routinely, and then later on when I was singing in the choir I would have to skip that, but we became quite well known. In fact, there are several pews in that big church that 01:03:00had my brother's initials carved; I would never deface a church pew or anything else but unfortunately my brother Gordon had no qualms about doing that. On Sunday afternoon, lots of times, I would ask if I could go with him because when just the two of us were in the car we had such fun. We would sing or talk, but sing an awful lot. Furthermore, by the time I was 12, when we would get off the main road onto a real country lane he would let me drive. I have actually been driving a car since I was 12, although you couldn't drive legally in Wisconsin until 14 in those days. But lots of other Sunday afternoons my brothers and their friends and sometimes girlfriends of mine would go with my dad. We had 01:04:00several very special places that we liked. There were some hills around the Tomah area that he would pass on his way to Wyeville or Valley Junction where we liked to hike. He would dump us out on his way to church and we would have a couple of hours then we would wait until we heard his horn honk. At Cataract there was a country school that had a round-and-round and some swings which was another place so we would put on our woods clothes and go there. I think mother was always delighted when we would be out of the house. Sundays were a nightmare, for her. She didn't behave as though she were having a nightmare but to get all of us dressed and on our way and then to juggle the timing of all of these services and then to have a noon meal, a real Sunday dinner ready, and 01:05:00then to clean up that mess and have an evening meal, and then for herself to be ready to go with my dad, which she did every Sunday night was just a hectic kind of day. There was a period later, we were still in high school at the time, when my mother would really want to eat Sunday dinner out. We didn't do it very many times but there was a Briggson Hotel in Sparta that specialized in Sunday dinners. Now that I think of it, I didn't think of it at the time, what a relief to her it was and would have been if we had done it more often and regularly but I am sure she had to almost plead to have it done at all, and then my father would grumble about what it was costing. So that is another aspect of....I think 01:06:00there were many times when my mother would like to have done something that cost a little bit and my father was always very generous in one sense and with us but paying for a meal out seemed like an extravagance to him--

--and not a recognition of all the energy that was being drained from my mother. I don't think he ever recognized that. I think when she paid her cleaning lady she would almost do it on the QT because he didn't like to have somebody else around, an outsider around in the house and he couldn't understand why somebody who kept the house as neat and clean as my mother, she would do laundry twice a 01:07:00week, 4 men with wash trousers and shirts and my dad's shirts had to be starched at the collar and cuffs, the ironing and in those days they ironed sheets and pillow cases and every item of clothing and on Thursdays my mother would clean the upstairs and change all the sheets and on Fridays clean the downstairs until it sparkled and then on Saturday bake.

MA: Did you carry that through in your marriage? When you first married did you expect that you also would clean a different level of the house each day of the week?

KC: No, I don't think that my standards have ever been quite as high as my mothers were and furthermore the whole routine of spring and fall housecleaning has happily gone by the boards, but she did that. When we first moved back to 01:08:00Madison and we had a couple of years of underemployment, the first year or so I hadn't gone back to work, but even when I did, what I was paid by Edgewood and the Extension for those parttime things hardly covered the babysitter so there were several years when we had no cleaning lady and that was just absolutely dreadful because I would spend the weekend, Saturday and Sunday, doing groceries and cleaning. I didn't have to set aside a day to do laundry because we had a washer and drier. I had less time with the kids to do family things because of domestic chores than I had the rest of the week. As soon as we had any income we 01:09:00hired a cleaning person and have the same one now that we've had for 22 years. She tells me she is getting on in years and I tell her she daren't!

MA: When you were a young woman in your twenties, do you think you had the awareness then that you seem to have now about how hard your mother's life was, relatively speaking?

KC: No, I doubt it. I was a little aware of it. One summer my mother was in the hospital for about six weeks or so. She had a hysterectomy and then complications and I was, I can't remember but maybe 14. We had no substitute at home and so I did the cooking and cleaning. I also was playing golf that summer 01:10:00with the junior golfers so I would get everything as close to done, but I even did canning and made jelly and jam that summer because those were things that were on the schedule. So I had some little notion. My mother used to have to can, she would can meat--some farmer would give us half a beef--and then my dad would keep coming home from the service with a crate of strawberries that needed to be done right then or they would begin to rot and some of those things that were just a real added chore for my mother. The only time, and I've told this story many times, that my father ever used good sense, and what an inner struggle he must have, had this person who wasted nothing, I mean he wore the 01:11:00same pair of shoes, he would polish them like a good military man, I forgot to tell you that he'd been a colonel in the Army Reserves and used to go to summer camp also, but one year the Cataract parish decided to pay him an annual salary. They paid him in pumpkins! This was during the depression when no one in the parish had any money, so they loaded up his car with pumpkins and he started home and he thought to himself that if he walked in and told my mother,."It's a load of pumpkins," that she might walk out the other door. Yet he couldn't bear to waste them, and he didn't dare let his parishioners know he wasn't taking them home and, I suppose if we'd had nursery schools then he could have let each kid have a pumpkin, but we didn't have, so at least he had the good judgment to 01:12:00stop at a quiet, dark place and dump all but 4 of them in the gutter someplace on the way home and not come in with them, and for him to part with anything was a wrench.

MA: I'd like to go back to religion for just a second. Do you think that it had an influence in terms of your social change? I'm trying to see the connection there. Was it a form of religion in which you did take responsibility for your fellows? I'm wondering what the transference was for you in terms of your later life?

KC: When I came here to Madison I didn't go to any, oh I went to things at the 01:13:00YWCA, in fact I was an elected officer there, but after a few weeks here I didn't want to take the time to go to church and it didn't seem a necessary thing for me at all. A lot of my friends and people who lived in the same sorority house that I did went to church, and one or two years a couple people prevailed upon me to sing in a Baptist choir when they did their Easter cantata and that was kind of fun, but when I wrote and told the family I was doing that they immediately said I would have to be immersed and began teasing me a little bit about that. I did, I suppose, things that were sort of religiously oriented sometimes; I was chair of the University Peace Federation and active in an open housing thing. I don't even know to this day how religious I am. I never did, 01:14:00even as a youngster, know what people meant with a lot of the rhetoric that went with religion. "Give yourself to God," I didn't know what that meant and I still don't know what that means, and "are you saved" and these things.

MA: How would you define what other people call religion for yourself?

KC: I don't know. I think that it is terribly important to follow one's conscience, but as far as I'm concerned that has less to do with whether I smoke a cigarette than how I behave politically and as a human being with other human beings.

KC: My parents used to bring home, as guests in our house, any foreign missionaries that they would encounter anywhere partly just because they were hospitable, but also because they wanted us to have a chance to meet somebody who had lived in a different culture and who had different perspectives on things. In fact, the only Black people I'd every met in my life, until I came here to the University, were ministers or missionaries, mostly from other countries who were invited into our house. I remember my dad and I used to have a lot of political discussions that my mother wouldn't enter into, and the boys, I don't remember their taking much part in it either. My father and I didn't mind disagreeing with each other at all, in fact we both rather enjoyed it and 01:16:00sometimes that upset my mother. We didn't argue, I mean didn't call each other names, but we would differ about some things and that kind of upset her a little bit. We would always do this at the table when we were eating when we had these discussions. One time, and this is the one that I am recalling, my father told an "Eleanor" joke. This was during the early days, my dad had been a Republican, a progressive Republican and until my own kids began to convert him to being a follower of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern I think he continued to be pretty much, well that's not entirely true either, he joined the union at one point to, but this must have been in the early regimen of FDR and my father told 01:17:00one of these, they were very current in those days, snide remarks about Eleanor Roosevelt. I don't remember the subject but anyway my father repeated one of these that he had heard and it troubled me I said "What don't you like about Eleanor? Don't you like her because she thinks niggers are as good as white folks?" It never had occurred to him, because my father was not a racist and in fact he deplored race discrimination as much as I had learned and have subsequently learned to do. He had never realized that here he was making fun of Eleanor Roosevelt, whereas she was giving public leadership on this issue that meant something to him. That was the last "Eleanor" joke ever told in our house.

MA: How old were you at that time?

KC: I was probably in high school so I was between 12 and 16.

MA: So it was important to you that Eleanor was there?

KC: Yes

MA: Did you ever listen to her radio show or read her columns?

KC: Yes, a little bit. I didn't hear her much on the radio. I remember her voice was not good, and in fact a lot of my older friends who did like her didn't think her column "My Day" was much either. I guess I wasn't feeling like a critic. I can remember how terribly excited I was the time I met her in the national museum. We just rode up on an elevator together and I was surprised to 01:19:00see she was as tall as I am and we just said hello and that was about it, but it was just a very exciting moment for me.

MA: You were in high school at that time?

KSC: No. This time I was in Washington, it was during World War II but the conversation with my father was when I was in high school.

MA: My father changed with the times too and moved a bit. When I was at the university, either first or second year, he came to pick me up one time or was in town and came to take me to lunch or something and when he walked in, I was living at the Alpha Chi Omega sorority house, and when he walked in said "I'd like to use the phone if I could," and that was kind of unusual; usually if he had to make a phone call he'd stop at a filling station and take care of it. I said "sure, the phone is right there". He said, "I have to call brother Kulpinsky" (I'm not sure I have that name right). I just thought it was another 01:20:00Methodist minister and I said "who is that"? He said "He's president of the union of state, county and municiple workers," My dad was a State Patrol and Probation Officer, and then he kind of, he wanted me to know this but he just couldn't come right out, so he had to hem-and-haw around with this miserable phone call and then he said "You know, I realize that the union has done a lot for those of us in my position in salary and benefits and that the least I could do is to join and pay dues." For a person who grew up with all the negative stereotypes of unions, to not only make that change, but then to have to confess it to his great critic was kind of nice.

MA: Kay, to continue from last week, lets talk about your mother a little. You had mentioned that she had a full life but in some respects was dissatisfied.

KC: I will begin by saying I suppose that my mother was a very warm and motherly kind of person. Not only beloved by her own children but by all of our friends and neighbors, and as we grew not only when we were very young, but over the years so that our friends always liked to come to our house and she was always 01:22:00quite welcoming to them. My mother, I think I already mentioned that she taught country school and then taught in a couple of smaller communities, and in fact was a school teacher when she met my dad and he was already in the state legislature and he was the local preacher. She told me at one time a terribly funny story about their courtship. I think she never dared to laugh to him or at him about it because even in late years he was apparently still a little bit sensitive about it. But while he would be in Madison attending the legislative session she apparently on some occasions dated some other person in town, and the joke that my mother told was that when my father found out about this, either from her or however, he said to her "I suppose you went to eat some of that inferior ice cream at the ice cream parlor," and of course it was the only 01:23:00place in town, but because she was with someone else it was inferior. She got a kick out of that.

We all, all four of us kids, had a built-in tutor at our house in the person of my mother. She loved teaching. She used to tutor kids in town who were having trouble in school and their mother's would call and say, "Would you help with whatever it was," writing, math, whatever. So by the time we were doing homework, which was not as prevalent in those days as it certainly has become, and....we would sit around the dining table and mother would sit with us and help. We always had an unabridged dictionary in my father's study, he had a study in our house. In fact, in the dining room, in addition to studying at that 01:24:00table, we had a big blackboard that covered one whole wall where we could play and write when we were little but we could do arithmetic, etc. That is also where we left phone messages for my dad and my mother would write "funeral 2:00" etc. They would be reminders to him, and much safer to leave messages for him on the blackboard than to leave a note on his desk because his desk was always a mess and he didn't like to have my mother help him clean his desk or his office, he knew just under which pile to look for what. He would let me help him clear his desk; I would take the time to say, "Where does this go and where does that go?" whereas my mother would just want to do it in a hurry and shuffle things together. I always thought it was interesting that later on when my own daughter, Sara, was old enough to help grandpa, he would let her help him clean 01:25:00his desk. As far as I know, we were the only two people who were ever cheerfully allowed to do that.

My mother also was quite a reader. I don't know whether I've mentioned on a previous tape her little arrangement with the Carnegie Library in Sparta which was presumably the first one in the state, the first Carnegie endowed library was in our little town, but she had an arrangement with the head librarian that whenever they got in a new book they would phone her at once and give her first dibs on it. We had a little place on the landing of our staircase where between the posts my mother would keep the library books that needed to be returned. She despaired of my ever becoming a reader. I did go to the summer reading programs 01:26:00at the library when I was in the early grades and would read the required 25 or however many books in order to get the diploma or gold star or whatever. Reading was not my favorite activity, in fact, all through high school I think I didn't read just for fun very much. I read a few books, especially those that I would receive for Christmas or birthdays or whatever.

MA: Did you have a favorite kind of literature?

KC: I loved "Little Women" and earlier than that "The Bobbsey Twins" and Nancy Drew books of course I read, but nothing very deep I guess. It was only in much 01:27:00later years that I began to read for fun and for something to do. I was much too busy with outdoor things all through high school really to ever have time to want to just sit and read.

MA: You mentioned sports--that your mother was able to play in competitive sports with other schools on girl's teams.

KC: That's right, when she was in high school, Sparta High School 30 years before I was; she graduated in 1907. They used to go by train to Wisconsin Rapids and other towns and play basketball and in fact she told me many times about going when she had what they called quinsy in those days, it was a terribly sore throat probably like a strep throat, and she would conceal that from her mother so that she could still go to the basketball tournaments or games.

MA: But by the time I was in high school, or well before that, interscholastic sports for girls had totally left the scene and had not been reinstated. My brothers were all on every athletic team, of course that's one of the joys of living in a small town, you do everything because they need enough bodies to do it although my brothers were fairly athletic.

KC: It sounds like you were too.

MA: Yes I was. I recently had occasion to look in my high school yearbook when we had our 50th high school reunion this year and noted that I had been captain of the volleyball and basketball teams. I don't remember that I was ever the softball captain but I played softball. I did a lot of things that were not team 01:29:00sports. I played golf a lot and swam and ice skated and skied.

MA: Did you continue those activities throughout your later life?

KC: Not really. Swimming, and had every high hope of playing golf when we moved back to Madison 27 years ago, when we thought we would be able to afford it. On Statan Island golf was very expensive by the time you paid a baby sitter and everything. Those hopes were dashed along with quite a few other things when I went back to work and maintained a household with three kids. I just had to cut out quite a few things, one of which was the possibility of playing golf.

MA: Because of time?

KC: Yes. Another was concert tickets. The first few years we were here we bought season tickets to the Union Theater performances and a few other things and found that we were not using the tickets. I realized that was another aspect of life that would have to go for awhile.

MA: We'll get back to that; that's interesting what you had to give up to keep your professional life.

KC: Yes, professional and domestic.

MA: You had talked about your mother's trips, that she took separate trips from your father.

KC: She did. They had sufficiently different interests. My mother had many friends and a few relatives whom she loved to visit; a sister in Florida and a sister in Texas, friends in California and an aunt in California. She would, not 01:31:00every year but every few years, arrange a trip for a couple of weeks and would have a wonderful time. She loved planning the whole thing and accumulating wardrobe and making arrangements. My mother came to see us, I lived far enough away from Sparta for enough years so that it was fun for them and for us to have my mother and dad come and visit. They frequently came separately; my mother came many more times than my father did to visit us. It was always, whether either or both, a red carpet event for my kids and for my husband and me when they were coming to visit. Their other two offspring, my two brothers, lived 01:32:00near enough, one right in Sparta and the other 25 miles away in LaCrosse so that it wasn't such a state occasion when there was a visit. But for us, we would plan it, when we knew that either one or the other was coming, plan it for weeks in advance, every menu item and the kids had to have pickled herring for grandpa and we had to have this and that. Once my mother came to visit us by herself when we lived in St. Louis on the occasion of David's birth or when he was just a few weeks old and, my mother loved this when I told her, Sara was four or nearly five I guess, and came to me one morning while my mother was there absolutely indignant, scolding me this little five year old was, she said "I think it's perfectly terrible the way you make Nina work when she is here." I said "Make her work? What did I make her do?" "Well she was just making her bed 01:33:00and I think it's terrible that you make her do that." My mother got an awful kick out of that because actually we never had her lift a finger except that she would read to the kids and that was about the extent of what we made her do. She would also do a little mending for me and a few little chores like that. The preparation that my children engaged in in anticipation of any visit from my parents was fun.

I had visits from my mother and dad long before I was married. A couple of them that I recall, especially in Washington during World War II. My youngest brother, David, was killed in a plane crash as an aviation cadet in 1943, early 1943, and I was in Washington with the War Production Board, and this was a most 01:34:00devastating experience for my father who thought there had to be a religious message in this. As a very devout Methodist minister he kept seeking, why did this happen, and why to him I suppose. He even sought out other religious people to discuss this with, and in the process in which he really behaved like somebody who was demented -- well I'm exaggerating in the use of that word--but it was just constantly on his mind and it was very, very hard on my mother. Not only hard to lose her youngest child, but also to have to be living with my father when he was going through all of this, so she wrote and kind of pleaded 01:35:00with me to invite him to come and visit me in Washington. She thought that getting away from home would be good for him, but it would be even better for her to have him gone for awhile. I did extend the invitation and he did come. All my friends rallied and we had a wonderful time, good meals and ate out and went to the theater. Then he left Washington to go visit his sister on Statan Island, where he was going to spend a week, and after he had been there two days he telephoned me in Washington to ask if he could come back instead of spending the rest of the week with his sister and would I please get theater tickets for the gang as his guests, which we did. It really did what my mother had hoped it would do and it was fun for me. I had a few dread moments before he came, 01:36:00myself, wondering whether he was going to upset me and my friends but, on the contrary, he entered into the whole activity and it was good for him.

My mother came on a number of occasions to Washington by herself and I particularly recall the time that she went with, I have two friends with whom I used to go to the race track once in awhile, and she thought that sounded like such fun that they arranged to take her one Saturday when I was not able to go, I had to work on that day, so she took me into the little dressing room of our apartment and hauled out this role of bills and wondered it that would be enough money to put on the horses. I just loved this idea of the country preacher's 01:37:00wife with her wad of money to go to the races.

MA: Do you recall how she did?

KC: No. It's possible that she didn't ever tell me. We never did go to the races in order to make money. We just took as much money as we needed to come and go and eat and if we made a couple of bucks we'd put it right back on the next race.

MA: You had also talked about your mother's role as an educator. I wanted to back up for just a second -- was it necessary for her to quit teaching public school because she married, was that a law in Wisconsin at the time?

KC: I don't know if it was a requirement, or if it was just de regour. My hunch was that it was just the thing to do.

MA: In some states it was a law.

KC: Yes, I know it was, particularly during the depression, but of course this was before the depression. My parents were married in 1913.

MA: As you look back on your mother it's clear to me that your sense of family and what family meant, came from the influences of your own family. But on a personal level what qualities do you feel that you have that were influenced significantly by her?

KC: I think, I don't know qualities so much as behavior, I don't know how one distinguishes those. My mother was a very dignified person and a calm person, 01:39:00respectful of other people. There was never any sense of class in our family, that I think partly because of the kinds of people who came to our house because my dad's office was there not only rural but people of all walks, people came to see him for legal or for ministerial or for parole and probation or whatever. Then my mother's activity in the Church Women United and some of the school functions and other community activities. People were kind of evaluated as individuals and were respected as individuals. I think that is something that 01:40:00really caught without ever saying it; that you don't distinguish on the basis of people's income or experience or rank or job title or whatever, we just absorbed this, it's the way both of my parents behaved.

MA: They truly did not see themselves as being a class above or below?

KC: Nor did they see other people in that light. I think that's something. I think the whole way my mother brought up kids, again, treating us with respect, and I think we've done that with our children. Again, a lot of this is tacit, I mean nobody ever said, "Do this." Then, the way we celebrated holidays and 01:41:00birthdays, I've patterned just totally I think the way things were done in my birth family and the way we liked it. I mentioned that on birthdays everybody gets a present, in fact, my Janet for example, cherishes gifts she has received on David's birthday sometimes even more than things from her own birthday, and lots of Christmas packages and lots of celebration at Christmas time. My mother had a knack of making us think we had the greatest Christmases that anyone in 01:42:00the world ever had by wrapping up necessaries, etc., and that was always fun. My mother also had a little store of gifts in a linen closet that she had upstairs that always smelled good from smelly soap. She would just stockpile guest towels or note paper or a nice bar of soap or something and would be able to haul them out if she discovered it was somebody's birthday or whatever. That's something that I also have mimicked. My mother also kept one little overnight case packed 01:43:00in case she was ever asked at the eleventh hour to go someplace. She had several friends, women in Sparta who drove cars and who would occasionally want to go someplace that would involve an overnight, and I guess they knew that if they called my mother she was likely to say yes. She never had to worry about did she have a clean nightgown or whatever, she kept this one just for occasions of that kind. Now that I don't do. Well, I do have a traveling outfit, pajamas, robe and slippers, that I only use for travelling and then I know they're clean and ready to go, but I don't keep them in an overnight case.

MA: I sense, though, that you may have gotten some of your organizational skills just through living with your mother all those years.

KC: Yes, I forgot to say how highly organized she was with lists and a place in 01:44:00the kitchen, it wasn't actually a desk but it functioned as a desk, and she would write down menus and kept a running shopping list. I don't ever remember her running out of stuff or having anyone have to run to the store because she was highly organized. Of course in my very young youth, we could order from the grocery store--pick up the telephone and read off your list and it would be delivered. And the milkman came; in fact, the milkman with his horse, it was the same man who used to deliver when my mother was, before she was married. He was still--and the horse knew when to stop and when to start, and that was--

MA: Let's move to your education, now; your formal, as opposed to your informal education. Tell me about beginning public school.

KC: Well, I probably was one of the longest students in Wisconsin at the time. I started school at the age of 2 1/2 and went until I was, well, 25, I guess, with a Ph. D. with just a few years out for other activity. But I did start kindergarten at 2 ½, trailing my next older brother. My mother was home with the baby and then she'd have to dress the baby and herself and go trail down to school and drag me home, until finally the teacher said, "Let her stay," and stay I did, but for 2 ½ years until I was old enough for first grade and it was very disappointing to me not to be promoted along with the other kids.

MA: And you had the skills to be promoted?

KC: Well, I certainly thought I did. However, my last year in kindergarten the teacher was very happy to have me there. I knew my way around, of course, so she could send me over to the other building to get a jar of paste or whatever supplies she might be out of. Also, I was very helpful to her in interpreting one of the--there was a student in kindergarten that last year with a very difficult speech impediment; and poor Ms. Griswald, the teacher, whom I adored, couldn't understand this child and I could, so that I was useful in that sense too. I once had a birthday party that last year in kindergarten that my parents like to remind me of. At the time I naturally thought nothing about it, but on 01:47:00my birthday, which is October 7th, I brought the kindergarten class home for a birthday party; and I had issued the invitation verbally a few days in advance, but had failed to mention it to my mother and father. And my teacher didn't think to clear with my mother and dad, because I was so responsible and our family was so inclusive in that it seemed very natural--perfectly normal. And so my mother and dad did not bat an eye when 30 kids and the teacher came hiking from school in the afternoon. And never once said a word to me about "why did you do this?" And luckily it was nice weather--some years there's a little snow on October 7th and some years it's practically still swimming weather. Well this was a nice day, so we played games outdoors, my mother sent my dad down to the local dairy to get five gallons of ice cream and some cones, and those were the 01:48:00refreshments that were served and--

[tape cuts off--Clarenbach talks about technical difficulties regarding another interview]

MA: We were talking about your school experience.

KC: That's right and I had gotten into kindergarten. Well, I finally did make it into first grade and then the first grade teacher had me take first and second grade in the same year, which was fine because I had been reading quite awhile before I started first grade. As a matter of fact, I think I got to be a junior or senior in high school before it even began to dawn on me that people went to school to learn something new. I mostly went to school to kind of show off what I already knew. I'm sure I was learning new things as I went along, but we had what I loved at the time but I think was an unfortunate practice in my high school, or junior high as well as high school, "A" students, students who had a 01:50:00solid "A" in a course, were exempt from final exams. I had never taken a final exam in my life until I came to the university.

MA: How was it?

KC: It was a shock! In fact I looked forward to those three days of vacation at the end of each term because while the other kids were taking exams I would have a holiday. One year I did cheat in junior high, my mother was a collaborator. I think of my mother as a completely honest person and in fact I think of myself as an honest person, but in seventh grade we had to take sewing the first semester and cooking the second semester and the big sewing project was to make the apron that we had to wear in cooking class. I never did really learn to sew nor have I ever enjoyed--well one year when I was about a freshman or sophomore 01:51:00in high school I made four summer dresses because I wanted some clothes and we didn't have money to buy any, but that's about the extent. I got it all out of my system that one year. So here I was spending my holiday from taking final exams in seventh grade finishing up this apron so I wouldn't flunk sewing, and finally I was making such a mess of it that I sneaked it home and pleaded with my mother to finish it up for me so that I would pass from sewing into cooking. She did, and I did, and I sneaked it back and probably got a B- on it, but at least it was over and done with.

My mother also collaborated with me on other things, but this was not really in the dishonesty department I think. She was highly respected in our community and 01:52:00beyond, and I used to get a bee in my bonnet every year that I would like to play hooky sometime, so my mother and I made an agreement that once each semester when I really wanted to not go to school that I should tell her that this was the day. I never stayed home just to stay in bed. I'd wait until there was a perfectly beautiful fall day or a perfectly gorgeous spring day and say, "This is the day that I don't want to go to school, I want to go play golf or take a walk in the woods or just ride my bike. So my mother would telephone the school office and say "Kathryn will not be in school today." She didn't lie, she didn't say I'd broken my leg or had the sniffles, just "she would not be in school" and the assumption at the other end was that I had a perfectly good reason not to be there, and I'd get it all out of my system and that would hold 01:53:00me until the next time. I've always thought that was a good idea.

Now I don't know that my kids ever asked to do that or ever did that but I do know that I've always had an attitude that when the world is too much with you, you should be relieved of some of it. I have tried to relieve my kids of excess pressure, encouraging them sometimes when they were in school to drop a course or to somehow lighten whatever, or to be helpful if the kids had one too many things to do to remove one of them and do it for them, or whatever, and I think that that's important at any age.

MA: Have you done that for yourself throughout life? Do you feel that you have 01:54:00taken that to heart in you own management of your work and your family life and recreation?

KC: I have. I don't know that I've always used good sense about which things I removed and which ones I retained. I have a feeling I removed a lot of the fun things such as the theater tickets and golf and going on vacations that may have cost more than I thought I should spend so I didn't go. I certainly have realized as I've gone back to work that there still are 24 hours in a day and 7 days a week and if you're adding something you jolly well better subtract something. When I was 35 I remember my birthday, we were living on Stanten 01:55:00Island, and I decided I was probably, according to statistics, half way at 35, now the life span is extended a little bit for women, and that for the next 35 years I was going to do a few things my way and immediately decided I would never wear a hat except in the winter to keep myself really warm and that I could have guests for dinner without having to make yeast rolls from scratch or a pie from scratch. There were just a few domestic things I could do without. It also was sort of an attitude that I had.

MA: It sounds like you were deleting some of the things perhaps that your mother 01:56:00hadn't deleted.

KC: I don't know, my mother wasn't such a great baker. A part of her Tom Sawyer bit that I spoke about earlier, it was a great privilege for me to be allowed to make dinner rolls from the time I was 10 or 12 and bake cookies. To this day I really enjoy making yeast rolls but I don't do it very often and I love to do donuts. My aunt Carrie in Sparta, mother's sister, made donuts for the whole damn town and she lived to be 82 or 83. The last time that I saw her she had a little batch of donut dough, always in her refrigerator, and when anyone stopped by she would say let's have a cup of coffee and she would knock up a dozen or 01:57:00half a dozen donuts to have fresh with the coffee. I didn't want aunt Carrie's recipe to go to her grave with her so I made her make donuts several times, because she didn't measure anything and didn't know what the measurements were, so she would dump and then I would measure it, so I got her recipe finally written down. Later on I discovered it was quite similar to one in my Meta Gibbons cookbook so that it was alright. I still do donuts once a year or so.

I have a wonderful donut story if you are intersted in the donut story. When we lived on Staten Island and Janet was an infant, she was born in August. On Halloween, that's my favorite time to have homemade donuts, Sara came home from fourth grade the day before Halloween, and announced that she had told her teacher that she would bring donuts for the class for Halloween, and she had 01:58:00forgotten to mention it. That was unusual for Sara to forget to mention something, but I said, "fine." Then I had to figure how do I make, donuts have to be fresh to be good otherwise there's no point in having homemade donuts, I think, so I wanted to make them in the morning so that she could take them hot and fresh to school. But I had a four year-old and a new infant and I didn't want donut grease around with a four year-old especially, so I got up at 4:00, before it was time to feed the baby and before David was around to be in the way. My husband and I had a team, we did donuts as a team. I would roll out and cut and he would fry, so that we could handle it and chill it. Well you don't need to hear the whole process right now, but we had fresh donuts for Sara to 01:59:00take to school. About the time we were finishing the donuts the baby was waking up and crying and Sara, who usually had good sense --eight years-old-- said "Do you suppose the baby would like a donut?" and, two months old maybe closer to three, instead of saying, "Don't be foolish or are you joking," I said "Oh I wouldn't give her a whole one, maybe just a little round hole," and when I went in a little while later there was this cheerful little baby with donut crumbs all over her crib. Luckily she didn't choke to death. In any case, the donuts were a hit in school.

I always sent, I didn't make donuts frequently for school, but cookies, every 02:00:00year that my kids were in school. I was a room mother for whatever grade and sometimes more than 1 kid at a time which didn't involve much, it meant making cookies a time or two or going to a program or something, but they always assumed without asking me that I would want to do it, the kids did, and I did always want to. Even though I was working full-time and doing other things that was one kind of relationship and association that was just assumed. I had the same assumption with my parents when I was growing up that they would be not only willing but delighted to do anything that had to do with school.

MA: Did your husband participate in, for example, PTA meetings or PTO?

KC: He did. In fact my husband and Judge Jim Doyle, both of whom died this year, we both had kids, Annie Doyle and David Clarenbach were in the same room all through Randall School and all through high school. But Jim Doyle and my husband were the two fathers who could always be counted on to be at a school program over at Randall grade school. Sometimes a few other men were there too, but those two inevitably. They would schedule their days to be able to be there and lots of times I would watch Jim Doyle instead of watching the kids on the program because he was so sentimental, such a marvelous person, and he would be tearing, I loved watching him.

When somebody was in senior high, Hank and I were urged to be the co-presidents 02:02:00of West High School PTA. By that time I was up to my eyeballs in the women's movement and in other things, and I told my husand that I didn't see how I could possibly do it and he said that he would do all of the behind the scenes things that take all the time, the telephoning and setting up of committee meetings, etc., and that I could stand up and give the reports which I didn't mind doing and which he was uncomfortable doing and which was a total reversal from the other co-presidencies where the women would do all the scutwork and the men would stand up and read the reports. He thought that was only divine justice and he was willing to do it, so we did and it worked out. We did initiate a couple of good scholarship programs and a few things that were useful.

MA: You were philosophically of like minds, so that anything you would do you 02:03:00would pretty much be together on?

KC: Right.

KC: Lets move back now, we're still following your education. You mentioned that you didn't ever feel that it was new learning in school until you were a junior, but rather, that it was an opportunity for you to show what you learned, which I think speaks to the kind of education that had occurred in your home, but tell me when the change occurred and what that was like.

I suppose my memory is faulty to begin with but I can remember now, not that you're pressing me, but that general science as a freshman and algebra and geometry were new, but they never seemed tough. I thought they were always fun. My senior year in high school when I took physics I had the same science teacher 02:04:00I'd had as a freshman when I took general science. Another classmate of mine, Mary Cornell, and I loved physics, just loved it and I would really work at even the little diagrams that we'd have to diagram the experiment we were doing would be a work of art, at least by my standards and for me to do. But, she and I had other ideas of things we would like to do so we bargained with the teacher, Walter Pribbenow, the physics room was not in use during the 6th period which was a free period for Mary and me, and we asked if we could do extra, not extra credit but extra experiments, things that would occur to us, and he said yes, that we could go in and use that room during 6th period provided that we didn't spend any of that time on the lesson for that day. He didn't want us to have an 02:05:00added opportunity that the other students didn't have. So we not only agreed to that, but loved the arrangement. He had a chemistry class next door and he would stick his nose in three or four times during the hour because he'd be so excited about whatever it was Mary and I were doing. Anyway, that was something I did that was lots of fun.

My German class was fun. I took two years of Latin and two years of German in high school. At our 50th high school reunion this year somebody had written a little skit and part of it involved this German Club and had a little part written in for me to do so it brings this back to mind. There were 14 of us in the German class and we stayed the same 14 for two years. We had a marvelous teacher, Alvina Helmke. Very early, maybe the first week or so of our first year 02:06:00in German class, we decided we'd like to have a German Club and could we meet on Fridays. She said well sure, provided that in the four days before that we would do five day's assignments and that no one in the class should fall below a 90 in any of these lessons and that we would spend German Club talking only German. We bought that whole package with enthusiasm and of course what teacher wouldn't be overjoyed, and for two years that's what we did. I was elected president both years of the German Club and immediately memorized some parliamentary procedure in German which had absolutely nothing to do with the class but it would always have the teacher in hysterics. We collected a few dues so that on Fridays 02:07:00someone could run down to the local dairy and bring up treats for us and then sometimes we cooked German meals. Once the German Club conducted a pep rally in the gym and had a schnitzel bank, which was all germane to the basketball team, etc. We did a lot of very inventive things. We made up games in German and anyway, that was another thing that was just kind of fun.

During my senior year in high school I sold tickets in the theater, the movie house which we called the theater. I did that seven nights a week and two matinees to earn a little money, $4.50 a week for those nine times! In the summer time between my junior and senior year and after my senior year in the 02:08:00daytime I worked in a gift shop and got $7.00 a week for doing that. I put all of that money in the bank and it was available then for when I was in college for spending money.

MA: As you describe your school experience I'm so taken with what an incredibly cohesive group you were, with a good many teachers that you liked and respected and who were good teachers. Did you have any disruptive elements in your schools? It's so striking when we look at it in contrast to school today.

KC: Well, what we thought were disruptions in those days were exemplary behavior today. There was nothing like, oh there were always kids being sent to the 02:09:00principal's office for one little infraction or another.

I did some practice teaching while I was still in high school. My sophomore year in high school in a social studies course we had to select a career and then find an opportunity to do something with it. Well, I wasn't very imaginative and so I selected teaching as a career and I asked around and some of the junior high teachers said I could come in and conduct a class. One of them was a man who was an assistant coach, Orv Kane, in fact I think he lives in Beaver Dam and teaches, he may be retired by now--probably is retired by now, but he taught 02:10:00geography and something else in junior high and he used to come to our house and play pool, or billiards, in our basement, anyway I think he was just overjoyed to have an hour off so he would ask me to come back and teach another geography class. I did the few I had to to fulfill the assignment for my social studies class so I would be pleased when he would invite me back. Then the word got around, well I don't suppose its a secret in a school system that size, and when a teacher would have to leave early for an emergency and be gone for an hour or two, the office would sometimes fish me up from wherever I was and ask if I would take the class, whatever it was, English, history, whatever. I did a little of that, not an awful lot, but I was apparently on-call for the rest of 02:11:00my high school days.

MA: Do you recall what you thought about it? Were you initially frightened like a student teacher in college might be now when he or she has reached their senior year and it's finally time to step into the classroom for the first time?

KC: I don't recall being uneasy about it.

MA: Public speaking was comfortable for you even then, wasn't it?

KC: I did a lot of public speaking in school. We had a good forensics program in our school system and in fact I think I started public speaking when I was in the early grades. I would be put on programs to recite poems or whatever and then my mother had me take lessons, elocution lessons. The piano teacher who was also the music teacher in the school gave little, maybe I was her only student I 02:12:00don't know, but I would memorize poems and sometimes some prose, but by the time I was a freshman in high school at age 12 I went out for extemporaneous speaking it was called then, it has another title now, but what we had to do was be prepared on about a dozen subjects and then on the day of the contest whoever was in charge would draw a title out of the hat and you would go and prepare or recall or whatever. During that freshman year we had contests between Sparta, Viroqua and Tomah, a three way thing and then a regional in LaCrosse and I won both of those, first place, and went to the state contest in extemporaneous speaking for two years. Then I got a little weary of doing that and I was on the 02:13:00debate team and that took enough of that sort of time for me, so I just did extemporaneous reading which didn't involve that kind of intense preparation or any nervousness about what they were going to draw out of the hat, because it didn't matter, you'd have half an hour to look over the readings. I also went to the state contest in extemporaneous reading and had some interesting debate experiences so that was easy enough for me to do.

MA: Do you remember how you felt about teaching? Did you enjoy it? Did it actually confirm a career choice?

KC: Absolutely not! I mean I loved doing it because it would get me out of a class and it was fun to do and I did it seriously but I had no intention of 02:14:00becoming a teacher and every year when my dad would line us up, there were always 3 of us in undergraduate years together, he would line us up to write out the check for the tuition and room and board and would ask us what we were studying and he always put the question to me in the same way "Is this the semester that you go into the School of Education?" So I could always honestly answer "no" because I had no intention of, but I didn't see any need to debate it. When I would tell him I was majoring in political science again he'd say, "Political science, what do you do with political science?" I would hem-and-haw a little bit.

MA: Was he putting real pressure on you or was this simply his way of communicating at the time of the check? Did you feel that he would have been happier if you'd have transferred to the School of Education?

KC: I think he thought I should have an objective, a career objective.

MA: But he wouldn't have withheld the money?

KC: No that wasn't related at all.

MA: It was more rhetorical?

KC: No. I think he really thought I was preparing to teach or to do something.

MA: What did you feel you were doing?

KC: I was learning a lot of things I wanted to learn and also what I heard about the School of Education left me so icy cold and when I would see kids who were taking courses in the School of Education, I thought, "I don't want that," and then I had professors who would make fun of it. Bill Ebenstein who was one of my favorite polititcal science teachers, used to say "I wonder how Socrates could ever teach, he didn't go to the School of Education."

MA: I was the valedictorian of my class, so I spoke at the commencement 02:16:00ceremonies and I had the lead in our senior class play. I don't know if I've told you this, but early in my senior year the woman who was going to be directing the senior class play spoke to me very privately and secretly and asked if I would be able to leave my job of selling tickets at the theater long enough to rehearse for the senior class play and to be in it, because if I could then she would select a play that would have a part especially good for me. I kept her little secret and of course told her "Yes, by all means." All year long whenever that thought would occur to me I pictured myself as Katherine Hepburn 02:17:00and I thought "Oh, I just wanted a role like one of those Hepburn things." When the play finally came, I was so glad I hadn't breathed any of this to a soul because the play she had selected, and my part was of Sophie, an old maid. It was a dumb play, the kind that lots of senior classes do. It was fun and at our 50th reunion the fellow who played opposite me in the play was there and was reminiscing about it and he told me, 50 years later, that he was so concerned that he had asked me at rehearsal one time whether my parents would be at the play and I said "Of course, and so will my brothers, why?" He said "Don't you think this is a little risque," because in the play I faint at one point and he had to pick me up and tote me someplace. He thought that maybe my parents would be offended.

MA: Kay, last week we talked about your high school experience. After graduation from high school, what next?

KC: Well, of course, I worked that summer, as I have mentioned, doing my two little mundane jobs and playing golf as often as I could and then enrolled in the fall at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. That was a choice that I made without really examining very many alternatives. I just really wanted to go to Madison. The year that I was a freshman my next older brother had decided to transfer from LaCrosse where he had had his freshman year, which was then a 02:19:00state college, and to go to the university in Madison. This was 1937 and things were not flush in the Frederick household. My third brother, David, was about to enter his sophomore year in high school and my family thought about this for awhile. My brother Bob was thinking about transferring to Madison. He had had one year there but he was kind of a nomad I think, he had had a year at Carroll College and a year at LaCrosse, he hadn't flunked out, he just simply thought he would like another institution better. So there was an outside possibility that three of us would be enrolled in Madison and with the fourth coming up soon. My parents made the decision, I rather think it was my mother who made the decision, to move herself and enough furniture to Madison to establish an 02:20:00apartment. My father would stay in Sparta in the big house by himself and conduct his life as usual. I think part of that decision, although it was never explicit at all on my mother's part, was really to get out of Sparta. She had always enjoyed Madison and she had friends here and whenever we had come to Madison or she had come by herself she had always had particularly good times. So, that's what we did, rented an apartment at 440 West Dayton Street, the building is still there although neighboring buildings are not any longer there, on the third floor. They even moved my baby grand piano up -- that was some enterprise to watch while they heisted with ropes from the outside of the building. In any case, about the time we moved brother Bob, number one, decided 02:21:00not to come to Madison, so there was just Gordon and me in the university, and David went to what was then called Central High School, the MATC building, part of which has recently been torn down. It was the same building my father went to high school in. It was then called Madison High and was the only high school in town when he was in school. For one semester we lived in the apartment and we all were doing our thing in school but by the end of the semester it just wasn't working out. My father was terribly lonely and I think it was difficult for my mother. I'm sure that just climbing those stairs was more difficult, and she didn't have the access to a car, even though she wasn't driving she could be driven anyplace in Sparta. I don't know what all of the considerations were, but 02:22:00in any case she moved lock, stock and barrel back to Sparta at the end of the first semester. David was very happy to return to his old friends in high school in Sparta although he had been an awfully good sport about his move, and Gordon and I had to find a place to live.

That's one of the reasons why we each joined a fraternity, I joined the Alpha Chi Omega sorority and he the Kappa Sigma fraternity, even though we were ambivalent about that, but the dormatories were filled and we needed a place to stay and the idea of a room in a rooming house was just abhorrent, I suppose, to both of us. We had friends in those organizations.

MA: Why were you ambivalent about joining?

KC: Because the whole Greek system is a very exclusionary one and discriminatory and sometimes a little bit upstage. I found many wonderful friends in that sorority house, some of whom I'm still friendly with, one came from Washington, D.C., and another from Milwaukee for the three of us to have a little reunion here in town this summer, so we still are in touch. In any case, I lived there then for three and a half years in the sorority house. My senior year I was president of the sorority house and my junior year I'd been corresponding secretary, and in that capacity I not only had access but had to read correspondence with national officers and previous officers of the local 02:24:00chapter, and came across one letter regarding me. Apparently I was being considered the year before to be nominated for the presidency which I didn't know anything about, and some comment in the correspondence was "But we're never sure what she might drag into the house." I was very active in International Club and I chaired the University Peace Federation for four years and was vice president of the YWCA and had many friends who were not traditional Greek and WASPs and so that's what the comment was about.

MA: Do you think in your time there that you politicized your sisters in any respect?

KC: I'm sure. As a matter of fact there are a few of us who connived among ourselves very consciously. We didn't start out to think of it as politicizing, 02:25:00but the table conversation was so boring and superficial. There were two or three of us who found each other more interesting than the others, who would rush to the dining room so we could sit together. We would save seats for one another simply to have a reasonable conversation. One of them, Ruth Thompson, who is now married, and has been for years, to Boudon Curtis and the two of them have run a couple of rural newspapers down in Darlington. Her brother ran for governor of Wisconsin unsuccessfully but was a state senator for 20 or 30 years, so she came from a very politically alert family and just interested in public affairs. She had a subscription to the Capital Times and, believe it or not, it just wasn't customary for students anywhere that I know of to feel the need to 02:26:00read a daily newspaper. They would read the student newspaper, but to know what was happening in the real world was beyond them, and of course this was before the era of television. On Saturday afternoon I would often sit in the little lounge with a friend and listen to the opera on radio, but there was no television and no addition to daily news or certainly to reading newsapers and magazines. In any case, three or four of us set out to improve the table conversation. We would give it some thought before the meal as to what subject we could raise that would make an interesting kind of discussion and it wasn't long before other people would drift to our table and want to sit with us because they found the conversation more interesting. Before the end of the 02:27:00year, I remember a national officer came to visit or inspect the chapter or whatever, and that was one of her primary comments, that it was the most interesting and alert conversation, she didn't know that it had been carefully nurtured and cultivated. And then women in the sorority did meet all kinds of my friends from International Club from all over the world and instead of being horrified they gradually found this interesting.

MA: Tell me about your academic life. Did you know initially what your major would be?

KC: No, I didn't. I did something I may have done in many other contexts all my life and I think in retrospect it was very foolish. I deliberately avoided courses that had been such a snap for me in high school. I decided not to take 02:28:00speech courses or to even attempt to be on the debate team. These were things I had done and done successfully and now I want to do something different. I didn't take courses such as physics, I think I mentioned previously what fun Mary Cornell and I had had in high school using that extra period, and so I moved into areas that were foreign to me. I had a couple of friends, again in the sorority house, who were majoring in anthropology, and they kept trying to interest me, not in my freshman year but at some point, into taking anthropology because they found it so fascinating. Two of these women made a career in anthropology and have done fascinating things over the years. I enrolled in one 02:29:00anthropology course and the very first reading left me so cold that I transferred out of it right away. Again, that was a mistake. If I had it to do over again that's an area that I would really enjoy, cultural anthropology

MA: Was Margaret Mead in the news yet at that time or were you aware of her?

KC: I don't really know, I can't remember. My first memory of reading anything about Margaret Mead was actually during World War II, reading an article called "And Keep Your Powder Dry." Now Margaret Mead had her 80th or 85th birthday ten years ago; we celebrated it at the Houston conference, she was there. The whole 2,000 delegates stood up and sang Happy Birthday to Margaret Mead and it was lovely. That was not too long before she died. That means that Margaret Mead was 02:30:0030 some years older than I so she was certainly publishing by the time I was an undergraduate.

MA: I was just wondering what her influence might have been on female students in the field at that time but perhaps she wasn't well enough known at that time.

KC: Not to me and not to my circle.

MA: Now you asked about academic. Well, I chose to study a little more German; I'd had 2 years of German in high school which is the equivalent of 1 year at the University. I had a very exciting experience during my very first semester when a professor of German invited me to have a part in the Christmas play. Apparently the German Club every year did some kind of a Christmas dramatic 02:31:00performance and I was quite excited to be invited. Later on I found out that most everybody else in the performance and in the organization were graduate students and I was just a freshman. I realized that the man was type-casting; he thought that my pronunciation of German was good, which was one reason, but also the most peculiar Christmas play I've ever heard. I was die frau virgin, I was the landlady where the shepherds came and spent the night. The only other woman was the Virgin Mary, of course, and that was not I. But I was trying to keep the shepherds from getting too drunk at my tavern so they'd still be able to go on and greet the baby Jesus. It was a very peculiar play; it was lots of fun to do.

I probably had more B+s than any undergraduate who ever attended the University. 02:32:00I thought I was a, just assumed I was a good student, but as I told you earlier, I had never taken a final exam until I came to the University, so I had no idea how to prepare for a final exam and I always did my classwork and recited in class and was actually generally doing A work, got A on my papers. But when it came to my final exams, I didn't do A work, and so I would get these B+s which was a great chagrin to me. Also, I had been all through high school kind of a big frog in a little pond and I came to the University, where there were at the time 10,000 students. And you know my whole town was 3500 people, and I felt very conspicuous. I felt kind of country and overgrown and most of the gals--we 02:33:00called them gals in those days--at the sorority house were not only much better off financially, much better. And their wardrobes and their experiences, some of them had cars, made me feel, again, a little--they didn't do anything to me or say anything that suggested that I didn't fit in, but I felt very conspicuous, as though I were not properly dressed.

MA: How did your parents pay for this? There were two of you then in a fraternity and a sorority.

KC: Well, I believe that the room and board was $30 a month. That was not much more than dormitory--the cost of living in a dormitory. And that and our 02:34:00tuition, and my dad also insisted that we each have a season ticket to the athletic events and a season ticket to the theater, concerts at the Union Theater, and those things he paid for. And then, anything else we had to take out of our own earnings and our own savings. So if I ever wanted a Coke or what else--

MA: Kay, we were talking about your college experience.

KC: Yes. Well I guess I was pointing out what courses I enrolled in and what I did and why.

MA: I was wondering if you felt academically inadequate, or less adequate in such a huge institution?

KC: I encountered new ideas and I had to study for the first time, not only to 02:35:00prepare for exams which I didn't learn to do until about my junior or senior year, but had to really study. I did a lot of my reading of textbooks for example in the student union in the Paul Bunyan Room which was the only room that women were allowed to go into. We couldn't go into the Rathskeller. We could go upstairs into meeting rooms, could and did, but for refreshment.

MA: Why weren't you allowed in those other rooms?

KC: Because there was sex based discrimination in the student union. We were at least allowed in the front door. In earlier days, well before my time, there was a special back door that women had to walk into to get into the building. I do remember being irked that we couldn't go into the great big Rathskeller so that 02:36:00when I would get a refill on my coffee cup, black coffee was 3¢ a cup in those days and second cups were free, that's how I learned to drink coffee, I didn't really like it but it was the cheapest thing to buy and 1 cup and 3¢ worth would last me the whole afternoon. I did a lot of my reading down there and then I'd be ready to go to meetings; I belonged to quite a few organizations.

KC: So I don't know that I really felt inadequate, I often found a good student in the class with whom I would study, at least there were a number of classes in which I found that a good thing to do and we would just kind of gravitate to each other, people I only met in the classroom and while there were a few big 02:37:00lecture classes we always then had small discussion groups so that the classroom situation wasn't a formidable one at all, but was rather nice. I was just thinking of some of the people I studied with. I don't know if that bears remarking about.

I did have an interesting experience in a geography course, a 5 credit geography course which had a lot of tedious ....We had I think two, 2 hour called labs--there were a number of field trips that were terribly exciting in geography. We went to Devil's Lake and looked at glaciated things and some of that was quite interesting but in the laboratory itself we had to sit and draw 02:38:00maps of rainfall and of other such things, really kindergarten activity. It didn't take long before 4 or 5 of us in this geography lab decided to combine forces and each of us would draw one rainfall map and then the others would copy it quickly. We couldn't leave when we were finished, we had to sit there for two hours so then we would sit and talk. Among the people that I talked with were Roland Day who is now a Supreme Court Justice and Charlie, who is an attorney here in town, Jim Hudson who lives in the Milwaukee area who is a very progressive left wing kind of person who taught me more about politics, at least I learned more, sitting in that miserable geography lab visiting with him and it was he who persuaded me to belong to the University Peace Federation, to which I 02:39:00was promptly elected chair or president. We brought Harold Laski from England to address the university student body under the auspices of the Peace Federation. I can remember that was the first time I went to the lion's den, the president of the University, to ask permission to do this and to ask for funding from the University.

MA: And you were successful?

KC: Yes. That was the first year that Clarence Addison Dykstra was here as president of the University. We had the meeting when Harold Laski came in the Old Red Gym. It was one of the places big enough to have a meeting of that kind. I can remember my brother Gondy, aka Gordon, was in the audience and he was so--he didn't know I was going to be introducing Harold Laski, we could have 02:40:00been doing a Charlie McCarthy stunt because Harold Laski came barely to my shoulder--anyway, my brother just about died of embarrassment because there I was in the spotlight. Anytime I did anything, at least in those days, kind of public it would just embarrass him, just as it had in 3rd and 4th grade when I would raise my hand too often.

I'm sure I spent more time in extracurricular activities which in itself were wonderful education experiences for me. Just meeting, not only the kinds of people and kinds of issues--Ed Nestigen was a person who was on the staff of the YMCA at that time, he was from Sparta, and he made it his business apparently 02:41:00every year to tap 4 or 5 freshmen who looked promising in leadership and then to kind of groom us without our knowing his full agenda of course. He would have little meetings and Bob Lampman who was on our faculty and has chaired the Economics Department was one of those and I was one and a fellow named John Bossort who is now an attorney over in LaCrosse, we were three of the little handful whom our class whom Ed--I even can remember now asking him, and that was 50 years ago, how in the world he could read a newspaper as fast as he could because I had never read a daily newspaper as a regular thing, all through my 02:42:00high school years. So it was only when I came here that I began to do that, and I can remember Ed very patiently walking me through a paper and telling me how he would look at a headline and decide it was nothing he wanted to read or read the opening paragraph if he had a little interest and then read the whole thing if it was something else. That's a skill that ought to be taught. I don't know, maybe they teach in it Journalism or English, but it ought to be taught in high school.

MA: Gerda teaches it in her history class, and it's the first time I've come across it being taught.

KC: I'm sure that Ed Nestigen was another influence in my concerns.

KC: I spent some time in an open housing committee; Madison in those days was far worse than it is now. When Paul Robson came to Madison to perform in the 02:43:00Union Theater in Othello he could not stay in any hotel in Madison.

MA: Where did he stay?

KC: He stayed at the Haagen residence, Euta Haagen was in the performance with him and her parents were here, her father was on the faculty, so he had a place to stay, otherwise I suppose some black family in town would have put him up. It's hard to believe, isn't it?

MA: Did you go to the performance? Tell me about it.

KC: Indeed I did. I don't know what to tell except that it was just terrific.

MA: What was the audience's response? Were any black people able to come and could they afford the tickets, for example?

KC: I have no memory of how many black people were or were not in the audience. They certainly would have been permitted in, there were black students on the campus. I met Hilton Hanna, who has since been a labor leader with the 02:44:00International Brotherhood of Meat Cutters and whatever the total title is, he has moved back to Madison in recent years, but I can remember eyebrows being raised when he and I would take a walk across Bascom Hill, but that was all. Nobody made any slurring remarks, he was a student in Economics at the time.

MA: Was it unusual that you, as a woman, were involved in all of these things? You've mentioned a lot of men who were involved with you, but you haven't mentioned other young women.

There were other women who were active in the Peace Federation and open housing. I don't know how close I was to any of them. Usually the secretary of any of 02:45:00these organizations would be a woman and I would work with her and there were women on the newspaper staff of the Daily Cardinal who covered things and would be in touch with me a lot and with whom I had a lot of contact and relationship. By about my junior year I became quite friendly with a fellow by the name of Jerry Kaiser from New York and in fact we dated fairly steadily for 5 years here in Madison and then when I went to Washington during World War II with the War Production Board, he was also in Washington. He had some friends, also mostly from New York, his friends were in graduate school--Joe Peckman who a few years ago got an honorary degree from the university and with whom I've stayed in 02:46:00touch, and Ben Stephansky who later became a labor attache to our embassy in Mexico, and some very, very interesting people and quite intellectually active. I spent a lot of time with this crowd. It wasn't just all of those men and me, those other men had dates and were friends of mine. In a way I suppose I had a kind of compartmentalized undergraduate time of having a lot of good friends at the sorority house and some of us would rush every noon and have a short game of bridge with the woman who was housemother before we had to rush to our 1:30 class so I had very good friends there. Then another gang in the International 02:47:00Club, and then some of this left wing progressive peace and housing kinds of people. They might or might not mingle or know one another, but I didn't feel fragmented at all, it all made sense to me.

I was taking a lot of social studies or social science courses and I might just mention that the reason I chose to major in political science as an undergraduate was that in the course of the junior year students were required to name a major and have "x" number of credits and related credits, etc., and political science had the fewest required courses of any of those subject areas that I found interesting, so I thought why not, then I could take whatever 02:48:00additional things I wanted.

MA: That relates to the question I wanted to ask you next. How did you experience the classroom? Gloria Steinem in "Everyday Acts and Outrageous Rebellions" states that college women experience the least discrimination of any group of women. I wonder if that was the case in your day? Did you find that in college life it's easier to be equal than when you move into the work world, etc.?

KC: I wasn't conscious of sex based discrimination.

MA: The faculty I assume were primarily male or isn't that a correct assumption?

KC: Yes that is a correct assumption. It was particularly true for me; by that I mean that I had very few women instructors at all. In fact, I had one woman full 02:49:00professor, Helen Clark, in social work. Actually the School of Social Work had not been founded yet, she founded it or was instrumental in getting one started here. But I took social legislation, group work theory and practice, case work theory and practice because I wanted more of what she had to offer. She and I stayed in contact and were friends after I moved away from Madison. She sat on my orals committee for my masters degree and for my Ph.D. and in some ways was kind of a surrogate resident mother for me. I'm sure if at the time I had said that to her she wouldn't have liked it probably very much. She was 25 or so years older than I am. When we moved back to Madison 27 years ago I got in touch with her and she had us over to her house for parties, particularly when her brothers would be in town. Then she moved out to Attic Angels and had a little 02:50:00apartment, that's a residence for elderly people, a very nice one, and then as she got older and couldn't maintain the apartment she moved into their nursing home facility. She died a little over a year ago and I was asked and did speak at her memorial service, which was very nice. In fact in 1980, when I was 60, the Women's Studies program on the campus had a birthday party for me at the Wisconsin Center and Helen Clark came in a wheelchair, the young man who was her driver and attendant brought her, and that was so wonderful for me to have her 02:51:00there and be able to introduce her as the one female professor I had in all my years as an undergraduate and graduate. There were other women professors here, Gladys Borchers in the Speech Department, Helen C. White, for whom the building is named, in the English Department who was an absolutely marvelous, gorgeous woman with the most beautiful posture and she always wore lavendar or purple, every item of clothing I think she had and she just was such a figure as well as a brain of course, and she was once I think maybe both of them in turn were advisors to Mortarboard which was a senior womens honorary society to which I belonged and of which I was president. So I did have opportunities to meet 02:52:00these--another woman in the English Department--so there were maybe half a dozen women professors around, but you could count them on your hand.

MA: Do you think that you consciously saw them as role models?

KC: No I don't think so. I know that I enjoyed being with them and I admired them. The Dean of Women at the time, Louise Troxel, was also somebody that I liked spending time with. I guess I never thought about it, it wasn't part of one's vocabulary and maybe of ones--I can't think of ever saying to myself "Gee I want to grow up to be just like that person."

MA: Were they married women? I ask the question because I'm wondering if a 02:53:00married woman could actually balance a profession with marriage.

KC: Not any of those people were married. Helen Clark did marry when she was in her 40's a man who was widowed and had 1 daughter who was either finishing high school or starting university, but that marriage only lasted a couple of years and then they were divorced. The other women I named were not married at all. Louise Troxel did marry an M.D. who was widowed and she was more than in her 40's, maybe in her 50's, and that marriage didn't last--Louise Troxel Greeley. When Dr. Greeley married for the 3rd or 4th time I don't know which it was, 4th I guess, his first wife died then he married her sister, I don't know if she 02:54:00died or they were divorced, then he married Louise Troxel and then they were divorced then he married a younger woman who had been dating his son--I know all this because my friend Jerry Kaiser his brother Phil is married to Hannah Greeley and so I paid special attention to a lot of this stuff. I know for a long time when Manchesters would send out their monthly bill to Mrs. Greeley they would get each other's bills mixed up.

MA: Did his 4th marriage last?

KC: Yes.

MA: When you were in the classroom with male professors it sounds as though you felt comfortable in discussion. Did you in any way feel inferior? You must have been in the minority in the numbers in the classroom as a woman student, or were you?

KC: There again I don't even remember counting noses or wondering what the ratio was.

MA: Which means it probably wasn't affecting you one way or the other, then?

MA: During my first year in graduate school which was the year of Pearl Harbor, by then the draft was on and men were beginning to vanish from the scene or to appear in uniform, then the ratio began to be upset with more females then males.

KC: The reason I ask you about your discussions, is in graduate school today for example if there is a seminar with 50% men and 50% women there is a tendency for men to dominate the conversation unless the women are quite assertive and able to take control.

That's true everywhere. It's true at the lunch table where our faculty eat together. We have enough sensitized men now after 3 or 4 years that they will 02:56:00call each other's attention to the fact that they are interrupting and that they are hogging the conversation so I think we're making a little progress but it's very slow.

MA: I'm wondering if you experienced that or if you recall experiencing that as a student?

KC: I don't recall being uncomfortable about it. Now it's very possible that I just accepted the fact that men talk more than women. On the other hand, I never felt silenced or that I ought not to open my mouth, at least not because I was female. There were times when I didn't know what was going on and then I knew enough not to open my mouth.

MA: Which is actually a sign of intelligence.

MA: Let's continue this. You made a decision to major in Political Science ....

KC: It just gave me more opportunity to take other things. For example what I just mentioned with Helen Clark, the group work theory and practice.

MA: How long after that time was the School of Social Work started here?

KC: Not too long. I can't remember the actual date but not too long after that.When I came back here, we moved back here in 1960, in the very early 60's when I was working in Continuing Education for women I called together a little meeting with Dorothy Witte Austin who is a journalist from Milwaukee who has worked for both of the Milwaukee newspapers and who I often refer to as the 02:58:00"Boswell of the Wisconsin women's movement." She covered everything and anything and kept us on our toes by asking me in advance "what's going to be newsworthy at your meeting, because if nothing is I'm not going to bother to come". So then I'd have to think we'd better do something that's newsworthy. Anyway, I gathered together a few people including Helen Clark and Ersel LeMasters who was then head of the School of Social Work and Dorothy Austin--I can't remember who else was there, some other women on the faculty--to talk about the university's discrimination against women faculty and just to ask what their experiences were. Both LeMasters and Helen Clark confirmed that the day Helen Clark bought a house in Madison, which would have been in the 1940's probably, she did not get another raise. Her salary was frozen at $8,000 because the head of the Sociology 02:59:00Department at the time, McCormick or E. A. Ross I've forgotten who, said "she's not going to leave even if she gets a better offer because she's got a house here now, we don't have to pay her any more". That was the way she was treated. Finally LeMasters managed, many, many years later, to get her salary up a bit but it never amounted to what it should have.

MA: Was that generally the rule, that the women faculty made less money than the male faculty?

KC: Oh sure. In fact that was going on in the 1960's when I came here and was doing the continuing education. That was one of the things we discovered and when the Faculty Women's Association got organized, which I helped to organize, first on the Madison campus and then the following year system-wide that was one 03:00:00of the first things that we were concerned with. The fact that so many departments had no women at all and when they did have they had them in as lecturers or as non-tenured people, and that the salaries at any level were that there was a great growth disparity; that battle isn't over yet.

MA: I'd like to hear more about that when we get to that time period.

MA: So you took social work classes, political science classes, continued with German it sounds like.

KC: Just for two years. Also a lot of economics, sociology, I don't kmow what else--English, loved English. Again, Warner Taylor was my--I had to take 03:01:00freshman English, in those days people took a placement test - incoming freshman took a placement test--and were exempt from freshman English, didn't get 3 credits for it just moved right into I just assumed that I would be exempt from freshman English and I was not. It turned out that even though we thought we had a very good high school in Sparta that we were not reading a lot of the more contemporary authors that I learned over the first year or two in just visiting with my friends who had read this, that and the other that I had never even heard of, so I realized that at least in that department my senior year in high school that we had not had the same kind of preparation that a lot of other students had. I don't regret in the least having had that experience of having 03:02:00had Warner Taylor as my English teacher, a full professor and a marvelous, marvelous person. I thoroughly enjoyed all of the things we read and learned how to kind of analyze. I think I learned as much about how to think about things in a somewhat analytic way from my English classes as I learned anywhere and it all was in a very pleasant and painless way.

MA: Do you recall favorite authors from that period, anything that particularly stand out as having been extraordinarily meaningful to you?

KC: No. I remember writing a term paper on Robbie Burns that year which got a 03:03:00lot of wonderful comments and a nice grade. Do you know that in my office I have that little poster that somebody gave me "Of course God made man before he made women, you always make a rough draft before you have a finished product." I've asked people if they know the Robbie Burns poem and so many do not. I think feminists ought to put that on a poster too and I'd be glad to recite all 4 lines to you.

MA: Please do. I don't know it.

KC: Auld nature sighs, the lovely dear, Her nobelist work she classes, oh, Her prentice hand she tried on man And then she made the lasses, oh!

KC: Did you, and this is probably hard to remember, I am wondering how many female authors were included in a literature class in that period.

Again I have no idea, I didn't pay any attention. This morning I got a brochure 03:04:00in the office of some international thing related to Nicaragua and the first thing I noticed was 5 male speakers, not a single female speaker. That now of course is the first thing I notice, before I even notice what the subject is. But I wasn't conscious of that at the time. I'm sure it wasn't pointed out either. Now we're reading this, or this woman author has a different view.

MA: While you were an undergraduate did you expect that you would go on for a masters and a Ph.D.? Was that a given for you?

KC: Not really, even though my dad used to say that he would see us all through 03:05:00a masters and after that we were on our own. I never have in my life planned ahead. You know that's very pro forma these days with counselors and advisors to women, "Where do you want to be 10 years from now?"

We were talking about planning ahead and did I plan ahead for my masters and Ph.D. I think not. It must have been sometime during my senior year that I made a decision to go on the following year for at least one year of graduate work.

MA: What prompted that?

KC: I don't know. I don't remember at least. I do know that I applied for and 03:06:00received a scholarship, a cash award from the Political Science Department and that I was invited, I guess I didn't know about housefellow jobs in the dormitories but the Dean of Womens Office asked me if I would like to apply, which I did, and I became what was called a housefellow in Elizabeth Waters dormitory. It was fairly new, I think it was about its second year I believe. I was one of five people in that dorm and each of us had one unit with about 100 undergraduate girls whom we didn't supervise but were just there to help them organize stuff or to be there when they had a problem and wanted to talk about it. I had free room and board at Elizabeth Waters, marvelous food and a private room with a telephone and a view of the lake. It was just absolutely gorgeous 03:07:00and a $400 cash award from the department. At the end of that year I had $200 left from that $400 and that's what I lived on. I still like to remember that there was a beauty shop in the dormitory and every Monday they had a special: for $1 you could get a shampoo and set and a choice of manicure or eyebrow arch so every Monday I would have a $1 manicure, shampoo and set.

MA: You didn't have an eyebrow arch?

KC: No. I didn't want anybody plucking at my hairs.

MA: How did you like working with the young women? Were there any notable experiences there?

KC: I'm not sure I was the world's greatest dorm fellow. I was always available if people came in with a problem or just wanted to gab, that was fine with me. I 03:08:00very soon and in short order decided I wasn't going to be available 24 hours of the day for just anyone to come in and gab, I was after all enrolled fulltime in graduate school including a course in statistics which I regarded as one of the worst wastes of time because it took a lot of my time. I would figure out a problem and think I had it perfect and then realize I'd gone off on the wrong track and have to do it over again and have never used the mathematics that is what took all of my time. I invested more time in that course than in all the substantive courses that I took put together. To this day I wonder why, it was one thing to learn about averages and the meaning of statistics when you read them and it's another to work out those silly problems. I decided to post office 03:09:00hours for when I was a housefellow. Nobody else did that but nobody told me I couldn't do it. I thought it was fairer to the students to know when they could expect to find me there rather than to have them running up to my floor and finding I wasn't there, so that's what I did. I never snooped around, in those days people were supposed to behave in a more decorous fashion.

MA: What were the rules for the dormitory? Could boys visit someone's room for example?

KC: Oh my no. There were parlors or lounges where they could visit at certain hours, only certain hours. Of course women students had hours in those days, 03:10:0010:30 on weeknights and 12:30 on weekends. You had to be in and were locked in. Boys had no hours on the theory that once the girls were in, the boys would go home. That's the way it was explained.

There was a separate women's student self government, in those days. Women were also a part of the regular student government but to make some of our own rules that governed females. I was never an active participant or officer in WSGA (Women's Self Governing Association) but one of my very best friends was president. In fact, a couple of them were over the years, trying not only to monitor and encourage adult behavior, mature behavior at least, but also to get 03:11:00some rules modified.

MA: To change some of the more repressive rules?

KC: Right. And also to be sure that the women students who lived off campus or in rooming houses had proper accommodations and had some voice in student government and just because you might be isolated, one or two or three in a house someplace shouldn't exclude them from things. There were a lot of good things that were going on. It was after my time here that the rules were changed so that women could come and go.

MA: If a young woman were to have gotten pregnant, would she have been able to stay in a dorm and stay in college if she wasn't married, or even if she was 03:12:00married, was that something that would have been acceptable?

I knew several married women students who were pregnant and there was no problem with that, but I never knew a pregnant unmarried person who stayed on the campus to the point that anyone knew she was pregnant. Now I don't know what was happening with abortions.

I do know that one of the first things the housefellows had was a meeting with a woman psychiatrist from the Medical School, Nettie Washburn, and a great gal she was. She tried to give us some insights into what kinds of behavior on the part of students might suggest that they ought to see an expert or a physician or 03:13:00whatever. She had some very enlightened and progressive views about sexuality.

MA: Did she talk about birth control or anything like that?

KC: She did to us and then we were supposed to be able to pass some of this along. I don't ever remember a student mentioning anything to me about birth control.

MA: Or abortion?

KC: No. I do remember when I was in the sorority house of girls being frantic thinking they might be pregnant but I never was privy to any information from anybody about that.

MA: Did you know or did you ever hear gossip about abortionists and where they might be found or wasn't that information that went through your grapevine?

KC: No.

MA: What about violence against women at night on the campus, for example. Were 03:14:00women afraid of assault as they are today?

KC: No. We walked anywhere but of course we had to be in at 10:30 or 12:30. But even people in town who were not students who worked at other jobs didn't seem to be worried.

MA: Busses cost 5¢ in those days. There were not a lot of bus lines but it was adequate to the size of the place and the size of the population.

KC: How about bicycles, had they emerged yet?

MA: No. Only a few queer ducks rode bicycles in those days. That was something for kids or something you did for recreation but not a means of transportation.

MA: Kay, we were talking about your time in graduate school. Let's back up to 03:15:00summer before graduate school. I would like to, because that summer I had an experience which was one of a kind for me. I was a camp counselor at a Girl Scout camp in Bear Mountain Park, New York, which is north of New York City, called camp Quidnunc and there are all kinds of camps here in Wisconsin of course but one of my good friends at the university had been there one year as a counselor and was asked were there some people on our campus who might spend a summer so she got in touch with several of us and we decided to do that. It didn't really pay much in fact, well Girl Scout counseling never does, I doubt that even my train fare was covered and I was there for 12 or 13 weeks, at least 03:16:00it was the entire summer. It was a beautiful, beautiful place and I met a lot of wonderful people. Just by coincidence, in part by coincidence, when we lived on Staten Island and my daughter Sara was a Girl Scout she went to camp Quidnunc and I thought it would be fun for her to go. Actually she was so homesick the whole 2 weeks that she almost died, but in any case she had that experience. That was the summer of 1941 and I remember being rather horrified as I'd go through cities with what now one would think of as the "winds of war" with all of these huge billboards urging people, men particularly, to join the services and of course that was just before Pearl Harbor and the war in Europe had been 03:17:00going on for some time but it came home to me when I saw those, in a way that it hadn't before, we had still been very active on this campus in trying to forestall, rightly or wrongly, U.S. participation in the whole thing.

MA: What had you done on the campus? I had chaired the University Peace Federation and we kept bringing speakers here and even though I no longer had a ....I didn't think of myself as an isolationist, but just ways to prevent ....of course we knew we didn't know everything about Hitler but we knew things were pretty bad, and it was worse as each year went by, and the Nazi's took over more and more of Europe. We were more persuaded that our options were closing.

Let me get back to camp Quidnunc. One of the things I remember very well about that summer was that I was transferred after a couple of weeks into the Brownie unit. They had had, those are for the very youngest kids, they had had a counselor who was a kindergarten teacher or something and no fun at all for the campers and so whoever was in charge thought that maybe I would be more fun for the campers. I can remember first walking into this Brownie unit. I was wearing shorts, which I think possibly makes me look even more long legged than I do otherwise, and when I walked into this group of maybe 30 kids they all backed 03:19:00away and kind of looked and nobody spoke to me and I wasn't going to rush them of course, and finally a couple of them started whispering "you ask her" no "you ask her". Finally one of the braver ones stepped forth and said "We want to know, are you really a giant?" So I acknowledged that I was and we had lots of good times. In a day or two about six or eight of them, they must have planned it in advance, tackled me and I felt just like Gulliver and the Lilliputians because they all piled on and I was rather helpless. But I did have a good time that summer. When we had time off I went in to New York City which was a reasonable bus ride away. I had a boyfriend in fact for a total of five years I 03:20:00guess, my junior and senior years and then he wasn't around during all of my graduate year but came back to Wisconsin from New York City where he lived. He came to vist me at camp a time or two and then I would go down to New York and visit with some of his family. When I went to Washington in 1942 he also went to Washington and got a job in one of the war offices so that we saw each other there for two more years.

I had been a Girl Scout when I was a kid and had gone to Scout camp, always loved it, and did as much canoeing, hiking and swimming as possible. I had gone to other kinds of camps, or had done camping I guess is a better way to say it. 03:21:00A group of my best girlfriends in Sparta, when we were in high school, used to rent a cottage at Spring Bank where there was a little spring fed lake and a wooden hanging bridge and a cave and it was fun. We would rent a cottage for a week, ten or twelve of us, no chaperone although there were families living in nearby cottages so we really were probably under surveilance at all times but we had the feeling of being quite on our own. I used to be asked, I think I was probably the youngest member of this group (we probably started this when I was twelve or thirteen and then each summer through my high school years at least) 03:22:00they would ask me to plan the menus for a week for all of us and work out a shopping list of how many cans and how many pounds etc. of this and that we needed. I didn't do it totally alone, I would do it in consultation with others, but I would certainly be the one to estimate what the cost to each one would be. I had apparently done enough shopping with my mother at grocery stores and paid enough attention to what things cost so that I would almost come out on the nose! It was always my assignment, at least I always was the one who did it. When we were staying there I frequently would be the first one up in the morning and would, some of the gals smoked and some of them occasionally had a boyfriend in who would bring a beer or something. There wasn't a lot of late night carousing but enough to titilate a little bit. I would often be the first one up 03:23:00in the morning and tidy up the dining area and wash cups and glasses and things so they would be ready and sweep the floor which it seemed to me it always needed. Years and years later when I was telling this to someone in the presence of my brother Gondy he looked at me and said "Why do you think they invited you to go along?" So that gave me pause years later, I hadn't realized that. I have wonderful snapshots of myself floating in an inner tube; I could swim and was a good swimmer, but that was my favorite thing to do, just sit in an inner tube and read or lie in the sun. That is still my favorite thing to do. I have snapshots from this summer up at Rhinelander, at our cottage, in an inner tube. I still love to do it!

Was it very common for young women to participate in athletics at that time? I think it must have been because all of my friends did summertime, golf, tennis, swimming and in the winter we would to tobogganing and sometimes skiing although skiing was not the activity that it is now. We only did things that were inexpensive. The week at Spring Bank, probably $5 apiece is about what we pitched in to have all of our meals; I don't know if we even paid rent at the cottage. I think someone we knew must have let us use their cottage for a week. So skiing was without--we just wore our regular boots and just had a strap across the ski.

MA: Did you have cross country skiing at that time in Wisconsin?

KC: There may have been, but I didn't ever do it. We would find a golf course with a hill or other things like sledding and tobogganning. We did go on sleigh rides. We'd rent, a church group or sometimes even just a private thing, and we'd call up someone we knew with a sleigh and a team and that was always fun.

MA: Was that a form of dating also, using these group recreational activities?

KC: Yes. We had some Friday night parties all through my high school years with boys and girls. A few of the people really came as dates but most of us didn't, but usually we had pretty even numbers of males and females. We took turns hosting these events. My brother just older than I and I were always in this 03:26:00group and half a dozen of his good buddies and half a dozen on mine. I know that when the parties were at our house we usually played games, some that my mother remembered from her youth, spin the bottle, sly winkem or we would play murder. Anyway, it was games and eating and lots of laughs. When some of the other people hosted they sometimes had dancing, dancing was not prohibitied at our house but neither my brother nor I were very good dancers so it wasn't an activity that we tended to sponsor. That was something to do in a small town, 03:27:00especially in the winter; we tended to do this during the school year and it was something to look forward to that was kind of fun too. The clientele may have changed a little bit over the years but it was pretty much a standard group. Another major social event in Sparta in those days was the high school basketball tournament. Every March, and because the gym in the Sparta high school was the best one among the schools that participated in this, we had the tournament in Sparta. Again, this gang of girls, mostly the ones who went to Spring Bank but with some additions and subtractions, would have lunch and 03:28:00dinner at various peoples homes....available for me to host and I was so disappointed and my mother said "Well how about Saturday breakfast?" which wouldn't have occurred to me or to anybody else, so we had Saturday breakfast. After that, every year the other girls counted on the fact that we would have a Saturday breakfast. There was no Saturday morning game that I recall so we went right from breakfast to the lunch party.

MA: This was a boy's tournament, you played basketball but it wasn't in a league in the same way?

KC: That's right, only boys were playing the game. I suppose the other unique social event, and this I suppose I did more of after I was out of high school, but when I was home for the summer, Camp McCoy, which I think I may have 03:29:00mentioned already, is near Sparta and the ROTC students from Illinois, Michigan and I don't know where else would spend several weeks at Camp McCoy every summer and sometimes CMTC (I can't remember what that stands for anymore but they were not university based activities) there would be dances out at the camp, highly chaperoned. The chaperones would take us out and then bring us back home. At least once and sometimes twice during the summer there would be a moonlight ride on the Mississippi River, which is just 30 miles from Sparta, in an old paddle boat where there would be a band on board and that was really kind of exciting. 03:30:00The boat would go up the river not too far but the whole thing would last three or four hours I guess and that was kind of fun. Those were the excitements in Sparta, all kinds of things you make for yourself. So we did have a social life that extended beyond playing softball in our back yard and going ice skating.

MA: An active social life actually, and you were always very, very involved in terms of hosting. When you look back on it did everyone kind of host equally or did you, I sense you being in a leadership role in terms of your home because of your family and your home?

KC: I don't know how much of a leadership role I would indicate but I think we always did probably more than .... I had several friends who were always 03:31:00included who never were permitted by their parents or the size of their house or their economic means or whatever, who never hosted. I had others for whom it would be a state occassion when they did and so I guess, in fact in my head I'm going through a number of these friends and I'm sure we had more events at our house. I always enjoyed them more at my own house to begin with.

MA: Because you liked the way they were set up?

KC: I guess so, and what we had to eat. My mother and dad always had fun at our events. Instead of ever saying they were too busy or it was a nuisance they would like to participate. When my brother Bob, who was six years older than I 03:32:00am, was in school at LaCrosse he often would bring a few of his LaCrosse University buddies home for a weekend and we would read and do dramatic performances. We'd use the stair landing as a balcony for certain balcony scenes. My mother used to remember that some of these things where the dead bodies would be strewn on our livingroom floor, but my parents always, either as audience or sometimes as participants, we could .... my mother would play these games with us, not just when we were small children but high school and early college. Everyone liked to have my dad come in because he had such a great sense of humor and also was a wonderful raconteur and if they could get him to tell 03:33:00funeral stories or other things then my friends always enjoyed that.

MA: Sounds very lively.

KC: Anyway, those were some of the social event things that I remembered I hadn't talked about.

MA: It sounds like they were a good training ground for what you were doing at the Girl Scout camp. Did that kind of social life and activity oriented life prepare you well for what you were doing there?

KC: I suppose, and the outdoors, that camp was very much semi-primitive.

MA: What were your tasks? Did you teach swimming or did you have certain groups that you did things with?

KC: Yes, we were with a unit, two or three counselors with an age group. We did 03:34:00almost everything; I did not do waterfront at camp Quidnunc nor at any other camp now that I think of it. The first year that my husband and I taught at Olivet College, Sara was a year and a half when we went there, that, I already mentioned. I think that the College paid us a salary and a half for two fulltime people, and that I developed four different courses each semesters that I was there because I had students who thought they were majoring in sociology and who until I got there would have the choice of two courses I guess in the whole curriculum. In any case, the school ran out of Money by about March I guess any nobody in town seemed to worry about it. They knew that eventually, maybe the 03:35:00next fall, they would have collected enough from the Congregational Church to pay back salary. We had no cushion at all and luckily the landlord didn't boot us out, he was accustomed to this little delay and the grocery store let us charge. Hank quickly took a night job down at Battlecreek making Kellogs Rice Krispies or something to bring in a little bit of money. When the end of the year came we didn't know what we were going to do for the summer when the Phy. Ed. teacher at Olivet college informed us that she was the director of a Girl Scout camp, Camp Long Lake I think, but I'm not sure, so she hired all three of us. Hank as handyman and Sara as mascot and me in handicraft. Marian Howgate was 03:36:00the name of this Phy. Ed. teacher; I can remember her name because she was the world's worst bridge player that either of us had.

MA: Kay continue with the story about the bridge game.

KC: All I was going to say was that if anybody opens with no honor count and long suit we refer to it as a Marian Howgate special. She was just a terrible bridge player but she was a great camp director and a good faculty person. Anyway, I said "handicraft" that's absolutely the last thing in the world

MA: You haven't mentioned that in your past.

KC: No, and for good reason. I could have handled waterfront because I'd had senior lifesaving and canoing and whatever would be required there. I could have 03:37:00done dramatics and music without any credentials, but with a lot of interest and enthusiasm and nature; I had done some nature things with Girl Scout groups elsewhere. But oh no, where they needed someone was in handicraft. I can remember telling her that I am all thumbs and that I have no talents in any of the kinds of things that I know Girl Scouts do and she said "That's perfectly all right. It's one of the philosophies of Girl Scouting that the leader should not be too far ahead of the troop." I thought, this one won't be!

We had one exciting event that is just now entering my mind, a prowler in the camp one night. Hank and Sara and I had some kind of special accommodations. We were allowed to spend our overnights in the infirmary, which was available in 03:38:00case any of the campers got sick. We very rarely had to use it as an infirmary but it gave us some privacy and the opportunity to be together. Sara had a marvelous time because all the kids liked having this little two year old around. Anyway, one night Marian Howgate came over and routed out Hank to say that there was one or two male prowlers stalking around in the camp. Hank went out with her and I stayed with Sara, who was asleep, but after I had been there for about a half an hour I got a little bit nervous and so I decided to go out and find them and see what was happening. I've always, again for good reason, 03:39:00regarded myself as a physical coward, I just don't want physical danger. I don't do anything that is deliberately dangerous and in fact I suppose I'm not even adventurous because I avoid it. In any case, here I was out by myself in the middle of the night and suddenly came across Hank chasing this prowler. They were kind of going around a bend of some type so I thought "A ha, I'll head him off", so I came in the other direction and he and I bumped point blank. He gave me a shove and pushed me down but that also slowed him down enough so that Hank was able to catch him. Hank, I think got a little extra adrenalyn because he saw me get knocked down. Between us we corralled this guy and took him down to the dining hall and called the sheriff. Actually it was more of a prank than a "bad 03:40:00guy". Still, who knew what kind of....and the fact that he wouldn't stop when he was asked to stop to identify himself, and it turned out that he was the son of a woman who was a big sponsor of Girl Scout stuff in that community so the sheriff didn't want to do anything about it and the camp was unwilling to press charges very far. That was one of the interesting kinds of things. Some of the girls had been frightened in the night because they could hear this guy, in fact there were two of them I guess originally, but one got away.

MA: Did this change your perception of yourself as a somewhat timid person in those kinds of situations? I guess I realized that when I have to do something I 03:41:00will, but I still don't like to.

MA: When you were talking about the camp we hopped over to World War II for a second. Do you want to take a diversion in that direction or save it for a bit?

KC: During that first year in graduate school, which started in the fall of 1941, I was at Elizabeth Waters at the time of Pearl Harbor, and I think it was 03:42:00during the second semester of that year, so that it was after Pearl Harbor, but not only were people being drafted, the draft had begun prior to that of course, but people were signing up and any who were not yet drafted knew that they soon would be. I think that at the beginning of the second semester I had another note from the same John Gaus who, years later, was saying, and I wasn't the only one to receive this message, saying no matter what course you have signed up for at this particular hour drop it and come and take this course with Professor Lancelot Houdman from London, who had just arrived on the scene in Madison. It 03:43:00seems that Lancelot Houdman and his daughter, whose name I can't remember right now, had gone from London I think to Oslow for a weekend back in, would that have been 1939, in any case to give a lecture or two. They had just weekend luggage and were going to go right back home and that was the time that the Nazi's occupied Norway, came in in a blitz without any forewarning, and old Houdman had to get out. He got to the United Sates by having crossed Europe and Asia and finally, because there was just no way and it wasn't safe to get back across the English Cannel, I don't know how he stayed alive financially, whether he was paid for giving lectures whatever, but in any case he finally arrived in 03:44:00San Francisco and then was trying to find a way to earn his keep and someone at Wisconsin found out that he was there and imported him here. His daughter was housed at Elizabeth Waters and Houdman was given a room at the Union, there were a few hotel rooms at the Memorial Union. It really was exciting to sit in his course. He taught sort of the History of Science, but it was under the auspices of the Political Sciences Department. He had published two books that the bookstore managed to get copies of, Mathematics for the Millions and Science for the Citizen. He had this wonderful way in both his lectures and in his writing to integrate history and historic developments and political developments with 03:45:00the scientific advances of the time. I don't even know what his course was called, but I do know that Elizabeth Brandice Rauschenbush who died a year or two ago was a professor in our Economics Department, the only woman in the department for a hundred years, she sat in on the class and was there in the front row, so a number of faculty people and towns people also came for this opportunity to hear this very unusual person. I think he was perhaps a little bored giving the course, I don't know that he was, but I think he gave every paper that was turned in a "B" and I don't know that he even bothered to read them. Nevertheless, his lectures were absolutely fascinating. It was almost as much fun for me to watch Elizabeth Brandice because she would lean forward and 03:46:00be so excited about things. That was another of the highlights.

MA: What did you take away from that? Was it intellectually significant, the blending of the fields in the way that you just described?

KC: I would think it must have been, but I was never all that introspective or self conscious about "now what effect is this having on me." In fact I probably still don't.

MA: And so you wrote papers for him because you were in the class. Did you always receive "Bs" also?

KC: I think so. Also, he wasn't accustomed to the American exam business. I 03:47:00don't know that we wrote papers but we did write exams, six week, mid semester, final. I think that in the British universities they had none of that nonsense. They expected students to read and absorb.

MA: And it wasn't necessary to grade them because they were all so motivated.

KC: Yes. Anyway, that was another of the highlights.

KC: It was not long then that the university males began to drain away and there were military, I think that they were Waves, women in the Navy as well as Navy men who were stationed .... then sometime during that same year on the campus and were taking work. Somebody got the brilliant idea it would advance the war 03:48:00effort if classes started at 7:00 in the morning instead of at 8:00 in the morning. Whoever had that bright idea probably is now in Congress having other bright ideas! So we would get up, pitch dark, and it was dark enough in Wisconsin at 8:00 in the morning, but to be in the classroom by 7:00. I never could figure out how that scared Adolph Hitler, but we did it.

MA: I was asking you about Jeannette Rankin's vote against our entry into World 03:49:00War II. Did you hear anything about this among your friends?

KC: No, I don't recall any conversation, though I'm sure there was note of it in the newspapers but I don't remember that it was a cause for ....

MA: What was your response to the War? Do you remember how you felt when Pearl Harbor was bombed? You mentioned that you were certain women would be drafted, that was one thing that you thought would happen which of course didn't happen.

KC: I'm sure I shared all the horror that .... and of course the inevitablity, just as in a Greek tragedy, had been apparent and I kept wishing it away up 03:50:00until the moment of Pearl Harbor. Of course I knew I had three brothers who would be doing what they did and all sorts of other people and of course we were just in the right generation. That was true of everybody we knew, the whole dormitory of course was filled with people who had friends, relatives, etc. There was a sense of getting with it then too .... I think that there was still a lot of the detail of the atrocities of the Nazis, were either not reported or not believed and people thought that this was the same kind of propaganda that accompanies war. It took really a long time, there was almost an anger with the 03:51:00Nazis and their arrogance and their taking over rather than, at least in my case, I had not ingested the numbers, the horrors of the concentration camps and the deaths. That took time, a lot of time.

MA: You were not receiving the information either in the newspapers. Is that correct?

KC: Yes, that's right. I did go to a couple of performances, one possibly in New York that previous summer, and one in Washington which were sponsored by some of the Jewish organizations to try to tell the people what actually was happening. I can remember being totally horrified when the Japanese were interned on the 03:52:00west coast. Then to win the war was the important thing and to do whatever one could do. I never felt any kind of deprivation because of ration cards. I would be very annoyed when I would be home in Sparta and see some of the friends of my parents, my parents were very circumspect also about ration cards, and how did it possibly hurt anybody to go without a little bit of butter or a little bit of meat and yet they had friends who would cheat or hord. This was very hard to take, to see some people doing that when others were contributing so much.

I believe I started to say that I had taken a Federal Civil Service exam, I guess it was for the professional service. These were things that were available and were given on college campuses all over the country. Then I got a telegram, as did thousands of other people I'm sure, saying "come to Washington and start your work" so I did just that.

MA: Did you have your masters degree at that time?

KC: Yes, I already had my master's degree. My brother Gondy and I both got them simultaneously at a June graduation ceremony. He also took a civil service exam and in fact I think he got a higher grade on his than I did on mine.

MA: That must have pleased him.

KC: Yes, it did and it didn't displease me. He never really accepted the fact that he had as much ability as he did have, so it was good. However, he went 03:54:00into the military instead of a job in Washington.

MA: Did he have the option for the job in Washington?

KC: No, I think he was drafted. He took the exam and got his grade and when was drafted. So I went to Washington. I got in touch first with a friend of mine who had preceded me there by a year, Lois Warfield, a person I still see. I made reference to her earlier, she was one of the people who had been president of Women's Self Government Association. Her grandmother was Jesse Jack Hooper who in that picture is the calendar person over on the right. She was Carrie Chapman Catt's right hand. She ran against Bob LaFollette for the U.S. Senate back in the 1920's. In any case, Lois and Lois' mother were always good friends mine. I 03:55:00moved in with her and I made a third female in this one room apartment, not one bedroom but one room apartment. In fact, on weekends my brother and sometimes a friends would come and somehow we managed to make full use of the floor space. I didn't intend to stay permanently with Lois and she didn't intend for me, nor did I do so. Another friend, Carla War, who was a UW graduate, and I did room together for most of the two years that I was there. We moved about every other month because the only housing we could ever find were sublets. Somebody would be leaving for a limited time and wanted somebody there who would take care of it and pay the rent but then get out when they returned.

MA: How difficult.

KC: It was difficult but I got to know a lot of Washington because we lived in so many parts. There still were trollies in Washington at that time, trollies and busses.

MA: Were you living in the heart of Washington, D.C., and not out in Maryland like everyone lives today?

KC: Right in town. Anyway, the job I thought I went to get wasn't a job at all, it was a fishing license. This was happening to hundreds of college graduates who got their telegrams saying "come to Washington."

MA: In reality you didn't have a job?

KC: No; I had to go from agency to another. I went to this one office because this friend said another Wisconsin graduate is in this office. Dave Levine 03:57:00interviewed me and it sounded kind of interesting and he said he'd let me know. It all seemed kind of vague so I went to other offices and asked around and as I was relaying this conversation to a friend they said "it sounds to me like Dave Levine was offering you a job" and I said "it didn't seem that way to me" so I finally got up my nerve to call him back "Yes, when are you going to report to work" said he.

MA: You didn't know you'd been hired?

KC: No, I didn't, but I was, and I stayed in that same office even though the office was moved to a couple of different buildings a couple of times. First we were in a temporary building, temporary from World War I, a little wooden kind of shack and then finally into a railroad retirement building which was air conditioned. Not all of Washington buildings were air conditioned in those days.

MA: And it was summer wasn't it?

KC: Yes. It was summer when we started at least.

MA: What did you do specifically in your job?

KC: It was a very interesting job, the Office of Policies and Procedures for the War Production Board. It was the function of that particular office to design procedures and processes for controlling materials that were used in war production that were in short supply, and having to know enough about the industry to know at what stage do you control the raw material, do you control the parts at this stage of production or something else and how to do it with the least red tape and the least burden on the industry, so they don't have to send in a report every day, and do we allocate a certain amount to each 03:59:00manufacturer and then they don't have to apply for specific applications for each thing. It meant finding out and, of course, the War Production Board as a great many of the war agencies, were filled with what were called "dollar a year men" and I imagine they were all men too; there might have been a female among them, but these were people on loan to the government from their industry and the government paid them $1 a year and the rest of their salary was picked up by the industry, and Washington was filled with just such people. Most of the industry or commodity divisions in the War Production Board were staffed with these people with expertise in what it was all about. We had to do the writing of these procedures and then making sure the industry followed these procedures. 04:00:00Had to be instructed by these people. I was hired experimentally as a young and totally inexperienced worker and another woman was hired, she had preceded me in the office, an older woman, she was about 35 I think and had years of government experience, but hadn't been in that particular, well no one had been in that line of work because it was a new line of work. Anyway, they wanted to see how well women would be received by these industry types who assumed that any female was a secretary and was there to take dictation and not to be telling them what to do etc. The two of us were obviously successful as an experiment because by the time I left that office it was about 50% female. In fact, it wasn't very 04:01:00long before these men would call up the head of our office and say "Send one of your girls over." It was never "women" of course, but nevertheless they liked doing business with those of us who didn't pretend to know anything more than we did know, but were fast learners and knew what questions to ask, and then were absolutely dedicated to keeping the red tape to a minimum and doing a job quickly and well.

MA: What I hear you saying then is that they were skeptical about having women but because you did your job well there was a fair amount of acceptance.

KC: Yes, I would say a lot.

MA: Did you have any negative experiences at all in terms of the male/female ratio?

KC: I had obvious skepticism initially, and as I would have to go to a different 04:02:00office with different people it would sometimes happen and then we'd work out arrangements on our own staff, of sometimes going two by two and I'd go with some man or if there were people in my office who knew certain things better than I did, we had a lot of teamwork in the office, I don't recall the kind of competition for brownie points or whatever. We hadn't been there very long, maybe six months or so, it was the practice for everyone in the building to go across the street to a coffee shop in the middle of the morning and the middle of the afternoon. It wasn't too many months before the word came down from the 04:03:00head of the War Production Board, "No more leaving the premises to go get coffee." The alternative, of course, was to make coffee in our own office so we approached the boss and said "How about a coffee pot and cups?" and he said "No, he didn't want any mess and he didn't want people taking the time" and we said "Come on now, we can write procedures for every industry in the country, we certainly can write a procedure for making coffee and keeping it neat and tidy." "Ok, write the procedure and I'll see if I approve it." A few of us wrote the procedure, bought a coffee pot and had everybody bring their own mug and then we worked out a schedule with absolutely no sexism and no classism. Every person took his or her turn being responsible for brewing the coffee and washing the coffee pot. Each person had to keep his or her own cup the way they wanted it, 04:04:00clean or dirty, we didn't care.

MA: What a breakthrough!

KC: Yes and nobody raised a hackle about taking a turn. One of the men who had actually been a Latin scholar before he'd been, Prince but I can't remember his first name, from the South, very gentle, a real scholar, it was a motley outfit because there was no specific preparation for doing that. The ability to write was helpful, the ability to absorb new information, to be well organized, but very difficult I would think to know from an interview what kind of a person was going to be successful and what kind wasn't. Apparently on some occasion when it 04:05:00was his turn for KP he encountered a cockroach because there was a sudden amendment to the procedure to be sure on the canned milk to put a cover and a rubber band on it.

MA: The cockroach was in the milk?

KC: I don't know if it was in it or if he thought there was a possibility that it could happen.

MA: We made a lot of good friends. We used to carpool, I finally lived in one place for a few months where I could latch onto a carpool and get a ride.

KC: One of the men in our office, I just think of him now, from Gloversville, New York, his name will have to come to me, came to Washington and volunteered. 04:06:00He was a little older, too old to be drafted into the military. He was so homesick for his wife and daughter and unable to get back too often from Washington, that was an expensive trip, so I can remember the time he said he'd "give anything for a good cheese blintz" and I said "Well, describe it to me and come on over and I'll fix one." I had never eaten a cheese blintz and had never even heard of one but he described it and I did fairly well in my .... (Saul Sakheim was his name) who had wonderful stories always. He told stories. When he left and went back to Gloversville, while I was still in Washington, we had a 04:07:00farewell party for him.

MA: You were talking about your friend Saul.

KC: I think maybe that was all I was going to say about Saul Sakhiem.

MA: There was a lot of great congeniality in the office. I suppose in a way that's part of what kept -- we weren't on the fighting front, we were sending things. I sent a box as often as I was permitted to to my brothers who were overseas. Everybody had someone they were writing to or sending things to and we had maps around because we would read about where the Germans were and where we were losing everything in the Pacific. You know, you had to be nice to the 04:08:00people you were with and be sympathetic and do some things.

KC: There was rent control and price control in Washington in those days, enough to make a good socialist out of anybody. Well I don't need to give my lecture on socialism, but it made it possible for us to eat a decent meal. I started work at the same income range there that everybody in my category did, $2,000 a year and after a six months or whatever the probationary period was it jumped to $2,600. I think that as I decided to leave Washington and come back to graduate school after I had been there for two years, I was about to receive $3,600 a 04:09:00year. Out of that salary I was able to buy war bonds, $25 war bonds, quite often.

MA: You received the same salary as the men then, there wasn't any discrimination within your unit?

KC: Thats right. Also, incidentally, the man who's name I mentioned, Herman Director, who was the director of the office by coincidence, I ran into him in Washington a few years ago. I was in Washington for a meeting of some kind and one of the old timers knew I was there, had read it in the paper or something, and told me how to get in touch with Director. I went to see him in his private 04:10:00consultancy, I can't remember what he was doing now--or what he was doing just a few years ago, but he couldn't wait to take me around and introduce me to his entire staff so that I would see that he had an Asian, and American Indian, a Black, male and female, handicapped and .... it was a matter of principle with him and he just wanted me to know. He had been that kind of a person all along. I was, I think, in a way very kind of lucky to be in an office that I was, but I met people throughout that war experience, war time experience, in Washington who were just terrific people. They were there to do, from whatever vantage point, what they could do.

MA: It doesn't sound to me like you had any kind of a special sense of, "as a woman it's my job to do thus or so," but as a person that you felt fairly united with the men.

KC: Yes, and then my housemate or roommate Carla Waller, who had been an economics major, was in a different, not in the War Production Board, but whatever the economic office was (I can't remember the exact title now) and she had the same experience there that I was having. In fact, there were many, many women, bright women, in Washington. Of course, even the whole "New Deal" had opened doors to women and of course the war experience began opening doors to minority people, men and women, in ways that they hadn't been in before

MA: I wanted to ask you about that. How did Washington, D.C., look during that time in terms of black/white housing; we know today we go to Washington, D.C., and it is a primarily black community and the whites have escaped to the suburbs of Maryland.

KC: That was not the case at the time. There were still many places within the city where blacks could not get housing. The city was predominantly white at that time. Within the government agencies there were increasing numbers of black people. They tended to be delivering the mail and service kinds of jobs.

MA: Any black female secretaries?

KC: A few, and a few receptionists, but not very many.

MA: The women that you worked with in the War Production Board and your friend in the economic section were primarily or completely college educated women then?

KC: Yes. I met a great many women through other friends who were graduates of some of the Ivy League womens colleges. There were social gatherings lots of times of Wisconsin people, University of Wisconsin people. It's a joke, and continues to be a joke among my children, that there was a dance at which a Miss Big Ten was, each of the Big Ten, the midwestern institutions, put one 04:14:00female up as a candidate. It is interesting to me that it had nothing to do with swimming suits and exactly what one looked like, because having a masters degree was worth points -- it was better than having just a plain BA. I don't know who the judges were and I don't know what the qualifications were, but a couple of my colleagues from my graduating class asked me to take part in this competition which I did as a joke, and then I got the prize.

MA: And you won Miss Big Ten -- that's wonderful!

KC: Yes. Some years later I gave my ribbon which announced this great victory to 04:15:00a friend of my mother's that she used to play bridge with and visit with, a woman who lived up the street who is actually one of the homeliest people I have ever known. I just loved her and her husband; they had no children. I don't know what the occasion was when I felt that I wanted to give Hattie some kind of an award or a prize and I thought that this was perfect, Miss Big Ten.

MA: Did she appreciate it?

KC: Yes, she loved it.

MA: You worked with the War Production Board for one year.

KC: Two years. During that time, sort of by the end of that time, in the first place I was deciding to terminate this five year relationship.

MA: Why was that?

KC: I had very mixed feelings. I realized that I didn't think he would be good 04:16:00husband material. He was a fascinating person and lots of fun and witty and someone with a great zest for life, but someone with no sense of direction and no kind of follow-through. He had enrolled in law school and had not done much with it and we were both kind of off and on. He came from a fairly Orthodox Jewish family. I used to think at the time that if his own sense of direction had not been so in question I don't think the religious difference would have been a huge factor, but in combination. That I think was one of the reasons I 04:17:00left Washington before the war was over. It looked at that point that we were actually winning but nevertheless what's to win. I saw a bumper sticker today that said "War doesn't decide who's right, it only decides who's left."

MA: Right, and your brother was killed in the war?

KC: Yes and the other two....I don't think the war experience did either one of them any good.

MA: However, I also was very aware over the passage of those two years of how very little I knew about political science or about the things and about how casually I had gone to college. While I had learned an awful lot, I had really 04:18:00majored in extracurricular activities and had filled in with going to classes on the side. I had a real, I suppose to call it a hunger is a bit too dramatic, but a real desire to almost be a scholar, to sit in the library and read things carefully that I had heard about and never gotten around to. I sent applications to a few institutions to see about not just admission to graduate school but scholarship support. Because those were what one of my professors called "the years of the locusts" with very few people wanting to go to graduate school, I 04:19:00was accepted and offered scholarships at almost every place that I applied. I made the decision, and I might not do the same things now that I did then, but I made the decision to come to Wisconsin where I was familiar. I knew which professors to avoid and which courses to avoid and which ones to take and I figured I could do the most expedient kind of polishing off a degree under those circumstances. I did have fellowships both years. I came back to Madison in 1944 and began a Ph.D. program in the fall and then went to school around the calendar for two years, summer included.

KC: How long altogether did it take you to complete your Ph.D., from the masters 04:20:00to the completion of the Ph.D.?

MA: I had two years in Washington not in school and two calendar years here on this campus.

KC: Then you were done with your dissertation at the end of two calendar years?

KC: Right. Well, who knows how great it was but...

MA: But you went with a new commitment. How did you find the experience? I understand what you were saying about really wanting to learn at a deeper level than you had prior to that.

KC: I certainly had the easiest, the smoothest kind of going to graduate school imaginable. At first I looked around for a place to live here in Madison and visited a couple of sort of one room things that were just dreary. Somehow word 04:21:00got around, because this was a lovely at least it was a small town then, and a woman that I knew only very casually, who was an instructor in the Ph. Ed. Department, she and her twin sister were two of the most glamorous undergraduate women in the Kapa Kapa Gama House, so I thought maybe I would be out of my class again but anyway, her husband was in the military and so she needed someone to share the rent and share the space and invited me to. My share of the rent, I don't know if it covered utilities or not, was $30 per month. I had a departmental scholarship so I didn't have to pay tuition. My father sent me the $30 a month for my housing and I had no commitments -- no job to do, no work, no 04:22:00family and if I wanted to I could either walk to the campus from University Avenue or take a nickle bus. Anyway, the living arrangement turned out to be just wonderful. I had know Cease as a very proper, mannerly, attractive, person and I couldn't believe that anybody was that polite and sweet all the time, I thought that was her company manner, but she was that way if we were doing the laundry, cleaning on Saturday, fixing morning coffee and she always looked, even when she was dressed to do the laundry in dungarees, she would have a scarf here or there and just always looked great. It was a real pleasure. She for example, 04:23:00the buildings across University Avenue which are there now were not there back in 1944 and 45 so that we could look out from the apartment window and see cattle grazing on the university field or corn growing, so she had this plan that we would set the morning alarm 15 minutes ahead of what we would need to and whoever's job it was to do breakfast that day, the other one would shower first and we had this great schedule that worked out and 15 minutes before we needed to leave the house we would sit in the living room with a second cup of coffee, maybe we would talk to each other and maybe we wouldn't but we would just sit and relax and look out the window, maybe think about what we were going to do that day. It was just sort of a meditative time and we started every day that way. It's a wonderful thing to do.

MA: How delightful. Do you ever see her or did you ever run into her later?

KC: Yes, she and her husband live here in town. I had a lovely note from her when Hank died. I get Christmas notes and we see each other once in awhile. She has done some teaching for our University Extension office over the years and has taught at College Week for Women on how to relax.

MA: In your Ph.D. program, do you recall what the ratio was of women to men?

KC: No, but there were two or three women. There were not a lot of men because it was still the war years. Of course that's where I met Hank when he came back from his military service. His brother was teaching on the campus in political 04:25:00science so he came just to visit his brother. He never did remember the first time we met and I remembered it very vividly. I don't know what impression I had but I could remember meeting him in South Hall which is where political science was in those days, it's now in North Hall. He was in his military uniform and with his brother and his brother stopped to introduce us. Hank had absolutely no memory of that. It was before he even had decided to come to Wisconsin.

MA: And you don't recall what you thought at the time?

KC: No, but I did remember meeting him.

MA: When did you meet him again?

KC: He came the second semester of my second year as a graduate student in political science. So he also had space in South Hall as I did. Bill Evenstein 04:26:00was one of my favorite professors, in fact, Bill and Ruth (his wife) used to invite this friend of mine and me over when I was still an undergraduate. We'd have an evening of charades or some other so we were always good friends. In fact, I had meet Bill Evenstein when I was a freshman and went to an International Club event of some kind. He was just freshly on the campus as a faculty member, but as a young unmarried faculty person, so I've known him a long, long time. When Hank arrived in January 1946, to do graduate work at Wisconsin Bill Evenstein said "why don't you go down the hall and talk to Kaye Frederick and she'll give you information, help, etc." He stopped in at the 04:27:00office of the other female who was in graduate school. I don't know what their conversation was, all I was that I heard him as he left, he just walked out of her office and said "thank you Miss Frederick" so he thought he had been talking to the person he was sent to talk with which he had not. I guess she straightened that out.

We had a couple of dates in the cold weather including a toboggan party which several of my roommates or my landlady, however one refers to such a person, and Elizabeth Bardwell and some other old friends arranged this toboggan party and I invited Hank to come along. Some other man from the Econ Department apparently 04:28:00thought he was my date, and so did the other gals who were doing a little matchmaking. All evening, it was 18 below zero and I thought only a fool would think of going tobogganing in that weather, but I think it was these matchmakers who were encouraging the evening more than anybody else, so we did and then came back to the apartment where Cease and I lived and had pineapple upside down cake which Cease had baked and coffee and had a good time.

MA: Did you end up having a date with Hank rather than the man in the Econ Department?

KC: Yes. In fact at one point Hank had borrowed his brothers car at the toboggan place and I can still remember Elizabeth Bardwell saying "Oh Henry, Kay looks so 04:29:00cold I think you better take her down to the car." I told my kids he did acquiesce and do that and gave me a blanket to keep me warm.

MA: Were there any women teachers in your Political Science Ph.D. program?

KC: No. Helen Clark in Sociology again was the only woman and there was Elizabeth Brandise in Economics but I didn't have work with her. I had no female instruction at all during those two years.

MA: While you were going through the Ph.D. program did you have a sense of what you would do with the degree? Did you have a goal in terms of the work you wanted to do when you were finished?

KC: I was a teaching assistant the first year. I didn't do a lot of teaching or 04:30:00instructing but I think the closer I got to the degree the more I thought I'd like to teach at a university. So, in 1946, I went to the Political Science Meeting that year, one of the few times I ever went because I knew that was the slave market. I was then invited to Bryn Mawr for an interview and was offered a job at Bryn Mawr and also was offered a job at Purdue and had to make a decision between those two. I think I told you before on tape that a midwester coeducational institution was more comfortable for me. Maybe now I would opt for Bryn Mawr. Also, Hank was trying to go to Columbia and both he and Bill Evenstein were plunking for Bryn Mawr because it would be so close to New York 04:31:00and I thought "well I don't want those people telling me where I should take a job" so I disregarded all of that advice, or rejected it, I didn't disregard it.

MA: Did you have sense of yourself as a woman in the way that we do today while you were in the Ph.D. program? By that, I mean were you aware of female role models in political science, the fact that you were a minority in the department, that there were no female professors, that really you were unique to be receiving a Ph.D. as a female at that time in history. Did any of that ever cross your mind?

KC: I was aware of how few women were around but it didn't seem particularly 04:32:00remarkable to me that I was doing what I wanted to do.

MA: Because it was a continuation of a long line of you doing that.

KC: Yes. But I did write my Ph.D. thesis on "Anti-Democratic Ideas and Tendencies in American Politics" without word one on sexism or the suffrage movement or any of the rest.

MA: So you had not come into an awareness about that at that time, but you certainly had, about injustice generally.

KC: Right.

MA: How did you like doing your Ph.D. thesis? What kind of a process was that for you and did you really learn from it?

KC: Well, I think I did. I enjoyed writing. I had done, in addition to the 04:33:00theoretical aspect of the thesis which actually the first three chapters were about, an exploration of the meaning of liberty, equality and the public good I guess those were the three. I also examined the really native fascist movement of the time and subscribed to a lot of ultra right wing, really fascist stuff, and went to rallies incognito and actually heard Gerald L.K. Smith and Father Couglin and some of those. It was my thesis that if fascism as such would ever 04:34:00come to this country it would come not riding on a white horse and with all the bluster, but through the accepted institutions that exist in our society. I guess I would still maintain that and that we have come awful close to right wing, especially if we look now at how many poor people and homeless people and hungry people in this country and what Justice Brennan calls the "cruel disparities" in our society. Then the limitations and the creeping limitations on civil rights and violations of token government, lots of pretty horrendous things.

MA: Were you able to use your dissertation in any way? Was it published or were you able to disseminate this information beyond the department?

KC: I never tried to and I never did.

MA: When you attended the rallies did you ever see women participating?

KC: Oh yes! Very reminiscent of the fundamentalists right now. The .... the right to life, those who are attacking abortion clinics, and the women who stoned the integration busses in Detroit (at a later time then when I wrote this). Anyone who ever maintains that women have a monopoly on the virtues and 04:36:00are not subject to violence and some of the other things need to take a second look at the right wing. The difference is less in gender than it is in political.

MA: If you had to make a generalization about social class what would that be? Was there a particular social class that was involved in the neofacist movement?

KC: I don't know. I'd have to think about that.

MA: I was thinking about Nazi Germany and the groups that fascism initially attracted there.

KC: Which were, of course, middle class but funded by the big industrialists. 04:37:00Whenever I read about our military budgets in this country right now I wish some of that would be published in terms of not what the government is spending to build certain things that are obsolete before they're built anyway, but who is receiving the billions of dollars, who benefits. Once in awhile a good progressive publication will indicate who is getting what in terms of income.

MA: Well, we've reached the end of your Ph.D. program.

KC: That's a good time to stop.

MA: Kay, lets talk about receiving your Ph.D. in political science. When did 04:38:00that occur?

KC: Well actually I never went through any graduation ceremony to receive the Ph.D. I did receive it in August of 1946. I was kind of sorry to miss that because, perhaps they still do it this way but in those days a Ph.D. candidate got to be accompanied by her or his academic advisor and major professor and walk across the platform together, which would have been sort of fun to do, but I didn't have time. That was the summer, which I think I have mentioned to you; I wrote my thesis in short order and probably got into bad habits then, bad 04:39:00habits that I've continued for 41 years since, and that is doing a rough draft of something and then turning it in. I may read it over for spelling or grammatical errors but very little total rewriting; I'm very much in favor of rewriting but I just don't do it myself. In any case, I worked very steadily from spring until close to August writing the thesis and having it typed. I used to tell some of my friends that I had to get married because Hank typed the rough draft of my thesis. I then turned it over to a more professional typist for the final typing but he typed it for me. I did then and always have since, do my writing with a pencil on a yellow pad of paper; I can hardly write on a white pad of paper. I hand wrote things, I did know how to type. I typed my 04:40:00previous papers all through my university work. When I got to New York City a couple of years later I actually lied, they asked me if I knew how to type at the Ethical Society after they hired me and I knew then that either they'd hire a secretary for me or they wouldn't, depending on whether I could type so I thought it was worth that deception.