Oral history interview with Yardley Nelson Hunter, 2010

              1
WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Yardley Nelson Hunter
INTERVIEWER: Therese Strohmer
DATE: October 24, 2010
[Begin Interview]
TS: This is Therese Strohmer and today is October 24th, 2010, I’m in Elon, North Carolina
with Dr. Hunter and this is an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical
Project, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. And Dr. Hunter, how would you
like your name to read on your collection?
YH: Doctor Yardley Nelson Hunter.
TS: Okay, very good. Well, Dr. Hunter, thank you so much for participating in this project.
YH: My pleasure.
TS: I would love for you to start by telling us a little bit about where you were born, where
and when you were born, and where you grew up.
YH: Well, I was born in Buffalo, New York, a very cold blizzard-y day, February the 4th. And
I’m the middle child of six children, baby girl, and I went to high school at—in Buffalo,
very active in Buffalo, in my church and my community, working in the Junior
Achievement program, in choir and church. And I saw a wonderful looking, beautiful
woman in the church one day, I was eleven years old, and I said to my mom “I want to be
just like her, I want to dress like her, look like her, be like her.”
TS: About how old were you?
YH: I was about eleven going on twelve years old at the time, and hadn’t quite made up my
mind on what I wanted to be, except I knew I wanted to be a teacher, did not know what
type, and I wanted to teach. I liked teachers at the time, I guess I liked school, too, that
was why.
And she said, in her wisdom, “Then why don’t you do what she did? Find out
what school she went to, and why don’t you go to her school?”
2
Ironically enough, seven years later, I went to Bennett College with four-year academic
scholarship, and ten years later, she was my mentor.
TS: Is that right?
YH: So it was great.
TS: Wow.
YH: So I had a great experience in Buffalo.
TS: That’s ironic, too. Well, what was it like growing up in Buffalo, New York? What kind
of—did you live in the city or rural or suburbs, where did you live?
YH: I lived in what you’d call inner city, one would call it the projects, which we did call it.
Ten buildings in one block, ten flights—eight flights on each building, and ten families in
each flight. And I didn’t know I was what you call a latchkey child until I read about it in
education somewhere, that—
TS: Years later?
YH: Years later, that children who went back home with a key around their neck were called
latchkey—latchkey children, or that we were considered to be children of poverty, not
realizing that either. My mother always told me to be proud of myself and be happy in the
skin I was in, and she raised us that way, so we were happy in that neighborhood.
Neighborhood school, and I enjoyed it. However, in the fifth grade, I was tested as gifted
and sent away from that school to a school across town. Had to catch a city bus, and had
to go to the special school with the special students with these special skills, and I believe
that gave me a lot of eye-opening opportunities I would not have had otherwise. My
father could not read or write, and he learned how to write his name late in life. My
sisters taught him. My mother’s a high school graduate and she always believed that high
school was just a passing thing for college, even though I’m first generation college, and
the only one who graduated from college of my brothers and sisters.
TS: Out of the six of you?
YH: Out of the six of us. It still was something she expected all of us to do. So I enjoyed
growing up in Buffalo, and I enjoyed the experiences that I had, and every time I wanted
to try something, my mother, being a housekeeper, as they say—cleaned houses for
people—
TS: Right.
YH: —would work even harder to make sure that I had the lunch money, the bus money—
there was no free bussing at that time, no bussing, so we caught—I caught the city bus,
and I had the opportunity to do whatever was required for me to do to keep moving
forward. And I’m very grateful for that support.
3
TS: What did your father do for a living?
YH: My father worked in Bethlehem Steel, which in Buffalo, New York, you either worked in
one of the steel plants or the automotive plants, and he was a molder, so as we traveled up
and down the highways going from his hometown, South Carolina, back to Buffalo, he
would look over and say “You see that big pipe? It says Bethlehem Steel. That’s what I
make.” So we knew he was a molder and he made these big pipes. But he stopped—he
stopped working for some reason, never could understand why, what happened, but we
ended up somewhat on welfare, and while he took odd jobs and whatever, we always had
food, lights, whatever, and he always made sure we went to church. He didn’t go, but he
made sure we were there, he made sure everyone was there, and he always picked up my
mom from church, we always wore our flowers for Mother’s Day, and he made sure
that—my mother made sure that we had our Sunday rides, Dairy Queen—
TS: [laughs] Excellent.
YH: Fine arts[?].
TS: Did they—was your mother also from South Carolina?
YH: My mother’s from Virginia.
TS: Virginia.
YH: She’s—I think in her time, she would be considered to be middle class. My grandfather
worked for the railroad, and so he had quite a bit of money, bought a lot of land. He was
one of the first families in the neighborhood—you know Virginia, not very big, outside
Charlottesville. He was one of the first families to have an outhouse in the house.
[chuckles] As we call bathrooms. And he taught his children well, he did, and he taught
my mother well. And my father sort of married up.
TS: How’d they meet?
YH: Now, that’s always funny, because my father says he picked her up off the street. That’s
not true.
TS: [laughs]
YH: My mother worked in Washington D.C.
TS: Okay.
YH: She’d had a child as a young girl and she left the child with my grandmother and she
went to Washington D.C. to work the factories during the war. And she and her cousin
were at the corner waiting for the bus.
My father pulled up and said “Do you want a ride?”
4
And of course they said “No,” and then he cajoled them to get in the car, and they
go for a ride. And after two or three “Do you want a ride?”s, he and my mom started
dating, and I guess I’m part of that history, right there.
TS: That’s right. So they met during the war?
YH: So they met during the war, while she was working in D.C. during the wartime effort. He
worked in a restaurant and he had gotten into an accident and he had to stay in
Washington while he was recuperating and he met my mom. But my mom was always
active in some type of civic and social activities anyway, so.
TS: Right. So you—so he did kind of pick her up on the street. [laughter]
YH: He did kind of pick her up on the street, so it’s understandable that they would get
married on April Fools’ Day, you know, keep the story—keep going, you know. But they
always had a special relationship, and my father always provided. He was not a dead-beat
parent as people may think, he was always there for my mother, he was always there for
all of us, and I sometimes felt like I was going to be a United Negro Fund commercial,
because I told him I wanted to go to college—go to college, of course, to be a teacher.
TS: Right.
YH: And he in turn says “Daddy can’t help you, I wish I could help you, but I can’t help you,
you’re going to have to take care of this yourself,” and I told him not to worry, I would
always be a good girl, I would always do what was best, and I would help myself. And so
when I went into high school, my goal was to do as well as I could so I could go to
college. So when I received my acceptance to go to college, I also received a letter to be a
debutante, and my friends were going to be debutantes, and I wanted to be a debutante. I
had worked all summer for this money to go to college. Seventy-five dollars to hold your
room at that time, a lot of money, you know, a lot of money when it comes to 1971.
And my mother says “You have a choice. You can pay seventy-five dollars and
register to be a debutante, or you can pay the seventy-five dollars and hold your room for
college. I’ll support you, whatever you want to do.” Wasn’t a hard choice to make.
Socially, it was, but I did send my money back to the college, and six weeks later, they
told me I received a four-year academic scholarship to that college, and so my way to go
to school was paid for, one hundred percent.
TS: That’s terrific.
YH: And while my friends were debutantes, and they may have gone to college too, I didn’t
have to pay a penny. I paid one hundred dollars in my senior year because tuition went
up.
TS: But other than that.
5
YH: By then, I had—I was in the ROTC, so I just paid that whole bill off, but it was the best
decision I could have made, but again, my mother—I praise her, my mother gave me the
opportunity to make that decision, because she knew I would have to live with that
decision, and I made the right one. And my father just packed me up and took me off to
college.
TS: [laughs] Well, let me back up, still, just a little bit. When—you said you’re the middle,
kind of the middle—with six, you can’t really be right in the middle, right?
YH: Four. [laughs]
TS: So, tell me a little bit about your siblings.
YH: My brother fought in the Korean conflict, Harrison, fought in the Korean conflict, in the
army. And as you know, in those days, they went into the service very young, and he was
enlisted, and his idea of the military was totally different than what the military was like
when I went in, so he was appalled when he found out that my mother had allowed me to
go into the military. How dare she? Those type of men that she was going to be around—
but he’s a good man, he lives in D.C., and when he came out, he was a GS1. They don’t
have GS1s anymore, but when he retired, he was a GM17, and they don’t talk about
GMs, because that’s with the Secretary of Transportation, and that paid[?]. He did very
well and unfortunately, though, he did contract malaria when he was in Korea, so every
once in a while, he has a little bout and a reminder that he is in fact a serviceman who had
effects of the war, of a conflict. Korea was not a war. My sister was very bright, she
pretty much picked up a lot of the Cherokee in my father’s side, Cherokee [white?], so
she had beautiful long hair, black hair and very bright, and she could have gone to school
free had she passed, but she chose not to pass, so she had two and a half years of college,
civil engineering[?], and start working in corporate America. She’s retired now, living in
Charlotte, civilian, but her husband is retired Marine Corps, so she’s still touched the
military. My other sister is—and by the way, my brother is more than—he’s more than
sixteen—I would say he’s more than twenty-some years older than I am.
TS: Yes.
YH: And my sister is seven years older, and my other sister is six, and she lives in Buffalo,
she’s the child who never left home.
TS: Okay.
YH: There’s always one, that stays close to home, that decides this is where they like, and so
she still lives in Buffalo. She did not finish high school, and she’s the one with the
common sense and the horse sense in the family. The rest of us have the book sense, but
she has the horse sense and the common sense. Then I come next, and so when they
married and left home, I ended up from being the middle child, baby girl, to being the
oldest child, only girl.
6
TS: Oh, right.
YH: So that role kind of shifted, so my brother behind me is a retired master sergeant in the air
force.
TS: Oh, okay.
YH: And he lives in Elmira, New York, and interestingly enough, we thought four children
were too many, would you believe that every one of his children went to college, and he
does not have a single college bill, because he pays every time they go to school. So now
my—his youngest child is in school, and her bill is caught up, and I’m so proud, because
when she graduates, she won’t have a bill like I have a bill. And he’s a wonderful man,
very close to the church and very family-oriented. My baby brother, who’s three years
younger than me, lives in Kinston [NC], and he’s Marine Corps, he went into the Marine
Corps. He didn’t want to go into the air force because his sister was an officer and his
brother was a high-ranking NCO, he didn’t want to go into the army because his big
brother was already in the army, had been in the army, so he chose the Marine Corps,
and—let’s see if I can back up. He was—my brother was—my baby brother was—
TS: What’s his name?
YH: Terence, Terence. T-E-R-E-N-C-E, Terence Nelson.
TS: What’s the name of the brother that went in the air force?
YH: Robert Nelson III. And of course my oldest brother was Harrison Levi Davis. But Robert
Nelson III was in Beirut, he was also—and Terence was involved in the Faulkner
[Falklands?] War, and he was also in Beirut. So we’ve all had a brush or a feel during
some strong event in the military, as far as the conflicts.
TS: You sure have.
YH: When—interesting thing, though, when I told my mother and father I wanted to join the
air force, they said “Well, you always knew what you wanted to do, so go ahead and do
it.”
TS: [laughs] Not a lot of resistance? From your parents?
YH: No, none whatsoever! Well, when Robert decided he wanted to go into the military, my
father cried. “Oh, no,” he said “He’s leaving us and going into the military.” When my
baby brother Terence decided he wanted to go into the military, my mother cried “Oh,
no.”
TS: Well, that was her baby, come on.
YH: Her baby! I said “But Mommy, I’m your baby, I’m your baby girl.”
7
She says “You’ll take care of yourself, no matter what you do, you’ll fall on your
feet, that’s it.” So apparently—
TS: Different reactions.
YH: Different reactions, but it’s interesting, because one would think that they would be really
concerned about their little girl, and of course, during that time, women going in the
military had its—it had its image.
TS: Yes. What kind of image—how would you portray that image?
YH: I had an advisor at Bennett College, her name was Dr. Helen Tropia[?]. She had been in
the army, and she was in charge of the special program for graduates—the graduates that
had gotten my scholarship.
And she sat down with me when I told her I was going to join ROTC at North
Carolina A and T State University, and she said “I want to explain something to you.”
She says, “People have a certain thought about women going into the military. They think
that they’re going in to find a husband or they may have an alternative lifestyle so they
want to blend in with the masses, or they’re so tomboyish that they’re never going to get
married anyway, so that’s just what they really wanted to do. You’re none of that, and so
you’re going to have to make it very clear to them that you’re none of that. Besides that, I
don’t want you ever to walk into a meeting with a pad or a pen, because you’re nobody’s
secretary. You’re going to be an officer, so you don’t take minutes. So don’t get into the
habit of being assumed that you’re a secretary, and don’t learn how to make coffee,” she
said, “Because everyone is going to think that you should be the one making the coffee,
again, a presumption that women are doing these things or should have these roles.
Well,”
TS: What a great mentor.
YH: I do not walk into any meetings right now with a noticeable pad or pen—it’s in my purse,
but I don’t show it. I’m the last one to show my pen and pad. And nor do I drink or make
coffee. [laughs]
TS: [laughs] That’s true.
YH: So she taught me a very healthy way to watch, but I did find out that womanhood is from
the inside out, and no matter what you wore, no matter what you do in life, or even the
fact that you can command men, the femininity will always be there, and it should always
elude[exude?] some out from inside, not from just the outside. So it wasn’t the makeup
and the cologne and the perfume and all that, it was the compassion and the dedication
and all those nurturing skills that are in women anyway that comes out in making
decisions about people.
TS: That’s a terrific way to explain, sure.
8
YH: I liked it.
TS: Well, now, when you had mentioned before that you think you liked school, was there a
particular, like, elementary or high school—now, you had said you’d gone from one
school to the other because you were selected for special achievement?
YH: It was called exceptional children, but really, it was for the gifted side, because
exceptional children are those with learning disabilities, and those were accelerated
learners. So I was an accelerated learner for gifted children, and they had no program that
was directed toward that. Not a big enough program in Buffalo, so they grouped us all
together into this one school, where one teacher who had that license could nurture us and
move us on to a higher level.
TS: So this is like in the ‘60s?
YH: In the ‘60s, yes. Very much so. I didn’t go to high school until ’68, so it was pretty
much—’67, ’68—so it was like ’65, ’64, ’63, I was eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.
TS: Was it an integrated school that you went to?
YH: No, integration hadn’t started yet, but it was—we integrated the school, so to speak. The
school that I attended from kindergarten to fourth grade was predominantly black and
Puerto Rican.
TS: Okay.
YH: Okay, three blocks from my home. And of course, we left at lunchtime, went home, and
then came back.
TS: Do you remember the name of that school?
YH: Public School 32. It was called Bennett Park School, interesting, it was Public School 32,
they now call it the Montessori School, which—I have my questions about that. But we
called it Bennett Park, Public School 32. And that was in Buffalo, New York, three
blocks from our home. And that was—there weren’t Hispanics or Mexicans, there were
Puerto Ricans in New York. And so our neighborhood was primarily with Appalachians,
who come from the mountains in Pennsylvania, blacks, and Puerto Ricans. And,
understand now, in those days, the projects were set up to have a—well, it is now, but
people don’t use it—to have an eight year, six to eight year life span. So people moved
into the projects and only stayed there long enough to do whatever they had to do to
stabilize and then they bought their home. For example, one of our state judges, supreme
court judges, was a law student, and he and his wife and child lived in the projects while
he went to law school. And my sister babysat, and then after he did that and moved on, he
bought a house. Young couples got married and moved there and saved their money and
then moved out, you know, to a bigger house or whatever. Now, projects per se house the
mother, the grandmother, the children, years and years and years, and the wear and tear is
9
really, really harsh on it. Well, when I was there, I went to the school and we went there
and after six or seven years, people left and moved on. So when I went to college—went
to this special school, a lot of my friends moved out, and new people moved in, but I
didn’t go to that school, so I didn’t know them. So for a while, I didn’t know some of the
people that even lived in the projects.
TS: Oh, I see, right.
YH: I didn’t know them very well. But the school was, in fact, predominantly black and
Puerto Rican, and then I went to a special school that was still predominantly black,
except that one class. That one classroom, for two years, had black and whites in the
classroom, but we didn’t know the people in our school.
TS: Okay. So you stuck together in school.
YH: We stuck for two years.
TS: What was the name of the school?
YH: That was School 48, which no longer exists, interestingly enough. And then we went to
School 68. And School 68, there were a total of four blacks in the entire school.
TS: And what year—what level were you at?
YH: I was in the seventh and eighth grade.
TS: Okay.
YH: Okay? And—it went through K[indergarten] through eight. And it was on the
predominantly white side of town, and we looked out the window one day and saw these
yellow buses coming down the street, and realized that that was the, I guess, first
introduction of integration. We were the only students in the school, did not feel a bit
difference except most folks up there were white, we were black. There were three of us
in the program, and one young lady’s sister.
TS: I see.
YH: And we looked at all these other blacks and said “Where did they come from? Who are
they?” They had come from a different part of town and they were starting to integrate.
TS: Into the school?
YH: Into the school. And that’s when I noticed, but we were never—I was never part of the
integration, in my entire life, and neither were my children. They were all—both my
children went to what are called neighborhood schools, at all times. And that was
something very important. And when I finished—
10
TS: Why was it important?
YH: [pause] I believe in neighborhood schools. I believe in equal schools, and I believe in
everyone having the same quality of education, but I don’t think it’s fair for someone to
take my child out of its natural neighborhood, its natural setting for learning, and move
all because of a color. That’s—to me, is a contradiction of saying that we live in a world
where people should be treated the same way as you should be treated, fairly. And it was
very important that my children realize that their neighborhood was a neighborhood to be
proud of and that can give them everything they wanted and needed as a neighborhood,
and that society did not look at them as deprived, or poverty.
TS: So, make that school better, don’t say, oh, well, we can’t make it better, we’re just going
to integrate something.
YH: We’re just going to move your children someplace else and see, as I told you before,
earlier, I didn’t realize that I was a latchkey child until I started reading books, and I said
“Is that what you saw of me, is that what you thought I was?” I mean, I was intelligent in
my own neighborhood, why’d you have to move me across town because I was
intelligent here? Why couldn’t you just keep it right here? No, they had to move me
away. And—
TS: So what do you feel about that? I mean, do you feel like—that you had like—there’s
trade-offs with that? With your personal experience?
YH: I do feel that way, because, you see, there was a young lady who had been selected before
me, but she was in a grade younger than me, therefore she did not qualify to go to this
other school. And so they had to come back and re-evaluate all the files, and they found
me. And so she and I are best friends, I just spoke to her this morning, and she reminds
me—it’s been forty years—that had she been chosen, she may have had these
opportunities in her life. And even though it’s not valid now, because of our decisions
and our lives roads or whatever, she still has that thought, that had I been given the
opportunity, perhaps more opportunities would have been given to me to have been
moved on socially, economically, intellectually, whatever. And I think if you multiply
that times those ten buildings, those eight floors, those ten families, there would have
been hundreds of children who may have been thinking the exact same thing. “I have the
same intelligence, but nobody moved me out of here to give me this, nobody placed it
here for me to take advantage of this, and it has shaped my attitude about education.”
TS: Very interesting.
YH: Has shaped it, pretty much so.
TS: So what did you like about school, then?
11
YH: I liked the fact that—well, this is what I liked about the school. My father said that people
can take away your home, your clothes, sometimes even try to take away your dignity.
But they cannot take away what’s inside your head, so you learn as much as you can and
you pick up everything you can as soon as you can, so that you can tell a fool from—
[chuckling] you can tell a fool from a wise man.
And he says “Don’t you be--” he says “A fool born every day, don’t you be that
fool that’s born that day. Get as much as you know, so that when you make a decision,
you make the right one. But they can’t take away what you know.”
TS: So even though your father was illiterate, he was very wise.
YH: Very wise, extremely wise. He knew it would have took—again, he knew what it would
take in life to survive. He knew, he just did not have those opportunities. But he knew, he
was extremely bright, and I really think that a lot of young people are like my father, my
sisters and brothers. If they were given the same opportunities, they would—they would
just excel. But it was separate, unequal.
So I was able to—and ironically enough, I don’t know if this is part of it, but on
my wedding day, my girlfriend wore black, and she cried, and she says “You were the
one who got out.” And that, again, magnifies that sense of “If we only had it here,
perhaps more of us could be where you are right now,” you know.
TS: Yes. Where is your girlfriend today?
YH: Can’t find her. Every year I go home—I used to go home, and unfortunately, her life is
not—it’s not there, it’s a broken life. So I can’t find her. In fact, my friends have told me
to stop searching.
TS: Really?
YH: Yes. And I think—I think when you deal with people thirty and forty years later, a lot of
people don’t realize what makes up that person. You know, I teach in the university, and
I call that your personal lens, and so I do everything I can to make sure that I’m a mentor
to young people, that I go back and pay back, or that I recognize potential, because you
never know what builds a person.
TS: That’s true, that’s so true. Well, tell me—so, okay, when you were in church that day and
you saw this nice-looking woman and you said “I want to be like her, dress like her,” and
your mom said “Well, go figure out, you know, where she went to school and how she
got—” Tell me a little bit more about that story.
YH: Well, her name is Reverend Lula Williams, she was not a minister at the time, she was a
minister’s wife, which of course in many—historically, it’s normally the, I would say the
preacher, teacher, mortician, who are the educated individuals who are, I would say, the
pillars in society and hopefully the role models, okay? So it was understandable that I
would look toward the minister’s wife. She reminded me of a black Jackie Onassis, her
little pillbox hat, her beautiful little box suits [?] and—she spoke very well, I found out
that she had gone to Bennett College. It was an all-girls school and I was boy-crazy, but
12
if that was what it was going to take, I was willing to make the sacrifice. Not realizing
that A&T State University was across the street. She was kind, very sophisticated, wore
pearls, always had a necklace on, or a pin. Patient, spoke her mind, with a lot of
politeness and dignity, and I wanted to be like that. Now, my mother was my role model
when it came to things of the heart, but there weren’t a whole lot of role models in my
neighborhood to—who ventured out and came back in. Of course there were strong
women all around me, but not that, so going to Bennett College was a big deal. I met
Shirley Chisholm [first black woman to be elected to Congress in 1968, among other
accomplishments], I met Gwendolyn Brooks [acclaimed poet], I had a chance to really
see strong, educated women.
But I didn’t know how to speak, and so when I walked the first day of school in
college and said “I want to axe[sic] you a question,”
Dr. Bulon[?] said “Oh my goodness, she wants to axe me!” I learned you don’t
say “axe you a question”, you say “I want to ask you a question.” And so my background
came forward, and I learned that just because a person can’t pronounce a certain word or
can’t say something doesn’t mean that they don’t have the know-how, the knowledge. I
found out that Mrs. Williams had—came from North Carolina, Mocksville, that she was
very much a family woman, had raised three girls and a son, she—and one is a minister,
the son is a minister, one’s a lawyer. She was a wonderful, wonderful minister, but very
strong supporter. I used all that to try to be supportive of my family, try to be supportive
of other people, try to work with people, and every once in a while, I’ll contact her, let
her know I’m still on track.
TS: Excellent. What kind of advice did she give you, then?
YH: Be for real, be natural. Don’t put on airs. It wasn’t so much the verbal advice as much as
watching her, being close to someone like her, being able to touch someone you admire.
Sometimes, well, people say be careful about role models, because they fall from grace.
I’m very pleased to say that she’s human and she’s never fallen out of grace, she’s just
grown and become stronger as a role model, and every once in a while, when I’m a little
confused or I wonder how I should respond to something, I think back to personalities
like her. And say “What would she do, how would she carry herself in that regard?” And
I really think that my daughter picked up most of those traits I don’t recognize in myself,
but apparently I had them.
TS: [laughs]
YH: But I think that’s what she did, was to be real, and be honest, and being a minister’s wife,
she had to deal with, I thought, certain parameters. But she raised her children to be
children, to be teenagers, and she realized that her husband had the calling, not her, at the
time. And she supported him, and then of course she had the calling later on, and she
picked that up, too. But I think Lula is the epitome of what a black female educated
woman can rise to be—again, I say, from the inside out. So her advice was just to be real
and be natural, be a woman.
13
TS: So tell me how you managed to—the other thing I was going to ask you, too, was that
you said your mother had thought high school was a platform to go to college. And so,
how did you treat high school as far as academics go? And also, did you have social
things that you did?
YH: That’s interesting that you say that. I didn’t know until my daughter was in college my
mother wanted to be a nurse.
TS: Is that right?
YH: And this is something—women—when women make decisions about their lives, they
don’t go back and talk about what they could have been or what they should have been,
so unless you get in conversation with your mom or your girlfriend or your great uncle or
aunt, you don’t know where their dreams were, okay, so I say that to say that my mother
read the paper all the time, in fact, she read for my father, of course, but she—she always
felt like you needed to go to school to learn and being a high school graduate, that was
something that she wanted. But her family had teachers in it, had educated people,
brothers and sisters, and so she knew there was a life after high school. She didn’t push it,
because of money, but she encouraged it. As I said before, when I wanted to be in Junior
Achievement, she made sure that I got there. My father had to drive me—my mother
never drove, which—she never drove a car. In this city, that was unusual[?], you know,
because you had to get everywhere through public transportation. But going back to your
question, how did I treat school, high school, I had to take advantage of every single
opportunity, or it wasn’t going to come my way again. So when I got into high school,
every time there was a chance to join something or be a part of something, I wanted to
learn about it. Junior Achievement, I learned about business, and so now I have my
MBA, because of that interest I had, IBM sponsored Junior Achievement at our school,
and my mother said “Go to it,” and it was in walking distance. In the summertime, my
mother did not believe in us sitting out on the porch talking or hanging out. She did not
believe in us having idle time, so I went to Vacation Bible School at the Catholic church,
at the Baptist church, at the Presbyterian church, and at my church. Week after week after
week, I know my rosary, I am not Catholic, hail Mary, full of grace. I know everything
because she felt like if you sat there and did nothing, you may get yourself in some
trouble. And having had a child at a young age, and she having three girls, she knew that
we had to stay busy. And so she kept us busy. Crafts—my mother wasn’t into crafts,
mother cooked, made homemade biscuits and took care of the house. But she did
encourage me to get involved in clubs. I sang, I sang a lot, I love to sing. So I sang for
radio at the age of eleven, twelve, and thirteen, on Saturdays at 11:30, I sang gospel.
TS: What radio did you sing for?
YH: I don’t know what station it was, but I sang music for the sick and shut-in, so we sang
gospel music. And I didn’t realize that my sister enjoyed it until I heard my mother say
“You know, Bobby’s always telling people about Re[?]—” —They call me Re, “About
Re and her singing,”
14
And I said “They don’t praise me,” but they praised me behind my back, so to
speak. But my mother was pleased with that. I sang in the choir.
TS: What’s the second shut-in?
YH: The what?
TS: You said you sang—I thought you said the second shut-in?
YH: For the sick and shut-in.
TS: Oh, for the sick and shut-in. So, on the radio so that it would get to them for the—I see, I
see. Very nice.
YH: It was always special music, so those who were shut-in—particularly, and that’s what
they called it, but of course now they have gospel music on the radio all the time. But
when a person couldn’t go to the church, that was sick and shut-in, they can always turn
to a station.
TS: I see.
YH: And hear gospel music or any kind of music, that was to help them—keep them company
and keep them connected. Now, churches have radio stations all over the place, but in
those days, you know, in the ‘60s they did not have that. And so that was important. Of
course, you didn’t have as many television stations as we have right now.
TS: That’s true.
YH: But I was in my youth choir, I was in the gospel choir, I was [unclear] their deacon is
now, my deacon is still in the church to serve communion service. My mother was in the
sisterhood, so anything she did, I pretty much went along with my mother. I learned later
on that my brothers and sisters—I reminded her more of herself than any of them. I still
wear hats to church, I’m the only one that does. My mother wore hats to church, I didn’t
realize that. I was very active in the church, my mother’s very active, my sisters are not
active until late in life, and my brother—one brother. But I guess I treated school like my
mother treated church. I took advantage of everything that I could get involved in,
because like my father kept saying, they can’t take away from you, you know. So I joined
the French club and I joined the—did not join the drama club, I ran an[?] office, I was
secretary treasurer of my junior class in high school.
And did not know I was popular in high school until I graduated from college and
went back home, my friends kept saying “Girl, everybody knows you!”
And I said “What?” And I think it’s because most of my friends did not take
advantage, therefore did not know as many people.
TS: I see. What year did you graduate?
YH: I graduated from high school in June of 1971.
15
TS: So you went through high school during a period of really cultural turmoil.
YH: Martin Luther King had been killed, John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
TS: Robert Kennedy.
YH: Robert Kennedy was assassinated. We had riots, I remember one night I had gone to a
basketball game across town with my friends, integrated school, and apparently there was
a gang fight with lots of gangs in Buffalo, and we hid in a telephone booth. I don’t know
if anyone remembers telephone booths.
TS: Oh yeah.
YH: And there were like about, I don’t know how many, but the police was rapping and
hitting on the—trying to get us to get out, and we’re all stuck in there for fear of them,
nobody wanted to get out, everybody was stuck inside, wanted to come out. It was just
horrifying, and—
TS: Just got caught.
YH: Just got caught in the wave of things, and I can understand looking at television now,
how people—innocent people, innocent young people, get caught up with just the fear of
running away from something, and it was nothing more than us leaving the game, the
basketball game, and saying “What’s going on?”
TS: Right.
YH: And they said “Run!” And we ran, and being in a residential area in the park—business
area, we saw a telephone booth, so we ran in there to get away from the crowd, and was
hit—smacked by the police.
TS: Do you know if there was like a precipitating event that made this happen, or do you
recall that at all?
YH: More than likely, there was a gang fight after the game. We had not come out of the
school yet, and we got caught in it. What I did find out, what I did learn—that my mother
would not let me go out again. She said “If you go to any dances, and I find out there’s a
fight, you cannot go to any more dances. You cannot go to any more games, and you
must be home by eleven o’clock.” And I had a young boyfriend, I liked him, he liked me,
but I told him my mother’s rule. And he was in the gang.
TS: Hmm.
YH: Well, in those days, a girl could not be in a gang—a girl could be in a gang, but a lot of
young men liked girls who were good girls, even though they were bad boys.
16
TS: [laughs] Okay.
YH: They liked good girls, you know, they didn’t like—both people being bad, so to speak.
And he would come to the dance and one of his sergeants, so to speak, and I say
this because I knew about gangs, would say “It’s time to go home,”
And I would say “Oh no,”
And he says “No, it’s time for you to go home.”
So I would be walked home, escorted home, and I would sit there at 10:30,
quarter to eleven, and my mother would say “You’re home early,”
And I says[sic], “Yes, I suppose the party’s breaking up,” and at eleven o’clock,
there would be an announcement about a fight.
And she would look at me and look at the television, and I would say “I’m
home!” And of course, I was able to go to the dance the following week. So that was—
TS: So long as you were home during the fight, okay, I got it.
YH: So I was basically taken care of by people who cared about me. I was active in the Hi-
Y[?] club, and I was president of the Hi-Y club, Gamma Girls.
TS: What’s the Hi-Y?
YH: Hi-Y is when the YMCA sponsored a lot of the clubs and social activities for teenagers to
be off the street but be inside the Y. And the Y used to be a very active center of activity
for any community. It’s almost like having a recreational center or a rec center
somewhere, and so, because we’re high school, we called it the Hi-Y club, of course. And
there were girls’ clubs and boys’ clubs and speakers would come in and it was a way to
keep so many teenagers from just hanging out, so to speak. And my mother saw it being,
again, a healthy way of me socializing but still having a curfew. And so I was active in
that as well. The colors were red and white, I was president of the club, and because my
mother didn’t drive and my father was pretty much a man of the streets, she had to pick
me up with my brother and take me home, and I got accustomed to having my mother
always coming to pick me up from parties and dances. Well, you know, that’s uncalled-for,
nowadays.
TS: Right.
YH: Whoever thought of your mother being around you past the age of thirteen?
TS: How uncool is that? [laughs]
YH: But to me, that was the in thing, and to my friends, that was also the in thing. Let’s back
up. To my friends who seemed to survive in the inner city, where I was raised, that was
the in thing. But those who did not do well, those who did not survive, those who are still
there, trying to get out, I still never knew their parents. I still never saw their parents, and
so you hear me talk about my mother and father a lot because I think they’re the reason
17
why I was pulled away from all of that and moved on. I went to a party, and my mom and
brother was outside, and some of the guys are out there.
You know, they say “Yardley, your mother’s here!” So I left, nobody laughed at
me, because that’s how I went to my parties.
And on the way out, someone said “Ooh, you should have seen Yardley dancing,
she was over in the corner talking to some boy, you should have seen—”
And I said “That’s not true, that’s not true.”
So Mom was well down the street, you know. And I heard one of the boys say
“Man, you can’t say that, because if she gets in trouble by you lying, she can’t go to any
more parties!” That boy ran four or five blocks. He had to.
TS: My goodness.
YH: And he said “Mrs. Nelson,” he said “Yardley wasn’t doing that, I was just teasing
because you were outside waiting for her, I’m so sorry,” and I was going to beat him up
at the school the next day.
But my mother said “I know she’s not like that, but thank you anyway.”
TS: Well, that’s terrific. That’s a good story.
YH: And I still remember that, because people knew—
TS: A lot of respect for that.
YH: —that my mother took care of us, and she was always with us, and there was never a time
when she didn’t just go to a party or go to—anywhere, or contact a parent, and so I did
that to my children. And my daughter understood that, but my son did not, because I
think he was being raised around people who didn’t—parents didn’t check on them, so he
would say “Mama, don’t call people!”
And I said “Well, you’re not going.” And so he got a little testy, but he got used
to the fact that Mama called. And interestingly enough, he graduated from college as an
engineer and he’s a math teacher, and the two guys who he hung with who didn’t like
that, they’re still trying to figure out what to do with their lives. And I still say it’s
because of the parents. But I took advantage of it all.
TS: Now what do you remember about—do you remember when JFK was killed?
YH: Not as much as—
TS: You would have been about eight, I think.
YH: Right. Not as much as I remember when Martin Luther King was killed. I remember
looking on television, on our black and white TV, and I remember them escorting
Oswald. I remember Jack Ruby, [unclear] Ruby, and my mother had us all [unclear], and
said, “Look at that,” and how he ran in front of Oswald and how we heard the gunshots.
And I just watched. And they played it, of course, a few times, and my mother tried to
18
explain what was going on. Mama never put a [race?] in the household, and she didn’t
put as much politics in there either. You know, she read different—well, one newspaper,
Buffalo Evening News, of course every newspaper has its own political side, but of
course, you didn’t talk about the political side in those days. But that’s all I remember,
someone shot the president. Well, my mother reminded me that a president had been
assassinated in Buffalo, you know, and—
TS: Which one was that?
YH: And I’m trying to remember—
TS: Was that McKinley?
YH: That was McKinley, thank you, we have a statue in front of City Hall, and she said—she
said “I feel so bad for Texas. I feel so bad for them,” so I take it my mother remembered
when McKinley had been shot, in Buffalo—how we felt. And so she felt for them.
TS: That would have been like 1900, 1901, something around there.
YH: Had to be. And my mama said—and my mother said “I feel so bad for them.”
TS: Well, that’s very compassionate of her.
YH: Yes, yes, and that’s when I found out that another president had been, you know—and
that’s when I started thinking about, not so much the person, but how did the city feel,
how did the people feel to go down in history—here I go with the history—in the history
books like that.
TS: Right.
YH: You know.
TS: Interesting.
YH: Yes, I found that—but when Martin Luther King was shot, I went to a school that was—I
would say it was eighty-five percent Jewish.
TS: This is your high school?
YH: Yes.
TS: What was your high school called?
YH: Bennett High School. I liked Bennett, the word Bennett.
TS: [laughs] I guess so.
19
YH: Bennett Park Elementary, Bennett High School, Bennett College—yes. But my brother
went to a historically black high school. It used to be white, and because of the
redistricting, and of course, movement, economic, and the white flight to the suburban
areas, homes were open in that area, so it had become predominantly black. A new
mascot, new colors, new—exactly.
TS: This is where your brother went?
YH: My brother went, yes.
TS: Which one?
YH: He went to East High School—Robert.
TS: Robert, okay.
YH: My oldest sister, Lottie, went there, and they were called the East Orioles, little bird, little
bird, the Orioles. And her yearbook, predominantly white, you know. And interestingly
enough, years later, my brother goes to the same school, and it’s ninety-five percent
black.
TS: Flip-flop.
YH: Exactly. So they went to the Board of Education and said “We don’t identify with this
little bird.”
TS: Oh, the oriole.
YH: This oriole. “So we want to be called the East Panthers,”
TS: Ah.
YH: “We want to have a new song, new colors,” and it was accepted.
TS: About what year was that?
YH: I’m trying to think, if I graduated in ’71 and he graduated in ’72 or ‘3, so it had to be
about ’69.
TS: Okay.
YH: About ’69. And they accepted it. Interestingly enough, when that school became
predominantly black and recognized as a predominantly black school, it excelled in
sports, people say “Well, that’s understandable,” it excelled in scholarships, it excelled in
the fine arts, because like I mentioned to you earlier, if you allow a school all the
opportunities it can to grow where it is, given the right ingredients, it’s going to do that.
20
Unfortunately, though, it didn’t last long. They redistricted again, for integration’s sake,
and changed that. But he went to that school. But he came over to my school, the mayor
had said that no one could change—could cross over the school areas to go to another
school to check on a school, to visit a school, because they were afraid of riots when
Martin Luther King died. So I’m in my predominantly white school, predominantly
Jewish school—we had all the Jewish holidays, you know, so we were out of school half
the time. And thinking everything is fine, of course they have a food fight in the cafeteria,
but that was it. I get home and find out that my brother’s in the police station. Apparently
he had come to the school to check on me because there was a big riot at the
predominantly black school, there was a riot, they had to close school.
TS: At his school.
YH: At his school. But the rest of our schools are still going on. And he came on our grounds,
and when he came on grounds, the police picked him up for trespassing. My father didn’t
believe in people getting in trouble. [chuckles]
TS: Interesting how you frame that.
YH: He didn’t believe in that, of course he didn’t, so he said “If you go to jail, stay there.” So
of course, when I came home, my mother was upset.
And she says “When Robert gets home,” my father’s name, of course, “I have to
tell him to go pick up Robert,” Robert the third, “I don’t know what he’s going to do.”
So I went to my room. And when he came home, he took his shoes off like he
always did, and Mama told him what happened. He said “You have dinner ready?” Mama
told him yes.
We ate dinner in silence, then Daddy sat down in his chair and listened to the
news, Mama said “You going to pick him up, you going to get him?” Daddy didn’t say
anything, he went to sleep like he always did. Around 10:30, eleven o’ clock, Mama
started kicking Daddy’s leg “You better get my baby, go get my baby!” Daddy went and
got up and got some water, sat back down, looked at the TV. I was in bed by then, but I
wouldn’t go to sleep. I wanted to know what Daddy was going to do with my brother. So
finally, he couldn’t take Mama’s mouth anymore, so around 11:30, twelve o’ clock,
12:30, I heard the door close. And Mama said “Took him long enough, took him long
enough.”
Daddy said that my brother was sitting on the bench, they had never put him in
the area, sitting on the bench with two other young men who hadn’t been picked up yet.
And he was crying—the police say he had been crying all day, all afternoon.
TS: And how old is he at this point?
YH: My brother had to have been a sophomore.
TS: So like fifteen?
YH: Yeah, fifteen or sixteen. Yeah, because it was like ’69 and I was a junior, senior.
21
TS: Yeah.
YH: And Daddy said that he said “Come on, let’s go, there’s no charges, no anything,” and
brought him home, and I heard Daddy say to my mother “He’s had enough punishment,
let him go to bed,” and that was it, but my brother never, ever came over to my school
again if there was any problems or any difficulty, he never checked on me. My mother
and father said “Everyone takes care of themself in that situation, you know where you
live, go home.” But I laughed, because my father did not believe in jail. Which was a
little ironic, but he didn’t believe in it.
TS: So, what—and this was the day that Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot?
YH: This was the day he was shot.
TS: And what did your family feel about that? And you, personally, what were your emotions
that day? Because you had this going on with your brother at the same time, too, so it was
probably mixed.
YH: We had a black student union in high school, and we had an African-American Studies
teacher. So everyone gravitated towards Mrs. Anderson, to listen to her, because what
were we to think, what—we were in a predominantly white school. Who do you talk to?
You go back to your—not so much your roots, but your kind, you go back to your kind
and you go back to the wise people in your kind, and that was Mrs. Anderson. And I
wasn’t allowed to take black history, I wasn’t—
TS: By who?
YH: That’s what I thought you were going to say when I say [?] talk about school. [pause]
There was a young lady, her name was—now her name is Dr. Lorraine, Reverend Doctor
Lorraine Peeler. But she and I had gone to the special school together for years, of
course, in our fifth and sixth grade and seventh and eighth grade. But she knew there was
something different about me, and she knew I didn’t belong in that neighborhood, that
school, I just didn’t fit. I spoke like this when I was growing up. Can you imagine
someone who speaks like this in the projects? [laughs] Hence, my name was “White
Girl.”
TS: What was your name?
YH: White Girl.
TS: Oh, okay.
YH: Because I didn’t sound like the rest of them.
TS: Right.
22
YH: She says “You don’t need to take that,” she says “Because you’re going off to college
and you’re going to go out in the world and you’re going to know enough, you don’t need
to take that. The rest of us need to take it, to find out what’s going on, but you don’t need
it,” so when it was time to set up our schedule, she set my schedule up for school. As
much as I was intelligent and bright and knew where I wanted to go and what I wanted to
do, that type of detail didn’t interest me, because in spite of what was going to be given to
me, I knew where I was going to go, I was going to Bennett College.
TS: Didn’t matter so much what classes you were going to take.
YH: Didn’t matter, I was going to Bennett College. In my high school yearbook, it says under
my name “Bennett College”. So I knew automatically, I’m going to Bennett College. But
she pretty much looked at my schedule and say “No, you need to take the fifth year of
French,” you know, or “No, you need to take the advanced honor class in English, no,”
like that.
And I would say “Everybody’s hanging out in Mrs. Anderson’s class,”
And she would say “I know, but you don’t hang out with them, you hang out with
Sherring Cornmeal[??], and you hang out with So-and-So Kobalsky[?], and you hang out
with Theresa, you know,” I hung out with all the Jewish children, and so consequently,
she knew I didn’t belong with them, she knew it. Now, not to say that we weren’t all
black, but all black aren’t all black. And so she knew that my world was much bigger
than that area.
TS: I see.
YH: But we all went—I went there anyway, to Mrs. Anderson, to listen to her. And you asked
what did we think?
TS: No, what did you think, not that—what you thought.
YH: What they thought—what I thought?
TS: Yeah, it’s your interview.
YH: I thought—[laughs] Thank you. I thought that [pause]—I thought that that was just one
more act from angry whites who did not want blacks to know, to move, to be anything.
And he had touched a nerve and had to be stopped, and that’s when I realized—passion,
now. That’s when I realized you have to go underground, don’t let people know your
agenda, or they’ll stop you. Don’t let people know what you’re really thinking, so they’ll
stop you. So.
TS: You have to be covert? Hmm, interesting. Tough thing to realize, especially at that age,
huh?
YH: Well [sounding emotional]—passion.
23
TS: That’s a good thing.
YH: I think—
TS: Yeah. [recording paused] Okay. You ready? So how was it that you felt?
YH: I felt that I had to be undercover, so I did not wear an afro a lot, or dreadlocks, or
anything that was going to identify me as a separate entity, and I think that’s what caused
me to move forward, so I think that’s what it taught me. To stay covert.
TS: And so it maybe grounded you in a certain way.
YH: It did.
TS: A resolve, I suppose.
YH: It pretty much did, it pretty much took care of that window dressing, or the militancy, or
the vocalness. What I thought and what I felt was never how I presented myself. What I
did was never advertised. Stay quiet for fear that I would be the next one.
TS: So you didn’t want to have barriers put in your way by people’s knowledge of what goals
you wanted to achieve.
YH: Exactly, exactly. And the more people knew what you were thinking, the more they knew
how to set up barriers for you. And until it became necessary, I thought it’d be best if I
built up my repertoire, if I built myself up, trying to become somewhat immune, before I
was attacked. So I stayed under the radar. Martyrs are dead.
TS: Yes.
YH: And heroes are normally injured or hurt. And you have to be strong enough for the next
battle, but you have to be alive.
TS: That’s right.
YH: So I guess that’s the soldier part of me, too, didn’t realize it was there, but that’s pretty
much an attitude I took, where—they come after you when you speak the truth. Or when
you speak your heart, people come after you. You know. And so having the dream is
great, living the dream is hard. And verbalizing the dream is dangerous.
TS: Yeah, but you had a dream to go to Bennett College, and you get there.
YH: And I kept it in my circle.
TS: That’s right.
24
YH: Because—for one thing, my circle was small, being young, but I think I kept it in my
circle because that was that preparatory age that I was in, and when you are young you
set the foundation of who you are and what you are, as I said before, and so I kept that.
And so the circle was my parents and my church and there. But even at Bennett College,
people sensed that I was a bit different. About three months ago, a young lady on
Facebook told me—a graduate from Bennett College, she said “I resisted knowing you, I
resisted trying to be close to you, because you knew where you wanted to go and I—it
was confusing to have someone like that around me, when I didn’t know what I wanted
to be or where I wanted to go. Now, I’ve wasted all this time, when I could have gone to
you and talked to you about where were you going, and gone with you.” You know.
TS: Interesting. Seems like there’s a lot of people who wanted to be on your coattails.
YH: Very much so, that I didn’t realize. And I think the main thing was that I was more
definitive in my direction than others, than young teenagers were, I was more definitive.
But the more I meshed with another world—other worlds, then the more I had to pull
back in my definition. When I was young, again, Martin Luther King dealt with—and
phrases like “Say it loud, being black and you’re proud”, all of that, but when I was
young, I started realizing that if you’re identified for a certain cause or whatever, you had
to continually defend yourself, and then other people moved away from you because you
were controversial. And I didn’t have enough role models as it was, and I’m forging a
new frontier.
TS: That’s right.
YH: I didn’t need to have a tag or a label on that, so I think that Martin Luther King’s death
taught me to lay low, keep moving, but lay low. And that’s what I did.
TS: It’s an interesting lesson. So tell me about Bennett College. So you put—you knew you
were going to go there, but how did you get this scholarship?
YH: It was a combination of my, of course, my SAT, which in my day, you only took it one
time. You didn’t take it three and four times, so I didn’t even realize [laughing]—I never
realized you had to take it so many times to pass it. I’m like “What happened to
education? It was supposed to be easy!” But it was a combination of my involvement in
the community, it couldn’t have been a lot of academics, it was my academic potential, I
think, because out of five hundred and fifteen, I was number, like, 232.
TS: Middle of the pack.
YH: But again—right—I was in the upper fifty percent, but again, I was in a school where
academics was a way of life, and it’s not a stereotype to say that number five hundred and
fifteen went to college.
TS: I see.
25
YH: You see, so—
TS: Yes.
YH: It was a very—
TS: The bar was set high.
YH: Very, very, very high.
TS: I see.
YH: And it was also—I believe the—they looked at your IQ, they looked at your SAT, your
grade point average, and how well rounded you were in the community, because I was
offered a scholarship by the National Endowment of Humanities, four-year scholarship,
to receive my degree without books, so to speak, it was called interdisciplinary studies, it
was a humanities degree, and twenty-one people, women, were chosen.
TS: For the nation?
YH: In the nation.
TS: Wow.
YH: And in Bennett’s pool, of course, and it was pretty much funded, but it was written by a
doctor, I told you, Dr. Helen Trobian[?], very strong white older woman, part of the
WACs, and it allowed me to think, who would think of a class called Synergetic
Strategies?
TS: [chuckles]
YH: You know, the only other school that had this program was the University of Hawai’i. It
taught me how to be a master—a jack of all trades, but a master of none. But I took it a
step further, because I wanted to be an English teacher. I took it a step further because I
wanted to get a commission from the air force. And so they modeled a curriculum for me
to do all of that and I’m grateful to them, grateful. I love Bennett College, I love it with
all my heart, an all-girls school to teach you womanhood. There were men going to
classes, consortium with A&T, but I didn’t see too many of them. We had our curfew, we
wore our hats and had our gloves. I loved my hats, I still have my tams in the trunk in the
garage. I have my gloves, and I still wear gloves, and I still wear hats to church. We had
our curfew, I did not care. People thought, coming from, as they called it, New York—I
was from Buffalo, [unclear] New York—
TS: [laughs]
26
YH: —that we would fight and buck it. My mother gave me a curfew and so I lived with it. I
had to get a special extension, though, in my freshman year, because Gone With the
Wind was being played, downtown Greensboro theatre, I had never seen it. My mother
wrote a letter to the president of the college and said it was very important to her that I
saw it, her Northern girl going down to the South, of course, and she wanted me to get a
feel for it—Gone With the Wind, she had talked about it. They gave permission, so I was
able to come in at twelve thirty that night. I think the most important thing I learned at
Bennett College was that there were strong, dynamic black women, who showed me that
there was a world outside my own, and it was okay to look out there. And I loved it. My
mother dropped me off the first day of school, and she said something very, very
important to me.
She says “You don’t have to be here, you know. You can always come home.”
She says “If things don’t do well here, you can always come home, but you need to think
about what you’re coming home to. The projects, inner city, gangs, Buffalo with a lot of
programs versus products, factories are starting to close down.” I knew what she was
saying to me. Of course I was welcome to come home, to what? So I took advantage of
everything I could at Bennett College, and so I graduated with a bachelor’s of arts and
sciences, in interdisciplinary studies with a concentration in English education, special
emphasis on military science, ROTC, distinguished grad.
TS: [chuckles]
YH: Graduated seventh in my graduating class, out of a hundred and forty seven, and I
graduated first in ROTC. And—
TS: Well, tell me how—why it was that you decided to go into the ROTC in the first place,
and what was it that, you know, put that into your mind?
YH: The Vietnam conflict.
TS: Really?
YH: Didn’t know enough about it. Young enough to be militant about anything and
everything, of course, you know how you have [unclear] with a cause. But my friends
were being drafted, and they weren’t coming home in a healthy state. Congress had
passed a law that women could join the military and stay in past pregnancy for a career,
officers, and recruiters from ROTC at A&T State University came over to Bennett
College. And being the outspoken woman that I am, and in the safe environment of
Bennett College, of course, inside the walls of—being able to have the efficacy to speak
out, I start loud talking about what I thought the military was all about, how our young
men were being killed, for what cause, what purpose?
TS: So this is what you’re saying to the recruiters?
YH: To the recruiter, this very wise man said “You know, maybe you should join the
military.”
27
Of course, I laughed at that.
He says “Better yet, take a class, just take one class in military science, so that
you’ll be able to know the facts. You like knowing the facts, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
He said “Well, you don’t have all of them right now.”
I resented that.
TS: Oh, he challenged you good. [laughs]
YH: And so I took a class. And another class. And another class. And before I knew it, he
asked me, did I want to go to summer camp. “What does that entail?”
Well, I went to summer camp, and when I came back, that’s when he said “You
have to make a decision about staying in anymore, because at this point, we have to
swear you in. We’ll pay you some money to come to classes in the military, but we’ll
have to swear you in, and you’ll be committed.”
And by then I was hooked.
TS: But what was it that was drawing you to these classes, even?
YH: Knowledge.
TS: What kind of knowledge were you getting?
YH: I was learning about a world that I did not know about, a certain society that was
affecting my society, and I didn’t have all the facts to it. I liked the fact that there was an
absoluteness about rules and regulation. I liked the fact that they couldn’t change my pay
in the military because I was female, or that I was black, and of course, because of all the
racial situations in the community and the world, I liked the fact that there was someplace
where there was some level of equality. I like the fact that I could be taken care of, like
my mother and father took care of me, and still see the world. I got my physicals on time,
I got my shots on time. I’ve got a chance to see the world, and still got paid. I liked all
that. It fit me, the military—I didn’t join the military, I found out the military joined me.
And so that which I am right now is only an enhancement of what the military gave me,
but I was like this beforehand, and people saw it. And I figured that it would help me
move faster, quicker, and I said “That’s the best way I could have grown up, is to have
the government as my babysitter,” and as most people say, if not me, then who? If not
me, then who? Someone was getting all this government money, and I could get it. I
didn’t know all the nuances about being a female officer and the officer part of it, I just
knew there was equality there. It was worldwide, and I learned all kinds of—I learned
about Mynot, I learned secrets, I learned about Pearl Harbor—I mean, in great detail,
from the military side. I learned about Air Force One—how cool that was? And the
uniform, I liked—I did like blue, I’m tired of it now.
TS: [laughs]
28
YH: But I liked it, and so all those things were hooks for me. Not the men. And after talking to
my advisor, Dr. Trobian[?], it was definitely not the men.
TS: What do you mean by that, not the men?
YH: It was not to go find a husband.
TS: Oh, I see, okay.
YH: And it was not because there were so many young men there.
TS: I see.
YH: Being at Bennett College, it makes you a little bit desensitized about men. When a man
walks on our campus and walks into our dormitory, it’s one to a hundred and thirty
something women. And that one woman at the reception says “May I help you?” And
that man has to identify a woman, “I’d like to page such-and-such,” There’s no
competition. If he didn’t call your name, he didn’t want to see you, and so there’s some
thick skin that has to be developed, being at that particular college. As well, there was a
boldness about numbers, so when there’s nine of us in the parlor and this young man
walks in, we can very easily say “Hello,”
TS: [laughs]
YH: And they’re all by themselves. “How are you doing?” And you start building a
personality of “You’re just a man, a man, and I don’t have to impress you, you have to
impress me,” and so in the military, it was the same. I didn’t need to have makeup on or
wear these spike heels or be ignorant or giggle at the wrong—it was a different kind of
“You have to impress me,” you have to know how to do these things, you had to be able
to do these things, you had to be physically fit, male or female. And I liked all that, I
liked that, and because of my, I guess, my intelligence level, it took a lot to impress me.
The men at that level, the way they were thinking and—it was stimulating to the brain. So
I enjoyed the company, and that’s why I went in. During summer camp, a young man
asked me a very strong question. He was from the South, Deep South, and I was his flight
commander, and he would not listen to me.
And finally, in his frustration, he said “Do you want to be treated like a soldier or
do you want to be treated like a girl?”
And I didn’t know how to answer that at first, and I said “I think I can be both of
them,” and I didn’t realize how strong that statement was until later on in my military
life, but I thought I could be both of them, and I know for a fact I can, and I give that
information to my daughter now. [audio file 1 ends, audio file 2 begins]
TS: And what rank is she going to be pinning on—
YH: She’ll be—this spring, April, May timeframe, she will pin on major. She’s also an ROTC
graduate from Clemson, and she just received her meritorious service award last—two
weeks ago, and she’s in missiles, and she has two fantastically wonderful children who
29
love her to death, and she cannot wait to take off her uniform and be Mommy. But she
can stand tall—I don’t know if I brought you the pamphlet of her. She can stand tall with
the rest of them as an acting commander, as a commander of her unit, does a great job.
TS: We’ll have to get her in on this collection. That’ll be wonderful.
YH: She’s fantastic, she’s fantastic. But I think that’s—I think that’s what Bennett did.
Bennett helped me grow up, helped me mature, and being in the ROTC program helped
me see a bigger world than what even Bennett was giving me, and it just deepened—
deepened my personality more so. That—I really think it prepared me to deal with the
hard knocks in life. I really do.
TS: Well, when we talked earlier about, you know, your mother and your father, like “Oh,
yeah, okay, fine, go on in the air force,” and your one brother was a little bit skeptical.
What about your friends, what did they think?
YH: My name was Nelson, and so you know they had Dream of Jeannie, okay, Major Nelson
[a main character on the TV show I Dream of Jeannie].
TS: [laughs] Okay.
YH: And of course I was a cadet major at some time, you know. They thought it was odd,
there were five of us, five cadets on campus, and this was the first class ever to have—
first time ever to have ROTC cadets at Bennett College, going back and forth to campus
or whatever. So there were days when I would be in uniform, on Thursdays, which was
parade day, and I would come back on campus late, couldn’t change my clothes before
the cafeteria closed, and so of course I ran in there in my uniform. And of course, there
would be times when I couldn’t find my hat, because someone took it, and I can’t go
outside without my hat, or my headgear.
TS: Were they messing with you?
YH: Messing with me. And I think they were because this was new. I was an oddity. There
were three of us who finally got our commission, and I really think that they didn’t know
what to do with us, or place us, we were just oddities. “That’s just what she does,” or
“That’s Yardley, that’s Nora[?], that’s Shirley,”
TS: They didn’t know any women that had been in the military, anything like that, so they
didn’t have any context.
YH: Their uncles, their brothers, they had no reference point for how—where to put us, you
know? It was always as if I was a star on this pamphlet, and they had a circle for me, and
they tried to put me in this star, but I couldn’t fit in that little peg.
TS: I see.
30
YH: And because they had no reference point of a female being in uniform, they just sort of
watched and looked, and sometimes played with us. However, about a year after I was in
the military, I received a letter from a Bennett Belle, they called them, a graduate, who
had graduated a year before me, who asked me “What was it like being in the military?”
because she was thinking of getting in. And then about two years later, I received another
letter from someone else, to ask how did I like it, because she was interested and thought
maybe she might want to get in, and I think more and more people started contacting me
about it, out of curiosity, because their world was starting to expose them to the military,
their cousin, their girlfriend, a buddy of them, and so they start asking more questions
about it, or they start thinking, maybe I should try that. But at the time, this was
something new.
But please remember, in high school, I was different anyway. People knew that I
was going to do something different. In college—and sometimes you find your circle in
college, versus you find your circle in high school, I found a few other people who were
like me.
TS: I see.
YH: And then of course in the military, and so when I talk about my friends—one of my
childhood friends lives in Greensboro, now, from Buffalo to Greensboro, and she never
came to see me. I went home, whatever, but she never came to see me.
TS: Oh, you mean, from Buffalo to here?
YH: From Buffalo to here. I’m in the military, she never came to the base.
TS: Oh, right.
YH: Where one of my girlfriends came, she’s in Arizona, and they just kind of looked around,
and because I try to keep my home as civilian as possible, again—
TS: While you’re in the military.
YH: While I’m in the military, they couldn’t feel a big difference.
TS: I see.
YH: They couldn’t. My daughter felt it when I would go through the gate, of course, and they
salute me, and after a while I noticed my little daughter would be saluting back to them.
That was noticeable. Or when they saw me go to base, and my friends would say “Well,
hello, ma’am.”
And they would go “They called you ma’am!” And they would note—but it was
still a novelty. It was very much a novelty. Now, what did my family say? That’s an
interesting question I want to answer. I was the only officer, and my brothers were all
enlisted. Totally different world, and one day, not my oldest brother, my two younger
brothers were home the same time as I came home to see my mother. Another oddity, all
three of us being together.
31
TS: And you’re all in the service.
YH: And we’re all in the service. And of course, [chuckles] they were on one side of the room
and I was on the other, just sitting down, of course, but it got to be a point of very
obvious, they looking at me and I’m looking at them, and a comment was made, and one
of them said “Are you trying to pull rank in Mama’s house?”
TS: [chuckles]
YH: And I started laughing, and I said “Only if you feel it.” Of course, my mother had us go
to three different corners at that point.
TS: Did you have a uniform on?
YH: No, but officers did not have to. Officer’s uniform is always there, it never changes, and I
find even though I’m retired, it’s still—it’s still there, you know.
TS: Right, right.
YH: Where the enlisted is not. And so, there are moments when I can feel the difference in
rank. My mother was concerned one day about my baby brother, Terence, couldn’t find
him, couldn’t locate him, didn’t know whether he was on a mission or whatever, you
know.
TS: This is the one that went in the Marines.
YH: In the Marines, because sometimes when they’re on the ships, they don’t contact anyone
for a while or whatever, and he was on his way to Grenada. But—so we didn’t know
when he came back, we couldn’t find him. And she could not stand not knowing where
we were. I appreciate that feeling now that my daughter’s in the military, see, and she had
three of us.
And she called me and said “Could you find him for me?”
“Sure, mama.”
Well, I called the unit, called the post, I contacted his commanding—I would say,
his commanding NCO. Mistake “This is Captain—
TS: [laughter] [unclear]
YH: “—looking for my, you know”
And of course, within twenty minutes, he was on the phone. “Why are you calling
me?”
I says “Mama says you need to call her, right now, you are not to go a month
without talking to Mama.”
“Do you know what happened when they found out you were an officer?”
TS: [laughing]
32
YH: And he gave me the rundown of how they—
TS: It’s [unclear] for him.
YH: Exactly. And of course, they called him in later on and told him that maybe he should
think about the officers’ corps and since he already has an officer, and he said “Never
come back to—never call me again!” So there are times when I was not conscious of the
power of the rank, and again, I say that to you, in saying that when I went in, I had no
role models. And I had no one to prepare me, and so I didn’t realize the weight, or the
influence, you know, so I think because of that, first-timers sometimes make mistakes or
errors, or we step over lines.
TS: I think that we all step over lines. [chuckling]
YH: Chappie James, when I met General Chappie James for the first time, he said “How do
you feel being an air training officer?”
And I said “It’s lonely,”
And he said “Well,” he said “Being the first and being the only are the two
loneliest positions that you’re going to have in your life,” so when things happen, I think
about that. I say, it’s okay, because there’ll be more behind. And that’s what it’s been for
being in the military. I was the first black female to walk across the Terrazzo of the Air
Force Academy, never in history will it happen again, and I’ll tell you, it feels so good to
go to Colorado—which I’m going this week.
TS: Oh, are you?
YH: Yes, and see so many minority, Asian, Hispanic, blacks, walking across as cadets,
knowing full well, I did that first, and look at all of you. I’m not by myself anymore. Or
to even deal with being a graduate of a college, my niece has her doctorate degree, and
my daughter’s working on her PhD, and my nieces are getting their master’s degree, and
there was a time I was the only one with a college degree, and I just sit back and I say
“You know, Chappie James, I’m not by myself anymore.” So, looking at the military and
seeing so many women involved, and so many—I don’t think of what my friends say, I
think about what so many of them are doing, and what the women are doing, and they’re
all relatives, we’re all kin.
TS: So you were a role model for many. And still are.
YH: Pretty much. And still are, and still are, because I still get phone calls, and I still get
emails, and I’m still a mentor, an air force mentor, for young officers, young female
officers who are trying to figure out their way and what to do. And of course I have my
daughter.
TS: That’s right.
YH: But you know, being in the military is not a nine to five job, it’s a lifetime job, and on the
brochure, like here it says “For your own sake tomorrow,” it’s for all the tomorrows that
33
people are looking at, because I smile when people don’t stand up and pledge allegiance
to the flag, and I say “Well,” first of all, I tell them, after it’s all said and done, I say “I
would appreciate if you recognized the fact that while you sleep soundly, I was out there
for you, and if this one gesture can be a way of saying ‘thank you’, then just stand up.”
And they just look at me, the students will look at me at the school, you know, or I’ll say
“That’s my bread and butter, people, I wish you would think about it,” and they would
stare. And I think the more personal contact that we have with the civilian world, that
men and women have been, or are, I think the more conscious our young people will
have[be?] that it’s not just the white man’s world or the men’s world or just their world,
but it’s all of our world, intermingled, then our tomorrow will be saved, you know?
TS: Yes. Well, let’s talk a little bit about the details of when you were in the air force, if you
don’t mind. Or do you need to take a little break? [phone rings] It sounds like we do, yes.
[recording paused] We took a short break there and we’re back, and—well, Dr. Hunter,
tell me a little bit how you—when you decided to go and join the air force, tell me what it
was like the first time you put on your uniform with your commission—what were you, a
second lieutenant?
YH: Second lieutenant. Well, when—of course, you know, they teach you how to wear the
uniform, and they talk to you about wearing makeup, and green makeup with your
fatigues and blue makeup—but when you put on the uniform for the first time and sign
in, I signed in, twelve o’ clock noon, August 22nd, 1975, at Keesler [Air Force Base,
Mississippi], it was a funny feeling, because driving in, I had to wear my uniform of
course, the first time at the front gate, saluted me, and like, this is new, and there were so
many, there were so many of us, of course, at the training base, that we were all—
TS: Oh, there’s a picture, okay.
YH: We were all giddy together.
TS: Where are you at in this picture?
YH: Oh. [laughs]
TS: [unclear]
YH: We were all giddy together—
TS: Look at how young you are here.
YH: Yeah, sixteen weeks of air traffic control school in Mississippi, where the tide doesn’t go
in and out, it goes up and down. This is—yeah, it doesn’t go in and out, it goes up and
down. And it was—I think it was a proud feeling, but I think the biggest thing is that
there’s a swelling of the heart, that you’re being patriotic, that you’re part of the soldier
unit, not so much the teaching unit, but the soldier unit of the world. They didn’t talk
about a state and no one talks to you about what city you’re from. They talk in jobs,
34
positions, how you use—there’s a joke about if you wanted to issue you a spouse, we
would give it to you, we would just go ahead—and so I liked that feeling, of when I’d put
the uniform on, that people looked at your ribbons, your rank, how straight you were,
your gig line [alignment of shirt, belt buckle, and trouser fly], that preciseness, and
everyone looked the same, except for the rank. Everyone did different jobs, but there was
a pride in the morning, you know, when you heard reveille, and there’s a pride in the
evening, at five o’ clock, when the entire base just stopped, it just stopped, for a flag to go
down. It gave certain symbols new meaning. Eagle, stripes, stars, uniforms, headgear,
even the way you walked, you know. Eye contact, the swinging of the arms, by your
leave, all that when you put the uniform on. And of course, the joke that goes along with
the fact that officers even wear their rank on their pajamas, you know. The separation of
the officers club and the enlisted club, and as years moved on—because of finance,
economics, the merger of our ranks club.
TS: Today, right?
YH: Yes, that separation was very distinct, and I didn’t know whether, and I still don’t know
whether it’s there for the right reasons. But I do know that there’s logic behind the fact
that familiarity does breed contempt, and it’s very difficult for you to lead people who
may take personal offense to you correcting them. And I think that part of wearing a
uniform and having a rank has always stayed with me, to the point that I keep a very
definitive line between people that I work with and people that I work for, or people who
work for me. I keep it very clear, to make sure that there’s always room for critical or
crucial conversations, if need be, without compromising myself. And I’ve had to learn
that the easy way and the hard way. So the uniform was an education, for me. How long
have you been in? Well, check all my ribbons, and find out, you know, what do the
hashmarks mean when you see army? I don’t know. What’s the rat one mean? I don’t
know. You have to learn all that.
TS: Right.
YH: But I do know that it was a society that I was very proud to be part of. [phone rings]
[recording paused]
TS: Well, tell me, was there anything—when you trained, since you went to ROTC, you had
to do some physical things, and then when you went in the—did you have to go through a
basic training or anything like that?
YH: Okay, this is—I’m showing you now, but yes, this is a picture of my basic training. This
is my basic training unit at Maxwell, and these were all the individuals who were in my
flight. And we had to go through—I believe we went through six weeks? We went
through six weeks of training, similar to the—no, more like three weeks of training,
similar to what an enlisted person would go through, of course, an enlisted person trained
us. So he would always tell us that officers did not sweat the way enlisted—we glowed,
you know, we just glowed. And he would say it in such a manner that he was proud that
35
he sweat. He was proud that he sweat. This is not—this is a training flight, at Maxwell
Air Force Base, and for ROTC graduates—
TS: Co-ed.
YH: Yes, even—it was co-ed. They stayed in one dorm room, we stayed in another dorm area,
but it’s co-ed, the flight is always co-ed. And the young man that I was telling you about
who asked me about being—either being a female or—
TS: Or a soldier.
YH: That’s a little Southern young man right there.
TS: Oh, I see.
YH: And he just did not understand why women wanted to be in.
TS: We’ve got one, two, three, four, five, six women, and the rest are all men.
YH: Now, her first name is—how you say—her last name, her name is—how you say it—
Nancy Yardley.
TS: Oh, is that right?
YH: And my name is Yardley Nelson. So when we were simulating our names, you know, our
code names, and I was Yankee November, and she was November Yankee. So we had to
be very careful to stay away from one another, not to be too close, because it would
confuse them.
TS: Right, you would confuse them, I can see.
YH: But we went through our basic training, we got up in the morning, and of course we did
our run at four thirty in the morning.
TS: Well, was there anything particularly physically difficult for you in this training?
YH: Interestingly enough, basic training wasn’t. I was physically fit, I was quite a runner, I
have strong upper body strength, I take it from washing all the kitchen walls and ceilings
that my mother had me do, okay, but no, there was nothing difficult. It was difficult for a
few people, and of course, that’s when the men started making comments about whether
women could handle certain things or could not handle certain things. Because a
woman’s balance line is lower than a man’s, we have to move—we have to position
ourselves differently, and it’s only because of our role in life. We’re childbearing, so we
have to have our balance a little bit lower, to hold the baby, but it effected how we
managed to hold and pick things up, of course, in the military. So once we understood
how to balance our body, how to situate things, we could do the same things they could.
36
But if—when it comes to running or if we had to deal with the arms, you know, the arm
stretch—
TS: Chin-ups and such.
YH: All that, it was the same. Sit-ups, all those, we did the same, and we tried not to ask for a
special push-up stance or anything, or special chin-up stance, we tried to do the same
thing. As far as I’m concerned, the men were wimps the same way that women were
wimps, so it was a nice range there. Most women were physical fit, even the ones who
didn’t look like they were going to be physically fit, they were physically fit, they could
run the distance.
TS: How far did you have to run?
YH: Well, you had to run a mile—had to run an eight minute mile, okay, we ran a mile and a
half, we had to run an eight minute mile, had to be able to—we tried to do, I forgot how
many sit-ups at a time. Air Force Academy, I’m more familiar with those numbers. But
the air force, in training, we had to be able to do, I think it was a hundred—a hundred sit-ups.
TS: Sit-ups?
YH: Yes. We had to be able to carry sixty pounds, sixty to eighty pounds, and of course, if
you don’t want to carry it, don’t pack it, because nobody’s going to carry your knapsack
but you, so you learn how to not carry a lot of things. I think the difficulty was with
hygiene. Girls not liking to smell, or wanting to brush their teeth. Some people were more
involved with makeup than others, so some of the vanity things irritated some of the men.
TS: Oh, really? Okay.
YH: Because they wanted—like I said, they wanted you to be a soldier. They didn’t want you
to be a girl, and when you became a girl, all the stereotypes of being a girl, their sister,
their mom, whatever, it surfaced. Weak, crybabies, that you whined a lot, you weren’t
strong enough to handle certain things, and always wanting someone else to help you.
And so the discussion was always about—when I was in basic training, what’s going to
happen in the real world when I have to turn around and help you out?
TS: This is within this unit, that you were having—
YH: Within it. And this is where we processed a lot of that. What’s going to happen? So we
had to make sure that we could address that, you know, by not being that way, you know.
We’re not going to fall behind, well, there’s moments when people did fall behind, and so
we just reconfigured our flight where the slow people were in the middle.
TS: Move them along.
37
YH: Move them along. And we made that part of the mindset, not so much of male-female,
but who else is slow, put him up there too, he’s slow, we pass him! And so as long as
there was always a male in the same profile as a female, the men didn’t say anything, you
know.
TS: I see.
YH: So, the big fear was losing our femininity, and trying to be one of the guys, and in some
cases, a lot of the young ladies did. They were more tomboyish or thought they could be
a little more rugged, so they can blend in, where the men were looking for them just to
pull their weight, or prove that they couldn’t pull their weight.
TS: Right. I see. So you had a little bit of gender issues. Did you have any racial issues, at all?
YH: Not when it came to the base. Not when it came to the unit. Like I said, the equality issue
was intact there. The race came outside the base.
TS: At Maxwell Air Force Base?
YH: We went to—
TS: It’s Alabama, right?
YH: A few of us went to a beach, and of course, I couldn’t drive, so I was in the back reading
a book.
And I popped my head up just at the time we were driving past a police car, and
he followed us, and so the girls in the front said “Yardley, go ahead and lay back and read
your book.”
I said “Why, where you going?”
And they said “We got a police car following us, and we know why.” And
everything got quiet.
And I said “Why don’t we stop and get something to eat?”
And one of the girls says “Not here, we’re not, we’ve got to keep on going.”
And he followed us until we got to the county line. And so, situations like that
became apparent to the point that we didn’t care whether you have a uniform on or not a
uniform. You’re black or you’re white, that’s how we[sic] going to treat you. But reading
books about what happened to other people, Chappie James was kicked out of a
restaurant in Florida, and he was a one-star general. He was beat up as a soldier. It made
me remember, and think that things still existed, uniform didn’t matter. But—and also,
when I went to Chicago, I was told—recruiting for the Air Force Academy—I was told
not to wear my uniform, because at that time, there was a lot of problems with military in
the airport, and people were protesting. You know how airports were years ago, I don’t
know if you’re young [old?] enough to remember that, where they actually had
telephones and Hari Krishna and protests and all that, okay. Well, we couldn’t wear our
uniforms. Well, that wasn’t race, but it was just military. So there were a few race issues
38
outside. At Keesler Air Force Base, my first base, we’re given a list of restricted
restaurants and hotels and places—they knew they were restricted.
TS: Restricted to everyone?
YH: No, just to blacks, and there was a list, there were like twenty-eight, twenty-nine on one
page. And these were all the places—
TS: And what year are we talking about here?
YH: At this point, we’re talking 1975.
TS: Okay.
YH: And we couldn’t go to them. We couldn’t go to them because these businessmen did not
support the Equal Opportunity Clause, so that if you—
TS: Civil Rights Act of 1964.
YH: [unclear] 1964, exactly right.
TS: Ten years later, they’re still—
YH: And they would not, they didn’t care. And so they didn’t want blacks in there, and so we
could not convince them, until finally they realized that money was green and they
weren’t getting any of the money, then they finally opened up a little more. And of
course, as more military people retired and stayed in the area and had businesses, got rid
of—then the flight, and of course, that changed the complexion again.
TS: The demographics changed.
YH: The demographics changed, and of course, again when the economy changes, everybody
wants everybody’s money, so they turn and look a different way and whatever. But we
were told not to go to those places, because they weren’t—the phrase was, they weren’t
endorsed or supported by policies that the military supported, you know, that’s how it
was said.
TS: I see.
YH: You know. So being in the military had its benefits, but the reality of the world was still
there.
TS: What’d you think about it at the time? Being restricted from certain places?
YH: Well, it was—what did I think of it. Basically, I didn’t think of it, except the fact that—
that was just the way it was. I didn’t have any thoughts, per se, except that I thought it
39
was a crying shame that people were still ignorant in those days, but here we are in 2010
and people are still ignorant, so it’s a constant, you know. If—I feel now, and I guess I
can say the same thing then, I feel like it’s a situation of the Hatfield and McCoys. You
have no idea what you’re fighting and arguing about, because you’ve been doing it for so
long, you don’t even know how to stop doing it. And you don’t even realize there’s no
rationale for it, you know. Until your daughter brings someone home or your son brings
someone home, you see there? And all of a sudden, you don’t talk about that. But the
main thing is that it’s a Hatfield-McCoy situation, where that’s the way of the world and
sour grapes and get over it. But at the time, they were the masses. Now, they’re more—
it’s still the masses, but not so prevalent. It’s still going on.
TS: Yeah. Well, then, how did you—when you first decided you were going to join the air
force, what was your—because I know you’re goal-oriented, I can tell. Did you have—
did you say “I’m going to stay in for a career, I’m going to do it for six years,” what did
you have in mind?
YH: I’ll be very honest with you. I didn’t have a thing in mind because it was not part of the
grand scheme of things. I was going to go into college and become a teacher, become a
professor, marry my professional man, have a three-story house, PTA mom, bake
cupcakes, active in the church, and travel. The end.
TS: [chuckling] Okay.
YH: And then I joined the military, and I had no idea what it was going to lead me, where it
was going to lead me, and so—
TS: Did that make you nervous?
YH: No, it made me blind to the big picture. I was very naïve to the dynamics around me.
Caused me to step on some landmines that—based on decisions. So I don’t know, I don’t
know where to place all that, except the fact that I was pretty much just kind of—found
some places, said “This is good, I like this, I see people moving up slowly,” but there
wasn’t a lot of—I mean, women, I mean, at the academy, they had us talk to a lot of
female officers and general officers, colonels and stuff, but most of them were in the
army and the hospital, you know, or in the medical field. They weren’t frontline service
women. They weren’t hardcore maintenance women. They weren’t doing what I was
doing, they were mostly nurses and officers or army people in the medical corps, so—and
they were white. So it was—I didn’t have a lot to go on. Okay, here’s a path, or there’s a
light for that trail, because I’m at the end of that light, so do it. So I didn’t have a goal,
didn’t have a place. I just figured I was going to ride it as long as it lasts. I did not realize
what I wanted to do. One day—and I didn’t have a driver’s license.
TS: Yeah, I’m guessing that, because you said you didn’t drive, okay.
YH: I was at Keesler Air Force Base, air traffic control school. Still not thinking—thinking I
was going to finish four years, marry my college sweetheart, transfer to Fort Bragg, Pope
40
Air Force Base—he lived in Fayetteville, and I was going to teach and move on, like I
said.
Well, I was in Keesler, I had a ride with a friend of mine, air traffic control
school, and she said “I have to stop someplace, can you get up earlier,” Earlier than five
o’ clock? “Because I need to stop by this place.”
I said “Sure.” So I go with her. I say “Where are we going?”
She says “I heard about this recruitment, I’m going to the Air Force Academy,”
I said “You plan on leaving air traffic control and going there?”
She said “I don’t know,” she said, “but I want to put an application, see what’s
going on.”
I said “Okay, I’ll go with you, because I have no way to get back to school and
we’re exempt if you,” If the women go there, you’re exempt to be late anyway. So I went
with her, her name was Rebecca. Went with Rebecca, Rebecca Ritchie[?], Ohio farm girl.
She became my best friend. I went with her to this big auditorium, and they had this
presentation, I’m sort of reading my book, doing crossword puzzles, about picking
women to train—the first class of women at the Air Force Academy.
And they showed a PowerPoint presentation, and they passed out these
application forms and so of course I give one to her and I keep on going, and she goes
“Fill one out.”
And I go “Girl, you’re out of your brain, I’m not filling that thing out [unclear],
I’m just figuring out the Black folk scheme [unclear],” [laughs] [unclear] Jet Magazine, I
don’t know, because I’m still out of my element, but I know there’s something more than
what I want to do. She talked me into filling the form out, so I fill it out, you know, I
figure, okay, they want to know how many of us filled out, maybe that’ll cover that I
came here, so I filled it out. And they called my name for the interview.
TS: In this—just after?
YH: Well, we were all there, and yes, about a couple weeks later, they called us and told us to
come to [unclear], so we go there, and—
TS: Did they call your friend, too?
YH: They called Rebecca’s name too, and I found they called another young lady’s name,
Irene Graf, G-R-A-F, called her name, and she was also in air traffic control. So they
called all three of our names, and we went there. Did not know Irene as well, but I
knew—she was in a different class, but I knew Rebecca, because she was in class with
me. And so, we go in, and I interview. And they talked to me about who I am and where I
come from and different things, and I’m talking to them, and had I heard about the Air
Force Academy, of course I had, you know. Yada yada. Then, ironically enough, we get a
letter. And it says that they would like for us—we get it on, like, the day we graduate
from air traffic control school.
TS: That’s interesting.
41
YH: And I was told that I was going to a base in Indiana, and this is how they said it. “You’re
going to be trained in air traffic control at a base in Indiana, I feel sad for you because
there’s a senior master sergeant—chief master sergeant who doesn’t like blacks, and he
has never, ever passed anyone, air traffic control,” because, see, at the time, air traffic
control was one of the few career fields where the enlisted trained the officer, and then
the officer was in charge. But they trained the officers in the training process. And I
fought this equality bit, so of course I wanted to try air traffic control, because “equality”,
you know, so. “Are we doing the same job as everybody else?” Not knowing any better.
And I said “If you know he’s going to wash me out, and you know he doesn’t like
blacks, let alone females in the military, why are you sending me there?” Woe is me.
Well, when I received my certificate, I received a letter clipped to it, and the letter says
“Congratulations, you’ve been selected to go to the Air Force Academy to train to first
class, and they would like for you to come out in January,” I’m like “Thank you! Thank
you! Thank you.”
TS: Someone’s looking out for you.
YH: So, unbeknownst to me, I had moved myself again to an area of opportunity. Rebecca
received the same letter, and so did Irene. So we get on this beautiful plane, first class—
when they had door prizes [?], and you actually had alcohol, I mean—
TS: On the plane?
YH: And food, everything. And we went there to visit in January. We went there in January,
January 7th, as a matter of fact, and—
[comments about recorder redacted]
And started our tour there. So, did I have a goal or a plan? I didn’t have one then.
When I got to the Air Force Academy, I did not realize the magnitude of my job. I didn’t
realize that—these were some of the girls I was with.
TS: This is a picture—this is for the tape. So who—can you name who these people are in
this picture?
YH: Well, this is Paula, and this is—she’s the tallest one, and she had beautiful long hair, that
had to be cut, of course. And this is Susan, Susan is lazy. Susan Wright[?]. Susan said the
best thing about being lazy is that you will do it right the first time, because you did not
want to do it again the second time. And so—
TS: I have actually never heard that before. [chuckles]
YH: And so Susan did things right the first time.
TS: Okay.
YH: Susan had beautiful long hair, and they chose to let her keep her long hair as an
experiment to see if women can go through basic training with long hair. And I’m
42
looking at this one, and this one is a young lady who—I’ll put this way. You know when
you join something and you find out it’s not your cup of tea, and you realize that this is
not who you are? Well, when she went to the program, she realized that she didn’t like
the training of the Air Force Academy, and she didn’t like the way people were trained
there, and she didn’t agree with it, and she couldn’t do it, and she wasn’t physically fit for
that, or—and she—I think she may have been mentally set, but she didn’t set her mental
sights on that. And so out of fifteen air training officers that were chosen by the United
States Air Force from all over the world, three of them could not see themself doing it.
Correction: two of them could not see themself doing it, and one elected to stop. That was
Becky, Rebecca. So this one, Dawn, did not go in.
TS: And this is you, here.
YH: That’s me, right there in the middle. I know, just ran through it. And of course, being the
only black, they had to figure out what to do with my hair.
TS: Right.
YH: And of course, they had to figure out “What do black people look like in the military?”
TS: Right.
YH: But we went there in January, met the commander, and we got our base and everything.
He asked me “Do you know why you were chosen?”
TS: Right. And so—I just want to, for the tape, I want to make sure that people understand
that you’re selected to help train the first class of women that are going to be able to go
through the Air Force Academy. And that would have been in 1976.
YH: That would have been in 1976, and this was January of 1976 right now. And we flew
there to be trained from January to May to—
TS: Prepare.
YH: Like, we were cadets—to prepare, so when they came in in June, we would be their
upper-class female cadre, along with a male cadre.
TS: I see.
YH: That would give this climate that, that’s how the school is set up.
TS: Because otherwise, there weren’t really any—
YH: Upper-class females, and we would be the ones saying “You can do it, I did it, you can
do it,” and they would hear that, and following you, they would become sophomores, and
they would say to their freshmen “You can do it, I’ve done it, you can do it,” but they had
43
no women to do that. When the Air Force Academy first opened, the air force chose
people or servicemen from the other services to act as an upper class cadre to start the
process, so they trained the first class in ’59, they trained the class, and as they became
upperclassmen, they went back and told their underclassmen “You can do it, we’ve done
it.”
Well, they repeated when Congress said “We will have women in the Air Force
Academy,” air force said, “How do we go about bringing the women in? We’ll do it the
same way we brought the men in, and we’ll have women there.”
West Point said “We don’t want them there anyway, and we’re not going to do
anything to make it any easier, and if they want to come here, they’re going to come on
in, the way—” Of course, that superintendent was fired, of course, and a new one came
in, because of the attitude, whatever, that he generated from this group. But that’s how
they came in. Annapolis [Naval Academy] had the same attitude, but they brought in
more women in their staff and their cadre area, so they had more women around them.
But the Air Force Academy was the only military school that actually brought in their
own and trained their own, and so I was trained with them.
And what happened, we got there the first day, fun. We’re all officers, they cannot
call us by our rank, so we had to be called air training officers. We cannot be called
Lieutenant Nelson.
TS: Right.
YH: And all of us wore these—and this is the nameplate. This nameplate, on our blues, so that
people wouldn’t call us Lieutenant—Lieutenant Whatever. Because—
TS: Did you wear your rank?
YH: We wore our rank, but we could not be called by our rank, because that would cause a
psychological difference between the cadets and the officers, because they called the
others by their rank as well, in training.
TS: It was something to be earned, sort of, right.
YH: Exactly. And because we wanted our cadets to call us—to treat us like basics, like—they
couldn’t call us ma’am. They couldn’t say Lieutenant, ma’am, you know, and so, they
called us ATO [air training officer].
TS: I see.
YH: ATO Nelson, you know [speaks in exaggerated deep voice] “Get on your phonebooth,”
you know, “ATO [unclear]” all this. So you went through that training.
Well, what was interesting is that we came in like “Hello, how you doing, so-and-so,
hi, you remember me?” And that night, we left things alone, thinking tomorrow we’ll
start our orientation. The room was a mess. At 4:20 in the morning, we hear this boom-boom-
boom-boom-boom-boom-boom “Wake up, get up,”
And we are like “What in the world?”
44
TS: [chuckling]
YH: Well, the gung-ho, [unclear] Smack, her name was Beth, now Beth Goosby[?], but she
was the youngest air training officer, we called her Smack because the youngest cadets
were called smacks. Beth, like, she was all ready, gung-ho, and I sit there going “Where’s
my sneakers, my shoes,” and we run out, and finally we get ourselves in order in the
hallway, you know. And we’re looking around like “What is this?” We find out that’s the
first day of basic training. The cadets were ready for us, we weren’t ready for the cadets.
And so you run around the Terrazzo, of course, earning your breakfast, and we start
out—so when that’s over, we get back to our room and said “Oh, so it’s going to be like
this.” We took a deep breath and we jumped right in. Now, please understand that there
were mixed feelings at the Air Force Academy, the same way there were mixed feelings
at West Point and at Annapolis. However, the air force tried their best to minimize as
much as they could, but there were attitudes. Please understand that the cadets had fathers
who were Air Force Academy grads. They had uncles, they had cousins, they had
military families, three and four generations, who talked about this big change for years,
how dare this one woman file a lawsuit against the Air Force Academy.
Where my thought says “How dare you actually believe that my tax money is
paying for a private institution that my daughter can’t go to?”
So there was—and I’m certain some of the wives of these academy grads, of these
ringknockers [Slang term for graduates of military academies who draw attention to their
class rings, e.g. by knocking it on a table. Can also apply to non-military.]—did I say that
sharply?—that they may have thoughts too, but they [unclear]. So we picked up some of
that, so there were times when we went to an officers’ meeting and they would say
“Room, ten hut!” We all got up, and they said, “Be seated, officers, be seated. You too,
ATOs.” As if we weren’t officers.
TS: Right.
YH: Or there were times where we were ignored, or we would walk from information, and we
would hear cadets, even our old fellow officers, saying “Go home, go home” off the
Terrazzo. And we would go back to our room and it would break our hearts. But that’s
what you have to do if you’re going to walk roads untaken, you know. You have to just
force through and say “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, there really is, and we’re
here for a purpose.” But there were cadets there who believed in us, and believed there
was a reason for it, and they understood, and they enjoyed training with us. Except the
class of ’79. The class of ’79 felt they were the last class with balls, not recognizing the
fact that they had men coming in with the class of ’80 as well. And of course, they had to
deal with that when they got there. And so they had a stronger attitude, because they did
not, as a group, with a passion. But there were cadets who were nice, like the class of
’70—I would say the class of ’78. No, I would say it was actually the freshman class
behind, or there at the time, was class of ’78, who put doughnuts on our pillows, but they
weren’t allowed in our room in the first place, but [unclear]—how I got that doughnut,
but it was nice of them. Or the class of ’79 who took our privacy walls down and we
woke up and there were no walls that separated us from the men, so we all just stood
45
there looking at each other in the morning. The men ran, we had our housecoats on. But
there were times when they would do things like that. There were funny times, too, when
we had to go to the bathroom, but there were no women’s bathrooms in the academic
room. So we confiscated a bathroom, stood watch, and we went to the bathroom. Then
the men realized they had to—but that’s how I got to the Air Force Academy, it was by a
fluke. But when I got there, saw my picture in the paper, interviewed by people—
TS: Is that that one clip, that newspaper clip that you had?
YH: No, this is not the clip, this one is just a clip—it was sewn to this, but this is a clip about
being—
TS: Oh, ROTC.
YH: This is the one saying that I had graduated from ROTC, but I do have a clip of us being
there, it’s in the Denver Post. And then they used to ask questions, what do the ATOs do
during their off time? We did the same thing as anyone else, you know, wash our hair, get
our nails done, we go to the movies. But I realized they were more of a novelty, and
people were watching us and seeing what we’re doing. And it was at that time when we
had classes about leadership and femininity, and that’s when it formalized a little bit
more, becoming aware of how do we teach our cadets how to be leaders, how to stay
being women. How to command the men, but yet be commanding of their own
womanhood. And the mission didn’t become public for us. The mission became personal
and private, for those who came behind us. So we ignored society. We were there to do
our job, and we had an assignment to do, and I believe we did it well, because when we
were called back, thirty years later, we were called back. Cadets—not the cadets, they
were now officers. They were asked to go get the bags of jewelry for us, necklaces, and
take it to one of the air training officers, and tell a story. And there were three that were
there at the time that kept fighting over a bag for me. And so they all held on to the
handle and came to me to tell me a couple stories. And you know, when you’re the eldest,
or the upperclassmen, you remember thinking from that perspective. But when you’re the
underclassmen looking at the upperclassmen, there’s so many little things that the
upperclassmen took for granted that they held onto.
TS: What were one of those things that they told you, do you remember?
YH: One young lady told me that she liked the fact that I was able to have a sense of humor.
She says “I was so afraid of you,” and she said “Particularly when you told me that
tomorrow morning, you wanted to see your face in my boots.”
TS: [chuckles]
YH: She said “I cried all night, because how can a black person see their face in combat
boots?” And she said “I didn’t realize then, that all you were saying was ‘Make ‘em
shine’,” and she said “And when I came out and you looked at my boots and you smiled
46
at them and walked away,” she says “I thought you were pleased, but then you said ‘I can
see my teeth, and that’s sufficient for me,”
TS: [laughs]
YH: And she cracked up. And she said “I did it, I did it,” and they kidded and said “You were
up all night with those boots, all night with those boots.”
I always went through my patrol and I would say “Good night, ladies,” close the
door, “Good night, ladies,” close the door. Well, one night, no smile—I was not big on
smiles at the time, but that’s why they thought it was cool, but one night, they decided
they wanted to say good night to me first. And they said “You say it so quick,” they
would call me ATO Nelson, they said “Good night, ladies, good night, ladies.”
So what they did was they hung this big sheet, and when you opened the door, the
sheet came toward, and it said “Good night, ATO Nelson”, and I said “Good ni—” and
they thought I was going to scream. And I said “[very firmly] Good night, ladies. Clean
up the mess.”
TS: [laughs]
YH: And they said “We thought we had you for a moment, but you never lost it!” And I
thought that was kind of nice. There was one conversation, though, that I had with an
ATO, that I had with a cadet, and that was interesting.
TS: This—was this thirty years later, or at the time?
YH: This was at the time, but you made me think of it. Her father was a chief master sergeant,
and she was going to be an officer, and she didn’t care for the way people talked about
the officership and the enlistedship. And she argued a lot, and she wanted to leave. And
was nothing more than she not understanding how to balance her role with her father’s
role, a little bit similar to my relationship with my brothers being enlisted, and me being
an officer. Being black, and it being in the ‘70s, many of the white commanders had
difficulty picking up the verbiage or the communication to talk to another black female.
Which is why I was there, and I’ll tell you that in a second, but—so they cleared the
hallway, and told me that I had three hours to talk to her.
It was a combination of a come to Jesus talk, get yourself together, and a
compassionate talk of “Yo girl, what’s going on?” That white cadets—that white ATOs
could not do. She could not relate to them. And I found it interesting to hear her talk, and
that’s what—how do we help them? She was crying, how does she respect her father, and
she’s outranking him? What does she do when she goes home and sees him, the way we
talk about enlisted? It wasn’t demeaning, it was knowing our role in the leadership of
individuals, in the commanding of other people, but she couldn’t put it back in place from
her daddy. We had a long talk. She’s a doctor now. [laughs] She finished and she did her
tour, and she’s a doctor now. But I would say that I think that conversation wasn’t so
much the female part as much as it was one that a male or female could have said to her
from the leadership part. But in the ‘70s, having a crucial conversation across the race
was very difficult, for primarily, both sides, you know.
47
I want to say this, I had been there for two months, and the commander called me
in. Commander McCarthy, his name was McCarthy. He was in charge of the air training
officers. And he asked me “So you know why you were hired?”
And I said—being arrogant, “Because I’m good,” [unclear]
But he said “Because you don’t wear an afro,” he says, “You don’t have the
stereotype that will turn the poster child, the poster look off as far as what a black female
officer would look like,” he says, “And you know how to speak, which says that you’re
articulate and you’re very educated, so that’s what the public wants to see,” he said “You
hold your own, physically,” he said “However, there’s something about you that says that
you’re very militant, and our young girls need to hear that,” and I had thought I had
worked real hard at keeping myself below the radar.
TS: All this time.
YH: All this time. And maybe I had, but he was very insightful, how he chose us and what he
chose us for, and I really feel that every female officer was chosen for a reason. Paula
was afraid of heights. She’s the tallest one there, you know.
TS: [chuckles]
YH: She could be looked upon as being the silly-dilly blond, Susan could be.
TS: The lazy one.
YH: The lazy one. Very efficient. Very thorough. Always in trouble. And so I really feel like,
going to the academy was a turning point for me, and I wanted to stay in. Didn’t know
what it entailed, but I wanted to stay in.
TS: This experience was a turning point, that you had at the academy. How long were you
there?
YH: We were there for three—I was there for three years. What happened was, after two
years, we were like juniors at the academy, so we told them to let us go. We were
supposed to have been there a four-year tour. But after the first year, the young cadets did
so well with us bringing the freshman class in that after we brought the next class in, our
freshmen were now juniors, so we would be seniors, so to speak. And we told them
“We’re not needed anymore,”
TS: And you didn’t want to be the seniors—
YH: No!
TS: —because they needed to be.
YH: Exactly.
TS: I get that.
48
YH: We didn’t need that, we didn’t want that, we wanted to fade out. And so we slowly
started taking positions in the military—we wanted to go back out into the air force, but
we also wanted them to have space to grow, and so, two of the air training officers went
into the flying group, to be in the second class of women to fly. And others just kept—we
just slowly—that summer, we slowly moved out. So when the upperclassmen came back,
they didn’t see us, they were now going into their junior year and they had the senior year
all to themselves, without us being there.
Now, I was on campus because I was a minority affairs recruiter, and so I went
out to recruit minority students, and what better person to recruit minority females than
another minority female from the air force until they had somebody of their own? So I
saw them, but I did not want to—we didn’t want to be there. Also, the scars of being—of
not being accepted, the scars of being isolated from our own officer counterpart, the scars
from all that was taking its toll on us, and we wanted to cut that tie, cut it. And I think at
that point, I wanted nothing else to do with the Air Force Academy, or with air force,
really. I got married, I was in the military, I got back into military movement and
everything, but unfortunately I married an Air Force Academy grad, so that didn’t work
out either. But I think that the whole idea of us moving on was a healthy move for us. So
by the time they were seniors, it was understandable they would have forgotten us, and
they went on out into the world—it was understandable they would have forgotten, but
they hadn’t, they just hadn’t gotten back together to talk about it. And so when they
became majors and colonels, watching their fellow female ringknockers come out and
they talked, they said “Well, don’t you know? What do you mean, you don’t know?” And
that’s when general officers and colonels who were the class of ’80, the ladies of ’80, said
“No, this is not how it’s supposed to be,” and last year, they dedicated a beautiful
painting—glass window with our faces on it, with our images and our names across it
inside the academic building. And next year, we hope they’ll finally place our names on
the [unclear] union building beside the men. You see how long it still has taken society—
military society, to put our names beside the very men who did the exact same thing? We
never received a military service medal the way they received it. We received a
commendation, because the men said we were just doing our job. But our male
counterparts received an MSM [military service medal]. So it was quite an interesting
experience. I’m still very proud of being part of it, but I think only from the appreciation
of the female cadets, do I feel the appreciation there.
TS: Do you think, though, that—because you said that it was fairly recently when you got—
so, for a number of years, you were a little resentful, maybe?
YH: A number, yes, from 1977 to 19—to 2003 or 4, something like this? Very much so.
TS: Yeah.
YH: My daughter didn’t even know. You know, she saw my nameplate, you know, like
“Mommy, what’s this?” She would hear about things in ROTC, and she knew her father
was an Air Force Academy grad, she knew he was in commercials for recruiting, and
then when she was in ROTC, she heard about the Air Force Academy and the history of
49
the women at the Air Force Academy, one and one, “My mother, my mother was an air
training officer!”
TS: She put it together, then. But you never talked about it?
YH: They said “What?” I talked about it to the point—that was one of my assignments in the
air force, and that’s when Mommy met Daddy and moved on.
TS: That’s it.
YH: You know. And you know—you know, when children start growing up, and they start
saying to themselves “You know, my father played basketball, and look, he’s in the
yearbook. I didn’t know he was the most valuable player!” That type of feeling, you
know.
TS: I see.
YH: And so it’s like, my mother was in the military and I joined the ROTC, she—my father—
wait a minute, that’s my mother’s picture right there, that’s my mother! So consequently,
she would say, “She’s in that booklet,” or whatever. And so that’s when they would say
“Yeah, right.” But with a name like Yardley, it was very hard to deny. And that’s when
Stephanie started saying “Mommy, so and so,”
And then when she got into the military, people would say—but particularly when
she’s in Colorado at the Air Force Academy, they would say “Isn’t your mother Captain
Yardley, you know,”
She goes “Yeah,”
“Oh! I was in service with your mom,” or “How is your mom doing?” or “Isn’t
your father So-and-so?”
“Yes,” and then she realized—and this is another thing—I have a network of
people who know me before I even know them and I have a role that’s given to me by my
mother and my father, you know. And that’s when she started recognizing, so I—my
father—my mother was ill, my mother was ill, and so I could not go to Colorado when
they dedicated the window. And so she went in my stead.
TS: Oh, fantastic.
YH: And she said she couldn’t believe it, the female officers. Because, you see, one, Terry
Gobowski[?], is a two-star general, more than five—four foot eleven or whatever, and her
father, two-star general. And “How’s Yardley doing?”
And she goes “Yes ma’am”.
TS: [laughs]
YH: That type—so that’s when I became more of a reality to my daughter. She’s always
admired me, and that has humbled me a lot. She’s always been fascinated by this world,
the military world, and I had to ask her over and over again “Are you certain you really
50
want to be in the military, or do you want to follow your mother’s footsteps? Because I
do not recruit for an all-girls college,” which I used to do, “For the military,” which I
used to do, you know. I do not do that. And I said “So I want to make sure it’s what you
want. I will advocate for it.”
And she always tells people “No, I’m not here because of my mother, she’s asked
me numerous times, do I know what I’m doing,” she says “I want to be a soldier, I like
the things about the military, my mother and my father were excited about the military,
they enjoyed it, and I enjoy it too.” So she’s in on her own, and I think she’s enjoying it
very much. We talk about the morality of warfare, which is a very important concept to
me, when I talk about being in the military.
TS: Well, I was going to ask you how you reconciled your feelings initially about Vietnam
and the classes you went to and then joining. So that might be a good time to talk about
it, and then the morality issue.
YH: We’re in Vietnam for a reason, and I learned what the reasons were, and I also learned
one very important thing. Civilians can’t fight a war. And if less civilians got involved,
they would have won the war. But because Congress decided they wanted to get involved
and because civilians got involved, instead of allowing the military to do their job, you
know—also, and I hate to say this, but—I don’t hate to say it, just may not sound as
pretty. There’s no democracy in the military, you know. I’m glad that we have a human
rights proclamation, and I’m glad we have the Geneva Convention. But I’ll be very
honest with you. Better you than me. And whatever means it’s going to take for it to be
you versus me, I’m for it. So I go with the phrase “nuke ‘em ‘til they glow”. And I love
the philosophy of second strike capability. My mother taught me that. Never start a fight,
never bully anybody. Never push people around, but if they so much as touch you, or
cross the boundary, that’s it. My father said “Never let a person walk away injured, they
will come after you. Never force someone to lose face, they will come after you, so finish
it while you can.” That may seem strong and mean and cruel, but as a soldier, I
understood why we had Vietnam. I feel bad, though, that civilians got so involved that
they could not take care of home when the soldiers came back. If they had concentrated
on taking care of the soldiers when they came back, without being angry about people
who actually wanted to go over and fight—and some may not because of draft—then I
think many of our wartime vets would have been better taken care of.
TS: So you mean the reception they got from the public?
YH: It wasn’t the reception they got from the military. It had to be from the public. So why are
we so angry with the military when it was the public who’d actually treated these military
veterans the way they did? You know, we have all of these little—[stand with the?]
troops right now. Save the troop. Where were they when Vietnam came—you know,
where were they? Still being flower children and dealing with who’s black and who’s
white and who’s right. If they had just taken care of Johnny when he came marching
home, then we wouldn’t have so many angry veterans now, who say “I wonder why I did
it to come home to this.”
51
So I don’t—I understand, so when—when a friend of mine came home and he
argued, I just listened to him. And all I could say was “How were you treated when you
came home? Because I know you ate three meals a day, I know you got your shots, you
got your physical, you got everything that was given to you by the military. How were
you treated when you came home? And I’m talking about your neighborhood. About the
community,” you know, I says[sic], “When you tell me they treated you bad, don’t tell
me the military treated you bad,” you know. Now, I feel bad about the draft, but when I
joined the military, I accept the fact that there’s a draft. But I played my part in that draft.
I was part of that draft, I volunteered. And I tell people “You volunteer to die, you
volunteer to die for your principles, it’s not what you want to do, and don’t commit
suicide. Be strong, mentally and physically, pull back, be able to fight another day. But
you volunteer to be a soldier, and sometimes soldiers don’t come back. So my daughter, I
tell her every time, “My heart goes out to you, but if you’re called to go, don’t go to
Canada, no one told you to go in. So you have to fight the fight,” you know. And now my
daughter—my son