Excerpts from the Interviews
*Edited,
with permission by Bethany Ewing*
*** implies that a question was
asked
***First Interview***
I am not sure, I know what it means, but my full name is Douglas
Campbell Waters, Douglas was a name my parents just liked, although I have
some Scotch Irish heritage and perhaps that was what they intended. Campbell
was a name that appeared on both sides of my family, my mother’s maiden name
was Campbell and my parental Grandfather’s first name was Campbell. In
his case he was named after an attorney who had gotten his father and his
Grandfather out of jail during the Civil War when they were jailed by the
Federal authorities for having been purveying to the blockade runners gray
fabric and buttons to what the feds assumed was southern forces, and the man
who got them out of jail was Ross Campbell and my Grandfather was named
after Ross Campbell and I was named after both Grandfathers, that is where
the name Campbell came from. Waters is an old English name and that part of
the family came over to this Country sometime in the late 18th
century.
***
I was born in Maryland during World War II in Edgewood, Maryland,
which is a little bit north of Baltimore, grew up in Northern New Jersey as
a wee little lad and about the age of 6 ½ moved to Petersburg, Virginia and
I went to public schools there until I graduated from high school, so I
guess Petersburg as my home.
***
Things were more innocent in those days, than they seem to be
right now, what sometimes seemed to me to be a very ordinary childhood our
family was a traditional family, a mother and father and a brother and
myself. I was the older of the two boys, it was an old fashion neighborhood
and there were lots of kids and sometimes you played summertime games that I
am not sure even exist today. Things like kick the can and catching fire
flies and spitting watermelon seeds on each other, that kind of thing. Went
to the public schools there, very active with the band, did run track for a
couple of years without the lack of talent and was a manager of the football
team for part of my time there as well.
***
I went to public elementary school; at the time was a junior high
school for grades 6, 7,and 8 and then the high school of 9, 10, 11, and 12.
I am not sure what that was like. It was actually might be of some interest
that I was perhaps the last class to graduate while integration was still in
force in Virginia. I think the schools began to integrate the very next year
so I am quite sure that my brother who was two years behind me was in an
integrated high school. At the time we didn’t think of it as unusual, but in
hindsight its like an historic time to have gone to school.
***
I do remember riding a public bus some of the time to school, (I
actually hitch hiked to school in nicer weather, but occasionally took the
public bus). I do remember looking at some of the young black women who were
on the bus who were almost certainly on their way to domestic employment to
the houses and without having really focused on it, I remember being
somewhat disquieted that these young women were doing that sort of work at
that tender age. I can’t claim a lot of social prescience but that was
something that did trouble me. In my own household that I grew up in
Virginia was conservative but probably somewhat more socially liberal
household than some of our friends and neighbors who probably weren’t so,
but I do recall that as a detail that is probably not a common experience
for anybody who came along after that.
***
I had a really good social life during my college years, meeting
the woman who became my wife in the spring of my senior year, literally a
blind date. We were introduced by one of her friends at her college which
was a woman’s college in central New York state who was "pinned" but not yet
engaged to one of my fraternity brothers. She introduced us and the two
girls came over for a weekend at RPI .After a dreadful Friday of the weekend
we discovered that maybe we had more things in connection than we thought.
We dated a couple more times before I graduated and she went abroad for the
summer in Europe and we corresponded and then dated the next year, so that
was something I guess was going on in my private life. We were married
between the years I was in graduate business school. We moved together to
Detroit, and left the area when I had to go to active duty in the Army,
where I spent about four years, a little over a year in training in various
places and two different assignments in Germany that kept us and gave us
some little adventures in living in Europe. During the time we were in the
Army we had our two children, both of them born in Army facilities, one born
in Southern Arizona and the other in Heidelberg, Germany.
***
We moved to Richmond, Virginia where I went to work for a relatively
small bank, certainly smaller than the one I worked for in Detroit before
the Army. We bought a suburban split level house. The kids, when we moved to
that house, were certainly less than one and three in age, We lived the life
of suburbia for at least three years after which we decided we needed to
move into an environment that would give our kids…we didn’t want our kids to
grow up thinking that everybody had two kids, two cars and lived in a split
level home… so we moved into another neighbor in the greater Richmond area
which was a considerably older place with a more traditional neighborhood
environment and with a much broader range of age and probably a little
broader diversity in their economic situation as well. We raised our kids
for a few years there during which time I also ended up leaving the bank and
started a leasing company of my own which allowed me to get out of an
environment where I wasn’t that comfortable with the leadership of the bank
and where I had the opportunity to make more money than I was at the bank.
Ran that company for about three and one half years during which time I
became the head of a company that installed and maintained telephone systems
whose equipment was the main thing that I was leasing and that was what
moved us to Roanoke, Virginia.
***
Waters: We did move away. We were here in Roanoke for eight years. We
moved away to Abingdon, Virginia which is in Southwestern Virginia. And when
we made that move we bought a small farm. Now we are circling back to the
reason you and I are talking. (laughs) We took the opportunity to learn
something…We were both city people which may have been implicit in my
description. But we ended up with about twenty acres of land, a couple of
old barns, and enough fencing that we didn’t know any better so we thought
it was ok to raise cattle. So we bought three pregnant cows. Didn’t know
what we were doing. We had the advice of a neighbor who ended up being a
very good neighbor and a very caring neighbor. He put us in contact with
neighbors miles further out of town on the same road we were living on who
had registered polled Herefords, which are beef cattle; sort of brown with
white faces, no doubt you’ve seen them. We went down there one night. They
had brought down from their field the three pregnant cows for us to look at.
We hadn’t a clue what we were looking at. But the price was something that
we could manage. Without knowing what we were doing we bought them. A couple
of days later, the neighbor showed up with his stock trailer behind his
pick-up truck, backed up to sort of a little subfield on our property and
unloaded these three cows who looked to us, enormous. We couldn’t
believe what we had gotten ourselves into, just clueless. But anyway there
we were. That breed is actually a very gentle breed, a very nice animal and
we came to like them a lot. But at that first moment we were just scared as
we could be that we had gotten into something terrible. But anyway, we moved
to Abingdon, had this little farm; our kids went through a certain amount of
culture shock because they had grown up in Roanoke which is not a big
cosmopolitan city, but compared to Abingdon, is a big cosmopolitan city.
While we were living in the country they both had the experience, my son
perhaps more than my daughter, of being city type kids living in the
country. So the town kids didn’t recognize them as two of their own because
they lived in the country; the country kids the moment they knew them, knew
that they didn’t belong in the country so they lived a little bit of a split
life for a time there. But I think both of them would agree that it was an
important change of life for them.
***
We might have talked about this the other day but, my wife in her high
school guidance testing was told that the best match for her personality and
her interests would be farming. That was sort of preposterous; nothing in
her family background would have led her in that direction and she didn’t
think it was very real but she filed it away and years and years later when
we had been married for awhile, we looked for country land when we moved
from Richmond to Roanoke. We discovered that we couldn’t afford both land
and livable dwelling so with small children we went for the livable dwelling
and lived in town. But we continued to think about it and when we moved to
Abingdon and our kids were older, teenagers we decided that was the time to
take the chance and bought this little farm and the cattle I’ve described
and that fulfilled the start of a dream.
***
I literally retired from the bank on a Thursday and came to work on
Hollins on a Friday. I retired when I retired in order to come to Hollins.
But I was probably ready…banking had changed a lot . I had done it on and
off for a little over thirty years. It’s a fun business but it had gotten
less fun for me, who had been in it when it had been a different kind of
enterprise and when it wasn’t an enormous national scale business. It had
changed and wasn’t nearly as fun as it had been. So I was ready to do
something….
***
Waters: Well we had had them (cattle) and sold them in Abingdon. We had
moved out to the house, and we knew that it wasn’t practical to have cattle
out there if we weren’t living out there. We moved out there in late 1997.
About a year or so later we had some fencing done, and we first got some
cashmere goats which are fiber goats. Some people use them for meat as well,
but their main claim to fame is that they produce a fiber that is used for
cashmere garments. We owned them for a couple years and discovered that the
Cashmere goat market is mostly made up of people who raise cashmere goats
and sell them to new people who want to raise cashmere goats. They really
isn’t money in the cashmere unless you have a lot more that we had because
there are places like in Afghanistan and elsewhere were they raise them in
large quantities where the labor is so cheap that they afford to do it and
consider that they are making money off of it where as in this country, the
value of raw cashmere is not very high and there are many other ways of
making a living. So anyway we had them for a couple of years and decided
that we would add some cattle. (Tape unclear…)…we thought it was something
we might want to get into. Somewhere we got a lead on Scottish Highlands as
a breed that was very independent, needed very little care, was used to
browsing in fairly rough pasture which is what we had and they are really
neat exotic animals and that appealed to us. So we bought three bred cows
again and a young bull a little over a year old, and a couple weeks later a
steer to be buddy to the bull. So we started out with five, and all three of
them calved and then the young bull was up to the task of breeding with
these three cows. (Bulls are normally older than that but he was old enough
to do what he had to do.) And then a couple years ago when my wife had
decided to retire we bought three more bred cows, so we had six cows, three
calves, and the bull. And we swapped the steer for a heifer which is a young
female that has not had calves. And my wife retired and by and by we had six
calves and the heifer and the bull and the six cows. And then early last
year we started having last years calves and that put us up to seventeen. My
wife decided that she was not going to stay retired and she was going back
to school so we, having built the herd up thinking she was retiring
discovered that we had more cattle than we needed. So we wound up, our plan
has always been to sell the calves, sold off a group of five – four heifers
and a bull calf. So that got us down to the twelve that we have now. Six
cows, a bull, and the five calves that were born last year and we’ll get our
next calves probably in May.
***Second Interview***
It’s (farming) a total alternative to how I have earned my living
for all of these years. I spent a lot of years as a banker and now I’ve
spent well into my fourth year as a university administrator. Farming is
just totally different. It’s out of doors; I’ve always worked indoors. The
way we are doing it is in just a beautiful setting, great piece of mind and
a great tension reliever to go out in the field and work with the animals
and do the physical labor that’s involved. It also gives you a considerable
amount of privacy if you work in a people environment all day. I am sort of
an introverted person; on the cusp between introversion and extraversion and
my wife is very much an introvert and she teaches during the day so she
likes the solitude and piece of mind that comes by being home in the
country. But it also made a difference to our kids and taught them some
things about life. In our daughter’s case, I think it transformed her having
lived on the farm with us for some time. Our daughter wound up always loving
horses, now works with horses, owns horses, draws horses, and is married to
a farrier who shoes horses. I think all of that came about from us living on
our first farm. Our son learned a lot more about tolerance and about being
the odd one in the group, having moved from the city of Roanoke to our farm
near Abingdon back when he was in high school and having to make his way in
a country society where he knew that he wasn’t one of them and a city
society that knew he wasn’t one of them because he lived on a farm. That
made a big difference in his general sense of who he was and how many kinds
of people he would have to get along with in life. For those reasons I think
that it’s just a pretty place to live and if you like to live in natural
beauty, then this is the way to do it.
***
I was raised going to church and Sunday school but farming in my
opinion is not at all a religious experience. I’m not sure that I am using
the term appropriately but I would describe myself as a Secular Humanist.
Working with the animals and treating them with care and respect is good in
its own right as opposed to having some sort of religious motivation
attached to it. Its hard on a pretty day, or even on not such a pretty day
not to have a certain sense that there is something spiritual about nature
and animals and the lives that they lead that are for the most part pretty
untroubled and peaceful. Being able to connect to that probably has some
sort of at least emotional resonance, but I don’t think really religious.
***
I don’t know if it was that background or if it was the natural
philosophy that my wife and I found that we shared. We have not pursued our
live with a particular outcome or destination in mind. But we have been more
opportunistic and I think we both truly believe that life is not maturity,
is not a destination. Life is a journey. So we have taken a couple of turns
that others might have thought strange but which suited us and exposed us to
an adventure. For example, staying in the army during the Vietnam War longer
than I had to because it gave me the chance to study German and know that I
would be assigned to Germany for at least a short period of time. But in any
event, what we decided that we would do was pursue opportunity where it
seemed to come along....
So we’ve tried despite the demands of work that have, at times,
been considerable, to carve out time so that most of the time we had dinner
as a family, most of the time we attended any number of soccer games,
lacrosse games, dance recitals, and other events that our kids have been
involved in. So we’ve consciously ensured that we kept some family time as
well as professional time and that’s easier to do if you look at life as an
adventure and you are not driven to become the president of the bank, or the
president of the university, or the principal or superintendent of the
school, or whatever other things you might have set for yourself as goals.
If instead you are looking at the adventure of having a family and raising
it and enjoying that process as you also are doing professional work that
interests you and is rewarding in what you do and sufficiently rewarding to
make your living in.
***
I think that if life for us is an adventure that we picked for
ourselves, I think that life for our kids ought to be an adventure that they
pick for themselves. The outcome of that is that our kids are doing things
that they really want to be doing, while they understand that at some point
they might decide to do something different. As opposed to doing some of the
upwardly mobile approved sorts of work in other fields that might pay them
more but suit them less.
***
...you have to safeguard some time for yourself. There are very few
professional jobs that require mental strength as well as athletic ability,
or leadership ability, the roles in which you are directing others perhaps
where once you are engaged in it that you won’ discover that the job can use
all of your time. That you will have more to do that you can do. And in most
cases it is stuff that people have every right to ask of you or want from
you. For example, in my role as a banker we had customers and customers need
things done. If you were their banker, you were the person they were
supposed to come to get things done. If you let that consume you, you
still won’t get it all done but you won’t have any time left for yourself.
*** Do you have any regrets?
No, no. I have, you know the time or two that I thought that what
I thought that what I was doing had run its course, I changed course. You
know I spent four good years in the army, and got out of the army when it
was time to do that. I worked for a bank in Richmond that probably wasn’t
the best choice of banks although I learned quite a bit from it, from the
experience, but I left there, started a business, when that had done all
that I cared to do with it I decided that wasn’t my favorite cup of tea, I
switched back and went back to banking. And so I would not trade the
experiences while I would admit there are some I wouldn’t care to do again
and others I was glad not to do any longer than I did them but I wouldn’t…no
I think I did pretty well.
***
Well small scale farming is probably harder and harder and will get more
so in the future to making a living at it if you have to buy your property.
And I think that is because the cost of land is going up so fast and the
financial returns on farming are unpredictable and not very great at least
on a small farming scale, its very difficult for somebody who doesn’t have
land that came to then somehow else you know either inherited or shared with
their family or bought with money that you have gotten through some other
pursuit. I couldn’t have afforded to buy our farm if I were dependent on the
farm to earn a living to pay the loan back. I think there is a much greater
interest in ecologically sound farming than there was even 20 years ago or
even a little longer before that. There is in fact both a general awareness
that people have but also perhaps fostered by the government’s programs that
help farmers do better jobs at land husbandry.
***If you could focus solely on farming would you?
I don’t think I would want to be only a farmer. We have pondered the
question I think again in our personal life planning we concluded we won’t
be on this farm long into our dotage. It seemed unlikely that either of our
kids basically would want to own this farm, realistically its probably worth
more than either of them is likely to be able to afford to buy at such a
time that we would be ready and so in all likelihood we’ll sell it. But we
are hoping that the time will come when we will retire from our working
lives and mostly do the farm but I wouldn’t envision doing it as though it
was our only livelihood and we were now full time farmers. I think that the
range of our interests I guess one example would be my wife’s experience
having retired from her teaching career and being retired and basically
living on the farm and for her at least basically being a farmer and what
she concluded was at least at her age, in her mid-fifties, that she wasn’t
ready to do that. And I guess I can look at that as a lesson to learn from
and say well no, I wouldn’t want to do that.
***On the subject of geography...
So geography at least in terms of urban versus suburban versus
rural is that we’ve dabbled in each of them and sort of settled in the
middle. Having lived and worked and having been in college in upstate New
York and having worked in Detroit and having worked in Virginia and having
been in the army in several places I also have learned that you can do
whatever you do for a living in several different places and you might as
well plan it in a terrain that you like. So although we liked Detroit and
the city, the weather is bad, the terrain is featureless, winter comes early
and stays late. You don’t have to live like that, so we don’t.
***
I don’t usually think of my life having been hard. In fact by most
people’s standards, it’s been not hard at all. There have been times that I
have been less happy and a couple of times that I would say that I have been
the least happy which had some sort of negative aspects for the rest of my
life. If I am in a crappy mood much of the time or under a great stress,
that can’t help but pour over to the rest of the family around me...One of
the beauties of Hollins is that it is a very tangible, visible,
understandable organization. The scale of it is real, and the number of
people involved and the diversity of its mission and issues is something
that if you work on them, you can see some sort of consequence. That, for me
at least, is important.
***
Lots of proud moments when people around me do the sort of things that
make people proud...It makes you focus on how rich that kind of an event had
been, sort of bittersweet that this was the end but on the other hand it
reminds you that there have been an awful lot of happy times on that kind of
a side line. I think that a common characteristic is that they are things
that people have done that have been successes for them that I can take
pleasure in. In the case of the kids it is because they have in fact been
free to pursue what they care to pursue. Its just stuff like that, for
the most part you can’t plan it but you have to realize, hey that’s pretty
neat. So those are the happy times.
***
But it (farming) was an experiment. We had moved around a lot before
that time that was mainly on my behest because of my career. And here we
were moving again from a neighborhood in Roanoke with great friends, and we
were moving again. But it did seem that this was an opportunity to try
something new. If there was ever a moment to try to live on a farm, this was
the place to do it. Although we had looked for farm property way back before
that when we first moved to Roanoke but really we were doing it to fulfill
my wife’s long curiosity to do it.
***
...it was just another way of living. We moved from a student apartment
when we were first married to a suburban great big complex in Detroit, to a
hovel in our first location in the army. We’ve been in Alexandria, we’ve
been in Arizona, a couple places in Germany, and this was yet another way to
live that seemed like it was worth trying. No, I didn’t see any sacrifice to
it at all. It was just another adventure.
***Do you think that the farm has given your wife some sense of security in
having to move so much?
Not probably in the way that you are asking the question. I don’t know
that all of the moves caused a sense of insecurity. I think to a fair
extent, probably to both of our surprise since my wife had grown up in the
same town until we were married and her parents lived there for several
years until they too moved someplace else. My folks lived to their deaths in
the same house that I grew up in. So we came from such a stable environment.
Some of the moves were more difficult than others; moving from Richmond to
Roanoke was a little bit hard, Roanoke to Abingdon was a little hard. Moving
to Roanoke turned out to be wonderful and we’ve lived here for a long time
now. Moving to Abingdon was a little bit more of a mixed bag but that was
more because of Abingdon being small and we being a little out of our
element. It wasn’t security in the sense that she felt rootless and lost and
alone. She would probably move tomorrow if something caused us to do that,
and I would too. Every place we have lived, we have made a home. In a couple
cases, it probably cost us money because we made it such a home that we
couldn’t get our money back out of it when we were done. But on the other
hand it means that home is wherever we are. I think that our consciousness
now is that wherever we went we would be home. If something happened all of
the sudden and we were without all of the stuff that we have, we would still
find a way to have a home. That’s again as most of my answers have been,
more story than you need but the farm doesn’t represent security, it
represents another way of living that we have now tried and enjoyed and
gotten pleasure out of but could switch from if there was a reason to do
that.
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*Edited,
with permission by Bethany Ewing*