Carolyn Tanner Irish, 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.

Carolyn Tanner Irish Interviewed by Marie Cornwall for the Aileen H. Clyde 20th-Century Women's Legacy Archive Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah July 1, 2014 Carolyn Tanner Irish Interviewed by Marie Cornwall for the Aileen H. Clyde 20th-Century Women's Legacy Archive Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah Born: April 14, 1940, Salt Lake City, Utah. Parents: Obert Clark Tanner and Grace Adams Tanner. Husbands: Leon E. Irish; Frederick Quinn. Children: Stephen Tanner Irish Jessica Lee Irish Metts Thomas Adams Irish Emily Anne Irish Kohler 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. 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 (July 1, 2014) Marie Cornwall (MC): Okay, we are here today on July 1, 2014, and if you would, to start, give me your full name and birthdate and where you were born. Carolyn Tanner Irish (CI): I actually was born here in Salt Lake City. It was just an interim time: my parents were living in Palo Alto, California, at Stanford University, so we moved back there as soon as I was born. I spent the first four years of my life there, and then we all moved back here. MC: Were your parents students at Stanford? CI: No, my dad was a teacher and chaplain. MC: Oh, he was a chaplain? CI: He was a Mormon chaplain along with Elton Trueblood 1 who was a Quaker, so they had a Mormon and a Quaker preaching! He loved teaching, and he taught the philosophy of religion. MC: Okay, I want you to think about when you were about ten years old—that would’ve been fourth grade in 1950—tell me what life was like for you as a ten-year-old girl. CI: My life was always looking forward. I had a great desire to get to junior high school, for instance, or get on the team, or to learn typing. I was always wanting the next thing. In this case, it was junior high school. MC: Were you here in Salt Lake at ten? CI: At ten I was. MC: What area of the city were you living in? CI: First, let me tell you how I got back here. All the children of my parents, Grace and Obert Tanner, had polio, and we were in the Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. My oldest brother died of polio. Others of us were not looking promising, but nobody died except Dean. 2 So, after that loss, my mother wanted very much to come back to Utah to be near her sisters. They were a 1 Elton Trueblood was a noted 20th-century American Quaker author and theologian, former chaplain both to Harvard and Stanford universities. 2 Dean Obert Tanner, born June 9th, 1933, died at ten years old on July 25, 1943. 2 close bunch from Parowan, Utah, and she was very close to her oldest sister, Adele Matheson, in particular. So she just told Dad, “I want to go back to be near my sisters.” He was great; he just said, “Okay, we’ll do it.” I asked him one time if he ever regretted that because the University of Utah wasn’t quite what Stanford was, but he said absolutely not. He said it was more fun to teach at the University of Utah because you teach philosophy of religion in Utah, and there’s something at stake in people’s lives, whereas at Stanford they take any kind of question for what it is, and they’re never rattled by it. Anyway, they did move back here in 1944, so I really grew up here. They bought a house on 2700 East; it was kind of an old farmhouse. It had ten or twelve acres, barns, an orchard, a vegetable garden. MC: The big white house at the top of Neff’s Lane or on 2700 East? 3 CI: Yes, sort of up there. But it doesn’t look now like it did then. I loved that house. If it looked now like it did then, I would be living there, but they changed it to be more beautiful in their eyes. In any case, that was a really close neighborhood. My mother had six children! When I had four, I thought, How on earth did she do this? The answer was the ward. The ward looked after everybody’s children. So if you were into any kind of trouble, your mother heard right away. MC: Where did you play? CI: In the front yard. MC: There wouldn’t have been many homes up there? You had ten acres, you said. CI: Not a lot. Yes, we had a lot of land, and the neighborhood kids always gathered at our place because we had huge lawns, and we could play kickball, which we called soccer. (That’s not what we’d call it today.) That’s pretty much where I spent those early years. MC: And when you played with the children in the neighborhood, was that brothers and sisters and their friends as well as yours? I’m asking whether it was age-graded, so that you only played with your own age. CI: No, I didn’t only play with my own age, or my own type, or what have you. At that time, we had lost two boys in my family. So Dean was the first. He died of polio. My little brother Stephen—I ran his life; I mean, I adored him—was run over by a car in a parking lot at Brighton 3 The home address was 3501 South 2700 East. 3 and killed that way. 4 So by the time I was ten, there were two less. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen, there were three less. My other brother, who was a little older than me, was killed by a guy who had been drinking in Millcreek Canyon. 5 So our family was whittled down. MC: Boy, that’s a lot of loss in just a little time! CI: Enormous loss, yes. I was the fourth child. A lot of people think I was the firstborn, but I wasn’t. I was the fourth. And my sister was older than me and very beautiful—and I was jealous of her. She was really beautiful. But she didn’t like me at all, so I just had to do the best I could. She wasn’t taken with the ward, whereas I was—in terms of activities. I loved all the things they invited us to do: giving talks, working in the welfare farm, skills like sewing, and all kinds of things. It was a really wonderful life for a child, and although I’m an Episcopalian now, I have never looked back with any kind of remorse on what that childhood provided for me. The other two things that were really critical for me around the age of ten were dance and horses. I had my own horse and all that land, and that was a lot of responsibility. I named him Cinnamon because he was the color of cinnamon, and he was a good horse but nothing special. We bought him off a farm somewhere east of here. MC: And you fed and took care of him? CI: I fed and brushed and staked him out every day and took him riding across those fields— there were a lot of fields. Our land adjoined Lowell Bennion’s property. 6 So I learned a lot about farming and the care and slaughter of animals. They used that as part of their living. And I was stunned by that—the slaughter. But Mrs. Bennion always called my mother to see if she wanted me to come home and not look if there was an animal being born or killed. She said, “No, I think she can learn from that.” So I learned a lot there. 4 Stephen Clark Tanner died December 28, 1949, a few days before his seventh birthday. He was born January 6, 1943. 5 Gordan Adams Tanner died May 26, 1955. Born March 16, 1938, he was almost seventeen. 6 Lowell Bennion was an educator, counselor, and author. He was most recognized for his community service, especially on behalf of the poor, elderly, and homeless. In 1986, the University of Utah established the Lowell Bennion Community Service Center to promote service learning among students. 4 The other critical thing was dance. I danced with Virginia Tanner’s Children Dance Theatre. 7 Now that’s a long way away from East Millcreek, so either my father or Mr. Hinckley—Gordon Hinckley8—drove us. His daughters danced. My parents were not as committed to dance as I was. They wanted me to play the piano. They would always argue that I could do it longer than I could do dance, but I felt very beautiful when I danced, and Virginia told me I was beautiful. I had some remnants of polio when I was very young, so it did me good. It was a form of therapy to do that. I remember as clearly as I remember anything Virginia coming up to me and saying, “You are so beautiful,” and for a little girl that was pretty special. MC: And was that every week you would go? CI: Yes. It was at the McCune School of Music and Dance. I had good friends there, and I stayed with it through road shows at the church. But I wasn’t in the company that went East, for example. I don’t think I was very good. But I turned out to be a good choreographer, so when I got to university, I was asked to be the choreographer of their musicals and shows, and that was a real treat for me. So those two things, Cinnamon and that dance company, kept me out of any kind of trouble I might have thought of. Those days you didn’t have kids smoking pot or drinking or anything like that, but if there had been, I wouldn’t have been interested because I was very busy. MC: So, where would you have gone to junior high school? CI: I went to Olympus Junior High School, so it was quite a ways to go. I rode a bus; it picked us up. MC: Did junior high meet your expectations? 7 Virginia Tanner began teaching children to dance at the McCune School of Music and Art in 1941. She eventually established her own school as part of the University of Utah’s continuing education program. By 1949 she had established the Children’s Dance Theatre. The Children’s Dance Theatre remains an integral component of the University of Utah’s Creative Dance Program, according to their website (www.tannerdance.utah.edu/programs/childrens-dancetheatre/). Carolyn participated on a regular basis from 1954-1958. 8 Gordon B. Hinckley later became the 15th president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, serving in that position from 1995 until his death at the age of 97 in 2008. 5 CI: Actually, it did: I loved it. I also went to Olympus High School, and there I walked. That’s not as far as Olympus Junior, but it’s far from 3501 South. 9 I was active in everything. I liked being active and being part of a play, being in a play, trying out for things. MC: Did you still do dance in high school? CI: I did. Kathleen Hinckley and Anne Golan and I were a trio of dancers. We had a really good time. We traveled quite a bit. My dad worked for the United Nations. He was very supportive early on of the United Nations. He always said, “I didn’t fight for my country because I was too young in the First World War and too old for the Second World War, but I’m going to fight for my country for peace.” And that’s what he loved doing. I have a picture of him with Eleanor Roosevelt when she came out here to Utah to start the model UN program. 10 She was very fond of Obert. He went everywhere to give speeches about it because a lot of people—not everybody, but a lot of people out here—thought it was a Communist organization. He worked hard. He took my sister and me to Europe because he was going to meetings in Geneva. So we went all over Europe when I was still in high school. MC: Wow, what an incredible experience! CI: It was a wonderful experience, yes. So the United Nations travel was great. And he gave other talks around Utah. He enjoyed doing that—and I thought he was the cat’s pajamas! I was very proud of him. Now to the last year in high school. One of your questions had been: Did you feel like you were free? Well, my parents were unbelievable that way. They let me make my decisions, and they didn’t interfere. They might have asked me a question about things occasionally, but for the most part I made the decisions. So when I was seventeen I was called and asked if I would go to New Zealand on a scholarship and study in an English boarding school, and I said yes. My parents were out of town. I don’t know where they were, but I didn’t ask them! 9 Olympus Junior High School is located in Holladay at 2217 East Murray-Holladay Road— about six miles from the family home. Olympus High School is located at 4055 South 2300 East—within a couple of miles of the family home. 10 The Model United Nations was begun (in various nations) as a simulation of the United Nations for the purpose of education. Students were assigned to represent different countries and topics in order to learn about diplomacy and international relations. Participants were to conduct research before conferences and formulate positions that they would then debate. 6 MC: How did you get the invitation in the first place? CI: Somebody at my high school, I think. It was the American Field Service 11, which is now very well-known but wasn’t then, and this was the first time they ever took American students and put them in school. Before that, it was always for the summer to live with a family in France or somewhere. But New Zealand’s too far to go if you’re just going to stay for the summer. So that year there were twenty-five of us Americans from all over. They were mostly east coast and west coast—and here was Carolyn from Utah. So that was one of the great adventures of my life early on. I lived with a New Zealand family. The head mistress of my assigned school at first said, no, she did not want an American girl in her school because she would corrupt her girls. (She had heard or seen bad things.) That necessitated a move. Then I had to be moved again because I was put in a family where the mother wasn’t there and the daughter wasn’t there, and my dad hit the ceiling and said he was leaving on the next plane to get me out of there. So they moved me back into the Auckland area, and I lived with an Anglican family, academic, and they talked the head mistress into changing her mind and letting me be there. They said, “She’s LDS, and we think she’s probably a good girl and won’t cause trouble.” (laughs) So I spent nine months there and came back just to graduate with my class in high school. MC: What do you think you learned from that experience? CI: You know what? I learned more than I can probably even recount. For one thing, the family I was staying with were Anglicans, so I went to church in an Anglican church and that was, as far as I was concerned, Catholic because the liturgy was a lot like a Catholic church. They didn’t all go to church, but the ones who did took me along and taught me how to behave there. MC: That’s much more “high church” than your experience had been in Salt Lake. CI: Let me tell you! (laughs) It was quite high church, as I’ve come to know. But there were also other surprises. I mean, the woman who taught history in my form (which is what they called grades; they called it the sixth form or the fourth form or…), she was a member of the Communist party—openly so, loved talking about it—and I was flabbergasted that they would let a Communist woman teach in my school. But she was a great teacher. I learned a lot from her. I was up to level in history, but in other fields I was about a third former because Olympus High School was in the cutting edge of what’s modern, which meant you take a whole lot of different subjects but you don’t focus in on any. So I had to take biology with third formers, for instance. 11 AFS (American Field Service) is an international exchange organization for students and adults that operates in more than 50 countries and organizes intercultural learning experiences. 7 Then one day a week I went to the Maori school because I really wanted to. They had a form of dance with tethered balls, their pois, they called them, that I loved watching. 12 So the head mistress let me go one day a week to the Maori school. The girls there were like junior high schoolers. They were very young and childish, but they pampered me and fussed over me and giggled and made presents for me and all that kind of thing. MC: So did you learn the dances? CI: Oh, yes, I did. They have these poi, the hand things that you slap across the back of your arm while you’re dancing. I learned that, and I learned their songs. And then I came home to graduate with my class. That summer I went to summer stock in Steamboat Springs—the Julie Harris Theater—and I went both as a dancer and to act in some of their plays. So that was the summer between high school and college. MC: Where did you go to college? CI: I went to Stanford. MC: And how was that decision made? Was that your decision? CI: It was totally my decision, but… MC: I mean; your father had been there. CI: He had been. Wally Sterling who was then the president of Stanford had come to Salt Lake to the Hotel Utah to speak to alums and other people, and so Obert introduced me, and he said, “Now where are you thinking of going to university?” And I said, “Either Stanford or the University of Utah.” He said, “Well, you come to Stanford.” I said, “Okay!” (laughs) … sort of like that. But it was my decision; nobody pushed me there. MC: And what did you study at Stanford? CI: Well, I loved English, and the reading and writing that I learned in that field, but I was at Stanford only two years, and then I got married. And that was a fairly serious mistake, as I look back. But, again, it was my decision, and I was married to that man for twenty-eight years. He was the father of my children. We did enjoy some things together, but… He wanted to go to law school at the University of Michigan, so I had to transfer from Stanford to the University of 12 A poi is a ball on a cord used in Maori dances, which are also referred to as poi. As a performance art, poi involves swinging tethered weights through a variety of rhythmical and geometric patterns. 8 Michigan. I did philosophy there and got high honors in philosophy. It was a great department and I loved that—philosophy. MC: Now, what year was this? Early fifties? CI: I got married in 1960. MC: I got the wrong decade. So in the sixties, and you’re in Michigan. CI: I graduated from Michigan in ’62, so I had just moved to Michigan in 1960. 13 MC: Why was it so important to you to finish your degree? Not all women were finishing their degrees back then. CI: It never would have occurred to me not to. It was in me, and it was what I did. I didn’t like the idea of not finishing. And I loved philosophy, and I loved my professors. It wasn’t easy, but it was what I did. Lee, my first husband, was then in the law school and committed to that. MC: And you started having children during this period? CI: No, we didn’t have children until eight years after we married. MC: Oh, okay, so you were both students at Michigan. CI: Then we were both students at Oxford. Lee got a Ford Foundation Grant to study jurisprudence, which is the philosophy of law, and I had been reading H.L.A. Hart 14 who was the man in jurisprudence—philosophy of law. He held the Blackstone Chair at Oxford. So I told Lee that he needed to go study with Hart—he needed to read him. When we got there and I learned how you study at Oxford, which was very different from Michigan or Stanford, I thought, I can do this. So I asked the head of our college if I could be a member. He said, “You can be a member of this college, but you have to be admitted by the 13 Carolyn graduated with a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1962. 14 H.L.A. Hart’s most famous work is The Concept of Law (1961). It develops Hart's theory of legal positivism—the view that laws are rules made by human beings and that there is no inherent or necessary connection between law and morality. The Concept of Law provides within the framework of analytic philosophy an explanation to a number of traditional jurisprudential questions such as: "What is law?" "Must laws be rules?" and "What is the relation between law and morality?" 9 philosophy faculty.” The man who was the head of the philosophy faculty was Gilbert Ryle, 15 and you might as well have told me I was going to have to be interviewed by Jesus because he was such a famous person. And interesting person! He interviewed me, and he asked me to write down on the back of an envelope every course I’d ever taken, who taught it, and what grade I got, and then he said, “Well, that sounds all right. Are you any good?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “The library is right over there.” Just like that. He took a big ledger down from his shelf and wrote my name in it. (This was the years before computers or any other electronics.) I had, of course, to get my records sent at some point, but I was admitted to study right then. MC: Based on that interview. CI: Yes. Based on that interview. It was a wonderful thing and frightening, too, because he was so famous. MC: Were there other women in your college? CI: There were, and there still are. I am a very active alumnus. I am a fellow of the college, and that was the second year the college existed. So it was a post-war college. It was only for graduate students, and they admitted both men and women. It was the first college at Oxford or Cambridge that admitted both. So it was a very special place in that way. 16 MC: Did you have any sense that you were pioneering for women at all in that period? CI: Not really. There were women at the college, but they came from all over the world—India and other places. But not a lot; it was still mostly men. But increasingly it was women, and now it’s probably half and half, although I don’t know for certain. My husband and I were both members of the same college and that worked in our favor. We traveled, and we did not have children—intentionally, because we wanted to grow up. It was only at that point that I thought of having a vocation, of working. I had never thought of that when I went to Stanford. A job, you know, that kind of thing. MC: What were you thinking—that you would be a homemaker? 15 Gilbert Ryle published on a wide range of topics in philosophy, notably in the history of philosophy and in philosophy of language. The Concept of Mind (1949) remains his best known and most important work. 16 Carolyn graduated from Oxford University in 1968 with a master of letters in moral philosophy. 10 CI: No, I wanted to be an educated person. That’s as far as I could tell you. I wanted to be educated. MC: And you got that from your family. CI: Probably, yes. Yes. MC: Because of your father’s focus? CI: Yes, he went to Stanford; he went to Harvard; he went to Utah. And he graduated in English, and he graduated from the law school here. I mean, he was an all-over-the-place guy, and I guess I got that. MC: Was it important to your mother as well? CI: She was proud of me, but it didn’t have the same kind of . . .. She had a college degree; she started at the University of Utah, and then she had to finish at Southern Utah University because she had to live at home, and Parowan was closest. MC: Still, it’s unusual for women of her age to have completed college, so that shows it was important. CI: It was important to her, yes. And they were always with couples that were well educated and interesting in different ways. MC: So, when do you come back from Oxford? CI: We came back when my husband was chosen to be a law clerk at the Supreme Court. So we ended up in Washington, D.C. He was a clerk for Justice “Whizzer” White.17 So we lived there, and that was when we started our family. I had ultimately four children, but spaced apart so I had two matched pairs: boy, girl, a few years, boy, girl. MC: And their names were? CI: Stephen, Jessica, Thomas, and Emily. And we’re very close, very close. MC: Did you enjoy motherhood? 17 Byron R. White, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, played professional football for a year with the Pittsburgh Pirates; the nickname “Whizzer” stuck. 11 CI: Loved it. MC: Did you stay home and focus primarily on that, or did you continue your …? CI: I did focus primarily on that and neighborhood things. I didn’t have any kind of LDS belief. That had long gone, just because the story didn’t compute for me. So that’s when I started thinking, “How did my mother do this?” I thought, “I need a church.” So my friends were taking their children to an Episcopal church, and I went. I thought I would just drop them off and go for coffee—somewhere else, not in that church. But it was an intergenerational Sunday School, so you had to be there. MC: What was that experience like: going back and finding church? Did you feel at home there? CI: You know, I did. I totally did. The Book of Common Prayer, second only to the Bible, is the greatest book I know. It’s a pattern that all Anglicans follow, and it began to feel to me…it converted me: that manner of worship. So, pretty soon I looked around and my kids weren’t there, and I was still there. I loved that manner of worship. MC: Were your children baptized? CI: They were all baptized at that little church. But they are not much church people now, although one of my sons became a Dominican friar for four years. He joined the Catholic Church and became a friar. But he fell in love with a lovely woman, and so he didn’t stay with that pattern. MC: Now during this period when you come back from Oxford there’s a lot of turmoil in American society with the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the birth of the Women’s Movement. Can you tell us about your experience with those—whether or not they were central in your life? CI: Big time; big time. I was at the University of Michigan when those movements were beginning: Civil Rights and Vietnam. While the University of Michigan was not Cal-Berkeley, it was second only to Cal-Berkeley for radical demonstration, and I found myself siding with that and being part of that. That felt very powerful to me. It really confirmed a lot of my belief system; it confirmed in me what I had begun with the United Nations. I loved international affairs. MC: And so all the experiences with your father really melded together. 12 CI: It did; it absolutely did. I never heard him speak poorly of any race or gender or anything like that; he was always teaching us that all human beings are equal and that we were to behave that way. So, that was a big part of that. MC: So did you demonstrate? You were there. CI: Oh, absolutely. I missed my graduation: Lyndon Johnson spoke at my graduation, and I missed it for the sake of the demonstrations that were under way and that we thought would be even more important than graduation exercises by far. (laughs) It was also under way at Oxford. Oxford was way ahead of universities here in terms of demonstrating and speeches and that kind of thing. Now, I’m going to move to the vocational part of my story. I taught school. I taught philosophy to high schoolers at a private school in Washington, D.C., and I was very eager that they learned to think for themselves. 18 I overreached the first year; I know I did. But then I got the juniors in that high school together, and I said, “We’re going to have a seminar class when you are seniors. What do you think you would like to study?” And they were eager to study ethics, morality, and similar subjects because they were part of these movements. So, that’s what I did with the senior seminar, and I did that for about five years. That was fun, interesting, although I may have overreached there a little bit, too. MC: So, how many students would have been in your class? CI: Eight or ten. MC: And this was at a private school, so these were young future leaders, maybe? CI: Maybe. I didn’t stay in touch with them for that long. But I then believed myself to be called to the priesthood as an Episcopal priest—a deacon and then a priest. (I never thought I was called to be a bishop.) 19 MC: Was there one moment or experience? 18 Carolyn taught at the Edmund Burke School in Washington, D.C. from 1970-75. 19 A deacon is one of three distinct orders of ordained ministers (bishops, priests, deacons) in the Episcopal Church. An individual becomes a deacon by being ordained by a bishop after having completed a course of study and formation. (This differs from other religious denominations where the title of deacon is often used for lay persons elected for a term to a governing position in a local church.) 13 CI: Yes, it was a very holy experience for me, and I’ve never forgotten it, and I never will. It was so clear that everything in my life added up to and would feed into that vocation: everything would be part of that. Now, it’s not easy, and it certainly wasn’t for women. (They had just voted to ordain women.) So I had to go through their ropes and systems to be accepted as what is called a postulant. That is someone preparing for Holy Orders. That took two years, and then I had to attend seminary. The largest Episcopal seminary in the world was across the Potomac River, so I could go to seminary and still live at home. 20 That was pretty great, although it was hard work; I had four children under the age of ten. MC: Oh, my goodness, and you were going to school?! CI: Full-time, and I was going to graduate school—hardest study I ever did, much harder than Oxford or any other place. Partly, I think, because it mattered to me so much; it mattered to me a lot. MC: Was it a new subject? I mean, it was theology now, right? CI: Yes. MC: And you had always been studying philosophy. So was that a big difference? CI: It is, and it isn’t. If you study philosophy, through the Middle Ages they were theologians, they were priests, they were monks, and they were also doing science at that time, doing experiments at their monasteries. Yes, I had already learned Augustine 21 and St. Thomas 22, and those people who would come up in a philosophy class, so I felt at home in the seminary. If you are going past your childhood belief structure and you have the kind of experience I had, which—I could not deny it, and I couldn’t let it go: it was that critical to me. Then I was ordained to the deaconate as a deacon—everyone’s ordained as a deacon first—and that’s a servant. You do home care, and you assist the priest. So I was a deacon for a year. Then I was ordained to the priesthood by the first African-American bishop, John Walker, and my family 20 Carolyn graduated cum laude from the Virginia Theological Seminary in 1983. Augustine of Hippo, also known as Saint Augustine, was an early Christian theologian and philosopher whose writings influenced the development of Western Christianity and Western philosophy. 21 22 Saint Thomas Aquinas was a Catholic priest in the Dominican Order and one of the most important medieval philosophers and theologians. He was immensely influenced by scholasticism and Aristotle and known for his synthesis of the two traditions. 14 came out to Washington to be part of it. I thought that was pretty wonderful. Everybody thought they would object, but they didn’t object. 23 MC: They loved it. CI: They did. Any time I came to Salt Lake, I took my dad to St. Mark’s Cathedral, and he loved it, he did. I remember one time it was a woman who was giving the Homily—the sermon—and she talked about how we like everyone to make their own decisions. Ours is not a church that tells you what to do: we try to educate you and help you form as a human being and then make your own decisions. Her example was the movie about Jesus that was very controversial at the time, and she said she did not want to go see it, but her husband, who was also a priest, did. So, she said that was fine. When we got out to the car, my dad said, “I love your church: that was brilliant! Wonderful. If I lived where you do, I would go to your church. But I don’t, and I can’t!” (laughs) Because he had written books for the LDS Church, and things like that. Anyway, let me finish, then, by saying I was elected to be a bishop. That’s not true in England; Anglicans are appointed to the Episcopacy in England, not elected. MC: And who elects you? CI: The people of this diocese. The diocese is the state of Utah, so nominees for bishop are recommended to their convention, and then they have an election. 24 I think I was elected because I was the only person anybody knew that was from Utah. I mean, that’s why I was nominated, and I had never aspired to it or thought that would happen. But, it did happen. I think having the name Tanner didn’t hurt me. MC: Now let me ask you a couple of questions, though. When you were in theology school, were there other women there, too, at that time studying? CI: Yes, there were, but just a few. Most of the women that had had that vocation were at places like Yale or Princeton; they have theology schools. But this was a seminary for Anglicans, for Episcopalians. 23 Carolyn served as assistant minister in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C. (1981-84), as assistant rector in the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia (1984-85), as priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan (1985-88), as staff associate with the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation (1988-95), and as staff associate at the Washington National Cathedral (1992-94). 24 Carolyn served as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Utah from 1996-2008. 15 MC: I’m going to ask you again: did you have any sense that you were doing something that was part of the opening of women’s possibilities, or were you simply more called to the ministry? CI: Sort of the latter. Well, I wasn’t going to say no if … But I hadn’t aspired to be bishop, so I wasn’t hanging on anything. But I was elected, and that is pretty big for a woman. I was the first woman west of the Potomac River. The early women were suffragan bishops, 25 that is to say, assisting bishops and not diocesan. And they were all New Englanders. So I came all the way out, just like the first Episcopal bishop did, came out here, and everybody made kind of a fuss about it. But they were proud of it, too. One woman in one of our congregations up in Logan had bumper stickers made that said, “Honk If Your Bishop Is a Woman!” (laughs) MC: Oh, that’s great! So when was it that you came here? Was it in the early ‘90s? CI: In ‘95 I was elected; in ’96 I was consecrated as bishop. MC: What was that experience like, I mean the actual consecration as a bishop? What was that experience like for you? CI: It was wonderful. I’m sorry to say my father wasn’t living because he would have loved that. He really would have loved it—at least all his friends tell me he liked to brag about me. And my mother was alive, and she came. And lots of friends from Virginia, from Michigan, from Washington D.C., came all this way to Utah. They were from churches where I had served or taught or . . .. Anyway, it was a lot of people, and it was a big deal—a big deal. It was held at what is now called Abravanel Hall. It was very special. My favorite professor preached, and that was special. Now, I’m going to conclude by saying I retired as an actively serving bishop. I’m still a bishop, but I don’t have any jurisdiction anywhere. In other words, if I wanted to preach here, I would have to get the current bishop to give consent for me to preach. MC: But as a bishop do you still have an administrative role? CI: No. I still am a bishop, so I can do anything I’m asked to do, as long as I have that bishop’s permission where it’s done—in a church, or whatever. So, there’s that, and you also don’t say “retired”; you say, “I resigned my jurisdiction.” That was in 2010, about four years ago, and we 25 In the Anglican churches, the term suffragan applies to a bishop who is an assistant to a diocesan bishop. A suffragan bishop does not automatically succeed a diocesan bishop, as does a coadjutor bishop. 16 moved to Washington, D.C., because my husband, my second husband, was in the foreign service, and D.C. was home for him. He was also an Episcopal priest, and he wanted to go back to Washington. I didn’t object because I loved Washington, and I discovered the Episcopal Church there. But now it’s kind of gone sour on me: politics is not a nice part of life there, and my best friend from there died—on Christmas Day two years ago. So I have maybe two or three friends there, and I have lots of friends here, so I’m very keen to move back. My primary work now is here. I chair the board of this company. 26 MC: Of O. C. Tanner. CI: Yes, and I love this company. I just do feel like I have something to contribute, and it’s a lot of responsibility, as with a lot of things I’ve done. A lot of responsibility, yes, but it’s wonderful to have other work that I just step into. My dad always wanted me to be involved here, and I didn’t think I would be able to be. And now I have this leaning to go west again, to move back here. MC: So you’re moving back. CI: Yes, we are, but it may be more gradual than I would like. But we have a place and we have friends and this is home for me. I’m always here for board meetings, of course. MC: Let me ask you just a couple more questions. Now, when you started seminary, had your first marriage already ended? CI: No. MC: So you were still in that, but then during that time… CI: Yes. And I don’t particularly want to discuss all that. MC: I’m just trying to get the timeline, that’s all. CI: I was married to him for twenty-eight years. That’s a long time for a bad marriage. MC: When did you meet your new husband, then? 26 O. C. Tanner Company is now one of the largest manufacturers of retail and corporate awards in the United States. The company was started by Obert Tanner in 1927 while he was still an undergraduate student at the University of Utah. Carolyn has served as chair of the board since 1993. 17 CI: I knew him in Washington because we taught together, and he went to the church where I was working, and we were both very high on environmental issues in the church: trying to get the church to be teachers of responsible stewardship. So we did a lot of programs together, and we were pals. His wife had a very tragic and accidental death. I was fond of her; this marriage was not something I ever would have imagined. But it happened, and that’s how it was. MC: Were you married to him when you came out here to be bishop? CI: Part of the time. Let’s see, we were married in 2001, and I came out here to be bishop in ’96. MC: Okay, so he joined you out here while you were Bishop? CI: He did join me out here—and it wasn’t his favorite place in the world. MC: It wasn’t?! (laughs) CI: No, it wasn’t, but he was a good sport, and I think he will be still. I love the West. I’m just so . . .. Both sides of my family came across with the loyal and senior LDS people. MC: Talk a little bit about your mother’s side. What was her maiden name? CI: Adams, so she was Grace Adams, from Parowan. She was close with her sisters, and her oldest sister married Scott Matheson. So my closest relatives now are all these Mathesons all over the place! MC: No wonder Utah is a good place for you! CI: It’s a good place for me, and it doesn’t bother them at all that I’m Episcopalian, whereas I know I have some relatives that probably think I’ve, you know … Anyway, I do a lot of things, and love the Matheson family, and they love me. MC: Well, to finish up here, I’d just like to ask you, given your vast experience, to maybe think about your daughters: do you think life is better for women these days compared to your experience, and in what way? What is it that your daughters have opportunity for that is unique and great? CI: Better—absolutely. I don’t think gender gets raised as the issue for them. I mean, some things might get raised, but it isn’t gender. My oldest daughter Jessica is one of the deans of Parsons School of Design in New York City. 18 MC: Oh, wow. CI: So that’s really big time. She’s been on sabbatical this year, and she’s just written two children’s books. I talked to her the other day, and they’ll probably get published. Emily just has two babies; one is two and one is one! So she’s a busy mother. My oldest son is at Cambridge University in England, and he’s studying and teaching history and philosophy of science. He’s kind of a brilliant guy. But you know what? Over there it wouldn’t have made any difference if he’d been female. Over there that barrier broke down sooner, especially I think for someone with an academic bent. MC: Yes. Do you think women have different constraints now than maybe before, when you were a young mother? CI: Well, you know, I didn’t ever think I had constraints because I was female. I knew I had constraints because I was a mother, okay, yes, that was true. Yes, my husband was not much involved in the children’s upbringing. MC: So, it was motherhood and the time to do it that was the constraint. CI: It was time to do it. MC: So, how did you do it? How did you have four children under ten and go to seminary? CI: Yes, that was probably a hard patch. (laughs) And when they were testing me about being ordained and so on, I always said, “Listen, if one of my kids is in trouble, I know what I’ll do. (I love them more than you do, so don’t think I don’t know what I would do.) I would quit seminary!” And I thought I would at one point. One of my children had a burn and was in the Children’s Hospital, and you know what? I forgot to withdraw. The next day I got up and went to class, then went back to the hospital to see him—and life just went on. Also, I did have a wonderful nanny, a lady from Central America. She was wonderful with them. She didn’t live with us, but she was there every day, so I didn’t worry. I got up in the morning at 4:00 a.m., did all my homework. The children were not allowed to get out of bed till 7:00. “You do not knock on Mama’s door until 7:00, okay?” Then we have breakfast, and everybody goes on their way to school. But I was up at 4:00 a.m., and I said, “No way are you getting up before 7:00!” But they had to test that out. I remember Tommy coming beating on my door, the door to my study. But all of that seems … 19 And I was involved in neighborhood things. There was a neighborhood club. There was an old building and an old swimming pool—and they all learned to swim there and had parties and plays there. It was a good neighborhood. MC: And by the time you were elected bishop, they were grown, right? CI: Pretty much. Let’s see, well, they all came for my consecration as a bishop. I remember them being there. The two younger ones were still in college, I think. MC: But they were pretty well raised by then? CI: Yes, you don’t have much say in their lives beyond a certain point. They tell you what they’re going to do. One of the blessings of my life was that all my children knew my mother and father—knew them well, and talk about them still, and liked to come out here. We came out here to ski—and always do our school shopping in late August, for some reason. MC: So you had good family life. CI: We had good family life. MC: One last question that I’m asking, given that you’re a bishop: what do you think of the prospects of religion in this modern world? Do you think it’s going to survive? CI: I don’t know. Marie, I really don’t know. There’s a diminishment of interest in the institution of the church. And by that, I mean Episcopal, Presbyterian; I don’t know anymore very much about the LDS Church. They always brag that they’re growing. But my experience and observation is they may be growing, but some of the people they convert are not sticking. I wish I knew the answer to your question, but I don’t. MC: Is it something you worry about? CI: No. MC: You think religion will take care of itself? CI: My world now is a world of spirituality. That’s the word I use; that’s what I talk about. It’s what matters to me: that direct relationship with the Holy Spirit, with God as spirit. It doesn’t mean I don’t think God is the Creator or Redeemer, but that’s what feeds my life and gives me my values, my hopes. It restores me. It restores me. It’s not the institution. I’m sorry about that; I mean; I wish it was. 20 MC: Well, it seems a lot of people are going that way. CI: I wonder. Yes. MC: That’s why I asked about it. So I appreciate the distinction you’re making between the institution and spirituality. CI: Yes. So whenever I’ve been asked to teach a class at the U or do something similar at a public university, that’s the way that I do it, without talking creeds and that kind of thing. Creeds don’t interest me. The Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, or the Twelve Articles of Faith—they don’t interest me; they don’t restore me. MC: It’s your spirituality that restores you. CI: It is, yes. So, when someone asks me, “What is spirituality to you?” I think about it as the interface of human spirit/Holy Spirit—that interface. And God is always there. Always. I may drop out for a while; I may get other things going in my life that are more important to me. I may. But that interface—I just turn the corner and immediately I’m whole again. That’s how I think of it. That’s how I experience it. Human spirit/Holy Spirit, as close as anything can be. MC: That’s nice! Is there anything else that we haven’t touched on that you’d like to include? CI: No, I don’t think so. I want to say this just to you. I had a problem with wine. And I had to have help getting out of it. I don’t particularly want that to be more public than my divorce has to be. But I’m just telling you that because I want to be honest. It was big—I mean, it was big to me because I wanted to be perfect, I wanted to be what everybody hoped I would be. I was a very private drinker. I would get home, and it would either pick me up if I was down or settle me down if I was up, and that’s all. I never drank in front of people, and I’m sorry I ever did at all, but there it is. I think probably some of the best ministry I’ve had to offer came out of that experience of being imperfect, of needing help. MC: And the spirituality you talk about; did that help play a role in getting better? CI: It did. Yes, yes. But I needed people help too. It wasn’t all just about God. I needed other people who had been through it and had managed to recover to talk to me and help me and strengthen me. So that was a generous part of my life, when I could turn to other people, and be imperfect. MC: And get over it, apparently. 21 CI: Well, it’s not part of my life now. I hope isn’t again. But there it is: you never say never. Marie, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you, and I appreciate your gentleness. It’s interesting, as we complete this, to reflect that I was never part of what you might be thinking of as a woman’s movement. I wasn’t. Maybe it came along after I had made the decisions I had made. I associate that with the ‘70s, but wherever I was, I was at home getting by and getting through. A lot of that had to do with my dad, a lot: he lost his three sons. The last boy 27 was born when my mother was in her mid-forties—and, bless his heart, he had trouble. You couldn’t have pulled him into this company, O.C. Tanner, for instance. He had trouble with drugs. I adore him, and he’s healing, and he’s just the best, but most of my life I’ve been getting him out of jail, or out of other countries where he’s caused trouble, or things like that. So I was his caregiver, the trustee of his resources—that’s not a popular thing to be! But we’ve now bonded in a new way that is very important to me. My sister died a few years ago, 28 so there’s just the two of us. MC: Well, I’ve really appreciated talking to you. It’s been a wonderful experience. 29 27 David Obert Tanner is the youngest son of Obert and Grace Tanner. 28 Joan Tanner Reddish died in 2006. 29 Carolyn has received honorary doctoral degrees from the following institutions of higher learning: Virginia Theological Seminary, Westminster College of Salt Lake City, University of Utah, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Salt Lake Community College, and Utah State University. 22 CAROLYN TANNER IRISH Chair of the Board O.C. Tanner Company 1930 S. State Street Salt Lake City UT 84115 [phone] Experience: O.C. Tanner Company (1993 – present) Chair of the Board The Episcopal Diocese of Utah, Salt Lake City UT (1996 – 2008) Bishop of the Diocese Washington National Cathedral (1992-94) Staff Associate Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation (1988-95) Staff Associate The Episcopal Diocese of Michigan (1985-88) Priest The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia (1984-85) Assistant Rector The Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC (1981-84) Assistant Minister Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC (1970-75) Teacher Education: M.Div., cum laude, 1983 Virginia Theological Seminary M.Litt., Moral Philosophy, 1968 Oxford University B.A. Philosophy, 1962 University of Michigan Date of Birth: April 14, 1940 Community Activities: Trustee, Tanner Charitable Trust Member, Board of Directors, Tanner Lectures on Human Values Member, Board of Directors, Nature Conservancy of Utah Awards and Honors: Honorary Doctoral Degrees: Virginia Theological Seminary Westminster College of Salt Lake City University of Utah Church Divinity School of the Pacific Salt Lake Community College Utah State University 23