Legacies Project Oral History: Judy Wenzel

Mon, 08/29/2022 - 12:01pm

When: 2022

Transcript

[00:00:10] Judy Wenzel: My name my legal name is Judith Marie Bonnell Wenzel, J-U-D-I-T-H M-A-R-I-E. My last name is B, as in boy, O-N-N-E-L-L-W-E-N-Z-E-L.
[00:00:40] FEMALE_1: What is your birthday including the year?
[00:00:43] Judy Wenzel: May 25th, 1941.
[00:00:46] FEMALE_1: How old are you?
[00:00:47] Judy Wenzel: That makes me 73.
[00:00:51] FEMALE_1: How would you describe your ethnic background?
[00:00:57] Judy Wenzel: Mostly descended from people who came from the Western Northern part of Europe. It would be the British Isles and Scandinavia.
[00:01:16] FEMALE_1: What is your religious affiliation, if any?
[00:01:20] Judy Wenzel: At the moment, I'm going to an Episcopalian Church. I've haven't always gone to a Christian church. At times I have not gone to any religious, but right now I am. I was raised that way in a different Protestant church.
[00:01:47] FEMALE_1: What is the highest level of formal education you have completed?
[00:01:54] Judy Wenzel: About 20 some years ago someone else paid the state of Michigan paid for me to get a master's degree in social work.
[00:02:07] FEMALE_1: Did you attend any additional school or formal career training beyond what you've completed?
[00:02:13] Judy Wenzel: I'm still going to school at Washington Community College. If you're over 65 and you live in those county, you can continue on.
[00:02:24] FEMALE_1: That's good. What is your marital status?
[00:02:26] Judy Wenzel: I'm married for the last 38 years. I've been married to Mark Wenzel.
[00:02:34] FEMALE_1: Is your spouse still with you?
[00:02:35] Judy Wenzel: Yes.
[00:02:37] FEMALE_1: How many children do you have?
[00:02:39] Judy Wenzel: We just have one son, and he's living in Cleveland.
[00:02:44] FEMALE_1: How many siblings do you have?
[00:02:47] Judy Wenzel: I'm the oldest of four.
[00:02:51] FEMALE_1: What would you consider your primary occupation to have been?
[00:02:55] Judy Wenzel: My primary occupation was working in mental health and I did all of that in Michigan.
[00:03:09] FEMALE_1: Now we can begin the first part of our interview beginning with some of the things you can recall about your family history or beginning with family naming history. By this we mean any story about your last family name or family traditions and selecting first and middle names. Do you know any story about your family?
[00:03:32] Judy Wenzel: The last name I was born with is Bonnell, and I know too many. I don't know where to start or how much you want to know. But back in the 1500s, my father's cousin, Floyd Bonnell looked up way back to the 1500s in Flanders, and they were French Huguenots and had to flee and eventually came to America in the 1800s. But it was spelled B-U-N-N-L-L back in those days. At some time after they got to America, they changed it to be O-N-N-E-L-L. That's not my married name, but it's my name that I was born with.
[00:04:24] FEMALE_1: That's very interesting. [inaudible 00:04:25].
[00:04:29] Judy Wenzel: Marie is I was named after my mother's mother. That was her middle name. There's a lot of question about that, Judith, [LAUGHTER] because I was born right after Judy Garland was in Wizard of Oz, and almost everybody I knew was named Judy. [LAUGHTER] I'm not sure. My mother claims that's not the reason.
[00:04:56] FEMALE_1: Why does your ancestors need to come to the United States?
[00:05:03] Judy Wenzel: The ones in the 1600s came, it's a big question really. First they went to England than they came to the United States. I don't think they were persecuted in England, but they were persecuted in Flanders. French Huguenots were, they didn't want to be Catholic. They left because I think that's the reason in the 1500s that they left Flanders, but I don't know why they left England.
[00:05:44] FEMALE_1: How did they make a living either in the old country, you're in the United States?
[00:05:48] Judy Wenzel: Oh my gosh, I don't know. Well, I do know that I'm not the person who came to the United States, but his father. I'm thinking it was his father or grandfather was a mayor of a town in England. But I don't know exactly how they made their living.
[00:06:14] FEMALE_1: Describe any family migration once they arrived in the United States and how they came to live in this area.
[00:06:22] Judy Wenzel: This area I came to, it's pretty complex. Well, after the people in the 1600s whose last name was Bonnell got to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Then the third son who was not put out to apprenticeship. Now this is, I don't know if I should say this, but my niece, who looked it up, said that the first Bonnell's to come to the Bay Colony were the very first people who were on welfare. [LAUGHTER] Because the Puritans were very angry that the father went back to England and left the mother and the children to fend for themselves. The first two sons were put out to be apprentices, but then the father came back and he wanted his son's back, but they wouldn't give him back. But they were able to keep the third son from being apprenticed out. He's the one that my father is descended from. He went down to what's now New Jersey and built a house called the Bonnell house is still standing. It's now being used by some people who are historians of the American Revolution. That house is still standing, but I've never seen it. Then how did we, how did the barn owls get to this part of the country? So all of my grandparents were either descended from or born in Illinois. Then the ones who walked across Illinois who were from Sweden, their daughter in that family ran away. They were part of Yan Yan sons group that came from Sweden. They had trouble getting out of Sweden because in those days, those in Sweden, there was a church that kept track of whoever was born. Those people had to change their name twice, and Peter Whitt Bloom, that was his second or third time he had changed his name. He actually, it's over in his voice is on a tape that it was made in 1900, and they say that's the oldest voice of somebody who is from Sweden and it's in a museum over in Sweden. But it's not known that the person I'm descended from Martha Whitt Bloom has, his daughter. He was confused by the time he was 100 and was making that tape that was made out of wax, I think. He said, no, my daughter, Martha, changed her name to Anna, but there was really two sisters, and Anna didn't move away out to Nebraska, but my great grandmother did, and they moved out to Nebraska. That's who I'm descended from. That all the other ones my other grandparents grew up in Illinois and my father grew up in the Upper Peninsula. He had never been in the Lower Peninsula until I moved here. I grew up in Port Arthur Texas, [LAUGHTER] so it's all very complex people moving around.
[00:10:45] FEMALE_1: Which family members came along or stayed behind, do you have any?
[00:10:50] Judy Wenzel: I have a great grandmother who I didn't meet, she died about the time I was born. She was living in Freeport, Illinois. Interestingly enough, she was actually born in Dundee, Michigan, which is not very far from here. Her last name was Fleming, and her parents moved to Freeport. But then her mother passed away when she was 15, and her father wanted to go back to where they had come from, which I assumed was Dundee, and she did not want to. She refused to go and state and free port Illinois and work for a seamstress. I guess that would be an example of somebody who stayed behind.
[00:11:49] FEMALE_1: Today's interview is about your childhood up until you began attending school. Even if these questions jog memories about other times in your life, please only respond with memories for this early years, earliest part of your life. Where did you grow up and what are your strongest memories of that place?
[00:12:08] Judy Wenzel: I grew up in Port Arthur. My parents moved there when I was about two-and-a-half. Truthfully, I only know from what my mother told me about Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where I was born. My first memories are living on 9th Avenue in Lake View, which is close to Port Arthur, Texas. My parents didn't have a car until I was about almost three. I remember it was not paved but there was grass in the middle where they would drive the car up into. How my mother learned how to drive was that they had this old green car with running boards that they bought. That was their first car, I remember that. My father held onto my hand I was about three and my sister, Mary, who was about one-and-a-half or two. [LAUGHTER] He said to my mother, Betty May get in the car and drive. She drove around the block. That was her lesson on how to drive. That was one of my first memories. My other memory was that I had reached in to pick a flower in the front of that house and a bee stung me. [LAUGHTER] It was a beautiful white flower, but it was a big shock that I got stung. It was during World War II and my parents moved to 4th Avenue, which was about maybe five blocks away from there, also in Lake View. My mother and father had a screen door with a hook way up high because they thought that we couldn't reach it and we'd be safe. But my sister, Mary was more adventurous than me. She got a broom and went like this and got the door open and ran off and we lived only two blocks from the inter-costal canal. It was a dangerous spot. My mother held my hand and went over looking for my sister and my sister was almost to the canal when she found her. My sister had learned this little song in Sunday school. All the way home, she sung Jesus Loves Me This I Know because she probably realized that she was going to be punished. [LAUGHTER] We lived in a little house that was built by FHA during World War II. It had asbestos siding. It had a slab. In Port Arthur, there could be no basement because we were below sea level. If you dug down for a couple of feet, you just hit water. It was a slab, concrete foundation. I remember that house the best and I remember that telephone number better than any other phone number. It only had five numbers in those days. [LAUGHTER] It was 58416, but useless information today. Another thing is that since I was the oldest, I was raised with the idea that I was supposed to take care of my little sister, who was 20 months younger than me. She was scared of spiders so she she told me when I was only three years old, maybe three-and-a-half, I'm scared of that spider up there. I said, I'll save you. I pulled out the drawers on the chest of drawers and I climbed up. But she climbed up after me and of course, the chest of drawers fell over on top of both of us. She crawled out and I broke my leg because it got caught in the door. Now if anybody tells me I'm scared of spiders, I said, I can't rescue you [LAUGHTER] because I already broke my leg once. [LAUGHTER]
[00:16:46] FEMALE_1: What languages were spoken in or around your house?
[00:16:49] Judy Wenzel: Just English.
[00:16:50] FEMALE_1: Just English.
[00:16:52] Judy Wenzel: But the problem was of course that I started to speak up north so I got teased by the kids in Port Arthur because I would say like pop and they'd laugh at me because they say, are you going to drink your father? They did not use the word pop for soft drinks.
[00:17:15] FEMALE_1: What was your family like when you were a child?
[00:17:20] Judy Wenzel: Are you still talking about before I started to school?
[00:17:28] FEMALE_1: Either one.
[00:17:34] Judy Wenzel: Well, I was the first and because that grandmother who refuse to follow her father stayed, she was thought to be stubborn and I was thought to be stubborn because I was the first kid. I was a terrible too. Well, I don't want to say in those days my parents didn't, especially my mother she absolutely refused to read Doctor Spock. She was, no, I'll just raise my child away, I believe. My father probably, he was busy as a chemical engineer working in a very dangerous job in a refinery. I wanted to say in a lot of ways it felt harsh, but I do know that both of my parents wanted me to succeed. My father wanted boys and because of that, he raised me and my sister to to do the things he wanted to teach a son. At the age of five, he got us out there and taught us how to swing the bat and play softball. Those are the good things. But I got spanked and I never believed that I had ever done anything wrong. I was very rebellious from day one. I always believed that I was perfect because I was raised with the idea I had to be perfect, which was of course not a healthy way to raise a child. But I was very shy too. I remember that I got spanked once for not saying good morning to my grandparents. I just couldn't do it. [LAUGHTER] I think that was pretty harsh, but by enlarge, my parents had very high expectations that I was going to succeed in every way. It was a lot of pressure, but I never felt like they thought I wasn't going to succeed. It was good and bad.
[00:19:53] FEMALE_1: What was the typical day like for you in your pre-school years?
[00:20:02] Judy Wenzel: My parents would get up early and I was always a morning person. I think I bothered them because I got up so early, but my father would get off to work very early. In the days when World War II was still going on, my mother would have to take my sister and me without a car to the nearest store to wait in line for milk but I don't think she had to do that every day. But I do have a vague memory of that. Then across the street from us were our best friends when I was a preschooler. That was Catherine and Carol Scott, who were the two youngest of six children. That their father was a ship captain and their mother was from Jamaica. That was fun. We got to run around with those kids.
[00:21:07] FEMALE_1: What did you do for fun?
[00:21:10] Judy Wenzel: Well, near the house that we lived on 4th Street, there was something called a China berry tree. We liked to dig in the dirt under the China berry tree. Then my father built a fence around the backyard. Even though the the house when it was first bought had no garage, no fenced in area eventually had a garage and a fenced in area. It was fun because we had a little swing and so as a preschooler, I think I had a very protected life, getting to play like that. We learned how to swing. [LAUGHTER] Actually one thing I loved and my mother could get me to stay in bed because I would never take a nap, she would get me to stay in bed by telling me I could color in bed. I love to color. I became very good at art before I started to school because that was my favorite pass time.
[00:22:32] FEMALE_1: Did you have a favorite games in school? [LAUGHTER]
[00:22:41] Judy Wenzel: Maybe as a preschooler, what was my favorite game? Well, we played with dolls and we did have dolls and we had the little dolls that would wet. So you'd feed them with a little bottle and then they'd wet. [LAUGHTER] There's a little hole in there bottom that was on the side of where you put on the diaper or whatever. But there's a scary or a sad story about that, that I think that I was so take over everything because I was older than my sister Mary that I think she was secretly quite angry at me. One time she punched the eyes out of my doll and my mother didn't want me to get mad. So she told me how I should not get upset about that. Then after that, I really didn't want to play with dolls anymore. So that was my way of handling, don't get mad about your doll getting messed up. [LAUGHTER].
[00:23:55] FEMALE_1: Were there any special days events or family traditions you remember from this time?
[00:24:02] Judy Wenzel: I don't know about preschool, if I remember that. I do remember about Santa Claus and that kind of thing. I remember about how my grandparents would send us some things that had to do with Easter, like Easter Bunny kinds of stuff or the Easter eggs that are covered with. But I truly don't remember if that was preschool or after I started to school.
[00:24:38] FEMALE_1: What were your Christmas look like?
[00:24:42] Judy Wenzel: We always had a tree. There was a big deal about believing in Santa Claus. And I was also going to church and hearing about the Sunday school. Even preschool I'm pretty sure I was going to Sunday school. It's probably pretty confusing between the pretty strict Presbyterian Church I was going to and also the story of Santa Claus. [LAUGHTER] But there were always quite a lot of presence, so my parents wanted to be as middle class as possible. [LAUGHTER]
[00:25:28] FEMALE_1: I think that's all the questions we have for today.
[00:25:36] Judy Wenzel: Is that all I have to answer, and is the hour up?
[00:25:40] FEMALE_1: I think so. You really answered all of the questions.
[00:25:45] Judy Wenzel: Should I've said more?
[00:25:47] FEMALE_1: No. You've said. [inaudible 00:25:48] [LAUGHTER]
[00:25:56] Judy Wenzel: Five times I've taken something called journal workshop at Washington Community College. I think I started out just telling bad stuff that happened to me, but it turns out better when I tell some good stuff and some bad stuff and say, okay, everybody has their problems. I certainly do like I say. I've always been way too dominant over my sister Mary when I was growing up. I don't live near her now. [LAUGHTER] But the interesting thing is my sister Mary called me yesterday and said, "We're going to go through the town where mom grew up. Do you remember what the address was?" Well, how would I know? But I looked it up and I went to ancestry.com. I remember a year ago or so, seeing her census of where my mother was living when she was nine years old and so I looked it up again because you can get that service for free for 14 days. So I signed up for it and found it and found the exact address. In a way, I think I am still that dominant sister, like why didn't my sister look it up? [LAUGHTER] She wanted me to do it. [LAUGHTER] She's very smart. There's no reason why she couldn't have done that.
[00:27:41] FEMALE_1: What's your sister doing now?
[00:27:43] Judy Wenzel: Well today, they're going to Memphis, Tennessee, and she's going with her son and daughter-in-law and her husband, all four of them. Her daughter-in-law asked her yesterday, "Well, what's the address that your mother lived at when she was growing up in Memphis?" Of course, my sister didn't know and of course when she called me, I didn't know. But I remembered seeing in the census of 1930 that they were living in Memphis and there were six people in the family. There were my grandma, my grandpa, my uncle, my mother, and then my grandfather's brother. This is the very interesting thing. My grandfather's brother married my grandmother's sister. So they were double uncle and aunt. They lived there because I'm sure they were having a hard time because in 1930, it had only been one year since the depression hit. Even though my uncle and my grandfather were architects, the stories are that those companies folded during the depression. So they had to move on to do something else or move somewhere else. That's probably why the aunt and uncle were living there too. Anyway, my mother went to Central High School [LAUGHTER] and now I know that she loved that. I think it was 260 North Willett. But it's probably not the same house after 85 years. [LAUGHTER] Or the same high school building, just the same name. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, are you still taping me? [LAUGHTER]
[00:29:59] Judy Wenzel: My mother grew up in Memphis and my sister, who has stayed closer to my parents, my parents have both passed away now, but Mary being actually their nicest child, and certainly not a rebel like the rest of us, especially me. She stayed closer to my parents and so she and her husband took my father up to Marquette and Gwinn, Michigan where my father was born. My father moved away from Gwinn before he could have remembered, but he took them to this place and he says, "This is the hospital where I was born." Well, it's now a dentist's office, according to my sister. But they went inside and my sister asked and the people in the dentist's office said, "Yes, that's right. This used to be a hospital." My father knew the exact place where he was born. And then his parents moved to Marquette and that's where he grew up. He was also able to show them some places in Marquette that he remembered. But I think the house where he grew up was no longer there. Maybe the church. He went to an Episcopal Church there, but I don't know if that was still there. They also went to, I don't know if it's the same trip, but maybe it was, went to Pittsburgh where I was a baby. My father was able to take them right to the apartment where my parents lived in 1939 when they first got married. It's pretty amazing.
[00:32:10] Judy Wenzel: Yeah.
[00:32:17] Judy Wenzel: Do you want to know about my childhood before I remember that my mother told me about?
[00:32:23] FEMALE_1: Sure.
[00:32:24] Judy Wenzel: I was the first child and my parents got married when my mother had just turned 19, was only barely 19. They took the train from Memphis up to. Because she was raised in Memphis, they got married there. But they had met in Illinois at the University of Illinois. My father had a job with gulf oil. Anyway, my mother wanted to be a piano teacher. My father said, Oh, I hated my piano teacher so much. I don't want anybody to hate you like that. Pretty soon, my father wanted to rule the family, be the person in charge. Then after my mother was just home in the apartment. My father was going to work and he or she was just a little 19-year-old. My father says, Oh, it's time to start having children because you don't have anything to do. That's how I came to be born. I was born in this really tall hospital where the Monongahela and the downtown Pittsburgh, where these two rivers come together to make the Ohio. My mother says that on May 25th, 1941, when I was born, she looked out and there was snow on the window sill. [LAUGHTER] It was a cold morning. In those days, my mother wanted to nurse her first baby. She at least knew enough about it to realize that would be healthy. But in those days, they thought it was very unclean to nurse your baby. They would take me away to the nursery or maybe I was there all the time and then they would feed me a bottle and then they would bring me in for my mother to nurse. Well, of course I didn't want any food by then. It was very difficult for her to do it the natural way. Then my sister was an accident. The fact that my mother was using a birth control method which she threw in the trash after she found out she was pregnant. When I was less than a year old, she became pregnant. So then my sister Mary, who is a much nicer person than me in the fact that she's, I want to say more social and more. She would never have trouble remembering people's names. Never, ever. She was born in 1943. Then after that, a one month after that, my father got spinal meningitis and his mother, my paternal grandmother, believed that it was because of that spinal meningitis that he was so harsh with the family. My mother said that wasn't necessarily true, but my father was a very good hearted man. He had a lot of expectations on him to make good and make sure that he made enough money to keep his family middle-class. Because when he was young, he saw that his father lost his job in the Upper Peninsula and never had work again. That made a really big impression on my father because he was only 13 when his father lost his job and my father would cry when he would tell about that. Because up until that point, they have been very middle-class and had very nice everything. My father went to his father to say, could you give me a dime or a quarter or whatever it costs to go ice skating. His father said, I thought I told you, you can't ask me for money anymore because I don't have a job. My father cried when he told that. That made a terrible impression on him. My father felt this really big burden that he had to make sure that he never lost his job. Therefore, he worked at a dangerous job when he was at the refinery. There is a chance of fires and it was very dangerous. I think we have to give that background to how he could have been pretty harsh when he was at home. I have no trouble telling. I went through tons of therapy and told my story so many times. I've always had the problem of telling too much of the truth and got in trouble for that. I'm not the type to not tell things as I see them. I've gotten in trouble for that. Not only with my parents, but sometimes even with my friends. Anyway, is it almost nine or should I say anything else? I don't know what time it is. I know that clock's not right. [LAUGHTER] I turned off my cell phone, which is my clock.
[00:38:56] Judy Wenzel: I think that trying to be middle-class put a lot of pressure on both of my parents. Even my mother saw her father loose his job and they moved to Ocala, Florida and then moved back to Memphis trying to make sure that her father still had a job, and so during the 30s was a really hard time for a lot of people. They grew up with the idea that I've got to do anything I can to make sure that I'm not unemployed, that I have a middle-class life. That's what I was born into as a little kid who didn't understand that at all. Of course I didn't understand it and I made a lot of waves because I didn't see why we had to be so strict and had to do anything for the job. I hated having that, people moving all the time. My relatives all being up north and I was being way down in place thousands of miles away and so I ended up moving back up north [LAUGHTER] for better or worse. Should I stop? Should I keep going? But I'm supposed to talk about before I was five. Before I was five, before I went to school, my parents would read to me and I loved books and I was raised to love books and my favorite book was The Bunny Book. It was by Margaret Wise Brown. Well, anyway, the first name of the person who did the pictures, I'm a very visual person. The pictures in that book were just so beautiful. That's why I loved the book it was before I could read. There's a lot of dyslexia in my family so I could talk about that when we talk about elementary. But I loved the pictures, they were just so beautiful of where this little bunny lived. The fact that the little bunny was lonely and I think else in the little bunny's life was this big blue egg and the bunny kicks it and can hear a little sound inside of it. Eventually, when the bunny falls asleep, a little duck pops out of the egg, baby duck [LAUGHTER] and then the little duck tries to wake up the bunny. That was my favorite book as a pre-schooler. Actually, that book still exists, I found it as an adult and bought it. My parents were very good in having us love books early and reading to us. My father was quite impressed that he came home one day and I was writing numbers and I was still a pre-schooler. In those days, pre-schoolers weren't supposed to know about numbers. He said, well, how did you know which number came after the other? I said, well, I was looking in the book and there was this number at the bottom so I wrote them all down. [LAUGHTER] That impressed him, I guess in these days, that wouldn't be so impressive, but for him, he didn't know that his little pre-schooler could think of that. It was before the days of television and my mother didn't like to have the radio on and so we didn't have radio on except when my father came home and on Saturdays, he'd listen to the ballgame on the radio. So I think I grew up really sheltered. Catherine and Carol Scott across the street are the friends that I can remember, Catherine was my age and Carol was my sister's age. Other than that, as a pre-schooler, I think that was pretty much it. There were other kids in the neighborhood, but they mostly got us in trouble. I won't tell my sister's story but she had a story of somebody else that she got into it with my parents, but she didn't do anything wrong. It was just that this other little kid got her to cut her hair when she shouldn't have done that of course. [LAUGHTER] I think that the town that I grew up in Port Arthur is one of the 10 wettest cities in the United States and that's including Hawaii and Alaska. I remember that we would look out after it had rained all night and if they had not started the pumps, the water would be filling the street and be creeping up towards our front step and so that's one thing I remember about Lake View. It was below sea level. Like living in Holland. The pumps had to be turned on to keep the water out. It wouldn't have been there except for the oil that was found in Beaumont, Texas. That's how I came to exist in around 1900, so really different from Ann Arbor. [LAUGHTER]
[00:46:06] Judy Wenzel: I think I had already started to school, but this is a story. In Texas, people are supposed to stand up when they hear the Eyes of Texas. My parents sent us to Mrs. George's preschool and Mrs. George, she wanted to teach little kids how to dance. But my mother having two children, she said, I am not going to make all those little outfits for you to dance. I wish that we had gone to a different school because as it ended up, the people who didn't have the costumes didn't dance, and they sat around and watched other people dance. That was not really the best way to go to preschool. After I had started to kindergarten, I came home one day and my sister was in bed. The story was that which I think I learned from my mother, not from my sister. She, as a preschooler, had climbed the fence and run away. As she came home towards Lake View, there was no sidewalks to get from Port Arthur proper to Lake View. She was walking along the edge of the road, just the two-lane road and a man stopped to pick her up and take her home. The thing that scared my parents most was she went home with that man. He took her to the right house, he took her to where her house was and she knew the way. But they were terrified, and I'm sure that more probably happened to her than just that she had to stay in bed [LAUGHTER] the rest of the day. But that is something that happens to my little sister as a preschooler. I'm pretty amazed. I don't think that I could have possibly found my way home from Mrs. George's. I am very unclear as to where she lived, but I do remember having to sit around the edge, having to watch other people dance and that was not pleasant because you'd want to do it yourself. Obviously, and she taught us all to sing The Eyes of Texas and that we were supposed to stand up when they played [LAUGHTER] The Eyes of Texas. People in Michigan don't think of that, that there is a state where people think we're so much still a country that people should stand up when our song is played. [LAUGHTER] That's weird, but what I grew up with. Preschool, the things that I remember [LAUGHTER], I remember being afraid of Catherine and Carol's older brother because I think he had a BB gun. As far as I was concerned, a BB gun was equal to a gun. [LAUGHTER] But he never tried doing anything wrong with it. Maybe it wasn't him that had that gun. Maybe it was the boy next door to me, but I remember being afraid. [LAUGHTER]
[00:49:46] FEMALE_1: Do you think we should wrap it up? Do you think that's good?
[00:49:46] Judy Wenzel: It's fine with me. I probably said a lot more than I should have [LAUGHTER], but it's okay.
[00:49:53] FEMALE_1: That's fine.
[00:49:56] Judy Wenzel: This is just things that I remember. I did find one person who thought they were very interested in taking part in this. She's also Episcopalian, but she goes to St. Andrews and I'm stalling because I'm trying to remember her name. Well, anyway, I'm hoping that she called because she sounded very excited about it. She has a very interesting story to tell because of-
[00:50:36] FEMALE_1: Today we'll discuss your time as a young person from about the time that school typically begins in the United States up until you begin your professional career or work life. So did you go to preschool and where and what do you remember about it?
[00:50:50] Judy Wenzel: Do I get to say something I remembered that I forgot to say last time?
[00:50:56] FEMALE_1: Yeah.
[00:51:00] Judy Wenzel: It seems like because I was born just before we got into World War II, then I want to say a little bit about how that affected me. For one thing, my father probably wanted to be part of the war effort, but he had been sick, really sick when my sister was born and I was two and a half and we moved down to Texas from living up North because that way he could work in a refinery and that was like he could feel worthwhile producing oil for the troops and stuff like that, producing gasoline. Then they have cards like rationing cards, and so my mother would walk down to the store with my sister and me, on each hand, and wait in line for milk. She'd have to give them those little stamps or whatever they were little things in a book to get those because that was limited during the war. And then when I was about three-and-a-half or four, my mother was not the type to ever show her feelings like cry or anything like that in front of her kids. But one day she went out to get the newspaper and on the front staff and came back in and was reading it and went in the hall and started crying and I was really scared because I was about three and a half or four and my mother was doing something she'd never done before. It was because as I found out much later, she was reading about the Battle of the Bulge, which was a big, big battle at the end of World War II and her brother was in it so she was really scared that he had died. So that's why she was crying. Those are my remembrances. And then starting to school, my sister was started in the half-year because, during the war for some reason, they started the kids every half-year instead of every year and she was a year-and-a-half younger than me. But as soon as the war ended, then about 1946 or '47, they changed that to where all the kids started just in September and so they bumped her up and she was a little bit too young for her grade. I was hard on her because she was a little bit too young. She was only one year behind me. [LAUGHTER] So those are the main things.
[00:54:01] FEMALE_1: Did you go to kindergarten?
[00:54:04] Judy Wenzel: I did. [LAUGHTER]
[00:54:08] Judy Wenzel: I was a very scared little girl. I didn't learn much in preschool because the teacher didn't have much of an idea of what preschool was all about. She just thought, wow, I'm going to have the kids have these fancy costumes on in dance, and I'll teach them dance. But my mother didn't want to have to make all the costumes. The mothers had to make the costumes. My sister and I and other kids who didn't have costumes had to sit around and watch. [LAUGHTER] Then when I started to kindergarten, which in those days they didn't try to teach you anything about the letters of the alphabet or the numbers or anything like that, they did grade you, but the grades were all satisfactory to not satisfactory, I guess unsatisfactory. It was based on whether you played with this or that, or whether you would try everything. I remember that I was so into pleasing people that I was in the satisfactory column for everything except clay. But I've never played with clay. The next semester or nine weeks, I think it was every nine weeks, I had to try really hard [LAUGHTER] to play with clay, but I had other problems swipe out on the back. When we played outside, there was a big slide. To me, it looked like it was very high. I'm sure it wasn't all that high. All the kids were lined up and I got to the top of the slide and I was so scared that all the kids had to let me come back down because I wouldn't slide down the slide. [LAUGHTER] I was a scared little kindergartener. [LAUGHTER]
[00:56:21] FEMALE_1: Did you go to high school and what do you remember about it?
[00:56:24] Judy Wenzel: High school. Can I have a timeout?
[00:56:31] FEMALE_1: Yes.
[00:56:32] Judy Wenzel: Are we going to do like first grade and stuff?
[00:56:36] FEMALE_1: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Did you go to elementary school?
[00:56:44] Judy Wenzel: Yeah. The school I went to was called Robert E. Lee Elementary School. I guess that shows you who the people in the South thought were important. He was the big commander of the troops in the South in the Civil War. Well, when I started to first grade, that's when they started trying to get us to read. The first thing that I really recall a lot is that the teacher said, well, some of us can read and some of us can draw. I was the one who could draw and this little boy who sat next to me was the one who could read because at first I had a little dyslexia and so isn't that look the same to me? Me and we'd look the same to me and I had quite a lot of trouble at first. But I love books. There was a library at that school and my favorite books were Dr. Dolittle and there were a lot of animals and I guess that's the reason I liked it so much. I remember that when I started, so they had pre-primer and then they had first grade. When I got to the second semester, probably that was when it was called first grade, and I went to the library to check out my favorite author or book was Dr. Dolittle. The librarian said, "Oh, that's too hard for you." [LAUGHTER] I insisted on taking it and then I started to teach myself to read because that's really how I learn. I don't learn well in a classroom. I hearing it, somebody talk about it. I did learn to read but wasn't right away. Another thing that happened, they would have these units. We studied cows at some point, maybe in second grade and the teacher wanted us to make our little booklets in the shape of a cow, but she wanted us to trace her cow but I didn't want to do that. I wanted to do it by free hand because I liked to draw. She was amazed and also not really that happy that I insisted on doing it free hand [LAUGHTER]. But she was amazed that I could actually make it look somewhat like a cow without tracing. But that was what I was good at before I started the school. One of the things I really had trouble with in school was that my parents were very intimate doing perfect. I remember taking home my spelling and showing my mother that I had gotten a hundred on it. She said, "Well, I expect you to make a hundred." [LAUGHTER] That gave me the clue that I better do everything perfect and study really hard and that made me unpopular because teachers in those days, I'm going to say it's in those days, they weren't very psychologically aware and so the teacher would tell who had made hundreds. Well, that made me very unpopular because if another kid didn't make a hundred, then they'd be mad at me and so it wasn't all that easy to make friends. It ended up that my best friend was another little girl who made hundreds on her spelling. [LAUGHTER] It was strange. I found elementary school a little bit difficult but I got so that I could read really well because I was a bookworm and had trouble even at home playing with other kids. My sister was the one who always made friends in the neighborhood and so I would go home and I would read The Saturday Evening Post and stuff like that which in my day, when I was a little girl, everybody was terrified of polio and they would tell all these horror stories of somebody who just wake up one morning and they were paralyzed and they wouldn't be able to move. I was terrified of polio too. I noticed that each month they'd have an article about polio in the Saturday Evening Post. I tried to read all about it because I was so scared of it. [LAUGHTER] I was trying to, in my own way, deal with that fear. That's pretty much what happened in early school. Then when I was in fifth grade, my parents moved to a different part of the city and so I went to DeQuin. That was my first time that I realized that there were things that I had not learned at my first school that people were supposed to know at the second school, even though it was the same city. I couldn't take notes and the fifth grade teacher wanted us to learn how to take notes. But I didn't know how because I've been taught to read by sight, which it wasn't that I had failed to learn something that they were teaching, they just didn't teach phonics. It took me many years to realize that the reason I had so much trouble taking notes was because I had no idea how to start the word off because I had no idea what it started with it unless I can have a picture in my head of what that. It was weird. I was always a little afraid of school because I knew I couldn't make those hundreds. [LAUGHTER] least not all the time.
[01:03:12] FEMALE_1: Did you go to high school?
[01:03:17] Judy Wenzel: High school wasn't so scary, but starting to junior high was really scary. Can I talk about that a little bit? In seventh grade we went to junior high, but it was huge. It was bigger than the high school. It was a very big school and you had to move from class to class and then you had to take typing. I was terrified with the typing teacher. I would raise my hand very timidly and tell her, "I don't know how to set the margins." Setting the margins is really important when you're typing on a typewriter and she'd come over and just go. I still didn't know how to set the margins and then the next time I had to ask her again, "How do I set the margins?" The she'd come do it. [LAUGHTER] I still didn't know how. [LAUGHTER] I was terrified of typing and also I wasn't good at it because maybe of dyslexia, I could never get fast and so that was terrifying and then an eighth grade, we had to take something called social planning. I was very sheltered by my parents. I had no idea what the teacher who was old night herself, well, I shouldn't say that, but anyway, she was unmarried. Those days they called people who didn't get married over maize. But she was trying to actually teach us how not to get a disease and how not to go to bed with a guy when we were in eighth grade. I was very young unaware, 13-year-old. I had no idea what this teacher was getting that and she never would use the words so I didn't know what social planning was all about. I made my first C in social planning because I had no clue as to what was teacher was trying to get at. That was only for nine weeks, thank goodness and then the next teacher who was teaching us how to cook, because in those days girls had to take cooking and the boys had to take sharp. Well, the cooking teacher looked at that and she said, "I couldn't believe that you made at C." Well, I had no idea where it was all about. [LAUGHTER] Then in 10th grade, I went to high school. In ninth grade, I had what I can always thought of as my best teacher ever and he taught civics and I just loved that teacher. It was during the McCarthy era when everybody was supposed to hate communists and think that the communists were the worst people on earth and so we were in a big Cold War with Russia. McCarthy was the person, I don't know if he was a senator. But anyway, he was doing which holds against people in Hollywood and all over the country, trying to prove that they were communists and they lose their job, never be able to have a job again. Sometimes they were put in prison. Really horrible things would happen to people. It all had to do with whether they were communist or not and so this teacher, he had been in World War II, but he would tell us stories about that. He did not have to fight. He was over in North Africa and Italy, but he was a person who worked in an office. But it was still scary because, the sirens would go off and you have to run and hide because the bombs were going to drop and stuff like that. But the reason that I liked him so much was because number 1, I didn't have to take notes and he would write everything up on the board. One day he came in and he had three columns and good and bad points are strengths and weaknesses of democracy, fascism and communism. I went home and I told my father, "Did you know that communism has some good points?" My father was just, "No, we have another communists in the family." [LAUGHTER] Because he thought his sister who had gone to the University of Chicago, which was a place where some of the teachers were communists, he thought that she was a communist. For my whole childhood, I thought she was a communist. But then when I actually got to know her because she lived about 1,000 miles away from us up north, I found out that she believed almost the exact same things as my father. [LAUGHTER] All this time I was a rebel, so I was thinking, she really has it together and, I just thought a lot of her and I still do. But she was no way the communist or even a socialist. [LAUGHTER] That was some of what happened and then when I really got into the high school, the high school is actually smaller than the junior high because in the town I grew up in, a lot of kids did not make it to high school. It was a little town in Southeast Texas and what I want to say is this, once I got to junior high, I realized that there were people in my town I had never met, that I never even knew anything about them. I never met a person who was black, who was my age until I moved to Michigan really. I grew up in complete apartheid is what I want to call it. Once there was a group that came from black high school to perform for us, to sing when I was in junior high. I'm not trying to be racist or anything, but I was just floored at what they look like because I had never seen anybody my age who was black and it just was a big shock to me. Then when I was in high school, it was when they were starting to talk about integration because there was a big brown, there was a big Supreme Court case during the '50s and I was in high school shortly after that so there were discussions. The town that I grew up in was so separated that when people went downtown to buy things, if you were a black person and you went downtown and you came from across the railroad tracks to do that, there were water fountains. There was a nice water fountain that had really cool water. That was refrigerated water and then there was a little fountain that was not refrigerated and above it, it said colored. That's the town that I grew up. Now, I know that Rosa Parks didn't want to move to the back of the bus and I heard about that after I was in college. But I don't really recall hardly anybody who was black dean on a bus or that I was ever on a bus very much. But we did have a maid in our house who was black. Her name was Hattie Palmer. We didn't call her Hattie Palmer or Mrs. Palmer. We just call it her Hattie. She was the same age as my grandmother and I would be so embarrassed if I wasn't a very neat little kid or even teenager. If she made up my bed, it was just so embarrassing to me because she was my grandmother's age. I knew that my grandmother would never ever make up my bed. She would make me do it and it was just so embarrassing to have the maid makeup my bed because I knew that she was elderly. I could see that she had gray hair and I knew that the reason she was working was because her daughter had died of pneumonia and she was having to raise her grandson and she made very little money. Those are some of the things that happened, not necessarily in school, but at home. My mother had grown up in Memphis, Tennessee and she was more comfortable with people who are black because when she was growing up, the white people are left in the houses on the street and the black people lived in smaller houses off of the alley. Because I think that back during our lifetimes, most likely that's what they had to do was take care of the horses and stuff. But my mother, of course, grew up when they didn't have horses. They already had cars. You want me to finish with high school?
[01:14:18] FEMALE_1: Yeah.
[01:14:18] Judy Wenzel: [LAUGHTER] My Parents really wanted me to go to college and a lot of my friends, their parents had come from Louisiana and it was to work in the refineries. If you could get a good job in the refinery, if you had graduated from high school, you could get a good job and that's of course, if you are white. If you were black you had to be the ones that cleaned up stuff and custodians or something.
[01:15:00] Judy Wenzel: But for that reason, a lot of my friends had no idea that they were ever going to go to college, and their parents, because they had come from rural Louisiana, didn't care if their child got married when they were 15, and so some of my friends started having babies and coming to school after they had already had two kids and stuff like that while I was in high school. It was quite different. There was no attitude that you could not finish high school once you were pregnant or had a child or anything like that, but I got put into classes that were pre-college. It's really funny when I went back. I probably shouldn't talk about what happened to me recently. But anyway, my father made us, all of his daughters take every single math, every single science class and when I said that to a friend who I saw quite recently, she said, you didn't take everyone because my father taught business math and you didn't take that [LAUGHTER]. She was pointing out to me that I was swinging my thought too wide. He made me take every pre-college math and every pre-college science. When I finished high school, I hated math so much that I spent my whole summer before college studying math so I could take the tests so that I could take all my math before I started to college. I did that and my parents by that point, one of the big things that happened to me when I was a child, when I was nine years old, can I talk about this? When I was nine years old, my mother got pregnant, and so I was nine and my sister was seven and we had a little sister. My parents wanted, especially my father wanted a boy so bad. They had the name all set for the boy, but because the little girl was born, my sister and I, Mary and I got to name our sister and because we went to a Presbyterian Church where to join the church when we were 10 or so, we had to read through the whole Bible. We were very impressed that there was a whole book in the Bible about a woman named Ruth, and so we named our sister Ruth. We got to name her. Then when I was 12 and we were very excited about that, but when I was 12, my parents had a fourth child and that was a boy, but by that point, I had gotten into pre-adolescents or adolescents, whatever. I was not so interested in taking care of little brothers and sisters by that point. That was pretty hard on me that all through my teenage years, my parents not only had a little sister, who if you ever wanted to go on a date with a boy, would try to hide in the back seat because she thought she was just as old as us, but we had a little brother who was about three at the time that I was 15 when I was first thinking about boys. If a boy came over, my brother might just run down the stairs naked or something, he was just a little kid and to him that was nothing but it was very embarrassing to me. [LAUGHTER] A lot of my teenage years were colored by having a little brother and sister and how that made me feel about bringing friends to my house or something like that. I was still very shy in high school and when I first had to get up in junior high and give a talk in front of people, I was so scared that my hands were shaking and I couldn't get them to stop. After I finished, it was so noticeable that the teacher talked about it. That only made me realize that everybody in the class knew that my hands were shaking, but she was very kind and she talked about Senator Kennedy. Kennedy after I was in college, became president, but at the time he was a senator. She said, his hands shake too, and he always stands behind a lectern, I think you call it, so that people can't see that his hands are shaking. At least she was very kind about it and let me know that somebody who was very important and had to give speeches all that time had the same problem.
[01:20:49] FEMALE_1: Did you play any sports or engage in any other extra curricular activities?
[01:20:56] Judy Wenzel: [LAUGHTER] I was not in band, but I did play tennis. But at my school, there was the champion for the whole state for girls tennis. In the tennis club, I was a member of the tennis club, but they had one of these things where you play somebody first and then if you went against that person, then those two winners play next. The first person I played against was Tommy Domain and you could tell from her father probably wanted boys too because she was named Tommy and her sister was named Bobby. Anyway, I didn't get one point, not one point and it was a very hot day in Texas and I was exhausted after that even though you'd think that it only took two games for her to beat me because we didn't have to go to the third game because I never got to a point [LAUGHTER]. That was the only thing that I played, but they had maybe unlike, I don't know how it is today, but we always had gym every single day. The girls played the girls. They had basketball, but it was girl's basketball. In those days, girls could only run half of the court and so you either had to be a guard or you had to be a forward. The forwards got to shoot baskets and they were the ones who were tall and I was short, so I had to be a guard. I never got to be one who got to shoot and trying to make a basket. That wasn't terribly fun. Then we would also play many times in gym. We would play volleyball. Volleyball in those days, you did it like this with your fingers, I guess nowadays you hit it here on your wrist and I was always springing my fingers and having to go have them x-ray to see if there were broke. I was not much of a player in the fact that my fingers couldn't stand the strain of hitting the ball. [LAUGHTER] Can I talk about sandlot?
[01:23:48] FEMALE_1: Yes.
[01:23:51] Judy Wenzel: When we moved to a bigger house when I was 10 because my grandparents were going to come and live with us, we lived in a neighborhood that was almost all girls, but two of those girls were extremely good at sandlot type of football, and so on when I was 12 my parents told me, you cannot play football, that's tackle. You have to play two below the waist. Until I was about 15, I was very interested in playing two below the waist and I was short, but a girl who went to my elementary school and I'm sure she went to my high school and also to the same college, but I just wasn't very close to her after that, but she was so excellent. She could kick a football so that just would go up just like you see on TV. Her name was Francis [inaudible 01:25:05] and she grew up to be very rich. About a year ago she was in a plane accident, a very small plane that went down and died. But she was just excellent and it was a lot of fun to play with her and Carroll Halter, who was also very good, but not quite as tall and not, but these girls were amazing [LAUGHTER] and I had a lot of fun playing with them.
[01:25:46] FEMALE_1: We're going to talk about popular culture next. Could you please describe the popular music of this time?
[01:25:51] Judy Wenzel: [LAUGHTER] When I was in high school, I was so unaware, but the music that was played and the dancing that I did had to do with kids that I met at church. I think the church wanted to make sure that they could have their eye on us, so they let us dance at get-togethers on Sunday night and stuff and of course [LAUGHTER]
[01:26:28] Judy Wenzel: Now I'm going to block out the name of the Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley was singing all the songs and they were these little 45 records that have a big hole in the middle. They're all at the top here and then one after the other we'll drop down in. We dance to Elvis Presley and what we danced was called a jitterbug. [LAUGHTER] It wasn't until I got to college that I learned some of the other dances that were a little bit after that. The jitterbug was the only thing I knew how to dance when I was in high school. [LAUGHTER].
[01:27:14] FEMALE_1: Did the music have any particular dances? What were the popular clothing or hairstyles of this time?
[01:27:26] Judy Wenzel: I grew up in the South and up North the popular thing which I did not experience was wearing bobby socks. But where I grew up girls didn't wear socks. They wore hose and I don't recall that I wore hose. My parents probably wouldn't let me but if I ever tried to where bobby socks to school, I was shunned because that was just thought to be absolutely not okay. I remember that one girl came to our high school and she was from the north. She must have been, she had Elvis Presley right here on her arm. We just thought that was the worst thing ever that anybody would ever put a name on their arm. She wore bobby socks too. What happened when I was in high school was that there were all these crinolines that you wore underneath your skirt. I think one time a teacher said to a girl, well, why do you have to wear so many of those under your skirt? This is particularly happened in junior high. She said, "If I don't wear all those people won't know that I have that many." That was how crazy it was. The girls would come with these little shoes like what you have on, but they have on hose that were very light colored. It was just like they had all these little tiny shoes and then they had on this big skirt that stuck out in all directions. Of course, it only came down right around their knees. It wasn't like old timey, long skirts and then everybody had to have their hair curly. But see I'm talking about white girls, in those days you didn't say white girls. It wasn't what you said because as far as you knew everybody was white except for some people who live far away that you never got to see. But at the time that we were having permanence to have curly hair, the people on the other side of town who we weren't seeing were having their hair straightened. That's the craziness that we were growing up with. Janis Joplin went to our school and she was in my sister's grade. Janis Joplin became famous later on in the '60s. She was never accepted in the town that we grew up in because she sang black music but she was a white girl. I think I threw away my high school yearbook but her hair was curled just like everybody else's. She looked just like me, essentially, with that same curly hairdo.
[01:31:12] FEMALE_1: Were there any slang terms, phrases, or words you said that aren't in commonly use today?
[01:31:17] Judy Wenzel: That are common or not?
[01:31:20] FEMALE_1: Not.
[01:31:20] Judy Wenzel: Are not common. Do they use the term making out today? [LAUGHTER] we used that term too. Now a more old term that I didn't use very much but I knew what it meant was spooning. Spooning means about the same thing. [LAUGHTER] Oh my goodness, some terms. See I grew up in Texas and they had a word. If you said I have to go to the bathroom, that was thought to be very rude to say it that way. The ladies would say, I have to use the commode and commode comes from something that in the old days before they had bathrooms inside your bedroom so that you didn't have to go to the outhouse during the night, they had a special cabinet and they had a little pot inside of it and that's what you'd use during the night if you had to and that was called a commode. Even though everybody had a bathroom where I lived, they still called it the commode and that was the proper way to say that you are going to go to the bathroom. That's probably not true for the people who lived up north but it was true in Texas. Then later on, I stayed friends with the family of the man who was that really great teacher I have in ninth grade and he told me about some of the other terms, but I didn't hear them when I was little so maybe I shouldn't talk about them. But there was one. Did you come for a coal or fire? What that meant was in the old days, before people had electricity or a way to stay warm. People would have to build a fire in their fireplace and if their fire started to go out they have to walk all the way over to a neighbor's house which might be a mile or more away maybe it was several miles. They have a little metal thing that they could keep the coals in so that they can stay hot until they got back to start their fire. If you went over to see a friend because you really wanted to see the friend, that was great. But if you were just coming because you needed something. They had this expression, did you come for a coal or fire or did you come because you really wanted to see me? They probably wouldn't say that whole sentence but they'd say, did you come for a coal or fire meaning did you come just because you needed something for me.
[01:35:01] FEMALE_1: What was the typical day like for you in [inaudible 01:35:03] ?
[01:35:05] Judy Wenzel: When I was in first grade or junior high or high school?
[01:35:11] FEMALE_1: Around high school, probably.
[01:35:14] Judy Wenzel: In high school my parents had four kids. When I first started to high school in 10th grade, my sister was in ninth grade at the Junior High which was to the west, and I was in high school to the east. We were right in the middle where we lived. My mother would take all four kids to four different schools. My little brother was in preschool, my sister was in elementary, my little sister and then the next sister was in junior high. We were all driven to school. But my sister and I had to walk on the way home, I had to start to school. My mother would get me there really early because at 07:30 in the morning I had to be there to learn slide rule. Slide rule was what they had before they had little calculators. When I went to college, the calculators were this big. You would have this little slide rule and you'd use the slide rule to figure out hard problems. I had to get up really early and do that and then I had to walk home after school. Are we running out of time?
[01:36:49] FEMALE_1: Yes.
[01:36:49] Judy Wenzel: I talked a lot. [LAUGHTER].
[01:36:57] FEMALE_1: That's okay. We're almost done, I don't have something.
[01:37:01] Judy Wenzel: You can ask it the next time. You told me I was supposed to look at the person who's asking the questions. Last time we didn't even finish me being a student because we stopped at high school, I think. It took me forever to grow up. [LAUGHTER] We'll never get to where I grew up. [LAUGHTER]
[01:37:43] FEMALE_1: Did you just want to talk more about high school?
[01:37:47] Judy Wenzel: Then I went to college so I was depressed, at the end of high school I took speech. Is it on should I now?
[01:37:57] FEMALE_1: Yes. But did you basically finish high school?
[01:38:02] Judy Wenzel: I don't know, I remember talking about how there was a lot of segregation where I grew up and that's all I remember. [LAUGHTER] That came up in high school where we discussed that a lot because I was in high school at the end of the '50s. The Brown decision happened when I was 13, and so then all through my high school years, I was going to a very segregated school. It actually did come up once, just once, can you believe it? Only once in social studies. One girl who hadn't had a chance to think about it at all, I'm trying to be very nice and say she was just horrified that we were going to all drink out of the same fountain. That was the level of the problem, but I'm not saying that I was immune to that because I grew up there and I learned that. My parents wanted me to go to college and my father wanted me to be a chemistry teacher, he was very rigid in what he wanted for his children. He wanted me to be a chemistry teacher, he wanted his girls. He had three girls to all marry chemical engineers because he was a chemical engineer. I think it was mainly that he was scared to death that we grow up and be poor. He had spent his whole life working at a job that I don't even think he really enjoyed that much, and it was a very scary job just to make sure that we were middle class. He wanted his son, who was 12 years younger than me, so he was only six when I left home. He wanted his son to grow up to be a chemical engineer. [LAUGHTER] This sounds so funny but it wasn't funny at the time, I was not very good at chemistry. But when I went to college, my dad also had made a slide rule, we had to get up really early and go and take slide rule before school. Slide rule was before they had those little calculators that they have nowadays, [LAUGHTER] you had to sit there and figure it all out by sliding this thing back and forth. I hated math, I wasn't so bad at math but I hated it. Because it took me forever and forever because I was dyslexic and I could finally eventually figure it out. But so I hated it so much that during the summer after I graduated from high school, I studied and took the tests so that I wouldn't have to ever take math again and then I got to college [LAUGHTER] and I passed those two tests. I got B on one and I got A on algebra because I'd had two years of algebra. Then in order to get into college I applied to three different schools, and I was the oldest of four kids. Even though my parents were not poor at all, still my next sister was going to go to college the next year after me. I had to go to one that didn't cost much or I had to get a scholarship. I applied to Rice University, which is in Houston. Now to give you a flavor of what it was like then, not only did Rice not allow anyone who was African-American to go there but only one in seven students could be a woman. They would take six men and only one woman and that was their ratio, so I was on their waiting list I didn't get in and that was probably a good thing. I applied to a school that was pretty expensive, that was a church school in the denomination that I went. Well, they didn't accept me because I wasn't good at writing, and so I don't think that my essay to try to get a scholarship for them turned out very well. [LAUGHTER] I got into the University of Texas and I did really well on the SAT, I am a person who tests really well, but it doesn't mean that I can write really well; those are two different things. I got into something called Plan 2, which was pre law and pre med. But I knew that my parents didn't want me to go to graduate school, they wanted me to get married. [LAUGHTER] I guess then in those days because it was even right at 1960 and women's rights was not a big deal. It was 10 years before women's rights. I thought it was important too to go out with boys and find a person I liked and that kind of stuff. I hadn't had any experience doing that in high school because I was such a tomboy, and by the time all the other kids who started dating at 12 and my parents wouldn't let me do that. They thought I was really weird because I was already in high school, didn't have a boyfriend, and so on. I never started dating until the 12th grade and I was very shy and awkward. Then there was this going steady stuff and so when I got to college I went steady with somebody who was trying to become an engineer, but not a chemical engineer but that didn't matter. My parents just thought it was wonderful because I was going with somebody who wanted to be a mechanical engineer but I broke. What happened was in college, [LAUGHTER] well for one thing, I was at a big school. It was way overwhelming for me and then another thing that was happening was trying to integrate because they claimed that the University of Texas was integrated barely.
[01:45:01] Judy Wenzel: Barely. I'd never met anybody who was African American the whole time I went there, but the dorms were not integrated and I don't know if I told you about this already but in my sophomore year, my roommate who was from San Antonio, and I was very not knowledgeable about racism and I thought that because there weren't very many African Americans in San Antonio, and it was mostly people from the North and who are called Anglo in the state I grew up in Texas. Then people who are Hispanic or also called Mexican although they weren't necessarily all Mexican. But the funny thing is, they grew up there. Their ancestors were there before the Anglos. [LAUGHTER] But I was very racist in Texas and my roommate who was from San Antonio was horrified. She was embarrassed. She was very embarrassed because I signed a form saying that I would be willing to have "willing" I was probably eager to learn about different people I didn't know about and I said, "Yeah, I'd like to have a African American roommate." Well, of course, all the time I was at the University of Texas they never integrated the dorms but just to show that my roommate, who I thought was from a very less racist city, she was horrified. [LAUGHTER] That's always really weird. Then I broke up with the person who I went with for a couple of years who was headed for becoming an engineer and I fell in love with somebody who I met in biology who really wasn't pre-med but we only went together for a couple of weeks [LAUGHTER] because he was a twin and he was in the shadow of his twin sister and he realized he was going to have to study all the time and he couldn't go with anybody in college. Then I got into biology as my major because my dad was like, you have got to be a teacher. You got to have a way to make a living and I'm putting you through. Therefore you have to become a teacher. Not only did I get to major in Biology, but I got the major where I could teach and I had to take 24 hours of education. I don t know how education is now, but it was horribly boring then. I got so bored by my senior year with just these platitudes the class is amounted to was you're not teaching biology, you're teaching students, just platitudes. Even though I thought I hated math in my senior year I asked to take educational statistics [LAUGHTER] just because I wanted something that actually has some meat to it wherever we were actually going to do some work and not just all these platitudes. In educational statistics, we had to use a calculator. The calculators in those days were like this big. You sat at a desk and you had to type in your stuff on this big thing. Of course, the only computer that I saw in college, it was this big underground building and only the graduate students could use it and they go over there with their cars to put in. They wouldn't actually get on the computer. They give the cards to whoever. I never got to get close to the computer because I was an undergraduate. I met a graduate student who to me looked great from my not very knowledgeable viewpoint. He looks so wonderful because he was picketing in front of the faculty lounge. It just seems so unbelievable. The faculty lounge was segregated and he was picketing to integrate the faculty lounge. That's how the University of Texas was. The other thing that was very much a thing of the time was every time we registered for class, at the very last thing we had to do was fill out an affidavit and it said, I am not a member of the Communist Party. We had to sign that. It was so McCarthyism. There was a senator. His last name was McCarthy. He just had the country in a frenzy of anti-communism. If anybody who was a Hollywood star or anybody was labeled as a Communist then they couldn't get a job. That's the college career. I married that man who was from Ohio, who was about to get his PhD in psychology and I worked for one year. I got a job working in East Austin, which was what would be considered a slum area and so I taught biology for one year. I taught four classes of biology in one journal science. I didn't know anything about general science, so that gave me the slowest class. They had slow, medium, and fast I guess and so I got the slow class. I felt really let down because here I had taken 24 hours of education that's supposed to teach me how to be a teacher and here I'm teaching half of my class, their first language was Spanish. Now I suppose if I had really said, I am absolutely determined to take Spanish, but I didn't do that. I had taken French because Spanish, there was so much prejudice in Texas at that time that if I had gone to Rice, the only people who got to take Spanish at Rice were the football players and at the University of Texas and also when I was growing up in grade school and well, they didn't have any foreign language in grade school, but in high school, people who were not going to college were pretty much the only people who took Spanish. It was horrible. My parents insisted that I take Latin, which helped me in biology. But anyway, there I was in my first really real job full-time all that. I couldn't even pronounce the names of half the students in my class because I didn't know Spanish and they would laugh at me and I looked no older than them. I looked very young at the time. I was thrown out of bars because I look so young and they wouldn't believe how old I was, stuff like that. It was not an easy experience because I was very shy. I would get sick every Monday morning thinking about how it's going to have to stand up in front of five classes and I would actually get sick. Then I'll go to school and it would turn out, all right, but that's how I should say I was before. The week will start and end. It's very hard work to be a teacher. I spent all my time on the weekends preparing grading papers and it was my first year to be married and after one year I said, this isn't right for me. The only thing I really enjoyed was teaching the labs and having to stand up in front of people was really hard. At that point, my ex-husband, I've been married twice, he had just graduated with his PhD in psychology. Now, you think psychology, he's into helping people but there's two kinds of psychology. There's the people that do the research and that's what he was doing. He was a skinnerian, he followed a man, I think his name is BF Skinner, and he just had pigeons pecking on different colors and they had to show that they knew which color was which and peck on the right colors in order to get food. [LAUGHTER]
[01:55:19] Judy Wenzel: [LAUGHTER] That's the psychology he did and I don't know if all the people who did the research felt this way, but he felt, and once he said to me that helping people was just witchcraft, and we didn't have a great marriage. We moved up North. Well, I thought I had moved up 1,000 miles North of where I grew up. First, we moved to Indiana and my ex-husband was working on his postdoctoral fellowship because he didn't want to teach in the South. He wanted to teach up North. We lived in Bloomington, Indiana for two years and nobody could understand me because my accent was so heavy. The people that I would meet who were in psychology, who were graduate students, who were from New York City they say, you're not in the North yet, you're still in the South. [LAUGHTER] There I was and I guess what you'd call Southern Indiana at a very big school. But the cornfields came right up to the university. It was a very small town and it may not be small today. I haven't been back to see it and I had many, many problems. I went to see a psychiatrist who was part of the university, and I had decided that I was going to learn how to be a writer, and [LAUGHTER] I always liked to write poetry, but I wasn't truthfully all that good at it. But I thought I could be better. I was slow at reading, but I thought that I could go back and take English classes and I did that. But I had many problems and in those days, they had just come up with some medications for people with mental illness and this psychiatrist tried all three of those out on me. Well, two of them were anti-psychotics and I was not psychotic. I was very anxious and I still have a little trouble with anxiety. I get worried about something ahead of time. But those were not the right meds. They didn't have any anti-anxiety meds in those days and he gave me an anti-depressant and that was completely wrong for me. It just made me so high that I couldn't even study, so after one week I went back to him and said, you know what? I can't even study. He took me off of that one. Truthfully, I don't think I needed any meds, I just needed somebody to talk to. I got my ex-husband to go together with me to see a family therapist stop in about, I want to say an hour's drive North in Indianapolis. But my ex-husband has some problems. Even though he was very much for rights of African Americans, he was not for rights of women. I don't know that he was aware of that, but in those days, a lot of men didn't think that women should just stay home, take care of the kids, do housework, and so on and that was sure not for me. I was not happy at all. I just felt like my life was ended because I had found out just before we moved up North about birth control pills, and I was taking birth control pills and I had volunteered in Austin and also in Bloomington at planned parenthood and I knew that there were many different ways to prevent getting pregnant and I was really into that because I was terrified I was going to get pregnant while I was with this guy that I wasn't even getting along with. My ex-husband would drive crazy on the way home and scare me and I don't know if he was doing it on purpose or if he was really that scared of therapy himself because he had had a hard time growing up. But his mother had died of brain cancer when he was only 14 and his father really did truly have mental illness. It was really, really hard for him growing up. It's amazing that he actually got to go to college and went to Oberlin and then got a masters in Maryland, and then finally got a PhD. That was really remarkable, but man, [LAUGHTER] we were we were both first children. I think two first children don't get along necessarily well. Both trying to run everything and it was a terrible time trying to get along. Then he finished his postdoctoral. I don't think I want to skip over this. I was hospitalized in a mental hospital for nine weeks. I want to say that the reason was because I didn't have a good job. I was working for about $1.25 an hour for the university and my ex-husband was a post-doctoral fellow. He had no health insurance, I had no health insurance. Because of that, we had to pay for everything. Really, we didn't have enough money to pay for me to go see somebody like a therapist and pay for each time. The psychiatrists in those days, they just wanted to either give you medicine or put you right in the hospital. I went to a place that I thought would be cheaper and it was up in Indianapolis. It was on the medical center campus. I went to see this guy who was learning to be a psychiatrist. He was a resident and he said I won't see you unless you go to the hospital. I said okay, I'll go to the hospital because I was just so unhappy with my husband. I was wow, I'll get away. [LAUGHTER] That is a terrible mistake. I don't think it's like this today. This is 50 years ago. In 1965, if you wanted to go to a hospital, you had to sign yourself in to be committed. I had to run my papers around to be committed and when I saw the judge, he said, you're writing the favorites around yourself, you won't be there long. [LAUGHTER] The upshot of it was I was highly, highly anxious, but I wasn't really psychotic. But the doctor who has seen at University of Indiana, he wrote down that I was psychotic, that I was suicidal, that I was always things that were really totally untrue. But he had had me take this test called the MMPI and I never want to take another test like that, is all these questions and then based on your answers, they decide whether you were psychotic or not. Well, they decided I was psychotic based on taking a test where you're just filling in little blanks, and is totally ridiculous. But anyway, I knew I needed help, but I don't think I needed to take Thorazine, Stelazine which they gave me both of those at the hospital. I was given so much Thorazine that when I would go to stand up, I felt like I was going to faint, so it had lower my blood pressure. In those days I had low blood pressure anyway, I don't anymore. I told the doctor, he was a resident, I'm not going to say his name. He might still be out there. Not that I would want to protect him because he was awful, but I don't want to say awful things about somebody and name them. What happened was I said I'm feeling like I'm about to faint every time I stand up. What he said was, just try it for two more weeks and I thought I'll be dead if I try this for two more weeks. I don't know how it is if you're in the hospital now, but there's no door on the restroom. You're in with a lot of other women so it was a state hospital, but they called it short-term because they couldn't hold you over a year and that's what a short-term was in those days. This is not true anymore.
[02:05:11] Judy Wenzel: They would want to see if I'd taken the medicine after they gave it to me but I have a very big tongue and [LAUGHTER] I was able to hide it under my tongue. I decided that because the lights were on all night, that I would need to sleep during the night. I took my medicine just before bed but it was given three other times during the day and I would go into the restroom and split it down the toilet. I did that for about three or four weeks and then thank goodness, I went in June 11th and all the residents changed and had different jobs on July 1st. I got a different doctor after three weeks. By the time I had that doctor he seemed a lot more trustworthy to me and so I told him what I was doing. He said, just tell me what you're taking and I'll give you that. I told him. I was terrified when I was in the hospital because my friends were all being sent upstairs to have shock treatments. I was on the admission's ward and so he sent me straight from the admission's ward to the going home ward. I stayed there about another month and went home sometime in August. Then when I got out, they didn't even tell me that I was going to have a counselor or a therapist and I said, look, I went to the hospital so I can have a therapist because they told me I couldn't be seen unless I went to the hospital. You I've got to give me a therapist. I got one and so I got to see a resident on an outpatient basis but that resident who saw me for about a year, he told me never stop taking your medicine because you'll be right back in the hospital. But he was wrong. I didn't need the medicine. He had the wrong diagnosis for me when he started to see me. I wasn't psychotic. I was married to a person that my parents wanted me to stay with. My father said you made your bed. I mean, the expression you made your bed lie in it. It was wrong but I had been brought up very religious and I thought that I was being bad to want to get a divorce and so I stayed with them five more years after we moved up to Michigan and we lived in Lansing, he got a job at MSU and finally I left him after five more years and I had gone for therapy that whole time with a social worker because when I got to Michigan, I said absolutely, I will not see another psychiatrist. I'm going to see a social worker. Finally, I got divorced when I was 29 and that's when I feel I actually was mature and grew up and made a decision on my own. I said, I can make it on my own. I don't have to. Because my ex-husband was saying, oh, you'll never make it on your own and when I left him we got divorced and I got the amount of money that we had earned together that was in the house and I knew I couldn't afford the house. I moved out and he said, oh, well, you'll need this money in case you get sick again. He was emotionally abusive. He wasn't physically abusive, but emotionally. When I went to get the divorce, the lawyer that I went to, and my ex-husband was mainly in the fact that gentleman layout say. He did it the way that it was supposed to be done in those days. The woman was supposed to ask for the divorce, the man was supposed to pay for the divorce and he did all that. But in those days, in order to get a divorce, you had to prove extreme cruelty. When I tried to tell the lawyer what the extreme cruelty was that my husband was telling me, you can't make it on your own, you'll never make it on your own. I said those things to him and he said, oh, I can't understand this. In those days in 1970 is when I got the divorce. Women's rights and the idea that a woman could be abused emotionally, or that anybody can be abused emotionally by the person that they're living with was not there. Nobody knew emotional abuse wasn't even a word. It wasn't an expression. It was hard for me to tell him how it was that I was being. Then nowadays you don't have to prove extreme cruelty. All you have to prove is that you're not able to get along with that person. Things changed rapidly after that. My husband was in the psychology department at MSU. Half of the Psychology Department got divorced in 1970. I wasn't the only one who asked for a divorce. In some cases, I'm sure it was the man who asked for the divorce. But lots and lots. In fact, the first person I dated after I got a divorce was another person who was in the department that I already knew. But what happened was as soon as I got out of the hospital, I seen so much misery, I guess you'd call it, in the hospital that all of a sudden I knew what I wanted to work in. I wanted to work and help people who had been in the hospital and I was able to volunteer. They didn't want to in the worst way. Nobody that I saw, no counselor wanted me to do that. They were all against it because in those days there was a lot of prejudice. If you've been in the hospital, there's something terribly wrong with you. You can't help anybody and all that stuff. I volunteered for two years while I was still married and then I got a job as a psychiatric technician and I worked at St. Lawrence Hospital and helped people who were getting out of the hospital because they were emptying out the hospitals because they'd come up with all these meds. That was a wonderful job. President Kennedy had pushed through getting legislation to help community mental health. That's why I worked at a community mental health for about six years. It was great. Putting pressure on me to do things that I thought were not good for the people I was working with and eventually I got a job with the State of Michigan working in a hospital for children. That's now been torn down, but it was called York Woods Center, that's five miles South of Ann Arbor. In 1975, I moved in Arbor and then I met the husband I'm now married to, and we've been married for 38 years and we have a son. I'm I about to run out of time? Arbor.
[02:13:32] Judy Wenzel: While I was still living in Lansing and I was working as a psychiatric technician, I wanted to go back to school. This is about same time I got divorced. I had already taken a couple of social work classes that MSU and I went to the social work department and asked to become a student to get a master's. I was still pretty green and didn't know how to realize that people could have prejudice. The person who interviewed me said, well, why are you interested? How did you become interested in mental health? I told the truth. I said, I was in a mental hospital and I saw how much help people needed. Immediately, he didn't want me. I wasn't allowed to go to school there because there was so much prejudice against people who had been in a mental hospital at that time. They just thought, once a mental patient, always a mental patient, you'll never be able to recover or get better. It's almost like people who did that kind of work didn't really believe that they could do any good and it's sad when you think of it. Anyway, so I ended up working in mental health for, I want to say, 20 years before I ever got to go to school in it. While I was married and I married somebody who was nine years younger than me and he did not have a degree. As soon as we got married, I said you should go back to school. That didn't work out for him going back to school. He was extremely bright. I knew he's a lot smarter than I could ever think of being. He can just learn foreign languages just like that. He also was anxious, he had an anxiety problem but how it played out was he was sign up for classes at AMU, then he would go buy the book. He would read the entire book. He would just study, study, study on his own because that's what he knew how to do, was study on his own. By the time he had taken the class for two or three weeks, he said, I know more about this than the the teacher. Now he probably did not, but he knew more than he should have. He probably should have just taken a test and said, hey, I have advanced placement in this. [LAUGHTER] But he didn't do that. What happened was he was very interested in philosophy and took some philosophy classes. But eventually, even though he had been one of the last people to be drafted and had the GI Bill still, he ended up not finishing, and so he had a lot of jobs. It was like we traded roles. I was the person who brought home the money and he was the one who stayed home with our child. We had a child in 1978. He was the house husband and then he did the volunteer work and he did the jobs that didn't pay much of anything but were very helpful to society. He worked at Ozone and he worked with at a house for girls who were halfway house so that they could get out of a mental hospital and stuff like that. He had a lot of jobs like that. He was very good with people. But it turned out that I had married somebody who was very, very hard of hearing, but he covered it so well. He had learned to cover it so well that nobody would realize that. Even I didn't realize it until we had been married for over a year. We had a tea kettle that had a whistle and one day we're sitting at the kitchen table, I said I have I've got to get up and turn off the kettle because it's boiling. He said, how do you know it's boiling? He couldn't hear that whistle. He was almost deaf in the high ranges. He could only hear best people who spoke low-pitched. He still has trouble hearing high-pitched voices, but now he has hearing aids, thank goodness. He had inherited this from his father. His father never wore hearing aids because in those days, the type of hearing loss that they had, my husband and his father, you really needed a computer. My husband has two hearing aids, he feels like he has something stuck in his ears. He only will where those while he's teaching. He's a teacher and [LAUGHTER] he came home after teaching for three or four years and he said, now that I have a class of 40 students, I'm having to guess what the people in the back are saying. Well, after he got those hearing aids, which costs more than $5,000, and thank goodness we had really good insurance that paid for at least half of that, then I realized he had been guessing what I was saying almost half our marriage. [LAUGHTER] Amazing. We did go for marriage counseling and so on when we had been married for about 10 or 15 years, but amazingly, we got along quite well and we're still married. [LAUGHTER] But every once in a while I'll say something and then I'll realize, he didn't really hear what I said. I might have to say it again. Look at me because he can read lips quite well. Look at me and I'm going to say this again. [LAUGHTER] That was, I don't know, I better let you lead. [LAUGHTER]
[02:20:14] FEMALE_1: Can you tell me about your engagement and wedding?
[02:20:22] Judy Wenzel: I'll tell you about my second engagement and wedding. Now, the first time it was more usual, it took about a year. We had known each other more than a year and then we got married on the very day that I graduated from the University of Texas because I knew it was going to be in a big stadium and I didn't want to go, which I felt bad about later because my father really wanted to go and see one of his children graduate and I just hadn't realized how important that was to him. But that was more usual. But the second time I got married, well, for one thing, I knew I did not want a ring. I am just terrible with jewelry and if I have a ring, it eventually gets lost or broken and the same with the watch. But how I met my husband, there is a wash and dry on the corner of Platt and Packard. I was working having a day off on Friday and a day off on another day of the week, maybe it was Tuesday. Because I was working at a hospital and I had been looking at a single screw and I just said, you know what, I am sick of looking for somebody to date or whatever. I'm just going to go wash my clothes. Here's this guy watching me fold the clothes, he's just [LAUGHTER] and that was the guy I married. There he is, he just follows me out to my car. It's after dark and I suppose that I was not being as cautious as I should have been, but he seemed really nice and I was, of course, immediately attracted, even though I don't believe that people fall in love immediately. But I found him very attractive. He said, do you go out to see many movies? [LAUGHTER] The funny thing is, it wasn't until we have been married for a year that we went out to a movie together. That night we went out for coffee and he was working as a dishwasher over on the west side of town, which now I can't remember. A snack or meal was their motto, but now I can't remember the name of that place. Bu anyway, he had to drive all the way across town to get his pay and then we went all the way back and we went out and had coffee. Then immediately we just started going together. Within a month or two we were living together and then by his birthday, which was August 1st, which is only about four months after we met, we got married. I said I'm going to marry you on your birthday because that way you'll never forget our anniversary. I guess in my first marriage, my ex-husband must have forgotten it because I was pretty adamant about that. I think that my second husband and I get along extremely well. I think that we, well, for one thing, he's not the first child and the family. He's much, much more social than me, much, much more able to help people to get along with each other. The funny thing is I wanted to be a social worker, but my husband is the social worker of his family. Without ever having gone to social work school, he's helped people in his family to get together if they were having trouble getting along or just wanting to see each other, that kind of thing. That's kind of a role that some people have in their family and that was his role in his family, was to help people get along. It worked out very well because I'm a person who sometimes if I'm upset, I'm not very talkative and I withdraw and he won't let that happen. [LAUGHTER]
[02:25:29] Judy Wenzel: It was a pretty whirlwind courtship. My mother, bless her heart. She was so thankful that he had never been married. And I thought to myself, but what does that say about me? I've been married before. [LAUGHTER] And the person who married us ended up being a Lutheran minister and he was also upset that I had been married before. But we talked him into marrying us. I think that I surely knew what I did not want again. I knew that a lot had gone wrong in my first marriage and I didn't want those same things to happen again. As far as my second husband, he was pretty young. Probably he didn't have a lot of experience but he was a lot better at getting along with people. I knew that right away. And then we had a child. [LAUGHTER] We had been married two years when we had a baby and I felt that my biological clock was running out because I was 37. That may not be true today that people feel that way but in those days, I felt that, wow, I just had to have a baby right away. Because I had never wanted to have a baby the whole time I was married to my ex-husband, but then in my 30s I was getting interested in that. Anyway, then we had a boy. In the family that I grew up in, my two sisters, I have a sister nine years younger and she had two girls and then a boy. And she said, "Well, you were so lucky. Your first one was a boy." Because our father wanted to have grandsons. [LAUGHTER] Admittedly, he treated his grandsons better than the granddaughters. It's sad to say that, but that was true. But my father meant very well, but he has some very old-fashioned ideas. What can I say? He tried very hard and he sent me to college. He tried very hard. My mother was a very good influence in my life too, even though I don't think it was true that I could really tell my parents how I really felt inside about very much, but they tried very hard. [LAUGHTER]
[02:28:22] FEMALE_1: Can you tell me about your children and what life was like living there young [inaudible 02:28:24]?
[02:28:33] Judy Wenzel: When our son was born, like I was saying, my husband was the one who stayed home with him. My husband had grown up studying on his own. I don't know how long he was hard of hearing. It might have been his whole childhood, and perhaps nobody ever realized it because he covered so well. So my husband was not doing nothing while he was at home. He was playing with our son and he was a good father but he also was studying. He studied about psychology, philosophy, and things that he was interested in. Once our son, when he was about five or six, was asked by somebody who probably didn't know us too well, "What does your daddy do?" He said, "He works." What he meant was that his father had an office in the basement and that he would work at the desk and study things. Then, "What does your mother do?" "She sleeps." [LAUGHTER] I worked midnights so that I could be home to see my son and everything. So I didn't want to work afternoons because I would be gone, and I couldn't work days because the day shift was taken all the time by the people that have worked there for many years. And so my son saw me sleep. [LAUGHTER] When he was born, I remember I was awake when he was born and my husband he didn't like to see people in pain. Even though they they gave me an epidural, I was in pain until I was given the epidural. He knew ahead of time he didn't want to be my coach. And so, my sister-in-law, who was even 10 years younger than my husband, she was my coach. She was only 18 and I was 37, so. [LAUGHTER] After, they gave me the first epidural so that it wasn't painful. She just collapsed onto the chair and she said, "I'll never have a baby." [LAUGHTER] but what was funny was, by the time she was 21, she had a baby and then when she was 23, she had a baby, but she did it all naturally. She didn't even do it the way I had to have medicine for the pains. I don't think she ever had to. [LAUGHTER] She actually did a lot better than me. We just had one child. I think my husband realized that he had only gotten halfway through his undergraduate and he said, "One is enough. This is all we can handle." And I said, "If we have enough money valid before I'm 40, we'll have another." but I was already 37, so we didn't have another. [LAUGHTER] When you have an only child, you want to have them play with other kids. By the time he was two, he was going into something called Tot Drop that was near where we lived. I volunteered there. And then by the time he was three or four, he was going to Clonlara, which is a private preschool and it's even a school that's, I want to say it's in the vein of where students get to run their own curriculum even if there are only six years old or something. By the time he was seven and the thought at Clonlara was when the child's ready to read, they'll come and tell you, "I'm ready to read." I thought, I saw my brother have lot of trouble learning to read and I know that I myself didn't learn to read until I was seven. Maybe he needs a regular school. Because he was seven and he wasn't saying, "Oh, I'm ready to read." [LAUGHTER] At seven, we started him into first grade. It was a private school but the teacher she was from Jamaica, but she was brought up in the English tradition that children should sit in their chair. He dis start to learn to read, which was good. [LAUGHTER] Am I running out of time?
[02:33:59] FEMALE_1: We have four.
[02:34:01] Judy Wenzel: Was I supposed to get into adulthood? I guess I've gotten into quite a bit of adulthood.
[02:34:08] FEMALE_1: Yeah. We did ask [LAUGHTER] [inaudible 02:34:10] there anyways.
[02:34:12] Judy Wenzel: Okay.
[02:34:15] FEMALE_1: I think we did pretty well Next we have the work and retirement.
[02:34:22] Judy Wenzel: Okay. That's good. I finally got to get a social work degree, but I was almost 50 [LAUGHTER]. After I had worked in mental health for about 20 years, I finally got to get a social work degree. What I told the teachers that I had been kept out, because I had been in a mental hospital, they said, Oh, we don't do that anymore. [LAUGHTER] That was back in, I want to say the 1980s that they said, Oh, we don't do that anymore. [LAUGHTER]. Sometimes I do.
[02:35:10] FEMALE_1: Okay. So we want to tell your story is one of inspiration to others about how you've dealt with a life-changing experience that others also go through. Some of the questions may seem familiar because we have asked them before during the first three sessions. We are asking again because the questions are critical to the story we want to share about you and because it'll be easier for us to edit the videotape into the story that will engage any audience. We have about 30 questions to cover today.
[02:35:38] Judy Wenzel: Wow. Okay.
[02:35:42] FEMALE_1: The first few questions relate to your family dynamics. Briefly describe your family life during your formative years. For example, did you grow up with two parents, siblings, other adults in the home?
[02:35:56] Judy Wenzel: Yes. I was the oldest. In fact, I was a little anxious this morning, so I was looking at photographs because the person who called me to tell me about this time that I was going to come said that there was going to be another time when you're going to ask for pictures, photographs, and so I was I was looking [LAUGHTER]. I was the first child to be born on either side of the family, so there's these pictures where everybody is trying to get me to smile a little baby, and that's their only baby. I was born at the end of the Depression. Then pretty soon I had a sister. At that time it was just my mother and my father and my sister and me, and we live in an apartment up in Oakman in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But then we moved to Texas because my father wanted to be transferred where he could be outside and not have to have a laugh job. While we were in Texas than I was about eight or nine and my little sister was born. Then I was 12 and my little brother was born. About the time that we started having more kids in a family, my grandfather started to have strokes. And so my grandparents actually because we lived way down south in the winter, they would come and stay with us. And then in the summer they would go up and stay with my aunt and uncle in Nebraska. In the winter we actually had eight people in the family when I was a teenager, and [LAUGHTER] the family dynamics, we're okay. A father, a mother, a grandmother, a grandfather, four children and I think that my parents didn't find me that easy to raise. They put a lot of pressure on me to make straight A's, then I also got the pressure that I was supposed to be the big sister. I did much better at trying to make good grades than I did at being the big sister. [LAUGHTER] So I sister who was about two years younger than me, she was much better at being the big sister.
[02:38:32] FEMALE_1: How long were your parents married?
[02:38:35] Judy Wenzel: Oh, my goodness. A long time. 62 years when my mother passed away.
[02:38:40] FEMALE_1: Can you briefly describe your perceptions of their relationship?
[02:38:45] Judy Wenzel: I'll try to be diplomatic. Well, my mother was very intelligent and she never went beyond one year of college, but she really should have. My father was very, a nice way to put it would be traditional. He wanted his wife to stay home. And there was quite a bit of friction over that matter. There was just quite a bit of friction. And I think that that was at the base of why there was friction. My father also was very intelligent, but not in the same way as my mother. My mother. Because he step back from a situation and figure it out, kind of not get too overly involved in it. But my father got right in there. In fact, when he worked in the refinery, he said one time when everything was shut down, he actually sat inside of something in order to figure out how it was going to be brought back up. [LAUGHTER] So my parents were very different. And it was hard to be the oldest kid and and see, not just see but I was part of the friction. Because I also probably had a hard time standing back and trying to consider what to do, I got involved in a lot of the friction. My sister who was two years younger, she she was able to stand back and say, Oh, I'm glad I'm not involved in this. It was tough and I went through an awful lot of therapy in my adult life, trying to not reproduce that when I raised a child.
[02:40:53] FEMALE_1: The next set of questions relate to your first marriage and its impact on your health. Where were you living when you first met your husband?
[02:40:59] Judy Wenzel: My first husband, I met at the University of Texas and he was studying to get his PhD in psychology.
[02:41:09] FEMALE_1: How old were you?
[02:41:10] Judy Wenzel: When I first met him? Oh gosh. I was probably 19 or 20.
[02:41:21] FEMALE_1: What were you doing in school like studying while I was studying biology.
[02:41:26] Judy Wenzel: My father wanted his daughters to be chemistry teachers and he wanted his son to be a. So to marry. This gives you a clue about my dad. He, he wanted his daughters to marry chemical engineers. That's what he was. He wanted me to be a chemistry teacher, but I was studying actually biology because that was much better for me. I had trouble with chemistry and I'm a very picture person. I like to see pictures of things that I learned about.
[02:42:04] FEMALE_1: How did you and your first husband meet?
[02:42:11] Judy Wenzel: Isn't that a good question? What I remember of it was it was a day like today, early spring, but it was in Texas. In Houston, Texas spring is flowers are blooming, it's lovely, of course I didn't know what it was like up North because I had never lived up North. My first husband, he was from Ohio and he just was like, this is the best weather ever. I can't believe how wonderful this is. I was like, what are you talking about? This is just normal, average. That's what I remember about our first conversation.
[02:43:02] FEMALE_1: When did you marry?
[02:43:03] Judy Wenzel: [LAUGHTER] I'm just laughing because I got married on the day that I graduated from college. I didn't go to my graduation. I knew that it was going to be held in a stadium and I didn't want to just be one of thousands and thousands. I got married on the 2nd of June, which was the graduation day.
[02:43:33] FEMALE_1: Where did you marry?
[02:43:34] Judy Wenzel: We got married in a little chapel that was part of a Presbyterian Church that my parents were going to in Houston, Texas. I had not grown up in that church. It was not a very good experience [LAUGHTER] getting married because what the pastor should do is, talk to the people who are again married ahead of time. But unfortunately, this man thought he knew me, but he didn't and he asked. I can laugh about it now, it was really sad. He asked me what my religious beliefs were and I had been raised in the Presbyterian Church and I thought I was always raised to think it's okay to question. I told him I'm an agnostic. Well, that didn't go over very well with him. But then he asked my ex-husband, and my ex-husband said he was an atheist. He had been raised in a very strict Lutheran Church. My first husband believed that in order to be a scientist, he could not be a Christian. The reason was because his church did not believe in evolution and did not believe it should be taught. He thought that since he was studying science, that he could no longer be a Christian. Sadly, the minister then told us that we should go over to the Unitarian church to get married. But I had never gotten to the Unitarian church. I had no idea where it was. My soon-to-be husband's parents and grandmother were on the plane. We're about to pick them up from the airport [LAUGHTER]. I burst into tears. [LAUGHTER] It was a very bad scene. I never wanted to be a Presbyterian after that because my husband-to-be said to the minister, what do you want me to say? The minister said that you believe in God and this guy said I believe in God and that just ruined it. I was like what? He's willing to say that? It was just, a really bad way to start marriage. [LAUGHTER] I can laugh now because it was more than 50 years ago.
[02:46:29] FEMALE_1: Describe the circumstances in your marriage that let you just seek the help of a psychologist.
[02:46:36] Judy Wenzel: I don't want to say it was on the marriage. I was very unprepared to be married. I was very immature for my age. I had hardly dated at all. All through high school I had not dated until I had maybe two days at the end of high school, wanted to go to the prom and which I had to invite him. One where I invited the guy that I had a crush on and he never went out with me again because we were both so terrified we didn't hardly talk and we saw, man and then say twice. What I want to say is that here are two people very immature and not ready for marriage. When I went to see the psychologist, I was very distraught because I wanted to get a divorce and I knew that nobody in my family believed in divorce and so on. That was probably it.
[02:47:45] FEMALE_1: Why couldn't you see a psychiatrist?
[02:47:47] Judy Wenzel: Why couldn't I have not? Well, actually the person I saw because my ex-husband had just graduated with his PhD. We had been married for maybe a year and then we moved up to Indiana. When we got to Indiana University where he was going to work on a postdoc fellowship. That was his way to be Backup North, he didn't want to have a job in the South. At that school, you could go see a psychiatrist that wasn't a psychologist. I did see a psychiatrist. Also, I was not pleased to be in science, I really been pushed in that direction by my teachers and my parents, of course. I was equally good in both areas, of English, not maybe English, but history, social studies. I was very interested in and I was mostly interested in science, I'm afraid just because of things like segregation, I wanted to learn more about things like different peoples of the world, things like that. Also, I was very interested in things like women's right to birth control, things like that. I took classes like embryology and things like that. Truthfully, I don't think I was really into science. I was into the social work aspects of science. Then I went to school in English. That didn't work out too good because the truth is I'm not very good at writing and so I wasn't doing as well as I wanted to do.
[02:50:12] FEMALE_1: Can you describe the circumstances of your stay at the mental hospital?
[02:50:18] Judy Wenzel: In the time I wasn't in the mental hospital. Well, number 1, I was so naive that I thought the mental hospital was going to be better than staying home with a husband that I wasn't getting along with. It didn't take me more than [LAUGHTER] stepping into the hospital to realize, I think I made a mistake that way, I would rather be home with somebody I don't get along with than to be in the hospital. I ran around the papers so that I could be admitted to the hospital. They would not take me unless I was committed. Committed means you can't sign yourself out. Nobody can sign you out except the doctor. Even my husband couldn't sign me out. I had extreme anxiety, that is true. I really was not psychotic, but I had extreme anxiety. In those days, they only had three medications, Thorazine, Stelazine, and one antidepressant.
[02:51:29] Judy Wenzel: They ended up giving me Thorazine and Stelazine, which are anti-psychotic medicines, which were totally way too strong for my problem. But they didn't have anything that was anti-anxiety in those days, so I've never had an anti-anxiety pill. I think that the problem was, in those days, what I saw in the hospital was that people could get committed to a hospital very easily. Then they could be left there for months or even years. It's not like that today, but just the fact that I was a woman, I was considered crazy because I wanted to leave a husband who had good prospects, who could support me, that kind of stuff. I was literally considered crazy because I didn't want to stay with a husband who could support me. [LAUGHTER] That sounds so crazy today, but it was before women's rights really came to the fore.
[02:52:39] FEMALE_1: Do you remember the name of the hospital?
[02:52:41] Judy Wenzel: Oh, yeah. I've looked it up online but it's now very different looking, Larua Carter State Hospital. It was a teaching hospital actually, so I got sent to the best hospital in all of Indiana. This was the best, and it was no good. It had several stories in it. Where are the people who work there were, it was either a square or a rectangle. Then where the wards were, they were in the form of an x. Once you got to the ward, you were so disoriented, you had no idea where you were compared to the rest of the hospital. It was laid out that way, the more that I thought about it. Afterwards is that they were trying to make sure we weren't disoriented. It's pretty scary.
[02:53:54] FEMALE_1: What was the location relative to your home at the time?
[02:53:57] Judy Wenzel: It was 50 miles North. I was living in Bloomington, Indiana, and the hospital was in Indianapolis. As I say, it was a medical campus.
[02:54:14] FEMALE_1: What was the year of your admission?
[02:54:17] Judy Wenzel: I went there on June 11th, 1965, and I got out in August. I got out actually very quick for what was normal for that hospital. It was by being short-term, they call it short-term. It meant that they could not keep you longer than a year.
[02:54:37] FEMALE_1: The next set of questions relate to your experiences in the hospital. Popular media has portrayed these hospitals as places in a negative way. Tell us about your experience by describing the treatment you received from your doctors.
[02:54:53] Judy Wenzel: I had two doctors while I was there, I won't name them. The first doctor was very negative. He wanted me to take Thorazine four times a day and I told him that I could hardly even stand up. I just felt dizzy and I'm pretty sure my blood pressure was very low, as I think about why it was I was so dizzy. He said, just try it for two weeks. I knew that I couldn't do that, I knew that I wouldn't be alive if I tried it for two weeks. My tongue can do a whole lot of things and so I still took the Stelazine, I knew that wasn't going to do that bad of a thing to me. But the Thorazine I would hide under my time, then I go like that so the nurse could see. They had a restroom that didn't have doors on the front of the stalls, but still I could go in there and flush it down the toilet and nobody knew. Then at the 1st of July, because it was a teaching hospital, the resident who was my psychiatrist to start moved on. I didn't know that that wonderful thing was going to happen to me. That was a miracle. All of a sudden I had a really nice doctor. When that nice doctor came, I told them the truth. I said I only take it just before bed because I know I have to sleep through the night and they had the lights on, you're not sleeping in the dark. They had the lights on so they can see everybody. All the beds are bolted down to the floor so you can't move the beds around in. I know they don't want people to commit suicide, but still it's very not conducive to sleeping. That doctor said, just tell me what you're taking and I'll write that down and that's what you'll take. From then on, I wasn't so terrified, but I was really totally terrified until July 1st. That was about three weeks of being terrified because I had no idea what the doctor I saw in a negative light. For instance, my mother tried to come visit me. Actually, it was my father put her up to it. My my parents lived in Texas at the time in Houston, and so my mother flew all the way up there, unbeknownst to me. For the first week or two you were there, it was two weeks, nobody could visit you, but they didn't ask exactly explain all that to me. Unbeknownst to me, my mother came to try to visit me and they wouldn't let her in, and so she had to go all the way back home on the plane. I didn't know that until after I was out of the hospital. But because she had tried to come, the psychiatrists started talking to me one day because you had to go talk to him for half hour or an hour or whatever it was. He said, you're daddy's little girl, aren't you? I thought, well, I'm not going to get into this with them, but I sure don't feel like daddy's little girl. [LAUGHTER] But I think the reason that he said that was because my father has sent my mother to see how I was, and that made the doctor I saw in a very negative way think that he was trying to psychologized it. Oh, now why would those parents come up to see their daughter because she's in the hospital? Well, she must be daddy's little girl.
[02:59:36] FEMALE_1: Did you have any other visitors?
[02:59:39] Judy Wenzel: Well, after the two weeks the only visitor I had was my husband. My husband, I'm sure he was embarrassed that I was in the hospital. One of the things that was so hard for me with my first husband was, he just wanted to put on a nice, beautiful front for society. He wanted me to not ruffle the water's, just keep everything quiet and don't bother anything. Just look like you're my beautiful wife and I'm going to work to become a full professor and have a good career and everything was going to be really quiet. [LAUGHTER] That was not who I expected that I was marrying in one way.
[03:00:42] FEMALE_1: Describe the schedule for a typical day including the wake-up time, mealtimes, and many other activities.
[03:00:47] Judy Wenzel: At the hospital?
[03:00:52] Judy Wenzel: I'm not sure if it was real early in the morning. I've never been a person who could stay up late at night and so if anybody wakes me up early in the morning, unless it was like 4:00 in the morning or something, I'm sure that they got us up at 6:30, 7:00, 7:30. I don't know. It wasn't annoying to me. But the big problem was that there were four beds in that room where I was one of the people sleeping there and as soon as you would put on your clothes which were in a little locker and left the room, the room was locked and it was locked for the remainder of the day. That was how they made sure nobody went in and tried to lay down on their bed during the day. I think there was a day room and that's where people play games, the most unbelievably boring games you can ever imagine. But somebody had gone to the trouble of making this board game by hand and you'd move these marbles around and try to like Parcheesi. I don't know if anybody knows Parcheesi, but anyway, the most unbelievably boring games. As to whether we ate breakfast in the day room I can't remember. There was a little room off to the side where people would have snacks, but I'm not sure. Just to give a clue as to how boring it was I had never smoked before in my life, but I learned to smoke in the hospital. They had this little thing on the wall. In those days it wasn't considered real horrible for your health to smoke and I guess people didn't even care about the fact that you could burn the place down or something. But there was a little thing on the wall where you could go over to the wall and get your light and nobody wanted to do that because that was so demeaning. So people would chain smoke all day and they would chain off of each other. I think the same thing happens when people are in other institutions like when people are drafted, Like my husband learned to smoke when he was drafted. You got to go for one hour to some art therapy and that was the best part of the day, believe me. You get to do some creative thing in art therapy. Then somebody had music therapy and he played music like way down upon the Swanee River and stuff like that. I think I'm taking too long. [LAUGHTER] I'll try to be brief.
[03:04:14] FEMALE_1: Can you share one or two prominent memories about the hospital?
[03:04:24] Judy Wenzel: They had some radio where I don't know if the people who actually were patients at the hospital were part of running that radio or if it was only somebody who worked there. But they played music and I remember that they played the song with a spoonful of sugar that medicine goes down and it's from Mary Poppins, as I found out later. It was just so ironic that they would play this song because they were trying to get people to take their pills, and it just seem unbelievable. Then the other thing that I remember, because I had not moved to Michigan yet, they played music from one of the '60s groups from Detroit. Once I moved to Michigan, I realized, oh they're playing, I think it's called The Supremes and man, whenever I hear that, I can never think of anything except the hospital, so I don't really like to listen to that song.
[03:05:51] FEMALE_1: Can you describe the circumstances surrounding your transfer to any care unit?
[03:05:57] Judy Wenzel: My transfer from one unit to the other? Well, how I got there, my ex-husband and I drove from Bloomington and our car broke down half of the way there. [LAUGHTER] We had to walk across a field to find somebody who could fix the car for us and then we kept on going and then when I first got there, it was almost like being admitted to a concentration camp. You had to have a shower. Take off all your clothes and take a shower. [LAUGHTER] Then I was on the admissions ward for half of the time I was there until July and then I was sent directly to the going home ward. I got to skip the scary, horrible wards upstairs where they gave people electric shock. That's why it was so terrifying. Was like what do you do to not get sent to electric shock?
[03:07:06] FEMALE_1: Why and how did you come to leave the hospital?
[03:07:09] Judy Wenzel: The second doctor his name was Ferri . I'll give his name. He said I was ready to go home. The reason that I went to the hospital or was encouraged to go was because I had been seeing a person who was studying to be a psychiatrist who would see me not on an outpatient basis and he said I won't see you anymore until you go to the hospital. So I went and I wasn't against going because I was very happy at home. When I got out, they were just going to let me go home. I said, '' Wait a minute, I came to the hospital so that I can have outpatient therapy. What about that?'' After I got out and they got me an intake with outpatient therapy, guess the doctor that was giving me the intake was the doctor who had been so mean and wasn't going to stop giving me the medicine that made me feel like I was going to faint. He grilled me for an hour as to why I didn't tell him what medicine I was taking. I was just staying there just trying to be really quiet [LAUGHTER] because I wanted to get my outpatient therapy. Then I had a much nicer doctor for the outpatient therapy and I had that for about a year before I moved to Michigan.
[03:08:48] FEMALE_1: Can you describe the family's support you received after you left the hospital?
[03:08:51] Judy Wenzel: Family support? [LAUGHTER]
[03:08:57] Judy Wenzel: Well, before I went to the hospital, my father told me, if you go to that hospital, you'll never get out. That was not much of support. My mother didn't want to talk about it because my ex-husband, she wanted to sweep the problems, like don't tell anybody that's too embarrassing. But I did go to see a social worker in a group. There was a women's group and that was supportive. I did get to go for a while a couple of months maybe, to a women's support group.
[03:09:45] FEMALE_1: The next set of questions relate to you after the hospital. What led you to your decision to start volunteering?
[03:09:54] Judy Wenzel: Well, I told the therapist I was seeing out-patient after the hospital that I wanted to volunteer, and he said, oh no, don't do that. I think the thought in those days was that people who were in a hospital had so many problems that they should never ever try to help people. It was the opposite of what people think today.
[03:10:25] FEMALE_1: Where did you volunteer and for how long?
[03:10:27] Judy Wenzel: I was living in Lansing by that point, and so I was watching TV, I don't think I had a job at the time when we first got to Lansing. I watched TV and I saw that they were asking for volunteers for something. I think they called it daycare or something, but I could tell it was to help people get out of the hospital.
[03:11:02] FEMALE_1: What made you decide to divorce for your first husband?
[03:11:08] Judy Wenzel: Sadly, I was only married to him about one or two days when I realized it was really wrong. Our personalities just didn't fit together, and I was maybe a little way too wild for him or something. Even though I have been drawn to him because he was picketing in front of the faculty lounge at University of Texas because he was against segregation. He just thought that that was something you did in college. Then, when he got out of college, he didn't want to do anything more than do [inaudible 03:11:50] ACLU meetings. I think I was too wild. I did finally convince him to go down to Birmingham the Christmas before I was in the hospital. He didn't really want to go. I think [LAUGHTER] it wasn't that it was scary because nothing bad was happening at the time, but it was just too much for him. He wanted to stay being a professor.
[03:12:27] FEMALE_1: Can you describe the circumstances that led to your second marriage and clean when, where, and how you met, and why you decided to marry again?
[03:12:34] Judy Wenzel: [LAUGHTER] I had been divorced for about five years and I was actually working as a psychiatric technician and then as a BA-level social worker, which even though I hadn't had social work classes, I had a BA. They let me be a BA-level social worker. Then I wanted to move away for various reasons because my ex-husband's second wife came to me and wanted me to help her put my ex-husband in prison. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm terrified. By then, it was starting to come out about how women who got away from an abuser should be scared of him. Even though he hadn't physically abused me, he had emotionally abused me a lot, he had told me I'd never make it on my own and stuff like that. I really did want to move away and things weren't that great for me. I went and took a test two times to work for the State of Michigan and I finally got a call to work as what they call it a childcare worker in a state hospital for children. I finally did get a job. Just south of Ann Arbor at low code, which no longer exists, that's been covered over by, I think a psychiatric prison. But I worked there for quite a few years. I'd moved from Lansing, and I'd only been here in Ann Arbor for a few months when I met my second husband. I had gone to a singles group. I said, oh, that is crazy. I'm not going to go to that singles group anymore, to heck with it. I went to do my laundry. At the laundromat, there was this guy who was just looking at me while I was folding my laundry. That was my second husband. We met in the laundromat about two miles from where we now live. He followed me out to the car. It was in the evening. I should have probably been scared, but I was already 34 years old, I guess I wasn't, and I thought I knew my way around the world by then. He said, oh, do you go out to see many movies? It ended up that we went out for coffee that night. It was very short. It was April when we met and we got married August 1st, which was his birthday. It wasn't a very long time that we had known each other.
[03:15:49] FEMALE_1: How is your current marriage?
[03:15:51] Judy Wenzel: It's great now, although I will admit that we had some bad times. My present husband is nine years younger than me, and I think that he has always seemed very mature for his age. Truthfully, when we were first married and I was trying to take some art classes over at Eastern Michigan. I would call to ask for something from the library or whatever. My husband would call and they would treat me like I was a little girl. They were treating him like he was a professor. [LAUGHTER] Even though he's nine years younger than me, he comes across very forcefully and maturely. Although, the thing is, because I was nine years old, now has some experience and I didn't feel at the mercy of my husband. I think that it worked out well that way. The other thing though that happened was that my present husband is very hard of hearing. For that reason or for some other reason, it was very hard for him to complete his college undergraduate degree. It wasn't until he was 45 that he completed it. There was some friction in the fact that he was working at jobs that were actually very wonderful jobs. All the jobs he had, he was helping society, but bringing him very little money. We did have some friction on that. But now he has a master's, and he has everything but dissertation on his PhD. He loves teaching. Even though he's hard of hearing, he loves teaching.
[03:17:55] FEMALE_1: What life lessons did you learn from your first marriage and your experience in the hospital?
[03:18:01] Judy Wenzel: Well, in the hospital, I learned how lucky I was. Sad to say, even though the attendance at the hospital were African-American. That was my first really up-close dealings with people who were African-American, who were somewhat my age but maybe a bit older. There was a little girl on our ward. She should not have been with adults, and she was pregnant. She couldn't have been very old. She was shunned by the attendants. I was so out of it and not understanding what was going on that, now, I would just run right up to her and try to involve her, you know what I mean? Or at least talk with her? But nobody talked to her. It was just horrible. The attendants, like if she would try to run and play, they would talk about how she was harming her unborn baby. But what I really found out was there's lots of women in this world that have a real bad time. That's why I want to volunteer and that's how I came, and I got into working in mental health.
[03:19:42] FEMALE_1: What lessons did you learn from your first marriage?
[03:19:45] Judy Wenzel: From my first marriage. [LAUGHTER] I learned that I could make it on my own. Towards the end, because I left my ex-husband that winter, from about February until March or April, I was living separated from him, but he was living at the house that we were renting, and I was living in a room at a rooming house because there was a little place where I could cook. But I had some jobs that didn't turn out very well. I'm a little bit dyslexic, and I was trying to be a waitress because I didn't want to be in a bunny. I'm telling you the jobs that were available were so demeaning. They tried to get me to be a bunny. Like wear a bunny outfit out on the street, and I refused to do that, so I said, no, I'll be a waitress. But I wasn't good at carrying all that stuff without spilling it and all that. It only lasted about six weeks. But what I really learned because I stayed married five years after being in the hospital because I was so terrified that something really bad would happen to me again if I left, that I really could make it. I also learned don't tell my parents because they would call me while I was separated the first time and say, go back. When I left the second time, I waited until it was after my birthday when I knew my parents would call after my anniversary, and my ex-husband, when we got married. Those were only a week apart. Then I knew my parents wouldn't call me again, and I left a day or two after that. Because we had no children, it only took two months to get a divorce. By the time my parents found out the divorce was almost final. I had somebody to move in with, so I wasn't living by myself. I had learned don't try to make it on your own, have friends to support you. Yes, my mother did come and visit me and my friend and it was so hot because we had an upstairs apartment that only cost $85 a month. When she visited in July or August, whatever it was, [LAUGHTER] she couldn't stay there, of course, because it was so terribly hot. She rented a motel, and my friend and I went and stayed there at the hotel too, because it was so much cooler. [LAUGHTER]
[03:23:04] FEMALE_1: What advice would you give to women who find themselves in a similar situation?
[03:23:09] Judy Wenzel: Well, nowadays there's a lot that people can do like in Ann Arbor, there's a safe house. Even if you're not being physically harmed, it's probably almost as bad or even worse to be emotionally harmed, and being told, you'll never make it on your own. You can have half of the money that we put into our house because you might get sick again when I got a divorce. There are a lot of options open nowadays. There's a safe house in Washington County, and in other places, there are such places where even if they don't think that your situation is such that you can live at that place, at least, they can give you support. You can call any time of the day or night to ask for help.
[03:24:17] FEMALE_1: Can you describe your philosophy, or approach to overcoming adversity?
[03:24:26] Judy Wenzel: I'm trying to think if my father was right. My father thought if he treated us harshly, that we would learn to make it in life. Truthfully, my siblings have made it in life and I did too. Although I ended up having a lot of problems at first. But really, I think our son, we have one son, and he seems to be making it too. I'm hoping that I didn't treat him as harshly as I was treated. But I remember that I did spank him, and my husband never did, except once when our son asked to be spanked because he knew he had done something that he felt so bad about. He had spit in my husband's face because he had been called to come in, and he didn't want to come in. He asked to be spanked. But I raised a son who was so good at expressing himself verbally that the second or third time I spanked him, he was already very verbal at two or three, whatever it was. He told me in no uncertain terms that he didn't like that, and he didn't want it. I'm thinking that it's good to raise your children so that they feel like they can express themselves in adversity. [LAUGHTER] I guess it's good to know that you can stand up being in the hospital was actually good for me in retrospect. Thank God, I wasn't given electroshock, which could have permanently damaged me. But because nowadays they give electric shock to people who are depressed. But they only give one after the person has gotten better. But in those days they'd give you 30. It doesn't matter if you've got better or not, and then you'd get worse, of course. I was terribly lucky that they didn't think I was depressed. I think that it's best if you're having to in adversity. I guess it was adversity while I was married to my ex-husband for seven years, for sure. I was also lucky that I had a college degree. Many women who try to leave a bad marriage, or for instance, my mother only had one year of college. I think she was terrified she wouldn't be able to make enough money to support her and the kids, that kind of thing. It's good to have, probably sounds too preachy to say, stay in school as long as you can, get prepared to be able to earn a living, that kind of thing.
[03:27:58] FEMALE_1: That's all the questions we have.
[03:28:00] Judy Wenzel: Is that all of them? [LAUGHTER]

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2022

Length: 03:27:56

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Legacies Project