Interview with Phyllis Schlafly # ISE-A-L-2011-001.01 Interview # 1: January 5, 2011 Interviewer: Mark DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 A Note to the Reader This transcript is based on an interview recorded by the ALPL Oral History Program. Readers are reminded that the interview of record is the original video or audio file, and are encouraged to listen to portions of the original recording to get a better sense of the interviewee’s personality and state of mind. The interview has been transcribed in near- verbatim format, then edited for clarity and readability, and reviewed by the interviewee. For many interviews, the ALPL Oral History Program retains substantial files with further information about the interviewee and the interview itself. Please contact us for information about accessing these materials. Introduction Interviewer: Mark DePue, Director of Oral History at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Interview location: Eagle Forum office in Clayton, Missouri. DePue: Today is Wednesday, January 5, 2011. This is my first interview for 2011, and I am thrilled that I get to start with interviewing Mrs. Phyllis Schlafly. Good afternoon. Schlafly: Good afternoon Dr. DePue. DePue: I’ve been looking forward to this one for a long time. I think you and I are going to have several sessions before we’re done with this. I am fine with that because you have an important story to tell, one that’s pivotal in the political history of the last half of the twentieth century for the United States. Schlafly: I have had a very interesting life. DePue: But we always start, and especially in a case like yours, I’d like to spend some time on your background—quite a bit of time—because I have the opinion that where we came from and our families and our early lives, have a lot to do with shaping the rest of it. So let’s start with when and where you were born. Phyllis Schlafly Interview # ISE-A-L-2011-001 Schlafly: I was born in Barnes Hospital, in St. Louis, Missouri. I don’t remember that event, but my mother would say she was the first generation of women who were having their babies in hospitals. DePue: And what was the birth day? Schlafly: August 15, 1924. DePue: Okay, so a few years ago. Tell me a little bit about your parents and where they came from. Schlafly: Well, they both were in St. Louis. I tell the college women when I talk to them, women going to college just didn’t start recently. My mother got her college degree, and a graduate degree in 1920, from a great university, Washington University in St. Louis. Then she was a full-time homemaker. When the depression hit, she needed to take a job to support the family, and she ended up spending twenty-five years as the librarian of the St. Louis Art Museum. DePue: What was her maiden name? Schlafly: Odile Dodge. DePue: Did she go by Odile? Schlafly: She did. She was called Odile and she had a nickname, “Dadie.” DePue: D-a-d-i-e? Schlafly: Right. DePue: Where did the nickname come from, do you know? Schlafly: I have no idea. DePue: What did you call your mother? Schlafly: I called her mother. DePue: Not mom? Schlafly: That’s right. DePue: And your father? Schlafly: My father was a sales engineer. He lost his job during the depression and had a hard time finding jobs here and there. He was a wonderful father and I had a wonderful mother. 2 Phyllis Schlafly Interview # ISE-A-L-2011-001 DePue: Where did your father work before he lost his job? Schlafly: Westinghouse. DePue: What was he doing for Westinghouse? Schlafly: He was a sales engineer. He sold all of its big equipment. DePue: How old was he when he lost that job? Schlafly: I don’t know. DePue: I understand though, he was quite a bit older than your mother, that he was a little bit older at the time? Schlafly: Yes, he was at least fifteen years older than mother. DePue: I’ve been reading a couple of the biographies on you. From what I read, he was 51 years old at the time he lost the job. Schlafly: That would be about right, yes. DePue: Was that tough on the family? Schlafly: Oh, of course it was. The depression was tough on everybody. We didn’t get any federal handouts, welfare, food stamps, any of those things. In fact, we would have considered it an embarrassment to be on the take from the government. We didn’t really think of ourselves as poor. We just made it, and somehow we survived. DePue: When you say we, both of your parents would have been upset by taking things from the government? Schlafly: Yes, I think they would have been. It just wasn’t in the scheme of things that anybody talked about. DePue: What are some of your earliest memories then, growing up? Schlafly: We initially lived in a St. Louis suburb, just outside of the city, at 6333 North Rosebury. I started school at the local public school, the DeMun public school, where I went to kindergarten, first and second grade. We lived on the third floor of an apartment. Then, when the depression hit, we could no longer afford the apartment, and we took the train and went out to bunk with an uncle of my mother, who had a house in Los Angeles. We were out there maybe six or eight months, and then came back and thereafter lived with my mother’s parents, first of all at 6105 Pershing Avenue in St. Louis, when she was starting to get one job after another. She started out selling yard goods at the 3 Phyllis Schlafly Interview # ISE-A-L-2011-001 Famous-Barr department store, which was a big branch of the May Company. 1 Then we moved to Normandy, a suburb, and had a house at 7729 Augusta Avenue, where we lived with my grandparents. My mother’s sister and her husband lived with us for a time too. Meanwhile, I had a younger sister, about five years younger than I was. DePue: And her name? Schlafly: Her name is Odile, like my mother. DePue: Was your father able to find work after moving around a couple places? Schlafly: Little odd jobs here and there. I remember when he installed the air conditioning in the Normandy movie theater; that was very exciting. I think we could go to the movies on Tuesday night for ten cents, and get free dishes, too. (laughs) Before we moved to Normandy, I went, in the fourth grade, to the Hamilton School, public school, and that was where I was introduced to writing. We had a teacher who would have us bring in a little paragraph of an essay every morning. I think that was good training for the fourth grade. DePue: Do you remember her name? Schlafly: No. DePue: That’s not unusual. Trying to keep track of your grade school teachers is awfully tough. I want you to tell me a little bit more or paint us a picture of your parents; who they were, what their personalities and character traits were. Schlafly: My parents were wonderful. They were loving and faithful. They were very hard workers. I remember years ago, one of my sons came home from college and I said, “Why don’t you go out and have some social life with some of your old high school classmates?” “Oh, he said, I don’t want to. They just want to go out and drink.” I said, “How come you don’t want to go out and drink?” “Well,” he said, ”Mother, I’ve thought about that, and I noticed that at the end of the day, my parents just kept right on working through the evening. They didn’t stop for drink or refreshment, they just kept right on working, and I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.” So I guess I learned that from my mother and father. They both were hard workers and the jobs they had were long hours, but in their spare time in the evening, my father would sit at the desk in the living room. He invented a 1 A few years prior to this interview Famous-Barr was bought by Macy’s and the name was changed. 4 Phyllis Schlafly Interview # ISE-A-L-2011-001 rotary gasoline engine, which he worked on for about twenty years and finally got a patent on, but unfortunately never sold it. But it was quite a thing. You can still read it if you go onto the U.S. Patent Office website. My mother spent her spare time writing a book on the social history of St. Louis; it’s a great manuscript. She never completed it or got it published. That’s one of the things I still want to do: get that book published, because it’s not only a part of St. Louis life that has not been well written about, but she has collected a remarkable group of pictures to go with it.