Origins
Family & the Neighborhood
Debra: I was born the only child of Donovan John and Eleanor Shine Abbott. I've been able to trace my dad’s family as far back as into the 1700s. I believe the Abbotts were there earlier in upstate New York from England and I remember him saying that he thought some of our family was also Dutch. But my great, great grandfather on my father’s side was a farmer. My great, great grandmother was a Native American. The Abbotts primarily lived and are buried in a place called Fort Plane, New York which is west of Albany. My mom’s family immigrated here from France in the early 1800s and were homesteaders. Ended up in Iowa and moved on to California. My parents got married late in life, or what was considered late in life. I think I was born when my mom was 36 and my dad was forty.
I spent my childhood in New York. We moved to Long Island when I was a little one and lived in several different towns there until I graduated from high school in 1970.
The neighborhood I grew up in was definitely middle and working class, and
predominately white, but not Anglo-Saxon. It was very diverse by way of
many, many Italian families, Jewish families, Irish families who were mostly
Catholic and Jewish. We were the only Protestant family. I didn’t even meet
another Protestant in my town until about the fifth grade. So
I celebrated a lot of
Jewish holidays and ate lots of wonderful, ethnic food, given my friends’
families and mothers who were great, great cooks.
Activism & Childhood
Debra: I would say as far as my political growth, I can remember putting Kennedy bumper stickers on my bicycle wheels. And I had to look hard for them because they weren’t to be found in my neighborhood! So I had to go around and look for them, and that did not sit well with my family, but that was kinda the early part of my awakening. I guess the other part of my awakening for wanting to serve others was when I tried to join the Peace Corps in the fifth grade.
Danielle: Whoa...
Debra:
I wrote a letter to the,
then, Sergeant Shriver, who was the first administrator of the Peace Corps. It
said, you know, that I was pretty much ready to go, and I got this letter
back from him on official United States government stationery. My parents
wondered, kinda, what in the world. He thanked me profusely for wanting
to serve the United States in capacity of being a Peace Corps volunteer, but um,
wanted me to kinda finish school and ya know, "Go get your high school diploma
and then come talk to us. And we’ll be ready at that point to deal."
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