/
University of California Berkeley
/\
Regional Oral History Office University of California
The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California
Theodora Kroeber-Quinn
TIMELESS WOMAN, WRITER AND INTERPRETER
OF THE CALIFORNIA INDIAN WORLD
With an Introduction by
Augus t Fruge
An Interview Conducted by
Anne B rower
1976-1978
Copyright (c\ 1982 by the Regents of the University of California
This manuscript is made available for research
purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript,
including the right to publish, are reserved to
John Quinn until July 1, 1986. No part of the manu
script may be quoted for publication without the
written permission of the Director of The Bancroft
Library of the University of California at Berkeley.
Requests for permission to quote for publication
should be addressed to the Regional Oral History
Office, 486 Library, and should include identification
of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use
of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited
as follows:
Theodora Kroeber-Quinn, "Timeless Woman, Writer
and Interpreter of the California Indian World,"
an oral history conducted 1976-1978 by Anne Brower,
Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, 1982.
Copy No. \
THEODORA. KROEBER QUINN
February 26, 1970
Photograph by G. Paul Bishop
Berkeley, California
TABLE OF CONTENTS Theodora Kroeber-Quinn
INTRODUCTION by August Fruge i
INTERVIEW HISTORY iv
I FOREBEARS, FAMILY, TELLURIDE
Forebears and Family 1
Mining-town Girlhood 8
Brothers 13
II FROM COLORADO TO CALIFORNIA
San Francisco Earthquake (1906) 17
San Francisco and the Sacramento Valley 18
Student Years at the University of California 20
Living Arrangements 20
Campus Social Life 24
Heterogeneity of the Campus 26
III UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, WORLD WAR I, PARENTS
Courses, Friends, and Professors 27
Psychology: Studies and Fieldwork 32
World War I and the Campus 36
Home Bases 41
Relations with Parents 42
Further Comments on World War I 45
IV EDUCATIONAL CHOICES
Leonard Bacon 46
Academic Shopping Around 49
V THE TWENTIES (1)
Wife/Mother/Widow 56
In the Anthropology Department 63
VI THE TWENTIES (2) 68
The Depression and Academia 73
Faculty Wife 76
VII ALFRED KROEBER, L. L. NUNN, MARRIAGE
Alfred Kroeber Before Theodora 81
L. L. Nunn, Telluride House, and Deep Springs: A Digression 94
Second Marriages 99
VIII THE THIRTIES 101
Kishamlsh 103
A Time of Illness 109
Berkeley Schools 112
Life in the Thirties 115
IX ETHICS, MEN, WOMEN, HOUSES
Miscellaneous Observations: Interviews, Ethics, University of
California Regents 121
Father s and Brother s Suicides 125
Older Brothers, Older Men 130
Mothers and Daughters 132
Clubs 133
Houses 136
X PARENTS, CHILDREN, AND COMMUNICATION
Parents and Children 143
The Personal and the Private 158
Communication and Parenthood 162
XI ORAL HISTORY, AN OLDER KROEBER, THE KRACAWS
Thoughts on Oral History 166
A Mellowing Kroeber lilt.
The Kracaws 177
XII LIFE PATTERNS
Configurations 185
The Absent Parent 193
Self-Awareness 195
XIII AGE, WOMEN S ROLES, HEALTH
Ages 201
Women and Men 205
Health 209
XIV POLITICS, RELIGION, WORLD WAR II
Politics 217
Religion 225
World War II 227
XV ACADEMIC "RETIREMENT"
England and the Queen Mary 234
Relocations 240
XVI STANFORD AND TIME TO WRITE 249
Writing: Beginnings 254
XVII WRITING AND ART
Writing: Transition 260
Arts, Crafts, Writing, and Women 264
XVIII REFLECTIONS ON REBELLIONS, GENIUS, AND BELIEFS
Changing Attitudes 273
Genius 281
Beliefs 284
XIX HOLIDAYS, PUBLISHERS
Christmas and Funerals, Telluride 287
Writers Cramps and Creations 293
XX CREATIVITY, WRITING FOR CHILDREN, MOJAVE 301
XXI SECURITY, WIDOWHOOD 313
About Almost Ancestors 326
XXII UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA REGENT (1) 327
XXIII UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA REGENT (2) 339
TAPE GUIDE 353
APPENDIX I: RETROSPECTIVE, ORAL HISTORY, July 16, 1977 355
APPENDIX II: THE TWO ELIZABETHS 360
APPENDIX III: JOHN HARRISON QUINN, Biographical Note
by Theodora Kroeber-Quinn 426
APPENDIX IV: CROSS-GENERATION MARRIAGE by Theodora Kroeber-Quinn 428
APPENDIX V (1) : STATEMENT ON DARK-SKY OBSERVING STATION JUNIPERO
SERRA PEAK 433
(2) : FAREWELL STATEMENT 437
(3): UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA REGENT S APPRECIATION 440
APPENDIX VI: OBITUARY, THEODORA KROEBER-QUINN 441
INDEX 449
INTRODUCTION
One thinks not of the life but of the lives of Theodora Kroeber-Quinn,
the several lives that fitted one on to the other and sometimes overlapped,
but that had each its own existence and character. In a general way and
without drawing sharp lines of distinction, these were: girlhood in
Telluride, Colorado, when it was an active mining town; school years in
California, first marriage and first widowhood; the long central period
as wife and partner of the great anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber; then
widowhood again and third marriage. The second marriage was to a man
much older than she; the third to one much younger; both were eminently
successful in their different ways. Overlapping the last two lives and
continuing until her death in 1979 was her career as a distinguished
writer, a career that had its beginnings in the scientific studies of
Kroeber ethnography turned by her into literature and that grew naturally
from there until she stood entirely on her own as writer and public
citizen.
A person could know her in one of these lives and be virtually
unaware of the others. I, for example, was acquainted with Kroeber
for many years in connection with his publishing activities thus
professionally and not personally without knowing Theodora at all except
for the occasional encounter in Grand Central Station or elsewhere. It
was only after his death that I came into contact with her when she
published her best known book, Ishi In Two Worlds . There followed
other books, other connections, until I knew her well as friend and neighbor,
knew her not through Kroeber but because of what she herself was. I
first entered the house on Arch Street when she was living there alone;
my wife and I continued to visit there through her marriage to John Quinn.
Of her long career as perhaps the central figure in an extended family,
and of her earlier life, I know only what she said and wrote; it is one
kind of tribute to the clarity of what she said not much really and to
the vividness of her writing that the family life stays in my consciousness
as something almost experienced, more real than hearsay. Others, I believe,
experienced her in similar ways. A few, mostly anthropologists and mostly
gone now, coincided with both the latter two lives. I don t speak of the
family.
Along with the different lives there were different informal names;
the difference may or may not be significant. Kroeber called her Krakie,
a diminutive of her family name of Kracaw; and some of us felt privileged
to use that name in personal communication while switching to Theodora
when speaking about her to others. John Quinn called her Theo. What name
or names the children and grandchildren used I do not know.
ii
Theodora came to writing late. When her youngest child was fifteen,
the older ones away, the husband recovering from a heart attack, she
made, she tells us in her book about Kroeber, "my
first tentative
beginning toward writing." She was always tentative about it, even
later when she must have had some confidence in her talent, and was
never, I think, a fast worker. Her first book, The Inland Whale, a
retelling in literary form of California Indian myths, did not come
out until 1959, when she was past sixty. It must have been at about
that time that she was given the responsibility for an old project
of the Anthropology Department, a general or popular account of Ishi,
the stone-age Indian who came down from the mountains in 1911 and who
then lived in the University Museum for the last five years of his life.
I doubt whether anyone involved in the undertaking Heizer or Kroeber
or Theodora herself foresaw that in her hands the recollections of
Kroeber together with fifty pounds of old documents would be trans
figured into a work of genuine literature. Or that the book would
have such a ringing success .
The book needs no late praise from me. Let me say only this,
because it says something about Theodora as a writer: when the manu
script first came to the University Press half of it was written in
her own words while the other half was a set of strung-together
quotations from the sources, mostly from the monographs of Pope and
Waterman in Kroeber s old series, American Archaeology and Ethnology.
Either directly or through our chief editor, Lucie Dobbie, I told
her to take the manuscript home and redo the quotations in her own
language. As first submitted the book fell apart into two sections,
unlike in style and in effect on the reader. When resubmitted,
source material rewritten, the book was triumphantly one thing,
possibly the finest account that we have of American Indian life.
Ten years later, when she brought in her biography of Kroeber,
there was a minor repetition of the incident. In one section she
tried once more to string quotations on a thin thread of commentary,
something she could not do, that no one should try to do. Why she
tried is a mystery, related perhaps to the tentativeness mentioned
above. When she rewrote, without leaning on borrowed syntax, the
improvement was beyond compare. A writer does not always know her
own strength.
Theodora was no scholar, nor ever pretended to be. She listened
and took in. Her strength as a writer was understanding, intuition,
simple words well placed, strong feelings understated, an unexplained
ability to project herself and her reader back into a time and place and
into the mind of another or so it seems. This is the ability of
the historical novelist, one of them at least, and it helps us to see
how she could breathe life into the unliving transcription of Indian
ill
tales, unliving because set down literally in an alien idiom. It is
this gift of re-imagining that distills reality out of old papers and
recreates Ishi as an individual person, not fully comprehended
of course by quite as alive and eccentric as my grandfather. And that,
as mentioned above, gives me the illusion of having known her family
as they went about their quotidian affairs in Kishamish, at Arch
Street, and elsewhere. It is a very great gift, this gift of making
us part of a life we never took part in, of allowing our presence
where we never were, of raising up a gone world. In another kind
of life, no husband s career to assist, no family to raise, Theodora
might have made herself into a considerable novelist. But let us
be content with what she left us.
August Fruge
Director Emeritus
University of California Press
22 April 1982
Twenty-Nine Palms, California
iv
INTERVIEW HISTORY
Theodora Kroeber-Quinn, born Theodora Kracaw, grew up in Telluride,
a small, active mining town 7500 feet up in the Colorado Rockies. The
town was a mixed ethnic community of Americans, British, Finns, and
Italians; the cricket field abutted on the baseball diamond and the
first polo game played in the United States was held there. The
social life of the town was a lively mix of sexes and ages, and Theodora
enjoyed a freedom rare for that time the turn of the century. To
use her own term, the town was "liberated." The chemistry of that
girlhood perhaps accounts for Theodora Kroeber-Quinn s own liberated
spirit, her delight in diversity, her certainty about who she was
and about the validity, for her, of her values. Her relationship to
notable people she was the wife of Alfred Kroeber and the mother of
Ursula LeGuin never engulfed her nor diminished her sense of her
identity.
Full recognition as a writer came to Mrs. Kroeber-Quinn in her
mid-sixties with the publication of Ishi in Two Worlds, a book which
has been translated into nine languages and which is extraordinary
in its intuitive understanding of the California Indian mind. She
continued to write and to publish until the year of her death. In
the considerable volume of her publications, however, Mrs. Kroeber-Quinn
did not set down her own direct observations of the diverse world in
which she lived. Because her full contribution had not been made to
an understanding of the early twentieth century West, the University
of California over a period of nearly fifty years, and of the changes
in the role of women, as well as to the portraits of some of the men
and women who were prime movers in that place and time, an oral history
of Mrs. Kroeber-Quinn was undertaken.
I came to know Theodora in 1967-1968 in the course of the conception
and preparation of Almost Ancestors, published by the Sierra Club
when my husband, David Brower, was the Club s executive director. By
the time we began our interviews, our friendship had progressed to
my rather shy use of her intimate name, "Krakie."
The twenty-five interviews began in October 1976 and continued
at intervals through May 25, 1978. The two final interviews, covering
her experience as Regent of the University of California, were taped
on March 25 and April 5, 1978, when she, but not I, knew she was
terminally ill. All our interviews were conducted at Semper Virens,
1325 Arch Street, Berkeley, in either the dining room or the den of
that lovely old Maybeck house, or, occasionally, in the sunny garden
beside the small fountain John Quinn had given his wife for her birthday.
The settings seemed extensions of Theodora herself.
The subjects of the interviews were wide ranging, as the table of
contents attests; they were not discussed in an orderly fashion
beyond our attempts at rough chronology. The influence of her
Colorado mountain girlhood and the development of her writing were
themes that were frequently returned to. Theodora was essentially
a writer and she had little regard for her own performance on tape,
hearing herself, "mucking endlessly along." She sought rigorous
editing of this "oral floundering," and between her and me the transcript
has indeed been heavily edited, although the continuity of the tapes
has been preserved. Much of my editing was done after her death, with the
guidance she had given earlier and the blessings of her husband,
John Quinn, and her daughter, Ursula LeGuin. I also worked on a
"posthumous autobiography" of Theodora with John Quinn, using her
journal notes, her letters, scraps of autobiography and poetry, and
drawing heavily on the oral history.
In Appendix I of this manuscript, Theodora Kroeber-Quinn sets
down her reservations about oral history, especially with reference
to herself, but I believe that these interviews give a glimpse
into an unusual mind, sensitive but tough and unsentimental, and
record the thoughts and recollections of an honest and perceptive
observer.
Anne Hus Brower
Interviewer /Editor
1 May 1982
Regional Oral History Office
486 The Bancroft Library
University of California at Berkeley
I FOREBEARS, FAMILY, TELLURIDE
[Interview 1: October 12, 197 6]
Forebears and Family
Brower: Shall we begin with your grandparents?
K-Q: I don t know too much about some of my grandparents. Of my
paternal grandparents, I know simply that sometime in the early
18th century, or perhaps earlier than that, the family left Krakow,
Poland, which was their home. There was a stop in Germany, long
enough to have acquired, taken, or been given the Germanized name
of their natal city and to have acquired a "von" before it. Then
there was a move to England for how long a stay I do not know. My
great-grandparents emigrated from England to America, to Baltimore.
I have the impression that, like the Kroeber family, it was not a
large family . Whenever either a Kroeber or a Kracaw writes or
calls, it s possible to discover some family connection, and it does
not happen often.
I never knew my paternal grandfather or grandmother. My
grandmother died and my grandfather remarried. But I did know my
father s stepmother, who was "Grandmother Kracaw" to me.
My father s father was a portrait photographer in Baltimore,
and my father, Charles Emmet t Kracaw, was becoming one, but
developed, or was threatened with, or was believed to be threatened
with tuberculosis. He came west, where some of his (apparently
never numerous) connections had preceded him as far as Ohio and
Missouri. I think my father s move west interfered both with the
profession he intended to follow and, probably, with his schooling.
He went to an academy in Baltimore, but never I think to college.
Brower: The academy would be the equivalent of the high school?
K-Q: I believe it went somewhat beyond, but I am not sure. My mother
went to an academy, in Denver. She did not go to college.
##This symbol indicates that a tape or a segment of a tape has
begun or ended. For a guide to the tapes see page 353.
K-Q: The spelling of the name Krakow was changed, I suppose in
England. As it came down to me it was Kracaw. I know one other
spelling, the German apparently, with two Ks.
The reason alleged for the family s leaving Poland was that my
ancestors were Protestants and there was religious persecution in
Poland of Protestants by the state church, which was Roman Catholic.
The old religious controversy never interested my father particular
ly, but a cousin of his whose name was Anna Neiderheiser and who
was his age was very proud of her Protestant ancestors and felt
this was very important and very significant. Anna Neiderheiser,
whom I knew, was the first, and lifetime, superintendent of
the Methodist deaconesses training school in Kansas City, Missouri.
Brower: What would be the explanation of the move from Germany to England,
do you suppose? Economic?
K-Q: Religious, I believe according to Cousin Anna.
During the years we were in Telluride, my stepgrandmother
Kracaw, who was also Methodist, lived in a separate house my
father bought for her. I was very fond of her. She was Baltimore-
born, and as I think of her now, Southern in her manners, very
quiet. Not terribly interesting but a gracious, quiet lady. I
remember she had a little rosewood box in which there was a pair of
gloves she had worn the day she shook the hand of Abraham Lincoln.
Brower: She can t have been awfully Southern then?
K-Q: She certainly was not Southern in feeling. She and Mary Todd
[Lincoln] were somehow related. I don t know anything more than that
about her family. She was kind and she must have been beautiful
as a young woman. She had hair that curled, making a perfect marcel,
and a curl lay alongside the knot of hair at the nape of the neck.
Brower: How long did she live? How old were you when she died?
K-Q: She lived a long time. I was essentially grown when she died.
Brower: How did her residence happen to be with your father? Was he an
only child?
K-Q: No. He had a step-brother, Edgar, and a full sister, Ida. I
think my father just had more money. Edgar lived in Telluride
when we did and in fact worked for my father.
Brower: Then there were a good many of you there in Telluride?
K-Q: Yes. There was my father s stepmother, and Edgar and his wife and
their two sons. These cousins were about my age.
K-Q: The Neiderheiser name surely is German; I suppose there was some
intermarriage in Germany. I don t remember any English names coming
in. The stop in England may not have been very long. I don t know.
[At Theodora Kroeber-Quinn s request a portion of the original
transcript has been omitted here. The omitted material is covered
in greater detail in "The Two Elizabeths," Appendix II.]
K-Q: I often visited my father s sister, who married a rancher. They had
a ranch on Cherry Creek ouside of Denver. I loved to go there and
I went with as much interest and naivete as might someone from
the East. What happened on the ranch was strange and foreign to
my mining-camp experience and it fascinated me. I loved it. My
father s sister, Aunt Ida, was a natural good cook. She did all
sorts of things in cooking, "putting up" the produce grown in her
truck garden, preserving wild fruit. All the routine cows,
separators, making butter, making cheese all this sort of thing
was absolutely fascinating to me. It was something I didn t see
at home.
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
But Telluride must also have been remote from any city How did you
get your milk there, for instance?
Just as we used to in Berkeley! [laughter] A dairyman brought it
daily in Berkeley he brought it from the little dairy in the hills
in Strawberry Canyon.
Did your mother inherit from her mother the sense of being a
fugitive from Boston, or did she enter into Western life completely?
I think there was a hangover, which came down to me, of the
Boston thing. My mother was the oldest; she was an excellent
horsewoman.
You spoke of your mother s wearing divided skirts,
ride astride?
Did she
Yes. I think she rode sidesaddle in Wyoming. I think I never
saw her ride sidesaddle, although I may have in the very early
years . Her horse was a stallion that nobody else could control .
It was my father who said, "It s insanely dangerous, for both woman
and horse, to ride these trails sidesaddle." Certainly, by the
time I remember, all women wore divided skirts and rode Spanish
saddles.
I never rode a sidesaddle in my life. A few women stuck to it.
But on a mountain trail you are off balance on the horse, and the
horse is off balance. I suppose divided skirts may have come into
the mountains in advance of the cities.
K-Q: Of course, in our mining camp, riding was a part of social life,
also. We had awfully good horses and everybody rode; that s how
you got around. There were, among others, leather divided skirts
and suits made very, very elegantly by a tailor in town. You
didn t just have a divided skirt; you had a darn good one. Even
mine by the time I was ten was tailor-made by the tailor. A
great many people wore them to tea, or to lunch, or whatever the
occasion was, because you arrived on horseback. And if it was a
real party, you carried your slippers and your dress in a bag
behind your saddle.
Brower: Do you recall doing that, or were you too young then?
K-Q: I did it many times.
[At Theodora Kroeber-Quinn s request a page of the original
transcript has been omitted here. The emitted material is
covered in greater detail in "The Two Elizabeths," Appendix II]
K-Q: While we re on this matter of suffrage and women s roles, I might
just say that my mother always had a job, always worked. It so
happens she had a job with my father. What he did was lose money
in mines and make lots of money in a general store. The real money
was in wholesale, in selling to the mines. My mother ran the office
because she liked to; she was good at it. She had, since before
I was born, a full-time housekeeper, the only one I ever knew;
we had her until we left Colorado. I think perhaps the fact that
my mother went to work every day, that she also kept track of
what went on in the house and was very much part of it, and didn t
consider herself "advanced" or "liberated" she simply preferred
it to doing housework has perhaps colored my attitude. It never
seemed remarkable to me that a mother should have a job, and I
don t think it seemed at all remarkable to her. However, she
certainly never gave me the feeling that this was the way 1^ ought
to live. In fact, she took it for granted that I probably would
want to live differently, which I did. But not so many women were
working then. And she didn t have to.
Brower: I think that must have been most unusual.
K-Q: Another thing we might just cover here, which I think is unusual. I
was born in 1897 and I had one brother five years older than I and
one ten years older. That takes us back to 1887, the year my
older brother was born. We were all born in what they call a
lying-in or was it a laying- in? hospital in Denver. A woman M.D.,
who was married to a doctor, owned and ran this hospital. She also
happened to be a very close friend of my mother s, and my mother
had her children there. After delivery my mother spent two weeks
in hospital with, I think, very much the sort of care that I had in
Berkeley at Alta Bates Hospital with my children. This was not so
usual then.
Brower: I didn t know people went to hospitals for childbirth as early as
1887. And a woman doctor at that period is unusual too.
K-Q: Yes. All I know about the two doctors is that they both went to
Johns Hopkins. I ll bet she was the only woman in Johns Hopkins
at that time .
Brower: I would guess so.
K-Q: [consulting list of proposed questions] Do you want this sort of
thing "Description of the family dwelling. Details to assess
family circumstances"?
Brower: I think we have covered that pretty well.
K-Q: Yes. [reading] "How
many shared a bed?"
Brower: It might be interesting to know a little bit about the Telluride
house. For instance, I have no idea what the houses in Telluride
were made of.
K-Q: Most of the houses are wooden there, except a few brick ones, and
ours was a large, frame, two-story house. Of course, everybody
had his own bedroom, including the housekeeper.
Brower: Were your brothers living there too at that time?
K-Q: Yes. We all went through the Telluride High School, which was
then accredited and was a good school. My brothers left home only
when they went to college.
Of course, there was running water and toilets.
[still referring to list of questions] The role of religion
in the home is one thing they re asking here. I think my sort of
mystic streak and sense of wonder comes from my father; in fact,
I know it does. He was not a Christian. He wasn t a believer. He
was immensely interested in religion and read an enormous amount
about different sorts of religion, particularly Eastern Indian
religions . He contributed to all the churches and went to none
of them.
My grandmother, my mother, and I all were Episcopalians, but
Christian religion really didn t mean much to me. Religion was a
social outlet in a mining camp. The church was one of the fun
places; it was where you went for small dances and parties.
Brower: Did you say grace, for example, in your family?
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
No.
Did you think of Christmas as a religious occasion?
I m afraid not. It was a grand occasion, but it wasn t religious.
Did they have a midnight Christmas mass, in that Episcopal church?
Oh yes, and I went to church. I always loved the ritual. I do
to this day. I love the ritual and I like the Book of Common Prayer.
It was written at a good time for written English. : think people
usually do worse when they depart from it on a ritual occasion
such as a marriage or a funeral. It gets you through a marriage
service, a funeral service, or whatever it is
As neatly as anything could.
It s much better than when people use their imaginations, I think.
[laughter]
I agree with you; it s beautiful.
I love the Episcopal midnight service. I consider myself a religious
person, but I don t consider myself a Christian. I have a private,
very strong sense of wonder, I guess. I think what I would naturally
have been is a sun-worshipper. The sun has not only healing qualities
for me; there s something of mystic significance to me about the sun.
But you would not describe yours as a religious household? Was it
a politically active household?
I would say yes. My father (who was rather fragile in health
always, in contrast to my mother, who was robust), served always
on the school board, on the town council, did his turn as mayor
and so on reluctantly because he really didn t have the energy
and the strength for it. But he felt a very real responsibility.
He was on the liberal side when we had a very bad, long strike in
which the mayor called in the national guard. We were under
military control for two years, during which my mother carried a pass
to get onto Main Street to go to work.
My father was oat in sympathy with the miners in this violent
strike (there was a lot of violence) . But he was the one person
whom they trusted. Of course, his friends were the mine owners, but
he could talk to both sides, and he was one of the few people in
town who could.
Brower: I imagine that was a time of great tension.
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
It was. The sheriff appointed a number of deputies and my older
brother, Austin, who was sixteen then, was deputized. He didn t
have any choice about that, and he was also blacklisted by the
U.M.W. (United Mine Workers) ,
as was my father and as were all of
our friends .
There were a few kidnappings and a few killings; our neighbor,
sitting at table, was shot right through the window and killed.
From that time on, we pulled the shades down. We had a white picket
fence around the house and during that period had to be inside
that fence before it began to get dusk, and my younger brother,
Forest, had to be home.
I remember, my first year in Berkeley, I was absolutely
fascinated walking around these hill streets and just looking in
people s windows, with the curtains up and the lamps lighted and
people moving about. It fascinated me because I had this long
experience of pulling the shades as soon as it was dusk.
When you say blacklisted, what was the significance of that?
If there had been a good opportunity, the miners might have shot
anyone on the blacklist. There was a lot of roughness on both sides.
For example, one person the mine owners caught was just told to go
over the hill. The mines had strong searchlights so they could
see to it that he went. It was winter. Well, where would he go
over the hill? If he was awfully smart or lucky, he might have
found a prospector s house. But as far as the people who sent him
were concerned, he could also freeze to death.
The roughness was on both sides; there wasn t all that much to
choose between them.
Do you remember being frightened?
No, I don t remember being frightened, particularly, but it certainly
conditioned my fear of the dark, which I ve never really got over.
I think the fact that I m night blind is just that I didn t have
the experience of learning to see in the dark.
You spoke of having to be home by dusk at that time. What did you
do until dusk? What was your recreation? Did you wander on those
hills by yourself?
Mining-Town Girlhood
K-Q: Certainly it was a different world, and it s curious, its impositions
and its freedoms. I always had a horse. I rode, either with a friend
or by myself, and I was expected to be in at whatever time I said
I was going to be back. But my parents didn t inquire very closely
as to where I went.
I sort of went wandering anywhere over the place. I might
ride up to the Tomboy Mine, in which case they would know where I
was going, but I don t remember that I was supposed to phone as soon
as I got there. You d meet trains of burros bringing the gold
bullion down, or empty trains going up, armed men at either end of
the "train," men I didn t know, and armed. These were all pretty
lonely trails where we went, and I felt perfectly free about that.
If by any chance something happened so that it got dark before I
reached home, I was just to wrap the reins around the horn and the
horse would come home.
Now, I didn t stay out over night I don t remember that
I ever did alone. But I could have. That seems terribly permissive
and casual, doesn t it?
Brower: Did this two-year period of martial law change that pattern, or
did you still go as free as you were before?
K-Q: I was as free, except during this tense period, and it was the only
time. On the whole, relations were good with the unions because
the mine owners paid well. This was gold mining, and the lowest
paid mucker, the absolutely unskilled guy in the mine, got five
dollars a day. That, in 1900, was pretty good and the salaries
went up from there.
The only crime 1 remember was an occasional knifing in the
red-light district, where I never went (it was marked like that
[gesture], you know). And there would be crimes of passion, which
somehow didn t occur on our side of Main Street [laughter], and I
don t remember much about them. I think they were not much written
up, or discussed.
Lord, there were these odd prospectors. As you came up on a
prospector s cabin, you went in and passed the time of day if the
owner was there; he usually made you some pancakes and gave you
coffee from a black pot kept hot on the back of his wood stove.
There were these lonely men around; when you d meet them on the trail
you exchanged greetings and passed on.
Brower: And no apprehension of the meeting?
K-Q: No, none at all. That I came to later. I was made afraid by
warnings (proper ones I should say) during the time of trouble, but
when that time of trouble was over I don t remember being afraid.
K-Q: Crimes occurred in saloons or in the red-light district, or two
miners would get drunk and they d have it out. But that was it.
Brower: Did that violent time affect your social life? You must have been
going to school with miners children. Was that a difficult time for
you?
K-Q: No. At least I don t remember it as being. I think I was pretty
young when that was happening; I can t quite remember.
Brower: If your older brother was sixteen, you would have been six.
K-Q: Yes, that places it.
Brower: Perhaps you were not even in school at that time.
K-Q: Yes, I was in school all right because I went to kindergarten. But
the school was down only a half a block and then a block on the
level up town on the "above Main Street" side of town.
For the article I did for David Lavender* I made a diagram of
the town divisions. The upper side of Main Street went up, up hill.
It was upper class and it was uphill, [laughter] The down side of
Main Street was toward the river and the railroad tracks; the red-
light district was there along with warehouses and so forth. And
the dividing line was absolute.
I remember my father once being asked how he could bear to bring
up sons in a mining town that was high license and made open to
saloons, and gambling, and bordellos. He said, "Give me a high license
town any time." He meant such a town was under strict legal and
police surveillance. It was very high license for saloons, very high
license for the red-light gals, and gamblers because they were
licensed, the people involved were known by name, record, and in
person. They were all known, and certainly the area boundaries were
strictly and absolutely drawn. Everything could be seen. Of course,
if a youngster crossed the boundary and was prowling around where he
didn t belong, the sheriff or the police were always circulating
quietly around and pushed him home. Also there was a curfew.
Brower: For young people or for people generally?
K-Q: It was for young people, but I think it was a bit precautionary too.
Maybe that started with the trouble with the union, and was continued.
*See David Lavender, "A
Rocky Mountain Fantasy: Telluride, Colorado,"
in Thomas C. Wheeler, ed., A Vanishing America: The Life and Times
of the Small Town (N.Y., Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), pp. 136-150.
10
Brower: Do you remember the hour of the curfew? Was it ten o clock, eleven
o clock?
K-Q: I think it was nine. Summer twilight is very long there in the
mountains, and in summer I know we could play out till ten; it would
still be light.
Brower: I didn t mean to rush you ahead to your school days, but in talking
about that violent time, I wondered how it might have affected you
in school.
K-Q: It s an interesting question. Certainly in school we were mixed.
My graduating class was seven boys and seven girls, [laughter] Of
course, some of the boys, and particularly miners sons, dropped out
instead of finishing high school; I suppose the age limit then was
fourteen.
I remember one of the really bright boys was Nilo Suomela
(obviously Finnish) . His mother I think the father was killed in
the mine his mother took in washing for a living. He was one of the
few, besides myself, from that group who went on to college.
Most of the miners were foreign; they were Finnish, they were
Greek, they were Italian. The Swedish and Scottish tended to become
subsuperintendents and to go on up the line. A great many of these
miners didn t bring their families; they sent their money home the
old immigrant pattern and when they had made what they considered
their pile, they went home. There were a few Italian families in
Telluride. So, there weren t so many miners children. There were
mine superintendent s children.
The Tomboy, which was the biggest mine there, was British-owned
and British-staffed in most of the upper reaches. So there were a
good many British children in school with me. The first polo team
to come to this country, imported straight from India with the trainer
who was with them there, came to Telluride. Polo was played there,
from the time I can remember.
Brower: You also mentioned there that there was a cricket field right beside
the baseball diamond.
K-Q: Right. A curious thing was that I had a carry-over, which I
unlearned here in Berkeley, of some Britishisms of speech. I think I
still say "again" [long a], although I tried very hard to unlearn that
because it was considered very funny here.
Brower: Was it only in your speech? Did you have tea in the afternoons, for
example?
11
K-Q: Oh yes! Now, how general that was in America, I don t know.
Certainly in New England. But we regularly did, yes.
If
Brower: May I go back briefly over your family names?
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: Your older brother was Austin Rogers?
K-Q: Right, and the younger brother was Forest Allen.
Brower: And you were Theodora.
K-Q: I was Theodora Covel. Covel is a family name from Boston; there s
still a Covel family there. My grandmother s name was Elizabeth;
until my mother, the eldest daughter had regularly been named
Elizabeth. My grandmother called my mother Phebe Jane (Phebe was a
family name, but I don t know where the Jane came from). Her younger
daughter was named Elizabeth.
When I came along, this same grandmother wanted me to be called
Theodora. Mother thought that she just liked the name, but after I
was named that, she found that my grandmother had read a novel I wish
to goodness I could see that novel! in which the heroine was Theodora.
My mother was furious because she said the novel was absolute trash!
[laughter]
Brower: Oh dear! What do you suppose it was?
K-Q: I d love to see it. I suppose it was one of those novels that come
and go .
Brower: I think Theodora is a very nice name.
K-Q: I think it s a nice name too.
Brower: [referring to list of questions] There is a question here about your
parents attitude toward education.
K-Q: Obviously they were for it.
Brower: There was no question of sending you to Denver to school, where you
might have had a more ?
K-Q: No. Telluride had an excellent school; it was accredited. I could
have had scholarships in any number of places, and they took the
credits here at Berkeley without question. Telluride had a good
school board, but the principal reason the school was good was that
they got the pick of young women teachers. There were several men
12
K-Q: to one woman in Telluride. When my father was head of the school
board, he simply had to change the contract with these young women
to insure that a teacher would finish out her term. She could get
married if she wanted to, but she must finish the term.
Brower: So young women came to Telluride with the object of matrimony?
K-Q: They came. The word got around. These were mighty personable young
men who were there British engineers, Australians, men from MIT,
from the Colorado School of Mines at Golden. Here they were. Some
of the most improbable women got married, [laughter]
The result was you had young, enthusiastic teachers. This camp
and I suppose other camps that were going well were on the preferred
list. So there was great competition; my father or another member
of the school board would go out to Denver and interview these pro
spective teachers. There were a few men teachers, particularly in
chemistry and physics, and the superintendent was always a man.
Brower: I would have thought that the ladies minds might have been so much
on their conquests that they were not good teachers under those
circumstances .
K-Q: I think they were good teachers. I remember some excellent ones.
Brower: Did you have any difficulties when you entered the university?
K-Q: No. My one difficulty was terror at the size. There were only five
thousand here at Cal when I entered, but that was two million to me
having gone through school with people that I knew, and the last two
years of it with just fourteen of us.
Because a great many of the boys went from our school to the
School of Mines (Golden, Colorado) or to MIT, the school had good
chemistry, good math, and good physics teachers, who were likely to
be men. These kids went right straight without any difficulty
to whatever university they chose. The boys who went on, for the
most part, went to an engineering school.
Brower: Was there a difference between your education and your brothers ?
K-Q: I took four years of Latin, I took chemistry, I took physics, I had
solid geometry. I think they also offered a second course in physics
and the next course in math.
Brower: But essentially the programs were the same for boys and girls?
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: Did you have a special enthusiasm in high school for a particular
subject?
K-Q:
13
I had an awfully good English teacher my last year. I liked English
anyhow. Lousy as I am at languages, I loved Latin; the last year we
just read Vergil, which was great fun. I suppose there were poor
teachers too.
Brower: You think that Telluride s condition is different now?
K-Q: It never survived the First World War, when the price of gold went
down. When I saw it in 58 with my brother, it was gone except for
the setting and Colorado Avenue its main street, and a few cute
little houses. Now, of course, it is having an artificial rebirth;
they re mining and making an awful mess of things, too mining the
old tailings from the gold and silver mining for uranium and tellurium
and radium. There are huge amounts of this absolutely deadly looking
(and very deadly) stuff piling up there.
Then, of course, it s becoming a ski resort; it s just a
natural for that and they have a ski lift. Now, some of these
tumble-down houses are selling for twenty-six and thirty thousand
dollars.
You know, there s nothing so dead as a dead mining town. I
think when Forest and I were there in 1958, maybe there were two or
three hundred people there, and I think they were employed in what
they now call "remining the treasure tailings" the spill from
the dregs left after extraction of the ore "treasure" or "treasure
tunnels .
"
Brower: When you were in school, did you have any sense of what you wanted
to be, or in what direction you were going?
K-Q: [laughter] Not really. I liked what I was doing.
Brower: You didn t think of yourself as training for any particular profession?
K-Q: No, I m afraid I didn t.
Brothers
Brower: Your brothers were so much older. Did you have pleasant relations
with them, or were they so much older that you didn t really see
much of them?
14
K-Q: I think I had an ideal setup. With a brother who was five years
older I got in on all sorts of things because he liked me; we
were good friends. He would take me along, or his friends would
beau me to things.
My older brother s attitude was quite fatherly. After Austin
married, I would visit him and his wife in Denver; I d go out by
myself on the train. He was the one who gave me such sex education
as I had. My parents weren t very good about sex-training; I don t
think most parents were then. Anyhow, I can t remember that we
talked so much about that, but the really great thing he did for
me I don t know where he was in his medical training at the time
but anyhow he came home for one Christmas vacation, and he had with
him the equipment for making menstrual pads. He showed me just how
to cut them and had the filler for them. He kept me supplied with
that until pads came on the market so that I always had disposable
ones. There were no commercial disposable ones to be had when I was
fourteen years old.
Brower: Had you already menstruated or was this in advance?
K-Q: It was in advance. He said, "We ll make up these now," and we made
them up together. He said, "I m leaving this stuff here, and you
make them and you burn them." My god, was I thankful for that!
My mother and "Auntie Norton," our housekeeper washed the
damn things; Austin spared me all that.
Brower: Had you been prepared for the advent of menstruation by your mother?
K-Q: Well, sort of. But I think there again, Austin did more than she.
Brower: Did menstruation seem a catastrophe to you?
K-Q: No, I took it more or less for granted so far as I remember. It
didn t seem a catastrophe to me. There were all sorts of things
that I didn t know, but I always did know more or less where babies
came from (although I had some very curious ideas about how
intercourse took place) .
Brower: I don t think that was at all unusual.
K-Q: This total ignorance business? No, I don t think so.
Brower: I would have thought that perhaps in a small mining town, things
would have been a little more visible.
K-Q: You know, they really weren t. It wasn t like a small town, and
it wasn t like a ranch I saw lambs born on the ranch. In a general
way, my biology was all right; but certainly at the human level, it
was most lacking, I should say.
15
B rower:
K-Q:
I don t know why mothers and daughters have this difficulty talking
about sex, but it seems much easier for a sibling than for a parent.
The fact that your brothers both were doctors is a little
curious. Were they the first in the family to go into medicine?
No, there was a tradition of doctors on the Kracaw side of the family.
Austin always meant to be a doctor, from the time he was thinking
about anything. He didn t go through any phase of wanting to be a
mining engineer or wanting to be a policeman, or anything else; he
always meant to be a doctor.
I think Forest probably was influenced by him. They were both
good doctors and seemed to have plenty of temperament for it. I
don t think Austin was influenced by the fact that there was an old
tradition of doctors in the family; but I wouldn t know. He might
have been.
Brower: Aptitudes in families can be inherited, I expect.
K-Q: I suppose so.
Brower: Where did they get their medical education?
K-Q: Austin, the older one, went to the Denver Medical School. It no
longer exists; it was absorbed by the University of Colorado. It
was essentially a group of doctors. It started the way the medical
school in St. Louis started. A group of doctors of different
specialties got together and established a very small school at
St. Anthony s Hospital (which happened to be the best hospital in
Denver) apparently the school was a very good one and drew doctors
to them. It remained a strictly private thing. I understand this
has happened with several medical schools (they ve gone on to become
something) ; this one simply got absorbed into the University of
Colorado Medical School.
Forest went to Marquette Medical School in Wisconsin. The
school in Denver had been absorbed by the time Forest was ready to
go, and Austin didn t think too much of what the university was
doing there; the hospital in Boulder was not as good as the one in
Denver had been. So, Forest went to Marquette. I don t know what
Marquette has become since; it apparently was good then. He had
several choices, but he went there and didn t regret it.
Then Forest was in the war (World War I) as a physician, and
stayed on in Europe, after the war. He was in charge of a field
hospital during the war. (Really, he shouldn t have been. But being
in Marquette, he had learned German. All doctors then learned German
the technical vocabulary but Forest spoke it because he had done so
much work in training amongst German-speaking people. So he spoke
German fluently.)
16
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
When the war was over, he had this immense curiosity to know what
really was going on medically that seemed to be so exciting in
Vienna. So, he went there, meaning to stay two weeks. He stayed
for more than two years. He stayed until his money ran out. That s
where he got his specialty training in ear surgery. He said Vienna
was very far ahead of us.
My assumption was that it was because of Freud that he wanted to go
to Vienna.
No. You know, I have no idea whether Freud and psychoanalysis as such
ever touched him. He was so much the doctor. He had been in Europe
ahead of our being in the war and had talked to German and Austrian
doctors and people who had Viennese training. He went Vienna and,
without really meaning to, signed up and got into classes with very
high-grade surgeons .
When he first went to Europe, he must have been in his twenties.
He was.
[silence]
What kind of clothes did you wear when you were a girl in Telluride?
You spoke of divided skirts; I suppose you didn t wear pants?
Only for hiking. No, I didn t wear pants until later when I went
back for a summer in 1918. I don t think any women wore pants. What
the devil did I wear?
As a school girl, when you went off to school, what sort of thing
did you wear?
I wore whatever little girls wore then.
My grandmother sewed well and liked to make me things. She had
imagination enough to make me little black dresses when I was very
small (I had flaming red hair, you know). She d make little black
dresses of black, shiny sateen with bright embroidery on the yokes
and on the ruffles, which I now see took courage and imagination.
Then, later, the general feeling was that if you were unfortunate
enough to have red hair, blue was about the only possible color, with
brown the navy blue sort of thing, which I wiped out of my clothes
as soon as I could. I loved blue-greens, anything turquoise, from
the tine I discovered them. You know, a bright dark blue isn t very
good with red hair, as a matter of fact; it s an illusion that it is.
There are any number of colors that are much better.
17
II FROM COLORADO TO CALIFORNIA
[Interview 2: October 26, 1976 ]##
The San Francisco Earthquake
Brower: You mentioned that you happened to be in San Francisco at the time
of the 1906 earthquake. Could we talk about that?
K-Q: Let me tell you rather briefly about it. About the earthquake.
The reason I was in San Francisco was that my mother had come
out to visit her sister Betsy who was living in San Francisco at the
time. She and her husband, Uncle Charlie Buck, had an apartment;
I don t remember the exact address, but it was in the Mission. My
mother had with her both my grandmothers and me; I had just celebrated
my ninth birthday. My aunt, who was many years younger than my
mother, had a six-month-old baby, Albert. My uncle was a contractor
in San Francisco. We were in one of these old apartments that shook
around a lot, but it did not go down. A newly built apartment
building along the street crashed as a single entity smack across
the street.
Brower: There must have been loss of life in that area.
K-Q: Oh, there was enormous loss of life! I think that s always been
underestimated. For instance, at the corner of Valencia and Mission,
if there is such an address things like addresses remain a little
vague to me it s one of the places where a creek (Valencia Creek?)
had been covered over by buildings. The earthquake just eliminated
this cover-over, and a working man s hotel, a square frame building,
went down so that the sixth story (it was six stories high) was at
the level of the street. The people on the sixth story who weren t
injured or killed just walked out at street level. That was a biggish
building where there must have been enormous loss of life, just in
that one place.
As I recall it, the fire did not cross Van Ness Avenue until
the third night. In the interval, we moved out to what became Buena
Vista Park, which had previously been a Jewish cemetery. They had
just moved out the bodies to a cemetery down the peninsula and there
were open graves. My uncle put up a shelter and took up the rugs
from the apartment and draped them over the top. It didn t rain,
but we had shelter from sun and wind.
18
K-Q: On that little hillside, there were, as I remember being told, some
two thousand people who took refuge there. We were pretty thick.
[At Theodora Kroeber-Quinn s request a portion of the original
transcript has been omitted here. The omitted material is
covered in greater detail in "The Two Elizabeths," Appendix II ].
San Francisco and the Sacramento Valley
K-Q: [Until we visited in San Francisco] I had never been shut up in an
apartment or played on the street. [One day] I think my mother
decided it was time for a little large-muscle activity. We took
a lunch and went to Golden Gate Park for the day. She just turned
me loose, as long as I would remain within calling distance of
her. When we finally were both exhausted, she was absolutely lost.
We had to hunt around until we found a policeman who would show us
where to go out. By that time she was completely turned around; he
went to the entrance with us and made sure that we took a streetcar
going in the right direction, [laughter] But that was a lovely day!
I just ran and played. I don t remember what I did, except that I
was used to being free and the park represented open country to me.
Brower: It must have been more open at that time than it is now, and
I m sure it was easier to get lost, then.
K-Q: Yes. There were fewer buildings, and I suppose there was only
one road, a carriage road, through the park at that time. Certainly
you weren t always crossing roads; you could just set off, across
open ground.
Brower: What a blissful day that must have been.
K-Q: Yes. I just happened to think of that.
In 1915 my family moved to California. Until my father s
death, for about two years, they were up in the Sacramento Valley.
Then my mother moved to Oakland.
There is one pre-University recollection that might be worth
recording here, because other people may have had similar experiences-
or very dissimilar ones . I came to a town about the size of the
town I had left, but in no other way was there a resemblance. I
really did not know what a small country town was like, because my
small town was a mining camp and was altogether different. Also,
I didn t know what heat was like, and it was summer in the Sacramento
Valley.
19
B rower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
When you say small town, are you referring to Sacramento?
No. My people went to Orland, which is now not so small but
was then. My father joined a company that had started a private
irrigation system up there, which I think didn t work out too well.
But I really don t know; that s so many years ago. When he died, my
mother got out of it. But anyhow, that s why we were there.
There were two or three engineers whom I d known in Telluride
who were in Orland doing engineering. So I talked plenty to them,
as people whom I knew, and who looked right to me.
You were not in school then?
This was the summer between high school and college.
We went to the Sacramento River and I just rushed into that
river, away from the heat. It was full of malarial mosquitoes, and
I got a terrific malaria, which would flare up in other summers when
I went to the Valley. When I came down in the hot train (and at
that time, the train went right onto a ferry that crossed the
Carquinez Straits), I d go out onto the platform of the car as it was
being ferried across. The fog and wind would hit me, and my temperature
would begin to go down just like that. I d be well the next day.
I m sure it was partly psychosomatic, but there was physical fact
too. The Valley heat is intense if you re not used to it.
I really could not make head or tail of the town,
meaningless to me; I didn t understand it.
It was
If I went down Orland s main street and passed the pool parlor,
there was snickering and whistling, which shocked me because I never
had seen or heard anything like it. In Telluride people weren t
allowed to lounge along the street.
Was there anything about the way you dressed that was, for that
place, somehow inappropriate?
No, no. It was just kind of a low-life part of Main Street, and
this sort of thing wasn t unusual there at all.
Did I understand that the low-life part of Telluride was off limits
for you?
Absolutely off limits. On the lower side of Main Street, which was
off limits in Telluride, every other door along the three main
blocks was a saloon. But there wasn t lounging in front of the
saloons, or whistling and this sort of thing.
Brower: It must have been a rather unpleasant interlude.
20
K-Q: I never was more homesick in ray life. I wasn t homesick for people
particularly; I was homesick for the place. Part of this may be
particularly acute with me because I do put roots down; I feel that
some part of me is in every place I have ever lived. We [Theodora
and Alfred Kroeber] had a year in Cambridge, Mass. We visited
back there frequently, but we lived there for only the one year, and
in a miserable little house above the Charles River just off Brattle
Street. I love that place and feel very, very strongly about the
part of the streets that I walked on, not about the house physically
but about the neighborhood. I also made one very good friend,
who lived next door to our house there.
Brower: When you talk about this period in Cambridge, you re talking about
the year 1947/48?
K-Q: Yes, it really doesn t belong in here.
Student Years at the University of California
K-Q: No, let s see. We re at 1915, are we?
Brower: Yes, at the University.
K-Q: My homesickness hung on enough that it s a wonder I didn t flunk out
my first year, because I am one of the people who gets the real
disease. And it jLs_
a disease; it s a terrible disease, homesickness
is.
Living Arrangements
Brower: What were your living arrangements when you were on campus?
K-Q: The living arrangements I think were extremely fortunate. My
mother came down and found a place in a house on Buena Vista Way,
just up from Euclid Avenue (it burned, of course, in the fire [1923]).
At that time, [Joel] Hildebrand, the chemist, lived just above.
It was one of these Berkeley brown-shingled houses, an ample house.
The man of the house where I lived had been an assayist in Durango
some fifty miles south of Telluride. He had retired out here and
gone into the jewelry business (which a great many assayists do as a
sideline). I think in his case it was not connected with highgrading
(the illegal selling of gold ore) , but in many cases it was (the
jewelry shop would be a front for highgrading).
21
K-Q: There were three grown daughters and one my age still in college.
The family took in, I believe, nine girls; with the sleeping porch
and so on, there was room for nine.
Brower: Did that include the three daughters?
K-Q: There was just the one daughter at home, and she was in college with
us; she was just a year ahead of me. My first day there, Ruth Gannett
(as she would be known now Lewis Gannett s wife who is still living,
by the way) and I made friends. She became my closest friend and has
remained so throughout my life.
Margaret Allen, from the family at Point Lobos (there used to
be a ranch at Point Lobos) , was in that same freshman group of nine
girls. She and I have remained, not the intimate friends that Ruth
and I are, but close friends. There were one or two who were friends
but less close. The daughter of the household herself, Dorothea
Balster, was one. She and I were very good friends.
I didn t have sisters and I didn t go to summer camp; I didn t
do many things girls do now, and it was rather trying for me to
live even this very mild dormitory life. I never got the kick out
of it that some women do, I mean, those who are perfectly happy in
the easy promiscuity of a woman s dorm. I ve never really liked it.
Brower: Was it because of the lack of privacy, or just simply that the
relation to women was new to you?
K-Q: I like individual women, and I m comfortable with individual women.
I ve never taken to women en masse; I suppose that s why I ve got out
of every club I ve got into. I imagine that my early situation had
a lot to do with that. I always have been shy; I always have been
introverted. My natural "sociability" is intimate, "one at a time."
One of the fraternities at that time was next door to the house
on Buena Vista. That was fun, with easy back-and-forth, dating, or
maybe just walking together from the house to the campus. We walked
eternally down to the library. I don t think undergraduates study
at the library today the way they used to. We would walk from Buena
Vista down to campus; it s a pretty good walk. We d come home for
lunch, starved, come home for dinner, and then very often go back to
the library. There was no reason why we should; we had space at home.
I think partly this was sociability and dating. But I think kids did
work in the library a lot more then than now. There was plenty of
space; there just isn t the space now that there was then. Even by
the time I was, briefly, doing some graduate work, it was only graduate
students who had a whole piece of desk to themselves.
Brower: How did Cal happen to be selected as the college you would go to?
22
K-Q: It wasn t in the first place. It was assumed by my mother and my
grandmother that I would go to Smith.
Brower: Why was that assumption made?
K-Q: My grandmother had made up her mind it was the best of the girls
colleges. I don t think she was necessarily right; she thought she
was.
When it came to the point, my father had pulled out from his
various businesses in Telluride because he couldn t live there
any more, and had made new and not such good investments, and we
were really pretty tight for money. There wasn t money for Smith.
Brower: Was this a disappointment to you?
K-Q: No, it really wasn t. I didn t have college very well visualized.
The only colleges I d seen close up were Denver University and the
University of Colorado, and I d seen them sort of through my brother s
eyes. I d gone to fraternity dances there and things like that. I
visualized a little green campus, like the Denver University campus.
But I didn t particularly visualize myself in it.
I think through luck I got more in the way of experience with
important people on the faculty than did most students. But I think
my student relations were not as important to me as to many others.
There was this intimate group that I liked. I suppose because I
had always gone with older men (there were so many around) I very
early made friends with a very small group of either upper division
or graduate men. This was in my freshman year. It was with them I
did my dating.
My mother was very much against sororities. Also, one of the
engineers who had a strong influence on me in Telluride, was very
much opposed to them. So I sort of promised them I wouldn t go in
for the first year. Then by the second year, I d settled into our
life on Buena Vista. The third year, my roommate and I went to
a hall on LeConte made up of a bunch of girls who had walked out of
College Hall (College Hall was the women s big dormitory) and got
two Scotch women to open up a house where the Divinity School is now.
I can t at the moment think what they called the hall. There must
have been about fifty girls there.
I went in with two or three friends and immediately met Jean
Macfarlane, who is I think four years older than I. We became
immediate friends. She s the other still-living friend who remains
very, very close to me. By this time, I enjoyed that dormitory, and
a larger number of girls together didn t bother me.
23
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Then the last year, two of us went to a lovely house on LeRoy at I
guess it would be Hilgard (it burned later, a gorgeous big house).
I had met the woman who owned it in a French class. We had a lovely
apartment. The owner of the house was alone there with her two small
boys and her mother.
When you say "we" are you referring to Jean Macfarlane and you?
No, I m talking about a woman whose name I haven t mentioned Helen
Gamble who was my roommate. Our fathers had been friends, but we
had never met until we came to college. She was a thoroughly
accustomed boarding-school gal, her parents were divorced, and she
had gone to a boarding school in Salt Lake City. We were roommates
and friends, but we weren t as close friends as Ruth [Gannett] and
I.
By my fourth year, I had the friends I wanted to have, and also
the war was on. The man I had gone with most was killed quite early
in the war. The senior class was very much involved emotionally with
the war as seen by President Wheeler. We were passionately,
aggressively I guess we didn t know how to demonstrate then against
it. You know, he [Wheeler] was given a very rough time because of
his attitude toward the war.
Brower: I understand he was regarded as pro-German.
K-Q: Yes because he had a picture of the Kaiser (who had given it to him
at some time). Wheeler got his degree in Germany; a great many
scholars did in those days, particularly linguists (and that s what
he was) . He knew the intellectual Germans and the intellectual side
of Germany. It wasn t that he was pro-German; he was anti-war, but
he certainly was not pro-German. The feeling on the campus was
violently pro-English.
Brower: I think any kind of rational behavior was suspect at that time.
K-Q: Oh, very! There was one innocent German on the campus what was his
name? who lost his job at the University simply because he was German.
Brower: I think it was Alfred Forke, in Oriental Languages.
K-Q: That sounds right. At that time, Wheeler set aside it couldn t
have been more than one Friday in the month one Friday morning
when students were invited, and the invitation was meant, to come
up to his office. The doors were open; you walked directly in. I
went; we had our pleasant visit, and obviously he knew how to end a
chat pleasantly. You sat down by his desk. He knew an astonishing
number of names of students particularly in that [senior] class,
because it was the class from which the ambulance units first went.
He was very much upset about this. If he had met you he would know
you, perhaps your name and where you d come from. You didn t have
24
K-Q: to have a problem in order to come. In fact, he did not want the
problem people for this morning; this was strictly social. He
continued these morning visitings as long as he was in office (I
think after that it probably would have become impossible in any
case, from the sheer number of students).
I took no courses from him. He always gave a course or two, but
they were not in my line. But I had an enormous affection and
admiration for him, which was not shared by the faculty (he apparently
was a rather rough and arrogant person with the faculty; at least,
I can imagine that he might have been) , but the students I knew were
greatly fond of him. He did lend an air. I think there were very
few state universities you could have gone to at that time and found
the finish which he gave to every meeting in the Greek Theater to
anything he had to do with. He was a very elegant gentleman.
Campus Social Life
K-Q: Of course, those student meetings in the Greek Theater, every Friday
from eleven to twelve, were a great experience, really, because any
distinguished person who was around political or literary or whatever,
it didn 1
t matter was very glad to take time to come over and speak
at the Greek Theater. So there was always something interesting there.
At that time, the Greek Theater was very active. My first year
[1915] I saw Margaret Anglin do a series of Greek tragedies, and things
of this sort. The Greek Theater was much more active, I think, before
the war than it ever was after. I suppose costs went up. People
played there for nothing actors, lecturers, performers of whatever
sort. It was nice to have on your record, I suppose, that you had
performed, whatever your performance was, in the Greek Theater.
Did the half-hour of music (which was usually an hour) on
Sunday afternoon there carry over to your time?
Brower: I think just barely.
K-Q: I think one thing that made a difference in our use of the Greek
Theater, students didn t have automobiles. They didn t think in terms
of dating by way of automobiles. You were much more likely to wander
down for the afternoon concert, always on foot. There would be many
students and other Berkeleyans too, of course, if it was a pleasant
afternoon (they didn t have the concert if it was an unpleasant one).
Then you might go home. Most of the houses served tea Sunday after
noon. You could have a little tea party or go to the movies or
whatever. There was a great deal more walking, a great many more
Sundays spent hiking, for instance. You went on dates, either by
25
K-Q: streetcar or you walked, wearing low shoes and carrying your slippers
(to put on after you got to the fraternity house or wherever it was) .
I think it was during the war, when there were air corps people
here that automobiles began to come in as a more usual way of
transportation .
Brower: The public transportation system was much better then than it now is.
K-Q: Oh, it was terrific, yes!
Brower: It was really not a problem to get about.
K-Q: As long as Wheeler was there, cars weren t allowed on the campus.
Wheeler never owned a car; that was a matter of principle with him.
Brower: And he did have a horse.
K-Q: He rode that horse every good day in the year, I think, for at least
a little.
I can remember how I resented the first times that I had to pay
attention to cars on the campus. The first cars that were allowed
were permitted just in certain places and were kind of timorous.
Brower: Did you adjust easily to this business of dating? You dated, I
guess, before you left Telluride. You didn t find this difficult?
K-Q: No. For most of my early dating in Telluride, I d go to a party or
dance with, say, a young engineer, and quite likely my parents would
be at the same dance. You d ride with a group if you were going to
a mine dance or something like that. If you went for a picnic lunch
back up in the hills, there were more likely to be four or six
people two or three couples than to be one couple; although it might
of course be one couple.
Brower: Was Berkeley like Telluride in that would a group be composed of
people of different ages?
K-Q: Not in Berkeley.
[silence]
Brower: So the impact of the war on the campus was great?
K-Q: It was terrific. The honor system was still active then, and I
remember, Wheeler putting it up to those of the senior men who were
left that it would be up to them to save it, and they did save it for
the time being. The honor system went out when they opened up the
University enrollment at the end of the First World War.
26
Brower: When you say honor system, are you referring to the system of
government by the Senior Men s Society, with the students responsible
for their own rules?
K-Q: Yes. They maintained their own rules. I think it worked to an
astonishing degree. Five thousand students may sound like a lot,
but when you break that number up into groups, you come to know every
body more or less. It was a much more intimate, and I suppose a much
more
Brower: Homogeneous?
Heterogeneity of the Campus
K-Q: Yes. I ve always felt that a university experience must be very
different from a small college one. In a sense ours was a homogeneous
group; in another sense, I discovered individuals and races I had not
known or come in contact with, and people with all sorts of different
backgrounds, many much less advantaged than my own had been, who were
a lot smarter than I was.
In Colorado, probably even today, there aren t very many colored
people. In Telluride there was a single colored man and only one
recognizably Jewish family. There was a Jewish ghetto-like community
in Denver (the intellectual Jews of St. Louis by my time had not got
to Denver in great number. They were in St. Louis I think it was
more like New York and so St. Louis got the music and got a good
medical school and got a lot of things) . Denver also had an
exceedingly disadvantaged group of colored people.
My older brother, Austin, went to medical school in Denver, and
got some of his gynecological experience delivering babies at home
for these people in these ghettos. There weren t too many hospitals
in Denver, and either they couldn t go, or they wouldn t go, or they
were afraid to go. I think by the time Austin graduated, he had
delivered something like nine hundred babies. There were little
Austin Goldbergs and little Austin Shapiros, and little colored Austins
all over Denver, because their parents were so grateful to have help.
But I had had little experience of races other than my own. I
was obviously fascinated with Chinatown; I ve never ceased to be
fascinated with Chinatown. On campus I think you got about as many
Chinese, proportionately, as you have now. There were Hindus, who
had come on scholarships; there were Japanese; there were Filipinos.
This would mean that you would meet them in one class or another, or
at one sort of thing or another. I found that one of the really great
things about a university is that it exposes you to more different
kinds of people and different ways of life, and I think a big univer
sity campus gives you more of that.
27
III UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, WORLD WAR I, PARENTS
[Interview 3: November 4, 1976 ]##
Courses, Friends, and Professors
Brower: Who were the doctors who gave the hygiene course to freshmen?
K-Q: Dr. [Robert Thomas] Legge, who was the head of the infirmary, and
the second in command, Dr. [Romilda] Paroni-Mead. Dr. Legge gave
a couple of talks to the girls, and I believe gave a "Hygiene" course
to the men, as Dr. Paroni-Mead gave one to the girls. They were very
little work, but attendance was mandatory.
Brower: It s curious, isn t it, that by the time I came along in the thirties,
they didn t have a required hygiene course. You would have thought,
that subject would have gotten more emphasis rather than less.
K-Q: It would have had to change. I don t remember very much about it now.
Brower: Pretty much the birds and the bees, I expect.
K-Q: I think so, and health and exercise and such things. I think it
would sound pretty simplistic now. But it may have had its place then,
goodness knows.
Brower: To go back a bit to the girls in the house on Buena Vista Way, can
you tell me a little about Margaret Allen at the Point Lobos
Ranch? I wondered if you d ever visited there, because that
would give a picture of Point Lobos before it became a state park.
K-Q: Yes. Point Lobos was then owned by the Allen family, and it was a
ranch. I know nothing about its previous history.
Brower: What a beautiful place to live!
K-Q: Imagine! And a sweet ranch house. This was a family that was very
well set up and provided for. I remember Mr. Allen gave his wife a
diamond ring on the birth of each child.
Brower: How many children were there?
K-Q: I think there were four children. Margaret was the one I knew. I
wish I knew whether they had anything to do with California history.
I have a feeling they did not; I think they were Easterners. But
it is also my impression (I could be wrong about this) that he gave
or deeded or whatever you do, the Point to the state; I don t think
28
K-Q: it was a matter of the state taking it away from him. There was one
daughter, I think, who later, after the father s death, was really
running the ranch, and there was a proviso that the actual ranch
house and such area as she needed for running the ranch, would remain
hers for her lifetime. Then, I believe the whole thing went to the
state.
Brower: Do you recall where the ranch house was?
K-Q: It s a good many years since I was there. My recollection is that
the ranch house was a typical California ranch house, one story,
painted white, largish but sprawling, and that it was really quite
close to the Point.
Brower: What a fantastic place that must have been to visit!
K-Q: Yes. And a nice family. I suppose it was originally a rancheria.
Brower: I do envy your having been able to visit it under those circumstances.
K-Q: To get back to U.C., we have Peroni-Mead in Hygiene. Then Henry Morse
Stephens, with his really remarkable, big, general history course.
Brower: Did you enjoy that course?
K-Q: Afterwards. I enjoyed it, but I had not had enough history or
discipline in history to really appreciate it as I would have later.
I came to this in my sophomore or junior year. The only other
history course I took was a course on the Federalist Papers, which
was, in contrast, detailed, bibliographically confined, dry as dust.
In that course you learned the method of history. I found that
after that I could read general history and more or less have my
bearings. It s like knowing a few words of a language or knowing a
system. I really regretted that that big general course came with
most of us (except the history majors) thoroughly unprepared. Most
of us must have been poorly prepared, because I squeaked by, and
I was absolutely lousy.
Brower: Was the later course also given by Stephens?
K-Q: No, this was by one of these solid, pedantic, literal sort of
professors. I suppose I took it to fulfill a requirement; I don t
know why else I d have gotten into that.
Brower: It would have been a good preliminary course.
K-Q: Much better. Once you know the method, then you can proceed.
29
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
I asked you if you liked Henry Morse Stephens course because he
seems to bring out such strong feelings; either people liked him
very much or didn t like him at all.
I guess that if you lived in the Faculty Club with him or saw a great
deal of him as a colleague he was pretty hard to take. But he was
one of these showmen- teachers who are a great deal of fun. He was
a natural actor, and so he brought a great many people and periods
to life for you. I suspect the general course was his best, although
he was a respected scholar.
What was your undergraduate major?
That was very curious. Until Leonard Bacon left and I made a decision
against taking English courses ,
I thought that it was going to be
literature. Then I took a course with Jessica Peixotto. Her course
had to do with the major protest philosophies, communism, socialism,
Bakuninism what are some others? Anyhow, you name them, we "had"
them. In that course, for instance, we read, in translation, Das
Kapital. My experience was like that of a medical student who has
in turn each disease he studies. I was a passionate communist, I was
a passionate socialist, and a passionate anarchist for the weeks that
we were on those particular subjects. Peixotto was able to bring
alive these social philosophies; you, as students, were "there";
you were living them; you were part of them.
So it was source material.
Das Kapital.
It was right from the horse s mouth, like
Right. That was the sound thing about her teaching.
Would that have been in 1915 or 1916?
It would have been 16. Then, when I went back to take some more
courses with her, because I liked her so much, within the period of
a year there had been maturing in me. I had had my one anthropology
course by that time, and was into psychology and economics. I was
changing, and I found Peixotto disappointing.
I think, like Ronald Olson, she was one of these superb teachers
for introducing kids to new ideas , new philosophies . Ronald Olson
was an excellent teacher for beginning Anthropology, for dramatizing
and somehow catching the interest of kids, giving them new ideas. But
with Peixotto I suffered a disillusionment [laughter] when I
discovered that the Peixottos were indeed a most prosperous and upper-
middle-class San Francisco family. And when I found that a great deal
of their money came from the rental of tenements [laughter] , this was
a terrible blow.
Brower: So the politics of protest didn t appeal any longer?
30
K-Q: No. However, that course did direct me, curiously enough into
several courses in economics, and I had one anthropology course, the
old 1A-1B one, in which there were three lectures a week and two small
sections, with from ten to not more than fifteen in a section. My
section was monitored by T.T. Waterman. I got to know him well,
and I liked him immensely.
Brower: Who was the lecturer?
K-Q: It was mostly Waterman, because Kroeber was away. Gifford gave a
lecture or two; I think these were very early; they must have
been his first lectures. Waterman and Kroeber were supposed to
alternate, more or less, each taking the subject he was most
interested in, but that was the year that Kroeber went to Europe.
I remember that very early in the semester this was when college
started in August Kroeber gave the lectures. Then, by about mid-
September, he went to Europe. Waterman gave the rest of the lectures
(except for one or two when he brought Gifford in) .
I do know why I didn t go on with anthropology. I then tried
and it had the opposite effect from the history course a course on
the material culture of California Indians with the details of
basketry-making and such, which Gifford was doing in a precise and
detailed manner. It was not what I was looking for then. At that
time it just didn t have any meaning to me at all. So I bowed out
of that one; I didn t even take it. I tried a lecture or two and
decided I didn t wish to know about basketry, [laughter]
There was Ira B. Cross and there was Professor Blum we called
him Blummy. And there was Carleton Parker. It wasn t the subject
[economics], you see; I got caught by these people, these lovely
people. In my sophomore year I took the basic course in psychology
with [George Malcolm] Stratton, and in my last year I decided on a
psychology major. I think I made this decision because I met Jean
Macfarlane,who was deep into psychology, and I took Olga Bridgman s
course on clinical psychology, which interested me. I had to take
a lot of courses in psychology to get a major in it because I had
simply piled up a mass of courses in economics, and I really wasn t
interested in economics [laughter]; I just liked the people in it.
Another person I took economics from was Lucy Stebbins. she
was really teaching sociology; it was a small group and interesting.
Brower: I didn t think Ira Cross was interesting; I remember finding him
dull.
K-Q: He was sort of a character. I think he just gave some of the lectures
in other courses; I don t think I took a full course with him.
31
Brower: Economics was written so badly, it seemed to me. I remember taking
hours to get through the text because I couldn t understand a word.
K-Q: Terrible! However I ever got into that and piled up so many units
in it, I don t know.
Brower: Carleton Parker has always interested me because of that very
loving biography Cornelia Stratton Parker, his wife, did [An American
Idyll].
K-Q: He was certainly a memorable person. He had a certain seeming
fragility and earnestness, and passionateness as a person and as a
teacher. He communicated, as did Blum. Anything he taught, of course,
had a large philosophic bent. I was interested in anything he chose
to talk about.
Brower: It s odd that you didn t opt for philosophy, since that was the
content of the courses you enjoyed.
K-Q: It s a curious thing. Another freshman course I had was Logic, with
Professor [Charles Henry] Rieber. Bill Dennes and I were in that
course at the same time we were in the course with Leonard Bacon.
I found Logic fascinating. But I m just incapable of remembering
or taking in philosophic concepts. I really don t understand the
philosophic mind. Rieber taught straight Logic on Monday and
Wednesday, and on Friday he d cut loose and talk to us about
Platonism. He was a Platonist, and he compared Platonism with
Christianity. I don t know at all how accurate his picture was,
but it was enlarging and fun to a great many of us.
I was not caught in the dilemma or conflict with Christianity,
but a great many of the kids were; it was a time of beginning
disbelief in Fundamentalism. For a number of years, Anthro 1A
was taught first by way of geologic ages, then working into Darwinism
and evolution very, very gently, with many students enormously
disturbed. I heard Waterman talk to some of them in our section.
Then, after a few years, Kroeber realized (this was only after
Lowie had come) that they could take for granted that kids, by
the time they were ten years old, knew something about the geologic
ages and about evolution and this sort of thing. But earlier, it was
necessary to give a geologic and evolutionary background, or else the
rest of anthropology would have been meaningless.
32
Psychology: Studies and Fieldwork
Brower: The ideas in psychology seem to have impressed you more than the people.
K-Q: It was curious. I think perhaps it s still true that the basic
course in psychology is fundamental to a good many things; if you
were going into medicine, for example.
Brower: Had you thought of medicine ever, with doctor brothers?
K-Q: No. I liked Stratton. I felt that he was out of place with the
mixed group in the beginning course. Most of the students there
had to take the course because they were going to be doctors or
ministers or social workers there was a whole series of professions
for which this basic course was required.
I liked Warner Brown. I wrote my master s more under him than
under Stratton. I liked him; I liked the family. I used to go
picnicking with the Warner Browns. He was a very sweet person. He
taught behavioral psychology, which was kind of a dreadful subject,
but I liked him.
That department was so small that its two or three or four
graduate students were really not sharply distinguished from the
undergraduates. The psychology building was first built for philoso
phy on the present site of Evans Hall, near Hearst Mining. It was
like a little Berkeley house, two stories, and a basement, with a
table like a dining-room table around which we sat. I knew it
when it had become the psychology building; I guess philosophy had
outgrown it and moved down to Wheeler Hall. Psychology was so small;
there were few enough of us in there that it was just sort of a
family. Stratton had an office big enough for us to sit in for a
class, and we sat around the table for the seminars.
Stratton did one very nice thing (I think this was my junior
year, when I was really beginning to direct myself toward
psychology). I would say there were, at most, eight or ten of us,
and one night a week throughout the winter, we went up to Stratton s
house on Canyon Road. There he read aloud to us William James, The
Varieties of Religious Experience. Then we would talk, and Mrs.
Stratton would serve chocolate and cookies. This was enormous fun.
None of us ever missed that, for a party or anything else, because
we loved it. I remembered this many years later, after Alfred
[Kroeber] was sick, and was going to give his seminar on campus I
said, "Have them come here." He said, "That s an imposition." I
said, "Imposition my eye! They ll love it." And they did. It
was a group small enough for our house. I don t know that it would
be successful now, but certainly at that time it was.
33
Brower: Was it in part the coziness of that department [Psychology] that
attracted you to it?
K-Q: I shouldn t be surprised, and the fact that we were all talking
about the exciting new ideas in psychology. By this time, Olga
Bridgman had started giving us school assignments; certain youngsters
were assigned to us for testing (they were using the Binet test
then) .
Then I began the work on which I did my master s. I began to
work at juvenile court in San Francisco. Everybody in the department
was doing something like that; so it was "our little thing." It
was the way Anthropology was in the years when I knew it, when the
group was small enough that there wasn t all that much distinction
among young professors and graduate students, and upper-division
undergraduates .
Brower: When you say you had school assignments, you mean children were
assigned to you by Olga Bridgman to follow through their tests?
K-Q: She would send me to a school. She always inquired first whether
the school was willing. Of course, I was learning a certain
technique. I found most of the teachers and the principals very
cooperative and willing to talk over the kids. They d say this or
that one was a problem child, for one reason or another.
Brower: I was going to ask whether these were normal children or disturbed.
K-Q: But at Hillside School, they said very stiffly, "We have no problem
children."
Brower: That was the philosophy of that school when my own children were
there. Helen Maslin was the principal, and her view was: "We have
no problem children."
K-Q: She inherited that view from her predecessor. She was there, but
not as principal. I can t remember who the principal was. The
children were all very bright. I asked, "Don t any of your bright
children cause problems?" "Well, perhaps there is one." So she
gave me Judd, the youngest of the Boynton children from the Greek
temple ["Temple of the Wings"]. He was a cute little wag, so
bright, and younger than the others. He was also the youngest at
home. I think there were six in that family. He was the youngest
and obviously spoiled baby. He was so bright he went right off the
(Binet) sheet. But he liked to be cuddled and he liked to have his
way why shouldn t he? [laughter] He was no more a problem child than
[others]; not at all.
I see Judd and his wife now. They are friends of my son Ted.
Judd remembers my testing him, and that we had fun.
34
K-Q: In my senior year I went over to the juvenile court in San Francisco
and there I was assigned a bunch of really not only underprivileged
but definitely defective children morons high grade to not so high
grade. I began bringing in reports on them to Olga Bridgman. She
didn t say anything to me, but she took me off the juvenile-court
assignment and sent me, not to Hillside, but to another school to
do a series of tests they had asked for. Only when she confessed
later did I know what she was doing. I d got so identified with my
little dummies that anything they did any performance I could get
I thought was marvelous. When I got with normal children, I was
flabbergasted at the speed with which they were running through the
same material.
Brower: You d accepted the limitations of the San Francisco group as the norm?
K-Q: Yes. This is why she reassigned me; she realized what I was doing.
It s very easy to do, you know; you identified. And they were
nice little children. I had absolutely lost all sense of reality
or of where they actually were.
Brower: Was that an emotionally trying experience?
K-Q: I did my master s thesis on six families from the juvenile court
that were certainly very far off center. Some were insane and some
feeble minded, some merely underprivileged. What I realized at the
end of that experience was that it was not my game; that I worked
best with bright children. It wasn t that I wasn t sympathetic; it
was too upsetting. There was one very bright child among my juvenile
court families who was getting into trouble because he was bright
and had a very bad home setup. We had, fortunately, a very
sympathetic judge. I was certainly happy with this child, and I
think more effective with him than with the others. I knew that if
I went into child psychology professionally, I would have to work
with bright children (however disturbed) .
You have to be able to separate yourself a bit. John [Quinn]
is learning that with his work now; he s only beginning to learn it.
It works sometimes, and sometimes he s just thoroughly down.
Brower: I think there are some temperaments that never succeed in being
objective enough for this kind of work.
i
K-Q: I m sure I would have been an absolute dud at it, and I think I d
have worn out.
Brower: But you followed psychology through as an undergraduate major and you
got your master s in it?
K-Q: Yes, and I liked that. I liked the contact in court, and my families
were amusing.
35
Brower: How were they amusing?
K-Q: There was one family who lived on a houseboat, at the foot of Potrero
Hill; you went out on this kind of teetering little pier-thing to
the houseboat. I wondered afterwards how sensible this was I
certainly was a green kid because if things really got tight at all
and the court or the cops came down on this really good-for-nothing
man, he just cut the rope and they went floating off somewhere else,
[laughter]
Brower: A lovely way to evade responsibilities!
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower;
K-Q:
I expect it was rather a mess inside that houseboat, but it was
also awfully cute, and he was amusing (although absolutely no good).
There was more of the strictly criminal in that particular family
than in the others. The others were just struggling along.
One of our families (the one that had the very bright child)
was a Spanish or Mexican-Spanish family. One of the case workers
at the juvenile court was a very nice person and was herself Spanish.
The year that I was working with them, she succeeded in persuading
this couple to get married; they never had bothered about that,
although they were good Catholics. So we went to the wedding with
a shining little bunch of four children standing proud as the
dickens to watch Papa and Mama be married, [laughter] That was
fun, but I think there wasn t so much of life that was fun for those
people. I didn t go over daily, and so I didn t get too big a dose
of it for too long a time.
After you got your master s, what were your expectations for
own career?
your
Stratton offered me a job a request came to him, from, of all places,
Tehachapi Prison. The job would have been as psychologist, and I
don t know just what my function would have been. It sounds
enormously inappropriate when I think about it now.
By that time , I was engaged , and that summer I was married . I
remember writing Professor Stratton and thanking him for the job
offer. That was as close as I got to it.
How long had you known that you were going to be married? Had you
planned a career in your own mind before that?
Sort of vaguely. I just assumed, as I think all of us did in
psychology (I mean that group, both men and women), that I would
have a career. We were not thinking so much of teaching; we were
thinking of work that was a little bit like that looked forward to
by anthropology students (when they were fewer in number) .
They
36
K-Q: certainly all expected to do something in the field, and that was
more or less the typical attitude in psychology at the time I was
doing work; you would be working with people.
I just assumed this, but I wasn t very clear about what I wanted
to do or what form it would take. Nor was I committed in my mind
to a career, nor was I committed against one. I think I was just
terribly young. I think people were younger then, and certainly
girls were. My brothers had known always they were going to be
doctors; I never knew what I was going to be.
Brower: You assumed that you would be earning your own living, however?
K-Q: I was certainly prepared to, and I had a mother who always could
have who happened to have worked with my father but who had her own
salary. She was, you might say, wage-earning, self-supporting.
II
World War I and the Campus
Brower: I m not clear in my mind how the campus responded to World War I.
K-Q: I suppose one can t generalize about that. As I told you, my
friends tended to be older, and when I got into psychology, the
women were older than I (because there were women graduate students
in psychology). Jean [MacFarlane] was only four years older, but at
that age that means a lot of difference experientially. And most of
the men I knew were older. This was a small, cohesive group. I m
not talking just about psychologists, but the group that I knew.
I suppose because my men friends were older several of them went with
the ambulance unit, the first ambulance unit. I think that hit a
different note with me than if I had been a freshman and associating
with freshmen.
Professor [Charles Mills] Gayley talked war and hate at a number
of the twelve o clock, one-hour weekly meetings in the Greek Theater.
I just didn t believe him; he was very, very gung-ho, and I didn t
believe that. I never believed any of the exaggerated statements
that were made. I never really believed in the extreme stories that
were put out the horror stories about the Germans with the Belgians.
Brower: Did Gayley incorporate these stories in his speeches?
K-Q: Yes. He was helping to sell war bonds. There was nothing illegiti
mate in what he did. He believed what he presented. And he was
very emotional.
37
K-Q: Really, when World War II came along, it seemed to me that everything
that was said about what happened in World War I what the Germans
were .said to have done they actually began doing. It was almost as
though they had to live out what had been planned for them. On the
other hand, I had no illusions about what was happening in Belgium
in terms of suffering. [Herbert] Hoover s role very much impressed
me then. I think Mary Anne Whipple was in the Red Cross at that
time, wasn t she? Anyhow, I know she was a pacifist. It seems to
me that pacifism was born of the First World War. Until then most
of us would not have had much feeling one way or another; we were
fairly innocent. We had behind us the Civil War, and we knew very
little about our disgraceful little Cuban and Mexican adventures;
and I think we believed the history books. Pacifism wasn t a
terribly strong issue.
So, when I speak of the campus attitude, I speak of the attitude
as I saw it. I think Bill Dennes would back me up on this: We as
seniors felt a responsibility. Wheeler s attitude was not that the
war was wrong, but that the business of leaders (there was much
more then of the sense that if you had an education you had a
responsibility) that as a student your real job was to allow
yourself to grow up, know as much as you could, and be as responsible
and wise a person as possible before you went out into adult life.
This was Wheeler s general philosophy, and I think this is the way
our group felt. But how much of the campus we represented I don t
know. It was a very innocent time; people knew so little about what
was happening.
Brower: In short, your group would not have rushed out to enlist because you
felt that you needed to get a thorough education and had a responsi
bility for leadership?
K-Q: Yes. To Wheeler, war was absolutely regrettable, and believing this,
we thought we were pacifists when we weren t. I mean, it is one thing
not to believe in war, and it s another thing to take a generally
pacifistic stance, which I took for many years until I discovered that
I really wasn t a pacifist (it was just that what I would fight for
wasn t what seemed to be going on). But those are two different
things .
Brower: But how much control did a male student, for example, have over his
decision? Wasn t there conscription?
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: Then did he go into the SATC [Student Army Training Corps]?
38
K-Q: Yes, that was one possibility. At least he would finish college and
become an officer. I think men really had no ultimate choice. But
these ambulance-unit people, like my brother, went in ahead of our
declaration of war. They went in with the French.
Brower: The men who did that couldn t have shared Wheeler s view, could
they?
K-Q: They didn t share Wheeler s view, but I don t think they shared
Gayley s. I don t think they thought they were going on a picnic.
I think they viewed this ambulance thing whether in fact it was
or not not as an alternative to war, but as a contribution that
could be made. They were very strongly for contributing.
There was never any question in our minds I don t think there
was in Wheeler s as to which side we were on.
Brower: In spite, in your own case, of a German background in your family?
K-Q: That German background was really nonexistent. Both sides of the
family were in America my father s, at least as far back as my
great-grandparents; my mother s, earlier. I don t know how long the
Kracaw family was in England; I don t know how long it was in
Germany, but that was all a long time before. There was no pro-
German feeling in the family at all. My father never thought of
himself as German, but rather as of English ancestry (although
the family was certainly in Germany long enough to have got a
"von" on the name; there must have been a few generations established
there) .
Brower: What about the campus itself? Were there no pro-German groups on that
campus?
K-Q: There must have been.
Brower: I suppose that position was so unpopular that even if there were, they
wouldn t have been terribly vocal and visible.
K-Q: I simply don t know. There must have been. I don t remember any
demonstrations, I don t remember any booing. I think, up to that
time, American students on a university campus were extremely
nonpolitical, on the whole, certainly as compared with later times,
even as compared with the period between the two wars, and much
less political than they have been since World War II. I think we
were terribly ignorant and provincial.
Brower: And certainly nonpolitical in contrast with students at universities
in Europe.
K-Q: Absolutely, there I think they always have been politically conscious.
We ve come to that very late. I think America was really extremely
provincial. Of course, you know what Kroeber said about that.
39
Brower: No.
K-Q: [laughter] Somebody accused him of being provincial (he d said
something commendatory of New York), and Kroeber said, "Sure,
everybody s provincial. It depends on what place you re provincial
about." [laughter]
Brower: The New Yorker certainly bears him out in that!
So World War I had a lot of impact on the campus?
K-Q: 1 think as compared to the Second World War the impact was
infinitesimal; the war seemed terribly distant, terribly remote.
Brower: I understand there were air cadets living on campus in barracks built
for them and a lot of marching and bugles?
K-Q: Oh yes. But nevertheless the war seemed at such a distance. This
[the training program] was great fun. It meant that every Friday
night a new group of men came over to dance (they were right across
the way from us on Le Conte Avenue). So, here were fifty handsome
Australians or whatnot, a new lot each week.
They were training Australians as well as Americans?
Yes. I imagine this was a way of giving real help to England before
we were in. After all, we did get in very late in terms of the total
length of the war.
The war was distant enough that one could sing the songs and
go to the parties and enjoy the uniforms and all that kind of
business with a clear conscience; I mean, we were so blooming ignorant,
Brower: The young man whom you knew who was killed, was he one of the people
who joined the ambulance units?
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: That must have made it seem more immediate.
K-Q: Yes, and also my brother Forest going in so early. Although I knew
very little about what was happening, I knew he was in charge of a
field hospital far enough up front that he was using his German
language all the time.
Brower: You must have been very anxious about him.
Brower:
K-Q:
40
K-Q: Yes. I think there was an attitude difference, actually, between
those of us who were seniors and who knew some of these boys who
were over there and were corresponding with them, and the younger
campus group. The war was closer to us, relatively speaking.
But it was a period before there was any questioning of American
values. The first questioning of values came, however indirectly,
in Anthro 1A-1B. My father had always questioned Protestant-Christian
values, but I didn t find other people doing it. I found that
anthropology emphasized that there was no biological difference
between people of different skin colors; anthropology was anti-racism
and anti-religious prejudice. In Anthro 1A-1B they emphasized
biology much more than they do now and were really aggressive about
it got into trouble with parents, regularly got letters of protest
about it, got kids very upset who were convinced and then, as with
their religion, didn t know quite where to go from there.
Brower: Did the course change your attitude toward race, or had you never
had a conventional one?
K-Q: Apparently I was born without it. I don t know why. I have always
thought dark-skinned people were beautiful. Oriental and black
babies have always fascinated me, and 1 have always found skin
contrast fascinating in itself. Somehow or other, it s just one
of those genes that missed me.
Brower: If one of your boys or if your daughter had married a black spouse,
do you think you would have had to do any adjusting in your head?
K-Q: I m sure I would have had to do adjusting, but I think my answer
would have been Waterman s. I expect he got this question every
year. "I know you have a daughter." (She at that time was quite
young, I suppose.) "Suppose when she grows up, she marries a Negro.
What would you say then?" Waterman said, "I would do everything I
could fairly do to dissuade her, for the reason that with the
prejudice there is on both the part of colored and white, it seems
to me interracial marriage makes a life which is difficult enough
just that much more difficult. I think you would have to think
very long about whether you wanted to wish that complication on
your children. But if I could not dissuade her, I would accept
him, perhaps more cheerfully than a son-in-law I m more likely to get.
1
I think what Waterman said is still true. It gets less true.
You can decide for yourself; to hell with the others. But I still
would wonder whether what I was wishing on the children of this
marriage was justified.
Brower: To return to World War I for a moment, do you remember the Armistice?
41
K-Q: Yes. The false armistice and then the real one.
Brower: There was something like two days between them?
K-Q: Yes, something like that. By the time the real one came along
[laughter], nobody believed it.
Brower: It was at the time of the flu epidemic. Do you remember how the
flu epidemic affected the campus, if it did?
K-Q: Oh, it certainly affected it. I don t remember much about it. I
had the flu myself; I think I had it during a Christmas vacation.
I was home when I had the flu, which was lucky. I remember the
infirmary absolutely overflowed; they used the gym, the old, women s
gymnasium
Brower: Which subsequently burned?
K-Q: Which subsequently burned, but there it was alongside the infirmary.
They were just a block apart.
Brower: Were there many deaths among the students?
K-Q: Yes, there were. It s funny when one speaks of it, I think of other
people, but I don t seem to remember what happened on the campus.
Brower: The Armistice must have been well received on the campus.
K-Q: Oh yes. There were fireworks in San Francisco and I suppose over here.
You know, the Second World War has pushed a great deal of the First
World War way back. I have to dig that out of my subconscious.
Home Bases
Brower: You spoke of being home at Christmas. I wanted to ask you what you
did on holidays and in the summers. Did you stay in Berkeley or did
you go somewhere else?
K-Q: I didn t stay in Berkeley. I went home. I went to the Sierra.
Brower: Where was home at that point?
K-Q: Home at that point was still up in the Sacramento Valley, but at
Davis. At the end of my senior year my mother moved and bought a
house in Oakland. I lived at home with her my graduate year.
Brower: When you say you went to the Sierra, would that be in the summer?
K-Q: Yes. I m trying to think. I visited the Warner Browns. The Warner
Browns had a place on Tahoe. Then I went hiking with a couple of
friends. I don t know quite when that began, because for many
years Jean Mac farlane and I went particularly in later years , when
I took a two-week vacation from the family . She and I went to the
Sierra for a couple of weeks and hiked.
Vacations, Christmas and Thanksgiving, I spent at home.
Brower: By the time your mother was alone, was her mother with her?
K-Q: Part of the time. There was always somebody with her; she was
always taking care of somebody. In the summer of my junior year
my father committed suicide. My mother moved, and my aunt (her
sister, who was thirteen years younger than my mother) and I did the
packing up of my mother s possessions. Then later that summer, I
went to Colorado, to Telluride. That was the only time I went back
until 58 when I went with my brother.
Brower: How did you happen to go to Telluride that summer? Were there
business matters to tend to?
K-Q: No. I just wanted to go. I wasn t aware of why I wanted to go. But
there was so much that was associated intimately with my father
things we d done together. I think I had planned to go before that,
but I wanted to much more than I had earlier.
Was it a good experience?
Yes, it was a good experience. An aunt and uncle, a half-brother of
my father s, lived there; I stayed with them. And I had friends;
I hadn t been away long enough that the people I knew were all
scattered. In fact, the mines were still running; I spent part of
my time up at the Tomboy Mine with a woman who had been one of my
teachers in high school, of whom I was very fond. She was married
to the mill superintendent of the Tomboy, and I stayed up there with
them I guess about half the time I was there. And went to old places,
A friend of mine loaned me a horse. So I did the things I had done
by myself or with my father as a child.
Brower: Was it therapeutic?
K-Q: Yes.
Relations with Parents
Brower: Did your relation with your mother alter as you grew older and were
in college?
Brower:
K-Q:
43
K-Q: I had this emotional attachment to my father. But I always liked my
mother and my mother always liked me. I think we were quite unlike.
It seems to me it was, on the whole, a remarkably uncomplicated
[relationship]. I felt very secure with her. I don t think we
were "pals-y," nor do I think we enjoyed each other the way Ursula
and I enjoy each other.
Brower : It sounds like a very easy relation.
K-Q: It was an easy relation.
Brower: That s unusual, isn t it? Either one is very much attached or
hostile. It s rare for that relationship to be simply relaxed.
K-Q: I think we really were so unlike this very strong, competent
woman, who did not feel herself nearly as feminine as she was
(and she was used to taking responsibility) . I think she liked the
fact that I was unlike her. She enjoyed having me around her. I
never bothered her, apparently. I could just play around with her
or near her.
I think potentially the relation with my father might have been
more complicated because I think I had a more active sense of
liking him and respecting him. For instance, had my father lived,
it might have been very hard for me to live my own life, to marry as
I wanted to marry. Whereas my mother did not get in my hair, I think
my father could not help but do it.
Brower: What about your intellectual life? Did you share that with your
parents?
K-Q: I don t think it was either an intellectual or an unintellectual
household. My father was more intellectual than my mother, but there
was no great discrepancy there. There were always books. In a
mining town, there are a variety of bright people around, and the
direction is very different from an academic one. Mining engineers
are field men and travel pretty much; they re likely to have been in
all sorts of interesting parts of the world; they are likely to have
come from all sorts of interesting places. I remember conversation
as being interesting and about most anything under the sun.
Once, my father had to go to Denver and I went with him; my
mother didn t go this time. We stayed in a hotel. I must have been
nine or ten-ish. My father was a Shakespeare buff. Robert Mantell
was to be at the Tabor Theater for a week. A different play of
Shakespeare s was performed on each of those six nights and the
seventh was Cyrano , I think.
44
K-Q: Anyhow, at this young age, I went seven nights running to the theater,
After the theater, we, my father and I, would go to Pell s Oyster
House, which served raw oysters sent up from New Orleans. So that
must have meant that I got to bed about midnight!
Brower: A lovely time for a child!
K-Q: Yes. There wasn t anything much made of this. It was taken for
granted that I would like to go and that it was all right for me to
go, and I certainly loved it. My father loved Shakespeare. If you d
start him off with a line or two, he could very often go on through
a speech or a soliloquy or maybe for several pages.
He read everything. When he began to have eye trouble there
were times when he couldn t read; he d have to rest his eyes. So I
would read aloud to him. He had read aloud to me; and my mother had.
There used to be more reading aloud in families, perhaps. In my
mother s family, on a ranch in Wyoming , when she was a child,
David Copperfield came out in magazine form (I guess all Dickens did) .
Anyhow, they would sit down as a family, when the new issue came, and
read it aloud. A lot of that went on in our family.
When I read to my father I would read things that really
meant very little to me, or nothing at all. But I suppose I absorbed
something through reading them. Anyhow, I certainly read a variety
of things by way of reading aloud to him.
Brower: This was when you were quite little?
K-Q: These were the later years, before we left Telluride. But I wasn t
very old. It would have had to have been in the last five or six
years before we left.
Brower: Do you have any recollection of the gamut of things you read?
K-Q: We read Shakespeare. We read other poetry. We read Pope and Dryden
and Wordsworth. Then we read a whole bunch of nutsy things Hindu
philosophy, for example all of which pretty well passed me by. But
I suppose something stuck. There was the Atlantic Monthly always,
and Harper s . And then the newspapers; I learned pretty well what my
father was interested in hearing and in how much detail; I learned
to skim them pretty well. I don t remember what else we read. I
know it was a funny combination of things.
Brower: It all seems pretty heavy.
K-Q: Some of it was absolutely meaningless to me. I ve never much read
my father s poets except for Shakespeare. My son Karl is the one
living person I know who really loves nineteenth-century, eighteenth-
century narrative poetry. He can read those long, narrative poems,
45
K-Q: and can quote from them when he talks about them! They sound
absolutely fascinating as he interprets them. He says, "This is
why I m having so much fun. I m the last living specimen who reads
that damn narrative poetry." He reads it from beginning to end
and teaches it. The only poetry that I really read is lyric poetry.
I can read Wordsworth, I ll admit.
Further Comments on World War I
Brower: Before we go on, do you have further memories of World War I?
K-Q: It s curious how buried the First World War is, in a sense, except
for highlight things, and when I begin to tell them to you, I
realize it was a very small group of us that I m talking about,
and how little I really know.
Brower: I think that s quite important for the record because I imagine
that much of what is recorded about that war and the university
deals with the jingoist surface.
K-Q: Absolutely. And, of course, all newspapers, so far as we saw them,
were pretty jingoistic. I think they d read that way now; I don t
think we thought of them that way then. There was an enormous
simplicity. I think it was much easier to make devils of the
Germans and heroes of the rest of us than it is now.
Brower: I remember some ludicrous things, like kaiser rolls suddenly
becoming French rolls, and hamburger liberty steak.
K-Q: Yes. Perfectly fool things like that. And those jingoistic songs!
We liked to go over to Golden Gate Park. Some of us from the
campus would go over there and play around on a nice Sunday.
During and before the war, a crowd such as that in the Park
would be led in singing patriotic songs: national anthems and
Tipperary, etc.
46
IV EDUCATIONAL CHOICES
[Interview 4: November 9, 1976]////
[At Theodora Kroeber-Qulnn s request a page of the original
transcript has been omitted here. The omitted material is
covered in greater detail in "The Two Elizabeths," Appendix II.]
Leonard Bacon
Brower: Could we now go back and talk about Leonard Bacon?
K-Q: Leonard Bacon was a young professor here [at the University of
California]. I don t know what age he was, but he was a young man.
It so happened that the other night I was talking with
Michael Raffetto about him. Michael Raffetto is just a little
younger than I; he was in college here at the same time, and
knew Leonard Bacon. I m not sure he had the same sort of course
with him I had, but he had some course with him and was aware of
Leonard s leaving and he had very much the same reaction as I had.
Leonard Bacon was one of the teachers of the required English
LA-IB, which I believe at that time all freshman took. It was
taught in sections, and I was in Leonard Bacon s section. I think
there were about fifteen of us. Instead of doing the dull routine
learning to spell and write and submitting a term paper that the
other sections were doing, he made us really write. We had to
write papers, and we had to deliver short oral reports, but they
were about very interesting literature, and we promptly got into
literature as such. It was his own passion, and he loved to talk
about it, he loved to read it. It was an enormously fun and
inspiring course. There was no doubt in my mind that I was going
to major in literature, which I surely would have done had Leonard
stayed.
I had that year and I suppose it was the first semester of the
next year with him. Then he left and went into the air service
and flew for the army in the Near East. It is my impression that
he wrote Uleg Beg actually in the Near East, but I may be wrong;
he may have written it when he came back. It was published, it
seems to me, almost simultaneously with his being there; but this
may be a misrecollection of mine.
Leonard Bacon came back here, but not to teach. He had married
here in 1912. He married Martha Stringham, the daughter of Irving
Stringham, who had been professor of mathematics and Dean of the
Faculty at Berkeley. Leonard Bacon came back here once or twice;
I remember seeing him at a reception.
Leonard Bacon was not wealthy, but he probably had some
independent income. He did not go back to regular teaching. After
the war, he lived, so far as I know, in Rhode Island, which was his
47
K-Q: home his birthplace. He always kept in touch with this campus,
but so far as I know, he didn t do regular teaching after that.
Brower: Did he write very much after that?
K-Q: I don t know. I don t think he wrote much, but he went to
professional meetings and Kroeber would see him sometimes there.
I remember Kroeber sent the manuscript of the Configurations
book to Leonard. They had been in correspondence about something
or other. Leonard made a very cute commentary on it. He said that
he enjoyed it enormously, but he thought that no publisher would
take it unless he, Kroeber, cut it down about two-thirds.
Brower: That didn t happen, did it?
K-Q: It didn t. The UC Press took it.
Brower: In its entirety?
K-Q: In its entirety, because that was its value the whole thing.
Leonard realized that. But it is a fact that a commercial publisher
would not have taken it without its being cut .
Brower: Would you tell me a little bit more about his teaching, if you can
remember why it was that it was so particularly satisfying?
K-Q: It was his own enthusiasm and his own scholarship. It was his
lovely friendliness; he made us all feel that we were quite his
equals. He was rather a comic man; long nose, spectacles that
would keep sliding down his nose, very thin and tall. He would sit
on top of his desk, and when he got enthusiastic, grasp his knees
and twirl around on the desk. You came out of his class so set
up, so pleased with what you felt was your own brightness.
He was very much intrigued by my name, Kracaw. His idea
was that I should specialize in Russian and turn my attention to
Russian literature all of which was fine as long as I read Russian
literature in translation. But I happen to be a nonlinguist.
Once quite early on in our freshman year, he said, "None
of you, I expect, has read War and Peace." None of us had. He
said, "All right, read it, and you ll never be the same again."
I read it for the first time then; I ve read it three or four
times since, and read it in different ways.
Kroeber once read it just the story part skipping all the
philosophizing and the discussion of militarism and so on. Then
he read it another time just reading the discussion and the
philosophy. I never made that separation. We had the old (and I
say "had" because I can t find it now) Everyman edition, six
volumes, which were put out in very good, thin paper, in three small
books.
48
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Did Bacon s prediction turn out to be justified? Were you the same
after you read War and Peace?
I think it does do something to one. It s a tremendously powerful
book; I can t say just in what way. Somehow or other, it clarified
some attitudes and gave me different ones. Well, Kroeber and I
took that Everyman edition, which was limp leather (imitation), just
a tiny little thing that you could pack it into air luggage, as our
only reading in the field.
I remember once we were stuck in Panama City. That was the
beginning of the Second World War, and we were on our way to Peru.
We were stuck because "the brass" had bumped us off. We were in
old Panama City, because there was no space in "American" Panama.
So for three days we lay waiting under mosquito netting for plane
seats , and read War and Peace .
How absolutely marvelous. Did you read it aloud, or were you each
reading one of the volumes?
Each was reading.
When Leonard Bacon suggested that you take Russian, did the
university have a Russian department at that time?
I haven t any idea whether we had or not. I think this may just
have been a mad dream of his. Here was a name and, of course,
the name was Polish, not Russian, anyhow. I think this was
typical of the sort of push his ideas gave students. Although I
never learned Russian (Ursula learned a little Russian) , -it
certainly sent me to the [literature] . I read everything of the
nineteenth-century Russian novelists and poets that had been
translated, and an awful lot of it has been translated!
That was unusual, too, because it was perfectly possible to go
the University of California and know nothing at all about
comparative literature.
to
Right. And of course this [a professor of comparative literature]
is really what Leonard Bacon was. He was not called that; he was
called an English professor. But he really was, by temperament,
as well as competence, teaching comparative literature. I suppose
I would have got to the Russians sooner or later, but I certainly
got to them sooner by way of him. In my own family, it was
eighteenth-century English novelists that we had around, and then,
coming down, Conrad and the rest of them. It was Dickens and
Thackeray and such, and not the Russians.
49
K-Q: It happened that, not the whole class, but let s say a nucleus of
eight or ten of us really were very hot on literature and loved
Leonard Bacon. So that group continued through the year and the
beginning of the next, the third semester [when Leonard Bacon left].
The only two people I know who pulled out after that were Bill Dennes
and myself. But I think some of the others did too; certainly as
a group we no longer existed.
Academic Shopping Around
Brower: So after Leonard Bacon left, your interest in being an English
major vanished?
K-Q: I didn t think, until I had to, about what my major would be. But
I certainly became interested in following the lines that were new
to me. If it were possible now, which I think it scarcely is, for
a young person one as young as I was (not chronologically but
experientially) to just taste around undergraduate university
courses, it s the best thing he could do. It is a way to grow
up, to begin to find oneself.
Brower: The tendency is to take the courses that you can get by in with the
minimum expenditure of energy.
K-Q: Or you re under more pressure.
Brower: Especially if you have to get through and get a job.
K-Q: And certainly boys are under more pressure.
Brower: I took the easiest possible road in college; but I was also working
eight hours a day. I d rather not think I was intellectually lazy,
but I m afraid I may have been.
K-Q: Well, I don t know. I think it would be pretty rough to [work].
You couldn t work and play around the way I did. I worked hard at
some of my courses. I also took some softies. For instance, I
needed another nonlaboratory science course, and I took one in
entomology. It was a ridiculous course. We sat around a great big
table with our textbooks smack in front of us. Whoever our
instructor was I don t remember (maybe it s just as well I don t)
would go right down the list and call on us alphabetically. All we
had to do was to be there, with .the book in front of us, keeping
one paragraph ahead of the instructor. I mean, really, it was
absurd!
50
B rower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
That is what we used to call a pipe course. Why "pipe"?
have any idea what the origin of that expression is?
Do you
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
[laughter] No, I don t; I never thought of it. Yes, it was a
pipe course; it was understood to be that, and no bones were
made about it.
What lab course did you take?
I think I did not take a science lab course because I had taken the
full [requirement] in high school. Would I have had to have a lab
course? I had the full lab chemistry and lab physics in high
school.
I think that probably fulfilled the requirement.
Perhaps I did take a zoology course.
You would surely remember cutting up those little frogs, wouldn t
you?
Yes, I think so.
To go on just a little bit more about tasting and experimenting
in this matter of course choices at U.C., I think that it s very
difficult for any youngster to do this now, and almost impossible
for a man. What America expects of its men is perfectly ridiculous!
They re supposed to know at a young age what direction they re going
and why and their goal, and they aren t given nearly the leeway
that women are.
I realized that with my own children. There isn t much a
parent can do about it. We weren t pushing our boys to know what
direction they were going, but all the rest of the world was; I mean,
they felt it all around them. Whereas, Ursula wasn t under that
same necessity for knowing ahead of time what direction she was
going.
That s an extraordinarily interesting comment to me, because the
questions on education suggested in oral history training material
emphasize the differences in educating men and women, with the
implication that they favor men. They appear to believe that
women are shoved into noncareer avenues, whereas men have this joyous
privilege of working their tails off toward the thing they re going
to do later on. I think yours is a very healthy comment to offset
that.
I just don t think that s true. A girl who wants to, who is directed,
can go ahead.
51
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Certainly now, but I suppose forty years ago women were rare in
(for example) engineering. But still, Lillian Moller Gilbreth
was trained as an engineer at the turn of the century.
Yes. Certainly any direction that I wanted to go, or that Ursula
wanted to go, we could. Ursula thought she was going to be a
zoologist. She was good at it; she s always had a zoological
interest. She very early had a microscope and still has one
always has some pond water around. Some of her outer-space
creatures and so on, she saw through the microscope.
Of course, she went in an entirely different direction from
science. All she had to do was to write a thesis to have got a
Ph.D. in French at Columbia. She decided that what she really wanted
to do was to write. She got her M.A. in a very esoteric kind of
French, and got her Fulbright to do a study on this is what she
was qualified to do pre-Provencjal French before Italian and
French were entirely separated, before the languages were
clarified into Provengal and whatever the most northern Italian
dialect is.
And this was the esoteric French that her master s dealt with?
Yes. She d put in enough hours and years work; she just needed
to write a thesis. Instead of which, she got married, and that
was good. And she went on with her writing, and that was good.
But I mean she certainly had plenty of leeway in deciding what she
wanted to do .
Did she take many different kinds of courses before she wound up
with French?
I think she went directly into languages, literature and such,
at Harvard. When she left here [Berkeley], she took her college
board without any preparation. Because we were going to be in
Cambridge, the logical thing was for her to go to Radcliffe. So
Harvard called up on a Sunday night, and the next morning, Monday,
she took her college board examinations .
She had a tremendously good French teacher at Berkeley
High, but overall she hadn t done very well there; she sort of
played along (I always wonder, when people say it s such a terrible
school) . So she qualified to go into a French-speaking class upon
entering Harvard. Her instructor at Harvard had absolutely minimal
English, nor did he speak a word of it in class.
Brower : What about the boys?
things?
Were they the ones who took a variety of
52
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Ted assumed that he was going to be a doctor, and would have been
except that he lost a lung during the war in the air corps. I
think it wouldn t have been any harder on him to go ahead and do
his medicine than to get a Ph.D. at U.C.B. in psychology, but
anyhow the doctors thought differently.
Clifton meant to be an historian. He got his A.B. before
he was signed up in the navy. I think he took pretty much the sort
of course he wanted, as Ted did.
Karl, being younger, was signed up for the navy as a Freshman,
and his college education was pure navy. He was sent to the College
of the Pacific except for his last year; in his senior year, he
came to Cal. I don t know how good or bad the College of the Pacific
was. They certainly had a lot of navy and maybe other military
people youngsters .
To come back to myself and college, I did have the feeling
in my senior year that I wished I could go back and begin over
again as a freshman; that I would know what I wanted, what I wanted
to do, and that I would get enormously much more out of it. I
suspect this really is true of a lot of kids; at least it used to
be (I don t know whether the kids are so really kiddish and green
now as we were) . I could think of all the things that I would have
loved to learn and do, which I hadn t done.
As a matter of fact, two or three years later, I did go back
for a little graduate work. That s when I took all the anthropology
I ever took.
When you say three years later, you mean after your master s, don t
you? Didn t you go on immediately for your master s?
Yes.
So this was three years after the master s, not after the A.B.?
That s right. I went back with the feeling that I didn t care
whether I got good grades or not. I did get good grades, but partly
I think because I didn t care or because I was interested. My whole
attitude was different. I noticed it with John [Quinn] and I
notice it with one of my grandchildren, Karl, who is married. He
had an A.B. from Cal Santa Cruz. Now, after a few years of doing
this and that, both he and his wife are teaching and are getting
their master s degrees in psychology. His whole attitude toward
going back and doing graduate work is entirely different. As a
matter of fact, another grandchild, Elizabeth, is doing the same
thing; that is, she played around and I don t think she even got
her A.B. But she s back now, seriously at work (I have two
53
K-Q:
B rower :
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower ;
K-Q:
grandchildren named Elizabeth, one for her great-great grandmother,
one for a great-aunt). She s taking science courses now, which
she didn t bother with before, because she wants to do some kind
of physical therapy, for which she has the temperament and the
hands (she played around for several years after the college
experience) .
I think what is happening is that the older people now are
taking degrees seriously, as John has been doing; and as Karl, my
grandchild, and his wife are doing. They re working under special
instruction what do they call that now? You have a professor in
charge, and it s done through a school, but you are not in attendance
at class. You report to your professor, and you meet with a group
a couple of times to listen to their reports and to make yours, as
a check-up. But you re doing it coincidentally with a job and,
you might say, extracurricularly . I don t know what that s called.
I don t know the term for that; I didn t even know it existed.
The psychologist (in fact, he s a professor of psychology; I think
he also is a psychiatrist) who is one of two people in charge of
John s work, took up this mode of training seriously He said he
just plain got bored teaching kids psychology who really didn t
want to learn psychology. He found that doing that repetitively
was no fun. As soon as he got with motivated people, and could let
them go at their own speed (a fast one if they wanted it) , and
really reading what he gave them to read, and discussing it with
him and with the rest of the students, it was much more interesting
and he felt it much more worthwhile.
It s a very hopeful development, isn t it?
I think it is . I think there s going to be a lot more of it. I
was amazed when I found these grandchildren of mine doing it.
It certainly wasn t an option when I was in college.
It didn t exist. Now they are formalizing it so that they
keep very good track of what the student does. You do not attend
classes as such, but you have to acquire [the necessary knowledge]
by whatever means you can. You do attend some classes (at least
John took some classes, but since this year, his work has been
straight field work) .
We did have something called "credit by examination" when I was
in college.
Yes. This [new approach] is done individually. You re examined
on an individual basis.
54
s death?
B rower: Fascinating.
You say three years after your master s you went back to
college. That was after your marriage and your husband
K-Q: Yes. This more or less is in line with our talking about education
as such. What I think I was saying was that kids who come out of
high school and as a matter of course go on to college, take it
as a continuation of high school.
I did that less so because it wasn t as if I had been living
in Berkeley and going to Berkeley schools; it was an extreme move
for me, and the whole setup was different. I was living away from
home, and the rest of it. I also think that what I got is very
hard for a kid to get now. From the very first, 1 had the cream
of the crop of professors. Cal has always had good professors,
but now I don t think you so often get a good professor teaching
freshmen. I didn t have an unknown or an assistant in a single
course.
Brower: There are some notable exceptions to that, I think, nowadays.
Sherry [Sherwood L.] Washburn gives the introductory course in
anthropology, for example, and for many years Joel Hildebrand
continued to teach freshmen. There s sometimes a real preference
for that.
K-Q: That s right. As a matter of fact, I must have had a course with
Hildebrand. You had to take some chemistry and some physics; I
don t think they were laboratory courses. But I do remember
Hildebrand as a lecturer.
Part of the university experience is having the men who are
amongst the top in their field, it does give you a different
perspective. It matters not at all whether they re good lecturers
or lousy; the size of the person makes the difference.
I confirmed that once with Dell Hymes. You know Dell Hymes?
Brower: Yes, I do.
K-Q: He s a lousy talker! He talks down into his beard and he mumbles,
and you have to sit up front in order to hear him. But I talked
to some of the people who were serious linguists [studying] with
him, and they said they didn t care; they d lie on the floor
underneath if necessary to hear what came out of that beard because
what came was so exciting.
To hold a large class you have to be a performer, such as
Henry Morse Stephens if you have a class of two thousand kids or
one thousand kids or eight hundred.
55
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
This isn t what I was talking about. For example, the experience
of knowing that Stratton was the man who made certain primary
discoveries in psychology and who was a friend of William James
Stratton lived in William James house one year when he was in
Cambridge. There is something to be gained from the authority of
the size of the mind behind teaching. This is probably part of
what so fascinated us about Leonard Bacon; he was top of the
heap in his particular thing. Your big man is likely to be far
more relaxed as teacher. You may have to work a lot harder, but
you get something of the atmosphere of his world; maybe that s
what is the exciting thing. I think this is one difference between
a college and the university. Some colleges also have top people,
but with the university you re likely to get the true aura of
academia, which is an aura all its own and a world all its own.
But there s a good deal of variation, isn t there, in how much
even a very big man shares of his own experience?
I think a great deal of the complaint of kids in these last years
of legitimate complaint is they are getting no sharing at all.
In a small college, you get something which is delightful and
which can also go over the edge, and that is where very tender
care is taken of a small number of students. Clif, my eldest son,
teaches at Occidental. Those kids are taken care of almost to the
point of being too much taken care of.
By taken care of, what do you mean exactly?
The professor in a sense is on call practically twenty-four hours
of the day, which is awfully nice for the students. Clif and his
wife have them at their house a great deal, and that is awfully
nice. But there can be too much of that. It s very good for an
inexperienced youngster. I m careful not to recommend that kids,
unless I know them very well, come to Cal, for instance. I think
[to get along at Cal] you ve got to be pretty sure of where you re
going and how to take care of yourself.
Caroline, Ursula s second child, is going to Cal San Diego,
is doing well, and loves it.
The Santa Cruz setup has always seemed ideal to me.
Ted s two children love it, but I ve known several bright kids who
simply couldn t take it. They wanted something more for real; they
felt this was play, and they didn t like it. They came back up here,
Nancy Mosk is one of them. She thought it would be great, and
she was sick of it at the end of one quarter. She came back here;
she felt it was for real here. But I think it was just right for
Ted s kids. The psychology department there gave them all the rope
56
K-Q: they needed, and those two kids needed a lot rope and time and
no worrying about it, and no holding them too severely to a strict
schedule and so on. It s good that we have lots of different kinds
of campuses.
V THE TWENTIES (1)
[Interview 5: November 16, 1976]##
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Wife/Mother/Widow
In the last session I think we had finished with your first
university experience and were about to discuss your first marriage.
How did you meet your husband?
He was back from France it was the end of the war and he was
working in a university office in California Hall, and I was
registering for my master s year. He was in law school.
So he was working as a student?
He was working as a graduate student in law, a few hours work
a week, I suppose. He was enrolled as:
a graduate student in Boalt.
He was four years older than I . We talked and I guess he arranged
to meet me or something. Anyhow, we saw a great deal of each other
that year and became engaged toward the end of my master s year.
That would be 1920, because I was graduated in 1919.
His father, who was a lawyer, was director of the Port of
San Francisco. My husband s name was Clifton Spencer Brown, Jr.
His father was Clifton Spencer Brown, Sr., presumably.
Right. He died in 1918 in the flu epidemic. Both Clifton s mother
and father were immediately from the Nevada City Grass Valley area.
Clifton Spencer Brown was British most directly. Lena Brown, the
mother, was French-German, from Alsace, an Alsatian family. She
looked French, and her temperament was French. Her son looked
very much like her dark, handsome, small hands and feet a very
French look (I didn t realize that at the time, because I had
never been to France) .
Unlike a great many GI volunteers, he learned French, and
upon arriving in France got himself bunked with a French family
whenever he could. He would have stayed, as a great many boys
did, to go on to school in France he liked it very much except
for his father s death. He was an only child.
57
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
We were married an bought a little house just across the line in
Oakland and all was well, except that he had had a very bad pneumonia
at the front in France. It left him with, not T.B. but
bronchiectosis, which is something very closely allied, and, as the
name implies, it s in the bronchia. You see it referred to
occasionally, but not often. Perhaps it is all tied up with T.B.
so that when they control one, they control the other. I shouldn t
be surprised.
Anyhow, he was alternately well and sick. At that time which
I doubt they would do now he was sent to a T.B. hospital in
Colfax, California. He was in and out of sanatoria. Clifton,
our eldest son, was born in October of 21 and Ted in May of 23.
In October of 23, Clifton was worse. We were living in Santa Fe
and that s where he died, in October of 23.
Did you know people in Santa Fe?
I didn t know people in Santa Fe precisely. As a child, I had
gone with my family into New Mexico; it was just over the range to
Shiprock and then down to Taos or Santa Fe. The only people I
knew who were in Santa Fe at the time Clifton and I went there were
Witter Bynner, the poet, and his friend, "Spud"
Johnson. They
had a house, one of those charming adobe houses there. Santa Fe
was very pleasant and would have been delightful had Clifton stayed
well because we found a little house along the "artists row" there.
At that time, Santa Fe was just a little sleepy old town with a very
small, self-conscious bohenia and art group writers and painters.
How long had you lived there before his death?
Ted was born here; he was only two or two and a half months when
we moved to Santa Fe. I can remember taking care of Ted on the
train and can remember putting him on a pillow when he was playing.
So we were there about two months and a half.
So essentially you had to go through this experience in a strange
place with no near friends .
Right. People were awfully nice, but it wasn t easy. Then, of
course, I came home as scon as I could.
Did your mother-in-law come to you there in Santa Fe?
No, neither my mother nor my mother-in-law. I don t think that
I m not sure that it ever occurred to me to ask. I did come
immediately home. Of course, the trains were fairly simple to travel
in; I was used to train travel. Really, it was less of a business
to get two children, two babies, into a train and on home than it
would be now, with flying and the rest of it. My mother met me at
58
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
Barstow because there we changed trains. I lived with her for the
next some months. She had a home in Oakland then. During the
time that we were in Santa Fe, the big Berkeley fire occurred. I
don t remember the exact date.
It was September 17, 1923.
My mother-in-law s house burned. It was at the top of Cedar Street,
a redwood house. It burned, and everything she had, and most
everything I had. I had all sorts of things there.
You d taken very little with you to Santa Fe?
Yes, and I d just moved things up there with her. So they burned.
She decided to rebuild. The Browns had built this house early. To
build a seven-room, nice little redwood house, two stories, seven
rooms, or a perfectly gorgeous level lot up there at the top of
Cedar Street cost two thousand dollars, when they built. That is
what it was insured for. You know, a great many people had done
just that. Then, in 23, there was the after-war depression and
inflation. Building costs had gone up; they wouldn t seem high now,
but they were higher than they had ever been. Redwood was too
expensive. Nobody was using redwood. Everybody was building
chicken-wire stucco. That s why there are all these stucco houses
in Berkeley today.
Don t you think in part that was fear of fire?
I don t think so. There were contractors who came here I don t
know from where but they had never worked in redwood. I think it
was not fear, because there were several people along our street
who would have terribly liked to replace their redwood houses. My
mother-in-law was in the position of so many people; the only way
she could afford to rebuild at all was to make a two-family house,
which she did. She made two flats, one on the ground floor and
one above. I moved into the downstairs one as soon as it was
finished.
Didn t one of your children subsequently live there?
Yes. My children lived there and my grandchildren, until Ted
turned the house over to his children, having bought out Clif, and
they promptly sold it to do something that they wanted.
I think that s the only two-family dwelling in that area,
zoning requirements must have changed.
The
59
K-Q: At the time, I think it so happened that the other people on that
particular block could afford to rebuild separate houses, but she
could not. There were a great many people in Berkeley who d
always had a single house who did that.
I lived there with her that is, not with her but in the
apartment under her. In fact, I was living there when Kroeber and
I were married. We left almost immediately after for Peru. But
we lived there for a few weeks .
I wrote my first novel (which would be totally unpublishable) .
Not the drive to write, but its subject matter was a sort of
tribute to this mother-in-law because she and I had a relation
which did not have to do with her being my mother-in-law. I
mean, we were friends. She was helpful. She was awfully good for
me.
She was a passionate, driving, explosive person. It wasn t
that she was sweetness and light. But I felt freer with her
than I did with my own mother, after having my two children. I
felt a little more natural living with her; I had lived in that
part of Berkeley throughout my college time and I felt at home there.
There was something refreshing about her, and intensely loyal.
Even when she disapproved of me most, she would have torn apart
anybody who said anything against me. We were very good friends;
frank friends. It was really she who insisted that I go back to
college. The house has a beautiful garden in the rear, and she d
take the children out there, weather permitting, or else upstairs.
I would dash down those Leroy steps
The reason I decided to take some graduate work in anthropology
was that my being in Santa Fe and being with people who were very
Indianophile aroused the former interest and not knowledge but
familiarity I d had with Indians in my childhood. I was curious
to know more, and interested, and really not heading anywhere
particularly, except that I did pile up some graduate units. It
was enormously good for me to do this, because I wasn t one to do
the social thing at all I never have been and I was there with
the kids, not knowing where I was going. Since Brown was perfectly
competent and liked playing with them "Brown" was what the children
called this grandmother. There was Grandmother Kracaw, who was my
mother, and then there was Brown. They called her Brown, and so
we all called her Brown.
Brower: I wanted to ask what your financial situation was. Did you have
to think about supporting yourself? Did you have to be thinking
of a profession of some kind?
60
K-Q: Ultimately, of course, I would have. For the immediate time, I got,
until I remarried, what was a very decent sum from the government.
Brower: Your husband s death was associated with his war service?
K-Q: Yes, a death benefit and a certain amount more, beginning then,
which I was not free to spend but which was saved toward the
children s education. Given the level of costs then, I think it
was a very decent setup. I realized this. It would not have
covered dental bills, things of this sort. There was some coverage
certainly for the children of service men but this was before our
social security.
I didn t particularly want to teach, and I was feeling around
for a "place." I had the feeling that I probably had two or three
years to find myself. Within a few months, I was at ease in the
subject. I suppose I would have gone on, except that I could much
more quickly get teaching credentials by way of my master s in
psychology. In fact, I think I could have, without any further
credentials, got into a private school. The private schools in
Berkeley then were A-to-Zed and one or two others.
That is probably the direction I d have gone, not because I
wanted to, but with the idea that I would do that and then perhaps
get back to anthropology, because there s really no way to get a
job in anthropology without a Ph.D. There are a few museum jobs.
Brower: What was your state of mind? Were you very unhappy?
K-Q: I think I was kind of numb. I don t think Clifton or I, despite
our being old enough, were particularly ready for marriage. I don t
think we had an idea in the world where we thought we were heading.
I think it s a marriage that would have worked out with our growing
up and getting used to things, although I think the two really
quite unplanned-for babies would have been a considerable hazard
because Clifton was not well.
He was pretty close to, but did not yet have, his law degree.
So there d have been some rough years ahead. Brown really had just
enough money to take care of herself; she couldn t essentially
contribute. My mother could have. Whether we were mature enough
to make a go of it, I just don t know. With the illness coming
right on top, or very shortly on top of marrying, then having these
two close- together children in a kind of feeble-minded fashion
I mean, not really planning.
Brower: Did you know about contraception?
61
K-Q: I did, but I didn t do anything about diaphragms then. I don t
know; I must have had a very benighted doctor at that time. I
think he was a good gynecologist. This was before I knew Dr.
[William G. ] Donald; I knew him, but he wasn t my doctor then.
Brower: Your doctor must have given you very inadequate advice?
K-Q: Inadequate. I don t think he was concerned. He was a prestigious
doctor and excellent (mechanically) . Both he and my mother had
been a little over optimistic. Really, Brown was very unhappy
with the second pregnancy because she knew the risks .
So, as I say, all these things were factors in the marriage.
I really wasn t prepared for marriage in a way I think almost any
girl is now. Everything kind of happened.
I have the sense, for quite a while in my life, of things
happening to me; of my not really having anything to do with making
them happen. I just was there, and they happened. I think it s
a fairly neurotic thing. I think it s also [the result of] a very
sheltered childhood, a very warm mother who wished to take all
sorts of responsibility and felt herself physically stronger and
more competent than I. Given me, an unaggressive and introverted
person, it isn t too surprising, but I think it was pretty feeble
minded, really.
But you were still in that state after your husband s death?
Yes. It was painful and ghastly. Brown realized afterwards that
it was a terrible mistake to bring Clifton home, but she felt
very sentimental about having her son brought back. So, there was
all that business. I closed up the house and packed, brought the
children, and was here. Then there was a funeral service with all
these relatives, a great many of whom I didn t even know, coming
down from Grass Valley and everywhere.
Brower: Did you accompany the body home yourself?
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: So much better if it had just been done there.
K-Q: Of course. Brown realized afterwards that it was an absurdity. Also,
I think one reason Clif went into as fast a decline as he did was
the fire. He had already lost his father, his father who had been
in excellent health; he had expected to be in his father s law office.
Brower: Of course, he didn t experience the fire, except that he knew about
it?
Brower:
K-Q:
62
K-Q: We got a telegram from his mother telling us she was okay, the
house a total loss. We knew what the loss of her home would do to
her. She felt about that house the way we and the children feel
about this house; she loved the house and the rose garden.
I might tell one anecdote about Brown and the house. The
advice she was given as a widow, with her only son now dead and a
very dependent daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, was that she
should sell her property (she could get a good bit for a flat lot
at the top of Cedar Street), and go into an apartment house.
it
K-Q: But she said that she was going to have a replacement house and live
in it no matter what. She said, "Here I am. I have an address; I
have my own property; people know me. Lena Brown in an apartment
just becomes a nonentity. I don t think I d know who I was."
Brower: She was completely right, with every other landmark in her life
destroyed.
K-Q: Completely right. She stayed there. A very sweet thing happened.
She and Clifton between them had planted and nursed the roses, and
almost all of them came back and are blooming there now, as far
as I know. A rose is a tough thing, and I suppose the fire went
over so fast it probably didn t burn very deep into the ground.
Brower: You used to see burned lots in Berkeley that just had a chimney
standing in quite a luxuriant garden.
K-Q: It took exactly ten minutes for that two-story redwood house to
burn. Whole branches of eucalyptus, practically like a tree burning,
would be blown straight against the side of the house, their oil
causing them to explode. That s what happened.
Brower: So she built her house?
K-Q: Yes. In fact, we were able to manage it, Kroeber and I, so that
she died literally in her house, which is what she wanted.
Brower: When did she die?
K-Q: I was trying to think. I m very bad about dates. She died a couple
of years after my mother died.
Brower: I was wondering where in your life, roughly, it fell.
K-Q: Clifton could not have been more than ten, if he was that. Let s
see where that would bring us.
63
Brower: He was born in 21. So that would take you to about 31.
K-Q: She died in the thirties; it must have been pretty early in the
thirties.
Brower: Did the children go to Hillside School?
K-Q: Yes, they did.
Brower: They must have been near her, then. Did they drop by after school?
K-Q : Oh yes .
They were five and three when Kroeber and I were married
(yes, in 26). They went to Hillside School. Yes, she saw a great
deal of them. When they were older and crazy for sports they rather
outgrew her reading and other entertainment of them. Then she took
on Karl, who adored her (Clifton must have been about twelve, I
guess , when she died . I can remember their being dressed up for
the funeral. They seemed like little boys to me, but I suspect
he was twelve) .
Karl thought Brown was wonderful. They had very much the
same sort of sense of humor. Karl was a rather fragile child and
the youngest of the three boys, and often couldn t go out to play
because he wasn t very well. Brown spent a lot of time with him.
They played together, and she would read to him.
1 remember one occasion. My mother was a little jealous of
her because my mother wasn t very well, and Brown had a lot of
the kind of ebullience children love. My mother was reading to
Karl one day, and she got tired after about three-quarters of an
hour. She told him that her voice was tired. I didn t hear this,
but my mother told me about it afterwards; she knew it was funny.
Karl looked at her and said, "You know Brown? She can read and
read and read. She can read all day." [laughter] Which was a little
hard to take. But he didn t know; he was at most, I suppose, two
and a half or three. He was just giving her a happy piece of
information, [laughter]
In the Anthropology Department
Brower: So you went into anthropology.
K-Q: Into anthropology. I had a conference if that s what you d call
it with Kroeber and he suggested what courses I take. He was
about to leave for Peru, and so we had just the one talk together.
Perhaps he met a seminar or two (no, I think that was the year
after). But he suggested that I take Lowie s seminar and such and
such courses from Lowie, and I think one from Gifford. I don t
64
K-Q: think there was anybody else around then. Then he was off to Peru
for the year, and I didn t see him again until the next autumn.
During that year, I don t know just what classes I took. I
think they were all graduate. No, primitive religion [Lowie s]
would not have been a graduate course; that was the one
undergraduate course. I think the others were seminars.
There was an interesting group in seminar: There was Lloyd
Warner (Ronald Olson was older; I don t think he was there), Julian
Steward, Ralph Seals (Omar Stewart was in there somewhere, maybe
a little later; some of these people I knew afterwards), Isabel
Kelly, and Duncan Strong. It was that bunch Duncan and Isabel and
Julian and Lloyd there may have been another one or two they
were considered the boss class for that decade.
There d been a long interval between Sam Barrett and Duncan
Strong; Duncan Strong was the first Ph.D. after Barrett. Sam
Barrett was anthropology s and Kroeber s first Ph.D.; Strong, the
second.
Brower: What is the explanation for the long period between the department s
first two Ph.D.s, Sam Barrett and Duncan Strong?
K-Q: Waterman was not interested in graduate students, was not
interested in having a graduate department. He and Kroeber, through
part of that time, were getting into the field as much as they
could. Sam Barrett was immediately launched into the field. People
were coming and doing field work linguists and such. There was
little effort made toward a graduate department.
Then Kroeber had a period when he was really unwell. He had
Meunier s disease, which was mistakenly diagnosed as neurasthenia.
He was psychoanalyzed and this led to his own practice of analysis.
He did not lose touch with anthropology, but in 1919 took a leave
from the university and opened an office in San Francisco. He was
reappraising his professional life, wondering whether he wanted to
go on with anthropology, or to become a full-time analyst. He
practiced for three years, part time.
The real change in the department came (I m really paraphrasing
Kroeber) when Robert H. Lowie came as a guest for a year. Then war
(the First World War) intervened, Waterman went into the army. It
was evidently easier to get out of the army then than it became
later, because Waterman resigned (and I think not in disgrace or
anything of that sort), but on his return, he was very unsettled
and unsettling.
65
K-Q: Anyway, there d been this year of having Lowie, a great satisfaction
to Kroeber. Lowie said it was absurd not to have a graduate depart
ment here. Then Waterman came back, restless and unhappy and
useless, really; it was a bad time for him. So, he took a job at
Fresno College, and eventually got a divorce and remarried.
Lowie came first in 17- 18; then he came to stay in 21.
Immediately upon his coming to stay, the tenor of the department
changed. Lowie never did any field work in California, and he was
interested in a graduate department, which Alfred was interested
in too, but not until he realized that he, too, was through with
serious field work in California.
Brower: It really was a good choice, to put field work first, because those
were the last opportunities to record the old ways.
K-Q: I think it was a good choice, and I think those early people wanted
it and got it Sam Barrett and the rest of them.
Brower: Otherwise, so much would have been lost forever.
K-Q: Yes. But it also was time to stop that, to broaden the scope of the
teaching, and it was high time for a person like Lowie, who was
a natural intellectual and whose anthropological interests were very
different from those of the earlier department. He never identified
with California, which I think was good. There were plenty of
Californiaists then; now, with [Robert] Heizer going, there isn t
any California identification, unless some of the young kids pick it
up. But at that time, it was good to have somebody who was of a
different stripe altogether. It helped to attract some of the more
intellectual students, such as Julian Steward, and a little later,
Cora duBois.
It was a terribly exciting bunch of students very different
that I found myself with.
Brower: And a newly revived department too?
K-Q: Yes. Lowie didn t marry until a good many years later and at that
time he very much liked being with the students. We would meet
do you remember the little old Black Sheep, the roof place?
Brower: Yes, indeed I do.
K-Q: That was a favorite place where we d gather and have lunch or perhaps
dinner and just talk on for a long time. Lowie was often with us;
he liked that. I think he was with us more often than not; he
probably could afford to eat there more than the rest of us could,
although it was much less expensive in those days.
66
Brower: It was really quite nice. You had to go through the kitchen to get
outside to sit on the outer porch.
K-Q: Yes, which is where we sat. Duncan [Strong] and Julian [Steward]
(Duncan was farther along than the others) and Isabel [Kelly] and
Lloyd [Warner] were all sparking in all sorts of different ways,
totally different in their interests and temperaments. Seminars,
of course, were infinitesimal; there would be from two to six around
a table.
In my first seminar with Lowie there was just Sarah Schenck and
me. That was great fun. Lowie chose symbolism as our subject and
let us play with it in terms of different Indian tribes and anything
we wanted to; color or anything else. I think the biggest seminar
was six or seven, or eight at most. The Schencks were around the
department too; they were taking seminars and he was also doing field
work. What was his first name? We always called him Bony. Her name
was Sarah. They were older; he was retired from a business career
in the Orient. There were others, but those are the principal ones.
Brower: The number of people in a seminar, then, would have been around five?
K-Q: Five or six. There might be a couple attending who were not members.
But they would not be deadheads; they would be contributors, too,
real give and take.
Brower: This was probably unique to anthropology, or very nearly; I don t
imagine there were many departments like that .
K-Q: Not by that time, I should think. I had a like experience in
psychology, which was a small department at the upper division and
graduate level. I don t know any other such department perhaps
geography. Maybe in some of the more exotic languages. But I don t
know whether they have seminars.
I can remember two things about my first seminar with Kroeber.
That one consisted of Sarah Schenck, Forest Clements, and myself.
Forest Clements was mathematically inclined, and he was playing with
a new formula that one of the men in psychology I ve forgotten which-
had invented. For this seminar, Kroeber was beginning to want to
analyze numerically. If he had lived on to the computer age, I m
sure he d have run to [computers]. With that painful element list,
he d have had a ball. He probably would have done what my son Karl
did with similar material in literature; he would have played with
it for a year and then would have decided that it wasn t terribly
fruitful for his interests.
Brower: But using the computer and finding out what its limits were would
have been exciting.
67
K-Q: What he was trying to do with his element lists he could have done
more easily [with computers] of course. He would have loved that.
Anyhow, the Clements-Schenck-Brown seminar was sort of pre-
element-list thinking on Kroeber s part. We took a very small subject
(I have a paper if you want to read it; it s just horrible [laughter])
and applied this new formula to it. But Sarah and I were both
totally nonmathematical. We did what we were told to do. This was
Forest Clements little game, his and Kroeber s, and Sarah and I
did the writing. We did computations and the rest of it, but we
really didn t know what they meant in the slightest!
Brower: Did you resent this at all? That so much of this seminar was given
over to mathematics?
K-Q: No. It was really fun, because there were all sorts of philosophical
things that came up in connection with this. In another seminar
I was to explain the difference between Ishi s arrow release and
other American Indians . With great compassion [laughter] Kroeber
just took the arrows and things out of my hands. I knew I could say
what was done, but I had never handled a bow and arrow, and I
couldn t for the life of me do it.
Brower: You were to demonstrate this to the class?
K-Q: Yes. [laughter]
Brower: And you could have written it but not shown it?
K-Q: I could say it to them; Kroeber moved as I described the action.
I theoretically understood it. But with my great mechanical genius,
you know, if anything had happened, I might have hit somebody straight
in the eye. [laughter] Maybe that passed through his mind, seeing
that I didn t know a goddamn thing about it. Of course, it never
had occurred to me to get hold of somebody who had handled a bow and
arrow and get him to show me something about it. I suppose my
own children weren t old enough yet to shoot a bow, and bows and
arrows had not figured in my young life, nor in my brothers .
I didn t realize until I had it in my hands that
Brower: You expected to be able to do what you understood intellectually?
K-Q: to do what I could tell the other fellow to do.
The new formula paper was published in The Anthropologist. So
my first publication was under the names of Theodora K. Brown, Sarah
Schenck, and Forest Clements.
Brower: This was the product of the seminar?
68
K-Q: This was the product of the seminar: a new formula. And because we
did make a concrete experiment with material, Sarah and I could tell
what it meant. But how it had been arrived at, we hadn t an idea!
So it was a publishable paper. But it reads pretty funny now.
I had an enormously good time doing graduate work. It was
entirely different from my undergraduate work, or the master s, which
I enjoyed too. I felt freer and I liked the intellectual association.
The next year, when Kroeber was home, he or Lowie or both of them
were pretty likely to be at most of the parties graduate students
gave. Lewie s and Kroeber s friends, to a great extent, were their
younger colleagues and students. I suppose both of them being in
a bachelor state then, were freer than is the usual case and were
looking for company. Both Kroeber and Lowie lived at the Faculty
Club. There d be a good deal of meeting for dinner with the Schencks
and me, or coming up to my place if I couldn t leave the children.
Parties were mixed parties (I mean students and faculty) . Once
a month the Club [the Faculty Club] had a dance in those days.
The Schencks went. I went to my first one with Lowie, and after that
I went with Kroeber. Anna Gay ton was one of the people in our crowd,
by the way. I remember she was usually at the faculty parties too.
Brower: Was your whole academic life involved in anthropology, or did you
take courses in other departments?
K-Q: I didn t take a course in another department. After Kroeber and I
were married, he very much wanted me to go on. It wouldn t have been
too hard for me to get a Ph.D., and he thought it would be good
insurance, in which he was perfectly right. But I couldn t see doing
it. I thought I couldn t manage the house and children and do
graduate work. I suppose I could have; I suppose I really didn t
want to.
I took this [graduate work] as intellectual stimulation; I was
tremendously interested in it. I wasn t awfully ambitious about it.
VI THE TWENTIES (2)
[Interview 6: November 23, 1976 ]##
Brower: When we last talked we left you just before your marriage to Dr.
Kroeber. Now could we talk a little bit about the wedding.
69
K-Q: Right. I have, I suppose, said my say about the twenties in the
biography [Alfred Kroeber; A Personal Configuration] .* sut it
does seem to me that I want to repeat a little bit, in a somewhat
different context, perhaps.
There s both a romanticizing of the twenties exaggeration of
them and I think a misconception. It was the crucial decade in my
life: it was in the twenties that I was graduated, that I took
graduate work. I was twice married in the twenties. My four children
were all born in that decade. It was certainly crucial in terms of
how and in what directions I matured and what directions my life
took for many years after.
It was a crucial time for most young people. I think it fore
cast, let us say, our children of the sixties, our young people, and
their hazards and readjustments. It was after the First World War,
and we were forever a changed world. The young people of the twenties
were the ones who were at the cutting edge of that change, because
they had to accept both a different life and a different world view,
and they were the fellows who were moulding it.
The idea that it was a very gay time and an irresponsible time
doesn t fit either my life or the life of the people I knew, there
was certainly a breaking away from tradition, and I think it differed
from the sixties in that the breaking away was forced; it wasn t so
much that we wanted to. We weren t in revolt against anything; we
were simply trying to come to terms with an unfamiliar world. In
that sense, it was an exciting time. It was a time when the whole
attitude toward college changed, when the colleges first opened doors.
It was the first time that Cal was really overrun with people; in 22
it had an enormous population.
Brower: Do you recall whether there were changes in the admission requirements?
K-Q: Yes. U.C. let them down, with the boys coming home and so on.
Then there was Prohibition, and for the first time we had the
gangster-Mafia sort of thing that has been with us ever since, and
which got its very healthy start with Prohibition.
The 20s are both idealized and vulgarized, it seems to me, as
they are looked back upon. Maybe it will take longer, and maybe it
will take a very wise social historian to make a fair judgment regarding
them.
*A bibliography listing Theodora Kroeber-Quinn s major publications
will be found as part of Appendix VI.
70
Brower: Could you be specific about what some of the differences were?
K-Q: Remember there was a first depression, early, and that was a new
experience for a great many people. The depression was followed
with false prosperity and tremendous inflation, climaxing in 29.
There was a change in education. Very different standards were
set in colleges, and they ve been fluctuating ever since then. I
mean, it was the first time the doors really were open to great
numbers .
What else specific? I think it was the first time that styles
became absolutely totally absurd, very much in the direction that
they took more extremely in the sixties. Before the skirt in essence
disappeared, it went to the thighs, you know, in the sixties. Well,
it pretty much did that in the twenties the flapper thing, and the
very long waistline.
You know Kroeber s theory about that. He made two studies of
women s styles of clothes; he took evening dresses because they re
the ones that get pictured and that you can take measurements from.
As far back as Godeys Ladies Book went, and then before that, by
using portraits, he got a long enough time span to measure the
extreme high waistline, the extreme low waistline, the extreme long
and the extreme short skirts, which showed up most significantly in
the evening clothes. Extremes, when you go extremely far above or
far below the natural waistline, and extreme oddities in clothes,
do tie up, he found, with troubled social times and times of change.
Brower: The empire thing, for example.
K-Q: Yes, the Napoleonic thing, the rest of it. As far back as his
[Kroeber s] studies went, there was a fashion response to an unsettled
social and political state. When you think about it, there s change,
there s unrest, and dress is one way these express themselves. Of
course, we did run through a ridiculous cycle in the twenties, as
far as clothes were concerned.
Brower: You would think there d be a lag, wouldn t you, between the social
events and the styles?
K-Q: It s like a biological thing I ve never understood. Promptly upon
there being a war, not only do people marry young and have more
children more quickly, but at once (there isn t a lag) there are
more boys born than girls, beyond the normal excess, boy babies over
girl babies. This symbiotic relation between biology and psychology,
or whatever it is, seems to me absolutely astonishing. And in style
there really is no lag; it just happens.
Was there anything else about the twenties?
71
Brower: A change in domestic help occurred, didn t it?
K-Q: Let me think about that a little bit. Of course it did change I m
wondering if it was in the twenties particularly; I suppose it
was. I wonder if the extreme change was not at the end of the
Depression in the thirties, with the beginning of making armaments
for England, when people who had been in domestic work took factory
jobs. Once getting regular hours, regular salaries, I think a great
many of them never came back to house work.
There s a great deal about what happened socially that I wouldn t
know about. After all, I suppose you might say I was turned in upon
myself, except to the extent that I was stimulated by the people I
knew. They were interesting people, many of them were graduate
students in anthropology and in psychology and were very involved
in what was happening to the world. But I was terribly involved in
what was happening to me .
Brower: Was this characteristic of you throughout your life, or just at this
time, when you had been recently widowed and had two small children?
Would you say you had been introverted in high school particularly,
or in your undergraduate years?
K-Q: No, I participated in activities, certainly in high school. I think
the temperament is an introverted one, but I wasn t withdrawn in
school or in college. I don t think I was withdrawn in the twenties.
But there were two marriages and there were four children, all within
the decade (somewhat less than the decade, to be perfectly accurate
about it within about eight years) .
Brower: And that, for every woman, is a period of turning away from outside,
simply because there s so much to do.
K-Q: Yes so much energy [required] and so much time. But I was aware
of the attitudes around me. What I was really meaning to say was,
the people I was with were academic; they were pretty strictly North
Berkeley. Again, I would hesitate to generalize too far, except I
have this conviction that the twenties bear the scars of a first
and violent reaction to a changed world, and in this lies their
significance. What one mostly reads about them never rings true to
me. I never felt the way we are said to have felt.
I think the thing that is hard to understand now, with the
later youth revolt (youth trying to find itself) , is that none of
us then were revolting against anything. We were not revolutionarily
inclined; the world was turned upside down for us, and we were trying
to find our place in it.
72
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
It was involuntary change that was thrust upon you?
Right.
I m particularly interested in what you describe as the opening up
of the University. Your impression is that there were suddenly
many more students at the university?
I m sure there were. With Wheeler s going out and Barrows
presidency, there was a lot of change in the University which
probably had to do with the times, and perhaps was exacerbated by
the change of personnel. Somebody who knows more about the University
history ought to go into that. I know there was a lot of wobbling
back and forth, as to policy, programs, and suddenly there were large
classes, and students without the qualifications that had been taken
for granted before. I ve never compared my views with those of other
people who are my age-mates; I ve never thought about it particularly.
The thirties are so much better documented than the twenties, aren t
they?
Yes. Isn t that curious? They re just not so far distant, and there
are so many people around who lived through the thirties. They re
getting old now, but I mean people like the top anthropologists who
couldn t get jobs in anthropology, and this sort of thing.
I suppose too the period of the thirties was more focused and had
fewer aspects, really, than the twenties, when people were making
so much money on Wall Street.
Nobody that I knew was benefiting by all the money that was being
made through the twenties. I also didn t know anything about that
from personal experience. As a student or as a professor s wife,
you took no part in this great accumulation of wealth, before 1929.
I suppose the University benefited from it.
example
Giannini Hall, for
I suppose it did. But certainly nobody that I was associating with
did. People we saw from day to day neither benefited from the period
before 29 nor were they wiped out by the crash. Some of Kroeber s
friends in New York City were, however. The people who were making
money weren t interested in the fact that this was a changed world;
to them it was a bigger and better world, and it was going to go on
making more and more money. There was a naive belief in that, in
which I think the young people, for the most part at least the
young people I knew did not share, nor did the people Kroeber s age
who were academicians or writers or artists.
73
The Depression and Academia
B rower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Do you think of the thirties as quite different from the twenties,
with the abrupt change that came with the crash?
Certainly it was a change. If affected a professor s family less
than some others. I was perfectly aware of what it was doing to
others. And of course there was the low period when the University
was really out of funds, and when everybody took enormous cuts in
salary.
They were voluntary cuts, essentially, because as I understand it
President Sproul said U.C. could either fire people or we could all
just take lower salaries.
Yes, right. But there was some threat of the University s having
to shut down. I remember quite seriously deciding in that event
to go to live in Kishamish, our little country place in the Napa
Valley, where one could live much more economically and raise a
part of one s food. I remember Kroeber saying, "I can teach any
age. I can take any kind of a teaching position." Jean Macfarlane
said, "I can cook. I can get a job with one of the wineries there.
I m a good cook. I can cook, and I ll see that we all get fed."
[laughter] We seriously considered this as a possibility.
The University was paying its staff and faculty with vouchers rather
than real money, which were redeemed by the bank, just on faith,
really; the banks just trusted the state.
Yes. But in terms of the actual displacement and suffering of many
people, I think the academic community got by pretty well if you
had a job and a reasonable shelter over you that you didn t lose.
It was the young people who didn t yet have jobs (I mean in the
academic community) who were the ones that suffered; they took other
jobs or did what they could. But I expect that Berkeley, and the West
as a whole, did not suffer as acutely as did the East. The Depression
hit full here late. There was the lag; there used to be more lag
than there is now between the East and the West. There was a style
lag; things that would be smart in New York in 1930 would reach here
about 32 or 33. And there was a Depression lag. The Depression
hit hardest here three years later than in the East (I mean its extreme
point) , which meant it was that much closer to the beginning of
recovery.
There was not the same lag with recovery?
There wasn t as long a lag, and therefore not as severe a one.
74
Brower: What was your attitude toward the political change that occurred
the end of a long Republican era and the Roosevelt era beginning?
K-Q: Hoover was never one of my heroes. I didn t have the worshipful
attitude toward Roosevelt, but I was mighty relieved when he came
in. I think it was important that he did come in.
Brower: Did the campus reflect much political dissatisfaction and unrest?
Certainly we were pretty close to revolution, I think, in the country
as a whole. What about the campus itself? Do you remember?
K-Q: I would now be thinking in terms of faculty rather than students.
Well, there was a lot of unrest. Now, how revolutionary that was
I really wouldn t know. Kroeber was old enough, as were a great
many of the people I knew, to have gone through other depressions
and therefore not to have panicked in the 30s. He d been through
at least two major ones, not counting the one after the First World
War (I won t list the dates; one would be in the nineties, I think,
and one in the very early 1900s). Anyway, they were major depressions.
His family suffered, and he suffered by way of them. So The
Depression did not create the panic in him that it did in younger
people. It was partly being older, having lived through others, and
partly it was having a sense of history, knowing what had happened
before in the history of the world. Generally speaking, the world
doesn t come to an end with these things; it s just mighty uncomfortable
and rough, and terrible in some cases.
Brower: You don t remember demonstrations on the campus at that time?
K-Q: I think that was pre-demonstration time, wasn t it? No, I do not
remember any. I don t believe there were any.
Brower: Of course, there was a big general strike in San Francisco and there
were student strike-breakers.
K-Q: Yes. But as far as hitting the campus itself, I have the impression
that these were individual or group things, but not directed against
the campus nor originating as campus concerns. Perhaps I m wrong.
Brower: I think, later, the unrest outside would have been more manifest on
the campus .
K-Q: Absolutely. But that attitude really came as an aftermath of World
War II. The similarities are there, but the differences are as
great. You can t equate them. I think the roots for a great deal
that happened after the Second World War were there and sprouting
nicely underground. I believe, as an historian will look at it in a
hundred years, the two World Wars will be regarded as a single war
with a latent interval in between. I don t know how long they will
make the continuum, but I think it will be seen
75
B rower: As one ?
K-Q: Yes. Not as separate wars as we see them and we see it correctly
that way in a sense, because there were the differences. But I think
the first and second World Wars are one whole big revolutionary
upheaval .
And perhaps as we get farther away from them, since there has
been some sort of war going on ever since, it may take in a much
longer period than we can now even guess at don t you think so?
as one very large [conflict]. I m sure the Hundred Years War did
not appear to the people who were living through that hundred years,
as "the Hundred Years War"; it was a series of wars.
Brower: Separate conflicts?
K-Q: Yes, a whole series. I think something of this sort eventually will
become clear; we re too close to it, would be my guess.
Brower: Do I understand that the twenties for you were essentially a time
of being at home?
K-Q: No, it wasn t. Really, I should say it was probably as extroverted
a time as ever I had. I mean, the extroversion was really, in a
sense, forced upon me.
H
Brower: And you feel that the twenties were not the simple gay, giddy time
that we ve been led to believe they were?
K-Q: No. Maybe it was for some people, but certainly not for the people
I knew, and I don t think it was for most people.
Brower: Of course, an academic community is essentially not a materialistic
one.
K-Q: That s right.
Brower: And since it wasn t, academics probably didn t speculate and so didn t
suffer as much.
K-Q: Kroeber, you see, never got one of these fabulous salaries. Our
attitude was that of the intellectual proletariat. It was assumed,
as it was a fact, that a professor got a pathetic salary in terms
of what another professional person with anything like his training
and intelligence would get. This was taken for granted.
76
K-Q: It was also taken for granted that this was a free choice; you chose
this because you were doing what you wanted to. Not that you wanted
to teach so many hours every day, but that a research man had chosen,
very much like an artist (it s very like an artist s attitude), to
do what he wanted to, to take less pay for it, to have more
satisfaction, to be relieved of a great many of the shackles of the
higher paid professions.
For instance, you could dress as you pleased one badge of
Berkeley and Cambridge. When I went to Cambridge, I saw precisely
the same sort of badly hanging tweed skirts, and the same sort of
brown faces, and women doing gardening, and so on; it s a familiar
type. As a doctor could not, a professor could drive (as Kroeber
did) a Mbdel-T Ford; the last Model-T Ford to be registered on the
campus for parking was his.
Interestingly enough, a professor did not live in whatever was
the equivalent in the twenties of the wall-to-wall-carpeting sort
of place. The faculty lived in not necessarily good houses; but
their houses, relative to their cars, their clothes, everything
else, were good. They were likely to be very pleasant houses.
An economic study was made a Heller Committee study in which
they examined the proportion of a faculty member s salary that went
to housing, in comparison to the other professions. What came out
was that faculty people spent too much money for their houses. I
said, "How can you say that they spend too much money? Unless they
are going to the poor house or just not making a go of it, how can
you say it is too much? It is their choice."
The houses were not elegant, but they were comfortable. A "study"
was a sort of a requirement for a professor, and room for books.
Maybe more money was spent on housing because more time was actually
spent at home by a professor than by a doctor or a lawyer. The
home took on a different aspect.
Faculty Wife
Brower: Wasn t there a good deal of entertaining of students also?
K-Q: A great deal. There was not only entertaining of students, but of
a great many people (perhaps more in anthropology than in some
other departments) who came through on the way to the field, because
California then was an active place for field people. San Francisco
and Berkeley have always been an academic crossroads. There was a
long academic jump for many years from Chicago to the West.
77
Brower: And of course many scholars were going on to the Orient.
K-Q: Yes, there was a great deal of that. I never got into the social
thing herein Berkeley. A university town like Berkeley or Cambridge
is different from a small college town you can choose. If you want
to play the social game, it s there; you can have a heavy social
schedule if you re so minded. If you don t want to, you don t have
to.
I have the feeling that faculty women have increasingly felt
they had a great deal to do with their husbands careers. That s
a little hard for me to judge because Kroeber s career was made
before I came on the scene. It seemed to me that probably it would
be best if the woman did what came natural to her. If it really wasn t
natural to be social/political, you could wear your heart out doing
it and it wouldn t make all that much difference.
Brower: You mean the faculty wives feel that their social role is really
important to their husbands careers?
K-Q: Right.
Brower: And that if they entertain the right people ?
K-Q: Right. I think some people get a great kick out of doing it. I happen
not to. It always seemed to me that between Indians, who came to
stay for a longer or shorter time (they were informants and they
usually became friends) , and all the activities of four active
children and a husband who was going in six different directions,
and the numbers of people who were coming through, and the numbers
of students, I was always in arrears with people who just lived here
and were my friends, not seeing them as much as I would have liked
to because there were all these other things.
At that time, anthropologists were far less the "regular guys
that they are now. They were considered the wild ones, the bohemians
of the faculty. Our particular inner circle was what I called in
my first novel "an innocent bohemia." This is what I think Berkeley
was; it was a bohemia; it had a bohemian attitude a very great
indifference to others social values and standards. Bohemia as
compared to the rest of the world, but a very, very innocent one
(I think that s a lovely title. [laughter] The book is no good,
but the title is marvelous. Somebody should use it some time).
When faculty had to be bought at high salaries (and, God knows,
the more power to them) it simply was a different world. Some
younger faculty wife once said to me that she rather envied the
earlier period. She felt that she was as regular as any lawyer s
wife or anybody else, instead of being kind of a free soul. In the
78
K-Q:
B rower;
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
earlier period there were a great many things you didn t have, but
you did have a kind of special classification and you were let out
of certain social responsibilities.
You spoke of faculty wives, who felt they had an important role in
their husbands careers. Of course, you shared remarkably in
your own husband s career! As soon as you were married, you went
off to Peru.
Well, I shared in a different way, Anne. I don t consider it a
virtue, or anything I would recommend to another person. I simply
discovered early that if I didn t have anything in particular that
was burning me up, pleasantly or intellectually or emotionally or
any other way it sounds foolish but I can simply say it was as
if I were the empty vessel. With these four kids sparking in
different directions and a husband full of ideas and all this
pouring in if I stepped out of that role, the smooth rhythm of
the household went to pot. I found it all very, very interesting
and exciting. I knew enough about Alfred s work that I was intensely
interested in it. There was a great deal of shop talk in this house;
it was mostly shop talk; it was likely to be. If there s going to
be a great deal of shop talk, I suppose anthropological shop is about
as interesting as any can be, when you come right down to it.
For one thing, its such a broad field; it encompasses so many
different kinds of things.
Different kinds of things, different kinds of people, and it spills
over increasingly certainly for a person with Kroeber s kind of
mind, or Lowie s, for that matter into literature and art and other
subjects besides the different kinds of anthropology.
It s certainly a very different thing from being married to a
professor of engineering, for example.
Yes, that would probably be a great bore [laughter] to have
engineers sitting around talking.
Was there any question in your mind about going on that first field
trip to Peru right after marrying?
No, I thought it was great fun.
That was eight months in the field, wasn t it?
Yes.
A long time,
camped out?
Had you had any real field experience? Had you
79
K-Q:
B rower;
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Well, no. Because, you see, I grew up in the mountains where you
would go out for a day s picnic or you would go up to the mine and
stay at the mine. I never had camped out until I came to California
and camped with Kroeber for the first time up on the Klamath River.
I didn t know a darn thing about putting up a tent, about a sleeping
bag, or cooking over anything more than a picnic fire, because in
Telluride you could go out and have your day outdoors and then come
home.
This living in the desert in Peru in a tent! One of the crew
did the cooking. All the water had to be boiled, and I timed the
boiling for the necessary twenty minutes because I had a watch and
because it would not seem important to a Peruvian Indian who was
immune to some of the bugs that got us, or who took them for granted.
An Indian did the cooking over an open fire, with only minor advice.
It must have been a wholly new experience, not only the aspect of
camping but your life in that whole period.
We went by ship; it took twelve days from New York. I d never been
on anything bigger than the boats that go up the Sacramento River
overnight that was my total previous experience.
You and Dr. Kroeber went to Peru with another couple. Was she an
older woman, who was more experienced in this kind of thing?
She was older, without children,
experience.
Were they congenial ?
Yes ,
I suppose she had some more
It was not a very easy [relationship] .
camping isn t all that comfortable.
Archaeology is hard work and
Brower:
We camped because if you lived in a hacienda, or village, you
couldn t regulate what you ate as you have to in Peru. Your water
had to be boiled. And you were subject to malarial mosquitoes, except
on the desert. We camped out on the sand, on the desert, and went
into a friendly hacienda to have a full bath occasionally and a
civilized meal. But camping was really -a protective device, plus
the fact that living in town or a hacienda would have meant a good
many miles of driving on poor roads to the digs .
It s a little trying for two couples, but we managed okay.
Also, of course, it was the beginning of a marriage and that period
o f adj us tment .
80
K-Q: Our ship was really a freighter with about a hundred passengers; it
was a Grace Line Ship and very nice. That trip to Peru was the most
prolonged of my camping and field experiences. The other times were
briefer; we d go up to the Klamath River and camp for a couple of
weeks. There, Kroeber did have a cabin the simplest sort of one-
room cabin, not even a window. He had it (until the Highway
Department took it over) for its gorgeous view. Sometimes I didn t
go; sometimes one or another of the children went.
It was much later, in the fifties, that we went to the Colorado
River. There we stayed in a motel in Parker and drove out to
various Indians and various sites.
There was one summer Kroeber taught a group and did field
work in Kingman, Arizona. I went down for part of that. It was
one of the few times when I did information gathering on my own,
working with an informant (except what I did with Juan Dolores and
Robert Spott, Indians who visited us every summer for many summers,
coming to us for their vacations) .
Brower: That first Peruvian trip was such an abrupt launching into your new
life.
K-Q: It was abrupt in every way. I think I appreciated it more afterward.
We went first to Chicago, where I met professional people outside
of Berkeley. Then I went on from Chicago to New York City ahead of
Kroeber (his Peruvian expedition was for the Field Museum in Chicago) .
I had friends in New York. I d never been there; this was my first
time in New York City. It was, as well, a first meeting with
Kroeber s family, which then consisted of his mother, his two sisters,
one sister s husband and four children, and some cousins, all of them
strangers to me. Kroeber s really long-time friends were New Yorkers.
There were the three most intimate friends from his boyhood (I tell
something of them in the biography) , all of whom were New Yorkers
then and remained New Yorkers, except for Carl Alsburg (who later
moved out here and was at Stanford University when he died) .
After we were married and before we went East was the only time
I knew Saxton Pope, because he died that year while we were in Peru.
He was professor of surgery at the U.C. Hospital, in San Francisco,
the head of surgery there.
Brower: And of course he wrote Bows and Arrows.
K-Q: Yes. Saxton, and Art Young brought back to America the use of the
bow and arrow as a skill and a hunting tool. He was one of the first
"Big
Game" hunters to hunt big game in Africa without a back-up man
with a gun.
81
K-Q: I saw him only a time or two. I had definite impressions of the
person, and then later, of course, knew Saxton, Jr.
Brower: What was your impression of the father?
K-Q: He was a very handsome man. He was one of the few men you would call
beautiful. And very gracious. We got the telegram telling us of
his death several days delayed. Kroeber was very upset; they were
close friends. He said, "He shouldn t have died. He need not have
died." (He died of pneumonia). I said, "How can you say that?" He
said, "You have to have a will to live, with pneumonia." This
always seemed a little strange to me.
Years later, I reported this conversation to Saxton Pope, Jr.,
and he said, "Of course, Kroeber was right." I said, "What do you
mean, Saxton?!" He said, "My
father could not face the prospect of
not being virile, not being beautiful, not being the top in the
particular areas he valued."
Brower: He couldn t face the losses that age
K-Q: Would necessarily bring (which is quite unlike Saxton, Jr.). But
it fits with this lovely, vain, beautiful, intelligent man.
About my first visit to New York, there was the city itself,
there was Kroeber s family, all of whom were strangers to me.
Then, of course, there was the boat trip from New York to Callao,
Peru, which, if you ve never been on a liner, is an experience,
and there was the Panama Canal, also an experience.
Later, I d like to discuss the interval between Kroeber s
marriages. That is something I didn t go into as such in the
biography. Ther period was thirteen years.
VII ALFRED KROEBER, L. L. NUNN, MARRIAGE
[Interview 7: November 30, 1976 ]//#
Alfred Kroeber before Theodora
K-Q:
Brower ;
K-Q:
We have talked informally ourselves about Henriette, Kroeber s
first wife.
Yes.
She was Henriette Rothschild. German-born parents (German-Jewish) .
She was born in San Francisco, and she was Kroeber s age. They
married at age twenty-nine. For two years or more, everything was
fine. She went on some field trips; she did some collecting; there
82
K-Q: are some folk tales and perhaps some published ethnography under her
name.
She was a good pianist. I don t think that she was established
professionally, but she was known. She knew many of the professional
pianists who came to San Francisco. The musical scene was part of
her life.
Her father died in 1908. I think this had no particular
connection with her illness, except that it aggravated her condition.
After all, she had tuberculosis.
Brower: She had tuberculosis even at the time of her marriage?
K-Q: I suppose so. She was certainly unlike her parents; you can see
that in the photographs. She was rather beautiful in a delicate way,
but she looked fragile. Anyway, the tuberculosis wasn t diagnosed,
I believe, until after her father died, there being a strong emotional
reaction to his death. She was an only child, and I think it was a
close family. For the following five years, it was an up-and-down
battle for her, but a losing one. They tried hospitals, they tried
a sanitarium in Arizona and in other places. It s possible that she
would have been better in these places, except she was thoroughly
unhappy away from home; it didn t seem to work. So she came home
and died at home.
These were terrible years because of the worry, the anguish.
In addition, there was no medicare or other financial help for
illness then, and for a young professor on the salary at that time,
the long illness imposed a terrific economic burden. There was
just nothing for it but to go into debt and spend the next several
years paying off the debt. That s what you did in those days.
Brower: Her own family was not well off?
K-Q: Yes, they were. They were comfortably well off, and yes, they helped.
Before she was seriously 111, her father had died. This required
drastic readjustment, and the mother came to live with Kroeber and
Henriette.
Brower: Drastic financial readjustment?
K-Q: Yes. But there was enough comfortably to take care of Fannie, the
mother. I m sure that she helped out to the full extent that she
was able to; I suspect that was considerable.
Then, of course, Henriette was an only child there was Fannie
In the household (and Fannie was very necessary, particularly
when Henriette was home, which she was most of the time during her
illness). Kroeber also took over the whole financial responsibility
for her estate, which meant that investments had to be carefully made
83
K-Q: and this sort of thing, about which Fannie had had no experience.
Kroeber took that full responsibility.
I might interject here that when Kroeber came into my picture,
he also took over the responsibility for my former mother-in-law,
and she made him the executor of her estate with full responsibility.
He took care of her little monies, which she left to the two children
when they were of age.
Brower: I have heard that Kroeber s interest in psychiatry had stemmed from
the fact that his wife had been emotionally disturbed, and you tell
me that s not true.
K-Q: No, that s not true. I m sure she was emotionally disturbed in the
sense of being unhappy, and a physically ill person is likely to
be a neurotic person. She was highly temperamental and sensitive.
But she was not psychotic or painfully neurotic. Kroeber would not
have hesitated to say, had that been the fact.
As far as Henriette s illness being the origin of his interest
in psychology and psychiatry, that is nonsense because his minor
at Columbia was in psychology, with Cattell. He always maintained
relations with Cattell, saw him on a less intimate basis than Boas,
but an affectionate one and a professional one. Also, as soon as
Freud s first papers began to be printed in Germany (in German),
Kroeber was reading them from sheer interest and curiosity. He had
this distinct interest in psychology apparently from the time he
was in college.
A more specific interest may have stemmed not from Henriette s
illness but from his own Meunier s disease, which we ll come to next.
An emotionally complicating thing complicating for Kroeber
was when Ishi got T.B. and died. It was for Kroeber a journey back
over the old rough road, not quite the same, but alike enough to
make Ishi s death particularly hard for Kroeber to accept. He would
have taken it hard in any case, but this repetition was pretty fierce
for him.
There s an interesting social commentary here, I think. They
had a pleasant house, Kroeber and Henriette, with room for Fannie,
on Washington Street in San Francisco. A pleasant little garden.
With all the economy they had to practice, there was money for a
live-in maid (this reminds me of the sort of thing you used to meet
up with in New York City, where families who were really quite poor,
still had a maid or a live-in helper) . It was the case also in San
Francisco, as it had been in Kroeber s family (of course, they were
a prosperous family in New York City), the maids were newly arrived,
German immigrant women, who I suppose were not paid much.
84
K-Q: I think it was not too different here.
Brower: Except there was the ubiquitous Chinese cook in this part of the
world .
K-Q: That they did not have. It would be a German immigrant woman and
part of her pay was that she learned English in the household, and
felt secure there because Kroeber, his wife, and mother-in-law were
bilingual.
Brower: Also, I suppose, she learned what was expected in a household in this
country as against whatever she d known before. So it was a training
period.
K-Q: From a simple household like this one, she probably could go out to
a more complicated one and a better job.
Moving on to Fannie, upon Henriette s death, they continued
on in the house, Fannie and Kroeber, for some considerable time.
In 1917, Robert H. Lowie, who came out as a visiting professor and
lived at the Faculty Club, said to Kroeber (who was leaving to get
to San Francisco in time for dinner), "Why
don t you live over here
in the Faculty Club?" Kroeber was spending more and more time in
Berkeley and less time at the museum ( which was then in San
Francisco), but it really hadn t occurred to him to move to
Berkeley. Fannie was lonesome and a little unhappy when he couldn t
get home, and he would give up things in Berkeley in order to get
home.
So he put it up to her. She d been thinking about it, and she
knew where she wanted to go to live: the old Granada Hotel. It still
is an old people s live-in hotel. Anyway, at that time it was at
a very good level, and she had a large enough suite that she could
take the furniture she really liked, and her silver, and so on.
There was a regular arrangement between them by which (of course
Kroeber would also see her in between Fridays) he would go to visit
her Friday night. She would have ordered a dinner (apparently you
had considerable leeway in what you ordered there) , and she would
either have some of his friends in or he would bring somebody who
was visiting it would be a social evening. Or they would go to
the theater or opera. She counted on this, and loved it, and it
gave him an anchor. It was a much happier arrangement and, as he
said, as economical because she required more help at home and didn t
get on with help very well was very fussy so that there was a
constant turmoil over servants.
There is no question that there was enormous affection between
Fannie and Kroeber.
Brower: You didn t know her?
85
K-Q: No, I didn t know her. What money she had, she left to Kroeber.
There was a cousin or two whom she didn t like; anyhow, Kroeber
made token payments to them. Kroeber had been taking care of
Fannie s finances since the death of her husband.
As a matter of fact, this little lump sum that she left Kroeber
he used to make the principal down payment on this house. His
feeling was that he wanted to do something special with it.
He was away when Fannie died. She had a bad heart, and she
was overweight. It was an instantaneous death. He was in New York
and came home. That was also the time of the beginning of his
Meunier disease (I m not very good about dates) and his taking a
longish leave in New York, partly because of that (to consult a
specialist there and so on).
Now, let s see. I wanted to wind up the Henriette/Fannie story,
and I m wondering if I have done that.
Brower: I think so. Would you say it was given, of course, the problems
was it nevertheless a happy marriage?
K-Q: I think potentially it might have been. She was at an evening
lecture Kroeber was giving, and she came up to speak to him after
the lecture; that was how they met. She was an intellectual, bright,
sensitive person who would have been appropriate to him.
One other thing I should say. He was totally identified with
her group, which became his group, in San Francisco, German. Then
I think it s still partly true in San Francisco some Germans were
like Kroeber (they were goys) and some of them were Jewish. There
was this mixture of Aryan Germans, Jews, and Anglo-Saxons; there still
is. I can remember that during the early years of our marriage; we
went much more to San Francisco than we did later, because of
Kroeber s many friends there. They were likely to be Jewish people
who were concerned with opera and museums (the Elkuses and such) ,
whose interests spilled over into Indian interests too. There was
[Max] Rosenberg, who made a trip with Kroeber to Mexico and
financed some of his work before Rosenberg set up the Rosenberg
Foundation. In San Francisco, in other words, Kroeber s social
milieu was much like his in New York. His gradual dropping going to
San Francisco was a matter, in part, of becoming more absorbed over
here, having small children, and so on. Also, these San Francisco
friends were age-mates of his; some of them died, two or three
families at different times retired over here, and so on.
Brower: So you shared a bit in that San Francisco life.
86
K-Q: I did. The Elkuses came rather later. I m trying to think of the
very, very Anglo-Saxon lawyer in San Francisco who was married to
a Van Ness; I mean, that was one of the combinations. I can t think
of their name now; both dead.
Then there were the Henry Harrises. Harris was a surgeon at
the U.C. hospital. They and Kroeber were very close friends. They
came over here to live for their last years.
Brower: The Elkuses were deeply involved in American Indian affairs, weren t
they?
K-Q: Yes. That was Charles de Young Elkus. But also in music and museums.
Brower: Were the Salzes part of that group?
K-Q: Yes, they were. And there s the it isn t Knowland. It s a German
name like that.
Brower: Neylan? John Francis Neylan?
K-Q: Yes. In San Francisco, it was a limited group, and you more or less
knew everybody in it, or knew about them. Some of them were intimates
and some of them were not. The scene was really remarkably like that
for Kroeber in New York earlier.
Brower: I m sorry that you didn t know Fannie. I should have been interested
in your impression of her.
K-Q: I should love to have known her. Fannie looked in her photographs
as though she might be an amusing handful.
Brower: It was probably awfully good for Kroeber at that time to have a
human problem to involve himself in.
K-Q: I think so. She was unreasonable only in the sense that she was
affectionate and wanted his companionship, but not in any mean way;
I don t think there was anything mean about Fannie.
There are some photographs of Henriette. She was considered,
perhaps not a beauty precisely, but she certainly had flare and
style. There s one photograph where she s really quite beautiful.
Brower: She seems somehow so much of the earlier century to me that whole
life seems that way.
K-Q: Totally. She had no pictures taken after, say, around the time
of her marriage or before that. So, you have a picture of this
willowy young thing. I remember thinking with a shock one day
that, after all, she was an age-mate of Kroeber s, and she would
87
K-Q: have been not in the least the figure that I have
Brower: That remains in your mind?
K-Q: I wonder if that life really was of an earlier century or if, as
you say, that same community in San Francisco functions in pretty
much the same way it did.
I shouldn t be surprised if it does. San Francisco hasn t
grown. I think there is still very much of an in-group, and a mixed
in-group, behind the symphony, the opera, the museums.
Brower: Yes. Those same families are still the patrons.
K-Q: The same families, so far as I know: just a later generation. One
thinks these things have changed, and sometimes they have, but it s
often just that you don t know them anymore.
My guess is that if you run down the list of sponsors, their
names would be very familiar; they always have been familiar.
Brower: I suspect that may be a peculiarity of San Francisco as against
other large, cosmopolitan areas.
K-Q: I think so. It s small enough. After all, it s just about the
size of Vienna; it hasn t Vienna s stability, but there is a kind
of core thing there that always has been, you might say, international,
It s given a very strong atmosphere to the city.
John [Quinn] and I spent last Thanksgiving in San Francisco,
stayed over night, and we were in the Huntington, which is a sweet
old hotel looking out over Huntington Park. The mixture of races
and activities that goes on in that little park is fascinating!
There s the most elegant sandbox in the world in the playground
for children. There were Oriental children and some colored
children there. They were staying in the hotel; we heard several
different accents and dialects. There were some men (probably they
were divorced) who evidently had their children for the holiday.
Children seemed to be very comfortable in the hotel.
Then there were some really old couples having a binge. The
most delightful Negro family was having their Thanksgiving dinner
there. It was a four-generation family. I had a feeling that the
holiday dinner may have been an established custom with them. The
very youngest little pickaninny and great-grandma at the end were
enjoying it the most, except that the papa who was giving it looked
very, very pleased with everything.
Brower: That wouldn t have happened even ten years ago, I would guess.
K-Q: I would guess not.
88
K-Q: There was another nice thing we noticed. We went over to the
Fairmont (because lots of places weren t open; we didn t eat where
we thought we were going to eat). In the Fairmont, in the small
dining room where we were, the help were Southeast Asian and
Filipino. The charming thing was that the wine steward, who wore
the cellar keys, was a dwarf. I think that said something about
the management, and it said something about the expected clientele,
because some people would
Brower: Would recoil from him. That s very interesting.
K-Q: San Francisco is a fascinating city. When John and I came back
home, I felt we might as well have been on a three- thousand-mile
trip; it had been a total separation from Berkeley and from our
Berkeley activities and interests. You can wander around San
Francisco the way one does wander around a foreign city.
II
K-Q: I think Kroeber might well have remarried earlier; in all probability
there would not have been so much of an interval between his marriages
except for a series of special circumstances. He very much wanted
a home, liked a home, and had always wanted children, expected to
have children.
Henriette died in 1913, and then there was Ishi, and then there
intervened the year away, when Kroeber went to Europe during the
First World War which is something to contemplate now: can you
imagine that happening in the Second World War? A man with a
German name and speaking German being permitted to travel in Europe?
The one place he was not allowed in was France.
Brower: I think it s most extraordinary.
K-Q: But he went into Germany. By the Second World War I think it would
have been assumed he was a spy. Don t you think so?
Brower: I m sure there was not that freedom of movement then.
>
K-Q: He was searched when he arrived at borders, but that was all. He
sat with his Dutch relatives in Rotterdam within sound of the
bombing; they heard it as they sat at dinner. Of course, this was
before America was in the war, although we were certainly involved
on the Allied side. Kroeber was allowed to come from Germany and
Holland to England. The one condition England made was that he not
go back to the continent but come on home; that was his itinerary
anyhow. He had already visited his relatives in Germany and visited
Fannie s and Henriette s relatives; that was part of his reason for
going to Germany.
89
Brewer: In what sense did Ishi delay Kroeber s remarrying, do you think?
Because it was a human relationship that kept him from being as
lonely as he would otherwise have been?
K-Q: In part. There was concern for Ishi; after all, Ishi was ill a
great part of the time. There were the hours of days on end spent
working with Ishi. There was this sense of urgency wanting to get
as much as possible on record. Once he understood what it was all
about, this recording of language and customs and so on gave Ishi,
too, great satisfaction.
But I wouldn t say that delayed Kroeber s marrying, precisely.
Ishi occupied a lot of time and interest and concern and threw
Kroeber with Pope (and with Pope s family who lived in San Francisco).
The Meunier onset was severe now they have something (I don t know
whether it s Valium or what it is) which moderates the severity.
There seems to be no cure. You were saying it was inherited. I think
it s an infection.
Brower: I didn t know that it was; I just wondered.
K-Q: One hesitation that Kroeber had because of it (this affected him
beyond the actual disease) was a certain fear of marrying. He said
to me, "If I go through this again and lose the hearing in my other
ear (he was afraid it would transfer from one ear to the other) I m
going to divorce you. Nobody should go through that."
He went through the several years of onset and remission not
knowing what the disease was. Nobody ever so much as gave a name
for it. The fear of recurrence hung over him. We had been married
two or three years, and I was reading the medical section in Time.
I said, "This sounds to me like what you had," and gave Kroeber the
article. This was the first time he d ever had a name for the
disease. He had consulted every specialist in San Francisco and
New York; they appeared to have no name for it. This article
described it and said that when it is over (it destroys the inner
ear; that s why wearing a hearing aid doesn t help), it s over; there
is no record of its going from one ear to the other.
Brower: That would have been such a boon for him to know in all those years.
K-Q: Nobody had known these things. This was when Time had to be in the
forefront of news, so it probably was new information that they were
printing.
Brower: And something that perhaps had not yet been fully tested in labora
tories?
K-Q: Right.
90
Brower: You would think that the state of knowledge in the medical world
would have been such that he could have been given some sort of
reassurance.
K-Q: I think so too. But that he was not given, and that certainly
added enormously to the strain and tension and unhappiness and
fear. He had Meunier s disease very badly. Two or three times or
maybe more than that he would lose his balance. Sometimes he
fell. He fell in the gutter over in San Francisco and apparently
lay there until it was near a corner saloon they came out from the
saloon and picked him up and took him in there. The assumption
was, I suppose, that he was drunk. There was always the fear
of this, when it didn t happen. And the danger the loss of balance
and that sort of thing was miserable!
The reason I think they do have relief for it now is that Sam
Barrett had Meunier s. He was taking, I don t know what it was,
but something which greatly moderated the lack of balance and the
rest of its symptoms.
Brower: Kroeber didn t take any medication?
K-Q: They didn t have any medication, suggested nothing, and so he took
nothing for it. Sometimes he thought that he had a brain tumor, or
that he was losing his mind. That would certainly have added to his
already considerable interest in psychoanalysis which had replaced
the earlier interest in more general psychology.
Brower: So that was the explanation for his interest, more than anything else?
K-Q: Yes. But I don t think that really should be emphasized too much
because
Brower: You mean the reaction to Meunier s
K-Q: Yes. I would simply say that it would have a much more direct
influence than anything that had to do with Henriette.
Brower: It intensified an earlier interest that had been there for many
years?
K-Q: Right. Then when he went to New York and took a year s leave of
absence (it probably was only for two semesters) , then he really felt
a need for some kind of help. But he also felt a tremendous
curiosity. He wanted to have the experience of psychoanalytic
analysis. Without the curiosity, he probably wouldn t have spent
the money or taken the time. He was disturbed and he didn t
particularly like the way life was going, but the problem was not of
a sort that would have led him to analysis. But curiosity would
lead him a great many places. He was intensely curious, and he
liked personal experience; he wanted to get his hands in whatever it
was that he was curious about.
91
K-Q: The analysis itself took part of that year. It was not a long
analysis; it was before long analyses had become "the
thing."
He wasn t concerned with a particular problem, just a generalized
sort of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. He had no deep-seated
psychological problems, so far as I know, that would have tied him
up. He was ready, in other words, to cooperate, which I imagine
makes an enormous difference in the length of time that analysis
takes .
(In 1974 John had a Jungian analysis, which went with the speed
of light because he wanted it he knew the person he went to and
he knew why he wanted it. He and his analyst got down to basics
very quickly . )
Kroeber s one delay was that I wish I could remember the
name of the man, a distinguished analyst to whom Kroeber went.
After several weeks, or perhaps it was only two weeks (I don t know
how often he was seeing him, whether it was daily) , he realized that
they were having delightful, intellectual discussions of analysis
as related to anthropology; but this was not an analysis. He put
it up to his analyst, who admitted it, and turned him over to
his son-in-law, who was a man definitely younger than Kroeber.
But it worked. This more literal-minded man settled down to a
real analysis, and Kroeber got a sufficient transference to make
it work; he d been a little concerned that perhaps he wouldn t
get the transference, but he did.
The analysis occupied a year I suppose most of his time in
New York City. Then he had to come back to the University. He was
not through with analysis. First, Pope sent him patients (or he
went to the Stanford Clinic, to see Pope s patients). Then he
opened a psychoanalytic office in San Francisco for I think it was
for three years. Perhaps the whole time in which he was regularly
seeing patients was three years and he had the office for only two
of those years. Anyhow, that was absorbing too.
Brower: Did he devote any time to anthropology during that period?
K-Q: Yes, he did. But he realized, as he went into, we ll say, the
second year of maintaining his office, that he could not indefinitely
juggle these two interests; he had to make up his mind. He was much
inclined to go into analysis; he found that he was good at it. But
he also was hard-headed enough to realize that without being an
M.D. he wouldn t have real control, and that the subject he really
controlled was anthropology. His thinking of dropping it was probably
tied up with a general feeling of not knowing where he was going and
a redefining of himself, that is common to men in their forties;
they re likely to reassess their goals, to wonder whether their
decisions have been right, perhaps to change direction.
92
K-Q: The psychoanalytic interest hung on long enough that in the early
years of our marriage we saw as many analysts, socially and otherwise,
I should say, as any other kind of animals, as many as anthropologists,
really. When the study was added to this house the first study,
which was the first addition to the house a rear door was put in
because Kroeber thought he might have patients; there were patients
he d had who wanted to continue with him. As a matter of fact, he
did not; he had no patients after he closed his office, and never
had any in this house. There were some of his patients who came to
see him, but not in a psychoanalytic session; they just talked.
Brower: A moment ago, you said you saw as many analysts "socially and
otherwise. . ."
K-Q: This was a time when analysts were arriving newly from [Europe],
refugees from the Hitler regime coming here. Kroeber was identified
enough with San Francisco and the Jewish Refugee Committee that some
of these people came to him not specifically for a place to live or
for help in establishing an office, but for general orientation.
He did help. He could introduce them; he still knew the staff at
the U.C. Hospital and other doctors this sort of thing. A good
many analysts poured into San Francisco during that time.
Brower: We re talking now about the early thirties?
K-Q: Right. Both from Germany and from Austria; more, I suppose, from
Austria. Erik Erikson was among them. He stayed on here, and the
Eriksons lived up here, always close to us. We knew them as a
family better than we knew most of the analysts who came.
Brower: He was a refugee?
K-Q: He was a refugee. In his younger life, wherever it was he lived,
he was a painter; he had gone to Vienna and was analyzed by Anna
Freud. He came to America as a refugee from Austria. His wife
was a Canadian. He was thoroughly identified with the Freudian
group in Austria. I don t know whether he was an Austrian citizen
or not, but I think he d been there several years.
To close this thirteen-year period I was talking about, Kroeber
realized that he couldn t follow both professions, and that he
wanted to stay with anthropology. By this time he had got himself
straightened around and was more identified with Berkeley. Lowie s
coming was a factor; they both lived in the Faculty Club, and Lowie
was never San Francisco-oriented. The tiro of them, being good friends,
made friends with the same people in Berkeley, specifically up in
North Berkeley and along Buena Vista Way the d Angulos and the
Gibbs a group which was a "little bohemia," all right.
93
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
You were living near there, weren t you?
I was up at the head of Cedar Street.
D Angulo of course I know about, but the name Gibbs doesn t
Dan Gibb was married to let s go back. Nancy was married to
Jaime d Angulo. Helen, the older sister, was married to Dan
Gibb, who had retired early (because he had T.B.) from the Indian
service (he was actually Scottish, but with the British Indian
service) and come here to live. I suppose he s what one calls
a remittance man?
You mean he retired from the British Indian service?
British Indian. He was an irrigation engineer,
cluster of three redwood houses on Shasta Road?
with his own hands.
You know that
He built them
Now, where are we?
We re in Kroeber s social life before his marriage to you.
Right. He must have been pretty well settled.
I think I told you I had known Kroeber through a few lectures
he gave when I took anthropology in 16 and 17. I m trying to
think. We were married in 26. He went to Peru I suppose it
was 24- 25. Yes. So I consulted him I think we have that
recorded before he made his first trip to Peru. Then he came
back it must have been in the summer of 25 and I took classes
with him that fall term. Maybe I m putting this a year forward,
but I know our trip to Peru was 26- 27, and he had to have a
year here between those two trips. Am I figuring this correctly?
I think the Peru trip would have to be 23- 24 to get the 25
in between.
When he got back from Peru, that summer, Leslie Spier and Erna
Spier were here for the summer. I had met them, and I saw Kroeber
again at their house that summer, which is the first time I met
Margaret Mead. The party was for her. She was coming through
on her way back from what probably would have been her first trip
to the South Pacific. So that would be, as we figure it now,
1925.
With both Kroeber and Lowie living at the Faculty Club, and
they quite eligible bachelors, there were plenty of very informal
parties, dinners, etc.
94
Brower: But there seems to have been something a little bit special about
that party the Margaret Mead party. You must have found each
other quite interesting on that occasion.
K-Q: I think that s true. Did you go through a period when at parties
the lights were so low, you couldn t see only hear?
Brower: I don t really recall that. It seems to me the era of candles
came later, although at our house, I remember, we did have candles
a lot.
K-Q: I remember Leslie guiding me in, sitting me on the floor, where
I heard many new voices. I met Delila Gifford for the first time
that evening (I had known Gif f before) . When the lights were
turned on I could place this voice (Delila s). Because I heard
her voice before I saw her, I think first of her voice when I think
of her. She has a particularly pleasant voice. Giff was very
deaf. Delila, without raising her voice, could get Giff s
attention; he heard her from across the room as he could not hear
anyone else.
As soon as the lights were turned on so we could see each
other, Kroeber came over and asked me how the work had been
going. This was before the new term had started.
fl
L.L. Nunn, Telluride House and Deep Springs: A Digression
Brower: Can we return to Telluride for a moment? I am curious about the
connection of the Telluride Foundation to the town of Telluride,
and Deep Springs School.
K-Q: I was a young child when I knew L.L. Nunn, who was the man who
established and endowed the Deep Springs School. He was an
electrical and mining engineer. He had had his training at Cornell.
He was unmarried. He selected and brought in very young men, some
of whom had not completed engineering training but who would
get part of it at the local power plant and in the mines. He
chose these young men for brightness and tended to choose boys
who didn t have much money and who had been, in some cases,
disadvantaged .
95
K-Q: Then Nunn decided he must take younger boys begin this education
much earlier. That was the beginning of the Deep Springs School,
which was for boys I don t know how young they were up through
high school. They were all there on scholarships.
Then he decided that this wasn t quite good enough
because their college education was too specialized. So, he
sent them, or a selected number of them, or certain ones who
wanted to go on into engineering, on a scholarship to Cornell.
Just in what order these things happened, I don t know. At
some point along the line, the Deep Springs, Virginia, school was
resettled out here in California.
Brower: On the east side of the Sierra. The name perhaps came from Virginia?
K-Q: It came from Virginia, where there were deep springs. Anyhow,
Julian Steward was a student there, for instance. It was
understood that later, as they could, as they themselves were
successful, they would give a certain amount of time to getting
acquainted with the boys at Deep Springs and to teaching there.
The year they were there teaching they would be housed and fed,
but the salary was modest; it wouldn t be the equivalent of a
professor s salary.
Julian Steward went to Deep Springs, was loyal to it, and
very happily went back to teach there. He taught for a couple
of years, took his full responsiblities with the boys; it was
expected that these teachers didn t just teach classes but that
they were an influence on the boys .
Julian Steward is the only anthropologist that I know of who
went there.
Then, at some point, Nunn established Telluride House at
Cornell. There "his"
boys lived as long as they were in college.
In the fifties some time, Kroeber went to Cornell to give a series
of lectures [The lectures became the Style and Civilizations book;
it was understood that the lectures would be published by Cornell
as a book] .
We were housed in Telluride House, which was a very curious
experience for me, and an extremely interesting one. They had
a delightful guest-room suite. Having visiting professors stay
there was part of Nunn s overall plan. By this time, of course,
Nunn himself was dead. But somehow or other this arrangement and
intent continued, I don t know whether to today, although I know
that Telluride House still exists. There was an older person who
had been at Deep Springs a very charming gentleman who was the
host when we were there not very conspicuous, but an influence.
96
K-Q: It so happened that our first meal there was breakfast. We went
down to breakfast and were assigned a table. There were I
suppose about thirty Telluride boys (as they called themselves) .
They would come to our table, one or two or four of them; they
would sit at table with you; they introduced themselves. They
had been taught both manners and a kind of nice ease; they didn t
intrude themselves, but they were there. We had different ones
at most meals, but somebody always sat with us, or they would ask
us to come over to their table. Except when there was some need
or we wanted to talk to him, the host, whatever he was called,
did not particularly intrude himself.
As an introduction, they had a sherry party before our first
dinner. All the boys came to that. After that, it was as might
be. But there was always sherry before dinner, and there was
always somebody to talk to. We were in the House between two and
three weeks. Rather startling to me was the extent to which
these boys without its being militarized or without your feeling
anything forced or artificial in their friendliness had acquired
great social ease (they were all scholarship boys).
Brower: The Deep Springs School had the principle, you know, of work on
the farm a working ranch, really. I think it s almost fifty-
fifty: half study and half ranchwork.
K-Q: I think so, which it could be. As Julian said, "You don t need
to be in school all day. If you ve got a bright bunch of kids and
a good teacher, they settle down to work half a day, and the other
half "
they milked the cows, did all the chores. It was a real
ranch atmosphere.
Brower: I think it still is, and it seems to me a marvelous formula.
K-Q: It s very interesting. Apparently when Nunn died, I know he left
his money to the Telluride Foundation, but the letters must have
been spelled out in some very interesting and careful way
according to his wish, for it to have continued. There was a small
Telluride House here.
Brower: At the University of California, Berkeley?
K-Q: Yes, and I don t know whether it continues or not. I was there
once, or perhaps twice. I wasn t at all sure that it was going to
quite make it. It seemed to me they half had the thing in hand
and hal f did no t .
97
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
It was a nice bunch of boys, and it was pleasant. But there wasn t
the same sureness of why they were there and where they were going.
I didn t know whether it was the man who was in charge or whether
somehow it just couldn t be transplanted, or what,
what s happened to it.
I don t know
You recall that Nunn s fortune was made in his devising means to
send electricity the alternating current business.
Yes. The first such long-distance, high altitude transmission was
set up at the top of the San Juan Range above Telluride.
It must have had all sorts of ramifications for the use of
electricity.
It apparently did.
It was really one of those landmark things.
And it was probably because of that that at the mines and, in fact,
in our domestic science kitchen in our high school we were cooking
with electricity, both the ovens and on top. These stoves had
been devised locally, and all the kitchens were electrified.
I think he, Nunn, was a solitary figure. So far as I know,
there were no women in his life. He had the loyalty of these
kids, who worked at the power house. He brought them there and
of course, they might be grateful for that, but it was more than
that. It was a very happy bunch. It must have been run somewhat
on the lines that he set up for Telluride House, as a matter of
fact, because the boys who were not graduate engineers lived in
the powerhouse. Nunn himself was there, and he set the tone.
The powerhouse boys were all extremely well-mannered and personable,
and they probably had not all come that way when they arrived in
Telluride.
I don t know when Nunn died, but it s been a good long while
because, after all, he must have been in his forties when I was
a child.
It s interesting, isn t it, that even the name Telluride stayed
in his life? He didn t call it the Nunn House.
No. I don t think he used his name, ever.
98
K-Q: There was a story that he was ruthless in business, which may have
come from some of the hostesses in Telluride. I don t think
he was "available." He was not the available bachelor. I don t
think he wasted any time on social affairs. I don t remember
his being considered peculiar there; I don t remember that at all.
He was special in that he did more distinguished things than did
most people. Certainly my father and the people I remember who
really knew him, liked him; he must have been an interesting man.
He is an added little oddity to the whole odd Telluride picture,
isn t he?
Brower: Yes. That town won t stay in the ordinary categories, will it?
K-Q: No, it won t. I suppose probably it was sheer chance that he
put the line up above Telluride . But doing so would have fixed
the name in his mind.
Brower: I was interested in one thing that David Lavender said about him
[in Thomas C. Wheeler (ed.), A Vanishing America: The Life and
Times of the Small Town. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1964], He said that Nunn didn t believe that things were impossible.
All the conventional engineers thought that this was a totally
impossible thing; it couldn t be done. Nunn really didn t know
enough engineering to recognize that it was impossible, so he
went ahead and did it.
K-Q: This is quite possible; this often happens. I think he was of the
genius variety. That is probably one of the qualities of genius
anyhow
Brower: Refusing to recognize the limits?
K-Q: Right. When you get a person with real genius quality, you re
likely to get some other peculiarities, [laughter]
Brower: You never visited Deep Springs School here in California?
K-Q: I never have seen it, no. The most I know about it is what
Julian told us. That was during the time that Julian was teaching
there, before he married. Certainly Julian, who was not an
enthusiastic person in general, had a deep loyalty to that school.
Apparently there s enough kudos attached to teaching there that
a man can afford to step out from his regular place for a while
and spend some time there. It isn t time lost.
Brower: It s quite interesting that you should have wound up in Telluride
House for a visit.
99
K-Q: It was so strange! They had House stationery. I sat down to the
desk in our room and there was the heading "Telluride" after all
these years. It seemed absolutely weird!
Second Marriages
Brower: Before our several digressions we had got you to the summer of 1925.
K-Q: Yes, or at the beginning of the term, which then began in August,
we must remember which was nice. I took my first seminar with
Kroeber. The seminars were small. As I mentioned, there was
Forest Clements and Sarah Schenck and me in one seminar. There
was a larger seminar that Julian [Steward] recalls rather
particularly in the obituary article he wrote on Kroeber in which
Julian and I were, and I don t remember who else probably Forest
and Sarah. It was sort of a round-table full, a seminar on games.
Julian and I were paired. Each pair did an analysis of games from
a different point of view. Julian and I did one. That was not
a big seminar, but we ll say there was six, perhaps eight, people.
Brower: Did you take both those seminars the same semester?
K-Q: I don t think so, but I might have. The year before, I d caught
up on the undergraduate courses that I needed, so I might have
been taking two simultaneously. I d already had two seminars
(it must have been mostly seminars) ;
I had two seminars with
Lowie and two with Kroeber, at least. I don t know just how
those were distributed. As I said, Lowie took me to a first dance
at the Faculty Club. By the time the second one rolled around,
Kroeber took me. From then on, we were together a good bit. When
I could, I d stay down for dinner; sometimes just with Kroeber,
just with Kroeber and Lowie, or sometimes with the Schencks.
Kroeber went east for Christmas (the meetings, do you
remember, used to be at Christmas time?). It meant he had Christ
mas with his family in New York. His mother was living then. We
were pretty well settled as to our preference for one another, but
we were both- a little wary of marriage. We had had curiously
similar experiences in our marriages. For all our age difference,
we each understood how the other felt.
Brower: Even such similarities as going to the Southwest with ailing
spouses .
100
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
A great many things. The good interval in the marriages was about
the same length of time. At that time, with the semester starting
in August, there was a long vacation at Christmas at least a good
solid month. When Kroeber came back from New York City, we
decided we would be married, and we were married that spring.
I remember the day [laughter] we went to be married. We
were married in the Oakland Courthouse. We said nothing about
our marriage plans to anyone except Brown and my mother and the
immediate family here; and we wrote to Kroeber s immediate family.
Kroeber was driving up Cedar Street at noon the day we were to be
married and he picked up Edward Tolman, the psychologist, who lived
right around the corner from Brown. Tolman said, "What are you
doing up here this time of day?" Kroeber said, "As a matter of
fact, I m picking up Theodora Brown and we re going to be
married." [laughter] Tolman sort of looked at him and said,
"Well it s high time, I should say."
Why did you decide on so simple a ceremony?
gists believe in rites of passage.
I thought anthropolo-
I don t have any feeling against ritual now, but I suppose this
was one of the hangovers from the twenties. One of the postwar
affectations was getting rid of ritual. That was part of it, and
Kroeber perhaps had had a little too much ritual from his
earnestly believing Jewish parents-in-law; that was not the side
of Jewishness that particularly appealed to him.
This was how it was done in the twenties if you considered
yourself an intellectual. It s a crazy way to do it, but I was
married twice in the twenties and both times in this "modern"
way the other one was in San Francisco in the office of an
attorney (whose name I ve forgotten). He had been a friend of
Clifton s father and Clifton knew him. We were married in his
office, as a matter of fact (both Clifton and Kroeber felt a little
shy in their bridegroom roles) .
As I say,
afterwards.
I finished that semester and did not go back
Would that have been the winter or the fall?
That would be the spring semester of 26. Kroeber wanted me to
get a degree, for the practical reason that he thought it was good
insurance. He said, "Here you are with young children, and I m
twenty-one years older than you are." It wouldn t have been all
that difficult to do it, but it would have been difficult for me.
Lowie wanted me to. Lowie would have been my professor for the
degree; it wouldn t have been
101
B rower: Kroeber?
K-Q: No. [laughter] But it was my fault that I didn t.
Brower: Do you regret that now?
K-Q : No .
Brower: Why do you have no regrets at not going on for the degree?
K-Q: I m afraid I haven t ambition in a public sense of ambition. I ve
never put any particular value on a degree as such. [At that time]
he said, "A Ph.D. is your union card. I think it s worth a cool
forty thousand dollars." Now, at this point in time (as we all
say, since Watergate), I don t know what sort of money valuation
he might put on it today .
VIII THE THIRTIES
[Interview 8: December 7, 1976 ]##
K-Q: It s curious. I have a visual image of December 7, 1941. As I
remember, it was not as warm as today, but it was a sunny day.
There wasn t fog, because I remember physically looking out from
our upper balcony, straight through the Golden Gate and, as it
were, straight toward Japan
Brower: The view suddenly had new significance, didn t it?
K-Q: Yes. We have never been much for turning on the radio in the
morning to get morning news; somebody phoned us, maybe one of
the children. We woke up to the news, didn t we?
Brower: I think some people did. I, as a matter of fact, didn t.
K-Q: But it did happen early in the morning?
Brower: Yes, we could have waked up to the news, certainly. I didn t
hear it until almost noon.
K-Q: It was a dawn raid, wasn t it? It would be earlier by two hours.
I have this image of standing out on the deck and looking out
through the Gate. It seemed very strange that something sinister
could be so near; all right, it s three thousand miles, but it
did seem closer then.
102
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
And of course we had no knowledge of whether it was a great deal
nearer than that . There was no way of our knowing we were not
totally vulnerable, which indeed we were.
We were certainly vulnerable.
The Japanese didn t know it.
That s right. It s very strange.
I remember the searchlights in the sky that night. It was
in this country and on this coast, certainly our first little
glimpse of war. That was all we ever had.
That s right. But we didn t know that then.
No. Then of course there were also the implications it had for
one s family in your case and in my own.
Yes.
Everything was disrupted,
for everybody.
Yes.
It was a very dramatic day, I think,
Now, to go back a bit from Pearl Harbor, to when you were first
married and you made the decision not to go on for a doctorate.
It occurred to me that one factor in that might have been your
wanting to have children right away.
I had two children, and Kroeber wanted a family. I simply
didn t see myself as going two ways, and I think I knew myself
there. I never did have the sheer physical energy that many
women have. Nor did I have any particular ambition; and you do
need some drive to do this sort of thing. I was confronted with
a great many new situations. I was new as a faculty wife, new to
Kroeber s friends, it was a new and different house, and I was
running a very different sort of household than I ever had. I
think that was about all I was up to.
I don t know that I m answering you very well. I m not
without ambition of a sort; ambition then was to do my job at
home. It really was all I could have managed reasonably.
A different person could have done both jobs.
Brower: What did the household consist of?
come to you, to this house?
Did your first mother-in-law
103
K-Q: No, she visited frequently. She lived just up the hill, and we
saw her frequently. But she didn t live with us, ever.
I always had help . There was always part-time help .
My
Aunt Betsy lived with us for a number of years? And for many
years, there was a Filipino houseboy; he d worked for military
families earlier. He would come after lunch, sometimes just in
time to get dinner and clean it up, and earlier other times if
we were having a party or for some special cleaning I needed.
We were talking about differences in generations one real
difference is that never with my children did I hire a baby sitter.
I never had to. Either I could run them down to my mother, or
my aunt was here, or Marciano, the houseboy, would stay over. I
suspect this makes some difference in children s attitudes
toward people they may be less adaptable [chuckle] . But there
must have been a certain security there; they never were
confronted with a strange person in the role of caretaker.
I can remember a time or two when I had my grandchildren
they were small and I got baby sitters for them. I found that
I had to be very careful, and I had to prepare them for accepting
a stranger. When my children were small, it was an extended
family situation. Brown would come down and play with the kids,
and if they were sick, she d come.
Brower: The aunt was your mother s sister?
K-Q: Yes thirteen years younger.
Brower: Did you have some feeling, in this matter of family, that you
wanted to have the children fairly close together, that you didn t
want a long gap between?
K-Q: I was very glad to have them close together because it meant that
by the thirties they were all here, [laughter]
Kishamish
K-Q: And they were very close. That was fun in their growing up.
*Aunt Betsey (Elizabeth Covel Johnston Buck) is described in
detail in "The Two Elizabeths," Appendix II.
104
K-Q: In some ways, I suppose our household sounds absolutely anti
social by present standards. The day after school closed in the
summer, I packed a trunk we went up to Kishamish, our place
in the country, in the Napa Valley, and I came back with the
children the day before school opened . I was there for the whole
summer. Kroeber might come down and get a stack of books to
bring back, or there might be somebody he wanted to see (although
usually, if it was that, he brought them up there) . With four
children there happened to be no other children close by there
in the country they were a group themselves. They swam together,
they played all the games we had up there soccer, tin-can golf,
tennis, "meadow-baseball," croquet, and badminton, cards and
board games . The older boys went to the tennis court at the high
school. The children wrote and acted plays; they had the "Barn-
top Players" in the loft of the old barn. They put out a
weekly newspaper.
These things it s interesting. They began with Clif , shifted
to Ted, to Karl, and finally to Ursula, because she was the youngest.
By the time she took over, Clif and Ted were in the navy and the
air corps. The children s friends from Berkeley came up.
We didn t enter at all into the social life and the Napa
Valley is really awfully social if you want to make it so . There
are a lot of writers and painters and retired people, not
necessarily of "retirement" age but of retirement income and
preference. Kroeber wanted a place to write; he was getting
away from people.
I looked forward to the summer because I liked it and, at
that time, I didn t particularly like the fog. I was sinus-y
and not very well here. I really was better up there in the heat,
which I would not like now.
Marciano, until the war, for many years went up with us
for the gnmmer. So I had more help in summer than in the rest
of the year, because he would be there full time. He d take a day
or two off every once in a while and come down to the city. He
had his own car. That was a better car than ours. Kroeber would
ask him to park it so that it would be the car people would see
when they came in [laughter] , because ours was the Model-T Ford
for many, many years.
So it was also my time to read. I d take a whole stack of
books. There wasn t much you could do about that house, and we
never did anything about it. We slept out of doors there. I did
a lot of reading in summer, and that s what I enjoyed.
105
K-Q: Kishamish s was an extremely introverted life, in a way. Tremendous
activity amongst the children, and a lot of company anthropologists
and other professional people and just friends. Some of them came
many times. In that way, I got my hospitality bug out of my
system. In Berkeley I d never been able to have people come and
stay overnight, stay a week, this sort of thing. I kind of loved
that. I got it out of my system, [laughter]
Brower: You had plenty of it?
K-Q: I had plenty.
Brower: Where exactly is Kishamish?
K-Q: It s in the Napa Valley, about four miles south of St. Helena,
to the west of the highway up in the hills. Now you can see
a couple of houses from there, but you couldn t even see the roof
of a house then. It s very sparsely settled even now, and none
of the people who ve owned land there have broken it up as yet.
St. John s Mountain is to the immediate west. You can start off
and, without meeting anybody, you can find yourself over in the
Sonoma Valley. There s just that one ridge between. You go up
St. John s Mountain, down the other side, and there you are.
The hills are emptier than they used to be. There are
deserted farm houses there where people had horses. Up just
above us was what would have been I think a decently prosperous
ranch. Well, the owner couldn t make it in the automobile age.
Brower: Is that property still yours?
K-Q: I gave it to the children, and they use it. The house is falling
apart; it always has been falling apart. It s more than a hundred
years old just a little old redwood thing stuck up on a steep hill.
Two families are going to be there this Christmas, for
instance. Ursula and her family hope to come down for most of
the summer. The children use it. And the grandchildren love it
in the perfectly illogical way that my children do. There isn t
anything they can do to it, so they have a certain freedom there
that they didn t have here. As Kroeber would say, "Don t rough-
house here in the house! You ve got forty-one acres you can
roughhouse on!" [laughter]
I heard Ted, at age about eight, I think, telling a friend
of mine about Kishamish. He was not boasting , from his point of
view; he was describing: a large, white house, a casino, a badminton
court, a tennis court, a croquet court, a swimming pool, an
106
K-Q: outdoor fireplace. Now, you can see what kind of an image this
would make. The fact of the matter was [laughter] there is a
seven-room white house (such as it is) ; the swimming pool is a
20 x 20 irrigation tank belonging to our neighbors it has
spring water coming in and going out of it. We, in return for
using it, kept it clean; we played tennis of a sort, but mostly
the meadow was a track field. There was a badminton court you
play on dirt in the Napa Valley in summer and a croquet court,
which became quite an expert s court, which also was on ground.
What else? The casino. At one time, a French chef had gone up
there from San Francisco and had run a country inn of sorts.
Some of his clientele came up for weekends. He had built this
structure the casino which had a roof; it was open on the
sides, and he set tables out there. Finally, we had to push it
over because it was falling down. The children slept out there
as long as it was in existence.
Brower: He was describing these things absolutely factually.
K-Q: Right, and perfectly innocent of the kind of picture his
description would call up in his listener s mind, [laughter]
Brower: This regal estate with rolling green lawns!
K-Q: John and I once flew up with a friend of ours who has a Piper
Cub, a tiny little thing. We flew over Kishamish, and landed in
a field down below, a tiny private air field. From the air
(it was early spring) Kishamish was perfectly glorious, with a
bright green new clover cover. You know the look when the hills
are green, that first green? The little white house you couldn t
see how rickety it was the little blue pool. I thought, "From
the air, it appears to have an elegance it doesn t have at all."
I realized when we went up there what the California
Indians meant by the new clover. When the new clover comes out
of course, the flowers come at the same time those brown hills
turn glorious green for a short time, until the clover gets coarse
and the grass turns "golden."
Brower: What do the Indians say about new clover?
K-Q: It was the first crop to come up. That is, with Ishi s people
and those around the Sacramento Valley, it was a first harbinger
of spring. It came just before the first run of salmon. So it
did mean the end of winter and the beginning of the bounty of
spring new crops. It began their new year celebration.
107
K-Q: Kroeber found that he could not work at his Configurations of
Culture Growth down here [in Berkeley] with constant interruptions.
He could do other kinds of work, but this required a continuity
that he didn t have here. So he simply put it aside. He wrote
the book over seven summers at Kishamish. When he finished it,
he signed it, "Kishamish." He could go up there with his load of
books and manuscripts, come down and get more, and spend his days
writing. He sat in a boiling hot room upstairs, which became
his study. There were no interruptions; we had no telephone and
no doorbell. When people came, if Kroeber did not want to see
them, he didn t come down. He d come down at the end of the day
and take a late afternoon swim with the kids. We had a light over
the badminton court. They d have a swim and they d probably have
a badminton game. Then, particularly if it was a hot day, we d
turn the light on over the badminton court, and then we might
play down there until ten o clock or so, until it really cooled
off. He would also take time off to go with them to the tennis
court in St. Helena. Kroeber taught the three boys their tennis,
and they re good players.
I might tell you one other thing which I think gives the
quality of the place the reason we loved it. When the
two boys were actually in service and Karl was signed up in
the navy and doing some summer work here (and then later Karl
was actively in the navy), Alfred and Ursula and I went up. Of
course, we were rationed as to gas; we didn t know whether we
would have gas enough. And we didn t know whether we could stand
the place without the boys, and there wouldn t be company coming.
Instead of its being dreadful without the boys, there was
something healing about that place. It hasn t a dramatic view,
but you do look straight to St. John s Mountain, which has a very
easy, nice, quiet slope. It s a composed picture; it s a little
bit as though you d framed a very country picture. These hills
and a bit of vineyard showing, and usually a cow a really peaceful,
domestic scene.
It was the one place I knew that seemed untouched, unchanged
by the war. It was as it had always been. Kroeber worked. I
read or I wrote. I wrote my first poetry there! It was a war-
response thing. Ursula would wander off. She had one tree she
liked to sit in. She was busily writing by that time. There
were some horses being pastured up there I didn t know this
at the time and she would coax one of the horses over and
sit on him and he and the others would crop the grass or he d
*This summer is also described in "The Two Elizabeths," (pp.
63-64), Appendix II.
108
K-Q: walk or trot her along. She was crazy about horses, and she had
ridden horses down here and up there when we knew it. But I
really didn t know that she was out with those horses.
It was a very peaceful place for us. But can you imagine now
letting a kid of thirteen or fourteen disappear for hours and have
absolutely no concern about her whereabouts?
Brower: I suppose not. But it would certainly be better there than here.
K-Q: Yes, but I wouldn t be able to do it there now. She always
appeared at lunchtime or tea time. And very often, when I couldn t
see her, she was within whistling distance. We had a good sharp
whistle because our neighbors down below had one, and they would
call us the [anthropology] department and two or three people had
the phone number if there was something important. We would
answer and then go to the phone it took four or five minutes to
get there.
Brower: And you did this by means of whistles?
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: That must have been a good big whistle!
K-Q: It was. It wasn t big in size, but it was a piercing one. Sound
travels curiously. I noticed that you d sometimes hear what people
said, coming down the road or down below us. The sound seemed to
move up and down that draw, between the hills. It was there
that we had as a summer visitor Juan Dolores, a Papago Indian,
who spent his vacations there with us for all the years until he
died. Then Robert Spott, up to the war, came for a number of
summers for a couple of weeks, which was his vacation. We had
these two Indians around the fire at night and talking (we
usually had an outdoor fire at night, just to sit around and
talk and play) .
It was a very peaceful time. I looked forward to it, no end.
Also I was always glad to get back here; the house smelled so
good and looked so good, after being away. It was the long break
in routine that was good for all of us.
H
K-Q: In a way, Kishamish is a hazard with the kids, who own it now,
because they re going different ways. Their children love it, but
how long that s going to last or what they can do with it what
can twelve grandchildren do with forty acres? When we bought the
place, hill land, which is so-called pasture land, was $1.25 an
acre! The house is still standing, and it does have seven rooms.
109
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
There was an old barn, which is still standing. There was the
spring, which runs a finger of water but runs the year round
faithfully. I think we paid just under three thousand dollars
for the forty-one acres and whatever was on it.
That would have been about 1930?
Yes. It was 1930 or 31. We had looked at a place on Howell
Mountain, with a rather lovely house on it. Then I got sick
I had my first bout with stomach ulcer and that put the sale off.
Afterwards, we were just as glad the place was sold because it was
quite a drive up Howe Mountain. Also, the mountain is now filled
with people. Then we found Kishamish. The name [Kishamish] is
not Indian, by the way.
How did it get its name?
Karl was in the full flush of his imaginary period. There was
Moon Prince, who was his great hero; Moon Prince never did any
wrong. Moon Prince took him to Sumatra every night, came and
got him and took him. Karl was flabbergasted when we showed
him a color map with Sumatra; I think he must have just picked
up the name.
It s a lovely name. I can see why he would,
significance for him?
But it had no other
Not a bit. He was just very pleased and astonished to find that
it was on the map. There were Gly-Gly and Py-dee, two little
fellows about his size. They were the ones who did whatever
was wrong. Anything that happened that was a little out of
order, Gly-Gly and Py-dee must have done it; Karl had never done
it. So they had to be watched a bit. We were all very fond of
Gly-Gly and Py-dee.
He named the two of the knolls at Kishamish. One was Thor
(he borrowed that, of course) and the other was Kishamish. Where
the name came from, I have no idea. Thor and Kishamish had a
knockdown, dragout, they knocked each other out, and there they
lie: the two knolls.
A Time of Illness
K-Q: Karl had a whole series of Greek heroes, some with real Greek
names. and some with made-up ones Heromines and Apomines, for
example. Alfred told the kids the Odyssey and other myths.
110
Brower: Has Karl been deserted by these entirely, or are they somewhere in
what he does now?
K-Q: I don t know. They were replaced. I think he hung on to them
longer because he was not well at all as a child, and lots of times
he couldn t play when he wanted to, and was alone, and entertained
himself very, very well alone. As soon as he was able, he got
into sports. He really was more for sports than the older boys,
I think partly because he was smaller and had been sick. He
became much more competitive than they. He sort of substituted,
for a few years, this devotion to sports for his imaginary friends.
Brower: It s Ursula who really has translated hers.
K-Q: Right. It s a little more possible for her to do it directly
than it was for Karl . Karl was a very cheery person with a
sharp sense of humor; that he has kept. I think where the other
part (the imagination) shows, he s been exceedingly imaginative
with his own children. Some of Karl s imagination comes out
particularly in his youngest, who is a girl. Kate has an
outrageous imagination. There s a touch of a witch in her in
her looks, in her humor. But imagination just rolling off the
place!
Brower: He s not in ill health now, as an adult?
K-Q: No. He was born with a nonfunctioning pancreas. It s a recognized
disease now; but it was only recognized by certain specialists then.
I think Karl would not have lived except that I m ashamed to say
I can t remember the doctor s name at U.C. Hospital who saved his
life he took Karl to U.C. Hospital for a couple of stretches of
two months each.
He passed the navy physical examination. I sort of wondered;
although he d been well, I wondered what would remain in the way
of remnant weaknesses .
Brower: Yes. And you wouldn t think you could teach a pancreas to function.
K-Q: It is more complex than that, but it is the opposite of diabetes.
I think it is something which is congenital, and either you
survive it, as Karl did, or if you don t survive it you die
within a few months of birth. Really, it is a sort of starvation
because the patient isn t getting any use from what he s taking
in.
Brower: Were you aware of this immediately on his birth?
Ill
K-Q: Very soon, because the other children the two boys had nursed
so readily and the diet had agreed with them, and Karl just wasn t
right. Nothing quite agreed with him. When he went to the U.C.
Hospital, he was thirteen months old and he hadn t gained an
ounce in two months. Well, at that age, that s pretty frightening.
His diet (and this is the diet he would go back to) was pureed
spinach, absolutely black banana with unbroken skin (it is a kind
of mush; it s perfectly sweet and totally digestible), and rice
was the one carbohydrate. When he was still a baby, I would say,
"Karl, you re back on the diet," and he would say, "Wice,
spinach, and bananas." [laughter] Perfectly cheerfully! We
would get bananas in a bunch and keep them in the cooler and
wait until they were dead ripe .
Brower: It must have been a time of acute worry and anxiety for you, though.
K-Q: It was. He was fragile. Because he didn t have much resistance
and he didn t have much weight, any sort of an illness became a
major one, for a number of years.
Brower: Did that have anything to do with your ulcer, do you think?
K-Q: I shouldn t be at all surprised. Yes, it almost surely did. There
was a lot of worry and a kind of constant watchfulness you had to
keep. Yes, as a matter of fact it must have been a horrible
time for Kroeber, and my aunt fortunately was here then Karl
was still at U.C. Hospital when
Brower: He had to stay there?
K-Q: He was there when I went to Alta Bates. My first ulcer was a
violent one; that really was bad. Poor Kroeber had two of us
at two widely spaced hospitals. I remember my first trip out of
the hospital was to drive over to see Karl. There must have
been a good interval there when I didn t see him at all. Kroeber
and my Aunt Betsy had seen him once a week during my illness. I
must have had three or four weeks in the hospital. Gosh, what
a horrible time!
I think maybe this was one reason too that I was not too
taken with the idea of writing a thesis, because you never were
quite sure. Karl could come out of it just like that {finger snap],
but then he could go back down very, very quickly. I think he
was a ten-year-old before one felt any security and began to
get a sense of a certain sturdiness. He seems on the whole to
be remarkably well. He is very thin, to this day; he always
has been; he hasn t an ounce on him extra. But he has tremendous
energy; he always did have energy.
112
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
But Ursula obligingly didn t have
She was a rather fragile little thing. She was absolutely healthy
until We were just ahead of the whooping-cough vaccine. The
children played with Robert Spier on Christinas day; he was here
all day. He came down the next day with whooping cough, and
they had it in turn. It was a perfectly horrible session of
it! Ursula was so small then (about six or eight months old)
that it took a terrific toll on her. She was horribly sick
and was real tiny and fragile for a few years after that, a good
few years after that.
So it really wasn t all smooth sailing.
No. Thank goodness, Clifton and Ted were husky little fellows.
But Karl had this thing from birth and Ursula started out
absolutely healthy and bonny until that [whooping cough] .
Whooping cough is a bad thing for anybody to have, but for a
child under a year, or apparently for grown-ups it s deadly.
The vaccine was just coming into use; as a matter of fact, they
gave the serum to the kids, but it was too late.
I can remember [laughter] dragging down, one of us, palely,
to the table to dinner (Betsy and I would take turns with the kids)
Then Ted and Clif appeared, and gradually the others. I realized
afterwards it had been about two months since I d been down the
front steps! I remember feeling, when we came out of these
series of whooping coughs, looking around at the outside world,
it was a brand new place.
That happens,
and on.
Those periods of confinement with children go on
As Dr. Donald said to me, when I asked how long would this go
on, "It s six weeks coming and six weeks going," and that s just
about what it is about twelve weeks. Of course, those twelve
weeks were
In rotation.
In rotation, yes. [laughter]
Berkeley Schools
Brower: In the meantime, when they weren t ill, the big boys must by now be
going off to school.
113
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
B rower ;
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Yes.
Were you a PTA kind of mother?
No, I was terrible. I belonged because I thought I ought to, and
I went with the idea of taking it seriously. The reason I didn t
was I found that to the women who were busiest in it it was an
important social part of their lives. They really enjoyed the
other women; they enjoyed the responsibility, and they enjoyed
confrontations with the school board and teachers none of which
I did [enjoy] . I discovered that my own children were quite
indifferent as to whether I belonged or not.
I think the theory that children care passionately if their mothers
are involved is apt to be a construct of these ladies who enjoy
it themselves so much.
I have great respect for a woman who can take thirty kids and
really get results! We had some really superb teachers in
Berkeley schools. I always felt that the teacher had to put
up with quite a lot from the PTA mothers, and that they were
absolute gentlemen about it. I found that in an individual
discussion with a teacher, if there was some problem she had with
your child or something that you felt was a problem, you reached
a reasonable understanding very quickly. There were teachers that
I was fond of and others that my children worked better with.
I don t think any of the teachers were really bad or indifferent.
They re a very hard-worked bunch. I have great sympathy with
teachers. And they do sometimes such superb jobs.
I think by the time my children were in the same schools yours
were, academic parents seemed to be very competitive about
their children s success. Whether that was true earlier or not,
I don t know .
I think there s always been a lot of that,
worst, [laughter]
Psychologists are the
Yes, 1 suspect they are. I ve always felt that teachers put up
with a good deal from the egghead parents of Berkeley.
Oh, I am sure! The eggheads, they know better and their kids
must be smart and all this sort of thing. This is perhaps why
a great many children of academics, long before they used revolution
as a tool, were dropouts.
114
K-Q: Then there is a competitiveness toward teachers where it s political,
where they want to get at the administration and at the school board.
Certainly with everything that I know is wrong and was wrong years
ago with Berkeley High, I could not complain about what my kids got
from there.
Brower: I think mine got an extraordinarily good education.
K-Q: And there must continue to be really excellent teachers there.
Ursula went from Berkeley High, where she wasn t doing very well
I mean, she just barely got by; she didn t like it, and she was
doing just enough to get her U.C. credentials. Her first year
at Harvard, her freshman year, she had her entire choice of courses
because she passed the College Board very high, without any
preparation for it.
Her first French class was with a French-speaking young man who
spoke no English.
Brower: She must have done extraordinarily well with the College Boards.
K-Q: I think all her teachers were good; she had no complaint as far as
her teachers were concerned. She didn t care for the social life
at Berkeley High.
Brower: Had you ever thought of sending any of your children to private
schools?
K-Q: Clif and Ted went Clif for all of his high school, and Ted for
part of it A-to-Zed (which, of course, no longer exists). It
was good for Clif. Ted would have been happier in the public
school. They had, of course, excellent education there, and it was
a nice school. It had no objective except the academic one. But
I think Ted would have been happier and had a lot more fun in public
school, and perhaps Clifton too. Ted and Clif, before A-to-Zed,
went to a small private school on Greenwood Terrace. The children
who attended were recruited from around this area. The teaching was
excellent. They had a great deal of fun, and they had the whole
Greenwood Terrace to play on then. It was the same time that there
was a neighborhood tennis court there. I think it used to belong
to the house that Wurster bought. It was a neighborhood school, and
these were the children Clifton played with.
Brower: What was the age group in this school?
K-Q: That would have been sixth grade, and it was going to go on up
through high school. Then, I think the principal was married and
moved to Marin. The school was the creation of this one woman, really,
and it folded. That is why we sent Clifton to A-to-Zed; he d been
with that small group and several of that same small group went to
A-to-Zed.
115
K-Q: Kroeber s total experience and that of his nieces and nephews in
New York City was of private schools. Karl and Ursula went straight
through public school and certainly had, I think, just about as good
an education. They may have had a better one in chemistry and
physics because Berkeley High does have young physicists and chemists
coming down from the University to teach there; they have to, in
order to prepare their pupils as well as they do for going straight
into the classes here on campus . I think their science has always
been better probably than in most private schools.
Brower: Were your children sociable children when they were in Berkeley?
Was this house a focus for young people?
K-Q: Yes. It happened that there were eighteen children, including my
four, who lived on the two sides of this block during the time that
they were growing up. The Landauers accounted for another four.
The Lions Club finally outfitted the children, and helped them form
the Arch Street Athletic Association. With cars not parked on the
street, it was a pretty good street to play on; it s almost a dead
end, and you couldn t park cars on the street at night at all. Do
you remember?
Brower: I recall that. You couldn t park at night anywhere in Berkeley.
K-Q: We bought the lot next door. When the Landauers bought the house,
there was an extra lot which they didn t want and felt they couldn t
afford. Kroeber had been looking longingly at that lot, to our
north.
So we bought the lot. There was a natural level where the front
house is now. We leveled it more and put a fence all the way around
it and night lights, and made a court. There are a whole series
of games other than tennis that you can play on such a court
badminton, volley ball, six or eight or ten games. The rule was
that at ten o clock the lights went out and the kids went home. But
they could play there up until ten o clock.
H
Life in the Thirties
K-Q: We were talking about life in the thirties. I ll tell you about the
Stanmtisch. The Stammtisch really is, as I understand it, a meeting
at a favorite restaurant or beer hall or whatever, of a group of
congenial men friends . So our Stammtisch was never a proper
Stammtisch because it was coeducational. There was Kroeber, Lowie,
I believe Carl Sauer (or did he come in later? I think Carl Sauer) ,
116
K-Q: Robert Oppenheimer, the Dan Gibbs (in some cases there were wives,
in some cases there weren t). I don t think there were any unattached
women; I m not sure. There weren t many women on the faculty, and
this was faculty except for Dan Gibb. I m trying to think of the
man in Classics who translated the Bhagavad-Gita and such.
Brower :
Ryder .
K-Q: Arthur Ryder. I don t seem to bring up any others. I m speaking
of ones that were at the heart of it. There were I think a total
of fifteen or sixteen, and there might be usually eight or ten who
would come at a particular time. This was Saturday evening in a
little Italian restaurant in Emeryville. It wasn t a very good
restaurant, but they did have a room that would hold us a private
room and they were glad to reserve that for us . We would have
dinner there, and wine. I think it was home-grown wine.
Brower: This would be during Prohibition?
K-Q: It was Prohibition. That was probably why
Brower: Why you picked Emeryville.
K-Q: Probably. We talked about anything. There was never any formal agenda.
Oppenheimer, Ryder, Kroeber, and Lowie were at the conversational
heart of it.
This is where Robert Oppenheimer and Ryder first met. One of
the interesting outcomes of their meeting was that Oppenheimer learned
Sanskrit and also learned a great deal of Indian philosophy and
whatnot. Ryder was a very bright, very peculiar man. He had his
foibles, but was extremely interesting in a group like this.
Surprisingly enough, although he was certainly not anti-women, he
hated very much to have women in his classes. He discouraged them
as much as he could, and not very many women were courageous enough
to go into his classes. He liked to have one student or two students
or three students. In those days, the university could have professors
of that sort. The other side of Ryder. He would come up here to
dinner and, to my astonishment, he was perfectly comfortable with
the children. The children had then an interesting set of different
ethnic varieties of little soldiers. One of Ryder s specialties
was setting up Hannibal s campaign, the Peloponnesian Wars any of
the great campaigns. He was fascinated by, it must have been the
mathematics, the exactitude, the exact poetry of war strategy. He
would set up the battle formation on the floor. He wasn t "jolly
fellow, well met" with the children, but he was interested and took
for granted they were which they certainly were. I think boys take
more naturally to the pattern of history; at least our boys did
very early, perhaps because Alfred told them stories which had
historical content.
117
K-Q: Anyway, the Stannntisch. I think we went on for a couple of years.
I don t know what broke it up. Maybe we tired of it or were doing
other things; I don t remember. We had guests, but very carefully
chosen guests. There was likely to be someone who was a visiting
professor. There was a Classics professor here during a term. I
think Boas had dinner with us once when he was coming through on his
way to the field. It was a way to gather in interesting people
and have an interesting talk and not have a home dinner. I think
we all went out so little it was great fun to go to Emeryville and
eat spaghetti.
Brower: Those were years when nobody was doing anything very elaborate or
expensive. I expect the professors had already taken their voluntary
cut at that time, hadn t they?
K-Q: Oh yes. You weren t spending any real money. At that time, there
really wasn t any place in Berkeley to eat. It s hard to believe
now, with the restaurants that there are.
Brower: No, there wasn t.
K-Q: A party around our own fireplace, was I think at least this is what
I seem to remember a great deal more frequent than anything regularly
social. Sometime during the thirties I think it was the early
thirties we also had an open house on Thursday nights. I think this
went through one year, and then I rebelled. We had very simple things
to eat and drink; I can t remember what, but they certainly wouldn t
have been much. But I never knew whether there were going to be
two people or twenty. I would think at the first of the week, "No
matter what happens if a kid s sick or whatever Thursday night is
precommitted." Alfred thought it was a way to see students briefly,
to have them at the house, or other people whom he didn t want to
have alone for dinner. If it was dinner, he liked to have just one
or two people.
Of course, what happened, to be ungracious about it, was that
the people you most wanted to see would wait and see you by yourself,
and the people that you really could do without, came regularly were
regular devotees. Then, I forget a person s name. I can look at
a person whom I know very well but I can t say his name. It was
agony for me to introduce people. I d go across the room and wonder
who was coming and if I d remember the name, [laughter]
That was not such a successful social venture.
Brower: What other thirties things come to mind?
K-Q: It was during the thirties that I was not very well. I had this
violent ulcer; its aftermath hung on mildly for a good many years.
The last burst of it was in Cambridge, when Kroeber was teaching
there that would have been 46 or 47. The summer before, Kroeber
118
K-Q: taught at Columbia for the summer. It was a very hot summer, and
I got one of these awful bugs that you can get sometimes in the
hot weather. It flared up the old ulcer, which had been quiet
meanwhile. It was nothing violent, as the first time, but I spent
that winter being pretty quiet in Cambridge. That was the last
flare-up. But I felt the aftermath of that for a good many years.
I think probably it was in the fifties when it disappeared. Whether
it was in part strain and responsibility, and maybe learning how to
take it better, I don t know. Anyway, I wasn t very well.
Brower: We re talking now about the thirties?
K-Q: We re talking about the thirties, yes. It was during those years
that my mother died, and Brown had about a years illness, a
mastectomy from which she never really recovered. It was about a
year, I think, that we had a full-time nurse with her. By doing
that the doctor was just around the corner, Dr. Donald she
could stay alone. So she literally died in her own bed, which
is what she wanted.
At some time during the thirties Kroeber had a gall bladder
operation. He would faint from the pain. He had the operation and
recovered very nicely. Dr. Donald said, "Kroeber s about two months
from being able to go back to work. It would be awfully good if
you could just go away for awhile." We thought of going down to
Carmel or something like that. Then they had a fantastically
cheap rate on the American Line steamers that were going around and
through the Canal and up to New York and back. We took a steamer,
went as far as Acapulco and got off and wandered around in an
automobile in Mexico. It was the first time Kroeber had done any
sight-seeing, had seen any of the usual things in Mexico. We had
a Christmas in Mexico City.
Brower: Without the children?
K-Q: Without the children. My aunt was here then. We telephoned them
on Christmas Day.
Brower: You didn t just stay in Acapulco?
K-Q: No, we took a car and stopped at Tepoztlan and Taxco, and went on
into Mexico City. Kroeber had never been in the valley of Mexico
to see the regular sights; he d just gone straight to his dig. So
we just were tourists and stayed in a little Mexican hotel. It was
great fun. I am sure you couldn t do that now. Mexico City is about
six times as big, I think literally. It was about a million people
then, and isn t it between six and seven million new? It s fantastic!
Brower: When you go in, you can t see the ground because there s this yellow
smog.
119
K-Q: I felt so awful! I sent Helen Farnsworth there over Christmas with
my vision of Mexico City clear as a bell! This gorgeous, bright,
high altitude sun and blue sky. She never saw the sun. Just this
pool of smog.
Brower: It s really worst right there, I think.
K-Q: It s another bowl situation.
Brower: Where did you spend Christmas? Mexico City?
K-Q: In Mexico City. Christmas in Mexico City and New Year s in [pause]
Brower: Guadalajara?
K-Q: Below Guadalajara. We were on our way to Puebla. It s about half
way between Mexico City and Puebla. It was where the gal that
directed Cortez, where her people came from. It s an interesting
site, and a small Mexican town, with these gorgeous fireworks that
Mexicans have. We stayed up all night New Year s Eve because the
fireworks were going all over the place. It was a sort of fiesta.
You couldn t sleep anyhow, and it was so much fun just to watch it.
Then we drove back and picked up our return boat. At that time
it really cost very little. It cost no more than to go to a
comfortable American hotel. That was a nice trip.
Brower: Did Kroeber enjoy being a tourist?
K-Q: He loved it!
Brower: Some men are such fun to travel with, and I gather others aren t at
all.
K-Q: He was a good person to travel with.
Brower: So then you began the serious semester again when he came back. He
was well enough.
K-Q: He was well enough then to go back to teaching. Fortunately, the
way it all was arranged then, he didn t lose really so much time,
which was important then.
Brower: Because of the way the semesters broke?
K-Q: He couldn t finish the semester, but he was able to go back to the
next one.
Brower: The beginning of the next one. Did the house and garden grow at
that time? Is that when it began?
120
K-Q: Yes, that s true, it did. I was just writing up something of that
because a couple of architects are coming out to do a Maybeck study.
I think this is going to be a real study ( there ve been so many
phony ones) .
They come with an excellent project and an excellent
backing from Yale. Anyhow, I was taking some notes down things I
could pass on to these people. So I was trying to recollect the
original house. I don t know how much of this would be
Brower: Repetitious? Perhaps it appears somewhere else, you mean?
K-Q: I was wondering whether this really has any interest for you and
what you re doing I mean the additions to the house.
Brower: Perhaps not in detail, but just something about it.
K-Q: Well, the house began as a house for three people. It was built
for Professor Schneider and his wife and one son. We began with
more people than that. Within a year, Kroeber put on the first
small study at the rear.
Brower: The house was bought, then, immediately after you were married?
K-Q: Yes, before we went to Peru.
Brower: So you never lived together anywhere else?
K-Q: Yes, on Cedar Street. We didn t move here; we were leaving so soon.
Harold Luck came down here. He was in the process of getting a
divorce from his first wife (not Polly) , so he came down here to
establish separate residence and lived in the house. We moved our
furniture in before we left and then stayed with my mother until we
went east.
I came back to discover a house everybody in Berkeley knew better
than I did [laughter], which was disconcerting. Kroeber built the
new study because the study upstairs was right in the midst of, as
it were, the nursery and everything else. Then in 33 there was a
second addition of three rooms and a bath, which Kroeber called the
Roosevelt Wing because it was built at the depth of the Depression.
A lot of it was imperfect, but it cost about eighteen hundred dollars.
With that, we got a made-over bath and three new rooms.
We needed more room. This gave each child a room to himself
and gave Kroeber a study which was separate from the noise of the
house away from the phone, away from the doorbell. In fact, it
had an outside entrance so that he could really retreat.
Brower: Did you have an architect?
121
K-Q: No, we did not.
Brower: You just drew the plans yourself?
K-Q: A Welsh carpenter built it. It came out better than it might have,
but we ve regretted since that we didn t have sense enough or
money enough to repeat the roof lines of the Maybeck house. But
we needed space, and we didn t have any money. It s terrible to
build on to a house like this in this fashion.
Brower: I suppose so, but it doesn t seem violated, to me, to my untrained
eye.
K-Q: I think we were darn lucky that we could still get the redwood. The
two fireplaces that we added work beautifully. Really, I think we
were lucky. We ve gone on constantly changing the house. John
fits right into the tradition. He s made some quite interesting
changes upstairs.
IX ETHICS, MEN, WOMEN ,. HOUSES
[Interview 9: December 14, 1976] ##
Miscellaneous Observations: Interviews, Ethics, U.C. Regents
K-Q: I was trying to decide where we were heading, or where there is
a point in heading, in my oral history. This is how I look at it
myself: My importance in the scheme of things seems to be that I
happen to have been married to Kroeber.
Brower: That s not the way I see it.
K-Q: As part of the University history, I came in late but had a certain
impact on the U.C. Press with the writing of Ishi and the writing
of the biography. I can relate to that.
There s another aspect, which I should think would always come
up. If you are interviewing a woman, you get the woman s angle,
I suppose, inevitably. You take for granted that when you interview
a man, you get the man s angle, but that a woman s point of view is
different. But how significantly different?
Brower: There s a considerable interest right now, as you know, in that
subject. For example, how does a woman married to a notable man
maintain her own integrity and growth?
122
K-Q: Maybe I m too concerned about the direction of the oral history, but
I m wondering where we are heading. One reason I was thinking of
it is that you re an enormously discreet person. In the kind of
questions some interviewers throw at you, discretion and consideration
don t enter in. I have no intrinsic objection to an intimate picture
of me, if there s any particular point in it, but I wonder why.
I know my first instinct is to privacy, because I consider the things
which don t hurt other people are none of their business particularly.
But I also think I m a little too much that way.
Brower: I ve had that feeling too. And I recognize one of the limitations
in myself as an interviewer that there are obvious questions I should
push further and that I don t touch. What I thought of doing, when
we were more or less over this preliminary history, is to re-
introduce certain subjects and ask you if I may bore somewhat more
into the question.
K-Q: That makes sense. Of course, also by that time, we might both be
sure of what this added up to. But I don t think you should spend
too much time on it unless it s going to add up to something.
Brower: I ve never said what my view of the thing is. It doesn t seem
to me that your importance lies in your marriage to Kroeber. I see
you as a woman who has lived a long life and has lived it extremely
well in its various phases. It seems to me that you ve brought
an awful lot of common sense to each phase of your life, and I think
that there s an importance here for other people. Also, I shall
be interested in the notable people you knew and your view of them.
K-Q: Unless somebody picks up a name for me, I m likely not to remember.
I m very bad about that, as you ve already discovered.
Brower: I can supply a list of names. But to me the importance is in the
decades you have spanned successfully and the roles you have played
successfully. After all, as a person in the public eye for herself,
you began really with Ishi. That was the beginning of a whole new
life. Of course, it had roots in the relation with Kroeber, but
it was your thing.
K-Q: Yes, it was a departure. It really was a total departure as far as,
let s say the image (that s the word we use now). But [as to] becoming
a writer, a person you might say in my own right I d always thought
I was a person but I became a different person. This I realized.
In other words, you really want a fairly intimate woman picture.
Brower: I think I do.
K-Q: Okay, okay. I wanted .to ask where we are heading, and if it is an
intimate picture of me, and if so, why. You ve given me your answer
for that. I take it what you mean is that the writing of Ishi, and
the life with Kroeber would be aspects only of the picture which you
would want essentially of me.
123
Brower: Yes. That s why I was a little worried about the discussion of
the house; it seemed to me we were getting too much into Kroeber
and why he wanted the house, which is interesting, but I didn t
want us to get too far away from you and your feeling about the house.
That, I guess, is why I suggested that we think about houses in
which you lived.
K-Q: Okay. I think that s a perfectly good suggestion. One thing also
I wanted to say, if we are talking intimately about me, I don t
think it s anybody s business, unless there s something clarifying
about it, that I lived with both Kroeber and John*before being
married to them. I have no sense of its being either important to
say this or important not to say it. It s important to say it only
if it enlightens something.
Brower: It seems to me it does. Especially in the former case, it shows
a kind of emancipation. I never have been sure whether this was
a commonplace occurrence at that time, but it certainly wasn t
commonplace for people to talk about it .
K-Q: No. And indeed I haven t talked about it, except quite intimately.
I think Kroeber and I were probably emancipated in a sense. I
didn t think of myself as being emancipated. I was brought up in
a mine town which itself was emancipated in certain senses. For
instance, I think I told you that I couldn t remember when I had
not seen women smoking. They smoked or didn t smoke. My mother
didn t smoke, but most of her friends did. I remember when I
came to college here, as a freshman, it was considered very smart
and very daring to go out, as it were, behind the barn and have a
cigarette. That seemed totally absurd to me!
There were things of that sort. It was the twenties. Kroeber
just being himself was emancipated. Also, for each of us there
was a first marriage which had really kind of left us rolling, each
in his separate way. There was a lot of shock; there was a lot of
hurt.
Brower: And in a way for both of you, your first marriage was an arrested
experience; it was an unfulfilled one.
K-Q: It was an arrested experience, and kind of a violently arrested one.
We were both very cautious about entering into marriage again
because we had this behind us, and it was a trauma. But I think there
was emancipation there .
Brower: I think I had similar attitudes, at a time when they were not openly
held. I had a strong personal moral sense, but it wasn t the
conventional one .
*Theodora Kroeber-Quinn
1
s biographical note on John Harrison Quinn
is included in her oral history as Appendix III.
124
K-Q: Moral sense is quite a different thing. I think that is a liberating
thing. I hadn t thought of it just in this way. But of course, I
never had any religious hang-ups because there was my father s broad
religious interest, as I told you. And anyway, it just was not a
hang-up .
Brower: Without religion you have to make your own rules, and I think that s
good.
K-Q: Yes. I think I always separated religion as a service, a ritual,
a pattern of belief, from morality. Ethics and morality I have
had and have lots of absolutes about them. But it somehow didn t
get connected up with religion, and I think that is a freeing thing.
Brower: I find that many people who are religious tie ethics and religion
so completely together they can t believe you can have an ethical
system if you re not religious.
K-Q: Right. Perhaps at one time, in a primitive society, religion and
ethics no, I wouldn t say that. There s ritual and performance
and a certain belief. I ve been working over the Yurok and the
Karok material because we ve been publishing it; we re at the Karok
material now. There was a very real separation. I suspect if
you d asked the theoretical question, you d have got that sort
of an answer (assuming the language communication was good enough
for that sort of question) .
That reminds me: Did you notice in the paper that Gregory
Bateson has been named to the U.C. Board of Regents?
Brower: Yes. There s Stewart Brand s fine Italian hand! [laughter]
K-Q: [laughter] Stewart Brand! Of course it is! I think it s very
entertaining. I would like to be present when Gregory holds forth.
Do you know him? Do you know how he talks?
Brower: No, I only know Bateson through Stewart Brand s article about him
in Harper s.
K-Q: This super-Britisher, this super-intellectual. He s a very difficult
man to make out. He s subtle and elusive, and half the time you
haven t an idea in the world what he s talking about.
Well, it s going to be very interesting. And the Chicana
replacing Catherine Hearst. Apparently this woman is quite something.
Brower: I gathered so from the little I read. I didn t read the article
thoroughly.
K-Q: I didn t either, but she s had lots of experience.
125
Brower: My son told me about the appointments and added: "Jerry Brown really
s_
different!"
K-Q: [laughter] I think he really is. Now, back to the houses?
Brower: Well, that s just an idea.
K-Q: I don t know whether I d finished, but we car. come back to that.
I think what I was interested in saying in part was, I don t
think you should force yourself but I don t think you should be
intimidated by me. If you want to ask me a question, I m perfectly
competent to say, "I don t think I want to answer that."
Father s and Brother s Suicides
Brower: The place where I felt the greatest lack in what I really wanted to
knew was the impact of your father s death. I feel that must have
had a considerable .effect on you, especially because of the nature
of his death.
K-Q: I have partly, as it were, analyzed that out (I ve never been analyzed)
Curiously enough, I did this very late in life. It was two years
ago. John and I were down in Los Angeles. He was there for most
of a year taking the beginning of seme special training. I went
down for about two months, two months and a half, toward the end of
it, because the going back and forth was getting to be so ridiculous.
I got a terrible back kick there. Los Angeles is a difficult
place. I was in a perfectly comfortable apartment, convenient and
this sort of thing. But really you can t walk there because you
just run out of a place to walk. And if you don t have a car, which
I did not (John needed a car; he was traveling about a hundred
miles a day just in Los Angeles to these various classes and
hospitals and so on). So I got a real depression sort of thing.
I deliberately remembered my dreams for a while, which I mostly
don t because I m just not that interested. But I had a reason for
remembering them because I was trying to get at why I was so depressed.
At that time, I came the closest I have come to going through I
think my father s killing himself was part of it, but I think it
was the whole going back to childhood things .
This I know about, with relation to my father (perhaps I said
this to you) : That I thought it might have been quite difficult
for me to marry had he remained alive. I had an enormous respect
and affection for him. As I think about one or two of the boys who
126
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
came up to see me after I was In college (my parents were living
up the valley) he [my father] was very standoffish about them and
was very standoffish about the engineer, a delightful man, whom I
very nearly did marry at a very young age .
Probably my father
was unconsciously jealous; I think he rationalized it as protective-
ness. I don t think I would have known how to go against his
wishes .
I had no hang-up of that sort with my mother. My affection for
her was not complicated; it was for my father. I think there was
an element [in it] of obedience and an element of fear of displeasing,
And you were the only daughter.
Right. My feeling about the suicide was I think less complicated
than my mother s. I had the feeling that if my father was going to
face blindness and a kind of horrid life, why shouldn t he
This was what he was facing? It was a genuine threat?
It was a genuine threat. That is, the oculist gave him reason to
believe that, and he did have trouble. I ve often wondered,
afterwards, whether it was a nervous tension sort of thing. But
anyway, it was real, and he had every reason to think that there
would be deterioration there, and maybe there would have; I don t
know. I suspect it was also complicated with [the fact that] he
had made a lot of money and he lost a lot of money. When the
decision was made to move out here he made some disastrously bad
investments he and some of the engineers from Telluride in an
early irrigation project up in the Sacramento Valley. It was a
private, not a government project. They lost their shirts. I
think there was a lot of guilt and depression and a sense of
failure in that. I hadn t thought of that at age eighteen or
nineteen, I guess; I didn t think of that then, but I have realized
it later. This my mother would have been much more aware of than I.
She would probably have felt this sense of failure. She couldn t
really, in one sense, forgive him for doing it [committing suicide].
I have met that attitude again (which to me is really quite
incomprehensible). Florence Kluckholm I don t know whether we
should say this in public she really couldn t forgive Clyde for
dying. I mean, she resented his dying; he d failed her in dying.
That s the classic response of small children, I think,
supposed to be the sense of betrayal?
Isn t it
Yes, and I suppose something childish clings to all of us. My
mother did feel betrayed. I think what she did not realize I
don t think my father was insane, but I think a person is probably
not in his thorough right mind when he commits suicide. His wasn t
like these suicides of people who are psychotic. I don t know
127
K-Q: whether one is entirely sane or not. The one person I think who was
entirely sane (I ve had two suicides in my family) was my younger
brother (that is, he was five years older than I, but the younger
of the two). Perhaps my father s committing suicide gave him more
sense of freedom to do it.
Brower: I believe that that is the way those things work.
K-Q: Forest s situation was this. He had a long-time, unhappy marriage,
no children. His wife, who was psychotic, finally died. He
remarried, a woman a good many years younger than himself; I guess
she was twenty years younger than he. She was rather an innocent;
she was just a darling. They were very happy; they were extremely
happy. But she d had not much of a life until she found Forest.
He was not at all well. That is, he had a very strong physique, but
he had one of these arterial replacements, one of the early ones,
and the prospects of his living long were not all that great. She
was absolutely terrified of his dying. She was in a complete panic
about that, and she could panic quite easily. I don t know her
early history well enough to account for this.
Anyhow, Forest came home one day, and she was lying on the
floor. He saw she d taken an overdose of pills. He picked her
up, put her in the car, and got her to the hospital. But he was
just about thirty minutes too late. They worked over her for hours,
but he was just too late.
This was pretty rough. They had planned to make a sentimental
journey back to Telluride. So when the time came, I said, "Do
you
want to go, Forest? If you do, I ll go."
I talked it over with
Kroeber, and there was really no reason why I shouldn t. So I
went with him. Because I couldn t have any real satisfactory
association with him during the lifetime of his first wife, it
really was the first time since I was in college that Forest and I
had an intimate three weeks, and it was great.
He said to me two or three times, "It seems to me you re all
right. You re happy and you re taken care of." I said sure.
He said, "I want to tell you what I m going to do . I have a pretty
good little estate, but it won t be anything if it s divided up, so
I m giving it to her sister, if it s all right with you
"
his
wife s sister.
It was really a very nice thing because she also was a very sweet
person, a younger sister, with a nice husband and two nice children,
who were struggling along down there in the Valley. I m sure it
simply made a different life for them, and they re nice people.
128
K-Q: Anyhow, I was watching him a little bit because I knew he was really
terribly lonely and unhappy. He was doing another thing. He had
found a young man just out of medical school who appeared to have
his particular surgical gift (Forest did these delicate ear operations
and mas to ids ). He took this man in, not as a partner really, sort
of as a trainee, and then gave him a small partnership. Then at
the end, in his will, he simply left his practice and everything
that went with that to him. That was about two years, that
training process.
This particular night, Forest had been going to come over. He
said he thought he wouldn t. It was kind of a stormy night. I
said okay (he was going to come over for dinner) . I was sort of
uneasy about him, so I called up about ten. He said no, he was
fine, and told me what he was doing; he was writing and whatnot.
I said, "I ll be up late. Give me a ring if you want to." So
he did give a ring about twelve thirty. He said he was fine and
was going to have a drink and go to bed .
K-Q: What he did, he took a drink, all right, a drink with cyanide.
The thing about that is that he had this diary sort of thing. He
just kept on writing to me up to the time he took the drink. He
watched the clock and gave me the times and so on.
Brower: Isn t cyanide a particularly miserable thing?
K-Q: I think so.
Brower: Wouldn t a doctor have had access to something better?
K-Q: I would have thought so. That s the thing about it I never understood,
There was not a thing in his diary or these notes which he kept.
Some of them went back a ways. From the time we went to Telluride
and he was alone, he had written paragraphs now and then. He just
went on with this until the last moment. There was not a thing
which I could pick up that indicated his being in the slightest
degree out of his mind. But I don t know. It does seem that a
doctor could have done it
Brower: With something less painful and disagreeable?
K-Q: Right. So that really leaves the question unanswered about the
state of mind of a person who commits suicide. But I certainly
understood that suicide. I think Forest was right. I think he
was wrong in the way he did it; I should think, given a doctor s
opportunity, he could have done it another way.
129
K-Q: This arterial implant was one of the early ones. A lot of them
don t take, and his was pretty major. It went down into the
main artery of both legs, and one of those implants didn t take,
which meant he was having increasing pain. It would have meant an
amputation, I m sure. This, for a person who had really been in
command in all sorts of responsible ways, I think would have been
pretty hellish. Perhaps not, if he d had we were close enough, but
he couldn t possibly have come here to live. That would just have
been hell for him, to feel that he was a burden.
I certainly felt with both my father and my brother that I
understood why or maybe I didn t understand why and I don t have
the moral feeling that one has not a right to take one s life. I
certainly think one has responsibility and has to think about what
it s going to do to others.
Apparently, as I understand psychotic suicide and maybe
they re all psychotic, and maybe this always is an element
psychologically suicide is taken as being a kind of ultimate act
of defiance directed against somebody. I mean, beyond any doubt,
the suicide has the last word. I suppose there is that element in
it.
Brower: Doesn t that oversimplify it a little that it s always an act of
defiance?
K-Q: Yes, it does. Or revenge. I think it s always an act of desperation,
surely. I suppose it s anger against someone or against life or
something. But I feel a little bit about that as I feel about a
great many things that you can t overgeneralize and have it mean
much. There must be so many different [reasons].
Brower: Do you think your mother s self-sufficiency was a factor? Your
father couldn t have been too concerned about her capacity to get
along, because she had already proved that.
K-Q: I think you re right, yes. I d never thought of putting it that
way, but I think you re absolutely right. He wouldn t have had the
sense of responsibility that Forest would have had had his wife I
believe Forest would not have committed suicide had she remained
alive, even though he suffered from some of these physical things.
Of course, that I can t know. But I feel pretty sure that it would
have been worthwhile to take those [physical things] had she been
alive. No, I think you ve hit on something there. Perhaps she
[mother] was quite accurate or justified or whatever you want to call
it in her
Brower: Sense of betrayal? Were you closer to Forest than to your other brother?
130
Older Brothers, Older Men
K-Q: It was a different relation. When we were small there was enough
difference. There was five years between Forest and me. Austin s
relation to me was really quite paternal. Forest and I were close
enough that it simply gave me entree to Forest s friends. Even
with five years between, there are a lot of things that you can do
together skating, playing in the snow, and going to parties. And
it certainly let me out to go to parties and dances and things
younger than I could have otherwise; Forest would be along, so all
would be well .
I adored Austin. He was very easy to adore, this very nice,
handsome, big brother. But Forest and I certainly did more things
together.
Brower: In speaking of your father s attitude toward the young men who came
to see you, you spoke of the engineer. Was it he who was killed in
the war?
K-Q: No, that was after I came to college. This engineer was in Telluride,
Brower: You must have been very young.
K-Q: I was terribly young. There was nothing immediate there. It was
just an understanding. There s no doubt that he thought this would
be a good idea. He knew he would have to wait a while.
You know, in a mining camp like that, where the eligible men
so predominate in numbers, you have quite a different situation.
Parties were chaperoned then, so I could go out with much older
men. Of course, this also gave me a different attitude, I suppose,
toward men than I would have had otherwise. They were in a care
taker relation to me.
I realized [this] though, I think quicker then the [Robert]
Heizers did when we were in Greece. They had Sydney [the Heizers 1
daughter], who was fifteen, and an age-mate friend of hers who was
traveling with us. This Iraqi and Greek boy young men; they were
both in the Greek navy struck up a conversation, one of them with
Nancy and one of them with me. [Later], they would come around and
take the girls out. Then they would come back and the girls would
go to bed or they d have their Coke or something, and these two
young men would sit and talk with us, or they d come to dinner with
us.
131
K-Q: Nancy [Mrs. Robert Heizer] was inquiring a little bit about this going
to the movies and something else they were going to do. This Iraqi
said, "I have a sister the exact age of Sydney. I know all about
kids that age." [laughter] But they loved taking them out, these
American girls. They were both cute-looking kids. I understood
perfectly what that man was saying because I was very accustomed
to this responsible attitude toward me.
I remember once [in Telluride] we went on a crazy kind of a
trip over the top of the range. It was in midsummer, but you know
how storms can come up. This was a real snowstorm, and we had to
take refuge. They have these cabins which are very tight. There s
some fuel, a stove, and there s some emergency food in them. It s
usually men who are
Brower: Snow survey or something?
K-Q: Yes, and following L.L. Nunn s line and so forth keeping that
straight. So we had to take refuge in there for over night. They
had a telephone to the Tomboy Mine below, and then the Tomboy would
relay it down to my people. They had absolutely no sense of fear
or uneasiness whatsoever. I think there were just two couples of
us. One of them was a school teacher there, a much older person
than I. I never thought of it before, but probably it s colored
my feeling toward men.
Brower: It certainly makes for a relaxed and unself-conscious attitude.
K-Q: I suppose it makes for a kind of childlike attitude, in a way. I
was aware that responsibility was being taken by somebody else. I
was aware of that an awful lot of the time. I think probably the
fact that I knew these older men, and knew them in a family
situation (because my mother s house was very much open to these
nice young men who were around there homeless), I suppose it
conditioned me at that young age to older men, which doesn t explain
my present marriage, [laughter]
Brower: It did explain the second one a little, perhaps.
K-Q: Yes. And certainly in college, a few of my more mature friends were
perhaps in my own class; but for the most part, I knew graduate
students. That happened with Ursula, and I think perhaps for very
much the same reason. She had three older brothers, she had an
older father, a father who was very communicative with her, and I
think she just naturally found older men at Harvard. She wasn t
going with age-mates, really. Women at that age are older than
most of their age-mate men anyway, I think. I think a woman matures
earlier. So there tends to be that anyway. But it probably was
exaggerated in my case. It may very well have had the effect
132
K-Q: with both Ursula and me certainly with me of my not maturing and
not taking responsibility and being perfectly happy that somebody
else should take it.
Brower: But of course in your first marriage you had to take a great deal
of responsibility.
Mothers and Daughters
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Yes, that was thrust on me, and I guess I can take it when it s
there; most of us can. But I certainly have none of my mother s
willingness to take it. She rather took it for granted that this
was her job. She was the oldest of a big family, and she was an
extremely robust person and had been, in a different sense from
me, on her own in the ranch life. She certainly encouraged my not
taking responsibility.
She did? Deliberately?
I don t think deliberately,
think she liked to do it.
I think it s quite unconscious. But I
It interests me that you copied your mother so little, and that she
didn t force you in her own mould in some sort of subconscious way.
I think she liked to think of me as different from her. I was
physically of a different build, and I didn t have her strength.
I wasn t sickly, but I was slightly on the fragile side. I think
she kind of liked that.
Why would she like it?
sort?
Because she wished that she had been that
I suppose so, I suppose so.
Would you say she was a masculine woman?
No, she was not. Not a trace of it. She had not a trace of the
ego that so often accompanies a successful businesswoman. She never
really wanted to work, except with my father, and always did work
under him. As his stretches out here became longer and longer, and
he had to leave for the whole of the real winter it got to be
up to four months she was responsible. Although she talked to him
every Saturday night and sometimes in between, [by] long distance
phone, she liked it less and less. She didn t like the total
responsibility thing at all; although he trusted her completely
and gave it to her, she really didn t want it.
133
K-Q: She was a competent woman. She ran her household very competently.
She was a good cook. She loved to have parties for young people.
She took for granted that she could do these things, and she did
them. I think she was a very feminine person. Men were very much
drawn to her. Her relation to my father I think they were very much
in love. She was very dependent on his judgment in a great many
things. I think he had a subtler mind; he was more intellectual.
She respected this and liked it. She was perfectly frank. She gave
rather short shrift to friendships with women. She didn t have much
time, between family and job and the rest of it. But she said
perfectly frankly that she preferred the company of men to the
company of women. She and Kroeber discovered a modus operand! very
rapidly. Men felt comfortable with her. Two or three of the
engineers were obviously in love with her.
Brower: I m glad I asked this question because I d begun to build up a rather
formidable lady in my mind, and this dispels some of that.
K-Q: I must have a picture around somewhere, which I think would tell it
to you.
Brower: There is a picture in the Kroeber book [Alfred Kroeber, A Personal
Configuration] .
K-Q: That s right. There s one of each of them [parents], isn t there?
Brower: But it doesn t tell an awful lot.
K-Q: I don t know that you can tell much from that.
Brower: Whatever it was, your upbringing seems to have left you a very free
soul.
K-Q: Yes. I m not sure that my upbringing was inadequate. I think it s
just intrinsic to me that I have a kind of deep shyness and a
considerable withdrawingness . To be sure, I can see something of
the same thing in Ursula. Ursula, her writing career coming early
with her instead of late, as with me, she has accepted far more than
I have a responsible public role.
Clubs
Brower: But this shyness and withdrawal didn t affect your social life in
college at all, or did it? You seem to have had a very
134
K-Q: I had a good time in college. It was always with a smallish group,
though. I never was any good at the large-group thing. I never
have been; I m not, to this day. When I get involved, as one
occasionally does, in such, I find myself withdrawing almost before
I know I have withdrawn, [laughter]
Was it two or three clubs that I belonged to? All of which I
resigned from, not through any fault of theirs. I liked the individual
women in them, but I didn t go for the women in masses, or something.
I m very bad at anything which is clubby, and I m not proud of it!
I realize this is a real deficiency.
Brower: Were these clubs in Berkeley?
K-Q: Yes, one was the Town and Gown. Honest to god, my reason for
resigning from that was that some women would give their eye teeth
to belong I shouldn t be saying this, I suppose and mostly, the
way my schedule was, the way I was going, I just never got there!
But nobody ever had resigned from the Town and Gown Club !
I gave my honest reason, and the people to whom it mattered
at all were sure I was not giving the real reason; there was
something more to it. It was just that it really wasn t meaning
anything to me. The Town and Gown Club must have been very meaning
ful when the University and Berkeley were small and all the faculty
wives knew each other and knew the town, and there wasn t any
entertainment. So they manufactured their own, which is very much
what one does in a small town. But when you can go up to the University
and hear first-rate lectures, and when music is all around you, you
lose the point, unless it is intrinsically just fun to be with
these people. I was enormously fond of a lot of the people in that
club. But I was not enormously fond of seeing them in the club
milieu kind of mob-ish and social occasion-ish.
I told you about Hortense Powdermaker and me resigning from the
Women Geographers Club?
Brower : No .
K-Q: Somebody got me into that and I got Hortense. There were quite
serious papers given, and that was a nice bunch too. But Hortense
and I discovered simultaneously that we were not going and that
life was just a bit too busy for us to go. Did you know David Hales?
Brower: Yes, I did.
K-Q: We were talking about it one night. David Hales was here.
Brower: I remember he lived here for a little while, didn t he?
135
K-Q: He didn t live here in this house, no. He was up the hill. Anyway,
he listened to us for a while. He said, "It s perfectly obvious
that it s ridiculous for you to be in the Women Geographers because
you both believe the earth is flat." [laughter] I thought it was
so funny that I wrote I thought a very nice letter. Because I had
got Hortense and I knew more of the people, she asked me to write
for her. So I wrote for both of us and explained that we were
resigning and our regrets and so forth. Then I said at the end,
"And then, of course, it has been pointed out to us that we really
don t belong in it because we both think the earth is flat." [laughter]
I thought this was funny. Not even Mickey Foster thought it was
funny nobody in there thought that was funny!
Brower: You were well out of that group.
K-Q: But don t you think that was rather funny?
Brower: I think it s lovely. Marvelous. We have a son who believes the
world is a parabola.
K-Q: Maybe he does belong in a geography club, [laughter]
Brower: Possibly. I thought the reason I didn t like women in large groups
was that I d gone to a girls school. You weren t afflicted that way.
K-Q: No, I wasn t, but I got a taste of it here at college. I was with
this very small group at first, amongst whom I made these life-long
friends. They had been living at College Hall, on the corner of
Hearst and [La Loma].
Brower: Where you moved in your junior year?
K-Q: I didn t move there. There was a move out from that [dormitory].
A bunch of them were immensely dissatisfied, and they persuaded a
couple of Scotch women to take this large house I don t know what
it had been over on LeConte. It burned in the fire. On LeConte,
just across from the Divinity School now. I believe they had eighty
girls. I had come to know Jean Macfarlane. She was one of the
movers-outers .
My roommate and I went into this dormitory, and it was very nice.
It was well run and this sort of thing. My roommate hers was a
broken family had lived in boarding schools all her life, so she
was perfectly at home there. I found that I just didn t like it.
There was privacy, and there were just the two of us in a good size
room. But there was a lot of regulation about comings-in and goings-
.
out, and some of the girls had great pleasure in being the bosses
taking the position of responsible bossing of the others.
136
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
I enjoyed Jean. She was ahead of me then, of course was older
and so she was out the next year. She was one of the people I
enjoyed in there.
it.
So, I had enough of a taste of it to know that I didn t like
Did they eat together in a group?
Yes.
That to me is the distressing part one of them, anyway.
Yes. Some of them enjoyed everybody being in everybody else s
confidence.
If
Houses
K-Q: You and I have been talking about holidays New Year s parties. The
trouble with most New Year s parties is they start too early and go
on too long. When one went to movies, there used to be always at
least one cracking good movie in town. So we would go to the movies
en famille, and Jean and anybody else who was around who wanted to
go. Then we would come back to a kind of late-ish supper and have
some sparklers and a few things . The kids , it was their chance to
stay up late. [We would] play around with the kids, and maybe
just a few very intimate people would come in about ten or ten thirty
and have a drink. Once the new year was in, that was the end of the
party. The kids were rushed to bed, and we d had it too. This was
fun.
Now, do we want to do houses? Houses have always been important
to me.
Brower: That was what I thought even your New York City apartment.
K-Q: That meant very much to me. Even the dreadful little house we
lived in in Cambridge, I ve always remembered it with great affection.
It was kind of falling down and old and inconvenient. But it also
was very New Englandish, and we had a very happy time there.
Brower: You spent a healthy chunk of your life in the Telluride house.
K-Q: Yes. That was the house built by my uncle who was a contractor and
who mostly built mills mines, shafts, huge mills.
137
B rower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
I trust it didn t have the characteristics of the mine shaft and the
mill.
That s where the name comes from. You mean this mine-shaft
architecture?
I meant the house itself.
Oh no. It was a very conventional, I should say generalized American
house. I have some pictures of it around somewhere a frame house,
painted white. Ample house. I don t know quite how many rooms,
but we all had separate rooms.
And there were five in the nuclear family.
Yes, and we always had a live- in [housekeeper], Mrs. Norton, a
German whom I called Auntie Norton and whom my mother always
addressed as Mrs. Norton, was already with my mother when I was born,
a little log cabin of her own where some relatives
a few miles down from Telluride, when we left.
She retired to
lived in Saw Pit.
When I went back in 18, one of the things I wanted to go back for
was to visit her. I was terribly fond of her. She had her own room,
of course, in our house.
There was an ample veranda around three sides of the house and
a good-size front yard, which was in grass, and a largish backyard
separated off (and they were spoken of as yards and not gardens) ,
with a stable at the far back end (because we always had at least
a couple of horses and sometimes more) . I think there were four
stalls in that stable. We had horses and we had dogs. Occasionally
there was a bit of a garden back there, but mostly it was kind of
a play place.
Of course, the town had, as most mid-western and western towns
had, alleys, back alleys. The barn opened on to an alley. There s
a great deal to be said for an alley. There s a place for the
garbage cans and for deliveries and this sort of thing. Ours was
a fairly wide alley because two large wagons could pass.
It was a very happy, comfortable house with a big living room.
You say it s now been painted again and
Yes. The railings were beginning to look a little wobbly and whatnot-
it s all been put back together again. I understand the prices
they
1
re getting for these houses are ridiculous! But it was a well-
built house, a good solid house. It did not have a fireplace. It
had an enormous base-burner, one of these tall stoves. It was the
height that an ordinary person could lift a bucket of anthracite
138
K-Q: the very hard coal, the little nuggets and pour into the top. This
fed down slowly. When the fire was started in the fall in that stove,
it wasn t allowed to go out. Right midway, just about this height
[gesture] were these big doors with isinglass windows. You d get
this glowing fire going. You know how the very hard coal if you ve
ever seen those little hard nuggets of coal it s just a solid glow.
Then you would open the doors, and you had an effect, a kind of
oversized Franklin Stove, you might say. Then at night these were
closed, the damper was shut down, and it just fussed along very
slowly. The first thing you did in the morning was to poke it up
and open the damper, and throw a bit of wood or paper on it. You d
feed in a scuttle of coal at a time. I think that scuttle was fed
in perhaps before one went to bed, and would drop slowly down. The
whole arrangement went up to the ceiling. In the upstairs hall,
there was a register in communication with this. You d open that
register, and the heat would come up. The bedrooms, of course,
were unheated and were cold absolutely freezing cold. There was
a little tiny stove in the bathroom where, if it was really cold,
you could start a little fire and get that roaring hot, if you were
bathing or washing your hair and it seemed just too cold. But the
base-burner heated the house, except for the huge cast iron wood
range in the kitchen which, if you opened the door, heated the dining
room.
Brower: I wanted to ask you about the register upstairs. Was it in the hallway?
K-Q: It was in the hall. What we would do, if it was cold, we d come out
and stand over that register and warm up, and more or less dress in
the hall and the bathroom (the bathroom opened just off it). Unless
it was very cold, unless you really wanted to have the bathroom warm
for a considerable time, the bathroom would warm up sufficiently
from that register.
Brower: Didn t you have those little portable kerosene heaters that make a
pattern on the ceiling?
K-Q: I never even saw one that I can remember until I came to Berkeley,
California. At that time, houses in Berkeley were not heated,
except by fireplaces. In this charming house where I lived, up on
Buena Vista, we would have a fire on Sunday afternoon and could have
our boyfriends in for tea; otherwise, we didn t have a fire. We
had these portable kerosene stoves. The air gets so bad with those
stoves, and I don t think we knew about putting on a kettle of
water. What we would do, we d pass this stove around to the
four rooms where we were. I think we all found that the thing to
do was to get into bunny suits and woolly shoes and open the window.
The air got so bad with them.
139
Brower :
K-Q:
I wonder if that heater is a local phenomenon,
the world had them.
I just assumed that
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
I don t know. Certainly we didn t have them [in Telluride] . I don t
remember any sort of kerosene stove there. My first winter in
Berkeley, having come from this rugged climate, I nearly froze to
death! I was cold. I had chilblains for the first time in my
life. I didn t realize what rain could do (we really had rain then;
I wish we had it now). So I d get my feet wet. One class was in
North Hall, which had a big-bellied stove; there d be a big fire
going in there. I d stick my feet up against that to dry off my
shoes, and of course I got chilblains. I d never seen a chilblain;
I didn t know what a chilblain was like till I came to [Berkeley].
That s not what you re supposed to do with wet feet put them on
the stove.
No. It was a few years before I finally adjusted to this climate.
I was used to houses that were tight and that didn t have these
vagrant drafts in them. And when they were hot, they were hot! I
only realized this completely when I went back to Denver finally in
midwinter, and I just couldn t stand this heat. I had windows open.
I don t know what the temperature was, but higher than it ever gets
inside here with us. So I understand people who come out here and
absolutely freeze.
Of course, in a cold bedroom, you just make a dive for the
sheets, and you pull everything up over your head.
I think it was a convention that California was the land of sunshine,
fruit, and flowers and that you didn t have central heating.
Because you don t actually literally freeze to death
Just short of it.
Just short of that. We found the same thing in Peru in 26. We
went in the winter; that is, for the sourthern hemisphere, it was
winter. In Lima this isn t true in the desert country in Lima
there s a winter fog. It doesn t rain there, but the fog is constant.
It s the way it is here on a foggy day if you don t have any heat.
Those buildings are adobe and very thick-walled and very cool in
summer.
I had a coat with a large raccoon collar for the trip. I
didn t eat a meal in Lima itself without that coat on. I wore it
inside. It was the same temperature inside as out, but outside the
air was fresher; it seemed colder and danker inside.
140
K-Q: I think that s very much the way it must have been here during cold
rains and foggy days. In private houses in Peru, they have small
fireplaces, or the equivalent some sort of heat. But it s a
very different thing.
Well, we loved the house [in Telluride]. I only realized after
wards, from the way my children are conditioned to this house, that
I always wanted to be in a wooden house. That was probably one
reason I liked the Cambridge house; for all its being ready to come
down on top of us, it was a nice wooden house.
Brower: Of course, your own children never knew the Telluride house at all.
K-Q: No. Ursula and her family, and I guess Ted, have visited Telluride;
they ve seen the house and taken pictures of it.
Brower: But it didn t remain in your family after you left the area?
K-Q: No, no. We sold it; my parents sold it when they left.
Here, I lived in this redwood house on Buena Vista, except
for my one year in the dormitory. Then there was an odd little
person who was coming to some of the classes I was taking; she was
just auditing. She lived in the house on the corner of LeRoy and
Virginia, which burned. I don t know who built it. It was a
magnificent house, part redwood, part very elaborate woods.
She was related by marriage to one of the wealthy Jewish
families in San Francisco (I ve forgotten which one now). As a
widow, with her mother, she lived on in this house as though she
had no money at all and sort of shut herself up in a room of it.
We talked. She sat with me in one of these classes. She asked
my roommate and me to come up and live in their house, which we
did my senior year.
It was an absolutely gorgeous house. It was the first, you
might say California- type house. The one on Buena Vista was
pleasant but a more modest one. Both of them belonged to that period
when everybody slept on sleeping porches. We did, there on
Buena Vista. We had this gorgeous kind of balcony to sleep on up
on LeSoy and Virginia. That house got really into my system.
Then, of course, I loved Brown s house. That was a seven-room,
redwood house up at the top of Cedar Street. That had all sorts of
fun associations with it. I had cooked before that; I d done quite
a lot of cooking because I always liked to cook. But I got my sense
for the kind of cooking I was going to go in for from Brown, and in
that house. I remember in detail the kitchen and the utensils.
141
B rower:
K-Q:
B rower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
You re speaking now, of course, of the house that burned in 23.
Right. There was nothing particular about that house. It just had
the charm that an old redwood house has, and a lovely garden, and
this compact kitchen. Brown had the absolute minimum of utensils,
which was rather opposite of my mother, who went in for machinery
and utensils and this sort of thing (she liked to operate them, and
she liked the idea of efficiency) . But Brown had this kind of
bare-bones way of cooking that gave me my key to the way I would
eventually cook.
That house burned. Although there was nothing so special
about the house that replaced it, it did have an absolutely charming
living room. The whole width of the front of the house was living
room with windows, the sun pouring in there, facing south. It was
a refuge to me . I loved the garden. With that living room, you
couldn t lose. The other rooms were just rooms.
Were you in the lower flat of that house?
Yes. So I was in contact with the garden, and it was as though
it were there were two bedrooms, a living room and kitchen as though
it were a little house, because I was all on one floor.
My next house was this house, and this house has been it since
then.
Was the Telluride house a house that drew people? You spoke of
entertaining and that your mother was hospitable to the young.
It had this huge living room and was kind of a nice, shabby,
comfortable, solid sort of place. It was likely to be the three of us
and these unmarried men. Some of them were just out of college.
They were awfully nice. Of course, many of them were age-mates and
became friends of my brother s. There were lots of people around
that house, and at Sunday dinner there would be a whole table full.
My father, being quiet and at the edge of things, could stand
so much sociability and people, and then he just wore out. But he
would just go to his room and settle down with a book or something.
It never bothered him that the rest of us would be roistering around.
If we were up late, he might come down, along [about] eleven or
eleven-thirty, and get himself a glass of milk or something and
sit there and talk with us. The fact that there was noise in the
house did not bother him as long as he felt free to come and go as
he liked, which he was free to. My mother did like this kind of
sociability. We were at home a great deal. The -house was of a
size that you could have a reasonable number of people dancing in
it.
142
K-Q: Did I tell you about my mother and the player organ? I think I did.
Brower: No, I don t think so.
K-Q: Well, I wasn t on the scene yet. This was before they moved to
Telluride. They were at Saw Pit, which was a smaller raining camp.
They lived in just a kind of funny house there; it was mostly a
log-cabin little mining camp. Anyway, my mother bought in Denver
a player organ. There d always been an organ which ray grandmother
played and my mother played a little, but not very much. So she
got this player organ. I m sorry now that that was allowed
just to escape itself because it would be something to have in a
museum. It was cherrywood. On Sunday afternoons there were
just the Last Dollar and the Lost Dollar mines there [at Saw Pit]
it was understood that anybody who wanted to could come along over.
(I decided that there was a musician hidden somewhere in there because
mostly you had to pump these things it comes out pretty funny,
but she made a very good imitation of an organ being actually played.)
Of course, you could do enormous things with it! You could pull out
the stops and get almost a pipe organ effect. It was a huge thing.
I think it weighed about a thousand pounds, [laughter]
So, miners and (the few of them who had wives) miners wives,
or there might be an engineer or two whoever wanted to would come
in, and my mother would play for two or three hours on Sunday
afternoons .
I have no memory of this. I have a memory of her playing in
Telluride, but not to miners. Telluride was bigger, and the class
lines were drawn there.
So we had this player organ and we had a player piano ,
a Weber
piano ( I don t know whether that s American-made or German-made).
Anyhow, it was a piano that I took lessons on; you could play the
piano. I realized afterwards that the things that sounded so
really possible when my mother did them were just a scream when any
of the rest of us did them. But anyhow, we had those two instruments.
Sometime early on, a wind-up phonograph. Of course, the player piano
was great for dancing. You could just get somebody to sit there and
[laughter] .
I think that s a somewhat different side of my mother than I
have given you otherwise.
Brower: That was an era of dancing, wasn t it?
and after World War I.
A great deal of dancing before
143
K-Q: And less and less and none at all, it seems to me, after World War
II. The parties were private parties. There were parties at the
mine. The Elks Club had a medium-large ballroom. The Fireman s
Club had a huge one. Besides which there were Swede Hall and Finn
Hall and Swede- Finn Hall; those were smaller buildings. Can you
imagine this distinction? The Swede-Finns were the Swedes who had
moved to Finland, and there was some intermarriage. The Swedes
were the ones on top, the Swede-Finns were in the middle, and the
Finns were on the bottom, [laughter]
Anyhow, there d be the Fireman s Ball, for instance. This
was a big bash. Or there would be smaller ones. The high school
auditorium had a pretty good size one. One or two of the churches
had small ones. But everybody danced. All ages went, and everybody
danced. Not everybody danced I mean all ages danced and most
people danced. There would be mixes of people in there who kept
to themselves. It would be a band or a full orchestra. Yes, it s
curious how dancing has gone out here. Really, everybody danced.
X PARENTS, CHILDREN, AND COMMUNICATION
[Interview 10: January 21, 1977 ]
Parents and Children
Brower: It s been an interval now since we talked.
K-Q: It has been. I think it was my suggestion that we build a little
bit around books. But I don t think my life up to that time was a
preparation. You re probably using this [word] in a different sense.
But [it suggests] that I had been unconsciously working in that
direction, and I don t think I had been at all.
Brower: Nothing up to the point we ve discussed now, bears really on the books ,
K-Q: I don t think anything bears on the books
Brower: Except as one s total personality does, I suppose.
K-Q: Of course, and particularly experience probably would determine
subject matter. But as a person, and assuming I had any direction,
I don t think it was that direction. Since I didn t begin to write
until I was fifty-five I don t know that we have got up to that age
yet.
Brower: No, we haven t.
K-Q: We may be ready to jump to that. I think you were filling in
background. I don t actually remember where we left off, do you?
144
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower;
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
We really never seem to get past the beginning years of your marriage
to Kroeber; we return to that. At least in my mind, there are a lot
of things I d like to know still about your relation with your
children and how that worked out in the early years of your marriage.
If you found enough of you to go around, for example. Somehow I
seemed to give to one child only by taking from another. Whether
that s peculiar to me or not, I don t know.
I wonder if that isn t a mother s dilemma, or the dilemma of
responsibility for several people. We ll say one child gets
seriously sick; we had a good bit of that, particularly with Karl.
Everything goes that direction. Then, as the children get older,
there s some sort of crisis or attention is needed [elsewhere] or
something. Kroeber would be doing, not a book precisely, with a
deadline, because that sort of thing he managed; but anyway, my
attention would be turned toward him for one reason or another.
One does throw these packages around,
just evenly distribute.
I don t think you can
I wanted to ask you an even more fundamental question. Women, I
think, choose to be wives first and mothers second, or mothers
first and wives second; did you feel that kind of choice to be made?
Yes. I think I was caught between absolute conscientiousness, insofar
as conscientiousness, not meaning competence a responsibility
toward the children. But I did feel myself a wife first, and that s
what I wanted. I don t think that I did it all that well, but I have
a feeling that that is a healthier family set-up. I suspect it s
healthier for the children.
Of course, you were aided in that in having help with the children
too. That is, you had a near-by babysitter in the form of Mrs. Brown.
Right. And my aunt lived with us for several years, and I had all
this part-time help in the house.
I think that [dividing oneself] is a more difficult dilemma for
someone of no means at all.
Absolutely, absolutely. But beyond that, I think there is a
temperamental thing. When the four children were down with a bad
case of chicken pox, and then whooping cough came right on top of
it those months of the spring, I certainly was paying very little
attention to Kroeber or to anything else but the children. You do
get caught in these things. Aside from the simple limits of time
and strength and what you have to do and certainly if a woman is
doing it all on her own there probably is a temperamental difference
or an aesthetic preference. My preference was not that my husband
145
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
was more interesting to me than my children; I felt that that was
the direction it [my attention] should go. And I was able to do
what you can t do when you live as my children have lived, for instance
(I mean, my children as adults, in bringing up their own children).
Our children did not come to the dinner table until they were
of an age to eat the same food and to participate (and by participation,
I mean real participation), and to keep quiet. The dinner table was
not the kind of rumpus-room performance that it almost inevitably
becomes if you haven t enough leeway and enough help that the
children can be fed earlier, and they are at table. The table
becomes more or less a nursery table, unless it s going to be just
terribly dull and the way one doesn t want it.
It was a tremendous advantage to Kroeber and to me either to
eat alone or, if we had a guest or two, to be able to devote time
to them. The guests were usually people that Kroeber was interested
in; I m not talking about people who just dropped in and were our
friends. Also, the children s own attitude was very different. It
was considered a step toward adulthood. As they came along, the
younger ones came, and Ursula much the younger, to the table. She
said she never had a chance to talk until her brothers went into the
army because they were always such chatterers [laughter] and she
never had anything to say. But it was an adult table, and they
were aware of that. And the behavior was adult.
Was this characteristic of your own childhood, do you remember? Did
you eat separately from your parents when you were a little girl?
It wasn t done quite in this formal a way. Of course, my mother
had more help than I had, and my brothers were so much older than
I. But it was an adult table. If it was going to be a late party
or something like this, I would eat with Auntie Norton, our cook
and housekeeper; I d eat in the kitchen with her sit up at the
table with her and eat which I thought was a great treat. I loved
to do that. But it was an adult table. There wasn t scuffling and
there wasn t children s talk at table. The children talked, but they
didn t take over.
Would you say that your household was an adult-centered household,
your married household?
It seemed to me almost that it was children-centered, because there
were four very active and demanding children and somewhat fragile
children (certainly the last two were) . But somehow that was never
my direction or my intent.
Brower: Of course, the phrase is a little absurd anyway,
black-and-whiteness .
It suggests such a
146
K-Q: I know, but it s a fair question. I think the weighting, despite
the numerousness of the children, was toward adulthood. In the
first place, Kroeber had his study. That the children went to to
rap on the door and say, "You re wanted on the phone," or "Dinner s
ready," or "May
I come in? I want a book," or "I want to talk to
you." But they did not run back and forth into the study.
The conversation sometimes at table with just the family bored
the be-Jesus out of Ursula and me because we went through a period
of years of its being sports-oriented conversation. But Kroeber
knew you never would have thought of him as being good at this
he knew baseball records way back. He even knew fighters records
way back. He didn t happen to care for football, but he taught
all his children tennis. He was much interested in tennis and tennis
players. So, they all would have a fine time at this. Ursula and
I, not being the least sports-oriented, found this rather a bore.
But this was Kroeber s decision, not the children s decision, really.
At least, when they brought it up, this was okay by him. But there
might also be political conversations and the rest of it, and
certainly it was not left in their hands to run the thing.
When company was in not at table, but in the living room the
children were certainly perfectly welcome there and came in. When
they were small, they always came down to say goodnight. But they
were there as listeners unlesss they had something to contribute,
or were turned to and drawn into the conversation. I should think
that would mean that at least psychologically it was more adult-
oriented, although I should say that nine-tenths of the scheduling
and an awful lot of the time would have been child-oriented.
Brower: Was this an arrangement that recommended itself to you?
K-Q: Yes. I never approved of I guess this is the key to what you were
asking. The children went to bed at regular hours, and they went
to bed early until they were on up in their teens . I never did
like the idea of my own children or other children up dominating the
evening. It seemed to me that after dinner and after the storybook
time (which went on for a very long time because the children read
early but they loved to be read to, and Alfred liked to tell them
stories), when that was over, then the evening was ours. I had the
feeling that this was fair enough.
Of course, another thing you can t do it if you ve got a little
house and no other way each child had his own room. He could go
in that room and shut the door if he didn t want his brothers or
his sister in. Or any two of them could take over the playroom.
But each child had his own bedroom. As a matter of fact, the house
was cleaned once a week by a cleaning woman, and I insisted they
put their things away before she came; that she shouldn t spend her
147
K-Q: time picking up toys and falling over them. But in between, if they
wanted to make a shambles of their room, they could do it. They
varied both as peoples and varied depending on ages and interests
and so on, between tidiness and absolute [gesture and sound expressing
lack of concern for tidiness]. You couldn t insist upon your living
room to yourself for the evening if there weren t other places for
them to go .
We were late getting radio. When we finally got it (it seemed
absurd not to, when we discovered the kids going to the neighbors
to listen to their radio), Kroeber s one thing that he insisted
upon the radio was mostly upstairs because we didn t like it but
he said, "If
they turn it on, they have to listen to it. This
business of having it and just making it part of the noise of life,
nothing doing." So, really the issue only came up with grandchildren.
They know here two things (now it s no longer an issue, but it was
when you d have several little sqwunks around). The TV is over
there at that end [gesture]. If it was in the cocktail time, there s
likely to be children s program time. They could have the TV on low
if they really sat around and didn t turn it up high and didn t
begin to roughhouse and scramble, and we d have our cocktails at
the other end of the living room. Otherwise, it would just be going
full-blast, and they d be romping all over the rugs. So this was
accepted as, "This is the way Krakie says it is to be, and this
is how it is."
But you can t do that if you have one room and a small bedroom
where a couple of kids are in the bedroom together, and you don t
have space. You can t impose that sort of thing on children. None
of my children some, to a greater or lesser degree, depending, but
none with the consistency that 1 did. But none of them had the
space, until Karl and Wish had the space in Wisconsin. Mish is a
pretty formal person, and I noticed she really did the same thing
as soon as she had a separate dining room and the children had their
separate rooms and spaces. There d be a playtime before dinner, and
they had dinner with us (they re quiet children); but then they went
upstairs if they wanted to play or put on the TV or something.
Brower: Did this pattern in your household continue through the time that
the children were in high school?
K-Q: Oh, long before that they were at the table.
Brower: Yes, they were at the table, of course, but I meant did they
participate in the evening life of the family or did they go off on
their separate ways?
K-Q: They were more participant than most children are now. We were
interested in what they were doing. Unless they had things to do
of course, very often they had studying to do or they had dates
there was no necessarily quick scattering after dinner.
148
K-Q: As little things and as big ones, they loved to sit by the fire; to
have the fire lighted and sit by the fire for a while.
We had one summer which was really very interesting. It was
the last summer that there was an en masse thing. I think it was
not Kroeber s actual last summer, but I couldn t be perfectly sure
whether it was the summer of 59 or 60. I have a little bit of a
feeling that it may have been well, I don t know.
Anyway, Ted s family was in reach, living here. Clif s family
was visiting. By this time, Ursula had two children. Ten of the
twelve grandchildren were born by that time, or at least nine of
them. The two families were here, more or less for the summer. I m
not sure that I had help then; not much, anyhow. We had this
arrangement: The adults sat here [gesturing]. There s a table, now
upstairs, which I had made as a chess table for Kroeber. It s
just the right height for small chairs. The older ones sat with us,
but the four little ones sat at that table. Then, when we could
eat outside, we had the same arrangement out on the terrace. It
was really great fun because these four felt very separate. Sometimes
we just sat quietly and listened, because they were just knocking
themselves out over these awful jokes that little children pick up.
We had a joke book around for years; I hated that book, but they
got such a kick out of it. The one who knew it was the raconteur
for the others. They d sit back and laugh! Clifton said to me
one day, "It sounds like a faculty cocktail party that s got out
of hand." [laughter] We would sometimes be pretty raucous at our
table. But that was really fun. I took the rugs up and didn t
worry about house or garden for that summer.
That was the summer (it must have been 59) Kroeber was writing
up his Style and Civilizations on which he d given his lectures at
Cornell. All of us said we wanted to see it. So each of us did our
own sorts of editing on it, and he said never again [laughter]; he
never had worked so hard over a thing in his life, because we might
have fairly legitimate points. So that was going on.
Mish, Karl s wife, is a sculptor. She was doing this antique
Greek technique or just the little hammer thing. She worked on the
upper deck. She was also learning Greek because she and Karl were
going to go to Greece. She was learning demotic Greek, because he
only knew ancient Greek. So here s this little tap, tap, tap, tap,
tap, of the hammer and chisel on the marble, and this rain of marble
dust coming down, and then this quietest of persons, because she is,
reciting her Greek out loud as she worked. That was sort of an
accompaniment to the summer.
Her name is actually Jean Taylor; she couldn t be more English.
She and Ursula and a third girl were freshmen together at Radcliffe
and lived in a cooperative. They had the one room downstairs in
149
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
their cooperative and lived together for three years. Jean was
Mishkin and Ursula was Dimitri and I don t remember the third. She
just made series of pictures of the various things they did. The
names didn t stick for the others. But I knew Jean Taylor first
as Mishka, so the name has stuck. I think all the family and a great
many of her friends call her Mishka.
So Karl met her through his sister?
Yes, he did meet her through Ursula, right.
It was Karl s family that was visiting that summer, then.
Karl s family and Ursula s. Ted s family was here. I think Clif s
family were at Kishamish that summer and were in and out, but there
were the two families that were in the house.
It must have been a lovely summer wearing but fun.
It was fun. I wasn t trying to do anything else. Alfred could go
in and work and come out whenever he wanted to, and he liked to join
in things. So it was really fun.
He comes through as a more tolerant person than I would have guessed
him to be.
He was enormously tolerant.
You see, my own association with him was colored perhaps because of
the hostility between him and Harold Small, the editor-in-chief of
the Press.
He never felt that any editor quite did the anthropology thing. He
always did have an editor [for the department] . But he had great
respect for Small. He was enormously two-minded when the change
came and the Press really became something else again. He was very,
very dubious about that. He always did have a bit of a question
mark about that.
As an editor, I saw him as a very difficult man to edit,
context, perhaps his tolerance was at its lowest ebb.
In that
When the Press was simply the printing department, there were four
series in anthropology that were being printed. Whoever the man
was the printer [Joseph W. Flinn] Kroeber had excellent relations
with him. I suppose it was very simple, and this was probably the
beginning of having an editor for this departmental stuff. Then he
would just pop down to the print shop and they would go over format
and such things. It was kind of a one-man show, it really was.
150
K-Q: After all, the department was small. All of the papers that were
going in at that time were Kroeber s or professional anthropologists .
And presumably, in those days, they mostly could write. It was
with the change to [Samuel T.] Farquhar [as manager of the U.C. Press
and Printing Department] that it had to be a different relationship,
and probably it was a difficult one.
The change had partly taken place in Kroeber. He was probably
a diffident and a difficult young man and very much had standards
and was probably not too patient. I think he learned enormous
patience and tolerance.
When I came into the picture, I always got that [later] side.
But I also knew a great many people who were very much afraid of him
and who found him difficult. I think he was a person who, with
relaxation and less strain than those early years had had, simply
continued to expand and to enjoy life increasingly and to be a
much more outgoing and genial person. Certainly in the last years
he shielded himself far less (I had to do this shielding just
[because of his] physical exhaustion). But he liked people more
than he did in the early years.
Brower: So Dr. Kroeber enjoyed life increasingly as he grew older?
K-Q: Yes, he did. Basically there, there was always the interest in people,
because you can t be a successful field ethnographer unless you can
relate to people. But during many years he could relate in the field
as he couldn t outside. I know this myself, although I never knew
him at his most diffident and probably difficult. But I remember
remarking to him once in going over the letters (which I did, some
of them, for that Ishi thing) that in the earlier correspondence
he was didactic; that this was how it was, not otherwise; [he was]
inclined to have the answer and say, "This is how it s to be done."
He was an effective person. He was rather impatient of inef fectualness ,
But the later letters. I don t think it was a matter of being
smooth. He simply had learned humanity and had learned that you don t
need to do it this way, and had probably learned that, indeed, the
other fellow might be right.
He was happy in his family life. I don t mean that he was a
miserable bachelor, but it wasn t his idea of the way to live. He
liked the house and the family, even when it was, it seems to me,
a horrendous strain and nuisance on him. Then he allowed himself
to really enjoy people. As he grew older, there certainly was an
increasing geniality and an increasing sociability. As I found
Kroeber, he was almost unboreable. There was just one exception
he could always find some thing to interest him, and mostly people
151
K-Q: could interest him for one odd reason or another; it mightn t be
obvious. Except the purely artificial person who doesn t really
want to make contact. You know, occasionally people are just a
bore, and they just are. But the only time Kroeber would be bored
was when he would come up against this artificiality, to which he
reacted with not anger but boredom. Otherwise, it really seemed to
me that he was quite unboreable. There was always something around
or in the air or in the person that he found amusing or intriguing.
This eternal curiosity kept him going.
Brower: It s a wonderful quality.
K-Q: It s a marvelous quality.
Brower: I suspect you have it too, whether you learned it from him or whether
you always had it.
K-Q: I learned a lot from him. I am almost never bored. That s the one.
job that I would say I did well with the children. Most of us
aren t too pleased with ourselves as mothers or parents; I m
certainly not at all pleased with myself. This one thing, and it
wasn t by intent for me. I m a person who has to recover from
people. I like people, and I get very tired; I ve always exhausted
easily. I had to have my time alone. My children didn t have
"activities." Now, they certainly weren t particularly well
socialized. Being four of them, there was always a great deal of
activity going on right within the household.
Brower: But you mean you didn t have Girl Scouts on Mondays and the Y on
K-Q: This programming thing. There were books, there were games, there
were these various outlets. But our kids were used to entertaining
themselves, either alone or with any combination of them. Except
with a child who was sick and you know how you can really reach the
end of the line except occasionally, when they were dragging around
with the flu or something, they would say, "What ll I do, Krakie?"
Otherwise, my kids never came to me and said, "What ll we do?" They
were out there doing more things, or they d just go to their rooms
and shut the door and read or draw, or whatever it was they wanted
to do.
Of course, I had been, in effect, an only child because my
brothers were so much older. I had always liked the retreat sort
of thing. I don t know when I ve been bored. Occasionally you get
into a social situation where nothing is happening; there are a
lot of people around, and it all seems kind of pointless. I m not
aware of being bored then; I m aware of being tired.
Brower: Wanting to go home.
152
K-Q: Yes, I just want to go home, [laughter] This is a quality that John
has. It s very interesting as it comes out in him. John loves to
go at just an absolutely manic pace, and I think he would just wear
out. Except, if it s a day when there s nothing to do, he can quite
literally sit and do nothing. He can sit out there in the garden;
he may garden, but he may just sit. I ve asked him sometimes
what he is doing, because his face looks awfully interesting. He s
making images. He s doing an artist s thing; he s making actual
images before him. But he can sit absolutely just not moving if
he decides that, "I m just not going to do anything now." He
doesn t have to learn to meditate. Just everything becomes
motionless. I think John is quite unboreable.
I wonder if, when people say they re bored, I wonder what
they do mean; whether it is an absence of resources. Some children
who have been oversocialized are really quite lost. And not just
children. Grown-ups are, really, if confronted with an hour or two
that they can t talk or something like that. Or if children aren t
used to entertaining themselves, they re probably quite lost.
I m sure that I erred on the side of not troubling about my
children being socialized at all. I think there would be a happy
medium. But these children who are always doing one activity after
another (and it s always doing with other children) then you suddenly
have to confront yourself alone. This must be more difficult. This
may result in boredom if you aren t used to it.
Brower: Of course, in a household of four children, the children are not often
thrown entirely on their own resources .
K-Q: Unless they want to bang the door and be alone. Right, sure. A
single child has a very different thing. But I was thinking of
not within the family so much as [outside] . A great many children
now always do things not with their siblings, but in a group. It
is structured. Perhaps the removal of the scaffolding can be perhaps
a little bit you know the thing you feel? Have you ever been in
a hospital and got to the point where you re a little afraid?
Brower: Of the real world?
K-Q: Yes. I should think, to a certain extent, if your hours have just
been [scheduled]
Brower: Was that way of bringing up children as much in vogue when your
children were growing up as it became later?
K-Q: Not yet. I was way over on the unstructured side. There was some
of it, but not nearly so much. A lot of what there was wasn t
structuring the children so much. But if the set-up was such that
children could not do what our children did, they had to be taken
153
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
to whatever they were going to do, and picked up, and this sort of
thing. Our children were within walking distance of school until
they were old enough to take a bus. They were within walking
distance of the campus. Their friends lived within walking distance.
Except the very young ones, they could go to the dentist on their
own.
It seemed to me that many of my friends were taxis for the
family. If possible, Alfred walked to and from the campus. When
he [had his heart attack] and wasn t up to it, he d walk over to
North Gate, take the bus up to Bayview, and then walk down. I might
pick him up at North Gate or something like that, but I never did
the amount of taxiing that some of my friends did. Certainly, as
compared with the structuring now, there was much less, really.
Of course, there are some nearly inevitable things; children
almost have to learn how to swim. Where did your children learn
to swim?
They learned to swim
That was fine. They
would empty the tank,
several days to fill,
learning to swim, as
accustomed to it. So
kid swimming without
knew how to swim, of
up country in this storage tank, [laughter]
irrigated every two weeks . The irrigation
The tank is six feet deep; it took it
As it filled, the year that one [child] was
the water came up ,
there was time to get
within one or two emptyings, you d have this
really any trauma about it. Then, once they
course they had several alternatives.
That s really lovely to learn in that interval when it was right
for you.
It really was just perfect. It was about six inches a day. It
filled from the spring; it depended on how fast that was coming in.
The rest of us would just wait around and play.
What a neat arrangement !
It really is a very neat arrangement.
Space and garden space. You also have a very different relation.
Kroeber, never in any formal or regular sense, did anything about
the house, ever. If we were alone, having dinner alone, and in the
later years when we were alone, he d bring the dishes out from the
table or something like that. But during the growing up of the
children, there was no need for his doing it. Had there been need,
I m sure he would cheerfully have done it, or at least he would have
been perfectly amiable about it. But there wasn t need for it.
That makes for a different relation.
154
K-Q: With all my own children, as their children came along I ve seen
more of Ursula s household. Certainly Ursula just couldn t have
done it. She s never had help, except what Charles has given her.
Brower: When you say a different relation, do you mean between the husband
and wife or between the parents and children?
K-Q: I should think all around it would make for some difference. The
children always helped me for anything that there was need, and
anything I needed help [with], Kroeber did. But it wasn t this
routine thing .
Charles, for instance, likes to cook. Never on any formal
terms (I think Ursula likes to cook too) . Charles cooks when he
wants to. But he also helps out. Charles helped Ursula enormously.
I mean, she is not all that robust; she couldn t have done everything
without help. Ursula happened never to have learned to drive, so
she has been saved that. That has been Charles s load because,
between all the music lessons and Portland is very scattered he s
had to do a lot of that. This makes, I should say, for different
sorts of [relations]. I m not saying that one is better than the
other.
Brower: Did you never feel put upon after a large party, or did you never
find yourself facing all those dirty dishes alone?
K-Q: That is where Kroeber would help, because I can t go to bed with
the vision of that kitchen I just can t. He understood that, and
he would put away the stuff and bring the dishes and this sort of
thing. If it was any party in which the children participated at
all, they were from the beginning a great help because they thought,
"A
party is a party," and that s fun. But I mean this day-to-day
help.
Of course, now it s become a women s liberation] assertion.
Next door here we have this young pair; they re not married, but
they ve lived together quite a while now. She loves to cook, and
her job is far less demanding than his. But it s a matter of
principle with her that he should cook every so often. This sort
of thing never came up [with us] .
I just think it would make for different Ways of feeling.
I ve always rather liked the separateness of jobs and definition
of who you were. It must be very different.
Brower: So you didn t feel put upon or abused because there was not more
help from that quarter.
K-Q: No, no, never. But I m not saying I wouldn t have if it had been
rough. If I hadn t had reasonable help and relief, I m sure I
would have.
155
K-Q: No, no. I don t think Kroeber thought of it in that way at all
either. The same thing holds for John and me. I love to cook,
and John cooks about two things, twice a year. He relieves me
entirely of all sorts of things. But I don t expect him to do the
cooking. I don t want him to, as a matter of fact! It s something
I like to do and I can do . There are a great many things , some
of them I like to do, which I can t do now, and I don t try to.
I was never one for having people sit around and chatter to
me, other than my own children, when I was at work, either in the
kitchen or [elsewhere], I used to sew a great deal; that s somewhat
more sociable, unless you really are figuring something out. I
kind of like to get my job done and then go out and sit in the
hammock.
Brower: Yes. I find a guest who wants to come in the kitchen and chatter
while you re thinking, "Did I put a third of a spoonful of mustard
in that or didn t I?" dreadful.
K-Q: That I think is disaster.
Brower: In your relation with John, when you do the cooking does John help
with the cleaning up of the dishes and things?
K-Q: Oh yes, oh yes. Of course, we ve had, until recently, part-time
help for dinner (our lovely part-time helper is in the hospital
with an awful bladder infection now, which is very sad). If I m
feeling low not up to things then John may take over entirely.
I m a terrible cleaner. Anybody in this world can clean a
house better than I can absolutely.
Brower: I don t see it.
K-Q: I don t see it either. Thank god I ve lived in a house where you
can get by with moider! [laughter] And anybody who wants to clean
up my house is welcome to it.
I love to cook as much as I love to write. Certain kinds of
cooking I don t like. I don t do pastries and fancy desserts. But
I love to do sauces and stews and soups.
Brower: I ve encountered some of the loveliest smells in this house, and
some of the loveliest impromptu meals too.
K-Q: This household division of work, which began as an American
phenomenon, as the old arrangements break down, is certainly
spreading through Western Europe England and apparently France
and Italy. I don t know about Germany; Germany may still have a
large enough population. I would imagine they d be more conservative
there; you might still get people who are available. Apparently
there are very few people available in England.
156
Brower: Of course, to assist in any way in domestic work must have been
quite foreign to Kroeber s experience in his own household as a young
boy.
K-Q: That s right. After all, in his household while he grew up did most
of his growing up I think there were four people in help. Certainly
three regularly, and the seamstress who came in once a week. Maybe
that was what it was. I covered that a little bit with you even in
the Henriette and Kroeber household in San Francisco. They had one
maid in help. There again, that was the same pattern; they would
get these German-speaking young women, who were still coming over,
to do this. They would have them before they learned English.
No, he had no experience of it [assisting with domestic work],
nor had he with his sisters because his sister, who had the four
children, had precisely the sort of household in New York City that
he grew up in, with the same sort of help.
Immediately, upon our being married, he got somebody as part time
help to come in up there in the apartment. As a matter of fact, it
was a woman who was very good and good with children. Clif and Ted
were very small, and I was off to Peru. My mother took real charge
of them, but with this full time nurse and helper to her. And she
had household help, too, my mother did.
Brower: So they stayed in Oakland with her, rather than in Berkeley with
Brown ?
K-Q: Yes. That would have been too much for Brown. After all, Brown
didn t drive; she didn t have a car. My mother drove and, as I
say, she had help herself. There wouldn t have been a place there
in the apartment for this nursemaid to stay. My mother had a big
house. What she actually did she enjoyed taking care of the
children more than she did the housework she turned the nursemaid
into cook and bottle washer, and she took most of the charge of the
children, which was all right because this was what she wanted to do.
Brower: When you came back, were they awfully glad to see you the children?
And did you miss them very much while you were gone?
K-Q: Not really. I think that was because everything was so exotic. I
had not traveled out of my own country; this was my first trip out
of America. I think the exoticness of it, the strangeness life is
strenuous, in a way, when you make a camp on the desert in the
heat this takes a good bit of your energy. I was immensely thankful
that they weren t there.
I heard from them frequently. My mother always had handled them.
I d been with her always during the first weeks after they were born,
and then she was back and forth. She would take them for weekends.
157
K-Q: At that time, she was physically well and free; she always had
people around she was taking care of, but she could always take on
the children and enjoyed it. So, I knew they weren t feeling deprived,
They were accustomed to being in her house, accustomed to being
with her.
Srower: It was an ideal setup, wasn t it?
K-Q: Yes, it certainly was.
Brower: You weren t pregnant when you were in Peru?
K-Q: Yes, I got pregnant in Peru. The awful part of where we were
staying was there wasn t a doctor within miles !
They re just
little villages down there, when you go south of Lima, unless you
go into the hills (what is it? There s one, the colonial city down
there, but that s up about eleven thousand [feet]). We were right
on the coast. There wasn t anything, except an old witch doctor.
She was kind of a local midwife. [laughter] But I was well, so
that was all right.
I came back earlier than Kroeber. Sitting there in the
desert camp was all right. The thing that finally got to be a
nightmare to us was when this old gal came around and I realized
that if something went wrong, she was it. This was before the
Panama International Highway was built, and it was simply a non-
road most of the way, just the old Inca road sort of marked over
miles of desert and pampa between there and Lima. There wasn t
much there but that road and the desert and these tiny little villages,
Brower: A little scary.
K-Q: It was a little scary. Staying in Lima would not have been very
satisfactory. Of course, I didn t have to fly; it was a matter of
coming on a boat, which was nice.
This witch she really looked like a witch!
Brower: She sounds like the lady in Gordo.
K-Q: [laughter] Yes, pretty much.
Brower: I gather she had very little appeal for you.
K-Q: But I had a great deal of appeal for her because she was aware I
was pregnant.
158
The Personal and the Private
Brower: It s interesting, in a historical sense, to know what kind of
preparation you had for sexual experience .
K-Q: Yes, and I should say I had none.
Brower: Your brother s help in preparing you for menstruation in a purely
mechanical way, as well as preparing you a little in your head,
seems to me of historic interest. And what kind of contraception
was used, is interesting.
K-Q: Yes, and that is important.
Brower: But that seems to me the end of the public aspect of sex.
K-Q: Unless, as you re suggesting I ll backtrack just a little here and
tell you something that I think is rather funny (I may have told you
this). I said about somebody or other that I didn t know very well,
"She s been married three times?!" Then I thought, "Three times.
Well, my god, look at how many times you ve been married!" These
women were married three times! [laughter]
Brower: Of course, yes. But your marriages were at long intervals.
K-Q: Anyway, I guess by the grace of god, and certainly not by the grace
of preparation or any sense about it, my sex life has been good, has
been fun and has been satisfactory, and has never come very much into
dissection for itself.
Brower: You mean you haven t been analytical about it.
K-Q: Right. Where I m saying that personal questions don t bother me at
all, I think you could ask me extremely personal questions and I
would answer them or not. Then there is an area of privacy.
It seems to me that if I say that our sex life is good, Kroeber s
and mine was good, in my first marriage my sex life was good, although
I was enormously ignorant there, and that John and I have an exceedingly
nice sex life, then I don t see why one should delve beyond that,
unless there s something that I missed completely or unless I were
troubled. That s where I say you re getting into what would be my
sense of privacy, which is beyond the personal, is something a little
different from the personal. Am I making sense to you?
Brower: Yes. I think it s a rather special division of your own, the division
between the personal and the private.
K-Q: I had the feeling that if you looked it up in the dictionary, my
distinction wouldn t hold water in terms of definitions.
159
Brower: But it s a very real thing, I m sure.
K-Q: Does it seem real to you?
Brower: Yes.
K-Q: Do you have that sort of a compartment?
Brower: No, I don t think I do. But I think I understand it.
K-Q: I think a great many people do not. One of my neuroses through life
and I think Kroeber was useful in getting me over that was an
overdeveloped or overused sense of privacy. I err very definitely
on that side.
Brower: Don t you think that you were rather more fortunate than many of
your generation in approaching sex in such a comfortable way?
K-Q: I must have been hellishly lucky. Certainly my first husband and I
were equally ignorant. Maybe it worked, by the grace of god, because
it certainly wasn t through preparation or knowledge or anything.
We just were lucky. Therefore, that was not a problem with me. I
think it had been for Kroeber. He was married at age twenty-six and
was a virgin, which isn t as unusual as it s taken to be
Brower: And certainly not for that period.
K-Q: but it still was fairly so. Then, there had to have been the
sex experience was good with Henriette. Then she was sick, and there
must have been an awful lot of
In the thirteen-year interval between marriages I knew two
people with whom Kroeber had had brief or intimate one was a real
liaison sort of thing which might have developed into marriage
except it just wasn t right, for some reason or other, and a third
that was in this same state. In other words, it had not been a very
full or free or particularly happy sex-experience time for
Kroeber. We never discussed this in much detail. But I did know
these three people, and I got some sense for it. The fact that I
was both ignorant but happily situated, and that I was uncomplicated
about the sex thing, was one of the reasons that he did untie in
marriage and family. I don t think it was any particular quality
that I had, except that maybe our areas of neuroses and complication
and sensitiveness were not the same areas. So I could handle that
one of his without ever handling it. He was certainly very much
aware and very smart and patient about me. But it seems to me
that s one place where it s luck.
160
K-Q: With the enormous over-self-consciousness about it that we have now,
I don t know how that may affect the actual relation. I can t judge
that. Generally speaking, I feel a little bit about sex the way
I do about the book you talk about [but] you don t write. I
sometimes wonder, with all this specific
Brower: It s not a spectator sport.
K-Q: Exactly, and all this quite specific, anatomical discussion of it
is this in place of genuine satisfaction and the spontaneous
pleasure of sex? I m not saying it is or it isn t because it s another
pattern from mine, and you observe it the way you observe another
pattern in another culture and this is another culture, in a way,
and I don t know the answer. Do you?
Brower: No, I don t.
K-Q: And maybe there isn t a single answer.
Brower: Although it s so evident, I m not sure that this preoccupation with
the mechanics of sex affects everyone. I have a sense that my
own children are largely unaffected by this approach, though I may
be wrong.
K-Q: I have this impression also with my grandchildren that I know well
enough. But there is an awful lot of it around, and there s a kind
of obsession to talk and write about it.
Brower: Yes, it s manifest in this, that I somehow feel I have to ask these
questions which I really personally don t see are very central to
what we re talking about. Somebody said that the Victorians shoved
sex under the rug and we shove pain and death under the rug. That s
certainly true. Maybe it does need to have a certain amount of
airing.
K-Q: I agree with you. It may be that it is like anything which has been
shut up in the dark you air it. You go overboard doing it. It s
like getting over some kind of a fear or obsession or something;
you re likely to go completely overboard for a while. It doesn t
worry me; it intrigues me and, after a point, it bores me. It s
like slang vocabulary.
Brower: It s piquant for a while and then it gets deadly dull.
K-Q: Yes, and then it is limiting. There is this thing now which I
think is part of the response to the under-the-rug business, that
you just have to use some nonpermitted words; you just have to say
"fuck" and all these things. And I think it really is necessary.
161
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
B rower :
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
I ve come about 180 degrees in my attitude toward those words,
which really upset me very much once. But they don t bother me
now at all, and sometimes they seem very handy.
I agree with you and, as I say, I think overuse is necessary just
to clear the air. As with any slang, it is limiting.
To get back to you. You had the example of a happy marriage, too,
didn t you?
Yes.
Although I expect you knew nothing about your family s sex life.
No, I didn t. They were not demonstrative toward one another, but
they were not entirely nondemonstrative. I never had any sense
of strain; I never heard a quarrel or strained relations between
them.
I remember how upset I was. My older brother came home from,
I believe it was his first year at college. He had gone away
engaged to a very pretty young girl there. She had wanted him
to get a job in the mines and not go ahead with his medicine. So,
he broke the engagement immediately upon coming home. I heard
him talking to my mother and father in the next bedroom, and he
had been crying (apparently this was not an easy thing to do). I
didn t know what it was all about, but I was absolutely
terrified because I had never heard anything of this sort in my
household, which I think answers that question.
My mother didn t realize that I d been aware of any of this,
but the next morning she explained to me about it.
That was a good marriage, I m sure. They supplemented one
another in a very nice way.
I think that must help a good deal.
I would think so. It s awfully hard to know, isn t it?
Yes. You seem to have had a very shared life with Kroeber, to
have shared his life to an extraordinary degree.
Yes, I did. That is true. That is where I think, when I could
make choices between him and the children, I made the choice
toward him. This probably has to do with a limitation in me too.
I didn t enjoy my children as babies nearly as much as Kroeber did.
He just thought they were funny and that everything was going to
162
K-Q: be all right. I worried too much about them. I have enjoyed them
increasingly, and I continue to enjoy them increasingly as adults,
but I never wanted them to stay babies. I ve never understood
women who wanted that. Before they could talk, when they d be
sick or unhappy or something, I d say, "Oh! If you could just talk
and tell me!"
Communication and Parenthood
K-Q: My kids all talked awfully early, and any grandchildren I ve been
around have. I may be a bad influence there [laughter], because
I simply could not understand my own children with their babies,
[their] not realizing that these babies were speaking. Months
before Clifton or Ted (Ted was more perceptive about this) or
Karl or their mothers thought that these babies were saying things,
they were! I wanted them to talk, and I did respond when they
talked. I think that does have something to do with it. My
children talked earlier than my grandchildren, except for Ursula s,
and Ursula had the same feeling that I had. She was aware early
that it was communication and it was speech, long before we were
inclined to think it was speech.
Brower: Do you think you had this perception because of having been spoken
to in languages that you didn t understand in field work ?
K-Q: No, I m a moron when it comes to I m terrified of language, and
I m not a linguist, and I never have mastered a language. I have
this absolute American tie-up about language.
Brower: "Why aren t they speaking English?!"
K-Q: Yes. And just afraid; I m absolutely tied up with fear. When we
went to Italy the first time, John and I, I knew really quite a lot
of Italian then. I d been there three times before, and John at
that time had not been there at all. John was communicating in
Italian the very first day. When we went to Greece, the same thing
happened. But he does what my son Clif does: they begin to sound
as though they were speaking a language before they re speaking it.
They get the whole rhythm. John was literally communicating being
understood before he was saying any Italian words. The emotion
got through
Brower: And a word or two would carry over.
163
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
and a word or two would carry over. Of course, Italians and
Greeks are both terribly linguistically oriented and very quick at
picking up anything.
The way I got this [awareness of infant speech] , I realized
that from the time a baby smiles at you, you are in communication.
That smile comes awfully early (I don t mean the colicky smile).
Then, when they smile, and you begin to get this tension and this
kind of burgling, gungling sort of thing, they are beginning to
speak then. This is a first effort. You know the amount of
strain that goes into that legs and arms and everything just
going. All sorts of excitement.
It certainly sounds to me as if you enjoyed your children when
they were babies.
Well, I did. But I did worry, and I was overconscientious . I do
feel strain and I do tire from it, and I think I tired from them
too. No, I enjoyed them. That first-year development is one of
the phenomenal things; the amount that is taken in in the first
year of a baby s life is just fabulous, when you think of everything
[that is gathered]. I imagine that it determines an awful lot of
later things.
I would think so, that first year.
When that is disadvantaged for any one of many reasons, the
catching up is a horrendous business. If you have that base,
somehow.
And a sense of security and love.
Right. It must be enormously important.
Apparently Kroeber took a really active interest in his young
children.
He really enjoyed them. He enjoyed the two older ones; he had a
good relation with them.
You must have felt that was pretty important before your marriage.
You certainly would have been unhappy if he hadn t.
He would come up and play with them on Sunday morning out in the
backyard there [on Cedar Street]. He said he wanted a family. No,
I would have been very, very dubious about marrying anyone who
wasn t really thoroughly for that. A woman with two children,
you ve got to be pretty sure that this is going to work. You
can t be sure, but at least you can see what the relation is
before marriage.
164
Brower: So you were ready to start a family as soon as possible.
K-Q: Yes, and Kroeber wanted a family, and he was glad to start with
the two already there.
Brower: Just to go back momentarily to Peru, was your health good? Did
you feel well during that period?
K-Q: Yes. I felt well during my pregnancies. This probably is a
big help with a woman s whole serenity, maybe toward her husband
and toward sex; I don t know. I didn t feel like moving mountains,
but it was very serene; I liked that selfish serenity that goes
along with [pregnancy]. You know, you get so self-centered, and
you just kind of serenely drift along. A lot of things that
ordinarily come in on you very hard, you re insulated against.
I think that biologically something happens to the nervous
system unless something is biologically really wrong or life is
really unhappy. But given half a chance, it is a good time for
a woman.
Brower: I have a theory that the deeply wanted child doesn t make you ill;
if you re fighting the problem, you get sick.
K-Q: It probably isn t 100 percent true, but I m sure it helps if you
are happy in your pregnancy. Certainly that is all on the good
side physically.
Brower: Pregnancy is not a pathological condition, after all.
K-Q: Exactly.
Brower: Did you nurse your children?
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: Did you find that difficult to do?
K-Q: No, I loved it. I nursed Clif and Ted for nine months, and maybe
a little more. I nursed Ursula only three months because I got a
terrific, I suppose a flu, temperature, and the doctor didn t want
me to nurse the baby. He was afraid she d get the infection. So
my mother took her Ursula was absolutely furious my mother took
her way back in the back of the house and said, "Now
just forget
it!" Ursula refused to take a bottle, and she screamed all night
long. The next morning, she was of course starved, and she took
the bottle. By the time I was well, I had just about, with that
temperature, dried up the milk. So I think she nursed a little
after that, but not so much.
165
K-Q: I didn t nurse Karl so long because he was not well, and that [the
milk] partly agreed with him and partly didn t. But I nursed both
him and Ursula beyond well, I can t remember with Karl, because
we had to begin with him trying other things .
Nothing worked very
well.
Brower: That meant that you must have nursed Ted through the death of his
father, which must not have been easy. And yet, it s very
comforting to nurse a baby, I think.
K-Q: Yes, it is. The nursing was well established. I hadn t thought
of it, but I think probably it was a great comfort to me. I had
no pattern for early [feeding]. You know, they didn t feed babies
as early then as they do now. If you could nurse them, you didn t
start; just a very few orange juice or something like that. But
I had no pattern for feeding him, other than nursing.
Brower: I m a little surprised that you found cooperative doctors by the
time that Karl and Ursula came along because at that time, as I
recall, it was kind of up-hill work for a mother to be permitted
to nurse.
K-Q: I had an entirely unsympatico doctor, but he was my brother s
choice. I think he was excellent (it s a curious thing; I ve
suppressed his name). I had no real relation with him at all, but
he was considered top of the heap. He believed in mothers nursing
children, and what he said went at the hospital. Particularly
with Ursula, it was beginning to be that the nurses would have
been reluctant except they didn t dare to be.
He was absolutely no use afterwards, in between this sort of
thing, but he did [advocate nursing]. He was very particular
about care, so that part of it was good.
But I remember that by the time Ursula came along, the nurses
were reluctant to bother with this .
Brower: Yes, it s a nuisance to them. I think that s the chief reason. I
guess it interferes with the mass production of bottles and feeding.
K-Q: I think so.
Brower: It s not very pleasant, though, to have a baby delivered by a doctor
you don t like very well.
K-Q: I was so ignorant. Now I wouldn t have accepted this technically
perfect [man with] no human feelings. But I was so blooming ignorant
(I never went back to [that doctor] once I was through with the
babies). The first time I got in the hands of my present doctor, I
realized the enormous difference.
166
Brower: Yes. We accepted so much without questioning. Women s lib, I
think, has made women readier to be analytical about their medical
care.
K-Q: Right! I think so.
Brower: Whereas we just accepted.
K-Q: Right. I ve often thought of that. Perfectly ridiculous! Because
I was frightened and I didn t have a lot of the information I
XI ORAL HISTORY, AN OLDER KROEBER, THE KRACAWS
[Interview 11: January 25, 1977 ]
Thoughts on Oral History
K-Q: I m curious have you had other reactions from other people to
their own tapes?
Brower: I haven t, because I ve never had the opportunity to go back and
talk to anybody.
K-Q: So you don t know if it s a common sort of thing that is really
the question I m asking the way a person feels about hearing his
own voice it s shocking.
Brower: I ve had people comment on that, yes. People don t sound natural
to themselves because when they hear themselves usually their
voices are inside their heads and not out.
K-Q: That s right.
Brower: Yes, I have heard comments like that, and in my own experience,
too, I m always shocked to hear myself.
K-Q: The thing that does appall me about my responses it sounds like
a stutterer stuttering to me. This just drives me crazy.
Brower: Well, you see, you ve got an absolutely untouched tape. The tape
that I did of our first meeting I automatically edited when I
transcribed.
K-Q: Yes.
167
Brower: But the transcriber here is extremely conscientious, and her view
is that you transcribe absolutely verbatim, unless something
clearly is a false start, and then you take that out. But, of
course, this transcription will really only be seen by you and me,
and we will be free to edit it.
K-Q: That s another question. Do you have, you as the person who s
taking it you and I have this opportunity and privilege?
Brower: Yes.
K-Q: With the completion of the tape and your turning it in down there
it doesn t go completely out of your control, in other words?
Brower: The tape itself, I would say, does.
K-Q: The tape itself, but not the transcription?
Brower: But not the transcription. I wouldn t hand it in officially until
you had done the editing you wanted to on it. You can remove things
that you ve said, you can alter the way in which you said them.
What I would do in preparing it for your eye would be just the
automatic kind of editing that takes out the stutter and that puts
in the verb when it s clearly understood that that s the verb
we re all waiting for.
K-Q: Right.
Brower: I have noticed that something happens in oral interviews there s
a leap between the interviewer and the interviewee that goes
without words. You look for a certain statement on the tape and
it s simply not there.
K-Q: It s not there. Well, this is what I wondered. I mean if we could,
when we got around to it, work this over and correct and fill in
blanks.
Brower: Oh yes.
K-Q: Great. That answers the first question.
Brower: The second copy of this tape, however, will be on file as an
insurance copy.
K-Q: That s fine.
i
Brower: But that is not the copy that is available to the public through
the Bancroft.
168
K-Q: All right. That answers that. I was wondering if I was more
stuttering than most people are. I remind myself so much of Karl
[Kroeber] , who apparently talks the way I do, and reading this
over I thought, "My god, it sounds like Karl at his worst."
Brower: I really have heard a great many individuals because I m not doing
any one long interview except for May Dornin and yourself they re
all short interviews with various people ,
so I have quite a range
of experience with people . There are a few who do speak in a very
controlled way, in complete sentences, but I think they re quite
rare. By far the greater number don t. And I know that David
[Brower] I ve heard him when he s reading over a transcript, say
"I ll never open my mouth again. I don t make any kind of sense.
I simply don t make sense." So I m sure that s a very common reaction
when one reads an absolutely unaltered transcription of what is
said.
K-Q: This occurred to me as I was going over it. I may be doing the
same thing here in my judgment as I did I ve written three
libretti (I think they re for composers who ll never get around
to getting them done or anything) . But my point is that I had
to learn another technique, because as a writer you express
meaning, emotion everything by way of the words. And Ed [Edwin
E.] Dugger, for whom I did one, was excellent as a coach. I had
to learn first that the total number of words in a libretto is
very, very small, and that I had many too many words.
Brower: Because it was being illustrated all the time?
K-Q: Right, and there s the repetition of lines and music and this sort
of thing. And he said, "Leave that out. The music will have to
say that. The music will have to get this across." This sort of
thing. I did learn to do it it was very interesting. It was
a different thing.
As a writer, I m just appalled at this oral thing. And,
of course, having happily done a lot of editing I just can t keep
my fingers off it. I told you I wasn t going to touch it, but I
just couldn t help but touch it.
Brower: Well, could I just tell you about my own experience when I came into
that department [ROHO]? I looked over the material they had, and I
took my pencil and went to work on it. Then, as a way of training
me, they had me listen to a tape and transcribe it. And I just
turned around a hundred and eighty degrees after hearing it,
because I suddenly realized the importance of the human voice.
169
Brower: It simply adds another dimension. Oral history is not literature.
It is not written English. And it shouldn t be transformed into
written English in the transcript. It really should keep the
cadence of the voice so far as possible and the lack of neatness,
precision, and organization that the written word has.
K-Q: Well, now this comes to another question. I don t suppose it s
possible for me to look at another history?
Brower: Yes, of course it is. I brought Dorothea Lange s up, you remember,
when I first came?
K-Q: That s right.
Brower: We didn t really have a chance to look at it.
K-Q: No.
Brower: But I m sure I could bring one. Do vou think of anybody who
would be particularly useful?
K-Q: No, I don t care.
Brower: I thought of her because it s amodest size and she s an interesting
person.
K-Q: Yes, I think it ll help me a bit.
Brower: I found it helped me. I had reached a period where I thought I was
a very bad interviewer, and I wasn t bringing out material that
I somehow should, and I was very vague about where I went wrong.
So I went over several others and came out feeling better about the
whole thing. It s a niche that we re neither of us used to.
K-Q: That s right. As a check, John had the day off, and sat down
in the afternoon and read the first hundred pages or so of the
hundred and forty some that you brought me. He thinks it s going
all right. He said, "Well, it s got to have the hell edited out
of it, of course, but," he said, "it seems to me it s going all
right. You should just go on."
His own feeling is, this is another thing I ll come to his
off-hand reaction was: "Go ahead and finish, and then you and Anne
go back and edit." But I was wondering if I would learn to present
material a little better if we at least went back and did some
editing now before we go ahead with it. Or would you be against
that?
170
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
No, except that I am terribly afraid you are going to want it put
into literary, written English. I think that that would be such
a mistake.
Now do you think that when we go back, whenever say that I went
over these three pages this morning. I had the feeling we began
with my paternal ancestors that the information I gave was all
right, but it would seem to me it would mean very much more if,
before going to my maternal ancestors, I did a little sort of
sum-up of ray feeling about what sort of people overall they were.
What sort of a psychic, as well as just a plain physical or
economic, background. Because there is a consistent family type
there that s run pretty well through. I think I failed to make
that point. I also failed to talk about my aunt, my father s
sister. And I think it adds a bit to some sense of what this
family was .
Is that the aunt who lived with you?
No, this is on my father s side.
I d forgotten her.
I could do this I mean take these notes of several things that
occurred to me in going over that. It seemed to me that what it
lacked was a real definition of what these individual things that
I speak of where they really fit in into a kind of picture.
I think I would agree with you about that, and that I have perhaps
been vaguely dissatisfied myself with that part of it.
This is the very first of course.
It tended to be very factual and not to give much sense of what
kind of people they were.
Terribly miscellaneous somehow. My idea would be not to write this
but I was wondering if we could take this, say stop at this point
where I go to my mother s side. And before we go there could we
put on tape these further things which seem to me would help?
And can that go back in?
Yes, the only place it wouldn t go is back on the tape itself.
No.
But we could insert it anywhere we liked,
in any way we like, and add or take out.
We can reorganize material
171
K-Q: And what I think one could say, because we know what is on a
particular tape, and say, "We re going back now to October 12th,
to take one, adding this material."
Brower: "Please insert on page so and so after such and such."
K-Q: I suppose that s how you would do it, because the tape data would
be there anyhow. Anybody who wanted to refer to the tape could.
Now I think that s that.
The only other thing, I believe, that I had was I wanted your
reaction to this: whether we should plan or whether we should not
to this extent that we agree or you suggest that probably next
week we ll talk about whatever it is that ll go on there. So
that that kind of sinks into my unconscious and maybe that rolls
itself around a little bit and I go back. I don t know that I d
necessarily sit down that s as might be. I might consciously
think of it or I might not, but to more or less
Brower: A sense of some form some place where it s going?
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: I was going to suggest that myself to avoid the kind of thing that
has happened here where we have overlooked something that
really was important. Could we take perhaps fifteen minutes at
the end of our time to discuss the next week.
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: Where we re going, and even, perhaps, jointly devise some questions
for it.
K-Q: Right.
Brower: I m sure that that s done. I know that, in fact, Mrs. Lowdermilk s
interview was done in such a way that the questions came after the
fact. I think there was a suggested list of topics and she wrote
her own material on it or made herself notes, and then questions
were sort of inserted. I think too much of that would be unfortunate
because then you would lose the spontaneity. But at least a rough
notion of where we re going next time.
K-Q: Of where we re going. And my feeling is that when we go back over
this, whenever we do it, I would make editorial corrections. You
would have made them before I would see the thing.
Brower: I would make them in pencil, yes.
172
K-Q: Then still make the additions or corrections orally keep that
quality.
Brower: I find that when I do edit what I do most of the time is make
myself look less like an idiot, [laughter] I feel free to make
myself sound better, but I feel a little tentative about changing
the things that other people have said.
K-Q: Yes, well I think you sound all right. I wouldn t worry, if I were
you, about it. But I think that was really what I had in mind.
One of the absolutely maddening things that I do I must do it
in conversation, one doesn t notice I use the word "just"
all
the time.
Brower: That s funny, I hadn t noticed it.
K-Q: The way some people say "and, er."
Brower: You know 1 broke David of "you knows," which he didn t know he
was doing. I finally counted them one night.
K-Q: I think I didn t notice the "you
knows" in this I noticed the
"justs" all over. Over and over again, just "just" you see?
And I think I use a good many "you
knows .
"
We all tend to a bit .
Brower: Well, yes, and especially in this kind of thing where you re
thinking of what you re going to say next its really just a
space-filler in there.
K-Q: Right. Well, that was it, Anne.
Brower: Well, do you think it might be sort of good to turn this off and
do a little discussion of where we re going today in advance?
K-Q: Okay. And keep that or not depending on whether it s it might
conceivably be of some use. Certainly we haven t talked of anything
that wouldn t possibly be of interest to somebody.
Brower: Oh, I think so, because the whole philosophy of oral history is
involved in decisions like this. And I don t know that I ve
communicated why I think it should retain, so far as is possible,
the quality of the spoken word. I think it s an experience you
have to have by listening to the tape yourself before you can see
why it just adds a dimension. It is not prose, however much one,
perhaps mistakenly, would like it to be.
K-Q: Yes, it is not. Would it be possible to hear some of the tapes?
Brower: Yes, I wish I d brought some. I d love to do that.
173
K-Q: I mean of somebody else. Of somebody else?
Brower: Sure.
K-Q: I think that would perhaps reassure or orient me a bit.
Brower: It certainly did for me.
K-Q: Because I really realize that this isn t the same as a libretto,
but I m up against the same
Brower: A new medium.
K-Q: Yes, and since it is my instinct to take the pen and write it
Brower: You ll have to somehow establish the nature of this in your mind
so you won t be so tempted to do that.
K-Q: Right. Or be so absolutely horrified [laughs] at the way it comes
out when I say it. You know what it may be related to is how,
particularly when you re starting an article, how very bad the
first pages are, and how many times I do over a first page a
first" page of a chapter, or a first page of an article, or
whatever it is . And I was very much encouraged after I began writing
myself to reread Virginia Woolf s it s the part of her diary
that Leonard Woolf extracted from her very long journals. And he
took just that which had to do with her writing, or with somebody
else s writing, or with comments about writers that had to do with
their writing. So it s really fascinating, and in that you get
some first drafts of some of her best stories. And her first
writing it was without style or flair. I don t mean her early
writing
Brower: The draft of even her mature writing was like that?
K-Q: Her first drafts up to the end. She would get started and get some
facts to work on, but it had no flair, it had no literary quality
there it was .
Brower: It was a jumping-off place for what she was going to do?
K-Q: Right, and this was really very encouraging to me, because like
her or not she is a stylist par excellence. But it didn t
come out that way on the first page or even sometimes the
twentieth.
Brower: I think that is very interesting.
174
K-Q: I think so, too. And something like that is at work here, I think.
Not that one necessarily would improve, but perhaps one does learn
something about presenting facts. The trouble is that they re not
facts they re impressions, feelings, memories, and so on.
Brower: I d like you to just glance at this one [handing over transcript],
because this was farther along, and that seems to me very coherent
indeed. That s what you are are talking about; it has already
happened .
K-Q: [reading transcript] Yes, this reads better. This is what John
said, too. Although he was forty pages behind this, he said he
had a feeling that my actual reporting was getting better. Yes,
this isn t you hadn t edited this?
Brower: No, this was done exactly the same way as the earlier material
by the same girl with the same literal philosophy that she expressed.
She came to me and said, "You know, I m going to give a verbatim
transcript of this." And I asked, "Well, didn t I?" And she said,
"Oh, no. You didn t at all." I d unconsciously, you know, edited
with my ear.
K-Q: Yes. Now, you have that dated, have you. Didn t you need it dated?
[referring to tape]
Brower: I m afraid I can t date it because I don t know what day today is.
[laughs]
K-Q: It s the twenty-fifth.
Brower: January twenty-fifth, 1977.
A Mellowing Kroeber
K-Q: Yes. What I was thinking of was this, that the last time, for
a few minutes, we talked about Kroeber with reference to the
[University of California] Press. Then we got off on to something
else, but I thought it was apropos that you should bring up this
thing of Small s finding Kroeber difficult. And I imagine that you
have picked up a good bit of that. I ve met with this before.
Lots of students were afraid of him, and felt that the front that
he put up was not a very easy one to crack, and this sort of thing.
And I think this is true, although I was really not aware of it.
Or it never seemed true to me let s put it that way. I was aware
of it, because I would see evidence of it. Also I would see the
evidence melt. But I think anything of this sort you have picked
up sort of corrects the record, as it were.
175
Brower;
K-Q:
K-Q: Insofar as I remember I was not very good about doing that in the
biography [Alfred Kroeber, a Personal Configuration], although I
was aware and I think I did mention it. I was looking over the
biography yesterday. I wanted to see how my description of
myself in that squared up with what we ve got in here [to] get
a little feel for that. It had been a long time since I d looked
at it. And I do say something that I came into the picture about
the time Kroeber s austerity and shyness, mixed with a certain
formality and this sort of thing, was melting. I think it was
after the analysis and after the analytic experience, which
certainly would have helped.
You don t think it was cause and effect? You don t think you
had something to do with the melting?
I had a lot to do with it. I didn t realize that at the time.
But by the time I was writing the biography I knew it. Kroeber
often said so himself. There was certainly nothing conscious
about that. I think it was simply that he was physically better.
He was having fun in his home life, and it was a happy sex life.
He was allowing himself to become the person he was supposed to be.
Years later on from then, when he was old, I was aware that
as you get older you just become more so, whatever you are. And
the genuine geniality, and the genuine friendliness and ease which
Kroeber had in his last decade, more than in the decade before that
even, showed what the basic person was really.
He felt that people were so very nice to him when he was old
a feeling which I share. I don t have the feeling that so many
people have that young people are rude or indifferent or discourteous
Now I m sure that some would be this is always true. But on the
whole I think young people are enormously tolerant and respectful
and affectionate they were with Kroeber. And he reiterated many
times that he just failed to feel the reality of this resentment
or discourtesy.
Brower: That is ascribed to young people?
K-Q: That is ascribed to them. It does make you wonder well, as
Ted [Kroeber] always says about any communication situation "It
takes two to tango." It s equally the old person putting off the
young ones. I mean, it is a two-way street.
Brower: I didn t mean to exaggerate that matter with the U.C. Press. It was
just an impression I had. I knew that Harold [Small] always was
very careful in writing the letters that he wrote to Dr. Kroeber,
and I remember Harold s saying to me, "Well, after all, English is
his second language." [laughs] Dr. Kroeber had taught English
somewhere along the way?
176
K-Q: Oh, he was an English major. And yes, he taught at Columbia.
Brower: So, you know, he had his own views of how things should be done.
K-Q: He s one of the few overall anthropologists who really could
write, and he reads very well. This is not just my prejudice.
But he has a definitely idiosyncratic style.
Brower: Yes, it is.
K-Q: But he did not allow his style to be interfered with. There
was one occasion, I don t remember which book it was, he got back
an editor s corrections, which had not to do with proper editorial
correction but really rewriting him in conventional English, and
he simply blew his top. This was, as a matter of fact, with
Harcourt Brace. They changed the editor to a person who was more
congenial, and he met this editor he d met the other one, liked
him all right. But he met this editor when he went east, and
they discussed this and so on, but it [the style] is idiosyncratic.
Brower: I have some recollection that it s something about semi-colons
he didn t like, or colons he used
K-Q: I m sure.
Brower: There was some particular punctuation mark that he and Harold tangled
over.
K-Q: It s a good thing he wasn t my editor. The other day John [Quinn]
was rereading a piece that I m doing for a medical journal I
did it a long time ago. But anyhow, it had been copied, and John
said, "My god, here s somebody put s in more commas than you do."
[laughter] My punctuation is I couldn t figure it out for a
while because it s crazy. Then I realized that when I write, or
when I m going over writing, I m reading it aloud to myself, and
it s punctuated where, if I were reading aloud, I d pause.
H
Brower: I d like to make one observation, too, about Dr. Kroeber: that
diffidence and shyness are sort of masked not even masked with
arrogance, they re just interpreted as arrogance.
K-Q: Right, or indifference.
Brower: Yes, or indifference. Another thing is that the tradition in which
Kroeber grew up was rather more formal than the one on this coast,
which is notably shirt-sleeved and relaxed.
177
K-Q: That s right. And whereas in a way he liked this I remember
as long as he wore a hat it was a soft Stetson this sort of thing.
But there was a certain unconscious formality , which he had
in his own household, and which, I think, remained with him as part
of the person. And that [was] combined with a willingness to say
nothing unless you have something to say, which can be disconcerting,
[laughs] And impatience, in a sense he was a person who worked
fast, who worked accurately. I think he was impatient of
incompetence or slackness or slowness, probably more impatient
than he should have been. You know.
Brower: But you didn t find him a demanding or hypercritical husband?
K-Q: Not at all. Oh, absolutely not, absolutely not. No. In fact,
what he put up with sometimes [laughs], was extreme. And one
thing that he really absolutely objected to and absolutely just
wouldn t have was to come home to a disrupted household, and a
sort of living room in which the kids were all over the place and
this sort of thing. If it was a party, if it was an occasion
but day after day your household was in order when he came in.
I don t think that was a bad thing.
Brower: Did you find that by trial and error or had you foreseen this?
K-Q: No, I think it was trial and error. Because I remember one time
when for some reason, this almost never happened, ironing was going
on here and Karl was crawling around and things were a general
mess. And Kroeber came in and said, "What is this, a peasant s
house?" [laughter] As I was saying the other day, there was
plenty of room, so there was no necessity for this. And I couldn t
stand too much of that myself. I have required a certain order
and so on.
Brewer: That was what I suspected that it was something jointly arrived
at and not sort of fiated.
K-Q: Now, should we stop and decide where we re going?
Brower: All right, [tape turned off]
The Kracaws
Brower: We re going to go back now to fill out a little more of what you
want to say about your father s family.
178
K-Q: Yes, we re going back really to the very beginning, because we began
with a discussion of my paternal ancestors. And in rereading it,
some things occurred to me. One person, for instance, whom
I had not mentioned at all had considerable influence on me.
[tape off] I d sort of forgotten to talk about her. This was a
full sister.
Brower: Of your father?
K-Q: Of my father. And I loved to visit her. There were three cousins;
they weie all older than I, but not that much older. This aunt
that I loved so much was married to a rancher. It was a prosperous
ranch. There was always money in the bank for whatever they
wanted, but it was a straight rancher s life. She did the cream
separating; she cleaned the separator after; she cooked all day
this sort of thing. But she was my height or a little more and I
think she never weighed over ninety pounds. And she and my father
had perfect teeth. Not one of us has inherited them. My father,
toward the end of his life, had to have a filling put in. They
had large, strong teeth they just went out the genes window for
anybody who s come after.
And she had a great deal of manner and bite and [she was]
interesting. She played the piano. And at the end of the day, in
which she would have got dinner for harvesters and things of this
sort been out all day we d go into the living room where the
piano was kept very shiny and very much in tune and we d play
duets. And the sort of parties that you have in the country
square dances and other dances she would go along with their
children, and she really danced better than her daughter did, who
was a heavier, less volatile sort of person.
Now, she certainly had an influence on me. Incidentally, she
was the good cook in the family.
Brower: Would you tell me her name?
K-Q: Ida Converse. She would be Ida Kracaw Converse. She outlived
two of her three children and died at the age of ninety-seven
or ninety-eight. And I think, as a matter of fact, Kroeber and
I saw her the one time we made a trip through the Southwest and
through Colorado. We went by the ranch and she was out there still.
She was scratching the ground, very quickly weeding her little
flower garden outside the house.
And certainly I loved to go there. I loved to just trot around
after her. I suppose temperamentally we were somewhat alike. We
kind of laughed at the same things and liked the same things.
179
Brower: Where was the ranch?
K-Q: It was outside Denver, right along Cherry Creek. And it had
everything. It had cows, sheep, horses, what seemed to me a pretty
huge vegetable garden. And she gathered wild plums and this sort
of thing and made jam of it. She dried sweet corn, and one of
the things we always had at Thanksgiving dinner was some of Aunt
Ida s sweet corn. You dry it, you know, and then stew it. I
don t know if you ve ever tasted it or not?
Brower: No, but it sounds heavenly.
K-Q: It is it s awfully good. I wonder why they don t do it now?
Brower: I wonder.
K-Q: Now this is what I was thinking of this morning I was thinking
of how I would summarize that side of my family some of the things
that seemed to run through those I knew. They were relatively,
in physical type, small-boned, rather fragile of build. This was
true of my father; this was true of this aunt; his brother any of
them that I remembered. And rather fragile health, but not sickly.
I mean easily exhausted, rather prone to a cold or something like
that, but long-lived on the whole. I have no idea how it would
have been with my father, but the connections, as far as I knew
them, were more or less like this aunt of mine who lived on into
her late nineties. I think they were tense, quick moving, rather
readily exhausted. I m sure there were deeply neurotic strains
through the family.
But a great deal of amiability and flair. I think that was
what I felt in her [Ida Converse]. Also (I wonder if it runs back
to the Baltimore beginnings) , they had rather more finished manners
and manner than were usual, it seems to me. I would say
intellectual in bent and interest. There were musicians [who] came
along not distinguished musicians, but people who played an
instrument and were musical like my aunt. And there was this strain
of the men being doctors, and very often surgeons, which was
repeated with my two brothers .
And I was thinking of my father s library we talked about my
reading to him and so on but I was thinking what was in there
besides poetry. The conventional general histories of the time,
and then these tomes on the philosophy of religion and on religious
history, which he happened to be especially drawn to. Reading in
there was a daily part of his life. Those books were dog-eared
books, and I should say it went rather beyond what one would expect
from his formal schooling and occupation.
180
K-Q: And then the other side of him he must have had considerable
flair for business. And he would take chances. Now he d pile up,
starting from nothing, several respectable fortunes, which he lost
by way of mines, or this last venture out here, the private
irrigation company up in Sacramento Valley. Maybe he wasn t a very
good gambler, but there was this element of experimenting, taking
a chance, and taking the consequences. And then hanging on to a
business that would keep the family and the rest going.
So there must have been, despite the fragility of which I
was very much aware, there must have been some competitiveness
and some drive, and, I think, a sense of fun. I can remember my
mother as not approving of a great many of these investments and
so on, in which she was, I m sure, entirely correct.
I think that was about what I wanted to [say] now, I don t
know whether that summarizes up a little bit the sort of feel.
Brower: Did the Kracaws have a sense of humor?
K-Q: Yes, they did have. Not in Kroeber s sense. Humor in a sense,
yes, there was Ida, particularly, laughed easily and genially
and rather liked a lively exchange. They did not have Kroeber s
peculiar not his sense of fun. I would say not wit. Kroeber
had wit. I would say they did not have wit. I think wit is not
particularly an American trait. And, of course, their experience
was American and a lot of it was mid-American. I mean Baltimore,
then into the Midwest, and then farther west.
Brower: I was going to ask you about that. I understood your father s
getting from Baltimore to Colorado, but how did the rest of the
family happen to?
K-Q: Some of them didn t. There was a move to Iowa, and that s where
some of them stayed, and that s where Anna Neiderheiser s family
these cousins of my father s [were]. There must have been a move.
Some of them stayed back in Baltimore, because I remember some
cousins or second cousins visiting us from there. But there
must have been a considerable family migration to Iowa. Why, I
don t know. And presumably, I should think, most people who went
to Iowa went there as farmers, or went into farming when there.
And I rather think Anna Neiderheiser s family were from an Iowa
farm.
But my father did not come I ll tell you, back up here just
a little bit. That move to Iowa was earlier, because when my
father came it was alone, and it was because he was thought to be
tubercular. He stopped for a while in Iowa, and then went to the
181
K-Q: Southwest and to dry climate because of this tubercular thing or
tubercular threat or presumed tubercular threat. So I imagine
this was just part of one of those moves to the Midwest that a lot
of eastern people made.
Something reminded me of Anna Neiderheiser the other night.
I think I told you simply that she was the head
Brower: She was a lay sister in a religious organization?
K-Q: She was the head of the Methodist Deaconess Training School in
Kansas City, Missouri, [laughter] She was its original head, and
was head until a rather late retirement age. And this is
extremely anecdotal, but it s extremely interesting. She had
one of these elegant Gothic faces, with the hair parted and brought
back; the little black cap tied under her chin she wore was extremely
becoming this really very strong, restrained kind of beauty that
her face had. And the simple black dress, you know, with a little
white around here and here [gesturing] .
My father reconnected with her on one of his trips and invited
her out for August, which was her holiday month. My mother was
terrified of her coming, and when she arrived took immediate
occasion to explain to Cousin Anna that ours was this sort of
household and she really couldn t change it. In other words,
the children might go to Sunday school, but the adults did not
regularly go to church, perhaps my grandmother would.
Brower: This was the reason for your mother s concern about the visit that
you were not as religious as this cousin would expect?
K-Q: Yes, here was this terribly religious person.
And my father said, "You don t need to worry. She s very
nice." And she was perhaps more humorous than some of the others.
But my mother did worry. And Sunday was a favorite day for going
on a picnic (I never went camping in my life because the lake or
the mountain or wherever you wanted to go would be within carriage
or horseback riding distance and then we would simply come home.
But we would go out and cook a dinner out, a midday meal out, we
were very fond of doing that).
And Anna said well, this was her vacation month. So once she
had arrived she put aside her black costume and just wore ordinary
clothes. And then, being much slimmer than my mother, she wore one
of my mother s divided skirts it looked rather funny on her and
she got some boots. She had never been on a horse in her life.
And I think she rode my father s horse, or he got one from the
stable it was a very gentle one. So from then on, she came out
for her August, as long as we stayed there.
182
K-Q: I was the leisured person around there. I had great fun with her.
We d go horseback riding. She drove my father crazy, because
she d get on this horse and just give the whole responsibility
to the horse, and nothing fazed her she d go over slide rock
areas and places. She was just so entranced with the mountains,
[laughs] It can happen, you know.
She just loved it. I was reminded the other night, I hadn t
thought of it for years, that we went off one day with a couple
of the engineers (there was likely to be one engineer or another
around who was available for a day s trip). And we went up over
the top of the range. I wanted her to see my Red Mountain, which
you saw from the top of the range. [It was] a gorgeous sunny day,
and we were up there right on top, and like this [snapping her
finger], you know how it happens in the mountains, we were in a
blizzard, just a real freezing blizzard. And this [ice] coming on
those trails made them [for] shod horses very, very dangerous.
So these two young engineers who were with us took us down
just a very short distance over the top to Lake Ptarmigan, almost
at the top of the range, where they had a little station. It
was you might call it a cabin. It was logs. As I remember there
were no windows in it, but the engineers and people who had any
business there, the men who took care of the lines and so forth,
had keys, and inside was fuel. Before you left you always
replaced fuel there. And it had a stove and canned food, so that
it was, in other words, a shelter for precisely this sort of thing.
And we got in there and made a fire there was no question of going
home or going down even as far as the Tomboy Mine.
But they also had a little phone arrangement there by which
the cabin connected with [a phone] opposite the Tomboy Mine. So
we got word to the Tomboy Mine, which would then phone my
parents so that they would not be alarmed about us. And there
were these little bunks along the wall. The presumption was that
there would be only men sleeping there. So when we got home
they said, "Well, what did you wear, Anna? What did you and
Theodora wear." And she said, "Well, what do you think we wore?
They all had pajamas. They gave us their pajamas." You see, there
were pajamas and blankets.
Brower: Oh, in the hut itself?
K-Q: In the hut. [laughs] This fazed Anna not at all. And in fact, I
can remember sitting around. We put the pajamas on because we
were rather wet and cold, and we got into them. I think they
were the kind with feet or something (this was meant really as a
sort of rescue place). We sat around in pajamas and a blanket
around us until the stove got the room warm, talking and making
up some kind of a meal on the top of this little stove from the
canned goods .
183
K-Q: But I think this gives a measure now here s a person in the Methodist
Church of all things. And I must say this for her, she made a try
she would like to have had me come, when I d finished high school,
to her school. She made a discreet try to. And when this was not
our direction she dropped it. I mean, there was no proselytizing.
And she only went to church a time or two because she was promptly
visited, of course, by all the pastors, so she appeared at church
and, I think, at a reception or something properly dressed in her
deaconess outfit. But that was it for one month. She said,
"This is my vacation."
And I think this tells you, I think this answers something a
little bit and I think she s rather an original herself, don t
you? [laughs]
Brower: Yes. I was interested in her before. 1 was sorry that she came
and went so quickly in our first interview.
K-Q: It s been so long since I had even thought of her, and the other
night, talking to Bernie Rowe about church matters, because she s
active in the church down here (she is a deacon, so we always call
her Deacon Rowe) , I was reminded of Anna Neiderheiser and reminded
of this little episode.
Brower: You spent just one night there?
K-Q: Yes, by the next morning it had cleared and the sun came out. This
was midsummer, you see, just early August, and the sun came out and
within an hour of the sun s coming out the ice had simply melted
off the trails and that was that. As a matter of fact there s a
tiny little lake there, which is undoubtedly volcanic in origin.
The water is extremely blue in it, not from the blue sky; it
must have been mineralized in some way. There was a little boat
there that the mailman and the engineers when they were up there
would go out in. As a matter of fact, the next morning they took
her for a ride. I did not go. My mother had said no to that boat
she had a kind of fear of this place. And there always was ice
floating in it.
Brower: On the lake?
K-Q: Yes, it always had some ice, and I think she [mother] had a little
fear of that. So I didn t go, but Anna went for a boat ride in it.
Brower: Did you have anything to feed the horses? What did you do with
the horses?
184
K-Q: Oh, yes, there was a shelter for them and food for them. These
[refuges] came at not frequent intervals, but not too infrequent.
The intervals were regulated by the particular circumstance of
the trail, and I suppose in part [by] having a place where you could
build a shelter. When you get up there where you re above
timberline not every place is congenial to making a shelter.
This is all that occurred to me as I went over this part that
had to do with my father s family.
Brower: Did you ever visit her [Anna Neiderheiser] in her own bailiwick?
K-Q: I never did. None of us ever did in my family, except my father.
He would make a trip east, or to Kansas City, or through Chicago,
depending on what he was going for. In any case, at that time
perhaps he just chose to because he had a business in Kansas City.
But he would go by train by way of Kansas City either coming or
going, so he saw her frequently there and would have a dinner with
her, a lunch with her out at the school. But I never did, I think
none of the rest of us ever did.
Brower: I was curious to know whether her winter, her nonvacation guise
was very different from her summer one.
K-Q: I think it was very different. I think it was very different. She
had the look of being an absolute head, and a very proud walk.
When she retired and then was ill and died I had correspondence
with people who were closest to her. And there was enormous
respect even where there must have been considerable intimacy. No,
I think this was really
Brower: A vacation.
II
K-Q: But it really was an anecdote. There was just one last thing, and
it s not a very important one. In trying to think what characterized
the Kracaws and that family, down through the generations, as I
summarize them they come out rather (as having] the so-called
I guess accurately, I don t know Polish temperament. It s simply
an idle wonder, but one does wonder whether something carries over
there I mean [if] some of the genes continue to carry this or
whether it s just chance. What these people lacked is the arrogance
that is apt to go along with the middle-class or upper middle-
class Pole. But you hear Poles described as people [with] the
tenseness, the intensity, the good manners, their own sort of humor,
the fast motions, the preference for light touch the things which
are so unlike the Germanic. And it simply occurs to me that as I
summarize these people they do have something of that temperament.
185
Brower: Of course, when you describe their physical type and also their
temperament it does seem very much that those are the genes that
have come to you.
K-Q: I belong on that side more than on the other.
Brower: You think so, too?
K-Q: Yes. Certainly as to this want to push, and then exhausting and
pluuuh! [laughter] You know. Okay, I think that s it
XII LIFE PATTERNS
[Interview 12: February 1, 1977 ]##
Configurations .
Brower: We began that last interview talking about the problems of oral
history.
K-Q: Right. We re on?
Brower: Yes, I hope so. [laughs]
K-Q: Let s go back to our discussion of tape recording for just a little
bit. It seems to me that I had the feeling still from the last time
that I wanted to go back and work over what we had done as we went
along. As I read over the transcript I decided if we d gotten
into that we d be so deep in we d never because, you know, I think
it would distract us. I think we d better go on.
Brower: And, of course, you can make those emendations in written form, if
you want to.
K-Q: I could work on it from time to time, but for us to spend time on
it I think when we get through, then it would be much better to
go back and give it some organization, because things are going
to be miscellaneous no matter what we do. We can t bring it all
together.
Brower: Would your idea be that we would give it some organization, that
is, with the tape off, and then put the tape on for the additions
we wanted to make?
K-Q: I think we just have to start with page one and decide.
Brower: You recall last time we filled in on your father s history.
186
K-Q: We did.
Brower: And you thought of doing the same thing for your mother s?
K-Q: I started to, and then I realized that there was some more on that
family farther along and it s just going to be so complicated.
We ll just have to do one sort of a thing at a time. And I think
we just maybe better go on
Brower: And then an overall return?
K-Q: And then go back an overall return. How does that appeal to you?
Brower: That seems fine. I can see this might be a kind of labyrinthine
thing which would lead us off.
K-Q: Yes, I think it would. There are goings back and forth, and I
think that s almost inevitable because you free associate.
Brower: Yes, you do. Actually, it s one of the values of the method,
because it brings up things that otherwise would be lost to you.
If you were doing it in organized written form I don t think
those things would ever come up .
K-Q: No, they come up by free association, so it s going to be a
mixed dish, no matter what. And, then, I think one could go back
and pick up the pieces, if that was the only thing you were doing.
Brower: It would be sort of a long not an erratum exactly.
K-Q: No, a reorganization, I think, or some clarification. I think we
don t know now what we would do then.
Brower: No, and, of course, cutting and pasting is always possible.
K-Q: Always, always. I think it s good to have a copy of the transcript,
and I think it does not need to be edited. I think it helps me to
see the transcript to read it even if I don t do anything. It
always gives me some sort of an idea. Now, for instance, I realized,
going over, reading it, and stopping myself from editing for the
most part, anything more than just an "X,"
that a thing came to
me about an ultimate organization of this material which was not
too different than what I discovered in writing the biography of
Kroeber. I got quite a ways into it before this pattern began to
emerge, which for him happened to be, in fact, a seventeen to
fourteen year cycle, which seemed to be a natural cycle for him.
It was repeated throughout his life.
187
K-Q: I was not looking for it, and I did not find any such cyclic thing
in myself, but what did occur to me is that when this is done I
think there are periods of trauma and change. There are certain
traumatic things which change my direction. I don t think that
is peculiar to me, but probably the particular traumas at
particular times or the things that were not traumatic will give
ultimate, overall pattern or configuration. I only came to
using this configuration [in the Kroeber biography] when I realized
that a pattern and configuration was forming long, long, way long
in the writing.
Brower: So it was not begun with this concept as a thing to work toward?
K-Q: Not with this title [Alfred Kroeber, A Personal Configuration]
I only went back to Kroeber s title when I realized that I had a
configuration there. Does that make sense to you?
Brower: Yes, I think it does.
K-Q: Do you want me to give this very off-the-top-of-the-head sort of
thing which has to do with a one-time, or maybe a some-time,
pattern?
Brower: For this?
K-Q: For this it wouldn t go very far. And then I would be off on
something else. Should I just start that?
Brower: I think it would be nice to have it on the tape.
K-Q: Okay. Then, let s see, was there something else I was going to
ask you?
Well, I think one can think of this either as traumas in life,
like the birth trauma and the death trauma these dates. One can
also think of them as platforms or steps up and down, and then you
reach a level at which you stay for a longer or shorter time, and
then there s a change of direction. I sort of think of them
stepwise, but anyhow, life doesn t just go in a slope. I think it
is steps and stops. And as I think about myself, I think the first
serious trauma, in which I was conscious of fear and change and
insecurity, was leaving Telluride. I think several things were
involved there. My later life has been colored and conditioned,
constricted and pulled out in various ways, by the really extremely
different life that that was, at an extreme altitude [that]
*The reference is to Kroeber, Configurations of Culture Growth,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944.
188
K-Q: undoubtedly did something physiologically to me. I don t know
just what, but I m sure that it did something, because, aside from
other things, I have always been hyperthyroid, and was, before we
left there, beginning to develop a very small goiter which
disappeared with coming to sea level. Things of that sort.
I think some of my difficulties and quirks of character
probably go back to this very peculiar life of the mining town,
to the absence of early traumas. Maybe the very serenity and
cushionedness of my life until I came to college is not the
best preparation for life. And I have not thought about this very
much. I thought of it as a plus it was very comfortable. But I
think it made me very, very insecure, being already shy, and
probably I turned my back on many things and situations which I
might not have had I thought some things earlier.
Then I think the fact of there always being it was a man-
dominated world. And this matter of security and insecurity most
kids, even when I came to college, by that time had dated and petted.
They didn t go into major sex then, but it was all the experimenting
in the world and I think most girls knew a great deal more than I
did and had experienced a great deal more, because I was going out
with older men who were very protective of me. And the man I
was semi-engaged to when I left Telluride, insofar as there was
considerable commitment both ways except that he was twice my
age, being an engineer. So there wasn t a firm commitment I was
to go to college and grow up, as it were.
But, I mean, that whole relation between men and women must
surely have colored my preferences and some of my absolute ignorances
and some things I never experienced at all. I experienced other
things perhaps. I think what I m trying to say is that in the
usual sense, it seems to me that I did not experience adolescence.
I had no religious thing going, as so many young people did at
that time ([either] the religious conversion thing or turning
away from [religion]) because I had never turned to or from. I
certainly didn t do the experimenting that kids did where there
were agemates playing around together.
And part of this trauma was this terrible homesickness, which
remained, shall we say, an aspect of my personality or my feelings
or whatever. It s a wonder I didn t flunk out my first semester
in college through sheer homesickness.
I haven t gone through I think the second trauma would be the
war. The First World War was not personal trauma in the sense
that I ve been talking about, but I think that that made for change,
made for growing up, and brought me to my second stage, where for
the first time I really bumped into some uncomfortable realities.
I m not sure that we want to go into that now. We might it leads
in all right.
189
Brower: I wish we could, because in what we said before I hadn t thought
of it at all in those terms. I hadn t thought of the war as
bringing you uncomfortable realities.
K-Q: Well, I think we were so marginally involved as a country really
in terms of what Europe was. I think just the inevitable change
that the war brought dragged me along with it willy-nilly. It
hasn t the extremely personal thing in the beginning, but I believe
that s the way it comes out.
I want to interpolate something here. Ted [Kroeber] was over
and we were talking about different aspects of oral history and so
forth. Did I tell you this the other day? I think I did. I
talked to you about part of my trouble being that my impulse is
to write and not to tell something. Did we discuss that?
Brower: Very, very briefly.
K-Q: Did I say something about my experience writing a libretto?
Brower: Yes. Yes, you did.
K-Q: Yes. That s essentially the same thing.
Brower: It s a mode you re not familiar with and requires a different
approach?
[Interruption. Tape off.]
K-Q: We were talking about adolescence and suggesting that when I say I
seem to have really not experienced adolescence in any traumatic
sense that perhaps adolescence was not such a traumatic thing up
until the Second World War. The children who became adolescent
and, if they re boys, went into the service or faced the prospect
of it.
Anyhow, since then, it seems to me, it has become increasingly
a state of which we are aware. And adolescents, I think, have
increasingly felt themselves as an age and a class apart.
Brower: I don t really think it was defined or thought of as a stage in the
earlier periods.
K-Q: I don t think so either. You just sort of moved along. And
adolescent rights and adolescent feeling was something that belonged
to other people, not to our culture. I believe that it belonged
to it much less than it does now. It s a good guess somebody can
work on that one.
190
B rower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
When the delivery girl interrupted us you were talking about Ted s
ideas of certain aspects of oral history.
Oh, he was asking me about who was doing it and what not. And he
said, "You d be a hell of a tough one to [interview]." Ted fs a
clinical psychologist and he works with groups and he works with
individuals. I mean he s [knowledgeable about this] sort of thing.
And he said, "What you ll tend to do, you ll set the stage and you ll
leave your feelings out of it." And he said, "My
advice to Anne
would be that she ask you anything she wants, because you re
perfectly capable of saying, I don t want to answer that. I don t
want to talk about it.
"
And he said, "I
think, if you re laying
out a situation or time or whatever it is a person that you should
try to remember to include your feelings, and if you don t that Anne
should bump you into it."
That s very interesting.
Yes. [laughs] He s better at psyching me out than my other kids.
I think my other kids don t try to psych me out, but Ted just
instinctively he just can t help it. And there may be way down
deep, [in spite of] what I feel [are] all his differences, we
may actually be more alike. I think maybe we kind of can t fool
each other. You know? That sort of alikeness.
Let s take a try at the First World War being a kind of
second trauma or period of change a step in another direction.
I d like to interpolate here that I think that part of me, and
one reason that I may tend to compartment these things and I
think it makes me a very bad historian When a period is over
I think I am so absorbed in today that I m not very good about
yesterday, or when it is a chapter. That has only one good thing
that I know about it when I m writing instead of talking the order
begins to interest me, and I like the sense of getting something
surrounded and that s a chapter.
And I think the extent to which I have lived in one place,
Berkeley, for most of my life. The people that I saw and knew when
I first came here, of course many of them are dead or they re
scattered from college and this sort of thing. But I think, beyond
that, I knew certain people through my first marriage, and except
for very old and close friends none of those carried over to the
Kroeber group. It was another group that did things. But there
it was.
Are you suggesting that your life tends to be in separate sections?
191
K-Q: I tend to think of it that way. I think I concentrate on what is
right today and get sort of caught up in that, whether I m writing,
or whether I m cooking, or whether I m with particular people that
seem to be a part of my inner thing. And I blank out everything
else.
Brower: Do you forget the emotions of the periods that are past?
K-Q: No, I don t forget the emotions at all. In fact, I remember the
emotions, whereas the facts [laughs], the facts just dribble off
downstream.
In the years that John and I have been married there are many
carryovers from him and from me. There is also a changed nucleus,
which we won t go into now. That is by the way.
Brower: Is this what you touched on in the Co-Evolution Quarterly?*
Well, you didn t really, did you?
K-Q: I didn t really touch on that. Well, I suppose in a sense.
Brower: Certainly there were no specifics there.
K-Q: But not directly, no. I should say, that following the war, aside
from the fact that the country was changed economics changed and
our relationship to the rest of the world changed I, with my first
marriage, really confronted illness. And yes, the fact of my
father s suicide and my general attitude toward that made it not a
general death experience in the sense that I had later. And there s
something awfully real about two babies coming awfully close together.
And a realization of insecurity. I don t mean acute insecurity,
but my just not knowing where I was going or how we were going to
manage at all and the rest of it. And I think that this hit with
some wallop .
Now what I have this week do you want to put it out just for
a second? [tape off]
Ted says, [and] when I say anything about it I think I m
inclined to agree with him, that my sense of privacy and I think my
capacity for hurt is such that I like to look at things from one
remove. I do not cry easily. I ve always envied these women or men
who could just dissolve into tears and come out kind of healed
from it. If I really do cry I m kind of wrecked by it. It just
*See Appendix IV.
192
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
tears me all apart. And I think I m extremely self-protective
there and have a neurotic sense of privacy. I was a long tine
coming to that, but I think it is true. And that it s much easier
for me to well, this distancing is just something that I do.
Well, let s see if this makes any sense here,
[notes] down in a hurry.
I put these
Of course the other side of the coin is that you do live in the
present and this makes for a very full and vivid kind of living.
Well, I use up all my energy that way.
But you don t waste any on the past where so many of us tend to
spend so much time.
No, [only] when I expound an anecdote occasionally. If I m sitting
up there by the fountain kind of dreaming along I m not dreaming
of the past very, very rarely. I m much more likely to be
dreaming about this dream novel that I m going to write, [laughs]
You know?
I think one thing I wanted it s here anyhow. Let s say that
we put a pause on this now. We ve gone so far on the trauma thing.
We re changing our subject. Maybe if we give our changes titles
as we go along, [laughter]
Right.
What I wanted to come back to, which I hadn t touched on with you,
was the stepfather relationship, and how I [phone interrupts]
Since we are [changing the subject] periodically, let s have
some kind of a sign by which we can say we re changing.
Okay. Well, we had that interruption just as you were about to talk
about Kroeber s stepfather relationship, so let s go back now to
the oral history.
Yes, because we re going to mix in from time to time with this sort
of philosophical discussion of oral history and I think it s
worthwhile doing it. And it occurred to me the other day when I
was talking with Ted (maybe I said this to you) , in a sense it is
rather like an analysis. And, like an analysis, you have to free
associate. And this is what I hadn t realized that I would do so
much of, but I agree with you I think probably the only way to do
it is to allow yourself the space to free associate. Unless one
does get carried away completely.
193
Brower: I m sure that with a trained oral historian there is some sort of
happy medium struck between total organization and total wandering,
But it seems to me you yourself impose a kind of discipline on
yourself, so free association is kept really within pretty firn
bounds .
K-Q: Well, all right. Now we ll change subjects.
Brower: Now I think we were about to talk about Dr. Kroeber as stepfather.
The Absent Parent
K-Q: This is the other side of it. What I hadn t gone into with you
Clifton and Ted as stepchildren. And part of this I only came to
a realization of in the last very few years. I think I did tell
you, I m sure I did, that I had the strong feeling that it was
wrong to hold up a dead father as a model with a living stepfather
in the picture who was taking the father s place, and in that my
mother-in-law agreed. Because that could lead easily to making a
hero out of him, and the comparisons, and this sort of thing.
Brower: I don t think I altogether know what you mean by holding up their
father as a model.
K-Q: Well, one s tendency when a beloved person dies is to enshrine them
a little bit. I did not talk much about Clifton, the father, to
the children. She [Mrs. Brown] talked some, I really not at all,
and I want to come back to that. When Clifton went to kindergarten,
the day before he went, he came to me and said, "When I go to school
tomorrow and they ask me what my name is I shall say my name is
Clifton Kroeber." And I said, "Of course, you are a Kroeber."
This was nothing I had suggested to him. He has always had
this need to have all the family together. It was Clifton who was
disgusted if somebody didn t come to the table, if everybody
wasn t there. He wanted everybody around. He still loves everybody,
So Kroeber adopted the children only later, and he did that
simply to it wasn t because of his feeling, it was a practical
thing. He thought it would be simpler to make out his will and
do various things if there was adoption, and also it cleared up
the matter of records in the service and various things. If the
name change has been formally made it s better.
194
K-Q: What I didn t realize through the years, at least I realized it only
rarely, [was] that the two boys were conscious of their having a
stepfather. And part of this consciousness came from the happy
visitors who come in and in front of the children say, "Now, which
of the children are Kroeber s," and this sort of thing. And they d
make wrong guesses. Now because I felt all this was wrong I think
I overplayed what was a sound policy Kroeber was at the heart of
their lives and let him be there and the dead father wasn t there.
But I think I never spoke voluntarily of the children s biological
father not spontaneously. And as they got older I should, I m
sure, have talked about him. And I never kept up with the paternal
relatives. This was partly due to bonds not particularly locking.
She [Mrs. Brown] had just an older sister and there was a big
connection on the other [Mr. Brown s] side. And she didn t
particularly like them, and somehow I never did.
Brower: Mrs. Brown didn t care for her own family, as well as for her
husb and s family?
K-Q: Well, she didn t have much family. She just had this sister and she
was not an impinging person. No, she was fond enough of her, but
she really didn t I think she was a little jealous and a little
indifferent to this family. You know.
Now, just a minute here.
Brower: I d like to ask you why you felt you overplayed the repression of
references to the boys natural father?
K-Q: I ll tell you why, this comes out, in just a minute. I should have
talked to them, elicited questions from them. I think it s the
way, maybe, parents feel about sex talk. I think when I began to
have the feeling that I should do this , as they were growing up ,
not having done it before, I didn t know how to begin it. [tape off]
Brower: Sorry to interrupt the train of your thought.
K-Q: That s all right. I really didn t know how to begin and I think I
posed my mind to it. I do that. I m very delaying and slow.
Anything I can put off I do put off. So I put that off, and in a
sense I put it off to the point where I had really sort of forgotten
about it. And Clif and Ted were between forty and fifty years old
when I faced up to my first total awareness of this.
Ted was having a crisis of his own, which involved in part
what we call an identity crisis, and part of which he discovered
by really acting out and then realizing what he was doing and
telling me that he quite simply didn t have sufficient information
about his father, his biological father. And to answer
195
K-Q: your question, there had been little enough said that there was
this sort of half feeling on the part of the boys that maybe there
was something that shouldn t be talked about there. Maybe
something a little shady, a little uncomfortable, something
best not to be talked about. Now I suppose I conveyed that by
never particularly enjoying it when people talked I don t think
it bothered Kroeber, it bothered me when they talked about it
in front of him. This is something that other people do
perfectly easily. It bothered me. And I think what got across
what was actually my embarassment or inadequacy there got
across as something that shouldn t be talked about to the kids.
Now, I made what amends I could. And I made part of them in
writing. I talked to the boys separately. It was far more
important really with Ted Clifton s problems were other than
that. But anyway, I wrote out as a kind of family history what
I knew of the family history and what I knew of Clif of what he
was, where he was, his interests. These things made a very
delayed sort of mini-biography for the boys, both of whom
appreciated this.
But I say this, not so much in confession, because the
confession was made with them, but possibly somebody sometime
will read this and be warned there is a halfway station there as
in most things, and I missed it whole hog. And I think looking
at myself now analytically that what one has to learn, and that I
learned and am learning now, is it takes courage for what I call
a kind of blasting honesty. I don t suppose you always are
wholly honest, but to not bury, not evade this sort of thing.
Self Awareness
K-Q: Kroeber helped me to see myself, to admit my ego, but he was also
enormously protective. I think now that perhaps in the thirties
not a Freudian but a Jungian analysis might have been a very good
thing for me. Kroeber thought that I didn t need analysis. I
think some of my illness was psychosomatic, some of it was real.
But I have a feeling that an analysis [would have been good] just
for a better understanding of myself. It wouldn t have had to be
one of these I don t think I had to dig up very deep, because
well, let s see.
196
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Was it a year ago this spring that we were in Los Angeles for a
year? John and I. And I felt very frustrated in Los Angeles.
I felt [laughs] somehow bound down and I had some extremely
Freudian dreams (apparently you don t have to dig very deep in
me; it came out) in which I discovered I had a different relation
with my father than I thought I d had. And somehow I worked
myself out of this. That s why I think a not too deep analysis,
or not too prolonged a one, would have been good.
I ve learned to be far more open with John. There s a
certain sensitive but drastic thing in John. Somehow I ve learned
to be more thoroughly honest with myself.
Was this post-Los Angeles or post-John in general?
Oh, my dream thing?
Yes, but I mean this capacity to be more open with John,
a change with relationship to the dream?
Was that
I think so. And he s a good person to I mean his drasticness comes
at the right time for me. I mean that it s an understanding a
drasticness.
When you say drastic you mean a cutting through of the normal
reticence?
In other words, "Cheer
Maybe you better stop it
Yes. Ted does it to a degree with me.
up kids" never seems to work, [laughs]
for a minute, [tape off]
Now, let s go back to trauma #1.
Leaving Telluride?
Leaving Telluride trauma. Talking about the psychosomatic aspect
[of illness], which everyone has, I think it shows up in my
immediately getting malaria [on coming to California]. Now there s
no question I had malaria. The only reason I was not operated on
one of these long neck scars it turned into an abscess.
An operation for malaria? I never heard of that. My mother had
to drink stout for it, which she thought was a splendid remedy.
That would be splendid. No, mine was acute. And the reason I
was not operated one of two then-top surgeons in San Francisco
was going to operate. My father wasn t entirely content, went to
the other for his opinion, and at that time they were just beginning
to use x-ray for this.
197
Brower: This had no relation to your goiter?
K-Q: No, no.
Brower: This was a malarial infection?
K-Q: It settled in the lymph glands. And they probably gave me ten times
as much x-ray as I should have had. I was very sick from it, but
I did not have to be operated. But then immediately, the next
summer that I went back to the Sacramento Valley, and did not go
in swimming of course, malaria will come back, and it did come
back. I think it did, but I also think there was a large
psychosomatic element in that, because the second the train would
reach Carquinez Straits and that cold fog would come to me I would
pick up with the speed of light. I think part of that was physical
fact and part of that was psycho-fact.
Brower: Had you continued to dislike well, you didn t dislike it exactly,
but find it very foreign, this community in the Sacramento Delta?
Kroeber: I did not dislike individual people. I disliked and I continue
to dislike California small-town life. Those interior valley
towns seem dreary to me. I don t think I like small towns. I
like villages, or country, or cities.
Brower: And, of course, the climate, in addition.
K-Q: Particularly the summer months, if you ve never had it [the heat].
Brower: But the malaria did not stay with you in Berkeley when you were in
college?
K-Q: The first time it hung over I was really sick that fall, too, which
probably did not help the homesickness. But after that first bad
go of it, with the treatment and so on (and that treatment put
me in the hospital), after that I did not have it in Berkeley, no.
I think that s it.
Brower: For the addition to the first trauma?
K-Q: Oh, wait just a minute here. There s one other thing that I
think might we re still talking about trauma one. The other
thing that happened in the first marriage other than its later
tragic aspects and so forth in Santa Fe it was not a happy
time because Clif was sick and it was a time of uncertainty and
so on. On the other hand, it was the first time that I think
either of us had ever done anything of this sort. We rented an
adobe house on a street along which artists lived and had the
198
K-Q: beginnings of something which I think probably would have been
Clif s direction had he lived and which became my direction when
I came back to Berkeley. That is probably part of the reason
that my graduate work and the people I knew then were so different
from the undergraduate ones.
It was the first whiff of the artist s point of view, the
artist s life its demands, its freedoms, its fun. There were
some pretty good artists and writers there. They were very nice
people. I remember a first kind of romantic feeling I had the
Indians I had known as a child really didn t have I never got any
romantic feeling particularly. And we picked up our first few
pieces of turquoise. I can remember one of the last things I did
before leaving there was to go back to the old Franciscan church,
which is the original adobe, and is the second oldest Franciscan
building in America. The first one would be what s the oldest
city in Florida. Santa Fe is the second oldest Spanish city in
America.
Brower: Is this church right in Santa Fe?
K-Q: It s in Santa Fe. And I went back there perhaps in a religious
mood, but certainly not in a Catholic mood, and picked up
bought actually the morning I left there a little string of
turquoise beads that Clif and I had found and had [planned] to go
back and get. And I have those to this day. I ve given away most
of my jewelry that I got later, the Indian stuff, but I have that.
And I think from that I got there my first directing breath
toward, let us say, my new world, which I came back to here,
because then I was beginning to discover the poets that were sitting
around up there on the hill in Berkeley ,
which I d never known
about before.
It was the beginning of a new direction which really took form
later, to grow up on after, and this is some of what we were
talking about earlier, after the war thing determined in part where
the second trauma would go next.
Brower: Do you recall the names of those people? Those artists in Santa
Fe at that time. Was Georgia O Keefe there, for example? No, not
yet, probably.
K-Q: The only one I recall is Maynard Dixon, who I actually met later
up here, and his brother, his younger brother, who was a jeweler.
I actually met them in San Francisco, but they belonged to that
crowd. I can t there is a fairly well known painter whose name
just escapes me. The only other two would be Witter Bynner and
Spud Johnson, who had a house there, and I knew them better, and
Spud was very nice and helpful to me in the days after Clif died
and before I left. I can t remember the others.
199
Brower: So when you came back to Berkeley after your husband s death this
sort of led you into anthropology, didn t it?
K-Q: Yes, it did.
Brower: And also then did you begin to make connections with Berkeley
people in the arts before your marriage to Kroeber?
K-Q: Yes. They re all sort of mixed up together there, but certainly
before the marriage. I would say by way of, in a sense, because
they were his friends, too. But not directly by way of him. And
they were right up there sitting all around.
Brower: Yes. [laughs] Now that really was not an addition to trauma one,
it was trauma two, wasn t it?
K-Q: I think these are not necessarily [traumas] [for] Kroeber, some
of his stages were traumatic to him, and some of them were simply
new directions. But a new direction that isn t just off this way
[a tangent] , but one that counts a direction for several years and
colors a person s life.
Brower: It s less a new bead on a string it s a part of the continuous
string, and certainly has been with you.
K-Q: Right. Now this is what this meandering around with oral history
does. I have never made any of those connections.
Brower: Isn t that interesting.
K-Q: Never. And, as I said, I tended to put these things away in their
little drawers, and I ve never, really, until this last one I made
just now talking to you, never thought of it that way at all. And
I think this is a terribly verbose, seemingly crazy way to arrive
at these things.
Brower: I don t think so. I don t know that there s any other way. There s
no easy way really to uncover that kind of connection in one s life.
K-Q: Because you begin to think of it differently a particular episode.
I d just been talking about the boys, and probably because of that
the old brain gets working and makes its connections.
Brower: Was there other evidence that the boys should have known more about
their father? They were perfectly well-adjusted children, weren t
they?
K-Q: Yes.
200
Brower: It wasn t anything that manifested itself early?
K-Q: No, no, and they were perfectly happy with Kroeber. No, and I
do think it was something I don t know, I would have to ask them
I don t think it was something that was [present] at length with
them, particularly. I had no reason to think that, and neither
of them has said that or implied that.
Brower: It was just a small piece of the mosaic of their lives. Their
concept of their father was too vague, not defined enough.
K-Q: It had just been dropped out. I think that s an excellent simile,
because it wasn t vague, it just wasn t there. That was the stone
that was missing. And one of those missing stones can raise hell
when other tensions come up. Being not a secure person myself, I
was not good at getting over the idea of security to my children
somehow or other. I guess you can t do anything. What comes out
is what you are. The children certainly learn I don t mean
financial insecurity, I mean a personal one.
Brower: They seem to have found it somewhere in their own way.
K-Q: Karl and Ursula, I think, had less difficulty that way. Perhaps
being after all, some of the genes were different, and you can t
ignore genes . Their relation as younger children I think that more
than anything else made their relationship different with Kroeber.
I think the difference there was an age difference perhaps, because
from the time Kroeber first knew Clif and Ted before we were married
he was on very good terms with them and paid a lot of attention
to them and included them in everything that we did that was
possible to, like picnics and such.
Brower: So you think it was not a function of their not being biological
children, but it came really from the fact that they were older.
K-Q: I think they were different, and mostly they had different experience.
No, I think that would be, aside from whether it s a biological
father or not Clif had five years, Ted had three before, whereas
Kroeber started with the other two from the beginning, and I think
this makes a difference.
Brower: It makes a difference.
K-Q: It makes a difference.
Brower: Are you a little tired?
K-Q: I think maybe I that idiot calling up.
201
XIII AGE, WOMEN S ROLES, HEALTH
[Interview 13: February 15, 1977] ##
K-Q: Well, we talked a little about Kroeber s seven-year and fourteen-
year rhythm that I extrapolated when I did the biography and the
whole, you might say, calendric pattern began to show itself. I
was trying to think whether I saw anything of the sort in myself,
and I don t. It may emerge, or you may get a feeling for it, but
I see myself rather in places, partly, with people, and guided, I
should say, largely by my marriages placing me here or there, and
such and such principal activities or whatever.
Brower: Did you think of Kroeber s cycles as sort of an internal thing,
something he imposed on his experience, whereas yours was
K-Q: I think any imposition my feeling is that it was constitutional
somehow or other. Now maybe that is absurd, but it is as though
[he] began and finished a certain phase or something in seven years.
The typical thing, the configurations book
Brower: The folklore?
K-Q: Took him seven summers. I think that was when I first began looking
back, because I thought, "Now that seven has come up again," or
earlier, and found that it had. And then without doing any
stretching or pulling, the pattern just unrolled itself.
Brower: Really.
K-Q: I find nothing of that sort in myself as yet, but I was thinking
of my different attitudes at different ages and what ages held
some significance for me, and I don t know how well this coordinates
with other women s feelings I think perhaps it s a little
different. Anyway, I m not thinking much about any particular
feeling I thought it was very important when I became a teenager.
Of course, I think all teenagers think that, don t they?
Brower: When they re thirteen?
K-Q: When they re thirteen. You re in your teens, and I think that s
very important. And it seemed to me that people were most
nonperceptive who would say, "You re twelve years old, I suppose?"
or fourteen, or fifteen, or whatever. They wouldn t know that
I was thirteen, or whatever age it was, and that that was so
different from the preceding one.
202
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
It should be clearly visible!
It should be clearly visible,
don t they?
But I think most children have that,
I don t know. For some reason or other I don t think that had
quite the same significance for me.
Perhaps being an only girl in a large connection, and in effect
an only child I mean with the age difference between these things
may have been paid a little more attention to than in a family where
children are close together and it doesn t stand out so much.
I felt very grown up at sixteen. Part of that was, I suppose,
my ignorance [laughs] of the fact that I was with older people.
They still had the institution of the coming-out party. It s
curious, isn t it?
Yes, I hadn t thought of that in Telluride, but I should have
guessed.
Yes, a formal ball, as it was called, at the elegant small
restaurant, our one elegant small restaurant, which would do
midnight suppers and things. And the cotton-lace dress, sent by
my brother from Denver. And I told you, I think, before, my
first high-heeled satin slippers he sent them also. All right
age sixteen.
Now the next age that I think of, and I believe this was true
at the time I just went on from sixteen, and I went to college.
But before I reached the age twenty-four I had the feeling, "Now
that is an important platform," as it were. You re too old to get
away with being a young thing and not knowing. You really have to
face up to adultness by age twenty-four. Again, I don t know
whether other women feel this way or not. I did marry at age
twenty- four (or did I marry before that? I can t remember). Anyhow,
age twenty- four that is an important age to me.
You felt it was in anticipation, did it turn out to be in fact?
I don t know. I simply told myself that I couldn t get away
[laughs] with what it was legitimate to get away with earlier.
That if one weren t grown up one ought to be. That you couldn t
be -immature any more.
The next age I think I did not think of this ahead of time
as [I] did age twenty-four and sixteen I think that this
occurred to me later or has been reinforced. I think if a
woman is married, has children, has pretty well set on a course,
203
K-Q: that thirty-five is an awfully nice age for a woman. She s still
young enough in our society to have whatever looks she s going to
have. For me, I had arrived at some conquering of extreme shyness
and feeling of inadequacy and this sort of thing by age thirty-
five. There was more confidence there. People who talk with
nostalgia about age twenty or anything under thirty-five it
doesn t ring a bell with me. But I do think it s a very nice age
for a woman.
B rower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
The ages forty and fifty at forty, a woman is supposed to
be through, certainly in my grandmother s generation. She
didn t allow as how that was the fact. But I think forty is no
longer the significant age for a woman that it used to be. Isn t
that true?
What did forty mean to your grandmother, that she was through?
Oh, she didn t accept the [idea] you really were thoroughly middle-
aged. You were on the shelf for sure if you hadn t married by
forty. There wasn t a chance for you. It was a crossing the line
into the beginning of old age. I remember my mother s feeling
this. I don t remember at the time. I remember her talking about
it later.
Some women I ve talked to have a fifty-year hangup. I think
it s sort of moved from forty to fifty. Women feel that they re
on the downward path definitely. Now I don t know whether I
missed that fifty thing. I had never thought of it as a significant
age. Or whether that was affected by the fact that Kroeber was
twenty-one years older than I. I should think that would come in,
wouldn t you?
I should think it would,
neither was fifty?
Then for you forty was no big deal, and
No. It would seem to me this is not a matter of its being left
to the woman herself but apparently a great many men have this real
middle-aged trauma. They have their menopausal thing. I think a
person who has a career, whether man or woman, would be taking stock
at forty. I think a man who is not established at forty in our
society probably has legitimate feelings of panic. I m talking
about middle-class people who expect to be established, and this
sort of thing.
You re suggesting that this in women s lives is sort of a byproduct
of their husband s uncertainty, and if you were contemporary with
your husband you d feel the same things?
204
K-Q: This would seem reasonable to me. Yes, if you were a contemporary.
It takes various forms. Sometimes it s panic about career, status,
this sort of thing, with men. And sometimes it s sexual panic.
Or they re all mixed up. And this certainly the woman would
participate in this and it would make her more conscious of those
ages, I would think, than I had any reason to be by way of my
husband.
Brower: So whatever you were going through was strictly your own, and it
didn t amount to much?
K-Q: No. I didn t think of the thirty-five much until I was forty-five
or fifty- five or something like that. Thinking back, I thought,
"Now that really is a nice time," you know.
Brower: I think it must depend very much on what is happening in ones life
at those particular periods.
K-Q: Of course, of course it does.
Brower: Far more than any innate, built-in mechanism.
K-Q: I think so, too. And I m absolutely sure that s true with me,
because I m just a sponge to pick up whatever tension, emotion,
happiness, unhappiness, strain whatever is around I just pick it
up and react to it. And sometimes I never realize why I was either
under strain or feeling great or what. Sometimes I realize
afterwards what was going on was not particularly initiated by
me, but I was amongst it, as it were.
I touch in my article in Co-Evolution on the age-unconsciousness
thing. And I think people are or they are not sort of constantly
age conscious. And it works both ways with me. The age of a
person is the least important thing to me. I have some of the most
pleasant memories [of] or actual ongoing, what I consider, adult
relations with certain children. My naughty little granddaughter
Katy well, she s only half in the real world, but on the other
hand she s very mature in her fantasy. And I ve felt that in
sharing books with children. I have to have a complete respect
for a book I read to a child. I can t read the stuff that bores
me. I think one should enjoy what one is sharing with a child or
sharing with anybody.
I was trying this morning to think what it was one feels a
comfortableness with a person and it has nothing to do with one s
own age or the other person s. Or you don t feel comfortable. And
it has [nothing] to do with agreement. Some of the people I m
fondest of they re not impossible people, but I don t in the
least agree with their politics. They re likely to be far more
conservative than I am. As long as they re reasonable people and
have a point of view.
205
Women and Men
Brower: It s something much more fundamental than an opinion, isn t it?
K-Q: Oh, much more.
Brower: It s an honesty, or
K-Q: Yes. I m sure about very few things really. I mean I m not so
sure I m right about very many things. So it isn t agreement. I
grant you there are limits of prejudice beyond which one just
isn t communicating. We re talking about something different than
that. And I think part of my attitude towards Women s Lib is
conditioned by the fact that I never knew well a male chauvinist
pig. I can name some, but they don t touch me. Nobody that has
really touched me, that I ve been fond of or involved with, has
been. And I wonder one must do some selecting oneself there.
I suppose I was fortunate in having a father and mother with whom
this thing wasn t an issue, but [who] were living rather differently
than most people were then.
Brower: I wonder sometimes if there is such a thing as a really thorough
male chauvinist pig. Sometimes the definition seems to be arrived
at by very superficial criteria.
K-Q: I think so. I think so, too. And so far as prejudice or preference
for difference is concerned I share that. I like sex differences
and all kinds of differences color differences and this sort of
thing.
Now going back to what I think is I think a great deal about
me is conditioned by shyness, by a preference to be the listener
rather than the speaker. I like to be the onlooker. And I think
maybe that is why, by and large, I have a preference for men over
women, which has nothing to do with the particular women that I
think are great. I mean that I m really fond of and like to be with.
But if one is meeting casually and without deep affect at a dinner,
at sitting down talking over a drink, or something like that I
think men I guess I m more at ease with them. Of course, I was
around many more men than I was women growing up. And I think a
shy person, a shy woman can sort of be an onlooker and not an
active participant more easily with men that talk rather than with
women .
Brower: My Women s Lib friends, when I say something like that, insist that
it s because I ve been socially conditioned to think that men are
more interesting and therefore I find them more interesting, though
I find that hard to believe myself.
206
K-Q: I think it s hard to believe. No, I don t think it s that. And
this reminded me I don t know whether this enlarges the subject
or not, but at Kishamish we had a great many guests. That s one
time I had lots of house guests, and I loved having them and
played that game out. I had enough of house guests. But anyway,
I observed how much easier it is for a man to be a house guest
than for a woman. Now this might not be true in a country house
in England or the equivalent of which in New England, where 1
visited a few times, where it s really on a size with servants, so
there is nothing really intimate in the household arrangement.
But where you have a man or a woman coming into a setup like
Kishamish, where there s one bathroom [laughs] for an indefinite
number of people, and where I had help with the cooking but there
was a lot of housework to do, and sometimes I was doing the cooking
and so on, and with small children about, the woman is on the spot.
Any woman is .
Any woman is supposed to feel that she knows what
to do with children. She s supposed to be able to be helpful to
her hostess, and the man is under no such responsibility.
Men sat in there and it was comfortable for me and comfortable
for them. Only with some women did it work. Some women were,
I m sure, kind of miserable. Here were the children all around
about and they didn t know really they didn t have children,
didn t know what to do with them; I m thinking of two or three
specific people. The whole thing was really trying for them,
and I felt it was I felt sorry for them. There wasn t much you
could do about it. I mean, there it is.
Brower: One of the things to add to that, it seems to me, is that men in
that situation are often quite insensitive to the currents of feeling
and mood, which is just great, because then the undertones are
easier to ignore.
K-Q: Right. And in my experience men well, get along better with
children isn t what I mean. I think they re less confronted. They
don t feel it [meeting children] as a problem. Generally speaking,
this was true of older men or with the graduate students when
they d come they felt no necessity for liking the children or
paying attention to them. Therefore the kids just accepted them.
Men usually liked them. I think men are really easier with children
than women, and it s partly because they feel free to either go
along with them they d play croquet, or they d take a hike, or
something or they wouldn t.
Brower: They could take them or leave them.
207
K-Q: Right. And the children could do the same with them. And children,
of course, pick up any uneasiness on the part of the other person
and that probably turns them either on or off some way that isn t
quite normal. That s a little bit off psych. I think it has to
do with what were you thinking of?
Brower: It just amuses me because I d observed this myself so much. And
recently we have had guests and I ve had a fresh opportunity to
observe this.
K-Q: Right. A woman cannot make the assumption in a household that a
man can. I m not at all sure if this has to do with Women s Lib.
I think [for] a woman, certainly, some of her role is biologically
determined. And there is this feeling women are supposed to like
children and houses and such, and a great many women don t. I
don t like all children. And until I had children of my own I
really didn t know what to do with children. I hadn t been around
babies or younger children and I really did not know what to do
with them.
Brower: Yes, there doesn t seem to be any handle, really, until you ve
had your own.
K-Q: No. Did we go into this matter, I don t want to repeat myself
unnecessarily, but the fact that I m very bad with a group of
women?
Brower: We did a bit.
K-Q: We had done that?
Brower: In your living arrangements when you were in college?
K-Q: Yes, this undressing before women and this informality and this
sharing of intimate secrets and this sort of thing. I think
partly it was I had no pattern for that. I had very good girl
friends, but somehow we didn t go in for that. Perhaps because
there always were boys and men around or just our temperaments
or something. I had had no experience of it.
Brower: You don t think it was part of the period?
K-Q: Well, I met it in college. I don t think so. I think some women
have always done it.
Brower: I attributed my own situation, which was the same, to a sort of
diffidence that came from conventions of the period.
208
K-Q:
Brower ;
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Well, the manners and manner of it were different, but I think some
women have always got in corners and whispered about intimate things
and some haven t.
I dare say that s quite true.
Now, let s see. I really did not get over the dressing-undressing
business until Kroeber got me over that as far as I ever got over
it.
Now this I may be jumping. I just sort of put these things
down as they occurred to me. I think what I was thinking about
was trying to give you some sort of a thirty-ish picture. We ve
stuck pretty well to the twenties for the most part. What I see
as a thirty-ish picture of where I was, of what I was.
Now it was certainly not until after Kroeber s death that I
assumed certain sorts of responsibilities. He would take over
where I felt shy or inadequate. I would gratefully let him. I
remember one time it was at a meeting in Kroeber Hall or on the
campus with anthropologists, I mean quite a large meeting and
this anthropologist from Stanford whose name escapes me threw a
question at me to the effect that I was secretly writing about Ishi.
I was at work on the thing. And I hadn t been questioned I d
never had a question like that thrown at me and it was sort of
a demand that I talk to this subject. And I couldn t stand on my
feet, I couldn t say one word. Kroeber realized that. He simply
took over and handled it very nicely, but did it for me. And
really, as long as I had him around, I didn t there were things
I had to do afterwards that I was doing for the first time at a
very old age to be doing them for the first time.
He was near you and sensed your dilemma and just handled it?
Yes. I think it was partly the it wasn t that I couldn t have
said a sentence or two, except that the thing came so unexpectedly
and it was couched in rather I don t think the man meant it but
it was couched in
He was aggressive?
Aggressive. And I m not very good at handling aggression anyhow.
I really am not.
How did he know you were involved in the Ishi project?
This I don t know. Somebody evidently he d heard some I was not
being secretive about it.
209
Brower: That s what I wondered.
K-Q: No, it was just I wasn t talking about it, because for weeks or
months I was not sure I was really handling or could handle the
material or would bring it to a point where it would become a
book. And I certainly didn t want to be the only talking I did
about it was with Kroeber. This was before Lucie [Dobbie] you
see, the [U.C.] Press wasn t involved in that book until the
book was pretty much on its way. And I think I just didn t know
how to handle it, that was it. I think the later experience,
after I d published a book and so on, threw me into a different
public relation. I wouldn t be disconcerted by such a question now
is what I m trying to say.
ft
Health
K-Q: I d like to come back to [my father s family] just a little bit
here. We won t go on and discuss the Ishi thing now. Part of this
picture of the thirties really requires some reference to my
health, which was not particularly good then. And I think it is
probably apropos to review the matter of my health, anyhow. As
I ve said earlier on this tape, I think my constitution was like
my father s, and this morning it occurred to me to try and say what
I meant by that aside from physical type and a certain physical
fragility. I think we were a combination of stoic and neurotic,
which is a bad combination, because it makes you very hesitant to
share, to admit to being tired, to admit to a great many things.
It was very hard for me to get to the point where I could just say
and mean it: "Some women can do ten times what I can, and that s
how it is. There isn t anything I can do about that."
I have physical endurance of a sort, but it s a nervous
endurance. I think I can stand up to some things I ve seen other
women not stand up to, but it takes a tremendous lot out of me.
And I think this stoic /neurotic thing may even be a type, [laughs]
It makes it very hard for oneself and for the other person to
really get at what is going on. And I think the psychosomatic has
been terribly mixed up with a great many of the things that were
wrong with me, because the list of them puts them right in the
psychosomatic field.
210
K-Q: One is that I d suffer from migraine headaches the first I
remember was in my last year in high school. In other words,
from thorough physical maturity on, and although if you live long
enough you tend to outgrow them, I still have, with strain and
tiredness, tension headaches and migraine headaches. And those
are certainly
For years I had miserable sinus trouble here. And in those
years I looked forward to getting up to Kish and out of the fog.
Now this is no longer a fact that I seem to have adjusted to, but
I had years of that.
4
Then I began life in an iodine deficient area. I think I
said once that I had an incipient goiter when we left, and have
always been hyperthyroid I am to this day. I don t think that is
a psychosomatic thing, but it is determining of a particular type
both tension and a great many things.
There was this fragility. I think I may have told you that
my mother took me out in a little carriage bundled up. This was
the doctor s recommendation. I just seemed fragile and I wasn t
gaining weight. Perhaps I would have been a runaround, but she
would bundle me up in winter weather and take me out for several
hours bundled to the eyes but in this fresh air. And I think she
felt I was quiet and entertained and happy there it gave me rest.
And that it pulled me through.
I was not particularly prone to childhood diseases. Perhaps
we didn t have the exposure there [Telluride]. I had whooping
cough, for instance, as an adult, which isn t a good time to have
it. I didn t have many I think the only childhood disease I had
was measles .
Brower: Did you have them along with your children then, later?
K-Q: No, no I didn t. I think there, where I had no immunity to flu
and this sort of thing, I think [to] these other things I must have
had a fair immunity.
Then before Ursula s birth yes, between Karl and Ursula I
had a miscarriage.
Brower: Between ?
K-Q: Karl and Ursula. And then after, Ursula was still very small
apparently I was anemic then. It wasn t really properly diagnosed.
And I had a stomach ulcer. I was always a stomach ulcer type. If
I got overtired, this is true to this day, if I m overtired and
eat well, I mostly just don t eat, but if I do, it just doesn t
work.
211
K-Q: This was bad. My bad time was in the early thirties. Then this
was taken care of. I was very careful about it. There were years
that I didn t drink anything at all. And I was careful about
I kept quarts and quarts of milk. One of Ursula s boyfriends,
when this was true as late as in the fifties, gave me a bottle
of milk for a Christmas present [laughter] because he couldn t
discover anything else that I seemed to take. I would drink milk
while other people were having a cocktail or something, and Karl
would say, "Ma s the only person I know of who can get high on
milk." [laughter] And so I had the last flare-up of the ulcer
that s why in the fifties I wasn t drinking anything I had the
last flare-up the summer of 47 when Kroeber (was it 47 or
48?*) taught at Columbia, and then we went on to Harvard. That
was when he was retired. And I got a very bad infection there
hot summer in New York and didn t come out of it very well and had
a flare-up of ulcer, which is the last flare-up I had.
Brower: Could we go back a little bit? You said the bad time was in
the early thirties. Wasn t there an operation?
K-Q: No. I was never operated for ulcer. I was in hospital, but I
wasn t operated.
Brower: And the time you were in the hospital was in the early thirties?
K-Q: Yes, it was. I can t quite remember. Kroeber was operated along
later in the thirties gall bladder. No, we got by this by way
of rest and diet. But anyhow, that picture, if it is a picture
Brower: You left out the malaria.
K-Q: The malaria was earlier.
Brower: Earlier?
K-Q: Oh yes quite.
Brower: But I mean when you were listing the
K-Q: Right. Because certainly the effects of that lasted a number of
years, really. The acute attacks no. The acute ones were over
mostly the first year and certainly the second. I had a little
flare-up, however.
*Kroeber taught at Columbia in the summer of 1947 and at
Harvard for the academic year 1947-48. See Alfred Kroeber,
a Personal Configuration, pp. 207ff.
212
Brower: That was about 1915, wasn t it? Or 1914?
K-Q: 15. 15, 16 then that as such didn t come up again, but I think
that left its mark, too. I think those very serious infections do.
And probably I had an overdose of x-ray beyond doubt when they
treated it with x-ray. They didn t know about how much to use then.
Brower: It s really quite fortunate, isn t it, that you were able to have
children?
K-Q: Yes. [phone rings]
Brower: There s the phone. Should I get it?
K-Q: No, because I ll tell you: by the time we get there, Anne it s
clear in the dining room they would have just hung-up, and if
it s something important they ll call back. No, you just can t
get to the garden. If it rings a long, long time then I know
it s somebody I know and they ll hang on, because I m either
right at the phone or I m just too far away from it to get there
with five rings .
Brower : Yes .
They gave up .
K-Q: They gave up.
Brower: That x-ray treatment, in your late teens it was, wasn t it? It s
amazing it didn t do more harm than it did, it seems to me.
K-Q: No, of course, it was up here, [points to neck]
Brower: Right, but did they know about lead aprons and things at that time?
K-Q: I think they did. They d been doing x-ray to get a picture from
and perhaps they were using x-ray for other treatments, but this
was the first time in San Francisco, anyhow, they tried x-ray for
an infection of the lymph glands. No, I think that the technique
for protecting themselves [was] nothing like the protection that
there is now.
Brower: Remembering the x-ray machines they had in shoe shops I just wondered
if they thought about it at all.
K-Q: Well, probably not too much.
Now what I was trying to say was this that this medical picture
of the thirties is, I think, typical. I think if it gives a
picture at all of the temperament, I think that this is the one
that has remained. And the weak things there are the main weak
things the headache, the stomach and head. Of course stomach and
head are so intimately connected in terms of nervous system.
213
Brower: But I get no sense at all of a hypochondriac who spent time in bed.
I mean, you were having those enormous numbers of people up. You
went on with your regular life.
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: The stoic seems to have triumphed over the neurotic. That s all.
K-Q: Yes. I had opportunity, always, to rest. And I always did have
to rest. From the time I nursed my first baby I took the rest
after lunch, which I continue to do to this day. And if I don t
I need that. I always did need rest and retreat, and if I had a
migraine I really had to retreat, because I had migraines before
they had Cafergot for treating them.
Brower: I didn t know they did have anything to treat
K-Q: Yes. Cafergot it s from ergot. It s an ergot derivative.
Brower: It must contract the capillaries.
K-Q: Yes, it does. And they discovered it they were giving it to
disturbed people for quite other purpose (what I don t know)
and had the histories on some of these people. It was in the
sanitarium. They began to notice in the history of people who
suffered from migraines that those people got a remission when
they took the it wasn t called Cafergot then.
Brower: Could you spell it for me?
K-Q: C-a-f-e-r-g-o-t. Now what they were using was just some ergot.
Brower: Contracts smooth muscle, I think.
K-Q: I think so. And then they developed the Cafergot adding a
caffeine to the ergot thing, and I don t know what else, in
an effort (and, I think, a successful effort) to lessen the extreme
symptoms that come with ergot. Some people can t take Cafergot.
And at first I took it by I took shots. I would get to the
doctor, and finally he taught me to give myself shots. When they
developed a capsule it was very much better. The shot always
[affected me]; I might not always be violently sick to my stomach,
but unable to eat and feeling queasy and I would lie down until
these were over. Once I got the pill as soon as you feel it coming
on you take it. And some people can t take it.
214
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower;
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
B rower:
Actually the only thing I ve heard recommended for migraine is
bio feedback, which I m convinced would be helpful, if one could
learn how to detect what the things were that pushed you into it
in the first place.
Yes, I don t know whether that would do it or not, because by the
time I mean, you would have to know beforehand. Because once
the cycle has started it apparently has to complete itself,
although you can know perfectly well what started it. And you know
being very, very happy and gay, but tense in a happy way, can set
one off just as well as any other sort of tension. Any tension
it can be a very happy tension that will do it.
So although you had these problems, you could control them with
sufficient rest and retreat from things to carry on more or less
as you did.
Yes, but I do think it has determined and determines to this day
well, I m not sure which comes first. I like a fairly retreat sort
of life and I was able to give myself that, and I can see all
sorts of neurotic reasons for this . And I think the physical
picture, with all its psychosomatic elements, works into the same
sort of thing. And which is cause and which is effect there
must be a great deal of inter- and re-action. But it has determined,
to a certain extent, a way of life for me.
preferences are there.
And, as I say, the
In short, the kind of life that had been imposed on you by your
health was a life that you would have chosen anyway.
Well, I suppose it s hard for one to say. Perhaps if I had my
mother s energy I d have chosen a more extroverted way of life.
But I think I was my father s you see, I did have the pattern of
my father, who also withdrew when he was tired, and there was no
doubt that he had this much physical energy and no more. And
I think there s no doubt that that is a fact with me. But another
person would surely have handled this differently.
What I m trying to do is to give I don t know whether this does
it at all or not what I see as probably a pretty consistent
health view, although the things that have happened differ with my
age and so on. I think they are related.
Earlier when you were in the field, in Peru, for example how
was your physical health at that time?
215
K-Q: It was good. There again I was no great I had my limits. But
I had mostly felt good within these limits. I had not thought of
myself as a sick person. I had been aware, and finally made myself
really aware, and faced up to my limits. As I say, I think my
granddaughter Kate is very much like me. She is fragile. She is
subject to total exhaustion, when she s exhausted. She just goes
like a monkey when she goes. And pretty much within the limits of
monkeydom that you can exercise [laughs] at my age, this is what
I like to do. I like to push and go over the top and then just
collapse. There is a temperamental preference there. But there
have been these limitations, which are partly physical and
partly psychic. And which, I should say, had to do with not being
terribly disciplinary toward myself, although guilt-ridden, but not
being very effective about doing something about it. [laughs]
As I see the temperament repeated in Kate and in my Ted I
believe it is one that has this blotter quality of picking up
[emotions]. Ted is immensely perceptive about other people and
other people s feelings and this sort of thing. Whereas another
person can turn that into doing something about it (Ted has learned
to do that, and was always more given to it than I), I kind of just
took this all in myself. I think this is why the many migraines
and things. I didn t have any very good outlet system, I think.
And probably this is true of a lot of migrainish people.
Brower: Do you think there were frustrations in your life that you were
not really consciously aware of in the role of wife and mother
(I suppose that question comes from my Women s Lib connections)?
K-Q: I had no sense of frustration except that frustration which I sort
of wished on myself. I didn t like this sense of inadequacy that
I had meeting people and this sort of thing. So far as marriage
and what I was doing no. I think [I had] plenty of frustration.
For one thing, I have always had, I still have, a great value for
not showing anger. And instead of pouring out and shouting at
somebody I behave myself and then eat it in. I think this is a lot
of damn foolishness. And that, of course, makes for frustration.
Brower: How did Kroeber respond to your migraines and illness? He didn t
push you to try to overdo?
K-Q: No, no quite the contrary.
Brower: And, of course, the health you enjoyed was so far superior to the
health of his first wife.
216
K-Q: Yes, yes. When I was really sick and miserable there at one [time]
while Karl was in hospital in San Francisco I was in the hospital
at Alta Bates, and that was pretty rough on Kroeber. And I had a
sense of enormous guilt about that. Remembering, I don t think he
ever mentioned it I don t think he even thought that way. But I
was aware of what he had gone through [in his first marriage], and
it seemed to me just too much that he should have another situation
in which someone was sick and the rest of it; it just seemed
terribly unfair. I certainly didn t get the idea from him I had
that all on my own.
Brower: Did you articulate things like that.
K-Q: Not as much as I should have. I think this is part of the trouble.
It s really only with Arlan Conn as my internist that I have learned
to give him anything like the sort of picture that he wants. I ve
become, these last months, fairly good at it, and ever since I went
to him much more so. Partly, when you get old enough some things
become simpler, and then he was able to communicate to me the
necessity for my telling him as plainly as I could. And he didn t
care how I interpreted what I said. He wanted to know what I felt
and this sort of thing.
No, I didn t communicate. And I think I never talked about
my health at least not willingly. If people would ask me
questions I d answer them. But it would probably have been
a great deal better I know it would have been a great deal
better. No, I think I ve got fairly over it as fairly over it
as one does but I was, I would say, as good a suppressor as I
ever knew, [laughs]
Brower: It s funny, because it doesn t seem to accord with your personality
as I ve known it. I ve always seen such candor.
K-Q: Well, it just seemed to me that this was not something to push
on somebody else. And I m sure I was brought up that way. My
father didn t push his special health problems on the family,
didn t impose them on the family, or he didn t talk about them.
So I suppose I had a pattern for it. And it never occurred to me
that after all he might have complained or might have imposed his
schedule, or his tiredness, or his convenience on the family. This
didn t occur to me. I mean, it just didn t happen that way.
And left to myself I am nonanalytic, Anne. I have to sort of
zero in to pull these things out. But to sit down and sort of
worry them like a bone and then get some knowledge or wisdom from
it I m much more inclined to put [it] back on the shelf and be
on with it.
217
Brower: It doesn t seem to fit in with the neurotic aspect, does it? If
the illness is neurotic one supposes that the person is going to
worry it over and talk about it.
K-Q: I think there is the neurotic who just plain doesn t talk about it.
And it s just as neurotic, I think, [laughter] It s like the
nervous fat person. That s certainly a real type. Yes, one thinks
of the neurotic as imposing his troubles on you, but I think that
isn t necessarily true of all, or his imposition is a far subtler
one. I think the imposition is by internalizing it and making
matters worse for himself or being unresponsive. In fact, it
occurs to me that this may be really tied up with this sense of
privacy thing we were talking about a tape or two back that I
had it and I made these distinctions and so on. It may very well
be all part and parcel of the same thing.
Brower: When you were widowed and alone how was your health at that time?
You ve not had great ups and downs in your health, have you, in
periods when it was essentially bad?
K-Q: Except during the thirties with the ulcer thing. There were a
number of things. It was a bad time for the migraine. And, in
fact, it was a bad time
XIV POLITICS, RELIGION, WORLD WAR II
[Interview 14: February 22, 1977] H
Politics
Brower: I don t have any clue to your real, formal politics.
K-Q: I ve always called myself an old-fashioned liberal, and I think
that s what in fact I am, with the particular virtues and particular
limitations of that. I am nonpolitical, I think, compared with
people whom I would call strongly political. I only got interested
in politics as such by way of a personality that I felt strongly
about. I think politically I ve voted Democratic all my life.
Brower: Before we get too far away from it, what do you consider the virtues
and limitations of the old-fashioned liberal?
K-Q: Well, I think I do very easily fall into rather sentimental and
sometimes not at all practical programs or goals. I don t think
the liberal is necessarily realistic. I think he s a very decent
chap and, I think, very often is not political but wants decent
government, is really broad-minded, but probably not tough-minded
enough to be all that much use, except as, perhaps, a neutral
218
K-Q: carrier of decent ideas. But probably very little use, for the
most part, in a campaign or that sort of thing. Not much of a
definition I m not any good at definitions.
Brower: We ve got his limitations now. Well, we ve got them both, haven t
we, in this resume. I think that does rather well.
K-Q: I think this is why there are a lot of us around and you, I m
sure, fit into this category the hill-libbers, that we re called
here in Berkeley. Well, I think that lots of the hill-libbers
there are a great many of, you might say, these sort of [laughing]
soft-minded liberals. Soft-minded, not hard-headed enough. But
we are a force that the conservatives and the hard, far left have
to take into consideration. Sometimes we get in the way of the
one, and sometimes in the way of the other, but we re always there,
I think, messing things up a little bit.
Brower: For both the far right and the far left?
K-Q: I think so. It is an effort certainly to find a middle road of
relative decency of politics and living and whatever it is, it seems
to me.
Brower: I found myself annoyed the other night when Paul Erhlich kept
saying, "Oh, he s just an old thirties liberal." And finally I
said, "Well, I m an old thirties liberal, [laughter] What s so bad
about that."
K-Q: "So what?" And as people crystallize into these extreme attitudes
it seems to me important that there should be this sort of off-side
liberalism, which I think is no use except as a background point
of view. I think it does represent what was a lot of the original
impulse and intent in America.
Brower: I have always taken that view that we re closer [to that], that
this acceptance of variety is the real American principle.
K-Q: It s our thing. It s what we have.
Brower: It s the only thing we have.
K-Q: Listen, did you listen to Carter s talk yesterday?
Brower: No, I didn t.
219
K-Q: It was at 11:30, and I just stopped for it and listened because
I wanted to hear how he met the press and the rest of it. I must
say it seemed to me he was reiterating just what we were saying.
That his intent, his ideal, is, I should say, pretty much that of
an enlightened and somewhat idealistic liberal. I suppose the
idealism is part of the thing that goes with this kind of soft
liberalism, and I suppose it s something that only a rather
fortunately placed person can afford to have. I mean you have to
be fairly comfortable, fairly secure, before you can really afford
to be generous. I m not saying this very well, but I really think
it is an attitude that must grow out of a certain security.
Brower: When you think about it in our past history, perhaps the most
notable example of that kind of attitude, combined with a fairly
practical sense, too, was in FDR, who certainly had had a fortunate
life and security.
K-Q: Yes, and that is the positive part of the Women s Lib movement.
Sometimes I m little bored by the the person who s making the most
noise about it is likely to be an advantaged woman, but really
they re the only ones with the leisure and the security and the
platform from which to launch this sort of a fight. It was true
in England. I think it s true here. And I think it s important
for me to remember that, because I can get extremely bored with
some of the attitudes that a fortunate upper middle-class woman
takes in this regard .
Brower: You say you weren t strongly political. Does this mean you never
found yourself in a picket line or on a peace march?
K-Q: I have peace marched. Not a picket-line no. I ve always voted.
I ve always had a sense of responsibility about that. I got that
from I think my father s attitude. He was always on the school
board. He served several times as mayor reluctantly, he didn t
have the strength for it. But, he said, "If decent citizens don t
do it, then we have no complaint if things get out of hand." And
if you want a good school you have to put your own energy into
seeing that you have a good school this sort of thing. And I do
have a sense of responsibility there.
These last years we ve all been disillusioned, but I ve
always felt until very recently that our taxes paid for health
and school and these things that we think are important, and yes,
if one was in a fortunate position you did pay more heavily. I
think all of that has been eroded these last years, and it would
be awfully nice if we could again feel whole-heartedly that this
was a pretty fair arrangement as things go.
Brower: I do think a beginning has been made so far as Carter is concerned,
and I like him so much better than I expected.
220
K-Q: I do too. Yes.
Brower: Then how did the oath controversy find you?
K-Q: Well, the oath controversy came we were in the East.
Brower: That s right.
K-Q: So we got it from a distance until we came home the summer what
was the crucial year [1949-50]? Whatever it was. We came home to
discover that we had two sets of friends in [Berkeley] they
weren t speaking. You had to discover on which side of the fence
they were [on] before you began talking or before you mixed your
friends, [laughs] This sort of thing.
At a step removed, it seemed to me the one person who was
perfectly clear and whose motives were unmixed in this beyond a
doubt was Ed Tolman, who started it, and who was emphatic that
younger people and people less fortunately placed than himself
should not put their bodies on the line, as it were, that he
could afford to be fired (he could afford anything) , that people
who couldn t just mustn t do this. I think a great many mixed
motives went into that [controversy] as the thing blew up large,
but I suppose this is always true.
What Kroeber said was that signing this oath was not of
importance to him that he d signed many papers crossing over into
various countries. That he would have signed it and felt that
this is another absurdity there are lots of absurdities in the
world, but that he would have respected his friends [who did not].
He respected more the people who opposed the oath. And he said he
would have stood with them had he been in active service and been
asked. The people whose ideals and motivations he respected were
on that side, 1 think, almost to a man and a woman.
Brower: Then it wasn t a requirement to sign the oath in order to receive
one s retirement or anything like that?
K-Q: Oh, no. This was, by the way, Robert Oppenheimer s attitude. I
remember we discussed it with him. And he said, "I ve signed so
many papers. If I began fussing about this I just wouldn t get
anywhere else." And I don t know what my attitude would have been
had it been put up to me directly. I m not sure, you know. I
probably would not have signed. I hate to sign papers. I have a
negative feeling toward* petitions that are brought around and I m
particular before I sign them, because I think one s impulse is to
be friendly and do it, but you re not quite sure what you re doing.
221
Brower: I had one last question I wanted to ask about the oath. Did you
manage to live pleasantly socially with those two groups for the
duration?
K-Q: Yes, a little strain though. I was very glad we weren t here, to
tell you the truth. We were [here] just for the summer during the
time that the feeling was running the strongest. And I really was
glad we were out of it, because it must have been kind of horrible
for people who were right in the middle of it and who were
infighting so hard.
Brower: With respect not to national politics now but to University politics,
was Kroeber much involved in politics within the department or
within the university? I don t really know what I m talking about,
because I don t know what kinds of pulling and hauling there can
be.
K-Q: Oh, there s a great deal of it. I think his attitude toward
committees pretty well answers that. He served cheerfully on the
editorial committee, on the committee which had to do with the
selection of a new faculty member, or had to do with scholarships,
fellowships anything about students, and simply flatly refused
to serve on the straight administrative committees, which he felt
was none of his business and it was an imposition. He kept himself
entirely out of the small infighting in the University. There s
an awful lot of that that goes on.
I think when a professor becomes a dean it s terribly hard not
to get thoroughly involved in that and go over to the whole
administrative side. And apparently some professors do that through
a kind of boredom with their subject. They sort of come to an end
or they perhaps have a capacity for administration.
Brower: Isn t there a familiar riddle? Does a son of a bitch become a
dean or does a dean become a son of a bitch? [laughter]
K-Q: That s it. I suppose I don t know whether we ve covered this
before or not. This has really to do with politics. I think maybe
we talked about my attitude toward the faculty wives and some of
the wives feeling that they were crucial to their husbands
careers and that dinners and social occasions and so on were
gauged with an eye to advancement or to knowing the right people
this sort of thing to play in a social game, which I did not do.
And I think I would have not done it even had I not known that
Kroeber s career and reputation were made before I even came into
the picture. So I m not taking any virtue onto myself, but I don t
believe it works that way. I think you just have to be yourself.
If you re a strong politician like Eleanor Roosevelt then you better
get into politics. I think she was a great politican. But if
you re just playing this under an illusion, or taaybe kidding
yourself because you want to play it. Fair enough, if you want
to play it as a social game, but I think to pretend that this does
very much for your husband on the academic ladder I doubt it.
222
Brower: I think we talked about the same kind of thing in the PTA.
K-Q: Oh, right.
Brower: Where the motivation isn t obscured very much it s really the
enjoyment of power and political activity and it s graded as your
devotion to your child.
K-Q: Right. If it s important to you to be on first name terms with
the president s wife, and the wife of the provost and dean and so
on, then that s your game, [laughing] This can be a great sport.
Brower: In political matters did you find yourself at odds with your
children at any time along the way? Were they farther to one
direction or the other than you were?
K-Q: Not politically. Ted was in the first grade or somewhere along
there. It was the presidential election when the Socialist
who was the Socialist who ran?
Brower: Thomas.
K-Q: Yes. And they had the children stand up and vote. This district
was predominantly Republican, so that the heavy Republicans stand
up. A small Democratic one, and then Ted stood up and said he was
voting for Norman Thomas .
Then my two older boys went through a period of not political
conservatism [but] they were early enough to be not particularly
politically minded. Students weren t in their day. But they
joined a good fraternity and were, generally speaking, over on
the conservative side and certainly social, as compared with us.
I said something to Ted about this. This pose, by the way, didn t
last very long, this posture. I asked Ted about it when he was sort
of in the midst of it and he said, "Well, you didn t leave us
any other direction to go except right." [laughs] But this was a
social thing more than a political.
Their grandmother, was a passionate Democrat. Later, politics
were discussed a lot here. But, no, I don t remember it as being
an issue, a generations issue. I think their most conservative
period was that, the beginning of college, which probably lasted
through the war, because their attitude was perfectly conventional
toward that. They signed up early and had no second thoughts
about it, I think. They didn t like it.
Brower: I think few people did.
223
K-Q: Right. Hitler sort of simplified that for us.
Brower: My best friend was married to a conscientious objecter and I found
it rather difficult, although all my sympathies up to that time
had been in that direction.
K-Q: Well, I think one felt as the British did that this was a matter
of life and death, as it certainly was to them, and would have
been to us if they d gone down. I think really we were left it
may have been our own fault. I would be willing to grant that
absolutely that we allowed
Brower: We permitted Hitler to come into being, and once there, there seemed
to be very little choice?
K-Q: None. I think really that that was the fact.
Brower: What were the family attitudes toward the Vietnam War?
K-Q: Dead against it all the way around. Ursula has done more active
demonstrating and peace walking and this sort of thing than I did,
but probably not more than I would have done at her age. There
has been more demonstration, more assertion, than there was before
the First World War. Before the First World War and in between
one didn t demonstrate. You had convictions and you it was during
that time that I belonged to the peace section of the Women s
Faculty Club that I told you about. That was the thirties, when
we were all very antiwar.
Brower: Yes, it s true. Demonstration as a technique, except in the case
of the very active women suffragettes
K-Q: [It was] not something that one just more or less did, which it
certainly became .
Brower: So would you feel that politics played a major role in your family
life or a minor one?
K-Q: Well, I think there was always awareness there and Kroeber was
far more political minded than I. I think it was a responsible
attitude, but except for a particular presidential campaign or
something like that I don t think it was just day-by-day central.
There was certainly none of this business of feeling that politics
was none of my business.
Brower: But neither did you go to Democratic state committee meetings and
that sort of thing.
224
K-Q: No, I m not a meeting-goer very much. No, it was part of one s life
and scheme, but it was never really at the center of direction or
activity probably would be a fair way to say.
Brower: Do you notice any tendency on the part of your grandchildren to be
more or less conservative than the family pattern would suggest
before?
K-Q: They re so different. And I m sure that the ones who are following
the route of resistance to college and having a hard time finding
their own way, particularly the boys who are doing this, are they
would be definitely left. I think Karl s sons in New York City
would probably be rightish rather than leftish. I mean, they re
complete little intellectuals and they go to a well, Paul is now
at Harvard very highbrow sort of school. And I imagine they are
not politically minded, but I think they would be far more
conservative than Clifton s boys, his four boys, who spent seven
years finding themselves and three of them haven t found themselves
yet. And now the one who has, the oldest one who has become an
attorney, I expect he is far more conservative now than he was a
few years ago, and probably than his brothers are. I don t actually
know about his [politics] I know he s a Democrat. He wouldn t
be voting Republican. There again, [with] those children it s a
social awareness, much more than a political one, I think, with
them. I m sure my youngest grandchild is going to be rather on the
conservative side [laughs] to judge by his present twelve-year-old
tendencies, but you can t tell.
I think for the most part they re directed toward the arts.
They re not particularly politically directed. I think Ursula is
more political certainly than her children presently show any
tendency to .
Brower: You never found yourself at opposite sides of a political issue with
Kroeber?
K-Q: No. We didn t always vote the same way, but no. Because, I ve
forgotten I think he did not vote for Roosevelt the first time.
I think he didn t vote that time voted for him afterwards. I can
remember sometimes (I don t remember who it was) we cancelled each
other s votes, and that was that. But I m more gullible. I m
more willing to be enthusiastic, I think. No, and my answer to that
really answers the question as to how central it was not very
central, because otherwise you would come to some sort of loggerheads,
225
Religion
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
I suspect that religion played the same kind of low-key, if any,
role in your family life.
It didn t really play any role that is, organized religion. The
older children did they go to Sunday school for a while? It
seems to me that they did, because they rather enjoyed it. There
were two or three different places different kinds of churches.
But I think this was when Clifton was going to the little Greenwood
Terrace School up here and some of his friends went, and they all
sort of went together. I think it was quite a social expedition.
No, it didn t. You see, it played no role in Kroeber s life
and none in mine, so it didn t with the children. It was a subject
of discussion.
Has that altered with the marriages of your children?
role of religion] in their lives?
I mean [the
No, it hasn t. Charles [LeGuin] ,
born in Macon, Georgia, was
certainly brought up as a Baptist, and he shed it with the
greatest of ease. As he said, his own immediate family, his father
and mother, were certainly practicing Baptists, but not very
passionate or earnest ones. But he loves to tell about his feet-
washing Baptist aunties and great-aunties and what not. But he
shed it. And Ursula never had it. Ted s first marriage was to a
woman who was technically an Episcopalian they were married in the
Episcopalian church but Joanie never went to church; she never
sent the children to church.
II
You said one thing about religion that sort of interests me when
you said you wished sometimes that you could have faith you could
buy it and have it. I wish one could have the ritual without having
to go through the belief in it, because I love ritual and a set
and ritual performance gets one by crises marriage, death, a great
many things. But [laughing] it seems a little hard to have the
ritual without the faith. You can t really.
No. But I know exactly what you mean, because in the few crises
of my own life, I hang on to the ritual of politeness, and all that
external form somehow gets you through.
Right.
226
Brower: And I m sure if one could have the kind of expression and comfort
that you get in a church it would be fantastic for periods like
that.
K-Q: Yes, and I think perhaps ritual should be separated from belief in
some fashion, and then ritual does move right over into manners.
That s what I think good manners, they re a form of ritual, too.
And it does tell people what to do; it does back you up when you
need it. It seems to me you could have a certain formality.
Brower: You can retire behind it and keep your mind and spirit somewhere
else.
K-Q: Right. But it seems to be very difficult if the cult of manners
is no longer a cult, but it s a cult of nonmanners. You can t
sort of bring manners in to your rescue. The fate of the Unitarians
seems to be a little bit I think that there s an intellectual core
left that perhaps is fairly living, but you know they ve become the
handmaidens of people who want Well, for instance, when John and
I were married John wrote our ceremony and we got this nice,
accommodating Unitarian minister to marry us. People turn to
Unitarians for this sort of thing. My grandson Karl didn t have
the same minister, but he had a Unitarian minister who went along
with this he had quite an elaborate ritual. John s was
exceedingly simple. Karl had a quite difficult one which involved
drinking his father s wine the wine that his father had made as
part of the ceremony. And this Unitarian minister went along with
this just beautifully.
Brower: Well, I think respect for the individual and the individual variation
is very deeply ingrained in Unitarianism.
K-Q: It is. And there is an intellectual side. I remember Max Radin,
who was really deeply interested in religion. Of course, he knew
Hebrew and this sort of thing. I remember for a good many years
he had a group of children who met with him, sometimes at the
Unitarian church and sometimes at somebody s house. But anyhow,
he was presenting an intellectual view of religion. Now the
Unitarian Church was the only place that he would have been given
a hearing.
And two or three anthropologists that I know who started out
as ministers kept (I don t know whether they still do) connection
with the Unitarian Church, because there again it gave them I think
they wanted a church connection. And this was it. But whether
this still obtains or not, I don t know.
227
K-Q: As I say, I think the real need for the Unitarian Church is less
than it was. People feel freer. I mean it isn t necessary to have
some sort of an anchor. You can t call it a Christian anchor
because
Brower: The Max Radin story reminds me of, I can t remember if it s the
rabbi who says, "Some of my best parishioners are Unitarians," or
whether it s the Unitarian who says, "Some of my best parishioners
are Jews," but I think there s a great deal of backing and forthing.
K-Q: Right. I think that is on a fairly intellectual level. Okay, I
think we re bust when it comes to religion and politics. Where
should we go from here?
Brower: Well, can you think of a direction?
K-Q: What is our time?
Brower: We ve got about an hour, [tape off]
World War II
Brower: So we ll talk again a little bit about World War II?
K-Q: Let s see if we get a direction there. It was for this family, and
I suppose for all families that had either fathers or sons who were
in the war, a total disruption of accustomed moves and ways of
thinking and the rest of it. I felt behind a total involvement,
because the three boys were in.
Brower: All three boys?
K-Q: Yes, Karl didn t see any action because he was so young. The Navy
had him in naval training [he] just got kind of a bad education
as a result of it. But he went through base camp and would have
been in as a midshipman had it gone on a little bit longer.
So there were the three boys . Then Kroeber was asked to set
up the language program here. It was realized that these boys
would have to know some language in the South Pacific and they
turned for the first time really to the anthropological method of
learning a language, which is to learn to speak it on the spot.
And so he set up this program and was terribly keen to do something-
when asked to do this program he was so happy to be able to be
contributing something. And he worked enormously hard on it.
228
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
It was very interesting. It was at the theological seminary here
in Berkeley set up there. And these boys came through young men
and six weeks to two months was mostly what they had (of course,
there were two or three of them, I think, [who] were kept longer
when they showed real astonishing capacity) . And they lived twenty-
four hours with this language. It was the beginning of the
language school at Monterey. That stemmed from this to which
(I don t know whether you know) John [Quinn] went; he learned
Arabic there. And for twenty-four hours a day (for John I think
it was six months), they simply thought, memorized, spoke, everything
in this language.
But this was a cram thing down here [in Berkeley]. The young
men liked Kroeber. He would go down and do the formal teaching
thing. Then he d often stay and have supper with them, or they
would go on into the evening. And he was living that, living at
really just a terrific pace, and it was during that that he had his
really bad heart [thrombosis].
Then he had to absolutely drop that [the language school] and
was in the hospital for six weeks. Then home upstairs for another
six weeks. And then back on his feet, but needing to be very, very
careful, because it was a very serious attack. I can remember that
Clif was home on leave during that. I can remember his taking me
down to hospital. And I can remember going in the back door
illegally the whole hospital situation was so terrible then. We
didn t have good rapport with the nurses who worked there, so
finally the doctor gave me permission to stay, because the night
nurse would be so busy she would neglect Kroeber. Then he would
get panicky and the doctor was afraid that this would bring on a
heart attack. So I would stay down sometimes I stayed there all
night. The doors were closed at midnight, so if I was in there then
I would just stay and take care of him. And if he knew I was
there and I could go out and row around with the night nurse. So
there was a lot I could do myself.
But it was a frightening time aside from the illness,
whole hospital situation made it really very frightening.
The
B rower:
Was this because of the war and the fact that regular nurses were
off on other duties?
Yes. And these women were very hard worked I don t know why the
hospital was so full. I suppose Herrick had additions put on and
such things then because I remember when Alfred went in there we
had a little room that wasn t a regular room at all.
The hospital you re talking about then is Herrick Hospital, not
Alta Bates?
229
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower;
K-Q:
No, it s Alta Bates. I was thinking Alta Bates was maybe more
crowded then because Herrick hadn t put on all its additions and
so on. But we had this old, tiny little room and this old oxygen
machine, which at one point leaked. I was there and I found myself
with water all over the place and I found a janitor who helped me
clean it up and who could tell me what to do with the machine .
There were just no nurses around. It was really a kind of drastic
time.
And I m wondering now why the hospital was so crowded. They
had patients in the halls. Now whether we had an epidemic about
that time or what, I don t know, but there were patients in the halls,
Isn t that extraordinary? I can t remember that there was anything
special that happened at that time.
And the nursery part was so overcrowded that the first grandchild,
who was born in the midst of all this, could stay in the hospital
maybe only two days. Which meant she came home here, and I never
really had handled a three-day-old baby before, [laughs] It makes
a lot of difference at two days and [at] two weeks. My [own]
routine in the hospital [had been] two comfortable weeks, and I d
have the baby, but always with the nurse there to take over. And
to just take full responsibility
For this limp-headed, floppy little thing.
Yes, and Stoobie really exhausted and not able to cooperate at all.
I was really terrified the first day or two.
That was the baby s mother?
Yes.
Of course the heart attack period must have been very trying, but
even the period preceding that must have been very hard on you
with Kroeber away so much most of the evenings as well as the
daytimes.
Yes. I felt some considerable concern for him. I knew he was
working too hard. That he was overdoing it. But it was such a
satisfaction for him to do it I mean he so much wanted to do it
that you just couldn t say anything. No, that was a thoroughly
nightmare period. Then he began to come out of it.
230
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Clifton was in the South Pacific. We had a telephone call. It
was understood that any time the boys could call from anywhere they
should call. And this cheerful voice came clear as a bell. "Where
are you Clifton?" "I m in Funafuti." And the radio man was playing
around with his machine, and he said, "Hey Clif, I have Berkeley.
You want to talk to your parents?" So clear as a bell came this
voice from Funafuti. He was on a minesweeper there.
It was an unreal time,
and our going up there?
I ve told somewhere about Kish[amish]
Yes . The three of you alone without the boys .
I told that the three. And one reaction of mine to that was for
the first time I wrote poetry. And it wasn t good poetry, but it
was good for me. I used it as an outlet, I suppose. I used it as
an analysis or whatever you will. But there was a need to express
something to hang onto. Something of values that would carry over.
It was such a thoroughly disruptive time.
Each night at ten o clock I don t know whether you had this
routine or not the radio news at ten o clock always brought you
up to date, as far as they could, on war news both for Europe and
the Pacific. And we never went to bed without turning on that news
And when the war was over I have never since turned on night news.
I just have an absolute thing against it. I don t like to get my
news by radio or TV. I like a newspaper. But that ten o clock
news just got so burned in. You couldn t go to bed without
knowing what was doing.
And I can remember trying to interpret it.
Yes, to read through
Trying to read between the lines.
And, of course, a very bad thing about that was we were lied to so
consistently that when the news really became favorable to us in
the Pacific we did not believe it. It was weeks and weeks and
weeks before the Battle of Midway before Kroeber would believe
anything of that. We had been so thoroughly gulled. And that was
frightening, too. It was more frightening than to have had the
truth and know that it was the truth.
Then, of course, it was our hysteria about the Japanese we
felt caught there. We just didn t believe it. Lowie visited very
early one of the concentration camps for Japanese and came back
absolutely appalled. Then all the blackout thing dramatized
231
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower ;
K-Q:
[our situation] there. And certainly at the beginning of that we
didn t know where we were and we didn t dare not do it. How
long did that blackout last? Do you know?
Oh, it seemed to me at least the [street] lights were still painted
black on one side until the war was over.
I think so .
We never could afford blackout curtains, so we just retired to the
basement where there was a light that couldn t be seen.
Well, this house was simply impossible. It s got ten thousand
windows. And we got black papers. Most of the windows we just
had to leave. There was no question of being able to have curtains.
As you say, you couldn t afford it. And any crack would show. No,
that was really an unreal time .
Do you remember looking out the window and being able to see
someone lighting a cigarette blocks away?
Blocks away. It was very strange,
blazing on was the Standard Oil.
And the shipyards .
And the one thing that went
Just a perfect beacon. It seemed to me so stupid. What better
light could they have had coming in? I can remember standing
the first time there was an alert standing out on the upstairs
balcony (a perfectly clear night) looking straight past the
Golden Gate. And Kroeber said, "By Jove, if something s coming
through that Gate I m going to see it." Standing out there and
watching. There were only two or three alerts, weren t there?
I don t remember.
Well, I think there were probably more than that.
There probably were.
But short ones .
It s curious how one forgets. But that was really an unreal time.
Do you remember the emotions of Pearl Harbor day? I m sure you
do. The first news about Pearl Harbor?
That was really one of those things that you couldn t react to it.
It seemed impossible. "This should happen to us?"
232
B rower: Yes.
K-Q: You realized how smug we had been; how secure we had been.
Brower: Remote from war.
K-Q: Yes, or from anything approaching what England had gone through
or any other country than ourselves. We re still innocent of
really knowing that. I think people were in a sort of state of
shock, of nonfeeling. Did you ?
Brower: It just seemed so unbelievable. And also, of course, the uncertainty
about there was no real reason why, if they [the Japanese] could
be there in Guam, they wouldn t be at our shore any minute.
K-Q: Precisely. And, of course, this was where we were caught you
couldn t actually protest, although you were sure the action was
wrong this incarceration of the Japanese.
Brower: I had very strong feelings about that, too, but I think we forget
that we believed the Pentagon at that time far more than we do now.
When a ranking officer said something was a military necessity most
people believed it.
K-Q: Right.
Brower: I think we d be less gullible now.
K-Q: And it was only after the fact that we began to realize how the
Japanese had been bilked and how selfish commercial interests really
got active. I m sure the first impulse was military and perhaps
well-intentioned, but certainly nothing that followed was.
Brower: I assumed that there were bad economic motives that had a role in
that from the very beginning.
K-Q: I think there were I now think. At the time, at least we did not
think that.
Brower: I did, and I felt awfully isolated, because almost nobody did.
K-Q: Then down at the university there were Japanese people that one
knew and this was so absolutely absurd. This was what really sent
Lowie on his first trip. And he discovered the Buddhist priest
that was there in the museum so long. What was his name? Well,
he found him in this camp and talked to him. They became good
friends. And Lowie said, "Well, when this is all over look me up."
Which he did, because, you see, his congregation was scattered and
all the rest of it. And I think he continued on at the museum long
233
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
K-Q: after he had his new congregation, partly through gratitude
this is how he got started, with that miserable little museum
salary. I think it was partly gratitude. Partly, I think he
could get away from his family and his congregation who [were]
always wanting things from him. When he got buried in that museum
he could just be as contemplatively Buddhistic as he wanted to be.
He must have come and gone before I was there.
Well, he was down in the preparator s part of the museum, downstairs.
What elicited that particular interest in Lowie? Did he have any
particular Japanese friends?
I really don t know. I rather think not. I don t know, to tell
you the truth. Maybe he wanted to discover he knew a lot by way
of his relatives and friends about European concentration camps.
Maybe he wanted to see with his own eyes. It doesn t seem like
a particularly Lowiesque thing to have done, now that you bring it
up, but anyhow, that s what he did.
Brower: What about Ursula during this period? She was pretty young.
K-Q: She was young. I think probably a great many of her later attitudes
got set there. But she was young and she was immensely introverted
and she was busy writing poetry. And I think it just kind of sunk
in there. You d have to ask Ursula. I think we ve never discussed
it, but she might have a great many memories and reactions. I really
don t know .
Brower: I guess I just mean what was her external life at that time?
K-Q: Her external life was very introverted, and she was very much with
us. And entirely with us when we were up country off by ourselves.
Brower: Was she in school at that time?
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: In high school, not in college?
K-Q: She wasn t in college, no. She was either in high school or maybe
she was only in intermediate. Ursula was born in 29 ten in 39.
She would just have been in junior high. And she was very much
alone. And when Alfred was sick she d be in the house with us, but
very much on her own.
234
K-Q: I remember the period as one where you sort of kept hold of
yourself. There was always this nagging anxiety sort of thing.
Except for Kroeber s illness there weren t hardships or anything
of that sort, but just this not knowing from one moment to the
next what life is going to be, the world is going to be. Just
this nagging anxiety sort of thing.
Brower: It s interesting that you say there were no hardships. That s
the way I recall it, too. But I suppose for some people the problem
of meat rationing, gas rationing, shoe rationing you remember.
K-Q: Yes. That must have been rough if you had younger children.
But compared with what other countries suffered
XV ACADEMIC "RETIREMENT"
[Interview 15: March 1, 1977 ]##
England and the Queen Mary
K-Q: We were talking about Kroeber s seven-year cycle and fourteen-year
cycle, which I suppose set ray unconscious thinking a bit about
myself. I don t discover cycles there, but I realized there were
periods saturated in one direction and then going over in another.
And as we were doing the thirties up to the forties to the end of
the war, I should say that was an end to one sort of an era of my
life. It was one, you might say, turned in toward family, toward
children little children, older, the war, the whole thing
intensely centered in family and taking place entirely within
Berkeley and at Kishamish. There were some trips in between to
be sure, but all of life seemed to me to center in this house in
the family.
And with the end of the war, and what happened with the
children, what happened with Kroeber, it was the end of that era.
And another one began which, I think, as I see it now probably ran
more or less in a single direction until Kroeber s death. That
would be from about 1946, when Kroeber retired from the University,
to 60. We ll see how this works out, but I think you ll feel
that there is that sort of pattern.
With the end of the war the children had come back none
of them had completed their education. They were all gathered
here, and the first grandchild was born here. And for a year,
approximately, with the end of the war, they lived on here. Then
they scattered. The two older boys married. And Karl had got his
B.A. at Cal, or got it that year, and then in the fall of 46 he
felt he was, for the moment, through with college, and he took a
job as a radio announcer and then [was] in charge of a radio
station in Keokuk, Iowa, for a year. So he was gone.
235
K-Q: And the two married boys moved out. Clif to go back to he had his
M.A. to begin work on his Ph.D. And Ted would have gone back to
his premed, but Ted was sick then as a result of this lung thing
that he got in the war. But they moved out to apartments and
were not here.
We were for the first time going to be alone. In fact, we
were, except for Ursula. Let me think about that. This began
then, really the children were still here but with retirement
coming up at the end of the semester in 46 Sproul gave Kroeber
a leave and we went to England in the spring of 46 for Kroeber
to be given the Huxley Medal. And with that, that was really the
first traveling I had done since our trip to Mexico in the thirties,
I mean the first traveling outside the country and it was my first
time in Europe.
And it really was, as I see it now, an emotional turning away
from Berkeley as much, or perhaps more, as a physical one. We
came back from the two months spring weeks in England came back
here, and that must have been Ursula s last year of high school.
[We] settled in here in a retirement mood, as it were, which didn t
last very long. We had [had] this trip which sort of whetted our
interest in traveling a bit.
And then Clyde Kluckhohn from Harvard visited us, and other
people, and there were invitations and urgencies to go East. So
after that one year of retirement here then we began our treks
east. Now I don t know this would be anecdotal. Have I told you
something about the trip to England? I don t want to repeat it if
I have.
Brower: No. All I know about it I know from the Kroeber biography.
K-Q: Yes, this is pretty anecdotal, but it was rather interesting
because, you see, the war was just over. Rationing was still in
full force. We had our ration cards given to us. We gave them at
restaurants. We gave them to our friends when we didn t need them
and so on. A ration for food and for clothes. We stayed in Albany
Street, just off Regent s Park, in a large, old residence that was
turned into rooms not apartments. They were rooms. Ours was an
old living room and looked out across the street to a thoroughly
bombed-out street except for the little pub that stood at the
corner all by itself. It just hadn t fallen down. The Queen s
Arm and Artichoke [laughs] was the name of that pub. And I went
back to look it up they had upgraded the name a little bit but
that was the name that was there. We went to that pub.
236
K-Q: Farther down the street past the bombing there was a rather
greasy Greek restaurant (the food at that time was not good in
England, as it has become since). And [the proprietor], an
intelligent Greek, liked to talk politics Kroeber could go his
food; I really couldn t. It was a bit of a problem to eat
unless one went to Soho where the foreign restaurants were and
you had excellent food there, expensive, as such things went, but
good. So we went there if we weren t out with friends. Or I could
live perfectly well in our rooms we got our breakfast, which is
a nice meal, I think, always in England, and tea. I could live
on tea. And that is what very often we had. We d eat perhaps late
midday and then have tea instead of supper.
Brower: Do I understand that your tea was supplied at the place where you
stayed?
K-Q: Yes, that was part of it. Breakfast and tea. I think that s fairly
usual in these lodging houses in London.
Brower: I know about bed and breakfast, but when I ve stayed it hasn t
included tea.
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: Was this a high tea with meat and everything?
K-Q: No, it wasn t. It had bread and cheese and crumpets something
like that. Somehow it seemed very satisfying to me and agreed with
my stomach much better than the places that were within reasonable
distance from us any place out of Soho. It was really still
overcooked vegetables and over-heavy things.
I learned how the British got through without meat. When we
first arrived there was a sort of reception lunch for us at the
Royal Anthropological Society and there were lots of people there.
There were little cheese and crackers and then there was Bovril
as many cups of strong Bovril as you wanted. And I found that this
would be quite a usual lunch. It was still strictly austerity.
But I think that Bovril
Brower: [laughing] Helped win the war, probably.
K-Q: Really. I think it did because, you know, it s much better than
any of ours. It s for real.
*
Brower: Real beefy tasting.
237
K-Q: And this would be hot and strong and good and you felt perfectly
satisfied with that. Well, it was a strange time, because London
was not they had not begun, of course, to rebuild. What they
had done was to decently put the bombed places sort of behind fences
so you had to look to see. But you walked I had much the feeling
I remember as a child when I walked with my mother in San Francisco
after the fire. It was a rather sobering sight.
Then we went to Cambridge for a meeting which impressed me no
end because there were professors there from behind the Iron Curtain
out for the first time in all the war years and so keen just to
talk shop, not talk about the troubles of their countries Poland,
Czechoslovakia, the rest of them. Just to talk shop you didn t
get any sleep. This was their week and you stayed up and talked.
That was all pretty startling.
The two trips on the Queen Mary were interesting. The Queen
Mary was , of course, converted completely to war use. And the
Queen Mary was built to be a troop-carrying warship. Have you been
on the Queen Mary?
Brower: No, I never have.
K-Q: Well, the circular cocktail bars and terraces and so on are really
circular gun emplacements for antiaircraft guns, which, of course,
they were converted to then.
Brower: As I understand it then, its original purpose was as a warship.
The conversion, really, was to a passenger ship?
K-Q: It was cleverly designed to do both. I found the Queen Mary the
whole thing very interesting. Because it was a beautiful luxury
passenger ship and apparently perfectly planned as an enormous
troop-carrying ship, protected with antiaircraft and such.
The captain and the crew that were the luxury-line crew served
all through the war the same crew. When we [went] there were not
many going over to England, but some of the crew got out deck chairs
and sort of set up these cocktail places. Of course they didn t
have any liquor, but we were mostly carrying liquor we d take
turns pulling out a [bottle] and have a little cocktail before
dinner.
The decks were entirely covered every sheltered place, every
place inside, had the little hammocks. Oh, five high they d be.
And then there were these stacks of boats life-saving boats
that could just be thrown from the deck, because, of course, the
ship as a passenger ship couldn t carry its lifeboats wouldn t
have begun to take care of the numbers of troops that they carried.
I think they carried five or six thousand troops. It s a huge ship.
And they were stacked inside and outside.
238
Brower: I d like to ask you one thing. You said the captain and the
crew of the liner, the luxury liner, served all through the war.
You mean they served when it was a military ?
K-Q: That s right. The same crew. Which I found interesting. So going
over we were in a largish, but inner, cabin, because, as I say, the
ship was fairly empty. The weather wasn t too good coming over.
Coming back it was a little like this weather today very cold over
the Atlantic, but with hot sun. And we made shelters of the stacks
of lifeboats, so we sheltered ourselves from the wind. And they
got out deck chairs and we would sit sort of muffled up to here
against the cold wind, but with the sun just pouring down. It was
really lovely.
The ship, of course, was very shabby. At that time they were
going to leave the ship rails as they were because there were
thousands of boys signatures on those ship rails. Well, of course,
they couldn t quite do that.
Then coming back we were pretty full, and Winston Churchill s
suite was turned over to the few men and women who were not the
wives of the soldiers who were coming back, under the auspices of
the Red Cross.
Brower: That s what crowded the boat?
K-Q: That s what crowded the boat.
Brower: Wives of American servicemen?
K-Q: What happened, there were just a handful they were mostly
government employees of one sort and another, except for Kroeber
and me. And the men were put into this Churchill place that was
the dormitory for the men and the women had a smaller one. And
there were, as I remember, nearly eight hundred wives, mostly of
American, some of Canadian, soldiers being brought over under the
auspices of the Red Cross.
Each wife had at least one child, and a good many of them had
two children. And they were kept in separate quarters from us.
And you d look down on a big, wide deck they were under a military
regime. They got up by bugle call. Breakfast was at such and such
a time. You went sunning on the deck at such a time. You d see
this mass kind of like a flock of birds these young, mostly
very young women, very pretty English women and these healthy
British children just all over the place. Their meals were in a
separate dining room from ours and this sort of thing.
239
K-Q: The way they were managed the way the Red Cross did it I thought
was exceedingly interesting. They had Red Cross personnel on
board. Insofar as they could there d be somebody from very close
to where each wife was going to go. If not from the town or the
state, it would be at least from the area, and if possible they
would know something, if not about her family, about the general
area and situation and so on. And they had sessions with the girls
I think as many as the women wanted.
We stopped at Halifax to let off the Canadian wives. And that
was very sad. Halifax was frozen over. There again the sun was
shining and we got out and walked about a bit. I loved seeing it.
But nobody was there, except just the proper Canadian army
contingent who would see to it that the women got to where they
were supposed to get. But it was a rather dreary leave-taking,
and the country looked, I should think to those English girls,
very forbidding. It looked forbidding to me very arctic, you
know.
Brower: It sounds as if these must have been enlisted mens wives, rather
than officers .
K-Q: Oh, sure.
Brower: I wonder if there were any officers wives among them or if they
were segregated.
K-Q: I doubt it. I don t know, but somehow I doubt it.
Then we turned down to New York. The Red Cross opened up a
beauty parlor and each woman was given a shampoo , a set if she
wanted it ,
or I guess she could have a permanent if she wanted
it, and a manicure. This was for free. So these young women who
looked so bedraggled all through this time of course, we all wore
heavy slacks and heavy shoes because it was cold and this sort of
thing suddenly burst out in, oh, their shiny clean hair, looking
very pretty, and they all had tucked away in their bags trim English
suits. They really looked mighty atttractive. And we sailed into
New York harbor in brilliant sun. The ship broke out all its flags
and the New York harbor gave one of its really great greetings .
You know the fireboats and the bands and all the rest of it.
Brower:
And so we tied up at Pier 52 on the Hudson River there, which
is a special slip made for the Queen Mary because no ordinary slip
could take her. There were, sort of behind ropes, a great many of
the husbands of these women.
Much more gala than things for the poor Canadians
240
K-Q: Oh, much more. Really, it was so dreary. I felt sorry for those
gals. And then they opened up the hold and this great bucket
would go down and pick up a whole oh, twenty prams [laughter] and
put them out there. And everybody seemed to have got his pram
they had their names on them. They got them all straightened out.
There seemed to be no broken prams.
None of us got off until they d gotten them off. And that was
[a] happy/sad mix because in some cases you d see the husband would
wave and the woman would hold the baby up and this sort of thing.
Then, of course, there were women coming to families where the
man had been killed. I suppose there was nobody in England that
could or wanted to take care of them or whatever. And there would
be a father, or there would be an uncle, or there would be somebody
to the Red Cross didn t let a woman go until she was connected
to somebody and they knew it was the right person. And for
those who weren t being met, the Red Cross kept them I think they
took them to a particular hotel or something of this sort and saw
to it that they were started on their way properly and they had
someone to meet them at the other end of the line, a Red Cross
representative, who had made sure that they were connected with
the family or husband or whatever that they were supposed to be
connected with.
That was very interesting. And I thought the way the Red Cross
handled it was quite remarkable they said that that was the
largest load that they ever brought over. I think the number was
782, and there were [laughs] I d say, an average of one and a half
children. These had been
Brower: Long-term relationships.
K-Q: Fairly long-term. They [the children] were pretty close together,
but there would be often a young baby and then a toddler.
Relocations
K-Q: Well, back from England, then, I sort of outlined what we did
immediately. Then the next year the summer of 47 that would be,
wouldn t it?
Brower : Yes .
241
K-Q: We went to New York City for the summer; Kroeber was teaching at
Columbia. And certainly the turning away from Berkeley and moving
into another sort of life and interest began there, if not before.
Ursula was with us for the summer. In fact, Karl was also with us
for the summer. Karl had got as far as he could go at his radio
station and decided that that really wasn t such a fascinating
occupation and decided to enroll in Columbia as (it is an extension;
a great many students have enrolled part-time at Columbia) as a
graduate student, and he would try writing for a year, which is
what he did.
For the summer we had an apartment that belonged to a member
of the Anthropology Department at Columbia; it was out, just a
block down from Broadway and 116th. In other words, right at
Columbia. And I remember looking in the New York Times and calling
up it was very early. We must have got there early because this
was the [May] 30th, Memorial Day. Called up and asked about some
tickets to theater, and whoever answered me from whatever theater
or from whatever I called an agency said, "You don t want to call
an agency today. This is a holiday. Just come down and get your
ticket." So I took the subway to Times Square and went to, I think
it was, six or seven theaters. I never had done anything like this
in my life. Here were the tickets to be had. We took tickets for
that long weekend, practically afternoon and evening, and I picked
up some for time ahead. I had never had such a binge of theater.
Summer theater in New York then was good and we went to theater
a lot that summer and as long as we were in New York after that.
That summer we went to theater and I wonder what they re going to
do about it now with fuel and water shortages with overcoats,
carrying them. It was a very, very hot summer and you d carry them
out as far from you as you could, because you simply froze [in the
theater] .
Brower: The air conditioning?
K-Q: It was air conditioned to the point where it was really dangerous.
And you d sit there bundled up and then come out and this hot air
would hit you and you could just barely bear to carry your coat.
Brower: It s a wonder everybody wasn t sick.
K-Q: Well, there was a lot of sickness, and I got very, very sick that
summer. No, I think it s madness that kind of air conditioning.
Well, anyway, it was certainly a very different life rhythm.
How are we doing? [referring to tape]
242
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
We ve still got time.
We had expected to come back, but by that time Kroeber was asked
to teach the year at Harvard.
You expected to come back after the summer?
Yes, instead of which we went on to Cambridge. And Ursula was
enrolled at Radcliffe. And we spent the year at Cambridge, and
before that year was out we were scheduled to go to Columbia
for the next year. And this time we took an apartment again of
friends, but we took an apartment on Riverside Drive, down from
116th Street on Riverside Drive what had been an old, very beautiful
apartment building, but the apartments were cut up. But we had the
front one with a very straight [view] across the Hudson and
straight down to we could look south to get a good look at the
harbor, the inner harbor, and the ships.
This would be 1948 now, wouldn t it?
Yes. Right,
to college.
And by this time Karl had decided to go back seriously
Brower: I m not quite sure we got all that about Karl just at the end.
K-Q: Karl had his year of seeing whether he could write or not and
deciding he wasn t ready to, which he was not ready to. Karl,
unlike Ursula, learned to write. It didn t just come to him. But
he got interested again in literature and decided to come back
again seriously and get a degree, which is what he did. And with
that return, I believe it was that year I m not sure whether
he stayed on with us another year in the apartment. I think not.
I think it was that year that he and a friend took an apartment
in New York.
Brower: And he was at Columbia?
K-Q: He was at Columbia, yes.
Brower: Excuse me he had not had his first degree?
K-Q: He got his B.A. with the navy the last year here in Berkeley. And
then took a year out had a year at this job. Then a year sort of
playing around. Well, he wasn t playing around he wrote very
seriously and convinced himself he wrote one excellent short
story, which got him into Columbia English Department, on the
strength of that story. It really was a very good story. So his
year was very far from wasted. He learned a lot and did a lot of
humming around New York during that year. That was fun.
243
K-Q: About Cambridge. I liked Cambridge. I felt comfortable in Cambridge
from our first moment there. I liked the people I met. I had the
feeling that one lives a life in academia in Cambridge it s an
Eastern version of what you do in Berkeley at least what we more
or less did in Berkeley. Very much the same sort of people. Very
much the same sort of houses, allowing for the difference in climate,
with a lot of attention to gardens and this sort of thing. A
very typical academic sort of thing. I found it congenial and
comfortable. I could see no reason for moving to Cambridge if one
was in Berkeley, but they did seem to be enormously alike.
We had a little tumbled-down mess of a New England house, which
was somehow charming and fun. And it was the year in which the East
was simply snowed in. It had been years since I had been in the
snow and I loved that. We didn t try to drive. And I made very
good friends with a woman, the wife of a retired professor, next
door to us, and saw the people that one could see in Cambridge.
Unlike Columbia, where the faculty lives scattered through Westchester
and Scarsdale and across in Jersey and so forth, in Cambridge, for
the most part, the faculty lived close in, either right in Cambridge
or a very few miles out. So it s almost as simple to see them
as it is here in Berkeley.
We went to the Boston Symphony. That was rather fun. I put
an ad in the Cambridge paper for somebody who had season tickets
who was going to be away got a very prompt answer from the
Sedgwicks. I thought that was a very nice name. And the Sedgwicks
were going to be in Europe for the year and very much wanted to
keep their seats and very much wanted somebody who was going to be
temporary. So we got their two seats for the season there. Again,
it was very much more social and very much more keyed to opera and
music. Cambridge is as Berkeley is now with Hertz Hall in
Sander s Theater there you had a tremendous amount of chamber music
and this sort of thing. Just right there in walking distance we
were within easy walking distance of Harvard Yard, I think about
eight blocks up Brattle Street. We were just a block and a half
off Brattle on the wrong side towards the river, but very comfortable.
I don t know if there was anything special about . Alfred
got his first feel for teaching as an emeritus and guest professor
and he liked it very much and was relaxed about it, and, of course,
had no responsibility beyond the teaching. He was given a secretary
so that he felt he was getting work done when he wanted to write.
These were graduate students, and we saw quite a bit of them at our
house. We had nice relations with the graduate students. This was
pleasant.
244
K-Q: I don t know precisely what I did. I wasn t awfully well that
year. I think I was really enjoying more just reading and being
social, not doing much entertainment certainly, but seeing a lot
of people talking literature or talking shop this sort of thing.
And the Kluckhohns were our most intimate friends there. I mean
we saw them more or less continuously several times a week. I
don t know there was anything special there.
We came home for the summer and then left for Columbia in
the fall. And the attitude toward home, as far as I was concerned,
changed there for several years. I knew we were coming back just
for so many weeks to pull things together, to see the family, to
pull ourselves together. Berkeley and what had been central to it
really retreated or was put in abeyance.
Brower: I was going to ask you. Was it just an abeyance or did you find
it was a sort of permanent alienation?
K-Q: At the time I came back, for a while it seemed permanent. I liked
New York. I d have liked to continue to live there. However,
Kroeber and I were aware that we were in New York with an extremely
good salary, [a] much higher salary than Kroeber ever got when he
was regularly employed. There was enough money that we could go
to theater; we could get good seats; we could take a cab home. Or
if I was downtown and it had gotten late, so that the subway would
be crowded and frightening, I could, if I wanted to, take a cab.
This sort of thing. We could go to dinner. If you can t do that
I mean if you haven t a little leeway in New York City there s
really very little use being there. It seems to me you just get
the absolute grind of living in that complicated city. Of course,
it was not as complicated as it is now for various reasons. And
then there was not the crime fear there one went freely in New
York City.
Ursula, when she would be there, she might have a date with
a man who would come and call for her or maybe would be coming
in from Princeton or somewhere and she d go down and meet him
somewhere or she d go meet Karl downtown somewhere. She d come
home alone. We didn t think about it. That was beginning to
break down toward the end of our stay there.
You see, Kroeber taught four straight years at Columbia. And
we kept the same apartment. At the end of that time I think we
both would have opted to stay, except that we realized we would
have been staying not on that fat salary we realized that there
would be just nothing. You would get all the grind and none of the
fun of being in New York, unless you have enough to cushion the
things that make it really bitter living.
245
Brower: Would it have meant retirement there, then, would Kroeber have
stopped teaching? Is that why the salary wouldn t have continued?
K-Q: Presumably. Of course, it didn t quite happen that way. He taught
other places. But during those years certainly we were quite
settled in. We didn t feel it as a well, we didn t think of it
necessarily as a permanent thing, but it certainly didn t feel a
temporary thing. And, of course, New York I had my closest friend
there [Ruth Gannett], the Gannetts. And Kroeber had family and his
then closest friends from his childhood were still living and their
families were going concerns and we saw a great deal of them. It
was his home city, and by this time I felt very much at home. I
know New York City better than I know any other city. I know it
much better than I know San Francisco because I learned New York
on my feet. I ve really walked many of those streets.
I walked one of the ones I started early was Third Avenue.
I took the subway down didn t try to do all of Third Avenue in one
day [laughing] but sort of did both sides of the street. It still
had the elevated over it. It still had the old, old shops they
were one or two-story buildings. And I did that up into where we
marketed in the Spanish District way up at the top of Third and
Park Avenue.
Karl and I conquered the subway system. We learned all its
complications, so we could go everywhere on the subway and then get
out and walk. And New York s a very easy place Manhattan to find
your way around. And I like a city I like cities.
Anyway, as to what I did besides walking in New York. I think
my whole feeling toward well, it just was a differently directed
life. Of course it wasn t children-directed any more, [even] when
Ursula and Karl were around. Ursula would come down on weekends;
[they spent] their vacations with us, and this sort of thing, but
she was in college and very much full of her own life. She was
changing. It wasn t entirely care-free, but it certainly was a
very different [life] .
Brower: There s a certain kind of freedom about being in a house that you
know is not going to be your permanent one.
K-Q: Yes, and the apartment was relatively I had some one to clean it.
It would have been hard to clean because it was an old place and
it s hard to keep old places clean in New York. But it certainly
was not very demanding. We had a great deal of company there, but
it was very casual entertainment. I didn t have any proper dishes
and this sort of thing. They weren t mine and I didn t mind, you
know? You are a little more care-free.
246
K-Q: There were times when Kroeber was sick and various things, but it
was certainly directed away from children and directed toward I
began to do just some scribbling there and simply was spending
more time with people who were themselves . There were one or two
things. Either they were literarily oriented or at that time Kroeber
was really spending much more time with artists and art historians
and such, musicians in some cases (particularly when we moved back
here the Grillers [of the Griller Quartet] were living next door
then) . We saw a great deal of musical people . He was thinking in
terms of art history. He had a long commitment to write a book
of art history, which he didn t, but we were discussing it, thinking
about it, in some cases piling up material in the museums and
planning what we would do in European museums toward gathering material
together.
Brower: Wouldn t that have been an interesting book?
K-Q: It would have been. Because in the first place it would have begun
with a background in primitive art. And then, I think Kroeber was
peculiarly fitted to do this. Did you ever hear his lecture on a
resume, a sort of history of art thing? We began in 60. We did
just a little bit of this at the art museum in Vienna. He had
corresponded with them. Just did a little bit of that.
So I was thinking in those terms very, very much. I felt
myself reading more. I think I was sharing in a somewhat different
way. It was still, and it remained with Kroeber I was sort of at
the heart of where creativity was going on, but I was just outside
it. I mean, I was surrounded with it, but I wasn t directly
participating. And I found this a time when I was excited by a lot
of things that I hadn t thought of before, I hadn t given any time
to.
I don t [remember] just how those [Eastern] years went. After
Columbia [1948-1952] there was half a year at Yale [fall 1958],
half a year at Chicago [fall 1959]. There was a year at Brandeis;
in which we lived in Cambridge. I think we came back here and then
went to Yale and then went to Chicago. We finished at Columbia in
52. And I think 53* probably was Brandeis. We took an apartment
in a little hotel there in Cambridge for that year and got breakfast
and lunch I had a little kitchenette in there.
*In Alfred Kroeber, A Personal Configuration, this year is given as
1954; perhaps the academic year 1953-1954 is meant.
247
K-Q: So these years of trekking about were years of housekeeping sort of
at a minimum and not centered in household and the sort of things
you do when you have your own house, and spending time really quite
differently from the way I had for many years.
In 54 Kroeber went several times to Stanford to the Center
for the Study of Behavioral Sciences. In 54 Clyde Kluckhohn was
there and we went down I know we were living here every few
weeks we d go down for overnight with him, stayed with him. His
wife was teaching in the East, I think then. Then we took over his
apartment from him and spent 1956-57 at the Center. How is our
time going?
Brower: We have, I would say, twenty minutes still. Fifteen anyway. What
was happening to your house at that time when you went down to
Stanford? Was there someone living in this house on Arch?
K-Q: Yes, at some point there was someone living, but I m trying to
think at what point we stopped renting it. I m not sure whether
it was for the whole period of our trekking about. Certainly for
the latter part of that we simply had a graduate student living in
house and taking care of it and keeping us in touch with it. At
some point , from the time we went to Harvard from the time we went
through Columbia we decided we were just not going to rent this
house any more. I hated renting the house.
Brower: Did you enjoy that stay at Stanford?
K-Q: I loved it. That s where I began writing.
Brower: Was Dr. Kroeber gone a lot during the day so that you had leisure
to write?
K-Q: Well, what happened was we got Clyde s apartment at Kingscote
Gardens. It s an apartment house right in the middle of the
Stanford campus, a block from the post office and such things
there right on the campus. It s in a two- acre or more, bigger,
garden, a beautiful garden. A convenient little apartment with a
sort of minimum of work to be done. And I took a look at the ample
provisions that were made for the entertainment of the wives of the
Fellows there and [laughing] it was very, very social. I thought I
was really freer in a sense there. There weren t children. There
weren t grandchildren. It was really a simpler setup than the city
ones had been in these movings-abouts . In either Cambridge or New
York, between museums and theaters and so on you spend a lot of time
pattering about art galleries and so on. Well, you don t have
that at Stanford. You more or less settle in on the farm there.
248
Brower: I take it that you didn t share in the entertainment that was
provided for the Fellows wives?
K-Q: Not very much, [laughter]
Brower: It gave you leisure of your own?
K-Q: I felt, "Well, look. Here I am. I haven t children. I haven t
grandchildren. I ve always thought it would be fun to write. Why
don t I write?" There were things we enjoyed doing. But some
conscientious person had planned things for planless women. I think
very few of the women who came there were that much interested in
all these possible things that you could do. And I enjoyed meeting
them, but not to do these planned [things] . You could be very social
if you wanted to.
And Kroeber did depending on what he wanted but mostly,
either somebody would be going up to the Center or I would drive
him up, because he liked to walk down. It was a bit steep to walk
up. I suppose we were two and a half miles from the Center. We
may have been more than that if you drove, but it wasn t very far.
Anyway, he d give me a ring generally about four and say he was
starting down, and he could walk down much more directly. And
I would start out we knew the routes we were going and we would
meet. You know the Stanford lake?
Brower: Yes, I do.
K-Q: Well, we would meet in the middle of the Stanford lake, because
about nine tenths of the year, even then, you know there wasn t a
lake [laughs]. There was this kind of wobbly path across it. So
we would more or less meet there, but he would have this walk
down. But ordinarily he spent the day up there and had lunch up
there. So an ordinary day I was alone there and free. Except for
we saw a lot of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann who was there Fromm s first
wife. People that were interesting Milton Singer was there and
his wife, who is a poet, and both of them are good friends of ours.
There were numbers of interesting people, but I was seeing them
in my accustomed way with there being people that Kroeber wanted
to see and me sort of sitting back and liking them. But it was
with reference to his socialness , and Kroeber was by that time
much more social than he had been. Our Sundays were usually we
would have Frieda over mostly on Sundays. She was so very impressive,
But in between, while he was up there, I was doing my own thing.
I wonder whether I have at least conveyed the feeling I had
of a sort of shutting down of one phase of my life with the end
of the war. Well, really, I think going to England sort of marked
it, you know.
249
Brower: There was a real physical relocation, really, as well as a spiritual
one.
K-Q: Total, yes. I think that s a pretty good place for us to stop,
unless you have some questions to ask with reference to this.
Because then the whole thing took a bit of a different turn with
that year at Stanford.
Brower: I wonder what Dr. Kroeber s particular project was during that
period. The Center period is the one that I was thinking of. He
had so many projects, it s hard to remember one.
K-Q: Yes, but he had a specific one down there. This was before he wrote
Style and Civilizations ; he went to Cornell for those lectures.
XVI STANFORD AND TIME TO WRITE
[Interview 16: March 8, 1977 ]##
K-Q: We decided to talk a little bit more about the Center for the
Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, at Stanford not financed
by Stanford, but Stanford gave the grounds on which the center was
built and, I rather think, paid the expenses of electricity, tax,
water, what not. I m under that impression, anyway. They were host
to it, as it were, and certainly whatever facilities they had were
open to the people at the center, including the library. And the
fact that the library was not altogether satisfactory for the
people at the center was not Stanford s fault. I mean, except for
the Hoover Library, the library isn t of the size and breadth of
the Berkeley library. So that the Berkeley library was used so
much there was a regular twice-a-week traffic back and forth of
books and people to the library, which made some people that
reason and some others feel that the center should have been in
Berkeley. Well, I think it should not. That was not a horrendous
trip up to the library and the very relative isolation at Stanford
the Center up on that hill I think was very much in keeping with
the idea behind the Center, which, I think, is not original with
The Ford Foundation originally financed it. And I don t know
what the individual whose idea it was Ralph Tyler was the first
director. He must have had a lot to do with the way it was set up.
It was different from the I m using the past tense here because,
although it continues to exist, I think the arrangement is
different from the original ten-year arrangement.
Brower: May I just add a footnote about the library. Apparently now there s
an interlibrary loan arrangement with Stanford that is daily. There
is a daily bus that goes down.
250
K-Q: That s interesting. I didn t know that. It may have begun with
this traffic back and forth. That s very interesting.
It differs from the Princeton Institute [for Advanced Study]
in that people come there [to Princeton] they have permanent
appointments. And I think, generally speaking, they re graduate
students, young people, who go as fellows to the Princeton Institute.
Whereas here they were of any age, but tended to be not young, and
therefore uncommitted, and very few old.
I had a few definite impressions of what was good and what was,
perhaps, a weakness about this sort of a setup. I should go back
first and say that the plan was and this was the way it was
unadulterated for five years and I think went on for ten years.
Fifty scholars from anywhere in the world were chosen. Although
the behavioral sciences were at the heart of it, they [the Center
Fellows] were chosen (and particularly after the first year) rather
more broadly, getting over into philosophy on the one hand, and
having an artist, or a painter, or a writer someone representing
arts [as well as those] representing a point of view which tends
to become the behavioral sciences , statistical-mathematical and
with a pretty heavy sociological-economic leaning. Which is all
right, but you can get too much of that.
Brower: You re saying that they did not go that heavily into the sociological
and the economic?
K-Q: Right.
Brower: They kept this leavening in?
K-Q: They found they weren t getting any deeper. They meant to, and
so deliberately used this leavening thing, which was good.
A professor was paid his salary plus moving expenses plus ,
probably, rental some help there. He was supposed not to make
money, but not to be really out of pocket because of [attending the
Center] for a year. And during the early years the center funding
paid everything. If a man really had a previous committment to go
to a lecture, or meeting, or something, or if it seemed to make
sense, he went. But the general understanding was you were there
to be, as it were, available to the forty-nine others. And on
the whole, except for a few odd balls, the people who were there
took this sort of responsibility.
It s extremely interesting to see what happens. You have a
group of committed men who are brought together and all they have
to do is to be there. There s secretarial help if they want it.
Almost everything a man wanted in the way of particular arrangements,
Ralph Tyler would see that he got. But he didn t have to do anything.
If he wanted to he could sit there and twiddle his thumbs.
251
K-Q: My feeling was that one reason it wasn t as successful as it might
have been I mean, quite as rewarding to the people who were in it
as it might have been is that the bulk of them were, say, in their
early forties. They were at the absolute peak of their competitive
drive to get wherever they were going to get in their profession.
They were being pushed from outside to publish and the tendency of
the men in their forties was to take this as an opportunity a free
year to write a book that they d been wanting to get at. There was
no objection made to that, but that was not really the purpose.
The purpose was to, as it were, sit and open your mind as you might
in meditation, but what flowed in were influences and the
personalities and the knowledge and the wisdom or the nonwisdom,
whatever it was, of the other forty-nine.
The occasional really young man there was no one there who
wasn t established after a sense. My feeling was that the
younger ones got more out of it than the middle ones . And the
older ones got really the most. Now this was not true of Clyde
Kluckhohn, but he had made it to the top. After all, he was
fifty. And he was where he wanted to be and he was willing and
eager to get just as much as he could from everybody who was
around and [to] give himself wholly to this.
What they attempted to do was to make subgroups of particular
interests, and discussions would center around something. The
year after we were there and we went back, the second year, because
there was a group who had what you might call a continuing seminar
on style this sort of thing. The year we were there Kroeber was
the oldest person there and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann was the second
oldest. And I think they got the most out of it of any of the fifty
because they gave themselves to it wholly, for rather different
reasons. I think the person who got the next most out of it was
Wally Stegner who was there, representing the arts, as it were,
as a writer. He was a very good person to have generally
intelligent. And particularly since it was very economically
sociologically oriented. His was a good voice of another sort
coming in.
Kroeber could give himself to this because the writing he
was doing was writing that he wanted to do. He wasn t under
pressure to get anything out. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann was a
Freudian analyst. She was analyzed by Freud himself, I believe,
and was Erich Fromm s first wife. She and Erich Fromm established,
I think, the first psychiatric hospital in Switzerland, and ran it
together for I don t know how many years. The divorce was
amicable there she was many years older than he. I don t know
anything particular about it, but I know they were friends and I
think they both wanted out probably.
252
K-Q: Anyway, Frieda is a tiny little person, five feet maybe, petite
and tense, an intelligent, Jewish woman with eagerness and gentleness,
She must have been a tremendously good analyst or just a sort of
natural healer. Frieda had worked all her life and she was used
to [doing] any writing that she did or thinking about her work
after midnight. She was on duty at the hospital, St. Elizabeth s
Hospital, at the time she came to the Center and on call at all
hours and this sort of thing.
Brower: Do I understand that while she was at the Center she was on call?
K-Q: No.
Brower: But it was just the habit that had been established?
K-Q: Yes. For the first time in her life she could sit in the sun and
she found herself a charming little place with an enclosed sunny
garden. And she could write at leisure. It really changed her
life and it s too bad that there was such a short time left
afterwards . She arranged while she was there that she would
half-time from then on in the hospital and leave herself half-time
to write. And she had a great deal to write because she was an
excellent and an innovative analyst and [an] open-minded, beautiful
person. She did this for the rest of her life the rest of her
life was only a little over two years. It was very, very sad.
And she was a very great influence there [at the Center] ,
because, as I say, we had these computer people very bright,
very sharp computer people including psychologists, who do have
a way of having the answers . I mean figures and computer figures
are pretty impressive. And Frieda was an excellent foil to this
because she was perfectly capable of and did understand what they
were saying, but her dimension was just a larger dimension. It
was very exciting for Frieda and it was very exciting for Kroeber.
I mean they got a lot from each other.
I think the Center changed when it could no longer totally
finance the people who were there. The sense of belonging was less;
the sense of obligation was less there was less obligation. And,
although I think it has continued to be rewarding, this dream
which Tyler really was marvelous at implementing that people
with good minds should have the opportunity to see one another
under natural and repeated conditions. I mean have days and days
and days ahead. It could be a full year if you wanted it. It was
nine months, in any case. And let come up what would come.
I think it s a great idea. It s an expensive one. It s an
expensive thing to do, but I don t know that it s any more
expensive than any sort of financing of scholarly work.
253
K-Q: Now I don t know whether there s anything more you want about
Frieda or the Center. Oh, I might say one other thing. It was
true that the women and the family situation certainly affected
how much the men got out of the Center. Beside Frieda there were
many other women, but there were predominantly men.
Brower: You re speaking of the spouses now?
K-Q: Yes, the family situation there. Now for us it was perfect. We
were right there. And the older people almost without exception
it meant that they were on bigger salaries they could afford to
rent a place that was close in. So there was give-and-take after
hours or you could just go up to the Center and they d have a little
dinner or an evening this sort of thing.
When my daughter Ursula and my son-in-law Charles [LeGuin]
were there I think it was still financed entirely by the Center.
But they had three small children. I think that isn t a fact I
think they had two small children at that time and had to take one
of these tract houses miles from the Center. It was even difficult
to get sitters because in the tracts there were not teenagers or
available sitters. And [it was] terribly expensive they paid
two or three times for their tract house what they could get for
their house in Portland. They would have people out from the Center,
but it was a much more artificial thing.
And these women, they came to California of course this wasn t
true of Ursula but I saw young women who came. They brought
wrong clothes for the children. They lived in houses that were not
as comfortable as their houses at home. It wasn t much fun for
them, and this reacts on the men. They did a great deal to try to
counteract this made sort of expeditions to the city with buses
or with car caravans this sort of thing. But I think it was those,
the younger people, who felt that had they been in Berkeley or
San Francisco they wouldn t have been, you might say, so ostracized.
Ursula knew nobody where she was, and got acquainted, but they
weren t people who would have been particularly interested in her.
They weren t people with small children. I think hers were the
only small children on the block. And she fared better than a great
many of them because, after all, they were here [in Berkeley]
whenever they wanted to be. But these women who were displaced from
the Middle West or the East did not have a good time and that
reflects. The older ones did. You see, there again they were free
and they could have a more comfortable place. But a woman with
children it isn t much fun to be transferred for a year to Stanford
and be out in the boondocks somewhere.
254
Brower: I wanted to ask you a little bit about your own situation at that
time. You were not included in the daily discussions. Would you
have been able to come along and listen?
K-Q: I went to and I believe that anybody who wanted to (wives or
family coming in) . I remember Clifton being around a few times
when there was something of particular interest to him, and his
being down there. And I sat in on the style seminars, because I
was definitely interested. And I sat in on some of the others too.
I think, yes, whatever I was interested in I went to and other
women did , too .
Brower: So you didn t feel in any way shut out of the experience?
K-Q: No.
Brower: 1 guess I thought about it in connection with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
that that kind of association with Kroeber might seem a bit excluding
to you.
K-Q: No. In the first place, Frieda is the most sociable, social sort
of person. And more Sundays than not she would come very often for
a late lunch, because we would sit out in the garden. We liked
that sort of thing. But I saw a great deal of Kroeber. They
spent a lot of time Frieda and Kroeber as it were, extracurricular
time, talking. And that, of course, I would always be in on.
No, the Center itself was not excluding. It s simply that
it s not all that convenient a place to live if you come for
a year, you know.
Writing: Beginnings
Brower: No. And for you, too, this was a time when you began your writing
in earnest, wasn t it?
K-Q: Right, it was the setup for me. And the setup for the older women
(wives) was fine. Either they could make use of the various
facilities they could come up to San Francisco for opera, and
symphonies, and exhibitions, and whatever, and whatever was going
on at Stanford. So they, as I, got a great deal out of it. But
younger women, I think, just had a rough year generally speaking.
255
K-Q: And very often, you know, you move kids, say beginning school age
you shift the schools for them for a year, which isn t so good.
And your first year in California you re likely to freeze to death
if you come from a tight house in the East or the Middle West, and
the kids pick up colds, and you don t have your regular doctor.
Brower: And, of course, I would guess that it would be even more difficult
for the male spouses of female Fellows . I know two women who went
there, one of whose marriage didn t really survive it, I think.
K-Q: I think the women who were there were not married. There was
Cora DuBois . Florence Kluckhohn would have been unhappy had she
stayed there. I think she was not a Fellow and she was teaching
and concerned with research as much as Clyde. She did not have
Clyde s theoretical mind. But she kept her job, wisely, in
Wellesley. She was teaching at Wellesley then; it was before she
had the Harvard position. She would fly out for a holiday or
even for a weekend something like that. And this worked out, I
think, very much better than it would have. I think she would have
been very restless and restive there. And probably there may have
been other women in that state that I didn t happen to know about.
It s an interesting experiment and I think it s worthwhile,
but it has some bugs [laughs] which I think anything of that sort
does . Now was there anything else you wondered about the Center
as such?
Brower: No, I think that s it. I was particularly interested in your own
feelings about it and you ve answered that.
K-Q: Yes. Now let s not go on too long this morning. And where are we
on our tape?
Brower: Oh, we ve only done
K-Q: We can go on then?
Brower: Yes, we ve only done one side, of course. Would you like to stop
and talk a minute before going on.
K-Q: No. I was thinking, unless you have something else, I could just
shift from this to what I actually did at the Center, because that
was the year I began writing.
Brower: I would like that very much.
K-Q: Okay. I may have told you earlier on the tape that I looked at this
very delightful, but full social program that they had for the
wives .
256
Brower: Yes.
K-Q: I told you?
Brower: Well, you just mentioned it was something they had.
K-Q: There it was. If you wanted to and had the leisure you could be
socially occupied five days a week at least. I thought, "Well,
this isn t really for me. I m just not that social a creature."
And I wasn t particularly I made some good friends there. Frieda
was my closest friend I made there. But I wasn t particularly
looking for new friendships as such. And we were in this apartment
which was within the heart of the Stanford campus within walking
distance of practically everything. A delightful apartment in
a two-acre garden (or bigger maybe) with a gardener. Surrounded
with this lovely garden and gorgeous weather. And no commitments
there were no children. The children and grandchildren came very
briefly for a day, or something like that. But no commitments.
And I thought, "Well, I ve always wanted to write. I think
I ll try writing this year." It just seemed an ideal time for it.
Kroeber had been doing a certain sort of analysis of poetry and I
had been doing more I had gotten into it by way of him, and I was
doing more of it. So I sort of set up this schedule. The mornings
that Kroeber went up to the center I d spend on poetry get as far
as I got that day on that. Then I d have lunch and my usual little
lie-down. Then I d take my notebook and go out by one part of the
little garden. We d have people and they d have tea out there.
It was run on sort of the English style. But I found this pool
over in a rather neglected part of the garden and I set myself
up over there. I d take my notebook and settle down by the pool.
We called it Tad Pool , because there were tadpoles in it and
three old carp and three enormous old frogs . And it was an
overgrown, neglected place. I was shocked a couple of years
later they had gardened and fancied it up, and its charm, really,
was gone. But I felt it was so much my place [laughing] that
I really resented anybody coming. Nobody came to stay, except one
woman who liked to read over on the other side, but generally
speaking people just didn t pay any attention to it. So that is
where I spent my afternoons.
And I wrote a novel there. It was a complete, full-length
novel. I think it would be between three and four hundred pages
probably, start to finish, and I m sure a lousy novel, but I
had written a great many thousands of words by the time I had
finished that novel. And the other part was by the time I had
finished the novel I had become a writer in a sense that
257
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower ;
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
##
Now what I was saying at the end of that tape was, since then,
a day in which I don t do any writing at all isn t quite as
satisfactory a day as one in which I do. And it needn t be more
than well, I can do a line, a paragraph. Of course there are many,
many days when no writing is done, but that became an established
habit, and I really prefer a day in which at some point or other at
least I do some sort of writing.
Why are there days when you don t?
of other obligations?
Because it s simply too full
Or maybe you re traveling, or you re not well, or there are other
obligations.
But the general rule is that you do.
If things are just rocking along normally. And, of course, it may
simply be letter writing, which I except from other writing, but
letter writing may take up a lot of time. Even if you don t do
very much, letter writing is enormously time-consuming and it
doesn t except very rarely it doesn t give you the feeling that
other writing does. There are some exceptions to that. Sometimes
when you really have to stretch your mind to compose a particularly
difficult sort of a letter. Then it has the satisfaction of other
writing. Otherwise I think so much of our letter writing we really
have to do, you know. It doesn t seem particularly creative. When
you can cut loose a bit then it has a creativeness all its own.
Would this apply, for example, to a letter you were writing to
Ursula?
No, that s fun.
But you don t think of it as part of a creative writing job?
No. I suppose in the old days of letter writing, when it was in
the back of the head of people that this letter might be published,
then I would think a literary person would approach it as he would
any other sort of writing. But if your letters are personal or
business, having to accomplish something or other, then I think
they re in a different category, don t you?
I suppose so. I thought perhaps in writing your own family you
would feel that this had a closer connection with the regular
creative writing. I don t know why I thought that.
258
K-Q:
Brewer:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Well, sometimes it can be fun, because sometimes Ursula and Karl,
particularly, will write a letter which simply has to do with our
mutual literary interest and we ll be discussing something that
has just come up or hit them an idea has hit them or something like
that. And Ursula s letters are so good in themselves that you re
kind of impelled to write her so she ll keep writing.
I think that was what I had in mind.
Yes. This is particularly true of Ursula. I hear from Clifton very
seldom because he writes a magnificent letter; he writes it by hand,
and it s a long, thorough letter. And he simply hasn t the time.
He has never got the habit Karl is likely to dash off something which
is just to report on the family or on something he s read or
something like that. But when Clifton writes a letter it s a letter.
He just doesn t often have the time you know it takes a lot of time
to write, say, two double pages, both sides, careful handwriting,
so I don t get many from him.
this business
Brower:
So this had its start, really, on the Stanford campus-
of writing something every day?
Yes.
Did you talk about it when Kroeber came back from the Center or
was it a private kind of thing?
No, I talked about it. I was very excited about it. Of course the
poetry we would go over together because we were doing that together.
And I think he didn t read I couldn t be absolutely sure about that
but I think he did not read the novel in process, but I would talk
about it. And I think we were not talking about the story of it
I think we were talking about whatever particular knot I d run into
that would suggest itself. I think this was how it was. Well, the
only people who read the novel besides Kroeber Ursula read it and
I think Karl read it. I think Ted and Clif never did. Of course
Ursula we were likely to be more workshoppy in our talk, and Karl,
too. Well, Clifton s writing has been strictly history and once in
a while it s fun to talk literature with him, but I haven t as much
as with the others. It s great fun to talk with Ted who chooses
not to write. I think he would write very, very well indeed because
he s a marvelous critic and the few things that he has written have
been good. And he writes a good letter. But I think he was going,
to be one Kroeber who didn t write, [laughter]
There at the C enter you had no opportunity to exploit Wallace Stegner
at this time, I suppose?
K-Q: I liked Wally.
259
Brower: Exploit is a horrid word. I meant, there he was and teaching creative
.
writing.
K-Q: We had lots of conversations. He s a delightful person and a very
outgoing one. I think Wally is brighter and more entertaining than
most of his novels. I think his nonnovel writing is excellent. He
wrote a beautiful I don t know if he calls it a biography of Powell
[Beyond the 100th Meridian] , but it s a biography of the trip and
this, as it were, learning about the West. I think that s a marvelous
book. It has his rhythmic, happy vocabulary. I think he writes
beautifully. It s just that I like the way he writes more than the
subjects of his fiction. He thinks up the most beautiful titles for
his books and stories.
Brower: I enjoyed his last novel very much, but I ve forgotten the name of
it.
K-Q: I did not read that. I know several people that said they liked it.
Brower: I think one is always surprised to find the bitter, rather narrow
personality that seems to be his chief character always. I m
always a little shocked at the lack of warmth and the censoriousness
of the person.
K-Q: Yes. Well, there may be more of that in Wally than appears on the
surface.
Brower: I think so.
K-Q: He is so very sort of finished in his manners.
Brower: And the impatience with youth that pervades the more recent novels.
K-Q: This may have grown with the years. I really haven t seen him since
a time or two that we were down there within a year or two [of the
stay at the Center]. I think I ve not seen him since. That, after
all, is twenty years. So I don t know.
Brower: Did you know Mary?
K-Q: Yes, I liked her very much, [phone interrupts]
260
XVII WRITING AND ART
[Interview 17: March 15, 1977 ]#//
Writing; Transition
K-Q: When we left off a week ago I said something about beginning to
write and I think I said quite a bit about being directing toward
writing.
Brower: You spent the mornings working on the poetry and then the afternoons
K-Q: And I think that sort of established a habit a writing habit. And
this made me think a little bit I don t know whether I ve thought
this through enough to talk about it. But I think this was a
transitional period from a nonprofessional to a professional
attitude. And I think this is one of the things that trouble women
now who aren t ambitious necessarily to compete with men, but who
do feel the need for an area in which they are pros . And perhaps
it is a failure on the part of our culture not to give a woman
more sense of being a pro when she s doing a pro job with her house
and children and the whole social picture. But anyhow, we don t
do it. "Oh, I m nothing but a housekeeper," is the way one "No,
I don t do anything but housekeeping and take care of my children."
Something of this sort. Both Ursula and I came upon this thing
not too far apart, despite our difference in age.
I said to Lewis Gannett once because I had been writing stories
for the children and some poetry, and doing some other things, and
had submitted one or two children s stories, which had not been
accepted. And I said to Lewis Gannett: "What makes a pro writer?
Because I have no value in this particular area, being an amateur."
And he said, "The pro s the fellow who gets published. I don t
know any other definition for it." He said, "It
certainly hasn t
to do necessarily with quality of writing." He said, "If
you re
published you re a pro; if you aren t published you re not."
Ursula and I both felt that our considerable families as
audience, an appreciative audience, were lots of fun and entertaining
enough to write for. This was before she was published except in
fugitive poetry journals. And at more or less the same time we
weren t aware of it; we confided this in each other later we had
the need. It came on me, as it were, overnight. I was perfectly
content, then suddenly I think I realized that, first, I was spending
more time writing. I was giving more of my attention and more of my
energy to it. And how much did I want to give if I were, as it
were, pleasing myself, period. I didn t mind pleasing myself, but I
wanted to know if that s what it was and then make up my mind on the
basis of that. So it was very necessary to know whether I was
publishable or not.
261
K-Q: About this time I had put together, or had practically put together,
the stories for the Inland Whale, which I had collected just by the
way for fun and was putting together really because I wanted them
to be somewhere except in these tiny little monographs that were
scattered around the library then. And the long-time editor of
American Folklore was here and I met him at a cocktail party. I
had sent him just a note or two on things I had picked up reading
a folklore note or two that he d published. And he said, "What are
you doing?" And I said, "Nothing that would interest you." And then
I said, "I have these stories, but I m not doing them folkloristically ,
I m putting them, as nearly as I can, into an equivalent English
to the correctness they would have in their own language instead
of the limited and sometimes vulgarized English that is all that
an interpreter may have. And he said, "Well, I m interested in
other things besides straight folklore. Go ahead and do just what
you re doing and send it in to Indiana." (The Indiana [University]
Press I think no longer published the Journal of American Folklore
but it did for many years, and that drew him and other folklorists
to Indiana.)
He said, "Perry,"
who was until this year the director of the
press, "will either take it or not, but he ll answer you promptly
and he ll give you a good criticism." So I sent it to him. Except
for those children s books, which I put out sort of tentatively,
that was the first thing I really seriously submitted. And Perry
came back very promptly with a contract. And I do remember it wasn t
[for] anything very big, but I was in hospital a few days, which must
have been rather shortly after that , some time in ihe same year
Kroeber came down with a check from Indiana for three hundred dollars.
I don t know what that was for. In those days it might have been
the original amount paid I don t know. Anyway, it was my first
money from writing and it was very exciting. It was extremely
nice to have it in the hospital where you re just sort of flat on
your face, and this gave me a big boost up.
I was working on that during this time [at the Center] no,
I wasn t [the year at the Center was] 56- 57. So we came home here
and I had finished my novel and I had finished these children s
things and I went to work on the Inland Whale. That would be how
it happened.
And another thing that fits in with that it was 58 that
we were in Yale for a half year. It was then the Whale was done
as far as I was concerned, but it got illustrated there at Yale.
I remember that because [Reco] Lebrun, the Los Angeles painter,
was in an upstairs apartment, we were in the downstairs apartment,
in a little house on the Yale campus. And I asked LeBrun if
he d illustrate it. And he said he d like to, but he was teaching
for the first time and it took all his time. He couldn t paint,
he couldn t draw, he couldn t do anything he was so terrified of
262
K-Q: these lectures three times a week or whatever it was. But he sent
me the person he considered his best student, who was a nice young
man knew nothing about Indians, had never seen an Indian, had no
ideas about Indians. But at least he didn t have any false ideas.
He didn t have the picture of the Plains Indian with the war bonnet
and the hooked nose and the rest of it. So his people came out not
particularly Indian, but satisfactory and sensitive. And it suited
me much better than he went off his rocker on the boat and gave us
an Eastern-style canoe, birch-bark, instead of the dugout, but it
was okay.
I ve got side-tracked a little bit. I was really talking about
I think this was a transition period for me. And the transition
consisted not so much in occupying myself with writing, which I
had been doing, as you see, by this time really this was how I was
spending my so-called spare time. It was a transition in my
own feeling and perhaps because one s feeling changes the world
regards you differently.
To come back to what I was really talking about with Ursula
and me we discovered separately that one of the great things was
in both cases that people would ask us what we were doing. They
would ask me and I would say, "Well, this and that," and so on.
I hesitated to say I was writing because it had an affected sound
to me. "Well, what are you writing?" "Well, you know." And now
I could say, "I m writing." Period. Because one little book was
published it made all the difference. And that has stayed with me.
Ursula said she had precisely the same feeling the first time her
first story was accepted and paid for. It was with a regular pro
journal it wasn t going to go down the drain next week and so on.
She could say, "I m writing." Period. And also, you get a protection
once you can say that. I mean people no longer feel that you re
really trying to avoid them or that there s something fancy about
it you know. And I think this was particularly true with me
because I was so old when I started. You know "What s the old gal
think she s up to." [laughs] Apparently it s all right to paint
pictures when you re old, but I m not sure you re supposed to write.
Brower: So you and Ursula came to the same point almost at the same time?
K-Q: Almost simultaneously, although separately and much divided as far
as age is concerned .
Let s see I want to sort of reconsider where I was getting on
this. It is largely the pro thing. Oh, I may be wrong about this,
but I had the feeling that women can, at the age I was able to say
first, "I m writing," I think they can say, "I m painting," and
never sell a painting. Now I really haven t talked about this with
a woman who had done this, but I do know women who go on painting
happily and say that s what they re doing. And I know they show with
263
K-Q: their own group hang in that sense. Maybe particularly in Camel
you get this sort of thing. You get it in North Berkeley. But I
don t think they ve ever sold a painting. It isn t necessary, I
think, to be able to say, "Well, I paint." Period.
Brower: Perhaps not to the same degree quite, but I
K-Q: I m not sure that what I say is fair or true. I ve never really
followed this through, because the people I know who actually are
painting, like Nancy [Heizer] does sell paintings. Not often, but
she does and she does show in small but regular galleries ,
and may
by now be showing in larger galleries. So I don t know I just have
this impression that you can do it with painting or sculpting,
but that you can t do it with writing.
I ve found in this turning a corner another thing that frees
you once you say, "I am writing." You can have some fun shop talk
with other people who are writing or who aren t writing but want
to talk about it. Lots of people like to talk literature and writing
and this sort of thing, and I ve always loved it. And it does open
gates there to conversation which somehow perhaps you ve kept
closed before because you didn t feel free to assert yourself.
There s another thing that doesn t quite follow, but I think
it does go along with it. I think you learn to write by writing.
I think classes in so-called creative writing serve other purposes.
I think they do not teach a person to write. You learn by your own
mistakes. You learn by writing it down and then reading it.
Assuming you have well, you re not writing unless you have some
critical faculty, I should think. lAnd I think what people get in
a course on creative writing depends on the person who heads it up .
Wally Stegner, in his creative writing course, got enormously
talented kids who probably had a good bit of writing experience,
at least of an informal sort. And he directed them to salable
writing. I think he made lots of criticisms that were valuable.
And that would be the part of it that was valuable if you had a
person who was a good critic, because there is nothing that is
more valuable to a writer than good criticism. And it s very
hard to get. People say, "Oh, it s beautiful. It s wonderful."
All these things. Or, "Why didn t you do this?" Or, "Why
do you
write this way?" Or, "Why don t you try fiction?" Something of
this sort. Get somebody who really sits down with your manuscript
and has either a very near-sighted view and tears you apart
stylistically or has a broad view and wants to talk about the
general subject that you re covering, whether it s biography or
whatever it is. This is invaluable. I think this criticism is
one of the things that comes out, probably, in creative writing
classes .
264
K-Q: Ursula does a lot of teaching of young fantasy writers. And I
think, so far as I can judge from what she does, I think she gives
them the courage to let their imaginations go, because she
deliberately sets up either very difficult or imagination-making
topics for them to do. And I think, being young in most cases,
being in a group is both stimulating and fun. I think when it
comes to the really technical business of writing you just have to
write. And also, most of these creative writing courses,
necessarily, I should think, because they re of short duration,
they re working with short stories. That s another sort of literary
animal from one that I know anything about. I don t like very many
people s short stories. It isn t one of my favorite forms. And
I can t write a short story really. Even my children s stories
it isn t that they re so long in length, but they re not the
short-story type, not the episodic type.
I think you do undoubtedly in a classroom sharpen the technique.
And a great many of these [classes] are for learning to write and
publish in magazines. 1 don t know what s happening to that now
with so many fewer magazines about, but that is part of what is
taught. I m sure that is what Wally taught superbly.
Brower: Did you yourself ever take such a course?
K-Q: No, I never did. I never had any desire to, but I can see why I
might have Ursula never did either. Ursula and me, we were
always concerned about style. We were always talking about it at
home. I mean we were more or less in a second-position milieu.
Of course she was always writing anyhow. Well, I never had any
use to. I think I just had to do it my own way.
I think it [writing] is a more introverted art or craft or
occupation than some others. Certainly [in contrast to painting
or sculpture] if you paint outside or have people you either
have your model
I
Arts, Crafts, Writing and Women
K-Q: I know that this is only true [of painting and sculpture] to a
degree because I know from watching John do it that it s an intense
and a tiring and a solitary thing. But I think that the overall
solitariness of writing is it may be one of the most solitary of
the arts. For instance, Connie Raffetto, who is a sculptor up here
in Berkeley, works very hard and intensely at sculpting and gets
265
K-Q: higher than a kite because of the excitement of it, but it is a
very sharing sort of thing because you have the model there and
there s conversation in between. She s moving about, she is using
her hands, she s got her hands in mud. One day after John started
doing art psychotherapy at Walnut Creek Hospital, she gave him a
sack of terra-cotta clay and he did his first sculpting and found
it enormously relaxing as something he could do and have fun with
at home, whereas he couldn t touch painting at all, just couldn t
touch it.
Brower: It s the tactile experience, I suppose.
K-Q: It s part that. Mud is for real. As John explains it, you face
a blank canvas and then you put on it what is in you that you want
to say then. You are creating an illusion, and if you work with
people all day who live in a world of illusion and you re combating
that world of illusion, you cannot face the illusion of the canvas.
That makes sense, whereas there s nothing illusionary about clay.
It s just mud pie and there it is and the very fact that you
get your hands covered with it and the rest of it, it s a genuinely
satisfying experience. These differences
Brower: To the lay person it s a little hard to see why paint isn t just as
real as clay. It s an entity. It s a physical, objective thing,
and it wouldn t have occurred to me that this distinction would
exist.
K-Q: There s no doubt about it. Ursula and Elizabeth were here and John
gave them some clay and, unlike when you re doing a painting ([when]
you cannot have a distraction) , they were doing different things
around the table here and shouting back and forth. Each was doing
his own thing, but he wasn t interrupted by the fact that you
were over there doing something else. It _is_
different. I don t
know why, except I think it s its three dimensionality. Maybe it
belongs in the real world.
Brower: I m convinced, although I would not have guessed it to begin with.
K-Q: I would neither. I never would have thought of it.
Brower: In certain African tribes, I understand, if you say draw a man,
they re absolutely helpless. They can t do a stick figure. But
you say sculpt a man, and they can do it superbly well. So there
is something about a whole kind of mind.
266
K-Q: It s very interesting. This is a little aside from where I started
but I think these at least interest me. Sculpting then is
something, however intensely one feels about it, that does have
this element of openness and relaxation, which gardening has. You
can turn from writing and go out in the garden and garden for a
few minutes and it s as though you had had this distraction for an
hour or so. There s something about gardening. Again, I think
it s using the hands. There again, the hands in the dirt and also
it is an occupation that doesn t allow for you can t think about
anything else when you re gardening. You can do a lot of things
about the house and worry about something else, but if you re
gardening you just don t see anything beyond this plant, this
plot of dirt, this moment, that becomes the most important thing
in the world. At least this is my experience. I think it s most
people s experience.
One other thing that s changed. I had done quite a little
sewing up to the time I began writing. One frustrating thing was
that I never was that good, I never was that professional about it.
I was likely to do things the hard way because I didn t know
enough to do them the easy way. I did quite a lot of sewing for
the children particularly for Ursula and I like to sew, but it s
rather exhausting and I have not sewed since I began writing. In
fact, when I discovered that I wasn t using my sewing machine I
gave it to Ursula who doesn t use it either but Charles runs it
when something needs to be [done] and the girls use it. I was
always not doing regular things for myself but something that
I d half design and then work out, but not really know how to work
out, and I found that took exactly out of me what writing does.
You re in the same position, you get cramps in the back, the same
way that you do If you re really figuring something out you can t
be in the least sociable while you re sewing and it will give you
a headache and leave you with very much [chuckles] So, it s
one or the other. You don t do both. At least I found that I
couldn t. Ursula never has sewed except as she does it by hand
and she may do something very amusing with sewing but she sews very
badly. She s nearsighted and I never encouraged her to sew; I did
learn early that it is sort of exhausting and I thought that she
didn t need something else that kept her bent over a desk. So she
doesn t sew except kind of amusing things which are badly sewed but
are fun to do.
No, let s see, where did I think I was getting with this?
Brower: Was this inherited from your grandmother? Do you remember the
sewing grandmother?
267
K-Q: I learned to sew with her, yes, and in fact, I learned to embroider
with her. That is my last embroidery up there on the wall over
there .
Brower: Oh, delightful.
K-Q: Ursula went to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and came back
with this for my birthday. She took it off from one of the Virgin
pictures and she makes these very she did little drawings and I
thought it was so funny because she had some very vulgar angels .
Brower: I looked at that before and thought it was charming, but I didn t
see the vulgar angels; absolutely marvelous.
K-Q: It s the ascension of the Virgin. Isn t is a scream?
Brower: Yes, it really is.
K-Q: I think they re awfully funny and I did this in the winter in the
East, the winter evenings when it was snowing. That s my last
work though.
Brower: It s the most exquisite work. Your grandmother must have taught
you extremely well .
K-Q: [laughs] Crazy! Well, we ve wandered away from where I thought we
were going. We might just finish up this little mixed-up thing
which has to do with the first impressions I suppose that came
to me as I began to get into the whole writing milieu business.
This isn t true of all people but it is true of Ursula. I never
submitted a book until I was finished with it, especially while I
was writing the Ishi book. I didn t submit it. I ve never gotten
an advance on a book and it s not only finished; I m through with
it before I want anybody else, except some people who do specific
criticism for me, to see it. I hate even the work of editing where
you do an introduction or something. I hate even that much of a
deadline. I hate the deadline theory. It wears me out.
Ursula, she s through when she submits a story; she s finished
with it. There s another thing that you learn early. The book that
you talk you don t write. I stop people who are beginners in this
who begin to give this enthusiastic outline. If you really want to
write that book or that story, don t talk it because you have had
all your fun right there and the best of it will have been gone
from you. You will have, in effect written it and I think that s
very true. Now, we had a great many literary discussions in the
later years , particularly when Kroeber was writing the configurations
book [Configurations of Culture Growth] and when he was doing the
later theoretical books that weren t just straight anthropology and
268
K-Q: had lots of discussion material in them. We did sometimes discuss
Configurations , but that would be when he finished a particular
section. That was a very long book and he was at it seven summers
and although his ideas were original it was an historical
compilation from which he abstracted his ideas. But where you
are creating an atmosphere or a story or something, you don t
discuss it while you re writing it.
Another difference for writing, I think most people require
solitude which is not necessarily true for painting. I think John
paints very absorbedly with a child in the room, and the only thing
that bothers him is music he doesn t like that distracts him, that
sort of thing. I don t want any kind of music. I don t want any
noise. Ursula has never tried to work with the children about.
When she goes to her study to work, they re all gone or taken care
of and they re not her responsibility.
Brower: If that s true for both you and Ursula, it s probably not a
generation-linked thing, but it is true, isn t it, that my
generation had quiet for studying, for example, and my children
are happiest with music blaring in their ears and that does seem
to be a kind of change in generations.
K-Q: Yes, but this habit came up. My children never were allowed to have
it. I mean, Kroeber didn t like [it]. He said, "If the radio is
playing, listen to it."
Brower: I wondered if this was a generalization that one could make?
K-Q: I think there has been a great deal of difference and some people
are so attuned to having music that they re uncomfortable without
it. I think perhaps Kroeber could write certain kinds of things
with interruptions, some things he could, but I think there the
difference might have been [that] the hour-by-hour household
responsibility was not his and I think a woman would have great
difficulty detaching [herself] from doorbells, the telephone,
requests of kids, anything else, the soup cooking over, whatever
it is. I find to this day if I start something cooking and then
get to work in the study the prunes burn or whatever it is it s
very difficult to do two things if one of them is writing. It
would be interesting to have somebody who is a painter or another
kind of a sculptor from Connie [or] who does another sort of
writing, to get their reaction to the picture that I built up as
to what are good writing conditions. I think a regular time is
desirable. That becomes less important as you become attuned to
it and can fit it in. One changes with age and with circumstances
too. I can write at the end of the day now after a rest which I
used not to be able to and type for an hour, not for a long stretch.
269
K-Q: Mostly I like to do it early in the day, but I think a regular tine
and it seems to me that all professional writers that I ve read
that have written on this, have a time which is their time for
writing. In all that I ve read maybe the people who have this
regular time are the ones who talk about it but I think people
that I ve known in writing have a regular time. Do you have that
impression?
Brower: Yes, I do.
K-Q: Now, whether that s true of others I should think that would be
true of others craftsmen in special occupations where they are
set off apart from
Brower: Yes, it s probably more a matter of devising where you can get a
slot of time.
K-Q: Yes, I think it s that. I think you can adjust to a slot, but I
think there has to be [one] and it has to be more or less regular.
You can shift but I don t think you can just leave it up in the air.
Well, that wasn t very systematic, but I realize that at the
point we were in my life, this was when these changes did [occur],
these new attitudes toward [writing]. They were very new
professional attitudes that I never had any of before.
Brower: It s a very significant transition from the nonprofessional to the
professional when, as you say, not only the way you regard yourself
but also the way the world regards you, changes.
K-Q: Right, right. I think that is I wonder if it s at all necessary
for a woman to do anything different from what she s doing, if she
likes what she s doing. If her own attitude toward it was a little
more [positive], made her more satisfied.
Brower: I do know people who are housekeepers, gardeners, mothers, and cooks,
who do it exquisitely and who take great pride and pleasure in
doing it, but I think the whole new attitude of women makes that
more and more difficult, the idea that somehow you should be doing
something else.
K-Q: I was perfectly happy, absolutely happy, doing that. I certainly
didn t feel that I needed anything else, but I could have had a more
perhaps I could have done something else. Perhaps I could have
started writing earlier if I had just thought I could. I don t
know. It seems to me that the dilemma here is one probably of
misunderstanding and certainly there has been denigration of what
largely occupies a married woman with a family. I think there s
less of that now, but still unless you really do feel that you
270
K-Q: are the feeling of being a pro in some one thing, I believe, is
very good for people and particularly if there is something toward
which your attitude is creative. It certainly doesn t have to be
an art or a craft. It could be any number of things, but I think
you have to feel that you re rather on top of it.
that one s own point of view
It seeais to me
Brower: In this matter of writing earlier, did you have a wish to do it
and did you have a sense of being frustrated because you couldn t?
K-Q: No, I just vaguely had the wish.
Brower: But it wasn t a feeling that you were not doing something that you
would much prefer to do?
K-Q: No, it really wasn t, it really wasn t. I think it s great to be
an amateur in all sorts of areas, but you probably need the security
of really feeling "I know what this is about." I m not sure it
matters too much what you know all about . Bernie Rowe knows that
she s a darn good automobile driver, that she s better than most
drivers, male or female. She has a sense of security about that
and I think she has very little impulse, nothing toward creativity
as such. But I think there are some things she knows two things.
She knows she s a very good driver and she knows that she can cook
well, according to Fannie Farmer s Boston Cookbook. She went to
Fannie Farmer s School, that s an upper-upper-middle-class girls
school still in Boston, and she doesn t wish really to depart from
that, but she has a sense of security about that. I think that maybe
each person needs to have just one little area of admitted it has
to be acknowledged professionalism. Maybe this is what is
unsatisfying to women who aren t satisfied now.
Brower: But you re not saying that you didn t have that kind of security
before you wrote, are you?
K-Q: I knew jolly well that in a way I was doing what I wanted to do,
but I think it s very hard to feel that you really are a pro. I
suppose one thing that makes it hard to think you re a pro is that
you are bringing up children and you are bringing them up reasonably
well and you have a reasonable household. You re doing, you might
say, a professional job there, but I suppose this implies "I m
awfully good," and no one ever feels that he s awfully good about
his children or about his household necessarily.
Brower: There are no convenient measures of that kind of thing.
271
K-Q: No, and the woman who is a good housekeeper may be an awful bore
because she s always straightening the pillows or something, but
I think this is the dilemma really. A great many people say I m
very sensible and I feel that I m very good about the other fellow s
child. What you know you can really, as it were, use professionally
but in another situation than your own. But I think it s very, very
difficult and it sounds sort of "home economics "-like or something
that isn t at all what one means. But I do think that it is part
of a woman s dilemma. I didn t feel it as a dilemma, but I think
it would have been good for me through those years, probably, to
be able to feel very professional about something. Now, Kroeber
wanted me to get a degree and that just never appealed to me at
all. I couldn t quite see myself doing it. I had no theoretical
objection to it, but I couldn t somehow picture myself doing it.
Brower: If you had had a professional life before your marriage, at least
a little more of it than you did have
K-Q: I didn t have any.
Brower: Do you think you would have been less satisfied with the domestic
role? I guess it would have depended on the degree of commitment
to whatever that professional role was .
K-Q: It s awfully hard to say, isn t it? Certainly, I see women having
a rough time who ve had a good many years of independent professional
work. I think that it s difficult for them to adjust to the peculiar
demands of household and children, don t you? professional nurses,
people who have been very good secretaries, this sort of thing.
It doesn t necessarily matter, they may be a little bit old to
tackle things, especially as one does as a young person. But I
think there s another thing. It must be a hard adjustment and I
think [especially] if you re a more extroverted person than I am;
part of the thing that kept me I just was absorbed in what was in
the house; there was reading and there were a lot of things that
were in the house that were of natural interest to me. I think if
one were more extroverted than I, it would be a little bit [harder];
certainly you would handle your adjustment differently.
Brower: When you did come to write, where did things come to you from? What
was the raw material that turned into the things you wrote? Of
course, it was drawn in part from your interest in anthropology.
K-Q: It happened to be anthropological material, but I think my interest
for all the writing that I ve done which seems anthropological my
interest has always been literary. If by chance, these stories
were Indian stories I have one bookcase full of myths and
fairytales and this sort of thing, any one of which I might have
played around with. It s just that here was much more alive
272
K-Q: material. I think what turned me to Indian myths was the fact that
Juan Dolores was a live Indian who told me these stories live,
followed by Robert Spott, and then some others who were less
important and less intimate. It was because this was, as it were,
from the horse s mouth, rather than [because of] its being Indian.
Then, of course, going to the biographical history, that
certainly was an accident of the particular situation, wasn t it?
Brower: I suppose so.
K-Q: I d played around enough writing, I d worked around enough, that
I had some confidence that I could write, that perhaps I could
handle it and that would have been a necessary experience or I
couldn t have handled it and I certainly wouldn t have tried to.
I have a feeling that if we re going to talk about Ishi,
which in a sense would be the next thing, then maybe we shouldn t
start that today. What s your feeling?
Brower: I have never understood precisely at what period in your life you
did work on Ishi.
K-Q: I did it after I finished Inland Whale. I was playing around with
some other things; I think Kroeber and I did another poetry
thing. I finished Ishi and turned the manuscript into the press
at the end of August 1960, just before we went to Europe. I had
worked on it more than two years , practically from the time I
finished Inland Whale, that would be 58, 59, 60, those years.
Brower: Why didn t you take it to Indiana, who had published Inland Whale?
K-Q: [laughs] That was a question that Indiana asked. In fact, that
was very touchy. Oh, no, that was really something. Well, I
think I should answer this the other way around. August Fruge
asked me afterwards why in the world I took Inland Whale to
Indiana. I said, "Had you taken it" and he probably would have
taken it or he might not (at that time he thought surely he
would have, but I m not so sure of that) "had
you taken it I would
never have believed that you did it other than [by] saying, Well,
this must be stuff from Kroeber "
273
XVIII REFLECTIONS ON REBELLIONS, GENIUS, AND BELIEFS
[Interview 18: March 29, 1977 ]##
Changing Attitudes
Brower: Last time we were discussing how writing differs from sculpture
and painting; I m not sure we re quite finished with that.
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
No, I think we aren t. I think we turned the machine on just as
we were discussing something totally unrelated, [laughs] We might
go on with that [reviewing off-tape conversation] . We were
discussing the fact that it had been suggested to Ursula that she
do a book on women s change of life or menopause, this request
being inspired by the fact that she had done an amusing and
interesting enough article on that for the Co-Evolution Quarterly
and Anne s and my reaction to this was (and it certainly was
Ursula s) that, good heavens, how would you do a book on it?"
Unless you re a medical person doing a medical book but otherwise
in its social and personal aspects, how would you do a book? Then
we just got to the point of saying somehow we had the feeling
that there was much less made of this [menopause] than used to be.
It used to be a much more significant time for a woman, it seemed
to both of us, than it now is and we were just beginning to
speculate as to why this was and decided that perhaps we might as
well record this part of our conversation. I don t know what
Anne s guess is going to be. I m wondering if in part it has to
do with the superstition that I think was held that a woman couldn t
have or shouldn t have or wouldn t enjoy sex, although every woman
must have known better than that. I think perhaps at least in our
Protestant social scheme and maybe in many others, maybe in the
Catholic ones for all I know
Yes, after all it s their view that sex is for procreation not
recreation
Right, that proper sex is related to procreation. That would be
a good Catholic view and this would be a good it would certainly
back kick on a woman whatever her own convictions were, that
socially she ought not to be interested in sex when menopause was
upon her or when she was past childbearing age.
That was what I was going to say, that I think that it [the
de-emphasizing of menopause] is part of a willingness to regard
a woman, or anybody, as a sexual entity into middle life and
old age. I think it s quite a new concept.
K-Q: It certainly is in our culture,
cultures
Now, whether it has been in other
274
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
In some of the primitive cultures, people don t live long enough
to find out.
This is often the case, and particularly the woman doesn t. This
whole social because it is a social phenomenon of women living
beyond the age of man, is not the way it s been the world over.
I remember seeing this in a graveyard in California and then you
read older biographies of pioneers and such and the people who came
West, the man was likely to have two or three wives, two or three
sets of children. It was not very likely that it was the other way
around .
I suppose multiple childbearing had as much to do with that as
anything.
Puerperal fever? well, I don t know. I m sure that a lot of it
must have been actually medical, but it seems to me that this
phenomenon of women quite regularly outliving men is a phenomenon
of our culture today. Perhaps it is all over the West, Western
culture.
I ve heard that now that women are insisting on the male role
more fully, this [longevity] will probably end, that when they re
subject to the strains of making a living and the pressures of
commercial life they re not going to live so long either.
The other part of this thing is that in a more primitive society
however hard a man worked it seems to be stress that kills much
more frequently than hard work. I don t know, when you take the
coal miners of England and this sort of thing, [but] this is probably
hard work under terrible conditions.
Yes, I would think that it was the conditions; did you notice the
survey they did with longshoremen recently?
Yes.
Apparently that kind of work adds to your life. You live longer
if you re doing that sort of outdoor heavy work.
Right. I think that was longshoremen here, wasn t it?
Yes, it was in San Francisco.
Where you have a benign climate for being outdoors really the
year around. But certainly it does seem to me that as a modern
phenomenon, man dies young and it is mostly of stress diseases,
isn t it?
275
Brower: I think it is, yes.
K-Q: So that, as a matter of fact, it seems to me that in a psychological
context and conversation and thinking, a great deal more is made
of a man s change of life (which hasn t the obvious physical
shutdown thing but which does come about the same time) , and this
is, I should suspect, really a social phenomenon, not a sociological
one. At least certainly literature, the 19th-century novels one
reads, whether Russian or English, I mean that s what I would go
back to for this sort of thing. Our earlier accounts, our earlier
psychological discussions, have far less to say about the stress
that seems to come about age forty, and the reason I suspect that
is a social thing is because men, I think, in our society, along
about the age forty or forty-five, are taking stock. I suppose
women are too but I think men are taking stock of what they re
doing and whether this is really where they thought they were going
to be, what they thought they were going to be doing, or whether
they really are getting where they d assumed they were going to get
and this is certainly part of the society that puts a tremendous
emphasis on success, achievement; we re certainly achievement
oriented, both men and women.
Brower: Do you think that the kind of taking stock that occurs at that
time is so much in terms of material success, or does it perhaps
relate to their own sense of well being and happiness? Are they
feeling not so much "have I been successful in what I set out
to do?" but more "Am I a happy human being?"
K-Q: Certainly. I think both things come in and perhaps more now
since we do seem to be more introspective, more inclined to inquire
into matters of personal happiness, personal adjustment, this
sort of thing. Since society allows a great deal more in the way
of, well, attitude toward divorce and in many, many ways, it s
really more a man can (and a woman can) not only judge himself
and think about these things but can take action if he wants to.
Brower: More choices.
K-Q: It does seem to me that the emphasis has slipped from the women
to the men here. I think on the women s side that medicine has had
a great deal to do with it because there are all sorts of, well,
just probably surgically. It s really rather simple surgery for
most women if there s nothing else wrong other than they simply
are they need a hysterectomy because or they re being repaired,
this sort of thing. This surgical repair thing that I suppose has
to do with bearing children, that has become so routine, it really
is so simple, that I imagine that has changed a great many
women s lives.
276
Brower: I suppose that hormone therapy must have helped a great many women
who have serious problems .
K-Q: I suppose it has. We are assuming here that physiology has had
a lot to do with sort of taking a woman through the time of
menopause and that with men it has been more psychological. Now,
the results with women have been more psychological. A great many
women just get under way at about age forty, so far as their more
public life goes or their feeling that they re getting where they
want to be, or not getting there. I think that the modern women s
lib thing has really not to do with the very young so much as with
women from thirty-five up isn t that about the age where the
leadership [of women s lib] is.
Brower: I would think so or even a decade beyond that now.
K-Q: Beyond that, but really not much younger than that. The younger
thing has been a different sort of liberation. That s been a young
people s liberation from marriage and from a great many things. I
mean, the so-called youth revolution has been and is another thing.
It seems to me, as the people I ve been watching have moved through
that and out of it, that that has more or less accomplished what
it set out to accomplish, and therefore isn t an issue so much.
Brower: I think there are areas where those two things overlap the business
of not feeling that marriage is as important as it once was, not
feeling that childbearing is as much a social necessity as it once
was.
K-Q: That s right. Of course, they do overlap. But I think that the
men and the women who ve gone through this young rebellion thing
(it really isn t a revolution, but it certainly has been a successful
rebellion, and I think a needed one and a good one) are not
necessarily the ones that go on into and become the front rank
of the women s lib, whether they re men or whether they re women.
At least my observation in my family, and just outside with their
age-mate friends (and I m talking about not my children but my
grandchildren now) [is that] they get established late, for the
most part they marry, although they marry the women they have been
living with and vice versa. As they are established in their
professions, they re moving into a more-or-less established middle-
class sort of setup but they re probably more conservative than
they were five or ten years ago.
Brower: But don t you think if they had a strong professional background
a girl, for example, because of the youth revolution she went
through, might feel freer simply not to marry? Or perhaps there s
no relation between the two things.
277
K-Q: In most cases, if they re really successful and really are achievers,
the woman has her profession or she has a profession by this time,
married or not married, living with a man or not living with a
man. If she wants it she has [it]. It s very hard to generalize
about this, and it would be extremely interesting to actually make
a social survey. I am sort of generalizing, beginning with my
family and their age-mate friends [and] people that I know about.
So I don t know .
Brower: In the back of my mind is the feeling that there is a kind of new
philosophical position that makes the relativity of values more
evident to people than it used to be. Alternatives are just more
acceptable, I think, to that generation, no matter how apparently
middle-class establishment their choices.
K-Q: My eldest grandchild s wife is pregnant now. There will be a first
great-grandchild. It will be interesting to me to see what happens
here, because for several years she has held an important office
in the women s liberation thing (she s a young person to be in
that but she was in that). [It will be interesting] to see where
she moves and how she moves in terms of her own family.
Brower: I was just thinking that the real test will be in how they accept
their own young, won t it, whether their own experience has stayed
with them and become part of their thinking so that they will be
more accepting of the next generation or whether it will be just
an old pendulum-swing thing.
K-Q: There probably will be some pendulum swinging, but I have a
feeling that in one sense, this young-person thing has been a
successful rebellion. It s not a revolution in that it has changed
the thinking of many tens of thousands of people, but it has
affected people who were not in it, who were beyond the age of
it and who were simply observers of it. I think it has changed
our thinking .
Brower: Did you find when you moved around the country that it s quite a
mistake to extrapolate from Berkeley?
K-Q: Oh! [laughter] Well, to put it in exaggerated form (and this, I
think, is a social and economic thing), actually you only have to
move over the hills into Orinda or across the invisible line into
Kensington to begin to get a stratified, a more conservative, point
of view. And if you move as far as the Sacramento Valley, up into
the valley and down into the San Joaquin, you probably are moving
into something much more like what I think you would get in the
Middle West, except for Chicago and the big centers. But it isn t
rural. The rural is one thing and then there is the suburban
thing. I suppose that part of all this is that you have in
278
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
America, in these communities, a more or less undifferentiated class
structure, and as soon as you get that, and very little at least
obvious ethnic mixing, you run into an attitude that isn t in the
least like Berkeley, or probably like any really urban area. I
suppose it sounds awfully holier-than-thou or better-than-thou or
something of that sort, but I think it is at the essence of a
university town (and that doesn t mean a local town where a local
college is, but really the university atmosphere) that it does have
a broader social scope. This is part of what being a university
is all about, and you ve got more people thinking that way in such
a community.
When I say that I m a Californian, that I ve become one, and
that I really don t wish to live anywhere else, I really mean
Berkeley, [laughter] I don t mean Los Angeles and I don t mean
any place in between, not even gorgeous, beautiful Santa Barbara
because there again you get well, of course, that s an artificial
community.
To go back to our original theme, did the experience of menopause
have anything to do with your becoming a professional writer?
No, I don t think so. In the first place, so far as the menopause
itself is concerned, I was medically, artificially stopped in a way
one wouldn t be now. At the beginning the menopause wasn t
causing me mental anguish but physical anguish. Now I think they
have much better ways of handling this. I was simply menstruating
far too much and too often. It was making me seriously anemic and
seriously headachey and the rest of it, and I certainly meant to
have no more children. So the doctors then stopped it with x-ray,
which I think they would not do now, and I think I was fortunate
in having two or three times been given overdoses of x-rays that
didn t back kick more than it did because I m absolutely sure that,
item one, it probably wasn t the way to do it; item two, I m sure
I was given too much x-ray.
I think it s rather remarkable. Isn t there a new view that some
triggering aspect of cancer is in personality, that people who
can handle stress are not so susceptible to cancer? Wouldn t that
be the thing that you would have expected as a result of this
x-ray treatment?
I m not quite sure,
it is or it isn t.
I m medically ignorant. I don t know whether
I think that is the thing that people are most afraid of now as a
consequence of radiation.
279
K-Q: There just is real injury, there must be. But I don t know. It
seems to me that I had a tremendous amount of stress. I mean that
I am a person who had all sorts of stress reactions in terms of
headaches and tiredness and things of that sort, but maybe I
always have had, maybe I do handle it in a certain sense.
Brower: Maybe that s the mechanism you have for handling it.
K-Q: I just don t know. They know there s a great deal of difference
in susceptibility. Now, what those differences are and how much
is known about them and what my own would be, I don t know.
Brower: I think it s all conjecture really.
K-Q: There s this theory that some people inherit a susceptibility to
cancer, whether that is a fact or not I don t know.
Brower: It seems to be a factor in breast cancer with people who have
grandmothers and aunts and mothers [who have had it], but beyond
that I j us t don t know .
K-Q: So far as I know the history of my family, the only cancer I know
of occurred with my maternal grandmother, who had a small, what
they used to call a rose cancer on one toe. My older brother
removed that toe when he discovered what she had, and that was
that. But I think that these things which occur outside the
skin aren t rated as serious as internal cancers. Isn t that
true?
Brower: I would think so.
K-Q: But anyway, I don t know. I don t know of any cancer other than
that [in] my family. That isn t saying they weren t there but I
don t know about them.
Brower: That [menopause] must have been a wretched time for you.
K-Q: Yes. Yes, that was the time when I really actively physically
felt my worst and this probably, as I say, wasn t the way to do
it but I think that something had to be done there. Maybe it could
have been done indirectly by way of building [me] up, but they tried
things to do away with the anemia and it seemed to be a lot of
agony for no very good reason. I was certainly happy to be rid
of it.
280
K-Q: Now, I m not sure how this really affects the psychology that we
used to associate with a great many women in their menopause
because you go on having the sort of sickly feelings and so on,
more or less. I think that continues on beyond the normal menopause,
doesn t it? I believe that medically it is realized now that
women s emotional ups and downs and good feelings and the rest of
it go through their cycle pretty much unchanged even though you re
not having this physical thing.
I had no sense of this at all. It seems to me I hear less
about-r-it [menopause] was a time when a great many women were
deeply neurotic or had episodes of insanity. I remember this as
a child. Do you remember hearing about this? Some of this
certainly was fact, and how much of it was fantasy, how much
this was built up or how much it had to do with simply no under
standing of neurosis and mood and the rest of this, I don t know,
but I think this has much changed, don t you?
Brower: It s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy if you ve learned from
childhood that this may be associated with menopause.
K-Q: What it is that women do instead I don t know. Apparently, one
always has these neurotic and psychotic outlets. When I was
studying psychology
II
K-Q: In the process of announcing that hysteria is something that one
doesn t have anymore, we were both about to have hysterics which
demonstrates that a woman is still capable of hysterics. Anyhow,
the general theory we ve been following is that there s as much
neurosis running about and we have had as big a share as we have
always had, but that it takes other forms than that of hysteria,
because the true hysteria was based on severe sexual, puritanical
taboos which have been lifted sufficiently that neurosis and
psychosis take other forms. We were theorizing a little bit as
to what those forms were and I think perhaps neither of us are
knowledgeable enough to know just what they are.
I m saying this not with the implication that women s
lib and concern with that is a neurosis, but the awareness of it
and the earnestness with which a woman may throw herself into
achieving something which she feels is a liberation may absorb
part of the energy that used to be turned inward and simply become
hysterical. I m not in the least saying that I think it s an
hysterical woman who goes in for women s lib but it is
Brower: But it offers an opportunity not to be hysterical.
281
K-Q: Exactly. She can express herself now. She doesn t have to take
these in-turned retreats. Certainly the woman who achieves what
she feels is a liberation does not have to be, and perhaps would
find it rather difficult to be, hysterical in the classic sense.
We were talking about the proportions of neurosis, not a particular
disease or a particular form of recognition of a disease, which
goes along with wherever one s culture is regarding these matters.
Genius
K-Q: So far as I know there are certain things, such as feeblemindedness
(specifically mongolism and that sort of thing) suggesting that
there seems to be a certain number in every thousand individuals ,
generally speaking. Although I don t think Kroeber said this
didactically, he tended to assume as he got on with his writing
[on] configurations of culture growth that probably there would be
a more or less the same number of geniuses in any thousand people.
The emphasis here must be on potential genius because the kind of
genius and its recognition differs with the culture, the times,
the history all sorts of things. I think I was talking about the
time that Robert Oppenheimer attended the university, at age twenty-
one, and I think Robert was a genius by any definition, a person
who was mathematically unusually endowed and of somewhat genius
capacity. Certainly it was a good time and there were a good
number of them [geniuses] that were recognized at that time. Then
we were simply cautioning ourselves or remarking that we re talking
not only about recognized genius, but assuming that there is
unrecognized genius, depending upon what the culture calls forth or
doesn t call forth, recognizes or fails to recognize. I suspect
that now our cultures pay much less attention to mathematical
geniuses than it did twenty or thirty or forty years ago.
Brower: It makes one feel awfully in the hands of social fate, doesn t it?
But it s evident when you think, for instance, of the potential
geniuses in the theater where there s no theater.
K-Q: Right, right. I think we have had some examples of just that; we
have so little new theater in America. The problem seems to be,
you get excellent actors for third-rate plays right now. Whether
they re geniuses or not, they re excellent actors. Judith Anderson
is a good case in point. I don t know that Judith Anderson ever
had a play, except perhaps Robinson Jeffers Medea, that was really
up to her capacity because she is a classic, classic actress and
she needed poetry, not the ordinary language but poetic language
to recite, and her capacity for tragedy is such that she really
is best when she plays the absolute limit of her tragic capacity.
282
K-Q: These years have not been years when plays of that sort were much
in favor, and I think the old Greek tragedies that she could have
done have been acceptable only when big companies have come through
and played them. I think she s a good case in point.
Brower: It makes you realize the waste that there must be.
K-Q: There is, and I suppose that it s an inevitable waste. We try to
reduce it. I think that is a humanistic goal but I don t know
that it s possible, and perhaps unachieved geniuses are happy
people. This is something that is pretty hard to inquire into and,
of course, the exact-minded person would stop at this point in
the conversation and say, "What is your definition of genius?"
I usually dodge this sort of thing because I m no good at definitions
and I m not sure that definitions are very helpful. When one is
very understanding of what one is talking about, it s not
necessarily so useful to try to reduce a thing to a definition.
I remember once hearing Stokowski talk to a group of women
and the gist of his talk was how to encourage a child to play an
instrument, his feeling being that most human beings were happier
if they had at their disposition a capacity to play an instrument
or to sing, and to have that just for fun. So the inevitable
question came up he was talking about ways of being able to afford
it and not afford it and that sort of thing so the question was,
what about the child that is a genius, that is a genius performer?
He said, "I m not talking about the genius. That child is going
to find an instrument in some fashion or another. You re not going
to be able to keep him away from them. That child is not our
problem. He will probably break through." He wasn t giving a
definition but he was making a distinction that was as good as a
definition.
Brower: In your contact with American Indians, do you think of geniuses
among them whom you knew, or would Kroeber have had those people
in mind when he made that statement?
K-Q: I think Paul Radin defined genius as those who were maladjusted to
their culture because they were beyond it. In other words, he was
talking, at least philosophically, about geniuses or near geniuses.
He thought of himself as not on particularly good terms with his
own culture, and he really was bright and he had a great capacity
for discovering the oddball in a primitive society. If there was
one in the community, and there always was, he and Paul Radin would
smell each other out immediately. Paul didn t do so terribly much
field work, but he certainly put his hands on a number of different
highly, highly talented and discontent individuals.
283
Brower: This was more his forte than Dr. Kroeber s?
K-Q: Yes, and he really was attuned to it and very good at it. Now,
they re a little harder to detect the best of our Indian
communities were broken communities. This would be less true,
working with the Hopi and the Zuni fifty years ago. American Indian
societies as a whole did not encourage departure from the norm.
Good performance was fine; but good performance within definite
limits, I think, was part of the American ideal. I think that
Robert Spott, whose Indian name none of us knew, who came from the
Klamath River and with whom Kroeber worked a great deal (and other
people too) , and whom I knew well because for a number of summers
he spent his vacations with us not his whole summer but his
summer vacation with us. I don t know whether his quality was that
of genius. It was something close to that and this is what I mean.
Robert was at least a generation too late really to have acquired,
absorbed, his own culture. He intuited his way into it even
when it was broken. He had this very talented aunt who was the
last Yurok doctor, Fanny Flounder, an intelligent person devoted
to things Yurok. She told him and taught him a very great deal.
He had a biological father and then an adopted one, both of whom
were famous storytellers. Well, when we say storytellers, this
means that the body of folklore, mythology, religion, customs, and
so on of the Yurok was not only in their heads but they could
communicate it. Robert Spott was surrounded with people of this
sort and he simply absorbed it like a sponge. He took it in. He
lived it. I don t know whether we re talking about genius here.
We re talking about character. Maybe we re talking about something
which was akin to a quality that belonged to Ishi.
Robert Spott, unlike Ishi, earned his living working on the
roads, doing manual work, whatever one could get up there along
the Klamath River, or running canoes on the river and that sort of
thing. He also was being a responsible person for his people and
was able to cope absolutely with government lawyers and other
lawyers . He was by nature an intellectual . He was a marvelous
linguist. His knowledge of English wasn t very good but his
selection of the exactly right word was; he d search for it but
that s the word he would have remembered and know about. The other
thing is he went through the First World War (as much of it as any
American could), was early in France, was early at the front; he
came through. [He] got along comfortably with GIs and this sort
of thing, apparently managed himself very well [during the war],
said nothing about it afterwards. Upon his death, his aunt and
his sister discovered he had a personal Croix de Guerre from
France. Nobody had ever known that and it was a very specific
citation: He was in a shell hole with this French officer and he
carried the officer out of the shell hole and under fire took him
back to the line. There was quite a little account there.
284
K-Q: In other words, Robert participated in Western civilization at its
low ebb on the Klamath River and in its violent phase and remained
completely a Yurok in his values, in the way he saw the world
and the way he comprehended it. This is why, aside from his passion
for wanting to communicate what he knew, this boy was such a
magnificent informant. Now, you re dealing with something there.
Robert, unlike Juan Dolores, had only the education that you d get
in a country school up there on the Klamath, and he didn t go
very long to this school. It obviously wasn t a very good school.
I suppose it was a country school which didn t happen to have one
of the genius teachers those schools sometimes do have. When you
think about what he remained as a person and what he could do
literarily in conveying the essence of these stories, you wonder
what, under other circumstances, Robert Spott might have been.
Brower: It s odd but he was the person I had in mind when I asked that
question about genius. I remembered that bright face and I wondered
if he would fall into that category.
K-Q: Part of his particular quality was sensitiveness with stability
and something which may be Indian, a fairly modest person but
assured. I would not say in the sense that you and I admit to
being shy, I would not say that Robert Spott was shy. I think
that he occupied his space with dignity and grace . I think this
was not something that he thought about one way or the other.
Beliefs
Brower: Do you think that your own personality and character have been
influenced by your exposure to Indian ways and Indian attitudes?
Do you think you took that into yourself as part of your own or
are they just values that you appreciate very much?
K-Q: I certainly appreciate them. I ve never thought about this so I m
rambling off the top of my head. My first impulse would be to
say no, but I think I know what you mean. I would have been, I
believe, a very happy follower of the more integrated eastern
religions had I been exposed to it. I think I would have been a
good Tao[ist] probably and there s a great deal in the Indian life
view which is very, very like my understanding of Tao and the
following of the way. Kroeber once said about Laura Adams Armer,
who lived next door to us for many years. She was an artist, a
good artist, who rather late, well, at sixty, wrote Waterless
Mountain which is a so-called children s book. It is a perfectly
lovely study of the Navajo child, a lovely sensitive book. Do you
know the book?
285
Brower: No, just the name.
K-Q: She wrote two or three other books but this was her beautiful
book. She was a painter. She went to the Southwest early. You
know how people really get a thing about the Southwest and she got
a thing about the Navajo it happened to be the Navajo. She was
accepted by the Navajo and was one of the earliest people allowed
to make sketches and drawings of their sun paintings, at a time
when they rarely were making the sun paintings , in the morning
before the sun could set on them. She did paintings about Navajo
themes that were not the sort of paintings that the Indians, the
Navajos and others, later did of their own things when they got to
painting, but which were a perfect expression of Navajo mysticism
and Navajo belief. Kroeber once said, "I think Laura is an
instinctive operator. I don t think she knows so much; she hasn t
troubled to learn so much about the Navajo, but I think that her
brand of mysticism simply is so similar that she intuitively
understands them and they realize this and therefore they trust
her.
I think to a certain degree, perhaps, I might say that this
is true of me. The quietism of the preference for the nondemon-
strative is a great deal of what I think I understand about
California Indians belief. Really it s only California Indian
religion, or ethics or beliefs, that I know enough about to talk
about at all. Certainly it is totally congenial to me. I feel at
home with it; I like it. My specific creation would be different
from theirs no doubt, but I think that isn t what we re talking
about. We re talking, I suppose, more about a temperamental thing
I m not quite sure what you mean.
Brower: That is what I mean.
K-Q: To that extent I think I probably would answer yes to your question,
except I was with an anthropologist who was working in this area.
I perhaps might have gone on and learned much more than I know about
it.
I know just what the ordinary half-informed person who has
been particularly interested in China knows. I probably would have
pursued that, because that was an early passion with me which I
think just got well, maybe it passioned itself out, or was
rechanneled anyway. I ve been interested in the fact that both
Ursula and Ted have really gone a great deal further and know a
great deal more about Chinese philosophy and thinking and use it
in a different way from the way I do. They ve gone further than I
did. I don t think they were affected by the fact that I had the
books around. I think it was just something temperamental in them.
286
B rower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
Was this shared at all by Dr. Kroeber?
he deal with the Orient?
In his configurations did
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
No. Well, I think perhaps he did, but if by sharing you mean
Had a similar
No. It was one of Kroeber s great regrets (he s very funny about
this), that he never had had anything approaching a mystical
experience. He would have loved to have had a mystical experience.
He would have loved to . Sure , he would like to have experienced
it. But his is a rational mind and he couldn t do anything about
the nonrational. [chuckles] So I think his interest in religion
was well, a rational mind can handle philosophic thought whereas
an irrational mind can t. I get sunk in the pursuit of philosophy.
I really get lost. I think I have to get what I get by way of
either practitioners or the implications of poetry or something
of this sort.
What about your father? Was his interest a rational one or a
mystic one, his interest in comparative religions?
There was this great curiosity about it, but I think, given a
little more congenial atmosphere, he might either have I don t know
whether he would have become a true believer in any particular line
or not, but there was the mystical thing that I think there was
some real need in him to discover. He would have been happy to have
discovered, let us say, an answer which seemed to him an answer.
Together with the curiosity, I think always there was a bit of the
quest thing. It wasn t pure curiosity, an intellectual thing, that
it was with Kroeber.
Yes, so your father in this sense is closer to you?
Right, and I think a lot of what I could acknowledge as being what
I thought I got from my father, not that at that time I acknowledged
it.
Your mother, in contrast, was a more practical-minded person.
Yes. I m sure that my mother believed in a God, and I know pretty
well the way her ethics would have run.
287
XIX HOLIDAYS, PUBLISHERS
[Interview 19: April 12, 1977 ]##
Christmas and Funerals, Telluride
Brower: I would like to go back to the Telluride Chris tmases if you would
tell me a little about them.
K-Q: Perhaps because we are injecting something here that we ll have to
fish out later, we were talking before the tape was on and what you
were saying interested me. It is the particular anecdote that in
some cases vivifies or makes real a general statement or situation
and you were giving me examples of that and that is the reason you
said that although I had said that Christmas was a grand occasion
I did not give you any specifics about it, [about] Christinas in
Telluride when I was a child.
Brower: It might be a good place to put it in here since this was a tape
that didn t record properly and this section is going to be a little
out of phase in any case.
K-Q: It s mixed anyhow and we ll probably have to sort it out later.
Brower: I think so.
K-Q: What I should think about is what made it perhaps different from
other Christmases. Of course, there always was a big blue spruce
Christmas tree. Our Christmas was on Christmas Eve. Now, with
children of my own, I shifted the Christmas thing to Christmas
morning, which I really prefer, but in the mountains Christmas Eve
was the great thing which I believe it is with Germans and a good
many people. Anyhow, our house was not unlike this present house
in that the sliding doors between the living room and dining room
normally weren t closed but could be closed and there were back
stairs.
Because of the difference in age between my brothers and me,
for awhile it was Forest and me and then it would be cousins and
other children more our age. Anyhow, the children kept to the
back stairs and upstairs from noon on the day of Christmas Eve and
then the doors were drawn open and there was this tremendous it
would be a tree that went to the ceiling. Of course, trees seemed
to be in good supply where we were. The thing that is a little
frightening now is that it was entirely lighted with candles
[chuckles] in a wooden house! It was a festive supper sort of thing
and we stayed up later than usual and then went to the midnight
service at the church which was not actually at midnight there.
It was called that but it was early enough that the children and
little children stayed up late and came. There were dozens and
dozens of presents. There were presents, I mean little things, but
apparently the church ladies worked very hard over the cookies and
the presents and all these things. There was choral singing. We d
practice for that, those of us who went to Sunday school; there were
enough larger voices to but the Christmas songs were kept within
the range of children s voices.
288
Brower: Were the presents tied on the tree?
K-Q: They were piled at the foot of the tree. There would be the
children of the mine families, a mass of them. I think this was
a pretty conventional sort of thing. Then there was a small service
along with the singing but very, very it was really well calculated
for children and the church would be full for that. Then the next
day was family as far as we were concerned and family came from
some distances sometimes for Thanksgiving and for Christmas and,
of course, for many years it was my brothers coming home for
Christmas vacation from college, with the age difference. So that
was always very exciting.
Brower: Excuse me, but I seem to be so absorbed in the logistics of this
party in the church. The presents weren t named for specific
people?
K-Q: No, they couldn t be.
Brower: Did they have boy presents and girl presents?
K-Q: Boy presents and girl presents and they had lots of cookie presents
and homemade candy presents and this sort of thing.
I suppose the other special thing is that our table was as full
as there was room for. Young engineers or the power-plant boys,
who were younger than the angineers and who were there for specific
training in electronics these would be nice, homesick young men
and certainly our table would be as full as it could be and other
tables were too in other houses. I mean this was sort of part of
the thing. One of the Christmas day things, and this was also a
Thanksgiving day thing, just once in awhile there would have been
a snow pack. We would go for a sleigh ride, and what this really
was was a hay rack put on a sleigh. It was huge and then there was
hay put in it and blankets and stuff, and you sat on it. You
could get an enormous number of people on these and it was a big
hayride . There would be four horses and the person who was managing
those horses had to really know what he was doing. Anyway, there
would be this sleigh ride, which meant coming out and playing in
the snow and this sort of thing. Everything was just crystal white.
Our snow was the kind of snow you could [drive on] you didn t
follow the roads. I mean the roads were completely covered up,
but you didn t bog down in the snow. The snow was so frozen that
it sparkled. The first time that I met wet snow in the east, I really
was astonished.
Brower: This was the very dry kind?
289
K-Q: Yes, and you could get the most horrendous snow burns on a sunny
Christmas or Thanksgiving. But then we d come back from that
absolutely starved, or course, and unaware of the fact that a few
adults had been slaving in the kitchen and had not been riding, but
were cooking cookies and things of that sort and that was just
great fun.
Brower: Oh, I m so glad we did this because it s such a nice picture.
K-Q: It was years before I could reconcile myself to a snowless Christmas
and to [give up] this kind of special, sparkling sort of thing.
Of course, I was totally removed from any of the work that it took
so it was just a sheer magic sort of thing.
We [often] went on the light sleigh that is really just a
two-seater sleigh. That was a light horse who knew his business.
You could just start off on skis over the snow. Those sleighs are
very light and you usually got tumbled out two or three times. You d
hit something or there would be a sharp turn, but you d just tumble
into the snow and one man could set the sleigh upright and, as I
said, the horse had to be a horse that was prepared for this and
you could just imagine the sort of mess it would be. It would be
the sort of mess that occurred did I tell you about funeral
services in Telluride?
Brower: No, no you did not.
K-Q: I should say that the death rate must have been fairly high in the
mines, death amongst young men, partly because at that altitude and
at that time, a person who got a heavy cold was likely to get
pneumonia and particularly the men who worked in the mines, husky
and all as they seemed to be . Unless we could get them down to a
lower altitude fast, pneumonia was likely to be fatal. Except for
the Italians, the majority of these men were without families. They
had bunkhouses and they ate in a large communal dining room at the
big mines. [The chief mourner] was likely to be a man s room-mate;
there would be this very close feeling. [At the funerals], in most
cases it wasn t family, but it was a turnout of the union members
and the rest of it. In other words, it would be a predominantly
male funeral. The graveyard was a mile or something like that
outside of town, maybe two miles. Anyway, a funeral was something
that was elaborately observed, and I m talking about funerals of
people that I did not know I think there would be the union dues
and most people belonged to some sort of a lodge. There were about
ten different lodges, and I think part of the object of many of
these the firemen and the Elks and these things was funeral dues.
Then, of course, the mine would contribute. All in all, it was a
performance. It was never a private affair you might say. A
290
K-Q: routine thing was to have professional carriages of course, auto
mobiles weren t allowed up there until the last year or two. So
this would be a long procession and it would be quite impressive.
It could be Masonic several of these organizations had their own
services and then there would be a Catholic service or whatever
the person was or what background he came from. So this would
be quite an affair, with the lowering into the grave and the rest
of it and sometimes this could be pretty rough if the ground was
frozen.
By the time this was all over it would have been quite a
performance. You hired a carriage for not less than half a day;
I don t remember what it cost, but as prices went it was fairly
expensive. You weren t going to waste that! So as soon as this
dignified, slow procession with the horses walking slowly was
over, there would be a race back to the series of saloons that
were waiting. And then everybody would get quite happy. You would
spend the rest of your time having a race through the well, it was
like the flat of Yosemite. There were several miles where the road
was pretty wide. The ridiculous thing was, both going to the
funeral and afterwards (although afterwards it didn t work so well),
there were outriders . An outrider would be a man on horseback that
went on either side of the procession and there was an outrider for
every four carriages, at least. They could keep order until the
funeral was over and sort of get all of the carriages turned around
and headed the right direction, and then about all they could do
if a carriage turned over or a sleigh turned over or something
like that was to be around to untangle the horses and the men and
whatnot. Sometimes these things got pretty wild and, of course,
carriages would bump into each other and horses would run away,
because a great many of these people weren t accustomed to handling
carriage horses, which is a tricky business, and a lot of the
carriages they used would turn over easily.
So that would be the end of it. It was a grand celebration.
Brower: There was no wake as such, just the informal liquid wake of the
saloons?
K-Q: Yes, if something like that followed I don t know. I doubt it
because this would involve a family. Undoubtedly, [there were
wakes] with the Italians; there was a considerable community of
Italians and Irish sequestered around the area of the Catholic
church. Now, undoubtedly those performances were private and
undoubtedly there were wakes and family things because most
[Italian] people lived in a family unit. But these I wouldn t have
seen. The one thing that we were supposed to do was to keep off
of Main Street and off this main drag while this performance was
going on, because on foot or horseback you were not safe while this
was taking place.
291
Brower: What a wonderful picture!
K-Q: I think I never really felt at all that it was Christmas here in
California until I had children of my own to whom it was perfectly
normal to have a snowless Christmas and who obviously were getting
as much of a kick out of their sort of Christmas as I got out of
my sort. As I say, I shifted the [celebration] from Christmas Eve
to Christmas day, which seems to me is far easier on a child; I
think probably lots of people have done this. Of course, my
children were close together and so it was very much a children s
holiday. When they were asleep, we pinned something on each pillow.
When my children were very small you could get these elegantly
made German and Czech hand-carved [toys]. There were farmyard
sets, there were train sets, there was everything under the sun.
They were real miniatures; now I think if you get these things at
all they re enormously expensive. The children, since they had
[collected] a whole set of these, bit by bit, could make any sort
of a setup they wanted. They would wake up, wake each other up,
and very quietly gather on the sun porch, and usually they were
so entertained by what they had set up they didn t really care
about coming downstairs. So we did the same thing. They came
down the back stairs and we had the little link sausage, the baby
ones (I haven t seen any recently, but you used to be able to just
buy them). We had those and a homemade coffeecake. Then we opened
the door and there was the tree and the rest of it and the day just
moved on from there, the way it mostly does.
Since we re going back this way, there is one other thing I
should tell you about the Telluride Christmas. This happened when
I was older. That is to say, I must have been fourteen because I
was old enough that I was allowed to go to dances with two or three
of these engineers who were particularly close to my brother and
were at the house a lot. Anyhow, we went off, and I know I was
older because we were having our own celebration after the church
thing. I was not aware of the fact that this one young man did not
go. When we came home the tree was lighted, but the tree was lighted
with electric lights. What he had done was to string up these
lights and this was a great surprise.
The interesting thing to me later when I had children of my
own is Alfred had left over from his childhood a few ornaments,
which go onto the Christmas tree to this day, and he had the little
German-made candleholders , so what we did, we had a tree small
enough that he or somebody could reach to the top and we lit the
candles and let them burn down sitting there. The electric lights
were in the tree; they just weren t on. But the magic which the
candles were to my children and I do think that a candle-lighted
tree is a gorgeous object this same magic I felt when I saw this
electric tree. It was a surprise thing. Gracious, when you think
292
K-Q: of it in that wooden church [in Telluride] , that great tree lighted
with candles, and the absurdity of it when you come right down to
it, because the whole camp, all the big mines, were electrified
really very early.
Brower: Did you have gas lights at home?
K-Q: They never went through a gas phase; there never was any gas there.
Brower: In your own home did you have electric lights as well?
K-Q :
Always , always .
Brower: I grew up with gas lights.
K-Q: It may have been that Denver, for instance, that cities, had this
phase. I simply don t remember about Denver. It may not have
had I just don t know about that. When we actually moved to
Telluride from a smaller town down the way which had not been
electrified, I remember my first sense of wonder and excitement
about what seemed to me a brilliant display of electricity,
electric street lights I think not too many of them probably.
The mills would be lighted with electric lights all night because
they worked three shifts, you see. They worked twenty-four hours.
Brower: Does this relate to Mr. Nunn do you suppose, because of his invention?
K-Q: Yes, yes, and the particular development there. I think I told you
at that time there were no commercial electric stoves, but they
simply had wired up in some way, and at the big mines, anyhow, they
cooked with electricity. They devised a way of heating the [stove]
top and, in fact, in our school we had domestic science, so-called,
and we cooked by electricity there in the school.
Brower: I was thinking about that Christmas tree. I wonder what he did.
He must have had only standard-sized bulbs, which would be quite
large, but perhaps bulbs were smaller then?
K-Q: I think perhaps they were.
Brower: My own recollection is that they were, and of course, they lasted
forever, which is something they don t do anymore.
K-Q: They certainly do not. I have a feeling, and this certainly would
have to be confirmed, I have a feeling that they were small lights.
But this could be so wrong. They certainly weren t colored.
293
Brower: To return to funerals, it would be lugubrious, I suppose, to compare
California funerals with the ones in Telluride. I take it they had
none of the gala qualities!
K-Q: Boy, it was a good day for the saloons! You see, the other aspects
of that funeral thing it would have been very stupid for the mine
owners to do otherwise than give a half-day holiday. I mean there
was no question about it. It was a holiday at full pay. No, I
think [such funerals] probably belonged to that period of mining,
and I doubt there was quite the equivalent thing here in California.
These mines were at such an altitude; they were so remote, and you
had this delivery-stable situation a delivery stable the size of
the one that we had would have filled one of these California
towns. The camp was 450 miles from Denver, which was a great
deal farther than it is now. A train ran all the time. The roads
were opened part of the time, depending on rains and floods and
snow and such things. So, although the trains brought in everything,
in a sense the camp was self-sufficient. It had to stock up from
other places, but it had its horses, it had its hay, it had its
food. The trestle went out with the big flood, and it was a
high trestle and took a long time to rebuild. We had a picture
of the first wagon bringing supplies from Montrose; it was one
of these gorgeous six-horse affairs such as the Borax people use.
It was carrying Budweiser beer! [laughter]
Brower: That was the thing they missed most, I suppose.
K-Q: Right! I suppose the Telluride thing always comes piecemeal. It
should be done as a whole, but the recollections come terribly
piecemeal, and I think I live in the past much less than most
people do. I think two or three times things have been put to me
in different ways as to doing not straight autobiography but
recollections and this sort of thing and I think that I want to
write them
Writers Cramps and Creations
K-Q: We talked earlier about why the UC Press and not the Indiana Press
did Ishi. Ishi s whole connection with the white world really
was a connection with the University of California, the museum, and
the people whom he knew best had connection with the University and
the UC Medical Health Center took care of him. He was a California
Indian. His story seemed to belong very much to California, to the
University, and so by association to the UC Press. Also, I was
294
K-Q: thinking of something that was not ethnography but was close to
it, an ethnographic biography, let s say, which would be in the
mainstream of the series, the anthropological-ethnographic series,
which the press had published since its very beginning, right? It
would be an actual continuation or offshoot from that, and it would
be of much more immediate interest [to the UC Press] than to the
Indiana Press (this probably isn t a fact because the Indiana
Press then had for many years published the Journal of American
Folklore maybe it still does and the Journal is predominantly
Indian folklore. At least it was for years; I suppose it isn t
now) .
Anyway, that [decision] involved some of my troubles, of which
I have had a great many, with my contracts and publishers because
I have a bad habit of well, as Fruge said (when I said [it] at
that party I was pretty well quoting him) ,
he gave up on trying to
make me read the contracts but had persuaded me to have somebody
in contact with me read a contract.
Brower: Do I understand that you had a contract with Indiana at the time
that you were doing Ishi?
K-Q: I did. I had a contract to one part of which I paid very little
attention, not being very good about these legal matters: that
they would have a first refusal of the next two things that I would
write. Well, at the time I didn t expect to write anything else.
I didn t think seriously about that, and when the matter came up,
August [Fruge] was rather sharp. He said that [provision was usual
for] a commercial publisher but that it didn t often occur in
academic contracts. And it s a fact that the UC contract does not
have that. But anyway this [Indiana contract] did, and technically
I had written a couple of things, a couple of children s stories,
which at that time I think now the Indiana Press is taking
children s stories but they weren t then.
Brower: Had you submitted them to Indiana?
K-Q: No, I offered them, but they said they weren t
Brower: I would think the offer would be an equivalent to a first refusal.
K-Q: Well, I offered them, knowing that they weren t taking children s
[stories]. August simply handled that one with well, August was
a person who counted more in the world of university presses than
did the Indiana man, a very nice man but he really isn t of August s
caliber. August just said, "This belongs to California for such
and such and such reasons." But the trouble with the whole thing
was that I didn t worry about this at all. I didn t think about
it until after it [Ishi] had this immediate success and all the
295
B rower:
K-Q:
B rower:
K-Q:
K-Q: publicity that went along with that. Then, of course, Bernard
Perry sort of hit the ceiling. August really intervened, and I
think that in this sort of a situation, August is probably very
skilled .
You had forgotten this requirement?
It meant so little to me.
August, I suppose, had not previewed the terms of your preceding
contract.
I think he had never seen it .
Probably the whole relation was such
that we weren t I had a contract with UC Press only This has
happened regularly with me; I ve never had a contract until a book
was finished, until I was through with it, a book or an article
or whatever it was. I ve never gotten an advance. The book was
finished and turned in and I think I must have signed the contract
before we met, but I didn t have a contract any of the time that
I was working on the book. Then, of course, I gummed up beautifully
when I did the children s version [with Parnassus Press], but I was
really very innocent. I did not realize [that] Herman Schein, in
whom I had great trust at the time, was a very sharp businessman,
which he is. He doesn t do things which are to his advantage but
he tries to be very sharp and hard-boiled and so on (the first
volume of Ursula s trilogy was with him).
Brower: I m not following this very well because I don t know who Herman
Schein is associated with.
K-Q: Oh, Parnassus Press. They published Ishi, Last of His Tribe. I
toldLucie Dobbie about it and I said, "Before I go any farther with
this, I should have an understanding with the Press." She said,
"Oh, that s perfectly all right. We don t do children s books
and that won t cause any trouble." But I did press it, and she
said, "Well, so you don t trust me." Well, she was already sick,
so I couldn t say, "You might die tomorrow." You could say, "You
may get run over by an automobile tomorrow" or something like this.
I knew that Lucie was dying and I just couldn t say that, so like
a fool what I should have done is to go over Lucie s head. But this
was before I had any real relation with August and my whole relation
[with the Press], my whole connection, was with Lucie. So, of course,
August was the one who really hit the roof. As I realized after
wards, Ted had tried to [warn me]. Ted had an instinctive distrust
of Herman [Schein] from the first, and he said, "I think he is
pulling your leg a bit," when Herman insisted upon the title
beginning with the word "Ishi" His rationalization for that was
the way books get listed in library lists and so on.
296
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Well, of course, that was really not his reason for doing it. This
was a perfectly ridiculous performance that was entirely feeble
minded on my part, entirely! I think actually August showed great
restraint, [laughs]
Lucie, of course, was the one who led you astray.
It s very curious. It was the last book that Lucie read. I only
saw her once after she had finished the book. Of course, she
was a pretty sick lady but she read the book. Anyhow, it was just
an outrageous thing for me to do and, of course, in the contract
(I had read the contract) that certainly was fairly covered. I
mean I was breaking contract; there was absolutely no question
about that. The press was curiously excited about this. August
was very upset about it and went to the Regent s lawyer about it,
and they sort of said who s second in command at the press?
Lilienthal?
Lilienthal. He just considered it a bunch of total nonsense and
said as much to me. He said, "If it does anything, it will help
sell the adult book which as a matter of fact it did but, of
course, this had nothing to do with the fact that I really had
broken contract.
But was August s position that they would have published it?
No.
That wasn t the issue?
That wasn t the issue.
The practical position was really Lilienthal s.
the other book.
It only helped
Right, and, of course, it worked both ways, but more often a
child reads For several years I went to the schools and talked to
the children. I mean, after they had read the book. They had
their series of questions and I d spend an hour or two with
them. I did that until I doscovered that doing this with children,
you were doing it with adults, and it was taking too much time and
energy and I had pretty well gone through the school situation,
but anyhow, kids would get the book. They d be given the book to
read at school. Then they would want the book. Then they would
want the adult book, or the family would look at the children s
book and go out and get the adult book for themselves. It
works both ways, but I think actually the children s book led to
buying the adults [book] more than the other way around.
297
K-Q: But the fact remains that me and contracts are [chuckles] bad
news for anybody, for me and for the other fellow and for
everybody. I guess I was right. The answer is to have some
designee to read the fine print.
When it came to the [Kroeber] biography, John [Quinn] was
around by then and he wrote the contract and then took the contract
to a lawyer who is not particularly informed about he isn t an
ideal person for a book person to have, but he did pick up some
things and insisted that the copyright be in my name for the new
edition. You see, there had to be a new contract for this new
edition of Ishi and the copyright is in my name, which doesn t
make much difference, but it does make a little. It gives the
author a bit more feeling of participation. Publishers can do
some things without the author having a say but you have a little
more leverage.
Brower: What about the estate s rights too? Wouldn t that be secured
better by a personal
K-Q: I should think so. You tell Ken [Brower] that the advice that
everybody gives me is to have the copyright in your own name and
anybody will give it to you, even though (unless you say so) the
publisher will put it in his name. If you say you want it in
yours, there s absolutely no question that can come up. They
can t refuse that and I think they never try to. They just don t
mention it if you don t.
Brower: I wonder if that s true also with magazines?
K-Q: I think you can have it [copyright] for anything. You tell Ken to
insist upon that because I think he s going to be a writer and he
might just as well
Brower: Get things worked out from the beginning.
K-Q: If he continues writing (not just the things that have sort of a
natural place to go so much, [like those] I ve done that UC Press
has published), he should have an agent.
Brower: He does have an agent, but he s just about decided that it s not
worth it. You feel they are important?
K-Q: I never had an agent. Ursula s had an agent from the time, I think,
she was first published in the science fiction journal. What was
it? She has an agent who specializes in fantasy and science fiction
and so forth. But anyhow she s been very, very [good]. It s
important that Ursula have an agent because she s about as
practical as I, and this woman is good. When I began doing these
other things I got [Scott] Meredith and he has sold only one thing
298
K-Q: for me. He likes what I write. He thinks it s great stuff, but
he hasn t been able to sell it! [chuckles]
Brower: Does he offer criticisms?
K-Q: No. I think that Scott Meredith just happens to think that he likes
this novel that he s been peddling around for two or three years
now. He had quite a little load of my stuff; he sent back one
article two articles which he couldn t sell. He gave me the
list of the people he had tried to sell them to. Stewart Brand
inquired if I had something and I showed him the article and he
took it immediately, and Mike Ferguson, who s doing a new sort of
medical journal, took the hippie article. Scott Meredith sold one
children s story, which is in the process of publication now to
Atheneum. It s the only thing he s ever sold for me. Technically
after two years he hasn t sold anything. Our contract was for
two years and after two years was to be renewed, but we ve never
gone through the formality of renewing; he sold this story, which,
I think, sort of automatically renews it. I find him entertaining
to correspond with occasionally, but with Ken it should be different
because he is a young person and he s likely to come up with things.
. But if an agent, it should be a good agent.
Brower: The disadvantage, of course, is having to give the agent a percentage
of your royalties forevermore.
K-Q: Yes, ten percent. Well, he can wait on that and see what happens
with his work there. He s working on a novel now?
Brower: Yes, he s making changes in a manuscript that s been accepted, and
working on a Micronesian novel as well.
K-Q: The novel has been accepted?
Brower: No, the novel has not. It isn t finished. He doesn t submit things
until he s finished.
K-Q: Well, like me. I think that s [good] you don t put yourself on
any kind of a spot if you do that .
Brower: Also he has the feeling that the conception in his mind won t be
clearly enough shown by an outline.
K-Q: I think this is absolutely right. At least it s the way I work.
Now, I m sure that Trollope worked differently and faster, God
knows, [laughs] But I don t know necessarily the direction. I did
not know the direction of the biography [Alfred Kroeber, A Personal
Configuration] was going to take; neither did I knew even for Ishi
299
K-Q: I didn t have an idea in the world. I was limited; I knew there
were certain directions I wouldn t go. But of those that were open
to me, I did not know where I was going, and I certainly did not
with the biography and I did not with the novel that Scott Meredith
has (I think he must have given up peddling it, but he still has
it).
I believe Ursula would never write an outline. I haven t
heard her say this before, but she and Ted were talking and I
overheard this. She starts from an image. Her last one, The
Dispossessed, was of two people, a man and a woman, driving a
sled over this ice field and she wanted to here was this image,
here were these two people. So she was in the process of discovering
what they were up to .
Brower: That s fascinating.
K-Q: Yes. She said then that she usually started from an image. Well,
if you start from an image or from some sort of simple concept as
I am doing with I can t say I m writing the novel now but I have
one on ice. I saw two people who filled me with an immense interest
and curiosity in Greece. I saw them for three different times, just
a few minutes each time, and I never was able to forget about them.
I decided oh, I suppose it was three or four years ago I just
had the idea of following those people through. I felt I could do
it and maybe I can and maybe I can t. I sort of hoped to settle
down and see where this goes. If you start that way, you simply
haven t an outline and you don t know where you re going and until
you get acquainted with your characters, and when you do get
acquainted with your characters, in a very real sense they take
over. This is partly [true in] a biographical thing too (Ken
and I must talk about that some time) . When you get acquainted
with the person, there are certain things you have to think about
and decide. [You must] come to the sense of conviction that this
is where this person must have been in his thinking or that you
can t find it, or something but it seems to me that you re more
the instrument than the director.
There must be two entirely different ways of writing, and
certainly [in] fiction it isn t plot but character. I can t invent
a plot. Ursula can t invent a plot. I think the plot people can
make an outline because you have your plot and then you fit your
characters and your situation into it. But Ursula s stories haven t
very much plot. You know, some people can sit in front of you and
they just can offer you a plot. They just think in terms of plot.
Well, I can t even begin to imagine a plot or to lay one out and I
don t think Ursula ever does.
300
Brower: Apart from the people who are going to
K-Q: The person or a particular situation. Ursula s imaging is
different from mine. It s a more purely imaginative thing, but
then she has a kind of riproaring imagination anyhow. It
certainly takes off.
It s noon.
Brower: I m excited about those people of Ursula s riding that sleigh in
the snow fields. What are they doing there?
K-Q: Well, she had to find out; in a whole long story she found out.
In fact, she does not do what I do rewrite and redo as I go along,
If she decided this wasn t going right, the whole thing [would go]
into the fire and she d start over again. Well, maybe if I had
been writing at her age I could have done it.
Brower: What frightful courage it must take. Were these people known to
you or were they simply strangers?
K-Q: Absolute strangers, two people. [Pause] I think we ought to quit.
301
XX CREATIVITY, WRITING FOR CHILDREN, MOJAVE
[Interview 20: April 19, 1977]##
Brower: I reread your biography of Kroeber to see if you had covered
the retirement years; we seem to have caught up with them.
K-Q: Yes, right.
Brower: It did seem to me that they are documented fairly thoroughly
there. I wondered if there were other things that you would have
wished to include that you remembered later, or perhaps that s
not the direction you re going in at all.
K-Q: As far as Kroeber is concerned, it seems to me that they are pretty
well recorded. It s been a long time since I ve looked at the
[book]. I think that in that there isn t quite enough of what
life was during those retirement years.
Brower: The focus, of course, is not on you.
K-Q: No.
Brower: But one does see you in the inadequate little kitchen cooking
in one house after another.
K-Q: It was an interesting series of years there.
Brower: Actually it was a kind of life that I think comes to most
people in the early years of their marriage and you rather reversed
it.
K-Q: Yes, yes. It was really nothing we planned. It just happened so.
But it was a very rewarding time for both of us. I did enjoy it
by that time, more than I would have earlier. I was free and there
weren t household or children or anything holding me, and
experiencing different sorts of food and people and so on was
really enormously interesting. It certainly shifted me away
from the domestic and from as much commitment as I had had to a
home in one place, and I suppose in that sense it was sort of a
preparation for my going ahead and doing something or other. I
think that s about the way I would sum it up. I haven t thought
of it particularly in this way. Shortly after we came back here
I was writing, of course.
When we came back here, it was {with the knowledge] that we
were coming home .
302
Brower: It was a commitment to stay in Berkeley?
K-Q: Definitely.
Brower: And anything else would be short term?
K-Q: Right. We wanted to be here; we had played with the idea of
perhaps not coining back here and had definitely decided that
this is what we wanted to do. We did a few things like bringing
the kitchen up to date and some things which had partly been done
before and had partly been dropped.
Brower: But I can see that that period away might well have been exactly
the right thing for unhooking you from
K-Q: Right. I was free in a sense I could have been before except
I just wasn t to meet different sorts of people and to meet them
on a different basis. By that time I was beginning to meet people
partly through Kroeber s activities in those late years, which
seemed to involve more literary people and more artists, art
historians, and such than anthropologists, except those
anthropologists who also were concerned with that area, or
historians of the sort who were going out from the center of
history to the history of science, the history of ideas that
whole borderline which has developed very much since then, I
think.
Brower: Did that orientation persist when you came home? Did you not
go back to the anthropology department as narrowly as you had?
K-Q: No, no, not at all. It practically continued here in Berkeley
precisely. As you know there are always people coming through
here and there are plenty of people here, in other departments,
university or non-university people.
Brower: The thing I loved about that last section in the biography is
Kroeber s unimpaired sense of curiosity and wonder that long
interlude with the octopus on the beach. His was just a
wonderful mind!
K-Q: Yes, and always an intense curiosity. That runs through the
family. One of his sisters was a biologist, and the other one
had biological training and, in fact, along with all of her other
activities, kept up her work in biology at the Museum of
Natural History as she could. One of her daughters, whom I
met just recently (she came through here), has this same interest
and, of course, I still have it too. It is a matter of curiosity
and I think quite an obsession with the biological, too, although
Kroeber was interested in all sorts of things. There is this
interest in all sorts of life, in living creatures.
303
Brower: Last time we talked quite a bit about writing, but I suppose we
have by no means exhausted that.
K-Q : Let s see where we are.
Brower: I remember we ended with the kinds of things that set plot
people off from character people. You were talking about your own
interest in a couple you had seen randomly in Greece. We were
talking about how a story gets started.
K-Q: I think we more or less finished that. I don t know. I m
wondering if we are coming to the end of what we should be
recording about me. Have we ever discovered where we re
going, I wonder?
Brower: Well, that, of course, should be my role and I haven t played it
at all.
K-Q: Well, I don t know. This is the question. What elements, what
parts, what things that I did or was or saw or experienced, would
be of interest to somebody else.
Brower: It seems to me you ve done very well in gathering those by the
wayside as we went along.
K-Q: I suppose that s how you do it. But I wondered if there was
some heart or center or goal or something that perhaps I wasn t
aware of.
Brower: I feel that perhaps there should be, and that my lack of a sense
of structure is a limitation in this.
K-Q: But what should it be?
Brower: We have roughly let chronology carry us along. That s why I was
looking back to see what areas we have rather neglected. I felt
that we hadn t done very much with those years of moving, the
retirement years. But those are handled pretty well in another
place .
K-Q: I think so. Continuing in a fashion more or less where we were
last week, I suppose, if I were able to say it, it might be of
interest [to show], or perhaps we ve covered this, the steps by
which there was a shifting from whatever you might want to call
it I should say the servant s role or the sort of second-in-
command role or whatever it is to an attitude of being,
whatever else, a writer and, however modestly, a poet and
that does imply a shift in emphasis . I think perhaps the thing
it implies is the sense you have of this demanding thing about
304
K-Q: which you feel seriously enough that you make changes in your life,
and you ve got to be willing to sacrifice something else to have
it. This came about with me and I think with Ursula, although
much earlier [for her]; she always meant to write and always did
write. I m not sure that she would say that, but I had the
impression that she, much more seriously and much earlier than I,
accepted the role, that she slid into it rather easily, that
there was no great harrowing thing about it, that the obsession
to write was there and so she gave it space. She wasn t
trying to get away from something. I wonder if this is the
difference when you re doing something which is creative no matter
what it is (I mean, cooking and gardening, whatever it is) but it
has that element in it
Brower: The element of creativity?
K-Q: No, the element of attempting what you want to do. Then it isn t
as if you re escaping something else. You re making room and you
make room perhaps drastically for that or you must let other
things go. You jettison them without any particular conscience
about it or perhaps even without consciousness of what you re doing.
Women should have other things to do and room should be made,
but somehow this happens. I mean you do it; you don t talk about
it.
Brower: It s not a conscious, mechanical matter of now I am going to
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
do it. But just in terms of time you must have had logistical
problems .
Well, Ursula certainly has.
had free time.
I didn t attempt it until I really
The postponing of writing was really a reflection of the
impediment
Except I wasn t aware of postponing it [chuckles]. That has to
do with me. I don t know how you d explain that otherwise.
I doubt if Ursula would say "impediment." I don t like to quote
her; she can quote herself. But you do something about giving
yourself time for it, one way or another, and she certainly has.
I was just reading an interview of hers and they asked about time.
She said that at first it was a few minutes any time she could
grab it, but that for those few minutes there was no banging on
the door, there was no answering the phone. Those minutes were
hers and then the minutes increased. I think I m not saying this
well, but I have a feeling there is a difference in attitude
there, when it s the push cf wanting to do something, and when you
know jolly well what you want to do.
305
Brower: For you it would all have been simpler if it had coincided with
your widowhood.
K-Q: Yes, but it didn t at all. It certainly affected
Brower: It must have made it more tolerable
K-Q: I think I was enormously stimulated, and I don t mean in a
particularly happy way. The publicity, the complexity of those
early, early two or three years of the Ishi thing, were as much
of a strain as anything else.
Brower: The business of pulling off a bestseller in almost your first
K-Q: I never had had any sort of publicity and I really did not know
how to handle it. I think I was overtense and overtired and
overs timiilated and also excited
Brower: And certainly a little bit pleased?
K-Q: Oh, sure. But I do look back on it as a strenuous time. Then,
of course, I began pretty soon writing the children s Ishi,
which was a very demanding thing in a way. I look upon it as a
harder book to have written than the original one. They re very
different, but I was not doing what I was told was the easy
thing to do the competition got a little heavy. I may have told
you this, did I?
f
Brower: I don t think you did.
K-Q: The pressure was to hurry the book because there were a half a
dozen different publishers who came first to me and I had said that
if I wrote one it would be for Parnassus and finally I got this
letter from one of the New York publishers in which the woman
said (the editor of this house) it s probably just as well
that I don t remember her name that really anybody could write
the book and that all you had to do was to take some of the
pictures and make a resume of the story and you had the book.
Brower: There would be no copyright law that that would violate?
K-Q: I don t know, but anyhow it worried me because at just about that
time Herman [Schein] at Parnassus had said, "You re hurting
yourself, and I think you shouldn t do it. I think you should
give yourself another year for this." I know that it was very hard
for him to say that because he was aware that a book might come
out.
306
K-Q: As I had done before when puzzled, I went to Bill Hogan at the
Chronicle because I knew him and I trusted him. I said, "What
about this, Bill? What do you suggest?" He said, "Leave it to
me." So he called me up, his daughter called me up at intervals
to know what was going on, and he just put this little item in his
column saying that he had called me up to find out what I was up
to and he said, "She s deep in a children s book on Ishi" and
made no implication as to when it was coming out. He told me,
"That will get to the publishers all around and you won t have to
do anything about it."
Brower: How wonderful! I wouldn t have believed that that would have
stopped them cold.
K-Q: He didn t say that it would be ready next month or in two years
or whenever it was, but anyhow that did it.
I think writing for children is the most demanding writing
there is and I think people who just do childrens books [off
hand], are immoral, because I think it should be the writing
to which you give the most. This particular story I was going to
I had no facts on Ishi s childhood but I had plenty of background
to know what it must have been and how he lived. We know a
great deal about the culture of those hill people. But the story
in essence was not a children s story at all; there are multiple
deaths and violence, cruelty and what to do about this? It
seemed to me that I neared coming to a full halt three different
times when I just couldn t go on with the story. One of the reasons
that I couldn t go on was I had made [up] the sister s cousin
(I called her Tushi) , and I had become so accustomed to Tushi that
I just couldn t bear to kill her off. So that s what stopped
me; it seemed to me that despite America s dislike of it death is
part of life, and it should be presented to children but not in
a covering-up way or a prettyfying way or in a shocking way. This
is the real challenge, very, very difficult to do. I think I
pretty well did it.
One of the early times I went to a school after the class had
well, in this case the class was young enough that the book had
been read to them. I haven t told you this, have I?
Brower : No .
K-Q: They were also young enough not to have as many scruples as older
children have about asking questions. The teacher read the book,
and she left it to them to ask the questions they wanted and did
not interfere or censor them. What they wanted to know was [mimics
child s voice] what they did with the body? Well, I explained
what I thought pretty well, but not in anything like the detail
307
K-Q: that these children wanted. So I answered the questions as they
came up. We spent the whole blooming hour or hour and a half
discussing this. I realized that we make a mistake in covering
up and washing over [death]. But the interesting thing is that
that was the youngest group I ever talked to. The older groups,
by the time they are in the sixth grade, ask only very discreet
questions. I think this is not any lack of interest because there
always are some questions coming back to you. I think they have
learned that there are some things that make Papa and Mama and
people in general uncomfortable and children do have discretion
about that. They will not ask things which they think will make
you uncomfortable. But that was the real difficult thing about
that book.
Brower: I can remember reading somewhere that we make fun of the Victorians
for sweeping sex under the rug, but we have treated death and
pain and illness in just the same way.
K-Q: Yes, that s right. That is one of the things I think they re
not handling, death or age. I think our young people have
done something about pain and illness. I think there has been
some clarification there, don t you think so?
Brower: Possibly, but there is something about the way death is
K-Q: Death is not handled well.
Brower: No. This jolly business of talking to everybody about it gives
me the creeps. I don t want some strange young man coming to my
door and saying, wouldn t I like to discuss my terminal illness
with him?
K-Q: No, no. We do not know how to do it. We have not learned that
yet. I think it s certainly as serious a deficiency in our
culture as the Victorian sex thing. Maybe it s more serious, but I
do think it is serious. I think it is not so tied up with religion
as some people think it is. It s because religion flourishes and
works up and down. I think it s a social ethic sort of thing
more than a religious sort of thing. I think religion gives a
ritual for handling it, but I can t see that the Protestant
religion has been much help in really making us face up to it or
in putting death in with the rest of the time of your life.
Brower: No, perhaps not. I often wonder how many people genuinely do
believe in an afterlife.
308
K-Q: I don t know, I don t know. This of course is something that has
been reexamined and there s a lot of new mysticism I mean new to
Western young people. Probably a lot of it is awfully half-baked
and half-felt, but it certainly is a reexamination. At its
best levels I think it s probably a very serious reexamination
on the part of young people today, and not so young people too.
K-Q: As for the rest of the writing, I think there s not so much to be
said that is of particular interest. There are two things I
probably never will write about, but I thought I would like to
write about children s writing, and about what biography really
is. In the matter of children s writing, my personal experience
has been that Ishi was a responsibility and I really worked so hard
over that, over both those books, that I was very late coming to
any real pleasure in it. I felt so much the need that they should
be as right as I could make them.
The three children s books that I really enjoyed doing just
came. First Fred Cody asked me to write something about my
Christmas in the Rocky Mountains as a child and I produced two
or three things. I m awfully bad at writing to order anyhow.
They came out absolutely blah and Fred admitted that they were,
[laughs] I was sort of struggling around with them and I had
gone up to visit with Ursula in Charles Grove for a few days.
At the end of one day, Green Christmas just came. It was one of
those things that I sat down and wrote, the way some poetry is
written, some lyric poetry just comes. Of course, I had to make
some changes and some polishing and whatnot but essentially it
was just one verse and that was it and I loved doing it and I
liked the man that did the illustrations. The whole book, the
whole thing, was just kind of a joy.
But I think there is too much writing for children off the
top of the head and I just think that it cannot be done that way.
If
Brower: You don t think of yourself as a poet?
K-Q: No, no, and I m not. I ve written very, very little, and I don t
know anything about the technical side of poetry. I have no
feeling for it. I really have no interest in it. It s been a
terribly emotional outlet for me. I had quite a burst of writing
309
K-Q: poetry during the war. It was obviously an emotional release
sort of thing and I suppose it was a beginning of getting me into
writing. The work that Kroeber and I did together in writing
about poetry was great fun. I like to have poetry read to me,
and what seems to be just a rather cut-and-dried word analysis
leads youto an understanding of a poem that you don t get
otherwise. I m really interested in style and use of words and
so on, but not in poetry as such and I would not know how to analyze
poetry form in terms of its poetic structure. That I know nothing
about.
Brower: Didn t Josephine Miles do something of this sort?
K-Q: Yes, yes. You better turn that off for a minute,
[tape interruption]
Brower: You were telling about the kind of interest that you have in
poetry which isn t really the poet s interest in poetry.
K-Q: No, it isn t and I have no competence and I have really no interest.
I m afraid that my interest in folklore also is not a folklorist s
interest I ve done, you might say, second-hand work in folklore
but the kind of folkloristic analysis that is made doesn t
interest me at all. I m interested in the rare tale that shows
imagination or is original, is different; there s something kind
of stunning about it. It s like "Loon Woman," not the great
universal myths that come up all over the world but the oddball
things that some individual imagination has created or that somehow
has got into and been preserved in a small body of myths. I
would suspect that they were the stories that are most likely to
get lost; it s what gets lost in oral history anyhow, oral
literature. There again I think style is particularly [interesting],
how the thing is done and probably the quality of an individual
storyteller. One of the things I think makes those late selections
of Kroeber s different from most [is that], fortunately, he
included a brief biographical sketch of each of his informants,
telling something about what sort of person he was. [He] then kept
[all] the stories, even when it s a repetition of the same story.
You can then go from informant to informant it will be the same
story but it will be different because it s a different person
telling it and his focus of interest [is different] maybe it s
a man in one case and a woman in another, an old person or a young
person, a skilled storyteller or an unskilled one. You can play
all sorts of games with this. Most great bodies of folklore are
pretty grim to read [for me] because I m not reading them in the
analytic way that a folklorist is. [chuckles] I m really looking
for a corking good story, I m afraid!
310
B rower: Did you enjoy the Mojave trip?
K-Q: Oh, yes. It was great fun. Kroeber had been there in 1900 or 1901.
Perhaps he was there as late as 1930, and then we went there in
53 and 54. He had not been back in the meantime. We found one
very old Mojave; he was a Mojave in the old tradition, and Kroeber
got a story from him with really astonishingly little change in
its essential aspects from the way the story had been told in
1906. We lived in Parker. In other words, we were on the
reservation. Parker is a little town cut out of the reservation.
Mojave stories in the first place, they re dreams for the
Mojaves and are what Mojaves mean by dreams, and they [continue
throughout] a lifetime; the story is only finished at the end of
your life. The stories, although dreamed, are absolutely
specific as to their geography. From the stories, you can, and
Kroeber did, map the old Mojave country. The old storyteller,
and some of the younger storytellers because in this case we
had to have a younger man as interpreter. Anyway, both the old
man and the younger man went with us down to the desert. These
dream stories of events and ancient gods are very specific; [an
event occurred] south of a particular hill, whatever it is. The
stories, as you get them all mapped [provide a map of] the
whole Mojave country. [These stories] go on for eternity; the
Mojave love to get every detail, geographic detail as well as all
the songs that go with it and that sort of thing.
Brower: Do you think that s because their country is so relatively unmarked
that it takes a detailed look to discover variation in that
terrain? Does this account for this obsessive interest in
details of geography, do you think?
K-Q: No, I don t think so. I don t know how to account for the
Mojaves. They have this tremendous interest in their country;
in traveling where they used to they do dream their lives. They
dream everything.
Brower: Would you explain that to me? I ve never really quite understood
the use of the verb "dream" in that context.
K-Q: Well, they obviously don t use it quite in our sense but what the
Mojave understands. Perhaps he does also really dream it. They
are directed dreams and they don t count the ordinary odd dream
that does not fit in with the life stream. They re really
thorough, contented mystics, and they re so interesting because
they re the most open of the California Indians. They re the
most accessible broad smiles, a strong relaxed people, and relaxed
in their general attitude to life. I think somehow this dream
pattern has made a life of really great serenity. They sat
311
K-Q: they still sit in the midst of datura. They were surrounded,
in their old life and now in the modern world, with people who
took drugs, and the Mojave didr. t go into that. Apparently
with this dream life you didn t need anything. All you needed to
do was dream.
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Well, that was very interesting. When we first arrived
and had been there fifteen minutes, Kroeber was sitting with his
notebook out while an old Mojave old, like the old storyteller,
very, very cordial, amiable nice man told him perfectly matter-of-
factly about how he had dreamed and with his dreams had forced
death upon an enemy of his . The man had been a friend but had
annoyed him [the dreamer], who didn t like what he had done and
so he just dreamed him to death. He calmly told us about [it],
neither boasting nor anything else. It was just one of the
important things in life.
Surely this wouldn t be regarded that calmly by his peers, would
it? How do they feel about people who dream other people to
death?
Well, that s how you did it in the Mojave. [laughs]
protected yourself against it.
So you
So he didn t have any apprehension in telling this story?
Obviously, no, of course not. [laughs] Obviously not. They re
not a conscience-ridden people. It s very interesting. But of
course I was just on the sidelines there watching the performance
and I loved the desert anyway. They can survive very well
apparently in the Mojave. Of course, now the older people are
about gone, and they have adapted I think economically perhaps
better than a good many other Indians have.
Brower: I suppose there was very little to attract a predatory people to
that area.
K-Q: If there was any mining around there it hadn t been heard of by
then, and it was a practically impossible territory for anybody
but Indians .
They had scraps and wars and they got killed, but it was not
the annihilating thing that it was with the groups that were
here in California. They [the Mojave] are right at the edge and
it was a much bigger territory.
Brower: I never really quite educated myself to appreciate the desert.
312
K-Q: When I went the first time with Kroeber to Santa Fe and out
from Santa Fe into that part of northern New Mexico (which,
of course, is the sort of country I grew up in), I had to say,
"Oh, it s so beautiful!" Kroeber said, "You re in the most
godforsaken place!" [laughter] That desert was pretty godforsaken.
I think the Mojave Desert is very beautiful. Now, I don t like
Death Valley. There you get the oppressive sense of nonliving and
I really don t like it. Its beauty is dramatic and beautiful but,
somehow to me, it s oppressive. I really don t like that. But
when you get out on the Mojave desert, it has a lot of life on it
really. It isn t like the Sahara.
Brower: I came to it after having seen the Grand Canyon country which is
desert country but with water .
K-Q: Really the part that I like best is the part by the river, that s
getting sort of offside. How is our tape going?
Brower: Oh, we have fifteen minutes. Would you like to stop now?
K-Q: It might be just as well, [break in tape] Parker is not a cozy
place. It had a motel which was comfortable. The thing that is
bad about the southwest, unless you are staying at a Harvey House
you have had it as far as food is concerned. I m convinced it s
still true and Parker, of course, had no Harvey House, had nothing
of the sort; it had one fancy-feeling restaurant but it wasn t
really good, and beyond that there was a counter and a soda
fountain and perhaps there was another place. My stomach never
has accepted fried food and this sad cooking that you can get
in the southwest. I simply got a sterno stove and we made our
breakfast on that and heated up some soup or something for lunch.
We took a graduate student with us because the driving can be very
difficult on the desert. Everything was fine. It was the right
time of year, February beautiful along the Colorado. But Parker
isn t the most comfortable place.
Brower: They may not have very good food, but what I remember about
Parker is ice cold beer in iced mugs that had been kept in the
refrigerator.
K-Q: That could be right. Things may have changed but over the years
in the southwest you were pretty dependent upon either yourself
and having some sort of a camping setup or else having a leather
stomach that I never had.
Brower: What kind of food is it generally?
K-Q: Overfried. It is old American food unregenerate, and I often
was with a cowboy at the stove or something like that.
313
Brower: Would this also apply to the Mojave themselves? What sort of
things did they eat?
K-Q: Oh, no, they ate very well. The problem was this sub-American,
sub-Mexican kind of mix that you get down there and no cooks
around, [laughs] As I say, there s lots of change now.
Brower: I m not sure!
K-Q: I m not sure either! I wouldn t bet on it.
Brower: It seems to me you were a rugged lady to go on that trip.
XXI SECURITY, WIDOWHOOD
[Interview 21: April 26, 1977 ]##
Brower: I feel that your security is very firmly rooted, and I wonder how
that happened.
K-Q: I m really puzzled as to how to answer this because I think I do
know what you mean and I think I am also correct in saying that
I think you re right, except that it is combined with so much shy
ness, so much unwillingness to really do something on my own
publicly. I didn t feel this in the family. I never felt it
in any family situation, but I certainly did in a public one or
social one. I think, speaking just purely socially, I was shy at
meeting strange people and I am not good at small talk. This is
the sort of thing that each person can manage if that is what is
to be managed. I grew up accustomed to, let us say, what we
would call [etiquette], the forms for introductions and this sort
of thing. I suppose this helped. It would seem to me that as
a child growing up I was not concerned with matters of inferiority
or superiority. It seems to me they just didn t come up and I
was before the time, as in great part my children were, of this
extreme sense of nonidentity which America has suffered or our
young people are experiencing everywhere. I certainly always
knew where I was, who I was not that I was superior and certainly
not that I was inferior. I m groping here a little bit. I m
wondering if [tape interruption: telephone rings]
Brower: I have the feeling that security begins in childhood, that
somehow a sense of self-worth is the most important thing a parent
can give the child. You spoke, for instance, of your mother s
not expecting you to be the kind of person she was.
K-Q: Right.
314
Brower: Which in itself reflects an acceptance of you as you.
K-Q: Right and I think, in fact, there was some preference that I should
be that way, not that I felt any pressure but certainly not a
trace of her wanting me to follow her route, which for the
most part indeed I didn t. I wonder whether the social attitudes
of the mining camp had something to do with that? I m asking;
this is a question. I wouldn t know quite how to make a case
for or against that, but I have a feeling that there may be
something there.
Brower: I had thought of that too, especially in the lack of emphasis
on a sort of adolescent success, on the level of being a girl who
had the lead role in the play or who was good in athletics.
K-Q: I don t think there was a trace of that sort of adolescent
competition. Although it wasn t what I was thinking of, this is
where the mining camps might come in a bit, because one reason
that adolescence wasn t so important to me was that I was associated
with my age mates along with a wide age range. In fact, as I
think I said before, all except the strictly high-school parties
(and even those) were likely to be age-mixed. So I think one s
particular age, perhaps, meant less there. Certainly the social
mores that I met in an agricultural small town in California, where
I expect the age rating is much more rigid, had very little to do
with the ones I had known in Telluride.
It was taken for granted that people you knew in the camp
were somebody. I don t know that they were so [notable], but
they were a fairly vivid group of people. They were active; they d
been pretty well over the road by the time they arrived at that
camp these were just the people one knew. Whether that would
have something to do with [my attitude]; I don t know. Then
I think perhaps [it is significant] that I had always had this
age mix and was the youngest at home and was the only girl in
my generation in the immediate connection. I suppose that I had
a privileged position in a way, and while I don t think I was a
spoiled child I suppose, in that sense, I didn t have any competi
tion. I must have been aware of this, perhaps. I don t
remember knowing any sisters until later when I got into college,
but I never had a longing for a sister.
Brower: There were no older sisters or cousins, who might have quite altered
the chemistry?
315
K-Q: In the first place, all the cousins were older, and they were all
male except for one who was so much older that she was like an
auntie to me and treated me as though she were an aunt. She
certainly was no competition; quite the contrary. I never thought
of her as a sister or even as belonging to the same generation.
There was age spread. I think probably that has something to do
with my not being impressed one way or another particularly about
Kroeber s and my age difference or about his relative distinction
as compared with my own. It seems to me I ve always known
people who either publicly or privately were distinct in some
fashion or other.
I have a feeling that as a protective device I may have
over the years developed a fair persona, and I do think I m a
hell of a lot more secure than
Brower: I m not talking so much about a kind of social security. I m
thinking of the kind of security that enabled you to enter into
and sustain your marriage with John.
K-Q: Yes, yes.
Brower: That s just an example of it. It s something I feel.
K-Q: I guess I don t know. That must be in a sense a given. I developed
that I think, at least by implication, in an article published
in the Co-Evolution Quarterly. I honestly think that I have
affection and respect for my family and people close to me, and
I value very much their affection and respect for me; it s
important for me that they understand and they re not left
cliffhanging or puzzled or anything else. As for people for
whom I have no particular regard I don t know them or I don t
really care for their values and standards I really don t care
what such people think. It s very important to me that my friends
and people close to me, my family, should understand me and that
somehow or other I measure up to what they think I ought to be.
[pause] Obviously, I wouldn t have married so eccentrically
had I been measuring myself by the norm or had it been important
to me to be approved of and understood by the general norms, not
those who are one s intimates, whose values one very much respects.
Brower: Well, that independence is a neat thing to have.
K-Q: I think it s a temperamental thing. I think I m dependent only
on my intimates if I had a need and a talent for social give-and-
take on a nonintimate social level, all these things would stack
up differently, wouldn t they?
Brower: I suppose so. But your independence is interesting because you
thought that your dependence on your mother as a child
316
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Well, she was there and she was a strong person,
person.
She was a loving
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
But you moved out of her realm and into a life of your own quite
young and apparently had no great difficulty and didn t become
dependent on anyone else.
Well, no. The move from home to college was I think I went into
that a bit somewhere along the line, but I was so desperately
homesick. It was, of course, tied up with [leaving the mountains
and coming to a small Sacramento Valley town].
I think the feeling of [home?] was itself displaced. I think
if I could have thought of [my] family in a home, probably I would
have felt less displaced myself if it had been in a place which
I could understand at all. I was so really homesick that, as I
say, I think it s a wonder that I didn t flunk out of college.
I really was a displaced person there for a while, and I was
certainly always a thoroughly reluctant dormitory person.
Perhaps that had positive value in making you an independent
person.
Oh, I m sure.
Perhaps the very fact that there wasn t the old home to go home
to
I think so and certainly by 1918 when I went back to Telluride I
was enormously pleased to be there and to see such of those that
were left. The scattering is always pretty sudden in such
places and more then because very soon after the end of the war,
the mining came to a crashing halt.
From 1918 I didn t think of it as a place that I would want
to go back to live, and when it came to going back to visit
I knew that practically everyone I would like to see was no longer
there. What I felt was purely affection for a beautiful place.
I knew I didn t want to live in Colorado. I just wanted to live
in the mountains. I mean that was over. It had been a great life
for a kid, but I was aware already that the few people who stayed,
the ones I saw the very few that were survivors there in 58
lived a pretty narrow life.
Of course, all these things that we re talking about would have
made for insecurity in another temperament I think, and dependency;
and instead they operated in a reverse way for you.
317
K-Q: I think I only learned very late to be somewhat analytic with
myself. I think it s an artificial thing, with the psychoanalytic
point of view which is so strong and which I had not met in college
because it was not allowed in. Now it s almost basic to psychological
and social and philosophic thinking, but it wasn t then. I really
met it first with Kroeber. I think I ve never been very good at
analyzing things, and I haven t intellectualized about them very
much.
Brower: Your security seems a kind of withiness that I suppose you can t
dissect.
K-Q: I m sure it could be [dissected], but I don t think _!
can.
Brower: I have an idea that a big factor in it was your parents taking
you as you and not trying to suggest another model.
K-Q: You may be very right. I m sure that this was not a conscious
behavioral sense on their part. In fact, I think that never works
with kids. I think they did accept me as I was and for what I was
and since I made no objection to the things which they thought
were important in fact, I lived by their standards I should say
until I well, inevitably I outgrew them. As long as I lived with
them, I certainly lived by their standards.
Brower: Was there ever a time later when you jettisoned some of those values
and did you find that a hindrance to your relation with your mother?
K-Q: I don t think there was anything that was violent or disruptive
of our relation. [There were] a few silly things that I ve mentioned,
and I was smoking. She did not want me to smoke around my great
Uncle John, who was living with her, and so I didn t and my
friends didn t. But I m perfectly sure Uncle John smelled
tobacco on people and so on. I think it would just have amused him.
As a matter of fact, Mother smoked not very often but she had
always been around people who smoked and she smoked with us.
Brower: As you became a woman with your own life, did you confide in your
mother or did you keep your private life to yourself?
K-Q: I rarely did confide. I never had these long, confidential talks
that little girls seem to have. It seems to me that my close
friends chatted endlessly about things that were hardly important
to us . I can remember some chattering about dates and that sort
of thing in college, but these opening-of-the-soul sort of things,
if I did it I don t remember it.
Brower: I have a feeling that it wasn t so much in vogue.
318
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
I think it wasn t. I think you talked about dresses and dates and
we talked about whatever was going then perhaps some women did.
Now, I suppose one always has a confidant, but I think mine was
as likely to be a man as a woman, perhaps more likely. In a
good many relations of mutual trust and friendship (and now I m
talking about women), I ve been the recipient of confidences,
it seems to me, more than I ve been the giver of them. And when
you see something new about yourself when you have an
enlightenment or something it seems to me that s more likely to
come up in a conversation with a man.
There were sort of confidential cliques in the year I was in
the dormitory down here in which I didn t join at all. I think
I was kind of around the edges of one, which, I realized afterwards,
was a lesbian couple who was next to us . I think that was talked
around but the words (those names) weren t known then as far as
I know. I think there was more talking around, and certainly
things weren t named, as they are now. I think there was none of
this private talking and public talking. Look how many articles
in the newspaper are about private affairs , not only sexual not
only private but very physical it seems to me. Maybe we ve just
had a lot of it this last year.
There certainly has been a change, hasn t there?
Oh yes.
Some of it seems rather destructive.
Well, I expect [that happens] with any change. I think it needed
to come, but I think people have rather gone overboard in using
words that were forbidden words in writing on subjects that were
forbidden subjects. After a while this becomes no longer so
exciting it was suggested in the papers this morning that
people who were going to movies were tired of violence, [chuckles]
I think there are these pendulum swings .
I think there are two things, Anne. I think you are right
about my parents attitude and my brothers .
Certainly my ego
was built up, not squashed, and that had a profound influence
on me because I respond very well to approval and I do not respond
well to disapproval.
How unusual! [laughs]
Some people seem to kind of fight back. But I have no wish for
it or no instinct for it. Some people seem to really thrive on
disapproval. I think the more competitive a person is the more
he will fight back against disapproval. I ve never been really
319
K-Q: in a competitive situation in anything that I was interested in
doing that I can think of. I haven t competed for a man. I
haven t competed for a prize. It s only as self-employed that I
myself have earned money. I simply have had no experience with
competition which is probably not a good thing but there it is .
Brower: In your marriage to Kroeber you never felt the need to be competitive
with other women, with other scholars?
K-Q: No, no, certainly not with other scholars and
Brower: With scholarly ladies or with semischolarly ladies?
K-Q: Well, no. I liked them or I didn t like them and they liked me
or they didn t like me, you know how that goes. But I certainly
didn t feel any competition. I ve been awfully lucky in that I
had no reason for being jealous or for being uptight enough to get
into competition
*#
Brower: When you came back from Paris after Kroeber s death, did you come
directly back to Berkeley?
K-Q: Yes, I did. I came directly back to Berkeley and Clifton met me
at the airport and Jessie Russo, who had been a helper in the
kitchen and so forth, was here and was staying over while she
was needed although she had her own family in Richmond. And
Ursula was here.
Brower: Was it by chance that Clifton and Ursula were there or did they
come on purpose?
K-Q: Yes. Clifton couldn t stay, but Ursula stayed with me for a
fortnight. It was a rather long time for her to take out right
then but she did.
I had these two opposite [experiences], which I think I did
mention in the biography. This has always been a shelter to me,
this house, [and it remains so]. But I have slept only a night
or two at Kishamish since Kroeber s death. I ve been there rarely
and for only a few hours that is all right but I don t like to
stay there. I never really wanted to be back there. I don t
know why the difference but there is. It bothered me very much,
the whole thing about Kishamish until John [Quinn] said, "Why don t
you give it to your kids?" That has been an enormous relief to
me not to feel that Kishamish involves any responsibility. Before
then I had to take responsibility for a place that I didn t want
to go to. I wanted to stay here. I felt this house as a shelter
always, and certainly since the time we were talking about.
320
K-Q: Now, let s see , you had something else.
Brower: This house must have seemed awfully empty and strange, but it was
still a sheltering kind of place?
K-Q : Yes .
Brower: I wonder where your help came from at that time. Was it strictly
from old friends or was it a time of making new friends?
K-Q: I was trying to analyze it a little bit this morning and I
actually don t remember anything except coming home. I have a
blank but it s not too surprising a blank.
Karl and Mish were in Italy and Karl came to Paris and was
with me the days I was there before I came home. He didn t go to
the airport with me; he had to go back (I think he left the morning
that I left but left a bit earlier) . Kroeber and I had decided
to stay on a bit and join Karl and Mish in Italy instead of
coming home as originally planned, so Karl said to me, "Why
don t you come [to Italy] in the spring?" I don t know what
went on in the meantime, but in the spring [1961] I went to
Italy. Karl was by then finishing a year which centered in
Milan because of the library there. I stayed with them and he
had got his work pretty well done. He and Mish knew Italy really
very well by then and we went to places either that they hadn t
gone or places that they wanted to take me.
Part of what happened in the next few years, I think, Karl
did consciously and deliberately; part of it, I think, just happened
so. Alfred was planning to do a history of art. It was a long
long-planned project. He was going to do a study of civilizations
in the history of their art and we started in the Vienna museums
to do some directed looking.
Karl s trips to Italy have usually been in pursuit of the life
and times of one Italian poet or another (in comparative literature,
the Italian is his specialty) . So when I went around with then
that is what we did, and he and Mish were very familiar with
the art galleries and they really gave me a concentrated
experience with that. I remember, for instance, in Florence
my first time there was with Karl I think we had only five
days or something like that and he built those five days up
to the Uffizi and we spent the last day there. We d go in and
then go out, get something to eat and come back in. But he just
built up to that. Then we went back to the Academia. Then
he said on the last day, "What do you want to go back and see
again?" and I said, "The Uffizi," that was it. The Uffizi came
just before the Academia.
321
Brower: Do you mean you had not been in Florence before?
K-Q: No, I hadn t been to Italy before. Kroeber and I did almost no
traveling except to South America and to England.
So I had that trip with Karl and Mish. Then I had a later
one in Greece I remember they met me at the Athens airport. It
was the first day that planes were again flying in Greece after the
coup d etat. I did more traveling in those years than I had ever
done, more European travel.
Brower: That s why I was surprised that you hadn t been to Florence. In
the time I ve known you you ve traveled so much that I assumed this
was a pattern that had been established earlier.
K-Q: No, no. I was in London twice, once with Alfred and once before
I went to Greece, [pause] I was trying to recall (which I didn t
do very well), there were three trips to Italy and three to Greece,
not necessarily separate ones some of them were separate. John
and I went to Italy in 69 and then again in 73. There were
those trips.
I started to tell you, when I traveled with Karl and Mish we
came back from one of our trips to sort of catch our breath and move
on and wash our clothes and so on. We d go off you see, by this time
they had Paul, who was two and a half years old, and we d come back
and sort of recover from these trips. At one of our comings back,
the galley for Ishi was waiting there and I read it, Karl read it,
and Midge read it. We spent five days and got that galley off and
then ourselves went off.
There was this traveling and then I wrote in that period, I
did the children s Ishi which, as I told you, I was a very long time
about and found very demanding. I wrote the biography during that
period and the little Green Christmas and compiled the Anthropologis t
Looks at History and I did a number of magazine articles. In
other words, I was very much occupied and preoccupied with writing.
Brower: Did you write while you traveled at all?
K-Q: No. I neither read nor write when I m traveling. I d go out into
a sort of preoccupation with place and people and the only thing
I read is something we might pick up which had to do specifically
with where we were and I might read that before going to sleep, but
I don t I just go into a kind of a trance, it seems to me, and just
sit and look.
Brower: I was thinking when you talked about the Uffizi that the interesting
thing is to go out from that building and see the faces you ve just
seen on the street. It s so amazing!
322
K-0:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
I noticed that. They re just walking around on the street. It s
fascinating. It certainly is a type, a persisting type, and a very
beautiful people I think.
I thought that the pattern of yours and Kroeber s visiting museums
in Paris was nice taking one room and confining yourself to that.
I think that if one could stay long enough to do that that would
be a superb way.
It is. I find that an objective and it doesn t matter what the
objective is, it can be really quite absurd but an objective helps
out. Now, some people, of course, eat their way through Europe.
That I have only done and only wanted to do at the native level, as
it were. I ve never been in anything above a second-or third-class
restaurant in Paris and I really have no wish to go. Usually in
Italy, God knows what they [the restaurants] were, but they always,
always had marvelous food. This following the trail of an Italian
poet is great because they lived in houses here and there and it
gives you some sort of a clue which you follow. It s great fun.
Once when I was there, Colin Hampton and I had been talking about
writing a book on annunciations and we began to get copies of
pictures of annunciations, so I looked at as many annunciations
and got as many postcards of them as I could. We never did anything
with it, but this was any sort of a clue [serves] I think, and it
needn t be any more than just a people-watching.
I ve been fortunate in that because I ve nearly always been in Europe
for a purpose of some kind.
Oh, I think it s a tremendous help.
For one thing, it s apt to get you into people s houses!
Right, and there isn t this kind of vague, amorphous thing. You
can say, "No, I don t want to do that because I m going to do this,"
or something of that sort.
I would say that in this period I was tense. I think I was
working hard. I think I worked hard partly because I wanted to and
partly because it was better to work than not to work. My traveling
took a kind of high tension. I think I got tremendous out of it.
But I was very, very tired and I think I was very, very tense during
that time. This would be my summarizing of it, as I recall it.
Brower: You must have a nice relationship with Karl andMish
to do that at that time.
to be able
323
K-Q: Yes, but, of course, they re awfully experienced travelers, having
gone and gone in a very inexpensive way always. In Athens when I
was there with them and they had their three children then Katy
was the one who was about as big as a finger. We did a lot of
traveling with those three kids in a little Fiat. But they had
things done very, very well and they both drive. I had a separate
apartment adjoining theirs. They had had an apartment at that time
for a year. It was an apartment in which they had a stove. It was
in a little hotel in Athens and they could have a little stove there,
Midge did breakfasts and lunches and so on, and I had an apartment
next to them. So I was separate in that sense, but then I was with
them all the time, and traveling with children is not the easiest
thing in the world. No, they re both very good traveling companions,
Midge, of course, is an artist; she s a sculptor. She s a very
reserved person. She gets an awful lot out of what she sees in a
day and we had lots of fun talking about it at dinner and in the
evening and so on. I think I never saw anything approaching a night
life in Europe. I ve always been so tired by the end of the day
I get to a late dinner, which it always is, and just flop into bed.
Brower: I never have seen night life in Europe either, and I have a feeling
that it s not all that great.
K-Q: I haven t wanted to.
Brower: I d love to go to a taverna in a village and see Greek dancing far
into the night, but I think that s pretty rare.
K-Q: You can see it in the villages in the daytime. John and I saw it
on Crete. We saw it in Crete and it wasn t in a village. It was
just a great big sort of nightclub thing with Greek singing and
dancing but nothing so special until midnight. We d gone there
for a late dinner and at midnight the whole place suddenly came
alive. The orchestra began playing Theodorakis music and everybody
began singing it and dancing. It was the first time that his music
was allowed to be played. You couldn t even have records of it
before and the place just went stark raving crazy. That was lots
of fun. But that is the only time that John and I ever were out
late. Well, really we were doing it because of Stavros, our driver,
who was such a nice lad and he d had us to his home and this sort
of thing and he wanted to go and he wanted us to go. He thought
that we weren t quite seeing what the city really was unless we
saw this nightclub. So we went to give Stavros a good time, but
we had a very good time too.
Brower: S-t-a-v-r-o-s?
324
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Yes, Stavros, as he told us after a day or two. He said, "The way
you pronounce ray name, you re saying the cross, the Greek cross
Sta vros," and he said his name was "Stavros"
1
and that accent
makes all the difference in the world. John was saying "Kalamari"
to the hotel clerk in the morning and he looked a little puzzled.
Finally, about the third or fourth morning he laughed and he
said, "Why do you say squid
1
to us in the morning?" [laughter]
Kalamari is squid. Kala mera is "good morning." It makes all the
.difference in the world. They don t even recognize the words.
Was the traveling a help in those years?
Apparently, it seems to have been some sort of a as I see it now,
there was a tremendous push. I suppose in part I began doing what
Kroeber and I had planned to do, and then it turned into something
else, which was some sort of a need in me. Most of my life I haven t
traveled and I have very little impulse to. I think traveling has
become exceedingly hard work, as a matter of fact, now. But
apparently there was this burst of restlessness. I remember going
back to Paris. I went that far, as far as Paris, with Mary Mosk
Hanley, you know her don t you?
Yes, I do.
We had two weeks or a little more there. Then I went on to Greece
and Mary went to England, and we met up together at Hydra just at
the end of our time. I liked that I don t know I think really
it is abnormal that I can take it or leave it as far as traveling
is concerned. There are weeks when I miss it, and there were
weeks, during that period [of widowhood] and before, when I mightn t
go beyond the front steps or the post box down here. Sometimes
they were confining weeks with the children and then later I d be
busy, this time when I was writing. I just wouldn t go there
seemed to be enough people. There was always somebody living in
the house someone I liked like Ted Allen and I think Ted Grand was
here how long?
I think it was a long time.
It was at least three years. Then he was replaced by oh, dear Perry,
what was your last name? Anyhow, terribly nice. He was an economics
student, Perry Shapiro. I had blocked on that name. It wasn t his
grandparents real name. He told me the reason there were so many
Shapiros if they had an unpronounceable Polish name (that is, to
an immigration officer it would be unpronounceable) there were
two or three stock names that the officer would sign on the
immigration form, and Shapiro was one of them. That s why there
are so many Shapiros. Well, Perry was a dear and he was here for
a long stretch too.
325
K-Q: The [tenants] were very separate in a sense but we were fond of
one another and got increasingly so and they were likely to drop
in in the evenings if they had nothing to do. They d come in in
the evening and we d sit and talk times when I was tired and not
working and they probably were very lonesome times, or would have
been except for them.
Brower: They were always men students?
K-Q: Yes, yes. I don t know whether a woman student ever applied here.
That room, which is now the library, had a coat closet and a bed,
but it wouldn t have been a very pleasant place for a woman, who
would have had to use the living room for company, and I just didn t
want that .
Brower: Did you find yourself cut off somewhat from the friends you d had
in the past? I remember Mary Ann Whipple, as a widow, commenting
on the fact that Berkeley society came two by two, and she was no
longer invited to the places she d been accustomed to going.
K-Q: Well, I think that s true. You know yourself that it s very easy
to have more women than men friends, and you do want [both],
depending upon the occasion. I think I didn t feel that particularly
and I think the reason is that I must have been enormously occupied
and preoccupied, between the writing and this trekking around because
that takes energy and preparation. And there were a great many
other- things; it was more than just writing. I mean there was a
lot of editorial business and just appalling correspondence through
those years, largely the Ishi correspondence but having to do with
publishing activity.
It must have taken my energy and my time, and I did keep up,
until the time that John [Quinn] and I found ourselves too busy here
to want to go over to the opera and the symphony. I had tickets
there.
Brower: These were tickets that you and Kroeber had?
K-Q: Yes, so I just kept on with those. We had mostly sold them or passed
them on to others, but I still had the seats and kept them for a
couple of reasons. John and I went regularly, along with Helen
[Farnsworth] and the man she was going with. I saw Nancy [Heizer]
and my few real intimates around here, and I think they came here
as frequently as I had time and energy for. I think it was just
sheer luck that I was so darn busy.
I was at the Heizers a great deal and a few places of that
sort, and I was hearing a lot of music then.
326
[Theodora Kroeber-Quinn requested that the following material be
inserted after the interview of April 26, 1977]
This is about Almost Ancestors. From time to time Robert Heizer,
Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley,
and I do informal collaborative tasks in anthropology. The book
Almost Ancestors, published by the Sierra Club, was our first formal
collaborative work (a second one, Drawn from Life, will be out this
year, 1977). Almost Ancestors is a picture book of California
Indians. Heizer was principally responsible for the pictures, I
for the text.
For lack of a better name, we called David Hales editor of the
book, his contribution being a peculiar and so far as I know nameless
one. David was one-time editor at the University of California Press
and was the person in charge upon the opening of the New York office
of the University of California Press. It was there that I met
him, when I went to New York to appear on the "Today" telly show
(Ishi publicity). Later he was with the Sierra Club. A complex
person, a rather tragic one. In the Australian Army he had been
captured almost immediately and spent the duration of the War in
a Japanese prison camp, from which he emerged in fair shape. His
Eastern mystic thinking, which had preceded the prison camp experience,
no doubt helped him through it.
I was finding the writing of a text for Almost Ancestors
peculiarly difficult. A brief text which must carry the full burden
of meaning is really much more difficult to write than a longer one.
David suggested that he read aloud some sections I was finding
particularly resistant to satisfactory brief exposition. I was amazed
how much I could hear which I could not see. The end of it was that
he read piece by piece the whole of the text, with discussion, mostly
questions from him who did not know the material or the Indians,
which opened my eyes to what I wished to do and say that I was not
doing and saying. I could wish now all that I write might be
subjected to this, as it were, extra-terrestrial view.
Hugo Rudinger, for love of the work and affection for Heizer,
undertook to bring our pictures of California Indians to as perfect
a state as their wear and fading and original defects would allow.
Hugo was one of Germany s most distinguished photographers, removing
to America when Hitler came to power. On our pictures he lavished
his precious special paper brought from Germany, while he spent long
hours and many days on the reproductions. The results are fantastic
when you know the difficulties and inadequacies of the originals
from which he worked. His charge to us covered only the materials
for which he had put out money here, nineteen dollars and some cents.
There are 315 pictures. Hugo Rudinger: a fragile man, old, elegant.
An artist.
327
XXII UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA REGENT (1)
[Interview 22: April 5, 1978]
Brower: Our interviews ended about a year ago, just before you entered on
your duties as a Regent of the University of California. I
gather serving as Regent proved as time-consuming as you thought
it would be?
K-Q: Yes, it did. I thought it might get less so, but actually I think
it would not have. It didn t for the time that I served.
Brower: I suppose, for one thing, as time went on you became more involved?
K-Q: That s right. [Tape off briefly]
Brower: I wondered how you felt when you first knew that you had been
named to the board?
K-Q: That was really very funny, because I was sitting out in the
garden, and John and Ursula had been erranding and came home.
I said to them as they came up the path, "You know what? The most
ridiculous thing happened. Governor Brown called up and asked me
to be a regent to serve out Forbes term, and I just laughed and
said, Don t be ridiculous! "
[laughter] John and Ursula said,
"You mean you turned it down without even talking to us , even
thinking?" And I said, "Well, of course! I just can t see myself
doing that. It seems a ridiculous idea."
Well, between them they persuaded me to let John call back.
It was not Governor Brown himself who answered it was an assistant,
whose name escapes me now, whom he uses as the personality man when
he wants to be persuasive.
I talked with John and Ursula and with Ted and two or three
other people, and I called up Gregory Bateson, who was, I believe,
the only person I knew on the board. He said, at first, "I don t
know, Theodora, that you want to do this." "But," he said, "on
the other hand, come aboard for a while. You can jump off any time
you want to." [laughter]
Anyhow, it was our chance for John and me to go for a little
vacation. We went up to quinwood, and Brown got through to me there.
For the most part, all the time this excitement was going on we
were just up there and out of it, but then Brown did call me there.
It was the longest talk I have had with him, because I ve seen him
only very briefly since then, and I liked what he said. I liked
his attitude, and I had the feeling that I felt all right about
it. So, I accepted then, and that was that.
328
K-Q: I really didn t want to continue after the one year, however, for
reasons that I had hoped to make clear in my farewell statement,*
but which I think I didn t make clear. I personally liked almost
all of the regents. I suppose you don t like everybody in a group
of twenty-six.
New tangent: I m very dubious about the helpfulness or the
soundness even, of having legislators on the Board. Of course, the
governor is president of the regents, but the lieutenant governor
also has a vote, as does the state superintendent of schools. All
ex officio members have a vote, including the alumni association
president and the vice-president of the alumni association. They
have a trial term or a learning term when they do not vote, but
when they are fully in, all ex officio members have a vote, unless
I m quite mistaken, and I think I am not. As far as the alumni is
concerned, I think that s entirely appropriate, but I m not sure
about these people who are elected to office. And there again
you have to except the governor, because part of his job is the
university. This has always been so. But the legislators point
of view is really so different.
To go back and tell you why I felt that I had learned what I
could learn, and that it was not my dish of tea it was not because
of the regents, for whom I have a great respect and whom I found
the most reasonable and competent of people to work with. And the
real issues that come up before the regents one has an enormous
respect for. It s time-consuming, but I think it s possible to
learn enough about these real issues to have a valid point of
view and to vote intelligently on them.
But now the regents are so constantly bombarded by legislators,
by the public. Anybody can get to the regents. They are very, very
(I think) over-generous, perhaps over-defensive, about giving time
to people to speak anyone except the professors. You see, there s
a curious thing that s grown up. I don t think it always was there.
I remember regents at the Men s Faculty Club lunch tables talking
with professors. Kroeber had some very intimate friends amongst
the regents, and there was never any hesitation about discussing
university affairs between them. Well, now no professor is supposed
directly to come to a regent on university business. This seems
absurd to me when all the rest of the world can do so.
Brower: You mean even in their official capacity, professors can t send a
representative to speak to the board about ?
*See Appendix V.
329
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
They can. But a professor isn t supposed to come up here [to
Arch Street] to me.
In an informal situation?
Yes.
But they may appear at regents meetings?
Well, I m sure that they may, of course, and occasionally they
do. But it was always, in my experience, to present a particular
matter at the request of a regent. I mean, they weren t just
miscellaneously coming up and complaining or bringing pressure
the way other people do.
I see. They weren t challenging the policy under discussion?
Never, never. No.
So, there must be some ground rules for what they can and cannot
do?
There obviously are, and, to me, this is absurd. The extent to
which the regents are subject to pressure from the public and from
the legislature is serious and enormously time consuming. It makes
it very hard to spend time on whatever is the important issue and
in fact on the meeting s agenda.
One of Gregory Bateson s criticisms, which he made in regents
meetings and outside, was that most of the time in meetings is spent
over issues either that are insignificant or about which he and
most of us were not informed didn t wish to be informed par
ticularly and that there was an absurdity about it. Well, this
is a fact not because the regents want it that way [soft laughter],
but because they are under, really, enormous political pressure.
What do you attribute this change to? Is it a legacy from the 60s
and the involvement of the students and the public in university
affairs?
Well, this would be the natural conclusion, and I m sure that s part
of it. I also think, Anne, it is because the university is the
biggest single budget in the state. The budget for this year was
$2.5 billion. Now, to any legislator that s a fine sum of money
to manipulate. I m not saying that all legislators are crooks,
but the political man looks at this sort of thing differently from
the regent-custodian.
330
K-Q: And the sheer size of the University nine campuses, five medical
schools, and I don t know how many more training schools for
nursing and medical care is a factor in increasing pressures on
the regents. The budget is so temptingly big let s say the door
got pushed open a bit in the 60s, and that once open the legislators
and lobbyists moved in. Now, for instance, it did not use to be
true that the executive board of the state senate had to approve
the governor s appointment of regents. Now it is. So, you go up
to Sacramento and sit while other things go on, and when your turn
comes anyone on that board, if he wants to, can make things difficult
for you, which they did for Sheinbaum, when I was appointed. For
most of us it was just a pro forma thing, but Sheinbaum had to
make a second trip back from Los Angeles to Sacramento and go
through a grilling.
The early concept of the regents as the watchdogs of the
budget and of the proper investment and control and distribution
of the budget, and as buffer between the University and the
legislature remains proper in function that concept, as stated
in the state constitution, is their basic responsibility. Some of
the members who have been on the Board a long time are extremely
conservative (I think most people who responsibly handle enormous
sums of money are likely to be conservative) . I found them to be
most responsible and to work very hard. The essential job is to
invest that budget and to somehow distribute it as fairly and
decently as they can between these [soft laughter] nine [campuses]
(and it s more than nine when you break them up), all pushing for
what they consider their necessary share; to make decisions between
them and to try to make sense of the over-all university pattern.
On the whole they do an excellent job, and it s a terrific job.
I m not sure how Brown s appointments are going to work out.
Gregory Bateson is fine. One person like him who has an overall,
large, philosophic stance is invaluable.
Brower: You have emphasized the regents fiscal role. I can see where
Gregory Bateson would be more useful in determining educational
policy and matters of that kind. And I suppose the regents are
also involved in that?
K-Q: It is one of the very important committees, and he s very good at
that. My point is, it s marvelous to have Gregory Bateson
(there wouldn t be two in any case). At simply refusing to discuss
petty things about educational policy or any other policy Gregory
is wonderful.
331
K-Q: As for some of the other appointments that were made along with
mine I m wondering if these people will grow in size; if they
see their function as regent in a sufficiently nonpolitical way.
Brown has a little tendency to pick people for a specialty or a
particular point of view. He considered that with me he was
bringing in a representative of the Indians. Vilma Martinez, who s
very bright and nice I like her very much is the Chicano
representative on the board and [pauses to think] I have the
feeling she feels pressure to always represent the Chicanes. But
when you become a regent you re representing the University. If
you have any special knowledge, interest, and skill, that can be
useful. But
Brower: But it has to be subordinated to the whole thing?
K-Q: It has to be subordinated to the whole university s needs. Another
thing that makes the meetings clumsy and wearing is that, since
the demonstrations the board does not meet in the regents rooms
on campus. It meets in a convention hall in Los Angeles (which
is an absurd place to go and be) , and it meets in San Francisco
in the U.C. Extension building, which is better, but it s still an
absurd place to go and be. There are not even enough hotel
accommodations anymore in that part of San Francisco to house the
regents (it used to be a nice part of the city, but it isn t
any more). So, the actual meetings are physically awkward and
clumsy and nonacademic .
Brower: Yes. Are those the only two locations where regents meet, Los
Angeles and San Francisco?
K-Q: So far as I know.
Another thing which I think faces the regents: There are at
most no more than twice as many regents as there used to be. In
other words, half as many regents for many years had just Berkeley,
the medical school, the experiment station at Davis and at La
Jolla. That was it. It was on a limited scale. Now, with no
more than twice as many regents , we have these enormous numbers
of people concerned. And, of course, it s not only the campuses
that have proliferated, but also the subjects that they deal with,
and it s the increased number of medical schools, and the rest of it.
The task, in other words, that the regents are asked to tackle is
colossal in relation to what it was.
Brower: Is it your view that there should be a board of regents for each
region?
332
K-Q: No. That would be disastrous [laughter] The inclusion of UCLA
could have been handled reasonably; it makes sense, with the
lo-o-o-ng [word drawn out] state and the large population down
there. A northern and southern branch would have remained within
the reasonable scheme of things. Why Santa Barbara? Why Irvine?
Why Riverside? They are the problem. Davis and San Diego are
somehow not problems like these other places because they were
always excellent in their particular specialties. And, you know,
institutions are like people, really; they have a flair, a
personality. The way they start is the way they more or less go.
Isof t laughter] The additions that have been made at Davis have
been high grade.
And that is true also, certainly, at San Diego. San Diego now
is reminiscent of what Cal was probably when you knew it. Cal was
smaller when I knew it. It had a student population of 5,000 when
I came here. San Diego has 10,000 and, you know, it s the most
conservative of the campuses. I have one granddaughter going there
now. She went in with excellent preparation, but for her first year
she has no electives! She s taking straight university-required,
conventional subjects. She loves it. She s a good student. She
likes very much the people that she s meeting there. This is so
like the way Cal used to be, and I think there s no problem there
at San Diego.
But what the regents are doing [laughter] fussing around with
Santa Cruz, with Santa Barbara, with Riverside, and with the Irvine
campuses, it s a little hard to see. When youngsters come up well
enough prepared to go to Berkeley or to UCLA or to San Diego, it s
very rough to try to persuade them to go to [laughter] Riverside
or Irvine or Santa Cruz, and they ll get out from under as fast as
they can.
If
Brower: Would you explain the distinction, between regents in attendance
at a meeting and regents present at a meeting?
K-Q: The system is that the regents meet the third Thursday and Friday
of each month except for the three months [April, August, DcemberJ
when they don t meet. The Thursday meeting is full-day, and that
is the meeting of committees. So, if you are not on the education
policy committee, while that committee is meeting you re listening
but you re not voting. You may be voting the next day on the same
thing, but only the committee members will be voting [on Thursday] .
I m sure this is what was meant by that.
333
K-Q: Some things get settled in committee meetings. Now, understand,
at these committee meetings it s not only that all the regents
are present, but as many people as can jam into the hall are present,
and it s a very odd way to conduct a committee meeting.
Brower: Excuse me, but do you mean all regents who are serving on that
committee, or do you mean all regents?
K-Q: All regents who come to the meeting are there, and that s okay.
But the hall is also full of "audience." You get an open-pit
rectangle around which you sit, and each person or each two people
have a private loudspeaker, because you can t be heard otherwise.
Voices you may not recognize come out at you, and you can t see the
face of the person you re talking to. It s the darndest way to
try to get business done in a committee. Anyhow, the committee
meetings will have been set up beforehand, and so that is the way
Thursday goes .
Then Friday is for everyone, all the regents; whatever voting
is done they all vote on. The president makes his report; the
financial report is made, and it s accepted or questioned (whichever
it is), and so with all the committees. Then if a matter has
failed in committee has been voted down if the chairman, or those
who are for whatever it is, want to, they bring it up in full
regents meeting, and it may get voted down or it may get voted
through .
Brower: It s the proponents who bring it up?
K-Q: Yes. This is a regular technique, and it makes sense. When the
committee is together for general discussion, the other regents
are simply informing themselves , making up their own minds . If
the committee decides differently from the way the full body of
the regents votes, that also makes sense. The committee s job
is that of being the specialists who get all of the information
there and as far as possible predigest it for a full body.
Brower: For the board? And during those committee meetings, are you
subject to the public s presentation of its point of view?
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: In person, not merely in written communication?
334
K-Q: Yes. Yes, you are, right straight through. The only release from
this is that whoever is chairmanning can call an executive session,
which means that the hall has to be cleared of everybody except
regents. They don t do this except when they have to. There are
certain things, certain few things, that are brought up only in
executive session, and these are things which, I think, are
properly confidential: Say a professor s salary is being increased
beyond the usual maximum, for whatever reason, or appointments are
proposed which aren t routine let s say distinguished-people
appointments, where pressure and evidence is brought why this man
should be brought from England or Czechoslovakia or wherever it
is. These things, until they re decided, become (and in fact are
supposed to remain) private .
The system there is to have all the literature beforehand,
so that the executive sessions are brief, and I never saw any
effort to retreat to this except when it was business properly so
conducted.
Brower: It was not used as an escape from audience pressure?
K-Q: It was not. The only time that it was, was once when the
demonstration got completely out of hand and there obviously
was going to be no chance to do any business. As a matter of fact
we adjourned then. I don t know that an executive session was ever
called improperly.
Brower: I noticed the adjournment you speak of, in the minutes. It was
a very short adjournment too. I wondered how you managed. Did
you meet again in another room?
K-Q: We went upstairs to another room.
Brower : I see .
K-Q: But it wasn t very satisfactory, and we d wasted so much time that
we never got to some of the business that was supposed to be [soft
laughter] the principal business of the day. That s the only time
there ever was a retreat to another room, but I think they felt
that nothing was going to get done otherwise.
Now, let s see. To speak personally about my experience, I
feel now that I would not have missed the experience for a great
deal. I also would not want to continue it. I m not saying
that another person should not. I think, instead of its being what
I am sure it was meant to be, a place where you could always get
reasonable differences of opinion and attitudes working just within
the regents, now the thing as a whole is under such time pressure,
335
K-Q: and it s under such a glare of publicity, that what you do feel is
instead of discussion and arriving at conclusions in a reasonable
way you do feel that you re being pushed, pressured from all
sides. It s a strenuous thing, and I think it s becoming increasingly
so. I think it s increasingly difficult merely to get through
their agenda and keep up with the job. And I m not good at that.
I don t like to be pushed. I don t function well under pressure,
and I m not good in this public situation where you grab [laughter]
the loudspeaker and you say your say and this sort of thing. I
mean, it really is a very pushy thing, and I found it exhausting.
I think I m not the person to function in this way.
Brower: I wonder if in an earlier era it wouldn t have been exactly your
cup of tea?
K-Q: Yes, I think so. I think so. And I think there are people who ve
been on the board a long time who find this as much of a madhouse
as I did for different reasons .
They look back to a time when it
wasn t. But I think they really do feel that it s crazy.
Now, I think that since I ve said this critical thing about
Brown s appointments, I should also say this, that there has to
be some change of attitude on the part of the regents, whether for
better or for worse, because of the way the world is. Most of the
people amongst the regents who take care of the investments
this wasn t true of all of them, but I mean predominantly did
not want a watchdog committee which would judge these investments
not only from the point of view of their making money, which is
what they re supposed to do, but also whether they are proper.
The South African thing came up. Now there it seemed to me
(and to the great majority of us) that you couldn t take one case
by yourself jump in and try to pull out. We didn t do what we
wanted to there. We got as far as we could, which was to have a
watchdog committee. This watchdog committee hasn t as much
power as those of us who felt there should be one wanted it to
have, but it was all we could get through, and it was a beginning.
This was the first issue that came up and, in the months since,
all sorts of institutions, all sorts of people, are talking about
this same thing. It is in the air.
This is something that Regent Coblentz emphasized the positive
role that the University could take in joining with other
universities and nonprofit organizations in examining the social
effects of their investments. And that we did get across. I
think the only reason we did was because there were enough of us,
plus Coblentz there are a lot of liberal-minded people on the
336
K-Q: board, hut there wouldn t have been enough without Brown s
appointees to have put that through; as it was, we only got a
weakened version through.
I think there are going to have to be people on the board,
whose point of view is social. It is necessary that the regents
look at their investments from a social point of view, for their
appropriateness. I think we ve come to that place.
And I think (in fact, I am sure) that David Saxon, as
president and regent, is doing everything that is feasible and
sound in the matter of getting minorities into the University. But
this has to be something that is I think that he needs and will
need increasing backing from the regents in his fight, and I think
his fight is a great one because he accepts the fact that there s
no good in bringing anybody into the University who isn t up to the
work. It s simply discouraging and disruptive and everything else.
But every possible means that he can use, I think David Saxon
is using and is ready to use, and I think he s going to need
real backing from the regents. And this means you ve got to have
a certain number of regents who really wholeheartedly accept this,
which some of the oldtimers don t.
Brower: I wondered, to go back just a moment to the investments, about the
legal aspects of the social scrutiny. I mean, I suppose a portfolio
has to retain its value?
K-Q: You can t disrupt a portfolio, and no single institution can do
this. I think it has to be, and is, a matter of trying to get at
the forefront of the cutting edge of this point of view. But
there s got to be a pretty general feeling for it, as one does with
personal investments. John [Quinn] and I have some, and we came
to this friend of ourse who is an investor and simply said, "[Invest
in] nothing that has to do with war materials, and so on. That
is out." You lose some money that way, but you also can manage it.
I think this has just got to be
Brower: The view of the institution?
K-Q: But I don t think it can be done just by one grand gesture.
Brower: You have to have a general climate of opinion?
K-Q: You cannot simply disrupt the whole university budget {soft laughter]
in one grand swoop. And, you see, you re not at liberty to pick
out these things. The total university commitment in South Africa
is infinitesimal, but everything else that you invest in a great
many things is likely to have a certain amount also in South Africa.
Well, you can t tear these things to pieces, you see.
337
B rower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower ;
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
No.
So, it can t be done just by an act of will,
pressured toward.
A slow moving in the direction?
It s got to be
And in any new investment that you make, be exceedingly careful.
This is where the watchdog committee can really function, not in
what is set up now, but they re always making reinvestments and
new investments. I think increasingly these can be cleaned up,
not to an ideal state. This is the way we operate, and there
has to be public acceptance of this, maybe not a majority, but there
has to be a
A strong supporting view?
Yes. There has to be a vocal minority supporting it, which I
think we re getting.
To move on to Saxon s hope to bring in minorities and the fact that
there s no point in having unqualified people in the University,
I ve wondered why a tutorial program hasn t been stressed more?
There s a tremendously wide-spread effort (I wish this was better
known) to work with the schools as far down as junior high school.
Of course, it should be below that, and then through high school.
[Saxon] is committed to this and is spending a lot of intelligent
effort on it. He s given very little credit for this; the
people who push and prod at him and the university are not playing
entirely fair. In California there are already differently graded
schools for those who can t yet make the university grade. The
state colleges, which require somewhat less than the university;
below them there are the junior colleges, and the community
colleges. Kids get started there, and then, by their junior year,
they re up in either one of the state colleges, or if they re good
enough they re in the University.
I understand that at Stanford they have a volunteer tutorial
program given by the students themselves.
Students here at U.C. have something similar. The young man who
was president of the student body down here last fall made an
excellent impression on me, unlike the students who were at regents
meetings just to be disruptive. He is a very intelligent young man
and really forward-looking. He never, never said a stupid thing,
and he had some excellent ideas (some of which the students were
carrying on voluntarily) , which included further training for
338
K-Q: teaching fellows, who have become so important these days, with
not enough professors teaching. A great deal more is being done,
Anne, than most people realize.
Brower: That brings me to a criticism I heard, and that is that the PR
for the University is poor, that they have a very bad press. Isn t
it too bad that the general public doesn t know more about these
positive things?
K-Q: I wonder if the University isn t really very stupid about that.
Brower: I rather think they are.
K-Q: I wonder if David Saxon has ever given that very much thought,
because I think it would make sense to him.
Brower: One Old Blue I interviewed maintained that even the student
organizations (specifically the student news service) were
cleverer in his day about getting good press for the University
than he feels the professionals are now.
K-Q: Oh, I m sure! I m sure this is true, {laughter]
Brower: Of course, his concept of a good press, I think, has a good deal
to do with who wins football games, but
K-Q: [laughter] Yes, I know. But I do really think this is probably
still true.
The one formal contribution that I made as a regent aside
from the voting, which I took seriously and I think constructively
had to do with the projected replacement of Lick Observatory.
Lick Observatory is smogged in, and so coming up is a final
decision on a new site for it. The site chosen (by whoever)
was Junipero Serra Peak in the Santa Lucia Range, in a setting
farther south, farther inland, and higher than the Lick Observatory
in the same Coast Range. Santa Lucia peak happens to be a place
of great sentimental concern to such Indians as remain around there,
and to other Indians who have now come to interest themselves in
each other s problems. There s no doubt Junipero Serra was anciently
a sacred and important peak.
When I started to make a presentation for the Indians, I thought
there could be a compromise, that the university could give it the
Indian name and perhaps have a commemorative plaque. But the
deeper I got into it {soft laughter], the more I realized that this
would not suffice, and that also it was altogether an absurd site,
{laughter]
339
Brower: I ve read criticisms of it as a very, very poor site, with the
same problems that already exist for Lick
K-Q: Well, of course!
When I read that the proponents felt we would have twenty
years before this new site would be smogged in well, what is
twenty years !
Brower: You were involved in that because you served on the committee for
is it called the site committee?
K-Q: The grounds and buildings committee. Yes, I did serve on that
committee. And every time anything came up, it would take me
back to the tin building [T-2, which housed the Anthropology
Department] and Kroeber s attitude toward buildings and grounds.
If there was any way [chuckles] by which he could get around that
department, doing the work himself, getting the kids to come down
on Sunday and carpenter or something, anything to get away from it.
But to get back to this Junipero Serra thing, I knew there
wasn t anybody else on that board who was going to pay any attention
to the Indian claim. So, I got the report in.
XXIII UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA REGENT (2)
[Interview 23: May 25, 1978 ]##
Brower: I noticed in the minutes of the regents that there was a proposal
to go to Los Alamos, and the necessity for Q-clearances for that
was mentioned. I wondered whether you had to have a Q-clearance,
or just how that worked.
K-Q: Well, the point is, if you go to Los Alamos or to the Livermore
Laboratories, if you want to be shown the secret inner workings,
you have to have a government Q-clearance, which is next to the
highest clearance that the government gives.
When I was appointed as regent, I got this telephone message
and then a follow-up notice that I should appear at such-and-such
an office on the campus to make out this Q-clearance, to fill out
my part of it, which I did, and then they came back with questions.
I never was interviewed on it. All I had to do further was send
a notarized signature and this would have given me the Q-clearance.
By this time, I had discovered that you didn t have to have a Q-
clearance unless you wanted to go into the inner bowels of Los
Alamos and Livermore. This is not made clear to a regent; if I
questioned it, somebody would have said, "You don t have to."
But I simply got this notice to come down.
340
Brower: You assumed this was part of the bag?
K-Q: Yes. It was rather ridiculous. I thought it would be very funny
to have a Q-clearance and no longer be a regent! [laughter]
Brower: Yes. I wonder how they work that.
K-Q: You see, there again, you get a government Q-clearance, and where
do you go from there? Well, I would not have gone to Los Alamos.
In fact, they asked me specially, wouldn t I like to go; I was
perfectly welcome. Nothing would have made me go there. I
particularly resent that place. Aside from what it does and what
I believe to be the impropriety of its being part of the University
business, I resent it because that s part of the world I grew up
in and that I love the idea of the place being used for what it
is .and the actual spoiling of the atmosphere around there, you
know. Right at Shiprock, I understand now there s
Brower: Where the air was once the clearest in the country.
K-0: Yes. And apparently it s just poisonous there. One of the regents
told me about going on one of these meetings where they took them
into the bowels. H had this Q-clearance, and he said he didn t
understand anything [laughtr] of what was going on and he
certainly was no risk. He probably was not a fit person to have
a Q-clearance because he wouldn t have any idea of what was going
on.
Brower: Of what he was giving away.
K-Q: Exactly! So, that was that. Did you have another question?
Brower: I wonder if you would elaborate a little on your feelings about
the Los Alamos and the Livermore undertakings .
K-Q: Well, it seems to me that this is one of these things that often
happens with institutions and with people. You make an apparently
innocent commitment, an apparently appropriate research commitment,
which I truly believe is the way this all started, because it
started back before the beginning of the Second World War; that
is, before we were in it. And I think the thing just grew and
became what it is without anybody s really willing that it should
be so.
Once you ve taken the responsibility and also taken the money
and gotten used to taking the money from the federal government,
I suppose it s very difficult to get a sufficient regent vote
Brower: To turn down that lovely money.
341
K-Q: And, now, I think the money does the University no good at all.
The money is spent. It goes through the University, and the
University supplies the plant and a great many of the people, but
those people are paid by federal funds.
Brower: The University probably gets a percentage for handling or for
overhead .
K-Q: I think it does. But as far as I can make out, the only thing
that the University got for its own purposes is the laboratory
up here, what we call the Rad Lab, where, so far as I know,
entirely proper and forward-looking and delightful research goes
on at several levels, some of them practical, medical, research
funds research and treatment and all sorts of things.
I think that part of the money for that Rad Lab may be some
spillover of federal money, and so far as I can see that would be
the only thing that the University, as University, would get out
of handling all these fabulous sums that come from the federal
government.
Brower: You speak of the initial commitment being innocent and appropriate,
but there was no question of its changing its direction. After all,
it was the atomic bomb that began there.
K-Q: I meant innocence in the sense of ignorance. I think we all were
so really frighteningly ignorant of what was going on, and there
was the war panic and the war attitude. I don t think that s an
excuse for being where we are now, but I think it explains it to
a considerable degree.
So, I think we should be out. I don t think the University
belongs in that sort of business at all. It has nothing to do with
what the university is all about.
Brower: Was that your chief reason for feeling that you no longer wanted
to serve as a regent, the inappropriateness of the University s
activities in that area?
K-Q: No, I wouldn t say that. I d just as soon have stayed on [laughter]
and fought that one, really.
I think the very political and contentious way in which the
regents are forced to conduct their business now is antipathetic
to not only my preference but my talent. I don t operate very
well under this business of contention and fighting. Really,
none of the regents like it, so far as I could make out, but a
good many of them are lawyers. A good many of them are pretty
strong competitive people, and I think they mind it less than I
did.
342
Brower: In reading the minutes, I thought I saw some of them who almost
delighted in the controversial aspects.
K-Q: I think some of the most effective of them actually do. I think
David Saxon is a good hard fighter for what he believes in. I
think he gets tired of it and feels its futility, but [laughter]
I think he doesn t in the least mind the fight, as such. And
Coblentz, I think, gets some fun out of it. Those people are
lawyers or they re used to talking and fighting on their feet, as
it were, and I think they accept it. I think they accept it
wholly when the business is for real. When you have to spend a
whole meeting talking about something which really is offside
because of demonstrations or the numbers of people that have spoken
somewhat off the subject and so on, then I think they all get
very tired of that. But, I must say, I think they take it with
great good grace.
Brower: The publicity, you mean? The presence of the public?
K-Q: Well, for example, at the February meeting in Los Angeles, they
brought up the matter of farm mechanization and had a great many
people speaking, none of them staying within their time limit,
and a great many of them speaking not to the point and Dymally,
who had insisted upon the whole matter s coming up, did not stay
to the end. Those speeches went on till dinner time, and the
regents stayed. To a man, they sat there and took it and stayed.
I think they re awfully patient and good about that, and fair,
very fair.
It was very wearing to me, and I felt that I couldn t function
well enough to make it pay for what was taken out of me physically
and psychically.
Brower: You said that the association with President Saxon was valuable.
K-Q: Coming to know David Saxon, I have a tremendous admiration for him,
and I think that, if he were given the opportunity and the time,
he would be a president very much in the Wheeler manner. Here is
a professor, a scholar and a very committed one. Every year he
gives from his not large salary a considerable sum of money to the
philosophy departments of the University to spend as they want to.
And, after all, David Saxon is a physicist and a very committed
and interested physicist. He s a complex and, I think, a very
interesting man, and I think he s a strong president.
Brower: Did he account in any way for this choice of the philosophy
departments?
K-Q: I never heard him speak of it. I just saw it listed.
343
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
I see.
He is a theoretical physicist and I think he feels the background
of physics is philosophical and apparently he has faith that
philosophic development is a necessary one in our present scientific
world.
Do you think his feeling would be that it s the ethics of physics
that develop in a philosophical
I ve never talked to him about this, but certainly that would be
part of it. You know, he s immensely committed to doing whatever
can be realistically done, and to do more and more, to get minority
people and disadvantaged people into the university. He has done
far more than the people who are fighting for this have ever given
him credit for, or even know, and I think he s realistically
comitted to it. He s been behind all of these moves, which are
more than gestures, of going clear down as far as junior high to
begin to try to do something directly with the youngsters to
motivate them and to get them so that they will begin, themselves,
to insist upon preparation for going to the University.
I don t see quite how this works,
public schools?
You mean, he works through the
Yes , yes .
In trying to persuade them to this point of view?
Yes.
Does he does the University fund ?
I think it costs very little money. I think it costs time. I think
he works through the school system and utilized people who have
some sense for how to do this sort of thing. I think he ll try
anything which he thinks will work. And this is why the criticism
of him is so terribly unfair. He is not for allowing into the
University kids who can t make the grade, because he considers that
that s bad psychology; it s very discouraging for them and gets
nowhere. As he said, there are alternatives. It isn t as though
the State of California doesn t have alternatives. I think he is
genuinely committed there and very intelligently so. I was very
glad to get a sense for him and I think he s a very high-caliber
person.
344
K-Q: I liked all the regents, generally speaking, and I think they do
an enlightened and a good job. I suppose in any group you might
find somebody who was using personal advantage, but, I swear,
I got no feeling of that at all. I had the feeling that they
were people who took their job very seriously. If something comes
up at the University that has to do with a regent s portfolio, his
financial portfolio, perhaps some of them use that to their own
advantage, but it s very hard for me to really believe that.
Brower: I would guess that they re disinterested personally, though they
may have interests for their particular group.
K-Q: Yes.
Brower: Such as Vilma Martinez s interest in Chicano matters.
K-Q: Yes, but that is
Brower: That s not a personal
K-Q: That s not a personal thing. I felt that it was a committed group
of people who worked awfully hard and spent a lot of time. It had
to be through real interest in the University. I mean, there s
no other reason for doing it.
Brower: Speaking of the individual portfolios, how did you feel about the
requirement for regents to disclose their financial status?
K-Q: I don t know how I feel about all this disclosure business. I think
the motive for bringing it up is probably an unworthy one. I think
[it came from] the elected officials [with] a political point of
view, which is so different from the regents . I think there
was a feeling, "Well, we have to do it, so why shouldn t you?"
And beyond that, I don t know. It s the thing we re doing now
and I m sure in some cases, when you think of Nixon and so on, it s
pretty darned important.
Brower: Would you feel that it would be better to have the elected political
members of the board without a vote?
K-Q: I certainly do. [pauses] Now, wait a minute. They aren t elected.
Brower: Well, I was thinking of the superintendent of schools and the
K-Q: No, this isn t by election.
Brower: What I mean is that they re elected to their office. It s an
elective office.
345
K-Q: Oh, it s elective office. I do question whether with the possible
exception of the governor, who is not a legislator (he is an
executor) ,
and whose job is technically president of the board of
regents, so he has real responsibility there. Except for him, I
do question the appropriateness of that vote. It does seem to be
used for special interest in a way that it is not by the regents
themselves. Riles, and Dymally, and let s see; who is the other
one beside the governor? haven t an overall view of the job of
regency, I think, because they only show up when it s a special
interest of their own.
Brower: The speaker of the assembly is also an ex officio member, and then,
closer to the University, the president and vice-president of the
Alumni Association.
K-Q: Well, there I feel differently.
Brower: They re not politicians. I shouldn t have brought them in.
K-Q: No, they re not politicians. And they, I think, take very much
the regent attitude. The ones I met I thought were taking it very
seriously and very intelligently. No, I think they should vote
because I think they re voting from the same point of view.
Brower: It s hard to understand the selection of these people as regents,
why the lieutenant governor as well as the governor, and why the
speaker of the assembly? It s easier to see why the superintendent
of public schools is on the board.
K-Q: Yes, I think that does make considerably more sense. You know, this
may be rather recent, Anne. I didn t inquire into that. This may
have been only since the 60s.
Brower: It may well be; I don t recall hearing about those other members.
K-Q: It would be interesting to know.
Brower: One can see the necessity to have an overall view, from somewhere,
of the state as a whole and the needs of the University in relation
to the state.
K-Q: And theoretically there s no reason why a legislator [chuckles]
shouldn t have an intelligent view and see it from a regent s point
of view, except I think the fact of being elected and of the
competitive thing. They re elected; they re paid. It does seem to
introduce a political atmosphere that is inappropriate, enormously
time-consuming, and beside the point.
346
Brower: Would you think that this stems in part from the personalities of
the men themselves? Do you think other men in the same office
would be less of a problem?
K-Q: I think it s partly a necessary point of view. If you re going to
be a good politician in this competitive world, you are a very
competitive person, and it seems to me that you re always
satisfying the people who elect you; that s what you re there for.
To assume the really very academic attitude of taking a large view,
I should think, would be hard for a politician.
Brower: Of course, the encroachments of the legislature on the policy of
the University has been something that s been resisted for decades,
certainly. There was legislation in the early 20s that threatened
to do that.
K-Q: Yes. I think the original setting up of the board of regents was
to remove it from political manipulation, and this is what there
is more and more of.
Brower: There has always been an attempt, I think, to get occupational
niches represented on the board, and to have a labor representative,
among others.
K-Q: Yes. Well, I don t know whether that s always been true or not.
Brown is making a definite effort that way, and I think a correct
one.
Brower: I think labor representation on that board is long-standing.
K-Q: Henning is the current one. We had the impression increasingly
that Henning was [pauses] well, let s say, learning his job as
regent. And I think there s a very good chance of his really
coming to this view. At first, I thought not at all, but
Brower: When you say, "...this view," precisely what do you mean?
K-Q: An overall regential view. He would have this special interest and
special capacity, he could contribute the labor point of view, but
I had the feeling that he was going to do that in a large and
proper way, not in a small political way.
Brower: One of the matters that came up during your regency did deal with
labor, didn t it? It had to do with employment relations on the
campus.
347
K-Q:
Brower ;
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
Yes. I don t think that, as such, was discussed. There were cases,
which were old cases by the time I came on, of this, but nothing
particular.
The thing I was thinking of was in January of 78, when there was
a review of a policy on employment-relations legislation, and
Carter was opposed to collective bargaining legislation applying
to the University.
{chuckles]
discussed.
I see.
Well, that came up, but I don t think it was much
It may have been discussed earlier.
I suppose a question like that would have had to come up before
the educational policy committee. *
Oh , sure !
Because there would be no other place.
There s no other place! [laughter]
What a catch-all that committee must have been!
Yes, yes. That s another thing about the organization of the regents
and it would be interesting to know what that goes back to; I
think it must have been that way from the beginning. The secretary
is doing an enormous job, and now has to have a whole corps of
people to keep up with that job, but it is done with the least
apparent effort of any organization that I ever had anything to
do with. It s not only competent; it s so humane, and it s done
as though it were effortlessly. The woman and her crew are really
remarkable. But I imagine this is old tradition.
I don t know that it is. I found the present atmosphere in that
office, when I went in there, a marked contrast to the way I
remember it from the 30s, when I think they were much more secretive,
much more inclined to treat you as if you had no right to know
anything, whereas the spirit in the office now seems most welcoming
and outgoing and candid.
Absolutely. It is .just infinite trouble cheerfully done, so that
you do not feel that you are imposing.
Almost invisible mechanisms.
*Employee relations (collective bargaining) legislation was con
sidered by the Committee on Finance, not Educational Policy, and
was discussed at length by a Subcommittee of the Committee on
Finance appointed specifically for that purpose.
348
K-Q: I think it s one of the most competent offices.
Brower: I was enormously impressed with their willingness to let me sit
there and read the minutes at my leisure and to bring me files of
the things that I asked for.
K-Q: They have a very neat archive there of old minutes and such things.
[Marjorie J.] Woolman is proud of that and is pleased when it s
used; you may have seen it. You have to be an appropriate person,
but she s very pleased when people come and use it.
Brower: I wondered what kind of screening was used, because I simply said
I came from the Oral History Office and would like to look at these
things, and I didn t have to produce any kind of identification.
I suppose I looked relatively harmless.
K-Q: Right, right.
Brower: If I d been a long-haired, starry-eyed
K-Q: Then they might have pulled status and rules a little bit to make
sure.
Brower: Though I do have the feeling that these are public documents, and
they know that, and no one s being disagreeable about it.
K-Q: Well, this is Woolman s attitude. The only thing she s done and
this is just as a proper archivist the old documents are handwritten,
and they have been handled enough that they have had to be copied.
Brower: They re not the originals, then?
K-Q: No, the originals are there, and she will show them to you, but they
aren t to be handled or consulted any more. This is absolutely
proper. I think she feels that these files are open, and they ve
certainly made space there for people to use them, and that s it.
Brower: It s a very pleasant thing to find in a campus office.
K-Q: It s delightful! And the relations between the secretary and
Saxon and Coblentz I found those all exceedingly comfortable and
useful, because they do work together. I didn t ask for very much,
but I asked for some things that were rather a nuisance to find and
get, and it was not only done with extreme competence, but also
so very pleasantly.
Brower: What kinds of materials did you ask for?
349
K-Q: Well, I asked for absolutely inappropriate things, [laughter]
I wanted to see what those darn tests were like.
Brower: Oh, of course. I don t think that s at all inappropriate.
K-Q: Well, it seems to me ridiculous to be voting for or against a
test you ve never seen. But, you know, it isn t their fault.
That testing business, I think, has become kind of ridiculous.
It s a commercial thing. It s a big company. It s a money-making
company. But it s very difficult to get in there to consult
anything. Beth Hansen had to take an oath that she would bring
these tests to me, that nobody else would look at them. I mean,
she really had to take an oath to this effect. She handed them to
me by hand; I handed them back to her by hand.
Brower: The regents themselves, of course, don t have these on file?
K-Q: They didn t, no. I thought it would be just a matter of calling
up the psychology department. But not at all.
Brower: I can understand why they wouldn t like you to see a test that had
been filled in.
K-Q: Exactly, but
Brower: But the blank test well, I suppose you could give it to a grandchild
[chuckles] who was going to college or something of that sort.
K-Q: Well, obviously, this had been done, because the people that are
coaching kids
Brower: Really know what the nature of those tests are?
K-Q: But for a psychology department that is dealing with things like
this not to be allowed to have a copy nowhere, not in the education
department, nowhere on campus could you find a copy. And you
had to go down to the place itself. As I say, she had to take an
oath and assume a certain risk, not knowing what I d do I
could have taken them and done something entirely inappropriate
with them.
Brower: It was lucky that she only had to go down to Berkeley.
K-Q: In fact, if I had insisted upon one of the others, that would have
meant a trip to San Francisco for her. Ridiculous.
Well, let s see. Have we anything else about the regents?
Brower: Have you followed the votes and the discussion since you left the
board?
350
K-Q: I got a few copies of the minutes. I could get copies if I asked
for them and, in fact, they may continue to send them to me. I
really haven t followed them very closely. I was absolutely
dumbfounded to discover that they devoted this last meeting to,
again, the South African investment thing, which was supposed
to have been settled. The regent responsibility there was supposed
to have been established, and a committee set up which would be
a watchdog committee. It did not have the watchdog power that
Saxon thought it should have and that we thought it should have.
It was a very weakened one, but it got through; it was all you
could get through the regents .
Brower: The committee had the power to recommend against socially damaging
investments?
K-Q: Right. And I think that s the important thing now because
universities are going that way, lots of them, and even some
companies are doing it. It s in the air. It s going to happen.
This demand by students and others that the University on its own
try to upset the cart is just not realistic thinking.
Brower: I suppose the regents return to that subject was a response to
pressure from students and demonstrations.
K-Q: Oh, yes, yes. My own feeling is that the regents almost
well, they certainly lean backwards to be responsive to students
and outside bodies. I wonder if they lean back almost too far. To
have to bring that up again and to have to bring up the matter of
the new student requirements it seems to me that the regents have
done all on that that they can at present, and that it was just
going back over the same ground that we covered my first two
meetings .
Brower: That was my impression as I looked at the newspaper accounts.
K-Q: Yes, yes. It was a little shocking, because there are lots and
lots of other things. The siting of the new observatory may just
get lost in the shuffle , particularly if they keep having to go
back to these old things .
Brower: It makes you wonder if they ll ever move out of square one.
K-Q: Well, that s another thing I found very tiring. You came away
with very nice feelings about the people I always did and
about the effort that they put in. But you had an enormous sense
of wasted energy and wasted time, not due to the fault of the
regents at all, but to this system which has got going.
351
Rrower :
K-Q:
Brower :
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Brower:
K-Q:
Actually, it s true of almost any board I ve ever had any association
with, from nursery school to the Sierra Club. Certain issues recur,
but at least they recur with a little interval.
But something could have happened in between. Nothing could have
happened here because Sheinbaum, who was put in charge of the
committee, would barely have had time to get his committee and to
get organized, and to report back, which he was to do. I mean,
he really would not have had time to do it.
I suppose what it means is that the action they took was unacceptble
to the group that is protesting and that they want a revision. But
why the regents should have to respond to that every time
I don t see why, and I really don t think they should. I think
there should be
Some statement that they have taken action on this.
And that this is all at the present that they can do, and that there
are these other things needing to be done.
What were the questions that interested you most, not necessarily
the ones that were most pressed by the group?
Well, really, those two that came up that we ve discussed. I found
the whole business of a new attitude toward investments interesting
and legitimate. Except when demonstrators were just talking and
yelling immoderately, I thought it was very intersting, and very
interesting that it s coming up.
change .
I mean, it does represent social
And I was interested in the university requirements, the change
of requirements, and that, I thought, tended to be a step backwards.
I was not happy about those.
Those were the two principal things that came up.
And they were the two things that also interested you most?
Yes. I did have a point of view about them. The things which
interested me least had to do with grounds and buildings, and there
I could see where regents could be manipulated to a degree by very
clever presentations .
352
K-Q: Handling a building is something concrete [chuckles] as we were
saying, a piece of mud is three-dimensional and you can see it
whereas something intangible, like a professor s research, is
harder to envision. I m sure that during the early years the
actual getting a plant, the actual building, was an important
part of the regents responsibility finding money for buildings,
and deciding upon them, and so on.
But I have the feeling now it s got a bit out of hand with
all these campuses, and it takes up an awful lot of time and
money. I personally just found it not interesting.
Brower: You felt the plans were over-ambitious, usually?
K-Q: I did. I voted against this dormitory on the Los Angeles campus
because they re doing with the Los Angeles campus what they re
doing here. You know, every time you go down on the campus, if
it s been a week or so, there seems to be another building that
you run into. I wasn t convinced by the arguments that they needed
this big dormitory, and I felt that the people who lived around
there and had fought it for two years really deserved much more of
a real hearing than they got.
Brower: Isn t there a question too about the size of the student body falling
off?
K-Q: Well, certainly. This is being constantly discussed. It will fall
off. The only thing that may slow its falling off is if more
minorities and disadvantaged people can be made ready fast enough
for the University, but I think that will not happen. That is
something that takes time. In terms of population proportions,
within three or four years there will be this presumable falling
off.
Brower: I m interested that you think of the divestment of investments
that are socially inappropriate as part of social change, but
the change in admission requirements you don t see as social change.
K-Q: I see it as social change.
Transcribers :
Final Typist:
Michelle Stafford, Lee Steinback, Carl Whitaker, Marilyn White
Steven A. Wartofsky
353
TAPE GUIDE Theodora Kroeber-Quinn
Date of Interview: October 12, 1976
tape 1, side A [side B not recorded] 1
tape 2, side A [side B not recorded] 11
Date of Interview: October 26, 1976
tape 3, side A 17
tape 3, side B 19
Date of Interview: November 4, 1976
tape 4, side A 27
tape 4, side B 36
Date of Interview: November 9, 1976
tape 5, side A [side B not recorded] 46
Date of Interview: November 16, 1976
tape 6, side A 56
tape 6, side B 62
Date of Interview: November 23, 1976
tape 7, side A 68
tape 7, side B 75
Date of Interview: November 30, 1976
tape 8, side A 81
tape 8, side B 88
tape 9, side A 94
Date of Interview: December 7, 1976
tape 9, side B 101
tape 10, side A 108
tape 10, side B 115
Date of Interview: December 14, 1976
tape 11, side A 121
tape 11, side B 128
tape 12, side A [side B not recorded] 136
Date of Interview: January 21, 1977
tape 13, side A [side B not recorded] 143
tape 14, side A 150
Date of Interview: January 25, 1977
tape 15, side A 166
tape 15, side B 176
tape 16, side A [partial, to 124] 184
354
Date of Interview: February 1, 1977
tape 14, side B 185
tape 17, side A [side B not recorded] 194
Date of Interview: February 15, 1977
tape 16, side A [partial, from 125] 201
tape 16, side B 209
Date of Interview: February 22, 1977
tape 18, side A 217
tape 18, side B 225
Date of Interview: March 1, 1977
tape 19, side A 234
tape 19, side B 242
Date of Interview: March 8, 1977
tape 20, side A 249
tape 20, side B [partial, to 300] 257
Date of Interview: March 15, 1977
tape 20, side B [partial, from 301] 260
tape 21, side A [side B not recorded] 264
Date of Interview: March 29, 1977
tape 22, side A 273
tape 23, side A 280
Date of Interview: April 12, 1977
tape 22, side B 287
tape 23, side B 293
Date of Interview: April 19, 1977
tape 24, side A 301
tape 24, side B 308
Date of Interview: April 26, 1977
tape 25, side A 313
tape 25, side B 319
Date of Interview: April 5, 1978
tape 26, side A 327
tape 26, side B 332
Date of Interview: May 25, 1978
tape 27, side A [side 3 not recorded] 339
APPENDICES
APPENDIX I 355
RETROSPECTIVE. ORAL HISTORY. 16/7/77
Note; This is a "Retrospect written upon reading the first 100 pages
of the transcript of the oral history I finished recently.
HOW did my good and patient friend, ArauBrower, who was my inter
viewer, come by the grace and graciousness to sit through my stumbling,
long, long recital? Without her and -ii she represents to me I could not
have done it at all. What I say of it has reference only to my own per
formance and is critical only of me as informer. It reflects neither on
interviewer nor on Oral History as such. It strongly suggests that the
gatherers of such histories should be prepared for vast inequalities as
between one person s recital and another s: some will be gratifyingly
good. Others, like mine, may be rather appalling. I believe I have hit
upon some reasons for these inequalities and their probable inevitability.
Reading the first 100 pages of the transcript of the oral history
I have just finished recording on tape, with Ann^Brower as interviewer,
I find it a disappointing effort at historical reconstruction. I do not
refer to the repetitiousnesses and awkwardnesses which are inevitable,
I suppose, unless there has been much previous practice in the method.
(I am a worse uh-uh-uher than most, however.) I refer rather to having
failed to bring to the tape-record what I was trying for: to go back up
my long timetrack on a Journey of discovery; to report honestly what
I found there, pumping into the account as well something of the once-
reality of these stored memories; to re-assay them so they would be mean
ingful to anyone who consulted them, to relate the once I to the now Me;
to make plain the pattern of my life in relation to its times, its culture,
356
its direction and meaning. These matters being, I take it, what oral
history is meant to elicit and elucidate. I can say for the miscellany
I find my transcript to be only that it is honest. But it does not go
much of anywhere.
I regret this the more since I myself learned much from the
experience. I also came to certain conclusions regarding the technique,
its value and its limitations. Oral history, in my view, is of incalcu
lable value in catching, on the final wing- swoops, something of what went
on in the minds and tines of vastly creative individuals whose thoughts
and acts have influenced our world s acts and thoughts, but who have,
through lack of time or inclination or capacity never put into written
words what they did or thought or were; people who never would, whatever
the opportunity, so commit to permanent written record what the world
badly needs to know of them and from them.
Of equal historical interest is such a record from the "ordinary"
man or woman who has lived an "ordinary" life, backed by good memory, keen
interest in people and events, whose natural medium of communication and
whose joy is in vivid anecdote, in oral recollection of times past. Much
of what most of us know of our own family history and background rests
upon such spontaneous and uninhibited accounts from an old aunt or uncle
or grandparent and a grand way it is to bring to life another time and
place and attitude. Informant-Ethnology has relied heavily on this form
of gathering culture-data: whole unwritten languages have been reconstructed
from such data-accumulations; the essence and much of the content of lost
cultures, of previously unrecorded oral literatures of peoples without
writing have been preserved for history by this method and by way of such
informants.
I an aware that the purpose of oral history is not to give insight
3.
357
to the informant regarding himself it nonetheless does just that.
I wish oral history might itself benefit by my recital and its after
thoughts as have II
I suspected before, now I know my brain came equipped with a
reverse sieve which diverts the watery materials of the inconsequential
into a nearby memory-pool, fairly accessible to recall but of amorphous
content. Dipping up some of it into the cupped hand, it flows between
the fingers leaving very little solid matter to examine, to explicate.
Most of the rich sediments and occasional treasure of remembrance of things
past have been dumped into a far sub- sub-basement of my unconscious from
which it takes much dredging as Ann^ knows but too well to recover
them. And time. Much time.
I now see there are "oral"
people, such as the superb informants
referred to above. And there are the "written" ones. Like me. My oral
report on my attempted journey back in time does not come out cramped
and crabbed because of an unhappy past; the backward glances I take from
time to time toward my past are usually heart-warming. I see my life as
fortunate, sheltered from much evil and ugliness, from traumas beyond my
capacity to survive and learn from; a life whose sunny side covers much
more of the screen than does the shadow side; a life rewarded with much
. love and joy and fulfillment. But you note the word I, unthinking, write
is "glances": over-views seen as from a smooth- skimming, silent, other-
world plane from which I catch brief impressionistic glimpses into a
forgotten dark corner, onto a sun-blazed mountain top, over a placid
meadowland to return swiftly, unlingeringly home. To Now.
Two anecdotes (I) may serve better than much explanation to illus
trate two characteristics in me which are inhibitory to doing a good oral
history.
k.
358
One Only last week my two Elizabeths among my twelve grandchildren
asked me to tell them about the two amongst the many Elizabeths in our family
for whom they are named. I responded, without thinking what I said, "Of
course. Only I ll write them. I think better that way." I am writing
"at" them now a page or so a day, it going best that way, and noticing
for the first time that the act of writing focuses my attention on these
pieces of family history I am recounting, and that with pencil in hand
and moving over paper the memories, tender, funny, odd, come flooding
in
(The second anecdote, the moral of which in the connection with
oral history being that, left to myself, my passion, my interest, such
creativity as remains to me, is focused on Today. And Tomorrow.) Here
it is_/-- A daydream, a fantasy induced by my husband s saying to me one
day in the garden, "Close your eyes. Keep them closed." I do so. "you
are walking up a green knoll to a castle on top of the knoll. You reach
the castle, pass under its portico, go up a broad stairway to the Great
Hall. Across the im-ii you see a small door, and behind it a narrow
spiral stairway. You climb the stairs to find yourself in an attic room,
empty except for a chest of solid gold fastened with silver hasps. Pry
open the hasps. Raise the lid... What do you find inside?"
The chest is full. I turn over its contents, rake my hands through
them. I say, "They are mine...toys. My first teddy bear. My first
doll he was a clown. My blocks. One shuttlecock. Letters. Embossed
invitations. Dance programs! Here is that lovely piece of turquoise!
And the rose quartz! Beads, the strings broken. Old pictures. Me.
People whose names I forget now. A pair of white satin pumps -- those
were my first high heels. The Sunbonnet
Babies^
I learned to read
from that _- Before I went to school. Kim!...The chiffon hat I was
359
two years old my grandmother brought it to me from Paris. The label
says *Bon Marche. And, and the studded bridle of my horse!" I laugh.
An other-time laugh. A young laugh. Then I am silent.
"What are you doing now?"
"Touching the turquoise. Putting the bridle back. Closing, lock
ing the chest. Returning the way I came. I am down the stairs, outside
the castle, back down the green knoll."
"Did you bring nothing with you?"
"Nothing. They are the Jewels of my Past."
I open my eyes. To the daylight. To Today light.
APPENDIX II 360
THE TWO ELIZABETHS
by
KRAKIE
at request of
ELIZABETH JOIGJSTON KROE3ER
and
ELISABETH COVEL LE GUHI
|KJ(?<? JC^Uc. I\AOULMJM
361
Dear Elizabeth and Elisabeth,
I promised I would tell you two something of your namesake Elizabeths.
What I recall will be random and patchy, for such is my memory. I believe
Ursula has the family tree Alfred once started. My recollection is that it
is concerned principally with the Kroeber family, but that it includes some
firm dates and names and relations got by Alfred from my mother which would
supplement riy approximations.
I begin to realize I shall be better at giving you sore idea of the
sort of persons the Elizabeths were than at contributing much detailed
history.
Elizabeth Covel Dane (Johnston) was my maternal grandmother, hence
your great-great-grandmother (Lizzie s namesake).
Elizabeth (Betsy) Covel Johnston (Buck) was the youngest child of
the above Elizabeth, hence my aunt and your great-great-aunt (E.J. s name
sake) .
"Covel" is a family name going back, along with "Dane",
to Scotland-
Ireland. Don t know how far. During Ursula s first year at Radcliffe, we
found a Covel in the Boston phone book. Almost surely a relative. We also
found the Covel house in Mecklenburg Square on Beacon Hill, but we did not
follow through. Maybe we were shy? Or did we want to retain our private
fantasies of how a Covel should look and conduct herself? (Funny we didn t
envisage a male Covel -- ) [Ted tells me he found Danes as well in Boston.
Like Ursula and me, he did not follow through.]
In Grandmother s family and connections, the eldest daughter was
regularly named Elizabeth Covel, after the Ancient Ancestor (Ancestress?).
Grandmother was the first so far as she knew to break the custom by naming
362
her firstborn, a girl, Phebe Jane, after a cousin of Grandfather Johnston.
She and Grandfather kept to the quaint spelling of the original, Fhebe.
(Phebe Jane was my mother.)
Grandmother was further non-traditional in persuading rcy parents
to name me, my mother s first and as it happened only daughter, Theodora.
Ky parents acquiesced, Mother thinking it a name of honourable Greek
origin; Father, more history-minded, entertained by ny hair as red as
that of the Bnpress Theodora and by a soon-evident explosive temper.
Dear Mother was furious upon learning that Grandmother had had in mind
another Theodora, a title-heroine of a modern novel. Pure trash, said
Mother. Ursula and I have searched earnestly but without luck for that
old modern 1
novel in New England secondhand bookstores
363 3
As to my maternal grandparents, my grandfather was a Philadelphia:!.
The name was Johnston.
.born Elizabeth Covel Dane,
Grandmother JohnstoH. must have been born in the l8UOs. She died in
"71
1925>
I think don t hold me to dates! She was born in Boston, where she
lived until about age seventeen. In 1850 or 51 again I ve no exact
date she with her parents and her only sibling, a younger brother John,
came to San Francisco. Although she lived the remainder of her life in the
Vest, she dropped not an iota of her Boston accent, preference or prejudice.
Her children insisted she made a special mou when pronouncing the words
Boston 1
or Bostonian*.
She was a schoolteacher, like the aunt whose Boston Seminary for
Young Ladies she attended. I have somewhere a card from that seminary,
embossed and in colour, offering in addition to regular school subjects
French, Voice, Embroidery.
The Danes traveled in comfort by steamer from Boston to the Straits
of Panama, thence by horse carriage across the Straits, and up the West
Coast by steamer to San Francisco. I had not thought of it before, but
I do not know why the elder Danes came West, nor what was their subsequent
lifel John, Grandmother s brother, no doubt staked by his father, did well,
better than most, in his mining venture, which yielded for him part interest
in a going gold mine in Volcano, one of the picturesque mining towns of the
Mother Lode country. He soon brought his sister to nearby Sonora, where
she taught in a local school, whether in Sonora or elsewhere I do not know.
Uncle John sometimes reminisced about those Sonora days. As he said,
all Sonora or any mining town lacked was women enough "nice"
girls to
go round. One of John s new-made friends was James Johnston, a young
Philadelphian who, with his brother Jack and an age-mate cousin, had come
overland with the Gold Rush. By the time Grandmother met him, the three
364
Johnstons had given up their dreams of a gold bonanza and had become land
owners, the cousin in the Sacramento River delta, James and Jack outside
Sonora .
According to Uncle John s account, the petite Bostonian schoolmam
had every non-school hour filled, what with buggy and horseback rides,
picnics, and most of all, dances. And those hours were spent increasingly
in the company of Uncle John s friend James Johnston. James and Elizabeth
announced their engagement, and within the year were married from the Dane
home in San Francisco.
The names besides Johnston which I remember from my grandfather s
family were Haymaker, Kellum and Tree. My mother was named for a Tree
cousin with whom in later years she regularly corresponded. One of the
branches of Trees was wealthy, its head one of the early Philadelphia
oil tycoons. My mother and father were guests in his home on occasional
visits east, where they found the gold dinner setting and the gold bathroom
fixtures to be reminiscent of those of the mansions of similarly newly-
wealthy mining people in Denver, even in Telluride. Gold dinner service
or not, those of the family we came to know over the years were a handsome,
sturdy and civilized lot. Grandfather, surely amongst the poorest of them,
may also have been the handsomest and possessed of the greatest charm, as
Mother and Betsy claimed. He died before I could know him, but my elder
brother Austin was said to much resemble him in looks and temperament:
both were tall, with a curly cascade of auburn hair, with generous ready
smile; both were affectionate and romantic; their humour gentle, gay,
teasing, mischievous.
<WJW
The Amador Ranch was thriving; three children /my mother! George,
A>
r
and Lafayette were born... Some instruction in school subjects was
365
under way. Had Janes stayed with these good beginnings, he might veil have
prospered, as did his cousin on his Rosebud Sacramento farm. But James
did not stay with them
I piece the story together from retellings of it overheard in my
childhood. It went something like this Two friends from gold panning
days, when they and Janes had had some sort of informal partnership, turned
up looking for someone to stake them a large stake. Grandfather gave
them a character recommendation to yet another friend, from whom the two
received their stake , $^,000, I believe - a fantastic sun for the time
and circumstances. The two friends departed, one for Brazil, one for Ari
zona, taking the money with them, never to be heard from more. As Grand
father saw it, he was bound by his misjudgment to make good his friends
default. He sold the ranch hastily that is, not to best advantage.
With what he got for it, and further payments over the next years, he at
last paid the sum in full and with interest. Under what evil star it is
hard to imagine, James with his wife, his three children (with another
a-coming), with his brother and such personal and household baggages as
could be stacked into and onto a four-horse wagon, departed Amador County
for an undeveloped piece of land on the eastern, desert side of Oregon.
(With Betsy, we shall come back to those years.)
Grandmother never mentioned the move or the Oregon years in any of
her reminiscings (it occurs to me, she did not much reminisce), nor did
she participate in her children s recounting of them. I can only guess
at what may have been her feelings toward them: a refusal to pass judg
ment on her husband s acts, whatever; or to allow criticism from another
(my father s negative sentiments, for example, toward his father- in- law s
sacrifice were never voiced in her presence); a successful effort to put
366
it behind her." That this putting was at some cost I realize only upon
writing this account those were the yearc during which Grandr.xither, of
perfect health and strength before and after throughout her life, suffered
a lone bout of stomach ulcers. These were also the years of terrible
migraine headaches for her, headaches to send her to bed for two or three
days at a tine. It is to Uncle George, my mother s brother, two years her
junior, I am indebted for some reality regarding life on the Oregon ranch.
Two anecdotes from that tine will serve here, I think, to give its flavour.
One, the stark statement that fuel for heating and for cooking vas
sagebrush the only free and plentiful crop of the desert. Picture what
this meant during the cold, snowy winter months: hov; many stacks of sage
brush, compacted to withstand the wind and to remain dry, at least within
stacks the diners icns of large barns".
The other, confirmed by my mother, had to do with the tv;ice a year
trip made to the Post to fetch hone whatever would be needed for the next six
months. !-<y imagination flags before the length and importance of that list,
which must include, besides the obvious foods such as flour, sugar, salt,
coffee, dry beans, etc., drugs for illnesses of man and beast; nails and
tool replacement parts; materials for dresses and underwear, for sheets,
for shirts on and on. The twice-yearly trip required that Uncle Jack
go to drive the second wagon and to help Grandfather; nor could Grandmother
entrust to the men the gathering in of her many household items, indispensa
ble to her keeping her family fed, clothed and in health.
So, on one of these biannual excursions, off went the three adults
and the two wagons. Left behind were the six children, Phebe sixteen,
George fourteen, and so down to Betsy, then three years old. George, with
Lafayette as helper, undertook the outdoor chores, feeding and grooming the
7
367
horses, feeding cows, pigs and poultry, as well as milking the two milk
cows. Phebe cared for the younger children, and kept the house as veil as
doing the cooking. All might have been uneventful enough, except that the
second day a terrified little bunch of Basin Indians, whom the Johnstons
knew and were friends with, cane briefly by on their way to the mountains
to hide from a band they did not know how large of strange Indians,
armed, hungry, and moving in the direction of the ranch, no doubt displaced
Plains Indians. Displaced since the Gold Rush, evicted by superior gunpower
and numbers from their own territory, moving^est, in turn taking, if they
could, territory and hunting grounds belonging to the Indians of the Great
Basin, the latter unarmed for the most part and themselves on the edge of
mere existence.
That night Phebe and George saw bivouac fires over the nearer ridge .
The ranch house was built solidly and with a lookout extension above the
second story, reached by a narrow, steep stairway. Without making anything
of it to the younger children, Phebe and George set up a 2^-hcur watch
between them. When one watched, with loaded rifle beside him at the look
out window, the other slept or made a meal, or did chores as he could.
Phebe kept the children close beside her, waking or sleeping. She was par
ticular to make it appear that all was normal children laughing and even
playing outside sometimes with her, albeit close to the house.
The third day a scout from the band, armed and in Plains Indian cloth
ing, came into full view, circling ever closer to the house. Phebe, a cool
shot, let him get fairly close, then shot, the bullet kicking up the dirt
directly in front of him. He turned and ran and was seen no more that day.
Another attempt was made after dark, but the nights were blessedly clear
with a nearly full moon; Phebe responded as before, adding a parting shot
3
368
as he ran off. It was a small band of Indians, so far as she could tell,
who were probably unsure just hov; many were in the ranch house and in what
state to defend themselves. The fourth day, two banded heads reared into
view in the brush close to the barn. Phebe shot whenever she saw them
and still they did not come within competing shot distance. The fifth day,
Phebe could see some sort of activity over the ridge, the feather-pieces of
three or four moving heads, the switching tails of two horses. Whether they
were intending to attack or preparing to move on, she could not know, but
in her spyglass she caught a distant cloud of dust coming nearer, becoming
two clouds of dust, becoming the two returning wagons. Lafayette and George
were off and running, on horseback, shooting off their rifles in good Western
fashion as greeting and warning. And before the wagons materialized in the
yard, Phebe, on watch to the end, saw the little band of Indians riding
hastily away, two to a horse, heading toward the inhospitable mountains.
The account left me quivering to the strain and responsibility laid
on the young Phebe, and it has yet another poignancy to me: the younger
children were happy and unafraid during those days of endless dread and
fear for George and Phebe, which would seen to say much for the trust and
affection and sheer interdependence these six children shared.
The Oregon years drew to an end. A new, a last trek, this tine with
all six children, with household goods, horses and cattle. Janes and his
far.ily went from Oregon, from out the shadow of poverty and danger into the
sunshine of Wyoming, to an open prairie stretch of land which would gradually
be fenced and tamed, some thirty-five miles out of Cheyenne. It became the
E-7 ranch: S for Elizabeth; 7, lucky number.
9
369
Here, gradually, there came into being a considerable community of build
ings: cow barns, horse stables, carpenter chop, harness storeroom attached
to a blacksmith shop, a comfortable bunkhouse where lived the resident cow
boys, with room for extra cowhands at roundup tine.
I ve no idea how many acres were comprised within the once open
prairie land of E-7. They were stocked soon with the breed of Arabian
horses brought to America by the Spanish ,0onquistadcre~ and known through
out the West as cow ponies ; delicately but strongly built, trainable,
non-temperamental as horses go, affectionate, becoming in skilled hands
one man horses. No one, I think, who like me owned a cow pony as a child,
ever discovers another pet of quite its emotional equal, (perhaps this is
truer for girls than for boys; the horse seems a natural sex symbol for us
Westerners, as was the bull for the ancient Minoans, and a girl s attach
ment to a horse, or to the horse generalized, usually wanes with the first
full-blown distraction of beaux and the fascinating world of sexual love.)
E-7 horses were in demand as show 1
animals in rodeos and as cavalry
animals at army posts throughout the West, where, in those days, cavalry
was big . E-7 also stocked beef steers and a breed of sheep -- I forget
its name, but its wool was fine and brought premium prices.
As for the ranch house, it was ample and rambling and sheltered by
a clump of cottonwoods in typical Western plains fashion. It differed from
other ranch houses in its exterior, in that a prim picket fence set it off
from the horizon-distant prairie a fence for all the world like the fence
around the yard of the Covel house on Mecklenburg Square in Boston. Within
the fence, season permitting, was a miniature flower garden tended by Grand
mother, and marking the extent of her direct concern with the ranch beyond
these limits .
10
370
Its springhouse too was different frcn nost. Water fror. a gener
ously running spring was diverted through a springhouse ,
whose own walls
and roof were extended to fora a continuous covered passageway from spring-
house to the laundry roon off the kitchen. From there, fresh- churned
butter, cheeses, the yellov; cream thick congealed on the wide shallow milk
pans, could be fetched without stepping out of doors. The springhouse was
large enough to accommodate, as well, shelving above the wet rocks of its
floor, on which were stored wooden tubs of sausage put down in pure white
lard, sauerkraut, mincemeat, wild and tame fruit jams and jellies, and the
put up garden vegetables. (Root vegetables were stored in a dry cellar
under the house.)
Indoors, the sitting room became under Grandmother s aegis a
parlour : prim, formal, with its horsehair furniture, the cherryvood
organ, the corner cupboards of bibelots, the narrow tall desk where Grand
mother wrote her letters and kept her accounts. Across the hall from the
parlour was a largish room, which eventually became the office usual to
a large ranch, for which much bookkeeping must in the end be done . But
until the youngest child Betsy was ready to go to Cheyenne to school,
this was a schoolroom, whose desks, blackboard, pens, ink stands, copy
books and subjects taught were as in a Boston city school, except
that Grandmother had a select group who learned fast and required many
fewer hours in the classroom than would have been the case in Boston. In
addition to her own children, the four children of the Johnstons nearest
neighbors the Burdicks became her pupils.
It was benign circumstances which brought these two families together,
the Burdicks also being from Boston and Philadelphia, of similar upbringing
and childhood memory. The two women became immediate friends, as did the
11
371
two husbands, the four Burdick children and the six young Johnstons. The
two families arrived almost together; their lands adjoined. The two ranch
houses were built in collaboration. The distance between was a mere three-
mile ride or drive, as I recall (house location determined by trees, shel
ter, nearness to spring or stream) . The Burdick children rode over to E-7
on school days. First there were classes. Then there was lunch and play
ing outside or in; singing around the organ with Grandmother accompanying;
horseback riding together; dances and parties; later, there was going away
to school; dating; falling in and out of love together. The bond has lasted
through four generations: Betsy s eldest, Charles (my cousin), and Lucy
Burdick Yates are married they are fourth generation. Retired now, they
live outside Washington, D.C. I ve lost track of the younger Burdicks
the connection may have entered a fifth generation of cross-family history.
With this friendship, with a settled and secure life on a prospering
ranch, Grandmother at last set her stamp and style on the little world of
E-7. Between her own extended family, neighbors families for miles around,
and people of various calling from Cheyenne, from Denver, from New England
and abroad, visitors were fairly constant. The hospitality of E-7 was
known and sought in an ever more varied circle around Mrs. James Johnston,
the "little lady from Boston,
"
as the cowboys titled her.
Two recollections of Grandmother shared by Mother, Betsy and me,
the latter only for the later years, of course may give you something
of her flavour 1
.
One: The dinner table a long pine table, beautifully crafted by
Uncle Jack to seat family and a considerably company of hands and guests
regularly was laid with a white tablecloth. Always so, in my experience.
Mother and Betsy told of times when clean linen ran out, or when bad weather
12
372
delayed the washing, and Grandmother would resort to a clean bedsheet in
place of the usual table linen. (Remember, sheets were of linen in those
days. And were ironed.)
Two: Grandmother herself never came to the dinner table without
having "freshened herself up," as she put it. Freshening depended upon
the circumstances of the earlier part of the day and consisted, in minimum,
of a clean white neckerchief or jabot, freshly done ha? r, and a refreshed
face. When she could, she liked to change (in my day, to a black silk skirt
and fresh blouse) . Grandmother wore a token bustle well down into my memory
of watching her dress. I think she liked the rustle of good heavy taffeta
and rep silk. I am very sure her men 1
adored it.
And this in turn reminds me that in her old age when she was living
with my mother in Oakland they were both widows -- Grandmother, who was
a scant five foot one or two, became very round. Then she read Count Your
Calories, the first of the new wave of diet bocks, so far as I know. She
did just as the book said, curtailing her love for chocolate drops and
sweet cookies; instructing my mother, or whoever was cooking for ny mother,
all about the calorie content of each dish (to the annoyance of the cook) .
Getting herself down to a relatively svelte figure of which she was proud
indeed; taking in her waistbands with tho greatest of satisfaction.
I recall as well, Grandmother would not wear bonnets, dressy and
really very cute in her day. I adored them. She never fudged her age,
she simply found bonnets silly and she loved hats. "Bonnets are for
babies, not ladies,
"
she said.
Anecdotes, it seems, come up as they come up! And must be stuck in
likei^ise There was my grandmother s sewing machine, my grandfather s
first considerable gift to her. This was in California, the machine a Singer,
373
for which Grandfather paid three hundred dollars in gold dust. The Singer
Company here believes it to have been the first sewing machine to come to
California --it came around the Horn. It is not an exaggeration, I believe,
to say it remained Grandmother s most precious possession. She learned not
only to sew on it, everything from the accustomed cottons, wools and silks,
to leather, which she fashioned into gloves for her men, as well as making
their shirts, and during the Oregon Hegira, their pants and coats . She
learned to use all the special attachments (by which I benefited long years
later with frills and ruffles and tiny tuckings as part of my dresses);
she learned as well to take entire care of her machine. Armed with which
expertise, she set and kept to a rule that no one, ever, should touch her
machine but herself. In return for this immunity, she sewed endlessly,
seemingly tirelessly, Mother said, for her family, for neighbors, for men,
women, for Indians . The latter, Indian neighbors with whom she and the
family made friends in Amador County, were her more rewarding beneficiaries:
they taught her to cure leather and to make leather garments; and while the
sewing machine was whirring in their behalf, the younger women liked to help
about the house, bringing their own babies and caring for them and for Grand
mother s together. Thus it came about that my mother made Indian friends as
a child. Alfred was astonished to discover, sixty some years later, that
A
she retained a good Miwok accent, remembering many words, phrases and whole
sentences, as well as to count to twenty as far as she had learned as a
child. Alfred and she exchanged Indian words as well as recollections of
the delicious roasted grubs and grasshoppers they had eaten with their
Indian friends .
One more note regarding the sev/ing machine. It made the trips into
Oregon and out again, to come to rest in the ranch house at S-7. When the
374
original ranch house burned, and the machine with it, George replaced it,
but to her the newer, shinier and far less heavy machine was a poor substi
tute for the original.
[I remember Ted, just able on extreme tiptoe to corr.e to eye level
with the machine table, gripping the table edge, holding himself on his
toes as long as he could manage it, watching the moving parts in silent
fascination. When he could no longer stand, he would indicate to Grand
mother which of the four drawers he wanted. Sitting where her peddling
feet were also in his view, he would empty, arrange and rearrange the
drawer s contents in ways depending upon which drawer he had selected:
the thread, the button, the findings ,
or the extra appliances drawer.
When he or Grandmother were at an end of their concentration, they
put the contents back in order (or Ted may already have done so) and the
machine was closed for the night. Above the whirr of the machine there
would be a more or less continuous exchange of exclamation, question, com
ment, between them. Grandmother made the clothes for Clifton and Ted --
their layettes , most of which came down to Karl and Ursula.]
To continue with some other anecdotes while I have them in my head:
Grandmother was a petite little perky lady, and her husband and sons -- even
iny mother, who was built on a larger scale teased her considerably about
her peppery smallness. They weighed themselves periodically en the grain
scales in the barn. On one of these occasions Grandfather said that "when
Lizzie tops a hundred we ll make her head of E-7." She continued to fail
to come to the top until one day, astonishingly, she weighed not only a bit
over the 100 mark, but nearly 110 pounds I She was promptly declared BOSS
of E-7, with all Rights and Honours Thereunto. Within a few months,
375
Grandmother on the scales again registered an ample 110. Then, shamefacedly,
relievedly, she confessed that this tine the weight was legitimate, her own,
that that earlier tine she had been so keen to make her mark that she had
tied a sadiron weight 8 to 10 pounds -- between her legs, balancing and
tying it with heavy corset strings, which caused her to waddle badly, walk
ing fron house to barn and back. Ho one noticed. Or no one said . In
telling ne of this years and years later, she said she was so relieved when
she confessed: she did not usually lie; also, sharp Phebe must have had
some sort of suspicion? Grandmother just didn t believe any daughter of
hers would be that dumb not to notice
It must have been somewhat later that another episode from E-7 recurs
to me: this involved the boys wanting to eat the pumpkin pies Grandmother
had made for sone next day festivities. They said they were going to eat
them when she went to bed. She said, You may eat them if you can find
them." Cf course they could find them I
In the event, they spent hours of the night searching everywhere,
including the barns . Defeated, they were led by Grandmother to the spring-
house the following morning. There, "under your noses, if you smell,
"
she
said, were the pies sitting securely at the bottom of the large shallow
pans used in those days for letting the cream rise to the top of the milk,
to be skimmed off after a few hours. Not a ripple showed on the smooth
yellow surface of thick cream. The boys had been in the springhouse all
right, scrabbling about amongst jars and barrels. They had, with extreme
care so as not to disturb, slid the milk pans to one side during their
search.
16
376
I add here two later anecdotes, while I have them in mind. After
Grandfather s death, Homer, the third son, took Grandmother East to visit
her former hone and such relatives and friends as she had kept seme touch
with. It v:as a leisurely summer trip, principally in "<ev
England and
Pennsylvania, much enjoyed apparently by both of them. Homer loved to
tell how Grandmother rather lorded it over her female relatives, who of
course did not have the vote, whereas "I have voted since I came of age."
Behind the obvious calendar- stretching was the fact that Wyoming entered
statehood with full citizen voting rights written into its constitution.
Hastings, the youngest son, in turn, took Grandmother to Paris for
the 1899 E/qposition. Of that trip, I can cone up with two anecdotes.
Grandmother insisted that Hastings take her to a burlesque show, which he
did, somewhat protestingly. Halfway through, she turned to him indig
nantly and said, "Hastings, get me out of herel This is no sort of place
to take your mother I
"
Grandmother had asked me what I wanted from Paris, e::pecting me to
say, "A doll." Hot so. I said, "I want a hat wiv fewers that go ziss way
when I walk..." (wiggling cupped hands). The hat is still with us the
ostrich fewers are a bit dulled from time, the chiffon ties becoming
shredded
A final recollection of Grandmother. The year of my fifth grade in
school I spent in Denver with Grandmother. It came about in this way: I
had had back pain my back did not seem to be very good. God knows:
I hiked, rode horseback, with no pain or "backkick" whatever. Perhaps
377
I wore the wrong shoes? (Almost sorely.) Also, I was a skinny bundle
then. It was Austin s decision that I should have several continuous
months at a "low" altitude: Denver s one mile, as compared with Tellu-
ride s 8, 600, the Tomboy s 12,000. Also, having drunk only melted snow
water -- piped from altitudes of upwards of 11,000 feet I was develop
ing a slight goiter enlargement. Like my father later, it was probably
good for me to have a change from the extremes which were my normal I
During that year, I had osteopathic massage for my back from a
schoolmate of Austin s. (They were both graduate M.D.s talcing their two
years of internship in St. Anthony s Hospital in Denver. The friend was
as well a graduate osteopath.) The massage felt good and no doubt was
good for me. And Grandmother and I had "a ball." We lived in a large
sunny corner room -- mostly windows -- in a small hotel somewhat in the
then outskirts of Denver and within walking distance of St. Anthony s
Hospital. We "boarded" at the family-style table of the hotel. Except
we were allowed (against rules) to have an electric plate in our room
for soup and tea and such. The "and such" came to include an amazing
variety of homemade soups and other hot foods and frequent guests:
Austin, his friend my masseur, Helen (then Austin s fiancee, later his
wife), and assorted hungry and/or homesick interns and refugees from
the austere table of the nuns of St. Anthony. Our outskirt included many
of Denver s immigrant Jews, by whom Austin was much beloved: he had
served his pre-degree practice among them. Little Austin Goldbergs and
Austin Shapiros were brought to call upon us, healthy growing evidences
to Austin s prenatal and postnatal care of them and their mothers. And
serving these people were excellent bakeries and delicatessens, the sources
for the materials of our upstairs and semi-legal feasting.
378
One table and one corner of our room was "school,
"
where, five days
a week, I went to school to Grandmother for a couple of hours in the morning.
(I returned to the sixth grade the next year well ahead of my schoolmates,
in arithmetic and spelling particularly.)
School lessons over, Grandmother and I vent out, whatever the weather
(which is usually good in Denver) . We did our little shoppings and market
ings. If it was sunny, there were open lots and an informal park area where
I ran and jumped rope and joined in games with other children. After lunch
I napped or anyway I lay down for an hour or so -- I usually read. I was
also in the paper doll frenzy, which occupied as much space as Grandmother
would allow, and as much time. We read aloud to each other. We went
"shopping"
-- mostly window, downtown. We went each week to the Orpheum
Saturday matinee 1
. We went to the City Park for more running and playing.
For band music. We went to the Tabor Theatre for a play. A concert. We
looked forward to the weekends with Austin. Maybe playing cards or board
games ("Hearts" was a favorite) if it was stormy. Maybe to Elitches Gardens
if it was fine.
I learned to embroider under Grandmother s direction. Certainly I
was never bored or lonely that year, and my memory of Grandmother is that
she was entertained, content. It probably was for her a pleasant change
from Cheyenne. Mother came "out" to Denver, as did my father: they regu
larly came to Denver several t Jones a year. George came down from Cheyenne,
as did Kaude and Lafayette and their son, my cousin William R. (We were
close enough in age to have fun together.) Also, we vent a few times to
my father s sister Ida and her family on a stock ranch on Cherry Creek
35 miles out of Denver, v/here there were three more cousins: (I was cur
rently in love with the eldest, Austin s age.) That was fun and we came
372
home from there loaded with wild cherry jelly, wild plum jam, dried sweet
corn and other delicacies from Aunt Ida s store.
Perhaps I have failed to mention Grandmother s capacity for and
enjoyment of jokes? She enjoyed them as she enjoyed "parlour games,
"
especially those involving language use. Austin and his friends brought
in fresh supplies of Jewish jokes. One of Austin s Jewish friends and
Grandmother rather vied with each other, she matching his ethnic jokes with
her own, which had to do with the various foibles, prejudices and affecta
tions within the Episcopalian fold. Grandmother overlapped Trollope in
more ways than the calendric, and her control of the Episcopalian church
service and "social" and "church- visiting" voice and vocabulary rivalled
Austin s friend s mastery of Yiddish-American.
I started to say, as I recall the year, it was a happy, unstrained --
in a quie^c way, a gay time for the two of us. Grandmother made no bones
of her preference for me: the only girl amongst the grandchildren, closer
to her tastes and temperament than were either of her daughters . Except
for me, she said simply she had had enough of children-raising. (Despite
which, she in fact spent many wearying months with Betsy during and fol
lowing each of Betsy s accouchements : she was a competent and unfussy
nurse and "mother s helper.")
It followed that I "saw" Grandmother differently than did her daugh
ters. That I was in fact fonder of her than were they. I knew her when
she was not under personal pressures, when her penchant for fun and humour
had its chance to come out freely. Also, having taken no responsibility
for Austin and Forest when they were babies and young boys, she and they
much enjoyed each other as they became adult. She was great fun to tease,
really loving the attention and the exchanges. I remember Austin s
38Q
amusement when Grandnother developed a "rose" cancer on a little toe. A
friend (surgeon) removed it at St. Anthony s, using a local anaesthetic.
Austin said, Oh sure, she could sit up and watch it being taken off -- the
little toe. As soon as the doctor got through fooling around with his
tools. She was furious to discover the toe was off before she was allowed
to sit up.
It was to Grandnother that the Sisters of St. Anthony, who loved
Austin dearly, confided that her grandson thought the holy water containers
at the entrance door of each room were handy cigarette ash containers put
there by a thoughtful furnisher. No, Grandmother should HOT tell him --
it might "make him feel sorry." They faithfully emptied then of their
ash ahead of the Mother Superior s inspection tours .
From my dim and infrequent memory of visiting E-7, I would say that
life there must have taken a comfortable and even course, with the old
Burdick friendships at its social center. The years passed. Uncle Jack
died. Then James died. George, the eldest son, a scant two years younger
than my mother Phebe, became with his father s death central to Grand
mother s life for the next many years. "Sickly" as a baby, petted and
coddled by Grandmother, George was the beneficiary of the petting and cod
dling my mother had rejected in favour of the attractions outside the
ranch house. And just as the child George was the one of the six to remain
longest v/ithin Grandmother s special ambiance, so would he be the adult son
who did not leave home or marry.
After another interval, Lafayette, the third son, took over E-7.
Lafayette and Maude, his wife --of whom more later expected Grandmother
to live on with them. It may have been, or it may not have been good for
381
George, but Grandmother s instinct was to live otherwise and otherwhere
than with her married children. Mother, too, asked and expected Grand-
nother to come to live with her and my father. She declined. Instead,
she and George moved to Cheyenne where they bought a pleasant house.
I remember it well, with Grandmother s particular treasures in it she
took only those treasures, such as the organ and her own desk, from S-7 --
and within sight and easy stroll of Cheyenne s little park. There the two
of them lived for a goodly number of years, George running a stage line,
passengers and the mail R.F.D. route, out of Cheyenne.
That thirty-five-mile drive appears in perspective bizarre enough
to deserve mention. The stage was a buckboard fitted with a second seat
for passengers beyond the one or possibly tv/o if one was a small child
as was I on the front seat beside the driver. It was a mail stage, and
mail and orders personally filled by Uncle George in Cheyenne from lists
given him by ranchers along his route, and other sacks and packages,
accounted for most of the load most days.
An early morning start was made from Cheyenne or from E-7 on the
return -- timed to bring the stage to the halfway point known as The Wind
mill in tine for lunch; and here there was a change of horses. The Windmill,
if my understanding of it is correct, was one of the way stations for
stock rather than for people to insure water for them in an often dry
land, and feed in a heavy or prolonged winter. In any case, I remember
this Windmill as having huge storage barns and a blacksmith shop and
horse barns; its facilities for the cowboys who were stationed there, a
bunk house attached to the windmill, and a kitchen large enough to accommo
date its huge wood range and a table to sit cowboys and stage passengers.
The "lunch,
"
no matter what the weather or day, consisted in my experience
382
of huge (well done) steaks, potatoes, dried boiled beans, root vegetables,
great chunks of homenade bread, molasses to put on beans and bread, apple
and/or peach pie, coffee, canned milk to go into the black brew. Or if
not steak, pot roast of beef and heavy gravy. Oh, of course, canned
tomatoes in which crusts of bread floated and sank. Everyone ate enor
mously. The food was the sort to stick to the ribs and keep then and the
rest of one s innards from rattling and banging too madly on the unspringed
seats of the stage. I remember a smell of chaps and saddle leather, cf
strong soap recently applied to tanned faces and hands. A feeling of inade
quacy before the heaped plate. Very large amiable men towering amiably
over me, paying much courteous attention to the embarrassed small niece
of the Boss.
I made the trip more comfortably in winter than in summer when
it was cold, I was snuggled down on blankets and hot bricks at my mother s
feet, even my head and face covered with a blanket the wind blowing off
open prairie is biting and unending as it was e;cplained to me, "She
comes smack off the snow fields in the Rockies and she s got nothin to
stop her shorta Kingdom Come .
"
I did not experience this, but George and Mother attested to the
fact that in the early days of the stage, the horses who were put into
harness for the Windmill/E-7 end of the run were young, strong, and in
process of "gentling" to harness and rein. Held against bars until all
was ready in the stage, the bars were lowered before them, upon which
they set off at a run. The prairie was open beyond the Windmill then --
no barbed wire to become entangled with -- and, with luck, prairie holes
(a horse s nemesis) would be avoided. It was a straight run "as the crow
flies" to the ranch and the next meal for horse as well as man. These
383
horses might not be wholly "broke" but they knew barley mash when they
tasted and felt it in their mouths. They made straight for it, arriving
Smack! against receiving bars beyond which would be almost instant reward
in the warn waiting buckets of nash.
[Cowboy yarns have a way of losing nothing in the telling. I can
say only that my sources were customarily responsible.]
When George retired, he and Grandmother came to California. Here
Grandmother at last accepted my mother s invitation to live with her.
My father was dead, and my mother, who never came to real terms with life
without him, had nonetheless taken an odd but characteristically extro
verted route by way of handling her inner despair. She bought a most
pleasant old house on a sunny street in Oakland and filled it and her
inner-empty life with relatives one a forty-eleventh cousin, she said
and with two, sometimes three or four old friends from Telluride days.
There were Grandmother and her brother, my great-uncle John; there were
the forty- eleventh cousins, one a Hattie, another an Edgar; there was
Dunny, a bachelor type mistakenly married to a dreadful woman who came to
rest in a sanitarium to which Mother drove Dunny for regular visits. It
was a cheerful household: someone usually playing cribbage or "hearts"
in the warm sitting room off the kitchen; the smell of good food drifting
from the kitchen.
Grandmother settled happily in, joined Mother s club, and took up
her old custom of churchgoing, an amenity with her as with many Episcopali
ans whose churchness is a matter of family custom and social outlet.
Uncle John, Grandmother s younger brother, joined this little circle
shortly after Grandmother, a circumstance which in the event was a happy
one for both of them.
38A
This in outline is the story. Uncle John had early discovered,
fallen in love with, and married a woman a good many years his senior
(shades of your granny .), a divorcee with six young children I I knew
Aunt Ella only in her last years, but still visible were the bright,
mischevcus dark eyes, the tall spare lithe figure; undimned was the
robustious and somewhat unbuttoned humour; the amiable drasticness. Like
my mother, Aunt Ella was a good shot, and like all womon over whom Uncle
John had any control, she slept, as did my mother, with a silver-handled
wicked little pistol under her pillow (these were gifts from Uncle John) .
The bullet embedded in the foot of the walnut bed, now Ted s, is evidence
of the Sunday morning when Uncle John wiggled his toes out from under the
bedding in demonstration of Ella s bad bed-making. She said she would
shoot off a toe if he did not withdraw his foot. After a second warning,
she shot the toes discreetly withdrawn just in tine. (Keith s version
of her getting his toe is fantasy.)
It was, despite my grandmother s disapproval, a good marriage.
Aunt Ella and Uncle John had no children. He brought up, educated and
cared for Ella s six, who repaid him with love and open fondness. Uncle
John prospered reasonably, witness the one-time silver pitchers and pots,
the gold watches, and the diamonds -- all of the diamonds in my family were
from Uncle John. Ella enjoyed Uncle John s pleasure in buying her expen
sive presents, to which she was otherwise indifferent. And she took pride
in his dandyism. He loved to dress and he dressed very well indeed. She
loved his playing and singing his guitar was pearl-handled like his
pistols, and his soft voice delightful to its accompaniment. She tolerated
his courtly manners up to a point. When he stood and held her chair for
her at dining table, the while she brought the food from the kitchen, she
2 j
385
might say, "Now SIT DOV.TT, Johnny no need to wait I m not going any
where I
"
When Aunt Ella died, Uncle John was inconsolable: his stepfamily
were concerned and tried to be helpful, but "Johnny" ran, as did others
before and after him, to the family Strong One -- to my mother, to Phebe.
There too was the sister when, over the years, he had seen at intervals,
but not intimately for a long time . There had never been a breach, it was
just that he had been elsewhere for the most part, and when they were
together, sister and wife had not got beyond decent inlawship. On the
other hand, Johnny had staked Homer and Hastings to their successful mine,
had lived with them, been closer to them than anyone Grandmother knew in
the years after they left the ranch, and had been with then at their
tragic deaths (see below).
Johnny and "Lizzie,
"
as he called her, curious about each other s
lives in the years since Lizzie s marriage, fell into a happy exchange of
intimate anecdote. Grandmother liked to be fussed over, she responded
graciously to having her chair pulled out, to gifts and attentions. Those
three years, I think it was, before Grandmother died, leaving him again
bereft, were jolly-happy ones for brother and sister.
[It is an emotion- loaded thing to become reacquainted with a beloved
brother after years of being apart. I know. Forest and I were in effect
estranged because he could not live with his wife of many years and see his
family -- she was psychotic, but only toward, the end committable. She
finally was permanently hospitalized and soon died, and when Forest
remarried his beloved Fern -- Forest and Fern I -- and we were again on
natural terms, intensified during the two years Forest survived Fern s
386
death, we experienced a precious-painful accommodation of our childhood
affection to adulthood and to an altogether different v.-orld. It was in
Forest s last year of life that he and I made a sentimental journey back
to Telluride his first since 1913, nine since 1918 -- there to see
through old eyes the unchanged beauty, the bizarre setting of our child
hood. To go where as children we had gone on horseback, now in an auto
mobile, over crazy roads into the remembered beauties of "our"
Rockies,
Forest hanging onto outside edges of car or some cliff edge, grinding his
camera, I driving to the outer perpendicular perimeters a thousand or
two feet down and up: to rediscover together that "our" world was in
fact as madly beautiful as we had remembered it to be . ]
When Grandmother came to die she was not long about it. Perhaps
she was lucky? I think it was her heart, but I am not sure. It occurs to
me as I write that all this was long enough ago that there was no elaborate
medical prolonging of life. Grandmother was in bed for the last few weeks
or months when I went to see her. Then she was gone.
27
387
Grandmother Johnston s youngest, a girl, was born to her in the
year l8?7. I believe the month was February but I am not sure now,
although she was with us for many years and we always celebrated her
birthday
1
.
(There were many birthdays in those years, I guess.) The
name Elizabeth Covel was given her by her parents in tardy recognition of
and partial conformity to the Dane family s girl-naminp custom.
Whenever Betsy was asked to give her birthplace she would reply,
"Oregon." Pressed for a more particular location, she would say, "on
the Johnston ranch in the middle of the Oregon desert"; she might add,
"near Steel Mountain, I think." Asked for the nearest city? -- town? --
she would shake her head. "There were none." Post Office address? Surely
there was THAT! "Yes. A military post, forty miles away, our nearest
neighbors." Which military post? Another shake of the head. She sup
posed the post had a name, but she did not remember hearing any other
designation than "The Post." How did they get their mail? They received
mail when someone from the ranch went to the post by wagon or on horseback,
or when someone rode out from the post to the ranch.
I am wondering as I record this whether the ambiguity of Betsy s
birthplace does not symbolize much in her attitude to life . She knew full
well who she was, where and whom she came from, as she knew with an abso
lute security her place on the sibling ladder: at the bottom, a fine safe
fun place to be when ahead of you were four loving, demonstratively affec
tionate brothers and a sister old enough and much inclined to take a mother
role with you. For Betsy and the two brothers closest to her in age,
Komer and Hastings, the Oregon years were secure, happy years. That they
meant grueling hard work and worry for the older children and the parents,
388
did not cloud the happiness of the lucky three. A happiness independent
of money, outside friends, clothes, possessions of any sort beyond the
simplest. They were never hungry or cold or unsheltered or unloved. Betsy
remained throughout her life indifferent to money, security, to her physi
cal surroundings so long as they were "clean and decent" her words
without need or v/ish for "things." In fact, any accumulation of "things"
filled her with a passion for "clearing out,
"
getting rid of. "Suppose
you MIGHT use this seven years from now. Would it be worth the trouble
of caring for it seven years?" (Betsy s question.) Before Betsy could
have begun to comprehend the fear, the uncertainty, the sometimes dangerous
aspects of the Oregon days, they were over, and the family home was the
E-7: to her, a continuance of the loving sufficiency of her babyhood.
Perhaps this is as good a place as any to give some picture of
Betsy s siblings, since they constituted her environment, certainly
throughout all her years to adulthood, a time to which she looked back
as the happy time in her life. (Betsy was not a looking-back person in
general, nor did she yearn for the "good old days." She simply knew she
fitted best within the arms of a large, boisterous, loving family.)
Closest to her in age were Hastings, not much more than a year
older than Betsy, and Homer, three years her senior. Until they left the
ranch, these three were a trio whose baby adventures, like their childhood
and adolescent experiences, were shared. I can remember times when they
were grown and came together in our home, they might well, the three of
them, engage in a scuffle-romp, like little children or puppies, on the
living room Navajo rugs, a strange performance to me, such goings-on not
being usual in the Kracaw household.
Homer and Hastings went East to engineering school Pennsylvania
where they met and became friends with their age-mate cousins amongst the
389
Trees and Kellums and Johnstons. Later, John Dane, Grandmother s brother
and their uncle, staked them to a good mine in Leadville, Colorado, where
they prospered for the next years. Then within a year of each other they
died violent deaths . Homer fell to his death in a deep shaft of the mine,
a loosened rung of a ladder catapulting him down some three hundred feet.
(Whether this was an accidentally or an intentionally loosened rung, Uncle
John was never sure. The times were rough, and feelings ran high between
the Miners Union and the mine owners.) Hastings was blown up on a train
platform along with sixteen others: the intended victim of this violence
happened not to be on the platform that day.
Lafayette, the next brother, was the only one of the four to marry,
except for George s late marriage (see below). He married a third or
fourth cousin, Maude. He followed his father as a stockman, albeit a far
more skilled and successful one, and in time took over E-7 from his sib
lings .
I have an early recollection of a visit to them. It was late
spring lambing time. An unseasonable and heavy blizzard fell. I remem
ber the night of that blizzard particularly because it was my second
experience of staying up all or most of the night (see below).
Lafayette and the ranch hands were all out in the blizzard rescu
ing lost ewes, helping with difficult deliveries, carrying mothers and
babies into the barn, carrying newborn lambkins to Maude: the orphans of
ewes dead from exposure and difficulties of labor, or the rejected off
spring of ewes who refused them once the smell of man was on them, or who
rejected them because they were the second twin. A storeroom off the kitchen
became the nursery. Maude kept up a hot fire in the kitchen range. Between
the warmth from fire and wrappings of heated blankets, and cows milk meals
from human nursing bottles, Maude, a proud wet nurse, brought all of her
390
charges through. Within the week they were frisking around and around the
foundation beginnings of a new barn, returning to the nursery for meals.
Have you ever held in your arms a newborn lamb? Looked into its
wide sky eyes? The open innocence, the following gaze makes to wonder, to
weep. A newborn baby-look is by contrast sophisticate.
Maude and Lafayette were the least ranch-looking couple. Unusually
handsome, they had a sense for dress; and with all the rough ranch work,
not even their hands gave evidence of it. Look at Clif s hands sometime:
they are like Lafayette s and like my brother Austin s. Clif is the
only one of my children to resemble the Johnston side of the family. He
looks much as did Austin and Lafayette.
Oh yes, Lafayette v/ore on the little finger of his right hand a ring
given him by Uncle John. (Lafayette s huge diamond looked O.K. on his hand,
I suppose because he wore it naturally. Such rings were not so odd then
in the West as they would be now.)
In the biography of Alfred I ve given a fair picture, I think, of
my mother, who was the oldest of the six, and I shall come back to this
elder sister in speaking of Betsy s later life. Suffice it to say here,
in explanation of George and his life, that Phebe Jane was a sturdy, tri
umphant baby. Grandmother told me that at age two Phebe spoke plainly,
using a vocabulary more than adequate to her needs and desires; that at
three her vocabulary was adequate to the needs and desires of the ordi
narily bright adult. Much petted and beloved by her father and uncle and
by the "hired hands,
"
most of them cowboys, Phebe early escaped any sem
blance of a nursery life; she was out with the "men" most of the time.
They taught her to ride, to drive, to harness, to saddle, to care for her
horse. She would later become a discerning cook, an efficient keeper of
her house, but she would not sew or embroider; she would take an office job
31
391
and hire a competent housekeeper and cook, whom she would assiduously over
see
George, two years younger than Fhebe, Uncle George to me and my
children, was the eldest of the sons and the most interesting to us, per
haps because we knew him so much longer and better than the others. The
shortest one of the boys, he was compact, lean, with lined and sun-baked
face and tight- curling red- sandy hair. One leg was a little shorter than
the other the legacy of some childhood illness. George dressed always
after the cowboy-dude manner: well polished pointed-toed high-heeled
cowboy boots, flamboyant ties and, preferably, shirts on the loud-plaid
side. On dress occasions the boots were worn inside the rather tight
black pants .
Clif and Ted probably remember from Uncle George s recounting of
them more than do I of their great-grandfather s and great-uncle Jack s
experiences crossing the plains in 18^9, and of other of their adventures,
such as the one in which Grandfather was saved from being mauled to death
by a grizzly [by Uncle Jack s forcing a burning branch into the animal s
mouth, thus freeing Grandfather to reach his gun. I may have this story
a bit wrong. Refer to Ted or Clif for correction.]
My own brothers went for a succession of summers to the E-7 for the
summer roundup, climaxing in Frontier Day in Cheyenne, where they of course
rode in the dusty procession of beautiful horses and riders who opened the
rodeo festivities. Throughout the actual roundup with its roping, brand
ing, fence-mending, camps and cowboy cooking, Austin and Forest were under
Uncle George s gentle but watchful surveillance. They participated in
392
everything, including roping and bronco-busting, up to the hilt their
hilt but no farther. During those dusty summers of riding and roping
and rounding they were never once sick. Nor did they suffer any reported
injuries .
When Grandmother went to live with my mother, George was on his
own, a free man you might say for the first time. He was past fifty years
old, a "confirmed" bachelor or was he? He bought a few acres of good
land in the upper San Joaquin Valley his "ranch,
"
he called it. Along
side the house, already there, there soon rose a new and shining black
smith and carpentry shop, a discreet red barn, and a chicken house.
Before many months there was added as well a v/ife, Amy. Aunt Amy,
a few years younger than George, "a divorcee 1
"
said Grandmother, looking
down her nose, having to contain not a little jealousy that another woman
was ministering and howl to George s happiness. Gentle, shy, loving,
her "Georgie" fairly blossomed under the balm of her love and frank approval
of him and ail he said or did.
The bachelor house, scratch in amenities till her coming, blossomed
like its owner. Amy was possessed of two greenest of thumbs: flowers,
produce, orchard responded to her care with bounty. Her chickens laid
large strong- shelled brown eggs -- the Boston in Grandmother could not
resist those proper Bostonian eggsl
The carpenter-blacksmith shop was first of all to care for the
precious mules (see below); then to make and repair furniture, especially
cupboards and such for Amy; then to give rein to George s considerable
creative skill with iron. (The fireside set here at Semper Virens House.)
There were ducks and a gaggle of geese; a milk goat shaggy and shiny and
3J
393
beautiful; some piglets; and there were George s mules his great pride.
He hired them out with himseli" as handler, of course -- for certain
(select) sorts of work. For the rest, he groomed and exercised, petted
and loved them. They followed him wherever he went out of doors, nipping
gently at his ears, at his pants leg, if he failed to keep up a conversa
tion with them or otherwise lagged in attention to them. Clif and Ted,
when we visited there, rolled and crawled safely under and between their
legs and sat on them, hanging to their tails as they slid off backwards.
The mules aJ.T. but invaded the house. Amy drew the line at having the
mules in her small, femininely-done house ruffly and clean and "tidy."
She did allow them to stretch their long necks over the opened upper half
of the Dutch kitchen door. There they could a-ii but reach the kitchen
table from which goodies such as carrots and apples and sugar sometimes
bread and cookies -- were fed them, a nuzzled shoulder reminding the seated
diner of a presence just behind him. Their snorts and snufflings were part
of the conversation at George s and Amy s table.
Mother took Grandmother for a day s visit, for an occasional over
night, as long as Grandmother lived. Amy was a gracious hostess; it was
a pleasure to be on that somewhat unreal "ranch" its products were real
enough and to participate at one remove in the serene happiness between
those two. I am sure the visits were a dreaded chore to Amy; I am sure
also that George never suspected this. It was his pleasure to exhibit to
his beloved mother and sister and the family gaggle his property, his
wife, his happiness. Amy carried it off beautifully. Perhaps I read in,
but it always appeared to me that Mother too was unaware of Amy s reluc
tance at family invasion of her little paradise, and that in fact she and
I were the two sufferers I in my identification with v/hat I read, I
believe correctly, as her strain; and her relief when the big old Hupmobile
394
Mother drove in those days finally pulled out of the driveway. (Carryinc
a precious load of fresh produce and flov/ers, always.)
As I recall, George and Any had ten or twelve years of this good
life. George died quietly as he had lived a quick heart thing.
And Any lived on, technically alone, but with nearby neighbors become
close friends I believe one a relative, for her own long last years.
Betsy has grown up the while I have been talking about her siblings!
She went from the ranch school to high school and beyond, a sort of "fin
ishing" school in Cheyenne. Then, faut de mieux, she returned to the E-7.
She could not delude herself that she was needed there. Grandmother
preferred her cowboy help to Betsy s they were quite opposite sorts of
housekeepers Lafayette would marry sooner or later probably sooner
her role would be third-wheelish any way you regarded it. I an not sure
how long Betsy stayed on the ranch following this return, probably a year
or the better part of it, during which some of the old pieces of her once-
life there were picked up, mostly to be discarded after a try at making
them fit her present mood and situation.
Some of the old crowd were still there and unmarried. An early
romance, rekindled, culminated in a rejection by Betsy, a "breaking up."
From this distance, my guess is it was a rejection of a role as much as a
rejection of the man. The role would willy-nilly have been a Betsy-
repetition of, even a travesty upon Grandmother s role: Betsy had been
offered a teaching position in a nearby country school; her suitor s ranch
was within easy distance of the E-7.
Betsy was at loose ends and unhappy. My parents were alerted by
Homer, I think it was, of Betsy s unhappiness she was often on the near
3;
395
side of a depression in her young days they invited her to come for the
summer, for a visit of indefinite length with then. She cane as soon as
she could "clear out" everything intimately hers at E-7. As she must have
meant, this was for her a final move: she returned to the ranch from that
time only as a visitor, soon as a guest of Maude and Lafayette.
Betsy cane to my father and mother as easily and spontaneously as
she might have to her ov.-n father and mother. "Phebe Ann,
"
as she called
her, had been like a mother to her; she could not have been more than six
or seven years old when my mother and father were married; she was a bare
ten years older than Austin, my older brother. She quite literally wor
shipped my father; he could, in her books, do no wrong. He stood for many
things she valued: he was handsome, a courteous gentleman. His Baltimore
beginnings had allowed to him more education and more experience of people
and life than the ranchers and cowboys Betsy had mostly known. He was a
quiet man, introverted, intellectual: Betsy was happy simply to bask
within his aura, (in later years, she would get a similar satisfaction
from association with Alfred.)
Also, to a sociable however shy young woman, Telluride, at the top
of its social form, was a far more fun place than any ranch.
A photograph of Betsy done by cur local "portrait photographer" in
Telluride gives us a strong, pure profile the Johnston nose; opalescent
enormous eyes. Grey-green. Wide set. Smooth brown hair. As an old lady
she remarked to me that she could not, as did her friends, boast of her
once long hair, her fair complexion, her faded beauty. "I see more
wrinkles, but my skin is no better and no worse than it always was; my
hair is no thinner, it hasn t had the grace even to turn colour; I weigh
about the same...." Hurtingly shy, wholly modest, she carried herself
proudly and well, although she did not have the advantage of my mother s
396
height and "presence."
She was a good companion and much fun to children,
and to adults with whom she was at ease.
Betsy needed sympathetic stimulus to bring her out, not being a
ready self-starter. My father hoped for her a mutual falling- in-love
between her and one or another of the particular friends of his and mother s
amongst the generous choice in Telluride at that time, especially as she
had had an early fondness for Lee Kellum (one of the Philadelphia Kellums,
an oil engineer, for whom she named her youngest son) . Another engineer
would put her in at least the same milieu.* Ky father and mother vere
disappointed when she married "Uncle Charlie" Buck, a good many years older
than she and not so "eligible" as some of her other suitors. My parents
may well have been wrong: it would have been a psychologically rare and
perceptive man to have made Betsy "happy." As it was, she was as "happy"
I begin to think as she would have been, barring always the rare, special
man. I say this because any marriage meant being "on her own,
"
and miss
ing as a lopped limb the family amongst whom she could sit, happy, smiling,
mouse- silent if she so wished.
I wonder: do I exceed my capacity as narrator? As intuitor? Be
cause Betsy was not at all the conventional clinger, the indecisive, the
immature. I try to picture what I feel to have been deep, deep emotional
need. (I am curious to question my children to see if what I say comes
through to them, to see if they agree or disagree.)
Uncle Charlie Buck was from Minneapolis, the wanderer, the rebel
without a cause from a family otherwise well-heeled, well educated, con
ventional. Like many another he had come to Colorado lured by gold. The
* It was the family view that except for an earlier "pre-ordained"
betrothal with a Philadelphia girl a childhood romance Lee Kellum
and Betsy might well have married. A mutual fondness between them persisted
throughout their lives.
3V
397
gold, in torn eluded him, but he was handy with tools and was a shrewd
enough businessman to become a contractor who ended by getting the con
tracts for building the mills and accompanying mining structures for many
of the principal mines throughout the San Juan area of southwest Colorado.
When I first saw the houses at Sea Ranch on the Mendocino Coast, I laughed
aloud, wishing I could show that development to Uncle Charlie. I am told
it is known as "mine- shaft" architecture. (John thinks I gave it that
name. I am sure it already was so named.) Anyway, Uncle Charlie surely
has as good a claim as originator of the style as anyone building in the
gold mining bonanza days of Colorado. (He built our house in Telluride,
by the way, but not in the mine- shaft style.)
A story or two come to mind:
Betsy was wearing a broad brass bracelet. Mother said to her, "liny
do you wear a brass bracelet?" For rheumatism." "I didn t know you had
rheumatism." "I haven t. But Charles is bothered with it, and he refuses
to wear the bracelet .
"
It was in San Francisco after the earthquake. Eggs were ten cents
apiece. Uncle Charlie, reaching for his boiled egg, said, "V7ell,
come here
you little ten cent piece." "You pay ten cents for a cigar" Betsy.
"Yes,
but the cigar is worth it!"
A sunny Sunday morning in our garden. Uncle Charlie sitting out,
enjoying the Sunday paper and his cigar. The present grass plot v/as then
a rose garden, arranged formally around a center fountain, with a circle
of Dutch tulips forming a second ring outside the rose bushes. The tulips
were in full, fresh bloom. Ursula, two and a half, was running about,
chattering to Uncle Charlie, bringing him "f owers." "Thank you, darling,
I would hear him say at intervals, absentmindedly, nursing his cigar, his
398
paper. The cigar finished, the paper put down, he found his lap filled
with ALL of the tulip blooms, picked (or removed) with a minimum of stem --
how much can one small person manage?
One great puzzle to my parents, and to anyone of us who thinks about
it, was that whereas Uncle Charlie always made good money, did not drink
or gamble or engage in women or other extravagances such as unwise invest
ments, they appeared never really to have money. They did not borrow, or
depend upon family, it was just that the household furnishings were of the
meagerest, clothes at a sort of respectable minimum, cars ditto when they
came to have cars; nor were there reserves in savings or investments. For
a number of years they gypsied from mining camp to mining camp as jobs
offered, always in temporary quarters an expensive way to live and
as it were from hand to mouth. I ve no better answer today than had Grand
mother and Mother or my father in the yesterdays . I am left with the sense
that Betsy liked it that way. That somehow money slipped through fingers
genuinely indifferent to it. Both hers and Uncle Charlie s. For so many
years there were no children; they traveled light and were up and away
from Telluride to Saw Pit, to Rico, to Silverton, to Durango at the drop
of a new job; off at last to San Francisco, where building contracting was
very good business indeed. There, after a while, after fifteen years of
childless marriage, a son was born to them. [Why the delayed relaxation?
One can only make conventional Freudian guesses.] And following in quick
succession were two more sons.
Betsy was at the limit of age for easy and safe births, especially
given the sort of medical care she went in for, to my mother s and grand
mother s despair: a "nice"
nearby general practitioner in the Mission, who
allowed Betsy to go well overtime: Albert, her first son, weighed fifteen
399
pounds at birth; Betsy was badly mauled and torn, only her basic splendid
health and the good fortune of no infection bringing her through. Albert
was a tremendously speeded-up, neurotic, fascinating and sweet child. My
father visited Betsy and Uncle Charlie during Albert s second winter: he
was much concerned for Albert, who, he guessed correctly, needed most
knowledgeable and imaginative care and training, and for Betsy, who was
close to a nervous breakdown from the sheer unending energy of the souped-
up baby and from her own very slow-returned health.
This haphazard medical care was incomprehensible to my father, to
my mother and to Grandmother: Grandmother had been fortunate in her birth-
ings, which had been home-and- scratch, you might say. Except she was
young and well built for giving birth, which Betsy was not: in Amador,
what is more, there was in attendance a doctor from Sonora and a nurse, as
well as knowledgeable and skillful care from her local Indian women friends .
Even in Oregon a doctor from the Post had managed his occasional visits to
coincide with Grandmother s deliveries, and again she was nursed by mothers
of the local Indians who were her friends; while, as for my mother, her
three children were delivered in the "lay ing- in"
hospital in Denver owned
and tightly run by a doctor who was also a close friend to my mother -- a
gynecologist and her husband, also an M.D., a surgeon, both graduates
of Johns Hopkins. My mother enjoyed with each of her babies two full weeks
of tender, knowing care following their arrival, with gradual return to
activity and responsibility for her young-un.
Albert died of meningitis which struck at the first onset of puberty.
It was diagnosed as viral and infectious. Mother, Betsy and I later specu
lated upon whether it went back to some congenital abnormality. His was
my first death: we were only some eight years apart and I much loved him.
I stood holding his hand through the rungs of his bed as he lay dying,
400
until the doctor, shocked to see this, pulled my hand away, reproving me.
Odd if he was all that infectious, why were we allowed in with him?
Betsy s youngest, Lee Kellum, died before reaching thirty, of an
arterial defect, thought by the doctors to be congenital. Only Charles,
the niddle son, lived out a full span. He died only this year, 1978.
Life in the sort of apartments Betsy and Uncle Charlie chose must
have been cramped with three small boys. They bought a "farm" near Peta-
luraa in northern California, where they raised chickens, as did most
Petalumans: white chickens, the offspring of incubators and confined liv
ing until time for early killing. Money is to be made in this not very
appealing industry. Uncle Charlie must have hated it -- he was not a
country man nor did he naturalize well to country living. He worked on
the place the chicken houses and incubators, etc., were of course built
and well built by him; but when and as he could, he continued to contract
for one sort or another of building job. There was a cow, and a pig, a
produce garden of sorts, besides the chickens. I ve the impression that
much of the daily repetitive routine of caring for the noisy, feckless
broods fell to Betsy, who claimed there was nothing to so clear the mind
as to scrub out a chicken house.
After my parents moved from Colorado to California in 19lU I
can rather pick up some of the pieces of Betsy s life as I saw or understood
them. I believe it was in 1916 that Albert died. When and how soon after
that they sold the Petaluma place perhaps as an aftermath of that death?
I do not know. But soon, I think. And bought a place less of a farm
than merely a piece of land -- near Brentwood in the upper San Joaquin Val
ley. Here there was a bit of an orchard and a vegetable garden, but I
think the income must have been from Uncle Charlie s carpentry work and
building contracts.
401
Then, ny father was dead, Mother was in Oakland --a scant hour or
so from Brentwood. I should say that there began at this time a process
of dissolution of a family in which there was no divorce or formal separa
tion, explosion -- even, God help us, definition of new status, roles or
directions. In this I am sure my mother played a part, however unconscious.
I should say the beginning may have been her decision to take Charles into
her own household, raise and educate him, which she did. Charles came to
her and stayed with her more than willingly, nor did he voluntarily ever
return home: Mother insisted that he spend his vacations at home during
the earlier years of his coming to her.
Then, what with Grandmother beginning to fail, and with her last
illness soon upon her, Betsy was spending more and more time with Phebe
Ann (as she called my mother), less and less with husband and son. In the
event, Betsy was living with Mother, going at frequent but never precise
intervals to pick up certain of the pieces for the two Lee Kellum and
Uncle Charlie -- left to "batch,
"
as they put it, at home. It was a strange
arrangement: Betsy had her strangenesses. Uncle Charlie may not have been
too discontent with it all -- I do not know. It was not good for Lee Kel
lum, whose talents, unlike those of his brother Charles, were not academic,
but rather person to person. He was a sensitive, feeling, lovable and
loving -- and very insecure young man.
402
The portrait I give you of my grandmother seems to fit comfortably
within its frame, however individual to me it probably is in some of its
parts.
Betsy is not so readily framed. How to contain her? Where, which,
what is, was, her center? She slips to one side even as I move my pencil,
thinking to "fix"
something of her reality. There is an old group pic
ture of a "Johnston" anniversary party. I search for Betsy, the youngest.
There she is; but, head hanging, she is half-concealed behind a protective
uncle. There is the half-smile, a smile to have held Leonardo. A way of
placing the hand against the cheek, of bending the elbow. But the shading,
the colouring? What were not her shadowed areas? And what in fact her
unshaded colouring?
I take refuge for the next pages in some recollections, moments,
hours, days with her which remain vivid to me.
Earliest memories have to do with Betsy and Uncle Charlie arriving
unexpectedly, unannounced -- not the usual way in our home. Arriving from
a nearby mining camp, the most recent contracting job having ccme to an
end; en route to another job in yet another mining camp, usually merely a
name to me. Recollections of Mother and Betsy going off by themselves
after dinner for long sister- talks. Animated with laughter. Then lowered
voices. These talks and confidences going on, to my regret, long after I
had been shed onto Aunty Norton, our housekeeper, or had had to go to bed.
It was 1906; I had but celebrated my ninth birthday, in San Fran
cisco, as it happened, Mother having brought me, Grandmother Johnston,
and Grandmother Kracaw to the Coast for a few weeks visit with Betsy and
Uncle Charlie. We were in their apartment on Valencia Street or was it
403
Divisadero? It was, in any case, San Francisco, April l8th, 5:13 a.m.
Came "The" Earthquake. I v/akened, being thrown from side to side of ray
bed, being lifted out of bed onto the heaving floor by my mother. I
believed we had been caught in a deep shaft of the Tomboy Mine during a
detonation of an enormous blast of dynamite, ^"hat I thought were flying
boulders and loosened dirt deep in the earth were in fact bricks fron a
falling chimney, falling bric-a-brac, a falling floor clock, framed pic
tures, china and utensils, and groceries from the shelves of an opened
cupboard door .
"Run I Run for your lives I" Uncle Charlie shouting as he guided
the grandmothers through the debris.
"Run where?
"
My mother answering him, guiding me through the
debris .
"Outside I Before the house comes down!"
We staggered, we could not run, to the front door. There, preced
ing us, was Betsy, standing like some female Horatio at the breach, six-
nionths-old Albert on one arm, the while she steadied us across the gaping
space now opening between the stoop and the high flight of steps to the
sidewalk. She followed, the last one to the sidewalk and into the street,
where we joined the other living and ambulatory occupants of the two
sides of our block of houses and apartments. Depersonalized, in Kafka-
like silence and impersonality, men in nightshirts, women in granny gowns,
staring in a feckless blankness as the one newly built apartment-building
in the block crashed as a single entity smack across the street and into
the shaken but standing houses opposite it .
[That early people-silence continued, as I recall, throughout the
day.]
Betsy s voice, matter of fact, familiar, broke into the universal
404
speechlessness, the unmovingness of people. "Charlie Buck . Where shall
we go for the day, maybe the night? The park?" She meant Golden Gate
Park.
Uncle Charlie shook his head. "LIo. There ll be a tidal wave. We
must run for high ground."
"Where?"
"Buena Vista, I guess." He referred to Buena Vista Hill, then a
cemetery from which the bodies had but just been removed to a new resting
place in Daly City.
[Uncle Charlie was mistaken, but his guess was a reasonable one,
and in fact Golden Gate Park opens onto the ocean.] He made as if to start
off for Buena Vista as he was. "We ve got to have clothes and the baby s
things and we d better get them while the house is still standing." Again,
Betsy s usual unemotional voice. [The house in fact continued to stand,
however uncertainly. The third day after the quake, it burned.]
The Betsy voice that galvanized into some sort of action those who
heard her. Singly but swiftly, Betsy and Uncle Charlie made the first
forays into the half-wrecked apartment for the most immediately necessary
articles and we were off, afoot, to Buena Vista Hill, the while the ground
heaved and growled beneath us.
During the next five days the action plans were of Betsy s initia
tion, Betsy the non-planner, the unorganized one, the do-it-as-it-comeser .
Many hours of those days are blanks in my memory, but bits of them float
to the surface upon occasion, the occasions having to do with Betsy, mainly
during the years, roughly the (extended) decade of the thirties, when she
was living with us in Semper Virens House.
Mother spent the daylight hours and on into the dusk of that first
day tramping the rabble-filled streets from telephone offices to telegraph
405
offices to post offices to city offices to army "field"
headquarters, in
an effort, doomed, to get v/ord out to my father to assure him we were
unhurt. Her did she loosen her grip on my hand that day. Where she went,
I went, mile upon stumbling mile, not a peaceful trek nor a safe one,
since after- temblors opened up new fissures in the street before one s
feet, sent cornices, yet holding, careening down, as like as not on some
one s, like as not your own head. [It was only on the sixth day after
the quake, when we were arrived from the City to relatives up the Sacra
mento River, that word of a sort went out to my father. And that was pos
sible only because the cousin with whom we were then staying was in "Com
munications" for the government and was able to send a coded message to
the Tomboy Mine in Telluride, something to this effect, as I recall,
"Kracaw safe." The military had taken over all communication systems
within the hour of the quake, as part of its martial law which was immedi
ately slapped on the still quivering city and its more quivering inhabi
tants. ]
Now while my mother and I were walking- climbing our tripped-up,
futile miles, Betsy had parked Albert with Grandmother Johnston, as the
more baby-easeful of the grandmothers, on Buena Vista Hill, and left with
two sizable empty market baskets, to return with full ones, to repeat
these trips throughout the day. She revisited her regular shopping-
marketing places where, for the most part, the owners filled her baskets
for free, since strangers were looting their shops. When she was -allowed
to, she paid. Her filled baskets contained bread, loaves and loaves of
it, durable goods such as beans, hard cheese, macaroni and noodles, flour
and coffee and cereals, sugar, a minimum of canned goods, a ham, a side
of bacon, enough fresh meat for two days of stew, which in the event fed
many besides ourselves.
406
Uncle Charlie meanwhile had erected a scaffolding of boards taken
from a fallen building, over which he draped the living-room carpet from
our apartment. He lugged mattresses up Buena Vista Hill, and together he
and Betsy dragged up a trunkful of the most necessary toilet goods, medi
cines, clothing and bedding. This they did by roping the trunk so as to
leave two rope handles by which they could pull it.
Our "pit"
house was, like the some two thousand others on the hill,
rectangularly intact, since no rain had fallen following the emptying of
the graves. One end became the kitchen, with a fireplace made of local
stones over which, on metal rods scrounged from a wrecked building, sat
the large black coffeepot, whose like was in my childhood regular equip
ment for picnicking, and the iron soup pot and griddle from Grandmother s
wedding utensils (which you know as part of my kitchen utensils) .
During our five days of occupancy of our pit house, Betsy adapted
the cooking technique she had seen practiced, but never until then done,
over "round-up" campfires. She made "reflector" biscuits. She made pan
cakes an error of sorts: the smell of them cooking drew hungry neigh
bors from all over the hill. She kept a soup pot going, tended by the
grandmothers during her hours-long absences from the pit. In later years
Betsy never made soup as she had not before the quake.
Now it may have crossed your mind in reading this that Betsy was
doing nothing more than any sudden refugee would do under the given rough
situation. Not so. Ky executive and practical mother was engaged on a
hopeless pursuit which, had Betsy done likewise, would have left her and
her family wholly unprovided for. Our neighbors in the apartment (and
again on the hill), a man and wife and two sturdy teen-age girls, saved
nothing and took nothing from their apartment except their new and, for
If
407
its time, quite splendid phonograph and the accompanying records. They
played it constantly those days, the while Uncle Charlie made them a shel
ter of sorts, and Betsy fed them. Their case was not rare, but usual.
Like the unnatural silence, the absence of conversation, chatter, laughter,
even of much crying during those days, it was response to shock from which
a whole city was suffering. More people are immobilized by shock, unable
to think or act rationally, than are, like Betsy, roused, mobilized by
it, and at full stretch. Uncle Charlie responded to Betsy s initiative.
Left to himself he would have expended precious time and energy trying to
reach ever higher ground to avoid the feared tidal wave.
The first night was also my first night to stay up and awake until
dawn. Beyond the mesmerizing brilliance and frightening sibilant snake
hiss of the fire, there was the constant need to stamp out at once burning
brands blown by fierce fire winds to land amongst us or other camps of
refugees, lest we become a part of the holocaust. I finally went to sleep
in my mother s lap, to waken stiff and sore and quite unable to open my
heat-reddened and swollen eyes. Mother was distraught. She must, this
day, be part of the Uncle Charlie/Betsy team to carry water, to fire-
watch and do whatever else was needed. (Water mains and hydrants were
broken. Pipes disconnected. There was no water on the hill. V/hatever
we used for cooking, for drinking, for washing, must be lugged in pails
from the foot of the hill. Even wood for the fire had to be carried up
hill.)
Mother stuck at leaving me behind: her determination was not to
be separated from me for one moment so long as we were trapped in the
shaking and burning city. I believe I remeraber Betsy s words to my mother
so exactly because they were the first and I now think the only ones
408
I ever heard her say in protest or criticism of Mother or her actions.
"Phebe-Ann, you are killing that child. You roust leave her here on the
hill the safest place with Grandmother Kracaw. You must leave her .
"
I remember them too because I now know I would have done as my mother did
clung however irrationally and mistakenly to my children lest they be torn
from my arms and lost in nature s violence.
I slept through the second day on Buena Vista, except for a bowl of
soup, swallowed in half-sleep, and through its night of fire fighting and
guarding. To be awake acain on the third night, to hear again the unnatural
people- silence amidst ear-crunching blasts of dynamite, set off to bring
down such buildings as yet stood between the wall of fire and Van Ness
Avenue San Francisco s widest street in an effort to control the
spread of the fire by "back-firing,
"
something I am told never works, but
keeps its appeal of desperation as violent offensive against a blaze out
of human control. At 3 a.m., despite the best efforts of firemen and the
Presidio army, the blaze literally jumped Van Ness in a single deadly-
bizarre and stunning leap, and so doomed most of the rest of the city to
destruction by fire.
Meanwhile, what besides cooking and fetching was Betsy doing? She
was helping the borning of a baby in a nearby pit. The young parents
this would be a first child were terrified, the thought of birth in a
grave adding imagined to unimagined fear. Betsy stayed with them as much
as she could as the mother s time drew near, Grandmother Johnston helping
and directing Betsy in the classic matters of the large tub of boiling
water, clean cloths and bandages. Betsy it was who searched out a doctor
on the hill in time for the actual delivery, which occurred simultaneously
409
with the fire s crossing of Van Hess, the snail birth-cry on Bucna Vista
Hill adding its tiny protest to the city s crackle and roar. Betsy made
up a scratch layette from baby Albert s supplies. Parents and baby were
doing well when we left the hill.
Betsy came walking uphill the day after the birth with a young man
carrying yet another baby, this one, Grandmother opined, about two months
old. Betsy had been standing at the bottom of the hill, "catching her
breath" before the climb uphill with a load, when the young man, whose
name she never learned, spoke to her. Earlier he had wandered away from
his lodgings, wrecked by the quake, into a street whose name he did not
think to note, nor the number of the house before which a distrait young
mother stopped him. Would he hold her baby while she went back into her
(already half-wrecked) home? She must get some things for the baby. She
must well, never mind. The father lay inside, dead, under a fallen
wall. Returning toward the front door, a second and a sharp "after-quake"
brought the standing house-front down upon her, killing her. Not daring
to venture inside the demolished house to search out any possible identifi
cation, the young man wandered on, directionlessly. By the time he spoke
to Betsy the baby was hungry and in need of changing. Albert s bottles
and his formula took care of the hunger, and a further raid on Albert s
clothing and diapers would, Betsy felt, take care of baby until his care
taker could connect, first with the Red Cross, and then with his parents,
who lived in Cleveland.
"And then?" Betsy asked. It was his thought that he wished to
keep the baby, to raise him as his own son, since "Fate seems to mean it
that way.
"
410
There were automobiles in the city, of course, but fire trucks,
army trucks and most business vehicles were still horse-drawn, and the
police were on foot or horseback. We saw horses lie down in their traces
and die from exhaustion: San Francisco hills are murderously steep. Betsy
put down a double load of water she had just carried up Buena Vista along
side a fireman resting his horses. When she offered him a drink of water,
he shook his head. "Ify poor horses need it more, lady." His horses got
their drink.
There was the vacant- eyed man in high silk hat, long underwear and
cutaway coat, carrying a broomstick on which were strung two cut glass
lamp chimneys, who consented to come along with Betsy. He did not want
to talk, but he drank the cup of hot coffee she gave him and ate the sar
dine sandwich. Before he left, he allowed her to pin a sign on his under
shirt: "Red Cross station, please." [One of Betsy s canned goods pur
chases was many tins of cheap, large sardines the sort I thought until
then I could not bear to eat. They proved to be a most satisfying and
nourishing quick pick- food for babies and grownups. Herbert Hoover, in
Belgium during the First World War, would by accident make this same dis
covery 1 ]
Came the fourth day, with the word (Red Cross) that river boats were
in operation for civilians, ready to be boarded at the Ferry Building
or would be, beginning the next day.
Betsy and Mother, on a joint trip down the hill, made the acquaint
ance by way of watering his horse of a man who contracted to take
us all with a minimum of belongings to the Ferry Building. We left the
hill early on the morning of the fifth day, arriving at the foot of Market
51
411
Street and our destination only toward five o clock that afternoon. Only
the grandmothers and the baby rode all of the way, the rest of us walking
as much as we could, spelling each other with rests in the wagon, to save
the horse who drew us. The distance is not great in miles, but the
uncleared streets were a succession of hazards of rubble, trash, twisted
pipes, and the irrecoverable lares and penates of fire- and earthquake-
wrecked households. Dirty, hungry, skin weather- and fire-dried, and hair
unkempt, we were welcomed aboard one of the trig, immaculate white river
boats by the unearthly immaculate and cool and gracious Captain and ships
officers, shown to two fairy-tale cabins. Bathed, and somehow combed out
a bit, we sat with the Captain to an ambrosial meal. I remember it today,
as I remember its like in Peru in 1926 at the American Observation Station
high in the Andes, this latter meal coming at the end of a stomach bout
with Peruvian highly spiced and greasy foods.
Of what did these remarkable meals consist? The two meals were
identical and were prime examples of American cooking at its native best:
beef pot roast, luscious gravy. Fluffy, creamy mashed potatoes. Fresh
green peas. Freshly baked, still hot, homemade bread, and of course
apple pie. [I never make pot roast, not being in the ordinary course that
fond of it. Also, it never comes out all that distinguished for me.]
Helum and I like to fantasy that her father was the mate on our
river boat that night. He well might have been, since he was working on
the river boats in those years, including the days immediately following
the earthquake. At any rate, there we were, before dark, steaming cleanly
up bay, into the straits, and into the lower Sacramento River.
The morning broke bright, the sun reflecting off a quiet-running
river, the quiet interrupted by our small ship s smart triple toot
412
announcing a landing. Ahead, a spidery pier thrust out from the bank, its
ensign reading "Rosebud Farm." We hove to, to sudden shouted orders, to
whizz of a mail sack thrown from ship to shore, to thud of packages land
ing in baskets held out to receive them in the hands of Chinese boys.
Above these sounds were voices, clear, half-laughing, half-crying, and
above them a squeal, "Missy Lizzie.1
Missy Lizzie 1 Micsy Lizzie 1"
Then,
somehow, we too were on the crowded pier, in the arms of what was to me a
flurry of names and perfumes, amidst which a delighted Chinese, his hands
on Grandmother s shoulders, jumped up and down, up and down, the pier
jumping with him, his cue repeating his leaps high over his head. "Missy
Lizzie I"
Sorted out, Rosebud Farm was where the cousin who came West with
Grandfather in ^9 remember? had settled. On the pier to greet us
were this cousin s elder daughter Bella Johnston, the younger daughter
Hatie, Matie s husband Frank Edinger (he who sent the telegram to my
father), and their son William, three years my senior. And Tin. Tim,
with whom Grandmother was an especial favorite, was the Rosebud Cook and
Tyrant-within-doors . (No wonder Bella and Matie were so serene, gracious,
so unencumbered, was my thought before many days had passed. I of
course did not apply these words or stop to analyze but I felt it.)
A brief sketch of the life on Rosebud Farm has some family-history
interest, these Rosebudders being the sole California transplant on Grand
father s side from the Philadelphia rootstock. Grandmother, Betsy, and,
during my college years, I to a lesser extent, participated in this life.
Betsy went there with her babies, where affectionate and willing hands
relieved her of their care for a blessed occasional week or two. Grand
mother spent some weeks or months there most years, so long as Bella lived
and Rosebud remained "itself,
"
she and Bella having become close friends
in their later years.
413
Rosebud has a broader, momentary historical interest You ve heard
something of the romanticised Spanish or Mexican-Spanish period, when Cali
fornia was Spanish and then Mexican-owned, when the open pasture land became
stock ranches, when fortunes were made in cattle and in hides, and when an
elaborate hacienda life was enjoyed by the fortunate few, a life as caste-
ridden, as luxurious and as socially barbaric as its continuing models in
Mexico and in South America even unto today. Alongside, and as a later,
domesticated, gentler rural way of life there came into being the Rosebud
Way neither hacienda nor southern plantation, but in the strict sense
an indigenous phenomenon born of the presence in California of numbers of
Chinese who, like the forty-niners, came, or were imported, first to "work
the mines,
"
and then to build the railroads. Like the cousin from Phila
delphia, many of them too found, if not their fortunes, their living and
security in farming, either as independent truck farmers and orchard! sts
selling to San Francisco and the smaller communities as they came into
being, or as the work force of a large and crop-varietal rural establish
ment. Rosebud is a perfect example of this Chinese-American forerunner
of the commercial cum middle-man business that "farming" has become in
California. Rosebud was as large as many a California stock ranch, but
its acres were the annual flood-replenished, black, fantastically produc
tive soil of the river delta. (Rosebud, the house, like other delta
houses, was protected by a high dyke, itself subject to inundation in the
event of especially high spring flooding of the river.) For the duration
of their ascendancy, the cooperative talents of Chinese and Whites were
rewarding enough that employer and employed could afford to learn as they
planted, thus coming to control a way of farming practiced nowhere else
in the world: if not "wholesale,
"
it was large-scale, yet predominantly
by hand, the simplest of machinery and hand tools all that was needed to
414
supplement the ancient Chinese hand-to-basket produce agriculture. Much
of the lauded-cursed gigantisra of California produce seems to have been
developed in the delta not by intent, but because other crops, as did
asparagus, for example, simply responded to the congenial environment
with great, succulent stalks, delicate and full-bodied despite their size.
The Rosebud Way had spent itself before the passion for produce that looks
good, that packs well (no matter how tasteless) had been developed.
The Rosebud and other delta products, those not consumed at home,
went first to Sacramento, then to San Francisco, traveling by cool river
boat, packed in naturally ventilated Chinese baskets, between protecting
wild grape or other broad leaves, to arrive quite directly at their desti
nations: retailers, wholesalers or, like as not, particular restaurants
and clubs which would take a given amount, sometimes the whole of a par
ticular crop, year after year as long as it was in season. "Johnston
strawberries this week."
I do seem to get sidetracked into these interesting cul-de-sacs
where my errant memory entices me but being here now at Rosebud Farm,
I ll take a try at a small word picture of it.
The house: three stories high, gleaming white-painted, discreetly
curlicued, all of wood, formal, half-hidden within greenery of tropic
vividness: climbing roses and other vines; trees; and a camellia "bush"
which bloomed heavily and which reached to the roof of the house. (Year
after year at the Sacramento State Fair, Matie took first prize both on
the unsupported height of this "tree" and on the number, size and quality
of its white blossoms.)
The house sat centered in a two-acre plot of rose garden. All
the gardens were lovely, but the rose garden was the farm s and Matie "s
55
415
particular treasure. Two gardeners were assigned to first call from
Matie, who spent parts of most days amongst her roses. April is the
height of the rose season in California: all the living and sleeping
rooms contained generous bowls of fresh roses when we were there, and
Matie s roses were of the fragrant sort: the pervasive smell of the
house was of roses, one flower whose perfume and appearance remain "in
beauty" well past its early prime. It was her boast that roses were picked
in her garden 365 days out of 365. To gild the rose, as it were, Bella
would lift the lid of the antique China (and Chinese) rose jar which sat
on the back living room mantel, to add its dried spicy fragrance to the
competing fresh ones.
The Chinese who composed the farm work force cook and assistants;
foreman, skilled and semi-skilled farm hands; the "carriage" hands
Rosebud with its heavy sandy dyke roadways was slow to resign buggies
for automobiles. Bella went regularly, accompanied to be sure by one of
the "drivers,
"
to inspect the farm field by field, traveling comfortably
in an old buggy, to which was hitched a trusty old farm horse who knew
the route as well as did Bella. Together in the fields, Bella and Frank
Edinger, her brother-in-law, consulted long and earnestly on the, to them,
fascinating details of the complex if peaceful running of Rosebud, the
while Matie, off in sunbonnet (she was vain of her English-fair skin),
and with great thorn-repelling gloves drawn over hands and arms, was deep
amongst her roses. So went an ordinary morning for them.
The dining room service and style were fairly formal; the ample
food, almost wholly home-grown, was delicious in a simple, lots-of-yummy
chicken gravy, home-made ice cream, home-made buttery, cake, bread sort
of way.
The Chinese, some with wives who also worked as waitresses or
56
416
housemaids or sempstresses indoors, some with families in China, lived
for the most part in a compound which probably bore a considerable resem
blance to its Chinese originals. Tim preferred his own private rooms in
the above-ground basement of the main house, the compound being the sphere
of influence rather of the foreman. (Tim kept wife and family in China,
to which country he returned every five years, and finally, to finish out
his ending years.)
The house was California-Spanish-Victorian in its decor and furnish
ings, rather simpler and more austere than later more self-conscious
neo-versions of these styles. Operating and operated fireplaces
were in ail living, sitting and bed rooms.
I was taken particularly with the upstairs sitting room the
first I had known where I regularly took tea with Bella upon Bella s
return from her field s inspection at the end of the morning. Now, Semper
Virens House has its upstairs sitting room, like Rosebud s in having its
fireplace, its air of intimate welcome.
In 1918 Betsy and I spent a week together at the end of my summer
vacation between my junior and senior years at U.C. This week laid the
base, as it were, for our later and adult relation.
My father had died earlier that year and my mother was moving from
the Sacramento Valley town to which she and my father had come from Colo
rado, but which had never become either "home" or a place of fondness or
of intimacy to her or to me. Anyway, she was tired, harried with many
new decisions and responsibilities, and unaccepting of the tragic implica
tions in my father s suicide. (He feared, among other physical ills, immi
nent blindness. In the light of today s understanding of tensions, and the
417
undoubted bad medical advice my father received, he need not have gone
blind. But this was before Aldous Huxley and the whole discipline of
understanding of the psyche had begun to enlighten the psychological dark
of our western world.)
In any case, Mother shrank even more painfully from moving, pack
ing, and their accompanying decisions than she had when we moved from
Telluride; and Betsy and I Betsy was already much with Mother offered
to do the packing and "make" the move. Mother accepted with relief,
giving us carte blanche to do precisely as we decided in all matters relat
ing to household effects and their disposition.
Beginning to measure our task, Betsy and I discovered that Mother s
solution in Colorado had been simple and direct, if not ultimately useful:
leaving to one side choice and its hazards, she had engaged a freight
car an entire one and brought everything she and my father owned
in the way of movable goods accumulated during a thirty- some-year marriage,
the detritus of three children s accumulations not an inconsiderable part
of that accumulation. By "everything" I mean everything. We found the
chamber pots and their lids which went back behind my and Telluride days,
probably to a brief stay of my parents in Saw Pit, a primitive little min
ing camp, obviously without modern "facilities." As I recall the contents
of basement, garage and shed most boxes had never even been unpacked in
the interval I see what a treasure-garage sale they would have made.
Betsy and I no doubt consigned to fire we kept a bonfire of trash going
for days and to give-aways and trash dump many objects of interest and
perhaps even of value today
I believe it was the chamber pots which gave us our sense of lan,
of courage-in-drasticness which caused us to make a game of what might
have been a depressing sort of occupation. What might not the next box
418
bring forth, to heighten our fire, to be tossed gaily out for the dump
in rarer cases, to pack?
The objects and furnishings Mother had in her house (which Forest
took care of upon her death) attested to Betsy and ray having faithfully
and well packed all books, china my God, what china glass, linen,
books and music rolls, to mention some of our individual-object repacking.
(Remember, there vas a 1,000-pound VIeber piano hand and player and
a not-light organ, also hand and player, and a great many music rolls for
each Wagner, Mendelssohn, the names unrolled as we fitted the little
roll containers into strong wooden boxes for reshipment . What would I not
now give to know what in fact became of the player-organ? Not to have in
the house, God knows but I think the Oakland Museum would have loved
it ~ or would now love it. There is the rub. In the thirties, with the
depression not yet beginning to dissolve before war-munition orders for
Britain, one did not think in today s terms. Like the fate of an author
who has enjoyed great popularity and who suffers a longer or a shorter
eclipse, to return at a future date for another round of another sort of
appreciation, Forest no doubt tackled his job as Betsy and I had entered
upon our earlier one: with disposition looming larger than preservation.)
Betsy and I "camped out" in the dismantled and to-be- sold house.
I would realize in the years to come that this was in fact Betsy s happi
est form of living hand to mouth. Right or wrong in our decisions of
Keep or Kindle, we found ourselves in agreement, I no doubt carried on the
wings of her "emergency" euphoria. We cried a lot that week a very
great lot for me, because I couldn t cry with my mother -- she was already
too devastated. And we laughed a lot. We did a clean job and went our
ways, the foundation firm for the later relation that the years and Betsy s
karma would bring us.
* * *
59
419
Now I wonder, trying to bring Betsy before you with something of
the complexity she deserves, whether her readier choice to leave Albert
with Grandmother Johnston there on Buena Vista Hill, i.e., her clear view
of the exigencies of emergency, forecast her later choices: to allow
Charles to go to my mother from the time of his adolescence and so be
lost to her and to Uncle Charles, which in fact he was: and, yet later,
to leave her youngest, Lee Kellum, at the midway point in a difficult
adolescence, to stay behind and alone with Uncle Charlie? I ask. I do
not know the answer.
We slid rather casually, all of us, into the routine of Betsy s
living with us for the next several years following Alfred s and my mar
riage and my return, ahead of Alfred, from Peru. After some days with
Mother, Clif and Ted (who had been with her while I was in Peru), I came
to Semper Virens House, and Betsy came along within a few days, as I
remember, to visit for a bit. She was spending most of her time with
Mother. Mother, without giving me particulars, told me she thought it
important for her mental health that Betsy be away from "Brentwood,
"
i.e.,
Uncle Charlie and "home."
Betsy and I enjoyed settling my furnishings and whatnots, and
Alfred s, into the "new"
house; it was decided between us that she would
stay on through the holidays, which meant through Alfred s return and,
as it proved to be, Karl s birth. I offered, and she accepted, the salary
I would otherwise have paid the nursemaid we had engaged during my
absence in Peru.
After Christmas, and without much "ado" or deep thoughts about it,
it was agreed between us, Betsy, Alfred and me, that Betsy should stay on
60
420
through the spring. A spring which in the event stretched itself into
years, punctuated with interruptions. The single "business" understand
ing between Betsy and us had to do with a salary, good for those days,
and our responsibility for medical care and such while Betsy was with us.
Betsy found herself for the first time in her life "independent."
Independent of Uncle Charlie. Of Mother. Free to come. To go. To buy
the clothes she liked. New clothes. Hers. To exercise her own good
taste. And it vn.s good. To have the sure privacy of her own room. The
sure sociability of a family and family life, not of her own responsibility,
but of her intimate sharing. Betsy clung to this life pattern -- at last
made real until her last illness, taking another and lighter position
with friends up the hill when the war came.
We early learned her pattern: those (blessed) days which completed
themselves without disaster, major or minor, without emergency or special
occasion to break the day-to-day design of living, which called forth no
extraordinary effort or talents or endurances, were days of only so-so
interest to Betsy. She admitted routine bored her. If it was too long
without interruption, Betsy would create a private diversion: excavating
out the very deep-rooted lilac tree (for a fact, it did not bloom boun
teously), or some drastic pruning, (it was of much and deep distress to
Hilde Landauer, herself then newly uprooted and pruned for living in
Berkeley, California, instead of in her native Berlin, Germany, that
Betsy, on whom she counted for a new stability only less than on me,
should display this, to her, "destructive" obsession. Hilde was not
entirely mistaken. Deep within Betsy were volcanic urges, capacities,
needs, which as I now see it never did have their full expression
61
421
whether "destructive," to another s point of view, or not, avidly neces
sary to Betsy s full life-realization.)
She might do a monstrous cleaning of the basement, during which
articles were likely to disappear for which Alfred would puzzledly
search. This was Betsy s equivalent of her earlier Augean stable counter
part a fierce cleaning of a dirty chicken house - "the best tonic I
know.
"
Or the routine-break might take a most peaceful and sunny course:
a whole day in one or another of the art galleries in San Francisco, with
or without some of the children, depending upon her need and our plans.
If children, it might well be to the ocean, to Chinatown, to visit some
more or less remote relative or friend. A lesser break would bs the
unexpected baking of a pie or a cake. Betsy enjoyed and was good at these
occasional forays into a complex cooking feat, whereas again, the day-
to-day cooking absolutely bored her, nor was she very good at it. Like
Tonki, she was a content and competent cleaner-upper of my or another s
cooking mess something I have never understood. (l dislike so much even
my own cooking disorder that I clean it up as I go, not being able to face
up to the unregenerate whole. I note with interest that Ted is like me
in this cooking habit.)
A birthday party, an unexpected social occasion of whatever sort,
an illness, any break in the usual, Betsy was rather like our Suly when
a moth or butterfly flutters before her half-closed eyes: instant at-
the-ready, efficient, resourceful, quietly assertive, with total commit
ment to the challenge of whatever was the threatening butterfly or
tiger confronting her.
It is my conclusion that personality adjustments among a house
hold "crew,
"
however big or little, from the base mother/father team,
62
422
through a single "mother s helper" on up the line of cook, upstairs and
gardener, and on to the old Oriental compound pattern, are the most subtly
complex and difficult of all cooperative arrangements. They work or
they do not. Nor can you predict or rather, as Ted would correct me,
nor can I predict which will be the winner, which the dud. The one
I am trying to describe worked. And I do not believe a fair-minded
outsider would have so predicted, given Alfred s wholly different home-
organization experience and our various and bizarrely differing tempera
ments. Whatever the unlikenesses, we, all of us, were deeply committed to
the job, to its "working,
"
to its goals. Committed. And liking what we
were doing not its agonies and worries and difficulties, of course
who likes those? But what they were all about. And we shared with each
other and with the children, bless their hearts, much joy in the day to
day living, even the rough ones. WE HAD FUN. There was never a time,
however grim, i;hen the unwinding of a day ended in other than laughter,
or, if we were not up to laughter, a healing winding-down over a bourbon,
a pipe, a cigarette (we were all addicted in those days) . Hone of us was
bored, ever, whatever the day, the night. Beyond what I believe to be
the crux our total and willing commitment our very unlikenesses per
haps saved us from shipwreck.
I mean whichever one of us was "on
duty,
"
Betsy or I, took
responsibility. Then, when Betsy was "off,"
she was physically away.
Free to go to Mother s, sometimes for weeks at a time. Free vhen she
needed to return home to Brentwood for whatever days or weeks were
required, as she saw it. In turn, I was freed to go to Mexico with Alfred
over Christinas holidays the year he was convalescing from a gall bladder
operation; to spend the spring months of his semester of teaching at
Columbia in New York City with him; to go for several summers for a fort
night of hiking in the High Sierras with Jean.
0.5
423
Betsy and I began where we had left off in our packing spree in
1918. We went on from there. Our friendship was just that it was not
a relation of aunt and niece. We enjoyed and we supplemented each other.
I liked to cook, Betsy to clean. I liked to introvert within my own
stockade; Betsy to prowl outside. And so it went on and on.
As I see in sight the end of this report to you, I find myself
anxious to be on to a subject presently much occupying me: its thesis,
"Let go." And I am reminded that it was part of our good understanding
with Betsy that when the time came for her to leave us, for our sakes and
hers, and in response to the world s as well as our own changed faces,
the separating was as natural, as unstudied, as had been the coming.
The staying. It is intrinsic to the character I have tried to delineate
for you that Betsy WOULD slip easily in. Easily out.
And when she was out, there were the good times when she would
come briefly back in. As when she joined Alfred, Ursula and me at Kisha-
mish, refugees for a few summer weeks from sitting out the war and the
ugly realities of the ten o clock news. (A symbol to me of those years.
We could not go to bed without hearing, appraising as well as we could,
the truth, the untruths in the, for so long, bad news. Clif, then Ted,
then Karl all were "in." The mere announcement of the ten o clock
news on radio or TV has been throughout all the years since a symbol of
horror.) Kishamish was the only place we knew that remained unchanged by
war. Its serenity, its framed peace, was too primitive, too primal to be
changed. We drew strength from it the while we hoarded our precious gas
for our one extravagance: a twilight hour of driving. The car was the
original of the three Georges. Betsy and Ursula, wrapped in ponchos ill
6k
424
the back seat, cold for all the heat that was a breezy convertible
even in the front seat. I would drive, Alfred being on a strict regime
for his heart; he chose the particular back road for the evening s
exploration. We went at snail s pace, using very little gas. Nor did we
go far. It was on those drives we really learned the nearer valley and
hills in an intimate, fence-post by fence-post fashion. We came home only
when it was too dark to make out those fence posts. And if it was a good
night, which it mostly was, we d lie, the four of us, out on the dry grass,
and pick out the stars, singly and in cluster; and await the late-summer,
late-night rain of falling stars.
I would like to end my recollections of Betsy with some description
of a single experience. Alfred and I were in New York City for five con
tinuous years in the early fifties. In the autumn of one of those years,
we sent Betsy a railroad ticket to come to us. The first morning of her
visit, she and I left the apartment early (on Riverside Drive, at Il6th
Street) . I showed her in brief the upriver and downriver possibilities
of the Riverside Drive and Park area. Then we went to the Seventh Avenue
subway on Broadway, one block uphill. We took the subway to Times Square,
where we got out and walked.
Betsy, I was to discover that morning, was a geborne urbanite.
She grasped positively hungrily at the techniques of getting about the
city on foot, by subway, and by bus. During our long walk uptown, she
memorized the pattern, the directions, the placings of buildings and areas
to which she wished to return. At the park we took the bus up Fifth
Avenue, Betsy getting off at the Metropolitan Museum stop, while I went
on home, secure that in her own good time Betsy would find her own way
there. She did. But only after she had been pushed out of the museum at
65
425
closing tine. To return, alone, to the Metropolitan; one by one, to all
of New York s art museums and galleries. I had known that she got more
from the then very limited picture-gallery possibilities in San Francisco
than did most people, but I had had no concept of the depth of her hunger
for, her passionate satisfaction in, her instinctive understanding of
paintings. She vas the lifetime thirsty traveler who, come upon his
elixir, drinks deep and on and on from a vessel never too full for his
emptying. We scratched, at her wish, our theatre-going plans for her.
She preferred to fill the whole of her days with picture galleries, and
with the living pictures in her mind to carry home from her long treks
and bus rides uptown, downtown. (l believe I have never, even with my
children and grandchildren, lived vicariously as intensely.)
And so it seems I am at the end of my reminiscing. It has been
fun. As much fun as trying to do an oral history of myself was both bore
and disaster. I cannot sit and talk about myself. There has to be some
chemistry some reason for doing such a stupid thing. Also, I am a
writing person. I just gabble when I talk. Or else I say, "aw-aw-uh-
uh-aw - SHUCKS!
Shucks I And love.
If you ve questions, do not be shy. I ll answer them if I can.
Or tell you why I cannot.
I /!/
/ 7
APPENDIX III 426
JOHN HARRISON QUINN
John was with the Sierra Club when we met in the early spring of 1969.
We met first over the phone, the call, a latish-at-night one, had reference
to Almost Ancestors, which Anne [Brower] and John were putting together to
get it off to the printer. They had discovered they were lacking an author s
blurb. I shuffled that dry task off onto John, who seemed not to mind.
Thus it was I knew his voice before I knew its owner: a New Englander
to judge by the accent, but with an intrusive R which was new to me. We have
since learned from an article in Times Literary Supplement that this R
characteristic of the idiom of Plymouth, Massachusetts, where John grew up,
came in the beginning from its birthplace along a stretch of the upper (facing
upstream) bank of the Thames River. From there it was brought to Plymouth by
Englishmen of that stretch of river who remained at their landing place in
America in sufficient numbers to imprint the local idiom. Drawring is the
example used in the Times Literary Supplement article, nor could a better
one be found.
We met face-to-face a few weeks later at the exit gate of the Los Angeles
airport. Heizer and .1 had flown to Los Angeles for the spring book fair.
John met us, drove us, took us to dinner, and came back on the plane with us.
There followed some book parties. Also a safari made by John and me, Heizer
busy teaching, again to Los Angeles and Hollywood to do Sierra Club book
publicity by telly, radio and private interviews with critics, reviewers,
and authors.
During the next weeks I was in John s house: a pre-1906 [1886, J.Q.]
wooden, small, Victorian house with a garden at the back, on Dolores Street
in San Francisco, some blocks farther out than the Mission Dolores. It was
in this house I first came to know John s paintings. Especially one,
"Timetrack," an oil done in his then severe, stark manner a manner he has
long since abandoned for acrylics and for figurative painting. It nonetheless
is a strong statement, and one which became a metaphor of sorts of our own
meeting of timetracks. When we were married, John s mother bought his house
from him, since which time it has been her pleasure to turn it out in all its
mini-Victorian splendor.
My book, Alfred Kroeber, A Personal Configuration, was already in the
printer s hands, but the cover design and the final placing of pictures were
not completed. John sat with David Comstock, then book designer for the
University of California Press, and together they designed the cover jacket
and placed the pictures.
427
The biography on its way and a new job coining up for John on the
University of California campus, Berkeley, he and I made a private safari
to Italy in August-September, our longest stay on Elba (which island
Napoleon was most short-sighted to have left!).
We returned, John to his new assignment and to his painting two
exhibitions were booked for later in the year I to my writing. On December
14th we were married in Semper Virens House, where we presently live and
which has been my home I just now realize for fifty-one of my eighty years.
Theodora Kroeber Quinn
APPENDIX IV 428
Cross-
Generation
Marriage
BY THEODORA KROEBER-QUINN
Theodora, known for yean as tftt wife of eminent
anthropologist Alfred Kroeber 123 yean her senior),
began her own writing career in her fifties. Her books
include Iihi in Two Worlds, The Inland Whale - Nine
Stories Retold from California Indian Legends; and
Alfred Kroeber - A Personal Configuration
In 1969. at the age of 73. she married John Quinn.
then 29. They had met through John s arranging of
TVpromotional appearances for her Almost Ancestors,
published by The Sierra Club. John now is resident art
therapist at Orinda Rehabilitation and Convalescent
Hospital and staff art psycho-therapist at Walnut Creek
Psychiatric Hospital Iwhere one of the patients recently
asked him, Wiich came first, the chicken or ttte egg?"
and hastened to answer when John hesitated, "Dino
saurs were laying eggs long before there were chickens. ")
This article wet rejected some while back by Ms. maga
zine. So was the article by Theodora s daugher Ursula
Le Cuin on the wisdom following menopause which
appeared in the Summer 1976 CQ. Is Ms. agent?
-SB
102
Someone slips on a banana peel. Never anyone one
knows. One is free to laugh, to enjoy the absurd
spectacle.
Just so one reads in the morning paper of the marriage
of a couple a generation or two apart in age. One is
free to cluck, to tut-tut, to enjoy the imagined absurd
spectacle, this being the sort of thing which simply
does not happen between people whom one knows.
Or does it?
It may happen, soon or late, that one or both parties
to such a marriage are amongst one s friends or
acquaintances. The reactions, then, are strong,
immediate, stereotyped, and show wide cleavage as
between women and men.
I have experienced as well as observed these reactions
over almost the whole of my adult life from the eye
of the hurricane: beginning with an early widowhood,
followed by more than thirty years as a "young" wife,
then nine years as one of the host of grey widow
The CoEvoluttoo Quarterly Fall 1976
429
Theodora Kroeber-Quinn, 79, and her husband John Quinn, 35, at the house
in Berkeley where Theodora has lived since 1926,
"ladies," and now I am in my seventh year of marriage Berkeley definition "Hill Libbers;" on the Warner
as an "old" wife.
I am seventy-nine years old, the mother of four
children, grandmother of twelve. My husband is
forty-three years younger than I. We are white; by
scale upper-middle class; our milieu Academia and
the arts. My husband is a painter. I am a writer.
. *
I here report reactions to stable, creative marriages in
which there is a generation cross-over, as observed in
Box 428, SauMiito, California 94965 1O3
430
1 931. Theodora Kroeber, 34. and Alfred Kroeber, 55,
had been married five years. The cabin was Kroeber s
on the northern California coast, neighboring Yurok
Indians. Theodora writes in Alfred Kioeber A Per
sonal Configuration, "My Yurok name was Sigonoy-
O-Pere, Old Woman ofSigonoy, a clever triple-meaning
name, which placed me geographically, indicated my
status as principal-woman-in-my-husband s-house, and
kidded my then relatively young age.
"
the today-culture of the United States. My view is
anthropological, and, as such, discovers our culture
to be age-grade-conscious and segregation-by-
generation-oriented and to recognize as its ideal
image, Youth.
When the age difference between a man and wife is
thirty years or more, it is usually the husband who
is old, the wife young. I started to write "twenty,"
forgetting for the moment how relatively unre
marked today is a gap of twenty years, a cautionary
reminder against the too-facile use of labels such as
"natural," and "instinctual;" and a warning, that
however laggingly, some liberation from generation
tabu is taking place.
OTHER WOMEN & THE YOUNG WIFE
How, then, do older women react to a young wife,
newly introduced into the friendship and acquain
tanceship circles of her husband? 0* is the young
wife who enters much more frequently and fully
the older husband s circles than he hers, except for
her family and most intimate friends.) ^
The husband who has shown independence in his
choice of a wife may be expected to stand out from
his peers in other ways, in accomplishment,
imagination, intelligence, dynamism, charisma -
one or more or all. The young wife slips into a place
readymade, and it may well occur to any sensible
woman that this automatic placing is a bit unfair,
hard to take, all too easy in comparison with her
own giving-of-self-contribution to her husband s
career. The readymade place may mean, in the
diplomatic service or other government service, in
the professions, in ladder-conscious Academia, that
v
the young wife is accorded, willy-nilly, social
precedence and consideration over her elders. (Time
and its passage being as they are, the "young"
wife
remains young relative to the older women long
after she is, in fact, no longer young.) The husband s
circles must, then, settle for his wife, like her or not,
if they are to keep him, and it may be expected they
will try to keep him.
The wives ask: Will this woman trade on her youth?
Shall she and we find enough in common to make
do? Is she, after all, up to her husband? The- attitude
is on the whole negative, wary, watchful, these
attributes tending to increase and predominate in
proportion to the "success" or actual distinction
of the husband.
The wives have reason to be on their guard, nor can
they look to their husbands for support. (See below.)
How positive the negative may become; how soon and
how thoroughly watchfulness gives way to trust and
affection, depends upon the young wife herself,
rather more than upon the older women however
whole hearted their goodwill. It depends upon how
far the young wife has already grown beyond the
emotionality, vanity, shyness and gaucheries of
adolescence and post-adolescence; how intelligent
she is; how ample her capacity for compassionate
and full maturity; how sensitive her imagination;
how genuine her amiability.
Observation reveals the auguries, on the whole,
to be good.
OTHER MEN & THE YOUNG WIFE
The men s reaction to the young wife is quite different:
Positive. Unreserved.
They find it delightful to discover in their intimate
group a young face, to hear the laugh, the fresh
timbre of a young voice.
They respond with a gallantry beyond their wont,
make a larger effort to be amusing, to please. Their
interest and animation quicken.
An aura of happy sex surrounds the couple.
1O4 Th Convolution QuArtttiy Fall 1976
431
Drawing of Theodora by John Quinn, 1971.
By George, if the Old Man why he is older than I!
can do it, why not I?
The shaky maleness gets a shot in the ego, without
having to put too fine a point upon a more-than-
beginning-paunch, an unadmitted lowered sex-drive,
or the spectre of male "change of life."
The fantasies set in motion rarely hover long over
the particular young wife who has given them wing;
the women s reserve is rarely embittered with
jealousy, real or imagined. The men s reactions are
in part natural and defensible, in part jejune; and
easy, all too easy to caricature. In fact there is nothing
funny about their behavior, and much that is tragic.
For American men are the victims, more woundingly
than American women, of the national obsessive
youth-worship syndrome: idealization of youth for
youth s sake, whatever its other qualities or worth,
and leading to that saddest of spectacles, the imitation
of youthfulness when the reality can no longer be
held on leash.
OTHER MEN & THE OLD WIFE
How do the men react to a reverse marriage in which
the wife is old? Promptly. Negatively. Denuncia-
torily. Moralistically.
Ether the woman is an old fool who is being taken
by a young scoundrel, or both man and wife are,
quite simply, beyond the pale.
Surely the old woman does not expect her friends to
accept this indecently young man?
The indecently young man surely does not-mean to
introduce his wife into his circle? .
^,
How in God s name is a man supposed to act toward
this woman, older- than himself? He d feel a bally
fool flirting with her. Playfulness won t do.
And what stance toward the young man? Fatherly?
Patronisingly at ease? Jolly?
It is my conviction these men are reacting to panic
-
sheer middle-years, American-made, male panic. The
aura of happy sex surrounding the improbably pair
reminds the older men that this young husband may
be presumed to be out-performing his elders - the
youth bogey raising its sexy head. And men are
justified in feeling that both nurture and nature have
let them down rather badly. They have been reared
within a culture which makes no positively oriented
and sanctioned provision for pre-marital sex experience
and which does not offer its young, or its old, socially
accepted patterns or procedures for extra-marital sex.
The double standard for sex, now in process of disso
lution, still leaves both men and women without the
sex proscriptions and prescriptions to be found in
most other cultures of today and in the so-called
"simple"
or "primitive" cultures of yesterday.
Nature, too, has let men down, putting male potency,
its degree and its durability, physically beyond
individual control. And when impotency Is upon
a man, there is no youth-disguise he may wear for
lover, mistress or wife.
OTHER WOMEN & THE OLD WIFE
Meanwhile, Why, the man asks himself, are the women
so damned unconcerned? To all appearances, so
acquiescent, ruminative? So intrigued? So pre
occupied in quietly, cooly, openly sizing up the
young husband?
It can t be they are fantasizing Young Lovers
of their own?
Well, of course it can. They do.
And if the husbands suspect they detect an ironic
gleam, a touch of naughtiness and triumph in
their wives eyes, their suspicion is probably correct.
The wives may well be recollecting fickle Nature s
generosity in placing no biological or age limitation on
a woman s participation in the sex act to full orgasm.
The women say ."Bully for you!" to both the young
husband and to the old wife, especially to the wife.
And mean it, for the most part. Given a reasonable
sense of security on the part of the other and younger
women, the marriage calls forth a spontaneous
generousness, not always to be found between
women; an amused by gentle gaiety; and something
almost protective toward both wife and husband.
Beyond the imponderables of temperament and
congeniality and the nuances of like-dislike, love-
hate, the reality of the positive reaction depends
Box 428. Saiualito, California 94965 105
.
-
432
upon the younger wife s own security, upon "where
she is," by her own standards and those of her society.
The unmarried woman, younger than the young
husband, or dose to his age, confronts in his marriage
a bursting of the youth balloon her secure toy. All
manner of new values, new life-patterns, tumble from
the burst balloon. Picking up the pieces, if she is as
bright as a woman ought to be, a wry smile accompa
nies her words, "And 1
thought I was liberated."
It will occur to her that perhaps, just perhaps,
American men, some of them, are taking stock of
women, lovers, mistresses, wives, in other countries?
In other cultures?
To the woman who is a widow, particularly if she is
old, ihe-marnage is an ego shot: If she can do it,
why not I? And indeed why not?
(The detailing of the whys and why nots and of the
whole of this area, widowhood, largely neglected by
both women s and men s liberation, I shall hope to
explore. It is a wasteland needing opening up. But -
another day, another thrust.)
THEWIFE&THEMAN
"So the women say "Bully for you!" And the men
come round given time and pertinent guide-lines
from their wives. The fact of the marriage and the
parties to it are accepted and naturalized to the
circle. There is exotic appeal in that the marriage
"works;" that it has an amiability, a distinctiveness,
a distinction all its own, and there is the difference
of menage. The wife has an old and comfortable
familiarity with the "life-style"
of the majority in
the circle. Both the women and the men find
something to envy, something to look forward to,
"When the children are grown up,"
in her present
so differently-oriented household.
In both women and men, but sooner and more deeply
(perhaps) in the women, there has been a pondering
and some subtlety of comprehension of the strains,
the restraints, the reluctances, the shocks and hurts
this old woman has herself endured and foisted, all
unwilling, on her family and her closest friends
before taking a lover; before the serious, thoughtful
decision to go on to marriage; of the questions the
young man must have asked himself, and found hard
answers to, before making his decision and
commitment to this marriage.
The shell is cracked: let us to the kernel, bitter
sweet, strong.
Crossing generations in marriage is a Way of Life too
aberrant, too special except for some few, particularly
when it js the man who is young, the woman old.
The man need rather to have raced down his Time-
track with greater awareness, speed and intensity
than is customary: to have lived through and beyond
the romantic love-fantasy of youthful illusion,
beyond first and later loves; to have been through
and out of an earlier marriage. He must long since
have realized that he does not desire nor intend to
Theodora by Constance Raffetto. The hat used to be
Eve Arden t. a friend of the sculptor.
have children of his own seed. He must have learned
many hard realities.
I can scarcely say what the old woman is about when
the young man comes abreast of her, loitering down
her long Track. But the tracks will merge only with
an instant chemistry and recognition, beneath all
differences, of mutualness of Values, Direction,
Taste, Pattern, Style.
In the merging wfll be no place for pretense, for effort
to appear younger and less wise than one is, or older
and more wise. No place for jealousy of youngnea,
of old experience. Each must be himself as he is or
strives to be within himself, not as family, friends
or society image him or would have him be.
For those to whom come such a love and such a
marriage, the horizon of communication takes on
a palette of sunrise shades, and sunset; an enlarging;
closed shutters opening to let new winds blow
through, bringing sounds and smells from new worlds
for them to savour. And always, the intimate
continuing discovery of the unknown potential
behind the unlined, unlived face of youth; behind
the lined, lived face of age.
1O6 Th Convolution FU irT
APPENDIX V (a) 433
DARK- SKY OBSERVING STATION
JUNIPERO SERRA PEAK
Dear Fellow Regents,
There follows a report on the California Indian objection to your choice of Junipero
Serra Peak as the site of the proposed new observatory for the University. It comes
to you in response to Chancellor Sinsheimer s request that I give him and you my
sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the Indian claims and of your own
responsibility to them.
You will recall that in May 1965 you appropriated $90,000 for a site survey; that
in June 1968 you authorized an application to the U.S. Forest Service for a use
permit covering 80 acres on the summit of the Peak; and that in January 1970 you
appropriated $500,000 for use in meeting costs associated with the project and
authorized the President to solicit a grant in the amount of $5 million (plus) to
meet construction costs of the proposed facility. Although no extramural funds
have been received as yet, it was reported at the November 1977 meeting that the
grant proposal has received favorable review by the National Science Foundation.
You also will recall that the passage of the California Environmental Quality Act
has required that "environmental impacts" be considered before final site and
project decisions can be made.
Chancellor Sinsheimer is concerned about the "environmental impacts" upon living
California Indians, particularly as represented by the Native American Heritage
Commission. Sinsheimer and I have discussed this and we have corresponded regarding
it. I have consulted with his two assistants, Dan McFadden and Joseph Calmes, who
have turned over to me copies of the relevant reports and letters they have received.
I have read these reports, letters, and other materials; I have consulted with
Professor Robert Keizer, UC Berkeley, an authority on California archaeology and
ethnography; and I have discussed the matter at length with Edward Castillo of the
Native American Heritage Commission. I have also suggested to Sinsheimer and his
assistants a course they might consider, should you cling to your plan to build
a new observatory on the Junipero Serra site.
I shall not be with you to present or to further defend or define my reasons for
advising against both site and project; hence I ask you to read this report when
the matter comes before you once again I am told it should be in May or June of
this year -- to ponder what I say here. And if you dismiss the Indian claims, I
ask you to do so in full awareness of the responsibility you thereby shoulder.
*****
Brief Overview
Junipero Serra Peak is the highest point in the Santa Lucia chain of the Coastal
Range of middle California. It is in southern Monterey County -- that is to say,
in the same range as Mt. Hamilton, site of the Lick Observatory, higher, farther
south and more inland than Mt. Hamilton.
As you know, it was because Lick was already smogged in in the 1960 s that a new site
was considered. At the present rate of pollution and smog penetration into the remoter
Coast Range, an optimistic projection is that Junipero Serra Peak may have left to it
as many as twenty years before it, too, suffers the fate of Mt. Hamilton.
A glance at the plans for the new observatory reveal no mean or modest project,
what with three observatories atop the peak, with extensive and elaborate facilities,
with permanent residences, with an engineered road to the foot of the peak,
with a funicular from the foot to the top of the peak.
2.
434
Back in 1968 it was the Judgment of Regent Forbes that the projected new observa
tory was of such low priority as compared with other University needs as to cause
him, regretfully, to abstain from an otherwise unanimous Yea vote of the Regents
for the project and the site. I quote the climactic sentence in that 1968 report
to you: "....The resulting two-year survey indicated the advisability of pre
serving Junipero Serra Peak as the astronomical resource, since it is the best
mountain-top for optical astronomy in the United States and the only remaining
first-rate site in the southwest. (The italics are my own.) I find this state
ment absurd. Do you?
The question for you becomes, I should think, Is a replacement of Lick still
defensible? It is the sense of critics of the project that before the new
observatory is operative, satellites of increasing versatility and utility will
be delivering photographs and a variety of other pertinent data superior to but
of the same kind as is to be got from a ground-fixed observatory. I am not com
petent to pass on this, nor are most of you, but there are disinterested experts
available to you who have that competency.
* * * # *
The Indian Case.
Indian objection to use of the peak rests upon the claim that the peak was
anciently an historic and sacred place and that it continues to be so today to
the living descendants of California s native peoples.
The validity of the claim is beyond serious question. The further claim that
the peak and its environs were the gathering place for festivals and the per
formance of *wmai i
y recurring ceremonies is highly probable. Nor is there
reasonable doubt that the mountain and the peak have been visited by Indians
in historic and in recent times, whether for nostalgic or ritual purpose. It
stands as it stood anciently, a symbol of the old days and the old ways: and,
as such, of concern to today s Indians, to historians and environmentalists.
An expert in California archaeology and ethnography could readily determine the
extent and importance of any remains, unless there has already been careless or
deliberate disturbance of the natural state, destroying or disguising the evidence,
[My own feeling in any case is that the Indian d.im rests on more subtle and
less readily disguised or arguable evidence.]
An expert could also determine the correctness of the Indian claim that there are
burial grounds at the foot of or close by the peak ~ again, unless the evidence
has been destroyed. If there are graves I mean more than a single one which
might be that of a prospector or a hunter they are surely Indian and should
be given the consideration we are used to accord disposal of the dead.
As I see it, the Indian claim rests on the historic significance of the peak to
them. Let me suggest something of the world in which it figured so prominently.
The land we call "California" was anciently a congeries of separate village- states
or, as the Indians knew them, separate worlds. Boundaried, cheek-by- Jowl, there
were hundreds of them. They differed in size and in age, but a-ii were several
3.
435
thousand years old. Each had been created by its own Creator God; the earth
itself and its waters, the people, the language, the individuated variants of
custom by which one world differed from another. Their worlds could scarcely
have been more different from our own; indeed, they were unlike those of
Indians anywhere else on the continent.
These first peoples were urbanites, stay-at-homes, attached to their particular
village. Their houses were permanent, often they were named, the identity of
the family tied to the name of its house. Unlike us again, they were excellent
linguists, speaking fluently two or three languages besides their own the
languages of those nearby worlds between which was constant trading, sharing
of hunting, fishing and gathering sites, inter-marrying, feuding, and exchange
of invitations to ritual celebrations.
We can never know how many of these tiny worlds there were, nor the sound of
how many unknown tongues, the Spanish and Anglo-American conquests having erased
and silenced them before observant travelers, linguists or ethnographers could
reach and know them.
As will be understood, the boundaries between these intimately ^T^lp^T^g^ne worlds
were of the utmost nicety and exactitude, beginning at an anchor point such as
a mountain top, a peak, an in- shore sea stack; *"d
nicely defined by a conspicu
ous tree, a well-placed boulder, the left or the right bank of a certain stretch
of stream, by an established length of shoreline.
Junipero Serra Peak was the anchor point from whose summit flowed the boundary
lines defining the limits of three worlds we know as the Esselin, the Sal 1 nan,
and the Costanoan. The peak may have been as well the abode of a God, or itself
a transmogrified God, it having been the custom for a Creator God, once his task
was complete, to depart to a world across Outer Ocean or up into the Sky World,
or else to remain within his own beloved world, self-transformed into a nature-
object, such as a mountain peak.
Whatever may have been its precise God- status, Junipero Serra Peak was a favorite
and sacred spot not only to its own three worlds, but to the larger cluster of
maritime worlds immediately along the Pacific Coast of California where, under
the most salubrious of conditions, the peculiar flavor and bent of the native
Californian culture came to its fullest and most exuberant expression pre
cisely in whose heartland , the then blessed isles of the Santa Barbara Channel -
Cabrillo and his shipmates hove to, and so initiated the end of the California
Indian Way of Life.
We preserve with seeming pride the Missions with their connecting trails; we
sanctify the site where Marshall "first" found gold in California. . .
*****
The one time practice of genocide in California may seem remote and of little
matter to some of you today. To our great loss, we learned nothing from the
Indian Way, a way of conservation, of moderation. Take the matter of trees:
the Indians burned the brush around their villages and around the best
stands of trees. They never suffered the destructive forest fires which, brush-
kindled, continue today to denude our lands. Their waters were unpolluted:
properly placed toilet areas and disposal of offal and other materials saw to that.
436
The population was kept about constant, at numbers such that children were
welcomed and much beloved, such that there was no famine neither history,
myth nor late report tells of any famine. No tool more disturbing than a
digging stick broke the good earth s skin. California fed, medlclned, clothed,
housed and boated her peoples without benefit of agriculture or curse of war,
and its population light by our standards of numbers was ten times the
density of Indian populations beyond the Sierra Nevadas.
Kroeber says of the California Indian Way, that it achieved an almost perfect
symbiosis between Man and Nature; that the followers of that Way surrendered
to their conquerors a land wholly undespoiled, unpolluted; in even better
order and productivity than that in which they had received it from their
Creator Gods.
Theodora Kroeber-Quinn
February 22, 1978
J
APPENDIX V (b) 437
Dear Fellow Regents,
I am told it is the custom for a Regent to make a summarizing or
farewell statement upon reaching the end of his term. Since t;he end of my
term comes hard upon its beginning, and I depart as I came, a freshman
albeit by long odds the oldest person amongst you, I shall be brief.
I mean more than the conventional phrase when I say it has been a
pleasure to come to know you, to have made new friends by way of you; to
know David Saxon. I congratulate you upon having had the wisdom or the
luck to choose him as President of our University.
I have come to have an enormous respect for you Regents of long tenure
on the Board; for your selfless devotion to an onerous and colossal job; for
your expertise in that job.
Herb Caen characterizes those of us who are Governor Brown s appointees
as "political weirdos." So be it. My brief function, as I see it, and your
continuing function will be to bring to the Board a more sensitive awareness
of social change outside the University; of the need for social change within
the governing body of a changed university.
*
What would I change for you if I could?
1) The mad-hatter settings in which you are asked to function. How
can a committee come to general understanding and agreement, its
meetings conducted with permissive public participation; with
communication, if that is the word, through disembodied voices
distorted over a loudspeaker system of unspeakable (pardon the
pun) crudity?
I wish I might waft you back to your proper campus quarters, there
to speak face to face; in one s own voice.
2) I would wish for you a relation with our legislators which would
be a sharing of function, you conveying to them your understand
ing of the University s needs. They, in turn, legislating into
actuality these needs in such measure as appears to them right and
feasible. The politics of pressure, the lobby, have no place in
a body such as this .
3) I would wish you to be in closer touch with the faculty. Why should
professor and regent be barred from free intercourse, when the out
side world and the student are given unrestrained access to you?
Sitting as observer and learner with you has been for me, quite simply,
a case of culture shock as acute as that of a first confrontation with a strange
culture and a new language in a foreign and unknown land.
438
What do I mean? I mean that here I sit outside the invisible fence
within which I have passed the greater part of my adult life, amongst
teachers, researchers, philosophers, students, artists, and such administra
tors who are close to the heart of the University, all of these people func
tioning within the ideals and goals of a humane concept of what a university
is "all about." Not that they or I are unaware of the shadow side of our
university sub-culture. This awareness has been present to me since 19*+0
when Robert Oppenheimer told us he would not be seeing as much of us as he
had since his first coming to Berkeley, that he could no longer be wholly
candid, as was the wont of all of us . I have watched with increasing dread
the shadow lengthen from Livennore and Los Alamos, beginning to darken the
once sunny prospect. But only here with you have I wholly faced the reality
that my University is the creature and partner of government, of corporation;
that an unblushing commitment has been made to the development of the science
and practice of war, of human and earth destruction.
* * *
Let me try to say to you where I am in my thinking about you and the
University at this moment of taking formal leave of you. Nfy case of culture
shock sent me back to Kroebers Configurations of Culture Growth; then on to
recollection of an evening s discussion in the late forties between Kroeber,
Pere Teilhard de Chardin and Julian Huxley. I was as excited as I have ever
been in my life by their vision into a possible future. An audience of
anthropologists listened to them, in a silence pregnant with incredulity,
disapproval, an itchy uncomfortableness . I believe Gregory Bateson and Earl
Count were the only exceptions to this discomfortableness, the only ones to
enter the discussion.
The three principals prognosticated the immanent convulsive death by way
of its own violence of Western civilization, with its orientation to a science
divorced from religion; with its competitiveness, its machismo; its racist,
nationalistic and war-like character.
Taking its place, in the event it did not bring the planet to destruc
tion along with itself, the three scientists foresaw man, dazedly at first,
taking into his hand once more the ancient tool of culture with which he had
fashioned his many worlds since the beginning of man himself. This time,
evolution would not expend its struggle and selection on a new species. It was
considered to be too late in the world s day for such biologic-- evolution, nor
was it necessary. This new evolution would be non-biologic, taking place
rather in the areas of increased powers of extrasensory perception, in
enlarged understanding, awareness, sensitivity, and creativeness in man.
Science would again go hand in hand with mystic reality, melded once
again to myth, to the inner world of instrospective man, in a union common
throughout human history except in Western civilization, whose continuance
depended upon denial of such identification.
Man would evolve, said the three, beyond earth- thinking to Teilhard s
noosphere, to an extra-territorial, planetary plane of philosophy, of day
to day living, of creativity.
439
I ve done snail justice to this vision, but enough perhaps to indi
cate that our University would surely reconstitute itself to fit into, to
be in fact intrinsic to this new world. Our University, its agora once
again unshadowed, open, green, inviting.
Theodora Kroeber-Quinn
APPENDIX V (c) 440
THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
In Appreciation
THEODORA KROEBER-QUINN
WHEREAS,
the Regents have found their deliberations enriched by the presence of
Theodora Kroeber-Quinn and have had the privilege of knowing an outstanding
individual of rare intellect, unique perspective, and independent convictions; and
WHEREAS, from July, 1977 to March, 1978, while filling out the term of a former Regent,
she has served on the Regents Committees on Educational Policy and Grounds and Build
ings, exhibiting warmth, humor and enthusiasm born of her long association with the Univer
sity; and
WHEREAS, she first called Berkeley her home in 1915; subsequently gained her bachelor s and
master s
degrees on the Berkeley campus; and was the wife and valued literary colleague of
the renowned University of California anthropologist Dr. Alfred L. Kroeber; and
WHEREAS, she has distinguished herself as an author of national and international repute,
and her writings have been acclaimed not only as a fitting tribute to California Indians but as
a testimonial to the human spirit, touching the hearts of people regardless of national, cultural
or generational differences; and
WHEREAS, she is a loving supporter of the University as evidenced by her contributions as a
Friend of The Bancroft Library, member of the Faculty Club at Berkeley, member of the
Kroeber Anthropological Society, Charter Member of the University Art Museum, and col
league working closely with the University Press and the Archives at Berkeley; and
WHEREAS, she has been lauded as a distinguished woman of California, receiving, among
other honors, the Commonwealth Club Medal, the Phoebe Appcrson Hearst Award, and the
esteemed title of Foremost Woman in Communications in 1969; and additionally, she has
proven to be a friend of all living things, as evidenced by her membership in organizations
dedicated to preserving life s natural heritage;
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Regents pay tribute to Theodora Kroeber-
Quinn as a woman of charm, vigor and perception, whose heart and mind remain ever young,
and as a scholar and literary figure whose views and concerns are timeless ;
AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that a suitably inscribed copy of this resolution be
transmitted to her and her husband John as a symbol of the Regents high regard and abiding
affection.
ATTEST:
of the University of California
4 APPENDIX VI
^>J
,1
I f,
441
442
THEODORA
Born: March 24th, 1897, in Denver, Colorado
Died: July 4th, 1979, in Berkeley, California
Theodora is survived by her husband, John H. Quinn, by her four
children: Clifton Brown Kroeber, Norman Bridge Professor of Hispanic
History, Occidental College; Theodore Brown Kroeber, Professor of Psy
chology, San Francisco State University; Karl Kroeber, Professor of Eng
lish, Columbia University; Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, author; by twelve
grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
The family wished, beyond her bibliography, some more personal words
in Theodora s obituary. Her husband suggested that she should write those
words.
Here they are:
"For the first eighteen years of my life I lived with my parents, Charles
Emmett and Phebe Johnston Kracaw, and my two brothers, Austin and
Forest, in Telluride, a gold and silver mining camp high in the Rockies of
southwest Colorado. I was graduated from Telluride High School in 1915,
following which my parents moved to California, my father s health requir
ing a lower altitude. In the autumn of that year, I entered the University of
California (Berkeley) as a freshman, from which school I was graduated
cum laude in 1919, and in 1920 received my Master s degree in Clinical
Psychology, as it was then newly called.
"In the summer of 1920 I was married to Clifton Spencer Brown, four
years my senior, a graduate of the Boalt Hall School of Law, University of
California (Berkeley). Clifton, a veteran of World War One, died in 1 923 of
a tuberculosis-related disease, the aftermath of a pneumonia suffered in
France during the war. This brief marriage determined the place and
much of the quality of my later life, placing me as it did at the geographic
and cultural heart of the north Berkeley town-gown-liberal Way of Life, a
Way wholly congenial to me. Since 1915, 1 now realize upon going back up
my Time Track, my absences from Berkeley have never stretched to more
than a calendar year, most of them much briefer; and counting the years, I
discover that this March 24th ( 1 979) I have lived in this house for fifty-three
years. Semper Virens House we call it. (Built by Bernard Maybeck in 1906.
Redwood upstairs and downstairs, inside and out.)
"In 1926 I was married to Alfred Louis Kroeber, Professor of An
thropology, University of California (Berkeley), and Director of the
Museum of Art and Anthropology, then in San Francisco, since 1960 in
Berkeley.
"Kroeber, 1876-1960, died in Paris within the week of conducting a
conference on Anthropological Horizons at Burg Wartenstein, Wenner-
Gren Foundation, in Austria.
443
"For the almost thirty-five years of this marriage, I lived within Berkeley
Academia, principally engrossed with the domestic occupations of run
ning a fairly complicated household and rearing a family of four bright,
energetic, and demanding children. World War Two directly involved my
three sons and my husband. With peace, there followed the one-by-one
departure of the children. Then came Kroeber s retirement and an al
together changed face to our lives: appointments as visiting professor took
us to one university after another, and into a fairly gypsy life. Summers
continued to be spent at Kishamish, our vacation place in the Napa Valley,
with the now married children and their families: a life centering for me
more and more on writing.
"The
publication of The Inland Whale in 1957, my first book, made me, as
I came to realize, dazedly, an overnight pro. This modest volume, for
whatever reasons, received reviews of the highest critical and intellectual
quality of any of my writing an exciting and delightful surprise. And the
three hundred dollar check, my first royalty, loomed larger, did more for
my never-too-steady ego than did any of the later successes, coming after I
had lost my first innocence. From more or less the early fifties and my own
age of fifty-five, writing determined the direction of my major interests and
the routine and much of the content of my days.
"With Kroeber s death I returned to Berkeley, to the shelter of Semper
Virens House, whence followed seven Widow years, lonely in the intimate
sense, and strained. These were the years of a public exposure strange to
me, one aspect of my being the author in 1961 of an unexpectedly popular
book,Ishi in Two Worlds. (In its
eighteenth printing today. Translated into
nine languages.)
"Between 1961 and 1968 I wrote four books, made several publicity
excursions, one to New York, gave interviews and appeared on radio and
television programs, besides writing some articles: par for the course for an
experienced writer used to meeting the public, but difficult and tiring for
me and much against nature. Also it is to be remembered that I
compose
slowly, painstakingly, sometimes painfully; that as I write I re-assess, and
that I am an obsessive re-write man.
"Somehow, and this too astonishes me today, I went to Europe several
times in the sixties: mostly to England, Italy, and Greece. In part I was
encouraged to go because family or friends were there whom I could join;
partly it was response to tension and strain.
"The
single steadying influence I now perceive holding throughout this
confused and complex time, was my staying, against a variety of advice, in
my accustomed home and surroundings. It is my firm-held belief that upon
the loss of husband or wife, or of any person close and intimate to one, a
woman, a man, should stay in the however lonely familiar setting and
surroundings and routine for at least a year. With intimate loss, one is, if
you will, off his head in the meaning of being open to any plan which
offers change and seeming relief but which may have no lasting value or
least appropriateness. The risk is that of exercising a sort of desperation of
444
grief in what may be a disastrous, even a bizarre decision. It takes months
for vision to clear and a possible and sane future to come into view.
"In 1969 I was married to John Harrison Quinn (1940- ). A painter
then, a painter, sculptor and art psychotherapist today, John was with the
Sierra Club when we met, Almost Ancestors bringing us together. John also
took a hand in the design of my nearly finished biography of Kroeber and
unstuck me from my difficulty in finishing it.
"It occurs to me, my husbands always have rescued me and pointed my
nose in the right direction ....
"With
John, Semper Virens House took an intimately creative course which
it
keeps to, what with studio, garden and writing ....
"I woke one morning some weeks after our marriage, to the realization
that the world of the artist was in fact become my world.
"Speaking
of houses or was I? life does cluster around Place and
Person, at least for me. As to Place, I am a house-person, a root-putting-
down person. I ve left torn roots behind in the most unlikely places in
Telluride, ofcourse and ofcourse, in Kishamish. And in Quinwood. And
here my roots must go through Semper Virens basement on down and
down all the way to China .... But I think also of roots left dangling in such
non-obvious places as the hot Nazca Desert of Peru where we lived for some
months in a crude and uncomfortable tent camp. In Cambridge, one year
in a scratch house down by the Charles River on the wrong side of Brattle
Street. Of five years on Manhattan in an apartment with a smashing view
and a cockroachy kitchen. Even in the flat on Albany Street in London ....
"I said Quinwood .... It is
special. Our dream. John s and mine. A
realized dream. I did some of my most aware and intense living there ... a
perfect place to write ... a totally introverted house and landscape.
"Of
Semper Virens House most of me is here, soaked into the wood .... I
almost recognize my own footsteps amongst those disembodied ones going
up and down stairs at night, and my own wood voicejoining in with theirs in
the nightly chorus: Crackle! Sreeks! Pop!
"As to Person: I am immensely fond of my Past and its
many Persons
dear to me. For the most part I see it as a wide strip the calendrically
widest strip of the tapestry which is
my life, its
patterning and weaving
whole and finished, rolled and stored away on a shelf in Bancroft Library.
"Here and Now is the yet incomplete Me, the weft a-weaving today, every
day, a new warp filling in the yet open and partial final pattern. It will
complete itself today or tomorrow, a soon-tomorrow. And this new pattern
of my life, a-weaving, a-borning, is for me quiveringly alive, tender, new,
unexplored, almost unknown; within it the double reality of dream and
waking life. Within it, the Persons who have continued down a Way similar
to my own: the few but precious friends from former times; and of course
the children, whose persons and roles are ever-changing, ever-new. But
most ofall the new attachments, the new, the Now friends. The new Reality.
The New Being. There is no looking back. Living is Now. Living. Being.
445
"When I do go back up into the Past, I am reminded at each turn, how
lucky I have been. How lucky I am:
In my parents . . .
In my college . . .
In my husbands . . .
In my home . . .
In my children . . . and grandchildren . . . and great
grandchildren . . .
In the freedom freely allowed me . . .
To grow as far as I could . . .
To discover and explore my own Way . . .
To follow that Way even when it
departed from other Ways . . .
To give of my love as I would . . .
To receive into my heart, my life, the love freely
vouchsafed me . . .
What do I like most to do?
To talk to John . . .
To my children . . . and grandchildren . . . and great
grandchildren . . .
To my intimate friends . . .
To have these people close about . . .
To cook . . .
To read . . .
To listen to Bonnie or Elisabeth play . . .
To garden or, lately, just to sit in the garden . . .
To write, of course . . .
To LIVE . . .
To BE ...
"This
obituary is
already too long .... But I would like to share some
thoughts and feelings about my writing . . .
writing does in a real sense I feel
stand for other aspects of my life, of my living:
"I
enjoyed writing The Inland Whale, Green Christmas, and The Two
Elizabeths. These were somehow joyous tasks, light-hearted, right when
done, like the making of a proper souffle. The biography of Ishi and the
retelling of his story for children I found to be heavy responsibilities. To do
all
justice to the man Ishi, to convey his truth without too much sadness or
anger I was relieved when these tasks were done. The reward has been
great appreciation more generous and understanding than I de
serve ....
"My
Poem For the Living my only published poem has brought a
strange, a tender reward .... Not a month passes without some letter the
writer has lost his copy and begs another ... or it is a request to privately
446
print the poem in memory of some loved one who has died ... or to sav how
much the poem has helped the writer of the letter. Of this correspondence,
Ursula once remarked, You ve the common touch, Krakie. I like that.
"I continue to remain as content with the Kroeber biography as one ever
is with a book, once it is out of your hands and you go back to it, discover an
error, a discussion you would now do differently ....
"I started a novel in 1974 when John and I were on Crete. Something of
its
subject matter and pattern had been forming in the back of my head
since an earlier trip to Greece, but now it came as it were full-blown into
consciousness. I
got quite a lot of the writing done on Goat Beach and other
open-air retreats of ours on Crete, but once home, the novel got nut aside
for one briefer writing task or another: for Heizer s and my book, Drawn
From Life and our Ishi Source Book; for editing and seeing to press the
manuscripts (Kroeber s) on the definitive collections of Yurok and Karok
Indian Myths; for The Tu o Elizabeths. Also the year I served as a Regent of
the University of California rewarding enough in itself allowed time
and energy for no serious writing. Now, with time perhaps I find I
cannot write it. A novel demands from its author an assumption of an
expanding time-space reality no longer mine. I
regret this, but so it is. The
beginning and the ending sections of the novel are written. Matthew and
Cornelia was intended not to tell our story, John s and mine that is ours
alone. But to celebrate its
meaning. Perhaps it is
enough to have had the
conception and for John and me to have grounded it as we did in two
houses on Crete, one in Napthlion, the other in Aghia Gallini.
"The
day I do not write so much as a single pesky paragraph is never
quite so good and satisfactory and complete a day as that on which I write
something creative. Even if it is
only that single pesky paragraph .... As
one writes, so one lives I
suppose, if one is a writer."
-March 24, 1979
447
Bibliography of the Major Works of Theodora Kroeber Quinn
1926
"A New Objective Method for Showing Special Relationships/ /Jme-rican Anthropologist, Vol. 28, no. 4 (published ;
Theodora Brown, with Clements and Schenck)
1957
"A Note on a California Theme," Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 70, no. 275
1959
The Inland Whale, (hardcover), Indiana University Press
(paperback), University of California (1964)
(hardcover), University of California/Peter Smith (1970)
(English hardcover), Gollancz (1976)
1961
"Shropshire Revisited," Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, No. 25 (published with A.L. Kroeber).
Ishi in Two Worlds, (hardcover), University of California
(paperback), University of California (1962)
(Danish paperback), Copenhagen (1963)
(Swedish paperback), Tiden (1963)
(French hardcover), Plon (1968)
(Russian paperback), Moscow (1970)
(Deluxe, Illustrated hardcover), University of California (1976)
(Polish paperback), Wydawnictwo Literackie (1978)
(Deluxe, Illustrated paperback), University of California (1979)
(Italian hardcover), Rizzoli (n.d.)
(Japanese paperback), Tokyo (n.d.)
(Spanish hardcover), (n.p.n.d.)
(German hardcover), (n.p.n.d.)
1962
"The Hunter Ishi," The American Scholar, Vol. 31, no. 3
1963
"About History," Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 32, no. 1
1964
Ishi, Last of his Tribe, (hardcover), Parnassus Press, Berkeley
(paperback), Bantam (1973)
(English hardcover), Gollancz (1976)
(English paperback), Puffin (1976)
1967
A Green Christmas, Parnassus Press, Berkeley
1968
Almost Ancestors: The First Californians (hardcover), Sierra Club, San Francisco
(paperback), Ballantine (1969)
1970
Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration, (hardcover), University of California
(paperback), University of California (1979)
"Life
Against Death in English Poetry; A Method of Stylistic Definition," Wisconsin Academy of Science and Letters
Vol. 57 (by Karl Kroeber, with A.L. Kroeber and Theodora K. Kroeber)
448
1972
"A Man s Wife," in Circle of Stories: One, edited by Alvin and Hope Lee, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich
1973
"Literature of the First Americans," in Look to the Mountain Top, Gousha Publications, also in The American Way,
American Airlines Publications
1976
Drawn From Life, Ballena Press (with Robert Heizer and Albert Elsasser).
"Cross Generation Marriage," CoEvolution Quarterly, Issue 1 1
1977
Carrousel, Atheneum Press
1978
The Two Elizabeths (Privately printed)
1979
Ishi, the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, University of California (edited with Robert Heizer)
Citations
Commonwealth Club Medal, San Francisco, 1962, for ISHI IN TWO WORLDS
Distinguished Women of 1965 Phoebe Apperson Hearst Award
Fellow, Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, 1965
Foremost Woman in Communications, 1969
Regent, University of California, 1977
Biographical Notices (partial)
American Who s Who for Women
World s Who s Who of Women (Cambridge, England)
International Authors and Writers Who s Who
Dictionary of Biography (England)
Contemporary Authors (Gale Research)
Community Leaders and Noteworthy Americans (American Biographical Institute,
Bicentennial Edition, 1975-76)
Memberships (partial)
Friends of Bancroft Library
Faculty Club, UC Berkeley
Friends of the Earth
Save the Redwoods League
Save the Bay Association
Charter Member, Council of the University Art Museum
Jacques Cousteau Society
League of Women Voters
Kroeber Anthropological Society
photographs by Liza Kroeber
449
INDEX Theodora Kroeber-Quinn
age, 130-131, 175, 189, 201-204
Almost Ancestors, 326
Anderson, Judith, 281
Arch Street House, 115, 119-121, 146-148, 291, 319-320
Armer, Laura Adams, 284-285
arts, 264-266
Bacon, Leonard, 29, 46-49, 55
Barrett, Samuel, 64
Bateson, Gregory, 124, 327, 329, 330
Berkeley, 24-25, 76, 138, 277-278
Berkeley fire, 1923, 58, 61-62
Boynton, Judd, 33
Brand, Stewart, 124, 298
Bridgman, Olga, 33-34
Brown, Clifton Spencer, Jr., 56-62, 100, 193-195, 197-198
Brown, Edmund G. , Jr., 124-125, 327, 331, 335-336, 346
Brown, Lena (Mrs. Clifton Spencer Brown, Sr.), 56-63, 83, 103, 118, 140-141
156, 193, 194
Brown, Warner, 32, 42
Buck, Elizabeth Covel Johnston (Aunt Betsy), 103, 111, 112. See also Appendix II
Bynner, Witter, 198
Cambridge, 243-244
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, 247-256
child- rearing, 104-105, 107-108, 115, 130-132, 144-148, 151-154, 156, 161-163
Clements, Forest, 66-68
Coblentz, William K. , 335, 342, 348
Cody, Fred, 308
Cohn, Arlan, 216
Converse, Ida Kracaw, 3, 178-179
d Angulo, Jaime, 92-93
d Angulo, Nancy, 92-93
Deep Springs School, 94-96
the Depression, 73-75
Dobbie, Lucie, 295
Dolores, Juan, 80, 108, 272, 284
Dugger, Edwin, 168
Dymally, Mervyn, 342, 345
450
education, 5, 10, 11-13, 22, 49-56, 63-68, 70, 113-115. See also University
of California
England, 235-237
Erikson, Erik, 92
Farquhar, Samuel T. , 150
field trips and travel, 78-81, 118-119, 139, 156-167, 310-313, 320-324
Forke, Alfred, 23
Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda, 248, 251-252, 254, 256
Fruge, August, 272, 294-296
Gannett, Lewis, 21, 245, 260
Gannett, Ruth, 21, 23, 245
Gayley, Charles Mills, 36
genius, 281-284
Gibb, Dan, 92-93, 116
Gibb, Helen, 92-93, 116
Gifford, Delia, 94
Gifford, Edward W. , 30, 94
grandchildren, 52-53, 55-56, 105, 160, 162, 215, 224, 226, 229
Green Christmas, 308, 321
Hales, David, 134-135, 326
Hansen, Elizabeth 0., 349
health, 110-112, 117-118, 191, 196-197, 209-217, 241, 278-279
Henning, John F., 346
Hogan, William, 306
holidays, 136, 287-289, 291-292
Hymes, Dell, 54
the Inland Whale, 261, 272
Ishi, 83, 89, 283
Ishi, 208-209, 272, 293-297 passim, 305, 308
Ishi. Last of His Tribe, 295-296, 305-307, 308, 321
Japanese relocation, 230, 232-233
Johnson, "Spud," 198
Kelly, Isabel, 64, 66
Kishamish, 73, 104-109, 206, 319
Kluckhohn, Clyde, 235, 244, 247, 251
A51
Kracaw, Austin Rogers (brother), 7, 11, 14, 15, 26, 130
Kracaw, Charles Emmett (father), 1-2, 4, 5-6, 9, 19, 22, 40, 42, 43-44,
125-126, 141, 179, 196, 209, 214, 286
Kracaw, Forest Allen (brother), 11, 13-16, 39-40, 127-130
Kracaw, Phebe Jane Covel (mother), 1, 3-5, 11, 14, 42, 43-44, 57-58, 63,
118, 126, 132-133, 141-142, 156-157, 286, 313-316 passim. See also Appendix II
the Kracaw family, 177-185
Kroeber, Alfred L. , 30, 31, 32, 38-39, 47, 48, 62, 63, 64-70 passim, 73,
78-94 passim, 99-102, 107, 111, 115-121 passim, 123, 133, 145, 148-164 passim,
174-177, 186-187, 194-195, 200, 201, 209, 211, 215-216, 220, 224, 225,
227-231, 234-236, 241-256 passim, 258, 267, 268, 281-286, 301-302, 309-312,
315, 319, 320, 328, 339
Kroeber, Clifton (son), 52, 55, 57, 104, 107, 112, 114, 148-149, 156-157,
164, 193-195, 200, 222, 227, 230, 235, 319
Kroeber, Jean Taylor (Mish) , 148-149, 320-321, 323
Kroeber, Karl (son), 44-45, 52, 63, 104, 107, 109-112, 115, 148-149, 165, 168,
200, 227, 234, 241-242, 244, 245, 258, 320-321, 323
Kroeber, Theodore (son), 52, 57, 104, 105-106, 107, 112, 114, 148-149,
156-157, 164, 190, 191, 193-195, 200, 215, 222, 227, 235, 285, 295
Lebrun, Reco, 261-262
Le Guin, Charles, 154, 225, 253, 266
Le Guin, Ursula Kroeber (daughter), 50-51, 104, 105, 107-108, 112, 115, 131,
133, 148-149, 154, 164, 200, 223, 225, 233, 235, 241, 244, 245, 253, 257,
258, 260, 262, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 273, 285, 299-300, 304, 319, 327
Lilienthal, Philip, 296
Lowie, Robert H. , 64-68, 84, 92, 93, 99, 115, 230, 232-233
Macfarlane, Jean, 22, 73, 135-136
Marciano, 103, 104
Martinez, Vilma S., 331, 344
Mead, Margaret, 93-94
Meredith, Scott, 297-298
Neiderheiser, Anna, 2, 180-184
New York, 241-242, 244-245
1930s, 115-121
1920s, 68-72, 100
Nunn, L. L. , 94-98
Olson, Ronald, 29
Oppenheimer, Robert, 116, 220, 281
oral history, 121-123, 125, 166-174, 185-186, 190, 192-193, 199.
See also Appendix I
452
Parker, Carleton, 30, 31
Peixotto, Jessica, 29
Perry, Bernard, 261, 295
Point Lobos, 27-28
political attitudes, 6, 74, 217-219, 222-224
Pope, Saxton T. , 80-81, 89
Powdermaker, Hortense, 134-135
Queen Mary, 237-240
Quinn, John, 53, 87-88, 106, 123, 125, 152, 155, 158, 162-163, 169, 176, 191,
196, 226, 228, 264-265, 268, 297, 315, 319, 323-325, 327, 336.
See also Appendix III
Radin, Max, 226
Radin, Paul, 282
Raffetto, Constance, 264-265
religion, 5-6, 31, 40, 124, 225-227, 285-286
Rieber, Charles Henry, 31
Riles, Wilson, 345
Rothschild, Fannie, 82-86
Rothschild, Henriette, 81-84
Rudinger, Hugo, 326
Ryder, Arthur, 116
San Francisco
diversity of, 87-88
social life (19th century), 85-87
San Francisco Earthquake 17-18. See also Appendix II
Sauer, Carl, 115
Saxon, David S. , 336-343 passim, 348, 350
Schein, Herman, 295-296, 305
Schenck, Sarah, 66-68
sex
education, 14-15, 27, 60-61, 158, 161, 188
morality, 123-124, 158-161
Sheinbaum, Stanley K. , 330, 351
Singer, Milton, 248
Small, Harold A., 149
Spier, Leslie, 93, 94
Spott, Robert, 80, 108, 272, 283-284
Stebbins, Lucy Ward, 30
Stegner, Wallace, 251, 258-259, 263, 264
Stephens, Henry Morse, 28-29, 54
Steward, Julian, 64-66 passim, 95, 98, 99
Stokowski, Leopold, 282
Stratton, George Malcolm, 30, 32, 35, 55
Strong, Duncan, 64, 66
suicide, 125-129
453
Telluride, 3-4, 5-13, 19, 25, 26, 42, 123, 131, 136-138, 141-143, 187-188,
287-293, 314-316
Telluride House, 95-99
Tolman, Edward, 100, 220
Tyler, Ralph, 249, 250, 252
University of California, 24-41, 49, 54-56, 63-68, 69, 72, 75-78, 220-222.
See also University of California Press; University of California Regents
University of California Press, 149-150, 293-296 passim
University of California Regents, 327-352. See also Appendix IV
Warner, Lloyd, 64-68
Waterman, T. T. , 30, 31, 40, 64
Wheeler, Benjamin Ide, 23-25, 37
women, 4, 21, 203-208, 269-271, 273-281, 304, 318
women s liberation, 154, 205, 219, 276-277, 280-281
Woolman, Marjorie J., 348-349
World War I, 23, 36-39, 45, 74-75, 88, 188-189, 191
World War II, 74-75, 101-102, 107-108, 222-223, 227-234
writing, 143, 173, 230, 256-264, 267-272, 293-300, 303-309
Anne Hus Brower
Grew up in Berkeley, California.
Was employed as an editor at the University
of California Press from 1937 to 1943.
Graduated in 1943 from the University of California
with an A.B. in English.
In 1944 served on the editorial staff of the
Historical Branch, Intelligence, U.S. Army.
Returned to the University of California campus
in 1958 as assistant to the editor of the Journal
of the American Institute of Planners. Editor,
Anthropology Department, University of California,
Berkeley, 1960-1973. Rapporteuse, Wennergren
Conference on primate behavior, Burg Wartenstein,
Austria, Summer 1968.
Joined staff of the Regional Oral History Office
in 1976 as interviewer/editor.
-
7/r
V J
/_if