Oral history interview with Linner Ward Griffin, 2014 [text/print transcript]

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THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT GREENSBORO
INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Linner Ward Griffin
INTERVIEWER: Hermann Trojanowski
DATE: February 17, 2014
[Begin CD 1]
HT: Well, today is Monday, February 17, 2014, and my name is Herrmann Trojanowski, and I’m with Dr. Linner Ward Griffin, Class of 1964. We’re in the Alumni House to conduct an oral history interview for the UNCG Institutional Memory Collection’s African American Institutional Memory Project. Dr. Griffin, thank you so much for coming all the way from Greenville, North Carolina this morning to conduct this interview. We really appreciate it. If you will tell me something about your background, about when and where you were born, we’ll get started on this interview.
LG: Well, I’m a native North Carolinian. I was born in Charlotte, North Carolina on April 24, 1942. We lived in an area that was called Biddleville [neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina] when I was little, initially.
HT: Can you spell that?
LG: Biddleville, B-I-D-D-L-E-V-I-L-L-E . Biddleville. It’s just a section of Charlotte. It’s heading toward the west Charlotte area, but that’s where I lived maybe for the first seven or eight years of my life. We lived there until 1950, and in 1950 my mother died, and my sister and I then went to live with my maternal grandparents, Robert and Linner Mitchell. My father and mother had lived together off and on for years, but once she died, he moved to Virginia, and we stayed in North Carolina. So I was seven; my sister was six. I have a sister who is fifteen months younger than I am.
HT: And what is her name?
LG: Minnie Cecilia Ward Allison.
HT: And didn’t she attend UNCG as well, or Woman’s College.
LG: She did, for four years. Yes, she attended the Woman’s College and then UNCG. She went for four years.
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HT: Well, what was it like growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Charlotte.
LG: Let’s see. Charlotte in the 1960s and the 1950s: lots of upheaval, lots of changes. When I was getting ready to go into high school in—Let’s see, 1957 was when we had the Dorothy Council effort to integrate Harding High School in Charlotte. It wasn’t a successful integration, and she only stayed there for about a week. She had been a classmate of mine. She did not enter West Charlotte High School when the integration effort didn’t work. She went to a private school, left Charlotte, but it was that type of time in the ’50s. Of course Brown vs. Board of Education was in ’54 so you have all the tensions that were associated with that and with a pretty segregated society in Charlotte at that time.
HT: And where did you go to high school?
LG: My high school was West Charlotte Senior High.
HT: And was that an integrated school?
LG: We had one student whose name was Stephen St. John, and Stephen was a member of my class. He was white, and he had been a member of my class the entire time. Now he was considered a little bit different because he was French—had actually come from New Orleans—so the community just looked at him a little differently, and there was the whole issue of being Creole, and others, but we had one student who was not African American. [both laughing]
HT: And in high school, what were your favorite subjects?
LG: In high school I enjoyed English; I enjoyed Spanish; and I took a lot of math and sciences. For example, I took the regular biology, advanced biology, first and second chemistry—regular chemistry and advanced chemistry—and then analytic geometry and then plane and solid geometry, trig, the usual. Lots of math, lots of sciences.
HT: So did you plan to go to college after high school?
LG: Always, yes. I come from a different family in that the Mitchell side of the family, which was the side that I lived with for most of my life—Mother finished high school, but did not go to college; she was an only child. The Ward side of the family all finished college, so the expectation was when I was little that my sister and I would both find a way to get to college.
HT: And did your dad help you at all?
LG: Not really. We were pretty much adopted, even though there was not a formal adoption, by our grandparents.
HT: And those are your maternal grandparents, is that right? 3
LG: Yes [my grandmother’s] name was Linner Mitchell. My first name is one that goes every other generation, and so there was Linner Mitchell, and of course, Linner Marie Ward, and my granddaughter is Linner—What is her name?—Linner Ehiomone Ituah. Her father is Nigerian.
HT: How do you spell that last name?
LG: Her name? I-T-U-A-H, that’s my daughter’s married name.
HT: Now is Linner a family name. I thought it must be.
LG: Every other generation to the first-born girl.
HT: Okay, very interesting. And when you started looking for a college; tell me about that process.
LG: Well, I guess a lot of what—A number of things helped me make a decision. I started to look at colleges in my, let’s say, ninth and tenth grade year, and at that time I took—I guess it’s the PSATs or whatever, and honestly was admitted to several schools: to Howard University, and to Fisk University through the intercollegiate scholarship program. It was determined by my grandparents and by me that I was just a little too young and a little too immature to go to college in the tenth grade so I continued and determined I was going to finish West Charlotte, continued to take the advanced courses as I mentioned to you because I was in the—what do you call it—college prep program at that time, and then in my junior year, I started to take math with a faculty member there whose name was Julian Pyles. That’s P-Y-L-E-S. He was the primary math instructor that I had during my years there, and he stayed at West Charlotte for a number of years after we left. But then subsequently he moved, I think, and began to teach at Fisk University. But he was very supportive of students who thought they wanted to go to college, and I guess he saw some promise somewhere, I don’t know, but he would actually have little mentoring groups that were held on Thursday evenings, and he would basically pull out students from his various classes or from others’ classes, and they would come to these Thursday night sessions, and basically they helped us to get ready for the SATs, and helped us understand more about college life. Initially all those classes were all about math and science, but in my senior year in high school, I also had the history teacher, for example, to come, and a number of different subjects were also supported.
HT: So how did it come about that you—
LG: Chose—
HT: Woman’s College.
LG: Well, what you will probably remember is that from West Charlotte Senior High School had come Clara Withers [Class of 1962] and Elizabeth Withers [Class of 1963], so there 4
was this whole idea of the fact that if we tried hard and did well on our standardized tests, that we could actually go to school. Now, [I] had applied to a number of other schools but, as I said, I had a sister who was fifteen months younger, and my situation with grandparents who were older, obviously, I needed to go to a school that was in state. And even though I was admitted to a number of schools out of state, I had to go to an in-state school partly because of the cost, and the transportation, and other types of costs. So of those, the Woman’s College was the one I chose partly because of its reputation. I wanted a good education, and it wasn’t too far—about an hour and fifteen [minutes], hour and a half—from Charlotte, and I could get back and forth freely. And then there were the Withers whom I was able to talk with, who I was able to get a sense of what they had experienced—the positives and the negatives—and I chose the Woman’s College.
HT: So were you friends with the Withers sisters in Charlotte?
LG: I knew Elizabeth better than I knew Clara, of course. Clara was a whole two years ahead. Elizabeth took piano lessons from Mrs. Blanche Oliver, and Diane Oliver [Class of 1964] and I had been friends from—Well, Diane was in my class. Well, Diane and I had been friends, oh, since I was about six or seven years old. So I knew Elizabeth both from school, but also because of piano lessons every week. She’s a very accomplished pianist. So it was easy to have more contact with her, and longer. When I came to the Woman’s College, my first roommate was Diane Oliver. We had—We made a pact. That was our pact when we went to this college. And what we were sure that we were going to run into, so we said that we would room with each other the first year. That’s all we wanted, the first year. And then after that we would know people well enough to be able to venture out.
HT: Sure, and so was Diane your roommate the entire four years or just that one year?
LG: The one year. That was our plan.
HT: And I understand she died.
LG: She died two years after we graduated.
HT: Was that a motorcycle accident?
LG: A car and motorcycle, yes, in 1966 in Iowa.
HT: Well, tell me about your transition from high school into college. What was that like?
LG: Well, I’ll have to say that I was fortunate. You’re looking at somebody who, I guess, scored well enough on the math test that I never had to take a math course in college. No, I never took a math course, and while I will tell you that I had to study—I knew that; I knew that coming in—I wasn’t—There were no delusions here. I kind of knew what I was getting into. So there was the studying, and I made a point to set up a structured studying schedule, and passed all my classes. I never had to go to summer school, and I 5
just kind of walked my way through. I think the piece I had to get used to was [that] aside from Diane, I didn’t really know anybody, except for the [black] upper classmen, and honestly upperclassmen and underclassmen didn’t really associate with each other that much, except when we would go over or they would specifically come over to see us. But just getting to be comfortable with myself, being able to put myself on a schedule and stick to that schedule, being able to figure out that Jackson Library was my friend, and [to] actually go over there and spend time and study. And during my freshmen year we had what they called closed study, where you would really be expected to be in your room between about seven-thirty and ten, and you were expected to study. And that in itself was a help.
HT: I don’t think they have that anymore.
LG: No.
HT: Which is—
LG: It was only for freshmen.
HT: Right. Well, what do you remember about your first day on the campus? Had you been on campus before?
LG: We had driven up, yes, and so I knew where the campus was. I knew what dorm I would be in because you get all that information before you actually come to campus. And I had to understand—You knew what dorm you would be in. You didn’t know what room you would be in so when I—we—got here, I was in Coit [Residence] Hall, and if you’re facing Coit Hall, I was on the right hand of the first floor, the right side of the first floor. And all of the African American students were on the right side of the first floor. There were seven of us, and that was a bit of a disappointment because I had initially thought that there would be more integration. And the first semester, we kind of—It helped us become more comfortable with each other even though we were from very different places. Second semester the dorms were very crowded, and a few of the students who had been upstairs and either had roommate issues or whatever, came in second semester, but they then put some of the other students, at their request, on the hall with us for the second semester of our freshman year. And that worked out just fine.
HT: Well, tell me about some of the other African American students. You said there were a total of seven.
LT: There were seven of us. Well, the one who became my roommate for the three years following freshman year was Janet Gordon [Class of 1964]. She was Janet Harper at that time, but she is Janet Harper Gordon. One of my lifelong friends since undergraduate school was Marian Thornhill McClure [Class of 1964]. And then, of course, there was Francine McAdoo [Class of 1964]. There was—Let me see, who else did we have? There were a number of us. Sandra Byrd was with us for two years. She left at the end of her 6
sophomore year, and so did Madeline Russell. Madeline was also from West Charlotte, and she was here for two years: Madeline Russell.
HT: That’s a name I have not heard before. And you say she left after two years, is that right?
LG: She and Sandra left at the same time. They had gotten—At least at that time, they were close, and I’m not real sure, you know. There are all kinds of rumors but you’re never sure why. I know that Sandra—because I’ve heard this from Janet—Sandra continued and finished, I think, nursing school somewhere in Virginia.
HT: I did not interview her but she has been interviewed, so I think, best I remember, she did.
LG: I have no idea what happened with Madeline.
HT: That’s a name I’ve not heard, so—
LG: Madeline and Sandra were—No, Sandra’s roommate initially was Janet, and Marion didn’t have a roommate. We were kind of altogether.
HT: Well, what do you remember about your classes?
LG: Freshman year, or through the four years?
HT: Either one. [laughter]
LG: My freshman year I had—and I don’t remember his name—but he did me the biggest favor that I could ever have had. I’m talking about my English professor. But freshman year when I was here, we had grammar supposedly the whole first year, and the whole second year was literature even though you ended up with grammar—the real hard grammar—the first semester. And then the second semester it was grammar and literature kind of mixed. But I had a strict professor in terms of grammar, and he had a horrible red or green pen, and I will never forget getting my first few papers back and having them marked up so that I had to learn to write. This is somebody who thought she knew something coming from English because I had had a lot of English and I enjoyed it. But he did me the biggest favor because having to go back and redo papers—and he never asked that we redo them and resubmit them. I just did that because I had to figure out how to do it better. But, yes, I did appreciate that man, subsequently. [laughter] And history: I enjoyed my history classes. I had come to the Woman’s College as a math major, and I tried to figure out which classes came easiest and which ones were the most enjoyable. I graduated from the UNCG at that time as a history major because history was something I had to work at, but that I really enjoyed.
HT: And what made you change your mind from becoming a math major to a history major?
LG: Probably the fact that I didn’t have to take freshman math like everybody else was having to take it, and I didn’t want to go through that horrible, horrible pain that they seemed to 7
be experiencing. And the second was that I enjoyed history; I enjoyed it very much. I’m not saying it came easy, because what I had to learn to do was think in terms of relationships, both to time and person, and events: how one event caused another event, but I enjoyed that, and I remember—I [think] back, and I had a teacher in high school. Her name, her last name was Bogle, Emma Bogle; I think it was B-O-G-L-E, at West Charlotte. She was the most—She was an unusual teacher. She was one of these women who just kind of sat down and [talked], and she would sit on top of the desk and talk to the whole class. And I enjoyed those sessions, and I don’t know that I ever wanted to teach like she taught, but I wanted to be able to bring the subject to life the way that she brought it to life. And I had a number of faculty here who were able to help me do that.
HT: Do you recall any of the history faculty?
LG: Oh, yes. I remember my Russian history faculty person. His name was—His last name was [Jordan E.] Kurland, K-U-R-L-A-N-D. I had history of before and after the civil war with her. Last name was [Josephine] Hege, H-E-G-E, I think. And I had history of the South with two faculty members who were actually chancellors. I had Otis Singletary, and I had James Ferguson, so I was fortunate. The first seminars I ever had were for my [French] history course, which I loved, and he ended up giving us this book that has always been an important one for me, called Seize the Day. But it helped me understand if you’re going to be in the seminar, you, one, have to be prepared and, two, you have to talk, and you have to also be able to listen and add to discussions. And that French history class did that for me. And Kurland’s class was the same way, in Russian history. But there was English history—a number of different subjects. My advisor, my senior advisor, was Richard Bardolph, I never had a course under him, and I’m not sure why. I’m going to tell you the truth; I don’t know why. He just never signed me up for a course under him. I had every other faculty member, but not him. And that’s okay. [laughter]
HT: Well, it sounds like you had a great time in the various history classes.
LG: I enjoyed them, yes. And I also enjoyed my clinical psychology classes. Yes, very much; learned a whole lot in those classes, too. I think his name was Smith, the faculty person. But I think it was good. I can’t—I’m not complaining about my education.
HT: So you sound like you got a good education here.
LG: I think I did.
HT: Well, Woman’s College had an excellent reputation. It really did. Well, let’s talk a little bit about dorm life and campus life and that sort of thing. You sort of alluded to it a little bit. What was it like, living on campus at that time. It was a small residential college compared to it’s a fairly large university today.
LG: I think we had—Well, I don’t know for sure—but I would imagine about five thousand students at that time. Not more; I’m sure it was not more.
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HT: It might have—I’m guessing somewhere between three to four maybe. Yes.
LG: It could be. I imagine there were about a thousand in each class with more coming in as freshmen, because more would leave at the end of their freshman year. But I don’t know exactly how many; I just know it felt enormous, and the fact that the dorms were always crowded. As I said, moving into Coit the first semester, [was] a little disappointing, but after you go through it, you say “thank you.” It’s one of those incidents where I had a chance to learn about other people; I had a chance to learn about myself; had a chance to become more comfortable with the university, to figure out how to walk from Coit all the way over to McIver [Building] and to get to class on time. You know, you don’t leave five minutes of; you need to leave at least fifteen minutes of to give yourself a chance to get over there. I had a chance to just kind of enjoy the dorms; enjoy the people that I was there with. I found it exciting; I found it tense because there were times when you were obviously in class or associated with people who didn’t particularly want to be there with you, but let’s just say we all persevered. They did and we did.
HT: Speaking of that, did you ever feel like there was overt discrimination against you or any other African American students that you saw.
LG: There were some special days. I still remember Rat Day.
HT: Oh, okay.
LG: I won’t ever forget Rat Day, especially my first Rat Day. It was not exactly a nice thing. Some of the upperclassmen were—They said some derogatory things that they didn’t necessarily need to say. And that they didn’t say to some of the other students, just those of us who were a little different. But otherwise.
HT: Did you wear the rat ears at that time.
LG: Yes.
HT: We know a little bit about the origin of Rat Day, but what do you recall about the tradition of Rat Day. What actually transpired? Do you have any recollection of that?
LG: Well, I just remember that the upperclassmen—specifically your sister classmen, which would be not the next class, but the two classes ahead—they were able to ask me to do things and you were expected to do them. And they weren’t necessarily complimentary to us. Yeah, you were to do tasks for them; you were to listen and obey.
HT: Now was Rat Day generally—It was during your freshman year, is that correct? And was it fairly soon after you arrived here or—
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LG: For some reason I think so. I don’t remember that well. I remember—and it may have been somehow associated with Jacket Day. I don’t remember. It wasn’t exactly something I wanted to remember. [laughter]
HT: That’s understandable. Well, since we’re talking about traditions, you mentioned Rat Day and Jacket Day. Now you got your jacket during your—
LT: Junior year.
HT: Junior year, yes. And what do you recall about that?
LG: Well, I was in the class that had that ugly gray jacket, but—
HT: Because your colors must have been lavender then.
LG: It probably was; it ended up gray. And some others had like blue jackets, which were really kind of neat, you know, but we had gray. And I bought the jacket; I wore the jacket; and I think I was pretty proud to have been here long enough to get the jacket. Now, I’m trying to remember. For some reason I remember wearing it in my junior year. I don’t remember wearing it sophomore year. It may have come in my sophomore year, but I do remember wearing it as a junior. Probably because that was—My sister class would have been the freshman class that was then.
HT: And what about ring day? Do you have any recollection of that; when you got your class ring?
LG: No, see, I didn’t get a class ring.
HT: Oh, you didn’t.
LG: No, but I do remember the day, yes.
HT: Let’s see. Daisy Chain: when you graduated, was there a Daisy Chain?
LG: There was a Daisy Chain, yes.
HT: And did you participate? Let’s see, that was for the seniors. But was it the juniors who actually formed the line with the daisies?
LG: No, I wasn’t a part of that, no. I don’t think—I’m pretty sure there weren’t black students who were involved in that; at least not in that year.
HT: Now I think, according to your information in the yearbook, you participated in the Junior Show. What do you recall about that?
LG: I was in the Junior Show? [laughter] Well— 10
HT: I don’t know what—
LG: Maybe I helped do the scenery, because in high school I had been in dramatics. What did they say?
HT: It just says that you participated in the Junior Show.
LG: Oh.
HT: It just shows all the various extracurricular activities you were involved in.
LG: I remember the Spanish Club and the History [Club], the Sociology Club, and the Baptist Student Union; and I was probably in, well, the Junior Show. I would probably have been working on the scenery and other things. I was not one of the performers.
HT: Right, you sort of worked backstage.
LG: Yes. And I was in the History and Political Science Club, the National Education Association, and the Young Democrats Committee, okay.
HT: Well, it sounds like you were quite busy. I mean that’s—
LG: A lot of it, there were ebbs and flows. Yes. And the whole Young Democrat Committee, when I took my first political science course, one of the things we had to do was to—Well, not Young Democrats Committee, but Young Democrats Club—was to actually volunteer in a political action, and so you had to put in so many hours volunteering, and you had to—the Club members actually went to the various campaign headquarters and actually [worked].
HT: Did volunteer work?
LG: —did volunteer work. It was part of the class. One of the first service learning groups.
HT: Now it said you participated in a lot of other things, but what do you recall was your favorite extracurricular activity?
LG: Extracurricular activity.
HT: Yes.
LG: I enjoyed the political, and the understanding of what politics were, and how politics worked served me well after the Woman’s College and UNCG because when I got my master’s—It’s in social work, and I got it from Chapel Hill, UNC-Chapel Hill—but I found that I had a better understanding of policy and how political processes worked, possibly because I was in history and political science, than some of the other students did. So when I finished the master’s and went on for the doctorate which came from the 11
University of Houston [Houston, Texas], I taught social work, and my teaching of social work at West Virginia University [Morganton, West Virginia]; at Temple [University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]; and at East Carolina [University, Greenville, North Carolina] focused on understanding political action. Social work has practice, policy, human behavior and the social environment, and research, so I taught research, and I taught policy and practice. And we are—we are the sum total of all of our experiences. Well, if that be the case, it was some of the foundation that came from the understanding of policy and how politics work here, and even in high school, and understanding—I told you I enjoyed clinical psychology—understanding the psychology helped me focus on the practice part of social work. And then just the research part was something I learned to do here, and part of it, I became a fairly decent writer and got a lot of things published, and I give that man in that freshman English class a lot of credit. [laughter]
HT: That’s wonderful.
LG: Writing federal [grant] proposals. You know, responding to RFPs and getting grants: I give him lots of credit for [the] learning how to write.
HT: That’s very important, isn’t it? Well, we’ve already talked about your roommates. What about the resident hall and the dining hall? What are your memories of those in general?
LG: I remember I loved the dining halls; I loved them. I always thought—Okay, hearing students complain about the food and complain about the dining halls seemed to be just something that was expected, and I thought that if you don’t have anything else to complain about, and you want to just, you know, fit in with the rest of the group, you complain about the food. I enjoyed the food. I had dishes that I had never in my life experienced before here at the Woman’s College, and different—There would be different days when we would celebrate different countries, and there would be just this whole line of food of whatever description. You could have whatever you wanted. I came back maybe ten—some many years, and they had gone with a contractor—Aramark or somebody.
HT: I think ARA.
LG: Is it ARA?
HT: Yes.
LG: Not nearly as good, and now I thought, Did I romanticize the food at Woman’s College, just, you know, because it was part of this memory, or was it really better? And in checking with some of my classmates, we had it better. Ours was not contracted in the same way. I think they must have—as far as I understood it, they actually did the cooking here.
HT: Probably so. It probably was small enough that they could do that, perhaps.
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LG: So, I’m trying to respond. You asked about food and you asked about dorm life.
HT: Right, dorm life. Rules and regulations and that sort of thing.
LG: Well, we used to have Monday meetings in our dorms, both dorms, [but] mostly in the freshman dorm. Every week there would be a meeting, and you would start the meeting by singing the sister song, which I don’t remember now, but I do remember the sister song. You had to learn the [class] song, and you had to learn the alma mater. So that’s where you got to practice all these things. But you also had these meetings once a week, which was every—It was on a Monday evening, and it helped you learn the people who were in your dorm. It helped you—It helped me, at least—to understand the policies and the procedures that were associated with this institution. When I was in Coit, I remember one time I got up the nerve to ask the—I guess you’d call them local policemen, whoever the campus cops were—why we were all in one end of Coit Hall. And he said it was for our safety; that because—if you know Coit, you know that there’s a street that goes right in front of Weil [Residence Hall] and if they had to get us out, that we were right on the end, that we could run straight out that side door, and we would be able to get to [safety]. Unfortunately that made sense at the time. I’m not sure I would have accepted that if I had my mind today, but, okay, you know what? I asked; he answered.
HT: I’m sure there were some safety issues, especially in those early years.
LG: My sophomore year, I was in Ragsdale [Residence Hall]. It was either 204 or 206. And Janet and I, it was our first time living together. We were in the staff room, which I think was probably a RA’s [Residence Advisor] room.
HT: I think the counselors usually lived there because they had their own bathrooms.
LG: The counselors. Yes, yes. And part of that was the fear of maybe sharing a bathroom, but that too went by the way, because the next year, my junior year and senior year, we were regular people on the hall, sharing a regular room, and the staff rooms were then up for grabs for everybody, which I could have been upset about giving up my private bathroom, but it felt good to be one of the group. And it felt good—Well, my private bathroom versus that hall bathroom, a private bathroom would have won every time, but the hall bathroom represented something else.
HT: I guess it just took a little while for the university to ask those students to kind of get—everybody get used to everybody else.
LG: Well, that may have been it, but I think it was also some of the objections raised by some of the white students over the fact that we were getting very special treatment. They were sometimes two and three in a room, and we were sitting here in a staff room with our own private bathroom, and everybody would have loved to have their bathroom because nobody liked all those showers in the hall bath. But all this wonderful, special treatment we were getting was something that I think some of the students may not have liked. Not 13
us, but—Well, we didn’t particularly like it either, but there was no reason for the preferential treatment, as it was perceived by the white students.
HT: Did you make friends with some of the other white students?
LG: Yes. In fact, when I was getting my master’s, Betsy Allen Carrier and I drove back and forth from Greensboro to Winston-Salem for a whole semester. Well, not a whole semester, a whole year, every day.
HT: How do you spell her last name?
LG: Carrier. C-A-R-R-I-E-R. She was Betsy Allen and her married name was Carrier.
HT: And you say you were living in Winston at that time.
LG: No, I lived in Greensboro, and she lives right outside of Greensboro in Guilford County—Guilford College, rather. And we would meet on [Interstate] 40 and then drive in to Winston-Salem because she was placed in Winston-Salem and so was I. She was at the Family Service Agency over there when she was doing her master’s, and I was at Amos Cottage, which is a part of Bowman Gray. [pause] And there was Linda Rowe. There were a lot of—You know, there were other people.
HT: Well, you got here in the fall of ’60. Is that correct? So the Greensboro Sit-ins had just taken place that spring in February of 1960. Do you have any recollection of that, because you were living—That was your senior year of high school. Do you have any—
LG: That was on the news.
HT: It was on the news, right.
LG: Yes, and it was still a part of Greensboro when we moved here, when we came to the campus. They were still—The upheaval was still going on.
HT: Do you have any recollection of that?
LG: Oh, yes. My more—more closely aware of the efforts to integrate The Corner [variety store], the area down here, because that was when I was here, and participated in—There was a grocery store that at one time didn’t really want to serve African Americans—
HT: That was on Tate Street.
LG: So there was this whole initiative of actually picketing the store, and I remember Otis Singletary, my faculty person. He was one of my faculty that year. I guess it was [’62-
’63]—I was a junior, so it was—
HT: That was ’63. 14
LG: Saying—He didn’t say, he inferred, and he said: the inference was “Get yourself arrested and get kicked out of school.” So the notion was: “You can participate in any way you want to. It’s your decision to make, but you need to understand that if this happens, then that happens.”
HT: So what was your part in the demonstrations; do you recall?
LG: Well, on Tate Street—
HT: On Tate Street, yes.
LG: Actually going down and holding my little picket, walking out in front, but make sure you don’t get arrested for blocking the entrances, and, you know, just the usual things. Being aware of what the law allows.
HT: And—
LG: A number of us did. I was not the only one.
HT: I had heard about The Corner, but I did not realize that it was a grocery store down there.
LG: It was like a grocery store across the street. The Corner was—I think—We always thought it was like a drug store, and across the street was a—
HT: A small grocery store. And what happened? Did The Corner integrate?
LG: Eventually, yes. The Corner. There was also the theater down there.
HT: Right, the Cinema Theater.
LG: And they didn’t want to integrate either, so there was—You’d walk in front of The Corner; you’d walk in front of the grocery store; and you’d walk in front of the theater.
HT: And how many days did the demonstrations last? Do you recall?
LG: No, I don’t recall, but I do recall that sometime during the summer, by the time I got back after summer break, we were able to go into all of the above. Now you could always go into The Corner. They never stopped you from coming in. It’s just that they really weren’t that anxious to wait on you.
HT: You mentioned being away for the summer. What did you do during the summer? Did you work or—
LG: I worked. I had to work. Now I [told] you about living with my grandparents. It was important that I earned the amount of money that I would need to carry me through the next year, to pay what the scholarships didn’t pay. 15
HT: So you did have scholarships.
LG: I had a small scholarship from the Woman’s College, and that then made me eligible for a larger scholarship that paid most of my tuition and fees, and then I worked for the difference.
HT: Did you work on campus at all?
LG: No. Never.
HT: And were your grandparents able to help you at all financially?
LG: They would sometimes send spending money, but for the most part I would pay the difference in my tuition, and I would then have enough left over so that I could spend—Again, making a schedule and figuring out what’s important. [You] set your priorities, and do that. But I was fortunate in a lot of ways. I spent three years as an assistant director of a playground—of playgrounds—in the summer for the Charlotte Mecklenberg Recreation Department, so [I] was out there being on playgrounds every summer.
HT: And how did you get that job?
LG: I applied for it and got it. My first job—I mean, Charlotte has always been a good place for me. Not only did I enjoy high school—And I guess I did fairly well—but when I got my first [professional] job, I was employed at the school from which I graduated, West Charlotte High School. If I had any advice for anybody taking a job, it is “Do not go back and work where you graduated from four years earlier,” because all those people who taught me were still there, so regardless of how knowledgeable you are, you get dumped on because you’re the newbie. I remember my first teaching job, which was teaching social studies at West Charlotte, I taught—what was it—I taught US history; I taught geography; I taught world history. World history and geography were like the sophomore years, and then US history was the second year. And I taught something called family living which was this whole—it was supposed to be sex education without talking—without really talking about sex. And then for senior year, I taught psychology and sociology. Do you know how many lesson plans and unit plans that is? You get dumped on. In addition to that, there were all of the chaperoning requirements. You know, in high school they have dances; they have football games; they have basketball games; they have baseball games. I don’t think I’ve ever worked as hard in my life. [laughter]
HT: And probably very little pay.
LG: Not the best of pay, but it was as good as one could expect, and in the Charlotte community where I was, it was a respected job.
HT: Where did you do your student teaching while you were here?
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LG: I was at Dudley [Senior High School, Greensboro, North Carolina]. In fact, there are two major things that I remember that happened in the world during my time at the Woman’s College and UNCG. The first one, I think, was probably my sophomore year, going into junior year, and that was the Cuban blockade when I remember going downstairs. There was this big TV in the downstairs rec[creation] room, and you could go down there. otherwise there wasn’t any TV. I remember going down there and listening to [President] Kennedy’s speech that he was delivering to basically threaten and intimidate the Russians to not provide the support and bombs and rockets or whatever else to the Cubans, and kind of draw his line in the sand, if you want to call it that, and the fact that the Russians backed away. I recall that. That was the first one. Again, politics and the whole pressure thing. You know, political action. And then, of course, during my senior year, I was doing my student teaching. Had just left on November twenty-second. I was getting ready to take the bus back to campus, because we would take the public transportation going back, and I heard that John F. Kennedy had been killed and rushed back, and again, everybody stayed glued to the television to try and figure out what was going on, and lived through a fairly sad time in our nation.
HT: That was terribly sad. That was another one of the questions I was going to ask you is about the assassination and how it affected you and that sort of thing.
LG: It was a sad time, and that’s all I can basically say. It was a shock obviously.
[End CD 1—Begin CD 2]
LG: And you just kind of—I guess there were so many hopes for the Kennedy administration.
HT: Right, because he was young, and—
LG: And vibrant, and—
HT: And vibrant, right.
LG: You know, the whole Camelot thing, and I had worked on the campaign. Hey, I had to do this. Political action and policy, and so, yes.
HT: When you worked on the campaign, what type of work did you do?
LG: Oh, mailing out flyers, putting up posters: all that interesting, really important work, but it meant that you saw the posters before anybody else. You knew about all of the campaigns that were being—the money-raising campaigns, other types of campaigns. You know, keeping a calendar, that kind of thing.
HT: Well, the next thing I was going to ask you about was about the administrators and professors. You’ve already talked a bit about some of the professors on campus and the 17
chancellors. Now Dr. Pierson, William Pierson, was the chancellor. Do you have any recollection of him at all?
LG: No.
HT: He was here just a short period of time.
LG: Well, when I came, or at least the first one I remember—Now I’m not saying that Pierson wasn’t here. I just didn’t know him. And he may have spoken to us. He may have been the one that gave that wonderful speech in Aycock Auditorium where, as a freshman, to welcome you and say, “Look to your right, and look to your left. When you graduate, one of these won’t be here.” That kind of thing.
HT: That was probably Dr. Pierson. [laughter]
LG: I remember that speech; I don’t remember him.
HT: And I think Dr. Singletary was probably the person who was here that you remember the most because he was here the longest period of time.
LG: When I was here. Yes, yes he was, and he—I believe Ferguson had been a friend of Singletary’s, and Singletary had recruited Ferguson because they both were from the same university, and they both taught history, basically of the South. Yes.
HT: And then, of course, Dr. Singletary was tapped to go to Washington, DC.
LG: He left.
HT: He left. I’ve forgotten exactly when he left but it was probably during your time or close to it anyway.
LG:; Yes.
HG: And I’ve heard many people say that he was very tall and handsome and young and vibrant.
LG: Curly dark hair with glasses. [laughter] And Ferguson was more stoic, kind of grayish hair, tall still, but after I learned to understand Dr. Ferguson—he had a twang.
HT: Oh, did he?
LG: Yes, he had a fairly distinct Southern accent, and I thought I had one, but his was stronger than mine. Heavy. I think he was from Mississippi or somewhere.
HT: I think that’s right.
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LG: Yes. I think both he and Singletary were from Mississippi, so it was different.
HT: Did you by any chance know the dean of the college, Mereb Mossman?
LG: She taught me sociology.
HT: Oh, my goodness. I have never talked to anybody who’s had her for sociology.
LG: I did.
HT: What was she like as a teacher?
LG: Quiet. I had a lot of faculty who, I’m assuming, had been in the military. I had Laura Anderton who taught me—
HT: I knew Dr. Anderton.
LG: Oh, you did,
HT: I interviewed her for the [Betty Carter] Women Veterans [Historical] Project. I loved her.
LG: She had been in the [Second World] War.
HT: Yes. She was in the Navy.
LG: Oh, I didn’t know that, but I just knew—
HT: Yes, she was a WAVE [Women Accepted for Volunteer Service was established as a division of the United States Navy during World War II].
LG: There were several faculty here who had been in the war. Mossman was not one. So I’m going to get back to your question. What I’m saying that I had female models and Mossman was quieter, and she had the problem with her leg.
HT: I think a car ran over her, as I recall.
LG: But she was a strong female model. Like Anderton. They were just different, but there was no question about what women could be and could do, and I’m not sure if it’s on that statue out there of Charles Duncan McIver, but somewhere I remember, and I don’t know who told me—I don’t know what’s on that statue, it may be. “Educate a man and you educate an individual. Educate a woman and you educate a family.” I took that seriously. Sometimes it takes a while, but I do take that seriously.
HT: That was Dr. McIver’s quote.
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LG: Okay, that I recall, and I’m sitting here thinking, Okay, and I guess I learned how to ask questions, how to feel comfortable with becoming a strong woman.
HT: You mentioned women in the military. Did you by any chance know Katherine Taylor? She was in the military.
LG: I thought she was the dean of students. She was something.
HT: Yes, she was dean of women, I think at that time. She was actually a graduate of this school. She graduated, I think, in 1928, and then joined the military in World War II, and then stayed here until the very end. Another very strong woman. And there was a lot of talk in those days about that either Dean Mossman or Dean Taylor should have been the chancellor sometime during the fifties. Of course, I guess the university wasn’t quite ready for that.
LG: Not yet, not yet, but—yes. And as I recall, Ferguson was the chancellor for a long time.
HT: He was, for a very long time. So you never had Katherine Taylor for any classes or anything.
LG: I had Mossman, and, as I said, she was a quiet teacher, a calm teacher. She was the first one that I remember having us do a lot of group work, so you were forced to work with whoever you were sitting next to or whoever’s name came at number six. She would call out by sixes, and she got six groups, and you had to learn to work with some who would do work and be very competent and some maybe who wouldn’t. But that’s the value of group work.
HT: What about alumni secretary Barbara Parrish? Did you ever have any—
LG: No.
HT: Do you recall any other administrators?
LG: Not really, no. You know, we lived in a kind of insulated world.
HT: Right, and unless you did something really bad, you didn’t really get involved with an administrator too often.
LG: No, thank goodness. You also mentioned who my best teachers are. I had teachers who kind of opened the world to me, too. There are two teachers—I don’t remember, I think his name was [Frank] Laine, and he taught something called classical civilization, which was all about the Greeks and the Romans, and I loved it. It was my real—I had read some of the works of Homer, but after taking his class, I figured out I really didn’t understand them when I read them the first time. But it just opened a whole new door. We had to learn the Greek alphabet. It was just really [wonderful]. I enjoyed that class. I also 20
enjoyed my first anthropology class, because again you’re looking at the evolution of people and of ideas and man.
HT: Interesting. Well, do you recall who your favorite teacher was, since we’re talking about teachers?
LG: My favorite teacher at UNCG was—If I had to [have] one—A favorite and the one who made the biggest difference would be two different things. Sometimes your favorite is the one who is the friendliest, whereas the one who leaves a lasting impression and forces you to make the most change is not necessarily the same.
HT: That’s true.
LT: It would have to be my English teacher—my freshman English teacher, first year, and it would probably be Kurland. He was the gruffest appearing man.
HT: He certainly made a lasting impression.
LG: Oh, yes. He did on me.
HT: Fifty years later. [laughter]
LG: He did on me. Yes, because—and partly because I didn’t know anything about Russia, really, other than the propaganda and stuff that you read and listen to on the news. But I remember in Hege’s class—it was the history of Africa—and I learned about Jan Christian Smuts whom I never had heard of. She knew about him, and she suggested that I write about him, choose that as a country and write about this black leader in South Africa, but I remember that; some things that were important to me.
HT: And what was that fellow’s name?
LG: Jan Christian—It’s spelled J-A-N. Jan Christian Smuts, S-M-U-T-S.
HT: And he was from South Africa.
LG: An African leader.
HT: Well, what do you want people to know about your time at Woman’s College and UNCG? How it affected your life in the long-term.
LG: I enjoyed my time here, as I look back on it. I’m not saying there weren’t stressful moments. Goodness, four years and you’re growing up from eighteen to twenty-one or twenty-two, so there was stress, both socially, emotionally. There was stress. And academically there was stress, because you had to maintain a certain average to stay here, and I couldn’t afford to go to summer school, so I had to do well enough so that I didn’t have to. But what do I remember: I learned about being a woman. You know, sometimes 21
when you—In Charlotte, at least in my circle in Charlotte, you could be a lady or you could be a woman, and being a woman wasn’t necessarily complimentary. It had certain connotations to it, like being assertive, aggressive, you know, hostile, not necessarily desirable, but I learned that being a woman was a very positive thing. And that there was some—there was nothing to be upset about. It was something to be proud of, and it was something that if you want to be a woman, you need to be a good one. And a good one meant a competent one, and I became comfortable with that. I grew up. I’ve had to ask myself when Woman’s College became UNCG about the impact of males, and what would that mean in this college, this university. And part of me was sad to see the introduction of males to the undergraduate experience.
HT: Now men did not come until the fall of ’64 so there were no males on campus, except probably graduate—
LG: Graduate classes.
HT: Graduate classes, right. But what was it like on campus at that time when you knew that was going to be happening. What was it—
LG: I wasn’t that excited about males in classes because I had seen other situations on campus. I mean, on weekends I didn’t go out a whole lot. I would go some. There were a number of activities over at [North Carolina] A&T [State University] so we could go over to dances and parties and this whole thing about having a boyfriend, but I had seen how women’s behavior changed in the presence of men, young men, and it wasn’t something that I guess I saw as really positive for females on this campus. I saw young ladies who came to campus—Can you take that off a minute because I don’t want—
[recording paused]
LG: I think I was fearful that the campus that had taught me so much about me would become one that would more fully embrace the method—I don’t want to call it even methods, because I don’t want to say the ideas, but that women would cease to actually or would no longer stress their own ideas and recognize the importance of their ideas and carry things through.
HT: That actually did happen. Once the men started coming here, they started assuming roles of leadership and the women sort of took a—
LG: Back seat.
HT: Back seat. It happened fairly quickly in the seventies. It’s amazing, and there weren’t that many men.
22
LG: There didn’t have to be. They were in the class, and in classes with the women, and the women wanted to be viewed as ladies. And that, to me, was sad.
HT: Well, have you forgiven the university for changing, even after fifty years?
LG: I appreciate UNCG and I’m not one who was opposed to the changing of the name. If there was a way for UNCG to remain UNCG and be a Woman’s College, I would have just been gloriously happy. There are others who obviously are more affiliated and have longer affiliations either through their own parents, because I still remember that question on the application form: “Is your parent a graduate of this—” I remember that, so they have more invested in the name, the Woman’s College, and while I am proud to have been a student at the Woman’s College, I don’t have any problem with being a graduate of UNCG. I think that the university, as it grew—and some of this is probably informed by East Carolina, too, so you have to understand this—but as the university system grew, the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, took on a whole different identity, not separate from the Woman’s College, but built upon the Woman’s College, and if we had been (we, the Woman’s College administration and students) possibly had been strong enough, we could have made it a safer haven for some of our young ladies. And I’m saying safer, but I mean safe for them to be who they were and to actually realize their own potential, but with the coming of men came the changing of the guard, so to speak. That’s the only negative I can see about the change. [laughter]
HT: Well, how have you been involved with the college and university since you graduated in 1964?
LG: Honestly, not much until about—it will soon be ten years. Maybe it took them that long to find me, because we moved about. My husband is an A&T graduate and we would move about every three and a half years—get transferred somewhere different—and I didn’t really hear from the university until we were firmly here, and I was at East Carolina. And I started at East Carolina in 1990—the ’90 to ’91 year.
HT: So your husband’s job or your job—
LG: His job.
HT: Made you move around.
LG: His job was good for me because after—I got my master’s while he was still here. I was living in Greensboro, and we traveled back and forth. I wasn’t able to live on campus because we had a little girl at that time, but I got it from Chapel Hill, just traveling back and forth every day to Chapel Hill. I worked for the Guilford County DSS [Department of Social Services]. I taught my first year and a half after UNCG, and then I started working for the Guilford County Department of Social Services, and they had a program which would support your going for your master’s degree, and I latched on to that. Betsy Carrier told me about it, and I got onto it, and Guilford County paid for my master’s degree. 23
HT: Wonderful.
LG: I was an employee of the Guilford County Department of Social Services and they supported it, even the field placements. You could get a stipend from the county to cover it. You had to pay it back or work it off, basically two for one. So that was a good thing for me, and then when we were living in New Jersey, I think, and my husband got transferred to Houston, and I didn’t really want to go. I was working at Temple University at the time, leading a project in gerontology at the Institute on Aging up there, and he said, “Well, they’ve got wonderful universities in Houston. See if any of them have something you’d like, and then we’ll just talk about a doctorate.” “Well, I’ll go.” [laughing] Packed up the kids and here we go to Houston.
HT: What line of work is your husband in?
LG: He was a project manager [or] what they call a procurement engineer. Basically he was in purchasing and purchasing materials, and he was in Houston with Aramco. And so he spent like—how long?—He was gone for eighteen months one time in Saudi Arabia, and I was going to school and finished. I finished my doctorate in 1985 after having been a clinical social worker since 1969.
HT: Did you like Houston?
LG: Everything except the traffic. We lived in [Stafford, Texas, a suburb].
HT: My sister lives there so I know exactly what you’re talking about.
LG: We lived in Fort Bend County, which is south of Harris County. Houston is in Harris County. Fort Bend—We lived in Stafford, which is in Fort Bend County, and it was about twenty or twenty-five minutes from downtown Houston, but it took me an hour almost to get to the University of Houston. But that was alright. I ended up with two kids. My daughter is Jannifer and she and her husband are the parents of our three grandchildren. And I have a son, Jeffrey, who is five, six years younger than Jannifer, and he has two daughters. So that’s our children and grandchildren. [laughter]
HT: If I can backtrack for just a second to A&T and social life and that sort of thing. What kind of social life did you have on campus? Or did you have much of a social life? It sounds like you were terribly busy with studying and that sort of thing.
LG: Well, you make yourself study, but you learn—You finally get to the point where you’ve got it pat. You know what your schedule is; I knew what my schedule was like, and most of my friends knew when they could find me in the dorms, and we would either play Bid Whist [card game] or Pinochle [card game]. It was a really big thing to be invited to the different dances and other types of social events over at A&T, and, yes, I met my husband during my junior year on Mother’s Day. It was the first Mother’s Day I didn’t go home, so Marian Thornhill McClure and her date got me a blind date who ended up being my husband. [laughter] Yes. 24
HT: So that worked out very well.
LG: Yes, but, yes, going to A&T for dances, for different social events, maybe you do what you have to do. I’m not a victim. I chose to come to UNCG, to the Woman’s College, to come to UNCG. I knew what I was getting into. It wasn’t something that I came here and everyone here was a total surprise. I’m not—Don’t even suggest that. As I said, my very first incident of integration was the whole Dorothy Counts situation. And she had lived like four blocks from us, so she was—and had been one of my classmates—so I knew the worst. And when I came here, there was Clara, there was Elizabeth, and my roommate was Diane so I knew at least four people on campus, one in my class, but at least four. And we all lived through different degrees of this. Probably Clara must have had it the worst, because she came earlier. Elizabeth’s probably was worse than mine, and our little class. No, no, not a victim. I knew what I was getting into, chose it, and I have to say, that having survived it, it’s made me who I am. It’s made me a stronger person and I’m very thankful for that, very grateful.
HT: You’ve mentioned this young woman a couple of times: Dorothy—
LG: Counts.
HT: Is it C-O-U-N-T-S?
LG: Yes.
HT: Okay, I want to make sure I get that correct. And she’s the student who tried to integrate—
LG: Harding High School.
HT: I think you said she only stayed there about a week or so, is that right?
LG: About a week, yes. It was really bad. It reminded you of some of the incidents that you might have heard about James Meredith in Mississippi and others. Lots of vile language, spitting, throwing things.
HT: I think the same thing happened here in Greensboro when the young woman tried to—Well, she did integrate Grimsley High School.
LG: It was not pretty.
HT: In the fifties, right.
LG: And so when I—You need to hear this, too. What I experienced was nothing near what I think she experienced. The university was aware of some of the tensions and some of the actions that had—that others had faced, and they did make an effort to control that. At least, that’s my opinion. And while there were some—I think you can’t control 25
everybody—there were some people who made their ideas known. For the most part, I was either ignored by the majority students or ignored, tolerated, or befriended, at different levels, same continuum.
HT: And what about the instructors? I’ve talked to a couple of former students who said they were actually ignored by their instructors in the classes. They sort of looked right through you or over you, or something like that. Did you ever experience anything like that? And Dr. Bardolph was one of those people. Of course—
LG: As I said, Bardolph never put me in one of his classes, so I’m assuming he did that to benefit me, and I’m appreciative of the fact, maybe, that he never put me in one of his classes, because the faculty that I did have, at least in history, were good faculty.
HT; And they’d call on you and—
LG: Oh, yes. I’d always sit in the front of the room, because I didn’t want to go in the back because you couldn’t always hear and I couldn’t—I wear glasses, and I wore glasses then—I couldn’t always see the board so I would sit very close to the front of the room. And that can be a danger, because if you sit too closely, [they] assume you know some answers, and they will call on you and you may or may not know it. But also if you raise your hand, they see you. No, the worst time I had—Those first few English papers—terrible. And saying—Because I thought I knew English, and I thought I was good in grammar—and saying, well, you know: Is he picking on me? Is he being racist here? You know, what’s he doing? Is he discriminating against me? And I remember going to him, and we sat, and he went through every one of those things, every one of those red marks, and he said, “Now, I think you can do better.”
And I said, “I will.” And I just made a point, as I said, even though he didn’t ask for it, I would redo every one of those papers.
HT: Did you turn them in?
LG: No. I didn’t need to. I had met with him at least the first one, and I knew the kind of errors that he would identify, so it was important to me to have fewer red [marks] on the next ones. And I also began the practice of starting a paper—If I knew I had a paper due at the end of the month, I would have it written by the fifteenth, and then I would go back to it maybe two weeks before or a week and a half before, and then I’d go back to it like three days before when I would actually type it up, and my work improved. Partly, I’m sure, because I paid more attention to it.
HT: Sure, and you gave yourself some time, which is very important.
LG: That planning piece.
HT: Well, what impact did the university have on your life? I think we have covered that just a little bit.
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LG: Well, as I said, it helped me define who I am; it helped me be comfortable with who I am, and—I’m going to give you this aside here—
HT: Okay.
LG: It used to drive my husband crazy, but he would make these statements when we first met and were dating, and he would say, “Such and such” and I would say, “Why?” And he’d say, “What is it with you? Every time I say something or want to do something, you ask me why.” I said, “Because I want to know why.” He said, “Is there ever going to be a time when you don’t ask why?” I said, “Well, Bob, if ever we’re married, and I’m a Griffin as long as I’ve been a Ward, the Ward will ask ‘Why.’ The Griffin: ‘Okay, I’ll listen to you.’ But the Ward will ask ‘Why’ and will want to understand why before taking any type of action.” Of myself and anybody and of him, too. And I don’t think I was that way before Woman’s College. Now I would ask questions in a class, but outside the class and just making it a part of me. I learned to ask why and to understand why, before acting. And to plan while here. Structuring my days and my weeks and allocating funds to myself, so that I’d make sure that I had enough to last me: that was all part of being here.
HT: So that sounds like it was a good fit for you.
LG: It was a good fit for me, because, as I said, I had a good sense of what I was doing, where I was going, and it wasn’t a surprise. There were some negatives; I mean I’m not suggesting there weren’t: the whole fact that there were Sit-ins, the whole fact that—As I said, I’ll never forget being in one half of one dorm floor. It didn’t do a whole lot for my ego, but ultimately I tend to be a glass half-full person. You can always concentrate on the negatives if that’s what you choose to do. I chose not to do that.
HT: Well what do you want people to know about your time here at Woman’s College and UNCG that we haven’t covered already?
LG: Well, I don’t know that I always appreciated the Woman’s College when I was here. It was hard, a lot of work, lot of determination, lot of painful experiences—some of them personal, some of them academic, some of them just growth related—but it was an environment that allowed me to become. You know, we’re all in the process of becoming in one way or another, and it allowed me to become. To take another step in becoming.
HT: It sounds like you’ve done a variety of jobs since you graduated from here.
LG: Every three and a half years. [laughter]
HT: Tell me a little bit more about—I guess this will be the last question. Tell me a little bit more about what you’ve done since you left here. I know you were assistant provost at East Carolina for a period of years.
LG: For academic programs, yes. 27
HT: You just retired from there not too long ago.
LG: Retired on July first of 2013, yes. Well, as I said, about every three and a half years, Bob would move—get shipped to another location.
HT: It sounds like you were in the military almost.
LG: Almost. Industry, oh yes. And he would—And there were times when he was away. As I said, eighteen months in Saudi Arabia, but he would come home every three months. But still, most of the teaching, I enjoyed. I just didn’t like teaching high school, because it was—with six preparations, it was just a bit much, plus all of that chaperoning, which really gets old.
I’ve enjoyed being a social worker, and when I have to figure out one word to describe who I am, I tend to be wife, mother, social worker. Social work opened lots of doors for me; it’s also a profession that allowed me to take on different roles in many locations; and I’ve been a social worker since the end of 1969. And I stayed a social worker. It allowed me to get onto the college campus which subsequently—the college campus as an employee, as a faculty person—which subsequently led me to return [for] the doctorate and go into education, actually teaching. I taught at West Virginia University for, oh, about four years, and then we got shipped—not shipped, transferred—to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and I said, “There’s nothing in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The closest university was East Carolina, and Bob and I drove over there one day, and I walked into their office, to the School of [Social Work]. There were two schools of social work in our state at that time: one was, of course, Chapel Hill; and the other was East Carolina. I walked into their School of Social Work office, and I said, “Do you have any vacancies?” Now, woe be, that’s not the way you apply for a job normally, but I did. And the dean happened to be in that day, and she had her associate dean come down, and they interviewed me right there. I hadn’t even applied, and they interviewed me right there and told me they would send me the application and to make a point to submit it—to complete it—send it back, and about—I guess two months later—I went in for an interview with the faculty and everybody else, and then started there. I’ve never really had a hard time finding a job with my MSW [Master of Social Work], and so for me it’s been the degree that opened the door. The doctorate allowed me to stay at a university, but the MSW opened the doors. So I taught and started as an assistant professor, moved to associate, and then to full professor, and I was the department chair, I was an interim dean, and then in 2005, the vice chancellor asked if I would agree to, on an interim basis, be the associate vice chancellor for academic programs. And I said, “Well, for an interim, because I’m planning on retiring in a couple of years.” Well, I stayed there for eight years. They changed the title from associate vice chancellor to associate provost for academic programs. And, in that role, I was responsible for all new degree programs, for all of the assessment activities of new degree programs, for making sure that the proposals that went forward to the UNC system were approved by the Board of Governors, and none came back while I was on the job, thank you. I enjoyed my academic career and I’ve enjoyed my clinical career.
HT: And are you enjoying retirement? 28
LG: Very much, very much. We’ve been traveling. In fact, our [last] Christmas [was] spent on a cruise ship from Amsterdam, Holland; then we went down around Spain; we went to Madeira, to Tenerife; Los Palmas; and came back to Casablanca and Morocco; and that’s our fifth cruise. We’ve been cruising. We decided to start cruising. I guess our first one was like in 2006 or ’07, and the point was to get ourselves ready to do things and to be comfortable so we’ve tried to do at least one trip a month somewhere. We’ve visited Savannah, [Georgia]. We’re just doing a lot of traveling, seeing things that we never had a chance to see when we were both working. Bob ended up at East Carolina, too. He was the project manager—not project manager, what was his—He was contract manager for the university, so he handled all their major contracts as a part of purchasing. It was like an associate director of purchasing. He was a contract manager. It served us well. He retired two years before I did. It worked.
HT: It sounds great. Well, I don’t have any more formal questions. Do you have anything else you’d like to add?
LG: No.
HT: That we haven’t covered. We’ve covered quite a bit this morning. [laughter]
LG: Probably more than you asked for.
HT: I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things, but—
LG: No, I—If you talk about this university, it’s a special place for me. And that’s probably because of the different processes that went on when I was maturing and growing up here. Because I don’t think—You know people think about growing up in your teen years, and I guess you do. But for me, being on my own, if you want to call it that, and having to make sure that I earned the money to stay here was important. It told me that I could do it. My high school yearbook has a—You know you have to give a saying, and it is “Give to the world the best that you have and the best will come back to you” and I tend to live that way, at least I try to. So that if you’re going to do something, you may as well do it right, and you may as well do it well. And I think that’s another thing I learned from here.
HT: It sounds like you have some good memories from here.
LG: I have some good ones and I have some bad ones, but I have some good ones. Thank goodness, the majority are positive, though.
HT: Well, thank you so much. It’s been a joy meeting you after many attempts over the years. I think I’ve been trying for like four or five.
LG: No, about two or three.
HT: Well, I’m so glad you could make it today, and I hope you have a wonderful trip back. 29
LG: This has been a good week-end. I enjoyed the luncheon yesterday with the chancellor, and the game—even though we didn’t win it. The basketball team didn’t win it. It was a good one. And it was just a good time so I have no complaints.
HT: Well, again, thank you.
[End of Interview]