Eileen Lingham Walker
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EILEEN LINGHAM WALKER. Born 1941. Transcript of OH 1314 This interview was recorded on Nov. 17 and 24, 2001, for the Voices of Black Women of Boulder County Oral History Project, directed by University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Polly McLean. The interviewer is Anthony Harper. The interview was transcribed by Sandy Adler. NOTES: Interviewer’s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in parentheses. ABSTRACT: Eileen Lingham Walker, whose family on her father’s side has lived in Boulder since the 1890s, talks about the family’s history here, including the founding of the Second Baptist Church by her grandparents, her experience of growing up as one of a small number of African American students in Boulder during the 1940s and 1950s, the role of religion in her life, and her close-knit family and neighborhood. She also talks about her career in medical technology and the missionary and ministry work with which she is involved. [A]. 00:00 (OK, go head and state your full name.) Eileen Lingham Walker. (So Lingham, is that your—?) Maiden name. (That’s your maiden name? And Walker. OK. Have you ever gone by any other names? If so, what are they?) Not really. They call me Leenie sometimes. I think I got that more from my Navy days. (Navy days! I hope I brought enough tape! [laughs] So tell me what you remember most about your childhood.) That could be a leading question. What do I remember most about my childhood? It was good. Boulder was a smaller town then. It was pretty good. My older brother and older sister and I and then my younger brother following me, we all went to school at Whittier. We lived on 24th and Mapleton in a two-story house. We lived right on a corner. There was a dirt road between us and our neighbors across the street. We spent a lot of time in that street area playing baseball. One of the neat things was, my dad found out that my sister and I liked to ice skate. Actually, we got some ice skates for Christmas, and a neighbor, when it snowed this one time, there was like a big kind of pool of ice or water, it was water at one time and it froze up at night, and we tried to ice skate out there, and my dad saw that. We had a flat back yard, a big back yard. He shoveled it, put the snow to the side, filled it with water and made an ice skating rink. Well, when the neighbors found out that we had that, then we had all the neighbors to our house using the skating rink. That was kind of a neat time. We learned how to ice skate then. Having all the neighbors, we had neighbors of all kinds, Hispanic, Caucasian. There weren’t too many blacks. There weren’t hardly any blacks. In fact, my sister going through school and my older brother and myself and my younger brother were probably the only ones in our class, though there were other black people in Boulder. I think they went to Lincoln. We were the only ones at Whittier. Probably the only ones at Casey Junior High. And then when we went to Boulder High, there were very few of us there. So we were probably the only ones. (While you were growing up, were you aware of the low percentage of blacks in your area?) I think we probably did, but we kind of made—like, we met with, because our church was mainly a black church, so we met with others. Yeah, I’m pretty sure we knew there weren’t very many, didn’t notice very many in Boulder. We were fairly well integrated. Whoever was in the neighborhood, they were our friends. So it wasn’t a big deal. (So seeing very few blacks in that area, how would you describe your relationship with your siblings?) It was pretty good. My older brother always seemed a lot older. We didn’t play around a lot with him. My sister was a year-and-a-half older than I was, so we played a lot during our growing-up years. (So you pretty much integrated with kids your age as opposed to—?) Yeah. 04:54 (Did you have any brothers and sisters? Of course you did. What are their names, and tell me a little bit about each of them.) My older brother, his name, we call him Reggie, but it’s Reginald Irving Lingham. He’s the oldest in the family. Seemed like he was a lot older, but he wasn’t, he’s probably about five years older than me. I think he’s about five years older than me. He did some sports in Boulder and then as soon as he graduated from high school went into the Navy, got to travel around the world. We have a lot of relatives in California, in the San Francisco area, so after he got out of the Navy, he ended up staying out there. He’s still out there, in California. They really like that area. He did some sports, yeah, football, I’m not sure he did basketball. I know he did football. He’s still a sports person. Janice Lingham Osborne is about a year and a half older than I am. She took piano. All of us took an instrument. Both my brothers play the horn. I play the piano a little bit, cello in junior high and high school, a little bit of piano. My sister played piano all the way through and was a music major in college. What else can I say about my sister? She’s a pretty good sister. She lives in Aurora now. She’s probably more a historical person than I am, but we both like history. I don’t know, pertinent information. When we went down to Denver to visit friends, like with my mother, she would stick up for me being a younger sister, fight for me. She went into such things in high school as the speech club. She liked to speak. And still does. She ended up, after going through high school she went to Adams State College. She didn’t get her degree from Adams State but ended up getting her degree from Colorado Women’s College after the kids and everything. And married Garland Osborne. I don’t know exactly what all you need. (So you have an older brother and an older sister?) And then I have a younger brother. (Tell us a little about him.) Kendall. Let’s see, Janice is in Aurora. Kendall is in Longmont. He came up after us and he went through the same schools, Whittier, Casey, Boulder High. After Boulder High he went to college. He went to CSU, got a degree in art, and then went back east, got married, returned back here. That’s one of his art pictures up there. He studied art a lot. And the pictures were so good up at CSU that they confiscated a lot of them. They really liked his work. They’re still up there, some of his artwork. But he’s living and working in Longmont right now, not doing his artwork, but doing other kinds of stuff. (What kind of influence did your parents have on you and your siblings growing up?) They were always—my mother was around more, but she always encouraged us to be honest, to get along with people, to love people, forgive people. She was a giving person, a very giving person. So we kind of all grew up with that, to treat everybody the way you like to be treated. She was very influential with us in that area. Then my dad was more like a discipline person. He disciplined kids in the family. He went through CU. He went through the same schools that we did. In fact, he was born in Boulder and his family came to Boulder in the 1890s. His mother and father, his father was out here. I think he had a connection with the railroad, Frank Lingham. His mother, Lulu Lingham, already had a sister, an older sister, and her husband and family living in Boulder in the 1890s. One of their kids got—I think it was one of their kids got sick. Somebody in the family got sick, and they sent back to Kentucky to send another family member to help out, a teenager, and that’s how my grandmother came out to Colorado. She came out here and she met Frank Lingham and they got married in the 1890s and they built the house on 2001—it’s now Mesa Drive, but it used to be North Street. It’s a brick house. Still there. 10:46 (Is that the house you grew up in?) No. But they were there. Actually, my dad built a house next door to it when we were in junior high. We lived on Goss Street for a while and then we moved to Mapleton and then we moved to Mesa Drive, which is next to my grandmother’s house, when we were growing up. Actually, when we were real little, my dad—the lot was big enough that my dad built a rock house, a smaller house in the back yard, because there was plenty of room. He was the one who encouraged us in our studies, was on us to keep up with our math and music and our reading and stuff like that.