Childhood

In the beginning of the first interview, I asked Rosemary about her childhood.

"OK, where are you from?"

"I, um, was born in Newport News, Virginia.  And I lived there 5 years, and then I moved to Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, and mostly grew up there, until I was... uh…21 I guess."

"Until you were 21, when did you move here, or where did you go after Pennsylvania?"

"I went to Wisconsin to school and Colorado, and then back to Pennsylvania, until 19…90, when I moved to Virginia again."

"Wow, so have you been in Virginia since 1990?  OK, so tell me about your childhood!  You already told me you moved from Newport News to Pennsylvania."

"Right."

"That’s not much moving."

(clears throat) "No, it’s not, um, so I guess I was only five, so I never went to school in Virginia.  But my parents moved P[ennsylvania]…mainly because my mom didn’t want her kids being raised in segregated school systems."

"Oh, so the schools were segregated then?"

"Yeah, they were seg…that was in ’58, 1958, ’59 I guess when the…So we moved to Pennsylvania and my dad got a job in Philadelphia and we moved to Pennsylvania, and I grew up in kind of a middle-class neighborhood, um.  I lived in the woods, my house was in the woods and I loved playing in the woods."

"Your house was in the woods?"

"Yeah."

"And you live in the woods now!"

"Yeah." (laughs)

"In Newport News were you in the woods?"

"Kind of, yeah. It was very… a lot of trees. It was a lot. But there were a lot of trees on it. And it was at the woods."

"I’ve always liked the woods."

"This is the most open area I’ve ever lived in, actually."

"The most open area?"

"Yeah. Well this farm has a lot of open land. I’ve mostly lived in the woods."

"Yeah. I grew up in Roanoke, I was born in Salem, and I’ve lived here.   I moved to Vermont for a while, when Quinn was little. But other than that I’ve lived here, too. And I’m from the city, I’ve never moved in the woods. "

"No!"

"But I’d like to live in the woods."

"I recommend it."

"Yeah. Um. I was gonna' ask you something…Oh! About segregated schools. So, um, do you, like, with, so, obviously your mom, didn’t, she didn’t want you to go to segregated schools, so, she had some sort of… opposition… to… prejudice?"

"Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It had a profound effect on me. To be told that story. I mean, I didn’t realize it at the time, when I was five, but I remember later on when I was maybe eight or something like, I don’t remember exactly, but I remember being small, and her telling me why we moved."

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"So how was your school life, when you were a child?"

"It was hard for me, because I was really scared."

"Really?"

"I was very shy, as a child, and, I had a really hard time making friends. (clears throat) So, I didn’t like school because it meant I had to face people." (Laughs)

"Yeah, I can see how you would not like school."

"Yeah! (laughs) Um, I think there were certain years that I enjoyed it if I had friends. I always felt like making friends was hit or miss. Like if I lucked out I had friends."

"Wow."
"Yeah."

"So you didn’t…did you feel very confident in yourself?"

"No, I didn’t. At all."

"Doesn’t sound like it."

"I don’t really know why, other than, my mother I think was fairly shy and afraid, too, and I think I sort of absorbed a lot of that fear."

"Just felt that, and then applied it to your own life?"

"Yeah."

"What about your sisters?"

"I had one older sister, and, she was very outgoing and made friends really easily, and in talking to her now she had a lot of the same feelings I did. But it didn’t look like it to me, it looked to me like she was always… (clears throat) more popular, and, you know, that was my impression. I mean, I think she was more popular, but she still had a lot of insecurities like I did, inside, she just expressed it differently."

"Wow. So, you thought the same way, just not, didn’t show it in the same way?"

"Right. Yeah."

"Do you feel like it’s still hard for you to make friends?"

"No. I don’t."

"Well, that’s good!!"

(laughs) "In fact, moving to Virginia had a lot of effect on me in that way because, in Pennsylvania I had a lot of, I had a hard time making friends, and actually in 1990.. so it was, I don’t know, how old was I?, 8 when I moved to Virginia, and I still thought I had a hard time making friends, and then I got to Virginia, and it was easy!"

"Wow. What do you think it was?"

"Well, I feel like some, it had to do maybe with the energy of the area when I was living in Pennsylvania, I think it’s hard for everyone."

"Outside of Philadelphia?"

"Yeah."

"Because it’s a big city?"

"Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean. I. If all energy is different. It’s hard to say how pure that is. But I know that, before I moved to Floyd, I came here three years before I moved to Floyd, and in that three years I was occasionally traveling to look for land and I kept coming back to Floyd, so by the time I moved here three years later, I knew people, and I had more friends than I ever had in Pennsylvania. Just before I even moved here."

"Just from coming here?"

"Yeah. Because it was that easy to make friends."

"Do you think that it’s easy to make friends in Floyd, as opposed to other places?"

"Yeah. I do. Although I still have some hard time with…getting close to people. Sometimes I have a hard time reaching out. Still. I feel, I still have some shyness."

"Why do you think that is?"

"Old, old fear. I think."

"Old fears?"

"I think it’s just...  Yeah, from..."

"From when you were little?"

"Yeah…I think so.  Sometimes you get, I don’t know wha[t], I mean, I can’t relate it to an incident, I have great parents and a great sister an’ I’m very grateful.  Um, but I do feel like I absorbed some kind of fear and and felt insecure.  And  I was chubby when I was a kid too and so, and my mom was a little bit overweight and so she had a whole lot of shame around being fat and a lot of anxiety about me getting fat.

"Did she talk to you about it, like 'I hope you don’t get fat!'?"

"Yeah.  Well, and I was chubby so she tried to get me to diet and she-the doctor coerced with her, he told her I should loose weight so I’d be prettier, and all this kind of stuff, so, yeah, that’s pretty sick actually." (laughs)

"Wow, that is, that sounds pretty sick."

"Yeah, cause I wasn’t even fat."

"And it doesn’t matter if you are…"

"And it doesn’t,…right.  The point is being active not…being active and healthy, not being…any…weight. Anyway, so it had an affect on me.  That lasted.  You know, a lot of that’s residual stuff from that.  Even though I…I kno[w].. I understand it thoroughly now intellectually, there’s still some, it’s really behavior, you know, like…"

"Patterns."

"Yeah, patterns of behavior from when you were scared you would act a certain way and so..."

"Right."

"It’s kinda' like habit.  (clears throat)  And until you notice that you have it you don’t drop it."

"Right, and everybody has that.  But it sounds like you’re recognizing it and you’re working on it, and that’s good."

"Yeah, yeah...Yeah, it’s, it’s, um, I get very grateful when I realize something like that because as soon as you notice any little thing is holding you back, you can do something about it."

"Umhum.  Yeah."

"You know what I mean?"

"Yeah."

"Then you have the power to actually change it when you know it’s there." 

"Yeah, you’re right.  It’s good that you recognize that."

"Yeah, it’s very liberating when you see that."

"Yeah, that is good.  Um, wow, so what about your dad?"

"My dad, was a rocket scientist."  (laughs)

"A rocket scientist?"

"He was an aeronautical engineer, well, an aerospace engineer."

"What is that?"

"He worked on rock[ets,] he worked on like the Apollo, some of the different ones, lights and stuff.  He was an engineer who figured out insulation systems for rockets and just different things that had to be figured out on how to make a rocket shoot up, shoot it off and fly."

"Wow, so is that why you were in Newport, because he was on some kind of a…"

"Yeah, there’s NACA, which is, which is before NASA."

"What is NACA?"

"Nat…I don’t remember."

"Some…some kind of aerospace thing."

"Right.  Yeah, it NASA, it’s the prec[cursor].. you know it’s what came before NASA.  Turned into NASA probably in the ‘50’s.  Right.  So then he worked for General Electric, doing the same stuff, yeah."

"Hum."

"He retired from there."

"Is he still living?"

"No, my dad just died 2 months ago."

"Oh, wow."

"And my mom died 3 years ago, I think, yeah."

"Yeah, my dad died 14 years ago yesterday."

"Really?  Aw, wow."

"Yeah, he was ol[d,] well he wasn’t actually that old, he was 64, not that old, but…he was really unhealthy."

"Yeah, mine too, he needed to go."

"Um, so did you feel close to your dad when you were little?"

"Yeah I did, I did.  Um, I used to go sit on the bed with him at night and he would be, he’d be laying across the bed doing calculations.  You know, they didn’t have computers then, so he had a slide rule…"

"A what?"

"That was a-a slide rule?"

"I don’t know what that is."

"That was before they had calculators, even.  It’s a-it looks like a ruler, only, it’s got, something that slides back and forth and you can do millions of like-square roots, and all kinds of mathematical things cause it has all these numbers and lines and stuff and you can do equations and stuff by lining different things up.  Anyway, he was on his bed and he had these, you know papers like that would be just numbers, equations from, he’d have paper after paper of like, figuring stuff out, you know stuff a computer could probably do overnight now, or even, well, in 5 minutes, he would have to spend weeks on, so…"

"Wow."

"Yeah, I used to hang out and talk to him."

"Wow."

...