Interview with Kelly Kerr, History 150H Spring 2020, Conducted by Cameron Kerr, April 5, 2020.
Biography:
Kelly Kerr was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 1967. Her father was an oral surgeon aboard the U.S.S Enterprise throughout the Vietnam War and during the rule of Idi Amin [1971-1979] in Uganda. Her father’s employment forced her to move around a lot as a kid. She has lived in ten places throughout her life. She attended James Madison University and then went into the workforce, before becoming a stay at home mom who raised three kids.
Research:
At the time she graduated from James Madison University, Kelly Kerr did not follow a typical path. The female college graduation rate in 1989 was 18.1 percent compared to a 24.5 percent rate for males. Fast-forward to today and this number has risen to 36.6 percent for females and 35.4 percent for male counterparts (Duffin). Next, median annual earnings by sex also had a major disparity in 1989 when she would have been graduating from JMU and looking to enter the workforce. In 1989, $35,926 was the median annual earnings for women, whereas $52,314 was the case for men (“Earnings”). This provides some context as to why my mother might have decided to quit her job and become a stay at home since she could not make nearly as much as my father. These statistics also correlate with the rest of society and my mother’s rough estimates that she provided and talked about towards the end of the interview. Finally, I thought it would be interesting to point out that currently, 49 percent of retail workers are women and 55 percent of the low-wage jobs are held by women (Ruetschlin).
Citations (MLA):
Duffin, Erin. “Americans with a College Degree 1940-2018, by Gender.” Statista, 31 Mar. 2020, www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment-of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/.
“Earnings.” U.S. Department of Labor, www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/earnings.
Ruetschlin, Catherine, and Robert Hiltonsmith. “Making Retail Jobs Good Jobs for Women.” Demos, 2015, www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Women In Retail.pdf.
Transcription:
Cameron
Hi this is Cameron Kerr and I’m here with my mom Kelly Kerr. Do I have your permission to give this oral interview.
Kelly
Sure.
Cameron
Would you like to give your introduction of yourself.
Kelly
Sure, I’m Kelly Kerr, and I was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 1967. My dad was in the Navy. And so we moved around to a couple of different places in my childhood, because my dad was a surgeon we were fortunate we didn’t have to move as much as some people in the Navy but we did move at some crucial points in my life, and I ended up in high school in Virginia and decided to go to James Madison University where I met my husband, and we’ve now been married for almost 30 years and we have three great kids, two of which decided to follow in our footsteps at JMU. Go Dukes.
Cameron
Great. Can you describe what it was like to be the daughter of an oral surgeon in the Navy.
Kelly
We had a nice life. It was difficult at times for the moves, and the periods of time where my dad had to be away on a ship. There were a couple of times, one time where he was gone for about six months and another time where he was gone for nine months. When I was very young, and so that was hard, but it did provide us a nice lifestyle we lived in nice places with nice homes, and we were able to take nice trips, we had good, you know, health benefits and. So, on the whole, I would say that it was a plus.
Cameron
Very interesting. Were there any obstacles you faced throughout your childhood due to your father’s employment.
Kelly
Well definitely the moves, and the times that he spent away. I felt like the times that we moved, I think it’s hard for any kid to move at any point in their life, but I felt like the times that I moved are kind of crucial times in my childhood. So, It was hard to be the new kid, very hard to acclimate to a totally new environment, sometimes a bit of a culture shock things were different, but I do think that moving makes you adaptable, and I did find that there is beauty all across the United States, and there are friendly and nice people wherever you go and not so friendly, and not so nice people. So you just have to seek out the ones that, you know, you have things in common with but there’s there’s good and bad everywhere. And so I took something from each of the places where we lived.
Cameron
So building off that, since you moved around so much. Where was your favorite home and why.
Kelly
Yeah, it’s hard to pick a favorite home because there were so many nice things about each place I lived. I lived in a really neat house in California from kindergarten through fourth grade. And we had just an amazing yard that had tangerine tree. Lemon tree artichoke bush, a really big weeping willow tree and right outside my window was a navel orange tree, and I could open the window and pick an orange from my bedroom window so that was a neat, memory, and we also lived very close to San Francisco. So we did a lot of neat things in the city there. But, and like I said then I moved to Maryland, Rockville area and there were a lot of nice things about that. I really liked my high school years were spent in Virginia Beach, and I was able to go to the beach every day we were just about two miles from the beach. And in the summer I spent many days on the beach so I loved that. But I would have to say most of all I’ve loved living in Leesburg Virginia for these last almost 18 years because it’s where we’ve raised our family, and seen our kids grow up and made lots of lifetime friendships, through our kid’s activities and our neighborhood and jobs so I would say, I like Leesburg festival.
Cameron
How do you think your experiences as a child shaped you for the rest of your life.
Kelly
Well definitely like I said moving makes you adaptable. It’s very hard to come in as a new kid when kids have been together since preschool or kindergarten and they have their cliques and their, you know friendships and everything’s already in place for them and you have to try and kind of find the cracks and find a way into to be included. And so that’s hard. It does I think make you able to, and this might not be for everyone but I feel like I’m able to chat with people and find something to relate to just based on the fact that I was always having to try to make new friends. But, and so I think it makes you more resilient, I think that living in the same place your whole life while that offers a lot of security, and a lot of normalcy. I think you don’t get a chance to feel uncomfortable and have to figure out how to adapt.
Cameron
So why did you end up deciding to go to James Madison University.
Kelly
Well that’s a little bit of a funny story. My dad had promised that wherever I got in, he would pay for it and send me. And unfortunately he kind of reneged on that promise. For some reason, I had my sights set on Boston University for some reason I thought that would be amazing to go to school in a big city, kind of far away, but this is all pre Internet, and I don’t even remember really where I got much information I think we had some big bulk in the guidance counselor’s office where you could read about different colleges and, you know, maybe I got a brochure or something sent to me in the mail but I ended up applying to seven schools and JMU was. I applied the last day that the application was due. And the reason I applied is because I saw that it didn’t… I was sitting in the study hall, and I pulled it out again and I saw it didn’t require an essay. And so I thought, oh, what do I have to lose. And I had seen JMU my grandparents had a house over, Bryce mountain, and so on trips to Bryce. Occasionally, my grandmother had taken me into Harrisonburg for lunch or shopping and so I had seen that it was a beautiful campus. And so once I got my acceptances, and my dad ruled out, you know, six of the seven, or five of the seven because of cost. And I think I ruled out one or two, based on you know more information that I got about them. And I did go on a tour of UVA and felt like it was too big. And so I kind of decided that I would go with JMU and I’m, I’m so glad that I did because I have so many great memories of my four years there and especially I met my husband there. So it worked out perfectly. It worked out the way it was meant to be.
Cameron
So what are some jobs that you’ve had,
Kelly
um, well that was the thing. When I first started at JMU I thought I wanted to follow my dad’s footsteps and be some sort of doctor. But I had never had to really study very hard in high school, and I found the transition to college where you did actually have to study, I found myself at a loss for having actual study habits, I didn’t really know how to study. And so I didn’t do well at all in the big chemistry classes and biology classes that I took my freshman year.
So I didn’t really know much about business. Besides having worked in retail, in high school. So I ended up taking a business management class and liking it, and switching over to the business school. And I debated between management and marketing, I liked both, and for some reason I went with management well being naive I didn’t really realize once I graduated that you can’t really get a job, you can’t just walk in and be the manager of a company that you know nothing about basically with the management, you had to start at the bottom and learn them, the business, and then work your way up. And when I graduated in 1989, there weren’t a lot of jobs, I really wanted to work for the Marriott Corporation. I had wanted to get into human resources and risk management and I went to a job fair at JMU and you know left my resume and I also had a contact there of friends, you know, sister in law worked there, and I tried to have her help me get a job there but I just kind of hit a dead end there.
And so I ended up getting a job in the management training program for a department store a big department store called Woodward Lothrop, and since I had worked some retail in high school, I was able to pull on some of that experience. And so I worked for Woodward in Lothrop which was also affectionately called Woody’s for. Let’s see I started there maybe in June of 89, and I only lasted until Thanksgiving. Because it was grueling I, there were so many things I really loved about the job, but heading into the holiday season. It became more and more apparent that, first of all, you couldn’t get two days off in a row, and then heading into the holiday season. We were even going to, we were going to be working seven days straight and you’d have to work really late at night setting up the sail for the next morning and then be in early the next morning, to be there when the doors open for the sales. So it was really hard work I worked in the sportswear department and I had worked my way up to the manager of the sportswear department but I didn’t have a merchandise handlers so I would get seven or eight of these rolling racks a day that I had to unpack myself that had heavy winter sweaters and jeans, and I had to work them onto the racks on the floor and mark them down, it was just a very physically demanding job. So I knew that heading into the holidays, I was not going to get any time off to see my family. So I actually quit without having another job, which was kind of a risk risky move, but I met a friend who had a job with a temporary agency that she had started at, but not as a temp, she was working in the office answering the phones and interviewing the temporaries that were coming in looking for office clerical jobs. And so she told me that one of their other offices was hiring. And so again, I actually took a pay cut and started again at the bottom of a company that I didn’t know anything about. And I started as the receptionist but I saw it as a stepping stone into
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recruitment and interviewing that I hoped someday would lead me back to an HR position and then, in a bigger company, but I worked there. Then I became the recruiter I put ads in the newspaper every week and met the people as they came in filled out their applications I interviewed them to see what kind of positions they were best suited for, and then I would tell what was called the servicing agents, about the temps so that they could place them eventually then I worked my way up to be a service agent or I had about 200 250 temps working for me at one time at different clients so I was the liaison between the clients that we had that the salespeople brought in, and the temporaries and placing them making the right matches for the jobs, and again it was a job I really loved it was rewarding to help people find work when they were out of work, and especially rewarding when you made a match that was so great that the client wanted to hire them full time. But it was also a grueling job, it, I would open the office, the office opened at 730 in the morning but I would get there at seven to listen to all the messages on the answering machine of people that weren’t going to go to work.
And then we would have to scramble to find replacements for our temps who were. A lot of times, replacing a permanent employee. So we’re replacing the replacements. And it was a job that even though other people came into the office later when I was ready to leave at 430 or five, they would look at me like, Why are you leaving so early on, actually, I’d been there longer than they had. So it wasn’t a great job for a family, and I got a because I would end up working usually 12 hour days or bringing work home with me, which was phone numbers were I would come home and then after dinner be calling people seeing if they wanted to work the next day. So once I got pregnant with our first daughter. I at that point I had worked my way up and I was the branch manager of that office in Rockville but I just didn’t see. At the time I actually was excited about my position and so I thought I was going to go back. But once I had our daughter I realized I really didn’t want to go back. So that led to some other moves and job opportunities for my husband that enabled me to then end up being a stay at home mom. So that worked out well.
Cameron
So did you ever feel a time when the fact that you’re a female played a role in the jobs that you got or the interactions you had in the workplace.
Kelly
Luckily I never experienced that I can remember any sort of overt sexual harassment or anything like that but it definitely working for the department store. It was obvious that the men were the upper managers of the department store, and the women ran the different departments. The only co-workers that I had that were male that were on the same level that I was was like men’s shoes and men’s suits. And then every other department in the department store so housewares jewelry. You know, women’s shoes, of course, and linens and how, you know, anything like that was run by women. So, that was more of a women centric environment, and then for some reason HR and temporary services tend to be mostly women. We did have a Kate. At one point we hired a guy to be a sales rep, and he was actually a friend of your dad’s, and he made a couple of sexist comments, and so he ended up not lasting very long, Not, not a good idea to say, sexist things when you’re in a company of, you know, 95% women. But, so I think I kind of gravitated more to industries that were more female-centric, but I never felt. I don’t think I felt like it really held me back, maybe it just with the whole Marriott thing. I wonder if I had had either. Some other experience or been a man if I could have got my foot in the door there. Okay,
Cameron
so sort of to wrap things up, did you and dad ever consider flipping roles. So for example, you would work, and he would be the stay at home, dad.
Kelly
We were I’m sure it crossed her mind a time or two but it was very apparent early on that he was going to make more money than I was in his chosen career was computers. That was not the love of his life he would have preferred to teach history and coach baseball, but he went into computers knowing that it would provide a good living. And so from the moment that we graduated, he was making probably close to $20,000 more than I was. And within those first four years, he was making probably 30,000 more than I was so it just didn’t make sense financially and plus I don’t know that he would have had the patience to do the, the actual hard work of getting kids to do homework he like to take you guys to parades and to get snacks at 711 and not so much to get, get your work done. So, it just, it just worked out that we kind of decided, I could have gone back to work. But then you all would have been in daycare and so we made the decision that we would be a team, but, but the way the team would work is that your dad would be away more and miss out on some time with you all. But I would get to have time with you, whereas if we were both working we would both be missing the kids all day long, so we tried to have some normalcy by having one parent in the picture all the time.
Cameron
Okay, thank you very much for your time.
Kelly
Thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Overview of Interview Process:
This interview was conducted in a quiet room in my house with the voice memos feature on the iPhone. The technical process went fairly smoothly, with a bit of a hiccup when trying to convert the audio file to an mp3. It took us a few minutes to gather our thoughts and test out the best setup, but after that we did the interview in one take and I did not see a need to edit it.
Conclusion:
I think that the interview went pretty well. I was worried going into it that we would not have enough information to talk for 15 minutes. However, I forgot how much my mom can talk when you ask her questions. I think she did a really good job with answering each question in-depth, rather than providing one-word responses (which I told her to try to avoid beforehand). I think I could have done a better job with building off of her answers with deeper questions. Also, I think I should have asked some more gender-related questions towards the beginning in order to get to the point quicker. Overall, I think it went well and we talked about a broad range of interesting topics.