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My name is Dolores Marie. Everyone calls me “Dorie.” I guess that it started back in grade school. You know how children give names? My mother did not intend for me to use the name “Dolores.” I was called “Marie” up until the time I started school, and I was named after two aunts of hers. So we used “Marie,” and I never liked “Dolores.” But when you go to school back when I went, it didn’t matter if you told the teacher or not what your name was. They called you by whatever was first on your sheet. I guess just shorten the “Dolores” for “Dorie.” That is how I got my name.

I was raised on a small farm. My dad was in military service and my mother worked, which was common back then. Then he went off to war, and my aunt and my mother went to live with my grandparents. I have a younger sister, eight years younger than me. And some of my aunts were still living at home that were younger than my mother and still in school. There were six children in my mother’s family. So I was almost like a little sister to a couple of the aunts. I was almost like a little sister, more than a niece. I had a very happy childhood. I was a little spoiled, I think, being the oldest grandchild and being so close to my aunts. I was the one they loved, that they were really close to. I still have one aunt that is still alive, but her memory is not so good. She still looks at me. But when she sees me she still sees me as a child. She doesn’t realize that I have children and grandchildren. It is hard to accept sometimes. Her memory comes and goes, you know, with the now and the back then now.

My grandfather on my mother’s side was half Indian and half French. My grandmother was Dutch. My Grandfather’s mother was Indian and her husband was French. So they tried living down in New Orleans in the Louisiana area, somewhere down in there. Of course that wasn’t accepted, and I am not really sure how they met. They must have met somewhere down in North Carolina, of course that was not really accepted back then, that being a mixed marriage. He was a blacksmith. I think my grandfather was born in 1890. Then they came back to Virginia. He was originally from Floyd County. So they came back to Floyd County, and then they later moved to Salem after they started their family. They weren’t really accepted there either because people were really, really intolerant. But they were more accepted there than down in Louisiana.

That really wasn’t hard for me. I can just remember my grandfather talking about being called half-breed; you know how the children were. He had two sisters and I think three or four brothers. As I said before, he was very strong. He grew up fighting so much because he had to back then. I guess you learn, you know? I guess he would go to school, and when he was called half-breed, he would fight. His brothers were the same way, but he was the strongest of all of them. That is the way things were handled. They went to a one-room school with all ages. Their father was a farmer. My grandfather was among the youngest, and the older boys were needed on the farm. Back then you would not go on to school for very long if you were needed on the farm. He grew up on a big farm in Floyd, so they needed the boys and the girls too to help on the farm. They used to fight. When he was older, when the circus used to come through, I remember hearing this when I was little, the circuses or fairs or whatever would come through and they would have their boxer fight the locals. If you could beat their boxer, then you could win five dollars, which back then was a lot of money. That would be 1915, 1916 something like that. That was a whole lot of money, and he would almost always win [laughs] because he would fight when he was growing up. He was known as a very strong man, and I think being a blacksmith helped. He actually shoed horses on up until probably in the early sixties, not a whole lot. He had a shop in Salem. That was when my mother was little in Salem. So they had a shop up there with some equipment at the house, and they had a small farm.

I was very close to him. I was very close to both of my grandparents. I called them “Mama” and “Papa.” I guess because my aunts did and my mother did. My grandmother died when she was fifty-three years old of colon cancer, and he died when he was seventy-seven. So he lived while longer than she did. But that was the way he would have wanted it. He said he never wanted to die in the hospital. I can remember him farming, and even at seventy-seven he worked to plow for the neighboring people that had little gardens. He would take his horses and, he had two horses, and they would let him do it instead of letting the tractor do it. He would complain, “Oh I can’t do much” he would say.

Sometimes I would walk along while he worked, and he would tell me some stories. Sometimes when he would be out in the fields plowing. He raised alfalfa and hay and worked the bales of that hay. When my grandmother was alive and I was a girl, I remember that I had a little bucket, and I would bring him a drink with that little bucket with some ice water in it or whatever. I would sit with him while he would rest, and then I would go on back to the house. So I had a very happy, very secluded childhood.

Most of the children on the neighboring farm were older than me. There were not many people around to play with. So I had to make my own little fun then. I had a wagon, and there was one little girl who lived about two miles down the road and sometimes her mother would come up and visit with my grandmother and bring her. I know this sounds really silly, so excuse me, but there was a little black hill, and it had little crevices with moss and stuff, and we would pretend like we had little rooms. We would walk around like we had living rooms and a dining room, and we would pretend that we had a little baby. You know my children cannot understand, as I am sure that you cannot understand either, that we were poor but everybody else was too. So we didn’t really realize that we didn’t have a whole lot of things. So I had a good childhood. I played hopscotch, and we played in the barns or in the hay rows. We helped on the farm. We fed the little chickens. You know my grandfather always had little chickens. We had two dogs that we would play with. I grew up around the barnyard where there were cats.

My little friend, her name was Grace, and sometimes I would go visit her. People didn’t visit a whole lot because there was so much to do. You know my grandmother didn’t have a vacuum cleaner; she was forty-five years old before she even had a vacuum cleaner. So you had to sweep every day and mop. There wasn’t a whole lot of time for visiting. They had to get their work done, and they worked all the time.

There was a black family that lived up the railroad tracks, not where the road ended but beyond that. But if you walked up the railroad tracks, that was the only way for you to get up there, there was a black family that lived up there. And they had a little girl my age. Whenever my grandfather would go down to Salem. He still had the blacksmith shop and whenever he would go over there, then my grandmother and I would walk up to the black family to visit them. She would take sometimes vegetables from the garden and she would take milk. She would always say, “Don’t tell Pop that we went” because he didn’t want us up there. At that time he was very racist, he was very racist. I guess there was this family up the railroad tracks, and I cannot understand this. This is silly with my grandfather growing up like he did being called half-breed. He could have been more tolerant I think. So it was kind of our little secret. But we went up, and I enjoyed playing with her because I didn’t know any different. I would see her skin, and I wouldn’t see her as any different. I didn’t know that he saw her as any different. I knew that he didn’t like it very much, and I just assumed that he didn’t want me playing on the railroad tracks. I assumed that that was the reason. Because he always used to say “I don’t want you playing on the railroad tracks.” So I thought that was the reason, and I did not realize that he was racist until I was probably in my late teens. He would always talk about the family that lived up there. He would make certain remarks about the family that lived up there. They actually later moved. I am not sure if they owned it or if somebody was letting them live there or what. So I didn’t know that it was the fact that they were black and that was the only thing.

As a result when I grew up, my mother saw to it that my sister and I were not racist. And in turn I saw to it that my children were not. My daughter, when she was in the first grade, that was the first year that they had integration here in Roanoke. I worked, I started work when she was two and a half, and I quit when she was five or so for a year. There were no black students when she went to nursery school. So when she started school, there were three or four little black kids in her class. She would play with them. They were almost a novelty to her. She immediately gravitated to the black children. I guess because the rest of them did not treat them real nice. Both of my children, I was determined that they would grow up not racist because they had to live in this society. That is what my mother said, that she knew that in 1965 when they were beginning integration. She knew that we were going to be in this society, and she didn’t want us to be racist either.

You know she grew up hearing stories too. People would tease my mother and her sisters and brother because people found out he was very much Indian. You could tell he had a lot of Indian features back then when everybody knew everybody and they knew say that he was of mixed heritage. Of course my uncle was a handsome man and my grandfather was a handsome man. They were a good mix. The French and Indian genes were good together. And of course my grandmother and my great-grandmother were very beautiful women. They were very handsome in the pictures. They died before I was born. Of course today there would be no problem with mixed marriages in today’s society, but still in some of the smaller communities there might be.

I decided to raise my children to be accepting of all people when I heard how mistreated my grandfather and his family was. There was a little black girl that I played with. Her name was Grace. We had a lot of fun together. Like I said, to me there was no color. At times I would tell my grandmother, and of course I was young then and I hated to take baths. I would tell my grandmother, “I wish my skin was like Grace’s then I wouldn’t have to take a bath.” Silly me, you know. I just didn’t want to have to wash all the time. [Laughs]. But that is just the innocence of the time. I just didn’t want to have a bath.

***

I have a husband. We have been married forty-two years. He is wonderful. [Smiles]. He is a wonderful husband, very good to me, very understanding. He has been a wonderful father, a good influence on our children. He is a Christian man, and we have a very good, solid marriage. We never have enough time to spend together it seems like no matter what, you know? We never have enough time. I feel like I am very blessed.

We met at college. He had had a scholarship to play football at another university, but he got hurt and lost the scholarship so he couldn’t stay there. He came to the college that I was at for a business degree. I was going for a medical technology degree. That is what I wanted to do, and we were friends. I was supposed to have gone to clerical school down in Florida, but I decided that I couldn’t go away from home. I had wanted to go away from home because my parents were so very strict with who I dated. I had my bags all packed up, and three days before I thought “I can’t go 1,000 miles away.” My stepfather said, “You are going to college somewhere. You are not just going to hang out.” So I went to a college nearby, and I met my husband there.

We met there and had class together. We were seated near each other, and we were friends. And then I broke up with the guy I was going with, and we dated. This doesn’t sound real good. We dated from, our first date was February second 1960 and we got married June sixteen of 1960. I was 21, and he was 23. My mother was like “No.” She said “No.” My parents weren’t real happy with the short notice. But we saw each other every day. I think that made up for like, you all date now where you see each other every weekend, where we saw each other everyday. So that made for a good combination. I knew within a week or so that I wanted to marry him. Well we had been friends before. He had a wonderful personality, and everyone liked him. He was such a good, good person and cute too.

During our breaks between classes, we had a little area where we would sit and have snacks, sort of like this [motions to Rathskellar student lounge area]. And he was always was so nice, everybody liked him. He always had a smile on his face, and he was really cute too. He was so kind to everybody, and that was the thing. We go back to his high school reunions in Charleston, West Virginia. And we go back to his high school reunions every five years, and of course he was an excellent football player and everything. All of the girls remember him as being the jock type, but they all say that he was one of the nicest people that they knew. He never was conceited or anything. He was always friendly and kind to everybody. That is what they all say. He was always nice to everybody. Some of the football players thought they were real special. But he was a very gentle, very humble person. That is what they all say. That makes me feel good because some people haven’t been to all the reunions, and they will come back after thirty-five or forty years and say, “You are so lucky because he was such a kind person.”

At the time that we met, he was dating another girl, but he wasn’t engaged. He had dated this girl for about a year and a half to two years. I was engaged to another boy. That kind of took care of it self. The man that I was engaged to was twenty-one, and I was eighteen. He was not a Christian, and my mother did not approve of him at all and the fact that he drank. That was the reason that my mother and father got a divorce was the fact that my father drank. I think they partied a lot before I was born, and he was very abusive. She told me that that was why they were divorced. The guy that I was engaged to was in the Marines. After he would take me home, he would go out and get drunk. He never drank with me because I didn’t drink. I knew he did that, but I thought that that was okay as long as he wasn’t doing that with me. My mother told me that that wouldn’t work because she thought his best behavior would be now. She said “He is good with you now, but when you are married he won’t have to try to please you.” She said “Believe me. It is a horrible life to be married to someone who drinks and who is abusive.” She connected that with being abusive. She didn’t mean that everyone who drinks is abusive, but my real father was. My grandfather he wasn’t abusive. So he was the first abusive person that she was involved with that she experienced it with. She was afraid for me to date someone who drank. My girlfriends were also afraid of him. I had heard that when I was gone that he would go out and get into fights and things, but he would always deny it. He would deny it, so he was lying to me. He was not even married, and he was already lying to me. So I told this boy that I had met this guy at school, and he had known about it, I had talked about it before. I told him that I had met this nice guy in school. My husband he does not drink. He has never ever had a drink in his life. My husband and I would sit near each other in class and that we would talk. I thought he seemed like a nice person. His mother died when he was thirteen, and he had a stepmother that was horrible. So I felt real fortunate that my stepfather was nice. So, I broke up with the boy that I was engaged to. I realized what a horrible life I was going to have. I heard that he has been married four times. But he was very, very handsome, and in those times I guess that was the thing. He was very charming. But he has been married four times, and I heard he was working on his fifth marriage right now again. He is 65 years old. [Laughs].

I have one sister. She is eight years younger than me. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin. I was very jealous when she came along because I was the center of attention before she came along. I was very jealous because she took away from my time. As we grew up we were very close even though we were far away, we were very close even with the age difference. We used to fight a lot because she would get in my way, she would get in my space and interfere with my friends, especially since I was in my teenage years. She was seven, and I was fifteen. I didn’t want to be bothered by her. She would listen in when somebody would be talking to me on the phone, and she got in my stuff. You know, she was just in my way. So it was a constant little thing there.

So when my daughter was born, and then eight years later my son was born, my mother said to me “Now you’re going to see what I had to put up with all these years.” I am glad my daughter was the oldest and not my son. My son worshiped her, still does. I tried really hard to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to my son as to my little sister. So when Richard was born I got her a doll, a little boy doll with a carrier and everything. So that when I would feed him, she wouldn’t feel left out. [Laughs].

I have a daughter who turned forty on September first, and she is a surgical nurse. She is married to an orthopedic surgeon that she met while she was in nursing school. And they have two children. Brandon is, he was sixteen in October, and Anne was be thirteen in January. And of course they are beautiful and handsome, and all of that good stuff. [Laughs]. My grandson is an avid tennis player, very good at it. He has won several state championships. He is hoping for a scholarship. That is his goal. I wish they were here because I don’t get to see them very much.

I have a wonderful son-in-law who is an excellent and very caring, a very dear person. When Catherine, my daughter, first went to nursing school, she was dating a guy at the college that she went to that I had known for a long time. And it really bothered me, when she broke up with him. It really bothered me more than it did her. We, me and his mother, we were like good friends. I really didn’t want her involved in the intern/resident atmosphere over there because she was very young. She started nursing school at seventeen. I think the interns sort of take advantage of the nursing students. They do because they are the little nurses, and the interns are the real cool guys. I was very happy with the fellow she was dating, but they kind of grew apart.

When she dated several of the interns, I didn’t like that at all. I let her know that because we have several doctors that go to our church and their families. Most of the doctors at our church did not have much of a home life, and I didn’t want that for her. Of course there are eight years difference between she and my son, and she being the only child for so long, she, we spoiled her. [Laughs]. You know that is what they are for. And she was used to a lot of attention and everything, and I really didn’t want a life for her like I had seen some of the doctor’s lives at our church. The wives raised their families by themselves. That was really the only thing I had against Michael when I met him was because he was a doctor. He was the middle son, but he was the mother’s favorite. When we were making plans for the wedding she said, “I hope Laurie is not marrying Michael because he is a doctor.” You know, just kind of with that attitude. I said, “Well, to be perfectly honest with you, that is the only thing I do not like about Michael.” I told her that I wished he was something else because I want her to have a life.

When he came and asked if he could marry her, he promised me that she would always come first in his life. If he had become a surgeon, and of course he is on-call a lot, but he said, if he ever got to a point when the profession interferes with my family life, he said, “I will do emergency room duty.” He said, “I will do that, but I promise you I will not let my profession come before Catherine.” And he hasn’t, he hasn’t. They’ll be married twenty years this June. So Catherine was almost, almost twenty-two when they got married, and he was twenty-eight because he had already gone through medical school and he was finishing up his residency. Then he took a fellowship and did more specialty training in microscopic surgery.

Catherine is my only daughter. I also have a son. He is thirty-three, Richard. He works for a bank. He has been with them since 1994. And he is also married. They’ll be married seven years in April, which is hard to believe. We have a wonderful daughter-in-law. We have a wonderful relationship. If I had chosen either one of them, either son-in-law and daughter-in-law, I wouldn’t have chosen anyone else. They are both very happily married. Richard and his wife have no children; they have two cats.

I think this interview has made me think a lot about my children, how different I raised them. I had a boy and a girl. I had a different, and I have admitted this, I had a different kind of values and reasons for raising each one. For the girl I was very protective. She had to be home early, I raised her like I was raised back then. She would get real upset and say, “Mom, I have to be home earlier than anybody else. And I said, “Well, I did too.” And she had a boyfriend that went on vacation one year with us, and when they were on the beach, and I know this was probably sexist or whatever, and when we were on the beach with Catherine and her boyfriend back then, they would say “Well, we are going to go back up to the room to get a snack.” And I would say, “Oh, well, I will go along.” [Laughs]. You know, I had to keep them within eyesight. I was very protective with my daughter.

There was one year when my son was dating, and his girlfriend would come to the beach with us, it was like if they were going to get a snack, “Bye, see you later.” [Laughs]. And I admit it. I had a different set of values for him than for Catherine. He could stay out later, and with Catherine, she had to be in at eleven or eleven thirty. With Catherine, I wouldn’t let her date until she was a sophomore in high school, and of course with him, he was a guy, and I said “If you are going to be out past one, call and let me know when you’ll be back so I know that you are not out somewhere stranded on the side of the road.” I think that I had a very different set of values, like I said, with my daughter, I wish I had worked here. I wish I would I have started here when she was about 12 or 13 so that I could have related to her more in her moods, and like I said, I see these girls in all sorts of situations, and they really confide in me for some reason. I guess that I am a mother or a grandmother figure. And they confide in me. And I think, I wonder if Catherine was thinking that too when she was in college. I would have been less strict with her. Because I was always worried about what people would think if they saw her come in late, or what the neighbors were thinking. And now, I wouldn’t care what the neighbors were thinking as long as she was safe and as long as she was morally strong. I think I would have trusted her more, and with the beach thing, I think I would have said “No, that is okay” instead of treating her like a criminal or thinking that she was going to do something bad. When I talk with women my age, they say that they have done the same thing with their daughters, and more lenient with their sons so… I have learned a lot from the girls here, the ones that are here now and the ones that have been here in the past. I have made some good friends with them.

***

We are a Christian family. Both of my children are, and both of my children married Christian. That makes me very happy. We are Baptist. I was raised in the Brethren church up until I was about fourteen. In our faith and in the Brethren faith there is not that much difference. They both are very similar. Both faiths believe that to be saved, to go to heaven, you have to accept Jesus as God’s only son a part of the trinity, in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Lord and Savior of your life, and that is the only way. We feel that is the only way to heaven.

Both faiths believe that the only difference is in the baptism. The Brethren church baptizes in water with full immersion. You get on your knees in the baptismal pool and it is three times forward “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” When you are baptized in the Baptist church, we get in the baptismal pool and they take you one time backwards “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” They also do what you call the Last Supper, the Lord’s Feast. The Brethren Church does the feet washing ceremony. In the Bible they talk about the Mary and Martha washing Jesus’ feet because it was a custom for everybody. And the woman would dry Jesus’ feet with her hair. Of course now there are all women on one side and all men on the other. It is just a symbol of humbleness and serving your fellow man. The Baptist church does not do that.

For communion, we use the unleavened little crackers. In our church and in the Brethren church, I know in some churches they do, we do not use real wine. We use the grape juice as a symbol of the red wine. My daughter and her husband in North Carolina go to a Methodist church and it is basically the same with a few differences. There they do baptism with by sprinkling water on your head.

My faith has always been a part of my life. My dad was in service and was gone a lot, about all the time. He was at Pearl Harbor, and was hurt at Pearl Harbor, lost a lung. Sometime during that period, I think I was about in the fourth grade, my parents divorced. I think there were only two other children in my elementary school that had divorced parents. I think there was only one other in my grade. So that was kind of hard because I was sort of teased and picked on a lot, and I could not understand why. I had no problems with the divorce. My sister was probably one. I think I was probably eight or nine, somewhere around there when they were divorced. People didn’t talk to their children like they do now. You never knew when there was a whole lot going on. Like when my children grew up, we would discuss family matters and things like that. I think later that I could understand why I was teased because my parents were divorced.

My mother was remarried several years after that, and I had a wonderful stepfather. He was a Christian man, and I don’t think my real father was. The divorce didn’t have a whole lot of emotional effect because I think I had only seen my birth father twice in my whole life. He was in a hospital in Memphis when he was injured in Pearl Harbor. My mother would visit him there, but I could not go because they did not allow children to go. So when she told me they were getting a divorce, I really had no clue that he wouldn’t be coming back anymore. That really didn’t mean a whole lot. I really felt like my grandfather was my father figure. My stepfather was also a wonderful, Christian man.

My grandmother used to walk to take me to church when I was little. We didn’t live too far, so we would walk to church. We didn’t have a car, so if it was really, really bad weather or if it was really, really cold, we wouldn’t go. I did grow up in the Brethren church, and then when my mother remarried, we went to the Baptist church.

I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been in church. I accepted Christ when I was twelve. My grandmother died when she was fifty-three of colon cancer. It wasn’t really my decision, but I guess at the time I decided to because I knew that she wanted me to do that. I did it before she died because I wanted her to know. Then when I was thirty-five, I rededicated my life and I was baptized again at North Roanoke Baptist Church. I felt then that this really was my decision and my real rededication. My husband accepted Christ then. He was thirty-seven. And our daughter accepted Christ at the same time. The pastor had talked to her, and she had felt that way up until then but had never made that decision. So then all three of us, my husband, my daughter and I, were baptized. We were all in the baptismal pool at the same time. My son was very upset because he felt like he was being left out. He wasn’t old enough I didn’t think, to really make that decision, but two years later he did at the age of nine. He got up in the middle of the night and he said, “Mamma, I want to accept Jesus as my savior.” He said the same thing that next morning, so I felt that he was being convicted by the Holy Spirit.

We had some tough, tough times. Our daughter, when she was fifteen months old, swallowed a hair barrette. The doctors said they might have to operate because it was going to go into her lungs. They were going to have to split her rib cage to get it out, and I did not want them to have to do that because she could die. So the doctor said he would try one more time to get it out without cutting her, but he said she probably would never speak normally. I immediately, immediately started praying and he tried one more time and he did get it out. She still almost ended up dying because she had pneumonia and a lot of infection. She ended up having to have a tracheotomy, and they ended up having to tie her hands down because she would try to pull it out. Before they pulled the trach tube out she was really unhappy because she was potty drained before she was a year old. She walked early; I think she was about seven months. She did not want to use the potty chair. She would walk over and want to use the commode. She was such a little person, and the hospital wouldn’t let her do that. She was really unhappy with that, and so she was a frustrated little person. She was so unhappy that she would force out the word “No.” But we prayed for her, and we couldn’t leave her side for three weeks. My husband and I, one of us was there all the time. We would take turns. One of us would go to the house and take a shower and then we would be right back off to the hospital. She still has a little scar there, but she has a beautiful singing voice. God helped us through that. I don’t see how… I mean we have faced so much. He was our comfort and strength, and I cannot imagine not having Him through that.

Our son Richard then was born with hyaline membrane disease on December 22, 1968, and they told us that if he lived for twenty-four hours there was a twenty percent chance of him living, and that was all because they really didn’t know what to do with these babies. There was a doctor in Blacksburg that had had twins that were born with the disease. They almost died with the same thing. The disease is where the lungs are full of fluid or something like that. I think it only happens in twins or premature babies, which our son is not so we didn’t expect this to happen. It was a very hard time.

Also, and at that time my grandfather came to the hospital to see me when Richard was born in December of 1968. At that time there was a huge, huge flu epidemic, and they were only letting you into the hospital if you were the patient’s husband or wife or parent, if you were a child. It was quarantined. So he came to see him, and they wouldn’t let him in, so he walked back up to the top of the hill about three miles in the snow to catch the bus. He fell on the ice, and they had to take him to the hospital. So my grandfather he died on December 24, 1968 while I was still in the hospital.

Our next-door neighbor was in a nursing program when I was pregnant with Richard, and she had just finished her OB training. She was telling us in the end of November that she would be training with the doctor in Blacksburg who had twins that were born with highline membrane disease. He had been working on a machine that they could hook the baby up to, and there were wires and tubes everywhere, like in the navel. I mean there were wires and tubes everywhere so that the child could breathe. They used to put children in an oxygen type thing, and then they could get too much oxygen then it would blind these newborn babies. He invented this new machine with the tubes in the umbilical cord because he thought that was where the baby got the oxygen from before, and that could be controlled. He had tubes and IV’s everywhere. He had IV’s even in his toes. Over his mouth they placed a plastic mask so he could breathe. They trained two student nurses, two nurses, and two doctors to use it. She said it was experimental, and there were very few of them. There was one here, and one at UVA, and then one on a plane that he could take all over the United States. He was helping then to train the student nurses, and she was one of the ones being trained. She was real excited about it, and so she was there when Richard was born. She helped deliver him, and they knew that he was having problems because his heart rate was 260. They couldn’t give me anything for pain because they were afraid that I would go into cardiac arrest. So I had a natural childbirth not by choice, and I did not have any other training like of the breathing that they do now. I was so panic stricken. So they did put him on the machine, and we had to sign all these papers saying that if he died we wouldn’t sue, that we understood that it was experimental. They did put him on that for about a week or ten days. But he is fine now. He had a lot of respiratory infections.

No one in my family saw him until he was about five months old except through the storm door. My husband, when he got home from work, would have to take a bath or shower and put on the clean clothes that we had laid out before he could come see Richard and me up in the room where we were. We had one bedroom where he stayed. Catherine, when she would get home from school, had to wash her hair, take a bath, and change her clothes before she could come see him too because they didn’t want to let any germs into that room. It was a hard time. I am amazed we got through it. It was a really hard time. We did a lot of praying, and we were very thankful for our children. I think they grew up a little bit spoiled. They were very much loved. It is hard not to spoil them, they were a constant reminder especially Catherine with her little scar there. We are now more aware which is why we tell our friends not to let their kids play with little things. Every stuffed animal that Laurie had, we tried to see if we could pull the eyes out. She would always ask later on “Why does my rabbit not have eyes? Did I do that?” We would tell her “No, we did that.” Anything that we could pull out, we did so she couldn’t swallow anything.

***

My parents loved to travel. Somebody had been to Cuba and told us how nice it was. And I did not want to fly because I was scared. So we could go by ship. And there were some different places we could go: the Bahamas, Cuba, and so on. That was when the “I Love Lucy” show was on, and I was in love with Desi Arnaz, you know. And he played on the Club Copacabana in Cuba, and they had it worked in so that we could sit in on his show. So when Dad said, Bahamas, or he named some other places, or Bermuda, or Cuba, I chose Cuba because I wanted to see, I thought all of the men in Cuba were quite handsome [laughs]. I thought they were so cute.

So we went. It was my stepfather, my mother and my little sister, the four of us. Mostly we just saw the sights. You know like every morning they would have a taxi come and I think it was more relaxed back then. They would just take us to the places tourists wanted to see. I know we wanted to see the pineapple plantations, and I think we only saw one banana plantation. I don’t know if that was really unique, but we only saw one. And I was really interested in the tarantulas. You have to be really careful that they don’t sting you. You know in the United States, we thought that if anybody would get bit by one, they’d die. Now I had to be careful because my allergies are so bad. But the kids, the kids were so cute running around. They would have the tarantulas running all over them, and they would never get bit. And it was fun. The people were just so great. Everybody was so nice. I was so amazed at even young girls my age, it seemed like they were so voluptuous like at fifteen [laughs]. They all are. The women are beautiful, the men are handsome. I felt like, I was just really, really skinny with no bust or butt or anything. And these girls who were like thirteen would be like 38, 38 for their measurements. You know, I noticed that, and they wore their clothes really tight. They didn’t wear underwear because they didn’t want the lines to show. The younger girls, early twenties I guess and the ones my age. I think that was the thing that they all had real elaborate hairstyles and tight clothes. And they all had just real elaborate makeup.

Back at that time, I started in 1958 at college. At that time the school I went to was known all over the United States. It is very large now, and they have satellites all over Virginia and maybe in North Carolina now. The women, at the time I went there there were maybe 250 to 300 Cubans there. I was so honored that we had such a large amount, maybe 30 to 35, maybe even 40 Cubans. Of course, I could understand most of them, well all of them had very limited English. They could understand and do the work, but that is what they came to do, what they wanted to do. We even had one man who was older. He was twenty-seven I think, and he had been on the Olympic baseball team there in Cuba and had come to the United States. And we asked him how they heard about it down in Cuba because I guess there were companies that went down there. Because at that time, the United States got a lot of sugar from Cuba, and I guess the United States sent people down there to run the companies. Some of them were United States owned. Some of the people that went over on the ships with us, we went over from West Palm Beach, were with companies from Cuba. I guess there was always the marine base there too, Guantanamo.

We saw El Moro, the famous lighthouse in the Havana harbor, and we saw Earnest Hemingway’s house. It was what I think they call a little hacienda. I guess it could have changed since then because like I said, we’re talking ’55 here. I was trying to think, there was something else that was very special. That could have been the hotel, El Hotel Nacional de Cuba, that looks out over the bay. El Moro sits up here on the bay.

I met some great people there. Then like I said, I went to college and they were drawn to me because I had been there before because a lot of them were homesick. I had a Cuban boyfriend, and he was very cute. He was very, very nice. And I did not realize until I was watching, I don’t know if you have ever watched, the international Latin dance contests. They talked and they said that the “cha cha” originated in Cuba in the early fifties. And I thought “Wow, Juan taught me the cha cha in 1959. I loved to dance. So that was nice. I didn’t know that it was such a new thing. I thought it was something that had always existed, or for a long time. I loved to go dancing, and he was an excellent dancer. And we would go dancing. You know and the other girls kind of felt left out, but I could teach them some stuff. So it was kind of lucky for me. But I have no clue where he is now, whether or not he is still alive. In 1959 was when Castro took over, and it was a hostile time. And my parents moved to Hollywood, Florida. And in July of 1959, I wanted to go over there to visit my boyfriend that went to school with me, and the man that was our next-door neighbor at the time was a pilot with American Airlines, he was a transfer pilot. And he kept me up all night because Juan had written me a letter and told me that I could stay with them. They were very wealthy. They owned a lot of the apartment buildings. And Mr. Redford who lived next door, he said, “No, we’re not even sending our pilots there at this point.” This was in the mid summer of 1959, and Juan kept calling and writing saying it was safe, and you know I had the money because I had worked and had saved. Mr. Redford said it would be horrible because there was an American reporter over there who could not get back. He could not get back, but I still wanted to go. So I don’t know what happened in the fall of ’59 he did not come back, and about fifteen others did not come back. The ones who were here had not made contact with them because when Castro took over, he cut of contact with the U.S. So here in Roanoke there are still two or three of them, of the men. I am not sure if any of the girls are still here. They either had to come and stay here or stay with their families in Cuba. But there was no contact with their families if they stayed here. They had to make a decision. But I hope that, they were happy here in the states.

They were very affectionate people. You meet someone, and the women would hug. And even if you were not their family, they would hug you anyway with the women. But with the men, they just shake hands. Now one thing that we could not understand. I had on shorts, and so did my mother and my little sister. And when the men parked the boat, I don’t remember what you call it in the harbor with that beautiful white sea. We were told that you couldn’t get off the boat with shorts on. Americans were not allowed to wear shorts. And that is practically all we took because nobody said anything. So we had to buy some stuff while we were there. And my Daddy said that the women there were wearing clothes so tight but they didn’t wear shorts. You’ve got to remember though, this is 47 some years ago.

It was just a wonderful experience and it gave me, and like I said I was really pleased when I ended up at the college that I did and some Cubans were there. People were really stand offish towards them because I guess they perceived them as different. The girls, like me, were real intrigued with the guys that were cute. The boys were thrilled with the girls. But that made the American boys not real happy when all the girls were seeing the Cuban guys. They were very friendly. It was really a great experience. I had gone to high school with eight or ten of the students there. And there were three other friends in the area that went there, so I kind of introduced the Cubans, you know at breaks and class. You would say, I’ll be over here. It was kind of like they were just over there. And I think I was one of the first to go over and to make conversation and find out where they were from. And they said they were from Cuba, and I told them that I had been there. And they said “Oh!” you know. And I think it was just such a wonderful experience, and I think that it has changed so much. I am not sure you could get the same experience or not with the government being so different. It’s got to be different. They had such lovely, beautiful flowers everywhere: on the sidewalks, on the balconies of the hotels. And I know my dad and mother went back in 1960, I think. Maybe it was ’59. But anyway, the shooting had already started, the war had already begun. And we were laughing because my dad was out, I wasn’t there, it was just my mother and my dad who went, he was out on the balcony filming. He had a movie camera, and there were shots going everywhere. And my mother said on there, “This is where I jerked Bill in because the shots were flying by.” [Laughs]. But he was out there filming people shooting, and then there was this blur and she says, “This is where I jerked Bill in off the balcony.” They didn’t have any problem getting out, and I think they flew that time because I wanted to go back. And I almost sure that because they were flying, I said no.

We had a student here who was from Cuba. Her grandparents were still over there, and I am not exactly sure when she graduated. I know she was going to go back and visit, but they wouldn’t let her go. I know that her brother was still over there for some reason and her parents also wanted to go visit him. But if they went, they could not come back. I know her grandparents couldn’t come here for graduation. They wouldn’t let them leave because nobody but her brother was there. I think it was like it was in the Soviet Union at one point because usually they would let you come to the United States with only one or two members of your family. That way they knew you would come back. You’d have to. I think that was the way with her. But she was supposed to go back to Cuba back then, and they told her she could on a certain day. And then she would come in crying the day before she was supposed to leave, and they said she couldn’t this time. So it was really hard for her to choose to keep trying.

You know women my age when we were teenagers, we had very small waists. I wasn’t terribly skinny, but I still had a fairly small waist. But the Cuban women had really small waists. We attributed our small waists to sweeping so much. The girls now mature a lot faster. I watched with my daughter, and she matured a whole lot faster than I did. And I don’t know whether it was the food or the vitamins and things. We didn’t have the vitamins like we have now. They are putting chemicals and things in the meat as well, and we didn’t have that. I know they are putting more chemicals in foods now. I was just reading an article this week that said that girls are starting their periods at ten now. That was something that back then you never heard of. I was in the eighth grade. I remember a few girls in our high school class, you know freshman, sophomore, junior, senior that had voluptuous bodies, but the rest of us were pretty flat. We wore padded bras, and it isn’t like nobody knew back then. And I guess that is one thing, that the American guys were so attracted to the Cuban girls because the rest of the Americans were like me and the Cuban girls looked like they were right out of the movies. They wore lots of make-up, and I am not sure if they still do. They were beautiful anyway, but they still wore make-up. Of course we didn’t wear a whole lot. Their skin was beautiful, very clear, and we all had bumps. I think that was one of the reasons that the guys were so crazy over the Cuban girls. But like I said, I was fifteen when I went to Cuba, and the fifteen year olds there looked like eighteen year olds here.

My daughter matured physically much quicker than I did. I can tell a difference between when I started here and the difference in you all now from twenty some years ago. I think now, well it may not be as true now as it was a few years ago, but I know at one time period there were a lot of eating disorders. I am sure there are still some cases here probably still now. But don’t think there is as much now. I haven’t seen much information in that area, and it maybe that I am just not as aware of it. They may have pamphlets and things that I just have not seen. Like seminars and things, and we used to have an on campus social worker, and I am not sure if we still do or not. They used to have I think three that were here all the time, and I think mainly what they dealt with was eating disorders. But I think more and more of the girls and women now are feeling more comfortable about their bodies if they are large or real, real skinny. I was talking to one of the girls, and she wanted to gain weight, and I told her “You don’t know what you are doing.” Because I was really skinny back then, and I think now I would have been considered anorexic because I was so thin at 88 pounds. I weigh 140 now, so things have changed a lot since then, but I tried everything to gain weight. But everybody was so skinny like me; we all looked like a stick palm tree. But then when my daughter was born we gave her those vitamins and all of that. And I did not have that. I had stuff out of the garden or whatever. So I don’t know how, I don’t know how they did that, how they got such nice bodies because they were doing the same thing. They were so voluptuous. Lucky Cuban girls!

***

I’ve really loved the girls and have enjoyed working here so much. I wouldn’t have traded my job for any other. I wouldn’t have worked anywhere else, and I love it. I’ve made some wonderful friends. It’s been a wonderful experience, and I feel very fortunate for sharing a part of their lives. They are very open if they are having problems with boyfriends or family problems or whatever. I would share my opinion, and I would tell them whatever I would tell my own children. I would tell them “You don’t want to hear this, but this is what I would tell my own child.” Sometimes someone would say “Now Dorie, that is so old fashioned.” And I would say “I know” but that is what I would do. I have had students write me notes saying “Thank you for being there for me when I needed this,” that or whatever.

It was very nice and very humbling to have them say, well you know, “It is very nice having you to talk to.” And some of them said, “You will never know what it meant for you to say ‘Well, hello.’ or ‘How was your weekend?’" I’ve learned a lot here. I wish I would have known this with my own daughter. I think sometimes I would have better understood the things that she was going through in her late teens, and when she went off to school. She would say, “Well, you were really strict. You were really this, or you were really that.” I wanted her to be perfect, but no one really is. I’ve learned that you can do things, that you can get into trouble, not really serious things, but things that I would have had a fit with had it been with my own children. I would had been really disapproving, but since they weren’t my daughter it didn’t matter as much.

You know, there was one girl in particular. She was just always in some kind of trouble, always. One day she came over from her apartment, and she had a coat on over her bra and panties. She hadn’t even combed her hair to come over. I said “Why are you like this?” Then she said, “Well, I was drunk last night.” And I said jokingly, “Well, if you were my daughter, I would kill you.” And she stood there and said, “Yeah, but you love me anyway, don’t you?” I said, “Yes.” She changed a lot since then. Now she is a very successful businesswoman. You know, you see them a lot. You see them change. You think, now this was the girl who wore black fingernail polish and black lipstick, and skirts up to here when nobody wore them that short. So then you see her a few years later with her two little children, breastfeeding another one, teaching Sunday school. When I saw her I said jokingly, “I thought you would be in jail or something.” She said “Well, you’re the only one who accepted me for what I was.” I said, “Well, I am just glad you weren’t my daughter.” [Laughs.] I said, “Poor thing, I just felt sorry for your parents.” It has been a wonderful, wonderful experience.

I think the girls are more career oriented now then when I first started. It was very common for a girl to be engaged in her sophomore year and she would get married right after they graduated, like that summer. Where you do not see that so much now. We have a few that still do that; probably married the boy they dated in high school. Like I said it was really common back then for several students to get married and to move off campus and then come back. But now I think they are more career oriented where as before it was not so important. It was more like “Well, I’m going to work until I get married and have babies.” Now, I’ve been talking to them and asking, “What are you going to do after graduation?” And most of them say, “Well, I am going to work, and I probably won’t get married until I am in my thirties.”

Of course they don’t seem to be so, and maybe they are still and it’s just that I am not talking to the right students so much, that they really don’t seem to be so interested in going out to Hampden Sydney or W&L or whatever every weekend. It used to be that you were really upset if you didn’t have a date every weekend, so now it’s now more like “Hey, let’s get together with a bunch of girls, and let’s go have dinner.” They are more independent. And they feel that they don’t necessarily need a man or a guy in their life at this time. They are more self confident in themselves and have a better sense of self worth than before. I think this is one reason that women and men are getting married later in life.

My son is 33 and his wife is 30, and they were friends in college. When I grew up, it was just automatic when you went to college. I dropped out of college to get married, and my husband did. And my daughter got married after she graduated. I was 20 when I had her, and she married four years before she had her child. So she was 24. So now, with my son, he was 30 before he got married. And his wife is like “Babies? No, maybe in a year, maybe in a few years, maybe in five years.”

Like I said, girls seem more career oriented and it used to be that they would go back home and look for a job. Now I’ll be talking to them and they will say “Oh, well I have an interview in California, and I have an interview in Chicago.” I will ask, “Well, where are you from?” And they will be from Atlanta or something, and I tell them “Well, you’re mom is going to have a fit because you’re not coming home.” I think that they are more bold, determined to find their place in the world, and to be more self-sufficient. I think the guys are going to have a hard time [laughs]. Like Elizabeth Valk Long who spoke at graduation, she is president of Time or like Ann Compton who has a terrific correspondence job. They are more competitive and they are more assertive, like when I first started here, or even twenty years ago, it was unheard of to have a woman C.E.O. and it is not even an issue now. I think it is more true here than at the co-ed schools because here you have more opportunities to be leaders. You know really, you are taught from the time you get here to run for office and to be involved as much as possible. So you are having to compete against other women and not against a man. The opportunities are just so great.

When my son was looking for a job, he graduated from college in ’93, a lot of places where he interviewed, some of them said, “You fit the qualifications, but our first choice is a black female, next is a white female, next is a black male, and a white male is our last choice because of the quotas.” And I am not sure if that is still working that way or not, if that is as prevalent or not. I would tell him, other than your name, you shouldn’t have to put your race or your color or your sex or anything. I think they should have to look at the one who is the most qualified, and if the woman is most qualified, she absolutely should be the one to get the job, not because of the quota. I think they are going that way, and I think it is pretty equal now.

But we have some pretty strong women here. They know what they want, they know what their goals are. I have girls tell me when they get here what their majors are going to be. They already know when they get here. It used to be that it wasn’t until they were sophomores or juniors that they would pick their majors and they would be here longer because they would have to play catch-up because they weren’t real sure. It seems like now they are coming in thinking “Well, I am going to do this, and do this, and do that.”

I think that we are seeing more and more coming in as sophomores and juniors in high school looking at colleges, and they already know say, that they want to study psychology. Where when my daughter was looking at colleges, I think that it was like senior year, and she was like “I don’t know.” Well she knew what she wanted to be, but she didn’t know where she wanted to go. The ones coming in now, they know. They come in saying “I want to study medicine. We have a strong bunch of women here.

I think sometimes we take a lot of criticism here at Hollins because we are all women and we are surrounded by co-ed schools. The protest last year that was in the newspaper, and then the tacky tour. I feel like we are in a fish bowl here. I feel like people are just waiting to see if somebody from Hollins makes a mistake. This is just my opinion, but I feel that if the same things would happen at Virginia Tech., nobody would have heard anything about it. You know like the tacky tour, I thought that was unfair. I know the girls involved, and the way the paper came across, if you read the article, it is not the way the girls are at all. You have to know the girls and what was said and know that that was just their personality. They are really sweet girls.

I know I’ve heard some people say “Well I was out in some bar, and I saw some girl with purple hair and fuchsia hair, and the piercings and stuff.” I said, and well I feel this way, I don’t see any difference in green hair and purple hair as someone at my age dying their hair red or blond to hide the gray. This is just a way that they are expressing themselves, and if they don’t do it now, they can’t do it later on in the business world. I told them “I wish I was young enough to do that, I would have fuchsia hair. I would cover up the gray with the fuchsia.” I feel like that is another freedom that they feel that they can express themselves here, where they feel that maybe at another place, they couldn’t. You see eighty year old women with hair as black as my pants, and nobody thinks about that you know. [Laughs]. The piercings I, I barely got my ears pierced. I almost stopped with one. I can’t imagine the pain, but as far as how they look, they pierce their tongues and their eyebrows, and that is just a way that they express themselves. I would not do that, the piercings. When the girls go out to the mall or to the movies, they are very visible. But they are just a wonderful, they really are.

I think this is a very good project. I think this is a good experience for you and for the people you interview. Because, I told my husband, I said, “You know, some of the questions she asks bring up things that I have not thought about in years. You just kind of go along, and you don’t really think about some of the things. I think this is a very good idea. I think it is a great experience. I think I have had probably the most boring life of anybody. But it has been interesting for me, for the person to bring memories back. It makes you stop and think about things that I had not thought about in years, things like my father and about my husband, things that I just have not talked about, you know.

I don’t know what the future holds. I am just going to put it in God’s hands. I feel like everything that happens, it happens for a reason. I have learned a lot here. The students especially have taught me lessons, many, many life lessons. You have to judge the person. You don’t go by their looks, or by their race, or by their actions at the time. You look for the person that they are deep down. I’ve learned that certain persons are not always what they seem to be. We’ve got some wonderful people here, we really do. This is such a great community, and I feel honored to be part of it. I just wish that it would have lasted longer, I really do.