Mrs. Brenda Hotard: The Early Dancing Years

An Incredible Story of a Life Devoted to Dance and So Much More

 

THE EARLY DANCING YEARS

I began taking dancing lessons at age eight. My parents could never have afforded them, but my grandmother offered to pay for my sister and me to study at The Barbara Speake School. Barbara Speake happened to be well trained in the Ballet Rambert and the Sadler’s Wells systems—the two founding companies of the classical ballet in England. Ms. Speake eventually became the most pre-eminent authority of stage projection with a very successful stage school in London.

Ninette de Valois (Picture from the Royal Opera House Collections)

Classes were held at a local church hall within walking distance, and nothing could have prepared me for my response. I experienced an instant affinity and could hardly wait to go again. My sister, on the other hand, did not care for it much and quickly dropped out. However, I progressed joyfully through the levels in the Sadler’s Wells system, which was founded by one of the first great English “Dance Pedagogues” of the art form: Ninette de Valois. I later learned that she laid the foundation of the British ballet tradition embodied by The Royal Ballet. It took less than two decades before becoming one of the world’s great companies, so it was chance that I was entering the ballet classroom in its early promotion. Exciting things of which I was unaware were happening. There was a sense of excitement as classes became available and were being well taught.

At the school, Barbara Speake appeared to take a special interest in me and one other older student named Valerie. I was aware of that encouragement and the joy of succeeding. By the age of nine, I was “en pointe” (dancing on my toes) in pink satin “toe shoes.” Strong and eager, I could do it, and I loved it.

Barbara Speake (Picture from the website of her school)

Ms. Speake also invited me to go to her house twice a week to join a group of selected children from all over the area. They were not necessarily kids from dance; they were from other venues, as well. We were all there for “stage training” in preparation for performing in the popular English Pantomime, which is exactly like musical theater. For example, at the precise time I had to discontinue dance, I had begun to rehearse for the role of Gretel for which I had been chosen in a Pantomime production of Hansel and Gretel. For little acting parts in this adult theatre genre, one needed to be able to speak clearly and enunciate well.

These classes at her house were called “elocution” training and included at least twelve other children. We had to take turns standing up and saying certain things, like (speaking in a clear, distinctive voice:) “Pa, may we go, too?” (Pauses.) And then we would sit down and go around the next time! (We both laugh…) (Speaking in a distinctive voice again:) “That pen is not much good.” (Chuckles…) We would have diction—short sentences—that would test the clarity of our voices, the annunciation, the articulation of the words, expression, and projection, and all the things you need to know if you’re going to put a child on the stage. At that time, I loved doing all of those things!

 

(To be continued in following sections…)

Mrs. Brenda Hotard: After WWII- School Life

An Incredible Story of a Life Devoted to Dance and So Much More

 

AFTER WWII: SCHOOL LIFE

When we recovered, it was slow from the war. The family was still poor. Thank heavens for good schools! My sister and I both excelled at school and loved school. We loved school. I would die rather than be prevented from going to school, so often when I felt like I was maybe sick, I wouldn’t let my mum know because I wouldn’t want to stay home. School was just a wonderful, wonderful experience. My sister was a year ahead of me, of course, and the schooling was excellent in London in those early years. We really were progressed rapidly from the reading, writing, and arithmetic of the early age. That is my impression.

By then, I was definitely always into acting, dancing, and entertaining. I knew that because I was always performing at home. If uncles and aunts would come over, I would perform something—sing a song or do a dance. I found in school—other than the academic part, which was always fun and the fact that I was always, from day one very athletic—that I would be selected to do the narration for any of the major productions that required a narrator. It was always, “Well, Brenda’s going to tell the story.” So I did all the nativity plays—any play or production that needed a principal speaker. And I usually had a speaking role in any play.

We did one about “raggle-taggle” Gypsies, and I remember standing up there. We took that to competition actually, in London. **Announces strongly:**

Away with the raggle-taggle Gypsies, ho!

(We laugh…) That sounds like so much fun! It was fun; it was very fun. It was the tale of a wealthy family’s daughter who was lured away by a gypsy clan passing through.

That was at the elementary school or the grade school. My teachers there were very strongly encouraging my mum to allow me to pursue the arts. Of course, my mum didn’t know what “the arts” really were. My parents had no concept of really “the arts.”

At age eleven, for every child in the English school system no matter where you lived up and down the land (Scotland too, I believe, and Wales), you took a very important set of examinations called the Eleven Plus. Everyone took it on the same day throughout the land. My sister and I had no idea what this was all about really; we were just told it was the Eleven Plus or scholarship exam. We would “sit” and answer all these exam questions and hand this examination in, which was not unusual. We did that all the time, but these were all graded by an essential examining body of the entire land. The standard was uniform and equable wherever you lived.

A small percentage, I guess “the most successful group” if you like to put it that way, were given the opportunity to go to a “Grammar School.” The Grammar School was a school of the highest learning standard and expectation. (We didn’t even really know what the Grammar School was; we didn’t know the meaning of these terms.) Then, you might go instead to a “Secondary Central School,” which would be the next lower category. You might go to a “Secondary Modern School” if you did not do as well on these exams. The Secondary Modern School was something like a trade school. The Secondary Central School was the school in which you could transition up or down if you happened to be a “late bloomer” or become less interested over time. We thought it was a wonderful system!

Well, my sister was offered the chance to go to The Burlington Grammar School for Girls. It had always been a fee-paying school founded in the sixteenth century as a church school. It happened to be a stone-throw away from our house. We were aware of it because we would see these Burlington Grammar School girls. They would have these really spiffy velour hats, and their uniforms were rather nice. We would see them being dropped off by cars. (My parents never owned a car—not from the day they were born until the day they died.)

So my sister got to go to the “Burlington” because that very year, the Burlington was required by the London County Council (the governing authority of all the London schools) to open to eligible grammar school students coming from surrounding areas, no matter what their means. We could ordinarily never have afforded to go to that school. My sister was in the first wave of this new system.

The next year, I got to go to the Burlington as well. So we were both there, and that was when our education foundation really deepened because they offered foreign languages (Latin, some Greek, French, and German) and a curriculum that we could never have imagined. They also offered all manners of sports. There were two specially qualified sports mistresses, and we played every sport in the book (field hockey, gymnastics, tennis, netball, rounders, and all the track and field sports). We had a field day every year in the summer, which was an outdoor event with all the running and track and field events. It opened up a world that we would never have had the opportunity to experience had we not just happened to be arriving at that Eleven Plus when all those changes were happening.

My sister and I have both talked about all this and have said how fortunate we both were to happen to have been brought into this excellent system. It sounds like a college. It sounds amazing! It was just wonderful, and the music… Of course, I was so interested in the music, and the music teacher, whose name was Ms. Godden, and I became very “good friends.” I got to sing a lot of solos, and we did lots of competitive choral work within an intramural network of schools, which were all at one time public schools (the equivalent of US private schools). They were all top-notch schools.

(To be continued in following sections…)

Mrs. Brenda Hotard: Time of the War

(Born 1941)

 

An Incredible Story of a Life Devoted to Dance and So Much More

Parents: Edward George & Vera Margaret

Father’s Parents: Ellen “Nanny Branscum”

Mother’s Parents: Eleanor “Nell” May

Siblings: Joan Margaret, Michael John, Ronald George

Husband: Ernest Paul

Children: Jennifer & Paula

 

TIME OF THE WAR

When were you born?

I was born in 1941 in London during the 2^nd World War. I was the second child in the family, my sister having been born slightly less than a year before I was. We lived in a small brick house in a suburb at 39 Primula Street, W12.

We were in blackout wartime conditions at the time. I am told that my mother went rather suddenly into labor; we didn’t own a car or a telephone, as we were a working-class family. Because of this, my father put my mum into a child stroller (my mum was small) and rushed her to the hospital, which fortunately was a scant mile away. It became a famous burn center for RAF (Royal Air Force) pilots who had serious burn injuries during the war. It is now a famous research center and is still the hospital for burn casualties; it was being transformed at the time of my birth.

My dad apparently rushed my mum in, and the nursing staff assisted her to the delivery. My dad said that there was no waiting time. They took Mummy away, and then they came right back out with her clothes, which were still warm. They were saying, “It’s a girl!” (Laughs…) I rushed into the world, which is somehow very typical because I have been rushing ever since!

I was the second child, and because I had an older sister who was apparently precocious, I learned very quickly by always wanting to be the same as my “one-year-older-than-I” sister. Growing up, we were treated as twins because I was not lagging behind in size or manner. From the start, I was always dancing, making up odd movement phrases and gaits. (We laugh…)

My mum played the radio constantly; she loved music. There was always popular music on the radio. (We had no other access to music.) She sang. She sang everything. She had a very pretty voice, and she knew the words, which is why with any song that comes on the radio that’s of her vintage, I seem to know all the words. I have been asked there is any song I don’t know. Well, if there is any song from that era that I don’t know, it’s because my mum didn’t know it! I just remember her voice, and I remember all the words to the songs. It was during the American songbook era, and “we” don’t write songs like that anymore. It was Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, and all the greatest songwriters of the 40’s. Those were the songs that were being played because I was born in ’41, and I was growing up with my mum singing all the time.

That was significant because I was surrounded by music. It wasn’t classical music; it wasn’t performance per-se, but it was beautiful melodies from the great songbook enduring in beautiful words. Have you ever listened to them? Mm-hmm. You have to listen to them. Like in our ballet class—“I can’t help loving that man of mine!” Yes… you hear me sing it. (Laughs…) That’s Gershwin! **Sings**

 

Fish gonna swim; birds gonna fly,

I’m gonna love one man ‘til I die.

Can’t help lovin’ that man of mine…

 

And that’s only the opening little verse, but they are all… Ella Fitzgerald—do you know Ella Fitzgerald? Mm-hmm, and jazz and big band and all the musicals, like Oklahoma. Oklahoma came out then. Show Boat… Yes. Some of the songs in those early Broadway musical theatre productions are enduring today. They are just as beautiful. “Surry with the Fringe on Top”—do you know that one? Oh, yeah! From Oklahoma! From Oklahoma. And of course, the Oklahoma theme (starts singing). The lyrics are so very, very beautiful! We can’t hold a candle to them today.

Anyway, that was part of my up growing, as was poverty. We didn’t think of ourselves as poor; we didn’t know what it meant to be poor, so it was not a negative association for us at all. But we were poor. There were four children in the family eventually. My dad, who had his own little business before the war, lost his business during the war. He had been apprenticed as a carpenter in his early teens. His business was in repairing and making fine furniture. I think he was a master carpenter, but nobody was making and repairing fine furniture during the war. (Laughs…) We were lucky we could save a stick of furniture from the bombs!

So, his business went away. He did not serve in the army because he had a congenital heart murmur. He had had rheumatic fever as a small boy, and rheumatic fever, in those days, was often not diagnosed or treated. It frequently left its sufferers with a heart valve deficiency, so those people with a heart ‘murmur’ were always asked, “Did you have rheumatic fever?” In many cases, the patient did not know or remember.

My father did not pass his physical for war service, so he worked with the Civil Defense, getting people out of burning buildings and saving people from bomb devastation. My sister and I have determined that when I was two and a half (around the summer of 1943) and she was three and a half, something occurred that we remember as if it were yesterday.

She and I shared a bedroom in the upstairs of our very small railway house; it was a brick house that my parents rented from the Railway Company. (My dad didn’t work for them, but somehow, we lived in one of their houses.) We had a front garden—mostly grass and michaelmas daisies—and a very small back garden. About 25-30 feet up a steep embankment from that garden was a railway line. It was the Great Western Railway that traversed South England at its widest dimension from the West Country to the seashores of the East. Trains rattled by all the time as we were growing up. We didn’t notice them much, except during the war.

At that time, outside our back window (our bedroom faced the railway line)… First of all, they had huge barrage balloons hanging in the air. Have you ever seen a barrage balloon? It’s like a Good Year blimp that you would have floating over a ballgame, but these were all gray. They were like huge, gray elephants up there, and they were a screen, a barrier against an aircraft coming in to bomb us. So, we became accustomed to seeing these huge objects floating around in the sky, day and night.

Then, we had an Ak-Ak gun—an anti-aircraft gun on the railway (you could see it), as it would trundle back and forth. There was a siding that it would go into if a train was due, but it was constantly firing if there was some foreign object in the sky. They, of course, would be alerted to shoot it down. So, this was one of my very first memories. I also remember the milk trains carrying supplies coast and on to the frontlines across the Channel. The trains would come down that railway line shrouded in black whispering a muffled clack-clack, clack-clack—very quiet.

Everything was shrouded in black; we were not permitted to use lights in our houses. We had to have complete blackout conditions, so that the enemy would not have a target. All the time? Yes, because we were constantly being invaded from the air. Anyway, it was night, and we were up at the window because the Ak-Ak gun was just so noisy. We were up there looking, and as it fired, it would illuminate the sky. Then, all at once, we saw this black, rocket-shaped object with flames just flaring from its tail. We hadn’t seen anything like it before, and it was terrifying for us. We both instantly started to scream loudly. We couldn’t interpret it. You don’t even wait; it was just a reaction.

My mum and dad hadn’t gone to bed, yet. My mum was knitting; my dad was reading the newspaper. I remember all the details of this, and they just scurried up the stairs. The stairs were like this narrow (shows me with her hands). Two people side-by-side could not run up the stairs. They were steep like little cottage stairs. So, they were falling and bumping each other, coming up the stairs, and they grabbed us. They didn’t know what we were screaming about. They grabbed us out of our beds, and just as they did, the whole house shook… This was the very first V1 rocket and had been fired in Germany with a time mechanism to come over London (just where we lived) and then cut out and drop and bomb. It gave us no warning, no whine.

There was a V2 rocket, which came later. They were both just devastatingly destructive to the city of London. But that bomb had dropped in the street next to ours. That’s why we saw it—because it was on its way down. If it had hit a structure along the way, it would have exploded, of course. My mum and dad had no idea what it was. It was all big news the next day.

Then, as a result of that, we—the children of London—were evacuated out of the city of London and maybe some of the other cities, too. (You might know this story.) The people of the countryside and the smaller towns in England opened their homes to take the children of London in and keep them safe during the war. I remember very well. We went to two places; we were miserably unhappy in both of them. Many things that I won’t go into happened in these various homes that are not good memories of that time. Eventually, my mum who came to visit (I think on Saturdays only) decided, “Enough of this. We’re going back to London. We will take the risk.” It was a very calculated decision on her part because there was bombardment danger in London, but she could see that we were not being well cared for and that we were very unhappy.

So, we spent that time between when she came for us and the end of the war in London. We would retreat to an air raid shelter. Whenever it was possible to do so, the yard of each individual house in England was excavated, and an air raid shelter was built underground. It was damp and cold. We would go down there and spend the night because the bombing usually happened at night. Every night? Every night. It seemed the wail of the sirens were always sounding. I’ll never forget that sound and the instant fear that followed. Toward the end of the war, though, my mum and dad stopped going down there because we would all wake up in the morning with puffy eyes because of the dampness. We would all be coughing. My mum said, “You know, it was a choice.” It was always a choice. Either go down there and be safe if you got a direct hit, or go up into your house and not have all these physical reactions.

We had a big, big, huge oak trestle table, so it had great bulges of oak legs and then a single, connecting, strong board underneath. It was very heavy and very thick and wide enough that we could make beds under it. We slept on one side or the other of this trestle. Bombs would be landing; we would hear them. The house would shake. My dad would say, “If this house takes a bomb, this is probably the safest place.” We also had a cupboard under the stairs, and that was another alternative place. For wartime experiences, there are many in detail, but those are the ones that stand out in my mind.

During the war and after the war, food was scarce. We had ration books, so each family could only buy a certain number or amount of anything. Everything wasn’t always available anyway, so we eeked out a pretty narrow diet of essentials. But the government was very wise about trying to maintain the health of the children. At clinics that were dispersed throughout London in every borough (district), essential foods were available and free, such as cod liver oil, which I loved. My mum would go and get a bottle as often as possible. Again, it was rationed and depended on the number of children you had. At that time, my mum had my sister and me.

We had a teaspoon of cod liver oil every day, and we had evaporated milk or sometimes even condensed milk. Have you ever had evaporated milk? It’s sort of like Carnation in a can that has been boiled, and it’s got a slightly different taste from milk. It’s very nourishing. We also had dried egg powder. We didn’t have eggs because all the eggs were being supply-lined to the troops, so we had egg powder, and we had to reconstitute it. I remember so well those three and orange juice. My mum would get a small bottle of concentrated orange juice. I am certain that the reason we came through the war in decently good health as children (with all the deprivation that there was) was that the government provided these essential nutrients through their clinics that were everywhere.

However, we couldn’t get just anything we wanted until about ten years after the war. It took the country an incredibly long time. Maybe not ten, maybe six years. That’s a long time. It took ever so long for the farmers and the crops and the population that it took to run the farms and the factories in the cities—the whole infrastucture. We were just so devastated after the war.

I think having lived through that with my sister, it is easy to see why people who are not bombarded, like people in America, have no concept of what it is like to live through the terror of that warfare with Germany. Of course, it was our second war of the twentieth century against that terrible foe, and the country was on its knees at the end of that war—financially bankrupt. The citizens and all the buildings in London had been bombarded. It was such a difficult thing to build back from, and we could not have done it without the help of America—not only America coming into the war and helping to win it, but also helping us to recover from after-the-war. We were all very well aware of that and have never stopped being thankful.

Our school was a walking distance away from the house, and I remember in some of those very first years when we went to school, we would occasionally be called to the nurse’s office. On this occasion, everyone was filed into there, and we were given something like Ovaltine or hot chocolate powder. It was sweet, and it would be leftover supplies from the war that had been provided by the United States.

To prepare us, the school would send home a note: “Please bring some paper bags.” In those days, we saved every paper bag. We saved everything and anything that was useful and could be saved. Candy, which in England was called “sweets,” was displayed loose in bins or behind glass, then weighed, and poured into a paper bag not much bigger than a French Fry bag. We would take the paper bags into the school, and they would fill them with “this” chocolate powder. I will never forget the taste of this divine chocolate powder because we just didn’t have such luxuries. In fact, I have been searching for that particular flavor for the rest of my life. “Oh, can I taste that chocolate powder? Is that from America?” I wanted to find that fabulous nectar that I remembered from the war! (Laughs…) I never did find it. Anyway, these are funny little things that stay with you through your life.

 

(To be continued in following sections…)

Mrs. Newell Tozzer (Part III)

(Continued from Part II…)

Were you interested in politics as much as you were interested in history?

Yes indeed. I couldn’t help but be interested in politics, being from my family with Daddy’s fame and newspaper knowledge. My grandfather, Alfred Colquitt Newell, had been a big newspaperman himself before he went into the insurance business. His grandfather was governor of Georgia—Alfred Holt Colquitt.

We would talk politics at home all the time. It was just inevitable.

Do you remember the first presidential election that you got to vote in for?

No, I don’t really, but I think at that time, Georgia had just become one of the first states if not the first to let eighteen year olds vote. Was the age twenty-one before? Yes, but then Georgia changed all that, which was significant.

Do you have a favorite president from over the years?

Probably Eisenhower. Daddy knew Eisenhower in the war. Really? Oh yes, he did. He went to his press conferences, so he met him and knew him. I was at Sweet Briar when Eisenhower was inaugurated, and Daddy got me tickets to the parade, which was wonderful. I could go up and had good tickets to sit up on the parade route to see Eisenhower’s inauguration, so I think I would say Eisenhower. I took a friend of mine from Sweet Briar, and we went up on the train early in the morning (probably at 5 or 6am) to spend the day in Washington. Daddy was already there. That was when Daddy was the president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, so I think he had an even more special place to sit than we did. Still, he got us a good seat on the parade route. That’s exciting! Oh, it was thrilling!

Then, Eisenhower awarded my daddy the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest award a civilian can achieve in this country. Wow! Was there an event that happened that was the reason it was given to him? I think it was mostly for his war correspondence—his bravery, his war correspondent career, and being captured by the Germans. He wasn’t even in the military.

He could’ve been in the Army, and he hoped and tried to do that. However, there was some minor health reason that kept him away from that. You see, Clemson was a military school in those days. He was a Second Lieutenant when he graduated from Clemson. He kept that up (his Second Lieutenant title), but for some minor health reason, he couldn’t join the Army. That was when he persuaded his boss to send him to London as a war correspondent, which really made his fame.

What about your career after your year of teaching at Westminster?

I guess I taught there for two years; it was wonderful. Then, I went up to Cleveland in the summertime to be in my sister’s wedding, and I met Brent Tozzer and fell in love with him. I met him in Cleveland; he was from Cleveland. He was much older than I—sixteen or seventeen years older depending on what time of year it was. He had been in World War II and had a wonderful record in World War II.

He was very handsome and was working for Kenyon College, the Episcopal school. I had always said that I wanted to marry someone and live in a college town. I met him through friends of Mary Lane and John’s on a blind date and fell in love with him. That was between the two years of teaching at Westminster.

We decided to get married, and after I taught just half of the second year, I went to Dr. Presley and told him. He said, “Well, I think you need to just go on, and I ‘ll get someone else to fill in the rest of the year for you.” That was a hard thing to do… So I got married and moved to Ohio!

Do you remember your wedding day and what it was like? Was it a really happy day?

Oh, it was a beautiful, happy day. Unusual for Cleveland, the weather turned good. It was April, and it can be snowy in April in Cleveland, but the weather turned pretty. I woke up that morning, and all of a sudden it was going to be a beautiful day, which was incredible.

We were having a small wedding at home, which Mary Lane had had, too. Mine was a little bit bigger than Mary Lane’s, but still. (We laugh…) There were certain people I wanted to be sure were invited, like my mother’s UDC, the United Daughters of the Confederate. She loved them.

At any rate, I woke up and was having coffee out in the backyard. We had a beautiful backyard that went down into a lake, and there was a summerhouse—we called it a gazebo (a pretty little octagonal summerhouse out by the lake). I said, “The weather is going to be pretty, and I’m going to be married out here,” so we changed the plans from having the wedding in the house to out in this beautiful, little summerhouse. It was a lovely, outdoor wedding; that was fun.

I had already asked my best friend in Cleveland’s two little girls to be flower girls and to carry my train. (I had a long train.) When it was so pretty, I asked the next-door neighbors’ little girls to be flower girls, too—we were good friends with them. She had two little girls about the same age; they were about three and five years old. I just had Mary Lane for my matron-of-honor, and Billy was Brent’s best man. Then, we had these four little flower girls carrying two little bouquets and two of them carrying my train. Wow, that must have meant the world to them.

I worked at the newspaper two different times here at the Atlanta Journal, which is now the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The first time, I worked for Sue Mobley’s, Aunt Sue Brown Stern, who was the society editor. I worked there just about eight months for her maybe. I loved her; I was very close to her, but I got very tired of just writing up weddings and parties. That got boring, so I quit. Then, I went back to Cleveland.

The second time, I had gotten my Master’s at Georgia State University. That was where I finally got my Master’s. I got a job then, which didn’t last long, but it was exciting, working for historic preservation section of the state of Georgia. Then, I got mixed up in some political mess, so the job didn’t last but six months. But… you have to remember one thing. This is a true saying: “When one door closes, another opens.”

This lady who was a friend of my parents and who had a big job at the AJC—she and I were having lunch just when I found out that the state of Georgia job was not going to last. She said, “Newell, I have a place for you in the promotion department of the AJC,” so I went there and worked for her for at least two years. That was an exciting job but demanding. I had to be downtown at 7:30 in the morning to do things. If there were a hole in the newspaper, I had to put a promotion ad in. I quit that job in the promotion department after probably two years, but it was a wonderful experience.

Then, another door opened, and I met Frances Porcher, whom I had never known before. She was an Atlanta girl who was four or five years older than I. She was the top editor at the Centers for Disease Control. Francis introduced me around at the CDC, and I hooked up with this wonderful lady who is still my friend, Priscilla Holeman. Priscilla hired me as a writer/editor, and I worked for her for probably two years.

Then, I got what they called a “temporary job.” In other words, I didn’t have full insurance benefits. Then, I got a job with another part of the CDC called “NIOSH,” which was initials for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. They were just moving the headquarters to CDC in Atlanta from Washington. I got a job there, and that job was fabulous. I was able to go places, do things. When the director of NIOSH found out that I spoke fluent French, he created a position for me as director of international visitors. Since NIOSH’s headquarters was in Atlanta, we had a lot of international visitors.

I was with CDC (most of that time was with NIOSH) for almost twenty years. Wow. What that after Mom and Brent were in college? During their high school and college years. That ended up being a very wonderful career for me. NIOSH and I just meshed like this (shows me with her hands). I put on big meetings in Cincinnati, Ohio where NIOSH had about one hundred people working. It was a time when I just commuted between Atlanta and Cincinnati. My boss sent me to a World Health Organization meeting in Geneva. Wow.

So learning to speak French has been a great help in my life and career, and it all began with Mademoiselle Groleau at the Washington Seminary. (We laugh…) She was fabulous. I did my junior year in France from Sweet Briar College, too.

Was your junior year in France the first time that you went out of the country?

Yes, we went to Canada a lot because Ann Lane and Bob lived close to Canada. Was that when you were growing up? Yes, they lived in Aroostook County, Maine. They bottled Coca-Cola up there. We went up there in the summer three or four times. Mother took Mary Lane and me up there on the train when we were little. Boston was halfway; it’s a long way.

After you went to France during your junior year in college, is that when you started to love traveling?

Yes, during my junior year. Sue was there, too. We were there together in Paris. We didn’t live together, but we traveled together on all our vacations. Then, Sue Brown came over right after we got out of school. I went to Spain with Sue and Sue Brown, and I had about two or three weeks there. We went on the train from Paris to Spain. I had that much travel in the summer. I had lots of travel during the year. Then, I came back home, and we traveled on a boat, which was wonderful (on a ship in those days to Europe). We didn’t fly. How long did that take? Five or six days. It was wonderful being it gave you that wonderful feeling of being in transit. I love being on the ocean in transit. You really knew that you were between things, then.

The summer between my junior and senior years was when we moved to Cleveland. Daddy had gone up there before, but Mother had commuted between Atlanta and Cleveland. Daddy had promised me that we wouldn’t break up our home in Atlanta. He said, “We will not break up the home in Atlanta until you get home and can be a part of it.” So I was a part of packing up the house in Atlanta. That was sad, of course, but Nana could always make it fun. She said, “We ought to have a dance the last night.” (Laughs…) Did you? We didn’t, but I had a date, I remember, and we kind of danced around.

We had one car, then. We never had two cars until we were in Cleveland. Mother was, of course, so wiped out and tired from the packing of the huge, old house we had here. She was organizing all of that. Mama went on the train to Cleveland to rest because it was a long train journey. Daddy put Mary Lane, Billy, and me in the car to drive up. At the last minute, Corinne Murray (who was our helper then)—she did a little of everything and was a young black woman. At the last minute, Mother had invited her to come with us, and she said no, that she didn’t want to come. Still, at the last minute, she came and jumped in the car and moved to Cleveland with us. She had a big, nice room in our basement and stayed right there with us.

At any rate, in Cleveland when I started work up there after Mother had had me take the Junior League provisional course, I was office manager at that brokerage firm (my first job in Cleveland).

What do you think your favorite, biggest accomplishment that you’re most proud of is?

Raising my children to be good people. That’s my biggest and best accomplishment—no question about it. It may be my hardest one! (Laughs…) Oh, I bet!

What was the hardest thing about raising children?

I think the hardest thing was being very much on my own. I was a single mother, so I think that was the hardest part. You know, your grandfather (my husband) died when they were very young, really. That was awfully hard on them and on me because he had been a big help to me. That was sad and hard.

Was the divorce really hard, too?

Yes, it was, but I felt like I had to do it. I didn’t want to do it, but I felt like I had to do it because he had lost three or four jobs. He had just gone into a decline, so to speak. He just went downstairs into his office and sort of stayed down there. It was just impossible for me to be married to someone who was not out in the world. I had never been involved with a man who wasn’t working. If I had been in a different time or era, maybe I would have just realized that I needed to be the worker bee, but I grew up in a different time when a man went to work and had a job. I was not used to that, so yes, it was hard. It took a long time. Yes, I can definitely understand that, though. I know it was hard on your mom and uncle, but I had to do it… kind of to save myself.

Mom always talks about your dog Honey. What’s your favorite pet that you’ve had?

I was always the dog person in our family even growing up. We had a wonderful West Highland Terrior that somebody gave us named Burly—Burly of Bryans’ Burlesque. (Chuckles…) He was a white Scottie, but mostly he was grey. We loved Burly, and I loved Burly so much.

One time Burly got lost. Mother put an ad in the paper for him. This was during the war, and she said, “One dirty West Highland Terrier in the vicinity of Peachtree Road in Lindbergh.” Mother got a telephone call from this man at Christ the King, a Roman Catholic Church up the street. He said (speaking in a French accent), “Mrs. Bryan, this is Monsieur Morleigh at Christ the King. I think we have your dog. Come see.” So Mother went up there, and Burly ran into her arms. Aww… Burly was all-white! They had bathed him! (Laughs…) The priest said to my mother, “Mrs. Bryan, your dog likes to go for a ride in the car.” This was when gas was rationed, and we couldn’t go for a ride much. Mother said, “Yes, so do I, but I just have an A-card, so I don’t get to do it very much.” Then, Mother offered the award that she was going to give, and he said, “Oh no, I will just give it to the church,” so Burly came home with us.

Burly was one of my favorites. Honey was who I brought your mother and Brent up with. Honey was a darling dog. She died at the foot of my bed. I came home from work at the newspaper one day and found her asleep at the foot of my bed. Fortunately, Brent was home, and he and Billy buried her in the backyard. Yeah, I think she was my mom’s favorite dog. Oh, I’m sure she was. She was so sweet… just a real honey and pretty—a cocker spaniel.

Then, I started having cats. Like ChaCha! (Laughs…) I decided that that was how your mother and Brent could learn the facts of life! Oh, in having kittens… I was going to let the cat have kittens. Fortunately, my mother happened to be here from Clemson and was staying with me. One time, the cat we had (I think it was Snowflake) had a bunch of kittens, and she refused to feed them. She would not nurse them.

It was just awful. I didn’t have any money to speak of, so I couldn’t just constantly take her to the vet. Still, I took her to the vet one time, and he said, “This is what we call ‘feline inertia.’” I said, “You mean that she’s just lazy?!” He said, “Yes, she’s just lazy.” So he told me that the Humane Society would spay her for very little money. He said that I had to get some goats’ milk and drip goats’ milk with a dropper into those teeny little kittens’ mouths. Aw… For several nights every four to five hours, Mama and I would drop goats’ milk into those baby, baby, baby kittens’ mouths. We kept most of them alive.

From then on, I had cats. I tried with one puppy dog, and I even built a run for the dog in the backyard. It dug out from under the run and escaped, so that’s when I decided that I just couldn’t do dogs any longer. I just wasn’t home during the day to train them. I had to give up on dogs and concentrate on kitty cats.

What are some of your philosophical beliefs about life?

Whenever one door closes, another one opens. That’s a big belief. There are hard times, but you get through them. Work is a good thing, and family is the most important thing. Family is the number one, most important thing in life aside from a belief in God. Believe in God and then family. They pull you through the toughest times. Yes.

What problems in the world are you most concerned about, and what do you think needs to be done about them?

Oh, Mamie! (Laughs…) Is that too deep, too??? (We laugh…) As far as the worst situations in the world, I think we still have the same problems that we’ve had all along.

What advice do you have for me and younger generations about living their lives and making choices?

Keep your options open. Study hard, play hard, love hard. Make lots of friends, and keep friends. The longer you keep them, the longer you’ll value them. Just like in Girl Scouts: “Make new friends, but keep the old.” Exactly, we put that on Mama’s tombstone. That’s a good motto.

Keep thinking, and what matters most is family.

Mrs. Newell Tozzer (Part II)

(Continued from Part I…)

When I was born, it was very funny. The story [of how I got my name] was told to me all my life. In the hospital, my grandfather turned to my father and said, “Wright, what’s her name?” Daddy said, “Her name is Ellen Newell, of course.” My grandfather, who was a wonderful boss, said, “She’ll be named Ellen, but she’s going to be called Newell. I’m going to get a namesake!” (His last name was Newell.)

I didn’t like it part of the time growing up because it was so different and unusual, but I came to like it. That’s great!

Did your parents tell you anything about the day you were born and what it was like?

Mother was in labor a long time, I heard that, but she loved her doctor. I was brought home because it was Christmastime. In those days, mothers stayed in the hospital a long time—about two weeks—but it was Christmas, so I was brought home to 1 Clifton Road, which was my grandparents’ wonderful home. We had Christmas there. Did your mother get home in time for Christmas? Yes, she got home just in time for Christmas. Oh good! You were her Christmas present! Yes!

The story goes that her bedroom was upstairs at Nana and Pop’s house and that my uncle Bob Whatley and my father carried her downstairs for Christmas with the family.

What were your parents’ full names?

My mama’s full name was Ellen Hillyer Newell. Newell was her maiden name, and Hillyer was her mother’s maiden name. Her mother’s father had been mayor of Atlanta—George Hillyer. He was a very prominent lawyer and mayor of Atlanta.

My father’s name was William Wright Bryan. He was named for his grandfather, General William A. Wright—his mother’s stepfather, actually, but she adored her stepfather. She loved her stepfather so much that she named her only son, my father, for her stepfather, and [my father] was always called Wright.

General Wright is buried out at Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. Is it in the section where Uncle Big Bill is buried? No, it’s in the Confederate section. He was a big Confederate general, and he was controller general of the state of Georgia for fifty years. There’s a beautiful inscription on his grave, which his wife, Granny Wright, got this famous newspaperman to write. It says, “Southern gentleman, controller general of the state of Georgia for 50 years.” He lost a leg in the war, yet he still was able to get around and manage. This is my great-grandfather, the one that my daddy was named for.

Do you remember when Aunt Mary Lane was born?

Not really, but she’s exactly three years younger than I am. She was born in December of ’36. We were staying out at Clifton Road; I’ve been told that many times, so I’ve heard about it. We were very close to our next-door neighbors, and when Mama went into labor, they couldn’t find Daddy. It turned out he had gone to a movie. What?! Yes, he had to be downtown very early everyday to get out the afternoon newspaper. He had to be downtown by 6:30 or 7:00 am, so he was finished by 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon. He had just taken off to see a movie that he wanted to see. They couldn’t find him when Mama went into labor with Mary Lane, so I was left with the next-door neighbors, who were our good, good friends: the Oberdoffers.

We had help, but it happened to be the day that was the helps’ day off. Wow, of course that would happen. Of course. So I was always close to the Oberdoffers; they had a daughter named Gail who was my age, so I was just sent over to them.

What else of your childhood do you remember? I guess a lot of it was during WWII.

Well, I was getting older by then. I think the most important thing to know was how close we were to our grandparents: the Alfred Colquitt Newells. They played a big part in our bringing-up. We went to their home all the time and had so much fun there.

We actually lived there. I was born and came home after Clifton Road to 15^th Street to the wonderful house that my father and his sister had inherited from Granny Wright. I went to kindergarten at Spring Street School right there.

Then, we moved out to Druid Hills to Nana and Pop’s house and actually lived there. That was very helpful to them because they had bought [the house at] Sea Island and were spending six months of the year at Sea Island. It was helpful for them to have us in their house in Druid Hills. After Spring Street Kindergarten, which is near 15^th Street, I went to first and second grades at Druid Hills School, which was near Clifton Road. My best friend at Druid Hills School was Mary Burke, and she married Foy Hood. She still is a good friend. Isn’t that wonderful! Wow! Brent [my son] was in school with her daughter, so it continues.

Then, Mother decided she wanted us to move to this side of town so that we could go to school with all her friends’ children. We were still at Clifton Road when Billy was born. He was born in September 1940. Still, we moved over here when I started the third grade in 1941. [My parents] bought the house on Peachtree Road three doors up from Lindbergh Drive, so I walked to E. Rivers School and was in the room with lots of their friends’ children. I loved E. Rivers School, and I went there from third grade through seventh grade. That took us through World War II, and that was when Daddy made the speech for my graduation.

I was talking to one other person who said that she had a big graduation in seventh grade, too. Why was that?

It was a tradition to have a graduation from seventh grade. The girls all wore white dresses, and the boys wore white pants and white shirts. Everybody was in all white, and it was down on the field, which was decorated with nice things.

After E. Rivers, was there a high school, or did you go to junior high?

No, I went straight to Washington Seminary, which was where my mother and my grandmother had gone to school. It’s now a part of Westminster, but it was separate in my years. I went there starting in the eighth grade and went through high school there. I loved it.

Do you remember what you did for fun during high school? Did you have lots of spare time, or were you really busy?

Both. We had some teachers who were very, very hard and strict. Thank goodness they were! For instance, Mademoiselle Groleau was our French teacher from Paris, and she was very strict. We had to really work for her. I also had wonderful history teachers who got more and more interested in history, which was fabulous.

I was editor of the Annual. I was also the editor of the little annual we had at E. Rivers. Bryans were always the editors! You were following in your dad’s footsteps! Exactly. We also had spend-the-night parties, and I’m still friends with people who were in our class at Washington Seminary. For instance, you know Aunt Sue Mobley. She and I were classmates at the Seminary, and she and I went on to college together. Atlanta was so much smaller then that it wasn’t as dangerous, and a friend and I were laughing about how when we had spend-the-night parties at her house, one time we got out in the middle of the night and had a Conga line across Peachtree Road! That sounds like a lot of fun, but it’s crazy to think of now!

Was there a special place where all the teenagers hung out, like a fun place to go for a Coca-Cola?

There was Rusty’s Drive-in. It was on Peachtree; it exists no more, of course. It was a place where anybody that had a car could go. [Having a car] was a very special thing. I had one rich friend who had a car. We would go in the car after school in high school to Rusty’s, which was sort of a competitor to The Varsity. It was very much like The Varsity in that you drove in, and there was a carhop who came and took your order. It was closer to our homes than The Varsity.

Did you learn to drive when you were in high school?

When I was sixteen, I did. My daddy taught me. He was a calm teacher, so he was assigned to teach me to drive. (Laughs…) I can remember where I got my driver’s license. It was out on Confederate Avenue, which is near downtown. Was it scary to drive in Atlanta back then? It’s gotten much more scary over the years. I was scared, but it’s much more scary now.

I remember I had a little accident, and my sister was in the car. She always reminds me when she comes to town that that’s where we had that accident. It’s on Lindbergh Drive. Atlanta was so much smaller in those days that we used to go out Lindbergh Drive, and it was sort of like the country. We could chop down a Christmas tree! We didn’t have to buy one; Mama could just go down there with an axe.

You know, Mary Lane and I, both being born in December—I was the 15^th and she the 10^th—always had a combined birthday party until we were grown-up almost. Mama would have about forty to fifty children to our house on Peachtree Road. Wow! She decorated for Christmas and would have two cakes (one at one end of the table and one at the other in the dining room) ice cream, games, and all that until I was in high school.

Do you remember when you went off to Sweet Briar College?

Yes, I do. We took the train from Brookwood Station. That was the nice thing about being able to go by train: Sweet Briar was on the main line of the Southern Railway. We could get off either at Monroe, VA, which is just about three to four miles from Sweet Briar, or if there were enough girls, which there frequently were, they would stop at the little Sweet Briar Station, which is now on the Sweet Briar campus instead of down by the tracks. It’s wonderful to go by train.

My grandmother’s famous saying that she told to both her daughters was “I want you to marry somebody and stay in Atlanta, but if you have to move away from Atlanta, you must live on the main line of the Southern Railway, so I can get to see you.” That main line goes up through Monroe, VA and Sweet Briar, VA up to Washington DC and then New York. It goes from New York down this way to New Orleans.

Did you ever get to go to New Orleans by train?

Yes, but when I lived in New Orleans, I didn’t go by train; I went by car. I shared a car with my brother Billy. When I went to Tulane, which was a few years after I got out of Sweet Briar, we drove down from Cleveland in this wonderful, old car that was Billy’s and mine. I went to drop him off at Vanderbilt in Nashville, TN where he was going to school. He graduated from Vanderbilt and loved it always.

How did you know that you wanted to go to Tulane after Sweet Briar?

Well, I had done a lot of things after Sweet Briar. I worked as a secretary-receptionist-office manager sort of job at a wonderful brokerage firm in Cleveland for a couple of years. Did you live with your parents there? Yes. Mama had made me promise that I wouldn’t get a job until after I took the Junior League provisional course, which was very interesting and good for me because it taught me about Cleveland.

We had just moved to Cleveland between my junior and senior years of college, so when I graduated from college, I hadn’t spent much time there and didn’t know anything about it. It was a good idea [to take the provisional course] that Mother insisted on because I met people my own age, and I’m still friends with some of them. One of them is my close friend still.

I did the Junior League provisional course, and then, at Christmastime, I met this nice gentleman at a party. He asked me what I was doing, and I said I was getting ready to “pound the pavements” and look for a job. He called me up right after that and offered me this wonderful job as secretary-receptionist-office manager at this small, fine brokerage firm. The office was at Shaker Square, which was near our house, so that was nice. I could bop home for lunch. I stayed there for a while (two years nearly).

Then, a very, very famous historian Bell Irvin Wiley, who was the most famous historian of the Civil War, came to Cleveland to make a speech. He stayed with us, and he was so sweet and kind that he sat up with me one night after his speech until about 2am and said, “Newell, if you will just get back into what you like, teaching will be for you.”

I guess by that time, I had taught for one year in the city of Cleveland Public Schools. Somebody asked my daddy if I was going to teach the next year, and he said, “Over my dead body.” I had a really hard year. It was a strange system; they promoted the half-year. Half the children were in the second grade and half in the third. I didn’t know how to teach children how to read. I had to stay up every night learning the lessons and doing the lesson plans. It was a very tough year.

Bell Wiley came to Cleveland to speak and said, “If you’ll just get back to what you love to teach, teaching will indeed be right for you.” So he helped me get a scholarship to Tulane. I got a tuition scholarship for my Master’s degree in history. He was good friends with the head of the history department at Tulane, so he wrote letters for me and got me this wonderful scholarship. It was a tuition-free scholarship, so I had to pay my own way, like living expenses and all that, but I had my tuition. I had a wonderful year in New Orleans.

Then, I was starting to go for my PhD. I didn’t actually get my Master’s at Tulane; I just did all the work. I got sort of antsy and decided I needed to teach, so I called up Dr. Presley at Westminster in Atlanta. He called me back shortly after that and offered me a job teaching at Westminster. So I drove up to Atlanta in this car that Billy and I shared. I got an apartment and taught there, and I loved that. It was a wonderful experience and very happy. I worked hard—very hard. Did you still teach elementary school? No, I taught high school; that was a good thing. I found that much more “up my alley.”

One of the most exciting, wonderful parts of that was that I taught with the lady who had taught me at Washington Seminary and who had been an inspiration as a history teacher to me. She gave me a lot of leeway to do whatever, and of course, I had just been at Tulane doing graduate work, so I had a lot of knowledge. It was wonderful and fun! I’m still friends with some of the girls who were seniors that year.

One time, a group of about six or eight of the students in that class had an extra period that semester. I proposed to my friend, the head of the history department, to teach them a course in Georgia history, so we had a whole semester in Georgia history, which was fascinating.

Westminster was very different then. It was separated into the Boys’ School and the Girls’ School. It was not coeducational then, and I taught at the Girls’ School.

What do you think about the difference between separating the genders and having a coeducational system? Which is better?

Well, I went to a girls’ school always—at high school and college. I think it gave me a great deal of strength to go to an all-girls school where I didn’t have any competition from boys. To gain more confidence? Yes, to gain more confidence and to be stronger. I believe in separate, not coeducation, especially for girls. I think it benefits girls.

This is a funny question. Do you remember any crazy dates or funny dates that you went on in high school or college or even afterward?

(Laughs…) Yes indeed, yes indeed. I remember lots of them, and you know, you had to go out with who asked you. Girls didn’t ask boys for dates in my day. My mama preached to me that you had to go out with the first one who asked you. You couldn’t wait around for the better option… so yes, there were some crazy ones. Were some of the boys crazy dancers? Oh yes, so much so. I would get the giggles, and I would try to hide my giggles because I didn’t want to embarrass them.

In high school, we had sororities and fraternities. It was just a sort of Atlanta tradition. It probably wasn’t good, but that’s the way it was. There was Rush. There was a place called “Dead Man’s Curve,” and we would meet there. Anyway, there were sorority dances, and we had “no breaks.” Have you ever heard of a “no break?” That’s when a boy cannot break in. Most of the time a boy could break in, and the popular girls would have many, many, many breaks. At a “no break,” that would be a dance where you would just have one boy to dance with.

If I hunted, I could still probably find some of my dance programs. They were small, probably about this size (shows me with her hands). You could hang a pretty thing on your wrist, and you got boys to sign up for which dances they wanted to have with you. That’s wonderful; it sounds like so much fun! It was. The wonderful thing was that you had a big sister in the sorority. My big sister, who was one of the daughters of a friend of my parents of course, got me dates, which was a huge help. She kind of looked after me. All the big sisters kind of looked after the younger ones. She would help me fill out my dance card so that I wasn’t a “wallflower.”

The style when I was in high school was to wear a hoop skirt. Later on, your mother wore my hoop skirts a lot. Ms. Buffington was the sewing lady who made the dresses to go over the hoop skirts. I think she probably made the hoop skirts, too. It was just about three steel hoops sewn into a petticoat. Then, she made these dresses to go over that. Did you get to pick out the pattern and the fabric? Yes. She mostly just drew a picture of what she could do for us. We went and bought the material, and she made it into a dress. I was very lucky because my mother’s best friend Rebecca (we called her Aunt Rebecca) gave me a dress one year. [Dresses] were expensive. I think that’s the one your mother wore some when she was in high school herself, so they served a purpose. I bet they were beautiful dresses. They were really pretty. The dances were at the Biltmore Hotel.

I guess the most important thing for you to know is that my father was one of the most important men in Atlanta, Georgia and actually in the state of Georgia. He was urged to run for governor of Georgia. Mother told me that, but he did not want to do that. He was so important, though, to the state and so famous. He went around making speeches to different groups all over the state all the time. I was very fortunate in that he took me with him some of the time. Sometimes Mother couldn’t go with him, so he took me with him. That was fun.

I came from a family that was very much involved in politics and the state. That was one of the most important things about my background.

 

(To be continued in Part III…)

Mrs. Newell Tozzer (Part I)

(Born 1933)

Parents: Ellen Hillyer Newell & William Wright Bryan

Siblings: Mary Lane & Billy

Husband: Brent Tozzer

Children: Ellen & Brent

 

Life During WWII

We lived on Peachtree Road, three houses north of Lindbergh Drive. That was neat because gas was rationed during WWII. Everything was rationed, and Mom was very proud of having an A-card, which was the least amount of gas anybody could get. She said she only had enough gas to go once a week to the grocery store and to take us to the doctor if we got sick.

Everything was rationed—not just gas, but sugar, coffee, tea, clothes, all sorts of things. The thing that Mama had the hardest time with was that shoes were rationed. She had three growing children whose shoe sizes were constantly growing and changing, so what she did was very fortunate. She swapped her mother (my grandmamma)—“Nana” swapped her shoe coupons for Mama’s sugar coupons because Nana just had to make a cake every week. She was a wonderful cake maker and had to make a cake. We loved it. So [my grandmother] didn’t need the shoes, and my mama desperately needed them, so she got her mama’s shoe coupons. But the gas coupons were really precious.

How did you adapt with all the different food that you had to eat, like the food without your sugar?

We somehow just managed, but the gas was really hard.

My father was a war correspondent during WWII. He persuaded his boss, the owner of the paper, to send him to England. He became very famous as a war correspondent and got there in time to interview Georgia boys in England, and all of this was the buildup for D-Day, the invasion of Europe.

Daddy was away, and Mama said that the thing that saved her sanity was that she had a ladies’ club, and they were called the “War Widows Poker Club.” The War Widows Poker Club met on Saturday nights and played poker. I don’t think they betted much money, but she said that it saved her sanity. They had some grown-up conversations together as friends, and they kept close to each other.

Mother said that when she would drive home from the War Widows Poker Club, (because the gas was so scarce) she couldn’t decide whether to leave the car in the front yard where she was afraid somebody would siphon off the gas. People stole gas by siphoning it off. To park, she would have to go way down in the backyard where the garage was, but there, she was afraid somebody might get her. (Laughs…) Because of that, she had a great debate with herself: where to leave her car!

But see, it was wonderful—she didn’t have to take us to school much because we could walk the two blocks down the street to E. Rivers School, and we could walk the two and a half blocks up the street to the Baptist church where we went to Sunday school and church.

Where was this house again? Was it the one that [your parents] brought you home from the hospital to [when you were a baby]?

No, that’s in Ansley Park right near the Driving Club. [The house that I’m talking about] is on Peachtree Road in Buckhead, and it’s now part of that pretty condominium development called “The Gates.” It was just three houses up from Lindbergh Drive near Peachtree Battle.

At that time, there was no shopping center there—none. There was this funny fruit stand. It was more than a fruit stand. It was covered, and it was called “Fred’s Fruit Emporium.” It was on Peachtree Road. There was just nothing down in the valley of what is the Peachtree Battle Shopping Center now. That didn’t come until the 1950’s.

At any rate, my fourth grade teacher, like all of us, liked a Coca-Cola. She liked to have a Coca-Cola every morning. Mrs. Wilson was her name, and she was at E. Rivers. She would send me across the street to Fred’s Fruit Emporium to get her a Coca-Cola in the morning. My mother did not like that a bit; she did not approve of that because one—it took me away from class, and two—I had to cross the street, and three—people thought Fred’s Fruit Emporium was a iniquity or something. It really wasn’t, but it was dark and dingy. You didn’t even go with a buddy? No, I just went by myself. Mama did not like that.

My mama was a strong lady, and she marched herself in to see the principal, Ms. Osterhout. When my sister Mary Lane, who was three years behind me, came along, my mama said, “I do not want Mary Lane to have Ms. Wilson. I want her to have another fourth grade teacher.”

Well, Ms. Wilson heard about it and was very offended. She walked up to call on Mama in our home, and she accused Mama. She came to your house? Oh yes, she did. She said, “Why did you request that Mary Lane have another teacher?” Poor Mama… She had to cope with talking to Ms. Wilson, but it was funny.

Do you remember what your favorite subject was in elementary school or high school?

Always history. History was always my favorite subject.

Did you talk about the war (WWII) when you were in class?

Yes, we did, and our daddy came and made the graduation speech in seventh grade when we had a formal graduation from seventh grade. The girls wore white dresses, and the boys wore white shirts and white pants. It was a nice formal graduation, and Daddy made the speech. He talked about prison camp. It’s really funny: he always told the story about how he was liberated by the Russians. His prison camp was in Poland, and the Russians came into Poland and liberated his prison camp.

He had been shot in the leg, and they had not done anything about his wound in the prison hospital because they didn’t know how much tetanus he had had. Without knowing how much tetanus this was, they were afraid to operate on him, so the bullet was just still in there. He told the story about when he was taken into Russia. The Russians actually took him into Odessa. At any rate, these Russian nuns bathed him. He told that story. (Laughs…) You know how old you are in the seventh grade; that was a little embarrassing for me. Still, he loved to tell the story of the Russian nuns giving him a bath.

The nuns also gave him the china—it was beautiful china—that he ate his first meal on when he was liberated. Mama always kept that china in her cabinet where she kept pretty china in the living room. So were the Russians nicer than the Germans? I think so, but he said those nuns really scrubbed him! (We laugh…) That’s crazy! It was funny to hear about that.

Did your father like to travel?

He always liked to travel, but at any rate, he got on a ship to Marseille from Odessa. Fortunately, when he got to Marseille, France, who should he see but a friend of his from Atlanta! Everybody in Atlanta knew that Daddy had been captured and was a prisoner of war, and everybody was worried about him. This old friend came up to Daddy and said, “Wright, what can I do for you?” Daddy said, “Well, in pre-war times, you were a banker, and I need some money. Can you lend me some money?” He was able to lend Daddy money that got my father to Paris! Well, actually maybe he got on an Army plane or something, but he loaned Daddy some money.

Then, when Daddy got to Paris, fortunately, another good friend was head of the first general hospital in Paris. He got Daddy in that hospital and saw to the fact that he had the best doctors. He was operated on. This was after the war? Yes. It was right after he was liberated from prison camp before he got home. This man got good medical attention for Daddy’s leg with the bullet in it and got the bullet taken out. [My father] stayed for probably three or four months in the Army hospital in Paris.

We have a picture of him in bed in hospital with a famous movie star and skater, Sonja Henie. You may never have heard of her, but she was very famous when I was your age. She came to visit men in the hospital, and there was a picture of Daddy and this General who got him in the hospital, and Sonja Henie by his bed. That picture just went all over everywhere.

Did he ever talk about what France or Paris was like while it was under control by the Germans or even afterward?

No, he wasn’t there, then. Well, he was captured in France. Was he captured right after he recorded about D-Day? Shortly afterwards, maybe six weeks afterwards. His D-Day report was so famous. It went all over every network. Every network had Wright Bryan’s D-Day report on it, and it made him very, very famous.

He did get to Paris for the liberation of Paris, and that was fabulous. Then, it was very scary for us because we heard his broadcast from the day of the liberation of Paris, too, and he said where he was. We could picture where he was, and when I went to Paris, I could see exactly where he was. [In the broadcast,] you could hear the shots coming, and the snipers were still there. The Germans were still in control of Paris until a few days later. It was pretty scary to hear your father being shot at. That would be scary.

He went into Paris in a Jeep with a driver and John MacVane, who was another famous war correspondent.

Did your father talk about the war a lot when he came back?

He talked about it because he was so famous and had written these reports, so everybody invited him to make speeches. He went not just around Atlanta, but all over Georgia. There were invitations from Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis Clubs, high schools, colleges to talk about his experiences because he was that much in demand and that famous.

It was really funny. One time, he went to South Carolina to an old girlfriend’s hometown. She and Mother were sitting on the front row, and he was starting to talk. She turned to my mama and said, “Aren’t you afraid Wright will forget something?” Mama said, “No, if he forgets, I’ll just go up and give the speech for him! I know it by heart.” (Laughs…) They were a very happy couple. Anyway, [the experience] made him his career.

Right after he got home to Atlanta, he was made the top editor of the paper. He had been just the managing editor before the war, but when he got home from the war and prison camp, he was made the top editor of the paper. That was huge. He remained that until he became the top editor in the country. He was president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. That brought him to the attention of Cleveland, Ohio, who needed a new editor for their paper. Their old editor was getting old and tired and sick and what not, so they came down and recruited my father to be editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which was one of the top papers in America.

Did your family move to Ohio?

Yes, we moved to Cleveland, Ohio when I was between my junior and senior years in college. Mama said that they had ten happy years there and one unhappy year. That was when a young man about my age (whose family did happen to own the paper in Cleveland) came in and started bossing Daddy around. Daddy had been brought up there to revive the paper. That didn’t fly, so my father quit the Plain Dealer.

That was when he went back to his Alma Mater of Clemson University. They had been after him for a while and really wanting him to come to Clemson. The last part of his career was a happy one in Clemson. Your mother would remember it well. Actually, your mother was born in Anderson, South Carolina next door to Clemson. At any rate, he was vice president for development of Clemson, which was a huge job. It was next to the president of Clemson. He had a very happy and successful time there. He made speeches for the president and raised money for the university. He and mother loved Clemson, and we did, too. We had a wonderful home and experience there.

So that was his working career. He was a big man, and he was tall and handsome. He was 6’5”. He got tired of people asking him how tall he was, so he would reply, “I’m 5’17”.” just to make them be quiet. That’s funny!

 

(To be continued in Part II…)

Mr. Ernest Hooks Jr., Architect/ MBA (Part III)

(Continued from Part II…)

What are some of your philosophical beliefs about life that you’ve learned from all of your travels, careers, and paths?

Well, we need thinkers. They’re what we have a shortage of: thinkers and people who move to do action. There’s no shortage of the need to promote change. The only shortage is commitment and action. I think that too often people will say, “I’m going to… I’m going to…” and then they never end up doing it.

Here’s an example. History is one of my passions, and this is something I wrote:

“Because I see the condition of the nation is at a crossroads,

The one word that I see is actually lacking is not just a deficit in the economy;

It is a Deficit of Character.”

That is from a poem I had written, and I had requested to be the student speaker at the commencement exercises coming from the University of Phoenix in September. I wanted to share that with the graduates to get them to buy in to that model. If they are willing to go out from Phoenix to become the models, they can make a difference, but right now, the line that is blurred is what the expectations are from the university and what their personal aspirations are. I’m saying if you can make that line bolder and make the character expression the model for the class, you can make a difference. That’s my platform that I’m offering.

The other part is that as adults living in a community, we see that we’ve got family disintegrations and all that. I’m a big brother for William, who is eleven years old. He’s not my natural child, but he’s in my community, so I’ve must take some responsibility for him simply because if I don’t invest the time to show him the right road to travel, I could become his victim. If he goes down the wrong road, I could become his victim, so the responsibility is there. As long as we are here in the community, one has to have the responsibility to be able to make an influence for that child in the next generation coming along. We need more adults to do that!

If the Class of 2013 can entrust that same value to the Class of 2014 and 2015, it becomes a chain. That’s the difference between that and a commencement speech where one week afterward, no one remembers exactly what was said. But if you have a chain and each class buys into that chain, then you have something that can be sustained. That’s what I’m trying to convince the operations of the University of Phoenix to do. So you’re the commencement speaker this September? Not exactly; well, there is going to be a speaker for commencement, and then they’re going to have a student speaker. I requested to be the student speaker. I submitted that poem to the committee requesting that consideration.

That’s wonderful. I love hearing that because when I’ve been interviewing so many people who have grown up during the Great Depression and World War II, they’ve told me how the communities have grown so close together in the war effort and everything. Even with the people who lived out in the country, their values were just really different from ours today, and it’s a problem. I usually ask another question, but you’ve pretty much answered it: what problems in the world today are you most concerned about, and what can be done? People have said technology can be a problem because it can take away children’s morals and can distract them from what’s important in life.

Yes, I heard about a bust by the FBI just recently about kids that were being used for prostitution. The FBI arrested about one-hundred-and-fifty right here in this area. These were the pimps who were pimping the kids from age nine up to sixteen. That’s awful! Yeah, Atlanta is one of the largest areas of human trafficking right now. Wow…

Now, you have more cases of runaways, cases where parents are giving kids away because they don’t want the stress anymore. There are kids out there from nine to sixteen who need some parenting. I said to myself, “Really and truly, what I would love to be able to do is have an orphanage.” Have you ever heard of Josephine Baker? She went to France and adopted numerous kids from different cultures, and she was an entertainer. She would teach them and maintain. I think that she had ten or twelve kids from other cultures, and she was black. I’ve heard her music, but I haven’t heard that about her.

I always wonder about where those kids are going to go and who’s going to be able to parent them. I would love to have a farm and be able to have proper chaperones for kids and be able to be that support because that’s an issue right there: where are they going to go? You can have foster parenting, but if you have a farm area, you can teach them some basic things about farming, and they will be able to grow up with food. You can’t do that very well in the city. I think that would be wonderful. Yeah, it was just a thought.

If I had the resources (or at least some of the resources), really and truly, I would go out and start it and request some of the foundations. I would go to other nonprofits and say, “Here’s a project that we can work together on.” With your love for education and creativity, it would be so wonderful. It really would.

In addition to that, I went back and did some studying myself and started connecting some dots of history that I had never been exposed to, and I made some discoveries. Then, I wrote one piece for Tuskegee. Have you heard about George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington? Mm-hmm. We were talking about character before… What’s missing big-time right now is character. When you look back over the landscape—this is what I made plain to some people that I wrote in response to this Zimmerman-Martin case, and I think clearly in my heart that Travon, at seventeen, had not had the proper parenting in order to be able to reflect character. I think he had problems at school; he was going to stay with his dad; his mom had problems with giving up. He was going back to his dad’s home when he had the encounter.

When I look at that and look at the association he had with this young lady who was on the stand—I didn’t hear the testimony, but I read the commentary. In high school, she could barely communicate. She was not able to communicate very well. I think it was beyond having fear of being on the witness stand. I think that was part of her makeup; she had not moved forward enough to be able to master communication very well. Then, I put all those things together, and thought that character was lacking in both cases. Therefore, you had the conflict that came about and caused somebody’s death. If character had been there, there could have been communication and a conversation that could have avoided that. But everybody wanted to blame somebody else… Well, there’s enough on both sides. Both sides were lacking proper character.

How do we know that? Go back and look at history. Booker T. Washington started Tuskegee in 1881—July 4^th, in fact, of 1881. He was a graduate of Hampton. He was so hungry to go to school that he walked most of the way from West Virginia to Hampton to get education. The lady that he had worked for in West Virginia had taught him how to clean so that he could get a job and go to school. So he went there, did that, and came back.

Then, the request came from two citizens in Tuskegee to send someone to start a school for that in Tuskegee, and he went there, found some land, borrowed two hundred dollars, and got the land. Then, in 1896, he learned about Dr. Carver, who was at Howard at that time and had just finished the Master’s program in agriculture. He requested him to come, and Dr. Carver came and stayed there from 1896 to 1943 upon his death.

There was character involved in both of those cases because Booker T. Washington had to stay on the road for six months out of the year to raise funds to sustain Tuskegee. He had eighteen hundred students. He wrote the book Up from Slavery. Have you read that? It’s a great book to read. Every student in Tuskegee has to read that before they’re admitted. It tells about his challenge to come from slavery and to establish Tuskegee. That book fell into the hands of Andrew Carnegie, and he was so favorably impressed that not only did he give him a library for Tuskegee, but he also gave him 600,000 dollars. Oh my goodness!

You don’t give that kind of money to anybody who has bad character. He had confidence in Booker T. Washington that he was going to do what was right. When Booker T. Washington came back, his response was— There was a stipend in the agreement that this amount would go to him Booker T. Washington and his family because he knew he had to live, so Booker T. Washington came back and said, “Hey, can you make one change please in this gift that your giving? Could you reduce the amount in the stipend for me and my family, so the people don’t think I’m in it for the money.”

Not only did Andrew Carnegie look favorable upon his efforts there to help that school… (It had been less than forty years since the Emancipation Proclamation!) But… what he recognized was that this was a launching pad. The people who had been in slavery for all this time had had no access to education, any of the skills or training—none of that! Tuskegee was a launching pad. With him being a former slave, he had it firsthand; he knew. This is what made it so powerful.

Andrew Carnegie gave him 600,000 dollars to use for the endowment, and in 1901, they had a fundraiser in Carnegie Hall to raise one million and eight hundred dollars. Then, they were going to take that train down from New York down to Tuskegee to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary.

All I’m saying is that men of character can really be able to attract more value and assets than men without it. That’s one of the things that’s missing in the education of our kids. They need to understand the value of having character. Although you get angry and upset, you’ve just got to stay calm and recognize that hey—violence is only going to get violence, so let’s have some wisdom here and try to work through it.

Even Dr. King made it plain and clear when he was talking about his four children during his speech in August of 1963. He said, “I hope they will be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” He was talking about black versus white, but when you look at the word “character,” you can talk about it with any culture or any person.

History is so important, and I don’t think our kids get enough exposure to history and the value of those historical experiences. It can give you a better viewpoint of where we are now.

For instance, I went back and did a data study to find out what happened at Yorktown [during the American Revolution] and who were the players. I heard of this man, James Armistead; I was unfamiliar with his name. Also, Prince Estabrook was a Revolutionary Minuteman. A man of color was a minuteman along with Paul Revere. Everyone knew about Crispus Attucks [another man of color] and the Boston Massacre in 1770.

Then, I found James Armistead Lafayette. He was a spy. He was the one who got the intelligence and brought it to General Lafayette, so they could defeat Cornwallis. His gratitude was expressed to Lafayette by adopting the surname of his partner. Wow.

That has never been shared before, and it gives you a whole different perception about how the U.S. Constitutional Convention came about in 1787-88. It’s was a shared thing… a partnership. It wasn’t all white colonists who did it; there were people of color who played important roles in being able to win the 15 Revolutionary War battles so that they could move to a Constitutional Convention. (Laughs…) Yes, and that needs to be shared.

Also, Lewis and Clark didn’t do it alone when they went west of the Mississippi River. In fact, this man, who happen have been a slave was an ambassador to the Mandan Indians and also helped with setting up and management of the camps. He saved Lewis from drowning in the Missouri River.

You see, the truth brings people to freedom. When you bring all those dots together, it gives people a whole different perspective of who we are individually and as a nation.

 

Mr. Ernest Hooks Jr., Architect/ MBA (Part II)

(Continued from Part I…)

What do you think your favorite project has been—the one that you’re most proud of?

One that I’m really fond of that I helped to build was a mid-rise building off of Lindbergh Drive near the Marta station. I was called the Resident Engineer and had to be there every day to monitor the construction.

So I had the opportunity to get hands on with the construction as it went. When they were getting ready to pour concrete, I had to be there and monitor and be sure it was done correctly and write up reports and all that. I think that involvement put a highlight on my whole experience because I was able to see the drawings and be there and help to coordinate the drawings. That was the high-rise right across from the old Lindbergh shopping center. Is it still there? Yes, Marian Road Mid-rise Housing for Seniors it’s still there.

When did you get into writing?

After I did work [in Lindbergh], I got an offer to go to South Carolina as the manager of an office. The gentleman I was working for [was part of] McDuffie and Associates. At the end of the job we were doing in Lindbergh, I went to Orangeburg, South Carolina and stayed there for about a year. While I was there, we did a lot of modifications for the campus to make it accessible for the disable. While I was there, I had the opportunity to go on the campus and go into the French language lab. I did it on my lunch breaks, so that was a real plus to be refreshed and speak some French.

Then, I came back here after working there for a year. In South Carolina, I used to come back on weekends. First, I would drive in my car. Then later, I had a motorcycle for my commute, which was really wonderful. I would use the motorcycle to come back for the weekends. I had to leave early Monday morning at about 3 AM to get back to Orangeburg, South Carolina by around 8 AM in time for work.

One of the greatest experiences I had was that when I left at three o’clock in the morning on the motorcycle, I would be heading east going to Orangeburg, South Carolina. At that point, I got the chance to experience something I had never experienced before: seeing a pre-sunrise sky setting. Then, [I could] witness all the different changes in the complexion of the pre-dawn sky that takes place between pre-sunrise and sunrise. Wow—it was phenomenal. I wrote a poem about it from that phenomenal experience I witnessed.

Mrs. Wilkerson was just in her prime. She lived in a mid-rise down in Summerhill, and she was noticed by Georgia State in an outreach program for seniors. They noticed her work and thought it was extraordinary. Is she the artist [in your children’s books]? Yes. She grew up in a farm down in Covington, Georgia and came to Atlanta. She was married but never had any children. My mom introduced me to her when I was a little boy because I used to pass her house on my way to daycare everyday. My mom would tell me, “You stop by and say hi to Mrs. Wilkerson,” so I would stop by. That’s how I got to know her.

When I came back from South Carolina, I learned that she had moved to a mid-rise, and I would go by to visit her. We had a great bond of friendship. When she died in 1984, she made me one of the exequaturs. Her next-door neighbor was also an exequatur, but her neighbor died in 1990, which meant that I was the sole survivor. As the will said, everything valuable would come to the sole survivor, so all her work came to me. Her actual artwork came to you? Yes, well, I had the rights to all of it. I don’t have all the originals. She has three pieces in museums and some that have been sold. Is it still hanging at the High Museum? Yes.

So I took it and put it in a file cabinet, and that’s where it stayed for probably ten years. One day, I pulled it out and said, “I must do something with this.” After a seminar that I went to at Landmark Education, I decided that I could put all of it into a children’s book. I was torn with whether to make posters to sell or put it into a children’s book. Well, I finally went with the children’s book idea. In the children’s book, one of the features that keeps kids engaged is that they can play “hide and find.” They have to find details [of the paintings] in the picture. That keeps them engaged and tests their skills about detail and recognition at an early age. As an adult, being able to recognize details becomes really important, so if they can get that early, they can be ahead of their peers.

I did that layout and then started seeking a publisher. Finally, Authorhouse came on the scene, and I looked at some of their work and decided, “Hey, I’m going to go with Authorhouse.” I did all of the layout work myself; I used my architecture skills for that. I went back and forth three times. In fact, I had to search very deeply about the text design and how I was going to be able to get something complementary as a text design that could keep kids engaged rather than just reading the text that adults read. I wanted to create text that was going to be playful and unique and keep them engaged, and that’s what I came up with. I love it! How creative!

You know, art has a really great power. I think people enjoy being around art although they may not be artists themselves. So you still have all the rights to all of her work. Yes, yeah. Her nieces and nephews never came back to ask about it? No, she was the last of the twenty-one children, so everybody else is deceased.

Throughout all of your experiences with so many different passions and careers, did you ever have any low points?

Oh, yeah. When I was in college, oh man, it was really something. I was so depressed because of the heavy load of trying to get everything done for classes and all that. It just became overwhelming at one point where I just did nothing practically. My mom and dad were concerned because I stopped writing. I didn’t call because I just was depressed because of the heavy load I had to carry.

How did you get through tough times like that?

I started going to church in Washington with one of the friends I had there. That sort of helped pull me through. Making connections? Yeah, spiritual connections. Then, I had to go on probation as an undergraduate because I was doing so poorly. I learned at that time and said, “I’m going to earn money to help myself.” I went and got a license as a taxi driver and became a taxi driver in Washington DC. Wow! What a challenge to drive there! (Laughs…) Oh boy, it was! I had to learn the buildings, the routes, and all of that stuff, but God pulled me through all that.

I established a foundation after I left meaning to build on that. While I was in the military, I learned Italian since I was in Italy. I was already familiar with French, and then I learned Italian. That was enjoyable.

Now, the next chapter that I’m looking at now is to go back and refresh myself by revisiting the languages and also going back to the piano. I’m really studying Beethoven’s Symphony in C-sharp minor, Moonlight, so I can be able to play it. I think that’s wonderful! It’s cool how you weave all these skills together, like how you weave your architecture skills with writing the children’s book.

The whole game is once you have a suitable product, you have to have enough vision to look ahead and see what your next product is going to be (laughs) or else you’ll be out of business. When I’m talking about branding (we’re talking about branding a lot in the class I’m taking now), once you get established with that first product (no different from Apple, Microsoft, or anything else), you’ve got a customer support base. It’s easier to sell that second product to that base that you have than going out and finding a new base. That’s what you do: you offer and create a market for those people and offer opportunities for them to come and get the second product and then the third product. Then, you just keep going. I think it would be interesting to see what the next opportunities are. I’ve had offers from an agent who wants to consider licensing a publisher outside the United States to use the book in a different language and get royalties from that. I’m looking at that as maybe an option for the future.

Once we got the first volume done, I had to go back and scrap all the text because I wasn’t satisfied with the text. I said, “Well, it’s got to be something to keep kids engaged; it can’t just have regular text.” All the books I saw on the shelf just had regular text. Kids see things differently from adults, and I really realized that. Recently, I tested a young three-year-old. I was using the chicken [illustration]. I made some of the letters bold and large, and I recognized that they were user-friendlier to the three-year old. She was able to see something bigger. She did not know the word l-o-o-k; she knew the alphabet, though. Then, when her dad and I asked her, she could read the letters with confidence, and we sounded the word out for her. She would beam! (We laugh…) He was happy, too, so he bought the book.

She was alphabet-ready—ready for the book. She got inspired, and that inspiration caused her to go on to another word. That was the real advantage there. Her dad and I were off to the side talking about something else, and she and her little brother were playing a game of “hide and find” in the book. That’s great! So it’s great for all age levels. Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

So here’s a bird’s eye view of what it was like in the farm culture. Clark Howard said that he didn’t learn that food didn’t come from the factory until he was nine. I gave Clark a complimentary copy and was trying to get this to be a part of his Christmas kid project. He came back later and thought that it wouldn’t be a good hit. I haven’t given up, though. After that Children’s hospital campaign that WSB did, I called in and offered to be able to share some of the proceeds from books, so they asked me to call next year and do that. I’m hoping to maybe get some press out of that. It’s all marketing now.

The original idea was to put the contents of Volume I and Volume II all in one volume. I had a lot to share, so that’s what I did. I put it all down at one time, and I recognized the fact that for any future projects, that would be a good way to do it: put everything that you’ve got to give together at once. Then, you came back, and the board says that it’s too much for them to absorb. Then, do two… a second volume, so I split it and put it into Volume I and Volume II. If I had not done it that way, I would have been slow to come back and do a Volume II. I already had all the contents and all the data, so all I had to do was change the introduction to be able to reflect on both books, so that’s what I did.

Did you make the children’s reading lists [in the back of the book]?

No, Marva Collins [made them]. Marva came out of Chicago and had her own school—Westside Preparatory. I called her and told her I was working on a project and sent her information. She loved it, and she wrote the forward. It’s interesting to me that she put Oscar Wilde in here because I never think of him for youth, you know. She has Dante, too. Yes, see Marva was teaching classics to her students. The benefit she got from teaching them the classics was that they learned early what the shortcomings of adults were through all of the classic characters. Therefore, in real life, they could be able to identify similar characters because things haven’t changed. Love and hate still exist, and they would be able to recognize them. So their maturity level was far better than their peers. Yeah, that’s smart.

 

(To be continued in Part III…)

Mr. Ernest Hooks Jr., Architect/ MBA (Part I)

Parents: Allie and Earnest

 

When were you born?

I was born in Atlanta. I’m a Grady baby. (Laughs…)

What do you remember about your childhood? Were you an only child?

I was an only child up until I was around five or six, and then, I found out that Dad had two daughters from his previous marriage. Those two daughters came to visit me in Atlanta. I don’t remember much about it because I was about five or six. They stayed a short while, and they were in their teens and going through that adolescence stage. (Laughs…) I think Dad took all he could take, and then, he sent them back to their mom, who was in Detroit. So for that brief moment, I got a chance to meet them, and I didn’t see them again until years later when Dad and I went up to visit them in Detroit.

What was life in Atlanta like when you were an only child?

I lived in the city and went to a daycare center: Gate City Daycare Center. In fact, Mom told me that at six months old, she took me there because she went back to work. At Gate City, I had the opportunity to really interact with other kids, and that was a good part about that experience. Then, when I saw other kids leaving the daycare center to go to school, I knew I had the passion, and I wanted to go before I became be six. Oh, wow! My dad told me that one day, I did actually go with them. I wasn’t supposed to go, but I went with them anyway because I was just so envious of everyone else going. I wanted to go to school! (I laugh…)

After that adventure, I had an interesting experience at Young Street Elementary School where one of the teachers was one of my next door neighbors – Ms. Rebecca Dickerson. She was always there to encourage me and treat me with favor. When I left there, I transferred to C.W. Hill Elementary School where her sister, Ms. Sanona Dickerson taught. She kept an eye on me to make sure I got engaged because I was shy at 10. She wanted me to get me involved at twelve years old and really start being outgoing.

Then, the time came when they had a school function that was planned for the Atlanta City Auditorium. They needed some students to play Indians in that particular skit; she put me in that role. (Laughs…) I had a big chance to do self- expression whereas my shyness would have kept me away from it if she had not been there; the opportunity to interact was really great for my early development.

Following graduation, I went to Howard High School. It was exciting because one of the first classes I had was health. (I was really very excited about learning.) I can remember that the instructor had to leave the classroom for a moment and he gave an assignment for everybody in the class. He said, “Hey, here’s the definition of health, while I’m out, read it, understand it, and be able to tell me when I return.” So, we were little eighth graders, and everybody got busy doing something else. But I started studying and reading, and when he returned within 20 minutes, he asked for students to recite the definition for health. I stood up and did it. That was a proud moment for me to be able to recite the definition from memory ahead of the rest of the class.

During those early years, Mom was teaching me to play piano; we were taking lessons together. Dad didn’t have any interest in that, so I used to go with her. But when I got to high school, I decided that I wanted to play the trumpet, so I requested for her to get me a trumpet. Of course, she wanted me to stay with piano, too. I said, “I’ll come back to piano later!” (Laughs…) I wanted to play the trumpet, so I could participate in the high school band. That’s what I did.

I started with the trumpet, but then, in order to move into the big band—there were two many trumpets, so Professor Days said he needed some tuba players. I switched over and started playing the tuba. So you got to play all those different instruments! Yes, I got to play the trumpet, the tuba. The tuba was very similar to the trumpet for fingering.

Then, we went on a concert. We did some of the classical pieces, and then, we had the marching band pieces, too. We did both, like in the winter, we would probably do classical pieces, and in the warmer months, we did the marching pieces. So I had an opportunity to perform a tuba solo, and I performed the tuba solo at one of the functions that we went to. That was quite unusual, then, as I think back, but it was rewarding to be able to do that.

By graduation, Georgia Tech was close by, but segregation laws prevented me from applying and attending. So I got a State Aide Scholarship to go to Howard University in Washington, D.C. I went to Howard to study architecture. By 1962, I went into the Army and stayed for nearly two years. I spent sixteen months in Italy. I was stationed in Vicenza—a little south of Venice and north of Florence and Rome. I studied Italian and European architecture while there.

I got a chance to plan an extended trip while there; I planned that trip to travel and see as much I could see of Europe. I took leave for thirty days and traveled to many cities of Europe. I started in Vicenza, went down to Florence; then to Rome, and then to Naples. I stayed in hostels in each one of those places, and [staying there] was about fifty cents a night for students. Really?! Yeah, yeah. (Laughs…) Then, I moved around there, went down to Naples for two nights; caught a U.S. Military flight from Naples to Barcelona, Spain. From Barcelona, I hitchhiked up to Switzerland. That sounds incredible! Yeah! It was fun; it really was. Then, I went back into Italy. All alone? Yeah, and I was hitchhiking. That was really, really fun… but challenging.

Was it kind of scary? Oh yeah, it was, but I got a chance to meet some really cool people at the hostels. Then, after that, we communicated for a while and then just lost track of each other. It was a wonderful experience because there was one guy, who was from Cleveland, who had been spending the summer in Israel teaching English. He and I actually hooked up in Rome and agreed that we were going to hitchhike together. Well, another American (laughs…) came by, and we got a ride with him! We went from Florence down to Rome. Then, I met three girls who were actually in Europe for the summer and were from New Jersey, and we started touring together.

At that time, we had a book called Europe on Five Dollars a Day. We were finding places that we could eat for little or nothing; we were using the book as a guide to find those places. We toured through all these places and really enjoyed it.

Then, one night, I got to Rome, and it was too late. [The hostel] did not have any more bed spaces, so we got offered to go up on the roof! (We all laugh…) So we had a blanket, went up on the roof, and stayed on the roof! Slept under the stars! Yeah…

I met some guy from Australia while I was there at the hostel in Rome. We were meeting people from all different cultures, and it was great just being able to have a conversation. We went to Barcelona, met some students there, and spent some time looking through the architect Gaudi’s work. Then, we took a hitch from Spain on up through Switzerland, spent some time there, and then came back around to come through Italy. Wow. Yeah, so it was rewarding! It really was.

I kept a log through part of the trip, so it’s refreshing for me to go back and read that, too. That really opened up some whole new worlds of conversation that I haven’t had before. Travel is one of the greatest educators, I think, that one can have. I just wish it were possible for more of our kids to be able to have that experience early, and I think there would be less friction between other cultures if they were able to do that. I agree. They would be able to help understand other cultures and other religions. Mm-hmm, right.

Then, I came back in about 1964, and Atlanta was in a transition period as far as race relations go because there was some pushback. Dr. King had the Montgomery bus boycott and had come to Atlanta doing some work here trying to get equality.

Shortly after I came back, I found a job as a draftsman for an architect down on West Peachtree Street where the old Marta station is now. Miles Sheffer was the architect, and he hired me, and I started working there. The upsetting first surprise I had was that I had already been to Europe (meeting people from different cultures and enjoying their company), but then I came back and wouldn’t get the opportunity to eat lunch at a local drugstore. That made me a little frustrated. I would explain and say that I had been out for two years in the military in defense of the freedoms of this country, and you’re saying that I can’t come here to eat? Shortly after that, I think that policy changed.

From that point, I worked for Miles Sheffer and went to other architects for opportunities. I worked for a Greek architect who was also an instructor over at Georgia Tech for about three and a half years. Following that, I went to work for Sheetz and Bradfield, which was one of the leading firms in Atlanta that was doing a lot of housing—multifamily housing. While I was there, I was qualified to take the architectural registration exam and became a registered architect. Was that hard? Oh, yeah—very difficult, but it was rewarding for the amount of time that was invested.

Then, I did some small projects on my own since I had registration, and I went to work for a larger company. Maynard Jackson [the first black mayor of Atlanta] was in office at the time, and I worked for M.A.P. (Magnusson Architecture and Planning). They had a piece of the contract to do the old airport—not this new one, but the one before this one. It cost a lot—350 million dollars. Whoa! Yeah, so I was on the team for that. That sounds exciting, though. Did that team work together well? Mm-hmm, it worked out quite well.

After that job, I went to several other positions in Atlanta. Then, I went to B & E Jackson Associates, which was an architecture and engineering firm. For continuing my education, I proposed to him to allow me to go to Harvard because they were cutting-edge on a lot of the new strategies, techniques, and all that. So I went there and became a whole lot more knowledgeable on indoor air quality. Oh, wow… Yeah, from 1989-95, I was going there over the summers to really be able to be in the professional development program. So every summer, you went up to Cambridge? Yeah, yeah. That is so cool!

So I got to enjoy the environment of the Harvard Square. It’s like a comedy just to be able to see all the different characters there. Several musicians were seen on the street. I guess that was the highlight: you would hear the musicians as they played their instruments, and you would just be able to reflect…

Then, I wrote a poem about the experience that I had there. Writing is my second passion. I think it’s wonderful because you are such a creative person, but then you have the math and the really analytical stuff too with architecture. Yeah, so then I had a real high after I was able to write the poem about my experience there.

Also, I went to one session [at Harvard] and had the chance to interview one of the instructors. That was one of my goals—to have an interview about architecture with one of the instructors there. I did that at the Harvard Club. We were sitting outside, and I had my recorder, such as you have there (laughs). I interviewed him and then came back and had to transcribe. I actually offered it for publication in the AIA Newsletter, and they accepted it. That was a really nice benchmark. Was he a professor in your department? Yes, in architecture. Ken Demay was the gentleman I interviewed; he’s deceased now. We had a great interview session at the Harvard Club during my brief visit as a summer student.

Later, I got really enthusiastic after being able to do that interview, so I went and contacted MIT, which is a short distance away from Harvard. The architecture head, who was at Harvard before, was unable to be there, but he sent a substitute, who was a British fellow. We went to the cafeteria at MIT, and I did interview him, which I still have to this day. I have the recordings. (Laughs…) I said, “While I’m here, I might as well make the best of this moment and get all I can within this short time span,” so I did that. It’s great to go back and reflect and hear those recordings again.

One of the last recordings I did was with Ike Saporta, who was a Greek immigrant architect. He retired, and he had a world of knowledge. This man spoke about six different languages. He was educated in Germany. His parents sent him there at about twelve years old, and he knew some of these leaders in architecture. He worked for Le Corbusier, the Swiss architect! He worked for Walter Gropius, too, before Gropius left Germany and came to Harvard as the head of architecture.
Saporta knew Gropius back in Germany for the Bahaus movement. The Bahaus was that group of imaginative, creative artists who got together and wanted to be able to create products that common men and women could afford. That was interesting for me to be able to hear him talk about those experiences. He also mentioned that the unfortunate changes came after Hitler was elected in 1933. Free thinking institutions, such as the Bahaus were shut down because they didn’t want freethinkers. I think Mr. Saporta left Germany shortly after that since he was a Greek jew.

It brings up confirmation when I hear the subject come from somebody who was there [during events] of which you’ve read. I thought that was really great. I had these recordings in my library, and I can go back to listen to them. It’s really refreshing to be able to hear that history.

That was another chapter that I completed. Then, I met Jefferson Brown who was my associate here in Peachtree City in architecture. I met him at Harvard, and then we talked about coming back and doing some projects together. When we got back, we made contact and started a project together. It came out real well. That was twelve years ago.

 

(To be continued in Part II…)

Anonymous (Part III)

(Continued from Part II…)

How did you decide that you wanted to be a nurse?

I like science. My older sister wanted to be an engineer; she liked math and became a math professor. My other sister likes books—law books. She memorized a speech from beginning to end.

I’ve always liked science, even when I was little. I liked to look at science pictures and science books. My dad always said, “Why are you looking at all those science books about how your heart works?” I just always liked to do that. That’s how it is, though; you find what you like to do, and then you study it. You go into it, and the deeper you go, the better you like it. The human body is a wonderful machine. Treat it well. That’s good advice. Treat your body well, yes.

Did you and your husband travel around the world?

Oh, yes. He traveled to Japan for work. I was supposed to go with him, but I couldn’t go because when I didn’t work anymore, I volunteered a lot in the library and was the school nurse. I was busy all the time, sometimes doing home care for elderly friends. See, I learned how to use my time; you have to be efficient because there’s a lot of work. You don’t get much time for yourself, but you don’t need time for yourself! (We all laugh…) You can always go to sleep.

What is one of your main accomplishments that you’re most proud of?

Everything. Sometimes, when I was young and working in surgery, we would get patients from France, Libya, and Algeria. There was a princess, a very nice lady, who needed surgery at our university hospital. I was asked to fly home with her after the surgeries. So I did. I could just stay a couple of days and then go back to work.

I’ve always liked adventure. That’s great that you jumped at any opportunity. As long as I was available… I just used all of my days off because in France, we didn’t have many days off, but that has changed a lot in the last fifty years. In France at that time, we worked six days a week, but I tried to introduce them to the five-day work system, which was hard to do (with new laws for the workplace and muck more). Now, it is done.

I also tried to install the new intensive care for big surgeries and to train specialized nurses. That’s why my surgeons sent me there [to the United States]. So you could bring back these ideas and concepts. Right, to work more efficiently.

You said that reading was one of your hobbies. Do you have any other hobbies that you do right now?

Well, I swim everyday here, and in the wintertime, since the pool is not heated, I go to our gym and enjoy the spa. I always have much writing and reading to do.

This is just a funny question: if you could support one genre of fine arts, what would it be?

I love the symphony and Opera, operetta. We love pretty music in my family. My sister was a pianist, and her husband was an organist; I think he played every church organ in Europe. He’s a great person. I like music—concert music, and when we were young, we all played the piano.

Have you had any pets during your life?

Who has time? If I lived in the country, I would like a Great Dane. I love the Danes. Some French have Danes; they’re just adorable dogs. I don’t like the little Chihuahuas. (We laugh…)

What are some of your philosophical beliefs about life?

You have to enjoy life. You have to be happy with what you do. Don’t look down at what you could’ve done; do it! Do something nice. Have life in you. Be energetic. Help someone who needs it; there is plenty of need for it.

Yesterday, looking down from my balcony, I did a lifesaving act—poor guy. I went down to the pool fast. He couldn’t get out of the pool. He’s a very nice person; he lost his balance. He couldn’t get back on his feet, so he was hanging on the handrail and just lying on the steps. He couldn’t figure out how to put his feet down. He kept on lying there with his head in the water off and on and called for help. He thanked me profusely afterward.

How would you define a successful life, and what do you think has made your life successful?

Just having a positive outlook on your life, and listen. There’s so much to learn from other people, and I’ve learned from everybody. I learned from you. You’re pretty young to do all that [interviewing]. Are many young girls interested in that nowadays? Would you like to become a journalist or a writer? You are on the right track, already a Girl Scout. Congratulations. Thank you so much!

I know my granddaughter’s boyfriend is a nice guy; he is an Eagle Scout. He is very outgoing, plays the saxophone well, and is always helping someone. You have to prove a good attitude and respect and stay dedicated to your work, your faith, and your actions. I think you’re right; I think it’s the way you grow up, too. Yes, you have to be taught when you are young. Yes, and seeing the way things are when you don’t have food and learning to survive. It was tough… even now, see, because you still have that barrier. I can still remember when my parents were mistreated. You know, you don’t forget that in your life, but you will try to forgive. It affects you in some ways, and I know some people who do not know what war is, only when you are in the middle of it. But science is interesting; science is so wonderful. Now, they have come up with this nanotechnology, though; I haven’t gotten that yet. (We laugh…)

It really is amazing how technology has opened the doors to knowledge and everything. I know; it’s amazing. It’s unbelievable, but my husband had, at that time, a lot of knowledge about that. When he started with his company in programming—when I met my husband (husband-to-be, at that time)—his company in the 60’s had computers that were big drums. The computers had to sit on a solid big block of cement with a certain cool temperature in the room. And the printouts… they were little strips of paper with holes in them. I would say, “How do you read that?” He would say, “Oh, I can read that. It’s easy.” (We all laugh…) It’s totally different, now.

It’s mindboggling how technology came from those big drums. It was very expensive to have those machines in the office like that. They got smarter and smarter—and now those computers are getting smaller and smaller. I have to learn how it works. Well, we will never know enough; the children will learn and know much more in the coming years of their use.

You can find all kinds of information and much, much more. Now, I have a cell phone. My son would say, “Keep your phone hanging around your neck, so you find it fast when I call; it might be my last call.” When he learned to fly helicopters, he was in Kuwait and Korea.

Were you really scared for [your son when he was overseas]?

Yes, I was always worried for him. He’s doing a very good job, like his dad. Now, I get after him because he’s too strict. He says, “Mom, you taught me that.” Yeah, right… (We laugh…) Blaming it on you… He’s so efficient, too, and with a good memory. I guess I had a good memory, too, when I was younger.

When I was working, I used to go climbing in the mountains—high mountains, on a rope. That’s amazing. What kind of mountains have you climbed? In the Alps. You have to go to the Alps if you go to Europe. You haven’t seen Europe if you haven’t seen the Alps. I remember one named L’aiguille du Midi, which is part of the High Alps, which is about 15,000 to 16,000 feet high. If you climb up that mountain, you’re going to see the world.

Did you climb it? No. On the ropes you did, wow. We went down by skiing. That’s a major accomplishment. That’s amazing! That’s one thing I learned when I went to college. In high school, we didn’t have time, and it was a very expensive sport. You need a lot of training before you climb high. We didn’t have time because we had so much to learn. So, in college, you learned how to ski, and you skied down that mountain. Yes, but slowly. It was fresh air; I’ve always liked fresh air. Fresh air is important, not air conditioning.

What advice do you have for young people, like me?

Learn, learn, learn as much as you can, and I add, you never stop learning; it is an ongoing process. There’s so much to learn, to see, to hear. Help others. Stay mobile, stay active, stay in good physical shape. Eat the right foods, but do not forget to pray.