Mrs. Sandee Beal (Part III)

  (Born 1947)

Parents: Woodrow Wilson Conner and Mary Clarice Quinn

Siblings: Ghee, Don, and David

Husband: Burgin

Children: Cameron and Casey

 

(Continued from Part II…)

So what are some of your hobbies?

I did cake decorating for many, many years. I was kind of self-taught. I quit doing it years ago, but then, I just volunteered to make Oscar the Grouch cupcakes for my grandson’s first birthday. (Laughs…) Aww… That’s so cute!

Another hobby I enjoyed with my first husband was photography. We had a business and did portraits, passports and weddings, and that was really fun to do. You learn how to deal with people, place people… I watch these wedding programs, and I just cringe because they don’t carry their flowers right; you carry them at your waist, so you can see the bodice of your dress… (We all laugh…)

I’m an avid reader, but I usually only read very positive things. I don’t read murders; I don’t read mysteries. I am not a proponent of guns. That’s how I am, too. I am not really into guns at all. When my kids were growing up, cap guns were a big thing. My boys did not have cap guns; they did not have squirt guns. They had to pop caps with a rock. They did have caps, but they had to pop them with a rock! (Laughs…) Consequently, neither of my boys is into guns.

After I started at working at FC&A, I didn’t really have as many hobbies. I think my grandkids become my hobby for a while. I’ve learned to text so I can communicate with them. That’s a little slice of technology I enjoy.

My name is Sandee, and I thought that Grandee would be really cute name for them to call me. Well, somehow or another, Crew ended up with Ginnie not Grandee. So I am Ginnie. That’s cute! I have no claim to fame because all I can think of is a guinea pig or a guinea hen. (We laugh…) Neither of those really excites me, but that’s what they call me. The funny thing is that that’s what all their friends call me, too. They call Burgin “Burger”. I was up last weekend to visit them and we were sitting on the front porch and talking—adults and kids. Kind of like what I did with the boys.

The other thing that’s kind of different is how I share duty with their other grandmother. Cameron’s wife is Tracy, and Tracy’s mother died before Cameron and Tracy were married. Her mother and I did not know each other, but we were both born in ’47 (I was January; she was February). She was a stewardess; I was a stewardess. So we had a lot of parallels. I felt like as the kids were growing, I wanted them to be able to remember her, so on Crew’s first birthday, I took a bouquet of balloons, and I put a note on it that said, “Happy Birthday! Send me a balloon, so I can celebrate with you.” So we sent Nana Dare a balloon. (They refer to her as “Nana Dare.”) I started the tradition of them always getting a birthday gift from Nana Dare. For the longest time, they truly believed that Nana Dare, in heaven, was getting these gifts to Ginnie. I was not ever blatantly lying to them; it was just the way we would weave the words, you know. As they got older, I think they sort of suspected.

One year (it was when Crew was in grade school), he wanted this pair of $150 sneakers, which he certainly didn’t need, but that was what he wanted. So I got him the sneakers, only I wrapped up one, and I gave it to him and told him that Ginnie did not have enough money this pay period. I could only get him one sneaker, and I said, “But I get paid in two weeks, and when I get paid, we’ll go get the other one.” Well, when he opened Nana Dare’s gift, he got the other sneaker. (Chuckles…) That is so cute. So it was just hysterical. That’s so thoughtful.

When Dare turned thirteen, I got her Jane Seymour’s Open Heart necklace that had a heart from me and a heart from Nana Dare. Now, Nana Dare is very much a part of their lives, a part of what they’ve always known without ever meeting her. It’s been really fun doing it. They still send her balloons on special occasions. I was the only grandmother and Tracy’s dad was, for a lot of the time, the only grandfather, so we tried to be creative in doing things.

Fortunately, my first husband—I don’t like the name “ex” because he was very much a part of my life, and he is the father of my kids. So I usually just say “my first husband,” but then, someone told me that usually refers to a deceased husband. I said, “Oh, okay. That’s all right… (We all laugh…) He is financially very stable, so he has assisted with the kids’ sports things and that type of stuff. He still doesn’t see them but once or twice a year and they don’t have much to say. It is his choice to be absent from their life. His wife is not very much a warm person, so they’re not into her at all.

What kind of pets have you had? Have they been a part of your life?

Oh yes! I grew up with dogs, and every summer when our dog had puppies, all the neighborhood kids would come, and we would watch this dog give birth to puppies. It wasn’t gross or anything. It was just… A miracle of life! It was; it was just nature.

Then, I had a dog that we got from the pound. It was the first dog the boys had. His name was Ted, and we called him Teddy. He was a Pomeranian and a Corgi. Corgis don’t, by nature, bark, and Pomeranians are very yippy. Ted did not bark. I can remember when we first got him, Bob and the boys would ring the doorbell and try to get him to bark, so here’s Bob and the boys going “bark, bark, bark, bark, bark,” and Ted just sitting there looking at them. (We all laugh…)

I had Ted for eighteen years, and I had to have him put to sleep. Eighteen years is a long time! Mm-hmm. It’s a long time. He didn’t really know he was a dog; he was a family member. During the time after the divorce, I jokingly said, “I got the dog and the divorce.” He was such a sweet dog. Burgin also got a dog and a divorce, so we had Ted and Pookie. Even coming from different situations, they were very, very compatible. We haven’t had a dog since then. Burgin’s daughter had Shadow, an American Eskimo, that we called our granddog. Whenever she went on a vacation Shadow stayed with us. He even came to our wedding. He really was the epitome of beautiful love. She got him as a puppy, and we all watched him grow. He was something else!

The day we had to have him put away is a time I will always remember. He was having trouble getting up and was so feeble. We met Kristie in Peachtree City, and her husband left work to meet us. We went to TCBY and bought Shadow an ice cream. Then, we took him up to the pond and put a blanket out, so he could watch the ducks. Then, we went to McDonald’s and got him a hamburger. We gave him the hamburger, and we all talked to him and told stories. Then, we took him to the vet.

We were all in the room with him when… The assistant took him out of the room and put a port in him because when you put that in, it can be uncomfortable. When they brought him back in, we all just said good-bye and he was gone. It was very emotional but peaceful. It was just… It seems like a special way to do it. I can cry thinking about it as a matter of fact. It was such a hard thing, but it was so beautiful. He was so much a part of all of us. I was with Ted when I had him put to sleep too. Shadow passed in the fall, and for Christmas, Kristi gave us a picture frame with multiple openings for the paw prints on our heart. There were all different pictures of Shadow.

I do believe that if you have a dog, it needs to be a part of your family. You know, you just don’t put them outside and chain them. I would love to have another dog. In my mind, I think I’m going to get a dog like Ted. Well, probably not. And if I get a puppy, he’s going to pee, and he’s going to nibble, and he’s going to dig, so while I was working, it wasn’t a good time. Well, now that I’m retired, we want to go places, so it’s not good either. It’s like, you know… I may never—but I hope someday I will. Yes, we love our pets at our house. They make our lives fuller.

My niece has a black lab that was a nursing home dog. She volunteered and could take him to the nursing home, and people just reached out. It just kind of melts away their… Worries. Worries. It does, yeah…

I don’t want to dwell on depressing things, but what problems do you think there are in the world today? What do you think needs to be done about them?

I think that a lot of problems arise from the progress that we’ve made as things have evolved. I think the current generation does expect immediate gratification. If you want something, you want it now. If you need the answer to something, there **snaps**, you’ve got it. You don’t have to visit the library and research it. Progress has changed our communication. People live on one or two-word answers. You text “Where r u?” “Home.” “Ready 2 go?” “Y.” To me that is not communication.

I think both parents working has had an impact on current problems. Kids have had to grow up in daycare. I don’t necessarily say that’s a bad thing. I just see it as a big change. I also think probably one of my biggest aggravations is violent movies, violent video games. You see somebody shot in a movie, and it’s okay. There is no emotional feeling. You don’t get the finality of death. When your video goal is to shoot all these people, there are no consequences. Movies that have to be triple X rated because of violence makes me sad. Kids today only know technology and it keeps changing and becoming further removed from what I grew up with.

Burgin and I were talking earlier about coming to the interview and what we would say in this type of stuff. He said that he feels that the cell phone is a really big breakthrough… for emergency, but it’s very misused. It’s a great thing, but as a phone how many times do you talk on your phone? You text. A lot of people don’t talk. When you don’t have that art of conversation, you lose an understanding of people and values. There just don’t seem to be consequences for actions. We often hear about robberies and murders on the news. We have become desensitized to what is real, and I think that is a problem that we really need to try to work on as a society. Definitely.

You know, I was a Girl Scout, and I went to Camp Anne Bailey. Was that in West Virginia? In West Virginia, mm-hmm. One week I was at camp, someone in our unit got some sort of a rash they couldn’t identify, so they quarantined us. We couldn’t go to the dining hall; we couldn’t go swimming. They had to redo the things they were going to teach us that week for our merit badges and all. It really turned out to be good, though, because we did a lot of interaction, a lot of learning about each other and talking. It was fun. I was in grade school, third grade maybe, but I know I wasn’t old enough to wear lipstick and I took my sister’s lipstick without telling her. On the bus ride to camp, I can remember putting that lipstick on every five minutes. It was the most awful bright pink you can imagine, and I am sure I looked a fright. But I was wearing lipstick! I can remember just putting it on and putting it on.

But I loved going to camps— At the Carbide Camps, we always had a campfire, and sat around the campfire and sang. Singing was something we did a lot growing up, and I sang with my grandkids, you know. But the songs that we sang at camp are so politically incorrect, now. There was one called “The Poor Old Slave Has Gone to Rest.”

The poor old slave has gone to rest,

We know that he is free.

His bones, they lie beneath the Earth,

Way down in Tennessee.

Then, you do it faster and faster “the Pe-oh-ur slee-ave, has ge on to re est we ne o that he o is free free free free.” It never occurred to me that a slave was a servant. It wasn’t something that I thought of. We had another one about “Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue.” (We burst out laughing…) It was just a camp song!

Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue,

Were walking down the avenue.

Oh honey have a sniff, have a sniff on me

Oh honey have a sniff on me 

I had no idea what that meant, did not have a clue. Now, obviously, these songs are not politically correct, nor would you want anybody to know them. It’s funny when I look back on how things were. I don’t feel like I’m that far removed, but things are so very different.

My mama and I are always talking about the differences from her generation to mine. You think of all the inventions that we have, and she wishes that she could have invented zip-lock bags. I thought, you know, that’s a really cool answer. We wrapped our sandwiches in wax paper, but wax paper doesn’t stay together. Tinfoil was too expensive. What do you do with zip-locks? Everything. You can freeze meat in them. You can separate things in them. You think of all the things you can do with a zip-lock, and I thought, “wow!” I never really thought about if I could invent something, what would it be. I have no idea what I would answer. That’s it! For Momma to say that, I thought, well, from where she came from, the zip-lock is something that made a difference.

How do you think she has lived to 101? How do you credit that?

I think her faith has been a big part of it. I do think that heredity is a big part because we don’t have a lot of illness in our genes. She is a very positive person. She’s so fun. She loves to laugh. Everyday when I talk to her, we talk about silly stuff. We talk about how the day’s gone. She still lives at home, but we do have caregivers who live with her. She gets up every morning and puts rollers in her hair and puts earrings on.

She has what they call short-term memory loss, which is not Alzheimer’s. It’s kind of like a part of dementia. She can remember last week, yesterday and beyond. She can remember very clearly when she was a kid growing up. That’s why we talk about stories, but if you ask her what she had for lunch, she doesn’t know. She was telling me the other day, “You know, I know I’m losing my mind, and I really, really don’t like it.” I said, “But Mom, the good thing is you really, really can’t remember that you’re losing your mind.” She goes, “You know, I don’t mind it so much, now!” (We all laugh…)

Would you say that your kids are your biggest accomplishment?

Oh yes, absolutely. Cameron is my sunshine and Casey is my heartbeat. I still tell them that. I believe life is good, and it’s a choice. You can either choose to be happy or choose not to be. Memories are a slide show of events that can be revisited as a measure of our love, strength, and growth. We move forward because of our past, and we choose our forward path to keep the slide show going.

Mrs. Beal’s Mother

P.S. Mama passed away September 29, 2014 at 101 just weeks after this interview.

Mrs. Sandee Beal (Part II)

  (Born 1947)

Parents: Woodrow Wilson Conner and Mary Clarice Quinn

Siblings: Ghee, Don, and David

Husband: Burgin

Children: Cameron and Casey

 

(Continued from Part I…)

How do you feel about raising your children? I know this is further down the road, but what was that like? Was it hard?

Raising my boys was probably the biggest joy of my life. If you ever ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wanted to be a wife and a mother. I also thought that a nurse would be great, but I was scared to death of needles. I would have liked to do that and take care of people.

When I had the boys, it was like God had just given me the second greatest gift he could give. Cameron was just nine months old when I got pregnant with Casey. I can remember thinking, “But I have a baby. I can’t be pregnant; I have a baby.” So they’re eighteen months apart. The first year was very difficult because Cameron was a toddler, and Casey was a baby. I would say that I had one wet, one dry; one happy, one crying; one hungry, one fed. It was constant. After the first year, they really were able to play together, and they were very, very, close.

During their young years, I was very involved in the Jaycees and the Jaycee-ettes civic organizations. We lived in a place called Sterling Park Virginia. It was a wonderful place to raise the kids. I did a lot with the civic organization and volunteering, which in turn, gave the kids a good idea of giving and sharing and learning how to take care of people. We did the clothes and food baskets for needy people. We never actually used the term “needy” for these people; it was just people who didn’t have as much as we had. I think that was a good basis for them.

I was a very hands-on mother. I tried to do a lot of things with them and took them places. I was extremely affectionate and loving; I wasn’t into yelling and beating the heck out of them if they were bad and that type of thing. I certainly spanked them when they needed a spanking, which nowadays, I don’t think they spank kids because they’ll call DFCS (Division of Family and Children Services) if you do. (Laughs…) My first husband’s family had a cabin on a lake, so for most of our vacations, we would go to the lake. They could ski and swim and pick berries and play games. We would make muffins and pies and memories.

They were in junior high when we moved to Peachtree City. We moved under the pretense my husband was transferred, but he also had an affair in Washington. I was just so blind sighted by it and thought, “What’s wrong with me? What did I do? I thought I was a good mother and a good wife. I do everything.” I was the one who kept things going… dinners were on the table; clothes were clean; I decorated for all the holidays. I did all of this because I enjoyed doing it, and I enjoyed being a family. So when he had this affair, I didn’t know what to do. I had been a stay-at-home mother, so I didn’t have a life skill that I could do anything with. I was still so in love with him and very confused. I decided that I would go to West Virginia and take the boys. He told me he would never let me take the kids from him.

You know, in retrospect, I wish I had had enough life experience and confidence to stand up to him. There actually was a letter that he wrote to his girlfriend that he was going to try to get somebody to do something to the brakes on the car when I was going out of town. I really could not make that fit in my mind. He wouldn’t really do this. He doesn’t really mean that. Because it sounds like you just think the best of people. Unfortunately, I guess sometimes I do. Which is mostly a good thing. Mostly it is.

We ended up staying together, and that’s when we made the move from the Virginia/D.C. area to Georgia. Everything was good, except I did not trust him. You just cannot love somebody you do not trust, but I would never let him know. I was more afraid of life without him, so I stayed. I was still the loving wife; I was still the mother. Nothing changed outwardly, and I kept convincing myself that we really do have a good marriage. It really is strong.

We came to Peachtree City and encouraged the boys to join in rec sports, but we were not pleased with the baseball program. Because of that, my husband and I actually initiated and brought Little League baseball to Peachtree City, which they still do play today.

One of the comments that my husband had made when I first found out about that first affair was that he “would stay with me until the kids were out of high school.” I assumed that that was just said at the time and that he didn’t really mean it. After all, we had been together many more years, so I thought everything was fine. I knew that I didn’t trust him, but I really felt like I did love him. We had our twentieth anniversary, and the kids were out of high school. The house was now too big. We moved into an apartment and built a house in Fayetteville. We contracted for the new house, and the day we signed the papers to build is the day he told me he was leaving. Gosh! How awful! And he had another affair. I just at that point thought, “I have to override my heart.” He kept trying to give me the “Well, I love you, and if you just let me date her for a while, then I’ll get it out of my system.” And I’m like, “Do you not recall the vows that we took? Do you not remember any of this?”

How did you get through all of this? What gave you the inspiration and motivation to keep going?

My kids. I felt like it was important that I not fall apart… although I did fall apart. As it turned out, I moved into the new house by myself. He did not move into the house with me. We were married twenty-five years when our divorce was final. We were divorced in March, and Cameron got married in April. That was the first time I got to see [my ex-husband’s] girlfriend. He brought her to the wedding? Oh my gosh… Mm-hmm. He was such a sensitive character (sarcastically). That’s awful. Yeah. But I could not let that define my life.

You know, eventually, Cameron got married, and they had Crew. Crew became the apple of my eye. I moved out of Fenwick into a less expensive house. By then I was dating Burgan, and he moved in with me. There was an incident when Cameron had Crew and Dare, and he and Tracy, who was 8 months pregnant with Kale, were renting a house from my ex. Cameron was late on a payment and told his dad he would be late, but he still got an eviction notice on his door. Oh my gosh. I just could not understand it. That’s your son. He was late with a payment, and he called you and told you. I could not understand it.

Now, I’m making my ex-husband out to be a monster, but he wasn’t for so many years. He was really a good man, and we had a wonderful marriage. It was just that he went in a different direction. He got involved away from a church belief into the power of crystals, into the shockras of the body, and into a lot of teachings that were just nothing I could embrace. Hypnosis was a big thing with him, and he trained to be a “healer” who could lay hands on an area of the body and dispel pain.

Anyway, Cameron got evicted, so he and his wife, two kids, and one on the way moved into this three bedroom, two bath house that Burgin and I were living in. That lasted about six months, and I just went out one day and rented an apartment. Burgin came home from work, and I said, “We’re moving over here.” He said, “We are?” I said, “Mm-hmm.” So I moved out and gave the kids the house because I didn’t want the grandkids to have to live in an apartment. They were in a wonderful neighborhood that was full of kids, so they stayed there. We moved into the apartment, but I could see them all the time. I would go over almost every afternoon. I spent all kinds of time with them. I was very, very close to them, and I still am even though they live [somewhere else] now.

So what kinds of things has all of this taught you about life? You’re such a strong woman, now.

I think it made me very strong. I was never a woman’s liber (liberator). My generation was kind of the one where it was coming into vogue. I was the generation where Virginia Slim Cigarettes said, “You’ve come a long way, baby,” and we all know where that went. (Laughs…)

I decided that I had to put my strength in God, and that has always been my foundation. I was not active in a church during a lot of this, but I felt like I had such a strong communication with God. The one thing that I would say when I got to a certain point was “thy will be done.” That was my mantra, and I would say it until it was okay. Whatever crisis had passed had passed. That’s what made me stronger.

I was also working in Customer Service for FC&A. That Christian company and the people there gave me strength. We published self-help books that were oriented toward elderly people. My granddad and I were very close, so I had always liked elderly people. I always felt they had a story to tell. I was always a good listener. (You would not know that today, would you?) (We all laugh…) So doing this job, I was exposed to all these elderly people, and I realized that that is just a group that somehow fell though the cracks.

It used to be that you lived, grew up, and stayed in your small town. Your grandparents were in your small town, and you did Sunday dinners with them, and you did Easter with them. However, as our times evolved, grown children started moved away from the small towns. Parents tended to stay in the same town and were lost after the kids moved away. I think that a lot of the people I spoke with on the phone really just needed someone to talk to. They weren’t so much mad; I mean, they would call up and be angry about something, but I felt like it was not anger… There was something else that was making them angry. I learned that I had the ability to calm them. I had the words that would soothe them, and I was very positive with everything I said. That was what they wanted. You know, they just wanted somebody to care. It seems like you would be a great counselor. That would’ve been one of the things I would have liked to have been. But I guess [your job] was, in a sense, a counselor. Well, it was. Thank you. Yes, that was it.

There was this one guy; his name was Roy. He was someone I met on the phone, and he was out in Oklahoma. He was a paraplegic and diabetic. His whole world was just gone. His wife was gone, and he didn’t know what to do. So when we talked, I was just encouraging him. We became very good friends. He was so sweet and changed his name from Roy to Roye because my grandkids all have four letters in their names: Crew, Dare, and Kale; he called me Babe, so I would have four letters; Burgin was Pete, so we would all have four letters. (We laugh…)

Burgin worked for Delta, so when Roye had a birthday, Burgin and I flew out there for his birthday party. We got to meet him and many of his nursing home friends. This was about the time when home computers were becoming very in-fashion. Roye was feeling that he couldn’t do anything or go anywhere anymore. I suggested he get a computer and told him “On a computer, you can be anywhere in the world you want to be.” He did, and he took lessons on a computer, learned to navigate places he’d been when he was in the service, and reconnected with old friends. It was such a joy to see him be so excited about this stuff. Rediscover his life. Yeah.

I stayed in touch with him until he passed away. It was very, very hard because I felt like he was such a good friend. Through the years, I made a number of good friends. I genuinely like the elderly, and it is definitely a passion of mine. I decided to give myself some time off through the summer before I started in anything, but I’m going to volunteer with hospice because I think, as strange as it sounds, with my grandfather being an undertaker, death is a part of life. It’s not a fear. It’s nothing I dwell on, look at, freak out about, or whatever, but with a lot of people that are transitioning from a full life through a hospice period, families don’t know what to do or what to say. So I want to work with hospice to work with the families and with the hospice patients.

I mean, I can listen for hours at my mother’s stories. I can listen while she tells them to me fifteen times. It’s the fact that you stay as engaged the fifteenth time as you did the first, so I think that I have that gift and that I can do that. I think that at the end of their lives, a lot of people want to remember and just look back. That’s what Mama likes to do. Like I said, she was an aquatic teacher and always said she missed swimming. So as a surprise for her 98^th birthday, my brother and I took her to the YMCA to go swimming. Just the thrill of seeing her… She could still float. You know, with her little arthritic hands, she couldn’t really do the strokes… but she was a beautiful swimmer, so it was just interesting to see her do that. What a wonderful gift!

I love interacting with the elderly, and I guess part of it is that I don’t think of them as old people. They’re just people. Absolutely, they’re just people. I think it’s wonderful that you had that rewarding career where you could have so many experiences and so much that you could get back from it. Well, that’s how I felt. I got as much as I gave. You can’t dwell on the things that happened because they do not dictate who you are.

If you interviewed Burgin, the differences of the way we were brought up [would definitely show through]. My family was, very close; we’re still very close. His dad died when he was very young. His mother had a mental illness and was in a state hospital for many years. He lost his younger brother ten years ago. He lost his sister—his only other relative—a year ago, so he had different conclusions from life than I have. He tends to be much more wary of people, not as accepting, not as easily forgiving. He’s also a Vietnam veteran, and was very affected by the war, as was my youngest brother. I understand that, and I have to segment the war experience because I cannot even imagine the personal impact it has on a person. I tend to put things behind me and try to be very positive. But I am sure war is one area that is so life changing that it is hard to put behind. I do have to qualify and say there are some things in life you MUST put behind you to move on, but maybe there are some that you just can’t.

I think because my dad was so strict, I strived to be positive. If I was positive and if I always smiled and if I always did the right thing, then there wouldn’t be any negative. That was kind of the way I wanted life to be. I’m still that way. I would not make a good journalist because I would always try to find the positive aspect of [the situation], which I think they should more than they do. I just want harmony. If everybody was in harmony, we would be fine. It’s not realistic necessarily, but I say in my world, it is.

It seems like your marriage works well because you makeup for where your husband falls, and then, you come together—the push and pull and learning from each other. Being a second marriage, the dynamics are different. I was the subservient wife the first time, but that was the wife’s role. The husband was the breadwinner, and the little woman was the heart of the home. My mother was, my grandmother was, my other grandmother was. This was how I was molded. With Burgin I didn’t have that same mold. We were changed by life experiences and had to work together to build our own “family unit”. We are much more equal in tasks and decision-making.

My grandfather on my Dad’s side was a railroad engineer and they were of meager means growing up. Mother was probably considered middle or upper middle class with Granddad being an undertaker, but family was very important to both of them. Even with Daddy being as firm as he was, family was what it was all about. That was the focus that we had, and that was always very good.

As a young wife, I tried to do everything right. It wasn’t that I was consciously saying, “I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to do that. He’s going to get upset.” I never felt that way. This was just what I took joy in doing. That was my pride and pleasure. I know now the second time around, I have learned to put ‘me’ a little more in the focus. I always put everybody before me, but I now believe that I’m important. Going through the divorce, I learned that if I can’t love me, then nobody else can. I think before I thought if I did enough right, there was no room for discord. I really like the person I am today. I would like this person to be about fifty pounds lighter, but this person isn’t. But I’m healthy; I go to the doctor, the dentist. I have no major health issues. Fortunately, longevity is in my family. There are no big, scary monsters out there that are known.

I think all that self-appreciation and positive thinking has kept you very young. You seem really, really young. Thank you. I think that it’s important that you feel good about yourself. I haven’t always.

I think when I met Burgin, I was not in a place to have a relationship, so we found a friendship. Through the years, we realized that this friendship was a companionship and a love that we both needed. He was my second chance. We’ve had to learn to blend families. Burgin had two marriages; his daughter is by his first marriage, and his son is by his second marriage. Because there was no infidelity involved in his breakups, we are able to interact with his ex-wives all the time. It really is probably the most positive way it could be for kids. It’s just all very intermixed and interplayed. There are no problems or hard feelings or animosity, where on the other hand, with my ex, there’s no communication.

(To be continued in Part III…)

Mrs. Sandee Beal (Part I)

  (Born 1947)

Parents: Woodrow Wilson Conner and Mary Clarice Quinn

Siblings: Ghee, Don, and David

Husband: Burgin

Children: Cameron and Casey

 

Where and when were you born?

I was born in January of 1947 in Charleston, West Virginia the third of four children. We lived in a small town—St. Albans where I went to school and graduated. I attended college for two years then struck out on my own at nineteen to become an airline stewardess.

At that time, you were not a flight attendant; you were called a stewardess. There were a lot of regulations to be a stewardess like height, weight, sound of your voice, and single. These restrictions would not be tolerated today. You also could not be married. I was three years into flying when I fell in love.

At that time, the average time for a stewardess [to work] was nine to twelve months because they would fall in love and get married. I was based in Washington D.C. You know, Washington is one of those places that everybody has this yen to go visit, and it’s a great place to visit. I raised my children there and considered it my backyard. Going to the museums, visiting the monuments and the National Zoo was just something you could do every day. Many school field trips were there. People would come in town, and you would take them there. You really had an appreciation and intricate picture of the workings of the government of Washington.

My husband at the time was an air traffic controller. We were married in 1969 and settled in Sterling Virginia and welcomed out first son in 1971. I have two boys. Both were born and raised in Virginia until 1985. Cameron was born in ’71, and Casey was born in ’73. We moved to Peachtree City in 1985, and they graduated from McIntosh High School.

After 25 years of marriage, we got a divorce, and I moved to Fayetteville. I lived there for ten or eleven years. I wasn’t expecting to get a divorce, but I was traded in for a “newer model.” This is just what happens. I feel like the generation I grew up in was the last that had the opportunity to be stay-at-home moms, and I was a stay-at-home mother. I went back to work after Cameron had already graduated and I think maybe Casey hadn’t.

Did you go back into flight?

No, I did not. I worked in PTC for a publishing company, FC&A, in Customer Service for 25 years. I just retired, and I’m loving retirement so far. Congratulations! Thank you.

Burgin [my current husband] retired about two years before me. So it was my time to relax and enjoy being a grandmother. I have four grandchildren. Crew is a 2 sport athlete and a rising senior; Dare, a varsity cheerleader, will be a junior, and Kail will be in eighth grade. My second son is a videographer and has his own business. He has been fortunate to video all around the world.

When I met Burgin, I really didn’t want a whole lot to do with men. We were actually together for fifteen years before we got married, and we’ve been married for five years. My mother was always the [one who said,] “Well, you know, the Bible says that you’ve got to be married. You can’t do this.” So for her 96^th birthday, I gave her a wedding invitation. (We all laugh…) Nobody in the family knew that I was going to do this. My side of the family was celebrating in Hilton Head, so I made arrangements to get married in Savannah at Whitfield Square. I went online and found a Christian minister who would marry us in a traditional ceremony. Burgin’s sister and her son and family drove down and his daughter came down with the granddog. We had our ceremony at the gazebo there in Savannah, which was just really fun. And your mother was there, too? Mother was there!

My family gets together every year in June for a family celebration. We just call it the “June-abration.” We celebrate all of the grandkids, great-grandkids, anniversaries and birthdays. It started by celebrating Mama’s June birthday. That is the one time we all try to get together and celebrate everybody and everything. The week we were in Hilton Head, we had an “un-birthday” party for all the kids and an anniversary party for my sister and her husband. My niece was very, very, very pregnant, so we did what would be called “Biggest Belly on the Beach” one night. We were doing a shower for her, so everybody was stuffing pillows up under their clothes! I knew ahead of time we were going to do this, so I brought one of those shirts that has a bikini body painted on it and put it on my mama… she loved it. She thought that was the greatest thing. We’ve got pictures of everybody walking around like this [with big bellies], and there’s my mama standing in this little bikini body shirt! (We all laugh…) That’s hilarious! That picture was actually her Christmas card that year, she was ninety-six. (We laugh…) It’s priceless! For Burgin and my one-year anniversary, his daughter made us a book through Shutterfly about our wedding and included pictures of the June-abration, too. It was really neat to have pictures of our wedding, “Biggest Belly on the Beach” and my momma’s bikini shirt all in a book. That’s funny! It is. It was so cute!

So what are the names of your parents? Do you want to talk a little about your childhood?

Okay. My daddy’s name was Woodrow Wilson Conner. I think at that time, boys were named after presidents. My mother is Mary Clarice Quinn. They’re both of Irish descent. I did not know my great-grandparents, but I know that their parents came from Ireland. It was several generations back from me.

Daddy worked for Union Carbide, a big chemical company. Carbide built affordable housing for employees to purchase. They were all just one-story, little houses. We lived in that house until I went to grade school. That is the house that holds a lot of memories. We spent all-day and everyday outside. That was just what you would do. My dad built what we called “the picnic house.” It was solid up to here and then had a screen, so that was where the kids played. All the neighborhood kids would be there rain or shine. We played family, school, dress up and circus—whatever would keep us entertained.

I guess I was probably five when I was totally smitten with Stevey Stelzman, my first love, so I dressed up in my finest ballet costume to go with him to several neighbors’ doors and get married. My sister was the “official,” and other kids in the neighborhood were the “Jesus Loves Me” choir because that was the only song everybody knew. After the “ceremony,” a lady had a little reception for us. That was over the weekend, and on Monday, I went to daycare with him as his show-and-tell! (We laugh…) That is so cute!

Later, we moved to a larger house. When I was growing up, there were a couple of things that I think were very interesting compared to today’s world. I grew up in a segregated time, but I didn’t know about segregation. When I went to grade school, there were no black children. The boundaries were determined by where you lived, and there were no blacks in our area. Now, I do remember there was one area of town called Amandaville, and that is where the majority of the black people lived. Some of the roads weren’t paved, and some houses were a little run down, but it was the norm to have segregated neighborhoods. I didn’t think if it was bad or good. The first association I remember having with black people was when I went to junior high, which at that point was grades 7, 8, and 9. The black people I knew were very strong football players. They had an elevated status, so I never experienced a racial issue. They were the ones who were winning the football games. They were the ones that we cheered for. I really wasn’t exposed to racism and the turn it took. So much was different.

My mother was a stay-at-home mother. She was there to go to all the parent-teacher conferences etc. She made us breakfast before school every day and made sure our blouses and shirts were neatly ironed. When I was in junior high and high school, girls could not wear pants to school. We didn’t wear uniforms, but girls wore only dresses or skirts. And this was in the dress code? Oh, I don’t know that there was a dress code, but you just did not wear pants. Most of us walked to school and I can remember listening for school news and closings on the radio. If it was a really, really cold day, they would announce that girls were permitted to wear long pants under their skirts. Wow… I never questioned it. It was just very, very different then.

We didn’t have the social media of today, which I think is probably a double-edge sword. We really communicated with our family; we didn’t text them. We had certain expectations that became a part of being a family member. My dad was very strict. He had very little tolerance for anything. He was not an abusive father; he just simply was not an affectionate father. And I was scared to death of him. If Daddy said, “Do it,” you did it, and you didn’t question it. Of course, as I was getting into high school and starting to date and be interested in boys, he would not let me go out with someone who had not been to our house and spent one evening there. There weren’t a lot of people that were really willing to do that. My daddy had a reputation—they called him “Big Wood” for a reason, and we had a very strict curfew. For every five minutes I would be late, I would have to come in thirty minutes early the next time. A flat tire would just wipe out next weekend’s dating. (Laughs…) There just would be none! He was just very strict about that. Mama on the other hand was a “doodle.” She absolutely is the light of my life.

We grew up camping, and learned a lot about the outdoors. Daddy was not a college graduate but was an educated man in the fact that he knew a lot of “stuff.” To him, life was a lesson. There was no letdown; there were no soft-edges. With he and Momma’s relationship, she was the one who gave us the leeway, and Daddy was the one who brought the hammer down. You didn’t have that hammer down too many times. Mother and I talk now about when they first met. Does it show you a different side of him sort of? It does. It really shows me a different side of him. I look at old pictures. They were married for eight years before they had children, so you would have to have something in common with someone to live just the two of you for eight years.

In their early marriage, she was a schoolteacher. You could teach with a two-year certificate. She was also an aquatic instructor. She loved the water and spent summers teaching swimming and going to national aquatic schools. That’s one of the things she and I talk about daily. I talk to her every day just to catch up on things. When we were growing up, there were pools that were membership only. We were a middle class family and couldn’t afford the membership, so Mama would teach the swimming, and we could go to the pool. We joke that we all had to learn how to swim really early in life because she usually taught lifeguarding and life safety classes, and we were the victims! (We all laugh…) She would chunk us in the pool, and we had to absolutely sink or swim. They would do the saving techniques on us.

Union Carbide where daddy worked was a very family oriented plant. They offered summer camps for the children of employees. Cliffside (for grade-school-age children) was the first camp you would go to. It had little cabins that were all Indian names (Chippewa, Cherokee, Apache). You learned to do bow and arrow and to shoot a rifle, and there were crafts and nature studies. It was good experience to get away from home. Not to get away from home, but to grow up. Was it a day camp? No, it was a two-week camp. You went, and [your parents] got you tucked in. Then, they came back the next Sunday to visit. Then, you were there another week.

The first time I went, I think it was really hard on me because I was such a mama’s girl. I was really close to Mother, and I would sometimes take the blame for things that a sibling did, so we all 4 would not be on restriction. I felt like I would be the least trouble for Mother if I was on restriction, so I would say that I made the crayon mark on the fireplace. Then, the other kids could go out and play. Somewhere in my mind, I just became the peacemaker. My role was to be the peacemaker. You were the sweet child. Well, I don’t know that I thought of myself as sweet. I didn’t think of myself as anything else.

There’s a story that Mother and I still laugh about a lot. Again, being the third child, they have pictures of my sister when she was a baby, and they have pictures of my older brother when he was a baby. However, they don’t have any of me as an infant. They have pictures of me when I probably was a year old or a year and a half, so when I went to grade school and they gave us the forms to fill out (just like you still do probably) that asked for “place of birth,” I would put “unknown, adopted.” (We laugh…) Mother could just not get it through to my head… I would say, “It’s okay. It’s okay that I’m adopted. I just don’t know where I was born.” To this day, we laugh and joke about. She’ll say something, and I’ll say, “Well, my birth mother would have…” That type of stuff. (We all laugh…) So we do have a good time with it!

My grandfather on my momma’s side was an undertaker. He started with this funeral home when he was thirteen years old cleaning out the stalls. Then, he got to where he tended the horses. Then, he drove the buggy (the hearse) with the horses. Then, of course, as everything progressed, he drove the hearse. If he was coming back from a funeral at the local cemetery as I was getting out of school, I would get into the hearse with him, and he would take me for ice cream. It never occurred to me that this might be weird. He was also an embalmer. Because the embalming fluids were strong, they always had a big jar of cream on the back of the toilet to keep his hands from cracking. We just called it “dead man’s cream.” That was just like Jergens lotion to me; I just thought that was its name. We used dead man’s cream all for many uses. If someone would say they needed something, I’d say, “Well, I would just put some dead man’s cream on it.” People would give you this “what are you talking about?” look. So yeah, it was strange.

What was high school like for you?

I wanted to be a cheerleader, and Daddy would not let me be a cheerleader, so I was a spectator instead. High school then was grades 10, 11, and 12. We walked to and from school. At night, we sat down at the table, and all of us had our books (well, by the time I was in high school, my sister was in college). We would sit there, and if you did not have straight A’s, you did have homework according to him. I was not an A+ student by any means. I was a B (every now and again a C) student.

When I was in 9^th grade—that was in junior high; you actually had a graduation ceremony where you walked across the stage. All the girls wore white dresses, and the boys wore their Sunday best. At that time, 9^th grade was the highest level of education for some boys. They only went to 9^th grade and then joined the work force of chemical companies or the coalmines. Ninth grade was considered a milestone.

Then, the summer after my 9^th grade year, there was another milestone: my first kiss. We were camping, and the boy I had admired from afar was camping there also. There was a big pavilion where everybody would go play cards and go snipe hunting—that kind of silliness. It closed at 10PM, and we would walk back to our camps in the dark. There was an occasional flashlight, but it seemed really dark. So my dreamboat and I were talking that night, and he walked me back to my campground and gave me my first kiss. Awww… But I was so awkward. You know, I didn’t know what you were supposed to do. I can remember that he had his arms around my waist, and he would try to get me to get my arms around him. They would just kind of go like flop (shows us and laughs). I just didn’t know what to do!

Then, in 10^th grade, I still was just in love with Larry. He was quite a good athlete and big man on campus and acted like he didn’t really know me. Daddy wasn’t really big on me dating. So it was just kind of “iffy.” Every now and then, after a basketball game, he would walk me home. I kept having this little, tiny spark and thought (whispering), “Oh! This is great! Someday…”

In spite of my crush in 11^th grade, I dated a guy who was a football player and new to our school. He was partially deaf, and they did sign for him in the huddle. He also had a slight impediment when he spoke. He couldn’t say a “d.” He couldn’t say San-dee, so I was Sanny. His sister was Brenna instead of Bren-da. But he was a good boyfriend. We went to homecoming and prom—that kind of stuff.

After he and I broke up, Larry and I started seeing each other during the summer before senior year. I can remember sitting in the bleachers at one of the first football games and overhearing somebody talking about Larry. They said, “Yeah, is he dating anybody? I wonder if he’s dating anybody?” I wanted to just [speak up and say something], but I wasn’t bold enough to say that. I thought, “Maybe I just think we’re dating. Maybe he doesn’t.” If that was the case, I wasn’t just going to put myself out there. As it turned out, we did date all through high school, through our senior year.

I went to college, and we were still dating. He joined the Marines and went to war. Was it the—? The Vietnam. I wrote him the whole time he was in Vietnam. Of course, we had pledged undying love forever, so when he came back from Vietnam, he came to Washington D.C., where I was based. I think it was in November. He came, and he spent a couple days with me before he went home. When his leave was up, he had to go back to Camp Lejeune; he was discharged from duty in the spring. While he was home at Christmastime, he got a girl pregnant. I was just floored because I was sure… Everything would work out. Yeah. To me, we were a couple. When get married, we’ll do something, but we weren’t going to do anything now. Ironically, this girl had had a big crush on him our whole senior year; she was a couple years younger. My maiden name was Sandra Kay Conner. Her maiden name was Sandra Kay Connery. That’s weird. Very weird.

Well, they ended up getting married and had a son, and when word got out, everybody just assumed it was me. Gosh, that would have been hard. It was very hard. At that point, we had dated off and on for 7 years, and he did not tell me about it. His mother was actually the one that told me. I called him one afternoon, and she said he was taking a nap. I said, “Okay, well just tell him I called.” She goes, “Well, I don’t think you know. Larry and Sandy got married on Saturday.” I was like, “Really… Okay…” A shock! It was, but you know, life goes on, and you have to roll with the punches. And I think I rolled for a long time before I picked myself up. But I did. Then I met my first husband, an air traffic controller, through his sister. I was roommates with her, and she was a stewardess also.

(To be continued in Part II…)

The de Groots (Part III)

 Interview Transcription 

(Continued from Part II…)

Mrs. de Groot:

You asked a question about stores— In South Dakota, as long as I can remember, there was always a JC Penney, a Sears and Roebuck, and a Montgomery Ward. You could pretty much get everything you needed at one of those stores. JC Penney didn’t have household things; it was just clothing, but anything else you could get at Sears or Montgomery Ward. Montgomery Ward went out of business in probably the 60’s.

Mr. de Groot:

Late 70’s.

What kind of store was Montgomery Ward?

Montgomery Ward was pretty much like Sears. Sewell Avery was the CEO of Montgomery Ward. The Sears Roebuck Company said, when WWII ended, that there would be this major explosion and that the economy would take off and everything. Sewell Avery said, “After every war, there is a depression,” which was true up until that time… So they reduced their inventory and it killed the company. I mean, it took twenty years for it to die, but it was that decision that killed it.

Take a look sometime… If you ever look at the top ten or twenty-five Fortune’s Magazine companies, how many of them are still in existence after ten years, twenty years, fifty years? Very, very few.

Mrs. de Groot:

I remember when my friend and I would get together when the catalogs started coming in, we would dream about the dresses in there. It was very seldom that they would have any pants for girls, but we would show our folks the dresses that we really liked. Well, you could take a basic pattern and alter it, but you just had to find some fabric that looked like what they had in the catalogs.

The thing that always amazed me was that you could order shoes, and they had this page where they had the shoes and this foot outline. You could measure the width and the length. Hardly anybody had a foot longer than the page in the catalog where you could buy shoes! (We all laugh…) But you lived by the catalog.

Mr. de Groot:

And really, you had “one size fits all” literally. There were no such things as insoles, so you always had two or three layers of cardboard in the bottom of your shoes.

I did this because I had such narrow feet.

It was the same with clothing. Because everybody wore a long-sleeved white shirt to church I had a problem! I was a small kid with a 14-½ neck, but my arms are exceptionally long and were even as a child. I’m supposed to be 6’7’’ this way (points from arm to arm). Do you ever watch baseball with the player from the Braves from Griffin…

Mrs. de Groot:

Jason Haywood.

Mr. de Groot:

Jason Haywood is fourteen inches longer in his reach than his height, and you’re supposed to be exactly the same [length long]. I’m six inches longer than I’m supposed to be this way (shows us his reach). Every shirt came right here (referring to a sleeve being to short)—you never forget that… and I could not buy shoes.

My great uncle had a harness and shoe shop, and in the man was a dwarf. He had a bench along the wall which helped him fork. If you look at factories, they used to have belts that ran everything. He had three of these lines of different kinds of equipment, like buffers and different kinds of jobs to repair with shoes. He would jump up on his bench because [all the equipment] was built for a certain height. You couldn’t buy any other equipment because that’s what was being manufactured, so he would just walk up and down the line [along the bench] to get the work completed. They had rooms and rooms just full of shoes. Sometimes they would get behind, and he would work day and night fixing shoes; you couldn’t buy any! The fact that there was a shortage of leather was a joke because it really was done by our government just so everybody would concentrate on the war effort. They wouldn’t do that now.

Mrs. de Groot:

The reason that it occurred was not as important as the fact that [the shoes] were not available, and they had to repair them all because there were no [new shoes] available.

Mr. de Groot:

It’s like clothing. On a farm, you would buy minerals and special feeds for livestock. For that, they had fabric and sacks…

Mrs. de Groot:

The feed sacks.

Mr. de Groot:

Feed sacks—that’s what women sewed into clothing for children and themselves. Right now, they charge crazy amounts for feed sack material.

Mrs. de Groot:

I had my granddaughter read [all of these interview questions], and I told her, “I think you’ll find this very interesting.” So, she read it all and came to me and said, “I want to know what you will say to this question: What problems in the world today are you most concerned about and why? What do you think needs to be done?” Well, I think the falling apart and the destruction of the family is a really serious issue because you don’t have someone to go back to and talk to. You don’t have family gatherings. The support system. Yes, the support system; you just don’t have that love and concern that you used to have. Now, not all families are perfect; please understand I know that. There’s still something there, though, that you were able to count on.

What do you think causes that falling apart of the family today—technology, distractions, and women with more careers… just the busyness?

Mrs. de Groot:

Well, it’s easy to fall away from your family and your responsibilities. If life gets tough, you find someplace else to go instead of facing it and dealing with it.

I guess that even corresponds to the shoe thing even though it sounds crazy—where you fix the shoe you have instead of throwing it away and getting a new one. And children don’t come perfectly; often they are flawed, and it takes a long time to work with such a child. I don’t think a lot of people are willing to do that. There’s got to be a cure for them somewhere, and they demand that the school make them right or that some doctor make them right. If they don’t make them right, they say, “Oh, we’re going to sue you because you didn’t do what I told you to do.” Or just give them medicine… It’s just not easy raising a family, and it’s easier to walk away instead of facing the difficult issues.

Mr. de Groot:

I think that’s one of the other things that when people have gone to a different area and then are drawn back to a small town because everybody takes care of one another. I can remember that we were just in the middle of corn planting and we had a neighbor, who was a couple of years older than was. He suddenly died from a heart attack; he was a really young guy. He had a pretty good-sized farm, and neighbors planted the rest of the crop, cultivated it, harvested everything, put it all in barns for them. The whole neighborhood got together, and in one day, everything was done. They still do that in small towns. When you grow up with that and see that…

Another thing was what do you do with the older people? Now, we’ve got all these different things that we can do or try to do or whatever. I can remember every county had a poor farm. They were good! They were capable. You had people who were elderly and would all work. They all had jobs. They did the milking, cooking or the laundry. They were self-sufficient; they took care of everything. This is the poor farm? Yes, the poor farm. They lived in a communal in kind of dormitory. They were basically all single and people in their late years, but people were still sewing, carpenter work, plumbing, whatever needed to be done. They were fairly self-sufficient. I’ve never heard of that before. Oh, yeah. Every county had one. Was it run by the government?

Mrs. de Groot:

In South Dakota, they did.

Mr. de Groot:

They had some.

Mrs. de Groot:

But not much.

Mr. de Groot:

In Iowa, it was a little bit more concentrated; every county had a poor farm. I don’t know when they stopped. In fact, colleges had farms, especially the private schools. That’s where kids could go work and pay their way through school.

So, Mr. de Groot, what’s your answer to the question about problems in the world today?

Mr. de Groot:

There are two things. I started with Medicare, and that’s how I got into the medical side of business. I believe that the breakdown of family is largely attributed to Lyndon Johnson because he made it part of the anti-poverty situation so that if you had a man in the house, you didn’t qualify for welfare benefits. The only way for people to qualify for welfare benefits was to have single moms. Until my mother died, I was raised by a single mom. The male example was missing. It’s almost irreversible because in certain populations, if they don’t increase by certain amounts, [the population] ends up decreasing. It’s a fact; it’s a numerical process.

This country is really divided now on race alliance, and a larger part of it is because of single moms. The more children you have, the more welfare benefits you have. Once you go into a poverty cycle, it is extremely rare and difficult to exit. Poverty breeds poverty breeds poverty… That’s the way it is.

I can remember during WWII where we went to a truck to pick up lard and flour and different things like that because those were excesses. We got those to live on. We did that.

Mrs. de Groot:

So many people did, John. There was no stigma.

Mr. de Groot:

No, everybody worked, and if you couldn’t work, you were taken care of. But if you could work, Buddy, you worked… If you didn’t work and you could work, you were ostracized. The rest of the things are cyclical. It’s a pendulum. They swing too far with unions; then, they swing too far anti-union. It goes back and forth. That makes sense.

What has made both of your lives so happy and so wonderful? What’s the trick? What’s the secret? (Mr. de Groot laughs…)

Mrs. de Groot:

Mercy! Oh my goodness… My faith has been very important to me and I would say for myself, in my family, it was very important to depend on yourself and not others. You bring yourself up by your own bootstraps. You don’t depend on somebody else. That’s not really looked upon very well in this time frame. If I couldn’t do it, I would have to find some other person who could, but I had to depend on myself to do most of the things I wanted to do.

One of the things I have learned is that it’s foolish to put things off until “someday” because it never comes. If there’s something you really want to do: “I want to learn sew well; I want to learn to garden, to do needlepoint…” all those things, do it now or forget it because you’re not going to get the chance someday. So, it’s just doing the things you really want to do and working at it. That’s good; that’s a good trick! What about you, Mr. de Groot?

Mr. de Groot:

I married the right woman… (Mrs. de Groot chuckles.) I told you earlier that her grandpa said, “If a man tells you he’s boss at home, he’s going to lie about other things,” (I laugh) but there’s a lot of truth. With her education still today, with a daughter who has an advanced degree in Nursing, the kids still call [my wife] for medical advice.

Mrs. de Groot:

And forget dinner! (We all burst out laughing…)

Mr. de Groot:

You do! And anybody who doesn’t believe that Grandma is the center is fooling themselves because it’s rare… Grandpa may be okay, that’s fine. We’ve had grandkids that when they were little, I got a call one day where one said, “Grandpa, could I just come and hang out with you for a little while?” Aww… That kind of thing—that’s fine. That’s the foundation and the solid part of it.

Mrs. de Groot:

There are funny things like one of the grandsons said, “For school, I’d like to talk about making bagels. Can you help me, Grandma?” I said, “Alrighty… I’ve never made bagel, but this is going to be the day I learn!” (We laugh…) You make the dough, and then, you boil it, bake it, or decorate it or whatever you want to do. He wanted a variety of bagels. It was an all-day process, but it was just one of those things where we said, “Okay, we’ll just try it and see what happens.” It worked out well; they were good! I’ve never thought of making bagels. Oh, yeah! I had never though of boiling bread.

Mr. de Groot:

With our daughter, if you ever told her she couldn’t do something, you better stand back because she was going to run over you. I can remember one of the first things she said was “by my own self.” (We laugh…) That’s cute! Do what you want to do was what she said.

Also, your education—it’s never too late. I started many years later. You know, you’ll change. Oh yeah! Because you got that degree later. Yeah, I was kind of forced into it. You took advantage of the opportunity. Well, I was told I had to as part of the position.

Mrs. de Groot:

We’ve got a family joke: fortunately, we moved away from Columbia, Missouri or else, he would be the oldest university student still in existence. He would still be going to school! (We all laugh…) There was always something he wanted to learn.

Mr. de Groot:

One semester, I read forty-one books. Wow. That’s incredible! She was at home with three kids, but that’s the way things happened.

 

*** Update from Mrs. de Groot (2/4/14)

Since the interview, I needed a pacemaker implanted in an urgent manner. It is a long story, but it still goes to what we have talked about. Then in November, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It is unbelievable all that goes with such a diagnosis. I am still in the process of lining all the ducks up so to speak, so I can start radiation and chemo. One never knows what each day will bring. Prepare to have a great day every day and find something good to do to help others. (I have made 10 dog beds for the humane society and 3 blankets for the dogs.) Well, they are sort of people. :)

The de Groots (Part II)

 Interview Transcription 

(Continued from Part I…)

Did you go back to Mr. de Groot’s hometown once you had all of your family?

Mr. de Groot:

Oh yeah!

Mrs. de Groot:

When we could.

Mr. de Groot:

When we were in the area, we did.

Mrs. de Groot:

However, there were some traditions there, but they came kicking, screaming, dragging their feet into the twentieth century. Men were always served first, and women stayed in the kitchen. Really? You did not associate. Wow. The women could not leave the kitchen and come visit with men, and in a small kitchen, it got really warm because there were maybe twenty women sitting in that kitchen… or standing. I used to think, “How stupid can you be?” (Chuckles…) Men are just sitting in there and chatting about nothing, and they’ve got all the comfortable chairs. We were doing dishes, preparing the food, and serving them… standing! But it never changed until they went out and met with people outside of their little community. Then, the women began to catch on and realize, “Ah… it’s not that way everywhere.” Then, it slowed down. In his family, until probably our grandchildren got married, it stayed that way. That was the tradition, and like I said, they didn’t want to change. Yeah, I understand how sometimes, it can just happen that way—where the women associate together, and then the men—but with preparing food, it’s nice if everyone does that together. It’s nice both ways, I guess.

Mr. de Groot:

In church there weren’t any separations. You know how in some churches, there are men on one side and women on the other side with children. We didn’t have that. At the end of Thanksgiving celebration, before people went home, Aunt Cynthia, who raised my brother and myself, still had the ability to play the piano, so she always played a couple of hymns and sang. “God be with you until we meet again…”

Mrs. de Groot:

I’ve told my grandchildren, “You don’t know what you’re missing when you don’t do dishes by hand.” (I laugh…) Some of the best conversations that I’ve ever been around occurred over the kitchen sink. You learn a lot—when everybody’s standing there washing the dishes and rinsing and drying and putting away—that you would never hear otherwise. Now you just stick them in the dishwasher and walk away; it’s different. It’s hard to explain, but it’s a tradition. I guess it’s just that feeling of doing everything together and how the conversations happen naturally because you’re all part of the same thing. That makes sense, yeah. It was very good, and it’s going to be missed, I think, because there’s nothing that I see taking its place.

Mr. de Groot:

The idea that the rural areas were healthier than urban areas—that was a myth that was destroyed, and now, it’s real “news,” but in the forties, it was starting to turn because of the health benefits of being near healthcare [located in the cities]. It was important; it helped. You were able to see a doctor. The air might not be as healthy, but the people were all set. There were a lot of those things.

I can remember that we butchered a cow every fall and a hog in the spring and a hog in the fall. Everyone had their job—what they did, what they cut, what they sliced, what they skinned. What they did and how they did it—they did it in a corn-crib alley, which is the middle of a corn crib. Cribs were on each side, and the alleyway was between them. That’s an example of a tradition I remember… I never heard anyone say, “Well, you do this. You do that.” You just did. They would go over, and one guy would do the sawing, and the women would start wrapping the meat when it came in—processing it, cooking it, tanning it; they all did it together.

You know what that reminds me of? It reminds me of the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers—just like the tradition of building a house or something where everyone does their job; they make it into a celebration. The whole tradition of butchering a hog is the same idea.

Mr. de Groot:

In north Missouri, there are a couple of towns that are very strongly Amish in that they literally build a barn in a day. That’s incredible… that they all do it together. Yeah, I mean, they’re crawling all over the place! It’s just like ants going everywhere; they know what to do. It’s amazing! It’s the same way with houses. People talk about Habitat for Humanity and how they [build a house] in a week or two; hey, [the Amish] do it in a day!

What about stores? Did you all have a general store?

Mr. de Groot:

Actually, the small towns (like in my town of about 1200), we had two dry-goods stores, and some of the stores were grocery stores with some dry goods and things. We also had three grocery stores, two meat markets, and a locker plant because very few people had refrigerators and no freezers. The only place you kept frozen goods would be your own locker… It’s kind of like a school locker. They were boxes that were different sizes, or you could get two of them. They were kept at [a temperature of] about 10 degrees below zero, I suppose.

I can remember that in the summertime, movies were a big deal because they were the first places that had air conditioning. 

Do you remember the first movie you got to see in the movie theater?

Mrs. de Groot:

I think it was Bambi. I think that was the first I saw. I know Mom and Dad and my aunts and uncles in the late 20’s or early 30’s went to a lot of the different movies, and they would give dishes away [at the movies]. They collected dishes. There would be a certain night that they would have plates, so for whatever movie that was showing, if you needed plates, you went to that movie. You got in for ten cents, and that was a lot of money back then. You got dishes that way! (We laugh…)

Mr. de Groot:

That’s another thing from history. It was not quite as true in the South, but in the Midwest, every town had a circumference of five miles. Then, you would have another small town. The reason for that is that you could get into town and back home (from the time you had to do your milking, go to town, and be back home) with horse and buggy. That’s where the towns were. Then, you had a ten-mile town and a twenty-five-mile town, and those were [planned] at a point when you could take a train. It’s very interesting.

In the Midwest, the number of people that would go to the Chicago stockyards would take a train in with the livestock and would stay a day or two (at least overnight) in Chicago and then come back. You look at the catalogs and the advertisements that were set along the railroad stations and depots… If you start studying the history of it, it’s amazing. There were reasons for all the displays. Very logical. Yeah, and “we find these truths self-evident…” They really were! That’s what you could do and how far you could go and what kind of a load you could haul…

Even just last year, in our brief overview of US History, we were learning about the expansion west and how they planned out the towns on map… how they had a school here (in each town)… and how they planned out the amount of acreage.

Yeah, 80 acres was the [norm], and further west, 160 acres was available by homesteading. In Iowa and part of Minnesota and Illinois and even a little bit of Nebraska, you could claim 80 acres, which is what my grandpa did, and then you could get another 80 with what was called a tree claim. All that you had to do was plant some trees because they didn’t have any. That’s why they would build sod houses. They would turn the sod over. In fact, I remember they built one for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the town.

We had walking plows and things, and that’s what you used because the grass was really, really tall. You don’t realize that the grass was actually taller than the horses for the first cutting. Then, for the second cutting, you wouldn’t actually get that much hay from it.

The year my mom was born was when my grandpa built the barn, so it’s been about 113 years, now. It was in the same family for that length of time.

Mrs. de Groot:

If you are curious about the way things looked, if you go to South Dakota, when you start getting close to the Missouri River, start watching. From then on, you’ll go a long ways between fences and poles, and you will houses—it’s all prairie grass, nothing but prairie grass and occasionally some buffalo. Somebody may own a lot of that land, but it’s there the way it has been for a great many years. It doesn’t produce much; it’s just there. Then, you can go into Wyoming and to Cheyenne, and you could go 50 to 100 miles, and you might see a house, maybe two if it’s well populated. That’s incredible.

Mr. de Groot:

The stretch from south of Pierre up to Watertown, that’s one hundred miles, and there won’t be a fencepost—nothing, nothing but grass.

Mrs. de Groot:

When we had to go home and visit family and we lived in Montana and when we would go from Huron, South Dakota back to Rapid City, we had an older car, and we always had these big canvas bags that we laid over the radiator. [The radiator] was full of water, and the bags of water were required because it got hot. When the radiator got hot, we had to stop and put water in it. Water was a premium. The water that the cattle drank was so alkaline that it would kill a human, but they would survive. Water there was a very precious commodity; you didn’t get it very easily. You could get lukewarm sodas or “pop” or whatever you call your “Cokes” (because everything is a Coke here). You could get sodas in gas stations to drink if you were really thirsty, but you didn’t get water because they had to haul their water a hundred miles, so they didn’t share it. It’s hard to imagine. You don’t think about those things. No, yeah…

Mr. de Groot:

Did you ever hear of Wall Drug? During WWII, it became very famous because GIs carried signs that said how you when got to Berlin it was 1275 miles to Wall Drug or 3749 miles to Wall Drug or whatever. They carried these signs all over the world, thousands of miles from the Far East to Wall Drug. It was started by the Husted family. They came in, and they were right at the edge of the Badlands (used to be Highway 16, Highway 90 now). They gave away free ice water. If you stopped and got it, they would pump your fuel because it was the last stop before going through the Badlands.

Mrs. de Groot:

Last vestige of civilization. (Chuckles…)

Mr. de Groot:

The Badlands are beautiful in the morning; they really are, but they are horrible in the afternoon. With no air conditioning, a trip through the Badlands was tortuous. This was your last stop. Then, they developed this whole culture. It was a drug store…but it gave away ice water! They had animated prairie scenes—little prairie dogs. Everything was animated with interesting mannequins—

Mrs. de Groot:

And cowboy bands…

Mr. de Groot:

Cowboy bands… All these little characters, all built, all replicas of them. And it just grew and grew and grew and grew. It all started from giving away ice water. Wow, that’s a great story.

They made a fortune. It’s still today the gateway to the Badlands and the Black Hills. There are corny little signs—“Lost your corn; don’t despair. We have plenty on the air.”, KOTA radio station, Rapid City. “Spring has sprung; the grass has ris’ where last year’s careless driver is.” (We all laugh…) There was one about keeping your arm out because a car may come by and drive off with yours… (Chuckles…)

(To be continued in Part III…)

The de Groots (Part I)

 Interview Transcription 

Mr. de Groot:

I had a couple of really outstanding professors. One was chairman of the department for a number of years. He was the West American History [professor]. Normally, the syllabus would be handed out (what we were going to cover), but he wouldn’t do that. He had this huge classroom where he wrote everything out in cursive all the way across the blackboard, and you (the students) would have to write it down. He said that if you wrote it down, you would remember it. He also told us what was going to be on the tests (the midterm and final). He would just count and say, “Three of you will not read the book. Four of you will not believe that these questions will be on the test…” By the end of the semester, he just nailed it! He just knew what kids would do. Attendees would sign up for this class which met on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday and you only enrolled if you really wanted to take the course (to take a class on Saturdays). Only if you were interested would you take this.

[My wife’s] town was identified for years by their marching band. Today, it’s identified by fifteen years of consecutively winning the state championships and going on to nationals in gymnastics.

I grew up in a town where today, freshmen girls are 6’5’’. (Laughs…) Wow—that’s tall! I graduated in 1951, and my best friends in high school were 6’10’’ and 6’11’’. I was the next to shortest one in my class. Even being as tall as you are! Yeah. I could grab the rim [of a basketball hoop], and all the rest of them could dunk it. We played with about thirty-six boys in school (freshmen through seniors), and we played schools with four thousand kids in their high school.

Mrs. de Groot:

It was really simple genetics: big people breed even bigger children. (We all laugh…)

Mr. de Groot:

Well, Holland today has the tallest average…

Mrs. de Groot:

But, they’re not nearly as tall as they are in Sioux County.

Mr. de Groot:

She couldn’t believe the size of the women when she first came to my church.

Mrs. de Groot:

He had me go to church with him, and I know my jaw dropped. There were these gigantic women, and I thought, “Why are these women so big and tall and broad-shouldered?” It’s not just Sioux County; it’s that particular area in Iowa. They tend to marry in and stay in that area, so the big [people] marry big [people]. They produce bigger children, and it just keeps on growing, and you just wonder, “When is it going to stop? How big will they get?”

Mr. de Groot:

When Jesse James robbed Northfield Bank in Minnesota, [my grandmother and grandfather] came through after they were scattered and got shot at. My grandma made a poultice where she would bandage a person with white bread and sugar.

Mrs. de Groot:

And probably some mustard.

Mr. de Groot:

They would bandage them up that way for healing purposes.

Mrs. de Groot:

It drew out any infection and contaminants. So it was like a sponge with the bread? No, it was thick like gravy that you would put on some cloth and then spread it on and lay it over the wound. Your mother didn’t do it, but my mother—if you got a cough, you got a mustard plaster. It was dreadful. She would take a piece of cotton flannel and mix this powdered mustard and a little bit of flour and some water until it was the right consistency. She would spread it on cloth, and you had to lie down and put it on your chest. She would come every twenty minutes and peek. “Not red enough, yet!” And you were like, “Oh… It’s blistering! I know it is; it hurts…” But no, you would have to stay a bit longer, and it would get rid of your cough. It caused the blood to come to that particular part of your body (a lot of it!), and then, that would get all the chest congestion pulled up to the surface, as my mother would say.

Mr. de Groot:

For coughs and colds, all the way through college and everything, you used to put on Vick’s.

Mrs. de Groot:

It’s entirely different. Oh yeah, I’ve used that before.

Mr. de Groot:

You would it on with wool and then wrap something around it to keep that in. Boy! When I was milking and things like that, that’s what you did because the next morning, you were okay.

Mrs. de Groot:

Well… (We all laugh…)

Mr. de Groot:

You were better!

I’ve heard of poultices before, but where did that come from? Did it come from the Native Americans, or was it just a tradition?

Mr. de Groot:

It works!

Mrs. de Groot:

Old, old, old, old… I mean, back in medieval times, they did this, but they would put manure and things like that in it, too.

Mr. de Groot:

For the Civil War, that was the only thing they really used. They just bandaged people up to pull out the infection because if they didn’t, you were going to die.

Anyway (talking about the bank robbery in Minnesota), when the James boys came through our area, all that they wanted was for somebody to put this poultice on them, and then, they just rode off. Nobody bothered to… Wait—they were the ones who robbed the bank? Yeah! Jesse was in a different group, but Frank James and one of the Younger brothers (I can’t remember who the other ones were)- The other Younger boys and Frank James took off. They split after robbing the bank. They didn’t get much when they came in there because authorities from north Minnesota were waiting for them. They knew they were coming! Frank James died of old age, but the Younger brothers spent a number of years in Stillwater Prison in Minnesota. Nobody said who helped anybody! (Laughs…) They weren’t tattletales. Well, those were the kinds of things you didn’t advertise. Nobody questioned you if you did them… for your own safety.

Asking Mrs. de Groot: What about your marching band?

Mrs. de Groot:

Our director’s name was Bill Ireland, and he was very creative in what he wanted to have the band do. We were rehearsed at seven o’clock every night down the Main Street of town, and people would come out to sit and listen. Every now and then, [people] would forget, and when they made sudden right-hand turns, the trombones would be coming at them. (Laughs…)

He had it lined up so that with all the fancy steps we did, we didn’t do a marching machine gun or plane like they do now or a boat going down the football field. We did fancy geometric patterns. The band would suddenly move in a particular way, and everybody did it. If you were paying attention, you did the right direction and the right step. And you were playing music while you were doing it. Yes.

We went to a lot of different places in the two years I was there—Minneapolis. We would tour the town when we finished marching. We would enter contests, and we usually won first place. We went to Chicago and all over the Midwest.

We all went on buses, and Bill kept an eye on us. I knew I had gotten in trouble when I went to Chicago. He said, “Do not cross that line. You stay right inside this line.” There was a man talking, and I was like, “Good heavens! What on earth is he chattering on and on about? I was just curious, so I stepped over the line. (We laugh…) I heard a, “Hootenanny, get back here!” He could never remember my name, so I was “Hootenanny.” For three years, I was “Hootenanny.” Everybody knew who “Hootenanny” was—in the entire school system, I think.

After our city orchestra concert practices on Monday nights, rather than let us go home, he thought we needed more of a challenge. He would go upstairs in the gymnasium. We had to take off our shoes. He would put some records on, and he said, “Now, dance.” And so we had to dance for a while. He was going to supervise our activities and know who was most likely to cause trouble, to keep an eye on you, to have activities that would keep you occupied. Wow. He was a father figure and a very, very good man. His daughter was studying how to be a band director, so she would come and work with him. It was fun. Everybody would give up anything to be able to get in the band. It was a lot of fun, and we enjoyed it. At the fiftieth reunion, there were a number of old folks who came back to have their band reunion and to share a number of stories of what they had done with Bill and all he had taught them. (And he did insist that you learn.) It was fun.

Mr. de Groot:

I think that’s an advantage of small schools. They can attract good teachers. In my school (with only eighty kids in high school), there was only one teacher with a Bachelor’s degree; all the rest had at least a Master’s. Wow! And it paid! The school district paid well.

Mrs. de Groot:

I think the thing that just fascinates me right now is—I’m on the newsletter list for the Madison school system. There’s a young woman that has taken over sending information out, and there’s a committee that’s getting a large amount of money from donors and businesses, and I suppose some of it from the government (they don’t try to get as much from them as they do privately). And the school system is just incredible! The new schools that have been built, the activities, all the computers, the testing, and so forth… I’m amazed because this little town was 5,000 when I was there. I suppose it’s up to 20,000 by now. Is this Rapid City? No, this is Madison, South Dakota.

Money has come into [the town]. A Polaris Manufacturing Company moved in, but still, that’s not money. Where the money has come from I don’t know, but there are many $500,000.00 houses in the area. This was a place where three to five thousand was a pretty good income when I was in high school, so things have changed. I mean, a five thousand dollar house was a pretty good house.

Mr. de Groot:

In Iowa, for instance, the state as a whole is still shrinking (the population). We had nine Congressmen, and after the last census, and now only have four. Des Moines is the second largest insurance home-office (so to speak) in the nation. You’d think that it would be in New York or something, but it’s not. The Equitable building is huge, and it’s one building—Equitable Life. That community in Iowa City (with the University of Iowa) had a small increase in population. Sioux City, when we were living there, was basically 100 thousand. I’d imagine that the population is 65 or 60 thousand now; I don’t even know if it’s that big. Back then, the population was [made of] packing houses and stockyards—those were the largest stockyards in the United States. It’s all gone, but my little home county sitting way up in the northwest corner is growing. Why? What in the world is there? They want to stay. The guys go off to school; one was an all-pro for the Dolphins for a number of years, but he came back. He developed a Bovine artificial insemination business—a gene splitting laboratory for dairy and beef cattle; it’s a huge operation.

Mrs. de Groot:

You talk about why they keep coming back, but I don’t think that’s so unique to Sioux County because I’ve really been thinking about that a whole lot. I think when you have a farming or ranching community, it’s normal to come back to that because you were raised in the same small area. That’s your home, and you tend to be pulled back to it. I, on the other hand, never lived in anyplace [for a long period of time]—three years was a really long time; six weeks was the shortest time in one place. Being in the band was unusual for me because I thought, “Why get attached? I’m going to be leaving real soon and going through the whole routine of getting acquainted and making new friends, and then, I would leave them again. I have very little attachment with anything in my past. He [my husband] has a very strong attraction to this one small area because that was where he lived all his life.

Mr. de Groot:

Well, and the language was either Dutch or German. The culture? I just never wanted to be on a farm; I never wanted to stay there. I just wanted to get out of there.

Mrs. de Groot:

But, every chance you got, you went back and looked. (We laugh and he hesitates…) Yeah, you did.

Mr. de Groot:

I went back to look around, but I think part of it might be because of not having parents and all the things associated with family. There was a family tie because my grandpa had strong opinions on how family should get together and when. Different people have different traditions. When we started dating and getting serious, she [my wife] said, “One thing we’re never going to do is have to have Christmas on Christmas Day or birthdays on birthdays or whatever because that was one thing that she always had to go through (we had to go back to Rapid City for Christmas Thanksgiving and vacations; this was a decision by my mother and father). Then, we would get to Rapid City and ask, “Okay, do we go to this family first or this family first?” There was that tug of war. When Grandpa, my mother’s father, for whatever reason, said very simply, “There’s one day [that they would stay home].” Thanksgiving was the day. I think that was for very good reasons because they were all farmers, and the corn crop would be in, and you were getting settled in for the winter, and roads were still good enough, and normally, snow hadn’t come in. Whenever it would snow from then on, it was going to be there. So that was your one really big celebration—Thanksgiving?

Thanksgiving was the deal. It started Wednesday with the women cooking and making all the preparations. My aunt had a wood cook stove in the basement, and when she was serious about cooking, it had to be on her wood cook stove. Aunt Cynthia would cook a dozen chickens—just huge… They laid it all out, and all my aunts, uncles, cousins, everybody came there for Thanksgiving. We would have some kind of a Christmas celebration sometime between Christmas and New Years—not a big celebration—but that was it. Everybody got together on Thanksgiving. The in-laws or whatever could do whatever they wanted to do [on the other holidays]; they could have Christmas or New Years or whatever. They just picked one.

Mrs. de Groot:

And that worked until the family got larger.

Mr. de Groot:

After the great-grandchildren started arriving… This was also an opportunity for people to come back to their own church even if there were little towns around. Thanksgiving started with church at nine o’clock in the morning. Then, everybody would start arriving and bringing in all the food. That sounds like fun. It was.

(To be continued in Part II…)