Ann Louise Barber Fletcher, interviewed for the Aileen H. Clyde 20th Century Women's Legacy Archive, 2016

The Aileen H. Clyde 20th Century Women's Legacy Archive oral history project was created to record the personal histories of 20th century women; to record memories and emotions related to historical events and social change processes; and to explore women's participation in and response to social and cultural changes. The project is conducted by Resources for the Study of Social Engagement, a non-profit organization, and is supported in part by the Clyde Family Foundation and by the Aileen H. Clyde 20th Century Women's Legacy Archive at the University of Utah.

Ann Louise Barber Fletcher Interviewed by Susette Green for the th Aileen H. Clyde 20 Century Women’s Legacy Archive Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah March 2, 2016 1 Ann Louise Barber Fletcher Interviewed by Susette Green for the Aileen H. Clyde 20th Century Women’s Legacy Archive Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah Born: July 5, 1921, Lewiston, Utah Parents: Seth Langton Barber and Orita Smith Barber Siblings: Frances Joyce “Patsy” Barber Callister Elizabeth Bateman Janet Ferguson Carolyn Mathis Husband: Dean Charles Fletcher Children: Louise (Richard) Fletcher Rupp Susette (Fred) Barber Fletcher Green Ellen (Jerry) Jean Fletcher Roundy The Aileen Clyde Life History Project is conducted by Resources for the Study of Social Engagement, a non-profit organization, and is supported in part by the Clyde Family Foundation, and by the Aileen H. Clyde 20th Century Women’s Legacy Archive at the University of Utah. Susette Green conducted and edited this interview. Footnotes were added by Dlora Dalton and Dawn Hall Anderson approved by the interviewee. Elisha Buhler Condie prepared the final manuscript. The focus of the interview project was threefold: 1) to record the personal histories of 20th century women, 2) to record memories and emotions related to historical events and social change processes, and 3) to explore women’s participation in and response to social and cultural change. 2 Ann Barber Fletcher Interview (March 2, 2016) Susette Green (SG): I’m interviewing my mother, who is ninety-four and a half years old. Please state your name in full. Ann Fletcher (AF): Ann Louise Barber Fletcher. SG: Thank you and also give me your birthdate. AF: July the fifth, 1921. SG: And where were you born? AF: Lewiston, Utah, which is practically on the Idaho border. SG: Okay, what can you tell me about Lewiston? AF: It’s a little tiny town except it covers a lot of square miles—twenty-five square miles—and there weren’t many people in each ward 1: it had three wards when I was growing up. We had two grocery stores, a drug store, a bank . . . SG: A movie theater? AF: The movie theater didn’t come until later. It was built with some of the money that Roosevelt, President Franklin Roosevelt, appropriated to build things that people need and to give them something, some kind of entertainment. 2 Besides all that, my mother and her friend Mrs. Hyer got a library. SG: Oh! How did they do that? 1 In the LDS church, local congregations are called wards. They are organized geographically and members attend a ward near their home. 2 Franklin Delano Roosevelt served as the 32nd President of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. The WPA, or Works Progress Administration (established in 1935; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration), was the largest and most ambitious of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives, employing millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. Almost every community in the United States had a new park, bridge, or school constructed by the agency. 3 AF: I don’t really know, but they were always on the phone figuring how to start this out, where to get the books, and they did it. SG: Wow. AF: We had a lot of books in our family, but most families didn’t, so it was a valuable addition to the little city. SG: How did your family come to live in Lewiston? AF: Well, my dad, after he graduated from college 3, taught school for two years in Park City, Utah, and then he served in World War I. I think he decided not to go back to teaching; he had a terrible nervous system. His father had worked in the Lewiston State Bank, 4 and Dad went to that after his service in the army. In the army he was a corporal. SG: He was like a secretary? AF: Company Clerk—so he didn’t get into any danger. His bungalow was down underground; because he’d studied German in college, he was able to break through where the Germans were going and was cited for that. 5 SG: Where was he when he was serving? AF: He talked about Belgium, but I think it was in France. 6 3 Utah State Agricultural College in Logan, Utah. Much later the name was changed to Utah State University. 4 Lewiston State Bank was established in 1905 and grew to include four branches through Cache County and into Preston, Idaho. Seth Langton Barber eventually became president. 5 Corporal Seth L. Barber of the 123rd Machine Gun Battalion, 33rd Division, was cited for gallantry by Major General George Bell Jr. for action in the Meuse-Argonne campaign, one of the most significant American battles of the First World War. “When the battalion entered the line for the engagement it had just finished a three-weeks tour of duty in the front line. Fatigued by that tour, it was called on to remain in action for nearly a month. . . .[It was described as] a period of strenuous service. The gunners had been under constant fire, and the woods in which they lived and fought had been drenched with gas of every conceivable variety. In addition to such difficulties, enemy planes had bombed the men of the battalion and sprayed them with machine gun bullets.” See Illinois in the World War: An Illustrated History of the Thirty-third Division, vol. II. Chicago: States Publication Society, 1920. 6 The Meuse-Argonne Offensive took place in the Argonne Forest and near the Meuse River, both located in northeast France near the Belgium border. 4 SG: And was he in the trenches? AF: Well, I guess, I guess . . . He, like most people, wouldn’t talk much about it, though he said it was a lovely war. SG: Which is crazy! AF: I can’t understand that at all, but he was below ground so he was safe—I think. SG: He came back, so I guess he was. AF: Yeah. SG: With his gas mask. AF: (laughs) My sisters and I used to play with it! SG: Yes, so did the grandchildren! AF: Do you want to hear the story about . . . he was the only boy in a big family of girls, 7 and he volunteered [for the army]. I never heard anyone complain about it. He had a cousin whose father was a farmer; he got him deferred, and the cousin died [at home] of the flu during the war. Dad came home without a scratch. SG: Irony. AF: Yes. SG: Okay, so at the time of your birth, what were both of your parents doing? Or each of your parents, what were they doing? AF: At the time of my birth? SG: Yes. AF: My father was working in the bank, and I think Mother was a housewife, as women were then, though she had taught school in Shelley, Idaho. SG: How large was your family at that time? 7 Seth Langton Barber had eight sisters. A single older brother died young before Seth was born. 5 AF: I was the eldest daughter. SG: And what year were you born? AF: ’21. SG: 1921, okay, and what was your living situation? AF: I don’t think it was too swell. I think my parents took two rooms in a house. I don’t know about a bathroom. SG: Oh. AF: My mother said that on the Fourth of July she went to the fireworks that night—and she was having fireworks of her own. I was born the next day! SG: (laughs) Who delivered you, do you know? AF: His name was Doctor Parkinson, and I don’t think he was very smart. He spelled [my middle name] Louise L-O-I-E-S-E! SG: On the birth certificate? AF: Yes! I can’t remember when Patsy was born. SG: You were two. AF: I was two, yes. SG: But children came about every two years? AF: No, four years between Patsy and Elizabeth. (I’ve had a hard time figuring that out.) SG: Okay, let’s go ahead into your childhood years . . . say, to when you were about ten. Tell me what your life was like in Lewiston when you were ten? AF: Well, there were more trees in Lewiston then, and my girlfriends and I would walk to groves of trees and have picnics. There would be little ditches along the way that we would manage to wade in. It was a very country town, very sparsely populated. It had nineteen hundred people, I think, spread over twenty-five square miles. So the wards were far apart. We didn’t have a movie theater then, so what I did most was write. I wanted to be a writer. I wrote stories, 6 and I only remember one that I called “The Unicorn.” I wish I had it . . . but I wrote a lot. Then one day I took a test, a test to see if I had enough brains or skill to be a writer. I only got a B+. I decided if it’d been an A-, I might have tried. But I thought, Well, I have a certain amount of talent but not enough. SG: Did you stop writing? AF: Pretty much. SG: That’s sad. AF: Except poetry. I did write poetry, but not when I was ten. I think the first poems I wrote were in high school, and they were pretty sad! But by college they were pretty good. SG: Back to when you were ten for a minute. What was your household like? Was it a busy household? Was it a quiet household? What kinds of things did you play with? Did you play with your sisters? How many sisters did you have? AF: I had four sisters [Patsy, Elizabeth, Janet, and Carolyn], and we played together, but I think we played with our friends more. I had friends that lived close next door and down the street a ways, and we played most at night: Run Sheep Run, and . . . What are some of those games called where people hide? SG: Hide and Seek? AF: Yeah, Hide and Seek. We’d play until it was dark in the summer, and it was fun, it was fun, lots of fun. Then when radios came in (and I don’t remember how old I was when that happened), 8 my favorite program was One Man’s Family, about a family that was swell—and not swell. 9 8 For radio, the 1930s was a golden age. At the start of the decade, 12 million American households owned a radio, and by 1939 the total had grown to more than 28 million. It provided entertainment with music, comedy, and soap operas, and was a source of news broadcasts, public communication, and advertisements. After the 1930s, the popularity of radio began to decline as visual technologies arose. 9 One Man’s Family was an American radio soap opera from 1932 to 1959. It was the longestrunning uninterrupted dramatic serial in the history of American radio. The radio plotline centered on San Francisco stockbroker Henry Barbour, his wife Fanny, and their five children 7 SG: Like every family probably. AF: Yes. I’d never miss it, never miss it. And I watched . . . listened to Amos and Andy 10 and … SG: Little Orphan Annie? 11 AF: They had plays, plays on radio, and they were very good, very good, because you could imagine a lot; you couldn’t see, but you could imagine. You furnished the view. SG: So, in your imagination. And did you all cluster around the radio? AF: Sometimes, but usually we liked different things. SG: How did you determine who got to use it? AF: We didn’t all like the same things, so it worked out okay. SG: What was your favorite pastime? AF: Writing. But reading too. Walking—I liked to hike. I loved to hike. SG: Where did you go hiking? AF: There were a lot of trails in Lewiston, a lot of trails, and little ditches went by them. When we got a cabin up Logan Canyon 12—and I don’t remember how old I was when we got that— there were the high mountains to climb. I loved that! I’d think I’d reached the top, and then there was another top behind that, and then another top behind that. I would be gone for hours all by myself. SG: Wow, and your mother didn’t worry? over the course of a lifetime, with Henry the stern father ending as loving, doting grandfather. (Television versions of the series, focused on the adult children, aired from 1949 to 1955.) 10 Amos 'n' Andy was an American radio and television sitcom set in Harlem, Manhattan’s historic black community. The original radio show, which was popular from 1928 until 1960, was created, written, and voiced by two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll. When the show moved to television, black actors took over the majority of the roles. 11 Little Orphan Annie, which follows the wide-ranging adventures of Annie, her dog Sandy, and her benefactor Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks, was one of the first comic strips adapted to radio and attracted about 6 million fans. It left the air in 1942. 12 Logan, Utah, is about 17 miles south of Lewiston. It takes about half an hour to drive between the two locations. 8 AF: I don’t think so. SG: It was a different time. AF: Yes. My youngest sister Carolyn got lost once, and Mother almost lost her mind! We found her down by the river—and she wasn’t that old. SG: What did your parents do while you were climbing mountains? Would your father have been there [at the cabin], or would he have been at work? AF: He’d have been at work, but he came for weekends, and I don’t think he did much. Mother hated that cabin because it had no necessities: it had a tiny kitchen with a tiny coal or wood stove that she had to cook over, and it didn’t have a bathroom. We kids loved it though. We loved it. And at night, if we slept in the river bedroom, the riverside bedroom, we’d watch the stars fall, and we loved that. There were always a lot of stars that fell, and I wondered where they went— Where would they go? SG: They’d burn up in the atmosphere. AF: Yes, but I didn’t know that then. SG: It sounds wonderful! Let’s see. You would have been a child during the Great Depression. AF: Yes, and my father had a regular salary, though it wasn’t very high, of course, in that day. To earn more money (because he wanted his five girls educated), he sold insurance and had someone feed cattle for him, and that’s how he brought in more money. SG: Oh, I didn’t know that. Were they on your land? AF: No. SG: No, you didn’t have enough land? AF: No. SG: You’ve talked about having your parents living in those two rooms; at what point did you move into a house? 9 AF: I’d say I was nearer to two . . . My grandfather died, and Dad had the house built with the money he inherited. 13 Mother told me that I preferred my grandfather to anyone. I rode all around Logan on his shoulders, holding on tightly to his hair, and he would point things out to me. When I was fifteen months old and had pneumonia, he gave me a blessing and I got better. (He had lost his first son at the same age to pneumonia.) After he died, I wandered around saying, “Where’s Bampa? Where’s Bampa?” In our new house, Dad wouldn’t put in a furnace or anything like that because he was going to have to go in debt for that, and he didn’t believe in going in debt. So, we had frozen pipes in the winter, and hot water bottles to keep us warm at night. We did have a fireplace in the living room, and some of our best times were Sunday nights in front of that fireplace. Mother would make sandwiches with the roast that was left over from lunch or dinner, and we would sit in front of that fireplace and visit and talk. It’s the only time I really remember that my dad was relaxed. SG: So he was more accessible to you at that time than any other time? AF: Yes, and I used to wish he’d go to church with us, but that’s when people had to work six days a week instead of five, and if he’d gone to church he probably never would have been relaxed! (laughs) SG: Probably true. . . . Tell me about religion in your family. AF: Well, we were sent, not taken, to church. SG: What church? AF: The Mormon, and I had some questions because I’d hear that the Church was the only true church and then I’d go home and I’d hear that it wasn’t true, so there was . . . but I didn’t let it worry me. SG: So your parents were members of the LDS Church, but they didn’t attend? AF: They were inactive at that point. Later Dad taught a class—twice, I think. SG: Had they come from inactive or nonmember families? 13 Alonzo George Barber, born in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, in 1857, died 10 December 1922 at the age of 65 while hunting in Logan Canyon, Utah. The new home would perhaps have been built the following year when Ann (born 5 July 1921) would have been two years old. 10 AF: My mother’s mother 14 was a saint, a real saint, and I’m sure Mother grew up that way. I don’t think her dad was, though. I haven’t figured out the Barbers 15 yet. SG: But they came from pioneer stock, all of them? AF: Yes. My grandmother Barber 16 was the first president of the second stake Relief Society established in Logan. She was my favorite grandmother. SG: Oh? What made her your favorite grandmother? AF: I knew she loved me. She was beautiful; she was elegant. She was also blind; she had an infection in her eyes, and of course there were no antibiotics then. She could see enough to get around but not to read, so I read to her. If I ever stumbled on a word, which I did occasionally, she would say, “I’d have thought you’d have known that word.” And, you know, it didn’t bother me because I knew she loved me. Aunt Marie was my favorite aunt. SG: Who was Aunt Marie? AF: My father’s older sister. There used to be a root beer stand not far from where the Barber home was in Logan, and if we ever went to town, we’d always go home by that root beer stand and have a root beer. Then Aunt Marie took me to movies. They always had vaudevilles then in Logan, and I thought that was wonderful to have live people on the stage. I don’t know how good they were, but I thought they were wonderful! SG: Was that when you were quite young? AF: Yes. SG: Do you remember the name of that root beer stand? AF: A&W, I think. 14 Eliza Ann Stratford Smith crossed the plains when she was three years old in 1854 and was an early settler in Cache Valley. John Pearson Smith was her husband. 15 Alonzo George Barber and Sarah Ellen Langton Barber were her paternal grandparents. All of Ann’s grandparents lived in Logan. 16 Sarah Ellen Langton Barber was born in 1858 in Smithfield, Utah. She worked the telegraph in Logan when she was 11 years old, taught school at age fifteen, and later attended the University of Utah. Ann recalls hearing that “the sheriff told her he would accompany her to school her first day of teaching, and she said, ‘I’ll accompany myself, thank you!’ She was a woman of strong will.” 11 SG: Alice and Willards? I think it was Alice and Willards—A&W! Yes, I think it was their first one. 17 AF: I didn’t know that; I just knew it was A&W. SG: Just a little bit back to religion. Did religion influence your family activities or your daily life in any way? AF: I don’t think so except that we went to Primary 18 during the week and to Sunday School and sometimes Sacrament Meeting on Sunday. At that time, we had Sunday School in the morning and Sacrament Meeting at night. SG: Your parents never went with you? AF: Never, unless Dad was asked to speak, which happened occasionally. He would take Elizabeth 19 to speak with him. He didn’t know I was a good speaker until he heard me read some sonnets years and years later, and he said, “My, you read them well!” And I almost said, “Yes, I’ve always read them well!” (laughs) SG: So he wasn’t very exuberant with his compliments to his children?! AF: No, he had two favorites: Elizabeth and Janet. Janet was an accomplished pianist, and Elizabeth was a red-headed Barber. He used to take her fishing with him times when he wouldn’t take us. But he took us all lots of times. We had a wonderful time, and while he’d fish, we’d hike in the mountains. Then mother would cook the fish for dinner. Those were good times; sometimes we even went with a neighbor. SG: Sounds wonderful. 17 On June 20, 1919, Roy W. Allen opened a roadside root beer stand in Lodi, California, using a formula he purchased from a pharmacist. In 1920, Allen became partners with Frank Wright and the two combined their initials and called their product A&W Root Beer. A mistaken notion is that the initials were derived from Alice and Willard Marriott. This mistake arose owing to Marriott’s first business, an A&W franchise, in Washington, D.C. 18 The Primary is the LDS Church’s program of gospel instruction, singing, and activities for children ages 18 months through 11 years. Until 1980 it was held on weekdays rather than Sunday. That year the Church introduced a schedule combining all meetings involving religious instruction for children, youth, and adults into a three-hour Sunday block. Activities are still held during the week. 19 Elizabeth was the middle daughter of five. 12 AF: Another thing we did was go to the hills and pick, uh . . . what were those? SG: Chokecherries? AF: Chokecherries, yes. They made the best jelly in the world, the very best. 20 SG: So any of the canyons had those? AF: I think they all had them, but one had more, Cub River 21. Cub River Canyon. There are all kinds in the canyons: Logan Canyon, Cub River Canyon, and High Creek, which everyone said, “High Crick”! SG: Yes! (laughs) But your family didn’t. AF: No. SG: Let’s talk about your teenage years, moving into the 1930s. What was most memorable during those years? AF: You know, high school wasn’t my favorite time. I loved college. SG: Tell me a little bit about your high school. AF: We had to study a lot. Now I was an English person, and I knew more than some of my English teachers because I was a reader. People had to teach classes they weren’t schooled in then, like I had to teach physical education later. And I can remember once correcting an English teacher’s pronunciation. (laughs) SG: Uh-oh! AF: Yes, I hadn’t learned that you didn’t do those things! I was very good at algebra, very good. Never knew what geometry was all about, so I memorized the book and got B’s in that and A’s and B’s in chemistry. 20 The western chokecherry is a suckering shrub or small tree with bright red to black fruit that possesses a very astringent taste, being both somewhat sour and somewhat bitter. The chokecherry fruit can be used to make a jam, jelly, or syrup, but the bitter nature of the fruit requires sugar to sweeten the preserves. 21 Cub River (in Franklin County, Idaho, and Cache County, Utah) is a tributary of the Bear River. Fed by a number of springs in the mountains of southern Idaho, it flows south into Utah, northeast of Lewiston, where it enters the Bear River. When Brigham Young was crossing the Bear River near this section, he named the smaller river the Cub River. 13 SG: What was unusual about your high school and your home? AF: Oh! We went to school on a train. That was fun. SG: How far was it? AF: Oh, probably six miles. SG: Not too far then. AF: Through trees, and we’d stop to pick people up along the way. The boys went in the smokers’ car, some of them. SG: To smoke?! AF: Yes. SG: Oh, my goodness. AF: But not my boyfriends. No. And we had clubs at school, but I’ll be darned if I can remember what they were. I had a dime to buy my lunch. This was during the Depression. SG: What could you get for a dime? AF: A main dish, and a drink, or a dessert. That’s not very much. I’d see kids eating MilkNickels and I’d think, Oh, I want one of those. SG: What’s a Milk-Nickel? AF: Ice cream on a stick covered with chocolate. [Made by Meadow Gold.] SG: Ah! But you couldn’t afford that? AF: No, but when I would see Dad at home in front of the bank talking with the bank president, I would go up and ask him for a nickel. He would hesitate, and he would hesitate, and the bank president (whose name is Ephraim Bergeson 22) would say, “Langton, give the girl a nickel!” SG: So the problem wasn’t that he didn’t have nickels? AF: No. 22 President of the Lewiston State Bank. 14 SG: The problem was… AF: He was a saver. He was also a very astute investor—and I’m getting those nickels now! SG: Okay. (laughs) So, tell me, did you go to church activities during your teenage years? AF: Uh-huh. SG: What kind of activities did you have? AF: We had dances, and a good many of the boys would come drunk. In Mutual, 23 I had one very good teacher, very good; another one turned out to be a prostitute. SG: What?! AF: Yes. And how do I know that? Elizabeth’s husband [Alphalus Harold Bateman] would check her into the hotel in Logan on Friday nights with a salesman. SG: That’s interesting. AF: I never knew it till years later when he told us. He saw her and said, “She’s the one that checks into my hotel with that salesman.” SG: Was she married? AF: No! She had a lingerie shop…a children’s store…she got good stuff, good stuff, and she’d show us all these things that she had for little girls. SG: You’ve always, I think, liked clothes, and I know your mother liked clothes. How did you manage during these Depression years? AF: Well, I tell you, I had one hand-me-down that I absolutely hated from my cousin Effie. Mother made me wear it sometimes. I had a friend who moved in from Kansas City, and she said, “That is the ugliest suit I’ve ever seen!” I said, “I know!” SG: What did it look like? 23 The Young Women Mutual Improvement Association of the LDS Church was nicknamed Mutual or MIA until it was renamed simply Young Women in 1974. Girls were encouraged to set self-improvement goals and earn Individual Awards in various areas, including attending church or other church-related activities, reading scriptures, giving talks, developing habits of prayer, paying tithing, offering service, and so on. 15 AF: I don’t know, but it was kind of a tan color, and it was just plain ugly. I hated it, but we had very few clothes then. We had two pairs of shoes: one for every day and one for Sunday. Years later I was to count thirty pairs of shoes in my closet! So times changed. We had one Sunday dress, then maybe two or three different things we could wear to school. I don’t know. Girls didn’t wear pants then. That was a revolution. 24 SG: Did you have any jobs during these years? AF: No, and I should have. My sister Patsy sold tickets at the theater, the movie theater, and she said when she wasn’t busy selling tickets, she was studying in the booth. I should have had enough sense to do something like that, but I somehow didn’t. SG: And what about friendships? AF: I had a lot of friends; I’ve always had a lot of friends, and we had a neighborhood “gang.” I played football. We had a boy who would build wonderful, wonderful villages in our sand pile; rivers ran through it, and mountains. In the winter, he’d build a snow house against their house, and it was a work of art. He was very good at that. SG: Sounds fun. Did you help around the house? Your mom didn’t do everything herself, did she? AF: No, she didn’t like it that I didn’t like to cook, so I got to clean under the bathtub with legs. It was very hard to crawl under there, and it got dirty, but I did it every week. It was the worst job I’ve ever had! SG: (laughs) The claw-footed tub. AF: Later they boxed that in so no one had to clean under it. But I always got that job. SG: I think I recall you had a mishap with that tub? 24 Trousers have been largely worn by men and not by women until the early 20th century. Women increasingly wore trousers as leisurewear in the 1920s and 30s. For a period in the 1970s, trousers became quite fashionable for women. In the United States, with the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 declaring that dresses could not be required of girls, dress codes changed in public schools across the United States. 16 AF: (laughs) Okay, yes, later they had a fire in the house—that was when I was in college, so I wasn’t home—and then Dad finally put in a furnace. But he thought the furnace could heat enough water. It did—for them. But there was never any water for us to have baths when we went home. We had to heat water on the electric stove so we could have a bath. One time I grabbed the kettle that I thought was the water and dumped it in the tub only to find out it was the stew for the evening meal! I said to my dad, “If only you’d buy a water heater, we wouldn’t have mishaps like this!” He said, “If I didn’t have such damned dumb kids, we wouldn’t either!” (laughs) SG: But you were old enough that you weren’t really afraid of his anger? AF: No, I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. But I was afraid of him when I was a child. I remember hiding behind the couch once when I saw him coming home because he’d been so ornery the night before. Yet he had a lot of charm when he wanted to show it—but he didn’t always show it. SG: Tell me what you did after graduating from high school. And what was happening in the world? AF: I graduated in ’43. SG: From high school? AF: Yes. Ah . . . no, college. High school is ’39: the War was just starting, World War II. Everything was about Hitler. 25 My dad would walk the floor, and I’d say, “What is it?” And he’d say, “It’s that damn Hitler. He’s going to ruin the world. He’s going to ruin the world!” People had a hard time, but because my dad had a steady salary, we didn’t have that hard a time. The price of what farmers got would go down . . . SG: During the war? Or during the Depression? AF: Depression. 26 And some of them had a hard time. One day, five pounds of cheese appeared on our doorstep. The dog had stolen it from a farmer’s porch (laughs) and brought it home to us. 25 As Führer (leader) of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945, Hitler initiated World War II in Europe with the invasion of Poland in September 1939. 17 We didn’t know whose it was, so we kept it! Life was hard without refrigerators. We had an icebox with a big chunk of ice and a can under it to catch the water that melted. I tell you, I think the refrigerator has to be one of the best inventions there ever was, because when we got one, life changed. 27 Ice cream could be saved in it. Mother made homemade ice cream, but it wasn’t good. Now mother was a very good cook, but she didn’t make good ice cream. You need one of those old-fashioned ice cream freezers to make good ice cream; you don’t just put it in the frozen section of the refrigerator and freeze it. It has to turn. SG: What kinds of things did she make that were good? AF: Everything but spaghetti. She made . . . my bread was better than hers, but she made wonderful pies, wonderful cakes; we always had a wonderful dinner on Sunday with the table set beautifully with flowers, good china, a roast, potatoes and gravy, a vegetable, and always a pie or a cake or something. One of my friends in high school had a mother who was not a good cook— she made quilts—and Doris knew what time we ate dinner, and she’d arrive! (laughs) Mother got a kick out of it; she got a kick out of it. She really liked Doris. SG: Tell me about the decision you made whether to be finished with high school or go on to college? AF: It was always understood that we would go to college, so there was no decision. That’s why Dad held extra jobs. And the tuition was very low then. SG: Tell me about the tradition in your family? AF: Oh yes, both my parents were college graduates. My grandmother Barber went to the University of Utah, though my Grandmother Smith only went to third grade. But they were both 26 The Great Depression lasted from 1929 to 1939 and was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world. It began after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and employment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country’s banks had failed. 27 In 1913, refrigerators for home use were invented. In 1923 Frigidaire introduced the first selfcontained unit. The introduction of Freon in the 1920s expanded the refrigerator market during the 1930s. Home freezers as separate compartments (larger than necessary just for ice cubes) were introduced in 1940. Frozen foods, previously a luxury item, became commonplace. 18 outstanding women in their own way, very outstanding. Grandma Smith made the most beautiful wedding cakes ever seen. People would come from near and far to get her to make their wedding cake. She was very busy, and she needed the money because her husband died young. She made patty shells 28 for the Bluebird, which was the best restaurant in town, and a very nice one, I think maybe she made other things for the Bluebird too. That’s where we always liked to go to eat in Logan: the Bluebird—a very fancy restaurant with very good food. 29 SG: Mmm, yes—and chocolates. AF: Yes, their chocolates were a specialty. SG: Since you lived in Lewiston, how did you get to college in Logan? AF: I went to Utah State University, which was Utah State Agricultural College when I was there, and I lived with Aunt Marie 30 to begin with. Aunt Marie was very good for me in the beginning, but later she got so bossy I couldn’t stand it. SG: Tell me a little bit about Aunt Marie. Why was it easy for you to move in with her? AF: She’d always liked me as a child, and she’s the one who took me to movies and vaudevilles and for root beer and sometimes to the Bluebird for meals. I don’t know where she got the money, because she didn’t go to work until she was I-don’t-know-how old. But there was a bond there, and she built me up. She built me up. She told someone I had the handsomest boyfriend, and I didn’t. But anyway . . . I had a boyfriend. I had several, and that was good. When I met Dean, 31 my own boyfriend introduced us, and both of us knew that we were going to marry someday. It was just made known to us—and neither of us liked it! (laughs) SG: Were you in college then or high school? 28 A traditional patty or pastry shell is a flaky bowl most often used to serve creamed vegetables, meats, poultry, or fish, but can also be used for a variety of desserts. 29 The Bluebird was founded in 1914 by O. Guy Cardon, M. N. Neuberger, and Julius Bergsjo. Originally, it was a candy, ice cream, and soda fountain located at 12 West Center Street. Soon after the business opened, a few food items—sandwiches, chili, etc.—were added for lunch. The business prospered and in 1923 the Bluebird moved into a newly constructed building in the present location at 19 North Main Street. 30 Marie Barber was her father’s unmarried older sister who lived in the old Barber family home. 31 Dean Charles Fletcher of Logan, whom she eventually married. 19 AF: Going to begin college. SG: And Aunt Marie was never married. AF: No, she became a social case worker in her later years. SG: Had she graduated from college? AF: No, she went, but she wasn’t much of a student. She had me pick up her grades once, and I laughed all the way home! She was smart; she was very smart, but not much of a student. Now where were we? SG: You and Daddy met and knew you were going to get married but didn’t like that. AF: I’d never seen anyone with so much hair in my life! And he didn’t know how to dress. He probably couldn’t afford to dress because he was one of fourteen children. But anyway, we dated off and on for five years before we married. SG: What was his background, besides the fourteen children? AF: (laughs) His father [Calvin Fletcher] was head of the Art Department at Utah State for forty years. He painted a lot of pictures, but people couldn’t afford to buy pictures then. He should have made quite a bit of money on them, but art wasn’t in then. Art’s been in for a long time now, a long time. But it wasn’t in then. 32 SG: What did people have in their houses? AF: Oh, they’d cut a picture out of a magazine and frame it. Some people, but not very many, had good art. They didn’t. You see, my parents were one of the few couples in Lewiston who 32 Calvin Fletcher attended Brigham Young University, graduating with both a Bachelor of Science and a certificate in Fine Arts while also teaching as an assistant professor of art and manual training, which he continued to teach after his graduation before leaving to study at the Chicago Art Institute. He returned to Utah in 1907 and began his longtime career in the Utah State Art Department. Throughout his life, Calvin Fletcher continually took art classes and studied with various artists in France as well as the United States. He was a member of national and local arts associations, served in various official capacities, won numerous local awards, and exhibited nationally. And he gave private painting lessons in his home all his adult life. Of note, in 1916 he designed and painted murals in the Logan Temple with J. S. Powell; and in 1935, with two other artists, he painted the first LDS fresco in the Logan 105th Ward. (Fresco: a painting done rapidly in watercolor on wet plaster on a wall or ceiling, so that the colors penetrate the plaster and become fixed as it dries.) 20 were college graduates. Come the GI Bill, 33 all kinds of kids that never would have had an education got master’s degrees and such. It was a wonderful thing. SG: Did Aunt Marie live close to the campus? AF: No, I remember walking up to the college. Now that was up a hill, quite a ways. For the first dance, I met a boy there who walked me home and fell in love with me immediately. But I didn’t fall in love with him. We dated for a while until I found someone else. He was a nice kid, but he was just not my type. SG: So it sounds like college for you was really a whole lot about social life since you had grown up in such a tiny little town . . . ? AF: I loved everything about college: I loved the learning, I loved the dating, I loved the friendships, I loved the extracurricular things that went on. And I won an original poetry contest. SG: Congratulations! Belatedly . . . (laughs) How do you feel about education for women now? AF: I’m glad to see that women go all the way through to their Doctor’s degrees. My advisor thought I should go through, but I wasn’t interested. I thought he was crazy. Girls went to college partially to find a husband. I loved college, but I hadn’t got to the point where [I saw its purpose]. There were a few girls who got master’s degrees, and I wondered what in the world was the matter with them! As much as I believed in education, I can’t believe that—that I felt that way. SG: Did women work then? AF: A few. Those who got jobs at the college were those who had to work to be there. I should have worked more than I did. I worked one summer at Fort Douglas. 34 33 The GI Bill, originally known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 22, 1944. It provided veterans funds for college education, unemployment insurance, and housing. 34 During World War II, in addition to serving as the headquarters for the Ninth Service Command, Fort Douglas housed a Prisoner of War camp and served as the Induction, Reception, and Separation Center for the Rocky Mountain Region. New recruits were sworn in, clothed, and received their assignments at the post. Later, when they returned, the soldiers received their discharge there before returning home. During 1943, its peak employment year, the post employed approximately 1,000 military personnel and 2,000 civilians. 21 SG: And where was that? AF: In Salt Lake. SG: Was that during the war? AF: During the war. And when things were a little dull, I’d look up the records of the boys I knew. (laughs) SG: I’m not sure that was part of your job! AF: I had good friends there too. My sister Patsy worked down at Auerbach’s, which was a very prominent department store there, 35 and we had an apartment near the college [University of Utah] up near Fort Douglas. SG: I’m just curious: did you choose that apartment or did your dad? AF: I think Mother did. SG: Mother. Okay. AF: We might have had something to say about it. SG: And you didn’t have a car? AF: No, so we were right close to transportation, both to town and up to Fort Douglas. SG: And what was the transportation then? AF: A bus. SG: How do you think your life growing up was different from other girls of your era, maybe in Utah or maybe somewhere else? Was your family different? AF: Our family was different. SG: In what way? AF: They were better educated, they had better manners, they served food elegantly, they loved the finer things of life: art, music, literature. But I had very good friends. 35 Auerbach’s on Main and South Temple and ZCMI on the corner of Broadway and State were the two major department stores that defined downtown Salt Lake retail. 22 SG: And were any of them like your family? AF: Some were somewhat. Not many, no. SG: Did you ever feel different? AF: Um . . . yes. I felt inferior religiously. I felt different in the things that we had that they didn’t have. SG: And when you went on to college, did you continue to go to church on your own? AF: Some of the time. I remember Dad coming one Sunday when I was still living with Aunt Marie and saying, “Aren’t you at church?” I should have said, “Aren’t you?” I wanted to, but I didn’t quite dare. SG: How did your education impact your life? AF: Well, I’d always read a lot, but it impacted me because I had to read more. And more different subjects. And I certainly wanted my children educated, as did their father. There was never any question about that. I would study at night, and then in the winter I would walk down a block where there was a nice skating rink and relax ice skating. That was fun, and I went to a lot of dances. The church would have dances during the week, and the college had them every Friday night. We had a great orchestra, and that was the age of great dance music. SG: Which in particular? What did you like the best? AF: Damn it, I can’t think of it, and his plane crashed in Europe … SG: Benny Goodman? AF: No, I didn’t like Benny Goodman: he was too jazzy for me. 36 Who was Miller? Arthur Miller? No. SG: He was a playwright. Um, gosh I should know too but I don’t. Tommy Dorsey? 37 36 Benjamin David “Benny” Goodman (1909–1986) was an American jazz and swing musician, clarinetist and bandleader, known as the “King of Swing.” In the mid-1930s, Goodman led one of the most popular musical groups in the United States. 23 AF: I say his name all the time! SG: Glenn Miller! AF: Glenn Miller. 38 Yeah. His music is what the orchestra played, and it was great dance music, just great—with a huge dance hall and lots of fun, lots of fun. During high school I went to quite a few parties, and . . . a few dances. SG: When you graduated from college, what did you see as your future? AF: When I was a teacher? SG: When you graduated from college. AF: I don’t understand your question. SG: When you graduated from college, what were you looking forward to? AF: Oh, teaching school, and the first time I was interviewed I was accepted. I went to Sugar City, Idaho 39, and it was amazing to me that a school teacher was never taught in college how to teach school. Now I had taught in the church when I was fifteen. I remember a little, oh . . . the lesson was on missionary work, and a little boy said to me, “My father went on a mission.” I said, “Where did he go?” and he said, “To the mission field.” (laughs) SG: It was a field! AF: Yeah. 37 Thomas Francis “Tommy” Dorsey Jr. (1905–1956) was an American jazz trombonist, composer, conductor and bandleader of the Big Band era. He was known as the “Sentimental Gentleman of Swing” because of his smooth-toned trombone playing. 38 Alton Glenn Miller (1904–missing in action 1944) was an American big band musician, arranger, composer, and bandleader in the swing era. He was the best-selling recording artist from 1939 to 1943, leading one of the best known big bands. While he was traveling to entertain U.S. troops in France during World War II, Miller's aircraft disappeared in bad weather over the English Channel. 39 Sugar City is a small farming community near Rexburg, Idaho, and within driving distance of Yellowstone National Park and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Originally, Sugar City was a company town for the Fremont County Sugar Company, which was part of the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, supporting a sugar beet processing factory built in 1903-1904. 24 SG: So you were teaching high school in Sugar City, Idaho, and well . . . why don’t you just tell me what happened during your twenties? AF: Oh gosh! That was a long time ago! I’m ninety-four! SG: I know, but something big was happening in your twenties. AF: The war. Oh, the war. Yes. I remember a cousin of mine who just got home from a mission in England, and while he came to see us, the war started—the march into Czechoslovakia. 40 Of course, he knew it was going to come. He knew it was going to come. I wondered then why there have always been wars, and I still wonder. They’re sick. People are crazy. Why can’t we have peace? We had a few years of peace, and they were wonderful. The war years were wonderful in a way, though: I have never experienced such patriotism. People loved this country, and they didn’t mind what they had to give up for it. They weren’t selfish. Gas was rationed. Food was rationed. Clothes were rationed. Cars were rationed, and on and on and on and on. People didn’t complain, they did not complain. They did what had to be done so we could beat that madman Hitler, and Mussolini over in Italy, and Hirohito in Japan. 41 This was a three-way war, and it went even into Africa. SG: So you were very aware of it even though you were . . . AF: I didn’t like to read about it. I didn’t like to read about it, but I would hear the radio about it. And movies then had newsreels, 42 and they’d have things about it. That was before television. Our television was the newsreels that were shown at the movie theaters, and they were good. 40 Officially, World War II began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and the French and English declared war against Germany as a result of that invasion. However, before that, on 15 March 1939, German troops marched into Czechoslovakia, pouring into the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, which were quickly made a protectorate of Germany. By evening, Hitler had entered into Prague. 41 Known as the Axis powers, this coalition headed by Germany, Italy, and Japan opposed the Allied powers in World War II. 42 During World War II most Americans followed the news of the war through three sources: radio broadcasts, newspapers, and newsreels that preceded the movies at their local theaters. Along with radio and newspapers, newsreels played a vital role in connecting the home front with the war front and kept Americans informed about the progress of the fighting overseas as well as its impact on their communities. Newsreels continued as a source of news, current affairs, and entertainment for millions of moviegoers until television supplanted its role in the 1950s. 25 SG: You were teaching school when the war started. What else happened in your life about that time? AF: Well, I went ice skating with my students in Sugar City in the winter. I had a couple of dates maybe, farm boys who were given deferrals because they had to work on the farm. This was a small high school I taught at, and the daughter of one of the other teachers has since become very famous—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. 43 She won the Nobel? SG: Pulitzer, I think. Was she a student when you were there? AF: She was a little girl. Her father was a teacher. He taught political science and history. John Kenneth Thatcher. 44 I boarded with wonderful people. First the home ec teacher and I just had an apartment. During the harvest vacation, which went on and on and on, the Wilding family lost a little girl very sadly. When we got back after harvest vacation, Mrs. Wilding came to see if we would board with her. She was missing this daughter terribly. Now, these were farmers, very good farmers, well-to-do farmers, and they saw that all their children were educated. It was a sad, sad, sad story. Her dad put her on a machine grading potatoes, I think, and she got her arm caught. They had to give her ether, and she was allergic to it. That was a terrible thing to happen. SG: Who came back into your life about this time? AF: Dean. SG: Yes. Dean who? AF: Dean Fletcher. He had been in my life off and on all through college. (He had a terrible memory, but he only forgot one date he made.) While we were still in college, we went over to 43 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was born in Sugar City, Idaho, and graduated from the University of Utah, majoring in English and journalism. She is an American historian of early America and the history of women, and a professor at Harvard University. She received the Pulitzer Prize for her work, A Midwife’s Tale, which examines the life of northern New England midwife Martha Ballard and provides a vivid examination of ordinary life in the early American republic. 44 John Kenneth Thatcher was a schoolteacher and superintendent as well as state legislator and farmer. 26 Brigham City 45 with some friends to go swimming, and he was going to propose to me that night. (My friend told me afterwards.) I always go to sleep after I swim because I’m so relaxed. So I went to sleep—and I didn’t get proposed to! (laughs) SG: Oh! AF: Then when we graduated, he came and brought me a present. But he didn’t take me any place! Then, the next Christmas he sent me a present and said, “I’ll be coming home, and I’ll have something else for you.” I thought, Oh my! SG: Where was he? AF: Camp Davis, North Carolina, in the Army. 46 SG: In the Army, okay. AF: I didn’t know what I was going to do about that because . . . I just didn’t know! He came to Sugar City—he had been commissioned an officer then—and the Wildings had plenty of room to put him up for the night. They let us borrow their car. Gas was rare but they had enough gas in it, and we went to a dance a ways up the road. I didn’t know whether to take that ring or not; I did not know what to do. Now, do you want religion as part of this? SG: Sure. AF: I made it a matter of prayer. I wondered how many people are absolutely sure when they get married. I don’t think all are. Then I remembered that Aunt Frances, 47 who had never married, had said to me, “I think you should marry Dean Fletcher.” This was when we were in college. I’d said, “I don’t love him,” and she’d said, “He will be good to you, he will be successful, and you will learn to love him.” That came back to my mind. With that and a lot of prayer, I accepted his ring. SG: And when were you married? 45 Brigham City, Utah, is almost a straight shot south from Sugar City, Idaho, down U.S. 1-15, taking a little more than two-and-a-half hours driving time. 46 Camp Davis served as an important antiaircraft training center during World War II. 47 Frances Barber, another of her father’s older sisters, got her master’s degree in children’s literature and later taught at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. 27 AF: The following April 5th. 48 Do you want to hear the sad part of when we went home? SG: Sure. AF: Dean was going back to Logan then to finish his leave, and he said, “Come with me.” So I got someone to substitute for me teaching. But when I told everyone in my family, they thought I was crazy. Everyone. It was a very difficult time, but I kept remembering what Aunt Frances had said. Aunt Marie didn’t want me to marry Dean because of religion. SG: He was more religious? AF: Now, this is interesting. He was the least fanatical of anyone in his family. He would go to movies on Sunday. And I hadn’t grown up in a religious family, so his family thought he’d married into a—what do you call it? SG: Gentile family? 49 (laughs) AF: And mine thought I’d married into a fanatical family. In time, Dean became more broad minded, which he needed, and I became more religious, and it worked out just fine. SG: Good. AF: Just fine, and guess what? SG: What? AF: My sister Elizabeth, when Dean and I came from the east to visit her, said, “How does it seem to be married to a handsome, successful, fun-loving man?” SG: So you knew that she accepted him? AF: Yes! SG: Good. 48 On April 5, 1944, Dean Charles Fletcher and Ann Louise Barber were married in the Logan LDS Temple. 49 In the Bible, the Hebrew and Greek words translated into English as “Gentile” signified other peoples, i.e., “not Israelite” and later “not Jewish.” For Mormons, gentile generally means “not Latter-day Saint,” although it is sometimes used pejoratively to suggest a person is worldly and perhaps immoral as well. 28 AF: And they all did, all my family. SG: Good. Okay so… AF: How was my teaching? SG: Well, no, I was just going to move on since you’ve talked about being married and Daddy being in the Army. So what happened then? AF: He had to go overseas, and luckily he never was in a battle. 50 SG: When he went overseas, what about you? I know you had followed him. AF: In camps. Now that was fun. I got to see the country, see the different cultures in our own country. It was very educational, and I loved it, especially being in New York. Then I went home [to visit]; I was pregnant with Louise. (Everyone said, “Well, she isn’t pregnant.” With the first one you don’t show as soon.) Oh, I know . . . my mother had said, “I want you to get pregnant just as fast as you can.” I’d said, “Now Mother, I’m not going to do it.” “Why aren’t you?” “Well, what if it comes early? Dean got home just two days before we were married.” She said, “People would say that, you know . . . !” “But then if the baby comes early, they’ll say it was someone else’s baby.” “Oh!” She finally got my point. SG: That really wasn’t the reason you wanted to wait, was it? AF: Part of it. I also just didn’t think you should start out a marriage being sick. I still don’t think you should. You should get acquainted. Okay, anyway, I was pregnant and went home to Utah for a visit, and I went to see my friend Doris who was pregnant too. She lived in Smithfield, and 50 During World War II, Dean Fletcher served at various stations in the U.S., the South Pacific, and Japan. He received the Army Commendation Medal for his leadership as Adjutant and Personnel Officer for Headquarters and Service Group, both in Manila, Philippines, and at Tokyo, Japan. 29 she wanted me to spend the night. I just didn’t feel right about it. I said, “I don’t think I’d better.” When I got home, the phone rang, and it was Dean telling me as much as he could—they couldn’t really tell you everything. 51 He told me that he was about to ship out, and in two hours my water broke. SG: Was it stress, do you think? AF: Yes, I do. Mother kept hearing me running into the bathroom. She said, “What’s happened?” I told her, and she said, “Well, okay. Are you having any pains?” “No.” I don’t know whether she called the doctor then or when she got up in the morning, but we got to the hospital. Is it okay to talk about having babies? SG: I don’t know. (laughs) Go ahead! AF: I still wasn’t having any pains, but Mother thought because the water had broken, we’d better be there. And she knew! The pain started, and Mother could see me clenching the headboard of the bed because the pain was so severe. The nurse called the doctor and said, “Your patient is doing just fine.” Mother grabbed the phone out of her hand and said, “Get here immediately!” So he came. (My sister Elizabeth was out on the porch at the high school and saw him fly by, and she knew that was going to be it.) They had to cross my legs so the baby wouldn’t be born before he got there! SG: But the baby was fine? AF: She was fine; she was little, but fine. And when Louise came, she came three and a half weeks early! Mother said, “Oh, thank goodness you didn’t get pregnant as soon as you were married!” (laughs) Dean was just about to be shipped out of the country when she was born, and Dad—how did they communicate then? SG: Phone. 51 During World War II, because it was so important not to let out information that might reach enemy forces, letters sent home from servicemen were routinely censored and servicemen were instructed not to include specifics, even in phone calls, as to location (except for the country), where the writer was going next, battle content, or movement of other units. 30 AF: No, he sent a telegram: It’s a girl! Everyone fine, including Grandpa! (laughs) And so Dean was able to ship me flowers and to call me [before he shipped out]. SG: After the war, you and Daddy really took up your life together. You couldn’t before that because you were living with your parents. AF: Right. SG: Tell me about that time. AF: Well, we lived with Aunt Marie for a while, but that was very bad. My old boyfriend Horace Milligan, also a friend of Dean’s, found us an apartment, and we moved into that. Dean was getting his master’s degree. I didn’t want to have a baby the first year Dean was back because we hardly knew each other. He courted me more after we were married than he did before. That doesn’t often happen, I think, but it happened with us. He was doing research involving experiments on pheasants, so one summer we lived on pheasants. 52 That was good, and our neighbors had a big garden and gave us part of it. We grew vegetables, and I canned beans. And, oh, Louise was a beautiful baby and so smart, so smart. Then the second year I had you, and guess what? You were as smart or smarter! (laughs) Before you were born, you kicked and kicked and kicked and kicked, and after you were born, I’d look at you in your bed, and you were just kicking and kicking and kicking! You were also born with calluses on two thumbs, and you sucked your thumbs even though my uncle who was a pediatrician thought it was shameful! I let you suck them till you went to first grade, and then I said, “Now do you think you could stop?” And you said, “I think I can,” and you did. SG: Alright. (laughs) So Daddy finished his master’s degree, and you have two children. What then? AF: We had the worst winter I’ve ever lived through. Oh, my gosh! We had a basement apartment, and the snow was up above the windows. Ice everywhere, cattle freezing to death . . . it was a terrible winter! Dean decided he was going to go somewhere else to get his doctorate degree, but Dad thought he should get it at Utah State. Dean found a house that we could buy for $4,500, and Dad said, “Prices will never go higher!” (laughs) “You can’t pay that. You can build 52 Dean Fletcher was working on his master’s degree from Utah State University in Public Health. 31 a basement apartment.” Dean would not hear of it. So he began applying to graduate schools. He took the one that would pay him the most money, and of course we had the GI Bill. It was the University of Delaware, and his new classmates there had gone to Harvard and to Johns Hopkins. It was a wonderful school for chemistry, and Dean was a biochemist. Ellen was born while we were in Delaware. We had a wonderful time there, a wonderful time and wonderful neighbors . . . wonderful neighbors. They immediately had me join their clubs. Kay Moyne, who was my best friend who happened to be Catholic, would invite me out in the evenings. Dean was studying, so he was with you kids. Kay’s husband Ernie was making his preparations for teaching, so we had a wonderful time, Kay Moyne and I, just wonderful. SG: And what about church? AF: Aw! David Merrill happened to be in Logan and read that we were going to Delaware. He knew Dad, and he called him up and told him about the church in Delaware and that he was branch president of the Wilmington Branch, 53 so we went. It was a small branch, and we were welcomed with wide open arms, wide open arms, and someone invited us to dinner that week and someone the next week. That’s the kind of branch it was. And guess what? The members weren’t narrow-minded! (laughs) SG: Which had been a problem for you before? AF: Right. Yes, it had been a problem for me before. The branch had wonderful parties, wonderful parties. We had a few converts, and we had a very ambitious man, Leo Stirland, who decided we needed a church building. (We were meeting in an old Odd Fellows 54 building in downtown Wilmington). He went to Salt Lake, and when he came back he said, “They don’t want to build churches, so we’ll build our own!”—which was not done then! It just wasn’t done. Someone told us the Catholic priest got up and said, “I heard that the Mormons are looking for some territory to build on. I don’t want any of you to sell.” This made one of his parishioners so 53 In the LDS Church, a ward is the larger of two types of local congregations, the smaller being a branch. A ward is presided over by a bishop, the equivalent of a pastor in many other Christian denominations; a branch is presided over by a branch president. 54 The Odd Fellows are one of the earliest and oldest fraternal societies. Odd Fellows are also known as “The Three Link Fraternity,” which stands for Friendship, Love, and Truth. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows was founded on the North American continent in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 26, 1819. 32 angry that he sold us his prize land in the best part of town! (laughs) So you see, there are narrow-minded in every church and not narrow-minded. SG: All right. (laughs) Let’s skip ahead a bit now. When you were in your thirties, you were in Delaware and that was a period of the Cold War. 55 Did that affect you in any way? AF: It didn’t affect me as much as it did you kids. It affected Dean because he worked with the local civil defense. SG: What ways did it affect us? AF: They scared you to death about it at school. 56 You’d come home and have hide outs in the basement. You know, I can’t remember much else: I’m ninety-four. SG: But after going through the war, it didn’t worry you too much? AF: Not too much. I don’t know why. I thought they didn’t have wars that often—like heck! They had the Korean War . . . 57 SG: What do you remember about maybe the Vietnam War? 55 The Cold War refers to the relationship that developed primarily between the USA and the USSR after World War II. The Cold War dominated international affairs for decades and many major crises occurred—the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the Hungarian revolution, and the Berlin Wall, for instance. For many, the growth in weapons of mass destruction was the most worrying issue. Historians do not fully agree on the dates, but a common time frame is the period between 1947, the year both the Marshall Plan (an Economic Recovery Plan to help Western European nations rebuild and resist the spread of communism) and the Truman doctrine (a U.S. foreign policy pledging to aid nations threatened by Soviet expansionism) were announced, and 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. 56 During the early days of the Cold War, the Federal Civil Defense Administration was set up in 1951 to educate—and reassure—the country that there were ways to survive an atomic attack from the Soviet Union. One approach was to involve schools in “duck and cover” drills. Teachers would suddenly yell, “Drop!” and students were expected to kneel down under their desks with their hands clutched around their heads and necks. 57 The Korean War began when North Korea invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950. The United Nations, with the United States as the principal force, came to the aid of South Korea. China came to the aid of North Korea, as did the Soviet Union. The fighting ended on 27 July 1953, when an armistice was signed. The agreement created the Korean Demilitarized Zone to separate North and South Korea and allowed the return of prisoners. However, no peace treaty has been signed, and the two Koreas are technically still at war. Periodic clashes, many of them deadly, continue to the present. 33 AF: Okay now, when did we leave Delaware? SG: 1957. AF: ’57. We went to Utah. SG: No, we went to Nevada. AF: To Nevada, right. I remember that it wasn’t a popular war, that no one who fought in it said we were going to win it, [they said] that we couldn’t possibly win it, that we weren’t really fighting to win it. That’s what they all said. And we didn’t win it, and that’s the first war we hadn’t won, I think. 58 SG: Korea maybe. AF: Yeah. It wasn’t a good time. SG: Economically how did you and Dean do? AF: We had to live very closely for a long time, but we didn’t have a huge debt because he was on the GI Bill, and he had a fellowship besides. His GI Bill ran out a month before he graduated, got his PhD, but they carried him another month! We had to live carefully, but we were very happy, and we had a good time. We always had a good time. SG: And eventually you moved back west. AF: Yes, and boy, am I glad we moved back west. SG: Why? AF: To be close to family. It’s so far to Delaware, even though I was very happy there, had wonderful friends in the church and out. SG: Reno was a very different place from Wilmington, Delaware. How did you adjust? 58 The Vietnam War occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. Direct U. S. military involvement ended on 15 August 1973. The capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese Army in April 1975 marked the end of the war, and North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year. Objectively, North Vietnam—the communists—who achieved their goals of reuniting and gaining independence for the whole Vietnam won the war, whereas South Vietnam under U.S. support lost the war. 34 AF: Well, I had two sisters there. That was a help. (Did I have the two? Yes.) I don’t think it was hard adjusting. Then we had neighbors on one side who were very friendly, the Trimmers. We played cards with them almost every night. Dean was working at two hospitals in the laboratory. Now this was below what he should have been doing, so he walked into the president’s office at the University of Nevada and applied for a job. He got one with tenure right then. He had worked in an industry, see—for DuPont. 59 SG: So he did research, but he taught also? AF: Yes. He loved teaching, he loved teaching. SG: Did you ever work outside the home, or were you a homemaker? AF: I worked in the community an awfully lot. I worked in the library, the City Library; I worked in the University art gallery; I worked in the hospital gift shop; I was involved in educational things. SG: Did you keep your teaching credentials current? AF: I did teach a year in Reno, and—oh my gosh—I almost died that year, teaching in a very difficult part of town and desperately needing a hysterectomy. I had to go back to school if I was going to continue teaching to bring my credits up to par, and something interesting happened. My contract to teach in Reno that year had said it was for a year; the health insurance was for a full year. I had the surgery in the summer. When they saw that I wasn’t going to teach the next year, they called me and said, “You can’t [have surgery]. We can’t pay for your surgery. You’ve quit teaching.” I said, “My contract says my insurance lasts a year.” So they paid. SG: Good! Okay, now tell me, what other ways did you use your teaching talents? 59 DuPont was founded in 1802 at the Eleutherian Mills, on the Brandywine Creek, near Wilmington, Delaware. As the inventor and manufacturer of nylon, DuPont helped produce the raw materials for parachutes, powder bags, and tires. After the war, DuPont continued its emphasis on new materials, developing Mylar, Dacron, Orlon, and Lycra in the 1950s, and Tyvek, Nomex, Qiana, Corfam, and Corian in the 1960s. 35 AF: In the church. I taught Relief Society. 60 I loved it. There was no problem with rowdy kids, and for the Cultural Refinement classes they had literature to teach, which was my major so I loved it. I also taught gospel doctrine [the Sunday School class for adults], and I had people coming up saying, “It must be a great satisfaction to you to teach the way you do.” SG: And it was. AF: And it was. It was a great satisfaction to me. SG: Do you remember anything about the women’s movement? 61 AF: I was very happy for the women’s movement. I can see now that it had its minuses as well as its pluses. I think women have been overlooked throughout the centuries, still are in the Church to some extent, though they’ve improved somewhat. I was thrilled [that people were finally looking out for the rights of women]. SG: Can you talk about any significant losses that you’ve had in your life? AF: Well . . . my parents, my grandmother, grandmothers. I never remembered either grandfather, though my baby book tells me I loved my grandfather Barber better than anyone and that he carried me all over Logan on his shoulders, as I’ve already mentioned. How do you 60 Ann moved to Reno in 1957. In the 1950s and on through the ‘60s and ‘70s, Relief Society met on weekdays, and the Relief Society curriculum included four areas of emphasis: theology, which was renamed “spiritual living” in 1966; social science retitled social relations in 1966; work meeting, which focused on practical skills of home management and included workshops, became known as homemaking meeting that year; and literature, which was redefined more broadly as “cultural refinement” in 1966. The cultural refinement classes “continued with the successful six-year course based on textbooks titled Out of the Best Books, compiled and edited by Bruce B. Clark and Robert K. Thomas of the Brigham Young University Department of English.” Cultural refinement eventually expanded its curriculum to include the study of other cultures. In 1987 that course was dropped from Sunday’s curriculum and became an option for the weekday meeting. See Jill Mulvay Derr, Janath Russell Cannon, and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher’s Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society (Deseret Book, 1992), 332, 395. 61 The women’s movement began with the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963 by Betty Freidan. At that time, women could generally not open bank accounts or buy homes in their own name; they rarely had jobs other than as teachers, nurses or secretaries and most middle-class women quit their employment at the time of marriage. They rarely participated in vigorous sports nor challenged men in intellectual endeavors. The Women’s Liberation Movement questioned assumptions about family, social and economic life and was controversial from the beginning. 36 explain death to a fifteen-month old? When I asked, “Where’s Bampa?” they could only say, “All gone.” He died of a heart attack on a hunting expedition. SG: How about the last big loss that you had? AF: Dean? Well, Dean was everything after we were married that he wasn’t before we were married –as far as courting goes. And goodness, we had a wonderful time. We traveled a lot, and he had a good disposition, a good disposition. But he was sick a great deal, so it wasn’t a surprise that he died young. 62 When we moved from Reno, we moved in the winter. As he was hosing out the garage, he fell and hit his head on some ice. What do they call what he had? SG: AV malformation? AF: AV malformation in his head, and he just couldn’t see right and he couldn’t feel right. 63 He had two surgeries, long surgeries, trying to clear that out. We lived in Pullman, Washington, far away from any of our children at the time. I always had a lot of friends. He was going to have a very long surgery, and two of them said, “We’ll go to the hospital and wait with you.” That was nice—but all they did was talk about people they’d known before I moved there! (laughs) SG: Where were you living then? Was that in Reno? AF: No, it wasn’t Reno. SG: Pullman? AF: Yeah, Pullman, Washington. SG: He was teaching at Washington State University. AF: Yeah. SG: Your children didn’t live close. 62 Dean Charles Fletcher died when he was 68, on 20 March 1990 in St. George, Utah. Arteriovenous malformation (AVM) is an abnormal connection between arteries and veins, bypassing the capillary system. An AV malformation occurs most often in the brain or spine. Even so, brain AVMs are rare and affect less than 1 percent of the population. Some people may experience neurological signs and symptoms, depending on the location of the AVM, such as severe headache, weakness, numbness or paralysis, vision loss, difficulty speaking, confusion or inability to understand others, or severe unsteadiness. Surgery is the most common treatment for brain AVMs. 63 37 AF: No. Susette, you called me one day and said, “Is Daddy all right?” I said, “No, he isn’t.” You said, “I’ve been wondering. He called me up and told me he was going to build you something that you’d always deserved.” I don’t know what it was, but I couldn’t find the doctor to find out what in the world was going on. It took me three days to run the doctor down. I finally got him, and I said, “Is he all right?” And he said, “No, he’s crazy as hell!” And he was . . . from that surgery. It took him a long time to recover, and during that time he couldn’t read. I had to read all the new scientific information to him so he was up on everything. I don’t think he appreciated me, but I think it was very generous of me! (laughs) And I learned a lot too about oncogenes and . . . yeah. And then he had to re-learn how to read, and he did it. Most people couldn’t tell how much he’d lost during that, those surgeries. I could tell because I was with him all the time, but most people didn’t know. He was a very bright man, and the University was very good to him while he was recuperating. They’d let him work half a day, they paid him full time, he got extra time for being sick. They were very good. And the ward was good: they’d come and prune our trees, mow our lawn, weed our garden. I was so allergic I couldn’t do the weeding at that point in my life. My allergies have virtually disappeared: that is one plus for getting old! Dean was hard to live with during part of this time. He really was because he had so much pain in his head. SG: What finally took him? AF: Okay, he had to go to Chicago to have some treatment on his head that finally helped him, and he could then live without pain and not take any pain medication. Three months later he found he had prostate cancer. SG: . . . which sometimes is not such a terrible diagnosis. AF: Most men live with it for years and years and years and die of something else. Dean happened to have a very aggressive kind. He lived two years, during which time he would go to Spokane to have treatments. SG: Radiation. 38 AF: Radiation treatments, and that all came free from the American Cancer Society. 64 I really still endow the Cancer Society because I’ve had two children with cancer in addition to a husband killed. This time we’d go home for weekends, and people would flock to the house--too much. It was a difficult time. Now, I like people, and I’ve always had a lot of friends, but we needed some time alone and with children—the children came. Susette had a lovely time on the plane with her baby who couldn’t stand the ascent. SG: Right . . . she screamed and screamed. AF: Yes, and as soon as the plane leveled off, she was okay. Hurt her ears, I think. SG: Yup. AF: During this period, we moved to St. George, Utah, where my sister Patsy lived, and which was almost equidistant from our children. We had a few good months there, and then Dean began to go downhill. We had help, though, fortunately. We didn’t want any more of the hospital than we had to have, so we kept Dean at home, using home nurses. We also had . . . what are those other people called? SG: Hospice. AF: Hospice. 65 Those people were wonderful, just wonderful. They said to me, “He’s not going to live long. You’re going to have to have a life after he’s gone, and we recommend that you start it right now.” So, I went places with my new friends there. Sometimes my sister Pat would come over but not very often. So Dean was left alone maybe more . . . no, the hospice would come at night when I was gone and during the day too. So he wasn’t left alone very much, but I wonder if I left him too much. I was doing what they told me to do, though. And Susette, you 64 The American Cancer Society is a nationwide voluntary health organization dedicated to eliminating cancer. The society was founded on May 23, 1913, by 15 physicians and businessmen in New York City and is one of the oldest and largest volunteer health organizations. Donations to the American Cancer Society help fund research to find cures for cancer, as well as supporting cancer patients who are in need of financial support. 65 Hospice care focuses on the palliation of a chronically ill, terminally ill, or seriously ill patient’s pain and symptoms, and attending to their emotional and spiritual needs. In hospice care the main guardians are the family caregiver and a hospice team who make periodic stops. Hospice can be administered in a nursing home, hospice building, or sometimes a hospital; however, it is most commonly practiced in the home. 39 and I became close because you came often and brought Erin, and Erin was wonderful. (laughs) She was four; she turned four that winter. And you were a tremendous help, a tremendous help. The bishop came in one Sunday to visit. After a few minutes, he went to leave, then came back and said, “Be sure and watch the Superbowl!” (laughs) I thought that was very good of him! We also had some very spiritual moments when the Mutual came and sang to him. SG: The Young Women. AF: And they were all . . . I had good help, I did. I had good help. Even so, I’d have to rush him to the hospital now and then. One time I had to, and he was so thirsty. There was nothing to drink within the room they’d given him because they were so crowded that day and someone had just left. I went to the nurse’s station and said, “He really needs a drink of water.” That nurse said, “He does, does he? Well, we’ve been awfully busy this morning!” I went back to the room and said, “Dean, there’s a real hellion in there! (laughs) I don’t know whether you’re going to get any water.” She was following me, and I didn’t know it! But the head nurse apologized all over the place—and sent him flowers! Mostly we had good experiences with hospitals, but we didn’t stay any longer than we had to. One time in Washington, he was up at the University of Washington at a hospital, and he came home when I didn’t expect him. He said, “I was nothing but a strange one for the medical students to look at, and I’m sick of it so I signed myself out!” SG: Good for him. AF: Yeah. SG: As you look back through your life and all the things you’ve experienced, how do you think your life has been different from your mother’s life? AF: My mother’s? Well, quite different; I mean life has changed tremendously, tremendously. Women now are college presidents; women now sometimes earn more than their husbands, and the husband’s the house mother. Um . . . we think more. We always read in our family, read a lot. Everything has been invented; it’s amazing the mechanical things that children enjoy now. I’m glad women have come into their own . . . almost. Almost. 40 SG: How would you compare your life with the lives of your daughters? AF: Well now, there’s that much improvement in my daughters. They’ve worked more, and I wish I’d worked more, though I’ve done a lot of volunteer work, an awful lot of volunteer work, which satisfied that need. But my daughters differ somewhat. One of them is more like me, and the other two maybe are more religious, but we’re all good friends, we all love each other, and I think I have wonderful children, and I think they know that. SG: Is there anything you’d like to say as you look over your life before you close, anything you’ve learned about yourself or learned about life? AF: I’ve learned that I’m smarter than I thought I was. That’s what I have learned from doing taxes! (laughs) I always knew I was good at some things, and I’ve always been interested in education and all educational and artistic matters, always, and always worked in them wherever I’ve lived. I wish I’d have spent more time with my children when they were little instead of having the house absolutely clean—which I don’t have now. I’m sure there are more. SG: That’s good. Thank you so much for your time and your memories. 41