Nana Biography

Sure, I mean, it’s different. 

Oh my word! Yes. My stepfather, I can hear him saying when I wanted to go to college and was going to Smith, “I don’t know why you want to go to college,” he said. “It seems to me like it’s a waste of time. It would be better if you went off to someplace like a finishing school, and you learned how to come in a room and how to poor tea and how to entertain and do things like that, because that’s what your life is going to be.“ He said this in total seriousness.

How did you feel when he said that?

Well, I had made up my mind. I was going to go to college and my mother wanted me to and I would’ve gone to Smith but the depression hit there and there was no way, but I still went to the University of Kentucky. And it was a sacrifice, because they needed – my father lost a lot of his money, and then I realized after a year and a half of college that maybe I should get a job . And I stopped.

Oh, I didn’t know. 

I got a job working in a dress shop, and all I can say about the job is I supported myself and bought my own clothes, you know. But they had to cut down a lot and oh, we weren’t poor poor, but it wasn’t the way it was before. And then I met Dan and got married, and he was in law school here at Stanford, I don’t know where else to go, maybe you’d better shut off for a while, I can’t think of anything else to tell you.

That would interest me, sort of, is it seem like there were two sorts of splits between your parents on the one hand, your mom raised you in what you describe as a kind of liberated way

-58-