Interview with Dawn Clark Netsch # ISL-A-L-2010-013.01 Interview # 1: March 19, 2010 Interviewer: Mark DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge. DePue: Today is Friday, March 19, 2010. My name is Mark DePue; I’m the Director of Oral History at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. I’m here this afternoon with Senator Dawn Clark Netsch in her office at Northwestern University School of Law. Good afternoon, Senator. Netsch: Good afternoon. DePue: You’re one of those people who could go by a variety of titles. Netsch: I’ve got so many different titles. (laughs) And some that I probably don’t want to know about. DePue: But “senator” is okay? Netsch: That’s fine. Yeah, that’s fine. DePue: Well, I’m delighted to have a chance to talk to you. You’ve been on our list of people we wanted to interview for a long, long time. Officially, this is part of the Jim Edgar Oral History Project, but as we discussed before we began here just now, hopefully you’re willing to cover much more than that, because you’ve had a long and important position in Illinois politics since the 1960s. Netsch: Yes. Well, it certainly has been long, that’s for sure. (laughs) Right. Dawn Clark Netsch Interview # ISL-A-L-2010-013.01 DePue: Since Otto Kerner. Netsch: Right. DePue: So let’s start at the beginning, as I always do. Tell me when and where you were born. Netsch: Goodness. I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio—the only easterner in my family. They considered Ohio east because they were all from the west. I was born on September 16, 1926, which makes me eighty-three years old right now. (laughs) DePue: Well, you’re doing extremely well. Netsch: Thank you. DePue: And just by the look of your office, you keep a very busy schedule. Netsch: Very, very, yes. DePue: Okay. Are you still teaching? Netsch: Not this semester, at the moment, but I am still on the faculty emeritus , and I taught last year, and presumably I will next year. DePue: Excellent. Tell me a bit about your family, your parents. Netsch: Well, my father was, I suppose you’d say, a businessman in effect, whose business was destroyed by the Depression. So I grew up as a Depression child as well as a World War II child, which I maintain is why I am so thrifty. My husband always said I was just plain tight. (laughter) I said, “You know, we had to be careful about things when we grew up.” DePue: I understand you father was also a World War I veteran? Netsch: He was a World War I and World War II. He went back into the service in World War II and served in North Africa, in—I guess it was, what, the Marshall Islands, I think, in the South Pacific eventually, and then was involved in the activity of flying things over the Hump into China. DePue: So he was in the Army Air Force? Netsch: He was in the Air Force, yeah. DePue: Well, it’s unusual that you go from the European theater all the way out to the Pacific and then to the Burma theater, I would guess, where he was doing the Hump. 2 Dawn Clark Netsch Interview # ISL-A-L-2010-013.01 Netsch: Well, he was not really—I’m trying to think—he wasn’t in Europe in World War II; that was World War I. DePue: Okay, I thought you said North Africa, though. Netsch: I did. No, I don’t consider that Europe, but… (laughs) But he was in North Africa, yeah, very much so there. I’m not sure. He obviously was not flying airplanes but was involved in construction, because that had been his life’s work, in a sense, and knew something about that. DePue: Constructing air strips and things like that? Netsch: I think involved in things of that sort, yes. DePue: What did he do in the First World War? Netsch: Well, two things. One, he was very much in the trenches at one point, because I know the story that I’ve always been told—and I should be clearer about these things—is he was actually gassed at one time. DePue: Was he in the infantry? Netsch: Well, it was the Army. I don’t know that it was all divided up that much. Yes, I assume it was. Yes, yeah. And the other thing (laughs) that at some point during the course of World War I, he ended up on the AEF, American Expeditionary Force, championship football team. Now, I have no idea how much of his service abroad that took, (laughs) but I know it happened at some point. DePue: I think it’s better than being in the trenches and being gassed. Netsch: Yes, yes. Right. And I think that let to a—I assume it must have been a scholarship at Harvard after the war. He had started at Colorado College before the war and then went to Harvard afterwards. I’m sure he could not have afforded it, so there must have been a football scholarship or something involved in it for a while. DePue: Was your father from Colorado originally, then? Netsch: Oh, yes. DePue: What was his name? Netsch: William Keith Clark. DePue: And your mother. Netsch: Was a social worker. 3 Dawn Clark Netsch Interview # ISL-A-L-2010-013.01 DePue: Her name? Netsch: Hazel Dawn Harrison Clark. I’m one of those last of the, what I call sort of unique minorities, pure WASP. 1 Not many of us left. (laughs) DePue: Well, can you be more specific in terms of the ethnic background? Do you know what countries they had come from in Europe? Netsch: The only thing I know really is—I mean, my mother’s name was Harrison; her mother’s name was Gatewood. You know, it’s just English all the way through. DePue: Clark is certainly— Netsch: Clark is Scotch. It can be Irish also, but I understand that in my family’s name, Scotch. DePue: Does that mean you have either Presbyterian or Episcopalian in the background as well? Netsch: Well, actually, I was christened in high Episcopal when I was three months old or something like that, but I did not stay with them, in an Episcopal Church, no. (laughs) DePue: Was the family not strongly religious when you were growing up? Netsch: They were not strongly religious. We went to Sunday School, yes, but there was not a strong religious streak. DePue: What was your father’s business? Netsch: Well, the business that I remember mostly, of course, is what he came to Cincinnati to do. He built up, and I guess really owned, a company that made cinder blocks. 2 At that time pretty neat, well-regarded cinder blocks for construction purposes. That was the business that the Depression ultimately took, as it took everybody else’s, practically. DePue: Any other siblings? Netsch: I had one brother. He was three years older. DePue: Tell me more about growing up in the Depression. What memories do you have about that time period? Because it was tough for everybody, and I assume your father, losing his business, had a hard time finding other employment. 1 White Anglo-Saxon Protestants 2 Early name for concrete blocks 4 Dawn Clark Netsch Interview # ISL-A-L-2010-013.01 Netsch: Yeah. Well, he managed to do that. I don’t think he was ever for any long period of time, because he was pretty bright and knew that kind of business well. But he ended up working for Proctor & Gamble, I think initially. That may have been the first thing he did after the business finally sort of went under. DePue: Did the family have to move when he found work, or…? Netsch: Well, within Cincinnati, yes, because he had built a house out of these marvelous cinder blocks, which was really a very nice house in a nice suburb. Not a mansion—I don’t mean that at all—but it was just very nice. Obviously eventually we had to give that up and lived in more modest circumstances. But, you know, I was never hungry, without food or clothing or shelter or something like that as so many other people were during that period of time. But I think that was the time also when my mother really went back to work as a social worker, and obviously spent a huge amount of time with the people who were at the absolute bottom of the economic ladder, many of them from what then we called the basin of the city, which was where the poorest people in Cincinnati lived.