Annette Poulson Benson Cumming, interviewed for the Aileen H. Clyde 20th Century Women's Legacy Archive, 2014

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.

Annette Poulson Benson Cumming Interviewed by Marie Cornwall and Louise Degn for the Aileen H. Clyde 20th -Century Women's Legacy Archive Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah May 13, 2014 Annette Poulson Benson Cumming Interviewed by Marie Cornwall and Louise Degn for the Aileen H. Clyde 20th -Century Women's Legacy Archive Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah Born: August 29, 1946, Salt Lake City, Utah Parents: Ernest Lester Poulson and Helen Lilywhite Poulson Husbands: Arthur Kay Benson; Ian MacNeil Cumming Children: John Darnaby Cumming David Edward Cumming 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 Aileen H. Clyde and the Clyde Family Foundation. Marie Cornwall conducted this interview along with Louise Degn. Transcription was by Elizabeth Condie Brough and editing by Dawn Hall Anderson. Footnotes were added by Dawn Anderson and Marie Cornwall and approved by the interviewee. Marie Cornwall 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. Interview (May 13, 2014) Marie Cornwall (MC): First, to start with, say your full name, your birthdate, and your birthplace. Annette Cumming (AC): Annette Poulson Cumming. I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on August 29, 1946. MC: Now, I want to take you back and begin by asking you about when you were ten. Describe for me what your life was like as a ten-year-old: where you were living, your family, what you did. AC: I lived in Paris, France. MC: Really?! AC: My dad was in the Air Force; he’d enlisted during World War II. Growing up, he lived in Ephraim, Utah, and he was a drummer boy in the National Guard. He thought that wasn’t a good place to be in the war (laughs), so he went to pilot training school, and he was a pilot in the war. Then after the war, he served in Europe. So when I was ten, eleven, twelve years of age, thereabouts, we lived in Paris, France, in a sort of military international village with all kinds of different people that worked at SHAPE—Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers of Europe. And then later Charles de Gaulle 1 kicked SHAPE out. But living there was really fun. MC: Tell me your father’s name and your mother’s name while we’re at it. AC: Ernest Lester Poulson; my mother was Helen Lillywhite—that was her maiden name. She was from Mesa, Arizona. 2 MC: After the war, then, he stayed there for a while? 1 Charles de Gaulle was a French general and leader of Free France during World War II. He later founded the French Fifth Republic in 1958 and served as its first president from 1959 to 1969. 2 The Poulson Commons Historic Fort Douglas Officers Quarters #610 was renamed and dedicated on October 16, 2004 as the 610 Poulson Honors Thesis Mentoring Community in honor of Helen Lillywhite and Ernest Lester Poulson. Nursing students in the residential program work individually and collectively on their theses and capstone projects while living in the home. The Poulson family lived in the home for a time during Mr. Poulson’s military service in the 1940s. During the 2002 Winter Olympics, the house served as the store for the Athletes Village. 2 AC: He stayed in the military for twenty years. MC: And so your mother just met him there? Or did he come home? AC: They had a blind date before the war, and they communicated the whole time. He was in prison camp for seventeen months in Romania. Prisoners tried many times to escape. Most of them failed, and then he finally escaped on his own. He was hiding out in the bushes and decided he would have to go knock on some farmer’s door. After a few days he did that and found out that the war had just ended! And then they met after he came home and did what everybody else did: they hurried and got married. They moved to Salt Lake, and I was born here in Salt Lake. They lived in Officer’s Circle up there at Fort Douglas. 3 MC: So as a ten-year-old were you learning French? AC: A little bit. We were in an American school, sadly. Un petit peu. MC: And at ten your friends were . . . ? AC: I can’t really remember much of that, but they were probably mostly Americans because I was at the American school. But we did have international friends and acquaintances there in the village. MC: And did you have brothers and sisters? AC: Yes, I’m the oldest. Then next is my schizophrenic brother, then another brother, and then a younger sister, who was born in Paris. MC: How long did you live in Paris? AC: Three years. MC: That must have been exciting for a ten-year-old—especially a ten-year-old from Salt Lake. AC: It was fun. But we didn’t appreciate it then! 3 After World War II, the Army began a slow divestiture of its lands at Fort Douglas to the University of Utah, which is located directly adjacent to it. However, it maintained busy Reserve functions for several more decades. 3 Louise Degn (LD): What were the names of your siblings? AC: Steve . . . (Stephen) and Tim (Timothy), who lives in Logan, and Cindy (Cynthia), who lives here in Salt Lake. MC: So you returned to Salt Lake for high school? AC: Yes, after being in Los Angeles for junior high. My father worked on the Atlas Missile there while still in the Air Force. 4 My dad retired after twenty years, and we moved back to Salt Lake after traveling around in many places. We lived in Salt Lake, and I went to high school and college here. I went to Highland High School. MC: Now, you went to college. I want some background on your decision about college. Was there always an expectation that you would go to college? How did you make that decision? AC: I think there was just an expectation. It was never very, oh, strategic. No one ever suggested, nor did I consider, doing anything amazing—like some other people did at that age. (laughs) So I thought that there were three choices: to be a secretary, a teacher, or a nurse. So I picked the most interesting thing. I went to nursing school at the University of Utah—and loved it and worked for eleven years as a nurse. MC: Did most of your friends also go to college? AC: They did, all of them. MC: So you became a nurse by what year? AC: 1968. MC: How long did you work as a nurse, and where did you work? AC: I started off at the University of Utah. I was an intensive care nurse. Then I got married and moved to Louisiana. My husband graduated from medical school at the U, and he got a residency at Tulane University in New Orleans, so we went down there, and I worked down there in a couple of different hospitals as a registered nurse for 11 years. We came back to Utah after that, and at one point he did a fellowship in Berkeley, California. MC: So, you moved around the country. 4 The Atlas was the United States Air Force’s first operational intercontinental ballistic missile. 4 AC: Yes. LD: What’s your husband’s full name? AC: My first husband’s full name—he died when I was thirty-one—his name was Arthur Kay Benson. (So I guess that’s another name for me in there somewhere.) He died in a skiing accident. MC: Oh, dear. AC: Yes. I was thirty-one. MC: Do you want to say more about that experience? About losing your husband so very early? AC: That’s … it’s ... an experience. We were living here. We were both working hard. I loved work; he loved work. We didn’t have any kids; we were sort of always waiting to have everything organized, have enough money. I felt very strongly that I wanted to have a lot of money, enough for good childcare so that I could keep working. He died before that happened— very unexpectedly. So, you know, it was horrible. Norma Matheson 5 and Mike Zimmerman 6 and I used to speak sometimes about being widows and widowers. But, you know, the fact that I was childless probably made it easier in some regards because it was sort of like I was twenty again: I started dating again, and I was unencumbered. If you have children and you’re widowed, then I guess your sole purpose in life is taking care of those kids. But for me it was more like starting over. And I got married pretty quickly: within a year I got married to someone who had sole custody of his two children—and I thought, “Hmm, this is a big job. I think I’ll just stick with stepchildren and puppies!” MC: And your second husband was named …? AC: Ian MacNeil Cumming. And the children were six and eleven. (He was a single parent for about four years.) So I thought that was enough to do. MC: Yes, that was. Before we get to other topics, I want to ask you about the civil rights movement and your impressions of it, your involvement in it. 5 Wife of Scott Matheson, 12th governor of Utah. Governor Matheson died of multiple myeloma at age 61. 6 Former Chief Justice of the Utah Supreme Court from 1994-98. His first wife died in 1994 and Zimmerman raised his three daughters alone during his term as Chief Justice. 5 AC: I was asleep at the wheel. I wasn’t a radical person, or even a liberal person. I was so busy in the hospital as a student that I didn’t march; I didn’t care about those social issues. I mean I wasn’t involved. I was vaguely aware of it, but I had three part-time jobs, plus I was a full-time student. And we didn’t have much money, so I had to work as a new nurse and generally worked 80 hours a week. And it all happened—and I woke up later to all that. MC: You lived in Louisiana for a while. How was that? AC: Well, yes, I had my own experiences. Okay, thank you for triggering my memory! When I moved down there, I was excited about the racial difference, and I decided I was going to immerse myself in it. I went to work at the VA (Veterans Administration) Hospital where they were almost all African American. The long and the short is that it was a very bad experience. (laughs) I was twenty-two, and most of the nurses in the IC intensive care unit were black, from Dillard University. They were all baccalaureate nurses, as was I, but they were very ill prepared. The head nurse was a beautiful African American woman, but she didn’t run a very good shop. I was assigned a computerized schedule, or a schedule where I would never have a Saturday off ever in my life! (laughs) And I would have every third Sunday off, and I worked a lot of night shifts. Whenever I’d work nights, I was the supervisor of middle-aged medics (all male) who were mostly back from Vietnam; they were all black, and I was white, and it wasn’t very good. They would do what they wanted, and it was very awkward to be the supervisor over them. I lasted about six months. When I started coming home crying every night because I hated my job, I decided to quit and go somewhere else. So I went to another hospital, and I was the head nurse of an ICU at what was then Southern Baptist Hospital. I had a great experience and worked with a lot of African Americans and other people, and it was great. MC: Was part of the difference that it was a VA hospital then? AC: I think, well, I just think there was such a disparity. To be white and twenty-two bossing over all these middle-aged black men, it wasn’t good. MC: Oh, they were black men you were bossing? AC: Oh yes, not women. Medics from Vietnam were almost all men. They didn’t really… MC: So tell us about your impression about caring for veterans of the Vietnam War. That was a pretty controversial war. Do you have any recollections about that? AC: They were patients, you know; they were just patients, and I liked the patients, but they were mostly old men as opposed to recent vets. It was interesting. The nurses were ill-trained: there 6 were very few nurses in the South with bachelor’s degrees, and the ones that we had there from Dillard University were not well trained. It was hard to work with people like that. So I was only twenty-two, I had a bachelor’s degree, and I could be supervisor of an ICU: that’s amazing. MC: Let’s come back to Salt Lake City then. You were back in Salt Lake City by when? AC: Early ‘70s—1974 maybe. I went to work at Holy Cross Hospital and ran the ICU there. MC: The women’s movement was beginning … AC: I was so busy. I worked eighty hours a week, a hundred a week when I was in Louisiana. When I was here, I was just too busy. It’s just the way it was: I was a late bloomer! MC: (laughs) So when did you bloom? In terms of community service? AC: I think when I married Ian. He was much more liberal than I thought I was. He had worked on Wayne Owens’ 7 campaign with Karen Shepherd 8. That’s how I met Karen—because they knew each other. I started getting exposed to politics and thinking about it. I quit working a hundred hours a week. When I married Ian, I was working as an assistant nursing administrator, so I had a more regular schedule and we had a life together. And I figured out I wasn’t really a Republican—the one that I thought I was, growing up with my parents—and I found that I had a lot of concerns about some other things. MC: What were your biggest concerns? AC: Well, when I was first working in public health, as a student, we had to rotate through public health, and we had to go visit some very bad areas. I mean, it was Salt Lake, so how bad could it be? (laughs) It was bad, but not that bad. But there were a lot of poor people. I just couldn’t understand why they all owned TVs, and they couldn’t get to the hospital for their appointments, 7 Wayne Owens was a member of the United States House of Representatives for Utah's 2nd congressional district from 1973 to 1975 and again from 1987 to 1993. He was the western states coordinator for the presidential campaigns of Robert Kennedy in 1968 and Edward Kennedy in 1980, and served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and 1980. 8 Karen Shepherd was elected as a Democrat to the Utah State House of Representatives in 1990. Two years later, in 1992, she won the Democratic nomination for Utah's Second Congressional District seat, which was being vacated by Wayne Owens. (Her campaign against Enid Green marked the first time in Utah's history that two women candidates opposed each other in a general election for the United States Congress.) Shepherd won the election. 7 or eat the right food, or …? That was a disconnect for me; I couldn’t understand. I thought it was just terrible. That was my sort of “old person,” my old self, and it wasn’t until later that it began to make sense. When I was married to Ian and quit working as a nurse, we invested in some low-income real estate, and I became what I called “a slumlord-ess.” (laughs) And I thought, I’m a nurse; I can handle this low-income property stuff. But when I really saw how they lived and how intergenerational the poverty was and how hard it was to escape from it, I just completely changed. I started being involved in some politics with Ian, and I met Karen and other similar people like that, the people I knew were more enlightened and more liberal. MC: And you changed your mind about these kinds of things? AC: I did. I think that I hadn’t thought about such things before. I was too busy working. MC: So tell me more about the low-income properties. You moved away from being a nurse? AC: Well, yes, I moved away from Utah, and then when I came back, my job here was gone, so I worked as an administrator. And that worked for a while, but I had decided, before I met Ian, that I’d wanted to go get a master’s degree. I looked at nursing but I couldn’t see master’s programs that I really liked. So I decided I’d get a master’s of business, and I quit working as a nurse. And the low-income stuff? There were some laws under Reagan that made it very tax advantageous to have low-income—or rental property, I should say. Anyway, we bought about five or six apartment buildings, and some little houses in Salt Lake, and I managed those and did the accounting and such, and it was just really interesting. It was an education. MC: That was a major shift from being a nurse—it’s more entrepreneurial. And you enjoyed that? AC: Yes. It was a shift. It was hard work, but I liked the change. I’d park my car away from the property: you can’t park a fancy car there; you can’t wear fancy clothes. I had to be sensitive to the people we were dealing with. And it was an education. We had a big theft—one of our managers stole a lot of money by means of double receipt books: one she submitted to me and one she skimmed. It was a real education. I mean, there’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on in the world. But it was an awakening. 8 And then Reagan changed the laws and all of a sudden rental real estate investments lost most tax depreciation advantages. There was no “grandfather clause” 9 for tax advantages—for what you paid for the properties. They were worth “this” and then they were worth nothing; it was a real fiasco. That whole real estate market just busted, and we liquidated a lot of our investments. We hung onto a couple of things, but I started doing something else. And the family therapist said I should do some volunteer work—and I was kind of offended. (laughs) But I started managing the downtown property that Ian had down on the block of the Keith Mansion—they owned a lot of property on the block. They also had a fire and the Mansion was very damaged, and I managed that, to help renovate and decorate it and move people out and in. MC: Where is the Keith Mansion? AC: The Keith Mansion is on South Temple and “F” Street, just a block west of the Governor’s Mansion. MC: Was there anything about the women’s movement that encouraged you to make the transition from nursing to business? Or was there something else going on? AC: There weren’t good choices then in master’s degrees in nursing. There was a dean up there at the U who had a Ph.D. in “trans-cultural nursing,” and I thought, Well, what the heck is that? It sounded totally weird. There were a lot of lesbians up at the College of Nursing, and I was just a bit nervous. Well, of course now my mind has opened up on all of that stuff! And I tell everybody I won’t marry again, or the next time I’m definitely going with women; they’re much easier to get along with! (laughs) But at the time it was just an environment that I could not relate to, and they were all really masculine looking. Well, not all of them, but it was just a weird feeling. I just knew it didn’t seem like a place I wanted to be. And there were some directors of nursing at the time that were getting their master’s in business, which I thought was cool. The choices in nursing for a master’s degree were in medical-surgical, or in psychology or psycho-social nursing, or obgyn-pediatrics, or trans-cultural; I just thought, Gee, none of those appeal to me. If they’d had one in critical care or something along those lines I might have been interested, but anyway they didn’t. Business sounded exciting and cool, and I had already taken the test for business, and I was all excited about doing something new and different. Ian was a businessman—but after my husband died, even before I met Ian, I’d decided 9 A grandfather clause is a provision in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations while a new rule will apply to all future cases. Those exempt from the new rule are said to have grandfather rights or acquired rights. 9 on the business thing. I’d just thought, I don’t want those medical, old friends taking care of me or feeling sorry for me. I want to just experience something new and exciting. 10 MC: So it was sort of a lifestyle change almost—just that you wanted to be different? AC: Yes. It was sort of an awakening. MC: I guess what I’m trying to get at is a possible connection: the women’s movement is really blossoming around that time. AC: And I’m oblivious! (laughs) MC: So you go to business school anyway? It’s not that you go because things are opening up for women? AC: No, in fact, I was so kind of down on traditional women’s careers. Always had been. My mother was a dear and a sweetie, but I knew I never wanted to do the same thing. She was a dutiful mother and had four children, and she lived in my dad’s shadow and waited on him hand and foot for sixty years, and I just knew that wasn’t for me. I wanted be a good skier. I wanted to travel all over the world. And I did not want to be a hausfrau. I always thought I’d have children, but that was not a driving force for me at all, probably because I had a baby when I was eleven: my sister. I did a lot of mothering for that little girl. So when other people were playing with Tiny Tears dolls 11, I had a little baby. And I took her around and people at the shopping center thought she was my baby. So I was just full of wanting to explore the world. And then with nursing one of the problems is that there were just women everywhere, and I wanted to get exposed to other things. What do men do? I don’t want to just be with women all the time. MC: So you were your own feminist. (laughs) 10 Ian Cumming gave the College of Nursing a $5 million gift for the Annette Poulson Cumming Building on the University of Utah campus. The 40-year-old College of Nursing building was transformed by $24 million dollars of public and private support and is now a state-of-the-art facility with an entirely new infrastructure, increased faculty and staff work areas and upgraded educational technology. Tiny Tears was one of the most popular baby dolls of the ‘50s and early ‘60s. She went through several style changes over the years but always retained the one characteristic that made her famous: she cried real tears through two tiny holes on either side of the bridge of the nose. 11 10 AC: I guess. I guess. MC: Tell me. You have a long resume doing many different things: tell me how you got involved in some of these projects. AC: Well, in Louisiana my husband was in a surgical residency—and what they didn’t tell you was that when you go to Tulane University if you don’t go into cardiovascular from there, you were farmed out to rural areas of Louisiana from time to time. So he was farmed out from time to time. I’d drive out to see him where he was, and he’d have a month or so stint here or there, and then we had a whole year where he was assigned to Alexandria, Louisiana. That is in central Louisiana, and I call it the “armpit of Louisiana.” I thought Utah was bad when I was here, and then I thought the Mormons were “a bit much.” And then I moved to New Orleans, and the Catholics were really too much. And then I moved to Alexandria, and the Baptists were way bad. (laughs) They were way bad. I just couldn’t believe it. I remember I couldn’t find tonic water in the grocery store; you had to buy it at the liquor store! Anyway, it was just a town of 70,000 people. There were three restaurants, and it was pretty Southern. It was an experience. I liked my work—sort of—but the doctors were horrible—chauvinistic and arrogant. One night I was working the night shift—even though I was the head nurse, I took my turn—and I went down to the cafeteria, and there were all these posters of aborted fetuses! This was an anti-abortion crusade, and the posters were the typical ones you always see, where they were totally distorted. I mean these aborted fetuses with the babies this big! And always distorted. And I thought, Gee, this is really wrong. I hate this! And, I can’t remember, I might have taken some of the pictures down and thrown them away. That was my first experience. I had never had any strong feelings about abortion, but when I was in college, my first husband told me he heard stories about girls that were pregnant, and as a doctor you’d sometimes give a referral to someone you knew who would do abortions. Anyway, that night in the cafeteria was my first exposure to anti-abortion propaganda, and I just thought it was horrible and misleading. Then we moved back to Salt Lake, and I became aware of the high teen pregnancy rate, so I thought this situation was really crappy. It doesn’t make sense. When I was a young, I was a pretty devout Mormon girl until I was about twenty, and I had some friends who had to get married, a couple of friends, and you know it was very sad. And it just kind of happened. I watched it. It never would have happened to me because I had everything very calculated. I would never have that happen to me ever. I just didn’t understand how people had accidents; I was kind of Miss Prim and Proper. (laughs) 11 Anyway, the University of Utah had a women’s outreach effort through the Ob-Gyn Department to get some women in the community involved, and I went to a few meetings. But I found it really boring. And then a friend of mine asked me to think about coming on the board of Planned Parenthood. I told her I was too busy, but I could talk to her in a year, and she called me in a year. I went on the board. There were all these amazing people. I remember Walker Wallace was the chair of the board, and we were dealing with real issues. It was a complicated board because you have medical services, you have education, you have lobbying and all the political stuff—and it was fascinating. I loved every minute of it. And then they asked me to chair the fundraising committee—and I was horrified! But I started doing fundraising. I loved Planned Parenthood: it was fabulous. MC: What was it like to be on a Planned Parenthood board in Salt Lake City? AC: I thought it was hard. But I wasn’t prepared. I’d thought, This shouldn’t be too hard because we have science on our side. So you just educate people, and if you have the facts on your side, what’s the big deal? It should be easy! (laughs) (And never mind that it’s now thirty years later and things are worse.) I thought it was very hard here, and then I’d go to national meetings, and I’d meet people from other places like the Panhandle of Florida or the South, and it was worse than Utah! (Everybody thought that their state was the worst, but there were places that were worse than Utah: places that had worse teen pregnancy, had worse health care, and worse education.) I loved being exposed to the broader world of reproductive care. I loved being exposed to the racial diversity that we had in Planned Parenthood in other parts of the country. That became sort of my career. MC: And you did it for how many years? AC: I’m still at it! I just went off the national board for the second time about a year ago, but I chair their national big donor group: people who give $25,000 or more a year. I’ve been on international Family Planning boards. I’m on the Board of International Planned Parenthood, the Western Hemisphere Region, which is primarily South America and Central America. I love it: I’ve traveled all over the world with reproductive healthcare, and I love going to those places. MC: What are some of the things you did on these boards? You mentioned fundraising, but what other kinds of things were you doing? AC: I was on the board of Friends of UNFPA. UNFPA 12 is the U.N. Family Planning Agency. It’s called the U.N. Fund for Population Activities; it’s one of those French acronyms Fonds des 12 “UNFPA is the leading UN agency for delivering a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe, and every young person’s potential is fulfilled. Since UNFPA started working in 1969, the number – and rate – of women dying from complications of pregnancy or 12 Nations Unies pour la Population. But it really is the U.N. Family Planning Agency. This Friends of UNFPA was an American support group because charitable money could not go from the U.S. directly into UNFPA. As a donor you had to have an American charitable organization as a conduit. So, we would raise awareness. We would raise money and lobby Congress for better international family planning programs. When I became the board chair, I decided I should find out what’s going on in these places around the world. I’d take an international trip around the world twice a year to Africa, Vietnam, and India. That helped me spread the word, and we developed the board, and that was a lot of fun. With International Planned Parenthood, where I’m working now, what we try to do is set the example to the member associations in these developing countries about how to run a non-profit, how to raise money locally, and how to conduct services—because it’s hard. They’re like the U.S. was maybe a hundred or eighty years ago. It’s like working with the U.N. It’s difficult. The U.N. is problematic: there’s graft, there’s all this hierarchy, all this bureaucracy. The International Planned Parenthood is a little bit like that, but my feeling is that if you are not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Like with U.N., to people who don’t want to be involved with that, I’d say, “Well, it’s not perfect but it’s what we have, and we have to work with that.” It’s a challenge, and I love meeting all those different people. MC: That’s pretty incredible. What do you think about this current problem in Nigeria 13 with these kidnapped girls? AC: It’s tragic. It’s just tragic. But these governments are … they’re flawed. There’s so much corruption—Africa is sad; it’s so sad in so many places—and yet you just can’t go in and change it! Look at Iraq: I heard that thirty people were just killed last night. It’s very… Change is hard in these countries. It’s very hard. But it’s interesting to be in there on the ground level, to go over there in these places and meet the women. It’s just incredible. It makes me want to cry … MC: Tell me about that experience. childbirth has been halved. Families are smaller and healthier. … But too many are still left behind. Nearly a billion people remain mired in extreme poverty. Sexual and reproductive health problems are a leading cause of death and disability for women in the developing world. Young people bear the highest risks of HIV infection and unintended pregnancy. More than a hundred million girls face the prospect of child marriage and other harmful practices, such as female genital mutilation.” http://www.unfpa.org 13 At the time of this interview, Boko Haram, an extremist terrorist organization in northeastern Nigeria, had kidnapped over 200 girls who had been enrolled in the Government Second School in Chibok, Nigeria. 13 AC: There’s a place . . . (long pause) . . . we went to in Rwanda where there’s a whole village of rape survivors. No one would have them after they’d been raped, so they started their own village. You go to places like that, and you look in their eyes: some of them survive and are vibrant, and then some of them don’t. You just see it in their eyes; they’re withdrawn and hiding in the corner. They will never come out of it . . . MC: They’re just shut down? AC: It’s pretty devastating. . .. But then you meet other people out in other communities, and they’re just fighting and full of spirit, even though their husband has been killed in a war, and they have five kids, and three have AIDS. And you just wonder how people do it—but they do! It’s amazing. MC: Well, you’ve had experiences that most people don’t get to have. AC: It’s great. I love going to those places. It’s amazing. MC: So, is it getting better? You said now, thirty years later, it’s worse. AC: Well, in our country it’s … the politics are worse, you know. It’s so sad what’s happening in terms of laws of reproductive healthcare. We’ve definitely regressed. In terms of teen pregnancy, though, it’s down. It’s primarily because of family planning, of contraception, and a lot because of education. It’s not because of any help from our Congress or our state lawmakers. There’s very little sex education in the school. A lot of kids get their education in other places. They can call 1-800-planned parenthood 230-PLAN on their cell phones and get an answer to any question, or go online and get an honest answer to any question, and people are finding other ways to learn facts. The technology of education for young people in terms of sexual matters is astonishing. We have people access our website from all over the world because they know they can get honest information. If you’re gay and you live in Saudi Arabia, you’re not going to get any information. But you can get it online. It’s fascinating to me, the technology, and the hope that really provides to us. MC: So that’s made things better despite what the laws are doing? AC: Yes, I mean you just can’t hold back information and technology. That’s going to change the world over time. MC: Is there any other issue that’s really important to you in addition to …? 14 AC: Politics: women and politics. I think that I got exposed to it with Karen Shepherd. I was the finance chair for her first run for the state senate, actually, and she was great! And then Wayne Owens asked her to run for Congress, so I chaired her campaign for that race and the one after. Just the whole . . .. I got involved with EMILY’s List 14 and really saw the difference that female politicians and candidates are from males—in general. Women are motivated in a completely different way than men. They have much more altruistic goals and concerns. You know, if there were more women in office, we probably wouldn’t have as many wars because they have children and care about children. And they care about families, and they care about education, and they care about health. I think it would just change everything. And I’m very pro-choice. It’s not all about abortion. But I know if the candidate is pro-choice, I could bet with 99% accuracy that they’re good on the environment, good on education, good on childcare; it’s a whole package, and I don’t have to ask another question. I could be really wrong on that, but women are just different. Anyway, that’s my other real passion: giving money to women candidates and helping them. I mean there are good men candidates too—but I’m very partial. (laughs) MC: How do you think we’re going to get more women in politics in Utah? AC: Well, it’s pretty depressing. Karen gave me a copy of the YWCA Status of Women in Utah report 15, and the stats are appalling. She summarized it all: we’re worse in many areas than we were thirty years ago. It’s horrible. I didn’t realize it’s that bad, but it’s pretty bad, even if you adjust for inflation and all that. It’s not good here. It’s not good, but it’s not good a lot of places. Even so, we should be ashamed. LD: Not good in what respects? AC: They had a whole roster they rated on. A lot of it was income (what women make compared to men). Education, health, all that stuff. MC: Utah women are not getting educated? 14 EMILY’s List was founded by Ellen Malcolm in 1985. According to the Washington Examiner, EMILY's List is "the nation's most influential pro-choice political action committee." The name is an acronym for "Early Money Is Like Yeast" (i.e., it raises dough). 15 The YWCA Utah partnered with the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) to produce a research briefing entitled The Well-Being of Women in Utah: An Overview, which was released in May 2014. Of significance, in employment and earnings Utah women who worked year-round, full-time were earning 70 cents on the dollar compared with similarly employed men. As in all other states, women in Utah remain less likely than men to be in the labor force and more likely to live in poverty. Women also continue to be underrepresented in the state legislature. 15 AC: They’re dropping out of school. They start college and don’t finish. They’re in low-paying occupations. They have more children, so there’s not that much to go around. They still have the highest per capita prescription drug abuse—I mean, how bad is that? The mental health community calls that depression drug we give “Sandy Candy”—all the housewives out in Sandy! Their kids grow up, and they don’t have anything to do. They’ve never had meaningful careers, and they go on anti-depressants. There’s a lot of that. I mean, it’s pretty bad. There are a lot of women that are underutilized and undereducated and undertrained, and they’re home making little arts and crafts in the Relief Society or something. It makes me crazy. I’ve made comments about that—and had some bad comments back to me! (laughs) But it’s like, “Really? Can’t we have women doing better things than glass grapes on the table?” It’s appalling to me. There’s so much to do. MC: My next question was going to be: How do you compare your life to your mother’s? (laughs) Well, let me ask it this way: How different was your life from your mother’s life, overall? AC: Oh, just completely different. MC: In what ways? AC: She was a devoted mother and homemaker. I came to appreciate her and respect her a lot more when I was older. And I didn’t dislike her! I didn’t disrespect her: I just never wanted to be like that when I was growing up. But I really learned later a lot of things about her that impressed me. For instance, she took a part-time job because my little sister was born in October, so she missed the deadline to get into school that fall. So my mother took a part-time secretarial job to get my little sister in Rowland Hall 16 so she could get in on that year—probably because (laughs) it was her last child and she wanted to be done! I don’t know. But she wanted Cindy to not be held up another year, and that exposed her to work, which was interesting. And then when my sister went into school, my mother had more time and she started reading. She was a voracious reader, and she ended up reading more than my father because he was so busy working. He had a master’s degree from Stanford and a doctorate degree from the University of Utah, but my mother, in the end, was better read than he was! That was a very liberating thing for her, and I grew to respect her more as I became older. But I still didn’t want to be like that! (laughs) MC: Do you have a stepdaughter? AC: I have two stepsons. I have many “almost-adopted” daughters—many, many. Nieces, young women I’ve picked up along the way: young women I’ve met in politics, young women I’ve met 16 Roland Hall is a private K-12 school in Salt Lake City. 16 in reproductive healthcare, Friends of UNFPA, neighbors, just all over the place. I feel like I have many daughters. MC: Well, thinking about these daughters, then, how are their lives different from yours, and do you think it’s for better or worse? And in what ways? AC: Oh, it’s better. They’ve done all the things I wish I would have done. MC: Like what? AC: Like be a doctor, or a politician, or a this and a that. I just never set my standards that high; I never thought about it, nor did anyone suggest it. I don’t feel anything is lacking, really, but sometimes I wish I would’ve thought more about stuff. I guess I was just kind of fat, dumb, and happy. (laughs) I always liked what I was doing: I always traveled and had fun; I was good at sports, and I’m great skier; and I did all kinds of things. MC: So they had more opportunities to do other things? AC: Yes, definitely—education and all that leads to. MC: Any other way in which their lives are different from yours? AC: The young women today are exposed to sports at a younger age. They’re much more fit, much more equal to men in terms of sports. When I grew up (you’re probably younger than I am) but when we had PE in school, we did jumping jacks. That was it! It’s so pathetic! MC: I remember the half-court basketball! AC: And then when you had your period, you didn’t have to shower! You were excused from participating. I mean, it’s just ridiculous! But yes, the young girls now that are actively involved with sports, they don’t get pregnant, they have more education, and they have better self-esteem and richer lives. They delay their marriage. They’re exposed to the world. I think they just have many more choices and options. MC: So you think it’s all good for them, the differences, or do you think there are any differences that may be negative for their lives? AC: I can’t think of any. I mean, you can contend that they delay getting married more, they delay child-bearing and so it’s harder to get pregnant. There’s that issue. It’s very complicated. I know all about those reproductive issues, and it’s not simple. In fact, I think women today have 17 tough choices, tough balancing choices. The challenges for women now are about balance, I think. And women seek more balance than men. Men don’t care about that at all, near as I can tell. (laughs) So that’s hard, but they’re figuring it out, slowly. LD: I’d like to know, when you are involved in Planned Parenthood and women in politics— your passions—are there also men involved in these organizations? AC: Yes. Yes. Not enough! That’s something I’ve worked on a lot. It’s always a challenge. It takes very, very brave men to be involved in those groups because they’re mostly women. But there are good men, and when I’ve been on any of these boards or organized a campaign, I’ve always tried to get men involved—because it’s critical. These issues are not women’s issues: they are people issues. Birth control: it takes two, right? Last time I heard, anyway. But it’s really tough, and especially in Utah. It’s even harder here, but it’s something we have to work on, always. LD: What changes have you seen in Utah society in your sixty-some years? AC: Well, I think it’s more diverse, thank God. I think if you go down to Liberty Park on the Fourth of July, you’ll find it’s totally brown. (Karen Shepherd’s birthday was on the 5th, and we would always go down to Liberty Park on the Fourth during her campaigns and during her term in office and see people down there.) Liberty Park is brown on the Fourth of July. It’s just how the diversity of Utah has changed; it’s pretty interesting. I think a lot of people are oblivious to that. You know, we go to our little gated communities or our place on the East Bench, and we have our own little circle of friends, and we’re not really exposed to diversity—not just racial diversity, but gay people, or handicapped people, or whatever. You know we’re pretty cloistered…. I wish every legislator in Utah could go down to my old slums and see some of those people and how they live, or go down to Liberty Park and see what it’s like in Utah. And Congress the same thing: these legislators in general are very not in tune with what’s going on in the world. LD: Why doesn’t voting cause them to change? AC: That’s such a mystery. I think our voters are not very educated. I think our people aren’t very educated. I just think it’s a terrible thing. I can’t remember the statistics of how many people in the U.S. don’t believe in evolution, but when you hear these statistics, and you think of all these people homeschooling … It’s just shocking to me. I think our education system has failed. We’re losing out in the world! You read all these stats about how we’ve fallen behind, how we’re so low compared to other industrial countries. I just think our voters aren’t very educated. They vote against their own self-interest all the time. There’s all kinds of evidence of that. It’s shocking. 18 I think people are afraid. I think people are biased and bigoted and they are afraid of the world changing. I think that’s what’s happening in politics today. I think that people see what they grew up with, the white picket fence and all that, and ignore that their world is completely changing. All you have to do is go to any downtown of any big city like New York or Chicago or L.A. You walk down the streets, and you’re surrounded by brown people, by different people, by people with piercings and tattoos and all this stuff—and they’re not all bad. I had an experience hanging some very expensive art in a New York apartment. The guys who came to hang the art had tattoos all over, and body piercing all over, and their hair … whatever! And they were so smart, and so cool, and so good! It’s just the world’s changing. I think people are afraid that they’re losing that picket fence lifestyle they grew up with, and it’s because they are ignorant about how the world has changed. I had an interesting experience with my 93-year-old dad who’s still around. He’s the one I grew up with, the one I thought I was a Republican with. (laughs) Anyway, when I started becoming “radicalized,” I started talking to him about things like black people and gay people and such. For example, I remember when Clinton was elected and passed that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy17, he said, “Do you know, when I was in the military some guy actually grabbed me. It was the most horrible thing, and we went and beat him up!” And I said, “Really, Dad?” I was in my forties or fifties at the time, and I said, “Dad, how many times do you think as a nurse I was groped or sexually harassed or put in a very difficult, maybe scary position on that kind of stuff?” He said, “Hmm, I never thought about that.” You know, it was all about him and his experiences. Long story short, talking to him about gay people, about racial stuff, about my experiences, and he’s totally evolved, totally evolved. He’s a totally “radical” person now (laughs)—and he’s ninety-three! And he’s just learned: we’ve talked about things; I give him articles. I’ve educated him. I just think people are simply not enlightened enough. They’re not educated enough about a lot of these things. LD: What was your process from going from what you said was a very devout Mormon kid to, as you’ve described yourself, a radical? Just walk us through that process. AC: Well, okay, the Mormon thing. First I was very pissed off that they wouldn’t give the priesthood to blacks. I just thought that was really terrible. Now, here’s an interesting women’s thing: I was so ignorant that it didn’t occur to me to be upset that women didn’t have it! (laughs) I just didn’t even think about that. But I was upset about the blacks. And then to all of a sudden 17 The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy established in 1993 (and repealed by an act of Congress in 2010) allowed gays, lesbians, and bisexuals to serve in the military only if they kept their sexual orientation secret and the military did not learn of their sexual orientation. 19 have this Revelation 18 and all of a sudden it was okay was just such crap to me. That was one thing. MC: But you were glad that it happened? But …? AC: Well, yes. But it just sort of showed me . . . I just began to have doubts about the Church. I began to ask questions. Whenever I asked a hard question, I got answers that didn’t make sense, like that one. There was that thing where they weren’t supposed to swim on Sundays because the Devil is in the water or something, and that just didn’t make any sense. Every time I asked those sorts of hard questions, nothing made sense. So I just decided, you know, if the whole thing wasn’t making sense …? I would date returned missionaries and they were so boring, and everybody else I dated was more fun. And I thought, You know, this is not rocket science. I want to have a good time in life. I want to be exposed to things. I got my—what was that thing?—oh, Individual Award. 19 I moved to Hawaii when I was in college. I paid my tithing while I was a cocktail waitress and had three jobs, and it just … All my friends were horsing around in Hawaii—my Mormon friends—and then they came back here, and they were goody-two-shoes! And I thought, This just doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t want to be different there than I am here, and I just need to find my own way about this. And I loved the freedom of not being involved with the Church. There’s still hardly ever a Sunday that goes by that I don’t think, This is so cool that I’m not in church. I have this beautiful day; I can do this or that. What did Flip Wilson 20 say? Something about the Church of the Outdoors? Or whatever … It was very liberating to me not to be any part of it anymore. I mean I value it; I love it that I didn’t sleep with a hundred people before I got married and all that. I feel 18 On June 9, 1978, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced what is now known as the Priesthood Revelation. At that time, the LDS Church reversed its policy and allowed all worthy men (without restriction based on race) to be ordained to the Priesthood. 19 Individual Awards were part of the Young Women Mutual Improvement Association of the LDS Church, nicknamed Mutual or MIA until it was renamed simply Young Women in 1974. It was structured by age, with programs and lessons for Laurels (16-17), MIA Maids (14-15), and Beehives (12-13). 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, singing, developing habits of prayer, paying tithing, service, and so on. 20 The Flip Wilson Show was an hour-long variety show consisting of comedy skits that aired on NBC from 1970 to 1974. It was one of the first American television programs starring a black person to become highly successful with a white audience. In one of his regular skits, Flip plays (con-artist) Reverend Leroy, the minister of the Church of What's Happening Now! 20 like I missed out on some things, but not too much. I just think it was a good education, but a good thing to let go of. LD: What was the process of your changing politically to a very liberal, radical person? Could you give specifics: Who? What? The situations? The issues? AC: Just exposure to seeing and learning about poor people. I think it was my slumlord experience where I really would be in people’s homes, trying understand why they couldn’t pay their rent, and just seeing poverty and working with it, walking through the dark halls of those low-income housing areas, going to collect a rent from a schizophrenic guy, going into his apartment and finding that he’s a hoarder and there are little paths between all this crap piled up on the sides and thinking, Oh my God! This is a fire hazard! Or being afraid, working with those people: I mean, having a murder in your apartment. Some gay guy that was murdered. I was just exposed to a lot of stuff and became much more sympathetic with people. LD: But why didn’t you think it was their fault? Why did you switch to start thinking these are broader societal issues? AC: In the beginning I was just rotating through public health as a student nurse for a very brief experience. But as “a slumlord-ess,” as I called myself, I was really very involved, and I did that for a number of years. I would go around to all the apartment managers, go into their apartments and go over the rents with them, and talk about their tenants and their vacancies. Go into the apartments and see what needed to be refurbished. Go back and check the problems with the trash. I was just immersed in it! And then you combine that with all the reproductive stuff—with seeing how uneducated young girls are getting pregnant—and I don’t know, it all just started to gel for me. LD: I want to ask about a sensitive topic. AC: Okay. LD: You’re known as a fundraiser. You are head of a lot of committees that raise large amounts of money for various causes and politics. Personally, how do you handle it when you’re getting hit up all the time for donations? AC: It’s a pain in the ass! And I thought it would be so fun to start up a foundation. It was my idea in our family—my husband would deny this—but it was my idea that we would start up a charitable foundation and that we would be organized about our giving. I thought it would be very fun to give away the money. But, what I really found was that it just meant everybody was asking me for money all the time. Especially, I mean, a lot of my “friends.” And to me that’s an unpleasant piece: people chum up to you and then you figure out that it’s not because they’re 21 your friend; they just want money. (sighs) I don’t love that very much, and so my own protection is just to isolate myself. I have somebody act a little bit as a hatchet person, and then also I only give to certain kinds of things, for the most part. That helps. It was really easy for me to take a step away from the arts. I was on the symphony board for a while, but it just wasn’t radical enough for me. (laughs) Everybody else can do the ballet and the symphony and the educational things. It’s easier. And it’s not that they’re bad—I like all those things—but I just felt underutilized. So I let go of all those things and decided I cared about reproductive things, about women’s things, about political things. And it helped me to narrow things down. It’s still kind of a problem. I’m sure people think I’m a jerk because I don’t give to certain things, but you have to develop a hard shell. LD: This kind of private giving, is it a good system for the United States—to rely on rich people? AC: It’s a big problem. It’s a big problem, and it’s different from Europe and other developed countries where the state and the government give so much more and then the private citizens don’t. You know, I think our system is flawed. I’m not sure theirs is perfect. But I think it’s really sad that we have to have these expensive charitable organizations to hand out the money— and so much goes to overhead and all that. I don’t know, I worry about that a lot. It’s not a perfect system, but I’m not sure Europe’s is the perfect one either because people individually don’t seem to care about charitable things, although as a society they do seem more compassionate than we are in general. I think they have better education, better healthcare; they have better ways to provide all those social services than we do. So I’m worried about our system. And I hate it that churches have charitable deductions. I just heard the other day that Utah gave the highest percentage of its income to charity. Well, that’s tithing, and so if that’s what it is, is that really charitable giving? Eh, not so much to me. LD: What else do you want to tell us about your life? AC: My great-grandmother was a polygamist wife? (laughs) LD: So was mine! MC: So was mine. 22 AC: Really? My mother’s family came through Hole-in-the-Rock 21. Yes, I think the whole Mormon history is fascinating. I value that. I don’t know, I think I have a complicated life right now; I have a complicated family situation. We just bought Snowbird Resort. (It’ll be in the papers today.) So we’re kind of in the family ski business now. My husband’s business has taken us all over the world; it’s been fun and interesting and at the same time difficult. I think of what I’ve had to do as a woman and I think this is one observation I can make: women always have to compromise, and it’s about the balance thing. I came to a certain point where I realized that my husband’s career wouldn’t support my having a real career, and that’s when I became a volunteer. Because it just didn’t make sense to do otherwise; I could either give up my marriage or my career. I think a lot of affluent women have to deal with that dilemma. So I have had to really figure out how to make that satisfying for me. I think I did a good job of it. I remember talking to my daughter-in-law who became encumbered with that same dilemma, and I said, “You’ve got to find your own path. It’s not easy. Because if you don’t, you will be a doormat.” You will be a doormat, and especially it’s exaggerated if you add in three kids, too. So you’re trying to find your own identity, and you’ve got three kids, and you’ve got a rich husband and everybody’s asking about him, and you’ve got to find a good place for you. It’s not always easy. I feel comfortable with what I’ve done, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like enough has been for the things I care about. But nothing’s perfect in life. You just have to make the best of things. LD: Talk about the emotional part of changing from the middle class to an affluent lifestyle. AC: I think it was, thankfully, gradual. When I met Ian, we met on a bank board. Because my first husband died, I had some life insurance money, and I invested most of it very carefully, with some help, and then I took a small amount and decided to do something that I thought was kind of risky. A friend of mine who was a lawyer suggested that I invest in a little unit bank 22. So I went to the first board meeting, and Ian was one of the major investors. I’d read his resume 21 Hole in the Rock is a narrow and steep crevice in the western rim of Glen Canyon in southern Utah. On January 26, 1880, a Mormon expedition (250 people, 83 full-sized wagons, and over 1000 head of livestock) began their descent to the river. Wagons were heavily roped, and teams of men and oxen used to lower them through the upper crevice, which has slopes approaching 45°. The perilous descent has become one of the better-known episodes in the Mormon pioneer story. 22 A system of banking in which the government restricts or does not permit a bank to open branch offices. Unit banking systems encourage either small, independent banks or banks that are theoretically independent but are in fact owned by a bank holding company. In the United States, unit banking is largely confined to the Midwest and Southwest. 23 before. I was good at reading resumes because I hired all the nurses at Holy Cross Hospital. And I noticed a gap in his that made me very suspicious—but that’s another story! (laughs) Anyway, we were the only two non-Mormons on the board. I remember reading his financial statement, and I had more money than he did. So I’d say that it was gradual: he was not that successful when I first met him. So I guess it’s better to be gradual than thrown into something. It wasn’t really that hard—it just came about over time. I realized at some point that I couldn’t keep working as a nurse; it just wasn’t working for me. So I went back to school, which was a good thing for me in that new marriage with two stepchildren. I went part-time; it took me four years to get my master’s degree in business. I loved every minute of it—it was so much fun! And it allowed me to have this life with him. He was sort of bi-coastal; his office was in New York. MC: So going back to school allowed you to what? Be an equal part in the business? AC: That was always sort of my dream—that we would be partners like that. But he chaired a public company, so it wasn’t really feasible. When we did real estate, I thought we would be more partners in that, and we sort of were—for a while. Although he’s a very liberal person and cares about all the stuff I care about, I think a lot of men, including Ian, are chauvinistic in a lot of ways. I think that’s true of a lot of men, especially businessmen. I look at his companies, and there are not many women involved. There are not women on the boards. It worries me. I look at the way he treats his sons, and the way he expects that his sons will be the providers for their family. I wish he would have had daughters, or a daughter; it would have changed him. The men—the older men—that have daughters have changed a lot. When their daughters experience sexual harassment, or when their daughters can’t get the job they want, when their daughters can’t get into the Country Club on their own name, those men change. I wish that would’ve happened to Ian more. I think that he’s just—and a lot of men are like that: they are part of “old think.” He doesn’t see these young people in the campaigns like I do. They are different. These women are different. They grow up: they absolutely are not looking for men to support them. Some are. Some have that Cinderella complex 23, but the odds of that scenario failing are high, which is what I told my niece. I said, “If you think that you are going to go be taken care of, and that you’re going to have the perfect marriage, think again. Everybody thinks that when they get married. Look what happened to me! My husband died. You can’t rely on that. You cannot rely on that!” And the young girls, most of them, don’t nowadays. They’re not thinking 23 Colette Dowling, The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence (1981) explores the topic of women's unconscious desire to be taken care of by others. The complex is named after the fairy tale character Cinderella who is beautiful, graceful, polite, supportive, hardworking, independent, and maligned by the females of her society, but not capable of changing her situations with her own actions and must be helped by an outside force, usually a male (i.e. the Prince). 24 that guys … It’s kind of a partnership. If it doesn’t work, they go their separate ways, and that’s just the way it is nowadays. I don’t know… there’s something sad about that, but something not sad about it. It’s different nowadays. But I think the young women are much more self-sufficient and competent and sure of themselves, just really sure that they can provide for themselves. LD: Your stepsons, what was the situation with their mother? AC: It was sad. She abandoned them. The youngest one was in diapers. She called her husband at work and said, “You better come home by three o’clock because I’m going off to be with that football player that I saw a few weeks ago at my high school reunion”…! She had issues, probably alcohol and drugs. She’s still around somewhere, but she has very little to do with the kids. She didn’t have custody of them, but we always had to deal with her, and the boys were… It was hard for me. Being a stepparent is really hard. I was—well, that’s a whole other issue. I wish we would’ve had some therapy first, or something. But we were just fat, dumb, and happy and did what we thought was right, and I did a lot of things wrong. I’m sure Ian did, too. I was too strict and rigid: my military background, I guess. But it got better. It got better when they got to have girlfriends and I related to them a little bit more. And now we have a great relationship. It got really good when they had kids because I knew how to hold the baby. I’d worked in obstetrics and pediatrics, and I knew things like that. You know, they also related to me because I knew how to ski and fly airplanes, and do all this stuff, and travel around the world. Anyway, we have a great relationship now—but it was rocky for a while. LD: How did you learn to fly airplanes? AC: My dad was a pilot. I couldn’t wait to be a pilot. LD: So do you have your license? AC: I did for a long time; it’s not active now. It was another one of those things where when I married Ian, I had an airplane, and we’d fly around. But his business got more and more New York based and with these giant distances, it didn’t make sense for us to have a little plane in the West. Pretty soon I caved in to sitting in the back and being in a bigger plane. He thought it was so much fun that he bought a bigger plane than mine! (laughs) And then we did that for a while. So…anyway it was fun while it lasted. MC: I want to clarify: you said three sons? AC: Did I? No, two sons. 25 LD: Does one of your stepsons have three children? AC: Yes, they both have three children. One has the rainbow family: three adopted. The first one was white, the second one was brown, and the third one was black. I tell people and they say, “Well, what part of Africa?” I say, “Well, that would be Cleveland.” (laughs) People are very … assuming. Anyway, they live in Utah; they all live in Park City. My name is Granny Annie. I thought that up. I can’t stand it when people are opposed to being called “Grandmother,” and they make up all these cutesy names. I don’t understand that. I think it is what it is. Of course, when I became a grandmother I was ready for it! If I had become a grandmother when I was forty-five, I probably would have thought up a new name too. (laughs) MC: I want to go back. One of the things I wanted you to talk about that I think is an important historical shift (and I think you were involved) is the Alta Club and women going in the front door. AC: (laughs) Oh, yes. MC: Do you want to comment about that? AC: When I was in college—or no, it was when I was a little bit older than that—they’d have meetings there. I just remember hearing about the front door for men and the side door being for women, and I just always went in the front door. I just looked down and didn’t have any eye contact. I’m sure people were giving me the evil eyeball, but I just never looked up. MC: Oh, so you simply broke the rule! Were other women breaking the rule? AC: Probably. (laughs) It wasn’t an organized thing. I was one of the first women members. 24 Genevieve Atwood was the first member, and then there were three of us together in the next group: Jan Graham, me, and Deedee Corradini. It was interesting; there was a lot of resistance. Now here’s the best story about the Alta Club, and I’m sure it’s true. (Somebody told me that was on the board or maybe the president at the time.) They used to have a blackball 25 system. 24 The Alta Club was founded in 1883 as a private gentleman’s club for wealthy non-Mormon business leaders to congregate in a more prestigious environment than the local bar. In 1987 the Alta Club welcomed its first non-widow women members: Genevieve Atwood, Utah State Geologist; Jan Graham, who became the Utah State Attorney General in 1993; Annette P. Cumming, a prominent local philanthropist; and Deedee Corradini, then a Chamber of Commerce executive and later mayor of Salt Lake City. In 2008 the Alta Club elected Ceri Jones as their first female president. 25 To blackball is to reject someone for membership, typically by means of a secret ballot. The term originated with “gentlemen’s clubs” and fraternities in the 18th century from the practice of 26 Oh, first let me tell you the other interesting thing I found out about the Alta Club. It was that when Ian came to Utah from New York, he was blackballed. He was a Canadian, and he had been working for an investment banking firm back there in New York, and they met these cleancut Mormon missionaries that had this plan—Bloomington in southern Utah, Terracor. Ian invested a million dollars in these guys because they were so blond and honest-looking, but the company was going into bankruptcy, and he moved out to Utah to salvage his investment for … LD: Terracor? Is that how he ended up with the David Keith home? AC: Yes, because Terracor had their offices there. 26 He came out to rescue his investment, and anyway, he applied for the Alta Club—it was Jack Gallivan (publisher of the Salt Lake Tribune) who tried to get him in—and he was blackballed! (laughs) So that’s the Alta Club connection. And that was probably one of the reasons that some people wanted me to be in the first women’s group a little bit—because that had happened to Ian. Anyway, the story is that whole vote on women membership came up in the Alta Club and people put in the balls, and there were three votes, three black balls, voting against women coming in. The vote needed to be unanimous, and the board took the whole thing in the back room and came out and said, “It passed! We’re letting women in.” No one dared to say, “Well, I put in a black ball!” (laughs) And I think that’s a real story. I mean, sometimes to make change you have to bend the rules a little bit. But it wasn’t easy. They were kind of mean to us. Well, some were very nice, but some were mean to us. MC: “Mean”? Like they wouldn’t talk to you? AC: Oh yes, but not only would they not talk to us, they would make rude comments. I remember one night Jan Graham and I went, and we were sitting at a little table for two, like you are there, and some guy came up right there by us and he was talking to the manager, and he said, “What are they doing here? Why are they here?” And the manager says, “Well, actually, they’re allowed to be here now, and these are two new members,” and the guy said, “Well, I don’t like that!” I mean that kind of stuff happened a lot. But it changed over time—it changed over time. registering a negative vote by placing a black ball in a ballot box where a white ball signifies yes, a black no to a proposed proposition. This system is typically used where a club's rules provide that only one or two objections, rather than a majority share of votes, are sufficient to defeat a proposition. 26 The historic David Keith mansion and carriage house, located on South Temple in Salt Lake City, was built during 1898-1900. Park City mining magnate David Keith, along with his wife and son, lived here until 1916. It was leased and renovated 1969 by Terracor. 27 I’ve worked a lot there trying to get more women members, but it was always interesting. I can remember one woman banker: we took her there for lunch, and we were telling her about the Alta Club, promoting it, and she was concerned about all the old people. I said, “Well, there are a lot of old people.” And we were walking out, and there was an old guy hobbling along with a stick. We were trying to decide if we should pass or not. We thought that would be rude, so we stayed behind—dutifully—and as he’s walking down the steps, he’s farting the whole time! And we’re laughing, and this banker woman is looking at me like… ! It is what it is. (laughs) It’s like, “Oh my god, this is a funny place.” MC: Did she ever join? AC: She did! (laughs) But there were lots of funny stories about old people falling asleep in the meetings and slobbering. But we all have to be tolerant about that; we’re all going to be there one day. Anyway, that’s the Alta Club: change is slow. LD: When I worked at KSL, I can’t remember what meeting we had, but it was a luncheon meeting for some reason over at the Alta Club. AC: And did you have to go in the side door? LD: Yes, but we were news people, so we were second-class citizens to begin with! AC: That’s true, that’s true! (laughs) Yes. Well, they had to have a lawsuit about it and threaten them with their liquor license: that’s how it all happened. Really, they had to change. They really had to change, and that’s probably the reason why the board said it passed. Because they couldn’t have had that club and not had liquor, you know. The Alta Club started out as a male, non-Mormon lawyer place, and one of the things I’ve worked on is to try to get some more Mormons in there—I mean, men that I knew—because it was not friendly to Mormon men. There are a lot more in there now. LD: Ah, so even though you’re not a Mormon, you’re an equal opportunity advocate! AC: I try to be. I try to be. They need that. There’s too much separation in our community. We don’t socialize enough, the Mormons and the non-Mormons. It’s kind of a sad thing—for both sides. MC: Okay, should we finish there? LD: You’ve been fascinating! Are you sure there’s nothing more you want to say? 28 AC: Well, I don’t know. I can’t remember: one thing that’s happening to me—one of the things—is I can’t remember stuff anymore! (laughs) Anyway, even so I think the histories are always interesting. Somebody at the U did my parents, and my mother had dementia. (She really had Alzheimer’s—she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.) They did my dad, who has this illustrious career, and then after, they said, “Well, we’d like to interview your wife.” And he said “Well, I don’t know about that.” Then he asked me, “What do you think about them interviewing Mom?” And I said, “Well, why don’t you let them decide, those history people?” And they did the interview, and her history was fascinating. It was fascinating! She’d get the dates wrong–this date came before that and so on—but they sorted it all out! It was really interesting to see how it all worked out. 29