TRANSCRIPTION
What is your favorite childhood memory?
My favorite childhood memory, I have a lot of favorite childhood memories but… every summer we would take a trip somewhere and one really good trip was to Carlsbad Caverns… I must have been about ten so about 1957 and uh it was just a really nice trip I always remembered seeing the big cave and being with my family my mom and my dad and my brother. We just had such a good time….we saw the bats come out and all that stuff.
What was school like for you?
School…. like going all the way through school… first grade was horrendous it was horrible, horrible, horrible I had the teacher from hell, Ms. Staten from Satan she was horrible she just delighted in torturing young children, humiliating them in front of everyone, but then after that elementary school was fine. And then middle school was middle school and we were just horrible, horrible children because when I was at Rogers we were a big experiment and they divided up the homerooms and the classes by your IQ score that was the stupidest thing anybody could ever do it went on for the three years I was there well no two years I was only there two years cause I started in eighth grade I mean yeah eighth grade cause middle school was seventh eighth and ninth grade. But I apparently have a very high IQ score so I was in the number one class well they stupidly let us know that that’s what they did so we felt like well my class felt like we were smarter than the teachers and we basically drove them crazy. We had one teacher one of our math teachers we literally drove her to a nervous breakdown because we decided we were smarter than her and she was stupid and that’s the way we treated her. Well they realized after that, that that was really dumb because just because you have a high IQ score doesn’t mean that you’re smart. You know it doesn’t mean anything it just means that you have a high IQ. And high school was great it was one big party, college was one big bigger party. And I realized early on in college I’m really not a good student I don’t take it seriously. Then I went to work so, I was 21….I made good grades I just don’t care about it. It just never seemed that important to me in a lot of ways. I was supposed to achieve and do all this stuff and I didn’t really enjoy it. It was just a party time. I was a big social butterfly…. I had a lot of friends.
Describe a typical day as a child.
Back in the 50’s, cause television there wasn’t anything on in the daytime, television at night was not geared toward children. The only time television was good was on Saturday mornings before you really got up. But we had great fun, because we lived here on Killarney, you know where we live now, but we were the last street and then my dad built this great big slab patio in the back. So there were a lot of children around here at that time because this was a really new neighborhood so everybody’s kids were about our age. I lived with skates on my feet; we were outside from morning till dark. We did everything we roller-skated, we pogo-sticked we went down to the creek and went into the woods and we had the slab back there we skated on and we played and we played and we played and we just had great fun cause nobody like.. Nobody worried about us you know it was before the times like now. You trusted people. And we were just outside all the time and we were healthier there was no childhood obesity at that time and you just had a great time playing all the games that these kids now have no clue about.. so there’s no red rover red rover, and statue, red light green light, dodge ball, mother may I, all those really fun games. We were always outside always.
As a little girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I didn’t have a clue, I didn’t worry about it. Nobody ever really asked me. My parents weren’t like oh you have to go to college and be a doctor like some parents do. My parents were just like grow up and have a good time and do what you want to do just see where it goes. They wanted us to have a good education it wasn’t that, my parents were very different for their time in the 50’s I mean you know mother was a swimming coach but she was also an artist and then daddy was a commercial photographer and they were just very bohemian for their age even though my dad was a staunch republican, right wing republican, he really was a very liberal person at the same time and they believed in letting us grow and see where we went and just learn and enjoy people, we had friends that were gay when nobody had friends that you knew were gay, they never really said it you know, but they had a very diverse group of friends and we were always taught not to judge people for who they are, what color they are, or what religion they are just to enjoy people. I was brought up in an atmosphere of acceptance and to think on your own, which was really not a 50’s deal, to think on your own and not just do it because everybody says to.
So you wouldn’t say your parents were strict?
Oh my god no, my parents were never strict they didn’t believe in corporal punishment we were never spanked or hit they just talked to us. There was a certain amount you were just expected it wasn’t like we ran amuck we knew when to go to bed and we had rules and we had curfews. We both after we turned 18 and were both still in the house the only rule was just call and let somebody know if you’re not gonna be home before twelve that you’re not dead. You know that you’re going to be home at a certain time so people didn’t sit around and worry cause it was before cell phones and all of that. But they just believed that if you turned 18 and you hadn’t learned anything by that age, it was too late to try to teach you. So, no my parents were not strict.
Do you think they had different expectations for you and Stuart?
Yeah, I was a girl and he was a boy. But, at the same time I was the oldest and I was the princess and I got everything and he didn’t. I got the car. But he was real smart he got a full scholarship to Trinity University and threw it all away to go to UT…. he was at trinity for two years he had a full scholarship hated it, hated that school, gave it all up to go to the University of Texas.
Who got you into modeling?
My daddy and my mother, my dad was working for a modeling agency here in town called the Ben Shaw Studio and my mother started modeling for Ben Shaw. When I was 6 they decided, I was a very introverted child I mean if somebody came over I would hide under the table. I was very introverted so my mother and daddy thought that getting me into modeling would help me because even though I wasn’t speaking I was still having to get in front of people so I started modeling. But it was a good thing because I was modeling professionally and in a small town like San Antonio at the time I made a lot of money so all of that money paid for like my braces you know cause things like that were real expensive. So they just put my money in the bank and then when I had to get my braces that’s how we paid for it. That’s how I got into modeling because my dad was working as a fashion photographer at the time.
So how long did you model for?
I modeled till I was twelve. And then when you turn twelve you get ugly. You just do. Twelve is just an ugly age you look stupid your hair gets stupid, your face gets stupid and you just look stupid. So you’re not a little kid and you’re not a teenager. You’re just twelve. So, that’s when I was already getting into competitive swimming so it didn’t really matter.
When did you start swimming competitively?
When I was 10 my mother decided because my mother was taking synchronized swimming at the Y just for exercise and at the time there was a team called the silver fins at the YWCA downtown over there on McCullough and Broadway its now the DPT laboratories I think or one of those but it’s a really really old building and the pool was in the basement, but the silver fins was the team and that’s when I joined the silver fins and I swam with the silver fins for several years and you know we were doing a lot of competitions but then my coach you see there was a big riff between the silver fins and my coach broke off from them and started a team called the signets wich is still around. This was in the 60’s and the silver fins went on their own way but they ended up going the away because they couldn’t keep their girls on the team. And so I started swimming for the signets and I swam with the signets till I was almost 21and we were junior national champions. We did really well for a Texas team. When I was in high school, I was the only girl that was in a competitive sport in the whole high school that wasn’t tennis. Cause at that time within the SAISD district there were no women sports. There was no volleyball, basketball, baseball. Nothing. Tennis, tennis was the only sport women had at the time, it was very, very discriminatory for women back then in the schools because they didn’t expect you just didn’t do that girls just weren’t “athletes” and I’m sure in other places they were just not here in San Antonio not within the SAISD district anyway, so I hung with all the jocks because I was a jock so and they kind of understood that I had practice times and stuff, that I had commitments. Like in the summer, we had meets all summer long, well like during the school year too. It was really great we went to Mexico twice; we traveled all over the state we went to California several times for nationals. It was fun.
Where did you all go in Mexico?
To Monterrey and that was a trip beyond words so the first one I was still in High school and things were real different in Mexico at that time there was a lot of segregation between the sexes. We were on TV on a band stand type show and it was just so weird because the boy and the girls didn’t dance together the boys were on one side of the room and the girls were on the other side of the room and we were like “they don’t dance together?”, but it was just a big taboo.
So you all were on it dancing?
Yeah with ourselves on the girls side and then they interviewed us, I don’t even remember what it was about because I don’t speak Spanish but there was a big pool being opened up. Monterrey sits like a bowl there’s mountains all around and Monterey sits down here and the slums are around the top like they go up the mountains and they had built this big huge municipal pool which they had never done for the people up that way which was really a big deal and so they were having this huge opening ceremony and having all kinds of stars well they had asked us to come down and perform which that’s what we were down there for. We were literally mobbed like we were movie stars, people trying to touch us, we’re like we’re just a bunch of girls from San Antonio but it was a big deal for these people at that time for whatever reason and I guess because we were Americans and a bunch of us our hair was blonde from being in the water so much and the sun and it was just a big deal for them but it was cool. We learned a lot; we saw a lot.
Where else did you all go besides Mexico?
Oh well in the early 60’s I wasn’t that old I must have been about 12 maybe or 13 we went up to when Lyndon Johnson was vice president still before Kennedy died we went up to his ranch in Johnson City to perform at his pool for the President of Pakistan and he was just a major jerk. Cause here we are poor little kids we were so excited we’re swimming for the vice president, we’re swimming for the president of Pakistan. Well we were in the back, kind of where we come in and all the food people are there and LBJ came back there and we were so excited. He didn’t even turn to look at us, or say hello or thank ya’ll for coming. He just ignored us and then walked off. We all thought you jerk, it really just hurt us and then I realized really what an asshole this guy was; I never liked him after that. I didn’t really like him before that but that’s because I lived in a Republican home and we all talked about how my father was very politically minded and we all talked about that stuff. He told us about how LBJ was really elected fraudulently with stuffed ballot boxes down in the valley. I think in Duvall County, which Duvall was very corrupt, and still is, but very corrupt at that time because George Parr was considered the duke of Duvall, see I knew his daughter and he was like the king pin of Duvall County and very corrupt at the time. He was real good buds with Lyndon Johnson but Georgianna his daughter was a real good friend of mine, she was his illegitimate daughter, but she did have his last name. But he was just a corrupt, corrupt person. He ended up killing himself eventually because it all caught up with him after a while. But it was interesting though his house was nothing. It was little, but the ranch is beautiful, that’s where we went.
What did family mean to you growing up?
Oh my gosh, family meant everything me and all my cousins and my mom and my dad we always did everything together. My dad was technically an only child for years his sister wasn’t born until he was 18 so he was basically an only child and then my mom her growing up was really hard so it was real important for them that we did everything together; we went to church because that’s what everybody did back then to but we they made sure that we did things together, we went out to eat on Sundays we just were a close family and not because we were forced to do it but because we all enjoyed it. I think because my parents they tried to nurture our individuality and they didn’t ever put us down for thinking a certain way. We had big discussions at the dining room table about politics and all kinds of things and they valued our opinion and I thinks that’s why we all enjoyed being together because if you had an idea or a thought you were listened to which was really unusual back then because I was nurtured to be an independent woman which is was really, really not what people did. People got married right out of high school so many of the girls I went to school with got married right out of high school because that’s what you did. Where my dad was like don’t ever depend on a man, that was not something you heard from a father, but my dad always said you gotta learn to stand on your own two feet; you can’t depend on a man to take care of you. Men are dogs you can’t trust them. But I think he was trying to protect me from all the guys from Lackland since we were such a military town, but he did want me to be able to take care of myself. He thought that was really important for a woman for them to be able to take care of themselves. My daddy was ahead of his time.
Let’s talk about the 60’s.
The 60’s- I graduated from high school in ’65, then started at San Antonio College. At that time, women couldn’t even wear pants to school not even to college. Everybody had to wear skirts, all week dresses, skirts, dresses, skirts. Women when you went to work if you got pregnant you had to quit your job when you were five months pregnant. They might hold your job and you might be able to get it back after you had the baby, but you had to quit your job. Women were very oppressed at the time. There was no equality, at all, at least not as far as I could see. And then the women’s lib movement started and it was like the burning your bra atmosphere; it was the so called hippie movement. When things really started to change was 1966, was you saw a lot of movement and women were saying hey you know I’m an equal person and I can work and I can do all this stuff, but give me some equality because there wasn’t really any equality. Especially not in the jobs and things like that you were just supposed to get married, listen to your husband, stay at home and take care of your children. And then ’68 was like a huge year of change. It was the year that the Democratic National Convention was major big as far as the riots and people standing up and saying you know we don’t want these fat cat guys telling us what to do, not even at a Democratic convention which is what was happening up in Chicago and all the riots and so it was the middle of the anti-war movement with Vietnam. People were just fed-up with the war, so there was a lot of anti-war demonstrations and people were just angry just really, really angry and not just the kids I mean the kids were finally saying you know we need to question some of this authority, you know things just aren’t right. There was a lot of stuff going on and a lot of changes that you could already start to see. More women were starting to work, a lot of things were going on here we had Hemisfair that year which was a lot of fun because I worked at Hemisfair up in the Tower, saw a lot of people saw Lyndon Johnson’s daughters they were really ugly and stupid and dorky. And different stars, this one couple that one the Dating Game that year and got a trip to San Antonio and he was a super dork, Jack Benny. It was fun. Then I went to work and you could see women did not have any real positions of authority at work, I mean it was a man’s world. You couldn’t wear pants to work then finally we could start wearing pant suits, the coat had to cover your butt. You could wear a mini skirt up to your butt but you couldn’t wear pants and then that started evolving and then all of a sudden if you got pregnant you didn’t have to quit, you could take some kind of sick leave. It wasn’t like what’s now where you could get more time if you want too. It took businesses a long time to come around and I’ve seen a lot of changes. But the 60’s were huge I mean it went from everybody being nice and good and rosie to just freak out city things changed dramatically.
How did you freak out?
Oh I freaked out I had fun. My brother was a hippie, I tried to be a hippie but I was working, so it was hard. There were a lot of drugs; there were a lot of drugs. People say this all the time but it was different because we were real naïve; the drugs were different they weren’t as horrendous like they are now. It was mainly marijuana, then some people tried to cook like what was it? Sunflower seeds… morning glory seeds; it didn’t get ya high it just made you sick or smoking banana peels that was the funnest one cause it didn’t do anything. Whoever thought that one up was really weird. But it was mostly just marijuana and the vice squad and stuff here were real stupid, you knew what cars they were driving. We had a lot going on cause of Stuart’s (her brother) involvement with the Students for a Democratic Society at UT at Austin, the FBI thought he was gonna take over and try to blow something up, so they were watching him in Austin and they were watching my parents house to but they were so obvious and my dad’s going “who are those guys in the suits that keep sitting in front of the house?” well there FBI, they think Stuarts gonna blow something up which Stuart’s a real pacifist, he wasn’t going to do that. And that’s when I was in college I was the county’s chairperson for the Young Republicans, now I became Young Republicans because my brother was a communist and I just did it to aggravate him basically. I met a lot of people but you know. We got Richard Nixon elected the first time, this was in ’68. There was a lot that went on in ’68, tons of stuff that went on in ’67 and ’68 but it was a lot of fun it was a lot of learning experiences too, and you met a lot of people, a lot of different ideas. People that didn’t want things the way they always were. They were questioning, questioning the authority and saying hey you know that’s really not right. This war is just not right. There was a lot of anger about it, there still is, especially with my age group there’s still a lot of anger leftover from that.
Besides Young Republicans what else did you do in college?
I was in a sorority, Sigma Phi, at SAC. I was in that sorority we had a good time. My sorority was kicked off campus along with all the fraternities at the time because SAC said we were giving the school a bad name because we partied. We had great parties and it wasn’t like we partied on campus or anything like that, we all lived off campus. We never did understand that, all of us did we didn’t have sorority houses. They were just social clubs basically but we were kicked off and we had to reorganize under a different name which was Kappa Alpha so we did a lot of that and I was on the SAC swim team to, the Marlins, so that’s what I did a lot. I was still swimming a lot at SAC so I didn’t have a lot of free time with school, swimming and the sorority and stuff.
So why did you stop swimming?
I was getting older and I had to get out and work. It was time to go to work and you can’t really work and have that kind of a swimming schedule because I had to be at the pool at five in morning. I worked out from four to seven hours a day depending on the time of year. I looked good though I was skinny, but it’s just harder though when you get older. You just can’t afford to do it anymore, so that’s why I quit.
What technological advancement do you appreciate the most?
Oh my gosh, computers. Really computers because I have computers at work and I’ve seen the changes from when I started working in insurance, now I’ve been in insurance for forty-one years. When I started out in insurance in 1968 we had our typewriter and we had carbon paper and I figured up premiums for policies well it took forever because you had to do everything… I had a calculator that had buttons it had 99 buttons and you punched all the buttons, I mean it took forever calculators were very primitive back in 1968. You would put together your policies and you typed them and you put together your premiums. Everything just took forever and then you see the evolution of everything. Like we didn’t have faxes, you called people and you mailed that was your choices. Then all of a sudden there was this thing that you could type on and send an instant message on a strip of paper and it punched like holes in it. It was like a teletype is what it was and you would put the thing in and it would type out, like someone could send you an instant do this kind of thing. It was weird. And then we started getting computers and basically what the computer was, was a punch card and there were people in these rooms that were sealed because the noise was deafening that would punch all the information into this punch card and they’d put it through a computer and the computer was in a room as big as this house and it had to be really, really cold because they were really, really big. And what they would put in was customer information and premium information. I never saw what it printed I think it printed out reports basically and that was maybe it. It was these huge things and then when I went to work when I got married in ’70 well I moved to Houston and then I got married in ’73 but when I went to live in Indiana for the agency I worked for up there, the lady that did payroll she sat at this big machine, it was an NCR machine to punch in all the information this thing was enormous I don’t even understand how it worked but it was an accounting machine of some kind. And so you see all of these big things then when we first started getting computers was in the late 80’s and it didn’t do a whole lot. It would rate an auto policy which it took forever to put in the information. It’s just you see it and then slowly all of a sudden they started taking off, the computers. The computer programs started getting better and now I’m on three nineteen inch screens everything is done like this, everything’s online, I’m paperless. So in forty years you see this huge advance, it just jumped and you think oh my gosh how did we live without these computers? Because job wise it’s been amazing and its made my life so simple but I think computers is like huge just cause I’ve seen it from a business stand point. You know going from a typewriter with carbon paper cause what I handle now by myself would have been eight or nine of us back in ’68. So it’s been huge, absolutely huge.
How has San Antonio changed since you were a child?
A lot, cause like when I was little we didn’t have freeways for years. When we finally got a freeway it went from Nogalitos to Fredericksburg Road, and on Sunday we’d all get in the car and go and drive on the freeway and get off the off ramp and get on the on ramp. That was like a big deal. It was just smaller and it was quieter. We were kind of behind the times, we were always considered kind of backwards, lame yeah. Things started changing in ’68 when Hemisfair came. It made us; it was like people had vision on the riverwalk because the riverwalk was Casa Rio restaurant. That was it that was the only thing because we used to go eat at Casa Rio all the time but we couldn’t go walk on the riverwalk. We couldn’t do that especially at night cause there were rats and people lurking in the dark so you didn’t walk on the Riverwalk. And then when they decided to put in Hemisfair they went you know we’ve got this beautiful riverwalk and they started putting in a bunch of stuff. I watched them build the Hilton Hotel and they lifted each room to put it together like a jigsaw puzzle. Yeah that hotel wasn’t built normal, they built the rooms, the squares, when you go and look at it you see these squares and that’s the room. They built that room and totally furnished it and then they lifted it and put it together. It was just considered so innovative. There’s an apartment complex across the street from the San Jose Mission they built that way. They never built anything else like that again. But it started, people said all of a sudden you know this town has potential, lets develop we’ve got the Alamo, we’ve got the missions, let’s start promoting all that more. I remember when they came out with the movie the Alamo, think that brought tourists in too and they started putting in more things on the river, putting in the restaurants. Hemisfair, that’s when they really decided that we need to try to develop our tourist industry and the Happy Jazz Band Jim Cullum it was his dad’s band at the time, it was a little place called the landing and that was one of the first real clubs on the riverwalk. It had jazz, it was fun it was a lot of fun I remember we used to go there. I quadruple dated with Henry Cisneros and Mary Alice before they got married so cause I was going with a guy from A&M and we all went down there. So you see it start to grow and grow and it just started taking off. I mean the people that grew up here still talk about San Antonio as being a “town” not a city it’s still a town. I remember El Mercado before they paved it all and it was just the street where Mi Tierra is, all those were shops all along that block and they had bakeries and some restaurants and herbal places where you could go and buy all the Mexican herbs like curranderos and brujas use. And I remember the Texas theatre and the Majestic when they were still theatres and next to the Texas theatre there was this shop called the nut shop that sold hot peanuts and all kinds of nuts and when we’d go to the drive-in we would always go over there and get a big bag of hot nuts. You went downtown to go shopping, we didn’t have the malls. They built McCreless when I was in high school and North Star Mall but still you still went downtown. I’m sad that that’s gone away because that was fun to go downtown and go to the movies and have lunch with your girlfriends. Now there’s no place to be, you can’t afford it and there’s no parking. It’s sad in some ways cause like when I first started working I could still drive downtown from work because my office was just up in Monte Vista off of Maine and I could drive downtown, park on the street, have lunch with my girlfriends on the river and get back to my office in an hour. And now you can’t do that so there’s some things that are good and some things that are sad.
What is your favorite memory with your mom, dad, and brother?
Oh wow my favorite memory with my dad, my dad and I were really close and I used to work for him when I was in high school and we spent a lot of time together, just talking, and it wasn’t anything in particular it’s just he’s been gone for so long, but my favorite memories are just being with him and going to work with him. Just being with him and talking to him cause we talked about everything and those were good memories. And then with my mom, my mother and I didn’t speak for, I don’t remember talking to her at all when I was a teenager, I really don’t, we didn’t talk we tolerated each other. I don’t think I really talked to my mother until after my dad died when I was 24 and still that was really hard. Then after that we got really close, we used to do a lot of stuff together, we’d take Eric everywhere, and we’d go everywhere. We would take little trips, just day trips. She was a lot of fun and just like to go and do, my memories with her are just getting up on Saturday morning and shed just say let’s just go somewhere, where do you want to go? And we would just take off and go somewhere that was a lot of good memories. And then with my brother, he was younger so I always thought he was a dork when we were in high school and when we got to college when he got to UT cause when he was at Trinity he was the manger for the basketball team, I really didn’t even see him at all even though he lived here at home, he was always gone. But then when he got to UT I would go up there on weekends and we would just have a good time. The weirdest time was when he told me, were having this rally and I’m gonna sit you in this VIP section cause I want you safe because we don’t know what’s gonna happen, it’s the middle of the Vietnam war it was the middle of all the protests and that’s when he was in the Students for a Democratic Society. Well I found out it was Abby Hoffman, who was a huge anti-war radical at the time, had come to speak, and Stuart, this is when I was working in the Young Republicans and Stuart sat me in this VIP section with every major communist in the state and the FBI is sitting there taking my picture, and I’m like Stuart. He says well if any trouble happened it was so I could get you out fast. I said no, no, no you did that on purpose and he says yeah I did that on purpose. But we had a lot of fun; we just had a lot of fun. We went to New York City together to, yeah to see my cousins Trish and Pete when they were living in Manhattan and we went up there for a weekend and that was a lot of fun. We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and we were just together and it was just a good time. We really enjoyed it. This was before I had Eric and he was divorced from his first wife, and that’s when I got divorced from my first husband. It was just fun we just had a good time.
Is there anything else you would like to add to this interview?
That I’m really not a party animal; I’ve become a different person. What do I have Sunday school, yea, my Thursday night drinking bible study. I work with homeless people sometimes. That’s about it.
The Rolling Stones:
1964, we had a big teen fair one summer, it was like a week and they brought in all these different stars, they brought in the Rolling Stones, they were here for three days everybody hated them, because they said these people, there icky they have long hair and their dirty and there icky. My dad was the floor manager and he would give me big rings of tickets and said give them to people bring them here to see the Rolling Stones, I saw them like three times while they were here, I’ve seen them two other times but, you know, it was just funny because everybody here hated them, and they were really popular everywhere else, but here, and all my friends were like how can you stand them and I said I don’t know you know, but I thought that was interesting. I’ve seen a lot of stars, I’ve seen Jimi Hendrix live, he was at the municipal auditorium, and I saw, who else, I’ve seen Jethro Tull, Cream, Three Dog Night. A lot of people that came here, so, but Jimi Hendrix was good, that was a good concert.
