Vivian Castleberry: Interview #3

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Kasper: Good afternoon, Vivian Castleberry. We're here going to pick up where we left off yesterday on your journalism career. And we both talked a little bit at lunch about the ethics of journalism and you wanted to say a few things on that.

Castleberry: Yes. I think I lived through a dramatic change in the ethics of journalism. When I first went with the Times Herald back in the late 50's, it was something of a given that newspaper people would have bonuses and that was that there would be a lot of free tickets, there would be a lot of free gifts along the way, and those were not only accepted as a part of what you did, but they were expected. And the interesting thing was, as I look back over it, that Christmas gifts that would come to us every year were numerous. The major companies in town would send candy or liquor or whatever they thought the reporter was most accepting of; the major department stores sent gifts. I still have an umbrella that Stanley Marcus sent me that I'm carrying after about thirty years, and it's oddly enough the only one in my house that I can keepóeverybody else borrows all the other umbrellas, but that one seems to stay. There were other things that came to usósmall pieces of jewelry that were sent along at that time.

And the newspaper itself, the management of the newspaper, also accepted gratuities, of much greater value than those that were given to reporters. And they even went so far as to say the job that you are taking with the newspaper, there will be gifts coming to you and that it's something of the bonus that you get for working for a newspaper. So that not only was it accepted, it was condoned. And I lived through the changing of that time when not only were we not allowed to accept gratuities, but we'd be fired on the spot if indeed we took them.

And after the Los Angeles Times bought the Times Herald, that's when the dramatic change came and I served on the Ethics Committee at the Times Herald after Tom Johnson came that changed the rules. It was a very difficult period of time for many of the old timers because I guess I was fortunate in clearly understanding right off that this was not a correct thing for a newspaper person to accept, but that it had been wrong from the beginning and that we should be paid in dollars and cents for the value that we were giving to the community and should be reimbursed by the newspaper that was hiring us rather than by the community that did its dole, its handout of gifts. It's almost asóI can equate it with the politicos of old, the politicians who acceptedóit was sort of accepted that they would be able to make appointments according to their own political persuasion, and this, of course, is still going on in our world, but is no longeróit's done more undercover. It is not accepted today openly as it was back in the old days.

So the ethics of journalism has changed dramatically and it is a good thing, although it was a very difficult thing for those of us who had been there to walk through. For instance, I mentioned to you yesterday that when Six Flags Over Texas, which is an amusement park in our area, when it opened, it opened with a press day and every year then it would open with a press day and we were encouraged to take our children, and that was with free passes and free rides everywhere and all of those things. And I used to get free tickets to the State Fair of Texas. I used to get free tickets to practically every musical that opened in town and the opera and the symphony and all of those things were a part of the given that wasó

Kasper: Do you think it may not necessarily, or maybe in your department too, but do you think it made a difference at the newspaper that the gratuities let's say that came from certain businesses in town or certain influential people in town made a difference in how the Herald reported the news?

Castleberry: How we reported? No. It never made a difference in how I reported and I was always so cautious about that. In fact, I would bend over backward to see that the person who had not sent me a gift, would probably get the better end of the

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And what had happened was that I had just been trying out his theories of child rearing in my own house and had found that they were devastatingly negative. [Laughter.]

Kasper: I remember when he was touted as the next Doctor Spock and I got so excited because his books came out about the time my daughter was born. And I read them and I decided that this guy was a fascist and I was appalled.

Castleberry: Well, it is amazing how many things you and I have in common because that's what happened to me. And, again, I was just naive enough that I would say to myself, "Where there's so much smoke, there's got to be some fire. And if this person is all this wonderful, then I'm going to try out some of these things and see how they work."

So at that stage I had a young daughter, and I mean, she was young. My youngest daughter was a new person in our home and in our lives. And Catherine Castleberry would have been a dedicated hypochondriac if I would have let her. She absolutely loved being ill and she loved the attention she got from it. And so I had just read Ginnot's chapter on how you relate to a child and how you condone first what they want to do before you even try to put in anything that you want from them. And he had said if your child says, "I am sick," of course you pat the child on the head and you say, "Oh, I am so sorry you are ill." And you begin to listen to what's underneath all that.

So we got up one morning and Cathy was not eager to get off to day care, didn't want to go at all, and was lying on the couch and had a stomach ache and had a headache. And so I tried out Ginnot and I said to her, "You poor dear little thing. Isn't it awful that you don't feel well and what can Mother do to help?" And within the next twenty minutes I had this kid lying on the couch begging for a hot water bottle and asking me when I was going to take her to the doctor, at which stage, I swatted her gently on the rear and said, "See how quickly you can get yourself dressed." And she got well quickly.

And so, anyway, there were those people along the way that I met whose advice would not work in our house. And I recognized that very quickly. This may be well and good for other people, but it will not work in our house and I am not going to entertain fools, gladly.

Kasper: There's a larger piece to this too. We're going kind of step-wise and I was going to take it to yet another point which is kind of related to ethics and morality and so forth. It seems to me from having talked to you over these couple of days here that one of the things that you've developed along the lines, across the years of this career as a journalist and your career as a mother, was a kind of personal morality of your own. Would you talk about that a little bit?

Castleberry: Exactly. Exactly. I developed very early on, and it was a growing kind of thing, that a personal morality of what would work in my life that might not work in other peoples' lives and how I had to take these experts that I listened to in my work life and evaluate them in my personal life.

At the same time I was doing this, I was very involved in my church, First Community Church of Dallas, was rearing the children in that church and working with a program called The Character Research Project, which is a program that is based on Christ's teachings as revealed in the Beatitudes. And from thatóthe material is written and rewritten for children age two to age eighteen. It was a wonderful learning experience for me because it required not only that we keep reports on what our children did, but that we set goals for them. And then, to guide them to where they could set goals for themselves. So it was a practical lesson in living morally and living ethically in the worldóliving with our own personal ethics. And I took that into myself as a learning tool. So these things were going on simultaneously. I was having at the paper access to all of the world's experts in these different fields. Then I was having the ability to try these out on a personal level to see if they worked for me and to develop my own personal code of ethics that would guide me through life.

Kasper: Can you kind of refer to some of what you feel are the tenets of that code that you live by, that you have lived by these years?

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pull you apart if you let it. The world is all full of expectation levels from every person that gets born into it, what you, as I said a moment ago, what you ought to be doing.

Kasper: Don't you feel, too, and again I don't want to put words into your mouth, but is there also not a place in this personal code of ethics for you that applies to home and career and community that says something along the lines of an obligation to work for change, to not just to report the newsó

Castleberry: Exactly. Exactly.

Kasper: óJust raise the children, but that you are here also in part to make a difference. Did you feel that that wasó

Castleberry: Always. I have felt that and it is, as the years go on and the birthdays come, I reallyóI can't say that I feel like I'm running out of time. I think one thing that cancer gave me as a gift is that I now have time to do everything that is significant, that God intended me to do, but that I must do it with care and deliberation and not waste a lot of it. That is a gift that came to me because I do think that every human being born is born with a God-given entity of their own and that most of us do not find it. And I think that I am one of the world's fortunate people and I say this with great humility, I am one of the people who found it and who knew very early on that I must be a change agent for the good, and most of my friends, and especially my male friends that I would dare broach this to, say that I am naive and at age sixty-seven I told them if I want to be naive I very well will be, but I still feel that my destiny is to make as many changes for the good as possible and when I get around to the peaceótalking about my peace work in a few minutes, I will then dwell on that a little more, if you will help me remember to do that. But all of these things that I was doing all along the way, you wanted me to talk a little about the community actions that I got involved inó

Kasper: Before we do that, what I wanted to do was put a little closure on your career at the Herald. Let's back up to say about 1983, '84.

Castleberry: About 1982.

Kasper: Can you tell us about the conditions that began to lead to your retirement?

Castleberry: Yes. The conditions that led to it, it was a very clear path although as I look back it was clear at the time, but it seemed quite garbled and quite muddy, but I knew, I felt in my heart and soul that I had done at the Times Herald all of the (quote) "good things" (unquote) that I was called there to do. That my role as a reporter was coming to a close.

Kasper: What were those good things that you would point to that were the highlights that you would have completed?

Castleberry: Well, the highlights of my life, that I had been able to report on almost all of the changing social issues of the time. That I had opened the doorówhen I went to the Times Herald, we could not publish on the Living page, the front page of the women's section, the words "planned parenthood." And I didn't know that until I did it and I found out I could do that. And so it had already been done and then I could do it. Also, the fact that when the feminist movement first came along, I started using the word "Ms." immediately. And I didn't know I couldn't do that for five years until one day "Editor and Publisher" picked up a speech that I was making and said that we had been using Ms. at the Times Herald for five years and the next day I got a written edict from my management that we would no longer do this, that it was either Mrs. or Miss and that the word Ms. had no significance and we could not use it. And that was news to me because I had been doing it for five years and nobody had noticed.

So from that then, there was an interesting evolution there that I have to tell you about real quickly, and that was that this went on for about I would say three or four years that I was back to what I thought square one and that the progress that I had made was suddenly just wiped out and erased, and of course, it never is. You always feel like that at the time, but of course it never is. So I had not made a big issue of it and when I was told absolutely to do things, I simply

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We had very little national news and almost no international news. And even though those of us who were journalists, even way back when, would read other newspapers to be sure that we knew what was going on in the world. And also, I did have access, as the head of the department, to pull in wire stories off the wire as they came in, so I was constantly being able to keep up with what was going on in Baghdad and what was going on in Cairo and what was going on in New York City as well as what was going on in the confines of Dallas.

So it was a really rich experience from that point of view and gave me a world view that I couldn't have had if I had worked say for a smaller newspaper that didn't have access to the wire services. Also, our library, even at that time, subscribed to the leading newspapers throughout the country so I did have an opportunity to run through those from time to time.

But as the paper sold, when Tom left here and another editor came, the editor that was brought in after him, Tom Johnson, whoóhe was partly responsible, I think, for hiringówas a totally different kind of human being. Not Tom JohnsonóTom Johnson andóI can't remember the name. But we had a revolving door then of management. First one, and then the other. Everybody that came in, we would have a called meeting of the department heads and the top managers of the paper, and we would be told in words that this was God's gift to humanity and we were going to have a wonderful new day under these people, and with every changing management, we lost prestige, we lost readership, we lost our foot in the community. In trying to be all things to all people, we did not know who we were. And at that stage we were neither fish nor fowl nor some days quite human, and the morale was at rock bottom in the paper.

It was at rock bottom in all departments and those of us who were still trying to hold our heads up and do a credible job were having to reinvent the wheel every morning when we came to work. And it was like walking into a place and being able to cut the atmosphere with a knife. It was so terrible that I think anybody who lived through those days, whether or not it was Charlie Dameron or Bert Holmes, and whoever it may have been that you may have talked to, would tell you that those were not pleasant times.

And, I guess, all of us in a sense saw ourselves as the saviour of the whole thing and I kept holding onto that and I kept saying to my staff, "I don't care what is being done outside this building, what we do insideóto be able to report on what is going on in this world to our readersóis the imperative. Therefore, we cannot shirk our duties or our responsibility." It was hard. It was really hard.

So I began to think in terms of what next. All of those years, every story I had ever written, every place I had ever been, every option I had ever picked up, had been a personal journey in what you want to do with the next stage in your life and setting goalsóliterally setting goals. I used to think everybody set goals. I learned that they don't and all of my life, from the time I started rearing children and learned that goal setting was important, I have not only set goals for myself, but I have set them down on paper.

And I have what I call my ten-year goal and I have my out-there goal, two years from now, three years from now, four years from now, and I have my immediate goals, which are my self-gratification goals because if you work only for long-range goals, they look so impossible that you can't get there, and especially when you're young. Now that I'm reaching old age, I find that things are entirely different. Out there seems like tomorrow. And I probably could set ten-year goals and not be dissuaded at all that I'm not going to reach those. But when I was thirty and forty, that seemed like an eternity away and I couldn't do that. So I would set what I call my self-gratification goalsósuch as next week I will allow myself to go shopping for an afternoon; or, you know, in six months I will take a week's vacation with the family or I'll take a weekend trip to thus and so.

I did that all along the way. And those are set down on paper. And what I learned very early on is that you never set anything in stone, you don't carve it in stone or set it in concrete, because life does things to you that you least expect, and sometimes the goals that you set for yourself are impossible and so you have to be flexible. And a newspaper is a wonderful place to learn that becauseó

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And I didn't know how I was going to do it. Quite honestly we could not economically afford it because my husband had, in the very early years of our lives, been a businessman and I had said to him, "Listen, my dear, I want you to do with your life what I'm going to do with mine, and that is to make your life. So you go do what you want to do with your life and I'm going to help you support this family. And we're going to do this together." And so that's when he got out of business and went back to teaching. And when one is being a newspaper woman and a public school teacher for all the productive years of their lives, and one retires, there's not much money there.

We had also invested in college education for our five daughters. We had said to them, we owe you one college education, and to the limit of our ability, one wedding, and after that you're on your own. It meant that there was not very much savings and what I think we did was invest in the thing that was imperative to me, and that was education. And although our children did not get the kind of education from the standpoint of scholastic education that I would like to have afforded for them, they did get the best that we could financially and physically and, wellóeconomically, physically and spiritually support, and so I have no regrets.

Kasper: You mean, you would like to have sent them to better institutions or private schools?

Castleberry: I would like to have sent them either to better institutions or along the way there were one or two of them that would have thrived in a private school for a period of time. I think you can never go back and do that over so you don't know. I also think we invested in summer camp for the children as they were growing up and I considered that an educational investment that was imperative. And it was something at some periods of time we could not afford and I borrowed money to send them to camp, but it was imperative that they have that as an educational part of their growing up. We also sent two of the children to youth camp, that is connected with the United Church of Christ at Union College for a summer period of time to explore their options in their growing-up years. And those I considered investments in education and have absolutely no regrets that I wish I could have done more, but I couldn't. I did it to the limit of my abilities so I will not chide myself over what has not been.

For myself, then, it became a need to explore options. At that stageówe'll go back in a few minutes and talk about as the years went on how I led up through some of the learning in these different volunteer activities to what I wanted to do, but let me put closure on this now. In retiring, or in leading up to what the world calls retirement, what I did was take a summer place in Colorado. We had a young friend who owned a summer home, or owned a home in Colorado, and she and her friends mostly liked to use it in the winter time to ski and so I rented it one summer for five weeks. She gave me a wonderful deal, and I rented it for five weeks and it's the only five-week vacation I ever had in my working life. I had then worked myself up to where I deserved and got five weeks of vacation during the year. And so Curt and I took the house for five weeks. Our children came and went. We were in residence for the full five weeks.

And that period of time, this is in 1982, and I walked the mountains and walked by the clear streams and sat by myself and wore jeans and tennis shoes and didn't put on makeup and didn't wash my hair until I needed to, and didn't do anything that was required. I didn't put on heels or hose, that I had to do everyday in my work life, and I talked to myself and my maker about what I wanted to do, what the next calling of my life would be. And something became very clear to meóthat the frustration that had been existing, of needing to make a change, was indeed imminent.

So I came back and I didn't want to do anything hasty and I first said to my husband, then I said to my daughters, that in two years I'm going to retire from the Times Herald. And nobody believed it. So I waited a full year before I told anybody else, you know, tell a friend, close personal friend, I'm leading up to retirement, I'm going to do something else. I didn't know what I was going to do, I just knew that, very honestly, I knew that I was being called to something, but I didn't know what. And I don't want to be one of those people that sounds like I'm looking for the next chapter of my life that's written out into the clouds

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And what had happened was that, as a nurse, she had started flying to Mexico with a medical teamóa doctor and another nurse and some other peopleóflying into Mexico to immunize children in zones of poverty-ridden areas of Mexico. That was her volunteer work. And one weekend, she was scheduled to go and she had a patient who was dying that she felt compelled to stay with so she got someone else to take her place. That weekend, the young doctor who was flying the plane into Mexico crashed the plane and killed all of them. And from that, Sharon felt that God had called her, or the powers that be in the universe had called her, to do something significant with her life. That she had notó

Kasper: She had not recognized before.

Castleberry: óshe, too, was exploring what the options were. So, as a result of that, she joined the Physicians for Social Responsibility and she began to do programs throughout California and then called into other areas on what we're doing to ourselves and our environment with the nuclear thing. And Sharon said everywhere she went people, when the question and answer session came, they would say, "Okay, that's all right for us, but what about the Russians?" And finally Sharon got to the point to where she said, "I knew I had to go see the enemy for myself." So she organized and put together in the summer of '83 the first citizen diplomat trip to the Soviet Union, took a group of mostly people out of the medical field from California with her, and in doing this, she hadóI'm leading up now to some other things, so I'll try to make it brief.

Kasper: This is '83. But isn't this '85?

Castleberry: No, this is '83. This is '83 that she's doing this. And, so anyway, she did that and then she was in my house this next year when I wasóin eightyówell, wait a minuteóyeah, in '83 that she did this because she's in my house then while I'm recovering from hepatitis; she is in my house planning her second trip. And she says to me, "Why don't you go to the Soviet Union with me?" And I said, "Because I don't want to. I've never had any inclination to go to the Soviet Union. That is not what I want to do. I am going to the country for a year with my husband. I am going down there, I'm going to write, and I'm going to give myself time to decide what I want to do with my life next. And the first thing I'm going to do in 1984, I am going to retire from the Times Herald, and then I'm going to spend a year deciding what next."

She didn't push it. But I just heard her talking to people in my house, she was talking to people all over the country, as she planned this second citizen diplomat trip to the Soviet Union. The day before she left my house, I walked into her bedroom and gave her a check for a hundred dollars and I said to her, "I am going with you. I do not know how I am going." The trip was $2,300. I did not have the money. I said, "I do not know how I'm going to do this at all, but some way, if I am supposed to do this, it will come." And so that was the year that my women friends after I hadó

Kasper: Passed the hat.

Castleberry: ópassed the hat. They gave me the trip to the Soviet Union.

Kasper: When I heard that, I mean, I was just really amazed.

Castleberry: It was astonishing.

Kasper: I mean, you are so beloved in this townó

Castleberry: I know.

Kasper: óthat your women friends passed the hat and collected the money which sent you to the Soviet Union. That's very impressive.

Castleberry: I know. And I have a scroll that they all signed that will go around this room three times. I mean, it came inóit came, of course, and I'm sure there were many of them that gave a hundred dollars, but they raised and gave me $2,600 justóand it's signed by endless numbers of people.

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still working on. That I'm still trying to build these bridges to connect them because we're all in it together.

Kasper: And did you think that the peace issue is one of the ways in which you could all be connected too, or is that separate?

Castleberry: Oh, yeah and besides thatóthat is not separate. It is an integral part of everything that we're doing. And I'll get to that in a minute. But in walking out, my final day there, my old staff and the people that were still there had got together and planned a small party in the department and they gave me a camera, which I value tremendously, and I told you it was one of those foolproof things because I'm in no way mechanical, and Maggie Kennedy had walked into a place and bought it and said she wanted a camera for a woman that had absolutely no mechanical ability at all. And she's right. And so it winds itself and it unwinds itself and on the days when the battery fails, if it does, well I take it into the camera store and ask him what's wrong because I justóbut I had it to take the Soviet Union with me and I have enjoyed it.

The funny thing is that all those years that I was at the Times Herald I never used a camera, but I learned how to take pictures because I can set up any picture. And I have learned that other people don't appreciate that when I walk in, especially at a family reunion when it's my husband's family, and I say, "You stand here and you stand here" and "no, you're not right here," and "you fill in this hole." They've said, "Oh, God, here she is again trying to run things." But I do know how to set up a picture and I've done quite a lot of that. So because of that I also know what to look for through the camera's eye. I can tell a story very well through the camera's eyeóunfortunately my mechanical ability is not such that I always capture what I see. But I did get some wonderful pictures in the Soviet Union of children and justó [Tape interruption.]

Kasper: The knock on the door is over.

Castleberry: Well, what I wanted to say just a little bit, is try to put a little closure on my leaving the Times Herald. The afternoon that I left, they had a little party in the middle of the afternoon and presented me with the camera and applauded and whatever. And then I said to Maggie Kennedy, "I'm going to the lounge and I am not coming back." So I picked up my purse and went to the lounge and walked out. On Sunday afternoon I took Curt and a friend back and packed up my things and moved them all out. And I did not go back to the newspaper for a visit for five years. I went back last week. I have been in the building three times since then, all three times to the credit union and that's it. Or I think one time I did go back to give Mamie Harris a hug because she's on the first floor. And I have seen Maggie outside a number of times. She's done some marvelous things for me including a wonderful story on me last year. When I was doing the peace movement, sheó

Kasper: I tried reaching her several times before I came down. She's a busy reporter.

Castleberry: She is a busy reporter and she is just so solid and she is the very last one of the group that I hired and trained. Nobody else is there that I hired and trained. And she feels like one of my children because when she married, I kind of eased her young husband through his trauma of having a wife who was a reporter, and I can remember so vividly Don used to call the paper in the early days and say, "Where is Maggie? Where is Maggie?" And it would be maybe fifteen minutes after she was supposed to be home in the evening and I would cajole him and love him through it. And so I've done that for a lot of young husbands, including the young husbands of my reporters, as well as the young sons-in-law that I've had along the way thatóthat men too need loving, and I'm not such a feminist that I can't be equally loving with the young men as they come along.

So I left the Times Herald and then I, ten days later, as I said, was on a plane to the Soviet Union and now, at this time, with your permission, I want to go back and explore some of the things that I explored along the way that led me to going to the Soviet Union.

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every year they get together and evaluate what they have done, what they need to change, what kind of course material they need to bring into it.

And Jean said to me, "We are starting this course. We don't know how it's going to work out in Dallas, and would you come out and talk to me about it?" And I saidóit just sounded like my thing. It sounded like something I wish I had done. And it sounded like something that I would do if only I had time. So I went out and spent an afternoon with her in her home, by herself; that was my first opening to it. And I want you to know that I was so impressed at the depth of planning that they were going to andóI can't say that I didn't know other people were feeling just like I did, but what I can say is that I thought, here is somebody who is going to bring in ideas from other parts of the country and other parts of the world that will help us to become where I have had the vision that we need to travel. So, it was exceedingly exciting and they taught it that year.

I did a little story on what they were trying to do, it was kind of an insignificant story at the time because they still hadn't done anything. You know, what you're going to do and what happens, sometimes they're miles apart. So I did a little story on what this group of young women were planning and it was just kind of an insignificant story as I recall and [I don't know] whether I even saved it or not. But, then they taught it that fall for their own few people at the church. It was a very small class, a very controlled group, that they just wanted to see, they wanted to explore what they were doing.

The next fall they opened it up to the community and they had twenty-four people in it and I walked into that room. They told me that I could audit the course. And I guess I'm the only one they have ever let audit it. Because, as a reporter, I did not know whether or not I could be free to attend all of the classes. As it turned out, I attended five of the six classes. Would have, I mean, turned heaven and earth to do it and remanaged my schedule in every way possible because it was so significant. Walked into that, it was taught at North Haven Methodist Church, I walkedó

Kasper: On Saturday mornings or something, is that what it was?

Castleberry: I think it was Saturday morning and I walked into that classroom and I want you to know that it blew my mind. They had boxes extended from the ceiling and pictures of women in every role that you can imagine pasted on these boxes. So the firstóbefore anybody ever opened their mouths, you walked in and you immediately got the idea that women are living in boxed communities. And this was a message that hung from the ceiling, it was pasted and plastered on every place of the wall that you looked. That they had set up thisóthe setting was just marvelous.

Kasper: Women were everywhere.

Castleberry: Women were everywhere, but they all were in defined roles. And they were roles that were defined by others, not by themselves and they were leading boxed-in lives. So that was the message that came through loud and clear. And then we started exploring, and very honestly I still have to say, even in looking back, I didn't learn a lot from that that I hadn't already known. It simply affirmed who I was. But it, again, blew my mind in how many women were involved in the course that didn't know where they were.

Kasper: Now, didn't you also follow two women who were taking the course and then write an article for the paper about the Explore course?

Castleberry: Yes. Oh, yeah. From the minute. From the minuteó

Kasper: Because Gail told me they felt that straight from the beginning that you began to participate in the Explore course and wrote this article that the courseóshe said at one point, the phone just didn't stop ringing. She said after you published the article in the Herald the phone rang off the hook because there were so many women in Dallas who responded.

Castleberry: Right. It blew the lid off.

Kasper: She said, "It blew the lid off," that's right.

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and Dallas women. The backbone of the whole thing is the volunteer community of Dallas.

Kasper: What is the full name of the seminar? It's the SMU seminar for women oró?

Castleberry: The SMU Symposium on the Education of Women for Social and Political Leadership. And through the years it has brought three keynote speakers annually: One who opens the conference, one who does a major lecture the first night of the conference, and then one who closes the conference. And through the years we have had such outstanding speakers as John Kenneth Galbraith, Margaret Mead, Yvonne Braithwaite Burke, Carl Degler, Maryówho was the president of Vassar. [Note added by V. Castleberry: It was Mary Bunting, president of Radcliffe.] I have every one of those programs if you'd like to see some of them. And the woman who started it was Emmie Baine, who was dean of women.

And last year it was turned over to a young woman whose name is Dr. Sandra Tinkham and Sandy is a fascinating person in that she participated in the first conference that was ever held at SMU as a student. Then, later was assistant to the dean of women and worked on the planning of it. And then, later, as a community volunteer was drawn in as a person who knew the community. She has been president of the YWCA Board; she has been president of the Women's Council of Dallas County. And then, lately now, is the executive director of the program. So she's been through every step in every phase of it, is brilliant and is open to all kinds of changes. Not only that, has a daughter of her own who's growing up and needs this kind of opening thing.

But the symposium and Explore then weóa few of us realized that what we were having was only a bite out of the, let's say, the chocolate cake, and that there was so much more that we needed to do for ourselves that was not done. So we started thinking what we could do to put together the kind of thing that would be ongoing, that would be a support system for the women of Dallas who wanted to be involved in feminism and in options for women. And we recognized that at that time Dallas was not ready to support a NOW chapter. We knew that the reputation that NOW had in the East would not go here. And so we needed to do it ourselves. So we were back to a do-it-yourself project.

So one evening in the fall of 19óI can't remember. It was in the early seventies, a group of fifteen of us met in Ann Chud's living roomóshe gave us dinneróto see what we wanted to do to form an organization that would explore options for women, affirm women, and give women a springboard for greater realization of their own potential in the community. And we formed Women for Change Incorporated. It was a name that I didn't like because it sounded too much like menopause to me, but I didn't get my way every time. [Laughter.] So, anyway, that was what we organized and it went through a period of, like everything, a new baby, it's birthing was tough. We would have Saturday morning board meetings inómostly, the Zale Center that gave us space.

Kasper: Zale?

Castleberry: Zale Foundation, which is a nationally, or was, a nationally recognized jewelry outfit at the time. I don't know where Zale is now on a scale of one to ten, but it was an outstanding one in the community. But we were fortunate in that one of founders was a woman whose name was Dr. Caroline (I can't remember what her name was at the time, and the reason that I can'tóshe's Caroline Galerstein, Dr. Caroline Galerstein). Busch was her name. She was married to a physician who died with a brain tumor, a malignant brain tumor, and then she remarried, and that's the reason it's Dr. Caroline Busch. But Caroline was a Zale and she had an entrée into the space that we took over and she was our first president. No, Maura McNiel was our first president, and then Caroline took over and kind of grew us up. Our board meetings would last all morning. It was an incredible waste of time, but it was simply a process of trying to get our act together so we could be helpful to other people.

Kasper: Sure. It's an inevitable process. We've all been through it.

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on the other side, being a community activist who was involved in trying to make change for it to happen.

And let me tell you, I never saw myself as being divided in that role. My management, my men, from time to time, would try to impress upon me the fact that as a reporter I could not be intimately involved with these social changes. And I would point out to them that I was a human being before I was a reporter and that I had to keep it together as a human being and I could not divide myself. It was tough. Because I did want to be honest. I did want to hear all of the voices, and at the same time, I knew that there were things that were being perpetrated against women in this community as well as the world that were unforgivable and I could not sit still as a human being and allow this kind of thing to continue.

So, in the early days of Women for Change we worked in trying to provide adequate child care; we did a child referral service that was the background for the child referral service that we still have going in the community; we did a rape crisis center that as a spin-off now stands on its own.

Kasper: Was it actually a physical location that women who were raped could go to and a hotline?

Castleberry: Yes, it was a physical location and there was a hotline. And we also worked very early on with the medical school so that women who were sexually assaulted could be taken to a safe place at the medical school for examination, and that has continued to improve through the years, that I dare say now is probably as good as any one in the nation. And worked with the police department until we got them to understand that these were crimes that needed to be reported separately.

I can't remember what the other things wereóand oh, education. We worked in the field of education from the very beginning trying to insist that our grade schools and our high schools provide equal opportunity for girls and for boys in the field of athletics, as well as in academic circles. And we did a large task force to check out primary and grade school textbooks to see what kind of sexism pervaded our textbook systems. Worked with and lectured to any group of teachers that would listen to us on how you train boys differently from the way you train girls. Became, through Barbara Reagan, who is a professor at SMU, very interested and involved in higher education, the kind of things that are offered on the university level that separate the boys from the girls and do not give the girls equal opportunity. There are other things that we did. Those are the things that come to my mind immediately.

Kasper: And Women for Change was just the beginning. It is no longeró

Castleberry: Women for Change evolved into the Women's Center of Dallas. And we evolved into the Women's Center of Dallas when it became clear to us that it wasn't only that we needed to make change, we needed to have a safe place for women of all persuasions to come. And one of the early things that we did was set up a law referral service for women, a legal referral service, and the Women's Law Center, which was an outgrowth of Women for Change Incorporated, was headed by a woman who put herself in touch with almost every attorney in the community, female attorney in the community, and we did things for women like provide legal service for divorce and child custody. And those things were not offered in this community at the time at all. There was just nowhereóand when the Women's Law Center, which was short-lived because the funding dried up for it, you know, as the Republicans came into power and theó

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Castleberry: óthing that we had to be concerned with, that women who were on the cutting edge of change were troublemakers. And so, as a result of that, the woman who headed the Women's Law Center, was almost indicted, not quite, but almost indicted for illegal use of funds. And very honestly, what happened was that she had a lot of young volunteers working for her, some of whom were black and some of whom would go out into some of the plusher neighborhoods of town and have their picnic lunches and who were not welcome there. There were other things that were going on at the same time, but believe me, I had interviewed this woman enough, and had been there at the Center enough to know that what was going on was wonderful.

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his reporters involved in community activism. So I went to him ahead of time. I knew that my name was going to be placed for appointment, and I knew that my city council person who had the right to appoint me probably would, and so Ióbecause he didn't know me very wellóand so I went to my boss and said, "This is something that I know I'm going to be asked to do, and I want to do, and under what conditions would you allow me to do this." And he said, "If you won't take a really front active part, if you will, you know, just be a part of the commission, you won't take a chairmanship, you won't be a leader, it will be fine." So it was a compromise that I was willing to accept because, of course, what happened was that Idelle Rabin ran our committee and I backed her up, and together we did the first Women and Work Symposium that was ever held in Dallas.

Kasper: Who was the woman you did it with?

Castleberry: Idelle Rabin. Owner of Del Anns. She is an entrepreneur. She is very rich in her own right. She is self made. She is a human dynamo. And she would call me, she's one of those people who will call you and state what she wants to say and then hang up. Almost like I am. I don't like to talk on the phone. So we worked real well together. But my kids got tired of answering the phone and they said to me one time, "Mother, can we tell Idelle next time she calls that you died?" [Laughter.] And she would call me at all hours and she just said, you know, "So and so's going on. What do you think we ought to do about it?" I would tell her. And we'd hang up.

But we rentedóthe Dallas Commission on the Status of Women held a series of open hearings at City Hall at night to hear the women's issues in the community and what women wanted to tell us about what their needs were. And we set this up for two evenings because we thought we would need two evenings to hear. The reception was so great that it expanded into four evenings. And although we limited the amount of time that they could speak, I was just overwhelmed at the number of issues that came out. That's the first time I heard the term phrased "displaced homemaker." And from tható

Kasper: Do you remember what year this was vaguely?

Castleberry: No, I don't.

Kasper: Early seventies.

Castleberry: Yeah. But I can't remember. But I will have toóI'll need to look up those dates. But the interesting thing was from itóalso, at the same time, that these things were hitting me, they were providing avenues for better reporting because I'd never done a story on displaced homemakers. And the next morning I was on the phone with Charlotte Stewart, and I said, "Tell me about displaced homemakers. What is it? What do I need to do?" It was through this same process that I learned about the very beginning of the Older Women's League and interviewed Tish Sommer, right off, because I learned that the needs for older women were not being met and that this, too, was a part of the need that was not being addressed.

So here we went from the cradle to the grave. We were talking about child care, and then we were talking about the disenfranchised older woman who was the poorest person in the community, as well as the world. The woman without any resources at all who suddenly finds herself widowed and alone. So I was garnering material for stories at the same time that I was being a community activistó

Kasper: And you were very much aware of this, weren't you?

Castleberry: Oh, I wasóI began to look forward to it. Listening to a public hearing is not always fun, but my note pad was full of stuff to follow up and names of people to call and contact, and howó

Kasper: Do you think that your management knew that or that it was serendipitous for them?

Castleberry: I think it was serendipitous for them. I don't think they had any idea and I think they probably would have discouraged it had they had an idea.

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Kasper: Oh, no. I don't mean not getting rid of the brides, I think what people like Dorothy Jurney hoped to see was that as substantive news took over and became the core of the women's pages, that it should have stayed women's pages with all of this news about women so that women had a rightful place somewhere in the center of the newspaper. What Gloria Steinem and others argued for, and which Dorothy Jurney was opposed to, was that women's news then became disbursed throughout the paper. Yes, some of it was in the new so-called living or style section, some of it was in the news section, some of it was in metro, you know, here, there and around. Dorothy, I think, wanted to see the transformation coalesce into one solid section of news on women called the women's pages and that did not abide.

Castleberry: Yes. What I really wanted to see was it evolve into a section that would be a section for people. And I think that's what many good feature sections in the country have done. I do know that increasingly I had lots of men reading my section. And even today, I will meet them out in the community and the kinds of dimensions that we were able to report on that now are totally left out of the paper, were where a lot of the men who are on the cutting edge of human issues in town got their meat and potatoes too.

For instance, there's one young man in town whose name is Anderson who still calls me every Christmas. And he calls me and leaves messages on my machine just to say thank you because he is in early childhood education and he isóthey're still struggling with many of the things that we struggled with way back there. And sometimes I know he feels like he's right back at the starting gate, but he also knows that I became, probably just by having it dropped on me, the early childhood education reporter in the community. And I cared about what was happening to kids.

And also, I learned a long time ago that too often when people in their own lives grow beyond a certain stage, then they leave that stage. I've never left that. I still realize to this very day that the care, nurturing and education of young children is the crux of where humanity is going. And as a grandmother and eventually I hope, if I live long enough to be a great grandmother, I will never leave that because if we do not love our children, and it still appalls me that we are one of the very few so-called forward-thinking nations in the world that does not have a child care policyó

Kasper: A national child care policy. Absolutely.

Castleberry: óthat we do not have a national child care policy is appalling. And believe me, they do a better job in the Soviet Union with early children than they do here in this country.

Kasper: They do in most western European countries too, and have for years.

Castleberry: They do in the Soviet Union what we give lip service to. They love their children and they consider them the landmark of the future. And unless we can get around to doing thatóone of these days we're going to lose it.

Kasper: We're going to lose the race to the countries that love their children better than we love ours.

Castleberry: That's right. Exactly. So, anyway, let's see, now where are we. We have justó

Kasper: Well, my next question for you is, now The Family Place grew out of the Center, did it not? Tell me about The Family Place.

Castleberry: The Family Place grew really out of Gerry Beer. And the way that happened, Gerry Beer had done a lot of work at The Childhood Center in South Dallas and the South Dallas housing projects under the auspices of the National Council of Jewish Women. Gerry is from New York City and she had come here as a bride and her husband was working in retail sales, a young executive in retail sales, worked his way up, is now one of the outstanding realtors in this community. Gerry has had a situation where she could afford financially to give herself as a volunteer to the community. But, in New York, she had been a fashion buyer to begin with.

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Castleberry: Oh, gosh no, I don't.

Kasper: Mid-seventies was it?

Castleberry: Mid-seventies. It was a ramshackle old house that was totally inadequate and, of course, we had to keep the address secret. And one of my funny stories, personal stories, was that they kept trying to name the place. And they kept trying to name the place. And I kept listening to them. And they had namedóthe organization that set it up was DVIA. It was an awful name.

Kasper: Dallas Volunteer something or other?

Castleberry: Dallas Intervention Alliance Association. D-Iówell, anyway, I would start to print that in the paper and I just couldn't get it out. And of course you're not supposed to say in theóyou can't use a headline that doesn't tell what it is you're talking about, and you've got to get the whole idea of what it is in the first sentence. And so I was constantly trying to explain what these people were doing and finding it just revoltingly difficult. So I said to Gerry, "If I had been there, you sure wouldn't have named it that."

I was back to the Women for Change Incorporated because I always think in terms of headlines and how is it going to look to the public. So I was dismayed by that. So when they got around to naming the house that they had set up, I said, "It has to be something simple. It has to be something that everybody will understand. It has to be something that will not divide the communityóit can't be divisive." So I said, "Why don't we call it The Family Place?" Well, they explored that indefinitely and they finally decided to call it The Family Place and the first story I wrote on it, I called it The Home Place throughout. And Gerry called me up and said, "Did I miss something along the way? Did you name our organization The Family Place or did you name it The Home Place?" And I had really blown it that time. But, anyway, it is The Family Place and The Family Place it remains and it has becomeó

Kasper: Is it still in Oak Lawn?

Castleberry: No. They moved it to Oak Cliff which is just across the river and they were instrumental as a group of people, with a lot of financial backing, of community volunteers they were and a credit to Gerry's careful way of putting it together and the cross section she got of board members in this community, they bought an old hospital in Oak Cliff, a fourteen-room hospital, and converted it into a shelter for women and children that is now on a wood-shaded lot in Oak Cliff, has a marvelous playground out back for children, and they do three different kinds of service. They provide in-house shelter for women and children; they provide out-service counseling for women who need help but do not need shelter, where women can get shelter otherwise; and they provide a continuing program for battering men who want to learn how to stop this violent behavior. They also provide a tremendous program for the education of children; to try to intervene at a very young age the pattern of battering that has erupted in the country.

Kasper: That's wonderful.

Castleberry: It is a wonderful organization. I just wish you had time to see everything here that we have in the way of these facilities. And what has happened thereóThe Family Place has become one of the places in the community that is socially acceptable for people to go and work. It is one of the outreaches for Junior League; it's one of the places that Junior League places its volunteers; it's one of places that all of the large church groups in Dallas support; it is one of the places that through this economic down period has not suffered a great deal because the volunteer community has simply not let it drop through the nets.

Kasper: So does the money that supports The Family Place come from the Dallas community or do they go for grants and money beyond Dallas?

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the Restaurant Wives Association and she called me up one day and said, "The Restaurant Wives Association has never done anything for the community and we areóI'm thinking in terms of, I don't want just to have a meeting for the husbands and have a dance, I want to do something for the community. Would you come down and just talk with me and see what kind of needs that are not being met that we can do?"

So I went down to El Fenix Restaurant, the family owns a chain called the El Fenix chain and there are several of the Martinez people. Irene Martinez Garcia is the president of the corporation and I keep hoping that she will really become a feminist. She's such a neat lady. But she's, you know, of this Hispanic background, kind of defers to her brothers, I think they just named her the president of the corporation. But, anyway, there's a large family and they own a large chain of locally situated restaurants and Anita is the wife of the oldest surviving son and as such hasóshe's a beautiful woman who would have been allowed just to play at life if she wanted to. But she has four children, three sons and a daughter, and somehow she became a community activist.

So when she became president of the Restaurant Wives Association, she wanted to do something important for them, so we went to the El Fenix Restaurant that her husband owns and had lunch together. And we talked about, and I don't remember whether she brought it up or I brought it up, but one of us brought it up that one of the great unmet needs in this community was breakfast for hungry children. And it seemed to me that the Restaurant Association would be an ideal place for this to start. So somehow or other it evolved in our talking that what we needed to have was one big blast a year called "A Taste of Dallas" where all the restaurants would bring the best that they had to offer to a major hotel and for one evening there would be music and dancing, but the people of Dallas would get to sample the best from every restaurant in the community, for a price.

Kasper: There's no wonder that you have been called an enabler by Mary Vogelman, the godmother of the women's movement by Liz Carpenter; a catalyst for change. I mean, you modestly say you didn't do it, but without your ideas I don't think a lot of these things would have gotten started.

Castleberry: Well, what happened here that was so fun. I still have the picture. I wish I had showed it to you. Anita said, "What can we do that will make a splash in the newspaper?" I said, "Okay." One of the funny things was that as we sat there in this restaurant, her husband, her mother-in-law, her sister, and her sister-in-law and one of the brothers, sat at a nearby table and eyed us as if, "What on earth are these womenó?" Now, Anita would tell you that what they were asking is, "How did Anita get this newspaper woman down here to talk to?" But I will tell you what they were saying is, "What is that meddling woman doing with Anita now?"

So, from that I said to Anita, and I still have the picture and it's glorious, I said, "I'll tell you what you do that will really make a newspaper splash. You go down to West Dallas where the children have no food, you know, where they are really hungry children, and you set up in the street the biggest feast you can imagine, and we will come take a picture. And you have all of these children coming in and sampling all this wonderful food and then we use this as the attention getter for what it is your trying to do." It worked like a charm. It just worked like a charm. I still have that photograph. She set up a banquet in the center of one of these poverty-ridden streets in West Dallas and she had children just coming from everywhere to sample the wares. And it was an absolute photographic image of how badly Dallas needed to feed its hungry children and it gave me the opening right to print the story on how many children were going hungry and the Restaurant Association was doing this big benefit and it was going to support breakfast for hungry children in Dallas.

And they did that for years. And five years after we started that thing, she and I went together to a "Taste of Dallas" meeting one evening and we sat on the stairway at the Fairmont Hotel and said, "Look what we did!" "It's impossible that this could have happened." There were thousands of people who dropped by that evening and for $5.00 a ticket, they had come to sample, and of course many of them paid $1,000, you know, write you a check for a $1,000 for the benefit.

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been founded that are on the cutting edge of change. And the Women's Issues Network is on the cutting edge. It came out of a group meeting that was held by the National Council of Jewish Women in cooperation with the Women's Council of Dallas County that addressed what are the unmet needs for women in the community. And out of that, Joy Mankoff became the founder ofóor she is the person around which the founding of Women's Issues Network came about.

Kasper: So is WIN a coalition or is it a group?

Castleberry: WIN is a coalition ofóit's a group. And it is non-political. It does not ask for tax-exempt status because it wants to meddle in politics. It is on the cutting edge of abortion issues. And it's on the cutting edge of issues for women in the community that no other organization willó

Kasper: But where does it draw its membership from? Is the membership individuals or is it women from other groups?

Castleberry: The membership are individuals. The women are individuals, but most of them are involved in other groups and they come from other groups. And actually the board of WIN is very small and most of the work is done by task forces. That where there will be an interest such as several years agoówell, WIN was founded and I was not on its first board, I was a member of the advisory committee that founded it, and then I withdrew from it and then I went back on the board and served on the board for two years. I have now resigned from that because I'm away. But I still think it is one of the cutting edge of change. It brings suit against people for discrimination against women. It isn't an organization that is very large, but it does very important things.

Kasper: How does it fund itself?

Castleberry: Mostly by the members who are working in it. But it doesn't take a lot of money. It's small.

Kasper: It's a small staff. No. Because you've got an executive director and some secretarial help.

Castleberry: Yes. It's very small and doesn't need a lot of money because we don'tówe and I say "we" because I'm still a part of itówe don't need to raise money to publicize ourselves. And some of the lawyers, some of the attorneys have taken cases just because it's the proper thing to do and we don't need toóso, anyway, WIN, as I said, is one of the cutting edge of change organizations.

And then about maybe three years ago, Helen Hunt Hendrix called a small group of us together and pointed out that women are real good at doing almost everything except raising money both for themselves and other women and that what we really needed here, perhaps, and she was very cautious to say you need this. Helen had grown up in Dallas. She now lives in New York City where she, with two sisters, has founded the Hunt Alternatives Fund that gives money to cutting-edge-of-change issues that involve women and children. And that foundation funding goes to organizations in Dallas, New York, and Denver, Colorado, where the other sister lives. And one of the things that's been neat about that is that some of the Hunt money is being used to fund women's and children's issues. And Helen, herself, is a delightful person. I will tell you about her later.

But she was, as I see, certainly the instrument and the catalyst around which the Dallas Women's Foundation was founded. She came down here, after calling us, she called Ginny Whitehill and she called Maura and she called me, and I don't know how many other people she called, but there was a group of women activists in the community that she talked to and she came down and we put together a meeting. And when I say "we," it was the group that she had contacted. I believe our first meeting was held in the building that is onó

[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side B]

Castleberry: óso Helen, the first meeting that we held was at Patricia Meadows, D'Art, down on Swiss Avenue and there was notóI don't remember, probably twenty, twenty-five of us. And Helen was extremely cautious in laying out the possibility

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meeting and the people who have been involved in the results of the grants are introduced. The first year they brought Elizabeth Dole and I chaired that meeting for them and got to sit by Elizabeth and got to introduce her. And I found her a person of wonderful ability and I can't understand exactly what her politics are, but [Laughter.]ó

Kasper: That's because they're not like yours.

Castleberry: That, of course, is true, but the interesting thing was, of course, she came out of a very liberal, democratic background and she's never totally forgotten that and I think being married to Bob Dole has shaped her and changed her somewhat. But, anyway, she was wonderful and her talk was marvelous. And then the next year they brought Coretta Scott King. Coretta Scott King is a person that I have always loved and admired. She can't speak and her lectures areóbut she was just perfect for the time we had her. And then this past year we had Jihan Sadat who outdid everybody, and, of course, that is in my estimationó

Kasper: She is a wonderful speaker.

Castleberry: She was a marvelous speaker, but more than that, she was a warm and loving person who let her hair down and who told us what her hang-ups had been, and how she had become involved in the feminist movement in Egypt, and how difficult it had been for her as the wife of Anwar Sadat, who really espoused the emancipation and the equality of women, but would have loved to have had a traditional wife. And she told us the kinds of things that she went through in exploring how she opened up to full liberation in that role. So you felt like that you had had a visit with a sister.

And it was so interesting, when I left the meeting that day, the luncheon that day, I walked right behind two young men who lookedóI have no idea who they were, but they were vice presidents and CEOs of some major organization, I can promise you, and on the way out they were saying to each other, and I was right behind them, and keeping up and listening on purpose. One of them was saying to the other, "Well, all that's well and good, but I just wonder how her kids feel about the kind of role that she lived when they were little and they needed a mother at home." And so, I said to them, "I beg your pardon? But I can tell you how they feel because I just read an article interview with her daughter in the New York Times and they think it is the most magnificent thing and the most magnificent role model that was ever set." And this young man, "Oh, oh. Oh, oh. Well, I'm so glad to know that." And off he went. So anyway, that's a little bit about the Women's Foundation. [Tape interruption.]

Okay, one of the things that we have been exploring as I have gone through all of my professional career as a journalist is how the activism or community activity both set a pattern for what I did at the Times Herald and at the same time how my Times Herald stories led into my choice of what I would do in the activity area of my life, that is, the extracurricular activity of my life. And the thing that I think that I always was leading toward was that in my so-called retirement years that the option that I would pick up would be in the areas of peace and areas of trying to make the world safe for future generations.

I think that began in my youth by being reared in a home where my father held out the vision that there were always better ways of settling human differences than by killing each other. I think it was set by my mother who set an example in the home that there did not have to be violence and conflict in order to resolve differences. And I think I was one of those fortunate children who grew up in a home where we did not resort to violence of any sort to correct our differences with each other. And I think it was a training that I personally garnered unto myself as I went along.

So that when Sharon Tennison had said to me, "Why don't you go to the Soviet Union with us?" it didn't dawn on me at the time that this was the opening book, or the turning of the leaf, the turning of the page, to a new chapter that would lead to peace work in my so-called retirement years.

Kasper: Hardly retirement years.

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intention of doing it, absolutely none. I mean, who was I to start a women's movement that would cross the border or span the universe?

I came back to the United States and I had hardlyóI hadn't gotten over jet lag and I was sitting in my den one day and I was trying to come to grips with some of the things that had happened in the Soviet Union. I had probably been home four or five days. Curt was sitting in his easy chair across from me and the telephone rang and it was Sharon Tennison calling from California. And she said, "Vivian, we have been invited by the Soviet Women's Committee to bring a Women In Leadership Conference to the Soviet Union and would you help me and let's put one together and would you co-lead it with me?" And I said, "No. I don't want to go back to the Soviet Union. I'm tired, I just got home." [Laughter.] Oh, so that seemed to be it. And I went back, finally, after we exchanged a few more pleasantries and said, "What a good time we'd had" and I went back sat down in my chair and I said to Curt, "You know what that crazy Sharon Tennison wants to do? She wants me to help her lead a trip to the Soviet Union? I've been there one time. I don't know the language. I can't speak Russian. I don't know any of the ins and outs of traveling abroad. That's the silliest thing I ever heard," I said. So I kept on exploring and after a while he looked at me and grinned and said, "When are you going to call her and tell her you will do it?" [Laughter.] So I got up and went to the phone and called Sharon in California and said, "Of course, I cannot resist. You bet I'll do this."

And it turned out that I was the one who put it together because Sharon at that time was leading one trip after the other. She led a group of physicians through the Soviet Union and then she would go back to Helsinki and pick up another group and lead them through. And then she'd go back to Helsinki and pick up another group and lead them through because that was justóit was just before Gorbachev came to power but it was at a time when things were beginning already to change. And the first timeóI want to put it into focusóthe first time I was in the Soviet Union in 1984, just before Gorbachev came to power, it was almost as if there was still a pall kind of hanging over things in that they were playing almost a waiting game. And then, the next time I went, two years later, Gorbachev had come into power in '86 and it was as if the promise were too good. When I went back in '87, it was as if a lid had blown off.

But back to the Women in Leadership trip, it occurred to me that since the Soviet Women's Committee had said bring us your women leaders, I didn't know what that meant simply because to me any women is a leader in her own right, whoever she is and wherever she is. But I interpreted that to mean that I would take whomever wanted to go, but I would also start with the top. So I invited Nancy Reagan, and Maureen Reagan, Sandra Day O'Connor, all the congresswomen, the one congress senator at that time, and all of the women governorsóI think there were three or four at that time out of the fifty statesóand some of the secretaries of state and that sort of thing, right down to, I sent out probably, I would say, three hundred letters. And I started getting responses. And I just had a wonderful time, mostly with the responses. Of course, not many of those wonderful women went, but it was so marvelous because I now have in my possession letters from most of these women of support for a Women's Leadership Conference in Moscow and whatever.

And the fun thing of it all was that my husband got involved again because he would be home, he said he really got a little tired during that period of time serving as my secretary because I didn't have an answering service. And I'll never forget walking in one afternoon late and tired and Curt said to me, "Who is Dianne Feinstein?" And I said, "Oh, you don't know her." "Well," I saidóand he said, "Well she sounds like a wonderful person. I just had a long conversation with her." So he got to take a lot of my telephone calls and became veryó

Kasper: He got to meet a lot of interesting women.

Castleberry: Right. He really did and he enjoyed what I was doing. So the letters, you know, fired back and forth real fast and then the time came almost up for the trip and there were fifty-two of us who signed on to go on the Women in Leadership Conference and we were to have meetings in Moscow and Leningrad and Minsk with the Soviet Women's Committee. And I got to Helsinki and Sharon came in and I met her thereó

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Kasper: An American?

Castleberry: An American. And she came down the first day that we were having sessions to get us ready to go in and said to me, "Something awful is going on in the Soviet Union. I don't know what it is because I can't understand on the television. I had the television on in our room, and I can't understand what's going on, but it's terrible. Something terrible has happened." And I said, "Coralee, if you tell the group this before I have a chance to check it out, I will screw your head off personally." And so, of course, she told everybody that something awful was going on in the Soviet Union. Well, it really was. That's whenó

Kasper: Oh, the atomic explosion had taken place at the nuclear plant.

Castleberry: The atomic explosion had taken place at the nuclear plant.

Kasper: Why can't we remember tható

Castleberry: Oh, goodness, it's right on the tip of my tongue. It'll be here in a minute. Anyway, Sharon and I immediately started to reach the American Embassy in Moscow and we spent the entire day checking out what was going on in the Soviet Union. We also spent the entire day, while going on preparing, asking ourselves, "Should we go on in?" And it turned out that night I was in the most dramatic women's session I have ever been in in my life. There were fiftyóit turned out that there were fifty-one women and one man on that trip. He is a video cameraman from the state of Washington and he is wonderful. He turned out to be one of the best feminists that we had on the entire trip. And, he went to film us, to film the thing the whole way through.

And so as we were making preparations for this thing, that evening, Sharon and I were still trying to get specific information, it was very hard to come by and we got the best information of all from the Finnish airlinesóFinnAir, that flew us in because they were real honest with us and leveled with us and they were not alarmist and they told us where they were still flying their planes because it was safe and where they weren't because it wasn't safe.

And so that night, as I said, we were in the most dramatic session I have ever been in in my life and it started out, we were being led through the evening by the Episcopal priest who started the session, but it wound up that our American Indian delegate was the one who kind of took over. And she's elegant, tall, with this long braid down her back, dressed in her Native American Indian attire, and she stood up and she finally said, "Ladies, I'm going through with the trip. I have been called to do this. This is what I am supposed to be doing at this time. There are guests waiting in the Soviet Union for us. We have checked out every degree of safety that we can. Those of you who want to go home are certainly free to go." (Sharon and I had said that repeatedly to then.) "I, for myself, intend to go through with it."

And at that point, everybody signed on except for two. There was one young woman in her first trimester of pregnancy who came home, and there was one older woman with a heart condition who, the next morning said, I just can't do it, and she turned around and came home. The rest of us, fifty of us, went through with the trip. And in the Soviet UnionóChernobyl is what we've trying to think of, it was the nuclear disaster in Chernobylóand I have to tell you that as the time went on, that was the only time in my life I was ever embarrassed to introduce myself as a journalist.

Kasper: Why?

Castleberry: My hands were held at one place in Leningrad by a woman with tears streaming down her face who said, "Why is the American press doing to us what they're doing?" She said, "When your Challenger fell from the skies, we stopped in the streets to cry and hold each other and to feel sorry for you. And now that a nuclear disaster, that we have no control over has hit our country, you are blaming us. And we get nothing but recrimination for what we have done." And the first time I had been over there, a Soviet had said to me, "Why does your President hate us so?"

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One of the fun things that happened in the streetóthere was one little kid, as you will find a little kid in every city in the country, had a pin and he was bursting the balloons. And he'd burst a balloonóa little child had been given a balloon and was on his way back with his parents, probably home, and this little boy came up and stuck the pin in the balloon and burst it. And just about the time he did, there was an officer, an armedówho just reached over and took him by the back of the neck and took the pin away from him and turned around and handed it to one of the group that we were with and I was walking with, and says, "Here, souvenir, Soviet Union."

So there were lots of little fun things and our women wereósome of the officers on the street were the most generous, open people. We were handed flowers everywhere we went. The Soviets love flowers and they were constantly giving us flowers. And, we were also there during Veterans Day. Veterans Day and the people came to the hotel with their medals that they had gotten during World War II and there are so many women who were just loaded down with medals and these were women who actually had earned these medals during the worst part of World War II. The children are taken care of so beautifully. And it was just exquisite.

So then I came home and then it started really bugging me that Iówell, the next thing that happened, some of the Soviets came to Dallas. There were groups of eight that Sharon Tennison and her group were able to get out on official visits, sort of grass roots citizens visits to the United States. And four of them came to Dallas. They divided and went into different cities and four of them came to Dallas. And Curt and I were hosts in our home for these four, two men and two women. And one of them was Ada Kosynkina and Ada is with the Peace Committee in Leningrad and she has really become my Soviet sister. I absolutely adore her. She stayed in our home. They were there for four days.

And one funny story. Just before they got here, they had been visiting in another state, I can't suddenly remember where it was, but I was just on my way to the airport to pick these people up and I got a telephone call from their host in the town that had just put them on the plane, saying, "Please let them rest some. We have just worn them out. They've been in San Francisco, and they've been here, and they've been on non-stop tours and please give them time to rest a little bit."

Well, I had an itinerary planned that wouldn't wait. I had put together here a host committee that we had planned every minute of their stay here for the entire five days from the time we met them at the airport until they left. And from breakfast through evening dinners and whatever. And I had garnered a committee to meet them at the airport. There were over a hundred people met them at the airport with banners that were printed in Russian and with balloons and flowers. And by the time Curt and I got them home that night, our living room looked like a funeral parlor because they had been given so many flowers. And one of the fun things was that Curt had even gone out to the back and resurrected an old goldfish bowl and some other things to put flowers in. We had more flowers than we knew what to do with.

But in the meantime, I had gotten their rooms prepared and I had put the itinerary in their rooms and some of my friends had printed some of the things in Russian for them so there would beóas it turned out, all four of them spoke fluent English, so there was no need of that, but I didn't know it ahead of time. But it dawned on me, I mean after I had this call, "Gosh, I've got them just scheduled right, every minute." And so, I thought, well one thing I can do for them is when I get them home tonight after I meet them at the airport and the press met them thereóand one wonderful young woman whose name was Phyllis Watson came from Channel 8 to interview them and she spoke Russian and she really outdid herself in makingó

It was so funny though, when the people got off that plane that night, nobody knew that they were traveling with these four Soviet citizens until they got to Dallas and they were just overwhelmed at the welcome they got when the plane landed and they started filing into the airport, and here was all this Russian and all these cheers and everything. So it was really neat. But, I thought, well, I can let them rest when I get home. So as soon as I got them home, I said to them, "Now I understand you've been on this long period of time and you are very tired and

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But it was such a goodóand the next day then, we went to a university and the young people who had been involved in the peace movement at that university came to talk with our kids and their kids. And there was a journalist there who came to cover us, to see what we were up to.

So everywhere we went throughout the Soviet Union, it is as if doors had been opening ahead of us and the groups that we needed to talk to were there, the groups that we needed to meet were there. So we were not seeing the traditional touristy things that people see. We were in their homes, in their shops, in their restaurants, talking with them over coffee late at night.

Kasper: In their minds and hearts.

Castleberry: Our kids were out in their nightclubsó

[End Tape 2, Side B; Begin Tape 3, Side A]

Castleberry: ógrand-daughter, let's say, just turn her loose at age 14 in any major city in this country? But I turned her loose in Leningrad and Moscow. I wanted to know where she was and who she was with, but I had no fear whatsoever of her safety. I knew she was going to get home all right and I knewóalso, the young men there are so protective. In the first place there is no place that they could go for illicit sex. It's all public. It's all out. And the first time I had been there, we had been in Leningrad during the white nights, so it never got dark and I walked all night. I walked one night three miles by myself between twelve and one o'clock in the morning because I was at a party and I felt like I needed to go home and rest and the rest of them weren't ready to go, so I walked back by myselfóthree miles. And I would never do that in an American city.

Kasper: Oh my goodness. No.

Castleberry: So, I don't know, to put a closure to my Soviet experience, it was wonderful to have had and I probably will go back one more time. I feel like I have some unfinished business there.

But at the same time, Ada just recently sent me the most beautiful letter and the photographóI cannot tell you how she has changed. What the example of perestroika and what the example of glasnost and what the example of Raisa Gorbachev herself has been to the Russian women, because Ada, who, when I first met her, she's probably thirty-five, she's single. She was a glowingly beautiful woman, but it came from an inner radiance of intelligence, of that quiet serenity of being in control of her life.

Recently, Louise Raggio, a friend of mine, went to the Soviet Union and by accident met Ada and found out that she wasóit wasn't so unusual because Ada moves in those circles, but at the same time it was really unusual that those two should have connected and Ada should have said to her, "Take my love back to Vivian in Dallas." Louise brought me a photograph of her. Ada has slimmed down probably ten or fifteen pounds. Her hair she has colored with a just a little bit more light so that now she is really blonde. She was wearing fashionable long earrings and a neat-looking outfit and she looksóyou could not tell her from a very fashionable American woman. So, the examples that are thereó

The example also that I had the last time we were there. One night Curt and I and a couple of our kids went and spent the evening with a writer in Moscow and his wife and he was a typical male, macho writer who wanted to talk about the role of women and talk about howóin disparaging terms. But his wife turned out to be an absolutely marvelous person. All I had to do was to get her by herself and she said, "Don't pay any attention to him. You know, he talks a good line. He knows who runs things in this house. I run things in this house. I run things in this house so that he can write," she said. So it's all over and it's universal.

And one woman at the Soviet Women's Committee was telling us about her twin sons, and they're twenty-three years old, and she considers herself the world's outstanding feminist, but she will be glad when these boys marry, she said, so that their wives then will have to look after them and she can go on about her business. And we said, "Hey, wait up. What is this teaching your sons about feminism?"

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the role of an attorney is to be skeptical, said, "Well, if you want to do it, you have my blessing." So it was that kind of thing right down the line. Not a single negative vote did I get.

And so the next thing I did was invite fifty women to my home for dinner. Dolores came down. She was willing to help me. We prepared spaghetti for fifty, and I had prepared an outline by that time for the conference, what I wanted to see happen. And it was a lengthy outline. And so, after dinner, I divided the women into six different groups and sent them to different bedrooms, or the living room, or the dining room, or different parts of my house, set them around tables with pencil and paper and said, "Take this thing and tear it up and tell me I can't do it." And every one of them came back, some of them were skeptical, but they all came back. They asked the same questions I had already asked and had already worked through. And so from that evening's meeting came the first steering committee of Peacemakers, Incorporated. We could feel, or I could feel, out of that group who was critically interested, who had reservations.

Kasper: And then you chose those who were the most enthusiastic ones.

Castleberry: We chose the most enthusiasticóand ableóbecause I knew we were going to need money. We put on that Peace Conference, it was a phenomenal overwhelming success. And we did it totally out of the way that other people would do things. We were told all the way through, you've got to have this much money, you've got to have that much moneyó

Kasper: So Peacemakers was formed in order to hold the conference.

Castleberry: Right. And what I wanted to do from the very beginning, I had no intention of organizing a new organization. I didn't want to do that. What I wanted to do was for an organization in town or someone in the country to take us over. So I talked to a number of different groups. We talked to the Women's International Peace Groupó

Kasper: Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Castleberry: League for Peace and Freedom, I just knew that they would do it. But it turned out with all of their overt enthusiasmóI had met the president of that in Moscow, oddly enough, I had met her in Moscow and had gotten to know her there and it seemed just ideal for them to do it. But it turned out thatówhat I learned and what I should have known but didn't, is that every organization has its own bureaucracy that builds up and that you can't start something new within that organization without innumerable meetings and lots of votes and a lot of promises.

Kasper: Unless their priority item is the same as yours, you have to start from scratch.

Castleberry: Right. Exactly. So that's what we triedóI floundered for about three months of trying to decide how to go about doing this. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, as enthusiastic as it was, their enthusiasm soon paled and waned and they wanted me to fly to Geneva and I didn't have the money to fly to Geneva to talk with them. They wanted me to spend so long outlining what it was I wanted to do and why I thought we could do it. And then they started saying, "Well, we've tried to do this for years and we haven't been able to do it and who do you think you are to be able to do it." Not in those words, but that was certainly the message that I was getting. And it was a legitimate message. I clearly understand that. I had read the history of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, had been tremendously impressed by what they were trying to do and who they were.

And so then I turned to some other organizationsóthe National League for Peace and Arbitration, and they were enthusiastic, but it was going to take too long. So then I turned to the Dallas Peace Center and they were extremely interested and the first time I went and presented it to them, they not only took us on, voted quickly to take us onó

Kasper: The Dallas Peace Center?

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Kasper: The three Hunt sisters run.

Castleberry: Two Hunt sistersófor five thousand dollars. That's the biggest grant.

Kasper: How much money did you raise nickel and diming it?

Castleberry: Hmmm. ProbablyóI don't know exactly. I should know exactly, but I imagine around three hundred thousand.

Kasper: Oh my lord. Over how much time?

Castleberry: One year. By the time we got to the point to where I knew nobody else was going to take us on and we had to do it ourselves, it was a do-it-yourself project. We had run out ofóso what I did, when I realized this wasn't going to work, I wrote a letter.

Kasper: When what wasn't going to work?

Castleberry: That getting a fundraiser wasn't going to work. Having somebody else fund us wasn't going to work.

Kasper: Oh. Knowing you had to do it yourself. Another do-it-yourself project.

Castleberry: By the time I knew that, I had to move on. So what I did was write letters to a hundred of my women friends in Dallas that I knew could afford it. And I told them what we were doing and I said, "I want you to support us, a thousand dollars each. I want a thousand dollars from you." Well, of course, I didn't get a hundred thousand dollars, but I got about thirty thousand dollars out of that, that got us started. And also in the meantime, I had written a letter to Carolyn Lupton, who is the administrative assistant to Caroline Rose Hunt and her good friend who owns the Crescent Hotel and the Rosewood EnterprisesóCarolyn had been in my first planning session, had been not enthusiastic, but she's just a very quiet-natured and very laid back woman and she was absorbing far more than I knew she was absorbing.

Kasper: This was Carolyn Lupton?

Castleberry: Carolyn Lupton, un huh. First I had thought it would be ideal if we could locate our offices at the YWCA because, again, it's one of those things that women should be doing and the YWCA is a perfect place for it, and our central YWCA is close to downtown and they had just built a new auditorium in their building and had opened new office space, and it just seemed ideal. So I wrote to them a letter and the women who were heading it at that time, Sandra Tinkham, and others were sympathetic with what we were doing and empathetic and Dr. Mary Sias, who is the Executive Director of the Y, I knew could be counted on to be supportive. What I hadn't counted on, again, was that you run into bureaucracy. So, while it looked like there for a few days that the YWCA was going to gift us with free space, it turned out that some of their more business-minded board members were asking hard questions about who is this little group of women and who do they think they are and how are they going to be able to pull this off and we don't want to beósee, nobody wanted to be involved with a failure. That's what it really amounted to. We went to SMU, talked to them about space, and they said, no, they didn't have space for such a thing. It wouldn't work.

So I was getting, at that period of time, a lot of negatives, but I was just moving on, I mean, it had to be done and I seem to have been appointed the person to do it and I had an incredible amount of support from friends in this community. Liz Devillet, who had been president of the Women's Council of Dallas County and who had never been involved in anything else, had come on board as a board member. And Margaret Estes, who is on the National Board of the YWCA, had come on board and was enthusiastic. About that time we were fortunate to get a young woman whose name is Carole Trout and whose background is business and who knew a lot about how to raise money and who is with the Bahai faith, which has a plank on peace, had come into our lives and was interested. Dr. Ruth Barnhouse is a psychiatrist and an Episcopal priest and a professor at Perkins School of Theology at SMU had come on board.

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they said 8/8/88. But it was the appropriate date to do it and it rang a bell with international women. Somehow that date was significant.

Kasper: Why do you think so?

Castleberry: I don't know. I think people who go in for soothsayers and look at the stars and numerologists just think that that was the ideal time. And it turned out to be.

So, anyway, along about that time, we had talked to hotels about hosting the conference. It was going to be terribly costly. We had it set at a hotel and it was going to be costly. So Roseann and I went back to SMU and we walked in and the young woman who had told us no the first time turned out to be a marvelous person to work with. She's just practical, she didn't think it was going to work. It turned out that she was on vacation and her assistant said, "Sure, we'll hold it here." It turned out later she shouldn't have said that. But by that time we were committed and they gave us the best possible price on everything. Literally, all we paid for was just about enough for the electricity, and this sort of thing. We were given so much free space and so much help in doing this. And we had going thereó

I cannot begin to tell you what all we had going there. We had an art show throughout the conference. We had women who sent artówomen's peace art, from all over the world that was on display there. We had quilts, and we had wallhangings, and we had posters, and we had children's art, and we had one long banner along the wall that was leading to the press room for kids and adults and anybody else who wanted to write peace graffiti, which we still have. And we started every day with what we called a moment of meditation, a quiet moment. We met in McFarlin Auditorium. We had music that led us into the day. We had an ongoingóoh, and some of the glorious things that happened along the way. Can I tell you two or three of them?

Kasper: Sure.

Castleberry: One of the things that happened along the way, I had had an early conference with Robert Muller, who is an outstanding peace activistóformerly with the U.N. and justóhe's German by nationality and American by choice and has worked for peace efforts all over the world and takes the peace message everywhere that he goes. And I had had an early conference with him and I don't think he had been too terribly impressed but, he again thought, "Well, if these little women want to do that, we will help them do it in whatever way we can." So he started telling everybody that he saw what we were doing in Dallas. See, and that's another way we spread, we told everybody and asked them to tell everybody. And so although there were a lot people who knewó

So, anyway, one day we didóone of the outstanding companies in town called me and offered to do our public service announcement.

Kasper: Oh wonderful.

Castleberry: And so our head musician, Rachel Ford, and her group, the choir that she was putting together and the children's voices got together and did the public service announcement and they used "Let There Be Peace on Earth" as the background music. Perfectly natural. And so then we got this PSA out to all of the television stations and anybody that would take it all over this part of the state and anybody else that would listen to it. And then Rachel walked in on Friday morning and said to me, "Who gave us permission to use that music?" And I said, "Oh."

And so in the meantime, my good friend, Eileen Hall, had volunteered to be our attorney because we knew we were going to run into some legal snags along the way and we had to have some help on those things. So I called Eileen up and told her what had happened and I said, "What do I do now?" And she said, "Well, I don't think you're in trouble because that song is so universally sung and universally known that I don't think you will have any legal hangups at all, but what you should do is find out who owns the copyright to it and write them a letter right away telling them who you are and what you've done and asking for permission."

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and then we subdivided each day into a theme. And day one was reclaiming our feminine voice because we were so sure, and we still are so sure, that women have the voices of peace on earth but they haven't been allowed to speak them. So I took careóit was my particular role to take care of inviting the plenary speakers, the ones who would keynote each day. I assumed that obligation and kept that obligation. And Ruth Barnhouse. I invited Ruth Barnhouse, and Dr. Leah Golden from University of Moscow because I wanted voices from two parts of the world to keynote that first day.

Kasper: Dr. Leah Golden?

Castleberry: Leah, un huh. We call her Lily Golden. And I want you to have a copy of Ruth Barnhouse's speech. She said everything I had ever thought. It capsulated absolutelyóit didn't cut off anybody, but it added women to the mix. It was a powerful speech. And the morning that we opened the conference, I had been so busy I had not had time to go into the auditorium to see what was going on. I literallyóit's one time in my life that I learned to delegate and walk off from it. And if things didn't work, they just didn't work, but everything worked so well that I can't believe how well it worked. But you had to delegate, you had to turn that piece loose and let it go. You had to let the art show go, let the kids run it, do what they would with it. You had to turn loose the music and let that go. You had to turn loose the informal meetings, you had to turn loose the host committee. We hosted every international delegate that was here in our homes. Made them welcome. Donna Shellhorn took care of that piece of it. She did a fabulous job. She found hosts for everybody, corresponded with them if there was time enough ahead of time. They met them at the airport, they took them to their homes, they brought them to the sessions at SMU, they planned sideline activities for them, they toured them over the city. They were just with them for the whole five days of the conference.

And the morning I walked in, the opening day of the meeting, I walked into that auditorium and it blew me away. It took my breath. The Women's Art Committee of Dallas, the Women's Art Caucus, had made a great white dove. They had turned that whole auditorium intoóthey had put a blue background over the whole back of the stage of the auditorium, suspended the white dove from the ceiling, and it was flying above the blue background. And on the stage, we had gotten permission from the Dallas area schoolchildren had cut out paperdolls about three feet high representing children of all nations of the world, and they were on stage. And it just was absolutely perfect. So then we did that session.

The next day we didólet's see what was the second day. The second day was Peace Education and Dr. Scott Peck came, volunteered his services, and came to us at the invitation of Ruth Barnhouse, who is a cohort of his, in psychiatry, and did the keynote speech on community and how you put community together. Wait a minute, that was the third day, because the second day was Peace Education and we had a panel of peopleóDr. Anima Bose, who is a Ghandian peace professor from India, and Alison Carpenter, who is a youth peace activist from Canada, and Margareta Ingelstam, who is a women's feminist educator from Sweden, and Dr. Nona Cannon from the Peace University in Costa Rica who is a family peace educator. So the four of them did the program on peace education.

Then the next day Scott Peck spoke on Peace and Community Building, which is the theme of his latest book. And what was so neat about that was that he capsuled for us what we had been doing and he talked about every organizationó

Kasper: You'd been building peace in your community.

Castleberry: Yes, but he also talked about every organization gets to the point of chaos and that's where we had been that day. And it was so neat to have somebody say, "It's okay for you to be in chaos, and if you stay with it, you will get to community." And that's what we did, we stayed with it and we got to community.

The fourth day was my favorite day, probably because I had worked so hard on the presentations of that day's events. And what I had that day was voices of peace from throughout the world's tension spots. And what I was aiming for, and what we mostly got, were the pockets of peace that exist in the worst areas of the world. And for that period of time, for that panel we had speakingó [Tape interruption.]

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up the kitchen and the phone rang and it was this child at DFW who said, "There's nobody here to meet me." I can't remember where she was from, somewhere in South America. And so, anyway, it was a matter of picking her up and finding a home for her for a week ahead of time and taking care of her. And also, it turned out, she was the last one to leave. Donna Shellhorn decided she wasn't going to leave us at all because she stayed a week after the conference was over. She simply wasn't ready to go home.

Kasper: Donna Shellhorn?

Castleberry: Donna Shellhorn who handled our Dallas's Host Committee who was responsible not only for getting people in and taking care of them, but getting them out again. And Donna decided this child wasn't going to go home at all. She was our youngest delegate and her father had sent her here because he wanted her to be involved in a women's peace conference. We probably could have kept her to this day if we had wanted to badly enough.

Kasper: Is Peacemakers Incorporated still going?

Castleberry: Yes ma'am, it is still going.

Kasper: And what is it doing now?

Castleberry: I have literally turned it over, completely. My vision was the peace conference and we did that. And after the peace conference I stayed with it until October, until all the follow-up letters were written and the offices were closed and I felt comfortable about turning it over. And then I hung on because they asked me to until January, until we had two very in-depth sessions of struggling with new identity and what we wanted to do from here on. And then, we elected new officers and Ruth Barnhouse is president; Roseann remains the administrator of it; Barb Middleton is vice president; Carole Trout has remained as treasurer. Let's see, the secretary is Leslie Lanes. Yes, it is still going on and I am now chairing the advisory committee. That's all I'm doing and right at the momentóRuth and I were invited by Margareta Ingelstam to come to Sweden to a women's peace conference recently. Ruth got to go. I simply didn't have the money to go and probably, if that had been a priority of mine, I could have found it some way because I generally do for things that I especially want to do. But I have turned a new leaf of my life and I'm now in the country. One of the thingsó

Kasper: By way of an example here, this is the final chapter.

Castleberry: This is the final chapter. And one of the fun things is that my husband, who had never clearly understood what I was doingó

Kasper: With Peacemakers?

Castleberry: ówith Peacemakers, had been lovingly supportive but was puzzled by it all. And about six weeks before the conference took place, he decided to go down to work with me one day and see what was going on down there. I'll never know why he went. I think it was another one of those serendipitous things where he was just led. And he walked into that office and realized that we didn't have anybody on full time to put names of international delegates into the computer. And he started using the computer and doing that and he became so enamored with it that he was the one who would get up in the morning and say to me, "When are we going to work? Hurry up and get up. Let's go because I've got lots to do today." He stayed with us the entire last six weeks, including weekends, Sundays and nights, that we needed to work and put names of international delegates into the computer. And he did fun things, too, like he would make the computer pull out for us how many American Indians were enrolled and how many Hispanics were enrolled. And one day he decided to pull out how many men were enrolled and he found six names. And he thought that was real interesting, so he signed up too that day so there would be seven. And then he decided that he would pull out how many Baptists were enrolled and he found two. [Laughter.] So he did lots of fun things.

And I told him at that stage, my black Baptist friends had not really enrolled yet because they were a whole different ilk. And sure enough they were. They were allóthe ones that were involved were marvelous, but they had not yet signed up,

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the wives of retired executives from Dallas and other places, immediately caught the vision of what we were trying to do and said, "We want to sponsor a delegate. And whatever it requires, we will sponsor a delegate." So it turned out that one of the women who had invited me down that day had been the "mother" of Arcelina Publio Dias when she was a student in Dallas in a Dallas high school. And she is now an outstanding journalist in Brazil and so they determined that they would get her here. [Note added by V. Castleberry: One day the president of their club, the Mathea Club, walked in and handed me $2,647.17. They not only paid Arcelina's way here, but also sponsored another delegate.] And Arcelina had a terrible time making up her mind to come because she'd gotten really involved in politics and was very involved in writing the women's planks for the new constitution in Brazil. So it was terribly difficult for her to decide to come. But, she was also fortunate in that the hearings happened just a week before she left to come here. So she had done that and she could now come here. But every time I read about something that's going awry with the new Brazilian constitution, I worry about her. Because one of the planks that they wrote in was equality of pay in the workplace. And what has happened, I just recently read an article, that what has happened to that is that now employers are not hiring young women for fear that they will get pregnant and leave and so they've got to work through how they're going to handle the spirit of the law along with the new legal implications for this law in their country. And I know that whereó

Arcelina turned out to be an absolute dynamo and a young spitfire and I know she's not going to go easily. But she renewed acquaintances in Dallas that she would have never seen again. It was a marvelous, marvelous occasion. She saw all of her family while she was here, her Dallas family, and her friends, and friends that she hadn't seen. And she's in her thirties and had graduated from high school here and then had gone to a university in France for study. It was that kind of thing that kept happening all the way through. I could just tell you endless stories, human interest stories, that took place.

But, you asked what Peacemakers is doing now, and what Peacemakers is doing now is preparing for its next assignment, under new leadership. Most of the old steering committee remained and one or two of them have resigned since then because they're going on to new things. And my vision was to do the conference and I did it.

Kasper: And so you've moved on to something new too. Why don't you briefly tell us about it.

Castleberry: Yes, I've moved on to something else and that's where I was saying that Curt came down and helped us do the conference, the final part of the conference, and was with me every day through the conference. It was really funny because he had been so concerned. His role in life has been to build a house with his own two hands and he has been in the country for five years now doing that, most of the time, since we've been retired. He would come home only when I'd call him and say, "I need you." And then he'd come home and we'd do a few things and he'd go back to the country and sometimes I'd go down for weekends. Well, that last year that I was doing the peace conference, those weekends were few and far between because I was busy hours upon endless hours, and couldn't leave here without something falling apart. And so he had gotten involved. And it was so funny, right there toward the last, we were driving to work one morning and he said to me, "Honey, you can't leave this. You say you're going to go to the country for a year and you can't leave this. You have got to travel extensively and tell other people what you've done here." And I said, "I'm not believing you. Here you have been preaching to me, for five years, to come to the country and stay with you for a year, and now you're trying to tell me that I owe it to the world to go out and tell the world this." But I said, "No, I knew when it was time for me to walk out of the Times Herald and I know when it's time for me to walk out of Peacemakers and let other people do it."

So after I had, as I said, done the correspondence and turned it over, I went to the country on the 30th of October of 1988. I moved to the lake house in the country where I am ensconced in a two-story, four bedroom, three bath, modified Victorian house that is about two-thirds of the way finished. We're now finishing the interior. And where? The address is Chandler, Texas. It is a small, sleepy town in East Texas. It is also the home of Senator Ralph Yarborough.

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harmony will create a better world that will allow all of us to sample the goodies of life rather thanó

I'm not sure how it's going to be done. I am grateful that there are groups in California, in other parts of the country that are working diligently on economic conversion to show how you take your war plants that are now making bombs and turn them into plants that are making pacifiers, as it were. But whatever it is that they can make, they can always increase the quality of life rather than destroy it. And all of us are well aware that the war toys and the war tools that we make do nothing. They're good for only one thing, and that's destruction. And once they destruct, then it has wiped out everything. And we are so confident that these same plants can be used to increaseófor profitable enterprises that will enhance rather than destroy life for our entire world population.

We know, for instance, that weóone of the pieces that we sent out during Peacemakers, we got the price of one missile and for the price of one missile, we could have done forty peace conferences on the level that we were doing it. But we said, we are also practical, we know we're not going to get the price of one missile to do this conference, so you have to help us ógive your dimes and dollars and quarters.

So I'm at the country working on my book and it's a wonderful experience. I am still probably accepting too many speaking engagements and trying to do too many things where I feel called to do. And trying to remember that I am not in this all by myself and that the sun will come up tomorrow whether I get up or not. And trying to remember thatóas when, my husband said to me one time, he said, "When you get the message, 'Here am I Lord, send me,' it doesn't mean you personally every time."