"
My full name
is Margaret Cameron McDonald Vowell. I was
born in Shanghai, China. My dad was flying
for the Nationalists Chinese. He was what
you might call a soldier of fortune, but he
was flying on the right side in
China. And my mother-- he was thirteen years
older than my mother. And my mother was in
Birmingham. They were from very close to
each other but did not know each other. She
was looking for a husband after she
graduated from college and worked in several
places in Birmingham and found that there
were none to be had!
"So she
joined the Red Cross and went to India:
where she was introduced to my father, and
they married in India, and I was born in
China. About nine months after I was born
the communists took over Shanghai and
essentially took over the country, so they
went first to Miami and lived there for
awhile. My dad became a pilot with
Pan-American. He had been flying with China
National Air Corps, which was a spin off the
Flying Tigers. He then joined Panam and flew
in Miami, and then we moved to Brazil where
he flew for Panam.
"My mother
got polio in Brazil, so he came down from
the sky. He had to
quit flying, ‘cause it was a high-risk
occupation, and he couldn’t leave her.
They
moved back to Birmingham. We lived in
Savannah for a period, and she went through
extensive therapy and got her ability to
move back. She was a golfer, and she was
stricken on a golf course, fell down on the
18th green. Golf is really what put her back
on her feet. That was her therapy.
"That
changed their lives quite a bit; it also
meant that while she was real sick that we
had a nanny. She was a mean German
woman named Martha. And she didn’t like us,
and we didn’t like her. And Mother didn’t
like her, but they had to get along because
Mother literally could not stand up.
"I grew up
in Birmingham. I moved there in the second
grade. I lived in the affluent part of
Birmingham, the Mountain Brook, Alabama and
went to public schools until about the fifth
grade and went to Brookhill School for girls
for about five years. Then my mother decided
I'd needed to meet boys, so I went to
Shade's Valley high school, and then I came
to Hollins.
"I'd been
to public high school I'd been there and
done that and didn't need to be in a coed
environment anymore. The comparison I think
made Hollins more attractive. And I think if
I hadn't gone to the public high school I
probably couldn't have forced my way into
Hollins, but it sure did make Hollins look
good.
"We did a
tour. My mother took me on a tour. Hollins
was about the size of my graduating class at
Shade's Valley. In fact, I think my class
was larger than Hollins, and it seemed just
absolutely perfect. I picked Hollins because
a girl from Birmingham was living in Main,
and I went to visit her, and she had made a
frame for her door out of Marlboro packs.
And she put these little footprints across
the ceiling of her room, you know how you do
with your hands and your fingers. I thought
that was the neatest thing I had ever seen.
And that made my decision right there to go
to Hollins!"
(For the actual, whole
self-narrative, please consult the
transcriptions of the interviews!)