Dorothy Wampler Interview, History 150 Spring 2017, Conducted by Kendall Baker, March 9, 2017

1. Overview: I conducted this interview in person at my grandmother’s house over spring break. I recorded this interview using garageband on my laptop with a blue snowball USB mic plugged in for a better audio quality. There were a few technical difficulties and we had to restart so the beginning of the interview is us making sure it is working properly.
2. Biography: My grandmother, Dorothy Wampler, was born in 1932 and grew up during The Depression. She grew up in New Jersey and went to integrated schools her whole life and then moved to Virginia where the cultural opinion was a bit of a shock. She got married and had five children and worked as a secretary who saw gender discrimination in a predominately male law firm against a woman lawyer who was the minority in that situation. My grandmother talks about many areas of social change in this interview that happened throughout her life.
3. Research: Before I conducted my interview I was not sure exactly what we were going to talk about and a lot of the information she told me I did not know previously. I research women in the workforce because I knew she had worked in a male dominated work place. I looked into the timeline of women in the workforce and how they started working after WWII and started fighting for women’s equal rights in the workforce. I looked into the gender pay gap which is still a problem today and it turned out my grandmother spent her working career working towards lessening the gap.

In the transcription I used the initials KB for myself and DW for my grandmother, Dorothy Wampler.

 

Kendall Baker: What is your name and date of birth?

 

D. Wampler: …Dorothy Wampler, my maiden name was Graves, and I was born April 9^th, 1932 in Plainfield NJ.

 

KB: What was your family dynamic like growing up?

 

D. W: I had- was the oldest of four children, two sisters and a brother. And as sisters we fought like cats and dogs but don’t let anyone attack someone else that’s not gonna happen. But with four of us, there was always something going on, that’s just what happens. You know, I never really thought about it because that’s just the way I grew up. And you just don’t think anything about it. There were good times and there were bad times, when money was tight you just ate a lot of fish because it was cheap. And we always had a garden. I do remember once the war hit, we had gotten into World War 2, I must have been 8 I guess…. anyway, my mother was always very shy and she never learned to drive, she drove twice and had an accident each time so she never drove. But we had rationing and you had ration tickets for meat, for sugar especially and canned good s and coffee, and once you ran out of ration tickets or ration tickets for that month well then too bad. Now I remember one time she gave me some tickets to go to the grocery store after school because I walked past it coming home, and I lost those things and I was absolutely horrified. I looked everywhere for those things and I couldn’t find them. So we were out of ration tickets for the rest of the month because of me. Umm also we dealt with, because of the war, I can remember we had a wagon and a bike that all four of us shared. It was a girl’s bike and my brother hated it but it was a bike and so you know there’s no such thing as each having your own. We had to collect newspapers, and we saved grease, I don’t remember why we saved grease for the war but Mom always had a can sitting on the stove, a great big can sitting on the stove. And she would always pour it in there and someone always came and picked it up all the time, I mean why they needed that grease I don’t know, but you know frying grease because they fried everything. …Another thing we had to deal with all the time was polio. They didn’t have the Salt Vaccine then, and actually it was my sister’s boyfriend, he died of polio. And they had umm, his name was Charlie, I don’t remember his last name but he lived around the corner from us, but umm it was a scary thing they closed the pools and umm in New Jersey, I don’t know about Virginia because I didn’t grow up in Virginia but in New Jersey there were pools everywhere, and they closed them all and that was about the only recreation that there was for ordinary people. Rich people had tennis courts in their backyard and whatnot but we didn’t have that. And then there was umm, and it scared the living daylights out most of us. They were trying to raise money for polio and for patients and whatnot. It was president Roosevelt at that time, FDR, and he had had polio and he tried not to show himself in a wheelchair but occasionally there would be a picture, and we didn’t have television at that time and we had radio but every once in a while, a picture would come out in the newspaper with him in a wheelchair, and the wheelchairs then are not like the wheelchairs now. Let’s see, what else, umm they had this iron lung that went from town to town and it was right on Main Street and they had someone in there all the time who had polio, and that was how they breathed was this iron lung, and without it they would die. People lived on that iron lung for a long time sometimes. But you could go about and walk in there if you wanted to, I didn’t-I didn’t want to. It made this awful sound but I just thought if someone is in there I don’t want to look at them, I would feel like I was invading- and I was a teenager, a young teenager I guess at that time and umm that Iron Lung it seemed like it was always on Main Street and right in front of Woolworth’s. And one of the greatest things was Mom would take us shopping and umm we would always have lunch at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, which was the best place to eat in town. This was a little after the Depression though, in the forties.

 

KB: Let’s see, can you describe your education growing up?

 

D. W: Umm I went to an elementary-didn’t have kindergarten in those days- but I went to grade school they called it, and junior high school, and then got to high school. In the town where I lived, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which is where I lived at that time, there were two high schools, Baton and Jefferson (for the boys) and Baton was for the girls. And they were segregated, never the twain shall meet, and it was because one boy and girl were caught doing something they shouldn’t have been doing behind the stage one day and immediately they segregated the schools. However, there was a Catholic high school right across from my high school, Baton-which is now an elementary school as I understand. But there was a catholic high school and they were integrated, there was you know boys and girls, and umm the boys from Jefferson, and well Baton was on top of a hill and Jefferson was at the bottom. One time the boys, they left the high school, why I can’t remember… and they all marched up to Baton and the principle oh she- [laughs] she was a witch, but when she heard they were coming from Jefferson she had all-and they had shades then not blinds- and all the shades were pulled down, oh we could still see them. You could look down there and see all these boys outside. Oh I remember I remember one time, another education thing, umm well the boys had a baseball team, we had a softball team, and I played tennis, softball, volleyball, basketball, everything but football. But anyways the boys were short a player, they were playing out for Jefferson but they didn’t have a baseball team and we did so they would come out and play their games across the street from us where the field was. And they asked the gym teacher, they were missing a player-a short stop-so they asked the gym teacher if one of her girls could fill in. I had a study hall at that time so they sent me over there and I played on the boys’ team, just one time though. I can’t remember what the outcome was, whether I blew it or not but I was just a part of it. But ah, you know I still keep in touch with some of those people and it’s been 67 years since I graduated.

 

KB: That’s impressive

 

D. W: … So most of us are old and dead.

 

KB: Okay, was segregation apparent growing up, did you ever experience segregation? And if so, in what ways?

 

D. W: Just in the schools… But when Pa Bert and I went back to New Jersey one time –this is really the only segregation thing I know, but the schools were not segregated, they were integrated in New Jersey, I mean there were black students throughout the schools in fact our class president was black I think. We didn’t think anything about it, it was just the way it was. And umm but when Pa Bert and I went up there after we were married and we ran into one of these black girls at the—in one of the stores or something and we talked for a few minutes because I knew her and she knew me. And he was just—he couldn’t believe it because he grew up in Virginia where everything was segregated, all the schools were segregated. He said to me, you mean you went to school with them? As if it was something—you know that was just the way he was brought up, and I wasn’t. So I had no problem when they integrated the schools here, I thought well it’s about time. Your aunts and uncles were in about middle school I think when it was segregated—I mean integrated. Because the black school it was up on the hill, it was an elementary school or a high school—I think it was the black high school but after integration they made it into the junior high school, and it’s been that way ever since. No one thinks twice about it anymore. But uh if you were brought up in Virginia, you thought about it, and my husband was really a racist, he really was.

 

KB: So growing up in New Jersey, that wasn’t a big deal for people there?

 

D. W: Not at that time—I mean when I was growing up, in school it wasn’t because you had to go to school and you all went to the same school because why wouldn’t you?

 

KB: Was it a shock moving from New Jersey to Virginia where the difference in opinion about that was so different?

 

D. W: Yeah because I could not get used to your grandfather’s racism, and there was that n-word, he would use it all the time, and my father did too and I hated it and he knew it. Every once in a while, it would slip out because his parents used it. I mean I heard your great grandmother many times use it and she was such a prude you wouldn’t believe it. But it’s a horrible word, it’s just like the f-word as far as I’m concerned.

 

KB: Okay so growing up as a woman did you ever experience inequality between the sexes?

 

D. W: Oh yeah

 

KB: In what ways?

 

D. W: Paychecks mostly, men make more money for doing the same jobs as women do, and it’s still that way. Yeah and the glass ceiling is definitely there. And I was only a secretary but I could see it. I belonged to a Business and Professional Women’s Club, in fact I was president a couple of times, and that was one of the big things we were working against was the equal pay for equal work, now they had this big rally but it’s the same thing that uh what was it yesterday? Women’s Day?

 

KB: International Women’s Day I think.

 

D. W: Yeah and that’s when finally, women—its always been that day—when women would work until March 8^th I guess that’s the day and umm it took them that long from January 1 to March the 8^th to get to the point where they would make as much money as a man was. It was a big thing all my working life and I didn’t really see it because I didn’t go to work full time until your mother was in school. I could see it with the women lawyers because the men lawyers definitely looked down on them, they did as if they weren’t as good as they were. And they were just as well educated and just as well spoken and everything else. But you could just feel it when you would take depositions or something and you would have a woman lawyer, I worked for two men but we had a woman lawyer in our firm, and two of the men in there definitively looked down on her, and she wouldn’t stand for it. But uh you could just feel it—hear it—in the way they talked to the female lawyers, it was just like “ugh I have to talk to you, so even though you are a woman and I hate doing it I’ve got to do it” and it was very, very obvious. And that’s about all I know about that.

 

KB: Thank you for interviewing with me.