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Show OLIVE O'MARA 22 2 2 for the war effort. So the government gave free courses at night cour lik 1 ctrical engineering, locally in the high schools. They were taught not by the public cho 1 but by separate skilled teachers. BEC: You said this was just for the men? OLI: Men and women. BEC: Oh, for anybody? OLI: For anybody who would come. But they didn't have enough people who enrolled. Men seemed to say, "I'm not going to go to that. I'm not going to be- l have enough trouble raising the family, doing my job, I'm not doing that." So the government planners asked us schoolteachers at one of the meetings, "Would you please go to the courses? Go to them yourselves, then the people will realize, or the men, at least, may say, 'Hey, if the schoolteachers are going to it, it must be something valid or worth our trouble.'" I remember I took all kind of courses: electrical engineering; glass technology-because in Pennsylvania, we have a lot of glass factories, in West Virginia and western Pennsylvania. Lennox is one that's two miles away from there. I can't remember all those courses, because I only took them because they asked us to. "Please take them." And there wasn't anything to do in the evening anyway. What the heck? There's always an outside chance that you'd find some man there (laughs), a single man-which was very unlikely-but, you know, the idea was, what else are you going to do? And they asked you to take them. So I took all I wanted. BEC: Wow. OLI: Only because they asked. BEC: Right. 23 |
