Transcript of Oral History Interview with Polly Mann
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Oral history interviews of the Vietnam Era Oral History Project Copyright Notice: © 2019 Minnesota Historical Society Researchers are liable for any infringement. For more information, visit www.mnhs.org/copyright. Version 3 August 20, 2018 Polly Mann Narrator Kim Heikkila Interviewer March 1, 2018 Polly Mann -PM Kim Heikkila -KH KH: This is an interview for the Minnesota Historical Society’s Minnesota in the Vietnam War Era Oral History Project. It is Thursday, March 1, 2018, and I’m here with Polly Mann. My name is Kim Heikkila. Today I’ll be talking to Polly about her roles and experiences in the anti- Vietnam War movement. Even though we know that Polly’s peace work or antiwar work has spanned many more decades than that, for this project we’ll be focusing on the Vietnam era. So Polly, just thank you so much for being willing to sit down and talk to me and share your story. PM: Absolutely. KH: So, as I said, I’ll just start off with some questions that you can answer rather briefly and then we’ll go into more detail on all of them. So can you please start just by stating and spelling your name? PM: My name is Polly Mann, P-o-l-l-y M-a-n-n. My legal name is—are you ready? Pollyanna and my rather tough-minded mother, why she named me Pollyanna I cannot tell you. (phone rings). But it’s my name and I don’t give it very often because I don’t want to hear any comments about it. Excuse me (answers phone). Well, that shouldn’t happen too often unless it’s somebody wanting to sell me a pig or something. KH: No worries. So Pollyanna, but you go by Polly. PM: Um-hm. KH: And when and where were you born? PM: I was born November 19, 1919, in the little town of Lonoke, L-o-n-o-k-e, Arkansas, which is, oh, about forty miles from Hot Springs [Hot Springs, AR]. KH: All right. And how do you identify yourself racially or ethnically? PM: As Caucasian. KH: Okay. And what’s your family’s ethnic background? 22 PM: My family came from the British Isles, Wales, and I think one of my grandmothers was Irish, so it’s Scotch-Irish, the same Scotch-Irish that landed on the east coast and moved south through Mississippi. They came from Mississippi originally up into Arkansas. KH: All right. This is a question I know that you can answer—and we’ll talk about in much greater detail, but can you just give us an idea of some of the major anti-Vietnam War events or efforts that you were involved in? PM: Well, the major one was participation in the Chicago Republican—was it the Republican Convention, yeah? KH: The Democratic Convention? PM: Yes, I’m a Democrat. And I went there—I don’t know if McCarthy asked me or not. I think so, but anyway, it was in support of Eugene McCarthy, whom I knew. KH: Okay, and then we know, too, that you were in Marshall, Minnesota, at this time doing some antiwar— PM: Yes, I was—that’s where I was living. KH: work there and you went to Paris in 1971. PM: Yes. KH: Okay, and we’ll come back to all of those. And so, granted there are many years between then and now, but what are you doing now? PM: Well, I’m not doing much. What I probably do the most of right now is write and I write for the newsletter for Women Against Military Madness (WAMM), which comes out once a month, and then I write for the Southside Pride [Southside Pride, 3200 Chicago Avenue Minneapolis, MN] which is a little neighborhood newspaper owned by a close personal friend. He writes, usually whatever I choose to—he publishes whatever I choose to write about. So that’s mainly my writing now. KH: Okay. All right. So those are the kind of introductory, the broad introductory questions, so I just want to start relatively from the beginning and ask you to tell me a little bit about growing up in your family. PM: Well, my mother and father were divorced when it wasn’t even—nobody got a divorce hardly—and so she and my younger sister and I lived with her family, my grandfather, who was a doctor in Hot Springs, and there were nine in the household. So I grew up in a large family, which I loved, and I never went to college. When I got out of high school it was in the middle of the Depression and I got a job for five dollars a week, working five days a week. Can you believe it? A dollar a day, as a receptionist at the doctor’s office and then the first real job I 23 had—well, I had one, maybe the second, was a civil service job working for the US Army and that was then at Little Rock [Little Rock, AR] and so—what else kind of thing? That’s enough to begin with. KH: Yeah, so let me ask you a few questions about that. How old were you when your parents divorced? PM: Huh? KH: How old were you when your parents divorced? PM: I was probably four. KH: Okay, so you were quite young? PM: Yes. KH: And you have said that this was something that didn’t happen very often— PM: That’s right. KH: At that time and now your mom at that point is a single mother, raising her two kids. You have a sister? A younger sister you said. PM: Yes, just a sister. KH: So just two of you. What did your mom do? PM: My mother worked for the welfare office. My mother had left college to get married. She was in a girls’ college—finishing school, if you can imagine—and so when she had to get a job it was, you know, whatever she could find. She did work in the welfare office doing kind of social service work, but it was more office work than anything else and the pay was not much. KH: Okay. PM: And I can remember she had, I think, two or three dresses and she just wore them in a row. KH: So you graduated from high school in what year? PM: Nineteen thirty-seven. KH: Thirty-seven, so that is right in the middle of the Depression— PM: Um-hm, and a little bit pre-war. 24 KH: Yep. So what was it like for you as a young person growing up with your mother in your grandfather’s house during the Depression? PM: It was okay, it was okay. I was happy and yeah, it was fine. The house was in the white part of town. My grandmother had great airs as a southern lady and so I didn’t feel—I was fine. I was happy. KH: And was it unusual for a woman like your mother to be at work or was that common because it was the Depression? PM: Part of those years, you know, I never thought about it. I never did. I never thought about it. I mean, women worked in the dress stores and things like that and in offices. KH: Okay. So then after you graduate from high school you eventually, relatively soon thereafter, take this job as a civilian employee of the army. PM: Yes. KH: And tell me a little bit about that job. What were you doing? PM: I was a chief clerk, what was called a chief clerk, in the rail transportation section of this army camp, which was out from Little Rock. There we wrote requests for tickets for soldiers coming and going to training camps and so forth, and we also did the paperwork about troop trains that were leaving from this base with troops to go to war. KH: Okay, so let’s see. You graduate in ’37, the war starts in ’41, so you must be twenty-two, twenty-three? PM: Yeah. KH: Something like that—did any members of your family, extended family, uncles or aunts I suppose, serve in World War II? PM: My husband did. KH: Is that how you met him, through your work as a clerk? PM: Yes. KH: And did he talk much about his experiences in the war? Well, let me ask this. What did he do? PM: Well, he was a private. He was drafted out of college and he had passed the bar so he was—he could come back and practice law. He had to take the bar again—I think he could have gone in as an officer but he chose not to, so I met him there working in the office. He would come in. I’ve forgotten where he—oh, I know what he was doing. He was examining contracts. 25 KH: Okay, okay, so he was doing legal work? PM: Right. KH: Did he serve overseas? PM: Did he serve overseas? Yes, he did. He served in New Guinea for, I think, two and a half years. KH: Okay. He was—was he—? PM: He was a captain then. KH: Was he in combat? PM: No. KH: So he was still— PM: And he never wore a gun and he told me that the one time he ever wore a gun was when they paid the troops.