Oral history interview with Charlotte S. Perkins, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Charlotte S. Perkins
INTERVIEWER: Linda Danford
DATE: October 22, 1990
LD: Dr. Perkins, can you tell me something about when you came to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro] and in what capacity?
CP: I came when Dr. Herman Middleton [communication and theatre professor] was starting a speech section to his drama department. And I came to teach one class because I had a three-month-old baby at home, and each semester I would add another class until I was finally teaching full time. And it was very interesting because they had always had a drama department, but they had never taught speech, per se. Then they—I think about—it must have been—
LD: This was in what year? This was in 1960?
CP: This was 1960, and about 1965 we started the speech pathology division of the speech department, and all of this has changed in title. Now it's called the Division of Communication Disorders, and the department is called the communication and theatre department. So that was why I came, and I stayed until 1977. And I am not Dr. Perkins. I missed that little piece of paper because [laughs] I was eight years—eight hours—away from my PhD, and I got married. And there was no place in this part of the country to finish my PhD. There was a program at University of Virginia [Charlottesville, VA] which I could have gotten a doctor[ate] in education, so I kept working on graduate work and decided one year to go and just get the doctor[ate] of education. And by that time I had three children. And we were all set to go. I had an apartment; the department was all set up at UNC—at University of Virginia. And the children suddenly balked. And it was—they thought we were breaking up the family because I was going to take them with me while my husband stayed here to work. [laughs] So that's what happened to my PhD.
LD: How old were they at the time?
CP: My youngest was six, and, of course it was upsetting to them, but to think of me being—daddy in North Carolina [laughs]—
LD: It was nice of you to be taking them with you. I would—nowadays, the husband would be expected to keep the children while you went off and did the rest of your degree.
CP: [laughs] Well, I knew I couldn't concentrate if they were that far away. So that's what happened to my PhD. But this was one of the charming things about UNCG. You were 2
supposed to have that piece of paper. It was like a union card, and I did not have it. And yet no one ever treated me with anything except the utmost respect. Dr. Middleton, Dr. [Richard] Dixon [professor of communication disorders], all the people I worked with always showed great deference. They were just charming. And I understand other people had bad, bad times. And the other thing that was remarkable—I don't think this happens anymore—but at that time Dr. Middleton realized that I had this baby at home, and he would check with me before he scheduled my classes to see when he was in nursery school, I got out so that I could pick him up. [laughs] It was just—I had a very happy experience at UNCG. And one of the things that I remember—of course, when I went it was a women's college, and one of the things that I remember being so impressed with was that Mereb Mossman [faculty in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, dean of instruction, dean of the college, dean of faculty, vice chancellor for academic affairs] was chancellor [Editor’s note: Miss Mossman was never chancellor] at the time. And Tommy Lou Smith [business education instructor, associate dean of women, assistant professor in the School of Business and Economics] was the dean of academic advising, and those two women were such good role models for students. They both had great dignity. They were efficient. Mereb Mossman ran that university with much less staff than anybody ever had before or since, but she did it. I'm sure she never slept or had any life of her own. But it was a well-administered institution.
LD: Now you don't mean chancellor. Chancellor is like the president of the university.
CP: Yes. She was the president of UNCG at that time.
LD: I think she was the dean. [Interviewer note: Dr. James Ferguson served as acting chancellor from 1964 to 1966 while Dr. Otis Singletary was on a leave of absence.]
CP: No. She—I've forgotten who it was that had left. I think maybe it was Singletary, and she was interim chancellor for a long time. But this was when—we were all just astounded. Here was this woman who was just managing everything with the greatest poise and ease. I'm sure there was grumbling, but there's always been grumbling. That's the nature of a faculty is to grumble. [laughs] But it was— there were no upheavals. There were no tremendous problems when she was in charge.
LD: I've heard her described as the iron hand in the velvet glove.
CP: She really had great poise and dignity, but you knew when she said, "We're not going to do that," that we were not going to do it. [laughs] So you didn't waste a lot of tears over it. But she did—she was there during the period when they were building all over the campus; every place you started to go, you had to walk over construction and all that was going on while she was chancellor and she handled that as well. So that was an interesting time. The other thing that I was trying to remember—when I retired, I didn't retire so much as retreat. I have never been back on the campus. I have never gone to visit or peek over somebody's shoulder to see what they were doing. I just said my goodbyes and left.
So a lot of things that happened I have just kind of pushed to the back of my mind. But one thing that I do remember was in the '60s the students were so different. They 3
were probably the most propagandized group of young people that have ever existed. You know, they were just bombarded from all sides to protest and to stand up for their rights and so on. And one of the things that I remember they always talked about was, "Is this relevant?" It didn't matter what the subject matter was. "Is this relevant?" Well, of course, your immediate reaction was, "Relevant to what?" Because at that point they were out doing sit-ins and what not, so the academic world could hardly be relevant. [laughs] And it was also a time when I was teaching huge classes. I had lecture in Taylor Theatre that had a hundred and fifty people in it. And between me and the students was this orchestra pit, and here were all these protestors with their hats down over their eyes, and I was supposed to engage them in intellectual activity. I hated it. And they hated it. And after a while I didn't teach that big class because I went—I concentrated more on speech pathology, and the classes were smaller and probably the students were exactly like the others, but they didn't seem so because you could see them.
LD: There weren't so many of them there.
CP: And you could react and interact.
LD: What class was that big lecture course?
CP: It was the freshman speech class.
LD: And what did they do in the freshman speech class?
CP: It was a class that was required of people who were going to teach, and the point was to improve their communication so that whatever they knew they could impart to their students without being difficult to understand and so on. And then the speech pathology majors were all in that class. And the drama majors were all in that class, so it was a mixture of a lot of different people. And I—from time to time in the grocery store I’ll encounter one of the students, and they remember me. And that's the thing, I think, about being a professor. You're on the stage. [laughs] They know all about you, and you can hardly see them. And you don't know who you're talking to. The smaller groups of students were fascinating. One class I taught that I enjoyed very much and the students I think enjoyed it because it was good for anybody. It was language development in children. And they went out and got samples of language from children. Sometimes they were relatives, and sometimes they just borrowed somebody's child, and when they were in a desperate situation, I would have the class out to my house—we lived in a neighborhood where there were lots of children, so the mothers would bring the children over and let the students talk to them. It was fascinating because some of their language samples—you could see them understanding that a child doesn't develop language if he isn’t stimulated. And some of them would have the tape running and the child wouldn't be doing anything, and they would say, "I don't understand how you get a child to react." [laughs]
LD: You mean stimulated to say something?
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CP: Yes. And, of course, the child couldn't have cared less whether the tape was running or not. But it was one of the nicest classes. Another thing I did that—at the time I thought I must be insane. We had—the seniors had to have so many hours of clinical practice. And part of that clinical practice was in the public schools. And there weren't so many public schools that had speech pathology in their curriculum, so one year I commuted from Greensboro to Raleigh [North Carolina] and from Greensboro to Charlotte [North Carolina] and from Greensboro to Mount Airy [North Carolina] and taught twelve hours in between that.
LD: In order to supervise the students?
CP: Yes, because you had to make sure they were performing and that they were able to put in practice what they had allegedly learned. Of course, there was a speech clinician who was in charge and she actually did most of the training of the students, but you had to check on them.
LD: Were all education students required to have this introduction to speech, that large class?
CP: No. The freshman course was required only of the people who failed the speech test. They gave a test at the beginning. And the students who failed were ones who made no eye contact or who spoke so softly that you could imagine the classroom just going wild with somebody that ineffective. And sometimes they had such thick accents that unless a person lived in the same town that they had lived in, they had been unable to understand them. So it was so—it was a challenge. The lecture was not the only thing. After they had the lecture, then they had small groups. I think there weren't any more than twenty in the classes where they actually did their thing. [chuckles]
LD: Speeches?
CP: Yes. Did their speeches.
LD: So this was not directed at English majors specifically?
CP: No. I'm not sure we had any more English majors than anyone. We had a lot of students who were going into early childhood education, who were going to teach the early grades. And at that time—as I said, at that time students’ attitudes were very strange, and I remember one girl explaining why she was going to teach first grade. She said, "I figure I know more than they do." [laughs]
LD: I don't know if that's so strange. I think that there are some who still make their choices on such a basis. So your background, your specialty, was speech pathology?
CP: Yes.
LD: And I know the department now does have quite a program. They take a lot of children on campus. I have neighbors whose children have— 5
CP: Well, when we started—we started about the time we that moved into Taylor Building, and we built the clinic down on the—really, I guess it was the basement floor. And I think there only about six or seven rooms. And the program started immediately with patients coming to the clinic. But obviously you couldn't take in too many because you were limited in space. Now they are in a new building, and I have not seen it but I assume—
LD: It's next to the Education Building.
CP: —it's a much bigger clinic. I think that very shortly after we started we got an audiologist so that they did speech and hearing testing and speech and hearing therapy.
LD: What about students who—what year did you retire?
CP: Seventy-seven [1977].
LD: Were you getting any students—? I know, I think right now there's a—tendency is the wrong word—but there seems to be a lot of students in communications who are planning to go into broadcasting. Did you get—did you have students back in the '70s who were—that’s a very popular field for—
CP: Yes. They were doing television I would say maybe the last five years. I'm not sure about the dates, but there were things—it was like being part of a circus. There were the people who were doing the stage. There were the people who were doing the television. There were the people who were doing public speaking. And then there the people who were doing the speech pathology. And when you got together in a staff meeting it was almost like being part of a regular faculty meeting because everybody had such special interests. And sometimes it was a bit difficult to keep your mind on what their problems were when you knew you needed to get back to your own problems. [Laughs] You know I really can't think of anything else to say. The—one of the reasons I have never gone back is not because I had any ill feeling toward the university, but the people I was closest to and enjoyed most were students, and they graduated when I graduated. So I had, I really had very little urge to go back and visit.
LD: What about the transition from Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina] to a coeducational institution?
CP: It was the kind of thing when you first heard about it you thought, "Oh, surely not," because they had defended it so long. And the dean of women, who was Katherine Taylor, [Class of 1928, dean of students] said, "We're going to have men." And somebody said, "Are you committing suicide?" And she said, "No, I'm just facing reality. We are going to have men students."
And at first we had very few, and they felt very awkward. They were more defensive than anyone. But then it began to smooth out, and there was just no problem at all. About the same time that that happened, I think, a lot of women who had abandoned their education for children, to have children, came back, and it seems to me that about 6
the time that I began to have men in my classes I also began to have women who were in their late thirties and forties. And they were absolutely delightful. They were petrified. They were sure they couldn't study. They were sure that they were outdated and all that. But they were so serious and they were so determined to do well that they lifted the whole class. You know, everybody was trying to compete with them.
LD: I had exactly that same experience in my Latin class. I had two women in their late thirties, and they were—they really were very conscientious, and they did a wonderful job. And it does spur the whole class.
CP: It was such a pleasure to see them develop confidence, to realize that they could do it, and that they hadn't lost all their study skills and that sort of thing. For the most part they were delightful women—people that you were really pleased to teach because they were bright and had enough experience to not fall apart at the seams if something that was scheduled didn't quite come off.
LD: And highly motivated.
CP: Yes.
LD: What about—I haven't interviewed anyone in the drama department, and I've wondered what the practice was when the drama department, prior to men coming on campus, produced a play. Did they invite men to come and play?
CP: Yes. Yes. And I have had such a checkered career. I taught at Greensboro College [Greensboro, North Carolina]. Then I went and taught at LSU [Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana]. Then I came back and taught at Greensboro College, and then I went to UNCG. While I was at Greensboro College, we were getting men from the community for our plays and UNCG was getting men from the community, so we had a little competition going on. And it felt very strange when I came to UNCG to realize that I was now working for these people who had been giving me such a bad time when we were fighting over the same men. [laughs] But Greensboro had a lot of—well, the people that we used at Greensboro College were young lawyers who needed to get some experience on their feet in front of an audience. It was a remarkable thing. They were the last people I would thought of, but they were the ones who volunteered, who came to tryouts and who turned out to be very good performers. So there was a kind of a core of people who enjoyed being in plays, and I don't think that they felt there was any great competition. It just meant there were some other plays they could be in. If Greensboro College wasn't doing something they wanted to do, UNCG would be, so there was always this opportunity to perform. And I think those people must have moved on to the community theater after both schools got men students because it would be too bad to take a part away from a student to give to somebody in the community.
LD: What about the leadership of your department? Who was the—Herman Middleton was the chairman of the department when you came?
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CP: Yes. He was chairman when I came and he was there—I think he gave up the chairmanship and just went back to teaching. But I think he was there until maybe a couple of years before I left. Because I—it was such a short time that I never established the same kind of relationship with Dr. [John] Jellicorse [professor and head of the drama and speech department] that I'd had with Dr. Middleton because in the meantime the communication disorders section was directed by Dr. Dixon, and my contact was with him. So it wasn't—I didn't—I'm sure that Dr. Middleton must have been there until I left in '77. I think he must have been there until '75, must have been the chairman until '75.
LD: The chairman. And then continued to teach. I know he was still producing plays when we moved here in '76. But Dr. Middleton was theater. That was his background.
CP: Yes.
LD: Dr. Jellicorse was communication, is that right?
CP: Yes.
LD: Do you think—is it true that the communications part of the department has grown or eclipsed the theater or do you think—?
CP: I'm not sure. I don't know. As I say, I've just have never gone back.
LD: I believe that the communications department is the department that has grown in the last ten years quite phenomenally on campus.
CP: I would think so, yes. There's such a turnover in television that I would think students had the feeling that here, at least, is a place they could get a job, whereas the theater is kind of iffy earning your living. I've always felt that students have wondered whether they could support themselves after they graduated in the theater. Of course, some of them have. Some of them have done very well. There was a student who was in one of those huge courses who was interested in children's theater, and I remember saying to her, "That sounds very practical because that's a group that every community has." Every community has a bunch of parents who would like their children to be in plays. So she did children's theater and—. For years and years and years now, she has directed the Livestock Theater which is part of the Greensboro Parks and Recreation Department.
LD: Do you remember her name?
CP: Barbara Britton [Class of 1969]. Very talented girl, and one of the students who was just very serious about what she was doing. She was determined she was going to earn her living in the theater. And she was going to do something that was practical, and it worked for her.
LD: What about the Theater for Young People? Do you remember when that got started? My children have really enjoyed those. 8
CP: Oh, yes. And the man who started that program, I suppose he's still doing it, Tom Behm [professor of theatre] is just very talented and always understood how to appeal to children as an audience. I think, it seems to me, it probably was the last ten years that I was there because it grew—it was growing faster than other things grew. Another interesting group of people in that department were the costumers. There was always a person who was hired to design the costumes. And there were several people I met, worked with—I didn't actually work with them, but met in faculty meetings. They were so talented, artistic and creative and stage costumes is such a marvelous field anyway. You’re such make believe. You use all kinds of things like [unclear] flannel that looks like velvet when you get the stage lights on it, that sort of thing. I really—I think I’ve just about shot my wad. [laughs]
LD: Well, that's okay. I appreciate the interview, and these interviews are very informative for me. I’m learning a lot about UNCG. It turned into quite a pleasant experience.
CP: I suspect that when—
LD: You want me to turn it off? I'll turn it off.
[End of interview]