Indianapolis Women's Oral History Project

Indianapolis Women’s Oral History Project:

An Interview with Martha Lamkin

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy and recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the William H. Smith Memorial Library, Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center, 450 West Ohio Street, Indianapolis, Indiana, 46202-3269.

PREFACE

Indianapolis Women’s Oral History Project

The following interview is one of a collection of oral history interviews devoted to collecting life stories of prominent Indiana women involved in business, education, law, philanthropy, politics, and religion. All of the women interviewed for this project were selected from within the membership of The Gathering, an informal networking group of approximately 175 Indiana women leaders which began around 1990. This group meets four times a year over lunch to hear from speakers and guests on subjects of interest to the group that facilitate discussion and enhance knowledge of current issues and events. There is no organized fundraising by or on behalf of the group, no lobbying, no partisan political activity, no charitable or volunteer commitments required. The Indianapolis Women’s Oral History Project (initially known as The Gathering Oral History Project) was organized in 2013 by the members of The Gathering and conducted with the assistance and supervision of the Indiana Historical Society (IHS).

This manuscript was transcribed from a digitally recorded interview conducted on August 29, 2013, in Judge Sarah Evans Barker’s chambers, Birch Bayh Federal Building & U.S. Courthouse, Indianapolis, Indiana, by Judge Sarah Evans Barker, a member of The Gathering. Data Logistics Control, INC, located in Indianapolis, Indiana, transcribed the interview in 2017, and Wendy L. Adams, director of oral history at IHS, lightly edited the transcript in 2019. The interview, which includes the audio recording, the transcript, and photographs of Ms. Lamkin, is housed at the William H. Smith Memorial Library, Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center, Indianapolis, Indiana.

Martha S. Dampf Lamkin was born in 1942 in Talladega, Alabama, to Keith J. Dampf (1911– 2006) and Neva Magness Dampf (1916–2005). At an early age, her parents moved the family to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and then on to Artesia, New Mexico, where she spent much of her childhood. When a teenager, she moved to Barstow, California, where she graduated from high school in 1960. She received her bachelor’s degree in English literature and music in 1964 from California Baptist College (now California Baptist University) in Riverside, California, and then attended Vanderbilt University, where she received a master’s degree in English and American literature in 1966. She met and married Dr. Eugene Henry (Ned) Lamkin, Jr. in 1968, while living in Indianapolis. After teaching English at Indiana State University, she pursued and received a law degree from Indiana University School of Law in 1970.

After graduation, Ms. Lamkin served on the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission, which led to her being asked by Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut to serve on the Indianapolis Public Housing Authority in the late seventies. At the request of Sen. Richard Lugar, she served as the Indiana manager for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1982 to 1987. During this time Ms. Lamkin also served as the vice chair of the first International Violin Competition of Indianapolis. She accepted the position of executive director of corporate responsibility and government affairs at Cummins Engine Company in 1987, went on to become the president of Cummins Engine Company Foundation, and then left Cummins for the position

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of executive vice president of corporate advancement at USA Group, Inc. in 1991. During her tenure at USA Group, she was appointed by Mayor Stephen Goldsmith to serve on The Indianapolis Foundation board, where she was involved in founding the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF) and its Women’s Fund. Before retiring from full-time employment in 2007, she served as president and CEO of the Lumina Foundation (formerly USA Group, Inc.) with assets of $1.3 billion. Throughout her career and in retirement, she has served on and chaired various boards of directors and trustees, including The Indianapolis Foundation, CICF, Christian Theological Seminary, Citizens Energy Group, Meridian Mutual Insurance Co., Christel House International, The Indiana Academy, Women4Change, and the Hoosier Capital Girl Scout Council. As the chair of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra board from 2007 to 2014, she played a significant role in guiding the symphony through an economically challenging time.

Ms. Lamkin and her husband have two children—Melinda Magness Lamkin Magaddino (b. 1970) and Matthew Davidson Lamkin (b. 1973). The Lamkins currently reside in Indianapolis.

Readers of this oral history interview should bear in mind that it is a transcript of the spoken word. Although the transcript has been lightly edited, IHS has diligently sought to preserve its informal, conversational style, as well as the integrity of the interview’s content. IHS is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the interview’s content or for the views expressed within.

The interview may be used for private study, scholarship, or research. Permission to reproduce or publish this interview, whether in whole or in part, must be obtained from the William H. Smith Memorial Library, Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center, 450 West Ohio Street, Indianapolis, Indiana, 46202-3269.

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Indianapolis Women’s Oral History Project Interview of Martha Lamkin

Date of interview: August 29, 2013 Location: Judge Sarah Evans Barker’s chambers, Birch Bayh Federal Building & U.S. Courthouse, Indianapolis, Indiana Interviewer: Sarah Evans Barker

Note: This transcript has been lightly edited and contains post-interview edits provided by Ms. Lamkin. Any additions provided by her are indicated with brackets.

Sarah Evans Barker: This is Sarah Evans Barker, who’s conducting the interview of Martha Lamkin. This is part of The Gathering’s oral history project. Today is August 29, 2013, and we are here in the courthouse in my chambers, where Martha has been many times before for visits. She is my dear friend and so she has allowed me to conduct this oral history. So, it’s my honor to do this oral history.

Martha Lamkin: Your honor, it’s my honor.

SEB: So, thank you, Martha, for submitting to this and more importantly for creating a record that will be part of the women’s history collection that will be accessible to future generations, perhaps even including your own children and grandchildren along the way, so that they can see your life and the wonderful, beautiful arc that it is from start to where we are now—not finished, just where we are today on August 29, 2013. So, it’s a good thing we’re doing today.

So, I’ll get the ball rolling by asking you to tell me about your parents. Tell me about where you grew up. Tell me about your parents’ early days; how they met. Maybe something about, if you know, where your family would have emigrated from into the United States originally and so forth. Go back so far as you can go.

ML: My parents grew up in the Ozarks of Arkansas. My dad was from Marshall, Arkansas, which is in Searcy County. My mom grew up in Western Grove, which is a little north of that in the northwest corner.

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SEB: What were their names? Your mom’s maiden name?

ML: My mom’s maiden name was Neva Magness and her mother was a Robinson. My dad was Keith Dampf—D-A-M-P-F—and his grandfather emigrated from Bavaria, And, we have some rather good records, thanks to one part of his family who’ve done quite a bit of research. His great-grandmother—my three great- grandmother—was believed to be half Cherokee and she traveled on the Trail of Tears from Tennessee to Arkansas. She had three children and was pregnant with the fourth, I believe, and the father’s family did not accept her. This was during the days of the Civil War, and he was wounded in the war and his family kept him and she went on the road of tears with these four children all by herself and raised them, then, in northwest Arkansas. So, we’re—

SEB: Now who was that again? That was your father’s grandmother?

ML: Grandmother, yes. And we need to further research the Cherokee part of our family because moving forward today, our son is now in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Native American heritage matters a very great deal. So, a research project to do on the horizon there.

SEB: So, did your father know those relatives? Did he know the aunts and uncles, who would have been his grandmother’s children?

ML: Yes, he knew his aunts and uncles. His mother died fairly young. I didn’t think to bring a history book, but there’s a two-volume work of the Baker family, who did research back to the landing at, I think, Plymouth, which is kind of interesting because my husband’s family— (pauses) my husband’s mom was quite proud of the fact that she was a member of the DAR—and our daughter could be—and I had never even focused on my side of the family, since we were just from the Ozarks. But that’s—

SEB: So, your father grew up in Arkansas?

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ML: He grew up in the Arkansas [Ozarks]. And both my parents—he was born in 1911; my mom was born in 1916. And so, both of them—both of their families went through the Great Depression and hard-scrabble times. My dad grew up on a little, bare farm outside of—they called it a farm—outside of Marshall. One of my fondest memories of breakfast is my step-grandmother went to the front yard, caught a chicken, wrung its neck, dressed it right there, and fried it for breakfast with biscuits and gravy, and it was the best fried chicken.

SEB: So, you have memories of going down there for visits.

ML: Oh yes. We ended up living in California most of my youth—or for a good bit of my youth—but our sole vacation every year was driving to Arkansas and going to visit grandparents on farms and riding in the back of pickup trucks. So, my dad grew up—he was the fourth of five siblings—

SEB: And they went to school?

ML: —two sisters and—no, actually, he had four brothers, so I guess there were six, yes. And he went to—he was the first in his family—no, one of his older brothers had gone to college and became a school teacher in northwest Arkansas. And then my dad went during the Depression and loved to tell stories about surviving in a basic agriculture dorm on blackstrap molasses and whatever else—

SEB: And where did he go to college?

ML: He was a graduate of the University of Arkansas and his name is—

SEB: In Fayetteville?

ML: In Fayetteville. And years later, I went to the demonstration school for kindergarten there. The most vivid memory of which, that I have, is being sent home because all of the scabs from my measles were not yet gone, and a sharp-

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eyed teacher spotted one on my part in my hair and sent me home. And I have lived with that disgrace to this day.

SEB: So, you were living there then?

ML: Yes, but I was not born there. So—Dad went to school during the Depression. My mom graduated from high school when she was fifteen and went right on to college, at what they [called the] Women’s College in Conway, Arkansas. And it has a different title today, but it took young women and prepared them to be teachers. But when she graduated, she was only nineteen. She came back to Western Grove, [Arkansas], and became the youngest postmistress in the country, I’m told, and I don’t—she probably was not the first; there were probably lots of females. But anyway, she was the postmistress in the town when my dad came to teach school at Western Grove High School. So, they met there and married in 1940.

SEB: So, your dad became a school teacher?

ML: He did.

SEB: And what did he teach?

ML: I don’t know. It’s a really good question.

SEB: But it was high school?

ML: It was high school.

SEB: Before we get too much farther down the timeline, tell me about your mother’s family.

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ML: My mom’s family were English, I think. Her name is Magness and you find a lot of different spellings of Magness in English literature and records. I don’t know much about her family.

SEB: Do you know how she got to Arkansas—

ML: No, I don’t.

SEB: —or they?

ML: No, and her mother’s maiden name was Robinson and we have quite a distinguished Robinson line of the family because her older—my grandmother’s—I guess he must have been younger brother went to college and medical school at Vanderbilt and served in the navy in World War II and ended up on Park Avenue. He was one of the early radiologists in the country. Then he decided he would like to go back to his roots, so he went to Rutgers and got a degree in animal husbandry while he was practicing medicine; brought my aunt, who was a very sophisticated New York lady, back to the Ozarks. They—he was a good friend of Edward Durell Stone, who is a noted architect from Arkansas; graduate of the University, I think, of Arkansas. And he got Edward Durell Stone to design and build a home for him on one of his farms, which is just marvelous, and they went around the countryside and picked—got lumber from old barns that were falling apart and put this glass and barn—exposed-wood cabin—in the highest sense of the word—together.

SEB: And you’ve seen it?

ML: Yes, we visited often. In fact, I would love to own it someday, but I don’t know.

SEB: Is it still there?

ML: Yes, it is. It’s outside of Harrison, Arkansas, where he practiced the last [several years] of his life. And he became quite a figure in Arkansas because he was an

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early radiologist. He was, you know, New York—he had the patina of New York. And he was very close to Winthrop Rockefeller, so his name appears—

SEB: And this was your mother’s brother?

ML: My grandmother’s brother.

SEB: Okay, so your mother’s uncle.

ML: My mother’s uncle. His name was G. Allen Robinson and my grandmother’s name was Nora Robinson.

SEB: And were there other siblings with your mother?

ML: One brother; and he also went to college. His name was William Cantrell [Magness]. He went, I think, to the University of Arkansas. I don’t know where he went to medical school, probably there. He served in the war—Second World War—as well and came back to Arkansas. He practiced in, (pauses) I want to say Conway; something that starts with a C. But he was recruited to Branson before it was countrified and electrified, in something like probably the fifties, because they had a new hospital there. And so, he was the town doctor in Branson before it became quite so commercial.

And I have one sister a little younger than I, and we had two boy cousins exactly our ages, so the highlight of our vacations was going as teenagers to visit these boy cousins, who were on baseball teams—you know, had scads of friends—and you went square dancing by Lake [Taneycomo] at night.

SEB: So, it was a close family?

ML: It was a close family. My mom and her brother were very close. Of course, we didn’t have some of the communication tools of today. My uncle—we called him

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Uncle Bill—Uncle Cantrell married a nurse while he was in the army. She was a New York girl. So, they were all Yankee fans. And in the meantime, the Dodgers had moved to LA, so we were Dodger fans—but that was a minor topic. But we had a very close family and lots of letters; I don’t have many of them—but lots of letters.

SEB: So, were you born in Arkansas?

ML: I was born in Talladega, Alabama. I seemed to live where there are dirt racetracks.

SEB: How did that happen?

ML: My dad served briefly in the army, but he was never deployed—

SEB: For World War II?

ML: For World War II—and instead he went into the CCC—the conservation corps. And his degree was in agronomy—no, soils management—from the University of Arkansas, so he went to work for the Department of Agriculture, and he was a soils guy for the Department of Agriculture all his career.

SEB: So, he got sent down to—?

ML: He got sent to Talladega to work.

SEB: As part of the CCC.

ML: Well, I think by that time he was in the actual Department of Agriculture. He and my mom had just married, so I was born in Talladega. And then when I was about

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five—four or five—we moved to Fayetteville briefly while he was transferred there, and that’s when I went to the University of Arkansas demonstration school. And his next post was in New Mexico, so I spent my grade school years in Artesia, New Mexico, which is a little town in the southeast corner of New Mexico, just north of El Paso and just west of the Panhandle of Texas.

SEB: Do you remember those years in Alabama?

ML: Nothing about Alabama; just stories from my mom of a few friends that they kept over the years and a few pictures, but not much.

SEB: So, when you left there at age five and went back up to Arkansas for a short period of time—

ML: Right.

SEB: —do you remember that? What’s your earliest memory?

ML: Of being sent home from kindergarten. (laughter)

SEB: With the measles.

ML: Yes, the scab on my scalp, yes. Then, I remember vividly our house in New Mexico. I was in the second grade when we moved there.

SEB: Do you have a recollection of those earliest years, we’ll say pre-New Mexico, of what kind of a kid you were? Were you outdoorsy or were you a reader or were you playful? Do you have any memory of those early years? Your sister was younger, right?

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ML: She was younger, yes. Actually, we did live in South Texas prior to—in between Fayetteville and New Mexico we lived on the very tip-end, [in Raymondville] down near Harlingen and Brownsville, so we lived right on the border. Our next- door—I guess that would be my earliest memory—our next-door neighbor was a border patrolman and he had the most fascinating collection of things confiscated at the border. In hindsight, I don’t know if he should have had them, but parrots and exotic animals and—I mean, that’s all I saw, anyway. I’m not sure what else he might have had. I probably was indoors. My sister tagged along with my dad to the cotton fields, to the citrus fields—and she and my dad became quite facile with Spanish because my dad spoke it all the time with the hands in the fields, but I didn’t so much. And I don’t remember vividly, prior to New Mexico, but by the time I was in the second grade, it was piano and books—bookworm.

SEB: When you got to New Mexico, had your family’s peripatetic ways drawn to a close? Did you stay there for a while?

ML: Until eighth grade.

SEB: Okay, so just your elementary school years you were there.

ML: And then we moved. My dad—my mom had allergies. My dad, I don’t think, was the easiest person in the world to get along with. He was a wonderful father at home, but at work he did get transferred. I knew nothing about—all I knew was my mom had to pick up, and she was already being paid half of what the men were because she had a working spouse.

SEB: She was working?

ML: She was a teacher. She started teaching early grades. And in those days, they called it “pre-first” because we—because of the farming communities we lived in, there was a huge proportion of Mexican children, and so she taught what they called “pre-first” in order to help the children with basic skills. And in those days, they were not doing bi-lingual education; it was “how do you learn English to succeed here.” And so, she would have to pick up and find a new position.

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SEB: Do you remember having any sense of the disruption of that? Or did you pick up on any feelings that might have been conveyed by your mom?

ML: Only much later. I probably was clueless at that time.

SEB: Yes, sort of impervious. Did it bother you to pick up and move, do you remember? Or was it just what you did?

ML: I don’t—I don’t remember the move to New Mexico, but I was not happy to move from New Mexico to California because I was in this wonderful scout troop [of] which both of the leaders are still alive today and we stay in communication—and I give Scouts just a whole lot of credit for what I’ve been able to do, and I really hated to leave that—and those women went through high school together and they still meet even more often because they have their high school reunion.

SEB: The women in your troop?

ML: In the troop—who’ve had fascinating careers; many of them ranching wives over the years, but some distinguished—you know, professor, other—

SEB: Do you remember your house in New Mexico?

ML: Vividly, yes.

SEB: Can you describe it?

ML: (laughs) It was a ranch in a subdivision right next to a cotton field. And of course, we always lived near farming communities, anyway. But I have wondered in later years if the crop dusting had anything to do with my two bouts of breast cancer. You know, we’ll never know. But it was right next to a cotton field. It was a brand-new division. And it had three bedrooms, probably only one bath; had a dog.

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SEB: Did you have your own room?

ML: Yes.

SEB: Was that good? Did that matter to you?

ML: It was good. I assume it mattered. I have been back one time to a reunion of the Girl Scout troop.

SEB: And you went back to your house?

ML: I went back. I didn’t go in it, but I found my way to it—and I found our first house there, which was right downtown, right by the railroad tracks. And we had wonderful neighbors at the time and wonderful teachers in school. It’s really amazing when you get out into little towns in this country, and—you know, I can’t vouch for all of it today, but the education I received—the culture, the piano lessons, the vocal lessons, the music we had in school—was marvelous.

SEB: Who directed you to get your music lessons? Was this a mutual decision from your parents or was it—?

ML: My mother was quite a musician. She was a singer and played the piano, and so we studied—

SEB: And how old were you when you started piano?

ML: I just remember, probably, second or third grade. We always had a piano and my mother always sang. Not very many concert artists come to little towns of twenty thousand, which this little New Mexico town was, but—

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SEB: What was the name of it?

ML: Artesia.

SEB: Oh, Artesia.

ML: Artesia, New Mexico. It’s between Roswell, where supposedly the aliens landed—except that we lived there, then, and my parents always swear they never heard anything—I never heard anything about it until decades later—and the Carlsbad Caverns, which are fairly famous, so—Artesia’s right in between. Lots of oil and cotton there.

SEB: So, you like that part of the country?

ML: I love that part of the country.

SEB: What do you think it was that made you love it so much?

ML: Part of it is good memories of youth—wonderful education and great supportive schools, churches, social groups, my parents’ friends, parents of my friends—I think. And, we kept living in hotter and drier places, so my dad’s next post was on the Mojave Desert—Barstow, [California], which is halfway between LA and Las Vegas, out where the Challenger lands when it has to land in the desert. And there were military posts there still from World War II because the West Coast defenses were out there and they track—Caltech has tracking stations for satellites and things like that, so that was an interesting—it was hot and dry. I mean, sunny. It’s California. You can drive [down to the beach and] up to the mountains. What’s not to like? So, I love the West.

SEB: Were both of your parents involved in the expectations that were imposed on you as a child for education and piano lessons and so forth? Did they both have a role to play in that? Was your dad as invested in it as your mom?

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ML: My dad was not a musician, but very supportive of it. My mother was the musician, and I think [she] saw to it that we got the exposure. And then we had wonderful music at school—stories of composers’ lives; sight-reading. I learned how to sight-read, so I could sing [parts]—in public school.

SEB: What was the name of your school?

ML: I don’t remember. I can see it—I could drive to it, but I don’t remember the name of it—[Central Elementary School]. But my music teacher’s name was Mrs. Spratt at school and my piano teacher’s name was Mrs. Caskey. And when I visited her house two or three years ago, it was a lot smaller than it had appeared when I was in grade school, walking up the steps. She was quite a demanding— but a wonderful, wonderful music teacher.

SEB: Did you like school?

ML: I loved school, yes.

SEB: And part of that was your hobnobbing with your friends, I assume.

ML: Right.

SEB: You probably liked it because you were good at it. Did studying and learning things came easily to you?

ML: They did. And I was a first child. And yes, both of my parents had been to college and they both expected this. And my dad would never pay me for grades. He said, “You do the best you can and that’s what your obligation is.”

SEB: Did you do that with your children?

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ML: Yes.

SEB: No pay for grades?

ML: Maybe we should have. (laughs)

SEB: Sounds like something that was planted deep early on.

ML: Well, you know, growing up, being a child—and both Ned—my husband, Ned— and I are children of children of the Depression—you just try not to take things quite as for granted as one might otherwise. My mother made potholders, aprons, clothes, sometimes, out of feed [sacks]—and my grandmother would choose feed sacks that she thought would make nice clothes or tea towels or quilts.

SEB: Did you wear clothes that she had made?

ML: Oh, until I graduated from college. And fortunately, they got more and more sophisticated. (laughs)

SEB: Did you learn to sew?

ML: I did, but I didn’t keep it up. And I learned to knit, but one sweater for a boyfriend in high school, I think, was about it; it wasn’t a passion—

SEB: So, was your dad a saver? Did he save stuff because of the Depression?

ML: I think so, yes, he would—neither of my parents was a hoarder, but they were very careful. They always lived as though they might have another child. They paid cash for a car and drove it until it died because the minute you drive it off the

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lot, especially in those days, you know, it lost half its value—and they saved very carefully. They—I think my dad retired probably as a GS 10 or 11.

SEB: Did they instill that frugality in you?

ML: I hope so. Not probably to that extent. I wash tin—aluminum foil. We save Saran wrap. We save Ziploc bags—

SEB: I think you could answer my question “yes.” (laughs)

ML: Yes, your Honor. (laughs) Yes, it comes out. We have a full attic that I’m having a challenge with my partner, getting rid of stuff now.

SEB: Well, it sounds like the value of things was instilled in you and the importance of taking good care of them.

ML: Yes.

SEB: When you were on summer break from school, what would you do usually in your earliest years to fill the summer days?

ML: Well, my memories are going to Girl Scout camp.

SEB: When did you start with Girl Scouts? Did you start as a Brownie?

ML: Yes—oh, when did I start with the Girl Scouts? Yes, but a Brownie and sashes, and Girl Scouts and the manual.

SEB: That’s like first or second grade. That’s—Brownies are early.

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ML: As soon as I moved there I was fortunate to join this troop, which I—perhaps it had already been started—but I was very accepted, and it met right across the street from our grade school and we had these two wonderful leaders.

SEB: So, you were working on badges and projects.

ML: Yes, you have to try a lot of different things, and you cook out over campfires and ride horses, pitch tents.

SEB: So, when you went to camp, was it an outdoor camp with tents and stuff?

ML: We had cabins, but we went on camping trips and then we would take horses— ride horses and had a wagon that would bring the tents. The most vivid memory I have is of pitching a tent in a draw when it rained mightily, and that turned out not to be such a good idea. So, we straggled back to camp with our horses and goods—with our wet selves.

SEB: What do you think it is about the Girl Scouts? You’ve said the leadership, but what is it that took hold in you that made that such a valuable activity?

ML: I think two things: that other people— (pauses) there was a supportive female community. Well, our dads supported it, too, but the troop leaders were women, and Mom was a big influence, obviously—who all were affirming that you can do a lot of things and the regime is going to force/allow you to explore a lot of things because you had to earn so many badges in different kinds of sectors, and so it forced us to try.

SEB: So that would have been back about 1950—the early fifties.

ML: Well, if I were in the second grade, yes, about 1950, ’51, something like that. So forcing and allowing you to do different things—“You can do this. You can try this. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t have to be”—you know. So, trying a lot of different things, I think, gave me—and then moving, you had to make new

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friends; you had to find your way and find new ways to function. So, I think both of those things—

SEB: It gave you a confidence that you might not have had otherwise.

ML: Right. and meet new people and—and I grew up with a lot of different people.

SEB: Well, it was also value-centered, wasn’t it?

ML: It is value-centered.

SEB: That the Girl Scout program is teaching you not just skills but how to be the right kind of person.

ML: Honor, honesty, a team—I never did play team sports, but in a way the Scout troop was—there were lots of things that required everybody to work together.

SEB: So, your family, when they would move, would find a new church home? I’ve heard you say that that was important to you, too.

ML: Yes, when my mother and dad married, my dad had been a member of the Christian Church—Disciples of Christ—and my mother was a Baptist and she played the piano for church. So, when they moved to Alabama, newlywed, she went to the Baptist church and began to play the piano and sing, which she did into her eighties. My dad offered to help with the Boy Scout troop in the church and they declined because he was not a Baptist. In the old, strict days of the Baptist church—

SEB: And Southern Baptist.

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ML: Yes, which might be—I mean, it’s kind of playing out again today. So, they decided they would go to church together, and they went to the Methodist church. So, I grew up until I was in high school in the Methodist church.

SEB: So, your mother played the piano there?

ML: She did, yes, but she mainly sang in the choir. Other people played organ and piano after that.

SEB: Did she teach you? Was she ever your music teacher?

ML: No.

SEB: Did you learn hymns from her?

ML: Oh yes. Well, we would sing at home and she would play, and she had lots of sheet music from earlier eras.

SEB: She would play, and she would entice you and your sister to sing too.

ML: Right—or she would get us to play.

SEB: Did you have chores to do when you were a kid?

ML: Yes.

SEB: Like what?

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ML: Washing the dishes. My favorite ploy was, though, if I would practice—she would—my mom would wash the dishes if I would practice. (laughs) That might have had a little thing to do with my concentration. You know, they weren’t onerous, but help with the trash, setting the table, washing dishes.

SEB: There were expectations.

ML: There were expectations.

SEB: Did your dad work a regular job so he’d come home, like, at suppertime and you’d have sort of a stereotypical, “Dad’s home! Lets have dinner!”?

ML: Very stereotypical. My mother got up, fixed breakfast, went to work, probably packed all of our lunches, came home, fixed dinner. My dad came home from work, sat down, read the newspaper, waited for dinner. (laughs)

SEB: Yes, we know the stereotype.

ML: Yes.

SEB: Did it dawn on you, then—I mean, did you see that that didn’t seem quite fair in terms of the division of labor, or did you just think that’s the way it was?

ML: You know, I don’t— (pauses) I don’t remember questioning it at the time. (pauses) I don’t remember. I think during college and then graduate school I got more—so that would have been in the sixties—I got more concerned and disturbed by some of those patterns and became more independent.

SEB: Would you think that your parents would say about you that you were easy to raise?

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ML: I think so. I was a first child. I aimed to please.

SEB: You were compliant?

ML: (laughs) Yes. “How high is that bar I want to—?” So, I was high school valedictorian.

SEB: Despite your move?

ML: Despite—well, we moved in the eighth grade, so I had that time to catch up. But, you know, it mattered to me.

SEB: Did you squabble with your parents?

ML: I don’t remember fights or squabbles. I think the most disruptive thing that happened was that—I didn’t fall in with the bad group in high school, but I did fall for the son of the Baptist minister.

SEB: (laughs) That might be trouble.

ML: It was trouble. And he was a triple-letter guy and, you know, upright, stalwart. I adored his mom and dad and his five or six brothers and sisters. It was just so neat. And then I wanted to go to church there, and that was very difficult. And then, my dad had said, “We will pay for college, but it will be state college. If you want to go someplace else, you’ll need to find the way to do that.” And there was a little Southern Baptist college, not too old at that point, called California Baptist College—today it is a university—down in Riverside, and the Riverside community foundation offered full rides—scholarships—to any valedictorians that would come to college there. I don’t—you know, later I would’ve thought I would have checked into the University of California at Riverside, but I didn’t. So anyway, I went to college there, and then my sister followed me. So—

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SEB: To the same school?

ML: Yes, to the same school—and met a guy there, whom she ended up marrying. So that was—I think the fact that I would step away from the Methodist church gave my parents the biggest discomfort of their life.

SEB: So, let’s back up just a little bit because I want to ask you about how long you took piano lessons. Was it through high school?

ML: Through college. Well, I switched to pipe organ.

SEB: Yes, you became an organist, so tell about that.

ML: Well, I took piano through, maybe, (pauses) I think two years of college and I was sick of it—and I wasn’t going to do it professionally—so I said to my mom, “I’d really like to quit.” And she said, “Do me a favor, please just take one semester of pipe organ.” “Okay, Mom,” and I—

SEB: You were a first child! (laughter)

ML: I just fell in love with it because here was this humongous piece of machinery that would just make fabulous noises and you didn’t have to be a brute to produce it. And so, I spent my last two years in pipe organ and just really loved it. And we didn’t even have a pipe organ at the college because our resources were so minimal, so I had to go practice at some of the churches in downtown Riverside, and that was really fun. I ended up being able to play with an orchestra and I got to do some fun things with that.

SEB: Well, I know you’re gifted at it. You don’t play as much anymore because I don’t get to hear you very often, but I know you can and you have.

ML: I was competent and I played a lot of great literature, but I was not inspired.

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SEB: Like in high school, did you get tagged to be the accompanist for the choir?

ML: You know, I didn’t because I was in the band. I was first-chair clarinet. One of the wonderful in things in Artesia was in the sixth grade— (pauses) in the fifth grade, they tested us for music ability and I got tapped along with a whole class of kids to go to an early seventh grade class at the junior high that was the starter band program, and then we got matched up with instruments. So, I started clarinet and took that. So, I studied piano privately, but played the clarinet at school, so band—concert, marching—

SEB: Were you in the choir, too, or just the band?

ML: I never did sing.

SEB: And was it a marching band or concert band?

ML: Both. You do one—march in the fall, pep band in the winter, and concert in the spring.

SEB: And did you enjoy that?

ML: Oh, a lot.

SEB: Was that another group activity that gave you a bonding opportunity?

ML: Oh my, yes, great friends. And in my high school, out on this desert town, our school system was the largest in the lower forty-eight states because it was the vast stretches of desert. In fact, we had kids who lived out so far on what they called ranches that they had to board in town to go to school. And so, we had— our high school was totally integrated—Native American, Mexican, African American, Anglo. It was totally integrated, as was the band and basketball team, everything else.

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SEB: So, were you open to that? Had your family value been such that the diversity was valued?

ML: Oh absolutely. My mom had been teaching migrant worker kids since she started teaching and we lived in places where everybody went to school together. And one of my best friends in the band was a Mexican-American—cute—flute player, who became later a judge.

SEB: (laughs) Oh, you know those cute judges. You got to watch out for the cute judges.

ML: Absolutely. Katie Yslas was her name, and she was great.

SEB: So, when you were in high school, you used to have to declare a concentration, like college prep or general ed or something like that. Were you in the college prep track?

ML: I was, but I don’t remember that was a track.

SEB: You didn’t have to declare it?

ML: I don’t know. I just took what they said, except I didn’t take the highest math. Something about the way—I don’t know, about the way the classes were structured—but language and English and science, chemistry.

SEB: But you were valedictorian, so you’re obviously good in the wide array of things. But what did you think were your best subjects?

ML: Oh, reading and writing— (laughs) books—bookworm.

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SEB: And in fact, you’d say that about yourself now, wouldn’t you? (laughter)

ML: I would love to read now. It’s not what I am doing, but—

SEB: So, what did you major in in college?

ML: English lit and music.

SEB: So it carried right through, didn’t it, that interest?

ML: It did.

SEB: Did you like that curriculum? Was it the right choice for you?

ML: Oh, I loved it. I don’t think English lit was as career focused as I—you know, today I would probably say to somebody, “Choose another angle for the reading and writing and take literature classes, but with an eye towards communication”—or—I don’t know that journalism is such a great deal—“but maximize the communication angle of it.”

SEB: But I’ve heard you in your public remarks summon up old references to Keats and so-and-so; sources you would have undoubtedly first known about—may have had to refresh your memory, but first known about because of your studies. So, it stuck with you, didn’t it?

ML: It did stick with me, and I’ve got lots of holes. You know, if I could—if I decide not to take on more projects in the community, I would really love to audit some classes and read a little more thoughtfully and more deeply into some areas. I have gaps—big gaps—in world lit and other fields, but I don’t know if I’ll get to it.

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SEB: Was college as socially stimulating for you as high school was? Was it a fun time, do you remember?

ML: Yes, it was. It was a very conservative Southern Baptist school. The first—

SEB: Which meant what?

ML: Well, early curfew, absolutely no drinking and other adolescent behaviors of any sort. But I was a church organist and we had choir and I was fully engaged in all the life that that meant, which I don’t think was a negative. (pauses) I was very seriously attached to my high school boyfriend, who was going to be and became a Southern Baptist minister.

SEB: Did he go there to the school?

ML: He did. He transferred. He had been to school at Texas Christian to play football, [where] he got a football scholarship—but he ended up transferring back to California. We came to a parting of the ways when it became apparent that he was going to tell me what I would play in the church service and be his dutiful accompanist—and I was studying Bach and other, you know, musical literature that wasn’t a part of the Baptist hymnal, and I guess that’s where the independence started to really show. So, this was not going to go in the right direction, so we broke that up. I had a great time my last two years. Found people not on the campus but through the larger church network—older; sophisticated; PhD, even— guys, who, you know, were not collegiate, so I had a great time. But had to figure out what came next after that.

SEB: Yes. So, did your folks—were they close by? How far was that college from Riverside? How far was that from your home?

ML: They had moved. When I went to college, they moved from Barstow to Indio, California, which is south of Palm Springs. Very hot and dry, although it’s below sea level, so they do grow a lot of dates and cotton there. It was about an hour and

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a half away, so they were close by, but I didn’t go home very much. I went home in the summers and worked in retail—JCPenney—

SEB: So, by the time you were getting to college, the ties with your parents were getting appropriately attenuated.

ML: Right.

SEB: They weren’t there a lot and you weren’t at home a lot.

ML: Right.

SEB: And so, what would you do, like, summers? Did you work?

ML: I did go home.

SEB: Did you have summer jobs?

ML: I did. I worked at JCPenney and I don’t remember what else, but I—I think I played the piano in some little churches around the community. I don’t remember what else. Probably couldn’t wait to get back to school.

SEB: Was the expectation, though, that you would get part-time jobs and that when you were playing the organ, for example, that it was supposed to be, in part, so you could earn some money?

ML: No, really, my mom and dad always said, “If you study hard, we’ll do our best to get you through school.” And I don’t remember any pinching along the way. My mom was still making my clothes—fortunately, they got a little more sophisticated—she made my prom dresses; she made suits.

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SEB: Did you have a car when you were in college?

ML: I did. I had an old car. (pauses) I think I drove our 1950 Chevy that my dad bought new, so it would have been ten years old. It had a lot of miles on it because we drove it to Arkansas every summer and no air conditioning and all that. But when I graduated from college, my mom and dad gave me a brand-new VW Beetle in that ugly, pukey yellow-citrusy color. But it was a cool car and I—

SEB: That was a generous gift.

ML: It was an extremely generous gift. I was going off to graduate school at Vanderbilt—which I picked because my uncle had gone to med school there—to study English lit, and so I had this cool car.

SEB: And so, you would have—and maybe did drive it from California to Tennessee?

ML: Yes.

SEB: You said your sister came to the same college, but she was five years younger?

ML: She was two-and-a-half years younger.

SEB: Okay, so she was there part of the time you were there.

ML: Yes, she was three years behind me in school.

SEB: And was that okay? Did that work out?

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ML: That was fine. There was enough difference in our age that our classes were entirely different, so—and she had very different interests.

SEB: Sometimes, you know, with siblings there’s a rub when one sibling trails after the other.

ML: Right. I don’t know from her perspective. I think she got tired of hand-me-downs because she was expecting to wear my clothes, and when the table finally turned, I was in college and I was thrilled when I got to wear some of hers.

SEB: Did you live together—

ML: We did not.

SEB: —in the same dorm or anything?

ML: No.

SEB: Did they have sororities?

ML: No.

SEB: And what was the student body? How many in the student body—or in your class?

ML: Gosh, then? I don’t even know. It was quite small.

SEB: And did you graduate at the top of your class—

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ML: I did.

SEB: —there, as well?

ML: I had to remind them that “summa” should go on my diploma. I don’t think the office secretary would have thought of it if I hadn’t. (laughter)

SEB: She’d let her Latin get rusty, maybe.

ML: I’m not sure. Maybe nobody else had cared about it, but I—yes.

SEB: So sometime, probably around in your junior year, you decided you wanted to go to graduate school.

ML: Yes. I thought I would teach in college and I really—I had thought about law school, but it seemed a pretty distant prospect.

SEB: And what year did you graduate from college?

ML: Nineteen sixty-four.

SEB: Had you been anything like a teaching instructor or anything? Did you grade the papers for a professor or anything?

ML: No.

SEB: Did they help you find a graduate program? Or did you do that pretty much on your own?

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ML: I did it on my own. I had a friend, an older friend—a slightly older friend—from New Mexico, who was doing a PhD in English at the University of Texas in Austin and highly recommended it. So I applied there and at Vanderbilt just because it sounded neat and it was far away—I wanted to go far away. And the Vanderbilt letter came first, and the UT letter came, I don’t know, two or three days later. And I’ve always wondered—I love Texas and the university is just fabulous.

SEB: Oh, UT was the University of Texas?

ML: Yes.

SEB: As opposed to University of Tennessee?

ML: Yes—no, Texas in Austin. I tried to get both of my children to go there. They couldn’t be interested, but—so I went to Vanderbilt, and it was lovely.

SEB: And did they give you financial aid?

ML: I don’t remember. I think my parents—

SEB: They continued to pay?

ML: —eeked out the—yes.

SEB: So, did you get a master’s there?

ML: I got a master’s. And during the second semester they said, “Would you like to do a PhD?” I was taking a seminar in American lit at the time and I was doing a paper on Walt Whitman, who was also known as the Good Gray Poet because he

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was a Union sympathizer [during the Civil War]. And for one of my papers, I found an article in one of the journals called—this is 1965—“The Good Gray Poet: Homo, Hetero, or Bi.” And in the first place, I didn’t know what all that meant, truly. In the second place, I thought, “I do not want to read—or get into the publish or perish [profession] and just be seeking constantly more and more [information] about less and less.” So, my plan was to go teach in a community college in California, but I started sending letters and nobody would respond to me. I did turn down the PhD. But a kid in my class’s dad was in the English department at Indiana State in Terre Haute, so they gave me a job. And not knowing any better, off I went to Terre Haute to teach first-generation college students and “bonehead English 101” and found myself really, quickly teaching sentence and paragraph structure, logic, basic rules of grammar, punctuation, diagramming—

SEB: To college kids?

ML: Yes.

SEB: You’d probably—if you were teaching now in the law school, you’d have to do some of that, sad to say.

ML: Yes, that’s what I hear.

SEB: So, when did you leave Vanderbilt?

ML: In ’65, I think. I think I was there from ’64 to ’65, maybe ’66—maybe I was there two years.

SEB: Those years in Tennessee were—I won’t say the height of the civil rights movement, but it was certainly when things were in full play.

ML: Right in the midst of it.

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SEB: And it was a Southern state.

ML: Right.

SEB: And there was the Vietnam War going on and you were on campus, and so what was going on? What did you experience with respect to these larger national themes—and international themes?

ML: You know, I don’t think we had a—I don’t recall having a television set in the graduate women’s dorm—we lived together in the graduate women’s dorm—and I was from California, so I had all kinds of liberal views, which the people from Miss So-and-So’s school in Memphis, who populated the dorm, by and large, could not understand. We had African American maids who cleaned the dorm, made our beds—I mean, it was—

SEB: It was segregated.

ML: It was segregated, and it was very class based. At the time I was there, I think we had three Miss Americas on the campus and they all wore their matched cardigans with the—these were the undergrads. And the sorority life, I knew nothing about that and didn’t have any part in it. I went to the First Baptist Church, which was a very big thing in Nashville because the headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention are there and—

SEB: And why did you go to that church?

ML: Because it was a remnant of, you know, having gone over to the Baptist side—

SEB: When you were trailing after that fellow?

ML: [No. We broke up in college, but I stayed in the Baptist church.] And had some fabulous friends in graduate school. One was there in medical school and went to

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India and spent most of her career in India as a missionary. I think she’s back in Texas now, teaching. Her dad had been a seminary president—was a seminary president, I guess. So, really interesting women—

SEB: At Vanderbilt?

ML: At Vanderbilt. Nobody in the divinity school, I think, at the time. So, I—we took the newspaper, The Tennesseean, so I watched—but I was pretty sheltered from it and I don’t recall any diversity in the student body. There may have been some.

SEB: So, there were no demonstrations or protests?

ML: I don’t recall it. But watching now the films of the sixties—I mean, there were— and documentaries about the era, clearly—I mean, there was Fisk and all kinds of social activism going on. I was sadly oblivious, I think, as far as personal engagement or involvement.

SEB: It was hard when you were in school to stay tuned in to current events, but—

ML: It shouldn’t have been, but I was buried in Shakespeare and, you know, English lit.

SEB: Right. Were you alert to the Vietnam War?

ML: That more in law school because a lot of guys there were deferred out of the Vietnam War.

SEB: So, when did you go to law school?

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ML: I taught English at Terre Haute for one year, and while I was there I studied pipe organ with a woman who was on the teaching faculty at—I think she was a TA, actually, at the music school in Bloomington and talked with her about what I should do next. She said, “Come do a PhD. That’d be great!” And I said, “Oh, I could never do that.” “Oh yeah, no problem. You’re in. That’s not an issue.” But I always wanted to do law and I had had a church in college—and as I said earlier, I was competent, but not brilliant; I was not going to be a world recitalist—and I knew what the other life was—piecing together various teaching and playing [jobs]. So, I did apply to the music school and I applied to the law school.

SEB: At Bloomington?

ML: In Bloomington—the law school there and the law school in Indianapolis. And I was accepted, I’m sure, at both the law schools; I think I was accepted at the music school, but I don’t have any papers to prove it today. But I decided I’d better do something practical, so I did come up here instead of go to Bloomington because I didn’t want to ask my dad—my folks—to pay for law school, too, and so I got a job in a law firm and I went to school at night. There was still a night school then.

SEB: What law school?

ML: IU.

SEB: No, I’m sorry, what law firm?

ML: (pauses) Kightlinger, Young, Gray and Hudson, doing mainly trial, legal-type support.

SEB: Now as you were making these decisions—I mean, you consulted the friend who was your TA, who was giving you advice beyond how to play the organ—did you have the sense that you were sort of charting this course on your own?

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ML: Yes.

SEB: Was this very much your own decision making?

ML: It was. And I didn’t—you know, looking back on it, I didn’t do a fraction of the job that I would do today or that I would do for my kids or—

SEB: You mean at charting a course?

ML: Charting the course; thinking with discernment about where to go. I mean, clearly Bloomington has the higher stature today—you know, staying in Indiana, not staying in Indiana, any of that. But yes, I just thought I had to do what came next.

SEB: So, when you would move from Tennessee to Terre Haute, you boxed up everything and headed out and you came up here and found an apartment—a place to stay—and found your way. And then when you decided to come over to Indianapolis, you did the same thing and you’re pretty much doing that on the basis of you own adventure.

ML: Yes.

SEB: Yes, that’s pretty gutsy.

ML: It’s kind of weird, I think about it now.

SEB: Yes, I think it’s brave.

ML: It’s pretty wild.

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SEB: Did your folks, in the background, consult? Did they give you advice or did you just keep them appraised?

ML: I just kept them appraised. I don’t remember consulting—I’m sure we talked about it. They didn’t know anything about law school. We didn’t have any lawyers in the family. It was kind of a wild idea. But—

SEB: Well, I mentioned it—you can tell why I mentioned it—but I’ll just say that with your own children you were much more involved, weren’t you?

ML: Yes. I certainly was. (laughs)

SEB: And don’t you think that’s a generational shift between the way you did it and the way you assisted your kids in doing it?

ML: Yes, although I will say in the end my children all made their own decisions—

SEB: Sure, but in terms of your role—

ML: —but with a lot more information.

SEB: —and input and regular contact and stuff.

ML: Yes.

SEB: So, that was—I don’t want to get out of our chronology, but it is an interesting compare and contrast.

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ML: It is. When I think about when my mom moved with my dad sort of away from her parents and she got to see them once a year, that was—first of all, when she went to college, which was, maybe—I don’t know how long it took in those days because the roads weren’t as good as they probably are now, but she had five cents a week to write her mother. She could send three one-cent postcards and mail a letter with a postage stamp of two cents. And then after marrying in Western Grove, Arkansas, and then making all these moves, she moved out to the West Coast and she would only see her mother once a year, if that.

SEB: Did you ever talk to her about that? Did she miss her mother?

ML: I don’t know, but it’s interesting to me that I kind of did the same thing and then I did not see my mother—I mean, in the early days of my marriage you didn’t just hop on an airplane the way we do now and say, “Oh, I think we’ll go see so-and- so.”

SEB: Because your parents continued to live in California, didn’t they?

ML: Yes, until they died. And I miss my mother—and I miss my folks. I can remember the first time that we went back to visit after we had gotten married and then we were leaving to come back to Indiana, I was just dissolved in tears, but after that I really—I felt sort of like Ruth—I mean, this is where I am and life and career—

SEB: Ruth in the Bible?

ML: Ruth in the Bible. My life was all about my husband’s family and two careers and two children. So, in a way I kind of repeated my mother’s pattern and my children are doing the same thing, sort of, in ways.

SEB: Did you talk to your mom, in particular, about that? Did she ever, in a heart-to- heart sort of way, say, “I wish you hadn’t done that” or “I feel like I missed out a lot because of the distance between us” or anything like that?

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ML: She missed seeing our children a lot. And she and my dad would drive—they loved to drive, so in their retirement they would drive across country. And so, they would come every year or two to visit us. She missed seeing the kids, but she— (pauses) I don’t know what I was going to say.

SEB: So, she adapted as easily as you adapted, it sounds like.

ML: Well, I don’t know because I wasn’t there. But what I was going to say is that my husband Ned is—was a physician and he helped at some very dramatic times in both my parents’ lives and—first of all because he was a doctor—sort of in golden terms—and because he could be so helpful, they just thought he walked on water. So, they, I think, felt that I was in a good place. My sister stayed much closer and they had a lot of involvement with her and her children.

SEB: She did stay in California, didn’t she?

ML: Yes.

SEB: So, go back. We’re in law school and you came over here to Indianapolis, and when you went to the law firm and got your job, did you say, “I want this job part-time so I can go to law school part-time”? And was that okay with them?

ML: Yes.

SEB: Were there enough women doing that you weren’t standing out or—?

ML: No, Shirley Shideler was the only female lawyer I knew at the time, when I first started. Later on, I met Elizabeth Dailey, I think— (pauses) in my last year I met Elizabeth Dailey. But there were two other women in my class—Toni Ax and Lila Young—so there were three of us in the class.

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SEB: Where did you think the confidence came from in you that emboldened you to go to the law firm and say, “I want to get a job here and go to law school”?

ML: I don’t have a clue.

SEB: I mean, there weren’t very many women—

ML: No.

SEB: And it was an anomalous sort of choice for a woman. And even to go to the law firm and say, “Give me a part-time job,” you were saying basically as a paralegal because you were going to law school; you weren’t asking to be the receptionist.

ML: Right.

SEB: And so, how did you know that about law school or about being a lawyer? You just thought you could do it?

ML: I guess I thought I could do it, and I would try.

SEB: Panned out, didn’t it?

ML: Well, (laughs) it was a good credential. It really was.

SEB: So, was it hard to get into law school?

ML: No.

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SEB: Because you had really good grades.

ML: I had really good grades. And, I don’t remember anything about the process. I don’t even remember if they had the LSAT in 1966. I suppose if they did, I took it, but—

SEB: So, when you went to law school, did you have the sense of signing up that there might not be many other women? That you were going into a man’s field?

ML: You know, I don’t remember consciously spending time thinking about that, but I think I knew that it was—

SEB: And when you got there, did it dawn on you? Did you look around and say, “See, there are only four of us”?

ML: Yes, three.

SEB: Three of you, yes. Did that matter?

ML: No, just do my thing.

SEB: Were you friends with the other two?

ML: Yes, but didn’t spend any time with them. I mean, I was busy. I wasn’t working part-time, I was working full-time and then going to school. But it was a drain. So, my folks said, “Why don’t you come back to California and get a little closer?” So, I applied to USC and UCLA and got accepted to both of those and decided—

SEB: To the law schools?

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ML: To the law schools—to go to UCLA. So I transferred for my second year, and when I decided to move— (pauses) I need to back up. I needed an apartment when I went to work in Indianapolis, so I had continued—I attended the noontime organ concerts at the cathedral on the Circle and met a guy there; he worked in an insurance company. We never dated. It was just, you know, two people who liked the organ. “I need an apartment.” He said, “I know somebody who’s a dental hygienist who needs a roommate, so I’ll introduce you.” And so, I went to meet this woman on my birthday in 1967. And there was a guy there to pick her up to go to a wedding—they had a date to go to a wedding—and he was a young doctor here in town, and so we met briefly. The girl and I decided to live together for the year and did. And she was dating the doctor, and when I decided to move to California, it turned out that the doctor’s dad had been one of the early people at Mayflower Moving Company and then that split off—a group split off called Wheaton Van Lines, and his dad worked for Wheaton. And so, I called Ned Lamkin—the doctor—at his office and said, “Could your dad help me get my few little belongings out to California?” And he said, “Sure! We want to do all we can to help good looking girls get out of town as fast as possible.” And he took me out to lunch on the last day I was in town—to the South Side, where none of his friends would see us—and we had lunch and off I went to California. And, he was already in the legislature at the time. He had been elected with a big sweep of young Republicans who swept out the old guys and reform moved in. And that happened to be the fall that Harry Gonso—and John Isenbarger—at IU football took the Hoosiers to the Rose Bowl. And in those days, legislators could get tickets to just about anything, so Ned called up in California and said, “Would you like to go to the Rose Bowl?” “Well, I’ve lived in California a long time, I’ve never been to either the parade or the games. So sure, that’d be fun.” So, he came right before New Year’s of ’68 and we met some other friends of his who came down from Seattle—another doctor that he’d gone to school with. Went to the parade; went to the game; corresponded. Later that spring I met his parents in Florida, and we married the next August.

SEB: That’s fast work.

ML: Pretty fast.

SEB: Since you’re out in California.

ML: Yes. Pretty fast.

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SEB: Okay, so he was dating the hygienist.

ML: He was.

SEB: Okay, and that’s why you went down to the South Side; because he was skipping out on her.

ML: He was. Today, you know, we probably wouldn’t think a whole lot about it, but in those days, it was—so I can’t think why I got off on that.

SEB: Oh, that’s a big part of your story, that’s why you did it.

ML: Except that my parents thought he was pretty cool.

SEB: So, he was practicing—he had finished med school—and so he’s a little older than you are.

ML: He is. Seven years.

SEB: Seven years, okay. Well, he was practicing here in Indianapolis?

ML: Yes.

SEB: And what was he practicing?

ML: Endocrinology and metabolism.

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SEB: And he practiced at Methodist Hospital, right?

ML: He did.

SEB: But in a private practice.

ML: Yes. He had served in Korea—he was drafted—out of his residency [at IU]. He went to IU med school—DePauw undergrad; IU med school.

SEB: Did he grow up here in Indianapolis?

ML: He did, almost totally.

SEB: And his family had the business that you just referenced.

ML: Well, his dad worked there. He was in an executive position, but he didn’t have any equity ownership, sadly.

SEB: Did Ned have siblings?

ML: He has one sister.

SEB: Younger?

ML: A year and a half younger and her name is Nancy Lamkin Edler. She lives in Wilmette.

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SEB: Illinois?

ML: Illinois.

SEB: And you had close ties to his family?

ML: Yes.

SEB: I know you’ve been close to her.

ML: Yes. And his mom and dad were both from Kentucky, so we spent time—not a lot of time but reunions—and reunions and a lot of stories.

SEB: Do you know where they emigrated from?

ML: I don’t. His dad—or maybe it was his mom—was a McCoy, so they like to say they were part of the Hatfields and McCoys. But we don’t know a lot about the heritage.

SEB: Were they college educated, Ned’s parents?

ML: His mom was. His dad started college—he was a really smart guy and very droll, humorous guy. He was the oldest of six boys; raised on a farm, but he left, actually, to help out at home and teach school in a one-room schoolhouse— Ekron, Kentucky—and found his way into the moving business. I can’t remember the various steps, but he ended up during World War II being loaned as an executive to the Department of Defense because he knew how to move household goods. And he wrote the early tariffs for household-goods moving. He set up the household-goods movers group. It was kind of a franchise setup—Mayflower was a franchise setup. So, people would set up their moving companies in towns and then function under federal law to deliver goods across state lines. Well, he set up

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the communication with—and the organization that communicated with—all the locally held ownership entities in Mayflower. So, he was quite a figure in his day.

SEB: You liked Ned’s folks?

ML: Yes, they were both charming; very, I want to say, cultured, but not in the—not in a snooty or an East Coast way, just salt-of-the-earth, Southern, gentle people who aspired to the very highest that they could do and aspired further for their children. Just totally—

SEB: They had class.

ML: They had class. That’s a good term. And in that respect very much like my folks, just without some of the experiences that they had.

SEB: So, Ned sort of swept you off your feet?

ML: He did. He could sing. He studied—sang opera in college and had a chance to go off-Broadway. Was smart in politics—I had been interested in politics, except that I supported Nelson Rockefeller in ’64 and he, of course, was Goldwater, so—

SEB: (laughs) Well, isn’t that a little like Baptist and Disciples?

ML: It is.

SEB: When you came back to Indiana, having married Ned, had you finished law school?

ML: No, I finished here. So, I did my first and my last years here.

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SEB: So that middle year was spent in California, but it was also spent courting, basically.

ML: Right.

SEB: Okay. And so, you came back and got back into the law school. Did it take you one more year or two? The night school was usually four years.

ML: A year and a half because I was able to go full-time then. So, I finished in, I think, January of 1970.

SEB: Did you go back to the law firm to work?

ML: No, I was able to go full-time and that was really great because Ned was in the legislature. It was really lots of fun. I was reading all of his bills; I was his unpaid assistant. I guess that got a few comments over at the statehouse—they didn’t have as much legislative services help in those days. I thought it was great fun. I loved politics.

SEB: Well, and he was quite influential. He had a leadership—

ML: He did. He was majority leader.

SEB: —role, and so that must have become sort of an organizing principle for your life. Besides your reading his bills, you had to do the socializing and the politicking and so forth.

ML: It did, yes.

SEB: How did that go? Did you enjoy that?

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ML: It was lots of fun. I was young. It gave me an incredible advantage of meeting people and making acquaintances and knowing folks in the community and opening doors. It was huge. And in the meantime, we started a family, so that took time and—

SEB: So, how long were you married before your first baby was born?

ML: We were married in August of ’68 and our daughter was born in September of 1970.

SEB: Two years.

ML: So, two years.

SEB: And your daughter’s name?

ML: Is Melinda Magness.

SEB: We know where the Magness came from, then.

ML: Yes, she doesn’t really like that Southern custom. (laughter) I thought it was dignified at the time. Mandy, we call her. And it turns out my father had a great- grandmother named Amanda, so we probably should have named her Amanda, but we didn’t do very thorough research at the time. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and her name now is Magaddino and she has two darling little boys—

SEB: Ages—

ML: Ten and eight.

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SEB: And what are their names?

ML: Jack is ten and Luke is eight.

SEB: And then, son Matt was born.

ML: Son Matt was born in March of ’73 and he now lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His wife, Jennifer Thornley, graduated from Zionsville High School, and they have two darling little girls.

SEB: Names?

ML: Willow, who is nine, and Autumn, who is seven, so they’re very stairstep.

SEB: And I know Matt went to law school, but he’s teaching law now—or teaching— he has a PhD now, doesn’t he?

ML: He does not.

SEB: Or some advanced something.

ML: He did a fellowship at Stanford. He went to Princeton, which was a very bad match for his sensibilities, but it’s a great thing to have on your résumé and it’s— you know, it’s served him well. Then he went to law school at Northwestern and clerked for district court in Portland; worked in a really big firm in Chicago and then at Baker and Daniels here in town; and then went to Stanford and, well, he did do a master’s in multidisciplinary public policy ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. And then he did a two-year fellowship at the Stanford Law School Center for Law and the Biosciences and out of that he was recruited to the University of Tulsa law school.

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SEB: Where did the kids go to high school?

ML: They went to Park Tudor.

SEB: And Mandy went to DePauw, right?

ML: Mandy went to DePauw, where her dad had gone. And then she did an MBA at IU and was recruited to Hewlett Packard on the West Coast in Portland. That’s where she met her husband.

SEB: And they stayed out there?

ML: Yes.

SEB: It’s a pretty place.

ML: It’s a gorgeous place, yes.

SEB: But it’s a pretty far place for mom or dad.

ML: We are going on Saturday.

SEB: Oh, are you?

ML: Now, we hop on airplanes. (laughs)

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SEB: That’s good. So now we got a little out of order here, but you related important facts, so we’ll go back to the children started being born after you were married about two years and then five years, right?

ML: Yes.

SEB: And were you stay-at-home during that time or were you working?

ML: I was stay-at-home for a year, up until—well, I finished law school, and then I was pregnant and Mandy came. And I stayed at home the first year with her, and I was in deep depression most of the time.

SEB: As in clinical depression?

ML: I don’t know. I just was in tears when Ned left in the morning and tears when he came back.

SEB: Oh yes, that’s depression.

ML: But we didn’t treat it. We didn’t—I mean, we just—but I joined the Junior League and that gave me some—and I had the Assembly [Women’s Club] and—

SEB: Assuming that it wasn’t all metabolic—I assume some was postpartum, but was there anything else?

ML: I don’t think so. I just think it was: here I was with this baby and what was I going to do next? So, one of my professors—I think it was Bill Harvey because I was obviously pregnant by the time I finished law school—said to me, “Well, you can join some sections of the ABA and stay involved in whatever subjects interest you.” So, because of our political connections and because I was interested in the topic and because I had grown up in a very integrated society, a wonderful friend of ours, Steve West—who was a distinguished city-council person for many years

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here—and the mayor, I guess at the time—asked if I would serve on the Human Rights Commission.

SEB: That was Lugar?

ML: Maybe it was Lugar.

SEB: Mayor Lugar.

ML: Probably. And we also lived in a neighborhood that could have been overtaken by white flight, but was not—but stabilized, and so I found myself at the age of, I don’t know, early thirties on the Human Rights Commission, hearing, administratively, cases of housing and employment and other discrimination. So, it was kind of a nice deployment of public policy legal skills.

SEB: So, after Mandy was born and you were in a funk, you said you joined the Junior League as well, and basically that’s when you talked to Professor Harvey about—

ML: I think we talked about that before I left school—“What am I going to do next now I’m pregnant?”

SEB: So, you acted on that.

ML: Yes. So, I joined some sections. I had written a paper for Jim White on housing (pauses) for low income—

SEB: Professor Jim White?

ML: Yes, for housing, so that was an interest, too. So after I served a number of years—four or six—on the Human Rights Commission— (pauses) probably

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Matt was born— (pauses) in between there, a friend from law school named Joe Geeslin, who had been an IRS agent and then was head of the Department of Revenue for the state of Indiana under Governor Whitcomb, was in my class in law school, and he gave me a job three days a week in his law office; he was a solo practitioner.

SEB: Here in Indianapolis?

ML: Here in Indianapolis. And that was fabulous! I mean, you could do— (pauses) I’m sorry, maybe that was before Mandy was born. That doesn’t quite tack—

SEB: (laughs) It’s hard to get the chronology.

ML: I should have studied the chronology before I came. But Joe gave me a job part- time—and not many people in town were thinking in terms of that, but it was a fabulous schedule because I could do things with the legislative—the State Assembly [Women’s Club] and other activities. I could—we could go to ball games at IU and other places on the weekend and do legislative things and still I could keep my hand—

SEB: And also, your Human Rights Commission stuff.

ML: And the Human Rights Commission. And then after I got a little tired of that (pauses) I was—I said, “I would really like to do something different.” So then by that time, it was Mayor Hudnut asked me to serve on the housing authority board and dealing with public housing again—dealt with equal access—and a lot of those same themes came through, so I got to keep my hand in a little bit that way.

SEB: So how were you managing the kids while you were doing these things?

ML: I was at home with Mandy for a year. And then eventually we bought a big old house at an estate auction at which nobody else showed up. We had room for a

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live-in housekeeper, and we recruited a wonderful woman from southern Indiana, who came and kept us together.

SEB: She lived with you?

ML: She lived with us and she cooked and cleaned and did the laundry, and then she would go home on the weekends, so we’d be on our own then, which was also nice.

SEB: Yes, just about the way you would want it.

ML: Yes. But she kept things together. She was a devout Seventh Day Adventist, so she brought some dietary exploration to our diet. But she cooked whatever we wanted to eat, but she ate no—she observed kosher habits, which was interesting.

SEB: That is interesting. So, she basically freed you from the childcare responsibility so that you could work at these various jobs.

ML: Right.

SEB: When you were looking for jobs, were you primarily drawn to do the things that you did because of your interest or were you getting paid? Or what was sort of informing your choices?

ML: Well, the civic things—the Human Rights Commission and the Public Housing Authority—were just interests—public policy and—

SEB: Volunteer?

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ML: It was volunteer and it was civic-related, and it had to do with the functioning of government and equal access, I would say. I did, through our social connections, know a lawyer in town named Syd Steele, and he hired me at Lowe Gray Steele and Hoffman, and I worked there a year or two. I was in no way prepared to be a rainmaker— (pauses) a bold, woman lawyer, I’ll just say. So, while I was there—by then Dick Lugar had moved from mayor to senator and he asked if I would head—he was going to be the national co-chair of the Howard Baker For President campaign, and he asked if I would head up the petition drive. So, I did that. Kind of went on leave from Lowe Gray Steele to do that and had a good time. Of course, he failed in the primaries, but he was a really good, moderate Republican from Tennessee. I knew his record from being at Vanderbilt, so I did read the newspaper a little bit there.

SEB: Did you meet him?

ML: No.

SEB: So, you were doing this mostly for Lugar?

ML: For Lugar. It was political. And I had been precinct committeeman. I loved that job; polling my neighborhood and walking door-to-door with a baby and just talking to people; see if they need absentee ballots and things.

SEB: Did you know Lugar personally?

ML: Oh yes, very closely.

SEB: How’d you know him?

ML: Ned and Lugar and others were a part of this young Republican group that swept out the old guys. And so, Lugar was elected mayor before I came to town, so probably ’67 or maybe ’65, I guess. And then the next year the legislative groups—Bill Ruckelshaus and Ned and John Mutz and Morris Mills and Larry

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Borst and a whole cast of characters—were all elected. It was called the Republican Action Committee. So, Ned knew Lugar very well. And when Lugar and others were putting together the plan for Unigov, which would unify city and county government, Ned was the leader of the Marion County delegation. At that time, the representatives from Marion County were elected as one body, so the slate— either one or—one slate won—whoever that was—and so Ned was the leader of the delegation. And he was the House sponsor of the Unigov bill, and you know, as a young, articulate doctor who had quite a stature in town. Larry Borst, I think, was the Senate sponsor. The newspaper at the time—this was 1969, I think, it was passed— (pauses) must have been 1970—said that the credibility of Lamkin and Borst [in] their [respective] houses [of the General Assembly] was key factor in the—and Ned gave quite a resounding speech, which got some press at the time. So, we knew Lugar very well. He sent roses to us, I remember. We had a little house on Fifty-Fourth Street; these beautiful red roses came in appreciation from Dick and Char Lugar. Then after he became senator, of course, we were very supportive all the time that he served and were very disappointed when he was not elected the last time.

SEB: Oh yes. So, you were really, along with Ned—I mean, Ned was the office holder, but you as well were very much part of that group of political movers and shakers and so you were drawn into it, too. Sounds like you were not the wife who was left behind at home to catch up with her husband later. Ned was always very inclusive of you, wasn’t he?

ML: He was. And I was reading the legislation.

SEB: So, you did it in a team sort of way, in many respects. So did you know the old guard? You were part of the new guard—but the Keith Bulen—

ML: Yes.

SEB: —John Sweezy—

ML: Oh well, they were [among] the [key figures] for Ned’s career. Keith Bulen was quite a master—and we weren’t close. Keith was a very distinctive personality,

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but I think widely acknowledged as a real political wizard. Sweezy, we knew, of course. He was not as supportive as I think he should have been.

SEB: So, you were content, basically, to help out on these special assignments that you were given by the mayors and so forth. So, you were developing your own career while Ned had his, even though you were doing the things as a team. So, talk about what was next after the Lowe Gray Steele—

ML: Well, so I went on leave to do the Howard Baker campaign and that came to an end. And about 1972 to 4, I think, was— (pauses) no, I think it has to be ’82. When Reagan won the presidency, the Republicans took the Senate for the first time in forty years or so and Lugar found himself chairing the Senate Banking and Finance Committee—I think that was the title. Anyway, he was chair of the committee that oversaw HUD, among many other things, and the slash-and-burn Republicans in the Reagan camp thought that they would get rid of all these bureaucrats whom they deemed to be Democrats—which is probably somewhat true—in the higher ranks of the civil service by moving high-ranking civil service people around to places they would never ever agree to go, like Anchorage; Dubuque, Iowa; Indianapolis, Indiana; and some others. And Lugar, coming from a distinguished career and a totally committed civic leader in Indianapolis, said, “No, we’re not going to do that to Indianapolis. That would not be the case.” So, I got a call one day from Mike Carroll, who was a much-beloved deputy mayor earlier and then Lugar’s state manager, saying, “Would you come talk to us about heading up the HUD office?” And so, I was asked to do that. Their strategy, for historical purposes, was to recruit Republicans into the SES ranks, which would then theoretically leave some longer term influence in the bureaucracy that runs the administration.

SEB: The SES, meaning the—?

ML: Senior Executive Service, which is the very top level. So, I was SES. I think I started off at seventy-five thousand and it was about, I don’t know, a hundred by the time I left—and got some nice performance awards, which can be looked at. But it was a fabulous experience. I had never supervised anybody except, you know, two little kids and a husband. (laughs)

SEB: So, what did the job entail? Give us a job description.

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ML: I was the HUD manager for the state of Indiana. There were about two hundred employees in the office. Most of them—the bulk—were in the housing side, so there—HUD oversees the federal housing authority issuance of insurance which homeowners can purchase on houses and then they do multifamily housing development and they do subsidized housing—public housing—and community development block grants. And the large cities—like Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, (pauses) probably Gary, Evansville—would receive block grants. So, based on population, Indianapolis would get a certain amount of money that it could then do certain, specified things falling within general terms, but they could make their own decisions. For everyone else in the state—the rest of the state’s allocation would go through the lieutenant governor’s office, and so the state would allocate funds to less-populated areas for housing and other civic projects.

SEB: So besides supervising 250 people, it also catapulted you into public life, right?

ML: It did, yes.

SEB: And so, that meant that you had to be alert to the media’s interest in what you were doing and you had to give speeches—

ML: Yes.

SEB: —you had to go to DC every once in a while to get support for your programs and meet with the senator and stuff. And were those things you liked doing?

ML: I did because it kept me in touch with all the mayors around the state, with the state government, with all the Congress—the congressional delegations—and I knew most of the people, anyway—and it continued the public policy interface. There’s not a lot of discretion in an area manager’s job, but there was some, and I was able to develop a couple of programs that were distinctive in Indiana with small allocations of money that you could wheedle out of headquarters.

SEB: So that would have been, like, in 1981?

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ML: Yes, I think it was—

SEB: Because Reagan was elected in ’80, right?

ML: Eighty, so it would have been about ’80—I didn’t go in right at the first. I think it was about ’82 to ’87. They were great years. Learned a lot, like carry cash when you are in downtown Chicago at the regional headquarters and you need to get to the airport; you have to have cash in your purse. (laughter)

SEB: And was your housekeeper still holding the fort in Indianapolis?

ML: Yes, until about the time the kids—well, probably just through grade school, and then in high school we started managing on our own.

SEB: So, were you one of those professional women who, despite the fact of having a housekeeper, wanted to keep close tabs on what was happening at home, too?

ML: I hope I did. Looking back, I’m not sure if I was always as present—

SEB: So, who did grocery shopping, for example?

ML: Well, Norma—Norma Wise was our housekeeper—she did most of it in those days. We would talk about what to have in the coming week and I would leave money and she would spend it, oh so wisely. And she would get cleaning products and—

SEB: And she’d get the kids to school? Or did you drop them off at school?

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ML: (pauses) Both, I think, because they went to grade school at St. Richard’s, which was on the way downtown. I think we typically dropped off and often picked up because it was on the way back.

SEB: And was Ned practicing?

ML: He was practicing at Methodist, but he would leave quite early and so he was usually out of there before they would go to school. They wore uniforms, so that was fairly easy once Matt learned how to tie his tie—and then once you tie it, you never untie it the whole year; you just pull it down and up and it’s ready to go with gravy stains and ketchup on it. (laughter)

SEB: And so, the kids had activities themselves?

ML: They did. I was not successful in starting a Scout troop at St. Richard’s, which was always a big disappointment. But they had—

SEB: Did they take music lessons?

ML: Music lessons.

SEB: And who saw to those, Martha?

ML: Both of us did, although I probably did more than Ned. I mean, if he wasn’t practicing medicine, he was in the legislature—and it was a great tolerance on the part of his partners to let him do that for about sixteen years—so he didn’t do as much of that. But he coached at Tabernacle Presbyterian Church. Both the kids did softball. Matt played basketball, and then Ned was a coach and really loved it.

SEB: And he sang—Ned sang.

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ML: Ned sang in the Christian Theological Seminary production of 1776 in 1976, and that was fun. And, we belonged to a little amateur drama group that would put on a musical every once in a while, so he’d get to sing there.

SEB: And you are active in your church.

ML: Yes.

SEB: Did you play the organ at your church?

ML: Only occasionally. I really couldn’t—

SEB: When enlisted?

ML: Maybe twice in all the years. The pedals and the [registration] of all the stops and the manuals, for me, it would have taken a lot of practice to keep it up. And we had children at home; I couldn’t practice at home. So, I dropped the music, except that I started volunteering for the Cathedral Arts group, which sponsored early music concerts at the art museum. And then out of that was one of the first people that raised the money for the—I was a vice-chairman of the first [International] Violin Competition [of Indianapolis], and we launched that.

SEB: And did you do that when you were—did you start that volunteer activity when you were at HUD?

ML: I think I volunteered at Cathedral Arts before HUD because I remember going to a summer concert before Mandy was born, with a very big belly and a yellow sun dress—maternity sundress—and so I think that started right away.

SEB: That was an early volunteer thing.

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ML: Yes.

SEB: So, you worked for HUD for six or seven years?

ML: Yes, five or six.

SEB: And then what happened?

ML: Well, I was—one of the things that HUD did for me, it did put me in public life. And people were beginning to think that maybe women should have a role in some of the governance around town, so I got recruited to the Meridian Mutual [Insurance Company] board of directors, along with Sally Rowland. And I was— the president of Christian Theological Seminary, T. J. Liggett, went to our church. I was out on our riding mower one day mowing the grass when T. J. showed up at the street and asked me if I would come on the board—sort of like Jesus and recruiting [fishermen]—and so I went on the CTS board. And the CTS—which I loved because, of course, I had done a lot of church music; I had thought I was going to be a minister’s wife; I had—you know, there were lots of threads in there. The Christian Theological Seminary has very strong ties to the Irwin Miller family, Tangeman—Mrs. Tangeman and Cummins Engine and all of that. So, a gentleman on the board at CTS, Harold Higgins, was a headhunter for Mr. Miller in his private investments, but also for Cummins Engine, and Harold asked if I would consider talking with Cummins about its public policy needs. So, I got recruited to go to Cummins to do what they call “public policy.” It’s pretty much flat-out lobbying because all the diesel engines that Cummins puts out have to meet EPA—Environmental Protection Agency—standards and they come under the provisions of the Clean Air Act, which arguably gets reauthorized every five to seven years—except that it’s so complicated, with so many different areas of commercial life, that it tends to just go on forever.

SEB: Like a budget.

ML: Yes. So, I spent a lot of time going back and forth to Washington for Cummins; had to be in touch with all the congressional offices. Phil Sharp—Congressman Phil Sharp chaired a very important sub-committee at the time—Lee Hamilton was our congressman from southern Indiana, so of course, we spent a lot of time

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just helping them understand what our issues were. We had two hostile [takeover attempts] while I was there and had to defend those through some marvelous undercover operations in Congress, where you arrange for people to be called before investigative committees because they’re making securities and other offerings without following the niceties of securities laws and had a roll in passing the anti-takeover statute in Indiana. So, those were really great.

SEB: Exciting times.

ML: Fun times—working with the chair and the vice-chairman, and Irwin Miller was still very active at the time.

SEB: Well, these positions—these two we’ve talked about so far; in particular, the HUD position and the one with Cummins—required you to function at your highest levels, basically, in order to do the job, you wanted to do, and that always exacts a bit of a toll, even for a high school valedictorian.

ML: It was a challenge. (laughs)

SEB: Yes, but it took a lot of energy and focus and follow-through and resourcefulness and so forth. So, were those things that made you like those jobs or did it just wear you out or—?

ML: Probably both. I mean, I loved working for Cummins because it had such a storied record—a genuine and storied record of both commercial success but civic leadership—and we had gone to Irwin Miller as a part of starting the violin competition. He owned and played a Stradivarius. He studied with Joseph Gingold at the music school in IU. He read and spoke Hebrew and Greek and was such a moral—he funded the Cummins Foundation; funded African American leaders in cities across the country in the early days of the civil rights movement; and he was a leader in both the Disciples denomination—but also in ecumenical affairs, nationally and internationally. So, all of that I admired so much. And I was with all these Yale MBAs. It was pretty scary and pretty heady, but—and I was driving two hours a day, which you can sympathize with, reading books-on- tape to my own little private reading—it was before the days of very flexible cell phones of any sort. By the time I—just a year or so before I left Cummins, I

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finally had a car telephone, and it was a big thing. It was bolted to the floor. But I read books-on-tape—Anna Karenina and great literature.

SEB: By this time, were the kids in college?

ML: No, they were in middle school and high school. And so, my other point was going to be about this time—about 1982 or 3, so that would have been HUD—I vividly remember my daughter standing in the kitchen—I’ve told you this story before—with her hand on her hip in her most confrontational voice saying, “When I grow up, I am going to be a real mother.”

SEB: Out of the mouths of babes.

ML: And my son told—there was a mother at St. Richard’s, who was trying to put together a recipe book of mothers—parents at the school—turned out to be mothers—and he told her that I didn’t cook. (laughter) And this is after—I mean, I did have a gourmet period; it was when they were preschool.

SEB: They just didn’t remember.

ML: They didn’t. And they probably didn’t get to eat it because I fixed a whole fish in aspic for Josie Orr, the first lady of Indiana, and we did some high-end entertaining, but you know, you had to do it again the next day and wash the dishes—and that was over really quickly, so he didn’t remember. And so, I was distracted. I was not a totally engaged parent, which I regret to this day. My daughter—both of our children have chosen to have stay-at-home parents or at least more flexibly employed—and those turn out to be the women. But my daughter will say—does say assertively—“But that’s why you and we all have so many options today; is because you did that.” And she’s trying to figure out what to do next.

SEB: So, while she has mixed feelings about it, it took a personal toll on her, but she recognizes in the broader sense it was important. Did you recognize it was important at the time? Was that part of your motivation?

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ML: It was part of it, yes. I really did not like being dependent on somebody else.

SEB: Well, there’s a theme that’s been longstanding—

ML: (laughs) I wanted to have my own resources. And I still feel that way, and I—

SEB: But if that were the only thing that was motivating it, then you’d just go out and get a job. But, you bought into a life.

ML: Yes.

SEB: I mean, you were operating in a way where it’s anything but nine-to-five.

ML: Right.

SEB: And so, did you sense that having gotten the opportunity to do this, you knew you were an unusual woman to have that opportunity because you were sort of on the cutting edge of it; that you had a responsibility to other women or that you felt the weight of your responsibilities in terms of other people coming along to ride your coattails, as it were? Did you have those feeling at the time? I think probably as you get older you see it differently, but at the time, was that part of your awareness?

ML: I think it was. And I gave a speech, which actually got published, on— (pauses) it had a snappy title, but it does not occur to me at the moment—why women should help other women and that the real mark of leadership was to share it, not to hoard it, and to make other people successful. And I was able to—with all the constrictions of federal bureaucracy—to make some career advancements for people at HUD. And then at Cummins, I didn’t have a lot of people—I had no people reporting to me except for a secretary, but I was able to help colleagues pursue their roles.

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SEB: Were you a mentor? Did you actively mentor?

ML: In my—I think I was very helpful to my—I know I was very helpful to my secretary at HUD, who was a very bright woman, and I gave her the opportunity through the mechanisms to become a professional in HUD and she ended up being able to work in other offices. Her husband was an ATF officer and they got moved to California, but she was able to retire at a much higher, professional position. And there were other women at HUD. HUD did have women in leadership positions in the local and the national offices. At Cummins, I didn’t have people—I only had a secretary reporting to me, but I was able to give counsel. My best example is Chris Letts, who preceded me as head of the Cummins Foundation. She was my neighbor in the headquarters building and she really wanted to contribute to the administration of Evan Bayh. And actually, she had tried to volunteer during the campaign and nobody ever returned her calls. When he got elected governor, she said, “Well, darn. I really wanted to help out.” And I said, “Well, I don’t think they have a bench”—because Republicans had controlled the governor’s office and the legislature for years. “They’ll be ecstatic over your Ivy League credentials and your Cummins manufacturing experience”—she’d been a floor manager at one of the big plants. And so, sure enough, she was tapped. So, we made the introductions and she was tapped for first the transportation—highways and transportation—and then Health and Human Services and then went on. Her husband got the opportunity to buy a Cummins dealership in the Northeast and so she’s been at Harvard at the Kennedy School ever since and got funded a chair in non-profit studies that really focused the whole Kennedy—that part of the Kennedy School program on the business- like way in which non-profits ought to manage—and that’s had some wonderful, subsequent benefits. And she’s still a friend. So I think that was—looking back, that was a really neat thing.

Then I was recruited to a company I knew nothing about called USA Group—and was on the north—had a big building on the northeast side of town on I-69 on the way to Fort Wayne. Ironically, it had been founded by John Burkhart, who was one of the political godfathers of the Republican Action Group of which Ned was a great beneficiary. He had built College Life Insurance Company and a number of other enterprises, including the IBJ. And he had this idea in 19[60]— (pauses) he was a poor kid; John Burkhart was a poor kid, who had been given a scholarship to DePauw, and he saw a market in selling life insurance to college kids because, arguably, they would make a good living and need the life insurance and be just a readymade market, so he founded College Life Insurance. Well, he also had all these other entrepreneurial ideas, and he thought that the civil sector of society should make contributions in the public good that were not profit driven, per se, and they weren’t government; that they were independent and truly

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American civic in that really distinctive way. He found this one little model in Massachusetts, where some people had put together a private pool of money that would stand behind—guarantee—a loan for a kid to go to college under the same [model as] life insurance; kind of thinking that there’ll be a risk, but it’s a manageable risk and most of the college students will go on and do something worthwhile and they’ll be able to pay off the money you loan them to go to college. So, he started this little company. It was the second one in the country; started it in 1960.

SEB: USA Funds?

ML: USA Funds. His key staffer—perhaps the only staffer—was a gentleman named W. W. Hill. They called him “Dub” Hill. He ended up being elected to the Senate in Indiana about the same time as the whole revolutionary group got in. But he was the bookkeeper for this business and he kept all these student loan records on little index cards in their office building right across the street, east from Tabernacle Presbyterian Church at Thirty-Fourth and Central. And so, they started this little insurance company and—to stand behind—the first loan went from Indiana National Bank to a young man who wanted to be a chemical engineer, I think. Anyway, he went to Wabash. And when five years later Lyndon Johnson was shopping around for programs for the Great Society, he came across these two little guarantee programs in Massachusetts and Indiana and he wrote lock, stock, and barrel this model into the Higher Education Act of 1965, which was non-profit—the statute made it organize by state, but any little mom-and-pop bank could set up one of these programs in the—the mom-and-pop banks could make these loans available to their constituents. So, it was a nice benefit, if you were in rural Texas, where he’d grown up, or elsewhere. And so, they were going to have a guaranteed student loan program to help people go to college.

Well, John Burkhart and his group were so conservative—because they were rock-ribbed Republicans, they knew that the government would just ruin this whole little business they had built, so they fought it (pauses) hard. They lost. And about twelve years later, they finally signed a contract and became an actual provider of the [federally] guaranteed student loans. But in the meantime, because they had already done it on their own, they went around to all the states that had formed these new programs and said, “We know all about this. We’ll be your back room.” So, they ended up being the biggest knowledge base and then operational base of the guaranteed student loan program. And they had all this nexus with the federal government, but they had nobody in Washington talking to

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people about it; they were just out there. They were computerizing it. One of the smart guys had written a program—

SEB: So, who recruited you?

ML: An independent—the matchmaker was David Gogol, who was a staffer in Dick Lugar’s office. He was the primary Lugar staffer for HUD and was a real city- public policy person. And Dave said, “There’s this company”—so he was— (pauses) by this time, I guess David had—so I worked closely with him during my HUD days and some during Cummins, but by then David had left and formed his own consulting firm. He was consulting and trying to find cities around the state of Indiana that needed his help. Indianapolis was clearly on his list but others as well. And in his scouting, he found this company that had all this business with DC and had nobody representing [them]—and it was more than a consultant coming in once in a while to do—so he said, “They need somebody in DC. Would you be interested in talking with them?” So, I went to talk to them, and they said, “You know, we don’t need much in DC, but we probably should be paying more attention to it. And there is this little notion that the current president”—Bill Clinton—“has about direct lending, which would take away all of our authority to guarantee the loans, and just issue the checks from the federal treasury, but we don’t think it amounts to anything. But we probably should be watching it.” Well, I left Cummins and did go to work for them and spent the next eight years—nine years—fighting direct lending tooth and nail—which we succeeded in. But again, it was working with all the Indiana legislators, but then it was national. So, we had an industry—we had a number of industry groups. The guarantors were one group and there were other allied—

SEB: And you were back and forth to DC all the time.

ML: A lot. So, it was this same kind—

SEB: And then, how did it—Lumina was next after that?

ML: Well, because—

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SEB: How did Lumina connect?

ML: Because USA Funds was a 501c3 incorporated in 1960. Then as the business grew—so, USA Funds just guarantees the loan and they have a bond portfolio that stands behind the loans that—as a risk pool that might have to cover loans that can’t be repaid—they started being a secondary market. So, they’d sell these loans into the market, like Sallie Mae—or they would collect the [payments], so they’d do the collections. And one of the smart guys—as soon as PCs became [desktops], one of the smart guys wrote a little computer program where you’re a college admissions person or a financial aid person, you can sit at your desk in Bloomington, fill out this form, basically, for the student, and they sign it and send it in and the federal money starts to flow. So, it revolutionized the business. Well, it got bigger and bigger, and so they formed an upstream holding company called USA Group. It was still a 501c3 because all of the activity was devoted to education. There were no shareholders. It was an operating non-profit, like a hospital; same kind of principle. It was publicly supported because the revenues came from all kinds of public sources—the federal government, the biggest; many state governments; and then individual fees of lots of different sorts—so they filed a 990 [tax form] every year, which you file for a non-profit.

Eventually it became so big that we really needed more investors, but very few people understood the business and the senior leadership did not want to invite in venture capitalists because they’d want to be on the board and control it. So, they didn’t really want to give up control. But we were competing with so many for- profit companies that it seemed that it was time to maximize the asset, so we did talk with financial people—Wall Street-type people. We found one group that was interested, but they wanted a—as part of the deal we would have to give them a ten-year guarantee that Congress would not change any part of the law, which meant that they didn’t understand the whole business. The entity that did understand it was Sallie Mae.

So, Sallie Mae paid us—we had valuation—opinions, just as you would do in a stock [sale or] any kind of an asset purchase—that valued it, and we sold it to Sallie—we sold the business—the operating assets—so the building, the computers, the book of business, the marketing contacts—all the integrated business that you can think of except for USA Funds, which held these federally guaranteed funds for bonds that are really tied down under the federal statute. All the rest of the assets were sold to Sallie Mae for 770 million dollars, and we took half of that in cash and half of it a little over a million shares of Sallie Mae, which at the time were selling for about—I think it was thirty-one dollars or thirty-two

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dollars a share. And that fall—in the year 2000, Al Gore was running against— (pauses) George Bush?

SEB: I have to think back.

ML: And we were not sure what Al Gore was going to do because he had been Bill Clinton’s vice president. And a long story short, we sold the stock within [six months]—in February for seventy-two or -three dollars a share, so we doubled it. And so, we had a nice little asset of about a billion, three [hundred million dollars] to change our mission. So, if you have an operating 501c3—if you’re Methodist Hospital and you sell to Columbia HCA or you’re the nuns and you sell St. Vincent’s, then you need to either find a new mission or pay taxes on a lot of money you never had to pay [taxes] on before. So, we decided—and we were already a 501c3, so all we had to do was to file a different subset of the [Form] 990. And you reach a decision point of whether you want to commit yourselves to be a public foundation, which means you have to continue to get donations or earned income on some diversified basis from the public—over time, you have to get at least 33 percent of your income from public sources—or you can be a private foundation in which you agree to give away 5 percent of your invested assets every year. We could have kept the public standing for several years—five years at least—and we could have done the whole thing again. I mean, we could have set up a company to guarantee student loans, but we decided to be a private foundation, so we invested the money, hired professional investors, hired a staff—

SEB: And that was Lumina.

ML: And that became Lumina. We had been through this bruising fight for ten years. We were trashed by those who had different points of view. We really needed to move on to a new beginning, and so we named it—

SEB: And you became president of that.

ML: I became president [and] CEO.

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SEB: And how long were you president of that?

ML: Seven years. And that called on a lot of the legal background that I had—the investment decisions, the duties of the board—

SEB: It called on everything, didn’t it?

ML: It called on everything.

SEB: Because you had to have your Washington skills.

ML: And in the meantime, I had headed the Cummins Foundation, and then I had gone on the Indianapolis Foundation and was there when we created the Central Indiana Community Foundation and chaired both of those—

SEB: And you were president of that board.

ML: I was president of that board and I had also been recruited back in the Meridian Mutual days to the Citizen’s Energy board.

SEB: And you became president of that board.

ML: I did—chair. So, all that kind of came together in the civic, legal, philanthropic access.

SEB: Well, it was hugely creative. I mean, you were creating something new and you were having to manage billions of dollars. So where did all the confidence come from that allowed you to think, “I can do this”?

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ML: (laughs) I don’t know. It’s just when I look back over my life—when I tried to jot down some ideas, it seems like I do startups—the violin competition, CICF—I mean, I didn’t do those by myself, but there’s an idea and—

SEB: And you’re good at launching ideas.

ML: Well, and you get some folks together and see, you know, how it can be shaped, civically. In the case of Lumina, we had this asset that had been built in over forty years, but still there are a million different ways to deploy charitable assets. Even once we decided you could choose any—where do you want to start to prepare kids for school? Pre-K? Prenatal? You know, parental education? I mean, it just— there’s a totally open field, and any place along the line you can choose to make an impact and you can choose to do it in many, different ways.

SEB: You were not only having to conceptualize the shape of this building, but you were having to find people.

ML: Right.

SEB: You were having to hire the right people to do the right things. You had to manage a board—the board couldn’t have always been easy to manage—

ML: No.

SEB: —so you had to apply all your people skills, too, and then just hang with it. I mean, you just had to keep going one foot in front of the other, right?

ML: And make mistakes and recover. The first big research thing—study—that we published—because we decided that we wanted to focus on access to and success in education beyond high school for all students but especially for those who have the hardest time—so, first generation, ethnic minorities, poor, and adult students—just statistically—but there wasn’t a lot of research on it, so how do we prove what we know and what we think we know? And how then do we direct the

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resources in the best way? So, one of the things we wanted to do was to publish, and we published a paper and got it on NBC Nightly News and [then] found an error. Made the private schools mad—all the private schools—and so what we learned from that was it’s probably a lot easier to fund people and to say—I mean, do the best job you can and research it, do all your due diligence, but you’re funding them and then it’s their opinion, it’s not your opinion. To be funded by you, they say on it, “This does not represent the policy decisions of Lumina Foundation.” But nevertheless, you get it out and you do massive amounts of communication, but you learn from your mistakes.

SEB: That’s an important thing to learn. During all this time, I know from my own interactions with you that you were integral in the development—a startup, you might say—of groups of women—professional women—who found pleasure in each other’s company, but also found that there was a purpose that could be served that was larger than just a social purpose, although the social purpose was important, just by coalescing around the presence in the community and the success that women were having in their own fields and so forth; and that you played an important part in that. So how did you get drawn into that?

ML: (pauses) When I was at HUD, I had a great lawyer who was the US Attorney at that time. Her name was Sarah Barker and she introduced me—

SEB: I think that’s the first we knew each other.

ML: I think it is, yes. My recollection is I called you up and I said, “You’re my lawyer, and I’d love to get acquainted” and it led to wonderful social and [personal] friendship and professional relationships—not in a direct, lawyerly way but in a wonderfully supportive and understanding, legally-related way. So, thank you for that.

SEB: You know, that was my pleasure, too. But it developed into a cadre—

ML: It did.

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SEB: —of women, and you helped conceptualize that and put it together and do the mechanics of it, as well. So, talk about how you worked this aspect of your life into all of your business work.

ML: Well, we usually found time to have either lunch or dinner once in a while. It wasn’t an every-week thing, but I think that there was a natural—or an understandable— (pauses) I mean, we were busy. We were—all of us were going flat out all the time and for the—well, I should just speak for myself. I had left college and social friendships way behind. I wasn’t involved in the sorority, so I never really got sucked into that. But through band and other group activities, I had had close circles of—Girl Scout troop—close circles of women friends. There were not a lot in my work settings and certainly none in whom I could confide and sort of just let it hang out or trade stories or listen to learn from other people. So, the opportunity of having lunch with you and Sue Shields and Ilene Nagel—and then as we began to—I think there were at least two groups, maybe more than that, who had sort of started to meet and have dinner every once in a while, and then eventually we said, “Well, there must be a whole lot of people who want to do this.” And we did a celebration in—I don’t know what year, mid- eighties?

SEB: Eighty-four was when we had Susan Stamberg.

ML: Okay, well, we had this great program with Susan Stamberg from public radio. She was much younger then, too, and she spoke, and it was stunning. I mean, we had people from all over the state. I think I plumbed the state legislative network, but there were enough women even then—and we had several hundred people. And then a few years later we repeated that with the performance of Priscilla Lindsay.

SEB: At IRT.

ML: At IRT, which was fabulous.

SEB: We had about five or so of those gatherings because there was the one where we honored five women—Jill Ruckelshaus and Marie Lauck and—I can’t remember all the others.

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ML: One of them—Jeannie Hoffmeister—played, I remember. That might have been Susan Stamberg—and people were just so thrilled with the opportunity of getting together with people they knew and didn’t know and then seeing the size of the group—and then we decided we would have this little lunch group that we called “The Gathering,” for lack of a better term, and we started with programs that basically we—at the beginning, I think, we gave the programs. I remember Ann Nobles and I did one on COMMIT. We were trying to reform [K–12] education in Indiana. And other people [in The Gathering] who had projects—she was at Lilly; I was at Cummins. I can’t remember other programs, but it started our tradition of “let’s meet three or four times a year; have a very loose operating approach; bring on new women; bring on diverse women.” And today, we had a lunch at which two of our members—one who is now in Congress, Susan Brooks; and one who ran for mayor, was not elected but serves as deputy mayor, Melina Kennedy— gave us just a super program at The Gathering.

We also—around the same time I was on the IF—the Indianapolis Foundation— and Central Indiana Community Foundation [boards]—started the Women’s Fund and it has—at the time, I was the only woman on the board of the foundations, and one of the more colorful people—men—on the board said he didn’t understand why those women needed a separate foundation. Well, we did a little research study and, of course, presented all kinds of data for why the needs of women and children are significant and important to the community—important to the fabric of the family and the community—and they have assets today. I’ve served various times on that board, but at the time I was the delegate from the Indianapolis Foundation, which gave them the first three to four million dollars. Lilly [Endowment] gave several million dollars as well, two or three—maybe some of that was in matching funds. Today, I think there are assets of about fifteen million—and they’d like to get it up to twenty million—and they’re supporting things, like the Grameen Bank, in Indianapolis to do microlending to women to support in economic independence, health, and welfare.

Another women’s group that we started about the same time, while I was at Cummins, was [with] a couple of our good friends, Judy Singleton and Teresa Lubbers—also big Lugar fans—started the Lugar Excellence in [Public Service] series, which has been running at least thirty years.

SEB: For women.

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ML: For women. And was copied by other people across the country, both Republicans and Democrats, I think, but is still very active in Indiana and has many public leaders today to show for its efforts over the time.

SEB: Yes, it was a leadership development.

ML: It was.

SEB: You also were involved in the Stanley K. Lacy leadership?

ML: I was, and I guess was in an early class. I was in class 5. Today, they’ve just announced recently the class—I think, 37; maybe 38—and I was the moderator of class 34. I think I was the third female moderator.

SEB: And most recently—at least, most recently, that I know of—you’ve almost singlehandedly rescued the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.

ML: Oh (laughs) well, I’ve heavily invested myself in that. I wouldn’t say singlehandedly.

SEB: Well, you came in and took over as president at the time it was really foundering.

ML: It was foundering, but I’m totally indebted to and standing on the shoulders of John Thornburgh, my predecessor as chair. Brilliant business lawyer here in town, who kept a board of eighty people, basically, together and renegotiated a business model that is hopefully sustainable with a whole lot of hard work. But we did— we had a campaign and raised five million dollars from brand new donors during the winter of 2012/13. We raised more than five million dollars from two thousand brand-new donors. Many of those were quite modest in size, a few—ten to twenty five-thousand-dollar, five-year pledges, but many gifts under a hundred dollars—under a dollar even. But we have a name and an address that we can build on. And then some really wonderful loyal donors pledged another 3.2 millon on top of that so that we could enter a new contract with musicians. So, we

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downsized the size of the orchestra. The pay was cut by 30 percent, although it goes up—creeps back up a little bit—under those five years. We cut the staff by half. And, we cut our draw from the endowment from 13 percent last year, which is clearly unsustainable, to 6 percent this year. We’re doing this interview on the twenty-ninth of August. Our fiscal year ends on the thirty-first, which is Saturday, because our concert series goes from September through the summer. We think we will see a balanced budget, which will be the first time in eighteen years, based on a reasonable draw. And we set ourselves a goal of 9.8 million dollars in contributions. So out of the winter campaign, three million of that gets put into this year. We didn’t know until maybe a week or so ago whether we really could make the 9.8. It looks like we may.

SEB: Yes—wow, that’s wonderful!

ML: But we have to double it. We have to get up to more than 12 million in five years because the wages do creep back up. So, it’s been an incredible undertaking. I am totally in awe and indebted to Yvonne Shaheen, another member of our Gathering group, who is just a force of nature. She’s done this for the Children’s Museum. This year she’s becoming the president of WFYI’s board.

SEB: Is she?

ML: She’s promising me she will keep the symphony first and foremost because I hope she’ll serve another year as our development chairman. And then we’ve recruited fabulous new staff who are just adding amazing energy and ideas and capability because we have lost all the senior staff in this reset. But it’s—I mean, it was—I was first approached—I did not seek; I had no idea of doing this—I was approached in November of ’11, and it was clear—because their union contract was up in September of ’12 —that it was going to be extremely painful. There had been two previous contracts and contract extensions, which should have seen revision and did not, so we were taking more and more out of the endowment. And literally after I accepted I— (laughs) one night I was stewing about it and I collapsed on the bedroom floor and went straight to see my cardiologist the next day—because we did not know what the next year was going to bring and it brought—we locked—ended up losing all the senior staff; not agreeing with the union and therefore having to lock out [the whole symphony] for six to eight weeks; not beginning the season [on schedule]—

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SEB: Well, I remember that time—

ML: It was tough.

SEB: —and I remember how stressful it was. What do you think it is about you, Martha, that when these asks are made of you and you’re sought out to do something and you’re invited and tapped or whatever verb you want, you’re so courageous about saying yes and not being daunted by the fact that you’ve never done it before or that it’s going to be hard or that there’ll be some aspects of it that are painful, like when you have to cut staff, when it’s going to be highly visible so that your efforts will be viewed and evaluated in the public—so there’s a lot at stake in these requests—where does that capacity to say yes come from?

ML: I don’t know. I just know that the Christian tradition says that to whom much is given, much is expected, and at this point in my life—I said at the time and I know even more today, “I’m not the best person for this job. It really should be a major CEO, major family wealth, major civic presence.” But you know, there was a lot at stake and we didn’t have that luxury on the board.

SEB: But on all of these, there’s always been a lot at stake. I mean, every time—every point of transition in your life—that’s what I was saying, every time. The orchestra is just one version of it, but there are all these aspects to it that would perhaps prompt someone else to opt out, but not you. And so here you are—I mean, really in such an exemplary way—stepping up to do everything you can and even more than anybody by rights ought to ask you. So, that’s an unusual capacity; that’s really—

ML: You do it. You have life and death—

SEB: No, it’s really your hallmark; that when you look back over these years you’d have to say that that is a defining quality by your life, don’t you think that’s true?

ML: Well, thank you for saying so.

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SEB: It’s supposed to be your oral history, but I feel like I can say that here to make you agree with me.

ML: Oh, well, thank you. You know, looking back I just—first child, aim high; Girl Scouts, you can do it. You can do a lot of different things. You can make mistakes. It doesn’t have to be the prettiest and the best, although it’s better if it is. (pauses) Determination. Showing up—I’ll show up. I’ll do the best I can. Civic engagement just matters a lot to me. And given my history and interests— music, I think, adds to the cultural and the finer side of life, but it also provides a discipline and a way for many people to participate. If you think of how many people participate in church choirs—and we have a little group that we adopted at the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra called the Metropolitan Youth Orchestra, started by a totally devoted African American string teacher on her own after school—she was a school teacher—after school. Eventually we adopted it to help with [its] fund-raising. Today we have our first student in Juilliard. The key to this program is a family member comes and plays with the child. And the mothers there will say, “The reason my child is not in prison or dead is because”—and so providing—the educational program really is one of my deepest interests, although I’ve come to understand in the business model, if you don’t have the orchestra, then you don’t have the educational program. And the orchestra is what costs the money.

SEB: I know you get immersed in these things and it’s all-consuming, but in the course of it, do you allow yourself to think in terms of your legacy? That this is the lasting effect that you want to have associated with you in your lifetime? Do you allow yourself that satisfaction?

ML: Well, I think about what my legacy will be. It’s a work in progress because of challenges. Still going to be out there. And my next challenge is to find my successor and to be sure that that’s the right kind of person to—

SEB: But there’s no possibility, is there? No realistic possibility that after you finish this stint and find a successor that that’ll be the last in this string of—

ML: Well, Yvonne is seventy-eight, so, you know, as long as somebody asks me to do something—

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SEB: I don’t think there’s any chance (laughs) that this is going to be your swan song here.

ML: I don’t know. But I will—

SEB: There’ll be something else and someone will come along and you’ll—

ML: You know, if I get to help out where I can is—

SEB: What would you say to young women coming along who haven’t had to break down quite so many barriers, although they face their own challenges? What have you learned that you would share with the next generation—men or women? What are your keys?

ML: (pauses) Well, for me volunteering was really the door to every career opportunity I had, either because of the subject matter or the people that I met. And in volunteering you can do anything, and you meet people that you would never meet in stature, station, or business niche—professional niche. There is just unlimited opportunity for growth in every way. I learned about investment by sitting on the CTS board. It had an endowment of less than twenty-five million, but it had this brilliant guy from Cummins who chaired it and brought in all the investment managers. And all the insurance company heads in Indianapolis would come to that meeting because they wanted to hear what these fancy people said. I mean, the real—so you just—the opportunity for professional development is just amazing, so volunteering. In practical terms, learning how to manage up is just huge in every aspect where that plays out. I think trying to be generous of spirit while holding high standards and high expectations—I think most people will strive to meet high expectations. And one of my biggest fears for our country at the moment is we do not have high expectations for all of our youth and we’re just slogging toward mediocrity for a great proportion of the public. And so, having high standards—whether it is in the profession or in school work—and providing opportunity for those who have a lot less—or less than a lot less on many fronts, I— (pauses)

SEB: What about balancing all your many roles?

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ML: Well, I’ve concluded that I can do almost—oh, well, this is a little bit—almost everything that I want to do, but I can’t do it all at one time, so something’s going to slide. Checks are not going to get cashed. The house is not going to be cleaned. The mail hasn’t been sorted. The children aren’t tended, or a report isn’t done on time. I think it comes in stages. And one of the hardest things in a career, I think, is—especially in those early years with trying to balance a marriage, children— and we know that statistics say that married people with children are the least happy stage in life. Statistically, it’s hard. And, trying to be present—I think one of the finest—I don’t think I’m [always great] at this, but one of the finest things that a dear friend has ever said to me was that I was the most present of any person he ever knew. And he had seen me at home in intimate family situations; professionally; publicly; and otherwise. I’m not always present, but it meant a lot to me that—

SEB: But I know why your friend said that because it is one of your wonderful qualities. You pay attention—

ML: Well, trying “to be” is so important in every setting. We have a saying on our refrigerator at home that “the first duty of love is to listen.” And colleagues have a lot to offer, they really do. And as I said earlier, I’d never supervised anybody when I went to HUD. Marjorie [Walls], a friend of mine who worked for Indiana Bell—who was an actual business person—before I went to HUD for my first day, loaned me a Peter Drucker book about general management. And the lesson that I took from that book was: up until you finish formal education you are paid in grades and other recognition to know all the answers. It’s your duty to soak up every single thing and to give the [professors] whatever it is they want. When you go to work in business, your job is to ask questions. And when I went to HUD and I inherited this office, some wonderful people—some people who said, you know, “Here’s another [political appointee]. She’ll leave in four or five years”—which I did—“but we can out last her”—they knew everything about what I needed to know. All I knew was I had some people who believed in me in Washington and elsewhere and my job was to ask questions—and I am not as good at it as you by a wide margin, but hopefully legal training also helped in trying to ask questions. And you don’t know—it’s fun to learn. It really is. The variety of my career and volunteer opportunities has always presented the opportunity to learn—and I’m learning about symphony orchestras, stuff that I never—

SEB: So, one of your keys has to be to find ways to embark on a lifetime of learning.

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ML: Yes.

SEB: And you learn most effectively if you ask and you listen.

ML: And listen and do. So, try it and see what works and fail quickly. (laughs) That’s what all the venture capitalists say—“Fail quickly and then do the next thing.” So—I mean, that’s a little cavalier when people’s lives are at stake, but still—

SEB: Any regrets?

ML: Oh, I think we covered—moving away from my parents, that was painful. I do love the West. Like to figure out how to get back there, but it’s complicated. Indiana is a wonderful home. It has been a fabulous, welcoming, very comfortable—comfortable and challenging in many of the right ways—home. That I wasn’t more present for my children; that I wasn’t smarter—

SEB: You gave them other gifts.

ML: Hopefully. That I wasn’t smarter at times, particularly in managing up. I don’t— I’m not as accomplished a public speaker as I wish I were. Still some things to work on—that I haven’t traveled. I would love to travel.

SEB: You’re widely traveled.

ML: A little, not much, but maybe the Christel House board will give me—you know.

SEB: Yes.

ML: You know.

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SEB: Yes. Well, shall we regard that as complete?

ML: Yes. That’s a long time. I am sorry.

SEB: It’s a wonderful life, Martha, and more to come. That’s the real good part about this—the real blessing of it. And it will be wonderful to see what is next for you, but I bet all those wonderful qualities that have influenced you to date and brought you to this point will continue on.

ML: You are wonderful friend, mentor, and interviewer—interrogator. (laughter) Thank you.

SEB: Well, in all the ways that your work has taken you in the direction of business and finance and so forth, all I know how to do is ask one question after another, so this played to my strength today. So—

ML: Thank you.

SEB: Okay, I love you.

ML: This was a gift. I love you.

END OF RECORDING

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