Legacies Project Oral History: June Rusten

Mon, 08/29/2022 - 12:02pm

When: 2022

Transcript

[00:00:09] INTERVIEWER: Can I please have you say and spell your name?
[00:00:11] JUNE RUSTEN: Pardon me.
[00:00:12] INTERVIEWER: Please can I have your say and spell your name?
[00:00:15] JUNE RUSTEN: June Rusten, J-U-N-E-R-U-S-T-E-N.
[00:00:19] INTERVIEWER: What is your birthday including the year?
[00:00:23] JUNE RUSTEN: 4th 1928.
[00:00:27] INTERVIEWER: How would you describe your ethnic background?
[00:00:30] JUNE RUSTEN: How would I describe?
[00:00:32] INTERVIEWER: Describe your ethnic background?
[00:00:35] JUNE RUSTEN: What background?
[00:00:36] INTERVIEWER: Your ethnic background.
[00:00:37] JUNE RUSTEN: Athletic?
[00:00:38] INTERVIEWER: Ethnic.
[00:00:39] JUNE RUSTEN: Ethnic?
[00:00:40] INTERVIEWER: Yes.
[00:00:42] JUNE RUSTEN: Different. Mainly German, French, Egyptian, had Egyptian grandmother, and my mother keeps saying we had a Native American uncle, but I don't know. But my family had been in the United States for a long time. They came over early.
[00:01:05] INTERVIEWER: What is your religious affiliation, if you have any?
[00:01:08] JUNE RUSTEN: I'm a proud christian, Unitarian.
[00:01:12] INTERVIEWER: What is the highest level of formal education you have completed?
[00:01:15] JUNE RUSTEN: I have two master's degrees.
[00:01:19] INTERVIEWER: In what fields?
[00:01:20] INTERVIEWER: What fields do you have them in?
[00:01:22] JUNE RUSTEN: Well, my undergraduate degree, my major was Social Studies, and then I have a Masters in the teaching of reading, and the history of reading, and a master's degree in using right-brain activities in combining language arts and science and social studies. I understand now they're not even talking about right-brain. That was a new thing about 20 years ago. But it meant more hands-on doing things. Of course, the goal was to be whole brain.
[00:02:03] INTERVIEWER: What is your marital status?
[00:02:05] JUNE RUSTEN: I am single right now.
[00:02:08] INTERVIEWER: How many children do you have?
[00:02:09] JUNE RUSTEN: Three.
[00:02:12] INTERVIEWER: How many siblings do you have?
[00:02:14] JUNE RUSTEN: I had five, I have two siblings left. I had four. I was the fifth.
[00:02:23] INTERVIEWER: Brothers and sisters. How many?
[00:02:25] JUNE RUSTEN: I have one brother and three sisters, but now I have just one sister. The three oldest sons. Our family was like two families. There were three of us that were close together, and then 11 years later I had two sisters.
[00:02:43] INTERVIEWER: What would you consider your primary occupation to have been?
[00:02:46] JUNE RUSTEN: Teaching.
[00:02:50] INTERVIEWER: We're going to start with the actual interview. I'm going to ask some questions starting.
[00:02:56] JUNE RUSTEN: Sorry you need to speak louder.
[00:02:58] INTERVIEWER: I'm going to ask some questions about your family history. We're going to begin with the family naming history. This is any stories about your first or last name or family traditions and selecting your first.
[00:03:10] JUNE RUSTEN: No, the only thing was my maiden name was Weine Homer. When we decided to go to Europe because he wanted to visit our son, I noticed on the map of Germany there's a town of Weinbau Hömer. We went there first, to see where our ancestors came from. It was a little town in picture is very nice. But that's only part of the family. I think my mother's family came from Alsace Lorraine, because she cooked some quite a bit of French food. That would be French if the French are on the last door, or it'd be German of the Germans on the last door. It's a mixture.
[00:03:53] INTERVIEWER: Are there any naming traditions in your families? Any boys who are named after their fore-fathers, their grandfathers or anything of that sort?
[00:04:01] JUNE RUSTEN: Well, my brother was named after my junior for my father. But that's the only one. My daughter's name is Helen. Because her grandmother's name was Esther Helen. I thought that was a good combination.
[00:04:17] INTERVIEWER: Okay. Did you leave from another country and come to America, or have you always lived in America?
[00:04:24] JUNE RUSTEN: No, I grew up in New York State, near Buffalo, went to college and Cleveland, and people in my hometown said, why are you going out West to go to college? At the time I went to college, Cleveland who was out West, and now it seems part of the East. Interesting how the express ways made our cities closer.
[00:04:54] INTERVIEWER: With the family history, what stories have come down to you and your parents and grandparents, or more distant ancestors?
[00:05:03] JUNE RUSTEN: Not many. I don't remember any. In fact, I I've been trying to before I even knew about your class, I was writing a grandmother's book for my grandchildren. When they had certain experiences that I had and how different they were because of it. I grew up during the Great Depression and World War II. Of course, their experiences are different. I've been trying to put in experiences that I had growing up, that are different from my grandchildren, so they'd get a global view of the history of our family.
[00:05:39] INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me a bit about the differences between living.
[00:05:42] JUNE RUSTEN: Well, I went to a one-room school. We had one row for each grade. When I went to sixth grade, after sixth grade, we had to go to a large, it was a rural area. We had to go to a larger city, Hamburg, and they were three girls, we're going to go to seventh grade. We had a man drive as each day in his car and pick us up after school, to all through junior high and high school. The next class below, there were more students in that class, so they went to a different town close to her in a school bus, it was unique to be driven the three of us to the high school every day.
[00:06:25] INTERVIEWER: What was your school called?
[00:06:27] JUNE RUSTEN: Hamburg. It was named after the town of Hamburg, New York, about 10 mi outside of Buffalo.
[00:06:37] INTERVIEWER: Do you know any stories about courtships, how your parents met or grandparents met?
[00:06:43] JUNE RUSTEN: No. If they shared them, I forgotten. I wish I had. There were certain things I would like to know and like to remember that I remember my parents talking about. But you don't write them down and we didn't videotape them. They're lost. I'm the oldest one in the family. When I can't remember something, it's gone. What you're doing here is very good for general ideas, but every family probably should do that.
[00:07:26] INTERVIEWER: Where are these older family members or parents span as well?
[00:07:31] INTERVIEWER: Where did your family come from, your parents and grandparents. Where did they live?
[00:07:36] JUNE RUSTEN: I don't know. I know when my brother bought my parents house, she had to go to New York City to the naive forgotten the land company that all land. Our family owned that land for years where I grew up, and I don't know exactly where they all came from because we're all sorted or mine girls. But originally from Germany probably. I'm sure I don't have any stories. I know I wish I did.
[00:08:15] INTERVIEWER: Next we're going to talk about childhood and attending school at that was like. If these questions jog memories about other times in your life, please only respond with memories from the earliest part of your life. Where did you grow up and what are your strongest memories of that place?
[00:08:32] JUNE RUSTEN: It was a rural area right near Lake Erie, just a mile from Lake Erie, so we were all there. We could walk over to the lake and swim in the summertime. During the depression, we were so poor and food was hard by, so our front yard, the grasses taken away and my dad built a garden. One of my jobs that I hated was to take an empty can and knock the bugs off the tomato plants and I would get $0.02 if I failed the big cun a day. We did the daily and then my mother candle the food that we ate all winter. One interesting thing I remember, this is when I was in junior high going to Hamburg, my father kept his job throughout the depression and he got a check for $13 a month. Our house mortgage payment was $12, and I was trusted to take that check to the bank in Hamburg, cash to pay the mortgage payment, and carefully guard that dollar bill because that's all I had to live on the rest of the month. But everybody who was in the same boat, so he didn't know we were really poor. Another interesting thing that I just remembered the other day, each morning before I'd go to school. This is an elementary school, my mother would hand me put my feet on the chair on a cardboard and she traced around the cardboard, cut it out, put it inside our shoe because the soul is on her shoe so many holes does it kept the cardboard, kept the stones out of her feet. That was normal, everybody at school had cardboards in their shoulders because there was no money to buy more than one pair of shoes.
[00:10:29] INTERVIEWER: Going back to the garden, what foods did you grow in that garden?
[00:10:34] JUNE RUSTEN: No, corn, beans, peas, tomatoes, all vegetables. My father who was very interested in learning how to, and I can't remember the name where you take a branch from a cherry tree and you somehow you grafted to an apple tree. We would have apple trees that would have several different apples on them because my dad would graft these on whatever however that was. I remember watching him but I can't remember what he did. But he planted a lot of fruit trees. We had fruit and a lot of vegetables. We did that until World War II was almost over. Then he planted grass in the front yard again.
[00:11:27] INTERVIEWER: I remember you saying that you really enjoy doing gardening. Do you think that has something to do with that?
[00:11:32] JUNE RUSTEN: I'm sure. Yes. I like to garden yeah.
[00:11:36] INTERVIEWER: What things do you garden now?
[00:11:38] JUNE RUSTEN: I only garden clark, I can't kneel and they can't squat and so I sit on a chair and that isn't really gardening. You need to kneel to garden and really get your hands in the dirt. But I do what little I can with just if I keep putting more into grass or actually ground cover. I can't even remember it, it has little purple flower in the spring and it's very pretty, but instead of having to water grass that can stand dry spells, periwinkle. That isn't the scientific name. I don't know, but that's the common name.
[00:12:26] INTERVIEWER: How did your family come to live where you live? How did you finally come to live there?
[00:12:34] JUNE RUSTEN: The owned the land and they just passed it down. My father had a brother and so they divided in half. My father had half and my uncle had half, and we lived next to each other.
[00:12:46] INTERVIEWER: That's nice.
[00:12:47] JUNE RUSTEN: Then my brother bought my mother's house, and that's the way to go, I guess.
[00:12:53] INTERVIEWER: Then did you get to see your family a lot when you were growing up did you spend [OVERLAPPING].
[00:12:56] JUNE RUSTEN: My cousins and in fact, that was the probably the only entertainment we had. One or the other would host a family on a Sunday afternoon because gas is rationed and sugar is rationed and all those things. Your cousins, worrier, playmates many times living in an area where not many other families lived except the kids I went to school with.
[00:13:23] INTERVIEWER: Can you describe what your house was like?
[00:13:26] JUNE RUSTEN: My parents builed it after I was born. A very nice house because only one bathroom, which says something interesting. Because I have a much smaller house and I have two bathrooms the times changed. I remember when he got ready for school and my father got ready for work. You took your turn waiting for the bathroom, so having more than one bathroom is good if you had a big family.
[00:14:01] INTERVIEWER: How many people overall lived up in your house?
[00:14:07] JUNE RUSTEN: At the time I lived in it, they were just our five children and my parents. My grandparents each had their own house while my father's parents died just the year before I was born. My grandfather, my mother's father. I remember as a child visiting him, he had heart trouble and many times he had a hospital bed in his bedroom and he would go to visit him. Then my grandmother lived a few years after that, and she was my favorite person. She taught me how to sew, and she spend time visiting each of her children, living with them for a few years. But I think she died before she was 65. So people didn't live very long.
[00:15:01] INTERVIEWER: What was your relationship like with your family? Did you guys get along?
[00:15:04] JUNE RUSTEN: All you had was each other?
[00:15:11] INTERVIEWER: Were there any languages other than English spoken in your household?
[00:15:14] JUNE RUSTEN: I remember a couple of my great aunt speaking some German. In fact before we went to Germany to visit my son, I got some records in the library and I had taken German in high school, and I thought, would, welcome back to me. But when I got to Germany and I was standing at the counter of the star wanting to buy some cheese for lunch. All I could think of as a slang German that my my aunts used, so I wasn't very good at learning the language.
[00:15:52] INTERVIEWER: ere there any other languages spoken in the settings that you lived, like maybe around the neighborhood [inaudible 00:15:57].
[00:15:58] JUNE RUSTEN: There was a big Italian community right near us, but they didn't speak Italian. And men in a couple of them had restaurants and I had a lot of Italian boyfriend says I was growing up But they didn't speak Italian, they spoke English.
[00:16:19] INTERVIEWER: What was your family like when you were a child and you said that [OVERLAPPING]
[00:16:21] JUNE RUSTEN: Like what?
[00:16:22] INTERVIEWER: Your family what was that like when you were a child, you were all close.
[00:16:26] JUNE RUSTEN: I still don't understand.
[00:16:28] INTERVIEWER: What was your family like when you were a child?
[00:16:32] JUNE RUSTEN: Like any family, even like families today, except I didn't do this, but my mother baked homemade bread and pardon me, was growing up during the depression. When my youngest child was in kindergarten, I went to, started in teaching, so then I worked and it was quite different.
[00:16:57] INTERVIEWER: What work did your mother and father do?
[00:17:00] JUNE RUSTEN: My father was a CPA and richer the South Buffalo Railroad, near Buffalo. My mother is just a homemaker, cooking and canning all that food and everything.
[00:17:16] INTERVIEWER: What does your father do exactly?
[00:17:19] JUNE RUSTEN: He kept records. I remember him talking about when the cars are on the railroad track and they were empty are being filled up. He kept the costs you know how much they spent. That's all I know he did it had to do with the railroad and bringing goods into the town.
[00:17:38] INTERVIEWER: What is the earliest memory that you can think of?
[00:17:44] JUNE RUSTEN: Earliest memory?
[00:17:49] June Rusten: Well, I remember we had a lot of snow in Buffalo, this year, reminds me of that and so much snow that drifted next to her house and it would freeze because it was cold all winter and we would make forts. You could stand up and they just lasted for a long time. I used to tell my children about that because Michigan didn't have that much snow but this year we probably could have built those fort's.
[00:18:19] INTERVIEWER: What was it day like for you in pre-school?
[00:18:24] June Rusten: Well, we didn't have kindergarten. You went right to first grade and I can't remember doing much. I just remember playing. The one-room school was just below the hill we lived on and so we'd go and play on the swings there. But I don't remember. I don't have much memory. Live too long.
[00:18:50] INTERVIEWER: What did you like to do for fun when you were that age?
[00:18:53] June Rusten: What?
[00:18:53] INTERVIEWER: What did you like to do for fun when you were that age?
[00:18:56] June Rusten: Just play with my sister and brother.
[00:19:00] INTERVIEWER: Did you have any favorite toys or books or games that you like to play?
[00:19:04] June Rusten: I had one book and it was a favorite, and I was so glad I had it. I think I learned to read with it probably. We didn't have many books. Now I have too many books I think overcompensating for that. But people have more books today and you don't spend money on books when you can't eat, spend money on food.
[00:19:31] INTERVIEWER: What was the favorite book called that you read?
[00:19:35] June Rusten: It was something about her tree growing, I forgotten that I did.
[00:19:44] INTERVIEWER: Was there anything else that you'd like to do? I know that you've talked about reading a lot and saying that that's something that you still enjoy doing as [OVERLAPPING]
[00:19:51] June Rusten: We didn't read very much. We had a piano and I remember playing on that. My mother taught me as much as she could and then I did have a piano teacher. But I don t think that I took piano lessons till I started school.
[00:20:07] INTERVIEWER: Were there any special days or events or family traditions that you can remember from that time?
[00:20:13] June Rusten: Every fourth of July, the whole family would gather my one-inch big house and every mother would bring food and we just had lunch there and suffer there and there were a few firecrackers, but it was just a family, so we were with cousins and aunts and uncles.
[00:20:33] INTERVIEWER: Do you remember any of the types of foods that you guys would bring? What was like a classic meal that you guys would have?
[00:20:39] June Rusten: Probably fried chicken and I remember the baked beans because I liked those and cake, but I don't remember any other food.
[00:20:51] INTERVIEWER: Now we're going to discuss you as a young person, so that can be pretty much from elementary to high school. Did you go to preschool at all?
[00:21:02] June Rusten: No, they didn't even have kindergarten. I don't really with the time I started school, you just went directly to first grade.
[00:21:10] INTERVIEWER: Then elementary school. You went to elementary school?
[00:21:13] June Rusten: It was a one-room school taught by one teacher and when we were in fifth grade, there were enough children there that they hired a second teacher and divided I think up to third, and then fourth and fifth and sixth. There's like two rooms, but still a raw for each grade level and I told you before on E3 sixth graders, and then for junior high we went to the high school in the city of Hamburg so there were a lot of children there. Back they had a middle school and high school.
[00:21:51] INTERVIEWER: What was the elementary school called?
[00:21:53] June Rusten: Pardon me?
[00:21:54] INTERVIEWER: What was the elementary school called?
[00:21:56] June Rusten: I do know. That did not even had a name.
[00:22:00] INTERVIEWER: What was the junior had called?
[00:22:03] June Rusten: Well, I don't know. The high school was Hamburg high school, so I am assuming the middle-school was two, but I don't remember.
[00:22:18] INTERVIEWER: Did you play any sports or engage in any other extra curricular activities at this time?
[00:22:23] June Rusten: No, because the car is there to pick us up and it would have had to walk 8 miles after evade state after for sports or anything. I could only be involved in daily activities which was just classroom work.
[00:22:40] INTERVIEWER: Did you have any best friends growing up when you were in elementary and middle school or high school?
[00:22:44] June Rusten: Well, the three girls that were in my class, we were best friends.
[00:22:48] INTERVIEWER: What were their names?
[00:22:50] June Rusten: One is called Cis and I can't remember her real name because everybody called her Cis, I think it was Joan, but I'm not sure and Dolores was my other.
[00:23:03] INTERVIEWER: Can you describe any of the popular music at this time?
[00:23:09] June Rusten: Well, yes, because the main activity that everybody did was to dance and especially in the summer. This is for high school and middle school or elementary and rigid or bugged and we'd like jazz and in all summer long, every night there, if you went to the lake, there is this hall that had bands come like the big bands and so we danced and danced. [LAUGHTER]
[00:23:40] INTERVIEWER: What were the popular bands at this time?
[00:23:43] June Rusten: The popular bands with Tommy Dorsey and let's see if I can remember. Oh dear, I'm forgetting what their names were but it was jazz music, mainly in the big bands music. In fact, this is something bad that we did. My two friends were Roman Catholic and I was protestant, so they had holy days of obligation, and at that time, I don't know if it's still true today, but they could take off school if they went to church before. They would do that and I would take off the day with them. I didn't go to church, but we would go to Buffalo to whatever and here, whatever big band was, if the movie theaters and all a big theaters had big band music, they would give concerts all the time. I would skip school and see a big band listen to their program.
[00:24:46] INTERVIEWER: At the movie theaters was there just musical performances or was like a popular [OVERLAPPING]
[00:24:51] June Rusten: They had movies too. But, it cost money. Didn't have extra money and I didn't care for movies and much. I'm sure the big bands cost money, but maybe they didn't because I remember I could always go with my two friends on their holy days of obligation. But I don't and probably we took her lunch even because we didn't have much money at all.
[00:25:20] INTERVIEWER: What were some popular clothing or hairstyles at this time?
[00:25:24] June Rusten: [inaudible 00:25:24] long can he called page boy where you'd put the curls under, he'd be long to your neck and then they had a Pompadour over the top would be raised up. Whatever the movies had, maybe we'd get copied.
[00:25:46] INTERVIEWER: Who are some popular icons at this time?
[00:25:49] June Rusten: I can't remember any. Ginger Rogers and who was her partner? I can't remember now.
[00:26:01] INTERVIEWER: What were some slang terms, phrases or words that were used in common that you may see today?
[00:26:09] June Rusten: Slang terms?
[00:26:11] INTERVIEWER: Some slang terms that were used back then, but you might not see them today.
[00:26:17] June Rusten: They would go along with the music and cool still men, like Cool does today. But then was a new term and burning with gas [inaudible 00:26:31] that was another term I remember. It's interesting how that has changed over the years. I wish I could remember more. They haven't changed that much but young people always have their own terminology.
[00:26:51] INTERVIEWER: What were some fads are styles from this era?
[00:27:01] June Rusten: I remember saddle shoes and socks. We are all a time and you and girls didn't wear slacks or pant. I think I was in college maybe before I could wear slacks and maybe later than that I'm not sure. But you just always wore dresses if you're a girls wear shorts in hot weather.
[00:27:32] INTERVIEWER: What was your favorite dress that you had?
[00:27:35] June Rusten: I had a dressing dress for Sundays and special occasions it was a dark blue taffeta with a design in the clock. It started sparkled her shine through when you move certain ways. I don't remember the exact style, but I loved the color and the cloth. [LAUGHTER]
[00:27:59] INTERVIEWER: What was the typical day like for you in this time period?
[00:28:02] June Rusten: Well, getting up and going to school and coming home and helping my mother work, and then doing homework. We've listened to the radio all the time.
[00:28:14] INTERVIEWER: What kind of radio stations?
[00:28:16] June Rusten: Well, it would be similar to NPR today. I remember when the Halloween show came on, they still rebroadcast at or every Halloween. That when a frightening one where the Martians are coming. I remember we listened to that and I remember hearing Franklin D. Roosevelt tell her about the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Our family was, it was in the kitchen and we're all standing there listening very intently.
[00:28:50] INTERVIEWER: How did you all feel when you heard that on the radio?
[00:28:53] June Rusten: Oh, that was shocking to know that Japan had struck the United. That involved us in the war. We were involved by helping provide the Europeans with weapons and things to fight off the Nazis. But when Japan struck Pearl Harbor and I met and we were totally involved and more on two fronts in Japan and Asia and in Europe because we're still trying to beat the Nazis and Hitler.
[00:29:29] INTERVIEWER: How did all the current events that were occurring at that time make you feel?
[00:29:34] June Rusten: When Nike like today, if there is a battle we lost. Hitler was such aggressive.
[00:29:46] JUNE RUSTEN: I don't know what you'd call him, but his goal is to take over all Europe, to be the king of everything, and then probably get the US too. In his philosophy was so the German race is supposed to be superior, get rid of all the Jews, get rid of all the poor anybody that they wanted this master race and so you got rid of everybody else. It was very frightening. It was so contrary to any ideas of social justice, where this was unfair in the United States and especially in the Buffalo area. I can remember my father telling when he'd come home from work that a black man had been killed, shot. I don't remember that the Sheriff ever found whoever did this killing and it was regular. It was probably one black man a week. This is really disconcerting. I come to work from an early age. I had jobs at a dime store and a drugstore in Buffalo and I would take the bus from Hamburg School to those jobs. I remember many times if a black person was sitting on the bus, the seat would be empty. I was grateful for that because usually you had to stand and I could sit. I always wondered why they were empty, why nobody wanted to sit next to a black person, especially a black man. Those ideas going through your head didn't make sense with all the history I was learning about we the people, including everybody and then we were so racist, really. It was terrible, that a black man could be shot and nobody would try to find out who did it. That's changed some, but it's still a conservative area and is probably many times a racist area. Although I don't get back to my home, much anymore but it hasn't changed a great deal. We still have that racist undertone throughout our country. I think it's borne out by the way some people respond to President Obama. They don't want anything he suggests to succeed and a lot of it, I'm sure it's due to being a black man. Some people I heard on the radio just the other night that many people, citizens of the US don't believe he's a legitimate president. They don t believe he was born in Hawaii and I've seen his birth certificate when he was newly elected it was even in the Ann Arbor News, it was printed. People don't accept that because of these underlying racist ideas they hold.
[00:32:58] INTERVIEWER: Going back to your childhood and things like your middle school and high school years, what things did you do for fun on the weekends?
[00:33:07] JUNE RUSTEN: You worked at home, you helped your family and I probably worked at the dime store, because I worked after school nights in Buffalo and I did on Saturdays, not on Sundays. Stores were not open on Sundays then, but I would do homework. For fun, we just did the dancing at night, if there was any big band are on or I had records that you dance to it too.
[00:33:45] INTERVIEWER: Did your family have any special sayings or expressions at this time?
[00:33:50] JUNE RUSTEN: Not that I can remember.
[00:33:54] INTERVIEWER: Was there any changes in your family life during high school?
[00:33:58] JUNE RUSTEN: No.
[00:34:00] INTERVIEWER: Was there any special days, events, or family traditions that you can remember from that time?
[00:34:06] JUNE RUSTEN: No. Other than the 4th of July, and then at Christmas we got with her relatives and had extended family gatherings. The interesting thing about my working because I wanted to go to college and nobody had been to college in my family before and they kept saying what a waste for a woman to go to college because she was only going to be a mother. Well, mothers need as much education and probably more than anybody else because you're the child's first teacher.
[00:34:46] INTERVIEWER: Go ahead.
[00:34:47] JUNE RUSTEN: Well, I worked at [inaudible 00:34:49] during high school at a dime store, and at a drugstore. Right after school and I would rush out of school, get on the bus, and go to Buffalo. I am sure the bus brought me home, but I don't have any recollection of that. But the interesting thing was you had little manila envelopes that you got paid with cash, and I would give my envelope to my mother. Then I was thinking of going to college and I only had very few clothes. I saw in one of the stores a red blazer with a black and white checked border on it and so I went in and didn't tell my mother and I started putting a few dollars down. In all summer, I finally paid for it just before school started in September. Then I thought now how am I going to get that in a house without telling my mother I bought this jacket. But I don't remember that she was concerned at all, but the cash in the envelope was all my earnings. But I just took out a dollar a week or something a small amount so she wouldn't know, and bought that blazer, which I wore through college. [LAUGHTER]
[00:36:10] INTERVIEWER: Where did that money go that you gave your mother to?
[00:36:13] JUNE RUSTEN: Food probably, the bills that she had to pay because we had only $13 a month that my dad earned and it wouldn't go very far. The interesting thing is, ask your parents how much your mortgage payment is today and our mortgage payment was $12. It's just unreal.
[00:36:39] INTERVIEWER: You've already talked about World War II and the racism that occurred at this time. Can you just elaborate a little bit more on those things?
[00:36:48] JUNE RUSTEN: Well, now you're aware of what's going on and you're aware of the resistance. There's been a lot of it in the radio yesterday and the night before when Obama gave the State of the Union message. Some of the commentary I was hearing yesterday is, no matter what Obama would suggest they would be against and try to obstruct it, which is a really sad commentary. It should make everybody be sure they know who the candidates are and vote in the next election knowledgeably because I heard that there was one man in Michigan who was elected because nobody regarded that he had committed felonies. The information didn't get out. I think without newspapers we're really handicapped. There's so much we don't know. I didn't know about this program that you're involved in today. If it had been normal times, Ann Arbor Public Schools probably would have had an article in the newspaper. I'm suggesting to Jimmy that he write an article even though we only get the newspaper two days a week, at least people would know about it. There's no other way to know about it unless you share it with your friends. This is such a great program for you and for even me as a history teacher.
[00:38:20] INTERVIEWER: You said that you had family members in World War II, cousins. Can you tell me a little bit about their experiences and? [OVERLAPPING]
[00:38:28] JUNE RUSTEN: Well, I remember I had boyfriends. We would write to her boyfriends. I had a friend who was in the Philippines, but they didn't write much about what was happening in the war and neither did my cousins when they came home, except one cousin who was in the Navy was stationed in the town of Winehime for a short time in the hotel so he was glad to see the town with our name in it. But several of them were killed, never came back. In fact, I thought about that the other day one neighbor's boy, they had never found his body or anything and I don't think they ever knew what happened to him except he was killed in the war.
[00:39:22] INTERVIEWER: You said that you had boyfriends who were overseas fighting in the war. What was that like?
[00:39:30] JUNE RUSTEN: They didn't really share very much, except what I've shared with you. If they did, I don't remember. [LAUGHTER]
[00:39:39] INTERVIEWER: What was the relationship like between you two?
[00:39:42] JUNE RUSTEN: Between what?
[00:39:43] INTERVIEWER: Between you and your boyfriend?
[00:39:44] JUNE RUSTEN: Well, mostly a letter, communication, because they didn't come home very often. Usually, by the time they did, you'd fallen in love with somebody else. [LAUGHTER] But it was just a boyfriend like you might talk on the phone with somebody but it would be more constant. This is just relied on letters.
[00:40:16] INTERVIEWER: How old were you at that time?
[00:40:18] JUNE RUSTEN: How old? 17, 18.
[00:40:24] INTERVIEWER: Did you have many relationships growing up or were you not very into men?
[00:40:30] JUNE RUSTEN: Relationships?
[00:40:32] INTERVIEWER: With other boys or men?
[00:40:34] JUNE RUSTEN: No. Well, you did a lot of things together. We'd go bowling, a church group, boys and girls, I mean just be friends in a group.
[00:40:48] INTERVIEWER: [inaudible 00:40:48] do you want to just end it now and wait for next week or should we continue? Are there any other memorable things you did or things that happened during your childhood?
[00:41:04] June Rusten: I'm sorry. I don't have very much of a memory, but I can't think of anything now. I wrote a few things down before.
[00:41:13] INTERVIEWER: You can go ahead and share those with us if you feel comfortable doing that.
[00:41:22] June Rusten: No. The rest start after I got out of college, most of them.
[00:41:28] INTERVIEWER: Well, then that's where we will start off next week then.
[00:41:32] FEMALE_1: [inaudible 00:41:32]
[00:41:38] INTERVIEWER: First off, you look really great and I'm very happy that you're here today. You know that you are here for the Legacies Project. This is a project that the students are putting together here at Skyline. It's also a project being worked on at other schools around the area, so we're gathering oral histories from you guys and putting it altogether to archive future generations. Please ignore the camera and just act like you're having a conversation with me. Just look at me when you're speaking. We may have to pause to change the tape at some point, but we will pick up right where we left off. If you need me to speak up, just let me know. I will try to be as loud as possible. You can call for a break anytime that you want. If you feel like you are not in a comfortable situation or you just feel like you are tired or whatever the reason is, just feel free to say that you want to take a break. I think we are ready. This set of questions is going to cover a long period of your life, so from the time that you completed your education, entered the labor force and started a family of your own and then we're going to span over when you retired. That's about it. It's probably going to cover maybe four decades of your life so it's going to be a long period of time, feel free to elaborate on whatever. Let's get started. After you've finished high school, where did you live?
[00:43:13] June Rusten: I went to college in Cleveland.
[00:43:16] INTERVIEWER: What was the college called again?
[00:43:18] June Rusten: Sheriff college. It was a girl's college, a church college, just two majors, religious education and social work. All my friends said, why are you going so far west to school because they didn't have the expressways belt and it took a long time to get to Cleveland. I always took the train.
[00:43:39] INTERVIEWER: How come you decided to go there?
[00:43:42] June Rusten: I thought I was going to be going social work. It was a good school for social work and it was inexpensive because it was a church school and my family had no money. When I left home, my dad gave me $50 and that's all he had to give me. It didn't pay for tuition and it didn't pay for toothpaste, so I had to get a job right away.
[00:44:06] INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me a little bit about what your college experience was like?
[00:44:11] June Rusten: But first I wanted to tell you because last time I couldn't believe that I had forgotten the name of the big bands because the jazz music and the big band music was such an important part of my life. We danced and listened to music probably from 1940s to the '70s, the same music. The only person whose name I could remember, the only band leader was Tommy Dorsey, last time. By the time I got home, I remembered, I wrote it down because [LAUGHTER] I didn't know if I will remember it today, Glenn Miller who was my favorite. And you asked me who the other people were and I couldn't remember any of them, but since I left till today, I remembered Count Basie and Harry James and Tommy Dorsey and Sammy Kaye. I had even gone through some old records. I could see this man with his clarinet and I couldn't think of the name, Benny Goodman. [LAUGHTER] I could visualize all of these people, but not think of their names and I wouldn't think I'd ever forget it because it was so many years of my life. You do forget very important things over the years. I wanted to be sure to mention that to you. When you were asking me what we did when I was a child in elementary and junior high, what kinds of things I did, I forgot to tell you about any of the work experiences. It was during the Great Depression and everyone was so poor that every summer I had to have jobs. I was thinking this week, now, what kind of jobs did I have and I said they're hard. My goodness, I don't think I could do them today. It was just during summer vacation time, but there were some large firms near where we lived and they often had migrant workers and they used local people. My father would drop me off in the morning on his way to work and I'd pick strawberries all day long and he picked me up when he came home at $0.02 a court. Every time the money was put in a little envelope, no checks, and I handed it to my mother. Then another summer there was an orphan home-built near for preschool children. I went there and there were 30 children and I helped them eat their breakfast, made 30 beds, played with them on the playground. That was an easy job and fun job. I rode my bike there, often there wasn't a way to get around, not much bus transportation. This is before I was even 14, but the labor laws for child labor were just being written, so they weren't being enforced. Even when I went to Buffalo to work in the dime store and in the drugstore, I was under age. They probably gave me a Social Security number but I don't remember that. But today you would never be able to get a job that young, but I was a soda clerk and made sundaes and sodas and drugstores had sandwiches at that time at their lunch counters and did that. I even did that during the school year on Saturday. Another interesting thing, that seems foreign today, no stores were open on Sundays. I can't remember when that came in, but probably not till '60s or '70s, maybe even later, that stores would be open. We can go anytime to a store now, but you didn't go anyplace on Sundays, just stores.
[00:48:18] June Rusten: I wanted to tell you that, let's see. I wrote that down so I wouldn't. The hardest job I had, I probably was 16 or 17. I worked at a sewing factory in Buffalo and they were making cold winter coats that olive, drab, wool, heavy low coats for the American soldiers. It was really hard sitting at rows sewing machines to lift those heavy coats. They gave me and my friends that were my age, I put the cuffs on the sleeves and then the sleeves into the coat, and it was piecework. The foreman would go around and say, hurry up, hurry up. You were so tired at the end of the day to try to lift those heavy coats and get everything sewed right, just sitting at the sewing machines all day long. That was hard work but you got more paid in at the drugstore. Another hard job that I only kept for about a month was that job. Then after that, there is still some time in the vacation near my home and there was a canning factory, I went to can green beans for the next month and it was a great big shop, just huge. On one-half were Americans and on the other half, we could see them, were German prisoners of war were working in the other side of the canning factory. They kept watching us. Don't smile at them, don't talk at the Germans, don't even acknowledge they're there. Some of them were as young as I was, 16 and 17 year old. I often thought how lonely their life would be. They couldn't talk to each other even. But the hardest job was at sewing of the coats because you're pressured all the time by the foreman to work faster and faster, and you got paid piece work which is a new concept to me, the whole idea of and that's been very prevalent ever since the piecework notion where it isn't doing the best job, it's get it finished quick. It was an awful job. Then I also when I was in junior high and in elementary school and high school, I taught a church girl class and I sing in our choir, and I belonged to a young people's use group, which was called Pilgrims Fellowship. I got to go to church camp one week a year. I think it was right at the end of school before I started working at summer jobs. I belonged to Girl Scouts who rode our bikes to the Girl Scout meeting, and I never was able to go camping with them, but I enjoyed the meetings. I did a few other things and I told you last time.
[00:51:43] INTERVIEWER: That's good to know. I'm glad that you brought all that information in. Can I just ask you why they didn't allow you to talk to the German?
[00:51:52] June Rusten: There was no friendization, because they were prisoners of war, I suppose, but I couldn't ave communicated. I even know I took German in high school as a language and I got to thinking last night, why did I take German? I think only German, French and Latin were offered. I took German because of my gradients could speak some, even though it wasn't a conversation on German, it was a lot of reading and a lot of vocabulary and the sentence structure which is quite different. Even most Americans didn't speak German at that time, and so we wouldn't have had a common language. But I suppose it was an army rule. If they were a prisoner of war, they were being punished or being caught.
[00:52:48] INTERVIEWER: Now I'm going to ask you just to go over your college experience was like, the type of things that you did, the things that you studied, anything along those lines?
[00:53:00] June Rusten: Well, because I had too little money and they were just the two majors in college, I took as much of both social work and religious education as I could. But in the back of my mind, I really wanted to be a teacher. But because of money, I thought I'd get a college education and, well, I had to work right away. I remember cleaning one hallway in our dormitory every weekend and I did dishes one night a week for the college work. Then I worked at the dime store one night a week on Saturdays and I worked in a drugstore several nights a week after my last class. But even that wasn't enough money to pay for room and boarding, even though the tuition was only $100, can you believe that? [LAUGHTER] I found some old records and I couldn't even believe. I couldn't remember, but $100 a semester was my tuition. I was building up all this debt going to school. And then I met my husband to be and we decided two could live cheaper than one, as cheapest one, which is a falsehood. [LAUGHTER] But when we got married and he was finishing a master's degree at Oberlin College and I worked in a library full time.
[00:54:31] INTERVIEWER: How old were you when you met?
[00:54:35] June Rusten: Probably 18, 19. It was my second year, probably 19.
[00:54:40] INTERVIEWER: Then did you guys get married right away, did you take a while?
[00:54:43] June Rusten: No, we got married. Otherwise, I would have had to go home and find a job and live with my parents. That wasn't a good decision. We wanted to get married and live together, and we lived together with my working at the library and he worked part time. He was able to finish his master's degree. Then my first baby was born. During college, I was quite busy in which social work we had field work we had to do. I was assigned being a coach for a junior high boys basketball team, which I liked except the rules are different from girl's basketball, so I had to learn those, but that was fun. I really enjoyed that. I also directed a youth choir, and then I worked still in downtown. In Cleveland at that time, the way to get around were streetcars. It was 10 minutes from my dorm could go to. By taking so many classes, I didn't have time for any any extra entertainment or anything, but I did to earn extra money, I would type other people's term papers. Of course, everybody left and got a little last night and so I just took coffee and went down to the typing room and stayed up all night, couple of nights before the end of the semester to get everybody's in my own papers tight. I remember it was $1.50 a page. You didn't earn much money. But it was money, that bought my toothpaste and stuff.
[00:56:45] INTERVIEWER: Do you feel like you spent a lot of your time just working and doing school, or do you feel like you were able to still live your life and have that college experience?
[00:56:54] June Rusten: Yeah, it was a girl's college, so dinner time at night. Even though we're round tables in a big room, you could hear group conversations and usually had a review of the news.
[00:57:13] INTERVIEWER: We are going to stop it right there.
[00:57:24] INTERVIEWER: You can just keep continuing with what you were saying.
[00:57:27] June Rusten: When there were still a lot of, I think it was a good college experience. I'm glad I had two years of it to get to know. I think that your college years are very important because you're learning who you are and making decisions. Do you want to be like this or do you want to do it? You become an adult there. It shouldn't be all work and no play. My life wasn't even though it sounds like it now, I had times during the day I didn't have classes all day long.
[00:58:05] INTERVIEWER: What would you do in between those classes?
[00:58:08] June Rusten: I don't remember. It's been too long ago [LAUGHTER] but every minute seemed full and it was getting to know them too.
[00:58:19] INTERVIEWER: Who are some of your best friends from college?
[00:58:26] June Rusten: Some of them I still have phone conversations with them. Couple live in Massachusetts my College big sis and my college roommate. Well, she just died a couple of years ago but we've kept and then I have one college friend, very good college friend lives in Ohio, but she has Alzheimer's and her daughter communicate with me. They were long time relationships with many other people, but a lot of them have already died.
[00:58:57] INTERVIEWER: How many years did you go to that college?
[00:59:00] June Rusten: Only two. I only had enough money for two years. Then after I got married and my husband got his master's degree, we got a job in Wisconsin and he came to Michigan.
[00:59:17] INTERVIEWER: How did you two meet?
[00:59:19] June Rusten: Friends and we were all going on a picnic. It was a blind date. I knew he was going to be there and it just clicked [LAUGHTER]
[00:59:32] INTERVIEWER: Then what was your dating experience with him? Did you guys date for awhile before you got married?
[00:59:38] June Rusten: Oh, yeah. We lived quite close, just from overland Cleveland, so wasn't hard to get. I didn't have a car but he did.
[00:59:50] INTERVIEWER: What kind of dates did you guys go on?
[00:59:53] June Rusten: Mostly picnics, free things because nobody had any money? I don't remember. I remember a lot of picnics, but we enjoyed being outside. I don't remember spending money. We went maybe to a couple of concerts but to the baseball games in the summer [LAUGHTER] But nothing that cost much money.
[01:00:22] INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me about your engagement? Where you proposed to? Anything along those lines?
[01:00:28] June Rusten: But there's no money for a ring or anything, but yes, he proposed.
[01:00:34] INTERVIEWER: Then what was the wedding like?
[01:00:36] June Rusten: It was in a beautiful New England style church near Buffalo, and my sister was my maid of honor and I think my other sister was my younger sister was a bridesmaid and it was just mainly family, friends in a pretty church.
[01:01:05] INTERVIEWER: Now, after you guys are married, how long did it take until you guys have kids?
[01:01:10] June Rusten: Two years.
[01:01:13] INTERVIEWER: Then what was your first born's name?
[01:01:16] June Rusten: What.
[01:01:16] INTERVIEWER: What was your first born's name?
[01:01:18] June Rusten: Eric, my son Eric and then my daughter Helen was born in Wisconsin in a town called Bosco Bell [LAUGHTER] in the southwest corner of Wisconsin.
[01:01:30] INTERVIEWER: You had three children?
[01:01:32] June Rusten: Yes. I don t know. The oldest one is dead, but I have two left.
[01:01:40] INTERVIEWER: Tell me about what life was like with your children and your husband when they were younger.
[01:01:45] June Rusten: Well, I still worked at the Oberlin library in full-time, and then he could baby sit when his classes are going on. And I did a lot of pre-work, people would ask me to teach a class and something. A church asked me to direct their Youth Choir, which no training for that [LAUGHTER] just takes really having gone through it myself.
[01:02:20] INTERVIEWER: Where did you guys live? Did you guys move around a lot or did you stay in one central place?
[01:02:25] June Rusten: Well, when we left Ohio State, went to Wisconsin and then I think we are there about four or five years and then we came to Michigan to Lansing.
[01:02:37] INTERVIEWER: How are all those moves for you guys? Was it tough on the kids? Were they completely fine with them?
[01:02:43] June Rusten: Kids are resilient. They adjust quickly.
[01:02:49] INTERVIEWER: Now I'm going to just ask you a little bit about what your working life was like after all your experiences in Ohio and Wisconsin and maybe more about what your teaching life was like?
[01:03:03] June Rusten: Well, when my youngest daughter started kindergarten, I was taking one class a semester while I was working and having a family. But when she got to kindergarten, I started teaching full-time in Ann Arbor.
[01:03:20] INTERVIEWER: What were days like for that?
[01:03:22] June Rusten: Busy [LAUGHTER]
[01:03:24] INTERVIEWER: You taught elementary school, correct?
[01:03:26] June Rusten: Upper elementary, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades.
[01:03:30] INTERVIEWER: What kind of activities would you do with them? What was the typical day like for that?
[01:03:35] June Rusten: Well, we have a curriculum and language arches, a big black reading and writing, and listening and spelling, and then science and social studies. I'm a Social Studies major, so I probably gave more time to that than other thing. In fact, not at first, but later we get a lot of team teaching. In many times, a teacher would say, I'll teach your math if you will teach my science or social studies, which I liked doing. In Thurston school one time, there were three sixth grade classrooms and I taught all the math for those. It was when the Challenger was going on when they all perished. But I had contacted the Christa McAuliffe, the teacher, had all her lesson plans. My students were having the three groups of 96th graders, we were designing a model of the challenger right at Thurston school a part pf it in the hallway and part of it in the library, and they were using their math skills to get the measurements right. Everybody was concerned, how did they go to the bathroom, how they sleep? It was very interesting. Sometimes they were sleeping vertically, but they were there. They were held vertically. Wherever there was space, sometimes they do. It was a very interesting program and very sad day of her die. She was like a sister to me because I had communicated with her so much, and the kids are so into it. It was very unusual. If you can remember, back in sixth grade, sixth grade kids don't want to get too close physically to their teacher and he says if you don't really care about her [LAUGHTER] and yet, when the Challenger had that accident and they all died, we had recess at lunchtime, the sixth graders all wanted to eat with me, so they came in my classroom and then we went out to the playground. They were as close as anybody could get to me almost as if they don't want their teacher to die, and this other teacher was quite a traumatic day.
[01:06:03] INTERVIEWER: What did your family enjoy doing together when your kids were still at home?
[01:06:06] June Rusten: Well, because we had no money we went camping every summer [LAUGHTER] It was the best way, to sleep and attend and be outdoors. We traveled a lot, in fact, I've seen all 50 states. But I went to Alaska and Hawaii and an elder hostel after I retired. But our families saw many states. In fact, when Martin Luther King died, we had been down south when we heard he was killed and we hurried home. We were afraid, we kept hearing what was happening to people's cars who are from up North. It was a scary time.
[01:06:51] INTERVIEWER: What was your favorite state to visit?
[01:06:58] June Rusten: I suppose Hawaii.
[01:07:00] INTERVIEWER: What was your favorite part about Hawaii?
[01:07:04] June Rusten: We had our elder hostel classes on the big island, and then we went to all but the very two smallest and rented a car each time and you could drive all around the whole island in half a day. I remember we have pictures of standing in the wettest place in the United States arranged so much. Of course it was warm and lush.
[01:07:35] INTERVIEWER: Do you have any special traditions or anything that you have with your family or any special days that you guys celebrated?
[01:07:41] June Rusten: No, birthdays, Christmas. Those are the main ones. We do have traditions and my son is carrying and carried it down with my grandchildren. At Christmas time I always gave to people that were less fortunate to NGO groups like Church World Service, or the heifer. I forget the total name of the heifer group where you're helping other people and so his family, so everybody would get a special gift for some other group of people and try to learn a little bit about them. He's carrying that on even though his children aren't married but one is 31 and one is 25 [LAUGHTER]
[01:08:30] INTERVIEWER: That's nice. What was Christmas like, what was Thanksgiving like? Any of those holidays just describe to me what you guys would do with your day.
[01:08:42] June Rusten: Well, on Thanksgiving, they always had in Turkey and all the trimmings and a dinner and you eat with friends or family, although we're far from our families so mainly of his friends. In Christmas, I was decorating a tree in Carolyn and opening presents.
[01:09:09] INTERVIEWER: Now getting into your adult years, more of the culture, what was the music like at that time?
[01:09:16] June Rusten: I only listened to easy music what they call easy listening. Of course, when my children were growing up, we got a big variety of music. But as far as choosing their music for me, just to sit and listen to, I still like the big band music. What was the other part of that question?
[01:09:45] INTERVIEWER: Just what the popular music was like but now I can ask you about popular clothing or hairstyles or just style you are on.
[01:09:53] June Rusten: We had teaching school, you had to be dressed in a dignified manner. In fact, I think it was during the '70s, I always had students, teachers to be three Easterner, U of M. For awhile everybody was dressed in blue jeans. I kept saying to them, if you wear blue jeans to sculpt, to teach, the students don't respect you, they won't listen to you and it clears that was true. They soon dressed up a little more to come teach even as a student teacher because it was like they were another kid, not the teacher.
[01:10:37] INTERVIEWER: Can you describe any other fads or styles from this era?
[01:10:44] June Rusten: No. You just go along with that. I wasn't that conscious so I wore a lot of suits. The interesting change was though I think it was the year retired teachers were allowed to wear gray box in school otherwise, you had to wear a dress shoes. I don't recall when we were allowed to wear slacks in school, but it hadn't probably the '80s, we had to wear dresses. Now I don't even have a dress [LAUGHTER]
[01:11:20] INTERVIEWER: Were there any slang terms, phrases, or words that we're used and are in common use today?
[01:11:27] June Rusten: No. That has changed a little too, but not much, you'd still know. Some of the language I used in high school, which is related to jazz and stuff your generation probably wouldn't understand, but we still use things are cool, you still use terms like that.
[01:11:47] INTERVIEWER: Now thinking back on your working adult life, what were important social or historical events that were taking place at this time and how did they personally affect you and your family?
[01:11:58] June Rusten: The main thing I think was civil rights more. I was always an active activist and I would protest. During the Vietnam War, I was determined my son wasn't going to be go to the Vietnam War as we had moved to Canada and he went and protested in Washington and stuff. But it turns out he was for F because of his eyes so we didn't have to move to Canada which is good because it would've separated our family. I don't know if I could have gotten the teaching job there. But I didn't want him to be cannon fodder which is what happens in a war.
[01:12:43] INTERVIEWER: What things did you protest against? What were those like?
[01:12:50] June Rusten: Well, I can remember marching and carrying signs, but I can't always do remember what the issue was now, which really bothers me because something that you were so committed to full time and the memory is gone. I wouldn't have thought, just like the big band names of the directors, the band leaders that like going home and it was really eye-opening. I thought, have I been in a state of denial? I know I don't have Alzheimer's, but why can't I remember these things that you're so involved with for years, and the memory's gone.
[01:13:28] INTERVIEWER: That's really maybe next time you can break it [inaudible 01:13:31] again.
[01:13:31] June Rusten: Yes.
[01:13:32] INTERVIEWER: That'd be great. Then I guess we can move on to work and retirement. This is going to also cause very long period of time from the time you entered the labor force, started a family and up to present time now?
[01:13:48] June Rusten: Well, I was always pro-union. I remember the year I started teaching in Ann Arbor was the first-year women got equal pay with men and that was really progressive. Not many places did that, women got less pay than men. Yet at oftentimes the women teachers were doing more paper correcting and more planning and more work in school than the men were so really it was not fair. I do remember that. It was very important to have a union because before that, teachers would have to go to the superintendent individually and say, could I have a raise? In a group, you had that much more clout to negotiate. It scares me today to know that Michigan's right to work state and so many people dislike unions, but they need to read the history because we wouldn't have the eight-hour day or the five day a week, and we would still have children working hard like I did as a child. Even though it was summertime, I didn't have much time to play and children are too young at 10 and 11 depicts the long rows of strawberries and it was hard work.
[01:15:20] INTERVIEWER: I guess we already talked about your primary field of employment.
[01:15:33] INTERVIEWER: I guess I could ask. [OVERLAPPING]
[01:15:34] June Rusten: I could also add to that. Not only did I teach Indiana Republic schools, I have two masters and one is in reading. I would rush four o'clock from my school Downtown to U of M or the Eastern and try to find a parking place to teach an evening class, usually in reading methods for teachers. Then I taught for 11 years at both U of M in Eastern mainly in the summertime. Then my second master's was in using the right brain activities to become more of a whole-brain person and to make it easier other than rote memorization, to really do things in science and social studies that would involve the right brain. I taught those classes too. I wrote fork. You probably had some of it. I wrote a unit on China, her seventh grade for the Ann Arbor schools, I wrote a unit on Nepal because I had spent a lot of time there with my daughter not being Nepalese. I did a unit on Mexico and I did a, I think forgot the first unit. It was social studies unit for sixth grade. But that one, they stopped teaching even while I was still teaching. But I think they probably are still using the unit on China when you were in 7th, 8th grade.
[01:17:15] INTERVIEWER: What are some of the biggest differences in your primary field of employment from the time that you started until now or whenever you retired?
[01:17:28] June Rusten: Well, there were some curriculum changes and we finally learned to look at the research. Education always upset me. Somebody would do a lot of research. It was important to how children learn in a different learning styles of each child. But as teaching and the Board of Education and Staff seem to ignore all of that and just did what had been done before. That was the biggest thing. We began using research really showed us about learning styles, learning together small groups and so forth. You didn't have to just sit in your seat beside somebody else. It should have provided a better education for you and people your age. That was the biggest thing. But there's still a problem today because there's still a bill up there that I don't think the governor has signed yet, that all third graders must read at grade level or they'll be kept behind. Well, that's the most awful bill. They never looked at a dropper research that's very bad. Doesn't do one single thing. It's the worst thing they could do because they forget about human growth and development. We can't say all children must walk by the time they're 12 months old. You grow at your own rate. The same is true in her third grade. You give them another three months or another six months to grow and they'll read at grade level, you don't make this horrible law and say you're a failure because you can't read at third grade. That's such bad when the legislators who are not educators don't know anything about research and education, make the laws, and then everybody has to follow it. Now I noticed the superintendent of education did come out and say that's a local issue. Parents and the teachers in the community, the school should make it in their own community they are on. But if this bill is adopted, everybody in Michigan will have to know how to read at third grade or be held back.
[01:19:38] INTERVIEWER: How do you feel about education today?
[01:19:41] June Rusten: Although I think teachers have a huge job. Teachers always talk about my kids and they think of their class really as your own kids. You get to love them as if they were your own. They do the best job they can for their own kids. They always do, and that's the biggest thing they must love kids or they wouldn't be in teaching. They're still doing a good job, even though they get blamed for everything. There are some bad teachers. What we need to work, help with. They either need more education or mentoring or they should get out of the field. Yeah, so we do have to be realistic. That's true in any area of life though.
[01:20:33] INTERVIEWER: What were some technology changes that occurred during your working years?
[01:20:37] June Rusten: Well, one of the biggest one is a computer. Anybody knew typing skills had me. You know other than getting [inaudible 01:20:45] and I remember we would have contest. If you did such and such, your school got an extra computer, and so people would do that again. Because it certainly is easier. When I was writing the unit on China, I did it on a computer instead of the typewriter. With the typewriter, you were always erasing when you made a mistake. On a computer, you could just delete or backspace, just saved hours of work.
[01:21:13] INTERVIEWER: Did you have any computers or anything in your schools that you taught?
[01:21:18] June Rusten: Yeah. Ann Arbor's very good about that one. I think being so close to the university, we had computers before. Friends of mine who taught in other school districts didn't have. The other thing I want to mention that I've learned through growing up, probably one of the biggest things, is the importance of public education in our democracy. It's an experiment to live the way we do and we're still experimenting. But if you all think it's a nation of immigrants, many different ethnic groups and from different nations and religions and cultures, would come here to live and they all went to the public school. One time when I was on sabbatical, we visited schools throughout the southern part of the country. I was specifically interested in individualized reading, but it was amazing. Every school I'd been in Utah, every teacher there went to the same teacher college because they were so much alike. Well, that's an advantage because we all went in, in our own ethnic group with our own cultural background, and we came out of school at the 12th grade as Americans. We were no longer German or Irish or whatever. We were American and we had certain values that we got through the public school system. It started scary to me today when I hear about all of privatization talk about vouchers to go to usually irreligious or private schools. That's a danger because you still need this public school system to make us all Americans, so we don't have all the fighting and the wars like Europe often does with the different ethnic groups. We could not have been the nation we are today, we would not be the democracy if we hadn't had this public school, everybody had this public school experience.
[01:23:31] INTERVIEWER: How do you judge excellence in your field and what makes someone respected in that?
[01:23:38] June Rusten: Well, to be sure you're helping children think critically and develop their own selves. There's some competition, but it still has to be an individual effort. The big problem with this is poverty does affect and if you come to school hungry, although INR is very good. In fact, I think I was the one who started that in [inaudible 01:24:08]. In the '60s, I remember one child came to school late almost every day and I sent him hello. He always came and he asked for a rubber band because the sole was off his shoe and he needed a rubber band to hold a sole on his shoe. I said to him, it's important that you try to get here in time. He said, well, I was trying to find some food to feed my little sister before I came. I got to know more about him and his single mother worked so hard that he had to make sure his sister had breakfast and was taken care of before he left to come to public school. I said to him one day, did you have breakfast? No, there was no food left. I brought cereal from my own home into school and use the school milk and told the principal and it was the teacher's lounge we had to use where the children who didn't have breakfast, first thing they came to school, they would go up to the teacher's lounge and fix a bowl of cereal and then go to their class. My principal shared it with the other principals and it became a program at the end of other schools. Because you don't learn if you're hungry, if all you're thinking about is eating. The breakfast program started and then they have a lunch program now in [inaudible 01:25:32]. You have to look at the whole child, not just their reading and writing.
[01:25:41] INTERVIEWER: What do you value most about what you did for a living?
[01:25:45] June Rusten: Oh, getting to know so many neat kids and to have an effect. I taught in a school system and listened to teachers, this breakfast program that I think I was the one who started. There are many schools if the teacher had the idea they had to do it on their own and keep quiet about it. Whereas this way I could share and it's a whole thing and they all lay in our republic schools now.
[01:26:21] INTERVIEWER: Tell me about any moves you made during your working years of retirement prior to your decision to move to your current residence.
[01:26:27] June Rusten: Could you start off the beginning again, I didn't hear.
[01:26:29] INTERVIEWER: Tell me about any moves you make during your working years your retirement prior to your decision to move to your current residence.
[01:26:38] June Rusten: Well, it was just mainly being a housewife and bringing up children [LAUGHTER]. Having children and finishing my education because I did want to finish my degree. I had decided long before. Well, I think when I had to drop out of college after the second year, I decided that I wanted to be a teacher. I didn't really want to be a social worker. I think I'd bring home all the problems to my [LAUGHTER] house and that wouldn't be good.
[01:27:11] INTERVIEWER: How do you feel about your current living situation?
[01:27:15] June Rusten: Oh, it's luxurious. I've been retired since 1990 with social security and medicare and savings. That's another good thing in our public schools did. They started a tax shelter program for teachers so that you'd pay higher taxes when you were earning less money and retired. It would be hard to live on just social security, I think today. You'd need savings to augmented. I had the luxury of having a lot of time to do all the traveling I did after and visit my children who are scattered around.
[01:27:58] INTERVIEWER: How did your family life change for you and your spouse retired and all the children left home?
[01:28:05] June Rusten: Well, the empty nest syndrome is really a problem. That's hard to deal with. I know my daughter acknowledged saying it's the hardest time she's had when her children left. We don't spend much time thinking about it, but it leaves a big empty space, especially if your children are in other states or other countries. My son was in the Peace Corps in Kenya. My daughter went to North Carolina into college and we were alone. No kids around, so far away. We went to visit him in Kenya. Thank goodness. In fact, when I was telling you about that traveling, I think in our first session, I forgot to mention and we had a really neat arrangement with the airlines, five different stops.. We flew to Germany. My maiden name was Helen Heimer. There was a town of [inaudible 01:29:10] and we rented a car and went to visit that little town where I knew my ancestors who come from it. Then we went to drove through Austria and Switzerland, and then got on a plane and visited my son in Kenya. Then we went back to Greece and spent a couple of weeks there and then flew home. We saw a lot of the things right then. [OVERLAPPING] Oh, that was the other unit I wrote. I wrote a unit on Kenya [LAUGHTER].
[01:29:50] INTERVIEWER: Are you living alone or you currently living with someone?
[01:29:53] June Rusten: No, I'm living alone now.
[01:29:57] INTERVIEWER: How has your life changed since your spouse passed away?
[01:30:02] June Rusten: Well, the biggest thing I've outlived a lot of my friends. Which is really surprising to me because of the longevity in my family. Everybody had died by the time they were 70. I thought I would be dead by then too. The longer you live, the more friends die. Many times I wished, Oh, I'd love to call up someone I taught and just visit with them, but they're gone. That's another thing that people living as long as I am living are facing and are quite isolated many times because the people that you always visited with, you've had dinner with all those things, they're not around. My one word of advice would be, be sure you have some younger friends, don't have just your peers because you need this communication with friends.
[01:31:05] June Rusten: That's probably the biggest change.
[01:31:10] INTERVIEWER: What is a typical day in your life currently? What do you think?
[01:31:13] June Rusten: Well, I'm lazy. I love to eat breakfast in my bathroom and sit and read. Sometimes I read until noon if I can see well, some days I don't see well and I can't read it all, and then I take a shower and can decide a better get busy. [LAUGHTER] But to have time just to sit and read and drink a cup of coffee is just luxury. Many people don't have that.
[01:31:43] INTERVIEWER: What does your family enjoy doing now together when you're able to see them?
[01:31:50] June Rusten: Mainly talk and eat. [LAUGHTER]
[01:31:54] INTERVIEWER: What are your personal favorite things to do for fun?
[01:31:58] June Rusten: Well, I'm still active in the Gray Panthers, which is a social injustice group of people of all ages, but mainly old people. We do work on issues that concern us with the homeless people in Ann Arbor and do they have shelter and then world issues and state issues. We get upset about that everybody should be held back in third grade, if you're eating and we're more active. We are not so active anymore because so many of us are so old, but we keep ourselves informed and you can still send letters to your congressman to get changes made. You don't need to always protest. But I know the Gray Panthers group in Detroit are younger and they still hold protests. But if I had to march for something, I couldn't do it with my arthritis. [LAUGHTER]
[01:33:00] INTERVIEWER: Are there any special events or social historical events that have happened that have really impacted your life, or just overall just had been the greatest impact?
[01:33:14] June Rusten: The new deal legislation, social security, the working hours, their regulations, and then the FDR put in place. That probably is, and then along with the civil rights issues too probably made the biggest difference. This worries me today where Tea Party people and other conservatives want to get rid of the FDRs new deal, and LBJ's getting rid of poverty notions. They don't want to do anything for the common good, which you must always do with somebody else. If you help somebody else and in the end it helps you.
[01:34:02] INTERVIEWER: What family arrows or keeps sakes and momentous, do you possess and what's their story and how are they valuable to you?
[01:34:12] June Rusten: Well, I don't have many because I really think consumerism is it. Collecting stuff is not such a good idea. You got to decide to do it and then create clutter, and then you have to spend time dusting it instead of reading it. [LAUGHTER] I don't know momentous. When I traveled and I have quite a few carvings that I saw bought right from the Carver in Kenya, which I'll give to my children. I don't even have a piano anymore. I took piano lessons as a child then my daughter started at U of M and piano in viola, but we don't have a piano. I can't think of jewelry, but I'm not sure to Iraq cone and some rocks are just beautiful if you'd get the cluster and the cleavage, and the shapes of them. I have met quite a few pieces of jewelry that are just the pretty rocks.
[01:35:28] INTERVIEWER: I'm going to eventually stop you here, so you can get [inaudible 01:35:33]
[01:35:39] INTERVIEWER: This set of questions come in still relatively long period of your life from the time you entered the labor force or started a family up to present time. What was your primary field of employment and how did you first get started with this particular job?
[01:35:56] June Rusten: Well, I started college, but I only had money to go for two years, and then we decided to get married because two could live cheaper than one, which is not true. [LAUGHTER] But we thought so. Then my husband is going to Oberlin College for master's degree, so I taught at the college library, and I didn't teach. I worked at the college library and I did that until my son was born and then we moved and I was just a homemaker with little children until the youngest one was getting ready for kindergarten and I was taking classes in the evening in summertime to finish my degree, and then I got my first job, which is my only job at the ANA republic schools as a teacher and stayed there for 30 years.
[01:37:01] INTERVIEWER: What raw materials did you use or supplies or anything that helps you get prepared or that you used every day for teaching?
[01:37:14] June Rusten: We had a curriculum guide, and when you followed that, you've planned ahead whatever the subject you're teaching. I was teaching fourth grade, so I taught all the subjects. There were no surprises, but I decided when I retired that there's a 30-year sleep deprivation because with the family having to go home after school and get dinner and help children with homework and stuff, I couldn't really sit down to do my homework until everybody went to bed. I think for 30 years on the school weeks, I probably never got to bed before 02:00 in the morning and then got up early to be to school early. Then when I retired, it was really interesting and it dawned on me, it was really a hit. They say you can't make up sleep, but I think for about four weeks after I retired, I would go to bed about 08:00, not wake up till about 09:00 or 10:00 every day. [LAUGHTER] I did make up for some of the sleep deprivation. But I think teachers do that today too, because you have to help your own children with their homework, then you have to correct papers and you have to plan the next subject you're going to teach and order their films and everything else for those. It's impossible to do it in an eight-hour day.
[01:38:40] INTERVIEWER: Do you feel like the sleep deprivation had a toll on you and affected your mood or anything?
[01:38:47] June Rusten: No, because it was every day. It was my life. On weekends, I didn't stay up that late, but I had to keep up with homework and plan the next lessons and to feed my family.
[01:39:03] FEMALE_2: [inaudible 01:39:03]
[01:39:09] INTERVIEWER: I know that computers was a huge technology advancement at the time that you were working, so can you just describe how you use them in everyday lessons and how you got the students involved with the computers?
[01:39:25] June Rusten: I never did really get the students involved in them because I retired in 1990, and we didn't have enough in the building. But how it began was the librarian would have information sessions for the teachers in the building, and it was an incentive program. If you went and got the information for every five teachers, I think your building got a computer. A lot of people didn't attend those sessions, but I was curious to know about it. My son was getting his PhD and he was using a computer. I was also at that time beginning to write the social studies units for the Ann Arbor schools, and it was so much easier to do it on a computer and just delete instead of erasing a typewriter page, so I was interested. I always took those classes, but it was on an Apple computer and when my son finally bought me a computer, was well I just thought of Windows. It's different from the Apple anyway, I had to learn over again some of the terminology.
[01:40:41] INTERVIEWER: Do you use computers today still or not as much?
[01:40:43] June Rusten: Not as much because I have trouble seeing. The screen isn't as easy as a paper copy. In fact, the magazines that I get, I could have the option of getting it online or getting a paper copy. I'm still getting the paper copy, even though it's age trees to not do that. But I don't see as well.
[01:41:04] INTERVIEWER: What is the biggest difference that you notice from teaching then to looking at teachers now, because I know that you've talked a lot about the differences, but what do you think the biggest primary one?
[01:41:16] June Rusten: Well, the use of computers would be one of them and named here now and everybody has a computer in school. Where it was fairly new, we had a one room off the library, in which we kept the school computers when they first started out before I retired. If you wanted to use a computer, you had to go there or you had to schedule a place to take your class. I don't think I ever took a whole class. There weren't enough computers. I can't remember exactly how I did this, but for some assignments it would just be three or four kids in the library, and we would be helping them.
[01:41:56] INTERVIEWER: How do you judge excellence in your field? What makes someone respected in the teaching world?
[01:42:03] June Rusten: Well first and most important is, do they like children? You have to like people and children or you might as well get out. Then second would be, be knowledgeable of your subject area, keep up with the research because there's good research going on all the time, and education has a problem with that. We always don't follow the new research. For example, right now, I haven't heard a lot of complaints from the education community, but there's a bill up that third-graders who don't read on grade level would be retained. But that's terrible. The research, even in 1990, told all the reasons why you would not do that. For one thing, you have heavy knowledge of human growth and development. Not every baby walks at 12 months old, and you don't say that baby is a failure, you give them time to grow until they're ready to walk. The same thing is with reading. Especially with boys sometimes have a harder time or have to be a little bit older, have to have lived longer, have more experiences before they can read. When I was teaching 4th grade and many times parents wouldn't be worried, and I'd say just let them live a little longer, read aloud to them regularly, so they don't miss information. By the time they're in 7th grade, they are some of the best readers in the class. You just have to give people time. Be knowledgeable about human growth and development of all people longer to live.
[01:43:41] INTERVIEWER: Would you consider yourself one, let the kids learn on their own and just let them grow individually or do you think that you just have everyone on a strict schedule?
[01:43:56] June Rusten: No, neither one. But every year we had a lot of good in service in Ann Arbor that you could take advantage of and always learning new things. One thing I learned, I did this or myself, but when I turned it over to the kids and had them do it, each kid would figure out their own goals, and then we'd see how we're measuring, how are we achieving our goals. When they had goals that they are working toward, it was much better. They learn faster and they learned better. There was no resistance to the teacher made me a thing, and there was none of this, the teacher gave me a greatest see. They knew why they got the greatest see, if we pick reaching their goals. I followed that and yet they had to know what the curriculum was, what my goals were when we started a new science unit or social studies unit. In fact, it really concerns me today that so many Tea Party people don't really understand our constitution or government, how it works. I think they were not listening in class because I'm sure they were taught this. We got to do a better job on teaching that, find better ways. Of course, there was lots of new knowledge on learning styles. Each person has their own learning style. If you expect all 30 people to do it the same way, not all 30 are going to learn. We also learned that we had teaching styles and many times we worked with other teachers for helping certain kids learn things. Another teacher could explain something to a child that I had difficulty explaining. Part of it was that learning, thinking style.
[01:45:51] INTERVIEWER: What do you think could be most improved with teaching today? Seeing how education is being taught and the programs that we have, what do you think that could have improved the most?
[01:46:05] June Rusten: Well, it worries me, the online thing when you're by yourself. I think you need the relationship, the back-and-forth with people in your class, people in the hallway. The whole experience is part of growing up. That's why it's good to have brothers and sisters at home because you get some of that back and forth right there with peers. But if you do it all on your own, you're up to miss things. I'm not sure that online would be a good way to learn social studies because that has to be the interaction with people. There are certain subjects that would be very good for probably math because you wouldn't have to wait for other kids to learn the same things. But a combination is probably the best, not doing things just one way.
[01:47:04] INTERVIEWER: What do you value most about what you did for a living?
[01:47:08] June Rusten: Well, I enjoy teaching very much. People who would say, what's your salary? Well, there was never a teacher I knew that knew what their salary was. That wasn't the important thing and I couldn't remember to say what my salary was. That wasn't why we taught. If you just did it for money, you would be a poor teacher and you'd probably get old soon.
[01:47:36] INTERVIEWER: How did family life change for you when you and your spouse retired after all the children left home?
[01:47:43] June Rusten: Well, the emptiness syndrome is the shock [LAUGHTER] . That was hard when your children were all gone and finally out of the house. My son went to the Peace Corps and was in Kenya and my daughter was in North Carolina. When Sundays would come, it would hit me, how can I get in touch with these kids? They're too far away. That was a little hard to adjust to. But of course, I was still working and had plenty to do so that was good too. It kept me busy. But it hits different. Then of course, the thing I liked most in retirement was taking elder hostel travel trips to many different nations.
[01:48:32] INTERVIEWER: How has your life changed since your spouse passed away?
[01:48:40] June Rusten: You just adjust. It's just one of those things.
[01:48:47] INTERVIEWER: What is a typical day in your life currently?
[01:48:50] June Rusten: Well, what I think is so great in retirement is the luxury of sitting in your bathrobe way after breakfast and reading for an hour or two, having no interruptions, just enjoying reading and of course, your day is yours to plan, that's nice too. The other thing that's rather hard at my age is that I've loved live and to so many of my friends that there are days, I think, oh, I wish I could call Mickey and have a visit with her, but she's been gone. So it's rather different and I keep telling friends of mine to be sure to cultivate friendships with people that are younger than you, [LAUGHTER] someone to do things to with. Because I think that's going to be a problem as people live longer. You all leave your friends, and if you're a person that doesn't want to be isolated, this is a problem.
[01:49:56] INTERVIEWER: Do you ever see your family often anymore or does that not happen?
[01:50:02] June Rusten: No, because there were five of us and my two younger sisters are dead. My sister that's closest to me, lives near Buffalo in the summertime and Texas in the wintertime. My brother and his wife live in the same area in Buffalo in the summer and Texas in the winter. I really don't get to see them very much anymore, but my sister and I talk on the phone at least once a week.
[01:50:35] INTERVIEWER: When you do get to see your family, what do you guys enjoy doing together?
[01:50:39] June Rusten: Playing cards. Both my sister and brother had macular degeneration, so they're legally blind. They can still play cards, those big cards with the big letters. I did not get to inherit those genes. Thank goodness. Although it's harder for me to see today, mostly reading, or even just in long distance. But I'm not legally blind and I don't have macular degeneration. Just sitting and visiting, we enjoy that. Then when you play cards, you can stop and visit.
[01:51:19] INTERVIEWER: What kind of card games do you guys play?
[01:51:23] June Rusten: Some of them are games my sister showed us. I don't think if they have a name or rummy, I used to play bridge but I can't remember what cards the other people have. I no longer play bridge, so it's nothing serious. It's a fun game.
[01:51:41] INTERVIEWER: What are your personal favorite things to do for fun?
[01:51:45] June Rusten: Well, I like to read and I listen to the radio, NPR mainly. I do a little sewing, but less and less because it's harder to see. But I enjoyed sewing and gardening. I still garden, even though I can't get down on my knees anymore or squat, but I can sit in a chair and use tools and my gardens are smaller and smaller every year.
[01:52:19] INTERVIEWER: When thinking your life after retirement or your kids left home up to the present, what important social or historical events were taking place and how did they personally affect you and your family?
[01:52:32] June Rusten: Well, I suppose the big thing was the civil rights movement. I remember our family took a trip during spring break, we went down South the year Martin Luther King was shot. With our Michigan license plates, we'd heard stories of things that happened to Michigan cars, and so we were glad to get home. Nothing happened to us. But you worry about it, those things. Let's see. I can't think of the word. [LAUGHTER] I am interested in governmental things and current events and things. That sometimes bothers me, and I've been a long-time Democrat, and so sometimes to see what's going on in Congress now and there's no agreement. Just what John Dingell said the other day in the paper about how Congress has changed. They used to play golf together or have a beer together. Then they'd argue on the floor of the Senate or the House but it didn't affect those, the issues you're talking about, but today it's he said it's obnoxious and I agree with him. That's probably one of the biggest difference is the way Congress reaction doesn't react.
[01:54:04] INTERVIEWER: Do you think that those relationships can have a toll on the US?
[01:54:10] June Rusten: Yes, there are bills, immigration, nothing has been done on immigration. They keep telling you about it all the time. Even the exclusion of people who tend to be gay. Our constitution wants us to be inclusive, invite everybody and learn to get along. So that's a big difference.
[01:54:34] INTERVIEWER: Well, what's one thing that you would change about the government if you had that opportunity?
[01:54:41] June Rusten: I'll have lectures to Congress and say, this is what you do in Congress, you don't fight. [LAUGHTER] I would probably work on fixing the curriculum in the public school and in high school regarding how we teach about the government. I thought I covered so many issues and then I hear Tea Party people say things that are not true. We need to maybe change our emphasis. Our emphasis in schools has been on reading and math, or maybe we need to think a little more about science and social studies. In fact, just yesterday's paper had the last MEEP scores and that's the last year they're going to be doing it. I noticed when I taught sixth grade my last year, my girls got the highest grades in Ann Arbor schools for science. They were really knowledgeable because I took them on field trips regularly, weekly, right in the thatched and nature area, and so forth. I noticed yesterday the science scores and the social studies scores are lower. So you need to think about that because that's how we relate to each other.
[01:55:58] INTERVIEWER: How do you think our education is compared to the rest of the world?
[01:56:02] June Rusten: I think it's very good because we do try to teach kids to think and think critically. It isn't regurgitate, just remember in our memory, think through it for yourself. Americans couldn't do all we do if we don't think for ourselves. We don't accept what people say without studying about it or resenting it or protesting or whatever.
[01:56:32] INTERVIEWER: Now thinking back on your entire life, what social or historical event do you think had the greatest impact on you?
[01:56:44] June Rusten: I don't know. I probably just civil rights thing because you really do examine your own self to see are you carrying through some of these racist ideas? What do you need to work on yourself? It's whatever wish the National current theme I think is probably what affected me most.
[01:57:08] INTERVIEWER: What are your views on people of other races? Did you think that you included them? Do you feel like you were friends with them or do you think that you've had those racial ideas because that's what you grew up with.
[01:57:21] June Rusten: Well, actually some of the racial ideas I grew up with helped me to ignore those. Say these are wrong, and I don't know, it's an internal thing that occurred. Social injustice who is not right and so knowing is that as a teacher, well, I remember living near Buffalo, near Lackawanna Lackawanna head was a heavy black population. So and I would work after high school and have to go to Buffalo after school, I would have to ride the bus and one thing I noticed so many times is if there was a black person sitting in a seat, the antecedent next to him was empty. That was good for me, I didn't have to stand all the way to Buffalo. But I couldn't figure out why was it so off to sit next to a black person, had never could figure that out and so those experiences helped you just. Then as a teacher, you had to be inclusive. The kids in your class are your kids, and and then I remember when I was teaching it, I think it was king school, but I'm not sure when they closed a black school in Ann Arbor was segregated, like, I would stall the schools in the 60s, and no, it was Bosco. Our school was literally like 250 whites school kids and the Perry, I believe it was Perry school it closed and we got 150 black kids. Now we had to really adjust quickly, and there were mistakes, but we learn from our mistakes, and it was a great school to go to. When I first went there at Bosco, many of the children, their grandparents would come in. The grandparents still lived in the Boston community, so that was a family school. Then grandparents had lived there and when the black kids came, we had to include them, although they were definitely outsiders who came and it worked out. We real work toward it, we had a lot of in-service sessions, but that's the way Americans solve some problems.
[01:59:45] INTERVIEWER: Do you feel like there's a lot of tension between the African American students and the white students at all?
[01:59:53] June Rusten: Not at fourth and fifth grade. You know how kids relate to each other and get to know each other, and that's probably a saving thing, it was the adults that might have caused tensions, I don't know. I don't remember that we had any, but I can't remember that far back.
[02:00:10] INTERVIEWER: Do you think that because it started at such a young age that they integrated the school that helped progress the civil rights movement.
[02:00:18] June Rusten: Yes. The more you get to know the person next to you and know that they're not any different than you are just their skin is darker, nature is going to make a difference.
[02:00:30] INTERVIEWER: Do you think that Ann Arbor itself was pretty diverse and well-integrated back then or do you think it is [OVERLAPPING]
[02:00:39] June Rusten: No, they were probably better than some communities, better at accepting it I think. But maybe I'm prejudiced, I don't know, I just enjoyed living here.
[02:00:51] INTERVIEWER: Do you think that you still see it today or do you think that now everybody is just equal and that everyone gets along well.
[02:00:58] June Rusten: Well, I didn't think there were any problems today like that. But the Ann magazine had an article about a mother who had elementary kids and they wouldn't have this one boy play with him because his skin was darker, I couldn't believe that. That was just last year's magazine, and I can't believe that that happened here but I'm sure it does. Every place probably and maybe every new generation has to go through some of the same learnings.
[02:01:32] INTERVIEWER: Do you think that a lot of the parents still have those racial views and then they teach them to the kids because I feel like a lot of the parents grew up in those racist backgrounds and then still haven't shaken it off a little bit, and then they [OVERLAPPING].
[02:01:50] June Rusten: You get at someplace. Where would a fourth grader get the notion that I can't play with you because your skin is darker than mine. Now my daughter-in-law is Nepalese, so my grandchildren are half Nepali and my granddaughter, I remember one time I was holding her arm next to mine to see the difference in their color, he's a little darker skinned. Now her brother has darker skin yet, and especially at the end of summer if he's been out in the sun, and so we hold her arms together, there are various shades and I'm of course the widest. But that was just a thing he was observing cause she knew her grandma having lighter skin didn't make any difference.
[02:02:38] INTERVIEWER: What family errands or keep sakes and mementos do you possess and what's their story and why are they valuable to you?
[02:02:45] June Rusten: Well, I've been a rock collector, so I have a lot of rocks that I still enjoy, and especially the ones you have to buy the jewells that are beautiful. At any rate, I have some rocks yet, given some of them to my son, but I thought some of my grandchildren would be the more interested, but they're not, I'm still working on that, and mementos have books I think are the hardest things to sell and give away because they're so important to me. Although the older you get, it's interesting. I can look on my bookshelf and say, I know I read that book, but I can't remember what the story is about and that it is disheartening, you think you'd never forget because if it was a book that affected you emotionally and really you learned from and to not been able to remember is really something.
[02:03:47] INTERVIEWER: Do yo feel that you'll pass these on to your kids and grandkids?
[02:03:51] June Rusten: I've got to, I keep giving them things and in my guest room I have some boxes for each grandchild and I keep putting things in there and maybe they'd like them. But it's interesting because I've done this before in some of the stuff I think they'd like, they're not interested in, but the brother or sister maybe.
[02:04:14] INTERVIEWER: Okay thinking back on your entire life, what are you most proud of?
[02:04:18] June Rusten: Pardon me?
[02:04:19] INTERVIEWER: Thinking back on your entire life, what are you most proud of?
[02:04:23] June Rusten: I'm proud of my teaching career. In fact, I remember kids saying to me or saying about me, I would overhear it that I was the fairest teacher they knew, and so I thought, well, I'm proud that came across that I could be fair to everybody. I think my kids liked me as a person and they knew I liked them, and lets see, I am proud of parenting my children who have done well they're good people, and I'm proud of that, and my grandchildren are, in fact, someone has said the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. My grandchildren, they have certain characteristics that are important to me.
[02:05:13] INTERVIEWER: What are some of those characteristics?
[02:05:15] June Rusten: Well, my grandson got an undergraduate degree in diplomacy and that would be right along my line. My granddaughter is so vibrant and alive in just so very active, I'm envious that I don't have that kind of energy anymore and applies herself so well to her work. She's what I call a go-getter, and yet does it very nicely. She isn't aggressive. I'm proud of my children and I'm proud of my teaching experience, if you do something for 30 years then it takes most of your life.
[02:06:07] INTERVIEWER: What would you say has changed the most from the time you're my age to now?
[02:06:12] June Rusten: By the time what?
[02:06:13] INTERVIEWER: What would you say has changed the most from the time you were my age to now?
[02:06:20] June Rusten: I didn't understand the first word I'm comparing is to from now to what?
[02:06:25] INTERVIEWER: What would you say has changed the most from the time you were my age to now?
[02:06:30] June Rusten: Your age? That's what I didn't understand. My goodness, a lot has changed. Yes. For one thing, growing up during the depression, I had to work a lot and just accepted it and yet you're missing out on other things when you're working and not taking music lessons or sports lessons or whatever your interest is. You have more time to do things like that and you're more free to make the decisions. I worked every summer when I was going to high school, and they paid you with the cash in a little envelope and I would just hand it to my mother. I can't imagine my children got allowances from me, but there was no allowance in that envelope for me it went to my mother for food or whatever she was buying. That's very different. If you work in the summertime in high school, you keep your own money and you either save it or spend it or whatever. That's very different. The freedom that you have today to do that, which helps you to grow faster probably because I didn't have any. Well, I knew you saved and of course, I was very for ago, everybody growing up then was for ago. I guess I didn't learn it that way, but you have the opportunity to spend foolishly and then go with out so you can learn it by handling your own money.
[02:08:04] INTERVIEWER: Do you feel like we're a lot more privileged now?
[02:08:08] June Rusten: Yeah, I think you are more privileged, but that's good, that should make you better people and you should be able to achieve more in your lifetime.
[02:08:19] June Rusten: I would think.
[02:08:22] INTERVIEWER: What advice would you give to my generation?
[02:08:28] June Rusten: Be mindful. I heard a lecture not too long ago about being mindful, really think of what you're doing. Many times, you make decisions and you're not really mindful. You let that creep into your mind when you're thinking about things. Am I really being mindful about this? Am I thinking of all of the ramifications of this, so that the world can be a better place. I'm very grateful today about Obama who was so cautious about going into war, especially with what's happening with Russia. I said, thank God, we've got a president who realizes the American people want nothing to do with war, we've had enough of Iraq and Afghanistan, and so he's trading slowly using diplomacy. There are better ways than to have wars, and it would be so good if your generation could turn things around, we had no more wars. But you have to take care of the nuclear issue that it's scary
[02:09:35] INTERVIEWER: Is there anything you'd like to add that I haven't asked about?
[02:09:41] June Rusten: No. I'll probably think tonight when I'm at home, [LAUGHTER] I should've said this or she should. I can't think right now.
[02:09:51] INTERVIEWER: Well, if you think of anything, go ahead and just write it down and then we can bring it back for later. We just have that one last interview, and then I will develop some questions based on the information that we've got for you these past couple interviews, and then we're going to just focus in on one main issue. I was thinking we might focus a little more around the Great Depression and how the difference is between the time period that you grew up in to something that we're growing up in now. Because we are going through economic falls right now not as great as the [LAUGHTER] Great Depression.
[02:10:33] June Rusten: The inequality who are in the top 1% on so much really can make all decisions for the world and all the rest of us are interested in being involved in that. That's similar to the Great Depression, but very different. It was the 99% who were in a depression, and I don't think there was that 1% when I was growing up, and that's really worsen today, and the minimum wage. A person, a family man who works 40 hours a week and can make enough money to provide for his family, that's an injustice. There are things that can be done.. People are trying to think of ways of taxing and tax relief and so forth. You're going to have to come up with some solutions so that the top 1% don't make all the world decisions, especially during election time. There is an article in yesterday's paper about the amount of money that was spent on the mayor's race last time and this time in Ann Arbor. Well, the people who have the most money have the most speech if you equate the two. That isn't fair. If I contribute $35 to a candidate and somebody contributes 3,000, maybe that's going to sway what their candidate does in office. We have to rethink that if we want this experiment in democracy to really work. It's going to be up to you, your age, and people, maybe your parents too.
[02:12:21] INTERVIEWER: What are some of the things that you think we could change about the economy? What are some simulations?
[02:12:25] June Rusten: No, I don't know. I keep reading about it too because the minimum wage should be raised, that's one thing we can do very easily, but you can't reason enough so people can ever get out it, but some people can get out of poverty. We got to change our tax structure and maybe there's some tax rebates that would help people. I know they did before and that has gone now in Michigan. But somehow, I don't agree with the Citizens United decision, it's money is equal to speech, because they would never be equal. A speech should be equal to speech, and that means the minority people are making the major decisions, and that's going to cause descent and protests. It's very interesting to look at, where is the country where all the treble is happening? Russia. I can't think of the name of that country.
[02:13:35] FEMALE_3: Ukraine.
[02:13:36] INTERVIEWER: The Ukraine.
[02:13:37] June Rusten: Yeah, the Ukraine. That little area of Ukraine tend to be Western leading, the rest of the Ukraine seems to be Russian speaking and Russian leaning. How are they going to solve that? Maybe that little area needs to separate. I don't know. There will always be things like that that they are going to occur and that you're going to have to deal with. If you can handle them by talking it out instead of fighting, it's better.
[02:14:10] INTERVIEWER: Do you think that Obama should pull the troops out of the war and just have it done now or do you think that we still need to keep troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and all those places?
[02:14:23] June Rusten: Well, I understand Afghanistan is very poor and they don't have enough money to even run their country unless we give it to them, and yet I understand that a lot of people in Afghanistan don't know how to read, they're very ignorant, they just don't have the knowledge, and the way they treat their women like less than cows. That's very concerning to me. Some way there should be a way to help them become knowledgeable, maybe through TV or something, so that they are more able to lead their government the right away. But I think if we pull them all out and they don't have the money to pay their soldiers, there's going to be more conflict, so something has to be done. But you know that their president doesn't want to sign any agreement with Obama, because of the elections that are coming up. I don't know, but I'm glad that Obama's standing firm on this. My own personal thoughts would be so many times I get upset the way they treat women. Let's leave them to themselves and bring our soldiers home. But that isn't the way to educate the world. We have to do something about more education and more schools. Some things have changed because they're now letting girls go to school. That is a much better way than fighting.
[02:16:06] INTERVIEWER: Well, I think I have concluded all my questions for today.
[02:16:12] June Rusten: Then a friend just tell me, oh, and I put cinnamon, it makes it [inaudible 02:16:17]. Then our friends told me about turmeric, she put some of that in the old meal, so I've got to get some of that. It gives you a whole day's worth of stuff in the breakfast.
[02:16:33] INTERVIEWER: That makes sense.
[02:16:37] June Rusten: Since I've been eating only in my cholesterol comes down.
[02:16:41] INTERVIEWER: Exactly.
[02:16:42] June Rusten: It really does work.
[02:16:44] INTERVIEWER: Good choice. Healthy decisions. Can you hear?
[02:16:49] June Rusten: Yeah. [inaudible 02:16:49] It doesn't stay tight, so I'm just going to hold it to one another.
[02:17:05] INTERVIEWER: That's weird. I think I might have been twisting at the rest of you. Can you tell me a little bit about the atom bomb and how that affected your family.
[02:17:18] June Rusten: Well, it was shock in World War II when Harry Truman and [inaudible 02:17:22] even though it hadn't been done before he became president, but just right after President Roosevelt died. It's frightening because depending on the size and where it's done, he would have just killed so many people and not just those that are killed immediately, but in 20 years later, those that die from thyroid cancer or other cancer. In fact, there's Moreau, that has a nuclear power stuff and rarer within a 50 mile radius, we'd just be fried. If it went off here, all the people in the Ann Arbor area and 50 mile radius from Monroe, so it's frightening. Nobody would ever use it. At first, we kept them because of deterrence. We said nobody will ever fight with us because they wouldn't want us to use it. That's gone, nobody would use them anyway. But still they keep updating them and we spend millions protecting ourselves from a terrorist stealing one or enough material that they could make a dirty bomb. I've worked on this my whole life. This is a serious problem and people your age who weren't around when the first one went off or even people your age who know about the one that went off in Japan with the tsunami and earthquake and all the problems and all the problems that the people are having now, especially teenagers coming down with thyroid cancer. In Japan, you would think the whole world will be concerned, but the media hasn't really done their job of letting people your age know how disastrous it is, nothing good about them. That's been a concern. I would think in someone's whole lifetime, you could solve the problem. But that hasn't been true. Partly because some people still think, we'll hang on during it'd be good to get rid of some people if we can use it, which is such a depressing idea. That, along with when you mentioned the two concerns I've had throughout my life would be getting rid of the nuclear weapons, eliminating all of them. Russia and the US have done a lot and we've gotten rid. But we want is how the UE need. Then the other thing was the polio vaccine. As a young mother my son needed his tonsil off him. We made so many appointments to have his tonsils taken out. He was about six and he had to cancel them because the polio epidemic was so bad or the temperature was too hot. It was such a worry and so many children in iron lungs and paralyzed. That was really a good solution and Jonas Salk mended that.
[02:20:49] INTERVIEWER: Do you want to get that really quick?
[02:20:50] June Rusten: Yeah. Because the answering machine come on. I'll have to hurry.
[02:20:54] INTERVIEWER: That's okay, don't worry about it. Were any of your family members politically active? So your children or your husband?
[02:21:08] June Rusten: My children are politically active. He's dead, so I can tell you about him. But I think in order for me to become politically unactive, I have to die. Because issues getting me all excited and I really take Jefferson's words to heart, we must be vigilant. I know one of the questions you wanted to ask me was about people teaching us parents how just even going to school and college we must be vigilant, there's a group that really wants to privatize public education, privatize everything. All our money can go to the share holders instead of having public institutions. If I give you a word of advice is remain active and vigilant and fight for those things you believe in.
[02:22:17] INTERVIEWER: When you went to college, how do you think The Great Depression affected that? Either how much money did you have when you left for college and how did you pay for college?
[02:22:26] June Rusten: Well, my father gave me a $50 bill and it was a lot of money then. In fact, my college tuition in a church school, so the tuition was lower than a private school. The tuition semester is only $100. You'd think giving me $50, I'd have half the tuition paid, I got a job at the drugstore on weekends and the dying star nights after my class. I dusted the hallway, did dishes on Nadar, still I couldn't pay off that last $50 because they had to buy books and things too. But everybody was in about the same boat. You couldn't work your way through school then and you can't today. My grandson just finished his graduate program with a $60,000 debt. Public university of Maryland College, it costs that much. You need help from family and you need to start saving from the time you're born until you go.
[02:23:36] INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me about the two people who helped you through college and told you that they were going to give you a little bit of extra money so that they can help pay for those?
[02:23:46] June Rusten: There's two ladies. I had a job in the drugstore and there was a woman's dress shop right next door, Downtown Buffalo and these two ladies came in and I was at the fountain so I made the lunches and earn something. They came in every morning and got a piece of toast and a cup of coffee. Oftentimes they were the only people there so I would visit with them when I could. They were very nice and they knew I wanted to go to college and they knew that my mother needed my money for the work I was doing, I would just give her the paycheck envelope. It was an envelope then we usually put the cash and I just always hand it to my mother. That was one of the big things from when I grew up. When you graze are growing up. Even when my children started working, they got an allowance or the chores they did around the house, they never had to give me money from them, when they got jobs, they kept their money. That was the big difference. But her family didn't need that money for food, whereas my mother did. These two ladies were talking with me and they knew from looking at me, I didn't have many clothes and going to college. They said, you treat us very well, you always have our coffee and toast ready. We'll give you a good tip, you keep that, don't give it to your mother, and then go buy a suit, our tip money is just for you. For two strange people that I didn't know outside of the drugstore, I thought that was very nice to have them mentor me and I really needed the money. I bought a suit, black and white check pleated skirt, red blazer top with the black and white check. I thought I was in heaven to have a new suit to take to college. They was the only new clothes I had to take. But I think that's what happens to anybody in any generation, it's the people that come along, that you just meet and get along with and they decided to help you and mentor you. I hope you're lucky that way too.
[02:26:24] INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me what the name of your college was?
[02:26:27] June Rusten: Pardon me?
[02:26:27] INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me what the name of your college was?
[02:26:29] June Rusten: Sheriff. It was girls and you saw the picture of the glare. It merged after I left, it merged with [inaudible 02:26:41] than I think, and then the last time it merged with Defiance and it's still active at Defiance College in Ohio.
[02:26:51] INTERVIEWER: How many girls were in the college at that time?
[02:26:54] June Rusten: I have no idea.
[02:26:59] June Rusten: I don't know. Maybe 200. I don't know.
[02:27:03] INTERVIEWER: It was a pretty small school.
[02:27:04] June Rusten: Oh, very small girls school. Only two majors, religious education and social work.
[02:27:10] INTERVIEWER: That was pretty typical for colleges to be smaller at that time?
[02:27:15] June Rusten: Oh, yes. Even I don't know if defiance was even started at that time, but they're a smaller college like that. Any church college would be small.
[02:27:26] INTERVIEWER: Where was your college located?
[02:27:28] June Rusten: Cleveland, Ohio.
[02:27:31] INTERVIEWER: Who else in your family attended college and what made you want to attend?
[02:27:35] June Rusten: Nobody else. I was the first one, and then my children are the next first ones in our family. None of my sisters or brother wanted to go to college.
[02:27:45] INTERVIEWER: Why do you think that is?
[02:27:47] June Rusten: I don't know because I can't imagine not having gone to college. There was no option, even today I would do that.
[02:28:00] INTERVIEWER: What made you want to attend college?
[02:28:03] June Rusten: To broaden my views, to know more, I was curious about learning things. In fact, when I was going to show up for college, I only went two years because I didn't have money enough to stay there, I took all of the subjects I could fit into the day in both social work and religious education, to be sure I got my money's worth. [LAUGHTER]
[02:28:27] INTERVIEWER: How many years of college did you attend?
[02:28:30] June Rusten: Pardon me.
[02:28:30] INTERVIEWER: How many years of college did you attend?
[02:28:32] June Rusten: Well, probably five years by the time I had to make things up when I decided to go into teaching. I decided after I had children I wouldn't be a very good social worker, I'd bring the problems home, so I didn't think that was a good thing. I'd always had in the back of my mind being a history teacher, and so I finished my undergraduate work and then I always wanted to know more, so I took two master's degrees to learn more.
[02:29:02] INTERVIEWER: What were your master's degrees in?
[02:29:04] June Rusten: Well, one was, I heard of a major in reading, how people learn to read and the history of reading, and then the second one was when I really designed with Eastern Michigan, they were very open-minded. It was when the new research came in about the right brain and left brain, so I got a second master's in right-brain activities for learning science and social studies, and normally, most of the activities were left-brain pencil paper things, and right-brain was more of doing, learn by doing. Also, it had a lot about learning styles and the new information on the brain. Although since I retired, there is the latest bit of information on the brain, and we're learning more and more. I just heard a program the other day on autism, how they think it's in the frontal lobe, and it really begins as the fetus is about two to three months old, they believe, so they have to do more studies, so you continually learn as new things come out.
[02:30:21] INTERVIEWER: Do you think it was worth it and benefited you for the future by attending college?
[02:30:25] June Rusten: Did it benefit? Oh, yes. Made me a better mother, and that was the biggest complaint. Everybody said girls shouldn't go to college because they would just get married. Well, that's better mothers, [LAUGHTER] knowing better things to do with their children, it made me a better person, I'm hopeful.
[02:30:48] INTERVIEWER: At that time, it wasn't typical for women to go to college, so how do you think that changed things for your generation?
[02:30:56] June Rusten: Yes, there were some women, but few, not very many women professors for being role models, which is very important I think, give girls confidence like, well, look at what that woman did. It's interesting, the last two years I taught sixth grade, there was a lot of information about girls in Ann Arbor schools, girls are doing so poorly in science, they shouldn't go into science, and I thought that lot of hooey, my girls are just as good as any other as the boys were in science, and then I checked the test scores. In the last two sixth grades I taught, my girls scored highest of Ann Arbor schools of any girls, and they scored higher than the boys in my class, even though they were all in the same field trip. But I was constantly aware of making sure they were confident that they could do it, and we did a lot of field trips and right-brain activities, so you're learning with the whole brain, and it just proves girls can do anything they want to do, especially in science. It's unfortunate there wasn't a way that could be shared even in the Ann Arbor schools.
[02:32:21] INTERVIEWER: Do you think that building a child's confidence is really what pushes him forward to the next level?
[02:32:26] June Rusten: Oh, yeah. Just using women as a model, if that woman can do it, I can do it, and there are plenty of men models, so the boys know they can do it if they apply themselves.
[02:32:46] INTERVIEWER: Who were some popular women role models at that time?
[02:32:50] June Rusten: Oh, boy. Well in science, and especially environmental science, there were quite a few women. Rachel Carlson was one and wrote her book, Boy, I don't think I can think of others, [LAUGHTER] but there were quite a few.
[02:33:10] INTERVIEWER: Was Jane Goodall one of them? She [OVERLAPPING]
[02:33:11] June Rusten: Came along a little later, I think, than I would have known would have affected me. But that helped because that continues to encourage you to learn more.
[02:33:25] INTERVIEWER: What was teaching like for you and what grade levels did you teach?
[02:33:29] June Rusten: I taught fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, and then I was a language arts consultant and I taught the teachers of [LAUGHTER] K12 and went to different buildings, worked more with teachers, but fourth, fifth, and sixth grade. Both fourth and sixth grades have a big physical growth as well as mental, and they're fun to teach because they are curious, they want to do more, and their parents think the teachers did most of it. Well, the teachers don't, the kids do it. But it was fun to teach because they were motivated. It's hard when the teacher has to motivate people to be interested in it, and then teach the content area.
[02:34:27] INTERVIEWER: What was your favorite subject to teach?
[02:34:30] June Rusten: Social studies, I think, but I like natural science too, and after I retired from the classroom, Eastern Michigan wanted me to come teach beginning teachers in natural science and I enjoyed that. They're just big kids the same as the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, but I was ready to retire and I wanted to do some writing.
[02:35:01] INTERVIEWER: Do you still keep in contact with any of the students you taught, or the faculty you worked with?
[02:35:06] June Rusten: Well, a few of them, but many of the faculty moved back to be with their elderly parents or moved to be where their kids had moved, and so a lot of people left Ann Arbor, many have already died. But Dan Ezekiel is a teacher Forsythe, and he was in my, I think in fourth grade, I had his sister too. On the school board is Suzanne Basket, and she was a fourth-grade student of mine because I keep in contact with her.
[02:35:51] INTERVIEWER: Does it feel good when you see the students that you had previously taught and see them in such high places in the world?
[02:35:57] June Rusten: Oh, yes. I can be really proud. Because you think of your kids in the classroom as your kids. We always talk about my kids, every teacher has my kids, and you become as a parent invested in them, and so it makes you very proud when they're successful.
[02:36:17] INTERVIEWER: What schools did you teach at and how big are they?
[02:36:20] June Rusten: Well, in Ann Arbor, they've always tried to keep them pretty much the same. If there are too many children in one building, they will rearrange the grade lines, so they are all about nearly the same size. Bow School, I taught at first, and then they closed the school and moved the whole school. We had about 250 kids, so it was small, and they added on editions and then closed that school, and that 250 people from that school joined Bow, so there was about 500, and I think that's about what most of them were. I taught a Bow and I taught at Lawton, and at King, and at Thurston.
[02:37:13] June Rusten: Then I was a Language Arts consultant. I had other buildings ahead Allen in Hazily and I can't remember where but and I can't remember where else. I would go to one school each day of the week. Our goal there was to work ourselves out of a job.
[02:37:38] INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me a little bit about the morning breakfast program that you helped to start?
[02:37:42] June Rusten: Well, I'm not sure. I think I started it, nobody else has mentioned it. But I had a boy in my class, he kept coming late. He'd come in and the first thing to my desk because he needed to borrow rubber band every day because his sole was a Lewis Terman shoe and it would fire up. He come right to my desk and get his rubber band. I was concerned several times he'd been quite late. I said, you really need to get up a little earlier if you have things to do. Then he said, well, my problem was trying to find some money so I could buy some milk for my sister's breakfast. His sister wasn't in school yet and he had to feed her before he could leave the house, take her wherever she was to go. I thought what responsibility for a fourth grader to make sure his shoe would stay on and make sure that his sister had something to eat. I said, well, did you have breakfast? Not that particular day and he said, no, I don't ever have time to eat breakfast but I have to feed my sister because she's hungry. I said, well, that seems to be a problem because you really can't work as well if you're hungry and your brain isn't fed to do the learning. I brought some cereal from home and we used the school's milk, talked to my principal that if he was coming home in hungry, other children are coming in hungry. So we use the teacher's lounge in any kids that didn't have breakfast went to the teacher's lounge and they really were self-motivated. We didn't have to worry about them, I didn't have to be there every day. They would fix their own breakfast, behave themselves well, and get into class just to be able to have this. Then my principal talk to other principlas about this. Because everybody knows if you don't eat and you're trying to learn, it's going to be a problem to start to level the playing field. I think that's what started the breakfast program.
[02:40:05] INTERVIEWER: Were you close with any of the teachers in particular?
[02:40:07] June Rusten: Pardon me?
[02:40:08] INTERVIEWER: Were you close with any of the teachers in particular?
[02:40:10] June Rusten: Yeah, you're always close to a teacher. It's an isolated job and you're so busy in your classroom and sometimes it wouldn't be till the end of the day that I realized the teacher in the next room had been out sick and he had a sub because you're so busy. But so you do a lot with in staff development and after school then you have parties and things. You to get to know people.
[02:40:40] INTERVIEWER: How would you describe your relationship with your principals?
[02:40:45] June Rusten: Well, on there, it was good relationship where you really have to develop a relationship of trust, especially if you want to do some different things in your classroom. It helps if they're knowledgeable. I think the goal is to make sure principals are the educational leaders of the school. But often that isn't true because they haven't the experience and they don't have the knowledge but I think we're working on that.
[02:41:15] INTERVIEWER: How important do you believe it is to build a relationship between the student and the teacher?
[02:41:20] June Rusten: That's the main thing. If you don't have a relationship with your kids, that's the whole basis for the whole learning as the foundation. If you think of them as my kid, you want to establish that relationship and get to know them.
[02:41:38] INTERVIEWER: What can teachers and principals do to work together to improve student's education?
[02:41:42] June Rusten: What did who?
[02:41:43] INTERVIEWER: What can teachers and principals do to work together to improve student's education?
[02:41:49] June Rusten: Well, be aware of new research, be aware of any kind of new knowledge, especially knowledge of how the brain works. Then try to implement what you learn in your classroom. Now often that's a problem because new things come down the pike and you're supposed to try to implement them and you just manage to implement the things you learned last year. Often there's too many changes. You need some time to practice and work out any kinks in the plan. But that's the way you do learn, the better way to teach.
[02:42:29] INTERVIEWER: How did the advancements of technology benefits education?
[02:42:34] June Rusten: Well, there's much more you can give them with all. I remember trying to make puzzles, especially maps for social studies and take me hours to think of questions and make sure they are accurate answers. Then when we got the internet, they came out with programs. You could just hand it to a kid and they could go and had this. One of the first games they would have said teachers hours to do very good one and on setting up a city. What are the things you need to do with regarding water and taxes and all of the things the city limits. The many of them are the problems you talked about in social studies and how do you govern a city. They had this, I can think of the name of it. It's one of the first games out there that was very well done.
[02:43:29] INTERVIEWER: How do you see technology today. Do you still think it's a helpful resource for students or do you feel like it's clogging our brains a little bit.
[02:43:39] June Rusten: Well, it depends on how it's used. If there are problems and you have to work awaited and if it's worthwhile, you want to find the way it works.
[02:43:52] INTERVIEWER: What changed the most in your profession from the time you started to the time you retired?
[02:43:57] June Rusten: I think being able to negotiate through union and began a union. When I first started teaching, the first couple of years and we were able to form a union. It wasn't just for money, sometimes it was. But teachers are very poorly paid and still are not paid well. If we as a nation think education is so important, then we should cherish teachers more and pay them more. Forming a union, I was able to negotiate an individualized spelling program in my classroom because of the union, that is very important to me. I probably could have done it with the principal alone, but it helped him to support a union behind you. The other thing is the staff development and in Ann Arbor has been especially good and that's where we learned the newer things after school. That was negotiated in our contract too.
[02:45:08] INTERVIEWER: What were some extra curricular programs that helped further student's education outside of school or anything like that, tutoring programs or anything of that sort?
[02:45:21] June Rusten: I think those are very important, especially when we have so many people living in poverty. Those children don't have the same experiences that the wealthier students do. Get to go on trips and all that. It helps to have tutoring and more people to level the playing field.
[02:45:44] INTERVIEWER: What are the differences between what you are in school and when you are teaching. Either diversity or a classroom size or the teachers.
[02:45:53] June Rusten: Every time we were able, we worked for smaller class size. You can use the analogy of a family. If you have two children, you can give them more attention and time and experiences. As opposed to if you had 10 children, you're not going to have as much time and energy and all of that. Smaller class sizes are very important, which means in biggest expense for school is the teachers pay. If you have more people working with those students, so you'll have fewer in a class, it's going to be more expensive. That's why it's gotten many time class sizes are large. I remember one time we had real downturn, I don't know there was part of that. I can't remember. The economy was bad, but I had 30 children in the classroom. You can hardly get around between the desks. And I had one student holding himself like this and I said, Peter, are you cold? He said no, I'm trying to hold myself still. That's a lot of responsibility, it's just your body movement was upsetting to people around you.
[02:47:08] INTERVIEWER: What were the circumstances when you are in school and dealing with the great depression in the classroom sizes and how did you learn everything?
[02:47:22] June Rusten: Well, I grew up and I went to a one-room school and there were just three of us and the one we got moved to. We are just in a row. The first grade, second grade, third grade and everybody wasn't in poor then so you didn't think of yourself as being poor.
[02:47:48] June Rusten: Was different. No, I asked depression. We had just a couple of years ago is that there's a great inequality and there are few people who can buy the whole country. Then the rest of the people was really rather poor paychecks. I think that's why the emphasis is on the minimum wage raising it. If you work a full 40-hour week, you can feed your family and the pay should be high enough.
[02:48:24] INTERVIEWER: What do you think of the children have to be able to read at a third grade level by third grade in order to pass?
[02:48:29] June Rusten: I think it's terrible. Legislators should not be farming rules for education. The NSA or professional educators they aren't aware of their research. We would never let the medical profession do that. In some Tom, Dick or Harry on the street could say, let's do this medically you'd have to make sure it was based on research and knowledge. Yet we're willing to let that happen in public education. Then you have to stop and think somebody's, what is their motivation for doing that? There's a big emphasis now to privatize public education. We must be aware of that and make sure that doesn't occur, because public education takes in everybody, tries to provide for everybody. Private education can choose who they want us to record. Then a nation of immigrants, like I keep saying, everybody with their own cultural and ethnic views, the only way they can become American here is by everybody going into the same public school, and you come out American instead of Irish or French or whatever. If you think of Europe and many other places, Asia too and Middle East, there's all the ethnic fighting and so forth. If you think back at the history of our country, public education was started right away and everybody went to school and came out Americans. So why would we fight over ethnics things we were no longer there. We must keep that in mind that that's one of the reasons we're, we can say we the people by for by and of the people because we were all the same.
[02:50:32] INTERVIEWER: How do you think that this effects that they're good as ours when they're being told a year a failure because you can't read it this.
[02:50:41] June Rusten: It's awful. It shows that legislators have no knowledge of human growth and development. If you think of a baby, most babies walk around the time they're a year old. But if a baby doesn't watch other 14 months, we don't say that babies a failure. We just let them grow longer till they ready to walk. In fact, one of my children wanted to creep on the floor much longer than they should have been. Normally, they shouldn't wanted to get up and walk. We have to think of human growth and development and not all chilled, every child is an individualism develops at his own rate of speed. Just let people have a little more time. We know many times boys aren't as quick to learn reading her verbal skills as girls. Let them have a little more time. Back then, I remember so many mothers would be concerned when their third grade boys were learning well enough. I would say just let them live, redo them, take them. We had experiences, different experiences to the zoo and other places and give them experiences so they learn, read to them. Usually by the time you're in sixth or seventh grade, they're reading above grade level. Just give them a low time to grow. That's why it's so terrible to think that if you can't read at grade level in third grade, you're going to be held back. That's a whole year you're holding him back. I read one place that there's a great number, 10,000 I think in the state of Michigan, and new teacher's aide hefty for new classrooms. Well that's awful. Then look what you're doing to their concepting self-concept. You're not saying you can do this here. You just need to work in this area. If you had tutors and people to come in and help smaller classroom sizes so that the teacher has more time to work with each individual child can give them what they need. Now that would require more teachers, but it's still, it'd be a better way to handle it than they hold everybody back a whole year and to tell all those children they are dumb.
[02:53:12] INTERVIEWER: Do you think that we've improved education in America and how?
[02:53:17] June Rusten: While I think you will, because teachers on it always do the best way to help people learn. If they're provided with in-service opportunities and equipment and things, like Skyline High or you go. It's amazing the equipment you have and the teachers that are allowed like your communications class. That's a new kind of class. My children have that option when they were in high school here.
[02:53:50] INTERVIEWER: I think we're getting a lot more opportunities than were ever really presented before. I think that we're pretty lucky with this we're able to do. This, for example, is an awesome opportunity. We never did this project.
[02:54:04] June Rusten: Well, just knowing that your teachers so trappable, even when things go awry with times and the equipment not working. She just handles it is a like, it's an everyday thing. It smooths everything. You're lucky to have people like that too.
[02:54:25] INTERVIEWER: What more can we do as students, teachers and parents to improve education?
[02:54:31] June Rusten: Well, keep learning. Be alert to new ideas. Get to know your kids. If there needs and you'll find a way to solve those needs.
[02:54:45] INTERVIEWER: How well do you believe education is in terms of financial and emotional success?
[02:54:53] June Rusten: I can't think of any way to say anything and just, there's nothing else. They can give you what you need other than, you need this and it concerns me with the online learning because it's many times they don't even know the teacher. One-person, isolated learning and I think in public education you need the interaction with people, your peers, NPN, older and younger too. It's a whole, person learning, not just book learning, it's good at the elementary level because you have littler kids. Did you have to be concerned about, one way for fourth and fifth and sixth graders to be aware of them and what can they do to make their school life good and many times, this has learned on the playground, but that's still part of educating the whole person.
[02:55:58] INTERVIEWER: What beneficial skills do you think we gained from going to school and actually attending public education or private education? Whereas if we were taking online classes and just staying at home.
[02:56:18] June Rusten: I know there's some people who want to make sure they know what their children are learning, so they do want to teach them at home. Now as a teacher, I wouldn't want to do that. I'd be afraid I didn't have enough knowledge in certain subjects to give them the information they need, not even find it and it goes right back to what I said about the whole child. I think it's better if you're learning social skills, you're learning how to relate to each other. You're learning how to play games, the fairness notions, all those things. That you must have other people around you to learn. I think the public school, hold on. If class sizes are so large, it hits negates or you're trained to do. But it's a better way to learn.
[02:57:14] INTERVIEWER: How did the Great Depression affect your education?
[02:57:19] June Rusten: Hold on. I did a lot of working every year and we didn't have the labor laws, child labor laws when I was growing up, that came with FDR. But I worked 10 and 11, had an orphan home, preschool or for now, I'm studying little children, feeding them breakfast, making their beds, and no one's that at 10 and 11, I shouldn't work there, and then I worked in restaurants and I worked hard jobs all the time. I've mentioned once, the hardest job was making the army codes. For soldiers, they were so heavy and the wool was so itchy. I can just remember it, my hands and everything getting and the man, though I didn't know what he was called, who kept telling us work faster, work faster. Even though it was just putting cuffs on the sleeves, terrible job.
[02:58:22] INTERVIEWER: How do you think there is the recent recession or economic downturn has affected students education today?
[02:58:28] June Rusten: Well, it's hard because there aren't jobs, that you could get in a drugstore at, you know, they're filled by family people, that who have to have them. So, it's harder and with the inequality you're aware of other people that have more. Inequality is not a very democratic way of living.
[02:58:57] INTERVIEWER: How can we better access to education for students in poverty?
[02:59:03] INTERVIEWER: How do you get more access?
[02:59:05] INTERVIEWER: How can we get better access to education for students in poverty?
[02:59:09] June Rusten: Well, one thing is smaller class sizes, more people in the classroom to help if for miss skills, mentoring and tutoring. Because they missed out on some things, they don't come to school with a large enough vocabulary. Is another child, who has all these experiences you have to make up for that and the school can provide that.
[02:59:33] INTERVIEWER: Being a teacher for so long. What advice can you give to other teachers about building a connections with students to help improve their education?
[02:59:41] June Rusten: I think develop a good relationship be at per with the kids, get to know them, talk to them and that's very difficult to find time in a classroom to talk to each kid, to get to really know them. Much of it would be serviced or the teacher just passing on information. I often think of a cartoon, that I might draw, show the wrong way to teach. Have kids with open heads and the teachers just pouring the knowledge in, that isn't going to do it. They have to relate.
[03:00:19] INTERVIEWER: Now we're going to just ask some more questions about your family, just because I don't think that we've really gotten over a lot of that. How many children do you have again?
[03:00:30] June Rusten: Three. Well, I have my oldest daughter died, so I just have two children.
[03:00:35] INTERVIEWER: Okay.When did your husband passed away?
[03:00:40] June Rusten: Last year.
[03:00:41] INTERVIEWER: Was that tough for the family.
[03:00:43] June Rusten: Well, yes but he was ready to go.
[03:00:47] INTERVIEWER: Unfortunately.
[03:00:48] June Rusten: Yes.
[03:00:51] INTERVIEWER: How many grandchildren do you have also?
[03:00:54] June Rusten: Well, I have five grandchildren, and then three great-grandchildren.
[03:01:03] INTERVIEWER: How old are all them.
[03:01:04] June Rusten: What do you mean
[03:01:05] INTERVIEWER: Do you know how old they all are?
[03:01:07] June Rusten: Well, let's see I'll take the family that lives in Maryland. My grandson is 30 just finished her master's degree, and my granddaughter is 26. Then the family that lives in Minnesota, the oldest great grandchild is in the navy. He zoning distances second year. The next one just graduated from high school on and then a girl as a sophomore this year.
[03:01:41] INTERVIEWER: That's like kids. Do you think that you're able to connect with all of them and still be in their lives even though.
[03:01:49] June Rusten: I don't see him enough anymore. So many times when they were younger, they spend weeks. Well, and my son is getting his PhD at Michigan State so the family lived with me, while I read. When someone lives with you for three or four years, you get to know them much better than just having visits, and I like that much better. But it's harder now because they're all working and maybe three or four times a year as well I see them.
[03:02:23] INTERVIEWER: Do you think that you had a big educational influence on your children because you were a teacher.
[03:02:30] June Rusten: Yes. They tell me that.
[03:02:34] INTERVIEWER: That's nice. I think that education is obviously very important. But I think that when you're living with someone who is a teacher, then they even becomes more important than.
[03:02:45] June Rusten: One time we were on a trip out west. And we camped a lot, and we stopped at some museum or something and I was giving them extra information. My daughter said, "Mama, you don't have to be a teacher all the time, " so it's just natural to do that.
[03:03:05] INTERVIEWER: Right. Do you have some other questions that you want to ask?
[03:03:08] June Rusten: No.

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2022

Length: 03:03:06

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Legacies Project