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A Conversation with Claudia Bushman 90 Mormon Historical Studies Claudia L. Bushman on the occasion of being chosen New York’s “Mother of the Year,” 2000. Fredrickson: A Conversation with Claudia L. Bushman 91 “There is Always Something You Can Do”: A Conversation with Claudia Bushman Interview by Kristine Wardle Frederickson Introduction by Richard L. Bushman Introduction Claudia Lauper Bushman has always identified with California. She was born in Oakland, June 11, 1934, shortly before her family moved to the Sun- set District in San Francisco not far from the Pacific. She claims she chose to attend Wellesley College because she loved living near an ocean, and on the map the Atlantic looked pretty close. Now at the other end of her life, she has returned to California to teach in the School of Religion at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, and do research at the Hunting- ton Library, a classic California Institution. She says she learned to love nature through her membership in the Brownies and Girl Scouts in San Francisco and spent a lot of time exploring a swampy spot on the hill on which Lincoln High School was located. Had her life taken a slightly different turn she would have become a naturalist. She still can identify scores of birds and was delighted when her son Karl took an interest in snakes and toads before turning to medicine. She and her three sisters spent lots of time at the Sunset Ward, where her father was bishop and stake president. They put out the sacrament trays and cleaned up afterwards until some well-informed returned missionary an- nounced to the ward that the priesthood should perform these duties. Sing- KRISTINE WA R D LE FRE D ERICKSON ([email protected]) teaches in the Departments of Religious Education and Women’s Studies at Brigham Young University, and the De- partment of History at Utah Valley University. She received a BA in Communications from BYU, an MA in history from BYU, and a PhD in modern European history from the Uni- versity of Utah. She is a member of the Mormon History Association and writes a weekly column for the Deseret News online edition of Mormon Times. 92 Mormon Historical Studies ing and dancing in countless choirs and musicals under the direction of her mother, Jean Lauper, led her to believe that the Church could be a great boost to young people looking for confidence and signs of talent in themselves. Claudia still says all she ever needed to know in life she learned at Church. Claudia applied to Wellesley at the behest of her high school counselor as something of a lark and was amused when she was awarded a scholarship. She was headed to Stanford until a boy friend said if he got a scholarship like that he would go. Always game for adventure, off she flew to Boston and a new life. She says that Wellesley opened a new world to her. She never thought of herself as a good student. The musical group she joined, The Wellesley Wid- ows, had a song that went, “We didn’t come to college to cram our heads with knowledge, we just came to sing.” And that she was prepared to do. No one can beat her on the words to every musical and popular song ever invented in the forties, fifties, and sixties. Whatever the topic of conversation, she is likely to break out into a relevant song. Riding with her in a car one of the first times we met, she sang two or three verses of “Getting to Know You.” We met in Cambridge when I was on a mission to New England, and she was a Wellesley freshman. We courted after I returned to Harvard in 1953 and married on August 19, 1955. The robes she wore at her graduation doubled as maternity clothes, and five children came along pretty steadily for the next ten years. The last son was born while she was working for her doctorate in American Studies at Boston University. “I began graduate school with five children and finished with six” is one of her lines. Children or no, Claudia discovered sometime in the early sixties while living in Provo while I taught at BYU, that domesticity was not enough. She needed something else, though she knew not what. She enrolled for an MA in English at BYU which qualified her to teach Freshman English during our academic peregrinations. Then in Boston in the sixties the world began to crackle. She was not the only woman in the ward with an undefined restless- ness. A group of Cambridge Ward women met to talk, and Claudia, unhappy with nothing but talk, proposed projects. First the “pink issue” of Dialogue, then an Institute class on Mormon women, followed by a collection of essays, Mormon Sisters, written by these otherwise untrained amateurs, and finally Exponent II, of which she was the first editor. That was the point where she showed her relentless will to make things happen and bring projects to conclu- sion. Anyone who has worked with her knows that once you begin, there is no giving up. She now has fixed her sights on local California Mormon women of a certain age whom she is muscling into the graduate program in religion at Claremont. I tore Claudia away from Boston when she was just getting on a roll that probably would have taken her into town politics. In Delaware, where Fredrickson: A Conversation with Claudia L. Bushman 93 we moved, it did not take long for her to hit her stride. Interested in local history, she organized the Newark Historical Society after teaching a course at the University of Delaware on the town’s history. That led to a position as Director of the Delaware Heritage Commission, then charged to celebrate the ratification of the Constitution which gave Delaware its nickname as “the First State.” She became a formidable political force, at one point facing down the governor and the secretary of state when they challenged her operation and her becoming a favorite of the local newspapers. The reporters liked her because she told them the truth and could offer sizzling one-line quotes on any topic. Leaving Delaware was even more traumatic than departing Boston. But off she went to New York City in 1989 when I took a position at Columbia. The Big Apple was harder to crack than Newark. Finally she found her niche at Columbia, where she launched the university’s celebration of its 250th an- niversary. She met big-wigs of all kinds through that job, and as always men of high standing confessed their deepest ambitions to her after short conversa- tions because she seemed so genuinely interested in their lives. When we left New York, she had taught in the graduate program in American Studies for a half dozen years, reviving a program that was faltering and making scores of friends among the interesting students who turned up for her classes. Through all these changes, she constantly complained that she was too old to learn anything new. But now she is teaching Mormon history at Clare- mont and working her old magic on her students. Her aim is for her students to become friends, and that happens because she is their friend. She keeps think- ing that the last book was her last (there are eleven of them now), but then a new idea takes hold and off she goes. Her memoirs will doubtless be the best thing she ever writes. The Interview KRIS: Let’s begin to understand the historian by learning about your childhood and family life. Tell me about your growing up years. CLAUDIA: I was born in Oakland, California. Both my parents came to Los Angeles as young people before they married because their families had exhausted their possibilities in Utah. They were not well off, actually marginal. My father could see that his father’s farm would never make it. My mother’s father just could not find his way in the modern world. They came to California, met there, and married. My father got a job with a book keeping supplies company. He was a very successful salesman. He traveled in Oregon before the company gave him the territory in Oakland, California, where I happened to be born, as was my older sister Georgia. The 94 Mormon Historical Studies Georgia, Claudia, and Paulie Lauper, ca. 1938. family then moved across the Bay to San Francisco. So San Francisco is the place where I grew up. The Church I knew was the Sunset Ward of the San Francisco Stake, and church was a satisfying experience for all of us. My father was the bishop. He was always the bishop or the stake president or the patriarch and then the sealer and so on. After meeting in the Masonic Hall, the Church bought a lot to build a new chapel. We bought a nearby lot soon after to build our house. Our house was just two-and-a-half blocks from the church, and we were there almost every day for some reason, whether practicing a program, picking up something we had forgotten, or attending a meeting. So the church was an extension of our home in every way. The Church was very important to us. My father was the ecclesiastical leader. My mother was the cultural leader, and because of her we had many rich and exciting cultural experiences in the Church: speech and dance festivals, three-act plays, an operetta every summer.
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