Nana Biography

I was about 12. I started maybe a little sooner, but I didn’t know what was up, because I resented having to not go out in the kitchen, you know, and to maintain certain attitudes towards the servants, as we called them, and always him telling me that they were nice people, and we should be nice to them, and all that, but they really Only had the intelligence of a 12-year-old so you should treat them like children. He told my mother that. I can remember telling her.  Well, he said, “Ruth, when you want something done, you go out there, and you say, tell them to do it, you don’t have to start out by apologizing and the other “, and I used to, that used to bother me terribly.

Your mother?

Well, it’s gone on now even after I got married, and I noticed that I am terribly upset. When people are oppressed, I read books that are about people who struggled, and I am interested in causes, and I’ve always been involved with them. Deeply.

Is that the source of your political involvement or is that separate from Don?

Well, he was the same way. We both were involved in politics, but in a kind of liberal thinking that I never had at home. I didn’t have that kind of thinking. And it was sort of fun to get away. I think that may be my family thought I was a bit of a communist, This was at the age when everybody ought to be equal and I think that I’d come home and preach this doctrine every once in a while to them and get laughed at or put down, but I don’t know where it came from. Because I never was associated with people like that. I never until I got married and came out here to California where there’s a lot of people and happenings and so on.

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