Legacies Project Oral History: Gail Beaver

Mon, 08/29/2022 - 11:54am

When: 2022

Transcript

• [00:00:13] Gail Beaver: Now the news.
• [00:00:13] FEMALE_1: [inaudible 00:00:13]
• [00:00:18] MALE_1: [inaudible 00:00:18]
• [00:00:24] Gail Beaver: Are you not going to be on screen at all?
• [00:00:27] MALE_1: We can to begin with everything.
• [00:00:28] FEMALE_1: Hi dear, look at camera. Your eyes can under, please not look directly at the camera lens like you're in office.
• [00:00:40] Gail Beaver: Okay.
• [00:00:41] MALE_1: This should last anywhere between 72 minutes hopefully, and through the middle of answering question, we have to change the paper. I'll ask you to hold that thought. Well, we change the tape and we'll pick up where we left off on the new tape. You can take a break or ask for a break anytime you want to just you can also remember that you can decline to answer any questions or terminate the interview at any time for any given reason.
• [00:01:10] Gail Beaver: I cross my legs. [LAUGHTER] Does my legs show.
• [00:01:16] FEMALE_1: No, it's pretty safe.
• [00:01:17] Gail Beaver: Good. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:01:23] FEMALE_1: We do a countdown? Let's get started. Please say your name?
• [00:01:30] Gail Beaver: My name is Gail Beaver.
• [00:01:32] FEMALE_1: What is your date of birth, including the year?
• [00:01:36] Gail Beaver: It's May 19th, 1939.
• [00:01:41] FEMALE_1: How would you describe your ethnic background?
• [00:01:44] Gail Beaver: Well, it's pretty easy, I'm half Italian and half Irish with a little bit of English thrown in.
• [00:01:53] FEMALE_1: You have any religious affiliations?
• [00:01:55] Gail Beaver: Yes, I'm Catholic.
• [00:01:58] FEMALE_1: What is the highest form of education you have completed? Did you attend additional school or formal career training beyond what you completed?
• [00:02:06] Gail Beaver: I have two master's degrees, one in theater and another in library science.
• [00:02:14] FEMALE_1: Is your spouse still living?
• [00:02:16] Gail Beaver: Yes, he is. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:02:18] FEMALE_1: How many children do you have?
• [00:02:19] Gail Beaver: We have three.
• [00:02:20] FEMALE_1: How many siblings do you have?
• [00:02:22] Gail Beaver: I don't have any.
• [00:02:24] FEMALE_1: What do you consider your primary occupation?
• [00:02:28] Gail Beaver: At this point? Well, I'm retired, so my primary obligation and occupation right now is doing whatever volunteer work I can.
• [00:02:39] FEMALE_1: What age did you retire?
• [00:02:42] Gail Beaver: I'm not sure. [LAUGHTER] I can't quite remember. It's been awhile. I retired from being a school librarian in the Ann Arbor District,19 years ago, but I kept another position I had as a lecturer at the University for the next maybe eight or nine years so it's been over 10 years that I've been retired now.
• [00:03:08] FEMALE_1: Now to be in the part of our interview, we're going to ask you to recall some things by your family's history. We're going to begin with like family name history. Do you know any stories about your family?
• [00:03:18] Gail Beaver: Well, my family name is actually interesting. My last name, my maiden name is Place. P-L-A-C-E. A lot of people asked me to spell it just like they asked me to spell Beaver. Because nobody quite [LAUGHTER] believes it, but my maiden name Place is English, and so that's the little part of my English heritage that I mentioned. We know that it came from a person who was probably an indentured servant in the 1600s. He came not right to the United States, but to Nova Scotia and then down in 1642, supposedly on a ship called the True Love so that we've discovered over the years. That part of my history, actually has been traced so those people came down through Nova Scotia then into New England, than across upstate New York, where my grandfather was born, and then into northern Pennsylvania where I was born.
• [00:04:32] FEMALE_1: Are there any naming traditions in your family?
• [00:04:35] Gail Beaver: I think there probably were particularly on the Italian side. It was common for my grandfather, for example, was named for his mother, was common for the first son to be named by the father, usually for someone in his family so I think that was true, but I don't think is true too much anymore. Although I guess in a way it is true because I say we named our son for both our fathers who had the same name so that was an easy one.
• [00:05:13] FEMALE_1: Why did your ancestors leave to come to the United States?
• [00:05:17] Gail Beaver: It's hard to know. Probably almost everybody who left, left for economic reasons. They just where they lived it was poor and they heard that there was so much more to be had. If you came to the United States and they were difficult trips, that wasn't easy to get here and leaving family, leaving parents behind. I know it was difficult so for the Italian and the Irish, I think for the Englishman back in 1600, he didn't have a choice.
• [00:05:52] FEMALE_1: Which family members came along and which one stayed behind?
• [00:05:57] Gail Beaver: For my Italian grandmother, and also my Italian grandfather. Their parents stayed behind. For my grandfather actually, his father came with all five of his sons, brought them to America and then he went back and it's notable that he left the only daughter back in Italy too. For my grandmother, her brother and sister had come first, and then she was left home with her parents. But when they were ready to pay for her to come, then she left and they never went back. On my Irish side, I'm not sure who was left behind.
• [00:06:48] FEMALE_1: Do you know how many possessions that they brought with them and why?
• [00:06:53] Gail Beaver: Well, I'm wearing one that my grandmother brought, but I don t think they brought anything that was very valuable. They just didn't have that sort of thing.
• [00:07:06] FEMALE_1: Why did your grandmother bring the necklace?
• [00:07:09] Gail Beaver: Well, she just brought the little brooch. I don't know why she brought it. I guess it was something of value to her and it was given to me, so I'm very happy to have it.
• [00:07:23] FEMALE_1: What stories came down to you about your parents and grandparents and more distant relatives?
• [00:07:30] Gail Beaver: Well, my favorite story, I guess, was the most commonly known one is that my mother came from an Italian family, my father came from an English-Irish family, but mostly at that point Irish. In terms of the town where we lived, it was one side and the other side, and this was not a match made in heaven. Nobody wanted this to happen. [LAUGHTER] In the end, it did because they didn't have much choice, but my parents were going to get married no matter what. But it wasn't the happy news that the families were looking for. [LAUGHTER] Some things still exist as they did then.
• [00:08:21] FEMALE_1: Your parents were basically on opposite sides of the tracks likely?
• [00:08:25] Gail Beaver: That's pretty much it.
• [00:08:26] FEMALE_1: So how did they end up getting together then?
• [00:08:28] Gail Beaver: I don't know. They met at a dance, that's all I know. They did share Catholic religion. So it probably had something to do with that, I'm not sure. But my father came from in those days in the little town, they had something called wards where people voted, but in fact they were where people lived. My father lived in the fighting Fifth Ward, which was the Irish ward. My mother lived in another section of town and I don't know. As I say, I think it probably was at a dance. That's the best I can figure out. But they were married quite soon after they met, my mother was the youngest of four sisters and in those days also, you really waited for your older sister who was engaged, by the way, but was working to have enough money to get married. Then the next one down was also dating someone and earning money so that she could get married, and here comes along my mother, who was the young upstart who said no, I'm getting married first and then I'll earn the money. That's how it went and they gave into her, I'm not sure. I suppose they figured they better or they would run off together, I don't know.
• [00:09:58] FEMALE_1: We're going to transition into your childhood. Remember you can choose to either take a break or not answer any questions should they make you too uncomfortable. Where did you grow up? What are your strongest memories of what you did?
• [00:10:11] Gail Beaver: I grew up in Bradford, Pennsylvania, which is, if you know anything about Western New York State and Pennsylvania, I grew up in a town which was 70 miles South of Buffalo, New York. It was an oil Boomtown, which meant that in fact, that's how my grandfather got to town was because of the oil boom. Oil was discovered there in the late 1800s. It was the home of Kendall Oil, Pennzoil, Quaker State Oil, and it was in a valley. It's a beautiful area in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, and it was just a nice, pretty place to grow up.
• [00:11:02] FEMALE_1: What was your house like?
• [00:11:04] Gail Beaver: My house? The first house I remember which we later moved back to actually was a very small house. It was on a hill, everything in Bradford was on a hill. It's hills and valleys. It was on a hill, but backed up to what was the main stream through town. It was the Tunungwant river or otherwise known as the Tuna Creek. Actually, I think it was the Tunungwant Creek and we just called it the Tuna. Anyway, it came through town and you could go into my parents' bedroom and look out the window and watch things and people, not people too much because it wasn't deep enough for water sport. But when there were floods because it flooded, you could watch furniture right down the creek. Eventually, they changed the direction so that it didn't flood anymore. But I remember that. I also remember that later, my father, who liked building houses, built a house. That house was also on a hill, and it was a little bit outside of town and it was just a wonderful place, and that's where my memories of the Second World War blackouts and covering the windows and having measles and being in that little room that I loved. That I remember. Then I had a friend whose name was Geraldine. She lived a little further up the hill and we could go berry picking and we were on the hill in the woods all the time, we loved it. It was just a time when you could do that.
• [00:13:08] FEMALE_1: How many people lived in the house with you when you were growing up, and what was their relation to you?
• [00:13:13] Gail Beaver: Just my mom and dad and me.
• [00:13:17] FEMALE_1: How is your experience as an only child? Like color your view?
• [00:13:22] Gail Beaver: I think in a way, I wonder sometimes if being an only child doesn't make you a little less aggressive maybe or a little less competitive because you don't have to be. I mean, you've got your parents more attention than you sometimes wanted. I used to ask my father to drop me off. It's about a block from school because people teased me all the time about being spoiled. There were just so many things I didn't want them to be hovering about me. But on the other hand, I realized how lucky I was, but I always was asking for please a little brother or little sister like everybody else had. I'm not sure, but I do think you have to remember that you had all the love and support you could possibly get, not sharing.
• [00:14:31] FEMALE_1: Were there any different languages spoken in your house or in your neighborhood or at your school?
• [00:14:36] Gail Beaver: Yes. My mother spoke Italian because her parents did. I begged my grandmother to teach me Italian, but she wanted to learn English. It's a standard story I think for immigrants. She wanted me to be teaching her more English, she didn't want to speak Italian. So it was a little hard to learn from her, but of course her children had learned and they had their own version of the language. There were a lot of things I understood, but I couldn't say I could translate them. I just knew what they were talking about. I did have that when I was young.
• [00:15:21] FEMALE_1: What work did your father and mother do?
• [00:15:25] Gail Beaver: Well, my mother didn't actually, she was a homemaker until I was about in maybe fifth or sixth grade. She took a job working in a department store. Then she went from that to being trained to do some computer work when computers first came into the marketplace and she took a job at Zippo Lighters are made in my hometown. She took a job working for the Zippo company and worked there until she retired long after I was married. My father, on the other hand, as I said, he built houses. [NOISE] He sold car parts. He sold tractor parts, and then he built houses at night on the side on his own. As he was doing that, he got more involved in the financing part of people trying to buy the houses. Eventually, he became president of the Savings and Loan Bank. He came in by the back door, I guess you could say. But that's how he went from building houses to helping people finance houses.
• [00:17:01] FEMALE_1: What's your earliest memory?
• [00:17:04] Gail Beaver: I was trying to think about that, how do you know what your earliest memory is? Part of the reason I have one particular memory, I think is because I've seen a film of it, a little bit of a film. My uncle had one of the first little home movie type things sets. He was often there with his camera and it was, herky jerky, a lot of fishing. He took it everywhere every time he went fishing. But there's one of me sitting on my father's lap. That becomes a memory for me. I don't know if it's really my own memory or if it's just because I saw it, it could be either. The other memory I have again with my father is we lived very close to a national forest, Allegheny National Forest and there were a lot of people in town often either had their own cabins there or we went there, rented a cabin and they were very simple cabins. There wasn't much of anything in them. We went with friends who had children my age and I just remember that in the middle of the night, I needed to go outside and my father carried me out to the outhouse and there was a bear standing there. This became common. We saw a lot of bear in those forests. The black bear and their common there. But I just remember my father being very calm about it. I think it helped me a lot because later in life it wasn't so scary to see a bear. I mean, it's still scary. It wasn't like I'm not hanging around here a long time. But it was just I remember feeling very comfortable that my father could take care of everything, including getting us back inside without angering the bear. That's an early memory.
• [00:19:22] FEMALE_1: How often did you go on those camping trips?
• [00:19:24] Gail Beaver: Oh, quite often. Eventually, my parents own their own cabin. That was just very common for us. We did a lot of camping. Just there though an inside camping. Not like my own family, my husband and I and our children ted camped later, but this was still always in a cabin. They were rustic cabins. You still cooked outside and all that. But we spent a lot of time in that park and so did all our friends did to.
• [00:20:02] FEMALE_1: Would you say that's [inaudible 00:20:02] when you were younger is spending a lot of times your friends afterwards in the woods?
• [00:20:05] Gail Beaver: Yeah. It wasn't that we were just out in the woods like out in nature. We had a little town. We were downtown, we went shopping. We hung out just like, I guess you could call it that. We didn't call it that then. But we skied we had strap on skis. Strap them over your boots so you could carry them up the hill and we had a cemetery and I can say I mean a cemetery across the street and up the hill from where I lived. That's where I learned to ski between the headstones coming down those paths in the cemetery. We would pack lunches and we would be up there in the winter. We were up there all day in the summer we were up there all day. Something you probably think of letting your kids do. Today.
• [00:21:04] FEMALE_1: Did you have a hybrid game you would play with the kids in your neighborhood or by yourself?
• [00:21:10] Gail Beaver: Pretty much acting things out. We made up stories and we acted them out. That's what we did. I just endlessly we did it on the playground. It's like we wrote serial episodic stories so that the next day you could play somebody else and someone was someone else and sometimes they were related to radio shows because that time we didn't have television until the '50s. I was the first 10,11,12,13 years of my life. It was listening to radio shows. In fact, my father cut a hole in the wall of my bedroom next to my bed. I had a little radio of my own right there cut out and in its little space. It was men are taller or something like that. Anyway we listened to Lux radio theater. We listened to accommodate things. I can't name them all, but they were just fun. Then we would carry on that story sometimes in the playground. On the playground when I was growing up, I went to a Catholic school. We had the girls on one side and the boys on the other side. That's the way it was. They would chase us and then we would run away and then we would chase them and then sometimes we even got in trouble with that.
• [00:23:04] FEMALE_1: Were there any other special days, or events, or family traditions you remember doing besides the campaign?
• [00:23:10] Gail Beaver: Yes. We had a lot of family days. There was the way you did things. I mean, the weekends. At least one day of every weekend you were with family. We went to see my grandmother or the Irish grandmother every Sunday. We sometimes had dinner. My other grandmother's house and certainly during the holidays, it was both of them all the time. One day of the holiday you went to one place. Sometimes you went to in one day, but it was just always family. Since my dad built houses at night that often meant that my mother and I would go in to one of her sisters and stay there until he came and got us. My mother and her family played cards a lot. I never quite got into that, but they had ongoing Friday night card playing sessions. Often I was dragged along being the only child. I didn't have anybody to take care of me no older brother or sister. I did a lot of reading and a lot of imagining during those times.
• [00:24:36] FEMALE_1: What books did you like to read during those days?
• [00:24:39] Gail Beaver: Well, we all read. Nancy Drew was big then. You had a birthday party. You've got the latest Nancy Drew book. Sometimes you got two of them. Then you could go back to the bookstore and switch out for something else. There was another series called Cherry Ames was a nurse. There were a lot and that was a little more romantic than Nancy Drew wasn't romantic at all. Even though she had a boyfriend. Those were the early days and then it just developed from that sooner. My mother had a series of books that were for adult women that when she didn't know it, I read those too and I have those to this day. I kept them just to see what was so risque at that time that I wasn't supposed to read it and now it's just comical to read it. I took all of them to my book club one time and told everyone to take one home and see what you thought of it. We all got a big laugh out of that.
• [00:26:00] FEMALE_1: Are there any nutritions that you continue with your kids remember growing up with?
• [00:26:11] Gail Beaver: Not really although there are some that they know about that we did continue when they were at home. But now I think I have to say it's pretty much there's certain foods, particularly that we had, say, Christmas Eve, Christmas day, and sometimes we remember those things, but I don't think we've had except for birthdays, were big on birthdays. If we can get together. We still are very and I know it's always surprising to me that people don't celebrate birthdays. Some did not grow up always celebrating every birthday. That makes it for me special when I think about it, that we do that as much as we can. We're so far apart now that it's hard to do that
• [00:27:18] FEMALE_1: Okay. [inaudible 00:27:18]
• [00:27:20] Gail Beaver: All right. Good [BACKGROUND]
• [00:27:33] FEMALE_1: Where's the earliest school you remember attending? It can be preschool, kindergarten.
• [00:27:38] Gail Beaver: I did not go to kindergarten. The earliest was first grade at St. Bernard school in Bradford, Pennsylvania.
• [00:27:47] FEMALE_1: What do you remember about it?
• [00:27:50] Gail Beaver: Oh, I remember several things about it. I remember the nun who was our first grade teacher, sister Rosaleen was her name, and I remember a boy who got sick sitting behind me on me. Remember that? I remember the day we were to bring our favorite doll to school, and my favorite doll was I'm not a pretty doll, not like the other girls brought in. Like they brought nun dolls and ballerina dolls and and various culture dolls. But my doll was a baby doll that had gone through quite a bit in her early life. The nun who was the principal of the school said to me, don't you have a nicer doll than this one? Which wasn't very nice. I remember that. But I also remember that I was one of the tallest people in my class for that one year. It was only that year. When we lined up, I lined up toward the back of the lineup because I was taller. That's my last memory of being taller than anybody. That's it. Then we had a nurse and a doctor also, and it's funny how you remember their names. Dr. Maria and Ms. Welch was the nurse and we got all of our shots in school in those days. We would line up outside and some kids would get so upset because they were so afraid of the needle, and I just remember that I remember standing in that line waiting to get poked with that needle. Those were early memories.
• [00:29:51] FEMALE_1: How about high school, where did you go?
• [00:29:53] Gail Beaver: Same school? 12 years. We started out with about 60 some students in my class, and when we graduated we were 46. But we went through 12 years together. Lots of good memories and are still in touch with all of them.
• [00:30:12] FEMALE_1: Did you went to school at career training beyond high school?
• [00:30:15] Gail Beaver: Yes, I did. I went from St. burns to a Catholic college in Rochester, New York. I went to Nazareth College for four years, and when I left there, I went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
• [00:30:31] FEMALE_1: Did you play any sports or occasion other extra curricular?
• [00:30:35] Gail Beaver: Believe it or not, I was on the high school girls basketball team. I often think about that and wonderful and in those days, I don't know how they do it in girls basketball now, but you didn't push up to land a basket. You used an underhand motion, and I was pretty good at that. Not at defending none of that, but I was pretty good at shooting in getting a basket. That was okay. But in freshman year of high school, you had the opportunity to try out for cheerleading. Cheerleading was a big thing for our small school. But if you won in your freshman year, it meant you were a cheerleader all four years and captain of the cheer-leading squad your senior year. That was my special moment because I did win. That was fun and we wore long skirts, heavy and hard to swirl around in and do anything in. But that was just the measure of the time. That's what we had to wear. The good thing was we got to go to all the basketball games. Particularly basketball was fun because it was during the week. We had Tuesday and Friday game. Every Tuesday we would travel out of town on a school night, and sometimes we had to go in those mountain roads,50 miles away, and that was sometimes a little scary because we had to find our own rights. We weren't allowed on the bus with the boys. We had to find our own rights, and sometimes some of the people who offered to drive us were less than reliable, but we never told our parents that. We didn't want them to know that sometimes these people disappeared during the game and then came back and it wasn't just cigarette smoke. They sometimes smelled like they'd gone off to a bar somewhere. But we never wanted to tell our parents about that because we were afraid they wouldn't let us ride with them, and the good part about the basketball games was that there was a dance after every game, even if it was a weeknight, we I don't know how we did that because it seems so strange now, but that sort of thing would be offered by the school itself. But we would dance before we got back in the car and drove back on those twisty roads in the snow in the winter. We had fun. We really did have a good time. That was fun.
• [00:33:26] FEMALE_1: That you had dances every game.
• [00:33:28] Gail Beaver: Every game.
• [00:33:30] FEMALE_1: Over these dances like.
• [00:33:31] Gail Beaver: Just people playing records for the most part, once in a while, a school group band would play when it was a bigger thing. But just while you were waiting for the team to shower and change and come back out and before they got on their bus, we had about an hour of just dancing and it was fun. There was always a lot of fun because then, people who had driven to the game themselves, spectators, they would stay too. It was always fun. We also had dances every Friday, and Saturday night. If it wasn't a game night, our local YMCA, and YWCA, I guess there was a women's and men's group, and they both had pools and facilities for table games, ping pong, that sort of thing, and then they had a room set aside for dancing and they often had a group playing there, and so for junior high school, it was Friday night and for high school it was Saturday night. That's where everybody in town and that included not just my school, but the public school too. We all went to those Friday and Saturday nights every all year long. We could go to one of those places and meet friends and new people, and it was all walking distance in a small town. It was lots of fun. When we were able to drive, which we were able to drive at 16. When we were able to drive and go somewhere else or some one of us had a car, we couldn't drive at night until you are 18. But we would go someplace else, and then we'd always wanted to go back and see who was at the dance that night. See who is down at the Y. That's where we always ended up.
• [00:35:50] FEMALE_1: What about your school experience is different from school as you know it today?
• [00:35:55] Gail Beaver: Well, it was much more what should I say? Formulaic, I guess. It was very much more lecture and response and learning early on, I guess I'd have to say by road. But it wasn't the hands-on kind of creative experience that I think has been encouraged since then, and it tended to if you were diligent goods student, you got good grades and you did well. If you were someone who learned in a different way, and I think in some ways particularly was a disadvantage for the boys who had more spirit and wanted to be doing more things, and I think, so many of them later on seemed to grow exponentially after they got out of high school, as opposed to while they were still in high school. But I was taught mostly. I mean, most of these people who taught us were women, and they were very bright and very well-educated. But they were stern and unexpected, right and wrong answers there. That's the way it was. There wasn't a lot of space for creative thinking.
• [00:37:26] FEMALE_1: Can you the popular music of your time when you were growing up?
• [00:37:30] Gail Beaver: Well, it was just slightly pre Elvis. Yes, it's '50s music and it was wonderful music. It's still is to me today. It was very danceable and a lot of it was crooner music. If we were somewhere in between our parents love of people like Sinatra. For us, it was just the people who were showing up on early years of television. People who were, they were women and men both, but there were groups, groups of four crewmen type voices. Then Elvis came into it shortly after that. It was at that time when things were changing, but music was everything does then. I think it still is to kids today. I don't understand a lot of the music but today, but I try. When we had our reunion, someone in our class actually made a recording for everybody of some of the songs than that they used to play at that old why.
• [00:39:00] FEMALE_1: Did the music have any critical analysis associated with them besides the general, once you went through?
• [00:39:06] Gail Beaver: Well we use to do that Jitter Bug [LAUGHTER] That's probably the most well known one shortly after that, things like The Twist. I remember my husband who I met in 1961, who's quite tall and we used to do that. What was it called? Where they held the rope and you had to go under it backwards. Well, you don't remember it, if I can't remember, I can't remember the name of it. I'll try and think of it and see if I can remember it later. That was when, what was his name? I'll think of it later. Yes, we transitioned from things like Jitter Bug to The Twist, but then we did slow dances too. That was fun, except the boys I really liked we're not the best dancers so it was a conflict. Now, what do you do about that, because I was a good dancer and there were several guys who really liked to dance. The question was, do you dance with them? Or do you dance with someone who's not quite so much fun to dance with.
• [00:40:38] FEMALE_1: What were the popular clothing and hairstyles that you remember seeing?
• [00:40:41] Gail Beaver: [LAUGHTER] I was trying to think of that the other day because I did get out a couple of yearbooks from my freshman and sophomore years in high school, just to see what I could remember about it. I could see that we are all the girls for the most part. At that time, we called it short hair because we had gone from all of us having long hair to mid length here. We still, you could tell the rollers that we put on at night. We rolled our hair up and at night, you could still see the roller marks and those pictures of all of us with her. They just look so strange to me now the hairdos, the hairstyles, there weren't pony tails yet. Long hair was pretty much out at that point. It was just this should medium short hair. Then it got shorter and then in the following years, but it was a, as I said, everybody put their hair into some slept on some roller that they twisted their hair into. When I was young and I had long hair and my mother put my hair up in rags every night and strips of cloth that you just put the end of the hair in and twisted it up and tied it with a knot. You slept on those knots every night and then after that, they brought in these commercially made rollers and they tried to make them softer. Some people at that time had what they called permanent so I think they still have them today, but permanent span we're really nasty. Nasty smelling chemicals that by never had one of those.
• [00:42:41] FEMALE_1: Were there any slave terms, racism words that were used more common then that are today?
• [00:42:48] Gail Beaver: I'm sure there were, but I don't know if I can think of any at the moment. I really don't know that I can think of any.
• [00:42:57] FEMALE_1: What was the typical day like for you?
• [00:43:01] Gail Beaver: Well, when I was in grade school and maybe in in the high school too, I guess. We had to be at school round 08:00. Maybe it was 8:30, I think maybe it was 8:30. The days I can think of because we walked to school were the days where it was snowing a lot. We had to wear leggings, not leggings like you have today, but things that were more like the ones that people wear for scheme. Only now the even they are much sleeker looking, these were bulky. Remember, women, girls didn't wear pants. We had just buy the types and high school, we were wearing jeans and that was new, but not to school. You didn't wear him to school. We had to wear skirts and then these bulky things underneath the skirts. Then your code over the top of it all because it was cold, but we hated the leggings. Absolutely hated them and you could hardly wait to get far enough away from home to get those things off. Then we had boots that came up midway up your leg up to your knee almost. Those were uncomfortable too but then when we got away from wearing the leggings, then the snow would go inside your boot. All of us by the end of the winter would have these red rings around the top of our legs where they'd been shaped by the snow. It's just a memory I have and I've asked other people and they remember it too and they came from all parts of the North. People from Montana tell me that that's what they remembered too and it's just funny, but I can feel it. I can feel it even now putting your boots and your socks and your boots on where, because the snow was not all plowed, are taken care of the way it is now the streets were always taken care. The people put chains on their head. We didn't have snow tires, so they put chains so that the sound of the chains driving. By the time the pavement was clear, the streets were cleared a little bit. It's snow, I remember most in terms of the day and going to school and coming home and we end we carried our lunches to school. We all had lunch boxes and it was always fun about what was in your lunch box. When I was in first grade, the nuns were very clever. I did not like to eat very well. I was not good eaters as they say. My mother would pack a peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich and it had to be miracle whip and then little carrot strips and a pickle and that was always my lunch. I did like that, but it was all I could do to eat it. I would sit and sit and we were supposed to go out on the playground at lunchtime after you finished your lunch, you could go out on the playground and I would still be sitting there. The nun was getting frustrated so she figured out how to get me to eat my lunch. She made my best friend sit with me. She couldn't go out on the playground until I ate my lunch so it's pretty clever. That's settled it [LAUGHTER].
• [00:47:03] FEMALE_1: Did the changes with your habit of eating [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:47:09] Gail Beaver: It changed [LAUGHTER] I learned to eat quickly and now my mother always used to say she didn't know when it all changed, but certainly did. When I was looking at those yearbooks, I discovered I had this memory and so I looked at my freshman year picture and then I looked at my sophomore year picture. That would have been just about as I was turning 16 and sure enough, my memory of having gained weight, that summer. Suddenly my jeans were really tight on me and my mother said, unthinkable that my mother who was always worried about my eating, would suddenly be saying, maybe you need to [LAUGHTER] I looked at the picture and you could see it in my face. My face had just balloon out in my sophomore. I could see it the other day when I looked at that, I hadn't had that picture out ages, but I have that memory of suddenly at all changed and then I loved to eat everything..
• [00:48:17] FEMALE_1: In your family were celebrating.
• [00:48:20] Gail Beaver: Well, mostly Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays were big, and Easter too. But as a family, it was Thanksgiving and Christmas and it was always family then you wouldn't think of not being there. They were very memorable to me those holidays. Because again, of the culture we talked about earlier where I have pretty much half-and-half Irish English and Italian. That meant that the food presented at those places was, the mashed potatoes of the Irish and the various special foods. My Italian grandmother and grandfather who were from different parts of Italy and had actually different cultures between them, and did not even sound the same when they spoke Italian. Their dialects were quite different. But they had a different, and it was always fun. Christmas Eve was different because we always had these fish dishes that was the common way of celebrating Christmas even in Italy. You had to get some of that fish from, not from local fisheries. We didn't really have any much fish there in Pennsylvania, so it would be packed in salt. It was codfish, these strange dishes that I think of now and I've looked up and figured out how to make and when you walked into my grandmother's house on Christmas Eve, there would be a big pot on the stove and it was a pot with oil in it and she would pull dough out of the bowl and make a ring of it and throw it in that hot oil. Then next to the stove was a little dish of sugar and as they came out of the hot oil and dried then you would dip them in the sugar. Of course that was a real treat. That was fun. They are like doughnuts only they were better than our doughnuts today, and I think people still make them. I think the name was like froppole, or at least it sounded like that to me. You said it.
• [00:51:03] FEMALE_1: Zeppole.
• [00:51:04] Gail Beaver: Yes. Zeppole, that's what it was. Somebody is still doing that. That's good.
• [00:51:12] FEMALE_1: I think because it's still [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:51:12] Gail Beaver: That's great. Maybe I should come to taste.
• [00:51:19] FEMALE_1: Are there any other memories you have connected to the actual food that you spend with your family on holidays?
• [00:51:26] Gail Beaver: Well, there were the desserts, and then I should also say that my Italian grandmother thought that my Irish father certainly did not want to have a meal without mashed potatoes, so she would cook. In addition to this other wonderful Italian food, she would make a bowl of mashed potatoes at which they sat down on the table, right in front of my poor father. He preferred the Italian food at that point but he always had to eat some mashed potatoes. I do remember that. I remember that my grandfather strangely enough who was Italian, he was from Southern Italy and he never ate pasta with tomato sauce, any kind of tomato sauce. He had his pasta with a little bit of olive oil, and maybe she chopped up some garlic in it or not, or maybe not at all. It was just very plain. He never ate the tomato type sauce that everybody thinks is basic to Italian food. Anyway, that's all I can remember right now.
• [00:52:40] FEMALE_1: When thinking about on your school years, what important social or historical events were taking place at this time?
• [00:52:46] Gail Beaver: A few things. One of them in particular I remember distinctly because again, it was a Catholic school and Joe McCarthy who you may or may not have heard of but he was a senator who was trying to rid our country, I guess, of communists. He had the McCarthy hearings. Because he was Catholic, the nuns at my school really thought it was just absolutely wonderful that he was this important figure making national headlines. They set up in the auditorium a place where we actually took time out of our classes to go into that auditorium and watch what is known historically now as McCarthy hearings. It was an eye-opening thing for us. Even then as young as we were knew that something was really wrong with this kind of interrogation and his approach to it which since of course has been much maligned and disgust and McCarthy hearings were in fact, what, I guess today's wording would be it was a real witch hunt, and it was, and it was a sad state of affairs. But I remember strangely again, that the lawyer for McCarthy was a young man named Roy Cohn who is still around today. At that time he just was a handsome young man, and that was the most impressionable thing other than the fact that we did realize something made us very uncomfortable about it. But he was getting by on for us anyway, the fact that he was Catholic was important enough that we were taken out of class to watch that. I suppose it wasn't just that, I suppose they did figure that it was a means of learning history as it was happening.
• [00:55:14] FEMALE_1: Did this event personally affect your family?
• [00:55:16] Gail Beaver: No. I don't think so. Although I think there was a lot of discussion about it in my family. I remember my father and my uncles talking about it. We didn't have anything to do with it. A number of famous people who were being interrogated and accused of being communist and accused of supporting the Communist Party were Hollywood figures. They were figures even though they were not personally friends of ours. They were people that people knew something about and so it was a familiar territory for most people.
• [00:56:11] FEMALE_1: After you finished high school, where did you live?
• [00:56:16] Gail Beaver: I went to college in Rochester, New York for four years.
• [00:56:24] Gail Beaver: First big memory of that is February snow, where we were actually snowed in. My freshman year I lived in a house on the edge of campus. The house had been given to the college. There were about 12 of us living in that house. We were literally snowed in. For the first couple of days, for a whole week, college campus was shut down. We had mountains and mountains and mountains of snow. At the beginning, it was fun, but by the end of the week, one girl was so upset, she walked through the snow out to the highway and managed to get on a bus and go home. It got a little bit creepy. [LAUGHTER]But that's one of my memories of that. But it was, again, four years of a lot of fun. I didn't really want to go to that school. It had not been my choice. But my father wanted me to go into an all women's school. It was about three-hour drive from my home, something that wasn't too far away. We had some family in the city, so that was another reason. But I just remember thinking this was not what I had in mind. I wanted to go to Boston to college. I just remember when they took me to college, the school had gates and I just had this horrible sinking feeling as we drove through those gates, I thought this is not, it was just disappointed. I was so disappointed. Of course, a month later, I was happy.
• [00:58:25] FEMALE_1: Did you move around a lot through your adult life?
• [00:58:29] Gail Beaver: In the beginning, we did to the point that offense said you better buy me a new address book. But that's after I went to college, then I went to North Carolina and that's where I met my husband, Frank, the first day I was there. By the end of that year, we were married the following June. He was in the army at the time. From that point on for awhile we were moving a lot because he went to Vietnam too.
• [00:59:08] FEMALE_1: What was it like when you were dating?
• [00:59:11] Gail Beaver: Well, it was group dating because I went to Carolina because they had a good theater program. Of course, I wanted to go to Yale, but I didn't get into Yale. Again, a disappointment, but I got into all the other schools I applied to. I got a scholarship. I could have gone to Catholic University in Washington for free, but the nun who was president of my Catholic college at that time, had in fact been one of the first doctoral students in a program at the University of Michigan before she became a nun. She called me into her office and said, Gail, I think you've really had 16 years of Catholic education. I think maybe it's time for you to broaden your schooling. I chose then to go to Carolina, which was, I think it was partially that even with the Catholic view was much more expensive. Even with the scholarship, it would have been more expensive than it was for me to go to the University of North Carolina and I still had that spirit of wanting to go far away. I really wanted to get to see more of the world, I guess. Carolina, it had a theater program called the Carolina Play Makers. It had a very good reputation as a department of work for theater. Actually it was at the end of its heyday, but it was still wonderful. I got there in September wearing what I would wear to college in Rochester. I remember it was a wool plaid cool up, which is like a skirt, shorts and it was wool. I arrived in North Carolina on September 5th or 6th, 1961. I think it was about 98 degrees when I got off the plane. I had to call my mother and asked her to send me some summer clothes. The first meeting that we had was on the stage. They asked the new graduate students to come to this meeting. Frank, who was already a grad student in another department because he was in the radio, television department, I was in the theater department. He and his friends came over to see what the new grad students look like. He has a memory of me in my wool cool on. I don't remember meeting him until a bit later, but it was very small group of us. There were five new graduate students, maybe six. I was the only new female graduate student. There were two other female graduate students in their second year. From that point on, it was a lot of fun because it was a small theater group. I was cast in a couple of different things. The Matchmaker, which is better known afterward as Hello Dolly. But the play itself originally was the Matchmaker. I was the maid or the cook, I think the cook, and Frank was cast as the waiter. That play toured North Carolina that fall. We were touring on a bus even to Frank's hometown where the stage almost fell down and I had to help hold it up because he knocked it down as he left. As he went on stage. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, we had lots of fun doing that and I think so that it wasn't exactly what you'd call dating because we were just together a lot because of that. Yes, we go out after or sometimes we go to a movie or something and I did go spend thanksgiving that year with his family and then for the early part of Christmas vacation, he came to Pennsylvania.
• [01:03:58] FEMALE_1: Tell me about your wedding.
• [01:04:02] Gail Beaver: Frank was in the Army by that time, and that's what made us decide that we were going to get married as soon as we did because I was offered a job because I would've been finished with my master's degree by the end of the summer. It was before May, it must have been April, I was already searching for jobs for the following fall and I was offered a job in Portland, Maine, Portland Junior College and I had flown up there to interview and it was a really good job. It was a bit daunting because I would have taken over the whole theater program and I wasn't really confident that I was ready for that, but I knew I had to do that. But on the way back, I stopped in Boston where Frank was stationed at Fort Devens just outside of Boston, met me in Boston and that's where we discussed our future because if I took this job, and he was about to get assigned and he thought he was going to be assigned to one of three places. One was England, one was Eritrea, and I don't remember the third one, but they all sounded like wonderful places to go. So my choice was do I take the job or do I take the chance and go with Frank to one of these wonderful places that he was going to go. The decision was made. I turned down the job. We decided we would get married, but he didn't have time off, so the wedding had to be where he was at Fort Devens in Massachusetts. Again, that became something of a difficulty in terms of family because the expectation was I would get married at home with all my relatives there and his family would come. As it turned out, we had a very small wedding. I was still back in Chapel Hill finishing my classroom work. At that time you had to do well, I can tell you that later there was more to it than that, but at least the classwork had to be finished. We decided we would get married on May 30th, I remember now, I shouldn't have said I didn't remember. It was a Kentucky Derby weekend when we got engaged. We still celebrate that. It's still fun and funny to think about how that all came about. But anyway, so Frank had to plan the whole wedding and there wasn't much planning involved, but I mean, things like ordering the cake and finding a place to have the reception, he did all that. While I was at Carolina and so we had a very small group of close friends and some of Frank's army buddies were there and his parents and his brother and sisters, sister-in-law, all came. It was very nice, but I was just a flurry of activity. I was trying to find a dress and, doing things that people take a lot of time now to do. If they're going to do it, they plan it and it's not the way this was. This happened fairly quickly and we had two days for a honeymoon and we went to Cape Cod. We weren't far away and then we lived in a wonderful little apartment and it was so nice and fun for a little while until we found out where he was really going to go. It wasn't England and it wasn't Eritrea and it wasn't the third place, it was Vietnam. At that point in time then it was 1962, Vietnam was just some people knew where it was. We didn't really know exactly where it was. We went to the library in the little town of Ayer Massachusetts where Fort Devens is and looked up Vietnam.
• [01:08:29] FEMALE_1: What's your experience like with your husband at Vietnam?
• [01:08:35] Gail Beaver: Well, it was difficult because suddenly when we realized he was going to Vietnam and he was leaving in October, and by that time, I was pregnant, and so the question I could have gone with him if we paid ourselves. But it would've extended his time there from one year to two years. We didn't have any idea what the medical situation would be. My father was absolutely determined that I should not go. He didn't really, he wrote me a very nice letter which I still have seen for the sake of this baby and for the sake of Frank not worrying about me. It would be better if I didn't go. It was a very poignant letter and I wanted to go. I wanted to see Vietnam. I wanted to go where Frank went. Anyway, in the end, I did not go and so he left at the end of October and he took me back to North Carolina where I was going to live with his family because I still had to finish. I started to tell you a little bit earlier to get a master's degree at Carolina at the time, you needed to do an oral examination, you had to do, we called it a thesis not a dissertation, but it was similar to a dissertation, not quite as involved, and you had to pass a language exam. I was doing French for my language exam, so I still had to pass the language test. I still had to finish. I had finished my thesis, but I still had to prepare for an oral exam. While I was in North Carolina, I went to a college in Frank's hometown to take some refresher French courses, French language so that I could pass that exam, and then I did take the exam in Chapel Hill. So I was able to go back and forth. That was good, and then at Christmas, I went back to Pennsylvania and that's where I stayed until Frank, well, he came when our daughter, Julie, was born. He was able to get leave at that time, and he had to thumb his way army style though from Vietnam to Buffalo, New York and then we picked him up there or my dad did, and then he stayed until I think he was home about two or three weeks while Julie was born and then he had to go back to Vietnam. Then he finally came home the following October, and it wasn't easy. It was not nice. It didn't like being suddenly with all my great interest in going somewhere else, I had to come back home and live at home with my family, my parents. Hard on them too, because then that baby who was seven months old had to leave, and so it was hard for all of us.
• [01:12:16] FEMALE_1: Have you [inaudible 01:12:16] your children in what life was like when they were young and living in the house?
• [01:12:22] Gail Beaver: First of all, there was Julie, and then Frank came back from Vietnam, and John was born after that. We had two children and they were 16 months apart. It was a new thing for both of us and new for me for sure. But I think it was fun. We enjoyed all that and that's when we were traveling, moving because at first we were on the base. First we were off the base, then we moved on the base, then we moved off the base again. Then we got out of the army and moved to Western Massachusetts for another six months. Then we were in Chapel Hill again, to finish both of our master's degrees for one summer. Then we were in Memphis, Tennessee, and then we were back in Chapel Hill. Those were the years when we moved a lot. We were a family in a station wagon looking for a place to live but they were just the two then after we got here to Ann Arbor where Frank came to get his PhD. That's when Johanna was born. Then there were three kids. Then we had to move again to a bigger house. Then we moved three times here and four times now in Ann Arbor. Finally, we settled on a street in Ann Arbor and then the children were growing up there and I think Ann Arbor was a good place to grow up. They had lots of opportunities and lots of friends. It was a busy house. Lots going on all the time. There's special memories at that time. I have to think about that.
• [01:14:22] FEMALE_1: Do you still live in your current house as you did till today?
• [01:14:29] Gail Beaver: No. We downsized about 14, 15 years ago. We lived in the same house for about 30 some years, very close to campus. Then once all three of our children moved away and far away, we decided, because by that time we also had a home in Northern Michigan on a lake for summers, that we would sell the big house. We did that. Yes, we lived there for 30 some years. It's still thought of by our children as home. It was home. But now we live in a smaller place.
• [01:15:20] FEMALE_1: Tell me about your working years.
• [01:15:23] Gail Beaver: I started working as soon as I could after our youngest Johanna was born. I actually always worked a little bit doing something, either substituting. I remember I was substituting in the Air Massachusetts the day John Kennedy was killed. That, by the way, was a very moving experience because we were in the army at the time and living. Frank was working on an army base. So we were very much part of the military response that weekend to his death and to having to be called out. He did, and of course, we all went along out onto the field where they made the pronouncement that their leader was dead. It was all an experience which I didn't realize. We didn't expect that. We were also stunned and shocked at the time that to be finding out that we were in some way a part of the people who had to be informed officially and to stand on a field and listen to that pronouncement and then the discussion or the plans for how things would go moving forward seems so strange. That's still a very significant memory for both Frank and me. But back to Ann Arbor and my working years, as I said, I'd substituted several times. I've taught part-time. When we lived in Memphis, I taught at the university there, the same one Frank did. Right away I was teaching five classes. During the year we were there, I taught. When I got to Ann Arbor, again, before Johanna was born, I also taught at the university here in Michigan, in what was then known as the Engineering English department. I was always able to pick up classes with my background, but I really wanted sooner or later to get a full-time job, but I couldn't do that until I felt that my children were growing up and in school. Then I started working. In the meantime, I forgot one big, huge piece. I had a master's degree in theater but it was difficult to think about getting a job in theater because theater involved a lot of night work productions and I did not want that with the children and their activities too, so I started working for the Ann Arbor public schools in a part-time position in their media center. It was at that point that, I think I mentioned this earlier, we had to do cable television productions and that's when every week had to produce enough material to cover. I think it may have even been two hours a week on cable television, educational TV. I spent quite a bit of time with those programs and also providing an update on research journals every month for the Ann Arbor school teachers. That's when I became more involved with the librarians in the Ann Arbor schools and decided that I would next pursue their library science degree. Then I became a student at Michigan in the Library Science Department and got my masters. Then took my first job, which meant I drove out of Ann Arbor to Clinton, Michigan, which is just 10 or 11 miles west of Saline. I drove down 12 every day for 10 years and had a wonderful experience there. In the end, I was the librarian for all three schools and have a great staff working for me. Because we were outline, we had special funding sometimes from the government because we were spread out all over, so we had a lot of advantages in terms of getting money to do things that we computerized our collection at the same time the Ann Arbor public school libraries did. We were right up there in the front of things and it was a great experience. Then after that, I was asked to join the faculty at Huron High School. I decided it was more practical for me to stay in Ann Arbor and work every day and only have to go a mile away from home instead of driving down US 12. I came back. All the time I was living in Ann Arbor and then I also started teaching as a lecturer at the university in the same department I graduated from. I was doing both of those things.
• [01:21:13] FEMALE_1: How long did you live in, and how long did you work at Huron for?
• [01:21:18] Gail Beaver: I worked another 10 years at Huron and I had taught back when we were in Tennessee, I taught in the public schools there. Eventually, I accumulated the number of years I had to retire. After 10 years, I think maybe 11, I retired from teaching in the public schools and I retired from Huron and then kept my lecturer job at the University of Michigan Library Science School, which has become, and became while I was still there, the School of Information.
• [01:21:56] FEMALE_1: Thinking about back to your working adult life, what important social or historical events come back to you immediately?
• [01:22:04] Gail Beaver: So much happened during those years. I mean, mostly things like elections. I mean, to even go back a little bit further, the Vietnam War was very much a part of our lives when we got married. It was the very beginning of the war. But the next several years, stood out and it dominated all the news, it dominated our life here in Ann Arbor early on. The reaction of the students was part of our lives. I mean, everything was active at the time. Young people were very active. We were too because it was all around us. Then I think in the years following, it was just the various elections and the changes that they all brought on. So very involved. There are other things too, and I have to think about that.
• [01:23:11] FEMALE_1: [inaudible 01:23:11].
• [01:23:15] Gail Beaver: Good. Because I'm about to cough a lot. [LAUGHTER] I was choking there. [NOISE]
• [01:23:22] FEMALE_1: Would you like some water?
• [01:23:24] Gail Beaver: I think I'm okay.
• [01:23:25] FEMALE_2: Are you sure?
• [01:23:26] Gail Beaver: Yes. I've got some in the car.
• [01:23:41] MALE_1: How long do you have? [inaudible 01:23:44]
• [01:23:45] FEMALE_1: What are all the different jobs that you've had over the years?
• [01:23:49] Gail Beaver: Over the years, let's see. My first job was working doing filing for a lumber company in my hometown when I was in high school during the summers. My second job was in college during the summers, and I worked at a place called Chautauqua, the original Chautauqua, which was like a camp. These were set up in the late 1800s, and this one is on Chautauqua Lake where I worked as a desk clerk at one of the hotels, during the summers of my college years. That was great fun because a lot of special people came to Chautauqua. Everyone from Dave brew back to the Cleveland Playhouse, there were lectures, there were philosophy lectures, there were theater productions, musical productions obviously. So it's quite a wonderful place to be in the summer and lots of fun too, because everyone who worked there in the hotels was a college student, just about, so we had a great time and it was a lot of fun. After that, it was piecemeal because after I went to college, graduated and started a graduate program at the University of North Carolina, met Frank there right away, first day I was there. After that and we were married. I usually just picked up teaching jobs wherever we went, and when we got to Memphis State University, I actually had a full-time teaching job there teaching. Actually, I was teaching English literature classes. Then from there, we came here for Frank to get his doctorate. By that time we had two children. I was able to teach in what was then the University of Michigan Engineering English department, and that was because they had a speech course that was required of engineers who were doing and having to do a five-year program in order to get in all the different requirements for their degree. They had a special English department dedicated to helping them do that, and so I was teaching. I taught, I think five speech classes. That was very interesting for me. That was a lot of fun because the students were interesting. They were engineering students and speech making was really not their thing they really wanted to be doing. Speeches ranged from how a refrigerator works to a wonderful student I had who spoke very little English, Spanish student, who didn't know what he was going to talk about, and I persuaded him at one point to do a speech in which he was actually just going through the story, the little storybook called Ferdinand, but doing it with his wonderful Spanish accent. He was a big hit with that. Needless to say, he did not stay in engineering. It was the language problem was difficult for him. Let's see, where are we? After that, I was working for the honor of republic schools doing exactly what we're doing here right now. Because at that time we had just begun cable TV, and the requirements for doing cable TV, they were to offer an education piece for the city. We at the Ann Arbor Public Schools had to provide, I can't remember, maybe two hours a week of educational television, something like that. We did that and we did, a good friend of mine, Jeff Gore was the camera man. He did everything, camera, audio, the whole thing. We would go out and interview all veterinarians and various other career people around the city and present those, we did one on the history of Pioneer High School, from the time that it was located, where Frieze building was on the campus at the time, and moved to where it is now. We did several of them. My favorite ones was when we went up in the Goodyear balloon. That was great. During that time, I began thinking about what to do next because I had this theater degree and as I think I mentioned earlier, doing theater when you have children was difficult because you had to be a way in the evenings, and so by that time I'd been introduced to some other people and recognized the library science department on the campus. I started taking classes there and got my library science degree then. Then I was hired in Clinton, Michigan, and that's when I took over the school libraries in Clinton. I did that for ten years. Then came back to Ann Arbor and worked in the same field at Huron High School, still in doing library work. That catches me up to when I finally retired from all, well, I retired. Actually, no, there's one more piece when I retired from the public schools. But I kept the other job teaching in the school, then School of Library Science, but became School of Information while I was there. I taught school library students as a lecturer, adjunct lecturer for 20 some years. I kept that job when I retired from the public schools, and I didn't retire from that for another several years. That was a wonderful time too, and I had wonderful students who are now librarians around, mostly in the State of Michigan and mostly not too far away from here, although some of them are retiring these days too. I'm still to today doing some library work because we discovered that the place where we have our lake home, Newark Post in Michigan, that there hadn't been a librarian in the Palestine schools for about ten years. But there was an elementary library and a middle school, high school library, and it was still being used, but it was very much neglected. That's been my project for the last five years.
• [01:31:41] FEMALE_1: You are working in education one way or another for most of your life?
• [01:31:44] Gail Beaver: Right. Exactly.
• [01:31:46] FEMALE_1: Has working in education and do as a person or help you work better with those around you?
• [01:31:53] Gail Beaver: I'm sure. I think so, yes. I'm just learning more and more about understanding people, about working with young people of every age, including college age students, and then working with college age students who taught me so much because several of the people that I worked with who were becoming school librarians had already been working in education themselves. They knew a lot about schools, about education, and they came from other parts of the country too. They weren't all from Michigan, and they came from different disciplines. They worked with different issues with young people. It was eye-opening for me, and it's still is. It's still is when I engage with any of the people at the Pilsen Schools and realize what the issues are that students have to face today as opposed to what they were before. There're just so many things about it. So many things are the same family issues, but some of so many other things are different. Yes, I think it's been an eye-opening experience for me.
• [01:33:17] FEMALE_1: Does having a positive impact on our students change how important education has been to you?
• [01:33:24] Gail Beaver: Well, I think every teacher wants nothing more than to have a positive influence on their students. The other part of it is that your students have a positive influence on you and you realize that's also happening. But my heart is definitely in education and I have to say what that experience and all those years has meant to me is watching the forces that can enhance education, and the other hand, watching the forces that can hurt it and disarm it. I'm very concerned about that, especially right now, that's a concern for me.
• [01:34:19] FEMALE_1: Do you ever regret not taking that job of being attracted to that theater program back in far way like important?
• [01:34:26] Gail Beaver: I don't regret it. Now, do I think about it? I've thought about it and I thought my only regret is not so much that I didn't do it, but I didn't have the chance to find out if I could do it and do it well. That's true. I'm not sure, without doing actually getting in there and dipping into it, I never did find out if I could run a theater program.
• [01:35:00] FEMALE_1: Okay.
• [01:35:01] FEMALE_1: Has traveling the world impacted how you see literature?
• [01:35:07] Gail Beaver: Well, probably most would say ours has been a fairly limited travel of the world, but I think we see the arts as a very significant part. The literature and all the arts are such a significant part of every country, every culture. Yes, I think we've been very much influenced by that. I welcome the fact that more and more right here, for example, in Ann Arbor have such treasures available to us from other cultures, from literature into film, for example. We have more access to all of that than we ever had before. We're seeing so many more, for example, foreign films and I'm saying literature in the film, but on the other hand, there are also translations that I think we're getting so much more of. I think that's expanded even my own book group. We've expanded our horizons and in terms of what we read because we have the ability to do that.
• [01:36:30] FEMALE_1: Do you wish you didn't retire when you did or were you in perfect content with how you led your life to that point?
• [01:36:38] Gail Beaver: That's a tough one. There are days when I honestly do wish that I was getting up and going to work. That's true. I see that busyness. I see people doing it. You want to know more about what's happening. You wish you were stretching your mind and making sure you could still do those kinds of things. On the other hand, I think that's why I do what I do with the Palestine Library. Most of my friends are stretching their minds. I think we have opportunities as retired people in Ann Arbor to do that. I think that's very special here. I do think about that. I have to say yes, there are days when I don't wish I hadn't retired, no. For the most part, it's much nicer to turn off the alarm clock, which by the way, I don't use anymore. But the first year after I retired, I kept the alarm clock on to that early rise time and made it ring so that I could turn it off and go back to sleep. That was great joy. But no, I still want to be stretching my mind and engaging with people. That's the other part of it.
• [01:38:06] FEMALE_1: You once said that your favorite books were the Nancy Drew books and [inaudible 01:38:09], has that changed? Do you have a favorite book?
• [01:38:12] Gail Beaver: Favorite books now as opposed to Nancy Drew then? Yes. For sure. You go back and read those and wonder whatever in the world actually attracted you to them. But I have a lot of favorite books, yes. I don't reread them though very often. Once in a while, I skim some. But I have favorite children's books as well as favorite books that I've read recently, but I tend to not want to go back and read books that I've read before just because I'm so anxious to read the ones that are coming out now and I don't have time to do both. But once in a while, I'll listen to a book that I've read before. There's certain authors that I always read whenever they write. I'm having a hard time right now thinking of just what I would say, these are my favorite books. I can't do that right now.
• [01:39:22] FEMALE_1: Do you have any other stories like the Ferdinand Story that come up in your mind? Do you remember most from your years as an educator?
• [01:39:28] Gail Beaver: Like the Ferdinand story? Let me think. From my years as an educator?
• [01:39:40] FEMALE_1: In general, really.
• [01:39:42] Gail Beaver: In general, I have a few favorite stories. When I was teaching storytelling, I had wonderful experiences with people. Most of my students were becoming school librarians, but at the same time, storytelling was becoming important in business, in psychology, and where psychologists were learning to talk to patients, business people were learning to talk to clients and to use story to find out more about them, either telling stories to them or drawing stories from them. Those experiences I remember especially because I had some students from different disciplines in my storytelling class, psychology students and some business students and one student in fact went on to become a storyteller. But that was a wonderful experience because they came to it with such a different angle and they used story in such a different way. But the best part of it all was they would come after class to me and say, I never even thought I could do that. I remember one person in particular who said I just never dreamed I'd be able to do that in front of other people. I've had some very special students during that time. Again, I think the best part of it for me was that they really felt they had gotten something out of the program that enabled them to advance in their own field.
• [01:41:46] FEMALE_1: Where have you been up to besides helping the libraries via linkups?
• [01:41:52] Gail Beaver: Well, as you know, we usually spend time in London where we have family because my husband, Frank, taught there, ran a university summer program but several years. So we have friends there. We spent a couple of months there each year, we've been able to do that and that we've really enjoyed. Usually that involves sometimes some travel for this year, for example, we were able to take a trip to Belfast. In the early years, we traveled a lot around England and Wales, Scotland, France and spent time in smaller villages and cities in the UK. That was very interesting. Obviously, we attend theater productions in London when we're there. I love just to wander in and out of the museums and the special exhibits and those have been wonderful. Anybody who has access to a large city has that opportunity and we get it here in Ann Arbor in a different way. We spent a lot of time and because Frank is a film person, we're film goers wherever we are. Yeah, we're at the Michigan Theater a lot. When we're up North where it is now called the Lyric Theater, a new theater up there that provides something that is not the big blockbuster films, but some of the other films that we'd like to see, so films, and book club, literature reading, mushroom hunting. So we're pretty occupied with those things. Then some political volunteer work as well. Yes, that too.
• [01:44:07] FEMALE_1: When did you decide to agree to be part of the Legacy's Project?
• [01:44:13] Gail Beaver: We just felt that it's a wonderful opportunity and it turns out it has been. We've really enjoyed it. It was fun to do it together, each of us still wondering what the other one said. We had been asked to do it a couple of times before and we were not able to because of the scheduling. This time, we thought we can do this, and it just seemed like the right opportunity. A couple of other people that we've known also have done it in the past and we just felt privileged to be recommended as possibilities for it.
• [01:44:59] FEMALE_1: Has this met your expectations on what you expect for this project to come out with in the end?
• [01:45:05] Gail Beaver: It has, and we've talked about it to other people too. When they say, well, what is it about? What do you do? We explained to them, and they say that it is really a great idea, that's wonderful. We've been able to promote the project a little bit. It is a wonderful idea. Yes, so far it has. We haven't seen the final product yet. I'm a little nervous about that. [LAUGHTER].
• [01:45:43] FEMALE_1: All your years and on your travels and everything that you've been through, what was probably the most memorable place?
• [01:45:51] Gail Beaver: Place or happening?
• [01:45:53] FEMALE_1: Place, happening.
• [01:45:54] Gail Beaver: Well, I think if I had to pick one thing, I suppose I would say, it was meeting Frank. mean just happening to make a decision to go to the University of North Carolina and happening to meet him the first day I was there. That certainly is the biggest influence in my life, change in my life. Many other things could have gone other ways anytime along the way, but that certainly made the biggest difference to me in terms of where I am today.
• [01:46:41] FEMALE_1: Meeting Frank, that first day and that's how you saw the University of North Carolina?
• [01:46:50] Gail Beaver: Yes, it did. For sure. I mean, he'd been there, he'd done his undergraduate work there. He was in what was then called Radio, Television, and Motion Picture. It was RTVMP. That was his department. I was in the theater department, but we had similar interests, and he knew the graduate and they had come actually, he and his friends had come over to see who the new graduate students in theater were. Because there were only maybe five of us. Now I was the only new female. The other two had been there a couple of years. I was not realizing it in my college whirls on a hot 90-degree September day because I thought coming from the North, that's the way he went back to school or to college in the fall. But anyway, I've already told you that story I think. But anyway, that was his knowledge and his friend's knowledge. We all went out to lunch together and I felt far more comfortable after I met them because I was a Northerner coming to the South in early 1960, 61 and, September 61. I didn't know what to expect. I had never really been out of the North. I grew up in Pennsylvania and went to school in New York State. This was a totally different environment, a totally different culture, and I was loving it, but I really didn't know what to do, how things were done, what was the norm. Yes, meeting him and his friends and then moving around, meeting some more people, that certainly influenced how I saw the University of North Carolina.
• [01:48:59] FEMALE_1: You said that you did some work with politics and such. I'm just curious as to how you feel that plays a role in today's schools.
• [01:49:12] Gail Beaver: Politics and schools. Well, my first concern is education. Well, I think it definitely right now is playing a huge role in how students are educated in our country. Aside from all the other things that are of concern, and aside from yes my involvement in my my political view, in terms of just talking about it in relation to education. I just think we have a lot to be very concerned about. I mean, I taught history of education because I had to teach history of school libraries and education, and they've been from the get-go. When we made a clear decision in this country that we would provide education, public education for everyone, and school libraries were involved in it from the get-go, from the beginning. We had very, very early on, we had a commitment to school libraries, even that aside, we had a commitment to provide good schooling for everybody. That should still be our commitment, and I find that there are some other ideas afoot that are detracting bringing down that public education offering, and it's not what it should be and we have to find it, we have to restore it. That's just a very great concern of mine because I think it definitely influences everything. It influences how people see their government. It influences how they face issues. It influences their economics. [NOISE] I have a great concern about that.
• [01:51:29] FEMALE_1: Thank you so much.
• [01:51:34] Gail Beaver: That cuts us off.
• [01:51:38] FEMALE_1: Thank you so much.
• [01:51:39] Gail Beaver: You didn't want me to get as hot and bothered. [LAUGHTER] I can get about that issue.
• [01:51:49] FEMALE_1: We had the [inaudible 01:51:49]
• [01:51:52] FEMALE_2: Okay.
• [01:51:58] Gail Beaver: Well, if you need me to do or redo anything, let me know. I'm here. I'm happy to do that.
• [01:52:05] FEMALE_1: Thank you.