Vivian Castleberry: Interview #1

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It's called Bethesda and it's a Presbyterian community five miles northeast of Lindale and they all bought property there and all of it surrounded each other, and you know it was just a kind of, I guess, womb almost for the family. And yet, from that there was a lot of reaching out. There were always things to read. There was always music in the house.

My grandfather was the superintendent of the black schools. In those days in Texas the black people could not run their own schools. And one of the things that I cherish is that in 1930, when he died, he was brought home from south Texas where he had gone to live and the black people all came and surrounded the church on a snowy, horrible winter day, and my grandmother got up and went outside and invited them all in, and it was the first time black people were ever in the church. So the history of our progression in inclusiveness is rather interesting for East Texas. Grandmother did that, then, you know, we began to make kind of quantum leaps for inclusiveness in the entire family that I have always treasured. So anyway, from that, the first reallyóI remember going to Sunday school in the church when I was a small child. I remember my mother teaching. I remember her playing the piano in the church. I remember her setting the stage for me toóthat there is more out there, that the worldóI remember that she always managed to have books, and this is the days when libraries were notó

Kasper: There were not public libraries.

Castleberry: ónot public libraries. But there were always things to read and she used to say that if I didn't have a book to read, I read the labels on cans. I read anything that came to mind. And taught myself to read, with her help, before I started to school with newspapers down on the floor. In fact, I recall vividly that I gave myself what the doctor at that time said was ink poisoning because I would lie on the floor on my elbows with my elbows down on the paper copying the letters and finally got an infection in my elbows and had to stop that nonsense.

Kasper: They called it ink poisoning.

Castleberry: I don't know what it was, but that's what they called it at the time. But I did teach myself to read and to write before I went to school with Mother's help, because it was always with my mother's encouragement. Although, my mother almost always had a sideline job in the home. One of my very earliest memories was of her "making cuttings." And that meant that she had a part-time job with a big nursery and the nursery would root rosebushes from the cuttings that she made. And I remember her working with gloves to protect her hands. But she always had some kind of an extra job.

Kasper: This was to make extra money for the household?

Castleberry: This was to make extra money for the household and what I have learned in the years that have followed is that women have almost always provided that little extra. I can recall that in the young days when there was absolutely no money in the house, and you will remember that I very much was a child of the Depression, so there was no money.

Kasper: And your father was farming this property.

Castleberry: My father was farming, and as a result of that, the income wasósometimes you made it and sometimes you didn't.

Kasper: Depending on the economy and the weather.

Castleberry: The economy. One of the years, as I grew a little older, when I was about eight, I guess, we had five acres of commercial tomatoes. And if you have never farmed commercial tomatoes, you get through processing them through one side and go directly to the other side of the field and start over. And Curt and I now say today, God, we can't believe that we came out of a period of time where we were really kind of dirt farmers toóthat's the reason we appreciate so much what we have been able to acquire, which isn't a lot of things, but it's certainly a lot of other things.

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Afterwards, people said, didn't we tell you there was quicksand in that creek? Nobody told us there was moving quicksand in the creek, and the car sank. We were halfway across this, what seemed to me an interminably wide creek, that normally was a dry bed, but in this rolling water was certainly not. The wheels on one side of the car sank just instantly. And my father walked us all back to the bank, putting each foot down and finding firm ground, back to the house. The car went completely under. So, Dad had invested a large part of his cotton crop in this car and he sold it for parts for $25.00 when we dug it out. So those are very vivid memories that I remember.

I remember very vividly hearing about the crash of '29 and recently, just shortly before I left the paper, on the 50th anniversary of the crash of 1929, I did a story for the paper on that because we didn't have radio out there, but the news came to the school. Incidentally, my mother would not let me go to school in the small community where we lived. She drove me five miles to school into Memphis, Texas, because, as she said, whatever else I do, I educate my children.

Kasper: And she felt those were better schools.

Castleberry: Oh, they were far better schools. The little school that I would have gone to was a two-room school with two teachers. And all of the grades were stacked together. So she drove me into town for school and that was a hard year because the snows came and sometimes we were iced in and sometimes she had to teach me at home and we had no telephone. But she got me to school, one way or the other, she got me to school. And there was one period of time after the car sank into the creek where she had no automobile and so she let me stay with friends for, I think it was six weeks, to get to school.

Kasper: In town, Memphis, so that you could get to school.

Castleberry: In town, to get to school, so I could go to school. So, her influence was, at that time, and continues to be aóas I grew up, Mother played word games with me when we would work in the kitchen. I was an only daughter. And as we would work in the kitchen together, she would play word games with me, and to this day I sometimes reach for her and say, "My words, my words, where are my words?" You know, I want to say this right, and it's not coming.

Kasper: Well, you are very articulate and I would say that at this point, you probably attribute some of that to your mother's influence.

Castleberry: I attribute a lot of it because the framework that is set, you grow from there. And that framework was set very early for the words that she wanted me to use and for looking for the exact right word. She would paint a word picture for me, and then she would say, "How do you see that?" And to use wordsóand I've done that with my grandchildren. I didn't do it so much with my daughters, I wish I had, but at that time I was so busy. But I have certainly done it with my grandchildren, playing word games.

Kasper: It's a nice gift. One of the women that I interviewed for my dissertation work, which we talked about yesterday, told me she was raised, I believe it was in Kansas, and her mother was a social worker and she didn't have any child care for her children, the two girls, so she would take them whenever she had to, you know, when they weren't in school, she'd take them around with her as she made her rounds as a social worker. And this woman would recount to me how her mother would tell her stories in the car because, like Texas, there were these vast tracks of areas that she had to cover to go from one client to another. And so she would make up what she used to call the car stories. And she said her mother had this avid imagination and she would start these car stories and they would continue for days, months, even years where they'd get into the car and it's sort of like they picked up from the last chapter. And this woman said she had one of the most wonderful memories of what otherwise would have been incredibly boring car trips over the empty Kansas plains where her mother just created pictures and stories in her mind that were just wonderful. She said, she's been forever grateful to her mother for that.

Castleberry: Yeah. I can relate to that so well. And the influence that a mother has, I don't know about a son because I've never been a son, but the influence that

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So I kept looking for it. And then as I would interview prominent women, I would say to them, "What impact did your mother have on your life?" For instance, I'll give you a specific. Sarah Hughes, Judge Sarah Hughes, I asked her that question, and she said, "Oh, my father was far more influential on my life than my mother." And then she started exploring that and after a while there was a dead stop and she said, "You know, I never appreciated what my mother did. My mother was there. She was the one that sent me out." It made me cry because the opening of her understanding that it was father that was out in the world, but it was mother that made it all possible. It's marvelous.

Kasper: And what you're addressing, just to bring us back to where we were before, is exactly that in your own childhood. You're saying that while your father was certainly a presence and a strong influence and many of your own qualities you can identify as coming from himó

Castleberry: Yeah, and he also was more, I would say, most of it came through my mother. And it was Mother that was there. The fortunate thing was that he was there for her. And probably formed a lot of the foundation that I didn't appreciate so much at the time.

Kasper: But then you're saying she also transmitted his qualities and your understanding of his role to you.

Castleberry: That's right. Exactly. And because she was the extrovert, she was the one who said the things, she was the one who made the home nurturing and comfortable and loving, and although, as I now know, he was a very good scholar. He enjoyed that and also she was a fabulous cook. And I am a good cook and that also was nurtured into me as I grew up. And because of her background in health, her early training in healthó

Kasper: Did she ever practice as a nurse?

Castleberry: Never did. She dropped out of training to marry my father and never did practice except in the neighborhood. She birthed all the babies, she was the midwife in our small country town. She did all of the things that are done in small country towns in the way of medical care. And we were, as I grew up, many miles from a doctor, and she nursed us through a lot of things that otherwise we may notówell I know I probably wouldn't have been here at all because she nursed me through diphtheria in the epidemic ofó1933?

Kasper: Yeah. '32, '33.

Castleberry: '32-33. She nursed me through that. But she formed the shell of nurturing and caring and loving, together with an extended family that intruded constantly upon her.

To get back on target, when we came back from West Texas, we came back because my father's father became ill in East Texas.

Kasper: Did you come back to Lindale?

Castleberry: We came back to LaRue, Texas. And that is a little town that my paternal grandparents founded. It also is in East Texas, and these two little towns are about fifty miles apart, but it's where my father had grown up. And my grandfather on my father's side, my grandfather Anderson, we know nothing about at all except for him. He did not know his father. We know that he has a Swedish background and that came down by word of mouth through the family. The story is, and I have no way of checking this, I haven't gotten into that yet, so I have no way of checking this, but the story is that my paternal great grandmother married this young man who was kind of going through the community and her brothers didn't like him and ran him off right after the baby was born. Now that's the story. I don't know whether she was pregnant out of wedlock, I have no idea what it was. But that's the story and he never knew his father at all. His mother died when he was a very young child and he was reared by old bachelor brothers. And so by the time I knew him, I remember him as kind of god's gift to humanity. He really was a very loving, wonderful man, far more than my paternal grandmother was. My paternal grandmother never liked me.

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Kasper: That was meant to be reserved just for guests. Not a living room in the sense of nobody lived in it.

Castleberry: That's right. Nobody ever lived in it. And I had a bad habit of going in there and playing on the player piano and doing other things that children are not supposed to do.

Kasper: Which your grandmother did not like.

Castleberry: My grandmother did not like that. And I also pulled her magnolia blossoms. She had two huge, gorgeous magnolia trees in the front yard. One of them is still there. I was by there recently to see it. It's gorgeous. And I would pull the magnolia blossoms and children justówell, and my grandmother was reared in an era where children were to be seen and not heard.

And on Sunday, the Baptist preacher came to dinner. We were not Baptists, but my grandmother had gotten mad at the Methodist minister somewhere along in rearing her children, and she reared half of her children in the Methodist church, and I was real fortunate, my father was one of those. And then she got mad at the Methodist minister and so she went to the Baptist church and took the rest of themóreared the rest of them in the Baptist Church. And the town was so small that we couldn't afford a minister full-time, so the Baptists had a preacher on the first and third Sundays, and the Methodists on the fourth and second Sundays, and the kids were always glad when the fifth Sunday came 'cause we didn't have to go to church. [Laughter.] But we would walk, the Methodist and Baptist churches were about a city block apart and we would have Sunday school in our church and then walk across the school yard to the Baptist church for church. And my grandfather, then, when grandmother yanked up the kids and took them into the Baptist church, which was before my time, it's just a story I heard, my grandfather became as active in the Baptist church as he had been in the Methodist church and was superintendent of the Baptist Sunday school for twenty-five years. So I remember my grandfather on his knees at the front of the church. But I also remember that he loved children and that he looked, in spite of the fact that I have inherited all of the dark complexion and dark tendencies, my grandfather looked like a Swede, the blonde, wavy hair, the blue eyesóhe did. And even when he died, very young. It turned out he had cancer. But in those days, we didn't know. And he was critical before we really had it diagnosed what was wrong with him.

Kasper: And during this time when he was ill and you all were living there and grandmother was sitting in the parlor, you say you're mother really ran the ship.

Castleberry: My mother took care of everything.

Kasper: Was there no farm help in the house?

Castleberry: No.

Kasper: So she did everything.

Castleberry: She did everything. All the cooking, the cleaning. From time to time, as I grew up, there was a wonderful black woman who became very important in my life and in my mother's life, but at that period of timeóbut interestingly enough, it was also pretty much of an extended family. People did things for each other. Neighbors came in. When my grandfather was very ill, people brought in food. But there also were a lot of people in the house, always. And every Sunday that the Baptist preacher was there we had him to lunch. Another thing that Mother did that grandmother didn't approve of, she fed the children first. She fed them in the kitchen while the adults ate. And in those days, the kids all waited, you know, until the preacher had had his fill and the adults had eaten. But Mother, again, was of that generation or somehow she felt very keenly that children must be taken care of. So she would set up a table on the back porch or in the kitchen and feed us at the time that everybody else was having their meal.

Kasper: So that you didn't have to wait until the preacher had his fill.

Castleberry: We didn't have to wait. And they sit around the table and talk. In some houses that I was in where children were still made to wait, it would be two o'clock

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Castleberry: And I've collected along the way. I've tried to collect family stories along the way that get lost otherwise, too, and I'm now at the age and stage where along with the book that I'm writing, I'm also doing the family history becauseóand I have discovered one of the things that I've done for myself just recently, I said my maternal family went to Bethesda community and founded it in 1879, and I just went on the 15th of June to a memorial service there, the 107th memorial service there. And I took my grandson, who was a seventh generation, direct descendent of the family that founded the community and had him standing in the pulpit with me. So there's a lot ofóthese things areóthey're extremely important to me, and I try to tell my grandchildrenó

I have to tell you one funny story. I took my granddaughter who's just ten, who was nine last year, I took her last year with me and I was trying to explain to her before we went the significance of the day and I said to her that these are people that have been in our family for years and they're all buried in the little cemetery back of the church. The church is a picture postcard pretty little Presbyterian church way out in the country. And the cemetery behind it is so well kept and I said, we go in celebration. We go to remember the good things that we knew about these people and we go to reconnect with our roots, who we are and what we're doing. Nothing out of this kid, I mean, we'd drive along and just nothing. So we then go and we have the service; and we have the visiting and the cemetery and the conversations; and we have the picture taking and we have the big dinner that's all spread all over the ground out front. And what Ryann remembers about it is that she sampled six different kinds of blackberry cobbler. So that's what she remembers about it. But we were on our way back and I was still trying to get her to focus on what she had just experienced. So I said, "Now, you see what the day is. You've experienced it. You know what the day is," and I said, "When I'm not with you anymore, you can go to a memorial service and you can remember the good times that we had together. How would that be?" Nothing. We drive along for about ten more miles and suddenly Ryann says to me, "Grandmommy, I want to ask you an important question." Boy, here it comes. I said, "Okay, what is it?" She said, "When you die, can I have all your makeup?" [Laughter.]

Kasper: That's great. Of course, what you wanted was the response you couldn't get, right?

Castleberry: Important, significant things you want and you get what's real. So anyway, when we moved back to LaRue, to get back on the chronologyó

Kasper: I was going to begin to ask you about schooling.

Castleberry: When we moved back to LaRue, I went toóI still was, I guess in second grade. And I had been to, at that time, I had had several different teachers because when I went to school in Memphis, it turned out that the school had seventy-five first graders and they had planned for forty. So they kept switching us around until they found the kind of fit. But my first teacher was a woman whose name was Miss Starr in Memphis, and I didn't have her very long, but she was extremely important because she was a maiden schoolteacher, silver hair, and loved kids. And she filled in a lot of the adventure that I had not been able to have at home of the learning to relate to other people, the social skills that went with learning, the opening up of team study. She would put us in little groups of four and five and. Then we moved to La Rue.

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Castleberry: There I had a teacher who was one of my dad's cousins and who recognized that although I had had good learning skills, that I probably needed some supportive help as I went into the third grade. So the summer before I entered third grade, she brought me practically every book in the LaRue setting and I read all those books that summer. And so when I started the third grade, I was way ahead of everybody else and bored stiff. And if it hadn't been for her guidance and her help, I probably would have been cut off at that period in my life. But she kept reaching for the next book and prodding me to, you know, she kept saying, there's more out there that you haven't mastered yet. And then with Mother's help with this, it began to accumulate that there's more out there that I haven't seen yet or done yet.

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Castleberry: That's right. And so then I went through high school in Athens. Mother and Dad bought a place, my brother still lives on that place, and that became home.

Kasper: Is he still a dairy farmer too, your brother?

Castleberry: No. He has worked all over this country. He's recently retired, but he did, mostly, supervised heavy construction work. And he's worked all over this country.

Kasper: So he's come back to retire on the property.

Castleberry: Well, yeah, but he floated out of there all those years when he was going on jobs hither and yon. He's always lived there.

Kasper: It was home.

Castleberry: It was home. And he brought his family back there to rearóand married a young woman from Oklahoma and brought her there and while he was out working all over the world, she put the kids through school. But he's been home more often than he hasn't been. They're both retired now, but it's stillóand I have laughed since then. I used to go home, of course, to Athens and tear up my mother's cabinets and put them back together. Well, I discovered that my sister-in-law was not too open about my going home. It's a different world when your brother and his wife live in the house than when it's your mother's house.

Kasper: Right. So you can't just go in there and start looking through family diaries and picture albums and so forth.

Castleberry: No. Although my sister-in-law and I have become closer and closer and closer through the years. My brother and Ióthere were two brothers. The older of the two died several years ago.

Kasper: The older of your two brothers died?

Castleberry: The older of my two brothers died several years ago with a heart attack at Christmas time. The younger brother and I have always been able to complete each other's sentences. We are extremely close. We live in the same world. We understand each other without words. And the sister-in-lawómy brother was married previously, she was married previously, and they put their two families together and then had a daughter. He adopted her son; she adopted his two children; and then they had a child who is now grown. So it's been a long period of time. But the sister-in-law was much younger, so it took us years to get close. And now, my brother has been going through some critical illness. He's had open heart surgery and he's had several different illnesses and that has made us extremely close. And I feel like now I could walk into her house and go into that attic and pull out all the stuff that's still up there perfectly freely. But for a period of time that wasn't that way.

Kasper: So they're living on the family place in Athens that your father and mother had taken over and dairy farmed.

Castleberry: Bought. And dairy farmed.

Kasper: And so you went to high school in Athens.

Castleberry: I went to high school in Athensó

Kasper: What kind of a high school was that?

Castleberry: It was an excellent high school and it still is. It didn't have all of the academic stuff that it should have had. I didn't have any background much in science. I wasn't encouraged to take science or math. But those were different days, too, and now the girls are encouraged to study those things. I had an excellent history teacher. I had an excellent math teacher, really, he was exceptional in his giving me a background for what I could learn later. I never thought that I cared for math until I joined the paper and I had to learn how to

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Athenian, from 1939 and 1940. All of them, I looked at all of them. And I found out that I was extremely naive. That was the onset of World War II and I told the kids that night, it was their initiation program, and there were twelve of us who were charter members of that group and ten of us made it back for that. One of them came from Atlanta; one of them came from South Carolina. Fascinating, fascinating experience. Because, as I told the kids that night, we were the last of the innocent generation. We had our heads in the sand. We didn't know it. But it was such a gorgeous period of time to live in because my high school was sandwiched between the Texas Centennial and World War II. And so that period from '36 to '40 was a critical time in American history as well as in my own history.

Kasper: Why is that? Can you describe why?

Castleberry: Yeah, I can describe why. Because we were just pulling out of the Depression, just pulling out of the Great Depression. It's the first time we had had anything and we had had a great many gifts of experience by being a part of the Depression where there was no money at all to float around, and to suddenly be able to go to a movie without having to wonder whether or not when Saturday came you could go to a movie. I can remember so vividly what it was like to walk a mile and a half to town on Saturday afternoon just to go to the movie. And also I could go in and buy a pair of shoes without wondering whether or not I was going to have shoes for the next event that came along. And in those days if a young woman had two pairs of shoes, she was rich, because you had one pair you wore to school and you had one pair that you wore on Sunday and for dress up. And the things that I've said about my fatheróthat he was the pessimistóhe also adored me. He bought me my first high heels. Mother let him take me to town when I was in the seventh grade and she had in mind some nice little black patent leather flats. And we came home with a pair of high-heeled blue shoes. [Laughter.] And I never knew why she let me keep them, but she did. I thought at the time, and I still think, those were probably the prettiest shoes I ever owned. I loved them.

Kasper: Do you think your mother and father had, despite their differences, one an optimist and one a pessimist, do you think they both had high expectations for you?

Castleberry: For their children. They had high expectations for their children. Now let me explain that. There were only three careers that were okay for a woman, in my father's eye: nursing, teaching and getting married and having children. And he never understood my yen, in those days, never understood my compulsion to study journalism and to write. People wrote if they didn't have anything else to do. They wrote letters, and you were supposed to write letters and keep up with your family, and he encouraged that, and he saw that I had writing paper to write letters on, or postcards to mail to friends. But to write for a living? That was unheard of! And especially when it began to dawn on him that I intended to get out in the cruel world and lock horns withóbut he also saw that there was a newspaper in our house all the time. That was a fascinating thing, as I recall, that even in the days when there was no money, we subscribed to a Dallas newspaper; it came the next day by rural mail. So the first story that I ever remember following all the way through from beginning to end was the Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker storyóClyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the outlaws. And I read that day after day. I would go to the mailbox and be there when the postman came so that I could read the latest episode. And I cried when they were killed, and, you know, the whole bit.

Kasper: Now do you think your father intended for the children to read the paper too?

Castleberry: Oh yeah. He intended for the children to read the paper.

Kasper: So it wasn't just for his own edification.

Castleberry: He really intended for us to have a newspaper. Good people had newspapers in their house. And so we had a newspaper when nobody else in the community had a newspaper delivered daily to the house. And I didn't, you know, kids accept those things and you don't know that you're different. But in reviewing I know that we were very different. To have had music in the house, and to have had a newspaper in the house, books in the house. It was different. And I didn't appreciate it, but I certainly do now.

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Castleberry: My mother always, has always said, "Go for it, honey." My mother always said, "When you go to college," "when you do this," "when you leave home." And she always held out the carrotówhat the possibilities were in the wider world. And she did that even thoughówhen I got ready for college, I won a scholarship, and I knew I had to because I couldn't go to school otherwise. There wasn't any money in the family.

Kasper: You were valedictorian in your high school, too.

Castleberry: I was valedictorian. And the only way that I could get to school was to win a scholarship and I shall never forget some of the fun things that were happening along there. I had to do it. I had to be first in that class becauseóand interestingly enough, recently at the National Honor Society, the young man who was the high scoring boy in the class said to me, "I hated you all those years ago. You kept making meóyou know, you kept topping me in everything." And I said, "John, I had to. I had to go to school. And that's the only way I could do it."

So I got a scholarship and I also had an extremely wonderful influence in my life at that time. A Methodist minister who had come to town and was light years ahead of his time. He had studied and trained all over the world. He had lived in Europe. I do not know what kind of conditions brought him toóyes, I do. It took me years to find out and I've only recently known. His wife was ill and he needed an atmosphere, a small, nurturing atmosphere, where he would have an opportunity to look after her, too. So he came to Athens and took that church on, and his study was my stopping off ground. It was between the high school and downtown and I very often would drop in there and look at his books and read things. And he prodded and pushed.

Kasper: This was during your high school years? Do you remember his name?

Castleberry: Yeah. William G. Fletcher. Later, he was a professor at Florida Southern College and there's a building named for him there. But he was light years ahead of his time in that the Protestant ethic that is so critical to East Texas, he sought a broader world and he always brought in for lectures the small number of Jewish families that were in town, the small number of Hispanic families that were in town. He made a world that didn't exist for me.

In the meantime, also, this black woman, who had become so influential in my life, when we first moved to Athens and opened the dairy, Mother literally had to have help. She couldn't do it all. And it was the milking, the bookkeeping. She ran the business of the family. She kept all the books. She did all of theónot only helped to deliver the milk, but she kept all of the books, she collected all of the bills, kept all the accounts. All of it was her business. My father could, but he didn't. And also, at the time, he was doing a lot of the hard work, the milking, taking care of theóthe hard labor.

And so Mary Jane Baxter, lived not too far from us, I don't know how my mother met her, but she was a bride who had just come to that community and she was black and she would come up and help my mother. And she's the one who taught me to iron. And she'd say to me, "Now, Vivian, do that shirt over. That shirt will not pass." [Laughter.] So, I grew up doing all of the things that are done in a house, including ironing my brothers' shirts when they first started to date because I had one brother who had to have a fresh shirt every time he went out of the house. And I did that. I took care of that.

Kasper: How did you feel about that?

Castleberry: Well, at the time, I accepted it as a given. It was only later that I rebelled and didn't do it at all anymore. But by the time I was in college he was doing his own shirts if they got done. But at the time, it was more or lessóand Mother, I think, was so busy doing the things that she had to do that she wasn't even aware of that division of labor so much. My mother also, as I look back over it, was a manipulator. And I say that in the kindest terminology there is because I became one too in my work life. I had to to survive. And that's the world that I am looking forward to for my granddaughters where women do not have to manipulate in order to have the good life.

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Castleberry: I often did, yes. And we'd talk.

Kasper: And what were the kinds of influences you think that came out of these conversations?

Castleberry: I think, really, when I said I learned from Mrs. Barron, when I say I learned in negatives, I learned that I did not want to be elitist. I learned that I wanted the world to have everybody to have equal opportunity for their rights. I learned that we should not be handicapped because we don't have the money to buy the dress.

Kasper: We should be fair minded.

Castleberry: One vivid experience that I remember, one of my very early experiences with her and I had to overcome that, was when I was in the eighth grade and I came out for extemporaneous speech and won for the school, and it was unheard of for an eighth grader to represent the school at the county meet, but I did. And Mrs. Barron was the sponsor of that. And she told me how to dress. She said, you know, half of whether or not you win will be dependent on how you look, on the way you present yourself.

Kasper: And you didn't like that.

Castleberry: Well, I couldn't afford that. She wanted me to dress in white with a, at the time the style foróshe wanted aóand I remember it so vividly, she said, the dress should have a cape and, you know, when you stand, you throw your cape back and whatever and whatever and whatever. All of the things that you do to get from here to there. Well, I couldn't afford the dress she wanted me to have. So my dress was made over from one of my aunt's dresses and I think she decided right early on that I didn't win that contest because I wasn't appropriately dressed. But, what I learned from that was that although it is accurate that our first appearance makes an impact on other people, that should not be the lasting impact, and I made up my mind that I would overcome that. That I probably would never be interested in fashion to the extent that I would be appropriately right for every occasion. And that to be neat and clean was the appropriateóI think that's what I learned from that. I don't know, but I think that's one of the things I learned.

Opal Lewis was significant as my debate coach in another way. She was a fireball. And she taught me that you don't stand back and let other people do it. She taught me to take up for myself. We traveled extensively in the state on debate teams. Every weekend we were goneóto Waco or to Austin or to Houston or to Dallasóevery weekend for that entire year that we were debating that topic. And, of course, learned to stay in hotels, learned to cope, learned to fend for myself, learned to handle what little money I had in making it stretch for the food I had to eat and this sort of thing. And also another experience that was just remarkable for me that I appreciate so much. The boys' debate team was exceptional too. They were exceptional. And one of those two was the Jewish boy in our high school. And I began to really experience other cultures. I began to experienceóup until that time I don't think it had ever dawned on me why people go to different churches or different synagogues.

Kasper: Except maybe for the minister that you talked about who brought in some of that diversity.

Castleberry: Oh yeah. He brought in that. He brought in the diversity, too.

Kasper: But this was all still new in high school for you.

Castleberry: But this was new to me. This was new to me. And even then, I graduated from high school still having almost a fear of Roman Catholicism. And I don't know how that got put into me because it wasn't anything that was said, but I was almost afraid of the nuns, the first ones that I met, in their black habits.

Kasper: I think that's true of a lot of us. And I'm not quite sure either how it's instilled. But I think there was some influence in probably my life as well as

Page 20

university that had more of a nurturing experience at the same time that it offered me opening to my life.

Kasper: Nurturing in what sense?

Castleberry: Nurturing in that it was small enough that you wouldn't get lost in the shuffle completely.

Kasper: And where socially you would be with people who were like-minded and comforting and so forth so that maybe your transition from a small townó

Castleberry: So the transition would be better. So what he did for me that was so mind boggling, I had no idea where I was going to school. I had a scholarship to Baylor University, a scholarship to Texas University.

Kasper: Were these all full scholarships?

Castleberry: There were all full scholarships in those days. A scholarship to SMU and then several lesser schoolsóNorth Texas University, East Texas State Universityóyou know, the lesser ones in our community. And nobody from our class had come to SMU. I mean nobody from Athens had come to SMU. I think that's another reason I did it. I wanted the pioneering spirit of doing it on my own. So he brought me to Dallas with him.

Kasper: To see SMU?

Castleberry: He brought me to Dallas with him, gave me streetcar fare from downtown Dallas, and turned me loose to find my way to the university and to interview with the dean. And I did not know that he had plowed the ground ahead of me. I did not know that he had talked to everybody; that it was all really prepared because, you know, he let me do everythingóthat independence of going and doing it for yourself.

Kasper: Had he talked to the dean at SMU and so forth?

Castleberry: I hadn't until then, until that day.

Kasper: No, but had he talked to the dean for you?

Castleberry: Oh yeah. He talked to the dean, he talked to the dean of women, he had plowed everything ahead of me, but I didn't know.

Kasper: He was not a graduate of SMU, was he?

Castleberry: No.

Kasper: But he knew he had some admiration for the school.

Castleberry: You know, I cannot remember, and I need to go back and check that out, where his degrees were from, but he had finished a Ph.D., which was unheard of in those days for a minister to take a Ph.D., so his title was an earned degree, it wasn't honorary.

Kasper: He was quite an interesting fellow.

Castleberry: He was light years ahead of his time. To the extent that when one of the things that was required at SMU was freshman religion. Everybody in those days had to takeóthey no longer do, but you had to take freshman religion. And I walked into that class, see an East Texas kid, with most of the students, my classmates at that time were Dallas, a great many of them were insulated Highland Park kids, who had almost grown up on the campus.

Kasper: Highland Park is an upper class community in Dallas.

Castleberry: You bet. It really is. It's your pocket of wealth and really insulated from the rest of the community. I'll show you. We'll drive around it before you leave.

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communicate with each other. We talked around each other. And on Sunday, this was on Fridayóon Saturday I got through the day all right. I remember that at one stage the kids, Diana, at the time, was fourteen and driving already, and so she took us out for a root beer to a drive-in place, but she picked up a lot of her friends on the way, and nobody talked to me, nobody was interested in what I was doing there or who I was or anything. It was an extremely lonely experience. And then on Sunday, because I needed something that would be a continuum in my life, I took the streetcar and came to Highland Park Methodist Church and I came to Highland Park Methodist because it was on the SMU campus and I thought I might meet some people who would be in my class, classmates, because Monday was to be registration day. And so on Sunday, then, when I got home from church, Lucretia was sitting cross-legged in the middle of her bed, and her first words to me that I remember, she may have said something to me before that, but the first words I remember was, "Prove to me that there's a God. You've been to church, now prove to me that there's a God." [Laughter.] So it was a very lonely beginning and I was extremely homesick and I was starting a totally new life in a totally new community, a totally new world. On Monday morning, Cleo, the black, all-purpose servant, drove me to school in a limousine. And here was this East Texas kid getting out of a long, black Packard at SMU on the first day of school. I wish I had a picture of that.

Kasper: What a series of contrasts, right?

Castleberry: I wish I had a picture of that because I don't believe it myself but it happened to be true. And he drove me to school for the first week until I insisted on taking the streetcar to school. I certainly did not want to make the wrong impression on my classmates.

Kasper: Well, and the degree of contrasts for you, personally, must have been so overwhelming.

Castleberry: It was horrible. It was just overwhelming, it really was. And then because things were so unpleasant in the dining room, very shortly I started picking up sandwiches in the kitchen or doing whatever I could not to eat with the family. And then I got the word from her through the servants that I was to eat with the family, that that was part of the package, that I would be present at meals.

Kasper: And living at the Hamons too, I should imagine, after a while, kind of cut you off from what was going on at the campus.

Castleberry: Oh, it did. Of course it did.

Kasper: Had you been on campus and hanging around the student unionó

Castleberry: Had I been on campus and been a part of it, it would have been different, but I wasóthe work was such thatóthe interesting thing was, again, you learn in negatives, and the interesting thing was that that's where I learned Shakespeare. I had never really learned it in high school. I'd had some of it, but I'd never really had a teacher that focused on it, but I had to teach Lucretia Shakespeare. And that's when I got an appreciation for some of the giants in literature that I had missed along the way. So, again, certainly nothing is ever all bad if you want to utilize those experiences for learning tools. But, the thing was, by, I would say, three months into that year, I was carrying more of a load than anybody could carry. I was a country kid, alienated from the background that I had, working in hours that didn't allow me time to go home for a weekend visit because I was on duty most weekends, and carrying a heavy freshman load and I just about cracked up over it.

Kasper: Well, and embroiled in this emotional thing.

Castleberry: The emotional thing. And I remember one day I was in the lounge and I dissolved into tears in the lounge and an older student, a senior woman came in and found me in this condition, and took me to the school doctor whose name was Minnie Maffett, who is considered a giant in this town. I hated that woman. It took me years to get over it. She took me in, perfunctorily examined me, announced that I was not a fit student for college, that I had nothing going for me that was of the caliber or quality that I would get through school, and that my best bet was

Page 24

Castleberry: Right, you did. But I always, I mean, nylons I had, because they would wear them and then throw them in the wastebasket. And clothes, they boughtóand Lucretia never did lose weight while I was there. She did later. But this child ate everything, and the thing was, there was unlimited money. They could always order, and they ordered, at night they would order hamburgers and pizza, well, pizzas weren't so much in then, but the food would come to that house in cartons and buckets and whatever.

Kasper: It must have been so astonishing for you, a poor farm child.

Castleberry: And I was supposed to see that she didn't overeat. [Laughter.] It was something. She later lost weight and made her debut at Idlewild and then walked off of her Idlewild Ball and married the foreman of their ranchóon horseback yet. [Laughter.]

Kasper: She finally went like this [motion] to her parents.

Castleberry: Glorious stories, just glorious stories.

Kasper: Really. It would make a wonderful book.

Castleberry: Yeah, it would make a wonderful book. But anyway, through the years, then after that second year, well I had earned enough credentials with the school and with the dean of women that I went to work in the dormitory and earned my room and board in the dormitory. In my junior year, I was the monitor on the freshman floor at SMU and I had neveróSMU is quite a social school, but I didn't know when I came from East Texas that one went through rush and that one pledged to sorority. Fortunately, I didn't know that. And so it never made any difference to me whatsoever. And by the time I had earned enough credentials on my own to be "rushed," I didn't need it anymore. I couldn't have afforded it anyway, but I didn't need it. And, in the meantime, as I have said earlier, some of the Jewish girls were dear friends of mineóAnnie Eisenstein, who rode the same streetcar with me, and she and I became very good friends; and Josephine Israel and I became friends and still are. She's Josephine Goldman now. And Bea Lichtenstein andóso I didn't really run around in that crowd so much because they were pretty much of a closed sorority unto themselves, too. But the intellectual climate that they had experienced in their own families was an opening for me.

Kasper: These Jewish girls.

Castleberry: These Jewish girls. And I appreciated them far more. Annie and I rode the streetcar together and her home was not too far from where the Hamons lived so that sometimes in the early mornings, especially if it was cold, I would stop by her house before we'd take the streetcar together on to school. And so I shall never forget being in her house when her brother was preparing for his bar mitzvah, and that was new to me. I'd never known anything about this. Somehow, I had missed it in my reading. Knew nothing about it. And I was so impressed with this young boy who was preparing for a bar mitzvah. And, also, we were friendly enough that I could ask any kind of questions and get answers. And I felt really good about that so that the Jewish community became then almost my extended family in my freshman year at SMU.

Kasper: And these were girls like yourself who did not live in the dorms. They lived in homes.

Castleberry: That's right. They were town girls. Their parents lived here. They were not boarding or rooming as I was. They were town girls.

Kasper: But they provided a transition for you between the Hamons and SMU, which you desperately needed.

Castleberry: That's right. I had to have. But by the time I moved into the dorm, I had caught the vision. I knew that I could hack it. I knew I could make it.

Kasper: You won the bet against Dr. Maffett.

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Castleberry: Of course. Exactly. And these kids didn't know that. And the miracle that Christ had performed. I mean, I couldn't believe they didn't know these things. So I had had that good background of experience and brought it with me, but my freshman religion courseóa man whose name was Ward Redus, and they're still good friends of mine, they're still livingóWard and Amo Redus. He's a religion professor emeritus, very learned. And they provided a home for me off campus. They lived a block from SMU and he would have us on Sunday night down to his house for rap sessions. We didn't call them rap sessions in those days, but that's what it amounted to. And he would invite the kids from his class who had "shown promise" and I didn't know that that's what they were doing. And they would invite us down. And also at the same time, I volunteered, went to Highland Park Methodist Church, and I volunteered as a Sunday school teacher in the black community. And I stayed with that, I taught black kids until one of the little boys ate all the crayolas and it scared me to death and I left that job because I was afraid he would die. I didn't know crayolas wouldn't hurt him. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Another lesson in life.

Castleberry: Another lesson that I learned the hard way. But all of those people made such an impact in my life. And the religion course that Dr. Redus taught became so significant of how religion shapes people that I then took a minor in religion and studied comparative religion in my sophomore year and could have very easily gone in that direction, and may have gone in that direction, had it been okay in those days for women to get involved in religion as a life tool.

Kasper: Yes. With the prospect of being a minister or something.

Castleberry: Yeah. What really turned me on was how religion shapes us and whereóhow weóbecause I was so appalled at some of these kids who had come out of conservative churches in the Dallas community where they were in their life and how they had been shaped and cut off by some of the things that they had been told. I thought all of us had had the experience of being with people who opened our minds rather than closed them down. And also my experience also with the Methodist church was that it was light years ahead of its time in that the Methodist church in those days was one of the leaders in women's issues.

Kasper: It still is.

Castleberry: And I was just amazed at what it allowed me to do. And I would go to Sunday school occasionally with my Baptist friends and find that they were sinners and that they weren't supposed to be doing these things, and I was astonished. So, anyhow, all those things shaped me so that by the time I was a junior in college, I was working all the hours that I possibly could for the Campus, which was a weekly. The Campus was the name of the paper.

Kasper: It was called the Campus and that's the weekly newspaper?

Castleberry: It was the weekly newspaper and at the time we didn't have a publishing company on campus so we had to go downtown to publish. We had to take our copy downtown. So I was doing that from the time I was a junior and working in all these hours I could. I was working in the dorm as a monitor on the freshman floor. That's when I watched girls go through rush and some of them leave because they didn't make the sorority they wanted. And to see what the Greek system did to kids and became very adamantly opposed to the Greek system. It was a quiet "agin'" but I was really "agin'" all the things that cut people off from community. And I had thirty-two freshmen on my floor. And I was nursemaid, mother, monitor, caretaker, nurturer. And in those days, it was against the rules for girls to smoke in the dorm. And most of my girls were smoking. So I simply called a meeting. Again, this is one of those places where you manipulate behind your housemother's back. I adored my housemother and I told her, "I will not lie to you. I will not tell you an untruth." But what I did was call my girls together and say to them, "If I catch you smoking, I'm going to report you. So you better be sure that I don't catch you smoking." So I'd walk into girls' room when the smoke was coming out from under the bed, but I didn't see it. The girls were allowed to smoke in their own homes by their own families, and it just seemed to me to be an obnoxious college rule that they couldn't do in their dormitories what they did in their own homes.

Page 28

and I did not go and tell my dean of women because I knew they would tell me not to.

Kasper: There had never been a woman editor of the Campus had there?

Castleberry: There had been, way back in the early days when the school first started, but not in the recent years at all. And it was a man's bailiwick. So I announced for it and it turned out that my opponent, my chief opponent, was another woman who was a sorority girl and a very rich girl in the community. And I won over her hands down, although it was a very organized political campaign and it got nasty. She did not have the credentials that I did and I, for some way or other, was a good politician. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed politicking. I enjoyed going to the dorms. I enjoyed talking to the people. I was credentialed. I had done my homework. I had done the background stuff.

Kasper: How were you credentialed?

Castleberry: I had worked for the paper ever since I'd been there. I had been features editor for it. I had been an assistant editor for it.

Kasper: Straight from your freshman year.

Castleberry: Well, as I progressed. And I had taken all the journalism courses that were offered. I had to have this course in creative writing. And not only that, but I had a wide following in the Independent Students Association by that time and had held an office in ISA. So I had a lot going for me. And when I wonówell, one of the funny stories. I met my dean of women face-to-face the day after I announced and, it came out in the paper that I was running for editor of the paper for the next year, I met my dean of women right at the water fountain at SMU and she pulled herself up right in front of me, I was going to speak and pass on, and she said to me, "My dear, have you forgotten that you are a woman student." [Laughter.] And I still don't know what that means. I still don't know what that means.

Kasper: And you didn't care to investigate any further because you'd won the position and that's what mattered, presumably.

Castleberry: Well, see, I had just announced, I didn't know I was going to win. I didn't know I was going to win yet. And she felt very confident that I wouldn't.

Kasper: Yes. Well then that's what the remark meant, sure. You've forgotten your place. Your place is not to run.

Castleberry: Not to be a top person on the campus. But, of course, it happened, and, again, I say the timing was right. I've had a lot of goodies because the timing was right.

Kasper: And as you said earlier, you say the timing was right because the boys were so committed to their service duties that it was an opportunity for a woman to come in and take charge.

Castleberry: And then, too, I had two roommates also for that period of time, and then I will get me through school quickly. I had two roommates. In addition to Edith Hanby, who was my best friend and dearest friend, she became my dearest friend in my freshman year and when the Hamon's would go out of town on weekends, they would allow me to have someone in so I wouldn't be by myself in that big house. And Edith would come and stay with me some weekends. And that was really, really rich because itóand as I say, she was cynical as I was positive, and it gave a good balance. In later years, she never could understand why I followed a career. Because of her background experience, she was an at-home mother. And she was one of those people who promised me that I would rear juvenile delinquents because I insisted on working. She was absolutely positive that that would happen. And I thinkóshe diedóshe had cancer, she had a spinal cancer, malignancy on the spine and died a number of years back. But we remained good friends. She was maid of honor in my wedding. She was my oldest child's godmother. We were really close friends. But my two college roommates also created an extremely good influence on my life.

Page 30

that they went clompity, clompity, clomp all the way down. We were on the third floor. All the way to the first floor, got everybody up. Well, finally, I can't remember what she got campused for, but she got campusedó

Kasper: What does that mean, campused?

Castleberry: It means that you can't go out for an entire weekend. And by that time we had so many friends and when I got home on Thursday night, she was campused from Friday morning to Monday class time. And when I got home on Friday night, or Thursday night, from putting out the paper, her boyfriends had sent a black wreath to our room. It was hanging on our door in memorial for Cordelia for the weekend. And she just made a ball of it. I mean, the people on the desk had to take messages, and the boys had made up that weekend that they would call her every hour on the hour and leave a long message that the girl at the desk had to take down on the book. And it happened foróand Miss B, Miss Brazelton said, "I don't know what I'm going to do with her. I campus her and she makes a party of it." And we just had a picnic. By that time she had two boyfriends in medical school. One of them sent a big old package that weekend with a sign on it that said, "Beware, this is a cadaver." Things of this kind that went on the whole time. So, anyway, that was a good year, and by the time I graduated, I graduated in June of '44 and the war, of course, was still in full swing and interestingly enough, all of the time that I was doing other things, I was corresponding with Curt Castleberry.

Kasper: Now, how had you met Curt Castleberry?

Castleberry: I met him in the seventh grade.

Kasper: You met Curt in the seventh grade?

Castleberry: In the seventh grade and went all through high school with him.

Kasper: In Athens?

Castleberry: In Athens. Never dated him. When we would get home, after we graduated from high school, if we happened to be home the same weekend, which was rare because I was in college and busy, and he was in business school at that time and busy, we went to a movie together or we did something together. But the background was that the one time he asked me for a date, I had told my mother, I said, "There is this boy in my class who is going to come out and ask me to go somewhere." At the time, we did not have a telephone. And I said, "He's going to come out here and ask me to go somewhere with him and I want you to say I can't go." It wasn't Curtis.

Kasper: It wasn't?

Castleberry: No. That wasn't who I was talking about. It was Curtis that came. I had no inkling that he was going to come out. He came out and asked me to go to a movie with him, and I said, "But Mother I want to go," and she said, "But you can't go." You know. And after he left, I said, "But Mother, I wanted to go." And she said, "You told me when that boy came out here to tell you that you couldn't go." So I had a hard time living that down. I think to this day, after forty-three years of marriage, he still doesn't believe that story. [Laughter.] But it was so funny because when he left the house that dayó

Kasper: Was that seventh grade?

Castleberry: Oh, no. That was high school. There was a little bridge that youóin our house in Athens, if I had time I'd take you there too, just to show you, you circle to the driveway. You know, you came in, you circled out. It was out in the country, but it was a big lawn and you circled out. He ran off the bridge when he left. And my father came in and said, "I'm so glad that you said you didn't want to go out with that boy. You will never go anywhere with that boy. He doesn't know how to drive." So I married him. [Laughter.] But we never dated. And then, after we graduated from high school, we were in the same class, graduated in the same class, after we were out of high school, we were in Athens two or three different times and went to a movie or you know, stopped and talked. But I corresponded with

Page 32

Castleberry: So I did. Then Lester Jordan came in one day and he said to me, "Vivian, I think maybe you better go home for the weekend [Laughter.] until things clear up a little bit." And they almost pulled the V-12 unit off the campus because theó

Kasper: What did you publish?

Castleberry: I just published what the boys were singing and saying about their commanding officer behind his back.

Kasper: Which was not so nice.

Castleberry: I don't remember what it was, but it certainly wasn't nice. And the Navy didn't like that much. That's the way Lester Jordan taught me. And he called me in Athens while I was down there, by that time we did have a phone. He called me in Athens while I was down there and he said, "Well you can come home now. [Laughter.] We've had a publishing board meeting and the university president and whatever has been called in and everything's calmed down and I think you can come back to the campus." [Laughter.] So I started it early, I started early walking just almost crossing the line that was not allowed. I wouldn't have done that had I known, I really wouldn't have, but Ió

Kasper: You wouldn't have done what?

Castleberry: I wouldn't have published it. It was sheer innocence that I did that.

Kasper: So it wasn't guts journalism so much as you just thoughtó

Castleberry: It wasn't guts journalism so much as I was naive. Even thoughó

Kasper: But it set a pattern that you thenó

Castleberry: It set a pattern that I could push, I could always push beyond. I could always push. And I always knew I could. And I always knewó

Kasper: And you had some encouragement. It wasn't just that you wereó

Castleberry: Sure. And I also knew thatóI learned pretty early on that the sun was going to come up tomorrow anyway and what I did or didn't do was not in the long run going to make a great deal of difference so I better live life to the fullest. Just live it to the fullest. And I did crazy things, like at the end of my sophomore year, instead of going home, Edith Hanby and I went out and got a room in town with kitchen privileges and then I called my folks and told them I wasn't coming home that summer, I was going to stay in town and work. But when I graduated from college, Dr. Fletcher was severely disappointed that I did not go on for my masters. At that time he had, and I didn't know what he was doing, but he hadóI don't know whether he talked them into it, but anyway, at Boston College I was offered a fellowship at Boston College to do my masters in religion.

Kasper: It's a Jesuit school. Right.

Castleberry: And I turned it down. Turned it down flat because I was so tired at that stage of living from hand to mouth, I really had gone to school on a shoestring and there were times that I could not buy a book that I needed. There were times thatóbecause when I came to SMU my father said to me, the total of his advice was, "Honey, we have done all we can for you. If you want to go to school, we will love you and support you to the limit of our ability, but it's not going to be very much financially."

Kasper: So you were on your own?

Castleberry: So, there was no money. People can't work themselves through college now, but I could and I did. And I hadó

Kasper: But you're saying, too, it took its toll on you, is what you're saying.

Castleberry: Oh, it took its toll. Oh yes.

Page 34

Kasper: Well, my daughter is one of my best friends, if not my best friend.

Castleberry: Oh, they are. They are my best friends. And I was so angry when my mother died, and that was something I had to come to grips with because when I went to work, this is a later story, but when I went to work for the Times Herald, and my hours were going to be god awful long and I didn't know when deadlines were going to be and I didn't know what planes I would have to meet, my mother said to me, "Honey, I will not come live with you because I don't think that's smart." This is after my father died. She said, "I will be available anytime you have to go anywhere or do anything, I will be available to you withó

Kasper: Within the home and take care of the kids.

Castleberry: "Just call me, that's all you have to do." And she died when my youngest child was four years old. And that removed tható

Kasper: That stability, that source of support.

Castleberry: That source of support that I had really counted on so it was a whole different thing.

Kasper: And besides which, I mean, I have not lost my mother yet, but I know I've heard her say this, and I know that I can even sense it beforehand, is kind of a senseónot only the terrible loss of your mother, which is obvious, but a kind of being orphaned, being left and bereft.

Castleberry: Yes, the thing that I came to grips with on the way home from Mother's funeral, the one thing that hit me right between the eyes is that I am now the older generation. It is now up to me. And that was just likeóawful. Wow! And so on the way home from her funeral I made up my mind that I will not try to fill her shoes. Well, Mother had always made popcorn for the grandchildren. I mean, it was just a ritual, that was a given. That night, after her funeral, one of the granddaughters said, "When are we going to have our popcorn?" And I caught myself going into the kitchen and making popcorn. Although I do not eat popcorn. Never have. It was just the continuing of that thing.

So, anyway, I got through school, graduated from SMU, declined a fellowship, went to work in Dallas for the Petroleum Engineer Publishing Company, as an editorial assistant which meant that I did everything from run errands for my female boss. Her name was Ernestine Adams. She recently died. She was a hard-nosed, queen-bee type woman who became a very good friend of mine, but it took years. And because she had been reared in small town newspapers and she had had to fight and claw and work her way every step of the way, she taught me by negatives and I learnedó

Kasper: Just like Doctor Maffett.

Castleberry: I learned almost too well. I don't want to be the kind of boss she is, so I almost ingested that to the point that I was too soft. It took me years to find a balance because all of it was a do-it-yourself project. I had no training at all for handling a staff. And Ernestine was, in the first place she was a tiny woman, she was little, unlike Minnie Maffett who was huge. But Ernestine was little, she never married, her work was her whole life. She was given any number of different kinds of awards in petroleum publishing in this country for her pioneering work.

Kasper: So was she the editor of their publication?

Castleberry: She was one. They had four publications, and she was the editor of one of them. Her specialty was in deep wells and offshore drilling. And she made that her bailiwick and it was so dear to her that if anybody touched it it was like touching one of her children. And I did more research for her than anything else on what was going on in drilling in the country. I also went back to SMU and took a special course in mapping, making oil maps, and I hated every minute of that. That was not my thing.

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alike and similar so they got thrown together. So Dick, Richard Anderson then, who was from Iowa, came to Dallas and he said, my buddy said to look up his sister when he came to Dallas, so he called me. And, at the time, it was a Saturday morning that he called and I was on my way downtown. I was all dressed to go downtown. I was going to do some work that morning, and so I said, "I will meet you at the Baker Hotel." Well, I got to the hotel and this tall, good-looking, blonde farm boy from Iowa in his officer's uniform was just, "Oh, wow!" So we fell just madly in love immediately. And then he went overseas. And the letters were hot and heavy and whatever, but I was still writing to Curtis all the time.

Kasper: All through this.

Castleberry: All the time, I was still writing to him. Dick and I never became engaged. We talked about it, but we never became engaged. He said, "When I get back from overseas, we'll see how things are," because he needed to finish college. He was working on his masters when he went in the service. And he needed to finish that. And he said, "I really don't know what I want to do with my life, so we'll talk about it when I get home." So, Curtis got home first. [Laughter.]

Kasper: Oh, that's it. That's the key.

Castleberry: But what happened was that Curtis got home and the next week after Curtis got home I got a letter from Dick. And the letters had waned in the meantime. And I didn't know whether the romance was paling. I couldn't figure out whether he might have had a girl back home or what it was that was going on in his life but the ardor had gone out, I thought, from my interpretation. And at that time, that was probably the most lovesick I ever was. I was so lovesick that I would go home at noon to see if I had a letter from him. But, it was interesting in that the week after Curt got home, I got a letter from him and apparently nothing had happened except that he was really giving it, you know, cautious, giving it the time, and that he was coming home and he was coming to Dallas to see me. And I had to write and say, "Don't."

And then, Curt's and my romance, the way that started, we had really fallen in love by letter. I could tell by what he was reading and thinking that his way of exploring life and mine were running in the same pattern. And when he went to Japan from wherever he was stationed, I've forgotten at the time, he went to Japan, I thought he was coming home, he thought he was coming home, the next letter was from the mainland of Japan. And I'll never forget he said, "Since I am here I will not waste this time. I'm going to make it count for something."

Kasper: And that really struck a cord in you.

Castleberry: That struck a cord in me. And so he did, he spent the time that he was in Japan, every leave he could get, going as far as they would let him go and doing everything that he could do in order to learn as much as he could. I know now that he did the worst thing that he possibly could do, but I think maybe we got by with it, he walked in the site where the atom bomb fell, you know, in the ashes where the atom bomb fell. I know, you know, we would know now not to do that, but he didn't know then not to do that. And his experiences are phenomenal. They, too, would make a book because in the first troop ship that went in, the Japanese were so scared of what the Americans were going to do. And when that big troop ship went in, they couldn't see a Jap anywhere. It was like there was just nobody. It was like a beach that was combed clean. And they could, you know, see smoke rising in the distance, but there was just nothing. And then, he said, slowly one or two began to peep out and then finally they came down and helped them unload the ship and made them, you know, they were a conquered people.

And so, the letters that I have from him at that time, and I have some of those letters which are very wonderful and very good to have, and they're not long letters because for the most part he was in situations that were so isolated from the main life that there was not a lot to write. But he wrote me what he could and I kept the letters and I think that says something, that along about that time I started keeping his letters.

Kasper: And he came back after three and a half years overseasó

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Kasper: What year was this that you were getting married?

Castleberry: This was 1945. He got home Christmas night of 1945 and we started dating on January 1, 1946. And we were married on May the 4th, 1946. Now, I'll tell you how that happened. We decidedówhen we first decided we'd get married, we would get married at Christmas time. And then, he went to work, it wasn't three months, it was about six weeks, because he went to work and the first thing the company did was to send him down to Waco to do some special work. And this seemed awfully foolish. We'd been apart all this time and here he was in Waco and I was here and we couldn't see each other. So I went down for a weekend to Waco. That, too, was unheard of in those days. But I went down and I stayed in a hotel room and, believe it or not, we stayed in separate rooms and we stayed in separate rooms. I mean, those were funny days. But we did.

And I shall never forget, because at the time, we were walking back to the hotel on Sunday afternoon and I saw this gorgeous suit in the window in one of those department stores, and I said, "If it were, you know, a weekday and the stores were open, I'd go in and try that suit on and buy it." And so, of course, he bought it and sent it to me with a note that said, "This is your going away outfit." So, I mean, even my training wouldn't let me send that suit back. So that weekend we decided it was foolish for us to stay apart anymore. We were both old enough to get married, we wanted to get married; it was time we did it. And so we were married on the 4th of May at home, in Athens, in the Methodist Church. By that time Dr. Fletcher had left. And we had a big church wedding and most of my college friends, from SMU days, came down and all of his family came. And we had magnolias to decorate the church.

Now I brought in all I could of the ties of my past history into that ceremony. It was perfectly, absolutely "us" all the way through. And Sue, my first college roommate came down and was my matron of honor. Edith was my maid of honor. Bridesmaids were the girls I'd lived with in Dallas. So it was pureóbut, the interesting thing was that both Curtis and I in talking in those days knew that we would have two careers eachóone at work, one in the workplace, and one in the home place. We didn't know we were unusual.

Kasper: You didn't know you were unusual?

Castleberry: We didn't know we were unusual, we thought everybody did this. I meanó

Kasper: But you know they didn't. I mean, you know that everybody's mother stayed home.

Castleberry: Well, I guess intellectually I did, except my mother had always worked with my father. His mother had always worked. The examples were there. I knew that most of my friends quit work and got married and had kids. But I knew I wasn't going to.

Kasper: And you knew you'd been different all along anyway so it probably didn't surprise you that you wanted to continue to be different.

Castleberry: I had been different all along. And so, Curt and I were incredibly lucky. We couldn't find an apartment in this town for blood nor money at that stage. And so we rented a room with kitchen privileges and we consciously looked for and rented a room in an older neighborhood in an older house with an old couple where there was just the couple in the house. It would have worked fine except the day we got back from our Colorado honeymoon, their daughter left her husband with her two children and moved home. And so we had six weeks of being nowhere to go really. We could go to our room and lock ourselves in our room, but there were just people there all the time.

So we started looking for a place to live and I took the Yellow Pages of the Dallas phone book and wrote to all the apartment owners and the second week this man called me and said, "Come talk to me, I like what I read about you." And we moved into an apartment in the Avon Apartments on Lemmon Avenue, in Apartment 201, in a one-bedroom apartment but with kitchen, little dinette, maid service. Can you believe it? I mean, we were incredibly lucky.

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Castleberry: Bryan. Curtis was at Texas A&M and I was in Bryan. It's five miles from College Station, the little town nearest College Station where Texas A&M is and where the doctors were. And that's when I learned to love the Catholics. The Catholic sister in that hospitalómy baby was in the hospital a month after I went home. And I couldn't drive at the time. And I couldn't go see her. And Curt was working two jobs and going to school full time. And the head nurse said to me, "Honey, don't worry, I will love your baby." And she used to put that baby on her shoulder and make her rounds at night when there wouldn't be anybody in the hospital. She'd cuddle and love that baby. But they wouldn't let me touch her. That, too, was a part of the whole thing. You couldn't go into the nursery and love your own baby. So I cried all the time. I had a baby and I didn't have her. And I got pregnant again right away by accident. Birth control failed. I was using a diaphragm. I would have been a fool to have had another child so quickly becauseó

Kasper: óbecause of the kidney infection. And your lives, too, were so busy.

Castleberry: Uh huh. Our lives. Curt's life. But I got pregnant right away and Curt was absolutely divine, just absolutely marvelous. You would have thought he'd planned it. And, you know, not all husbands do that well. And he, you know, he said, "Honey, don't worry. We've gotten through rougher things, we'll make this." So we had the second baby the 25th of June. Carol was one year old on the 23rd of June. And we had this second baby on the 25th of June, on a Sunday afternoon. I came out of anesthesiaó

Kasper: And you'd had a kidney infection during the second pregnancy too, the same way.

Castleberry: Just terrible. Just terrible. That baby was born at eight months. I carriedóI mean, my skin was so puffy, if you saw pictures of me at that time, you wouldn't even know it was me. I looked awful, and I felt worse. And this was in the days before antibiotics.

Kasper: And you had an infant, too, that you were caring for.

Castleberry: I had an infant that I was trying to take care of. And I was also trying to work part time to help him all I could.

Kasper: You were editor of the A&M Battalion. Was that at that point too?

Castleberry: Un huh. I talked myself into that job. Yeah.

Kasper: Is that all during this time you also edited their newspaper.

Castleberry: Un huh. All during that time. Right.

Kasper: And you were the first women's editor, I gather, of the Texas A&M Battalion.

Castleberry: Yeah. Un huh. Well I was women's editor. They had a male editor, but I did everything because I was there all the time. The other kids were students and they kind of turned it over to me. But the pregnancy was so difficult and the little boy was born on Sunday afternoon and it was June the 25th, 1950. I came out from under anesthesia and I did not hear them say, you have a son. I heard them say, "We're at war again." Korea. That was my first memoryóof hearing the nurse and the doctors talkingówe're at war again. And that baby lived three days. He died with a congenital heart deformity. And, of course, I've always been so grateful that I didn't misbehave during that pregnancy, even though it was tough and rough and hardó

Kasper: No, that you can't attribute to yourself anything that happened.

Castleberry: You know, I can't. I can't because Curt took care of me and I took care of myself. I did everything I could. And the baby was born at eight months and Carol had been born at seven, and he was born at eight. And he weighed seven pounds. So there was nothing, I mean it wasn't tható

Kasper: It was an accident of nature.

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They were exceedingly good to me. I was good to them, but they were good to me. They gave me a certificate when I graduated declaring me editor in chief for life of the Texas A&M Battalion, for life.

Kasper: When Curt graduated?

Castleberry: When Curt graduated, they gave me a certificate sayingó

Kasper: Now is Texas A&M an all boys school?

Castleberry: It was at that time. It isn't anymore.

Kasper: Okay. But so that's why you were sort of the grand house motheró

Castleberry: Grand dame, I was.

Kasper: óand mother and sister and every female formó

Castleberry: ófriend, and protector and what everyoneó

Kasper: óas well as the editor.

Castleberry: And the chancellor said to me, "Women will never be admitted to this university. Never." And I said, "I will give it five years." [Laughter.] In Curt's senior year, because he had been a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps, boys, young men who went back to college who had been in service did not have to go into the Corps. Everybody else had to go into the Corps, but he did not have to go in, and people who were coming out of service didn't have to go into the Corps. Well, he didn't, of course. He'd had his service years and he didn't go into the Corps. But when Korea broke out, on the day our son was born, he went into the Corps because he said to me, it is very simple, we're all going to have to be back in service. It's a matter of graduating with a commission so that I can support my family. And so he went into the Corps as soon as the Korean War was declared which meant that when he got out he would be in service. But he was going to be called back anyway.

Kasper: This way if he went in as a commissioned officer he'd be better off.

Castleberry: Yeah. If he went in as a commissioned officer he'd be better off. So he then was doing all the marching and all the stuff that Corps people do. And one day, early on in that senior year of his, they were marching, marching, you know, in the hot September afternoon, he fell out. I mean, literally fell out. It turned out that he had acute appendicitis, was operated on in the college hospital, nearly died. If I hadn't had connections with the chancellor's office where I could move heaven and earth to get medical help for him, he wouldn't be here. Believe me, it had gone intoóI mean, salty old country doctor who yanked him in there and did surgery without his permission or my permission or anything. I mean, our medical tales are something. So he reallyóhe was lying there justóhe literally, I think, was dying.

Kasper: He must have had a burst appendix.

Castleberry: He did. And they just went in and operated and didn't know how to take care of it. And this salty old country doctoró