Minnesota's Greatest Generation Oral

Jane C. Freeman Narrator Douglas Bekke Interviewer October—November 2007 Minneapolis, Minnesota DB: Minnesota Historical Society Greatest Generation Project interview with Jane C. Freeman in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 31, 2007. Mrs. Freeman, could you please say and spell your full name? JF: Jane Charlotte Shields Freeman. II DB: And Shields is your maiden name. GenerationPart JF: Right. DB: Where were you born? Society JF: Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Actually in Statesville just outside Winston-Salem. Project: DB: Was that like a small town or a suburb?Greatest JF: It was a small rural town. Historical DB: I imagine it’s a suburb now. History JF: Yes. My parents moved back to Winston-Salem very shortly after I was born. DB: Your birth date? Is that okay to ask? Minnesota'sOral JF: Yes, of course. May 25, 1921. Minnesota DB: Can you tell us a little bit about your parents and your ethnic background? JF: My mother and father had come to North Carolina from Pennsylvania. My mother was born and raised in Pennsylvania. Her father was Scotch-Irish. Her mother was Swiss-German and English. A mixture. My father was born in York, Ohio but raised in Pennsylvania most of his life. He was English and Scotch and Irish but I don’t know from which grandparent or which parent, how that division came. But basically we were mostly Scotch, Irish, English and some German. 25 DB: And had your family been in the New World, in the United States for a long time or had they immigrated in the 19th century? JF: Yes. As far as I know they had been. Let’s see, my mother knew her grandmother. Her great- grandmother I believe had come from Switzerland, those were the ones that she knew. Unfortunately we just didn’t talk a lot about those backgrounds. My father, his father was a Moravian missionary and minister. His father had been in this country. So that’s all I know for sure about them. DB: Into the probably early 19th century then. JF: Yes. I think so. DB: See, one of the reasons for this interview is so that your grandchildren will have a record of you. II JF: I know, because I know so little. Because we were raised in North Carolina and in those days you didn’t travel. We only once ever went up to Pennsylvania and to New York where my mother’s brother was living. We just didn’t go and when Generationwe left NorthPart Carolina and went to Washington, D.C. where we lived in Alexandria, Virginia for two years, then various relatives came down to see us. But we never traveled north. So I really hardly knew, hardly even met cousins and relatives. Our two grandmothers each came to stay with us Societyeach winter. My father’s father had died when we were very young. I never met him. My mother’s father died after her mother had come to live with us and I never met him either. So I never knew my own grandfathers. There was only one uncle who livedProject: in North Carolina. That was one of my father’s . no, he was not an uncle. GreatestHe was a cousin. DB: What kind of memories do you have of your grandmothers then? They came to visit you from a fairly early age? Historical JF: Yes. My father’s mother livedHistory in Pennsylvani a. She lived in what was called the widow’s house. The Moravian church had a widow’s house and a separate widower’s house where people who had been of service in the church could live in their older age. She would come down to visit us for a month each year. It was always a fairly traumatic time because we had to be on our very best Minnesota'sbehavior. MyOral mother was always a little uptight about the mother-in-law’s visit. DB: Was she—maybe sternMinnesota is too hard a word, but she knew what she wanted. She had standards. JF: Oh, very strict church standards. Stricter than my parents enjoyed. My father had been the fourth of four boys in the family. His parents had hoped that each of them would be ministers or missionaries. The two oldest brothers both became teachers and both died in Alaska with flu during World War I. DB: The influenza epidemic. 26 JF: Yes. The third one became a writer and an author and a very liberal radical, much to the upset of his parents. So when my father came along, nothing would do but he would go to Moravian College, to the seminary and he had to be a minister. After a couple of years of that, he decided no thanks and that he would be an educator but he would not be a minister, which is what he became. So it was because of that that he came to North Carolina. With the assistance of the cousin who was living there, who was active in the Moravian church, my father came to teach in a Moravian seminary, which later became a college. To teach English. That’s what brought my mother and father there after my father had served in World War I for a year. DB: Did your father serve overseas? JF: No, he did not. He served less than a full year and the war was ended. DB: Did your parents meet through that? I’m a little unclear. Did your parents meet through his World War I service someplace where he was stationed? II JF: No. You know, I never heard quite how they met. It’s interesting because my husband and I told our kids so often about how we met. But they didn’t Generationsay how theyPart met. But they were both active in the Moravian church and I think probably it was when my father was at college and my mother went to what was called a finishing school. That was a Moravian-run one. They must have met that way somehow. Society DB: Would that have been after World War I or before World War I? Project: JF: No. Before World War I. One ofGreatest the pictures I have is of my mother and father. He’s in army uniform and she’s in a huge black hat and they’re sitting on a bench in the Moravian cemetery. That was a great place for courting in those days because it was a beautiful park and because the Moravians don’t allow any stones to be above the Historicalground. Every stone is exactly the same size as every other one and they’re flat on the ground to symbolize equality before God. They’re sitting there, and this is when they supposedlyHistory became engaged and decided to get married. DB: Any other stories of their courtship? Anything else that they talked about? JF: No. UnfortunatelyMinnesota'sOral not. It’s strange that we didn’t hear about it, but we just didn’t. DB: It’s not strange, it’s typical.Minnesota JF: I think maybe it was a generational thing. Yes. That we just didn’t. But my mother’s mother lived with us most of the time for about the last five years of her life. DB: Was she more easy-going? JF: Yes, she was. And she was a great help. My father adored her as much as my mother did because she was such a great help. She had been a practical nurse in this girl’s finishing school where my mother went, which is how my mother could afford to be there, because she lived with 27 her mother and her mother ran the infirmary and was the nurse. But she was very good at nursing. My mother had three children pretty darn fast and my older sister is two years older than I am and was a very sickly baby. Then I came along and then my younger sister was just a year later. So having your mother live with you and help with the babies who had . in those days, you know, there were not many vaccinations, so we got the measles, the whooping cough, the mumps, everything. [Chuckles] One right after the other. Then my brother, who came along five years later, we always said he was the spoiled brat in the family because he was the only boy and he was the youngest, but he developed scarlet fever at six months old. So that was a very traumatic time. So the whole family was quarantined for six weeks with the scarlet fever. In those days when you got the measles and the mumps, of course everybody had to stay home and you were quarantined for a week or ten days. DB: Your grandmother had been a nurse and she was there to help? JF: She was there to help and save my mother’s and father’s lives. II DB: Invaluable. JF: Really. So she was very important in our family. GenerationPart DB: Did either of your grandmothers help with cooking, help in the kitchen, help with the domestic chores, things your mother was involved with? Society JF: Oh, yes. Yes. Actually, my grandmother was the best peach and potato peeler in town. [Chuckles] She taught all of us how. She taught usProject: how to peel peaches in a very effective way because they canned a lot of peaches.Greatest So while my mother is doing the bottles and the jars and all of that business, we’re all sitting there peeling peaches.

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