Interview with Amy Brown, Narrative of Her Life – Teaching in the 60’s/Oldest out of eight siblings/Working on the electoral board, History 150 Spring 2024, Conducted by Marissa Prem, March 18,2024

Overview to Social Change Interview

There have been many forms of social change within the workforce throughout the  1960s-1980s. If you were fortunate enough to go to college during this time period and not all women were encouraged to, there were not a lot of opportunities open. If women didn’t want to go college they went to secretarial school. If women did go to college they could only study to become a teacher or a nurse. In the 80’s the people who worked for the electoral board mostly consisted of women who would be in charge of one of the party’s election officers to staff the polling places.

Amy Brown was a French teacher in the 60’s and began working for the electoral board in the 80’s. Amy speaks about challenges she had to overcome throughout her college and work experiences. She also provides an opinion on the changes in society since she was a college student. It is so important to think about challenges for women in the past so that we can grow as a society in the future.

Biography 

Amy Brown, my grandmother, was raised in Buffalo, NY where she went to an all girls Catholic grade school, high school and college. Her father was a sports editor of the morning newspaper, and her mother, for the most part, was a stay at home mom. She had many responsibilities as she was the oldest out of her 8 siblings. Her family was Irish, Catholic, and Democratic. Amy Brown had been working from a very early age but started her career as a French teacher in the 60’s when she was just 21 years old. In the 80’s she started to work at the electoral board in Northern Virginia where she printed the ballots for absentee students and was in charge of sending the ballots out.

Research

Transcription

Marissa Prem 0:01

Okay, can you tell me some background information about yourself?

Amy Brown 0:08

Sure. My generation or at least me was the first baby boomer generation, all of us were born as soon as the men got home from World War Two. So I lived, you know, My early childhood was through the 50s. And I had, as we’ll talk about later, many siblings. So I guess that’s it. I went to all girls Catholic high school and college and Catholic grade school. So I think that formed somewhat of my personality and the way I think. My father was a sports editor of the morning newspaper, and my mother, for the most part, stayed home until, I think, until I was in college. And, you know, we were Irish and Catholic and Democrat. It was long time that I thought that was all one word, IrishCatholicDemocrats. [laughter] And I guess that’s about it. We can cover the rest of the other questions.

Marissa Prem 1:00

Yeah, that’s perfect. So you were a teacher. And what made you decide to become a teacher rather than a nurse because I know that you’ve told me that in the 60s woman could mainly only be a teacher at nurse.

Amy Brown 1:15

Right. If you were fortunate enough to go to college and not all women were encouraged to go to college. My mother was adamant that we all went to college. But there were not a lot of opportunities open. A lot of girls went into secretarial school if they didn’t want to go to college. And most of the colleges that women could attend were geared toward teaching first, and then also nursing. But I think my choice to be a teacher is just part of it is being the oldest because I felt like I was teaching my whole life. I was always teaching somebody to read or teaching somebody their ABCs or teaching somebody their  math. One of my brothers said I taught him to swim, another brother said I taught him how to do the Cha Cha, which was a dance [laughter] And another said I taught him how to throw a baseball. So teaching just kind of came naturally to me and nursing not in the least. [laughter]

Marissa Prem 2:05

Yeah, that seems like teaching would be perfect for you.

Amy Brown 2:08

It was it was a good fit. It was a logical progression.

Marissa Prem 2:11

Yeah. Can you describe your college experience and like the process of becoming a teacher?

Amy Brown 2:19

Yeah, when I started college, I really didn’t intend to be a teacher. When I was in high school, I was already working. I started working really young. And I was already working in one summer I got mononucleosis, and pneumonia and something else. So I had to go for weekly blood tests. And I kind of got uncomfortable and as unpleasant it was, it was kind of intriguing. So when I started college, I thought I would go into chemistry. But my very first year they combined all the sciences, we had 10 weeks of biology, 10 of chemistry and 10 of physics. And I think I failed the chemistry. [laughter] So I decided I needed to go in another direction. And I really liked languages. I have taken French and Latin in grade school. And I took French, and I think one year of Latin and college. And so then my goal was I wanted to be an interpreter at the UN. That was kind of a crazy dream, because people that are interpreters at the UN are, are, you know, fluid from birth and multiple languages. And I really wasn’t. But I enjoyed French and so I decided, you know, that I would go ahead and be a teacher. And so I went and I ended up teaching high school at a Catholic co Ed High School here in town, you know, here in Buffalo. And I really liked that and it worked out well for me because the very first year I started I started teaching, I was still only 21 I hadn’t even turned 22 yet. And I had one class that was almost all senior boys who were 18 [laughter]. What I had going for me was that I have four brothers, so I wasn’t intimidated by the boys. And I was tall so that gave me a certain amount of authority. So it wasn’t awful, but it was interesting.

Marissa Prem 4:07

Wow, that sounds very cool. [laughter] Did you ever feel limited in your career possibilities?

Amy Brown 4:16

I really didn’t because I knew from the time I was fairly young that I wanted to teach or that that was what I had a, you know, a gift for I guess I’ll say. So no. So I did not feel limited. I was lucky enough to go to college. But here’s another thing. I went to college in New York State My parents never could have put eight kids through college let alone Catholic college but in New York state they had regents scholarships. So if your grades were really good you can apply for it and get a Regents scholarship. So I had a Regents scholarship. And also the whole time I was in college I was working at Sears. So between my scholarship and the money I earned my parents didn’t have to spend any money on my college education. But having said that, I was not a very good student. I had been smart all through high school. So I always get by with very little actual studying, which was a mistake, because when I got to college, it was just it was just hard because my French classes were in French, I’d read a lot of novels and French and, and I was leaving school every day and going to work. And I had morning classes and afternoon classes. And in between, I would come home from school, because I could only go to school here in town, and because my dad worked nights, he would still be asleep in the morning. So I would pick my youngest brother [Christopher] up at daycare, then I would bring him home and give him lunch, get my father up and give him breakfast. And then my father with Christopher [youngest brother] would take me back to school for my afternoon classes. And then I would take two buses to get to Sears. So in point of fact, I didn’t have a lot of time to study. So but I didn’t have much of a social life either because it was an all girls college, so.

Marissa Prem 5:50

Yeah, it sounds like you were very busy.

Amy Brown 5:52

It was a busy time.

Marissa Prem 5:56

Yeah. Um, what was the biggest lesson that you learned while being a teacher?

Amy Brown 6:03

That was one of the questions that I kind of stumbled over. I’m not exactly sure. I got to be very comfortable in my height, and in my ability to command a classroom. And that was a good morale booster. You know, I learned that I could be in control. And I think I did a good job. So that was that was good. That was an important lesson to learn that I could hold down a job and teach and earn salary.

Marissa Prem 6:30

Yeah, that’s really good….

Amy Brown 6:34

Yeah, I don’t know how much I earned my first year.

Marissa Prem 6:36

How much did you earn?

Amy Brown 6:37

5600 dollars.

Marissa Prem 6:37

Wow.

Amy Brown 6:38

For the year. [laughter] I will say that diesel was five cents a gallon and gas was 35 cents a gallon and so…

Marissa Prem 6:52

Oh wow. I wish it was still those prices.

Amy Brown 6:54

Yeah, I know. But you’d have to live with that salary, too.

Marissa Prem 6:57

That’s true.

Amy Brown 6:58

Yeah.

Marissa Prem 6:59

Um, you also worked for the electoral board? Can you describe what that was like?

Amy Brown 7:06

Yeah, I loved that. I really loved that. I really felt like we were contributing to, not to sound too highfalutin, but like to democracy we were, we were performing a function that was vital to the country and I really loved it. The Electoral board was divided into two halves. The front room was the registrar’s office and there was a lot of women, it was almost all women, I don’t think there were any men, and probably 20 of them and their job was to get voters registered to keep the registration up to date and stuff. Then where I worked was the actual electoral part of it, which we printed the ballots for absentee students like college students, we were in charge of sending the ballots out. I had two functions when I was there. One was, I was in charge of democratic election officers to staff the polling places and my counterpart was in charge of making sure there was an equal number of Republicans. And our first boss was wonderful. She, she always maintained an equal balance, there was always equal number of people from each party. And we were all friends, and we all worked together. And we always made sure that polling places were adequately staffed. And then the second job I had there was, I was in charge of all the printing of all the ballots and mailing them out.

And Fairfax County, has elections every year, but one year, it was school board, Board of Supervisors, one of the congressional districts and something else, but there was, I think, 104 different ballot combinations. And you had to make sure that everybody got the right… that it was all separate ballots. So everybody got them, and especially college students, and I’ll tell you something that I learned for one thing, I learned the zip codes of every college in the state of Virginia, Commonwealth of Virginia. And the other thing is a lot of kids would fill in their absentee ballot application, they’d give their for instance, JMU address, but then they forget and put down their hometown zip code. [laughter] So, you know, technically speaking, I could have sent their applications back, but I never did I just correct, you know, send them out to the correct zip code. But I really did like that job. I liked the again, it was all women. I liked the women I worked with, I liked my boss. And we just felt like we were doing something productive. It was it was frantic, frantic days, long days, long nights. I mean, the day after the polls closed, we had to be back at work at eight o’clock in the morning. And sometimes we didn’t leave the office until 6am. So you know, we go home, change clothes and go right back. But it was very fulfilling. I really liked those years.

Marissa Prem  9:27

That’s amazing how you loved it. You probably know my zip code better than I know the JMU zip code because I don’t know it. [laughter]

Amy Brown 9:36

Well, schools like JMU have one zip code for on campus and one zip code for off campus. So that was… that was the tricky part. And of course, you multiply that by 10 or 15 universities but…

Marissa Prem 9:46

Yeah, that is crazy. [laughter] Do you want to talk any more about like your family and how you were the oldest out of eight children and do you want to describe more about like, your role?

Amy Brown 10:04

Yes. Yeah. You know, everybody lives the life they live and don’t realize how different their lives are from anybody else’s. So I was probably well into the end of high school before I realized that not everybody that was in high school with me had a crib in their room, which I always did, [laughter] because the baby always slept in my room. And my mother always said I was her good right hand because I kind of functioned as the backup mother. But I didn’t dislike it. It was interesting. And it was fun. And it was busy. And the first four of us were born very close together. Like, when your Uncle Mike was born, he was the fourth child, but I had not yet turned five years old when he was born. And then there was a four year gap, we all said, My mother got to take a rest. And then your last four aunts and uncles came in two years apart. So, my sisters will tell you half jokingly that I’m the Bossy one. [laughter] My response to that is I had to be because I was so often in charge to do things my mother used to say to me all the time is, you’re the oldest you’re in charge. Or even worse, you’re the oldest, you have to set the example. [laughter] So I had to be, you know, doing the right thing all the time. Because you know, otherwise, I might be a bad influence on a sibling.

Marissa Prem 11:17

That’s true.

Amy Brown 11:19

Yeah, it was busy. And my parents were busy. But I didn’t mind it. Like I said, I didn’t know any other way of life, so.

Marissa Prem 11:28

I’m the oldest and so I kind of get that. But you had like a lot more people who are looking up to you. So that must have been crazy.

Amy Brown 11:38

It was a lot of responsibility. When I look back on it. I’m sure my mother realizes that too. It was a lot of responsibility. But we all got through.

Marissa Prem 11:45

That’s Good. That’s good.

Amy Brown 11:48

Yeah.

Marissa Prem 11:49

Are there any other significant events that you remember that you want to talk about that were impactful on your life?

Amy Brown 11:55

Yeah, I think we talked briefly about the, the era that I grew up in, which was mostly the 60s, let’s call it. And it was… It’s another example of things that you live through. Everyday you just got up and went to school, you did your assignments, you took care of siblings, you went to your job, but when you look back on history, it was the… John F. Kennedy being elected was a huge thing and I remember everybody talking about how he was the youngest president and “he was so young, he was so young” and I thought to myself, “he’s 42. Why is that young?” [laughter] But now I know that it was… it was young. But Robert Kennedy was assassinated, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Robert Kennedy was assassinated. We had the Vietnam War going on. A lot of my male peers were going into the service, your grandfather went into the service. They were all going to Vietnam. We we lost friends. I had friends that died in Vietnam. The moon landing was that year, In the 60s, I think. And the civil rights movement was very big, because John F. Kennedy has started it but Robert F. Kennedy was the one that really pushed for it when he was attorney general. So the two of them were really pushing for civil rights and not always getting far ahead. But when Lyndon Johnson after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and Lyndon Johnson became the president, he really pushed hard for civil rights. So that was… that was a time of a lot of activity. A lot of forward motion on that. So it was a very tumultuous time. The other thing was, a lot of college students were protesting the war in Vietnam, because nobody understood exactly why we were there and why we were sacrificing all these mostly young men, but there was a lot of nurses over there, too. And the students at a school called Kent State in Ohio, were protesting. And the governor, there called out the National Guard. And the National Guard was not supposed to be armed. But they opened fire and they killed like 13 or 14 or 16 kids on our students. So, that was that was a really big deal, too. But, but like I said, it was… you just pushed ahead every single day. Oh, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was the other big thing. Russia had put missiles in Cuba. And they were they had the capability of reaching the United States. So very young, John F. Kennedy had a confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev, who was the premier of Russia. And they set up a blockade and I remember vividly that every day, there was a threat that the United States was going to be hit with an atomic bomb. Every day, that it was going to be nuclear war. And it was it was very frightening until finally Khrushchev backed off and that was the end of it. But it was very… a very tense time. It was just a lot going on, you know, and you’re supposed to go to school every day and do your schoolwork, you know.

Marissa Prem 14:38

Wow. Yeah, that seems like a pretty scary time, but also exciting with like, the first landing on the moon and all that stuff.

Amy Brown 14:51

Yeah.

Marissa Prem 14:52

It’s very eventful.

Amy Brown 14:55

It was a very eventful decade. The 60s… very eventful, we haven’t even touched on the music which was amazing. But, the historical events, I think made more of an impact, so.

Marissa Prem 15:03

Yeah. That’s very exciting. [laughter] Do you want my generation to know anything about any of your experiences?

Amy Brown 15:13

That’s a good question. I think one of the things that’s way different than my sisters, and I… especially my sisters and my brothers too talk about this all the time, is that both sides of our family. They survived World War II, but they did not, they never had a lot of money. You know, they, my mother, never my mother was an orphan by the time she was 15. So she finished high school and three years because she had to get a job and support her younger sister. And my father came from a fairly poor background as well, but they, they did well, and they pushed all their children, and we all got college education, and everybody’s educated and happy. But we had a real sense of, if you had a job you worked… you worked as hard as you could, and you always gave more than was expected. And it seems like that’s kind of a lost thing, I think. We had to be able to support ourselves fairly young, our parents couldn’t, they just couldn’t, you know, Christopher was in grade school when I was in college. In fact, I think he was in pre K, my first year of college. And so we took our job seriously. And we really worked hard. And what I see a lot of these days is kids don’t need jobs, they don’t need money, their parents give them everything they need. My parents couldn’t do that. Most of the parents or my friends couldn’t do it either. But these days, there’s much less incentive for young people to have jobs and to be responsible about their jobs. Because they can fall back on their parents. And I think that’s, that’s too bad, you really… you really should have a sense of integrity about yourself and about giving your best to whatever job you’re doing, or in your case, your schoolwork, you know, I think it’s kind of fallen through the cracks a bit. And I’m sorry to see that. And the other thing that I just got is gonna circle back to teaching a bit. When I was a teacher teaching was a profession, it was very much respected almost on the level of a doctor or a lawyer, almost not quite, because it was all female at that time. But, every day that I was teaching in high school, I was dressed up, I would wear dresses, or pant suits and high heels, I was dressed up every single day, because I considered myself to be professional. I remember walking into your elementary school one time, and one of the teachers came up through the hallway, and she was wearing sneakers and jeans and a sweatshirt. And I thought… I understand that like if you’re a kindergarten or first grade teacher, you have to be dressed and things that are washable. But I don’t know how you can expect respect as a teacher if you don’t dress like a professional. So I guess that’s probably going the way of the world and a lot of professions because I read recently that even in the Senate, the men don’t have to wear suits and ties anymore. I don’t know, I think you have to, you have to have some respect for yourself. Because if you don’t, nobody else is gonna have any respect for you either. And to me, that means dressing appropriately for your profession. So yeah anyway, that’s the end of that rant. [laughter]

Marissa Prem 18:02

Yeah, that’s a good message. And I will be sure to take my job and my schoolwork seriously…

Amy Brown 18:08

I know, I know, you take your schoolwork seriously, honey.

Marissa Prem 18:11

Thank you. Um, that is all the questions that I have. Is there anything else that you would like to talk about?

Amy Brown 18:20

Um, no, I don’t think so. I’m trying to think if I’ve covered all my bases, I guess I have. I guess I have. I think that one thing that young people are better about is I think that they’re more politically aware, which I think is a good thing like this whole….. after this Sandy Hook massacre, and those young people that are really working very hard to get gun control legislation passed in their respective cities, counties and states. I think that’s a good thing. So I, I do think that young people are more… certainly more technically savvy, which is a huge help. And I think that they’re much more aware of the world going around around them. Our world was fairly circumscribed by what we read in the newspapers. I mean, people read newspapers in those days [laughter] and I know that grandma’s a newspaper freak, but these every single piece of information that goes on in the world is instantaneously on your phone. And that’s a good thing and a bad thing I think it gives all of you a lot of stress to live under. If every time your phone dings at you, somebody’s being killed somewhere there’s been a massacre somewhere there’s been a plane crash somebody there’s a bear ate somebody, you get instantaneously bombarded with all kinds of news and it’s almost always bad. And I think that’s, that’s really sad. It’s frightening in and I think that’s a reason that a lot of you live live under so much stress. So you know, my message was take a break every once in a while, put the phone away for five hours or stay off social media for five hours a day or something and give yourselves a chance to breathe and you know, read a book or listen to some music or draw a picture or do something creative. Because I think technology can be… it can be our friend but it can also create a lot of stress and in young people’s lives, we older people are it rolls off our back a little bit more, you know, maybe because we’re closer to the end, you know, but we’re, we tend to take everything with a grain of salt.

Marissa Prem 20:14

Yeah, well, putting down our phones is probably a good thing. I totally get all the bad messages that I probably don’t want to see. But yeah, that is a very good message.

Amy Brown 20:29

Oh, good.

Marissa Prem 20:30

So that is all that I have. Thank you so much for your time.

Amy Brown 20:33

You’re welcome. I was happy to do it. It was very it was an honor to be asked. So thank you.

Marissa Prem 20:39

Aw, you’re welcome. Thank you. Bye, I love you.

Amy Brown 20:44

I love you too honey. bye, bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai.

Overview of interview technological process

The interview was taken place over FaceTime on my laptop. The interview was recorded on my phone while I was in my dorm room. The setting was quiet and the audio is clear. The audio was transcribed by https://otter.ai. I chose not to include some stutters or repetitive words so that the conversation would flow if someone were only reading the transcript. I also added in brackets when we laughed and when certain subjects needed extra clarification. I found working with the AI was beneficial but a great amount of editing was needed.

Bibliography

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