Interview Andrea Krochalis by Sharon Mirtaheri

 
Sharon Mirtaheri: Ok… here we go. Uh if anytime Annie you don’t want to answer 
                             Anything just tell me ok.
Andrea Krochalis: OK.
SM: I Annie can you tell us your name, full name and date of birth?
AK: My full name is Andrea Brown Krochalis and I was born May third 1950.
SM: Ok. Can you tell me about your parents?
AK: Sure uh. I was closest to my dad. He was an attorney. First-generation Lithuanian. Practiced law in New England Township. Did some things like school boarding; what was then called town council… it’s like being city attorney. And he quit practicing law to go into a business my grandfather had which was selling tractors and farm equipment. His old law office had been adjacent to that. Our little township it was four little um areas comprising one town around Enfield Connecticut and it was that old form of government… we had a town meetings and um had our Halloween party in the town hall, you know… so it was small, and it was rural at the time. My grandfather had been a butcher came over from Lithuania on the boat and learned English when he got here, dropped his son off at Yale and moved to California for a while and came back when he graduated. My mother was third generation Irish she was a Irish lit scholar and also ran a writer reader conference, a separate writer reader conference  in Connecticut and  was a stay at home mom until I was in high school and then she went back to teaching she was an AP [Advanced Proficiency]  English teacher. I had her for four years every day (p) at our Ladies of the Angels Academy [All girls school] , very small school of two hundred.
SM: What kind of writing did your mom do?
AK: Mostly um about Irish lit. Both of my parents did some creative writing and there were writers around my house all the time. That’s how I learned of Hollins cause George  Garr was at  writers conference and Bill Smith and some other different writers, Eudora Welty and they would have parties and they also had a writers group that met at the house and  was my first introduction.
SM: You hopped into the literary world from… from a child.
AK: Umm hum.

SM: You were surrounded by it. That’s amazing!  What was the relationship between you and your parents like? You said you were closest to your dad but could you elaborate on that?  
AK: I was the youngest surviving child. I had a little brother that died. I was fourth and had an older brother and two sisters. I was kinda like my dad’s buddy. In family therapy terms, which was my field, I went from being like the family mascot to the actor-outer, very rebellious. I spent a lot of time with my dad and when he was practicing law I would go with him on title searches and he went to a lot of county courthouses. It was pretty rural in New England and I would take my little golden books and he would take his papers and we’d travel around. I was not very close to my mother ever really. The time when we got along best was when we I had her for an English teacher an we would have tea after school. She had an annual Christmas tea for the academy and we would do readings of things that [like] “Pickwick Papers” and “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”. So we were able to tuck that literature that… we were pretty much…at odds. We did not really have a good bond.
SM: Well why was that do you think?
AK: I think my mother was fragile, and she had five births by cesarean; I was the fourth and when the fifth child didn’t survive on…I was also hyperactive and… she just  had a hard time having the energy for that. She was not very willing to make, in my estimation, that sacrifice that a lot of women make to be a parent. It’s a real ego death and she kinda resented it. She was pretty demanding of keeping up a certain family image and family name. Grades were all important so I traded off grades, getting good grades all the time for more freedom. Also I was the most social of the children in our family and I think she was also just really more bitter as time went on.
SM: Would you say you are more like your dad than your mom?
AK: Yeah. I would.
SM: Your dad was very social.
AK: Yeah he was. And as a lawyer he was very much against pre-trial publicity. He was very concerned about the McCarthy hearings. We used to watch those when we would come home for lunch from school and he would watch those. He had been involved with some folks, in Kippie  [Small nearby town] some Jewish folks and he was at Yale, and… he was very outspoken about civil liberties.
SM: This is very interesting. So… your father went to Yale?
AK: Umm huh.
SM: For a law degree?
AK: No, no for undergrad. He went to University of Connecticut for law school.
SM: And your mom, where did she go to school?
AK: She went to Albertus Magnus. It’s a small Catholic college in the same area in New Haven Connecticut. And then she went to Wesleyan in Middletown where my grandmother lives, or lived,  for her Masters and started her PhD. work there. 
SM: Your mother had a PhD?
AK: She didn’t finish.
SM: Wow that’s amazing… for that time in history. I need to stick to the questions and there are so many things I would like to ask you  So you were raised in Connecticut?
AK: Umm hum.
SM: And … as you said you’re grandparents, your grandfather came over from Lithuania and your grandmother?
AK: Her um. Her parents came from Ireland.
SM: From Ireland?
AK: Yeah. That’s my mother’s mother. And my mothers side my grandmother side was one of ten children. Lots of dentists and insurance agents in her family and she was a teacher. And she married a plumber, a plumber and heating man, who I really didn’t get to know. He died when I was very young. And she stayed in Middletown through, she was about a block away from Wesleyan, her son, my uncle, Phil went to Wesleyan and was later on the board of trustees at Wesleyan. He was an attorney. My her other child, my aunt, married a fella who became dean of Middlebury college. And… then my mother, see she had three children. My father was an only child. His father came from Lithuania as a teenager and was a butcher and in an area called Torrington Connecticut which had a lot of Lithuanian folks and had a strong sense of being an immigrant. Then they moved to Warehouse Pointe which is just below Enfield and started a tractor business. He used to have a “Farmers Day” every year when the new tractors came out. And he had this huge clam bake and all the customers would come and the people who worked there and they did sales and they did parts and repair and… it’s a pretty big place. 
SM: What kind of tractors did they have?
AK: Ford.
SM: Ford tractors not an Allis Chambler tractor like my grandpa had. That’s very interesting And your grandmother never worked?
AK: No my grandmother had had polio I think and she was disabled. I remember her having a little golf cart we rode around in with her because my grandfather’s place was on fifty acres of Connecticut river land. And then when she died  my grandfather went on a cruise and married again.
SM: He met his wife on the cruise?
AK: I’m not sure, I think perhaps so.
SM: Yeah. That’s fun.
AK: Uh hum. 
SM: So you remember all four of your grandparents… somewhat?
AK: I remember my grandfather and his two wives and my grandmother. I don’t remember my mother’s father.
SM: You have two older siblings?
AK: Three.
SM: Can you tell me about them, and their names and what they do?
AK: Sure. The oldest uh, Jean Elizabeth, named after my mother who is Jean Marie, is a professor at Penn State. Her field is really early Anglo Saxon languages. She just, she’s published some on Chaucer. She is widowed. My next sister is married with two children, Suzanne. She lives in Ireland. She went to graduate school at Trinity and Dublin and married and stayed there and feels very strongly tied to that land and that area. My brother now lives outside of Atlanta. He is an attorney. He has not really practiced law. He’s in business, insurance, financial and uses his background that way. Interestingly enough he went to Yale and he went to Yukon Law. He started in University of Michigan in Ann Arbor but dropped out and then as he was working later went back and did his law degree. My two sisters went to Mount Holyoke and the oldest then went to do graduate work at Oxford and Harvard and Suzanne did hers at Trinity.
SM: Your whole family is very educated!
AK: Umm hum. Big value.
SM: It’s really awesome. And the youngest that died?
AK:  Jonathon.
SM:  What did he die from?
AK: He died of, really I would say, complications of birth.
SM: I see. Is there anyone in your family involved in social change or volunteer community work? And it sounds like your father definitely was but…
AK: And my mother too… my mother was on the state board and Connecticut women’s community club and she worked in various committees for that group and the Briding group and so on and my father was on the school board and did some government work pro bono. We used to joke that you could tell who my mother had lunch with by what kind of accent she had at dinner. So she was among the ladies who lunch. My father did a lot of work in the community because he spoke Lithuanian which was close to Polish and so he could do a lot of work with people who needed translators. There was a large Polish, Lithuanian, Irish, Italian, Catholic community. So it was very much a community where you are aware of your heritage and then divided again by religion.
SM: I see.
AK: It was an era if you were Catholic you had to go to Catholic schools and so on.
SM: And your family’s religious background, what is that?
AK: Roman Catholic.
SM: And do you have memories of going to church and the ritual and all that?
AK: OH yeah! I went to a Catholic kindergarten, Catholic elementary, Catholic high school, and it was an every Sunday must go to mass and communion. There was a was a very prominent part of our family experience that we were Catholic on both sides and everything was in Latin and when I went to high school we spoke Latin. In Latin classes it was in the mother house of the convent and there was a novitiate and junior college there so the alter was round and then the novitiate was on the other side and the people who was studying to become nuns and there was these tiers of choirs and it was very elaborate, gilded, very Italian marble kind of…(p).
SM: Fancy.
AK: Very.It had a small chapel but very ornate and the parish school and parish church, Saint Patrick’s, was huge, I remember it just  being very big so it was always a part of our life and doing things with the church was a part of our life.
SM: You used a word I haven’t experienced before when describing the church. Evishnet?
AK: No. Novitiate. [she spells it out for me.]  In the Catholic Church studying to become a nun there was, there were levels, and a novice  was one level and a novitiate was what that called. So in this high school  there was a residential unit, a very small little building that had students who lived there and then there was the whole mother house which would be like a central regional area for this order of the Felicians and they had there novices and other levels of people moving up that ladder to becoming a nun. Then they had a junior college that drew a lot of folks and then they had a infirmary for the elderly and so on. So it was like a campus. And I think the other thing that was interesting about it was in this community at that time a lot of girls were able to go school there and sometimes enter the order to get a college education and as as I came along and we came into the sixties several of those folks left the convent and went into the rest of the world. Because it was a very closed community. Convents are a closed community.
SM: Right. Do you view having that  religious background as positive or negative?
AK: Both. I mean I certainly had a good education and certainly it teaches you a lot of abstract thinking skills. It certainly exposed me to a sense of ancient history and I view the Catholic Church as a wealthy, powerful and extremely corrupt institution. It is abusive and I really didn’t stay Catholic even into my teens.It was a constant battle with my family. So I’ve seen both sides to it and  it’s a very medieval based institution, very feudalistic, very ritualistic and I’m certain there is some good things that comes from that, in terms of the number of people, women in particular, who were able to get an education, even a college education. It’s very orientated to guilt and shame and I think that it’s very damaging to one’s soul, whatever soul might be, one's spirit that in that I don’t agree with a lot of the teachings.
SM: How have your family values affected your social change work and we probably covered some of that but could you alaborate?
AK: Growing up in the Catholic Church you certainly realize that there is a lot of power and resource in the big mega-institutions. Certainly it was drummed into my head that worth by achievement was of value. We were valued by our achievements. I don’t… think that is the best way to raise a child but that was a family value, education is an immigrant value, service is a spiritual value. I think my father’s influence is strong in the sense of he really preached to us aboutpeople’s right to independent thought and their rights to make mistakes and have a second chance and their rights to equal treatment under the law and equal dignity and the evils of prejudice.
SM: So although your father was Catholic would you term him conservative or liberal?
AK: Liberal.

SM: How would you describe your personality type?
AK: [She chuckles] Hmm…
SM: I had to put some fun questions in here.
AK: I tend to be… an introverted thinker in the sense that I think… about what I say  before I am public about it. The more comfortable I am the more extroverted a thinker I am in the Myers Briggs sense, since in Business we use that test all the time even though I know psychometrically it is a terrible test. I value my friendship and social connections, highly. I like connectedness. I like the belonging part of that. I am pretty fun loving and I like the outdoors so I am pretty adventurous. I tend to be self reliant, a pretty New England value.

How She Defines Activism

SM: That was fun. How do you define the term activism?
AK: I think activism is a process really for me. I would say activism is about what you do in the world and how you go about doing it and doing it in a values based way. So that if you’re value is to protect the environment your actions would reflect that just about how you lead your life and also how you try to influence social interactions whether its... for example I won't use  plastic cups at my house and I won’t use throw away plates and stuff even entertaining. It’s a small thing but that is an action on a value that I hold. I think activism tends to be looked at mostly as carrying that to a level regarding legislation, social policy or community activities.
SM: We need to start more on a personal level too.
AK: I think so.
SM: What does the term mean to you but I think you just told us that. Do you consider yourself an activist? Why or why not?
AK: Yeah, I certainly do. When I think back to my time at Hollins I was certainly considered an activist. I have always have been , even as a child. When I was in high school I worked on a social action project in Hartford Connecticut in the Spanish speaking community. My Spanish isn’t good enough now but we did some assistance with folks who needed some go-betweens in the community, and just to give them a chance to practice English and as a cultural sharing kind of exercise. And as a Catholic you are always asked to do these things that are more like a collecting for missions and that kinda thing, I wouldn’t really call that activism, I’d  look at that as tokenism but the seed is planted and now I am an activist certainly in terms of a Sierra Club, or Forrest Watch or Smart Growth. In college I was very anti-war, I am still ant-war, any war. I was very active in that movement.
SM: What or who inspired you to do this type of work?  
AK: Mm?
SM: Spider.
AK: Daddy long legs break. {She gently removes it from the table.] [She laughs} Oops. I think there are a couple of things, certainly my dad, certainly the times. You know I went to Hollins from 68 to 72. I was the youngest of four. The two closest to me were more liberal, my brother was eligible for the draft and when my sister got married he wasn’t able to go cause he and just graduated. He was "One A" so there was some life events like that. She got married in Ireland so he was not able to leave the country. And probably would have gone to Canada had he been drafted. My father was a conscientious objector but because of his Catholicism wasn’t allowed to be.  So he served in a military group as a medic. Also, interesting, they pulled him out of law school and make him a medic  because he was a CO. So I think the times was a big influence because it was a social change in all people.
SM: And on a grand scale.
AK: Uh hum.
SM: Why and how is this work meaningful to you?”
AK: Well it’s meaningful because it’s work that has a larger purpose than just your paycheck. It’s meaningful because you spend a tremendous amount of time in your life at work and I would like to think that in bits and pieced here and there it has done something to improve human condition, just in terms of working with run away and homeless youth or whatever. I think too I was driven by the fact that I had seen abuse and had seen corruption and it fit with my coming of age at the same time…that there was this social upheaval so I got to act out a lot of that.

Education

SM: Where did you go to grade school and high school and what activities and hobbies did you participate in growing up? You covered those but if you could just reiterate.
AK: I went to our Ladies of the Angels School for young children. That was the pre-school that was at this same convent mother house where I went to high school which was later, it was later called Longwood. And then went to the parish Catholic elementary school. I was always pretty active. I was outside a lot. We were in Northern Connecticut so there was a lot of snow. We would build snow forts, we would go sledding. I played basketball, was on the basketball team, debate club, Spanish club, social service club. [A club that has projects helping others less fortunate]
SM: A lot of activism in high school.
AK: Some. Yeah.
SM: Through the church but uh…. What hobbies are you involved in now?
AK: Umm… I have two dogs and a cat. I’ve always had animals and used to horse back ride. And I do agility training with my dog, both my dogs, but just for fun we don’t show. When I had my horse I didn’t show either. He was trained but I didn’t want to get in to all that stuff. Had enough of that with my mom. I do grant writing for a living now so I do various kinds of writing for folks. I like to do lots of athletic things, have done rock climbing and repelling and I like hiking and I like gardening and have done some dance things. Just recently a bunch of us went up to Floyd to do some country dancing. That was fun. Just kinda of a big community event. It was just fun.
SM: Where do you do that in Floyd?
AK: Sun Music Hall.
SM: I am not familiar with that. That’s interesting. Any childhood memories you would like to share? Some good ones, some bad ones?
AK: Be a little more specific like around… what kind of theme.
SM: It doesn’t matter, like I have happy memories of my grandfather, sitting on his lap playing with his bibbie overalls.
AK: Hum.
SM:  And things like that…. like as you look back on your life some really happy memories some really sad memories.
AK I remember being very close to siblings and my older sister was very protective of me. My grandfather had a lot of land and I used to  roam that fifty acres and we had a real huge playground we could drive some of the old tractors, we all learned to drive on tractors. I can remember [laughing] my father saying you can take your drivers test when you can hill hold with the clutch on this Worthington tractor and not roll back over this board. So I was determined to do that. So I did that. And I can remember swimming in his pond. He had a trout pond for fishing and a lower pond for swimming went into a swampy then a brook area that went out to the river and then there was some woods. So I actually can remember all of us swimming in that pond and hanging out and and we’d ice skate there as well. That was the one thing my dad would do with us outside, he was an excellent ice skater. But he didn’t like to play catch or I played a lot of softball and a lot of or baseball when we were younger. And he didn’t like that sort of thing. I can remember we had big clam bakes and we always had big holiday dinners at our house and all the relatives would come in.
SM: You had a big extended family in the area. How did you feel about school when as a child and a teen and what subjects where you’re favorite or least favorite and why? Did you like school?
AK: Yes and no. I always had a love hate relationship with school. It was a good place to achieve and achievement meant safety to me, in my family. It was social; I always had a lot of friends there. It was always confining and full of Catholic discipline that I wasn’t comfortable with . My favorite subjects were English and social science. My least favorite was probably trigonometry [she says with resignation].
SM [I chuckle] At least you had trig. I never made it that far. Who influenced you as a child and teenager and played an important role in your life and why.  Maybe other than your father.
AK: Well certainly different relatives but my friends particularly. I had really strong friendships and that was always a refuge for me that those friendships and a friend of mine and I started the first basketball team at the academy. We had to play in skirts, that was when you could only dribble three times and that rule changed as we went on so it was really interesting to be breaking that ground but we pushed through getting the basketball team.

SM: : Who were your personal heroes and heroines in childhood and now and why?
AK: Hmmm….
SM: Start with childhood.
AK: Probably my dad, Emerson ,and there were people I knew in college who were certainly were influential and certainly characters from that whole cast of characters on the left in that hippie culture kind of experience. I remember the Chicago Eight and the Black Panthers and various people from that area. I have to think about that some more.
SM: Ok. Well we’ll revisit that on our next one. Any hero or personal heroine or hero today that inspires you? 
AK:  I don’t know if there’s any one person. Certainly environmentalists. Certainly people who think on a more  metaphysical global level.
SM: Those that see the bigger picture.
AK: Umm hum
SM: Do you need a break?
AK: I’m ok.

Adult Life

SM: Are you married? If so tell us about your partner and how you met?
AK: No, I’m single.
SM: Always been single?
AK: Technically, I never married. I did live with somebody for several years.
SM:  So, no children?
AK: No.
SM: You mentioned to me that you have dogs. Tell us about them and have you always had pets and what do they mean to you?
AK: Yep, I’ve always had pets.[Smiles]  We each had a pet. We had… my brother had dogs so I didn’t have dogs till I was an adult. I always had cats, still have cats. I had a horse. My horse was like a real unusual thing that I was the only one who did that and had who that being the youngest of four over achievers was really… got old … that really got old. And so it was hard to find things that were not done before.  and.. My horse was named Tony and he was named after Tom Mixes horse; Tom Mix was the first Lithuanian to make it in Hollywood. He was in Westerns. The dogs I have now, my dogs are always rescue pups,  my cats too, I always get them from shelters. And I have two dogs now. It is interesting because I am really close with my dogs. I do have an interest in animal communication and animal rescue. When I retired that was the first group that I worked for , the Wildlife Rescue and  Doing some writing and stuff freelancing for them. My dog Millie is a border collie, retriever mix, very reddish hair, a little bigger than a border collie and she must be my karmic return, she is a classic femme fatale. Just… funny, if she cuts her paw, the entire area knows it. She screams bloody murder. She is very histrionic. Camilla Jane was my neighbor’s dog. My neighbor became ill and later passed away and I took in, kinda, the Jane, because she and Millie were friends. And another neighbor took in George, the other dog. George lives about three and half miles around the country road from me. But he visits all the time. Camilla had a boyfriend up the road who is a great white Pyrenees, another mile in the other direction. So I drive the dog pool, I call it. Sometimes at the end of the day after I’m corralling the dogs its a…  Millie will be home, she stays pretty tied to me. And Camilla had always been able to wander and so she’s had a big adjustment with having rules. Yet the first time she spent the night at my house she wasn’t used to ever being allowed in the house so she slept an like an inch from the door .And she was afraid to ride in the car and … so I have had to do a lot. Millie was much worse about the car than Camellia but Camellia had been what they call a yard dog so…. She’s a Sheppard mix and she’s very different, a good balance for Millie.  She’s very reserved and lady like, and independent, makes the compromise of humoring me by coming in at night [smiles]. And now of course she has her own bed, her own crate, her own bowls and toys … she never had toys, she had bones but not toys. But she and Millie would hang out together and they would chew on the same dog bone before she came to live with us. It was kinda a struggle for her to get used to …having  to answer to me or to be accountable somehow,  like where are you and are you going to be in by dark?  So… and dogs are very companionable they have very interesting personalities. They’re herd animals, they’re social like horses but they’re unlike cats. My Cat Bessie is nineteen.

I just lost a cat, Hattie Mae, who was twenty. Hattie Mae was solid white, had two different colored eyes, was not deaf. Was rather… haughty. She loved me but not too many other people. She and I were very close. I would say we had some possible past lives together. And she loved Bessie. Bessie is a black and brown Tabby and is classic Tabby, sweetness; hi you can pet me, now I am going to go. And very reserved, Hattie was umm... bitchy.
SM: [Laughing] They have personalities just like people.
AK: Yeah they do. It is interesting, they do.
SM: My next question was going to be how do they affect your life but I can see they are a huge part of your life.
AK: They are! Because I live in the country in a house that I  bought at an auction that I’m rehabbing. It didn’t have a bathroom. It had one spigot in the kitchen but it did not have water that would pass any kind of a test. It was ground water. I’d been there fifteen years sitting on my round two, just starting round two, I’m building a home office to write in and run my little business from. And so you spend a lot of time and their energy presence is very real and it’s a lot of company. Because I used to hike a lot around the area I know everybody’s dogs and they know me. That’s how I first got to know my neighbors and that mountain. I would hike down, there is a nature preserve two or three miles from me and I would hike over there and walk back home. As I would walk down the road on these little two lane six hundred level roads the dogs would just start to follow me and when I came out of these woods they would drop off at their houses so…. I felt like I was part of the pack.
SM: Yeah, you had a herd following you.
AK: Umm hum.
SM: So when you say you were part of the doggie pool you collect these dogs and take them somewhere?
AK: No its just that when I ... especially when Camilla Jane was getting used to living with us, I had to pick her up at her boyfriend’s house and take then take George and drop him off at his house, so it was like a six mile loop on these back roads.
SM: Oh I see.

BREAK
 
 Advanced Education

SM: Where and when was your advanced education and the reasons for those choices?
AK: My advanced degrees are from Virginia Tec and they’re in Counselor Education with concentrations in sociology and adolescent and family. I picked Tec because I could work and go to school. I was in the first Roanoke program before the Higher Ed Center was here. And a lot of us who worked for social services at the time were in that program together. So there was a lot of support. And I picked that because it was accessible, it was affordable. I was a scholarship and loan student at Hollins. My dad got sick when I was in high school and there wasn’t any money and I was the fourth kid to be educated. So I got through Hollins in an very  interesting way. At one point they put me out for not having the tuition and another student said: “Well if her dad doesn’t pay it I will”. [She sing-songs this in a Southern way]  And they said I could come back. So I have always been very grateful in terms that being able to get that education in the sense that this was another activist that happened to come from a matriarchal line of money. And it’s just amazing to be somebody who was not wealthy in a school of wealth where she didn’t sign anything she just went in and talked to the vice president. I registered.
SM: And actually paid your tuition?
AK: I ended up… I don’t think she did pay it. No, I paid it and my dad paid some. We sold the company and after that I was mostly… I had scholarships and loans. I  finished paying off loans and then did my masters and worked on my doctorate. When and where I picked grad school. It was interesting because it was so much easier. I enjoyed grad school more although I didn’t particularly like Tec because it was so huge. It was the first public school I ever went to. It was the first co-ed school I ever went to. Very segregated by sex, my education. Umm… and so I, there were parts that I really enjoyed and it was related to the work I was doing so it was a whole different motivation. I could learn and use it right away. I started a program in Roanoke City and it became a really big half million dollar budget and half million dollar building that the city built for us. The Crisis Intervention Center. And a lot of my papers were orientated to writing programs for that and  doing research for that. So it really meshed with my whole life.
SM: Let’s back up just a little bit. Tell us about your Hollins experience and why you choose Hollins. For your undergraduate degree.
AK: I choose Hollins because it was eight hundred miles from home. It had a creative writing department. I had a scholarship. So when I got there I remember driving in and looking at it and just bursting into tears and saying I do not want to stay here. First night I went to dinner  I asked someone to pass the salt and they said “You’re a damn Yankee!” I went back to the dorm and called my dad and said “I am not staying here. It’s like a prep school. I hate it. I don’t want to be here.” And “These people are all Southern, rich, you know, little princess syndrome”. And he said,” Stay a week”. Well I’m still here. So… at Hollins I was certainly the radical fringe. I left the English department and I remember getting a lot of flack for that and joining the sociology department which everybody in my family was just appalled at since I was sent there to  to either marry up or get the Pulitzer Prize.
SM: So it was your family that gave you the flack?
AK: Well, Hollins wasn’t happy about it either. I mean they didn’t want to loose a major. [I assume the English department]. But I was surprised that they noticed but Hollins is not that big. When I was there it was about eight hundred students so…
SM: Was your scholarship tied to the fact that you were English major?
AK: No. Sociology was something that, that I got to pick for myself and my education and I was really drawn to … I was fascinated with it. And it was very much a part of my activism and a part of developing my world view. I had a really great professor. Eustace Theodore was one of our lead professors and he was a sponsor for our class. He left before we graduated and went to Yale. He was a really good teacher and I remember having just all kinds of things start to make sense about how the world worked and what the forces were in the world. And I liked studying groups. So I just got caught up in it.
SM: Was Professor Nye there when you were there?
AK: Yeah.
SM: I had sociology with Professor Nye.  He’s still there!
AK: Wow!
AK: And Ra. Ra was there. He came when I was there. [Professor Jong oh ra] 
SM: He’s still there too! I saw his picture when we looked in the annuals [Spinster 1972]. Oh my goodness!
AK: Mm hum.
SM: So you switched majors?
AK: Yes.

SM: You didn’t do like a minor in creative writing?
AK: Probably in journalism. We didn’t really have a minor. But  I went to W and L the first semester to study journalism and did push to get some academic credit for doing the paper [Hollins Columns]. Forrest Landon, who later developed an organization around freedom of the press and freedom of information access, and had just retired from that. He came and taught from the Roanoke Times so… I think that was the beginning of having had journalism. It was a different time because Hollins was changing. We had social rules when I was there. You had to dress for dinner. And you couldn’t wear pants in the dining hall so we had a demonstration one day where we went in pants. And the staff saying: ”We can’t serve you in pants.” So we took them off!  [I suck in my breath audibly!] And they served us. And then we ate. And then we put them back on and left. So there was a big social upheaval about the social rules and we had approved hostess homes and you couldn’t stay anywhere else. Well there wasn’t exactly a hostess home to stay at at the D.C. demonstrations for the moratorium against the war or the ‘68 demonstrations and so there was a lot of change going at, across campuses. And that in loco parentis changing to students being more independent. So at the time that I entered Hollins and the time I left it became a different kind of school. And it’s now much more oriented towards careers for women than it ever was. I mean you were either marrying or going to graduate school. There was a social work department but it wasn’t, at that time, viewed as academically equal, which is unfortunate. And I laugh about that now when I think at how I had to major in pure sociology and get two graduate degrees to hold a job. You know, it’s kind of ridiculous but…
SM: I remember when I was in grade school, the same time you were at Hollins, when it was bitter cold and we had to stand outside to wait for the school bus, the school would not let the girls wear pants. The only way we could wear pants was under our skirts and then take ‘em off when we got to school.
AK: Mm hum. Yeah. I was always in a uniform all through high school. 
SM: I’m really interested in what you said before about being on the fringe element of girls at Hollins. I think your term was the radical fringe.
AK: Mm hum.
SM: Did you feel like you fit in?
AK: No, I did find a community there, but it took a while. My early impressions of Hollins was just the tremendous amount of wealth that these students came from and that I didn’t. And that I came from a middle class family. But I would have been a scholarship student anywhere and with my dad’s illness there was less money. Their whole lifestyles were different and they would complain about their debut or their having to go to meetings about their inheritance and so on and so on. And a lot of us would just look at them like, you know, get over yourself. There was a huge town gown issue more so than there is now. There’s still some of that.
SM: A Town Gown?
AK:  Town gown, in terms of the town and the Hollins gown, the academic gown, the prom queen kind of thing or whatever. Hollins was as suitcase school at that time. There was nobody there on the weekends and that was how, being there on the weekends we developed a lot of community a film club that had films every Saturday morning and people would just kind of hang out together. And people came to be more interested in things on campus on the weekends. And people would ask you “do you date V.A. or Tec? Are you V A?”  Which institution do you find your boyfriends at?”  And I thought that was very weird. I
SM: Let me make sure I understand. At that time on the weekend everybody, most everybody, left?
AK: Right.
SM: [continues] and either went to stay with a host family?
AK: Well no they… there was just a heavy dating scene. So, and if you were away for the weekend you had to stay in approved hostess homes which would be like a woman who opened her house to students and you would signed in and out. They  had curfews and so on. It’s like you didn’t go stay in a motel or at your boyfriend’s apartment. Which of course people did but they just didn’t…
SM: Report it?
AK: Right. There were a lot of social rules.
SM:  So…Mainly for the purpose of dating they’d leave campus?
AK: Yes.
SM: You weren’t allowed to have men come on to campus?
AK: Yeah… there wasn’t a place for them to stay. And certainly... sometimes there were, occasionally, events too, like the Hollins Cotillion which was a big formal dance. And one year we had one of the first different kinds of Cotillions where we had a lawn concert that Livingston Taylor played at it. That was the big break with tradition. So at the time that I was there all these things were changing. And there were men  in the creative writing and psychology graduate programs but they kind of come and went. They weren’t there all the time.
SM:  Big changes. There’s a house now that men can spend the night when they come on the weekends. But they also spend the night in the dorms with the girls too I think. So, things have definitely changed.
AK: There were visiting hours for men in the dorms but your door had to be open. We used to joke about the one foot on the floor on the floor rule. That, you know, if there is a guy in your room the door had to be open and you had to have one foot on the floor kinda thing. 
SM: Like if you were sitting on the bed? [I get it and laugh at how ridiculous that is.” Oh my goodness! Your major was sociology?
And why did you choose Sociology? You just explained that you were an English major in the beginning.

AK: Because it was something I picked for myself and I was just really interested in it.
SM: .Was it the first big decision you had ever made in your life concerning your own life?
AK: No I wouldn’t say that, but I felt very much independent of my family even when I lived with them cause there just wasn’t a lot of closeness with my mom and my dad became sick when I was in high school with some heart and other kinds of problems. So I was pretty much on my own. I worked when I was in high school. And just kind of really developed a kind of two lives. I just sorta of kept my mother at bay with this…you know, here is my grades and here is my list of awards I am going to win and all that kind of stuff and then I just went about my life. So… I was the only one that had ever worked or played on a big sports team kind of thing [out of her siblings]. So I felt pretty much like that I was on my own and keeping up this family name pretense kind of thing.  So switching majors was just picking something that I was interested in that wasn’t part of the programming so it had certain ripple effects that… so did not wanting to be Catholic and so on and so on.
SM: And you said that first week you were totally miserable and you wanted to go home. So why did you end up staying?
AK: I think being there was a better option than being at home and because of the scholarship. And  it was a way to be on my own.
SM: You just toughed it out one day at a time and one day led to a year.?

AK: . Yeah.
SM: You didn’t go out of campus on the weekends like some of the girls did but did you go home?
AK: Well sometimes I did. No I didn’t go home.
SM: Did you have a host family in this area?
AK: There was just a list of people to stay with. It wasn’t like you had a connection with anyone specifically. I had some connections to faculty members through my family but I went there a few times. But no, sometimes you would go away to go to an event or to do something or to date but it wasn’t… it was just a phenomenon about the school that there was hardly anybody there on the weekends. And sometimes I was there and sometimes I wasn’t. It would just depend on what my plans were.
SM: It’s just so amazing to me that you need permission to go out anywhere on the weekends.


Interview Andrea Krochalis by Sharon Mirtaheri

Interview One/Section Two

Advanced Education Continued

Sharon Mirtaheri: Ok. We’re back. Let me see. Was there a professor or professors that influenced your decision about social change work?
Andrea Krochalis: Well I worked with Eustace  Theodore on a… registering people to vote in Roanoke. There was uh… Richard Adams who taught a kind of Eastern Philosophy course. Frank O’Brien, who is still in the area, I see him once in a while, he taught in the English department. John Allen was my fist advisor, and George Garrett, Richard Dillard, Annie Dillard. So there were people in different departments that I remember as having an influence on my thinking or my choices.
SM: Richard Dillard’s still there. Annie Dillard taught in the beginning?
AK: No, she was a student. She graduated around the time I did. And she was married to Richard, or I am not sure when they got married. I just remember her being on campus.
SM: So you knew her?
AK: Yes and there were other students that were politically active.
SM: How do you feel your education at a women’s university has affected your life and community work?
AK: You know its interesting ‘cause I always went to women’s schools all the way or very segregated schools, even then. The pre-school and the elementary school were co-ed but you lived your life in two different lines. There wasn’t a lot of exchange. I think it is true that in women’s schools you get to separate out your academics and your studying and your social life. But I also think there are more leadership opportunities for women there and I think there is an automatic reflection on who am I as a woman, what kind of role do I want to have in my life and society, career and so on. So it was something I was used to but it was also something that had positive impacts that certainly distorts how we view men, I think. It is the interesting reverse of making the male the sex object.
And because they are not part of your everyday life. So they don’t get the same kind of sense unless you grew up with brothers or you don’t to class and have a guy sitting next to you. That’s unusual. We had some men when the eight college exchange started [There were 13 exchange students, males, from eight other colleges]. We had a few men that came to Hollins so it was distorting that way. And there wasn’t the experience of competing with men. I didn’t compete with a man to be news paper editor and that kind of left men as something exotic. That’s  the down side I think.
SM: Your resume says that you were a Vietnam Era campus radical activist.
AK: [she laughs].
SM: Tell us about that and what your views about the war was.
AK: Well I think the war was an unnecessary war. I’m anti-war, any wars. And I think it is a terrible statement about us that we can’t come up with a better answer to conflict than glorified fist fighting. I think most wars are about imperialism, property, oil. In this era of oil. There were some oil interests that Mobil had in Vietnam and so there were some ties even there. And it’s about protecting American interests that, you know, we may not have a right to those interests. Certainly we do not understand the Eastern culture. I mean, we don’t get tribalism and that point was brought home to me because of one of the early demonstrations against the Vietnam War in D.C.; we camped  by the Eclipse and we camped by tribe and the tribe [was] just what state you were coming from. And I camped with Virginia of course but because that was where I was from. The diggers from California came and they cooked for everyone. They had these food lines and this huge expansive camp. And then people looked out for each other. Even in seventy one when we got arrested at May Day there was this underground network of taking care of folks to make sure they got out and that they got connected to some legal recourse and that you had a place to go when you got out and so on. There was a different cultural norm in that counter culture that was about taking care of each other, about taking care of the earth, it was the beginning of environmentalism, the beginning of the women’s movement, the beginning of this massive uprising against a war. I remember working with  Vietnam Vets against the war and Kerry and those folks and I remember the Black Panthers started out as a group that provided free breakfast in schools. So there was an anti-poverty movement at the same time and trying to share resources more equally. And that the values in the counter culture were about positivism, sharing resources. And certainly there was a different sexual norm and what people saw as “free love” was also about being loving to each other, coming from a place of shared abundance and a sense of scarcity. I think that there were very few people willing to risk  going to D.C. and the numbers got smaller as the years went on. The last time I went with a woman, who is now back in Roanoke as a physician. Only the two of us went from the campus for the May Day demonstration and the whole campus  knew we were going. When we came back I remember the Dean walking by and {she said: “I am glad to see you are safe”. And that was it. That was the only thing that was said. As the stakes got higher you put more on the line to protest this, the fewer people were willing to do that.
SM: And this was the May Day protests in what year?
AK:  Iin seventy-one. It was the one in front of the Justice Department.
SM: You were a junior that year?
AK: Mm hum.
SM: And did you get arrested?
AK: Mm hum.
SM: And you spent time in jail?
AK: Mm hum. My twenty first birthday. In the D.C. central cell block.
SM: Tell me what that was like. {I am pretty amazed by this}
AK: It was grotesque. It was awful. The the arrest was for civil disobedience for sitting in front of the Justice Department and they just picked people up and carried them to buses and the button we threw… messages out the busses because the busses were all being chased by reporters so we… I threw out my uncle’s name. He was a prominent D.C. lawyer at the time. He came to see me went to the Georgetown jail first and then we were moved to the D.C. jail. I was in for two or three days. Longer than most. And there was a guy in the central cell block across from me who stood on his head most of the time. And  that area, he D.C. central cell block, was abusive, the Georgetown was not. They would feed us food but it was food that had gone bad. You know, like rancid bologna. Of course they weren’t prepared for this onslaught and well, I can see ...{I interrupted}.
SM: How many people did they arrest?
AK: Thousands.
SM: And when you left Andrea, did you pretty much have a clear idea that you would probably be arrested?
AK: Yeah, that was the idea. There were some disruptions we did almost like a street theater slowing down traffic going into D.C., stringing across the  roads coming in and slowing down traffic just to disrupt daily routines to shut down D.C. for a day. Then when we sat down in front of the Justice Department you knew you were going to be arrested and I can remember other times escaping arrest by just hoofing it out of somewhere. I remember one time going down an alley, being chased by police and going over a brick wall and I could not tell you to this day how I got over it. But there was a lot of tear gas and I knew I was getting out of there. Most of them were non-violent. The responses were not always. And we were marching, we had a permit, were marching down D.C., there were riot police lined up and tear gas and you could just see that there was this trigger happy tension.  It just seemed that it was very… adversarial but it was like the… our adversary was a big military industrial complex. So one of the best tactics was to try to engage somebody in a way that humanized them and humanized you since you had to interact. Like giving flowers to policeman or whatever. Eventually I was acquitted because they could only prove I was sitting. The church room was sitting and standing. Then the records were expunged later. Also a lot of people got damage money for being arrested illegally. People have the right to protest. It was pretty dramatic.
SM: How many of these marches did you attend while you were at Hollins?
AK: Well there were the three big ones in D.C. but there were marches in Roanoke and other places so… I don’t know. Several.
SM” I was at an age where I didn’t understand it. I was in grade school. I graduated from high school in ‘77. I’m sorry that I don’t know more about Vietnam era protests. I do however  remember Watergate. I watched it.  I was old enough then to start understanding.

AK: And the Chicago Eight, I think was a big motivator. I mean the democratic demonstration in 68 and Chicago became… there were some anti-war protest there and  the police just became incredibly violent and then they arrested eight people who became known as the Chicago Eight and they were also tied to the Black Panther movement, some of them. Bobby Seals and some of those freaks, Dillinger, who later became...
AK: Ram Das, The Jena Six.

SM: Things are getting repeated! Right now what is going on in Burma, with the Monks are protesting, peaceful protesting.  [Current news]
SM: Besides the Vietnam War protest were there any other activities...
AK: Registering black voters. Welfare rights. I worked for welfare rights one summer, which was about women on welfare being becoming more self determined and knowing their rights in the welfare system. Because Virginia had a "man in the house rule"  which of course broke up black families and poor families. Also women’s issues and environmentalism. There was a big issue at Hollins because Hollins had a history with the black community next to it that was very umm… plantation like in its mentality. Most of the staff was black and they had a day room, and we went in and painted the day room and worked on workers rights issues. Because it just wasn’t a consciousness that wasn’t there yet. There was still segregation and this was in ‘68  when Roanoke Virginia had massive resistance to integrating schools. Hollins wasn’t…. I mean their first version of integration was to get wealthy Trinidadian black students and when they first got some inner city black students they were just incredibly angry and it was like just being plunked down in this white affluent…fluffernauter kind of environment that so there was a lot of confrontation around issues that would come up. It was cultural clashes. The anti-war movement was also part of a whole larger, for me anyway, larger counter culture in terms of values based on more than accumulation wealth but based on people realizing their potential and all people having the same options to do that. And…a peaceable way of life as opposed to a corporate cut-throat way of life. And it was the beginning of the back to the land movement and then the folks that lived on the road a lot. And there was a greater safety to do that then because in the counter culture people automatically took each other in if you were traveling. You could hitch hike and get a ride and you could find a place to stay. There was a safety in that in that… in that sub-culture.
SM: It doesn’t exist today. You know there are still several women in the cafeteria that have been there for forty years. I think one of them retired last year.
A lot of the same staff members that were there when you went to school are still there.
AK: Well that whole community next to Hollins, over towards Carvin’s Cove, did not have water. It was called Oldfields.  I mean… as affluent as Hollins was the staff housing ... It wasn’t university owned  per say, it was so poor these people didn’t often have their own water. There was that much of a difference.
SM: I have to get a map and look for it. I have heard people talk about Carvin’s Cove but I’m not sure where it’s at. I think I saw it from the top of Tinker.
AK: Yeah, you would.
SM: So there is a  black community that lived near it.?
AK: It was called Oldfields community. And they had actually worked the fields for Hollins Institute and Hollins College. So a lot of them became staff at Hollins. It just really was… the end of that era and Hollins represented the white affluence Well I went to one reunion and one woman brought her nanny for her children. It was just another reminder of the rich are different than you and I.
SM: What year reunion was that?
AK: Oh, I don’t remember. Twenty, maybe.
SM: Some things change a lot and some never change.
AK: Right.
SM: What other activities were you involved in at Hollins besides like…the ones you mentioned so far?
AK: I was in Grapheon, Literary Society. Umm I was in student activities. Umm…We had a thing going [Laughs] this Saturday Morning Fun Club which was about films. I did some horseback riding. And let’s see…worked with some of the the register to vote campaign.

SM: You edited… you were the editor in chief of the… [Hollins Columns]
AK: Yeah, I was. For the second half of my junior year and senior year. Because of that role in the newspaper I was always at a lot of functions covering them or just keeping up with the general pace of university life. I played the flute so and took some music. Then it was the end of my flute playing.  I’m really, was not great. [Chuckles] But it was fun.
SM: Did that carry over from your childhood?
AK: Yeah.
SM: After Hollins and before you started at Virginia Tech on your Masters degree, it was four years in between. What did you do in those four years?
AK: Well, the first year I stayed here after graduation and moved with a friend, who was finishing Hollins, off campus and  I worked as a brick mason’s helper.
SM: Ha! [Amazed]
AK: That was a trip. I was the only woman on the crew and I was the only white person except for the fellow I had met waiting in the bus stop that had gotten me the job, who was a brick mason but was also a drunk, so he wasn’t there all the time. So we were a hit on the construction sites, let me tell you. But…uhh… [Enjoying remembering this]
SM: That was pretty radical for that time.
AK: Mm hum. And I worked as a plumber’s helper on big construction sites, apartment buildings and so on. There weren’t very many women there either. And I worked in a factory on an assembly line which I really hated. So I moved to loading trucks and that was kind of a fun thing, short lived, until I went to work at the welfare department. And at the beginning of my, starting my…what became a career orientated job, my father died. My very first day at Roanoke City. So I always kind of thought of it as he let go when I finally got settled in what would become a career.
SM: That’s… pretty amazing…
AK: Mm hum.
SM: And how did your family feel about the brick mason and plumbing jobs? Did they know and… if they did…
AK: Well,  we were kind of estranged and it was a way to make…you know, was just kind of scraping to make a living and then we [her and some friends] moved out to the country so it was more of a group living there. So it was really difficult because my father was   interested in what I was doing because he had some… you know he would admire it as being self-reliant and figure I would eventually settle into something. And I worked at the New Yorker [Deli] too. I was third chef at the New Yorker which meant that I slung Cole slaw. Two Hollins professors came in from the phys ed department and they were just appalled that a Hollins graduate was working there. Just appalled.  I was so tired every day; I mean it was like; all I could smell was coleslaw. I didn’t care. I just had to pay the rent. [I’m cracking up in the background] So, you know it was a definite struggle to get established. It was a definite struggle. And uhh…too, they weren’t thrilled with it. They would have preferred that I go back to Connecticut. But I was determined not to do that, I just...
SM: Did you ever go home in the summers?
AK: Went home my freshman year cause my sister got married in Ireland and I went to that wedding and I worked at the writer’s conference [her mother held a writers conference each summer] and…. After that I really didn’t. Just kind of stayed in Virginia and….
SM: And when you graduated you had definite ideas you wanted to stay here? Long term?
AK: I can remember having a conversation with my brother saying: “You know when you leave school you have to move out of the dorm. Where are you going?” I was like:  Oh yeah. [Sings it]  My parents came to my graduation. “Do you want to go home?” [Parent asked]   No. That was definitely not an option for me. And so I moved in with another student who was living off campus. And working and she had not finished with her classes and so she had to live on her own for a year first to finish with umm… and be able to get loans. Cause at the time you had to not be on your parents taxes to apply for student loans. And… certain categories apply for certain scholarships so... 
SM:  after the plumbing job and the New Yorker restaurant job your first, really, career type job was at the welfare department?
AK: Mm  hum. I did welfare eligibility. And then I did general services, social, social worker services. And we did, we worked, with all of the different programs so that we did child abuse and neglect, we did elderly, we did aid-dependant children. So we had different kinds of case loads. I had different sorts of cases. But it was mostly single moms and children.
SM: And was it while you were there at the welfare department that you started at VPI? 
AK: Yeah.
SM: And did they help you with you’re education? Financially…at all?
AK: Not at first. There was the beginning of the tuition assistance program but it was like three hundred dollars a semester or something and so we‘d  spend… three thousand for every three hundred you got or something  like that. It was loans. But they did help sometimes with giving us time to go to class if it was a job related class.
SM The positions and duties that you had at the City of Roanoke Social Services that that’s the same thing as the welfare department right?
AK: Right.
SM: You just told us what you did. And what made you to decide to pursue the job at the welfare department. Is this something you had a clear idea that you wanted to do?
AK: I had to pay my student loans! [Measured out the words and chuckles]
SM: So it was just a job? In the beginning…
AK: It well…Yeah, eventually I thought I would go to journalism school so it was a job that had the attraction of  providing some social good but it also had a steady salary and benefits and I needed to support myself and start paying off my student loans. And… then I liked it and there were a lot of other folks just starting out and so there was another group, community. I had done some work with welfare rights so I was familiar somewhat with that system.
SM: So the idea of getting a masters in journalism… sorta…
AK: Took a backseat. Yeah. Didn’t get there. Then when that program came up in Roanoke that Tec was offering, because it was a time when social work was beginning to professionalize more as a career so that meant higher degrees and so on. And so… that program appealed to me and several of us entered that program and it was in Roanoke and it was very accessible.
SM:  So you didn’t actually have to travel to VPI?
AK: Well  I did but some of the classes were in Roanoke. Some were at VPI. And when I went back for my doctoral work, yeah I did have to travel to VPI.
SM: So you ended up going to get your Ph.D at VPI as well, also in social work?
AK: No, they were both under the college of education which is now merged with a something else. But it was in counselor education and agency counseling. A program for people who were working in public agencies and the school systems. So, I did a Masters in Education and would have been EDD and I ended up doing a stint in advanced graduate studies. And then my concentrations were in sociology the first time and then in adolescent and family therapy the second time.
SM: Was working and going to school those three years difficult?
AK: Oh yeah
SM: If so, elaborate.
AK: It was difficult in terms of money. It was difficult in terms of time and just in terms of being so tired all the time. Because it takes a lot of time to go to graduate school. And we did two courses usually a semester.  And so you really didn’t have a lot of free time. So it really tightens that group because we were working together and studying together. So it became a tighter group of people in social services and other agencies that were doing their masters. But it really was restrictive in terms of what else you could add to your plate.
SM:. So they became your social network as well?
AK: Yeah.
SM: You were all in it together In 1977 when you were working on your masters for the city your position changed to manager of a group program?
AK: Mm huh.

SM: Tell us as much as possible about the 22 years that you had in that position.
AK: Hum.
SM: That’s a long time.
AK: Yeah it was. I left social services to work on a two year grant program through criminal justice to start a program; residential short term care for adolescents who were status offenders. What that meant was is that their offences that brought them before juvenile court were results of their status as juveniles: run away, truant, habits and practices. That was what it was called then and they wanted to, the state, wanted to separate those kids out from the kids who secure custody at secure detention. So it was a separating out of kids with family issues, a lot of abuse and neglect, a lot of kids who were being abused by males, girls in particular.  Kids who had ran away from home; either ran from or ran to something and getting them separated out from kids who were  in juvenile detention for crimes. It was the beginning of the hardening of the juvenile correction systems. At the end of that two years, that program  became a Roanoke City department. And I remember those politics and getting that into the city with the help of the folks in the state office and regional office. And being connected to a whole network of residential care facilities in the state. That was when I became a department manager. So I had been the youngest and one of the few women to be a manager of a group home. And then, I think I was the second or third woman as a department, third, as a department manager in Roanoke City. So I was twenty six, twenty seven, when all that happened and I was finishing my masters and living with Jim [A boyfriend at the time]. It was like, life was intense. That was a really big victory to get the city to take that on. And the city eventually built a building. That was why  I didn’t finish my doctorate. I came back to work and had took an educational leave. It was unusual for a manager to get that  [job] but I did and that was the time we were building a building and that was more important to me really. So I kept using what I was learning and I was really into making this a treatment facility which was a shift from warehousing kids. You know there is a whole system of foster care that provides care and some of it is specialized care. But I wanted this correctional funded facility to be community based.

 We also had parents sign their kids in so there was no custody change. And that was unusual so… there was a lot of groundbreaking in being able to make those shifts to saying: “they can come from home and return to home”. And then we later expanded to the run away and homeless youth program and we worked with our waiting list, because we had a waiting list for replacements and  had just twelve beds, for the most part. Sometimes we would fill some over-flow beds but. There were kids that couldn’t go home. And foster care has never had enough resources anywhere. And then we started what we called “FOG”: family oriented group home. These were families that took three or four children much like foster care but they were supposed to be more therapeutic. And then we would do supportive services with then. It was such a small system that we could work with more difficult cases. And then we did an outreach program which was the run away and homeless youth and we had an anger management program. Or, mostly rational behavior therapy. That kind of thing. Umm, So it was a great job. The politics of being a manger was not my favorite part and also when you do that kind of job you are tied to state. I had state, federal and local funding. Mostly state and local. And it was a  umm, two thirds state and one third local matching. We… I wrote grants and so that is how I got my grant writing skills to be able to offer other services and my goal was to establish a continuum of care. So that  you could stay in parental custody without having to be removed and enter the foster care system but be able to get supportive services to maintain those kids and those families. So I had a women’s group of women that had been abused and then their daughters often, sometimes not necessarily mother daughter. but sometimes children whose mothers were not abused but who were being in an abusive relationships or had been sexually abused by an adult. And those probably {was} my first love. I mean, that really is the group I miss working with the most. And we did parent education and family therapy and court reports. We had this continuing care where we could put a child on outreach where they were at home and we would check to make sure they were in school. And they didn’t have to be charged with a crime like detention outreach where  it’s a conditional release from juvenile intake but our outreach program was more of a counseling program. Then we had this short term residential and we had an after care program where kids could come back once a week for group {therapy}and parents could continue coming for family work or for parent group or women’s group. Then we had the family oriented group homes which could take kids on longer term placements but that only had eight beds so it was a very small program.
SM: So I am getting that this is really cutting edge stuff at the time.
AK: Yeah, Yeah.
SM: That you didn’t just lump all these kids which really had separate problems into one group…
AK: Mm hum.
SM: …of the worst. The ones who had…
AK: Oh they weren’t the worst. I mean they were the beginning of kids in the system and sometimes kids who had already been through the system and umm didn’t have a place to go and kept… you know… they were kids that were acting out and in family dynamics they were the ones… the symptom carriers of their families; they would be acting out and … so that their social systems, school, home, neighborhood whatever, weren’t able to tolerate the behavior and sometimes the goal of that behavior is to get attention to that entire family. To get help. And… so… they were the client to work with in that system because they were the ones that were drawing attention to the system. {dogs in park are running like crazy racehorses  and whipped around our table and drew her attention away.}  That’s what my two would be doing. They just like to run. They don’t get to run anywhere else I bet.
SM: Wow. That is a lot of energy running like that! {We watch the dogs for a while.}
AK: Dogs really need that exercise just like horses do.
SM: Yep.
AK: Four leggeds. But anyway, so yeah it was kind of cutting edge and it was very different to have a treatment focus. And you’re tied to social legislation and funding. And in state government you have a four year governor and he’s got, or she, has two years in the middle where they can really be moving their projects but then you never know if the funding is going to stay. Then you’ll  always have this population to deal with {families she deals with} and so I tried to carve out a niche where I knew the population was always going to be there and need services and provide unique enough service that the system wouldn’t replace it somewhere else. But there is always a cycle in dealing with a  juvenile delinquent or a juvenile acting out, disturbed population of…. Are they criminal, are they pushed to the mental health system? Well the mental health system at that time was not mandated to serve adolescents. Their mandate is to serve severely emotionally disturbed and mentally retarded, developmental delays and so on. So this group kind of fell through the cracks. Social Services hadn’t aided dependent children and foster care system based on imminent danger, based on neglect, and then there are all these other kids that are not making it and not sure why and trying to find out why. And get them to tell their story. And… I think that is why this project appealed to me because working with families you are looking for… the story. What have you tried? How did that work? Try something  that you haven’t. And try to find out who is playing what role in the family and where the power is, where the pain is, where the behavior that draws out the attention of the social systems to the family is. Usually it’s the person in the most pain that brings the system in. But you are working with more extreme problems. It is not the worried well. Most therapists have a case of the worried well. So it was just interesting to me on so many levels because I could learn about family therapy and family therapy dynamics and I insisted on doing it with  using the standards of the profession. We did clinical supervision. We taped and reviewed therapy sessions and all that was new to this public system. And the city kept saying “your standards are too high” {she sings songs it} and I thought: Why don’t…you want it good enough for government work, not with other peoples children. And it’s just very interesting cause that cycles into do we criminalize these kids, do we put them in mental health, do we over burden social services? What about kids who can’t make it in the school system? And as the detention hardened to him, kid jails so to speak, they were less able to absorb kids who needed services and the state went to a child in need of service, child who needed supervision kind of standing. We tried to work with kids in that group who were not before the court on felony charges, who were pretty much non-violent and not currently addicted although certainly all those lines got blurred. A lot of alcoholic family children, a lot of abuse and neglect, sexual assault…(she pauses to reflect).
SM:  So that was a very big chunk of your life.
AK: Yes it was.
SM: Yes. And you left your position as manager to do research for a couple of years. Tell us about that research.
AKIt was really more of a city reorganizing department managers and political shenanigans. It was a blurb... about my boss using money for the public libraries that I had in federal grants {for her program in social services}. And because there was a gap in the city manager position there wasn’t a clear direction and the fellow that was in office was a little afraid to act.  It’s kind of what happens with government whistle blowers; you just get isolated. I was supposed to be …the reorganization which I helped write would put me in a job that I would do clinical supervision but the system was really too paranoid to allow me do that. And I just stayed a couple more years and got my retirement and moved on. That… that was pretty traumatic, it was…uhh, to say the least. But it was something that  I’ve…I have had to spend several years thinking about and reflecting on to be able to just put it that simply. And I was a gadfly. I was, you know, the cutting edge that was the critical voice and when the system was wobbly it kind of closes in on itself. Systems go back to homeostasis for balance, they stay the same. Bureaucracies are designed to handle volume and sameness. And to keep things stable. They are not agents of change at all. And their… to maintain the status quo that’s how we run. That’s what a bureaucracy is. High volume and high volume doesn’t include a lot of diversifications. And people were jockeying for position. And…so it mainly… so I look at it now, looking at life narrative, and I think, oh classic!  Runs away from home and starts a center for runaways and says, you know, there is something rotten in this system; it’s the same thing as being the family actor-outer.  I can look at the full cycle patterns in my life and integrate all that. but it took a while to get detached from it and… and it really uhh…there wasn’t a place to really put my energy, so I choose not to stay. Plus I had been there …at that time I had been there about thirty years and I wasn’t going get any more retirement if I stayed.

 And I really wasn’t able to do anything. I did …you know, wrote programs and I did  kind of a casual clinical supervision but it was a real unhealthy environment. Very unhealthy environment. It was very chaotic and  fear motivated and people were trying to curry favor with  all kinds of maneuvers and it was just a dysfunctional system and it probably has reformed in a new way. But I also…I mean I had to dig deep to process this one so… I had to look at the life cycle of bureaucracies and companies and corporations and they have life cycles. And…eventually they, you know, their not… lively, their not energetic, their not creative. They’re not moving forward in terms of allowing people to get job satisfaction from using their creativity. People get stuck in protecting interests that actually if you take a step back you would be willing to give up. So I choose to play the card to make the move to that job. it was my best option at the time, even though it wasn’t a good option. And then there just wasn’t the energy with the new manager who came in to put into that function of city government and what’s interesting to me now is that I realize that the program that I developed is the one that’s left standing. So I feel good about that. And I created this city intuition and it’s still there. Even five years after I left. It’s still therapeutic, it’s still open. And some of the other parts of the system now I’ve seen have been shut down. And that’s also because at the state level there was a lot of division of funds among what I call the big four: education, mental health, social service and corrections. And they had pooled their money for special placements and corrections had split off their youth care system to a small, and as it turns out, vulnerable department, and they went after our money and got it. And… I think the shift will come back around, cause it always does, to saying, you know, as we have more school violence, as we have more middle class kids in treatment, as we have more visible populations that are swept up in dysfunction, and we have schools that are not getting certified, we have a greater need for public library resources and kids … we have…  You know Roanoke has shifted they have an adolescent homeless population that they try to keep invisible but it’s there. It’s definitely there and they keep shifting their places where they can be around.

SM: Isn’t that one reason they support the Rescue Mission?
AK. Sure.
SM: All the business downtown.
AK: Mm hum. 
SM: Cause they don’t want to deal with it.[Interesting that we had this conversation prior to the November '07 Roanoke Times article in which council member Bev Fitzpatrick was quoted as saying "Roanokers are just too dag-gone nice to the homeless". A controversy has since brewed over the council and Mayor's remarks about the Roanoke Rescue Mission).
AK: Yeah. Right. And a lot of those folks are in the public library downtown. The main library and that’s where they moved my office to. So it was an interesting thing to watch because the libraries were pretty hostile to the homeless and the homeless had no place to go during the day. And a lot of them were de-institutionalized schizophrenics. So it’s like you have seen it happen in mental health: de-institutionalized schizophrenics and you have homeless population. You see schools saying we are going to have ten day rules;  if you miss more than ten days unexcused absence you’re off the roles therefore you are not a drop out. So we have a lot of kids that dropped out but they are not counted as drop outs. We have less special ed money, we have less special ed accommodation for students with learning [disabilities], we have special needs populations where parents can not afford thorough their insurance to get the needs for autistic kids or severely physically, mentally challenged children and so those children come into foster care. And schools have to provide them with an education. That’s extremely costly. And some parents are forced to say “I’ll give up custody” to get their kid in the system to get services. And all those problems are cyclical and how we respond to them and they seemed to get pushed from one of these big institutions to the other. And what I have noticed in some of the juvenile justice literature now is that victims rights issues are being raised about accessibility to care and services and questions like: were these kids really criminal or did they just in need of services? And resources like  insurance companies that aren’t wanting to pay. I think we’ll come back to providing more community based care. The other move was privatization of services. Privatizing jails, privatizing mental health services. And in my opinion it doesn’t work as well. We have these scandals like Red Onion Prison and so on. In the public sector there is a certain… [noise from a two way radio or something blacked out a part of this passage and the machine made a noise also that interrupted us and I checked to see if it was still running. Big brother perhaps checking in? Who knows?]
SM: I don’t have a… clue what that was about but keep going.
AK: I don’t either. In the public sector there is a certain sense of duty and a sense of it’s our mission to serve and protect whatever. In the private sector they’re run for profit and profit is based in a whole different system of thought. I
SM: Right. It’s about the bottom-lin, not about helping…
AK: Yeah. It’s not about therapy, it’s not about community safety, it’s not about social change, it’s about money. And people are less experienced, training levels are lower sometimes, salaries are lower. And I am not sure that it is cheaper to do it just comes out of a different pot.
SM: Right.
AK: So the privatization move of government to get the private sector to bear more of the cost because that’s where the money is; money is in the corporations. And… that contributed to the demise of a lot of the children’s services and it’ll, it’ll come back up again in a new form. It’s beginning to.  There are too many kids that are not functional.
SM: And the crime rate is rising.
AK: Mm hum. There was a whole scare about  violent predatory adolescence and it really was more hype than reality. The juvenile crime numbers also depend on how you categorize the code sections. You know it’s a status offence, status as a juvenile, to be a run away or to be out after a certain time or to have habits and practices injurious to your health. And then we moved into separating those kids out. And then the volume that that involves of kids needing to be before the court and they can only be before the court or juvenile intake so many times before then they have to take a court based action. So the diversion from juvenile court was one of the issues at the time I left that they decided that they would fund our programs that were community based care if the kids all went through the court system. Well that meant that there was only one or two times that a child could be diverted from being before the court. And that meant a whole other staff had to come into to play and another agency and [on] off hours to get these kids to us. Because we had to get them before juvenile court on some sort of petition or before the juvenile intake officer, even without a petition, to accept them which took away the ability for parents to sign their kids in. And it immediately brought kids into the system that might not have had to be there. So … and I look at it from the social change perspective, and having done it for thirty years, I know that as a society we go through patterns that we repeat of passing burdens around. It’s like, my own spiritual beliefs have become, because I think I sought so much refuge in the outdoors from home and church and so on that and abuse , that umm I got into, I got  interested in Native Americans traditions. And, you know, Native Americans have a lot of very interesting beliefs that were based in community. And they have a burden basket that they left outside their door and when you came to visit your friend you put your burdens in that basket; symbolically, metaphorically whatever, or literally. And you didn’t bring them to your friends, you know, you just left them outside the door. And it’s as if sometimes we look at this population of uhh families that can’t maintain or children that are in need of care or service or supervision as, you know, a burden that gets passed around. Like do to we criminalize them for this ten year period because we’re are angry about juvenile crime so they all become, you know, corrections kids or do we decide there all they are disturbed and so they become mental health cases but we also don’t fund all these mandates. And social services has long been over burdened and they never have enough money for foster care and it doesn’t pay enough for people to do it. And too, you have these saints out there in the community that will take these kids in and you also have people who take enough [numbers of kids] in to make it profitable and maybe you don’t give enough supervision. Like in every profession there are, you know, people who do it or maybe someone who becomes involved in doing it because it’s a child they know. But it’s an interesting perspective on how we view children and who’s responsible for raising them. It takes a village and umm some villages are more willing to be involved. And just look around your neighborhood and it’s like, who is allowed to correct a child and is it only the parents or is it the elders? Umm, is it everybody’s responsibility to make sure that if a car comes down the street every adult looks up to make sure the kids aren’t in the road or is it just the parents or the older children and younger children? And I mean that’s an over simplification but…
SM: I think it’s actually the root of the problem.
AK: Umm hum.
SM: You know its part of that me mentality.
AK: Mm hum.
SM: My generation..
AK: Mm hum.
SM: Just worrying about yourself and not thinking bigger.
AK: When you look at the times, it’s interesting to me to then place it in time, and you have World War Two and the Depression so people squirreled things away and they said education and immigration, after World War Two, education is your way out. You know, having enough in case there is there are shortages, storing canned food in the basement kind of thing, scarcity. And then you have  post World War Two generation with a …we all… they shipped us off to college. You know it was really important to get your kid an education. And in my family it was that immigrant value of come to this country and do better. And even though I was in Connecticut, a pretty affluent state, and in a middle class family, upper middle class family, very  education oriented as you can tell… worth by achievement. Then you have that group of kids raising the “me” generation of, you know, it’s all about getting something for yourself. And then the next generation all raised in groups. They’re all in activities all the time.  And they seem to be the reviving of a social conscience.
SM: And that’s the present… the current generation?
AK Yeah. They’ve been raised kind of like in packs.
SM: In groups?

AK: Yeah. They’re in one lesson after another. And part of it is the need for…like we started education because we had kids in the street and child labor laws came in. Well, we developed schools and it’s really so they were somewhere during the day and parents could work. And now kids are in daycare and parents… very few people can get the schedule they need and provide child care. We have stay-at- home dads which is still considered somewhat unusual even though I don’t think it is. And you know it’s just a different… you can look in lots of areas… it’s the sociologist in me. I can’t help it. I keep trying to find all those pieces to put together.
SM:  I think having that background in sociology forces you to look at the bigger picture  instead of the tunnel vision: this is the problem and trying to piecemeal a  fix to it. Being in sociology you look at a broader spectrum of what is causing the problems. It’s like putting a band aid on a huge wound.
AK:  When you look at patterns of behavior by groups it’s like we look at our group as socioeconomic class and race and religion and then you look at the conflicts we’re in now in the [Middle] East and we have no sense of tribe. We’re so far removed from that. Where it’s a religious, cultural, land or crop based tribe. You know, the Bedouins have the tradition of migrating. We’re so focused on this globalism in terms of economic, which is really corporate economic, mega corporate structures and a kind of [in] saneness that pervades that.  Then you get into sweat shop things and child labor someplace else.
SM: Right.
AK: It’s not in your backyard.
SM: You export your problem. OK let’s take a break.
AK: Whew… God…
 
 

-

-`    ---2-

...