Interview of Annie Laurie “Linn” Ford-Saunders by her grandson, Douglas Wayne Garner in 1987

Part 1 – bad qualityGanny: My name is Annie Laurie Linn Ford Saunders, as you probably know. My mother’s name was Annie Linn. When she and my dad were married, and he being a romantic, wanted her to be married as Annie Laurie. So she was. The first child was named for her mother (Margaret); the 2nd child was named for his mother (Jemima). And then I came along, and I got Annie Laurie Linn Ford. I was born in 1907 in Guyandotte, West Virginia which is now a part of Huntington. My father at that time was teaching at Marshall College, which is now Marshall University. There was a flood when I was three weeks old. Children were born at home in those days, and they had to take my mother and me out of the house in a rowboat. When I was about three or four years old, we moved to Welch, West Virginia. At some later date, I will record incidents and anecdotes about these various moves, but right now I'm going simply to outline. When I was three or four years old, it was about 1911. My birthday was on February 27 th. I was born exactly 100 years after Longfellow (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet) which was told to me when I was young therefore I was supposed to be a famous author. Sometime between 1907 and 1909 we moved in Bluefield. My brother was born in Bluefield, and I was two and a half years old at the time. We lived at the top of a long hill. My father was city superintendent of schools in Bluefield. When I was eight years old we moved to Welch, West Virginia which is a coal mining district very close to the Kentucky border. It was close to the place where the Hatfield and McCoy feud was, and “Devil Anse” Hatfield was a friend of my dad’s. My dad was a lawyer as well as a teacher, and he practiced law in Welch. Those are my earliest memories of playing in a town. He had what we know now as a disease. He was an alcoholic. He was admired and loved by his friends, but his disease would get the better of him from time to time. He finally gave up the law in Welch, and we moved to Charleston, West Virginia which is the capital of the state. He got into the National Guard division. I was 8 at the time. That was 1915. After a few years when the war was declared overseas, then we went into the war, my father got a commission into the regular army as a captain. He was sent down to Mississippi to train troops. He was at that time in his 40s somewhere. He never saw really active duty, but did finally get some overseas. See his father had been a captain in the Union Army, and he wanted to be a captain, another Captain Ford. When my brother was old enough, he became a Captain Ford. So there were three in a row. Dad went to France, and when he came back, he took a school in a little town called Dunbar which is only about 2 miles up the road from the institute where there has been so much talk about the chemical spills from Union Carbide (~1985). That was the spring of 1920. He came home the summer of 1919. We moved on the Sissendel road, right outside Charleston on the side of the hill into what called couldn’t be called anything but a shack. It was the happiest summer of my life. We played along the hills. That’s why I wanted to guess on the map that I got that I was 65. Poppa ran for state superintendent of schools at that time, and we moved to Dunbar. I grew up and the rest of my childhood life and went to school in Dunbar. I graduated from high school, and there were 14 in our graduating class. Imagine that. Then I went to West Virginia University in the fall of 1924. I’d been active in 4-H, and I spent 2 summers in Jacksons Mills, that’s the state 4-H center in West Virginia. The fall when I went to college, I went with a group of 4-H’ers from West Virginia to the eastern states’ exposition in Springfield, Massachusetts. My granddaughter Margaret was born in Springfield. When we came back to college, we were a couple weeks late getting in. I was passed over by the sororities even though my father was the state superintendent of schools. It was partly politics, we think perhaps. When I went home at Christmas time my freshman year, I was not very happy. My mother said, “Honey, you don’t have to go back to that school. We’ll send you over to Marshall. ” I said, “There is no bunch of people and no set of circumstances that’s going to defeat me. I’m going back.” And I did! I majored in English and took journalism. When I was a junior, I decided that I’d gone long enough without a sorority because I was going to have to stay out of school the next year. One of my older sisters was in dire straits, and mom and dad had to help her. So there wouldn’t be money for my college. So I told one of my friends that I had decided to join a sorority, and if I didn’t get anything better, I was going to join a certain sorority. She said, “I thought that you wouldn’t consider anything but a certain sorority” because we were supposed to be socially up here, you know. I said, “Well that’s when I was a freshman and didn’t have any better sense.” So she talked to the girls, and they were delighted to have me. So I was initiated into the Delta Gamma sorority in April of 1927.

The next year I taught school in the junior high school on the banks of the Kanawha River in a place called Chelyan (pronounced Sheelian). It was just about a mile down the road from Cabin Creek (West Virginia). If you know anything about mining wars, you will have heard of Cabin Creek. I taught there one year, loved it, but I wouldn't say I was a good teacher. I didn't know how to teach, but I enjoyed it. I lived with a family that were delightful; just ordinary people.

The thing that was most interesting about that year was that the governor of West Virginia was a man by the name of Howard M. Gore. He had been a classmate of my father's when they were at the University (of West Virginia). My dad was still at the Statehouse as the state superintendent. Governor Gore said “George, don't you have a daughter who's in college?” Poppa said, “Well, yes.” The governor said, "Well send her up to talk to me. I want to have a dance at the college, but I can’t in this Methodist state say I want to have a dance, so we’re going to say I’m going to have a reception for the college kids. You send her up to me next Saturday afternoon.” So I went, and I took another girl with me. Governor Gore didn’t have a wife (he was a widower), and he was the most delightful man. He sat me down opposite him, in the Statehouse, at his desk, in his study. I have today the notes that I made that afternoon, what the governor was to do, and what I was to do. He had me call me friends and

make up a committee. The poor man had no wife or children. The girl who was with me thought we were overstaying our welcome, but I knew better. He suggested that we stay for dinner. He called in his butler, his name was Napoleon, and he said “Napoleon, set 2 more places for dinner.” He didn’t have to eat dinner alone that night. So we stayed for dinner, and then he called the policemen, and 2 of them had to drive us home. I lived 6 miles away from the statehouse and my friend lived just up on the other side of me; so that was a delightful experience. We had the dance, the reception. He said, “Now we can’t call this a dance. You come to me in the middle, after the reception line has broken up. You say, ‘Governor Gore, could we dance?’ Then we’ll get the girls on your committee to roll up the rugs, and then I’ve got an orchestra sitting up there in the balcony ready to play for you!” That I think was one of the first really important things. Then I went back to college. The girl who was supposed to be the president of Delta Gamma didn’t come back that year. They elected me president. I’d only been in the sorority 2 months. Their excuse was that I didn’t belong to any cliques, and I wouldn’t be biased in any direction. I had made friends with some of the faculty members. I had attained some attention at the University, and in the spring of 1929 I received a letter from Phi Beta Kappa saying that I had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. I always know who it was who spoke for me; it was Dr. Darby. I had the lowest grade average of the 19 people who were inducted in Phi Beta Kappa. The one who was number 18 was the captain of the football team. He was about 6’6” tall, and when Dr. Darby came in to the room where we were all waiting to escort us across the hall to be initiated, the captain of the football team had me straight up in the air, holding me by my elbows straight up in the air! Dr. Darby didn’t blink. He led us, and then we had to receive a handshake from each of the faculty members there. Of course I almost burst out laughing, but I managed not to. I thought it was funniest thing I’d even seen in my life. Dr. Johnson, the head of the English department, giving me the handshake was beyond my imagination.

I graduated that spring and got a job teaching at Nitro, West Virginia. That was about 20 minutes from Dunbar. Of course my father being state superintendent made it very easy for me to get a job. I taught at Nitro for 2 years. Nitro was named that because the town had been built by the government and had plants that had been built by the government to manufacture Nitroglycerin. The (first world) war was over so there was nothing to manufacture. So other industries came in and took over, but the town was Nitro. That was 1929. The summer of 1930, I was married to my husband. He had gone to school and worked and gone to school and worked. So although he was 3 years older than I, he didn’t have his degree yet. So the year after we were married, I continued to teach at Nitro, and he was back at the University. Of course we spent as many weekends as we could together. In the fall of 1931, I went back to College; it was his last year. In the meantime his father, who was a wealthy man, gave him $10,000. He put it in the bank, and we went back to college. I got my master’s degree that year, and he finished up his engineering degree. There weren’t any jobs when we came out in 1932. I was pregnant. When I took my final oral examination for my master’s degree, I was four months pregnant. I really do believe that those dear men in that examining group gave me every break in the world. They needed a master’s candidate from the English department. We came back to Dunbar, and one of Phil’s brothers let us have a large upstairs apartment. Barbara was born on the 17 th of November, 1932.

Phil did a lot of things. He sold airplane rides at the county fair. He poured concrete at the Black Deaf and Dumb school. In those days of course the black education and the white education were separate. The institute was a Negro college just south of Dunbar. They had a Black Deaf and Dumb school down there. Finally he got a job at DuPont up the river at x West Virginia as a millwright which is heavy work. He had a degree in engineering, but that was all the job he could get. He took it and after he’d been there a few months, they moved him into the engineering department. But he had lost his self-confidence, and he couldn’t compete with the fellows from the eastern colleges DuPont had brought in. After Barbara was born, Peggy was born 2 years later. Barbara was born in 1932, and Peggy was born in 1934. They were 17 months and 9 days apart. In 1936 I went back to teaching. I taught in Dunbar for 2 years. I was teaching so there was money coming in. So he quit and went to Cleveland. He just went all over this town (Cleveland). This was in the fall of 1936. Finally he got a job as a machinist in General Electric in the base works on 152nd street. He hired a truck and came down in the spring and loaded us all up, and we moved to Cleveland. That was in the spring of 1937. We lived in Cleveland then…

Part 2…until 1941. He left General Electric because he wasn’t going to get out of the machinist department. He was a good machinist. He had worked as a machinist when he was growing up before he got his college education. So he went to a head hunter, and they got him a job with Glenn L. Martin in Baltimore, and we went to Baltimore. Philip was born the spring of 1940 in Cleveland (February 12, 1940). My mother said that was good because when he ran for president, it would be better if he had been born in Cleveland instead of West Virginia. Which I thought was very unfair of her because West Virginia is a great place. I still think so.

We lived in Baltimore in section called Hamilton which is in the most east part of Baltimore. Baltimore is Baltimore County. It’s all one and the same. Every time there’s a suburb developed, they incorporate it right into the city. It’s a square, quite different from Cleveland. He wasn’t happy, and in the spring of 1944, we left there. I was very pregnant with my youngest child, Dabney. He came back to General Electric, back to the base works, but he came back as an engineer. I took the children and went home to my mother in Dunbar. She was 74 years old, but she took us in, you know. She had her house. She was living alone. As soon as school was out, he had bought a house on Taylor Road in East Cleveland and moved his family up there on June 19 th of 1944. Dabney had been born in Charleston on April the 5th, 1944. So she was 10 weeks old when we moved there. I left that house in

1971 after my husband had died. I moved to Brecksville to an apartment and stayed there a year after he died. I retired in 1972. I had started teaching in Brecksville in 1957. I drove 20 miles each way every day through everything. Yesterday was the anniversary of the coldest day they’ve ever had in East Cleveland. I went to 19 below zero. I drove from East Cleveland to Brecksville to teach that day. I thoroughly enjoyed my school teaching days. I had taught 5 years in West Virginia: 1 in Chelyan, 2 in Nitro and 2 in Dunbar. When I went to teach in Brecksville it was part of the county system. Later Brecksville was incorporated as a city, and it was no longer a part of the county. Some of my very best friends in the world I made there. So when I retired, my husband was dead, my youngest daughter had been killed in an automobile accident on the 4 th of January 1969. She died and left a little girl 2 years old. I retired. In 1968 I had bought 100 acres on top of the mountains in southern West Virginia, in a place called Flat Top. I was 3 and a half miles out the country road, similar to one that made John Denver famous, Country Roads, West Virginia, mountain mama. That was before I retired, that song came out. I built a little house down there. I had 2 sisters living in Beckley, West Virginia which was 20 miles away. This was in the heart of the Pocahontas coal region. Beckley is a very little town, stratified If you belonged to the Presbyterian Church you were socially acceptable. I couldn’t take it after a while. I developed rheumatoid arthritis before I left there, so I knew I had to give up living on the mountain. I also knew that if I stayed I was going to be end up being the companion of my older sister until she died.

Ganny: (Looking through Barbara’s photo album) this is a picture of my father; on the back of it someone has put 1917, so this is the First World War. I don’t know who had this (picture). Barbara was very acquisitive. Anytime she wanted something, she got it. She didn’t steal things. She just acquired them. These are all pictures of Barbara as you would expect. That’s your granddaddy holding her when she was a baby.Douglas: That’s the biggest smile she’s got there.Ganny: She always has! As we go through this you will see pictures of her and your mother together. Your mother’s got her head down like this and Barbara was smiling and posing. These are Barbara as she grew. Here is Barbara and here is your mother. I’m in the middle on the little red rocker. I don’t know what happened to it. We bought it for Barbara. We had it on Taylor road. You remember, don’t you? Who got it, I don’t know. I suspect that one of Barbara’s children may have it. Here she is with your mother on her lap and me crouching behind. This is in Dunbar, when we lived, you wouldn’t remember. You weren’t anywhere in this world yet. Your Uncle Davis lived up on the hill, and we lived in a little house down opposite. This is Davis’ young son he was about Barbara’s age. I had friends in Oakland, Maryland. The mother was a roommate of mine. We went over there one time when the kids were all little. That’s my mother and me and the 3 girls. Before we were married, your grandfather went to Citizen’s Military Training (CMT) Camp somewhere down in Kentucky. There we are on the shore of Lake Erie, after we moved to Cleveland. Barbara is always on camera. You know she wasn’t really happy until she married Jim. That’s why we’re all so fond of Jim, because he gave her 12 years of happiness. I made that coat for Barbara for Easter. I sewed very well. This was the coat she had before, so Peggy got it for Easter. I almost didn’t get it finished. She wanted to wear her old coat to Sunday school, and I vetoed it. That was in Cleveland. Victoria road was the street where Philip was born. We moved to Cleveland in 1937. Your grandfather couldn’t get a job as an engineer with General Electric, but he took the job in the machine shop because he was a pretty good machinist. He had worked as a machinist in Dunbar. It wasn’t working out. This was right during the depression. He got ahold of a headhunter, and he got the job at Martin Marietta. We lived in Baltimore for 3 ½ years. Philip was 6 months old when we moved to Baltimore. So we lived in Baltimore from the summer of 1940 to February 1944. Until about 2 months before Dabney was born. Dabney was born in Charleston, WV at the hospital. Barbara and Dabney were born in a hospital, but Peggy and Philip were born at home. Philip was 10 ½ pounds. I don’t know how I was made to deliver.That’s George Hall, he’s Margaret’s son, and Jemima Elizabeth (Jimmie) Richmond, she lives in Bellevue, Illinois, that’s David Hall, that’s Cordelia Richmond (Dee), that’s Barbara and Peggy, that’s Silas Ewing Richmond, Jr (Pete/Buddy). George and David are brothers and Jemima Elizabeth, Cordelia, and Silas are siblings. This is when we lived in Baltimore. This where we saw the pictures of the kids all on the front steps, Oakland, Maryland. There’s David Hall, he came over and spent some time with us with Barbara and Peggy. This was in Dunbar. Withers built a little house for us up in the east end of Dunbar. We were living there when your granddaddy got a job in Cleveland. I was teaching in Dunbar at that time. I taught 2 years there. Look at Peggy, look at that frown. Barbara always dominated, and Peggy resented it. You could see it. Becky, Kelly’s daughter, has that face, always up to something or thinking about it. Your granddaddy was great for taking the girls on trips. This is the dining room on Walther Boulevard in Baltimore. It’s definitely Barbara’s birthday cake. Look at that face on Peggy again, Barbara was bossing her around. They were 17 months apart. When Peggy was 5 months old, I heard her crying. I went out in the bedroom, and Barbara was on a stool from the bathroom. The stool was a disgrace if you know the history of it. I won’t change the cupboard because your grandfather stood on it and painted and there’s painting drips all over it. So it’s a memorial to your granddaddy. So Barbara stood on that stool with her foot through the slats kicking the baby in the stomach. From the time Peggy was born, Barbara resented her. She did everything she could to put her down. As I said about my brother, I was careful to see that he never got his head above water. Kids are like that.

This man is Arthur Yates. He lived in Grafton, WV, and he was about the only member of my father’s family that my mother would have anything to do. She felt the Fords were dirt. But he was the president of the bank in Grafton. Arthur Yates always

came to see us. His mother was Mary and she had been very nasty to my mother. My mother was a school teacher which was way above Aunt Mary. Aunt Mary didn’t rank.

Part 3I went back to teaching… well I taught 2 years at Dunbar High School when Barbara and Peggy were tiny. I had taught 2 years at Nitro high school before I was married. Even before that, I had taught a year between my junior and seniors years of college at Chelyan which in on the Kanawha river. So I had 5 years of teaching experience when I went to Brecksville to teach.

Barbara’s husband gave her this album. He had diabetes. Barbara had it too when she died. I didn’t know. Everybody was sworn to secrecy; I wasn’t supposed to know. That’s Barbara and the boy she went to senior prom with. His name was Mackenzie and was a football player. That’s Dabney and Dell Rimley who lived across the street from us on Taylor road. This was taken in Delaware, Ohio where our friends the Ditricks lived. That’s another of Barbara’s boyfriends. She had lots of them. When she married Bill Glover they were in camps different places.

This man is now the principal of the high school in North Royalton. He was one of Barbara’s boyfriends. This is Dusty Miller, your Aunt Janet’s son. (Reading a caption) “Barbara has been pledged to Kappa Delta at to Bowling Green University”. I didn’t remember that pledged a sorority. She went for one year, and she wanted your granddaddy to advance her the money for the next year, which he wouldn’t do. He was afraid that if spent money on the girls, he wouldn’t have it for Philip. Of course when the time came, he didn’t have it for Philip anyway. He got most of his from scholarships and loans and help from his mother – who was teaching at that time. There’s your granddaddy again, doesn’t that look typical? Long suffering!

Jim had been married before. He married some woman who had a bunch of children. She wouldn’t let him have anything to do with them, and they were divorced. Jim didn’t have any children of his own, but he was a wonderful father to the two girls, Barbara’s 2 adopted daughters. They were with me for 6 months. Barbara was working in Waterville, Maine. They weren’t very nice to her. They wanted to put her in major works, but you had to go all the way downtown for it. So it was just out of the question. Barbara got fed up with the place up there, and Jim just retired from the air force; he had a pension. She wanted to come down here and get a house and build a little addition to it – for me, with my own quarters. So that they wouldn’t be in my way, I wouldn’t be in theirs, but I would eat with them. Jim was a pretty good cook. They lived for 6 months with me, upstairs. He didn’t get a job; he had to have another job. He didn’t have his professional certification in plumbing. He’s a plumber. He’s very good, but he wasn’t certified. He’d been a plumber in the Air force, and you didn’t have to be certified. Jim is a French Canadian, and he had a bit of difficulty with English. Now he speaks very well, but his phraseology and his arrangement of sentences was a little off. I had French in college so I understood him. So he could get temporary jobs, but since he wasn’t certified, they didn’t pay him very much and they’d let him go. They went out to Geauga County which is east of here. Ashtabula is on the lake; it’s in Ashtabula County and Geauga County is next one down. If you look at the map you’ll see Lake Erie is this way. Now the wind comes across from Detroit and hits the high ground at the other end of the lake. They have an awful lot of bad weather in Geauga County and Ashtabula County. While I won’t get any snow, they’ll get a foot. They were wanting to buy this house. Barbara just loved it. They lived in it for several years. Barbara was so happy there. It was a nice little house, plenty of room. The kids could come; plenty of room for everybody. Jim has told me that when they moved in, she stretched out her arms and said, “My house, my house”. When she died, she’d had a couple of heart attacks up in Maine. I didn’t know she had diabetes. She weighed 245 pounds. That would lead to the diabetes. They were watching television and she decided that she’d go and lie down, and she died. Bill was staying with her, and he came home from work and went in to see her and she had died. Jim was watching television, but there was nothing wrong with that. Now he lives up in a place called Thompson. Philip and Liz and I went out there one time this summer, and that’s when he gave me this photo album. Now Douglas, what do you do?Douglas: I’m with Marriot. I’m a construction coordinator for their Roy Roger’s food chain. I handle construction projects in different phases in the Washington/Baltimore area. I do quality control and hire the contractors.Ganny: Oh, that’s pretty good! That’s wonderful! Oh your granddaddy would be just thrilled to death. Philip of course was born a lawyer and this kid (Douglas) cut his teeth on nuts and bolts in the basement (in the house on Taylor Rd). Your granddaddy told me, you give him $2,500, and he was hoping he’d go to an engineering school. Of course you didn’t, but that’s all right too. What good did it do him? He never got a job like you’ve got. We were married during the depression, in 1930. From then on until we came to live in Cleveland in 1937 and then back in 1944, it was 1944 before we even got our feet on the ground. Douglas: During WWII, did he (granddaddy) work at the GE plant?Ganny: No that’s was when he was in Baltimore and he worked for Martin Marietta.

Part 4Douglas: Oh, so that’s why he didn’t have to serve did not have to serve because he worked at the plant? Ganny: Not only that, but he (referring to her husband, Philip A. Saunders, sr.) had 4 kids. He was worried about it. He said, “Would you feel better if I were in the army?” I guess he thought that maybe I wasn’t proud of him. I said, “If they called you up, I would take all 4 of my children and walk down there and tell them they were crazy.” That’s one of the reasons that he took the job. One of the things that he did was that he designed the bomb bay door of the B-52, and he had several patents with General

Electric. In the 152nd street division, the base works, he had a lot to do with the little screw on the end of the bulbs. He was a full-fledged engineer. He had graduated from engineering college… university, West Virginia. I went to West Virginia as well. I graduated in 1929. I should have graduated in 1928, but I took a year out from school between my junior and senior year.Douglas: You didn’t have to graduate to teach then?Ganny: Not if your father is state superintendent of schools! He had pull; unfortunately there were people in Chelyan who didn’t think much of that. I had enough credits. Then I got my masters in 1932. We were married in 1930. I had Barbara and Peggy in quick succession. Your granddaddy worked for DuPont at the other side of Charleston. All of the other engineers were from MIT and places like that, and he felt very much inferior. Not too bad, but he had taken quite a beaten during the depression. It was awful hard on young fellas. Here they were, qualified and couldn’t get jobs. He was selling airplane tickets down at the county fair. Anything he could get to do, worked with his brother, Withers, except Withers was a contractor. See the Saunders’ attitude was “make money”. None of them were graduated from college. He’s the only one who did. Well you see, in order to marry me, he had to get be a college graduated. I wasn’t about to settle for less. For one thing, I was going to have a college degree, and it would have been very difficult for him. He did all kinds of things to save his money. Besides which, Daddy Rob, that’s his father, was impressed with the fact that he was about to marry George M. Ford’s daughter. The old man liked me. So he gave your granddaddy $10,000 so he could go to college. That was a lot of money. It cost us $900 a year to go to university. When we came out of college, me with a master’s degree and pregnant, and him with his degree in engineering. He had a job with DuPont, but it didn’t work out, so he left. I showed a picture of the house that his brother built for us. I was teaching in Dunbar. So, he went up to Cleveland and went everywhere in this town looking for a job. Because he was a machinist, he got a job finally with General Electric, at the base works downstairs in the machine shop. He didn’t come then. After a few years he got a job with Martin Marietta (she is mistaken, it was in fact, Glenn L. Martin) as an engineer. So then when he came back to Cleveland, to GE, he came back as an engineer. He wasn’t an easy man to get along with. He made a lot of enemies among the other men. The Saunders’ had idea that they were better than the ordinary bear. The Fords think that too, only for different reasons. We were intellectuals and they were people who made money. They all had beautiful homes. Douglas: What was your master’s in?Ganny: English. He knew I was Phi Beta Kappa. My mother (Annie Linn-Ford) told me that the reason that I was Phi Beta Kappa was because they wanted to give it to Poppa (George M. Ford), but he drank so much they … the men who knew him went to school with him and loved him. They loved him. He was a brilliant man, but he would go off on these binges. But he state superintendent in for 2 terms, 8 years! In spite of that! I was laughing to myself last night, about my master’s degree, my orals. I was pregnant. Those men were all granddaddies. They weren’t going to turn me down. They wanted somebody from the English department to get a graduate degree that year! I wasn’t fooled; I knew. I did not shine, but they all loved me so they gave me my English degree. I never really was a scholar. When I made Phi Beta Kappa, there were 19 of us in the group. The captain of the football team, whose brother was a very famous as a football player for the coast guard academy, he was #18, I was #19. I wasn’t such a dummy, but I didn’t realize that I had friends. There was a man in the French department, and I had been in charge of a dance up at Willard’s hall. I saw to it that the chaperones were nicely seated. I saw to it that they were served refreshments and so forth. They were just amazed; nobody had ever treated them that way before! I would have been brought up to be a lady; to behave like a gentlewoman, and naturally I would do that. I would never even think twice about it. So that had a lot to do with it, my courtesy to them. You never know.

Part 5Ganny: I was a little bit embarrassed because I knew I was going to have a make pit stop. I didn’t know how to handle it with an older man like that. I don’t remember what happened, but I just know we stopped to get something to eat, and that took care of it. I thought it was pretty nice of him, to be willing to ride as passenger with ME driving. McLaughlin, he had a daughter named Annie Laurie. We were brought up to believe that if you had Scottish blood you were better than anybody else. You’ve got to have something to be proud of. We never had any money, so we were given that. Most immigrants when they come to this country, they do the very best they can with their kids. I don’t know when my grandmother and grandfather (David & Margaret Linn) came to America from Scotland. My mother (Annie Laurie Linn) was the first American born child in the family. They came to America just before the civil war. They came and landed in Nova Scotia. They only stayed in Canada for a year or two. My grandfather (David Linn) got a job as a railroad engineer. He went west to Chicago. My grandmother (Margaret Linn) was a highlander. This land was SO flat. She was homesick for the mountains. So he got a job as a railroad engineer in Baltimore. He went from Cumberland to Baltimore as an engineer on the B&O. Maryland is a grand mountainous state, and my mother was born in western Maryland, in Lonaconing. It’s a small place along a railroad track I think. Then there were 2 other girls born. They had a son in Scotland who died of croup when he was 3 years old. So when they came to Maryland, they had Margaret and Jennie. I think that most of those people do head to Canada first because it was part of Great Britain. My mother (Annie Laurie Linn) taught school a one room country school when she was 15 years old. The first day she whipped every kid in the school and she never had to lift her hand again. Her very presence... Douglas: You have her presence.

Ganny: I think I must have because I didn’t have any trouble with the kids.Douglas: You can look at her tell that she’s self-confident, well statured. That’s the way you come across when you’re standing there, especially when you had just a couple more pounds on you.Ganny: No, 10 or 15 or 20. When I was teaching at Brecksville, there were a couple of boys who were thrown out of Catholic schools because they were so much trouble. They put both of them in my homeroom. One of them gave me a lot of sass one morning. I don’t remember what it was that he said, but it was very disrespectful. I had to laugh at myself; I rose up on my hind legs, and I pointed at the door, and I said, “OUT!” Now, I didn’t know if he was going to go or not. He didn’t last in my homeroom for very long. They had an arrangement at Brecksville where they had a thing on the wall next to the door, and the teacher could signal the main office that she was having trouble with incorrigible kids. They would send somebody to take care of the situation. It wasn’t that you couldn’t handle them; it was that some of those kids could be difficult. Anyway, I was wondering how I could get over to that when the kid didn’t move, but he packed up and left. I just stood there and pointed to the door the whole time. Another thing that tickled me too; I had study hall and there was a boy in the study hall. He was a little rascal, I stopped by him and I said, “You remind me of my grandson, Billy.” He laughed like it was supposed to be a joke. Of course, I had a reputation. The kids thought I was funny. He put his hand up in the air and said, “Can I go back to talking to Danny for 5 minutes?” I said, “All right.” You see, if you know how to give a little, then when you won’t give, they know the difference. So he went back to talking to him, and 5 minutes later I said, “5 minutes is up”. Of course he didn’t want to move, Danny says, “You go back where you belong. Don’t give Mrs. Saunders any trouble.” That’s why I had such good discipline. I had the kids on my side. They were going to see to it that I didn’t have any trouble with anybody. Another thing that I did when I was teaching, I never made the kids sit in alphabetical order. That is the stupidest thing anybody ever did. They came in the first day, and I didn’t say anything about where they sit. The next day when they came in I’d say, “Now sit anyplace you want to, and they did. Then I said; “Now THAT’s where you’re going to sit the rest of the year. I don’t like alphabetical seating, and I don’t think you do either, but I don’t intend to put up with any nonsense. If you’re happy in that location, that’s fine.” Then I’d make a seating chart. It didn’t make any difference to me where they sat. It didn’t have to be alphabetical. Any substitute just had to look at the seating chart. I used a lot of humor, and I think that helped because the relaxed. I said, you take a 14 year old boy or 15 year old boy and you put him sitting down behind or in front of a 14 year old or 15 year old girl. He’s not very comfortable. He’s self-conscious and uneasy. His hormones haven’t advanced as far as hers have. He is really not very comfortable, not underneath. So they collected in the back corner of the room. Someone said, “Won’t you have trouble with them?” I said, “No, they’re happy back there. They don’t have to prove anything. They’re mutually protected. ” It worked. I had a reputation of being a fair teacher. I loved them. I loved them. I cared about them. This one boy was the captain of the football team. He was very unhappy, I could tell from his face, very bright, made As. I stopped beside his desk one day and said, “I wish you would come and talk to me.” He said, “WHEN!?” I said, “I’ll be here this afternoon if you’d like to come.” He said, “I’ll be there.” He came and spilled everything that was bothering him. There was a situation in the athletics that he thought was very unfair, not to him but to somebody else. He had to get that off his chest. I felt very privileged that he would trust me to that extent. I preferred boys. That’s because I’ve had so few of them I guess. I like girls. I told the kids very frankly that I prefer boys. I said, “I’m a girl so I know all about girls. There’s no mystery. I have 3 daughters and 1 son. That 1 son is the one that interests me. The boys interest me the same way my son does. I won’t be unfair. I don’t dislike girls, but I’m more interested in boys. The kids laughed because not very many women teachers like boys. They’re afraid of them. They were unsure of themselves in handling boys. I didn’t have any trouble, except that one time when I said, “Out!”Douglas: Did you ever get involved with any of your female students. I don’t remember you ever telling me a story about girls.Ganny: I had some very good relationships. I didn’t have any trouble with anybody. I had the school paper. I had the journalism class. After they had taken the journalism class, they could be on the staff. We had a wonderful relationship. I suspect that comes as close. I don’t have any special memories about girls. I do have one. It’s a question of, the kid had troubles. That’s where I could help. I knew a lot of the kids who were in trouble. This girl I knew was very unhappy. Her mother and little brother had drowned in a boating accident. Her father was a politician in Cleveland. He married again a woman who had children. That didn’t work out to well so they were divorced. He married a third time and that woman is a very nice person. I know her; I’ve known her since we came back up here. Cindy Mall, her name was. She came to me one day; she was going with some boy and she said her mother and dad were a little bit concerned about it. Well she had no mother! So she came to me. Well something happened before that, she said something in class one day, “Oh, you’re just trying to do that with everybody.” I said, “No, I’m concerned with you, Cindy, as a person.” So that gave her leave to come and talk to me. I’ve always felt that I didn’t handle it well because she quit going with this boy. I didn’t tell her to quit going with him but I said, “There have been 2 or 3 prominent girls in high school who have gotten pregnant. I know what your mother and father are worrying about. This boy is just fine, but these affairs can get to be pretty intense. I don’t want to see this happen to you.” Well anyone who had been through this much emotional trauma as she had would cling to anybody who was good to them. He’s never forgiven me to this day. One boy who was in one of my classes…

Part 6

Ganny: …classes, after he had been out of high school for 10 years, he called me up one time. He was another one of these kids who I had gotten out of trouble. He called me up and he was in Grand Rapids. He was finishing up his PhD. He had his degree and was a congregational minister. He was taking his PhD. He went to Durham, England, the University of Durham. I never ever heard of it before, but it’s up close to the Scottish border. He was there for 3 years, and he took a PhD there, and wrote to me the whole time and sent me materials. He’s back in this country now. I didn’t answer his last letter, but he’s in Detroit. He’s a pastor of a Church of Christ. I thought it was a little much. I want him to remember me and like me and all that, but I don’t want it to be too intense. I don’t think it’s healthy. I really don’t. I’ve had several very close relationships, but nobody takes it too seriously. He was just going overboard. That’s what disturbed me about it. You know what surprises me? Is how much I sound like a West Virginian, the spacing and everything, it’s just quite surprising to me. Douglas: One thing I found really interesting in that tape was you go a lot of detail about the early years and through college and then some of the early life, your early married life up through the war, and then when you move to Cleveland nothing happens, with the except you talk a little bit about going to school, and then you retire. You don’t talk at all about your married life. Is that because of the unhappy portions of that? Ganny: Some things you just skip over. I wasn’t unhappy in a sense, and yet life was very difficult, and it’s awfully hard to talk about. Your grandfather was a fine man in lots of ways, but as I said before, we think that he was manic depressive. Knowing your mother (Peggy) you can understand why, he was difficult. They laid him off at GE, well they were having reorganization, the people up at Menlo Park. He wasn’t picked out. From then on (1958) until he died in 1970, 12 years. The last 10 years of his life he didn’t’ drink. He almost died at one point, and this doctor who was taking care of him, a Jewish doctor. Because of that doctor, we pulled him through. I called the doctor one morning, and I said he’s very bad, and he said well he’d better come to the hospital. Your grandfather insisted upon taking a bath before he went. I called school, and said I can’t come. So I got him up to the hospital, Suburban Community hospital, on Lawrenceville Road, way out, south of Chagrin Boulevard. They gave him a bottle. He was still drinking hard at that time, and they gave him a bottle of whiskey. Evidently they knew something else as well. He said it was the worst rotgut that he had ever tasted in his life. Well when he came home from the hospital that time, well then he quit drinking. He did it on his own with the doctor’s help. He did a lot of work around the house. He’d do a lot of remodeling, the living room used to have double doors into the dining room; all that was closed off. He made a bedroom and a bathroom there on the first floor for himself, did a lot of things, took care of the yard, and I went ahead and taught. He made an apartment on the 2nd floor. So he had income from the apartment on the 2nd floor and the apartment on the 3rd floor. Douglas: He ended up getting early retirement or something didn’t he, from GE? Ganny: I don’t remember. It seems to me that he got $3,000 worth of pension or something. That’s what it amounted to. They didn’t call that in those days. The supplemental income that he got from the apartments kept me from supporting him.Douglas: How did you feel about having your house chopped up?Ganny: I didn’t care. See, I’m not house minded. I’m not money minded. The Saunders’ work. I suppose I got much less because of that, rebelling against it. They were always telling me what to do, and it all had to do the way they did things in the state of Virginia. I told him at the time, “Now I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll buy the food and I’ll pay for the telephone because I like to call. You take care of everything else.” See, we had already paid for the house. There was no mortgage.Douglas: I remember mom telling me at some point that that was a real bone of contention back when you first bought the house because he wanted to pay it off really quick.Ganny: I don’t remember a bone of contention. There were probably some discussions, but it was only $2,500 owing on it. I think about it now, and I realize that I didn’t give him credit for what he was doing in holding down expenses. We never had 2 pennies to rub together. If I took the kids with me over into the center of Hamilton, where the shopping centers were, I couldn’t even buy them a 10 cent toy at the 10 cent store; the same thing with clothes, everything. But when we came to Cleveland and bought that house, we had $6,000. He sent me over to talk to Daddy Rob to get the other $3,500 to pay for the house. So he was right, but he didn’t have my sympathy because I wanted to live! It was hard for me to accept. When I started teaching, he wanted me to put my money in his bank account, but I wouldn’t do it. He paid for all the heat, light and everything like that, anything that had to be done around the house. I paid for, I bought that couch is one thing, things of that sort, I bought. I paid the telephone, and I bought the food. So I felt that I was doing my share, and the rest of it I could do as I pleased with. They had a teacher’s credit union, and I belonged to that. I paid for my car. $1,500 I think is what we paid for that; it was a second hand car. I turned it in and bought a Ford. I had that a couple of years, and then I bought the Rambler. That’s what I loved.Douglas: Didn’t it have a reserve tank? It seems to me it didn’t have a gas gauge, it had a reserve tank instead. I remember you taking me to school in that when I was the 3rd grade. I was staying with you after I got out of the hospital after the (car) wreck. You’d take me to school in it, down all those back roads, that back way you had down by the creek and everything on the way to Brecksville from East Cleveland. I remember that.Ganny: You came to live with us from the time you were born. You lived with me until you were 4, until Peg married Joe. Ed always came to see you, even when you were little. He lived over on 120th.

Part 7He was a faithful father, and support was regular too, child support. Your mother worked in the library, saved her money, then went to West Virginia University for a year, came back to Cleveland worked up at General Electric. I remember picking her up at ? Park, saved her money, and then she went down to Kent (State University) for a year. That’s where she met what’s his name, Joe (Garner).Douglas: I remember you taking me to visit her somewhere in a dorm room.Ganny: Yeah, that was Kent.Douglas: I think that’s when she gave me Morgan, the dog with the squeaky nose. I think that was one of her pet animals.Ganny: The thing about Ed. We had you in a nursery school. Do you remember the nursery school at all?Douglas: I remember stories about it. The first nursery school I remember is the one in Akron, so I would have been about 5.Ganny: You were 3. It was in Cleveland Heights up at the corner of ? boulevard and Lee Road. They had some kind of celebration or something, and I know Ed came. We didn’t get pictures, but I remember his kneeling beside you, and I thought it was awfully good that he came. He wanted to establish himself with those people as your father, which I thought was good. But he and Peggy never would have made it. Well there’s more than one reason, now that we know she’s manic depressive, it makes a lot of sense! But old man Dillehear was a good old man. I knew them, Ed’s mother and father both. If Ed paid child support, the old man saw that he had the money to do it with. He was a retired railroad engineer I think. Douglas: I was told somewhere along the line that the reason he finally gave me up to Joe (Garner) for adoption was because he was terminally behind on child support. Ganny: Well, maybe so. He (Ed Dillehear, Doug’s biological father) didn’t want to do it, of course (give Doug up for adoption). I’m sorry because Joe was never a favorite of mine. I never did like him, and that didn’t help matters any of course. There were so many things that he did. We were at the dinner table one time. The dining room was still the dining room then, and you had trouble with your bladder, and he ORDERED you upstairs by yourself. You had to go by yourself and change your clothes. You couldn’t have been more than 4 years old. He was the big man ordering you around. Not only that, but I remember place over the garage or shed where you lived east of Cleveland. Do you remember that? There was a building in the back of the house. I know that Joe tried to be a “disciplinarian”. He didn’t have any understanding or perception or sympathy for people. I remember you sitting at your desk. I had to be careful not to undermine Joe’s authority because he was still in charge. I remember the time I came out to get your mother and all of you. You were in high school by that time, and you lived in Painesville. Your mother had called me up, and she was in utter distress, and I said, “I’ll be there.” I went out and got her and the kids. You thought maybe you should stay with Joe, and we persuaded you to come on with us. That was a year or so before your grandfather died. They split up soon after that for the final time. Joe came strutting up, he had on a night shirt or something like that, and he came out to the top of the steps on that split level. If he wasn’t the most ridiculous looking specimen that I have ever seen! I just pushed you all out into the car, and we went back to Taylor Road. He was a good person, but he’d been brought up with the wrong ideas. He had a high IQ. Kelly’s top notch; she’s a great girl. Mark’s (her husband) got his feet on the ground, and he loves Kelly, which is important, extremely important. She’s got a beautiful family. I’ve got her portrait here, if you want to read it. Douglas: Who did we used to go visit on Heisely Road, was it the Stones?Ganny: Yes. Oh! I was talking to Marian (Mrs. Stone) today. I was supposed to be sure to tell you that I had talked to her. I told her that you all were coming. I said, “Don’t I remember Doug come galloping down to your house one day?” Do you remember?Douglas: Shortly after we moved there, I went over to their house and reintroduced myself and said “Hi, do you remember me?” They were nice people. Ganny: Well she remembered you perfectly. The spring after your grandfather died, I went down to Atlanta for spring vacation for week, and they were just wonderful. We had known them in Cleveland. He was with that engineering firm that was there at office at the Presbyterian Church. Marian and I, ever since, once a month. One month she calls me, the next month I call her. I said today, “Marian, we’ll never give up on each other.” And she says, “No, never.” Ralph (Stone, Marian’s husband) has Alzheimer’s. They’re in an Alzheimer’s enclave down there. They have their own quarters. I always ask about it. She tells me about it. Certain things she has to do for him. She was telling me about it today. He swims! He goes swimming! It’s MOST amazing. Now she has to bathe him, she shaves him. He can’t dress himself because he can’t figure out what thing goes on first. It takes him about half an hour to go to bed. He takes everything off and puts it in a certain place.

I was engaged to Dana Farnsworth when I was in college. He went on to an illustrious career, but he died of Alzheimer’s several years ago. Now he was only 2 years older than I. (Phone rings) Answer that for me. Douglas: “Hello? Saunders.” They hung up. Ganny: Well I got a call at 1oclock this morning. It was somebody, I said, you’ve got the wrong number!” I was furious! It’s probably the same guy who called last night. (Phone rings again). I’ll answer it. “Hello? Look! You’ve got the wrong number!”

Part 8Ganny: Another thing too, people live up to their upbringing. Now in my husband’s family, the males didn’t lift a finger around the house, and the women didn’t want them to! The women ruled the house. Men went outdoors and got waited on when then

got home. My family wasn’t too different. I can’t imagine my father ever lifting a finger to do a dish or anything of that sort. It wasn’t that he was too macho. It was just the generation. That’s the way it was in those days. It was a little difficult for Phil to face that I needed help sometimes. I had a 12 room house that I took care of all by myself, 4 kids, and he came home for lunch. I worked all the time, morning, noon, and night. There wasn’t an inch of that house that I hadn’t washed down or time or another: 3rd floor, kitchen, everything.

I wanted to talk a little bit more about Taylor Road. It was 27 years we were in that house, and I could have skipped over it all, all that pain. It wasn’t intentional because I was trying to get important stuff on before I got to the end of the day. Douglas: What it was like when you started school? You had just turned 6 and you were in the 2nd half of the 1st grade. What was your school like?Ganny: It was a regular school, 2 story, and red brick. We had all the grades. Welch was an old town; it wasn’t just a coal camp. It was a town. The first automobile I ever saw was in Welsh. My father had a very good friend whose last name was Payne. They were wealthy people, and Burness Payne and I played together a lot. My mother wasn’t a social climber, but we didn’t have anything to do with people who were on a lower scale, except for my sister Jemima. My mother and Margaret always looked down on Jemima because she always picked up lower class people. As far as I’m concerned there are no lower class people, just people who haven’t had the opportunities that I’ve had. That’s the difference. You see so many people from families that haven’t opportunities, and a genius will come out of the middle of them, especially in West Virginia. Look at George Hall, the Fords weren’t wonderful, except of course they had to get some good genes or none of us would have been so smart, and the Halls weren’t anything. And yet George went through University, was Phi Beta Kappa, went to Harvard Law School, and was the senior vice president of a big New York firm.

When my brother, Frederick Ford died, his best friend was a Jewish man. I can’t remember his name. He delivered the eulogy at Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia. The church George Washington went to. What he said was, “Who would’ve thought that a little boy from a small town in West Virginia and a Jew from the sidewalks of New York would have come to Washington and been best friends and political colleagues. Frederick had a pipeline to the whole Jewish community because of his friendship with this man. Of course it was mutual. I talked to the man after the funeral and I said, “You know, my son married a Jewish girl.” He said, “Don’t expect us to sympathize; our son married a Catholic girl.” He gave us a copy of the eulogy. It really tells something about Frederick.

I remember about school that I was very indignant with the teacher. I was in 2nd grade. She said I had to stay in at noon and finish some work, and then she went off to lunch and left me there all by myself. Well I was infuriated. I gathered up all my books and went home. I lived just down the street. I told my mother, “I’m not going back to that place anymore.” It was just before we moved to Charleston, so I didn’t have to go back! I got away with it! Mother sympathized; she thought it was perfectly heartless of the women to go off and leave me sitting there by myself. When I got to Charleston (West Virginia) it was a different proposition. It was a much bigger town, but the school wasn’t very much different. It looked a lot alike, red brink, playgrounds all around. My teacher was a Miss Erna Young. She was short, plump, and I didn’t like her much better than I like the other one. I graduated from grade school and went over to a junior high school, Central Junior High. I was there about a year and a half when Poppa came back from France. Mother was teaching out on the Sitindel Road, in a 2 room consolidated school. She had started teaching out there before Poppa got back. So we went out there and lived in a palace not too different from this. Poppa took the principalship of the high school in Dunbar, and as soon as Momma’s school was out, we moved to Dunbar. I never went to a big city high school at all. I always had good teachers; it wasn’t a question of that. It was back in the day where nobody taught school except old maids. Erna Young had been engaged to a man who later became governor of West Virginia. It was joke in our family that she was an impossible person. I was about 12 when we moved to Dunbar. Poppa came back from the war in 1918. We moved to Dunbar in 1919. I must have been about 12. There wasn’t any high school there. My mother who had taught out in Union District, that’s where her school was. The counties were divided into districts in those days. The farmers out there had a lot of respect for her. She wanted to start a high school in Dunbar, and call it the Union District High School, and bus the kids down to the high school. Kids she’d taught out in the country. She had so much influence with their parents. That’s how we started the Union District High School in Dunbar. I went through 4 years there. It was in a 2nd story place, over top of a bank. We took Chemistry. We really had pretty a good faculty. I had just all the courses I needed, and I know that we had this man who taught Chemistry who was quite capable. He did a very good job of teaching us Chemistry. When I went to University, I took Chemistry because I’d already had a high school course in it; it was simple. I met your granddaddy when I was 15. We lived in Dunbar. The Saunders’ had lived up above Charleston in a place called Montgomery. They’d actually lived on a riverbank. I could tell you stories about your grandfather rowing the ferry across the Kanawha River. He rode the ferry when he was just a little boy. His older brothers were in the army in France. The steamboat would come up the river, and he’d just keep right ahead of it. The steamboat would edge up on him. Also, the railroad track ran through there, and he’d ride his bicycle along and hold on to the sides of the cars. Both companies complained to his father, “Please stop your little boy from harassing us”. He was a devil. He and a little colored boy went up on the hill. Each one had a shotgun. They shot at each other from behind trees – with real shotguns. Your granddaddy had a couple of shotgun pellets stuck in his lower lip or on the side of his nose. It was a wonder it didn’t blow his head off. He was the devil. But you see he was the youngest one in the family, and his brothers teased him and

tormented him. When his brother, Withers, came back from overseas, had his gun around, then it went missing. They questioned Phil about it. Phil had taken it down to the river for target practice. He was just that kind of a kid. I met him when I was 15, and that was it. He was 18; he was 3 years older than I. His family had done something for him. They had sent him down to Charleston for high school. So that he got a good high school education. None of his brothers got past the 8 th grade. Well, they lived up in London, 2 miles south of Montgomery on the river bank.

Daddy Rob made his money in real estate. He would buy and sell. He bought land all up and down the Kanawha Valley. When he died he was…

Part 9…quite a wealthy man. As I told you, he gave your grandfather $10,000. He felt it was part of what was coming to him from his grandmother, who had already died. I thought it was very fair of him to do that. We went together through high school. He went to Charleston high school; he didn’t graduate from Dunbar. I graduated from Dunbar the same year. Mother bought a house over on West Virginia Avenue. It was just being put up. Poppa was in the state department of education by that time. A friend of his was a contractor and had built the house. We lived there all the time I was in high school.

I did a lot of 4H club work. I went 2 summers to Jackson’s Mills. It was a state camp for the 4H club. Of course, my father, being a prominent man, I got perks. It always annoyed me. When I went to University, I resented it. The fact that if I had to give them anything, it was because of my father: my Phi Beta Kappa and my master’s. I could never be sure if it was on my own or because of my father. It didn’t mean anything if it was because of my father, that why I made fun of them (the awards).

Then I went with a 4H group to Springfield, Massachusetts to a national camp. Polly Johnson was on that trip. I have a picture of the whole group of us; she was on that trip. She and I entered University late. They had us take intelligence tests, Polly and me. I never went back for the results, but she did. She came back and told me that they thought she was Linn Ford and they told her they expected her to make straight A’s. She said, “Oh, I’m not Linn Ford.” I started in the home-ec school because I had been so involved with the 4H. I thought I was going to be a home demonstration aide. They had a woman in every county who headed up the women’s clubs – agriculture and so forth. One year in home-ec was enough for me. I didn’t belong there; I knew it. I transferred over to the ed school and majored in English because I didn’t have anything else to do. It was my junior before I got a course in botany, and I said, “Where has this been all my life? I should been a scientist. I shouldn’t have majored in English.” I really was interested in it. My mother had been an English teacher so I thought that’s what I had to do. Well Dabney followed the same course at Smith. When she was a junior, the Physics and Chemistry department wanted her to change her major. Take a major in science, but she was already too far along in English. You can understand why I moved to the top of the ridge, because that’s what I loved (plants and trees). I went ahead and graduated in English. That’s why my master’s oral was such a farce, and I knew it because I couldn’t remember poems they ask you about. The poems didn’t have any impression on me.

Now my sister Margaret, she’s a very bright woman. She should have been at the University instead of me. We had no money. After I went to University, well Dunbar was just a stopping off place, in my mind. Mother continued to teach there. They built the new high school. Oh that woman, I’ll tell you, she moved mountains. So they had a bond issue and passed it and built a new high school in Dunbar. The high school that I had gone to in the 2nd floor of the bank building was qualified as a first class high school on the strength of the new building. So I didn’t have to take any exams, otherwise I would have had an examination before I could enter the university. Mother managed the whole thing and saw to it that I had all the courses that I need. I had 2 years of French, 2 years of Latin, Algebra, and Geometry. There were 14 in my graduating class. This was first class that ever graduated from that high school. Part of the kids were from the surrounding area. They’d come in on the bus. If it hadn’t been for mother, I don’t know what would have happened because Poppa wasn’t involved in that. He was running the state school. I graduated in 1924. It was after that that they had the big crash on Wall Street. So when I went to University, I was passed over by the sorority. I was going to make it on my own up there and did. I always appreciated the fact that they elected me president of Delta Gamma after having been in the sorority only 2 months and then out of school for a year. They did it because I was myself. Well partly because I was a name that would attract good people, but I was going to be running that place. It was worth it to me because I felt that I had gotten that on my own. We’re always elected; members of my family, Phil’s 3 girls, all 3 of them have been President of the youth group at the Temple. Everywhere I go, I get elected President. Everybody in my family gets elected to important jobs. My brother, Frederick Ford, was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). It doesn’t hurt to have connections, but it isn’t very comfortable being the son or daughter of someone important. Look at FDR’s children and young Ron Reagan. I feel sorry for those kids because I know what it is. You don’t get any credit for anything you do; “it’s because of your father”, even when it’s deserved. That’s what I said I think about those men on the examining committee. They knew me. I had had classes with every one of them. They had evaluated me already. It wasn’t a question of an oral exam. That wasn’t what I passed. I had passed with them long before. When they were considering me for Phi Beta Kappa, I knew a young man who was a member. He told me that someone raised a question, “Well, Linn Ford’s grades aren’t very good.” My general average was 86, never a 90. Dr. Johnson who was head of the English department said, “Yes, but Linn Ford can think.” So that why I made Phi Beta Kappa. So I felt that mother was a little mean when she said that it was because of my father. Dr. Johnson said I could think. That was because I had outlined a course which I thought should be followed in preparing teachers for junior

high and high school. I had had one year of teaching at Chelyan, and I didn’t know anything about teaching. So I stumbled through it. I realized as a result of my experience how I should have been trained. Dr. Johnson was really impressed. He said, “Is this what the education department puts out?” I said, “No, that’s my own idea. I taught school for a year, and I realized what I needed.” He was very much impressed.After I went to University, I had been going with Phil all through high school, he went to Chicago. He had a brother living in Whiting, Indiana, outside Chicago. He went to a technical college for a year or so. I don’t remember how long now because I was so much more involved with my own affairs. He got some credits there. Then he went to Marshall College for a couple of years. When he came to the University when I was there, he didn’t have a full 4 years to go. He got credit for his machinist ability. He got college credits for that, because he was a machinist. So he didn’t have to take a lot of courses he might otherwise have taken. So he got through engineering school all right. I was president of Delta Gamma, and his fraternity was right over on the next street. He had kudos because he was pinned; as soon as he got initiated, he brought his pin over and put in on me. After the first meeting when I was 15, I never cared anything about anybody else. I was engaged to Dana Farnsworth when I was in college and Phil was in Chicago; we weren’t’ very much in touch. Poor Dana, I tell girls, “You be careful. Don’t lead a boy on. Even if you don’t mean to, because it isn’t fair to him.” I talk that way to my granddaughters. I felt guilty all my life for that fact that Dana was crazy about me, the way my shoe strings were tied, I mean ridiculous things. He was absolutely fascinated by me. Here’s another example. He came from Gilmer County; there wasn’t a foot of railroad in Gilmer County. He was brilliant. He ended up the head of the student health service at MIT and also at Harvard. What I said is true, from people who you wouldn’t expect to produce anything, still the brains are there. I felt sorry, but when Phil showed up on the scene again, it was goodbye Dana. He took it awful hard, and I understand. I’m not bragging; I’m stating facts. He was teaching outside of Morgantown in Mericksville. After this he started going with a little girl down around Parkersburg. She was a friend of Polly’s. She worked in the county’s agent place where if I’d gone on with home-ec, I would have been there. She was exactly what he needed. She adored him and made up the difference you see. He had somebody. So they were married, but somebody pointed out to me, I don’t know where they got the information, but they said that she wouldn’t marry…

Part 10Ganny: … that she wouldn’t marry him until after I was married, because I might change my mind. Of course that was ridiculous, I was never going to change my mind. Dabney and a boy she went with in high school; he was crazy about her. They said, why didn’t she like him better? She said she didn’t like the way his hair grew on the back of his neck. Girls are funny. It’s simple things like that. Of course it had to be more than that; there was no chemistry between them. There wasn’t any way I was going to marry Dana. Although when I was teaching at Chelyan, we were going to get married in May. We even had the date, 28 th of May, and Philip came back. He was in school at Marshall and he found out I was at Chelyan. He came up on the other side and brought his car over on the ferry and one look at him and that was it. Douglas: Your family didn’t mind you marrying this rascal?Ganny: Of course by that time he wasn’t a rascal. If my mother had taken a more definite stand one way or the other. She didn’t feel she get too good a deal in Poppa. She was wrong of course. She didn’t believe that romances that started in college were the best kind. So she didn’t stand up for Dana. If she had it might have made a difference with me. The Saunders’ lived right there in Dunbar. I knew Mrs. Saunders, Phil’s mother and that sort of thing. They weren’t very crazy about my marrying Phil, but there wasn’t very much they could do about it.

This is sort of intimate. Poppa, my father, was wonderful. He talked to me. We sat in chairs in the front yard the summer I was married. He was just a little bit curious, how the relationship was with Phil. He didn’t ask any questions, but he was clever enough to lead the conversation. I said, “Well you don’t need to worry” Phil was always ready to go ahead, but I said “No. There were 2 things that I wouldn’t do. That was one of them, and I wouldn’t marry him if he had an illegitimate child.” So Poppa heaved a great sigh of relief. I was brought up a certain way you see. We’d had a couple girls in high school who had gotten pregnant, and it was just the end of the world.

I married him. He had a year still left at University. I was teaching in Nitro, and he went back to University, left his car with me, and was in the engineering school. His last year in the engineering school he got money from his father, and I went back up and took my masters. We had an apartment in Morgantown and finished up his engineering and I got my MA. People didn’t work and go to school in those days. Well, Dana did. Dana worked at the cafeteria; he was a cashier and worked in the chemistry department. There were gas wells on their property in Gilmer County, and he had some money coming from that, but he didn’t have any money to throw around. He should have been Phi Beta Kappa. He was brilliant. Douglas: Why didn’t Phil end up going in the family construction business?Ganny: I don’t know. When we came out of school, it was in the midst of the depression. Withers had his construction business, but it wasn’t a question of Phil going into it. He worked for Withers, but Phil always really had to live up to me. I realized that later. Because I was what I was and who I was, he had to have felt that he had to live up to that. So finally he got at DuPont after a few months. First he went in as a machinist, and then he got in the engineering department. Then he came to Cleveland. He got a job as a machinist at General Electric. Then we left Cleveland and he went to work for x Martin as an engineer, and came

back to Cleveland as an engineer. It was terrible for the boys in those days because there wasn’t any money. The fact that you had a degree didn’t mean a blessed thing. There were no jobs. It just took all their self-confidence. If he’d gone into, and Daddy Rob suggested it before he ever even gave him the $10,000, if he’d gone in with Withers, his father would have given him money for his share of the business, and he would have made lot of money. But he wanted to be right so he had to have a cross to bear. The Saunders’ always had a hand at making money, except my husband. I made more money in my time, free and independent, that he ever did. When I sold my place on top of the ridge, I sold it for $55,000. I paid $2,000 for the land and $20,000 for the house to be put up. I had sold half of it to the Marshes. Of course I got rooked on that. I never got paid all what they owed me, but I got paid several thousand dollars. They paid me $150 a month for 2 or 3 years.

He finally came to Cleveland. I had been teaching in Dunbar 2 years. The girls were little, and I had a neighbor came and took care of them while I was at school. Withers would have taken Phil in then. That’s when Withers got the house for us; I showed you the picture. But Phil was going ahead with the engineering. Well that was very hurtful to Withers. That’s what happened; he became a GE engineer in the base works. He had several patents. He designed the bomb bay door in the B-26 (not 52). When they had the reorganization in General Electric in 1958, he was let out. But he had been ill for some time. We already knew he had diabetes, and he was drinking. He would sit at his desk over in GE and go to sleep, and he was hard to live with over there and at home, so they let him out (fired him). I remember the evening he came home, and he had to tell me. A bunch of us were in the kitchen, and he told me and I said well … see I wouldn’t make any fuss, it’s not my way. I said, “Well, that’s not too bad…

Part 11Ganny:…You’ve got some money already, and you’ve got rents from the 2nd and 3rd floor, and I’m teaching, so relax and take a vacation.” So from then on he didn’t work anymore, but he did an awful lot on the house. He did real good work too; his carpentry was excellent. He was raised in it; this was his family; he was brought up in the trade. He was taking shots at first for diabetes, and then he went on to pills, but of course his heart was affected. I didn’t know how bad, but he kept going to Dr. Fishman, who was an awfully sweet man.Douglas: All that coffee he used to drink couldn’t have been good for him. He would drink 2 Thermoses a dayGanny: Not only that but he ate anything he wanted, like Barbara. After Barbara died I found out that she had diabetes. She’d been eating everything under the sun, sugar and all. I remember the milk man was selling Christmas candy too. Phil got a bag for himself. He didn’t tell me anything about it until the bill came due. He came in and said, “Candy?” That night or early the next morning, we came down either Saturday or Sunday, I don’t remember. It was early Monday morning. I had already called school and told them I wasn’t coming in because I was going to get him back to the doctor on Monday. I had an appointment at 11:00. I got up Monday morning, and he was dead on the floor of the door into that little bathroom. This Dr. Fishman, I called him. I got up at 7:30 and I called Dr. Fishman, and he said he’d come down and make out a death certificate. So he did and then he told me, “Mrs. Saunders, his heart was almost gone anyway.” You see I hadn’t known about Barbara. I’d always been very ignorant on medical things. He said, “If he hadn’t died, he would have been a vegetable. It’s a whole lot better this way.” The last year he was in bed most of the time. He’d gotten up that morning and made oatmeal, and brought in the morning paper and got into the door of that bathroom with a cup of cocoa in his hand. I found all that when I came downstairs. I called your mother (Peggy) first thing. Barbara was living close by, so I called her and she came over, then your mother came. I called Philip and one of his friends took him to the airport and at noon he was walking up the steps. He had taken the bus. He was living in Boston. So all the kids were there. Of course Philip handled the legal end of it, the powers of attorney to my name. The house was mine, bank accounts, and all that stuff.

Your grandfather wanted to be cremated. We did have a memorial service at the Presbyterian Church. Douglas Nest, the principal of the high school and a couple of the other teachers were there, all the way from Brecksville. I appreciated that, I really did. Ron (Naumchick, husband of her daughter, Dabney) had sent a telegram and roses from Margaret. There were no other flowers because we had told everybody no flowers. I thought that was nice. It’s so easy to make judgments at a time when you’re under pressure, and then later in years I have understood more about my husband than I ever did at the time. There were so many things that he did to please me or to make life easier for me, just as a matter of course. I didn’t show the proper appreciation for them, and they were things that he did on purpose. For instance, that work counter in the kitchen, he had me stand and put my hands down where I would want the top of it, and then he built it that way. And the cabinets that he put up over the sink, they were a little bit too high for me, so he took them all down and lowered them. There were an awful lot of things like that that he did that made life a lot easier for me. If he found out that my friends had washing machines and automatic dryers, then I had them too. He didn’t know how to be personable. He did this thing, and I was supposed to understand. Of course I was just running around, and I just took it as a matter of course. It wasn’t always horrible. Because you go back through lifetime, and his whole life was programmed according to my needs and my ambitions. He went to University because of me. He took jobs that would have some prestige to them because of me. He thought I was a smart woman, and it would make him look bad if he couldn’t live up to it. Douglas: You were in a situation that you could have gotten by without him certainly financially - . Is that something that you ever considered?

Ganny: No! Never, you see to me marriage vows are forever. I would not have divorced him. Millie Wachter, friend of mine, is a social worker. Her estimate of was that children were better off with a not too satisfactory father than with no father at all. But that isn’t why I decided that. I adored the man; I cared about him, and I had dedicated myself to taking care of him, and I intended to do that. I was brought when the woman did that. Things today are too casual. People don’t REALLY commit themselves to marriage. I was 23 and he was 26. If we’d been 18 and 20 it would’ve been a different matter.

Part 12Ganny: Philip was 22 in February, and Liz was 22 in October of 1962, and they were married in July. So she was only 21 and he was just a little past 22 when they were married, and they’ve been married 25 years. They were dedicated to it. Of course, they had got themselves where they had a difference in religion. They were absolutely going to make it work. Your Uncle Philip had never gone with a girl on a steady basis. He had never had a steady girlfriend, even at Brown (University). Liz was the first girl he ever fell in love with, and it was permanent as far as he was concerned. One time when they weren’t getting along so well; I have a letter he wrote me, and he said no matter what happened that it was permanent as far as he was concerned, that he would never separate from her. Any time she packed it up or whatever; of course she’s nervous, high strung, it didn’t make any difference, he was still dedicated to Liz. So that helped a lot. Liz was expecting me to resent her, and she didn’t think why I shouldn’t. She thought I had a right to resent. But after they came back here, I said, “Now Liz, it doesn’t make any difference what you say or do, you are still ok with me. You don’t have to worry, just relax because I never will hold anything against you or quarrel with you about anything. And she and I have been very good friends ever since. Mother-in-law and daughter-in-law… well of course it’s been very, very profitable because the children love me as much as I love them. Douglas: Of course you go out of your way not to meddle. Ganny: I do that, not only that, I did that purposefully sometimes. One time I was over at Philip and Liz’s. Liz was having one of her nervous storms. She was at the bottom of the steps screaming up at the girls, and her father was there. I went out to the bottom of the steps and I said, “That’s all right Liz, I’ll take over.” She went away and left me alone. I went up the steps and said “Now that’s enough” and the girls quieted down right away. Her brother George was up there and he saw the whole thing; he was upstairs too. I never let them quarrel while I was there. If there was any quarreling, I said, “That’s enough, I’m not going to listen to that. If you don’t shut up, I’ll go home.” If they wanted me to stay, they had to get along with each other. But you see the pattern was there for them to quarrel. I always have thought a lot of Liz for letting me take over. If we hadn’t established a pretty good relationship, she would have resented that. Douglas: I’ve never met people who banter as consistently as Phil and Liz. Ganny: Well they understand each other. They are bantering. It’s mostly banter; it wasn’t serious, not around other people. Sometimes they say things in a bantering tone. You could understand that; everybody does that.Douglas: So you got married at 23. What was your wedding like?Ganny: We were married in the Baptist church in Dunbar, which was a frame building, not at all elegant. Phil had David as his best man. My sister, Margaret, was my matron of honor. One of those pictures in there shows me in a lacy dress. That was my wedding dress. I had bought that to take to national convention of Delta Gamma down in North Carolina. I couldn’t see any reason to go into a lot of white satin I would never wear again. I was married in the afternoon at 3oclock. You see, servant girls were married on Saturdays. That was their only day off. Of course we, being not in the servant class, were married at 3oclock on Tuesday afternoon. Isn’t that something? Not very many of my college friends came. A friend of Phil’s, Pete Steamberger, from Point Pleasant came up, and a girl I had taught with in Nitro. There was a sprinkling; it wasn’t a big to do. There wasn’t a reception afterwards or anything.

When drove to the Grand Canyon for our Honeymoon. We changed our clothes and took off. We went to Chicago to his brother George’s in Whiting, Indiana. I remember a trip we took in a canoe on the river. I don’t remember the name of the river. We took off from there, went into Chicago and bought whatever we thought we needed, a little round kettle that had other pans inside, like a big mess kit. Did you see it down in the basement in East Cleveland? Douglas: It sounds vaguely familiar.Ganny: There were handles that were separate, and they slid in the slots on the side of it, and a coffee pot in the middle. So we took off then. There had been a drought that summer. Two-thirds of the country was just dry as a bone. Where there had been streams, there was a little bit of green, but everything else was dead. We went to Salt Lake City. Our idea was that were going down to the north rim of the Grand Canyon, but we couldn’t go from Salt Lake west because it was a sea of rain. We got to the end of the draught, and it was just nothing but rain out there. They were bringing the buses over east from there pontoons. So we had to go down south to the top of Pike’s Peak. We drove the Ford all the way up there. I have pictures of that. Then we went down to Flagstaff, Arizona. We didn’t get to California. We were running out of money. So we headed east. We didn’t go north again. We went through Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky in the middle of the night. I don’t know how much money we had left when we got back, but it wasn’t much, a couple of dollars. It was a wonderful trip. We both got a lot out of it. I could cook. Those days they didn’t have hotels like they have now, but they did had motels. They would be little cabins. I would cook our meals, and that would help a lot on expenses. Every time we would pass something that was interesting to look at, we’d

stop. I know we stopped at a store; we needed something, supplies or something. Your grandfather was sitting out in the car waiting for me. I went in, and the man running the store had to candle the eggs. I’d never heard of candling eggs. So I went in the back room to watch him candle the eggs. That’s all they did, put them up so a candle would shine in them. Your grandfather, I was gone so long

Part 13Ganny: …Indian reservation where they made pots and stuff. It was a very barren looking place. There were some Indian women there. Then we came back, and that’s when I taught school at Nitro, and he went to University worked on his engineering.Douglas: Going to the huge house on Taylor Rd. in East Cleveland must have been quite a switch. Ganny: I was in the hospital giving birth to Dabney, and when I came out he had bought the house on Taylor Rd. She was only 10 weeks old when we moved in. We had paid extra rent on the house in Baltimore to leave the furniture there because we didn’t have any place to send it to. It was cheaper to pay an extra month’s rent than it was to store the furniture. When he bought the place, he had the furniture moved. It was already in the house when I got there. I’ll never forget; he came down to the hospital after the baby was born. I heard him walking through the hall at night. I sat up. I knew that step anywhere. He was glad with the baby and all, he’d seen her. Barbara was 11 and Peggy was 10, Philip was 4, and Dabney was 10 weeks old. I had phlebitis in my left leg after Dabney was born. We were down at Mother’s for several weeks Dabney was 10 weeks old when we went out there. I could barely move because of phlebitis. I started out with an ace bandage up my leg when we got to Cleveland. Eventually I graduated to an elastic stocking. I felt a little bitterness, maybe unfair, your grandfather didn’t understand, but I should have had household help.

You are 35. You were born in 1952. Dabney was born in 1944. I went back to teaching in 1957. You were only 5 years old. All of my children graduated from Shaw high School. Miss Provo was the dean of women Kirk Junior High School. Then she went up to Shaw. When Dabney was at Shaw, Miss Provo and I had our little difficulties from time to time. The kids at Shaw had to wear uniforms. It was a public school, but the girls had to wear skirts and midis. Peggy didn’t have any midis, and she was supposed to be able to wear blouses the first week or so until she could get some midis. Well she didn’t want midis, and Miss Provo jumped down real hard on us because Peggy was coming to school in blouses after she should have been in midis. Barbara was wearing midis, and anything Barbara was doing, Peggy didn’t want any part of. I didn’t really mind, after all, I was the same way in high school, as I said, I was very careful to not let my brothers’ head get above water. I was always going to be the leader. So I couldn’t criticize Barbara too much. Peggy was beautiful, much prettier than Barbara, and she was quiet. I remember one summer we were down at Mother’s. Peggy was a shy little thing. She was on the front porch, and Jeannie Saunders, a cousin, Davis Saunders’ daughter, Barbara’s age, and they were cavorting around, showing off. David Salisbury, whose father was mayor of Dunbar, was there; they were been showing off for him. David went up on the porch and asked Peggy to go with him over to get some ice cream. She’s the quiet one. Barbara and Jeannie had egg on their face. Peggy said to her grandmother, “I don’t have any money.” Her grandmother said, “That’s all right, he’s going to pay for it.” She was only 12 years old. He was the one that your mother always said that she should have married. He was a nice boy. He’d call her up. After we came to Cleveland, he came up there too. One day she came in from school. She was in junior high school. She came in with some other kids. He had driven his father up to some kind of meeting in Cleveland, and hadn’t notified her he was coming. He was already there. So I put him in the kitchen to surprise her, and she was wearing a sweater that he had sent her. She was bouncing around being very much herself. I had him come in from the kitchen; she almost had a heart attack. That romance kept on for a while. I don’t remember. He moved to Florida, and he met somebody down there and married her.

Peggy had a lot of beaus. Barbara had a lot of beaus. When Dabney was little I said, “Now honey, the girls are going to take all of my attention…

Part 14Ganny: …for the next few years because they’re teenagers. I’m not going to have as much time to spend with you as I would like. I want you to understand that it isn’t that I don’t love you.” Well accepted that so she and her little friend down the street played up on the sleeping porch. Every afternoon the boys and girls would gather in our living room, and your grandfather would come in from work and sit in the kitchen and drink his iced tea. The kids would just be having a good time. I thought it was a whole lot better than gathering in some restaurant or drug store or some hang out. Dabney was exactly resentful, but I had gone back to teaching before she graduated. So there wasn’t anybody but her father there, and that wasn’t very conducive to conviviality. So she’d come home from school in the afternoons; not like when Barbara and Peggy were in high school. She sort of resented that because she had looked forward to the days when she would be there, and I would be there, and everything would be like it did with the older girls. I hoped that persuaded her that I taught so I could have the money to send her to school. But you know parents are likely to pick out things that the kids don’t really want. I picked out Smith; I promoted Smith. Perhaps she’d been happier if she’d gone to Kent or Ohio State or someplace like that.

Barbara had 1 year at Bowling Green, and then she came back. Her father wouldn’t provide any money. I taught substitute teaching and saved all my money, and then I made him give me money from the rent on the 3 rd floor, and that’s how we got her

there. 1 year and after that, that was it. I always resented that. When Philip got ready to go to Brown, your grandfather gave him $1,000. That paid his first semester’s tuition. Then about February he gave him another $400 so he was able to finish. Then he got a job working for the Carling Brewing Company, in the chemistry lab. He’d had chemistry in college so they took him on in the summertime, and he worked with them every year. In his junior year he wasn’t satisfied with the courses he was taking, so he dropped out of school, in his junior year, at the middle of the year. He worked with Carling for a year and went back to school the next January. The battle of the bulge was going on in Europe, and there was a corridor that was safe to go into Berlin. (She must be confused) Whatever it was, the government was going to do a lot more drafting. Philip was just the right age to be drafted. Your grandfather was determined that Philip (his son) was not going to go into the service. He was willing to go in for a couple years, and get it over with and then would get the help from the government for college. But oh, no! So he went back to Brown 2nd semester and that’s when he met Liz.

It was beneath the dignity of a college boy to take the train. He drove a car for somebody who needed a car driven. Liz’s mother had a brother whose name was Jack who was all wealthy. Uncle Jack, when his car got old, he would send it over to Rose, Liz’s mother. It was a perfectly good car, only a couple of years old. Liz’s father was a teacher, never a business man. He was a teacher and scholar. He was an organist. He was very highly regarded organist, but no money maker. So Philip was wanting to go back to Providence, Brown University. He looked in the paper for somebody who wanted a car driven. That’s the way they did it. I know that he and a bunch of pals out of high school, they graduated mid-year. They went to Florida and did everything driving cars for people. So he drove the car over to deliver it to Rose’s house. Of course Rose fed him and gave him a tip and all that stuff. Liz was in school at Tufts University. She was downtown with some of her girlfriends, and she called home. Her mother said come on home there’s a young man here. So we told Rosie that it was all her fault! So Liz came home, and they met each other, and that was it. Douglas: It’s interesting that her mother would put her together with someone out of the faith.Ganny: Her mother told me one time that it wasn’t so great being married to a Jew. She didn’t have any prejudice. It bothered her father but not Rosie. We went to a service one time at the synagogue where he was playing. Philip of course didn’t have a car, but they got together frequently. When school was out in June, this was 1962. He was finishing up his junior year; he should have been graduating. He got a car from somebody else and went over and got her. She had packed up all her clothes. They loaded them up and took them over to Providence, over to Brown University. She sat there in his room while he packed up his stuff. They called her mother and said that they were at Niagara Falls, they were down at Providence. They started out and drove all night and came here the next morning. She stayed with us. Dabney had a double room with single beds.

Part 15Ganny: …She (Liz) shared the bedroom with Dabney. The same thing seems at their house to me, it doesn’t make any difference who a garment belongs to, any of them who want it to wear it, they go get it and wear it. Well Liz of course had never had any sisters so she’d wear Dabney’s blouses, and Dabney didn’t like that at all and complained to me about it. In the Saunders family your belongings are yours; nobody else touches it. Philip would get an envelope that was propped up on the mantelpiece him when he got in, and she opened it. Oh! I wouldn’t have opened it for anything in the world! Those were some of the things that made it a little difficult. Liz was 21 and Philip was 22, and Rose called me when she found out where they were and said “What are we going to do?” I said, “Well, they’re both old enough to get married without our permission. If we don’t want to lose our kids, we’d better make the best of it.” We had a wedding at the Rabbi’s… oh they had a hard time finding a Rabbi that would marry them. This reform Jewish Temple, that was a lovely man, the Rabbi, Rabbi Silverman, he’s dead now. All the arrangements were made. We had the wedding, and Uncle Jack took the whole wedding party down to Tudor Arms in the University Circle area. We had a good dinner. My mother was there. Of course Jews they think highly of older people, and the fact that this 94 year old woman was present at the wedding dinner and everything, it gave a legitimacy to our side of the bargain in their eyes. Of course Mother had no prejudice; she had had a lot of Jewish friends. The only person who ever made any comments at all was Liz’s father. Liz’s mother and father had come down to the house when Liz was living with us before the wedding. He brought up what they were going to live on after because Philip had still another year at Brown. Liz had graduated from college. Robert was indignant about the fact that Liz was going to teach school and put Philip through the last year of college. We made it clear to him that if at any time, if it was necessary that, of course Philip had worked and saved his money, if they didn’t have enough money that Philip would quit school, get a job and take care of his wife. It wasn’t a question of her, so he (Robert) had to shut up. There wasn’t anything that could be said about that. They (Philip & Liz) had an apartment. She taught outside Boston. That’s when they had the little Volkswagen, the little “bug”. He drove over to Providence for his last year. Then when he went to Cornell to Law School, Liz got a job teaching there for a year. Then she got pregnant. Of course, Rosie was going stand for just so much. She wanted a grandchild. He had gotten scholarships in the meantime. He got a loan from the bank in Ithaca, and I guaranteed it, and I paid it off, and he got through law school. Because of the baby, they didn’t have any income. Douglas: I remember going up there. We took them the red car when you bought the yellow one. Ganny: I had a green car. You got the green one.Douglas: I got that from Barbara, but I thought Philip had it before Barbara.

Ganny: I bought the 1963 green car when I started teaching. Your grandfather already had the red station wagon when I got the green car because he went with me to buy it. It was second hand, a used car when I bought it. I paid $1,500 for it. I drove it for a couple of years. I then got another car, it was a dark blue one, it was a new car, and I didn’t like it very well. I turned it in and got the wagon. It was a very good car.Douglas: You used to speak very highly of the wagon. How it’s gets you there through all the bad weather. Ganny: Philip was a born lawyer. He was 8 years old. I told you about popping Marion Stone? One day they were in our living room, Ralph and your grandfather, talking to Philip. Philip was sitting in the big orange chair that was in the corner by the lampshade. He was 8 years old. He was not going to pay taxes. Those two men stood there and argued with him about how he couldn’t get out of paying taxes. Argued with an 8 year old! They didn’t convince him.Douglas: You were really involved with the girl scouts for a while?Ganny: Yes I was. That’s when the girls were little. Dabney was in the girl scouts, and they got to junior high school. There was some backbiting. There was a girl that she liked very much, but this girl’s family were Unitarians.

Part 16Ganny: This girl, Laura, her name was. The girls started making fun of her, nasty remarks and such. Dabney said, “Well, I won’t stay in an organization where the people do that.” She got up and walked out never went back. If that is what girl scouts were, she wanted no part of it. She had been to Girl Scout camps. Barbara had too, and Peggy had too, in Baltimore. Dabney was an independent soul. Her standards were very high. She was an awful lot like Suzanne. She was defending the underdog, always. Suzanne has lost friends…of course, in the long run it adds up. It’s a plus, but a lot of people don’t understand them. Dabney was working at a summer house part time because she wanted to not because she got any money for it. Suzanne, when anybody was being picked on or anything, Suzanne jumps on them to their aid. That’s why she’s a resident advisor at Michigan.Douglas: Not to mention vice-president of the Young Democrats, or whatever. Ganny: Oh, I love it!Douglas: Dabney would be right in there pitching, I’m sure.Ganny: Well Dabney was not aggressive. That’s the funny part about it. She would have been aggressive, but you see there were so many put-downs, and then her father drinking that made it very difficult. She couldn’t invite anybody to the house.Douglas: She was such a pretty girl, at least I thought so. Ganny: Well, if she had been more aggressive, she would have been able to avoid that crash that killed her because she would have seen what that other driver was doing. He rounded the curb and ran right into her, but she was on the curb too, see? Now you wouldn’t have been in that position and you wouldn’t have died, but she wasn’t an experienced enough driver. She didn’t drive when she was in high school. Whereas, Barbara was in the driver’s seat of a car as fast as she could get there. Douglas: Barbara was always very aggressive, from the beginning.Ganny: Very aggressive! Peggy wasn’t so much so, but she managed all right. She had to hold her own. But Dabney, it was difficult for her. She finally got her driver’s license, I think after she and Ron were married because she just wasn’t aggressive. If she’d been a more experienced driver, she wouldn’t have been… Douglas: Was she a good student?Ganny: Oh yes, but she didn’t make any great honors. Here again, she went to a public school, and she went up there to Smith where all those girls had been in prep school. La-di-da. They looked down on her because she hadn’t gone to one of their prep schools. She was very sensitive. So she withdrew. The first roommate that she had was a nasty little brat from New York City. She invited Dabney down for her coming out party in Thanksgiving time and then withdrew the invitation. How tasteless can she be? There was a lot of snobbery. Of course there were a couple of girls who were fast friends of hers. One of them was from just outside Chicago, a wealthy family, but she wasn’t at prep school. Girls can be awfully nasty. If she had gone to a state school or even Michigan… But I came from east of the Ohio River, and anybody who grew up east of the Ohio River looked down their noses at Ohio. It didn’t make any difference how poor or West Virginian we were; we looked down our noses on anybody from Ohio. Around Cleveland, I think Kent (State University) wasn’t highly regarded, and I’m sure Kent is a very good school now. Especially since they’ve gotten an electronics program, and they have a school of fashion design too. It’s way different from what it was. They have a waiting list; people can’t get into Kent.

My father taught at New River State in Montgomery (West Virginia) and goodness knows I think David Hall went down there to school because probably David Hall couldn’t have gotten into anything else. His brother went to Harvard Law School, but David teaches in the high school in southern West Virginia. David’s most outstanding accomplishment is his circus. He has built a complete circus that would cover a basketball floor, no kits, everything from scratch, his own design. He takes it places and exhibits it, and his brother is a Harvard Law graduate. It just shows you how different they are. David inherited one set of genes, George another, that’s all.

Oh, I want to tell you about Harriet (Anne Hall, sister of George and David). Cousin Harriet works for the New Yorker magazine. My sister was 47 years old when Harriet was born. The 2 boys were on the high seas. Well David was on the high seas because he was in the Navy, and George was in Germany in the Second World War, and their mother produced a baby sister. Well they

had the baptism at the Presbyterian Church, and Margaret was embarrassed because everybody knew how old she was. She was embarrassed because everybody would know that she and Harry (her husband) had had intercourse. That’s how foolish she was. But Harry was as proud as a peacock carrying her (Harriet). Sex is something that we don’t talk about, but it’s right there all the time! Harriet is tall, blond, very pleasant personality. She was gushy when she was growing up, and my kids couldn’t stand her. Her mother of course thought that Harriet was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened on this earth. Margaret wanted a daughter more than she wanted heaven. So Harriet always got piano lessons, dancing classes all the clothes her mother could possibly make for her, everything. She was a nice kid. She went to Wheaton College. You know something, for a girl to be able to type and take dictation is a plus. It’ll get her in the door in a business, no matter how much college training she’s had. Harriet started at the New Yorker as a secretary. Her personality and her ability soon showed that she was a person to be considered, and so they moved her into the art department as the assistant to the art director. Now she is a photographer who, besides being at the New Yorker, she is a photographer who takes photographs of weddings and everything. She makes a lot of money. She made I think $9,000 outside of her salary last year. I want to show you a book. I have a book here. Everyone at the New Yorker adores her. She’s a year younger… she and Mary Carter and Dabney were all sort of together. Dabney was the oldest. This book, she took this picture on the book cover, “Anne Hall”. She’s divorced. She uses her maiden name. This man (in the picture) is the brother of Leonard Bernstein. She goes out there and spends the weekend and everybody just adores her! She got this book and had him autograph it. See what it says, “For Linn F. Saunders, the aunt of my favorite photographer. Best wishes and Merry Christmas” of course they’re Jews “signed Burton Bernstein. December…

Part 17…1985.” I enjoyed reading the book very much. He decided to learn to fly an airplane, and that’s what it’s all about! He’s no musician; I don’t know what his occupation is, but it’s very interesting. Harriet has been able to make money with her photographs. This picture of Mother (Annie Laurie Linn Ford) when she was 90; Harriet took that. See how she’s got her posed so that the mirror is in the back of her? It’s a very telling pose I think. She (Harriet) seems to have an artistic ability. She poses the people and then she takes the pictures and does very well. Margaret told me yesterday morning. I called her because I knew that I wouldn’t have any other time. She calls me one week, I call her the next. Everybody from the art department had gone someplace, and all the cartoonists come in on Tuesday. They all left and left Harriet in charge. I guess they recolonized that she has some artistic ability. So she selected the cartoons to go into the New Yorker. The thing about it is that she’s done it all herself. Nobody has had any influence. It was her own ability, her own initiative, her own personality that got all this. I must admit, I’m real proud her, not because I care anything about the New Yorker but because of the fact that she’s made it in a way. Of course you know about the beginning of the New Yorker magazine. It was the days of the Algonquian roundtable. All those literary figures used to have lunch together at the Algonquian Hotel and started a literary genre. That’s when they started the New Yorker magazine. I know the names of all those people, but I just can’t remember them.

My mother taught school for 37 years. I haven’t talked about my sister Jemima. She was a nurse. Speaking of genes, all the ones who inherited genes from my father’s side of the family are lawyers. There’s a lot of lawyers on the Ford side: Philip, George (Hall, her nephew), my father (George M. Ford) to name three. The other side of the family is all doctors. I’ve told you about my cousin, Jim Johnson (they were 1st cousins because their mothers, Sylvia Linn (Johnson) and Annie Laurie Linn (Ford) were sisters), when Tojo tried to commit hari-kari. Have you never heard that story? (*see actual story from internet below) When Tojo, after the war, tried to commit hari-kari because he couldn’t be captured, and he missed. They called in an American surgeon to save his life and it was Jim Johnson. He and his brother, Morrison (David Morrison Johnson), were both in the South Pacific. He was my 1st cousin. When we were in college, he told his mother that he was awful sorry that we were cousins because he really went for me. Well I liked him to, but just like a brother; I wasn’t in love with him. He was in the Sig Ep (Sigma Epsilon?) house when I was at the Delta Gamma house and he brought a great big Sig Ep pin. The pin was a heart, and he brought a display one over, and I wore it for a while. Nobody knew who it belonged to; we thought it was funny. I’ve got a Sig Ep little sister pin and a Sigma Chi little sister pin. Jim gave me the Sig Ep one and Frederick (her brother) gave me the Sigma Chi; little good they ever did anybody, but that’s what they wanted to do. Frederick went to the University of West Virginia and the law school there too. When I made Phi Beta Kappa Frederick said, “I hope they think it’s me”. Virginia, whom he married said, “Well don’t worry, they won’t.” (laughing). But you see he had law brains. I would never have been a lawyer. I was going to be a scientist. I mean I should have been. That’s where my heart was. I found out afterwards.

I really enjoyed that trip to Mexico a few years back. That was a wonderful trip. I’ve been to Canada. I’ve been on a steamer in the St. Lawrence River going from Buffalo to Montreal with my mother when I was 19. I’ve been to the west, to the top of Pike’s Peak and a lot of different places like that. I’ve been to Mexico. Now I'm not like my friend, Thelma, she brings me stuff. She travels quite a bit. Portugal and last summer they went to Japan. She didn't bring me anything from Japan, but that's alright; I didn't really look for it. And I'm not just saying that, it think it was very nice. What she would do is bring a bunch of little trinkets and say “now which one you would like”. She's a very good friend of mine.

My sister Jemima was different from the rest of the family. She married a boy up in Beckley named Silas Ewing Richmond. Now Richmond is a good bloodline in West Virginia. They had Jemima Elizabeth and Cordelia and then they had Silas Ewing who was

true to the horse traditions. Jemima Elizabeth is a smart is George hall. Cordelia is a nurse. Jimmy, we call her Jimmy, taught school out in Belleville, Illinois across the river from St. Louis, when he came back from the service. But Jemima (her sister) was a nurse. Knowing what I know now, I know that Jemima was dyslexic. Frederick was dyslexic. Philip was dyslexic. My girls weren't, but Philip was. I found out about it when Philip was in kindergarten. I found out about dyslexia, but people really didn't know anything about it before. So Jemima got the reputation of not being very bright. She was a smart as anybody else, and the same thing with Frederick. He hoped they would think it was me, you know that sort of thing. But he had a very good brain, or he would never done what he did. So it doesn't mean that they aren't smart, it's just means that they get things twisted. I took Philip; I was going to help him one time, but I found this out from a child psychiatrist who had spoke to the mothers at a PTA when Philip was in kindergarten. So I recognized that's what is trouble was. He had been ambidextrous from the time he was born. He could use either hand to do anything. So I tried to help him. I printed his name in capital letters P-H-I-L-I-P. He took a pencil and did just exactly the opposite. He printed “Philip” started at the right-hand side. Every letter was backwards. That's the way he saw it, and I was helping him with his spelling one time. It was the word something like rat. He was thinking about it and he writes T-A-R. No that's not the way your teacher wants it. R-A- T. Now he had to learn it both ways, and mathematics he didn't take too much mathematics when he was in high school because it would bring down his grade average. He could do everything else, you see. He went to night school. He graduated midyear, and he went to night school and took the mathematics he hadn't been able to take in high school because of the grades, problems he would have with grade average. He was determined to go to a big University, and he wouldn't have gotten in if he hadn't had an IQ. He would get frustrated, and teachers are not all good teachers you know. There was this old maid who was teaching at Kirk and something happened. I don't know what it, but she pulled his hair. It was in a science class, and he cleaned out that place. He just went on a rampage! Well the principle of Kirk Junior High School was in the Presbyterian Church, and we’d been on a panel together. He called me down. Of course everybody who knew of us knew that my husband drank, so Dr. Myers talked to me, and he said, “Well I think you're not the trouble”. He said, “It must be his father. I want him to come in and see me”. I said "You can call him and see”. Phil did go down to see Dr. Myers, but of course he refused any responsibility. But the kid had frustration all of his life. I talked to the pediatrician, and I said “Well, what about putting him back?” See he was in the top class, the top rank because they knew he was intelligent. I said, “What about putting him back?” “No” the pediatrician said “No, I know Dr. Meyer” and Dr. Meyer told him not to because he said it would ruin him. It would destroy his confidence, any he does have. They tend to outgrow dyslexia, and as he grew older he got better, but with mathematics you see that would be a problem. He still has trouble once in a while with numbers. Law school you see was perfect, and he worked so hard all the time he was in school. The boy studied like you've never known anybody to study. He would come in from school and the afternoon, stretch out full length in the middle of the living room and go to sleep, and sleep till suppertime. Then he would sit in that chair with his feet propped up against the end of the little loveseat we had sitting there and study until midnight. So he earned everything he's gotten. I've always supported him so, psychologically and in every way because I’ve explained to him what his problem

Part 18Ganny: …was. He knew it wasn’t anything to do with his how smart he was. So he could live with it. Just twisted wires, that’s all.

Look I tell you that boy would do anything in the world for me. He came walking in one night with a color television. Anything in the world he can think of that I could use, and he gets it for me. I've got a birthday card from him. I wouldn't give a million dollars for it. It itemizes all the things that I've done in my life, and where he ever found such a card I don't know. But it's a printed card it isn't one that he wrote himself.

Well his father was proud of him too. But what irritated me was the fact that he (Philip sr.) didn't do enough for Barbara and Peggy. They were just as smart as they could be. I was the one that got the education for Dabney. She went to Smith, I taught school, got bank loans, paid them off, pay their bills, and after she was graduated I paid $1000 the next spring for a loan, and then she was killed. I wrote to Smith and told them what had happened. They wrote back and said it was a government loan and that they forgave it. So I didn't have to pay any more on it.

Margaret is doing fine. Margaret is majoring in mathematics. Of course she's a math genius. I don’t know whether I told you that. In high school she was on the math team for the state of New York! Now that's going pretty much. Also as another major she has Russian. Right after Christmas last year, she went out with a group to Russian, and I have a postcard from her somewhere that she sent me that shows some river. She's 20. She and Suzanne are close to the same age. She's at Smith.

They had the trial seven years after Dabney was killed. I don't know why it took so long. They had the trial (for the wrongful death of her daughter, and Margaret’s mother Dabney Saunders Naumchick, by a drunken truck driver) and of course the award wasn't nearly as great as it should have been. Philip was in Europe. He was working for some company, I don't know which one, as an international taxation lawyer, and he was in Europe when they had the trial. He was in this law firm in Boston, Phil was, at the time. The man who conducted the trial, the trial lawyer, did a lousy job. I was there. I know he did. I think all Dabney was clearing out of it was $60,000. Why you know that's ridiculous. Philip came back, and he got through the courts that Ron was to be her guardian of her person, and he, Philip (her uncle), was to be the guardian of her property. Of course Ron had gotten some money out of it too. Philip doubled her money, so that when she went to Smith's she had more than $120,000. When she

(Margaret) was 18, he (Philip) took all the stuff over there, sat down at the dining room table and explained it all to Ron and Margaret. The only thing he still had was the diamond he had bought for her as an investment. He mailed it to them this fall. They are the level of people you see that are very suspicious. I like his (Ron's) wife very much but she comes from the background where she decided that Philip was using some of Margaret's money for his own uses. When the whole thing was settled, why of course the Naumchicks (Ron’s family) wouldn't accept her ideas. Ron's father was an orderly in a veteran’s hospital. His mother was a cook in one of the houses at Smith. They got all 4 of their kids through college.

Ron's father painted that blue and white picture. We have always been friends. Of course you can understand that all of the relatives live around Smith College. Smith College was up here and everything else was down here in Chicopee. There was a lot of nastiness among his sisters they went to smaller colleges. I have never said this to another soul, ever, but Dabney got pregnant the spring before she was to graduate. I've always felt in my heart that that was deliberate. That Ron was afraid that if she graduated he would be left behind. It was important to him and his family that he should marry a Smith graduate. Now that maybe is very uncharitable of me because evidently they'd been having relations for some time. So I have no absolutely no proof of it. It's logical isn't it? So the point is that Margaret came over here every summer, and one time she said, “Ganny, was I born too soon?” I wouldn't lie to her. I said, “Yes, your mother was four months pregnant when she and your dad were married, but don't you ever let anybody put you down for that reason! They loved each other, and they I loved you. They wanted you, and don't ever feel bad about that.” She had gotten that from some of the aunts, but I can call up the Naumchicks right now, and we're the best of friends. I went up there to get some information for the trial. They were trying to get all they could from Dabney’s student teacher for the trial. I stayed overnight with Naumchicks. Mr. Naumchick was living at that time and Mrs. Naumchick too. There were a whole lot of pictures. He painted quite a lot. I stayed overnight at their house, and I was admiring his pictures. I was perfectly sincere. The next day when I left, he said “Well now you pick out which ever one you want and it's yours.” I picked out that one. I said “I made such a big play for your pictures, you could hardly do anything but give me one.” He said, “That's not it at all. You're part of the family.” Ron told me when Dabney died, “I will see to it that you will always have access to her (Margaret). Ron married again a couple years later to this girl who raised her Margaret. Sandy her name is. When I went over there for the trial, we had dinner one night at the restaurant, just the three of us. I told her “Don't feel that you are looked down upon in any way. Dabney was a beautiful thing that happened to all of us, but you are Ron's wife and that's the difference. They’d been married a number of years, and I told her later, “I want to give you my personal thanks for the job you've done raising Margaret.” She had children of her own when she and Ron were married, but Margaret turned out beautifully. And I wanted her (Sandy) to know that I was aware of it.

Well that's a picture of your granddaddy when he was a freshman or sophomore in high school at East Bank, West Virginia. This is a bunch of boys and girls, young people. It was the summer after I graduated from high school at 4H camp at Camp Jacksons Mills. We were sent to Camp vale in Springfield, Massachusetts. That was the summer of 1924. I was about to go to university. This is the cast of "Peter slick on pumpkin crick" when I was in high school. I want you to notice particularly the ear bobs, the puffs of hair we had around our ears. That's the way the girls wore their hair in those days. I was a very poor actress. That was the only play I got into I think. I'm the second one from the right, and the one on the end is my very best friend Mary Catherine. She was the one, who moved back to Charleston from Florida, and she called me two or three weeks ago, and she wrote me a couple of letters. She'd love for me to come down to Charleston to see her, but it's out of the question. Oh yes, that's your granddaddy with the hair, sitting on the front. That's when I was in high school. Here it is again. You can understand we were going together, look at my face, that shy smile. I can see where Melissa gets her theatricality. I was always showing off.

Photo Caption: Tokyo, Japan, September 11, 1945. US Army Captain James Johnson of Newark, New Jersey, a physician in the 1st Cavalry Division, works to save former Prime Minister, Imperial Japanese Army General Hideki Tojo after suicide attempt. A bullet passed through his chest and exited his back. Six hours after the suicide attempt, he arrived at the U.S. Army’s 98th Evacuation Hospital in Yokohama. He lived to be tried and convicted in an International Military Tribunal. He was hanged on December 22, 1948.

Part 19 Start of Tape 6 Side BGanny: This (picture) is a bunch of us on the hill above Dunbar on a Sunday afternoon. These are the basketball teams from Dunbar, but I wasn't on either one of them. You know, Melissa looks a good bit like me, when I was young. That was our first chemistry lab at Dunbar high school in the winter of 1922-23. The 4H camp at Jackson's Mills 1923 Lewis County cottage, and

these are some of my friends. This is Dana Farnsworth and me in 1927. He was a graduate of the University in 1927. Dana was my boyfriend; I was pinned it to him. He was a chemistry major. He went on to Harvard medical school, and then he interned at Massachusetts General, and then he was the head of student health of both MIT and Harvard. This is Less Weaver; he taught at Shillean. He took me around when I was teaching there. I went with your granddaddy all through high school. I was known as being peppy.This is Uncle Will. My mother's uncle from Scotland; this is my mother in Welch, West Virginia, and Margaret and Jemima and Frederick and me. I'm standing right in front of Uncle Will. My legs were bowlegged; they still are a little bit. That's your great-grandmother (Annie Laurie Linn Ford) in 1912. Now this one is in a dormitory in Morgantown. These are two of my closest friends when I was a freshman. They went ahead and joined the Chi Omegas, and I never saw much of them after that. They thought I was going to be a Chi Omega, and my father was important, so they hung around. This is George Everett Hall, my sister Margaret’s eldest son. He’s one of my unfavorites. He’s arrogant. That’s Barbara and Theresa and Nadine when they got back from the Philippines. They adopted them in the state of Washington and took them with them to Texas and then they took them to the Philippines. I think that picture was probably taken in Texas. Billy is Barbara’s son, my grandson. We called my father Daddy or Poppa.Douglas: What did you call him when you were in trouble?Ganny: By the telephone. No I never did, but as soon as I got my notification that I was Phi Beta Kappa, I called him on the telephone. He was a Captain in WWI. He didn’t look like someone who had been (in a war in) France for 3 years. Well he was a major before he got out. This is my great grandmother from Scotland. We have a little tiny picture of her that’s been enlarged, that’s Margaret Buchanon Linn. She’s my mother’s grandmother. She came over from Scotland and died when my mother was only 8 years old. The stamp (on the picture) is from the enlargers in Charleston. All 3 of these are from Harriet Hall’s graduation from Wheaton (College). This is Harriet, and her parents, Margaret and Harry and Phil and Liz. Liz and Phil were living in Boston. Isn’t Liz pretty? That’s Philip and Frederick and Liz at the same occasion. They’re all gathered for the graduation. Frederick didn’t go up to Smith for Dabney’s graduation; Margaret and Harry didn’t get there. I held it very hard (I wasn’t happy about it). I thought they could have if they’d wanted to. Pam looks just like her mother here. I think that Pam looks more like her mother than any of the others. That’s your granddaddy when he was 18 years old. Look at all that hair. By the time we were married (he was 26), he was already going bald. There are pictures that we took when we had the picnic at Philip’s backyard, but they’re not very good! None of them is good of Frederick. Frederick and his son sat over to one side.

Part 20Ganny: Well if I were in better health, we could all go together. Suzanne wanted to take me down to Beckley (West Virginia) this past… whatever it was. She and I were supposed to drive down to (her sister) Margaret’s. I just wasn’t able to make the trip. I just don’t dare. If I stick right here, and follow my little routine, and I’m close to my doctor and all, I’m all right. I don’t feel at this point why I have to take trip down to see Margaret. Suzanne wanted to go because she wanted to go out on the ridge to see the place again. It’s been sold 2 or 3 times. The people who bought it paid me $x5,000. They bought it with the idea that his mother or her mother, one or the other lived, in Parkersburg, West Virginia. They thought that would be a good place for her to live. They were going to settle down in the Beckley area. They’d been going all over the countryside looking for someplace to buy and fell in love with my place right away. Well I had electricity. I had plumbing, a complete bathroom, and I had all the conveniences. I made them walk all around. I said, “Now I want you to be sure you know what you are doing before you buy this place.”

I lived there for 6 years. I didn’t in the wintertime, of course I spent most of my time in Beckley, but I’d be out there whenever the weather was good. Of course I knew everybody up and down the road. That made it nice. There was a young couple. They had the horses, a special kind of horses. They lived away from Flat Top, you’d have to go on past my place. He taught in the mining college. See people had the wrong idea about West Virginia. Those people are not stupid, ignorant, louts. They had a special school down there for people who were interested in mining. They called it the mining institute or something. He taught in it. The man who had the country store out at Flat Top had a college degree and owned most of the land out there. The Woods family, they were really nice people. As I said, I got along just great with the people down there because I spoke the language. I knew how to talk to them. I could stop wherever I saw people and talk to them. Everybody up there took care of me, you see. Nobody would have thought of bothering me because everybody knew who I was and where I lived, and you’d better not bother that woman. Which is interesting I think because of the fact that as I said, I speak the language. A lot of people who moved there from up North would come there talk down to them. They didn’t know West Virginia the way I did. There isn’t a place in West Virginia that I don’t at least know of. One time when I was in Morgantown (WV) everybody I knew came from some little town in West Virginia, and you didn’t put them down for that reason. I’ll tell you what, there was an article in a magazine, a lumber magazine at the University that talked about the people who had settled West Virginia. The people who had settled in the state of Virginia, along the coast, were frequently upper class. I mean people with money or something and could afford to. But a lot of the people settled in the flat country up in Virginia, but they were originally from the mountains of England and Scotland and Wales, and they weren’t happy in the flat ground, so they moved over into the mountains of West Virginia. So you see those people over there, they’re not trash. They’re people who have good ethnic backgrounds. You take Dana Farnsworth; his

ancestors crossed the mountain in an ox cart. I remember his telling me about that. They settled in Gilbert County, which is in the heart of the mountains, and he went up to Harvard medical school. They’re no dummies. That’s what irritates me so when people talk down about West Virginia; they don’t know what they are talking about.

Who is the leader of the leader of the Senate? Robert Byrd? He grew up outside Beckley in a little hamlet called Sofia. Now he is speaker of the House or majority leader. People just don’t understand about West Virginia. Our state motto is, “Mountaineers are always free”. We’re mountaineers and independent as sin. There’s no use in the world in putting us down.

I did a stupid thing last year in living room learning. The woman who was leading the group was ignorant. She may have had some degrees from Western Reserve, but we all voted we’d never have her again. She said something about West Virginia. I was irritated with her anyway, and I looked up and I told her! I said, “You don’t know what you are talking about. West Virginians are not ignorant. I am a graduate from West Virginia University, and I have a Master’s and a Phi Beta Kappa key! And I am not ignorant! And I’m a West Virginian!” “Oh, well I didn’t mean the educated people” she said. She doesn’t know! I was ashamed of myself for bursting out like that. You know who will never come out of that is this woman who’s on television now, Dolly Parton. That’s what they have in mind when they talk about West Virginia. They’re all Dolly Partons: Kentunky, Tennesee, and West Virginia. They don’t know any better. Now North Carolina’s not like that. North Carolina was settled by Scotsmen.Douglas: That one corner of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky all right there. All of the people that we’ve ever met that came out of that area were generally low life types. Ganny: Well I’ll tell you, one of the reasons is that was in the middle of coal mining, and people don’t go down in the coal mines if they’re executive material. Another thing too, they brought in a lot of immigrants from Hungary and middle Europe, so they aren’t true West Virginians. They’re not typical. Douglas: What do you remember of the way people in the towns that you were living in, say for example the way your family viewed people who worked in the mines. I mean did you associate with the mining children?Ganny: There weren’t any lines drawn that way, but we had no access to them. They lived down the hillside some place with little country schools. But my mother and father would not have permitted us to be snobbish. She was an immigrant child. My father grew up around Grafton in the northern part of the state, and they were farmers and so forth. They weren’t upper class. It took Arthur Yates, one of my father’s nephews, to be the president of a bank. He had a brother who became a dentist. They were the only ones in the family who “amounted to anything”. The genes must have been there.

We lived out on the Sissendel road after Poppa came back from the war (WWI) and Mother was teaching out there. I told you about the little house we lived in on the side of a hill that was a lot like this painting. My mother would never have let us put them down, those kids, so sir! They were on equal footing with us because they were the typical West Virginians. They were the people who had come through in the early 1800s, those families, and they were just as good as we were. We were upper class; there was no question about that. We had no money, but we were upper class in our backgrounds. These people were to be respected. Well, the Saunders’ the same thing. They came over from Virginia right after the Civil war and ended up on New River, which is in the eastern part of the state. Mrs. Saunders (Annette Campbell Straughn Saunders), they called her mother dear, her family was in Montgomery, a college town up the river. Her name was Straughn and she was upper class too. She had gone to a private girls’ school in Virginia, like the prep schools today (private high schools). The girls didn’t go to college, they went to prep schools. Daddy Rob had gone to a prep school, Fox something, in Virginia, yet they were living on the banks of the Kanawha River in a house not much better than this one. There was a lot of good blood, after the Civil War it moved over from Virginia. Well, there was a lot of good blood already there, people who preferred the mountains. Daddy Rob made his money buying and selling land. Of course, you can understand, after they had been dispossessed in Virginia during the Civil War, that their whole philosophy was MONEY. Daddy Rob was Robert George Saunders. So one of his son’s was named George and one was named Robert. His sister was married to a Davis, so one of them was Davis. Philip was named for his maternal grandfather. We have family trees, so I have all that. Janet’s husband (Janet Saunders Miller, Ganny’s sister-in-law) Boyce Miller did research on that and had that drawn up. Now I’ll tell you, this shouldn’t be necessarily be recorded, but the Smithsonian magazine had an article in there I got such a kick out of because I thought, “Oh boy, if the rest of the Saunders’ could see this.” Henry Saunders landed at Jamestown about the same time that the first Saunders in our line landed there. His name was Henry, and ours was James. It was just about 1660 was the first one that landed there because we have a family tree. Well Henry was put in jail for something, I forget what. I got such a kick out of it. You have never heard any mention of Henry in the family tree. He may have been the brother of James, but he’s not accepted as part of the family.

There are a lot of family stories that are impossible to get down in a time like this because we don’t have enough time. There are a lot of individual stories which bring it all alive, make the people seem real. One of the things I want to do sometime, is I have a Kodak album for Dabney and all her pictures, but I’ve never done anything with them. I had hoped that young Margaret would, but she didn’t seem to have a lot of interest in it; when she gets older she will.

Part 21Ganny: You can decide whether or not you can use any of those three (pictures). This is one of Liz carrying the cake out. She got quite a lot of applause, and I’d like to have that. This is Mary Carter and Frederick and Frederick junior. That’s blurred but it

shows Frederick. I had a family picnic and Frederick and Frederick junior came over from Washington by plane. Mary Carter and her husband were down at her husband’s brother’s house close to where Philip lives. We had everybody come to a picnic in Philip’s back yard, all of Philips relatives. I think Liz’s mother felt a little hurt because she hadn’t been invited, but the point was to have Frederick’s relatives; people who were kin to Frederick. We had 30 people. We had enough; we didn’t need any more.

Oh! This (picture) is of David Hall’s (senior) daughter (Melissa) at her wedding. The boy she married died about 3 days later; some kind of a seizure. This is David junior and David Hall. She didn’t remarry. Her name was Melissa too. Here’s one of Melissa and Frederick (Ford, her great uncle). David Hall senior is Margaret’s second son. Now this is Margaret and myself and Jemima and Frederick in the 1970s in Beckley, West Virginia on Aunt Margaret’s front porch. That’s Harriet in her office at the New Yorker.Douglas: She’s one of my favorite people. Ganny: Who?Douglas: Harriet.Ganny: Is that right?Douglas: We’re down there in the summer when I was a little guy. She treated me so nice. Just of those people you remember. Ganny: Well, that’s good. I’m so glad.Douglas: Here we have a picture of you and a gal in a purple sweater. Ganny: That’s Margaret Naumchick, before she went to Smith. She came down every summer until last summer and this summer. She was working, and she couldn’t get away. They live outside Rochester (NY). I have a picture of her over here. She’s a Naumchick. She doesn’t look a thing at all like Dabney. She’s a junior at Smith. Her father’s Russian and they’re a good bit Nordic. There’s Margaret at Philip’s one summer. I don’t know which summer.Douglas: What’s this picture of Philip?Ganny: It tells all about it on the back.Douglas: Philip Arthur Saunders: age 15, height 6’, weight 135lbs, Shaw high school.Ganny: He had to shave when he was 14, at Christmastime.

Part 22Ganny: It doesn’t matter where they are all. I’ll take my time and put everything away when you are gone. You can see that he (Philip jr.) is under stress because he’s dyslexic. He doesn’t stand up there with his chin up and facing the world. He’s still uncertain, I’m sure. This is Withers’ house, Robert Withers Saunders. Daddy Rob lived there and mother dear and Janet and Phil and after they’d all gone, and he (Withers) married Hazel, he and Hazel lived there and he died there.Douglas: Is this the house that had the barn behind it that had all the junk in it after they died. Ganny: I guess so.Douglas: This is your honeymoon stuff.Ganny: Pike’s Peak. This is the car that we drove. It had a rumble seat and the trunk was on the back. Here he is standing in the middle of the Indian village. There’s some of the women who sold their pottery. That’s George Saunders, Phil’s oldest brother when he was little, half grown. That’s the station at London (WV). Ho ho, you’ll want this one. A man was hanged. It was up at London where my husband lived. He grew up there. Douglas: It’s signed Joe Brown, so that couldn’t be the guy who hanged (It actually was Joe Brown, hanged in 1905, story on google.)Ganny: This is 1866 Taylor Rd from across the hedge. The angle was over from the Smith’s house. (In the next picture): that’s Daddy Rob back there in the background, this is George, and this is Withers, and this is Davis, and this is Phil. This is Walter, that’s the 5th Saunders boy. There were 5 sons. That’s Walter and his wife, I can’t remember her name. I was 15 when I met Phil. at 23 when we were married, 8 years. These pictures would have been about the time that we met. That (picture) was taken in Dunbar, and they (the Saunders) moved to Dunbar soon after we did because they lived up river. Phil’s family was very much interested in having him marry me. I went to his graduation with his mother, rode uptown on the Inter-Urban and attended his graduation with his mother. Douglas: The Inter-Urban…that was a train?Ganny: It was a street car.Douglas: Horse drawn? Ganny: Oh, hush!Douglas: No, I don’t know!Ganny: No, of course not!Douglas: It was electric?Ganny: Well certainly! You have fantastic ideas! We had electricity. When we first moved to Charleston our house had gas lights. We had electricity in Dunbar all together. It’d been so long since they’d brought in electricity, I don’t even remember when it was. Anyway, his father had given him $10,000. They were really interested in having him marry me. Of course all of the

daughters-in-law hated the idea. I was a teacher. I was a college graduate, and they were all just ordinary people, and they resented me. All of the Saunders’, all the people with Saunders’ blood in them were just delighted with me (laughing). That’s a nasty way to talk, but that’s the way it really was. They all had beautiful homes, and I had nothing, but they still resented me.

That (picture) is where we went the 2nd day of our honeymoon. That’s George and his wife and their 2 children. That’s the St. Joseph River. Phil and I went out in a canoe in a lake. The people that were staying there at the time thought they’d be real cute, and they short sheeted our bed. We discovered it and corrected it.

Part 23Ganny: Someplace I’ve got a picture of Jim Johnson, that’s the boy who saved Tojo’s life, he was a surgeon. It don’t know where it (the picture) is of course. That’s (picture) a girl named Fields. She was a lovely, lovely person and we all admired her, Tennis Fields. Isn’t that a ridiculous name?Douglas: That’s a cute picture (of you) sitting on a rock. You were so cute, I don’t know how you could stand yourself.Ganny: Well you see, I was never advertised as being cute. My sister Margaret was the beauty of the family, and the rest of us just sort of trailed along in her shadow. I was never considered pretty. At least if I was, I didn’t know it; nobody ever told me. Douglas: Certainly a miscarriage of justice.Ganny: The neighbors are terribly curious as who’s is at my house. Of course I will notify them all next week.Douglas: You have a pretty good rapport with the neighbors in general?Ganny: All except this one woman, the dog lady, she lives next door, in the same building. See, everybody else sort of bends over backwards to be nice to me.This picture is of Janet (Phil’s sr. sister). This is the only one that is still alive. She was 15 months older than he (Phil sr). Janet married Boyce Miller. They lived in Fairmont until Boyce died, and then she moved to Florida. Mrs. James Boyce Miller. This is George, Phil’s (sr) nephew. I don’t know if he’s still living in… where Saddle River, NJ. It’s not too far from Baltimore. This is a stone house. He had an illustrious career.This is East Bank High school where your granddaddy (Phil sr) went his 1st and 2nd year.These (pictures) are of our honeymoon in the Indian villages. This is at the foot of Pike’s Peak in the cabin where we stayed. He (Phil sr) was in his last year and I was doing graduate work.This is me and your granddad the 2nd year we were married 1931-32. I got my master’s and he got engineering in 1932.Douglas: Is this is the car your dad gave you?Ganny: No no, this was the car that he bought (Phil sr.) We drove to Pike’s Peak on our honeymoon, drove all the way across the United States in it.Douglas: East Bank was in Charleston (WV)?Ganny: Upriver from Charleston. I taught at Shelian and East Bank was north of Shelian. This is Withers’ house. They’ve torn it down and i-64 runs through there.This is Dusty Miller. I think he’s real cute. That’s Janet’s son. This is a here picture of Janet and Betty Saunders (sisters). Douglas: Where was the place that we went that one summer to visit her on the Rappahannock?Ganny: That was Betty’s place she had bought down there. She lived in Fredericksburg. She had a place on the Rappahannock. I thought it was the Potomac. I could be wrong. She was always trying to…. she tried, but she irritated me. She was so superior, Phil’s sister, Betty. Nobody who didn’t grow up in Virginia knew anything. We were all barbarians in West Virginia. Douglas: …and of course you were on the side of the North during the (civil) war ….Ganny: Well, not only that, but I was a college graduate and a teacher, and I wasn’t taking the back seat to anybody! But very delicately, she tried to steer me in the social graces. If I had lunch at somebody’s house, I was supposed to write them a note afterwards. People do that more today. My husband took it upon himself one Christmas, before we were married. He was going down to Betty’s for the Christmas holidays. It must have been the Christmas of 1929. He wrote to Betty asking if he could bring me. She wrote back, no, it didn’t suit her. He told me. I didn’t know a thing about it, and I was furious! My mother would never have permitted me to go! She was a Victorian lady; I wouldn’t be going all across the country to visit his sister, especially without a specific invitation from her! But Phil was naïve. He didn’t know about that. I was furious. I think that’s what set up my antagonism towards her. She thought she could get away with it. Who is the heck did she think she was!? I was her equal and superior in most ways. I was Scottish. We were brought up to believe that if you were Scottish, there was nothing more to be said. Well, as I’ve said, we had to have something. We didn’t have any money. And you remember of course that my mother was the first born to an immigrant family. So you had to cling to something.