Oral History Center University of California the Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

JoAnn Fowler

JoAnn Fowler: Building the Foundations of SLATE

The SLATE Oral History Project

Interviews conducted by Amanda Tewes in 2020

Since 1953 the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and JoAnn Fowler dated September 17, 2020. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

For information regarding quoting, republishing, or otherwise using this transcript, please consult http://ucblib.link/OHC-rights.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

JoAnn Fowler, "JoAnn Fowler: Building the Foundations of SLATE" conducted by Amanda Tewes in 2020, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2021.

JoAnn Fowler, circa 2018

Abstract

JoAnn Fowler is a retired Spanish language educator and was a founding member of the University of California, Berkeley student political organization SLATE in the late 1950s. Fowler grew up in Los Angeles, California. She attended UC Berkeley from 1955-1959, where she became active in SLATE and served in student government through Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC). After completing a master's degree at Columbia University, she worked as a teacher, mostly in Davis, California. In this interview, Fowler discusses growing up in Los Angeles in the 1930s-1950s, including the racial and social dynamics of East Los Angeles; attending UC Berkeley in the 1950s, including expectations for women and concerns about freedom of speech; the origins of SLATE, including influential figures and balancing different political perspectives; running for and serving on ASUC in the late 1950s, along with Mike Gucovsky, as the first SLATE members to do so; and SLATE's impact on her leadership skills and interest in labor organizing.

Table of Contents

Interview 1: September 10, 2020

Hour 1 1

Birth in February 1938, childhood in East Los Angeles — Racial diversity in Boyle Heights — Multiculturalism in Boyle Heights — Elementary school activities during World War II — Military culture in Los Angeles — Maternal grandmother's children as prisoners of war in World War II — Background of maternal grandparents — Maternal grandparents' work in Los Angeles — Family life of father — Relationship with father during her college years — Father's association with Communist Party — Political environment of childhood neighborhood — Lack of political formation prior to college years — Influence of high school counselor in decision to attend University of California, Berkeley — High school jobs — Living in a co-op in Berkeley, California — Friends in Hoyt Hall co-op during freshman year — Panty raid at co-op — Experience of being a woman at UC Berkeley during 1950s, lack of female students on campus — Jobs in co-op, experience as social chairman — Curfew of co-op, reasons for leaving the co-op — Nondiscrimination work, community housing report — Understanding of McCarthyism at UC Berkeley campus — Reaction to communist label at first SLATE meeting, impact on political activism — Impact of Loyalty Oath on campus freedom of speech — Recruitment by Mike Miller for SLATE — Influential figures in first SLATE group: Fritjof Thygeson; William Carey McWilliams, Jr.; Hank di Suvero; Pat Hallinan — First impressions of SLATE, political identities of first group — Perspective on graduate students — Towards an Active Student Community — Role in first meetings, formation of SLATE in 1958 — Representation of majority view, limited presence of women in first meetings — Lowest significant common denominator concept — Key ideas of SLATE during formation — Political agreements in SLATE — Musical aspect of first SLATE meetings — Personal politics — Activities in San Francisco with SLATE members

Interview 2: September 17, 2020

Hour 1 19

Concerns about involvement in SLATE, visit from Russian students — Nature of involvement in SLATE protests, public activities — Spring 1958 campaign for UC Berkeley student government, Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) — Issues addressed by SLATE campaign — Public speaking for campaign — SLATE candidates in spring 1958 race, Fowler and Mike Gucovsky as winners — Struggle to establish SLATE as permanent political party, positive impact of SLATE — Pride in being one of first SLATE members to reach student government, shortcomings during term — August 1958 trip for National Student Association Conference, debate on whether ASUC should remain part of NSA — Organization of meeting for SLATE at University of

California, Los Angeles — Impact of personal leadership experience in SLATE — Involvement in Davis Teachers Association — Bittersweet view of SLATE memories, social aspect of SLATE — Relationships with SLATE members, regret regarding lack of relationships with women in SLATE — Lack of gender representation on campus — Discrimination against women in teaching, including personal experience in Chicago — Graduation from UC Berkeley with honors in 1959, move to New Jersey with husband to pursue master's degree at Columbia University — Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley — Speaking skills gained from being in SLATE — Lack of political activism at Columbia — Move to Davis, California, 1965 — Activism for administrative change in Davis workplaces — Above-average academic environment of Davis High School — Five years of student trips to Mexico — Teaching trip to Spain, late 1960s — Development of six-week program for students in Spain — Involvement in Advanced Placement Program, last years of teaching career at Davis High School in 1990s — Introduction to second husband in 1984, differences in political views — Reasons for not attending SLATE reunion in 1984 — Research on SLATE members during COVID-19 pandemic, process of participating in oral history project — Comparison of political activism between students in the United States and Latin American countries — Political and religious differences between California and Texas — Berkeley as an ideal environment for SLATE — Reflection on personal legacy — Personal impact of SLATE

Interview 1: September 10, 2020

01-00:00:05 Tewes: This is a first interview with JoAnn Fowler for the SLATE Oral History Project. The interview is being conducted by Amanda Tewes on September 10, 2020. Ms. Fowler joins this remote interview from Davis, California, and I'm in Walnut Creek, California. So thank you so much for speaking with me today. Let's start at the beginning: when and where were you born?

01-00:00:27 Fowler: Okay. I was born in East Los Angeles. I was born in probably the county hospital, Los Angeles County Hospital, in 1938, February 25.

01-00:00:42 Tewes: And did you grow up in Los Angeles?

01-00:00:44 Fowler: Yes, I grew up [there]. My grandparents raised me, my maternal grandparents, and I lived in an area called Boyle Heights. It's a part of East Los Angeles, which was very—it was called a melting pot, which now may not be the thing to say, maybe you can say that it has multiple cultures. It was primarily composed of Mexicans who recently migrated, plus Mexican Americans who had been there a long time, and then Japanese—the same thing, who had been there for a while and those who had recently migrated—and a lot of Jewish people that had come from Russia and Poland. Those were the three principal nationalities represented, and there were very few people that weren't Jewish or Japanese American or Mexican American. It was an interesting experience, because now, if you went back to Boyle Heights now, it's all Latino, it's 96 percent Latino. Where then, it was, let's say, 30-30-20-10, something like that.

01-00:01:58 There was a gang, there was a large Mexican gang, and early in my childhood I became aware of it, because I joined the gang briefly. I had a little clubhouse, participated in the gangs until some girl punched me in the stomach and so I withdrew at that point, but I was never afraid. Gang activity was far away, except when I was in high school the student body president was knifed at a party, and so you were always sort of aware of it. Does that give you a brief idea of what the neighborhood was like, Amanda?

01-00:02:36 Tewes: Yeah. Well, I'm interested in this idea that it was a very mixed—culturally and ethnically—neighborhood, but what did that mean in practice in—

01-00:02:47 Fowler: Right. In practice, the neighborhood delicatessen was Canter's, it was a famous Jewish delicatessen, and you could have a corned beef sandwich or you could buy a big pickle for a nickel. Or you could go walk down the block and you could have a burrito. In church, I went to church, the Catholic church in the beginning, and the snacks outside would be Mexican, maybe brown

sugar kind of cones that's almost solid brown sugar. There'd be Mexican treats. The swimming in the high school was at the Boys and Girls Club, and I think it was Jewish, and the Hillel was obviously Jewish. They [gathered] youth of all nationalities together. My upbringing has always been to help all minorities, because later on in life when I had opportunities here in Davis to sponsor young people, [I did]. They are always from abroad, they are always from different [cultures].

01-00:03:58 Let's see, in grammar school, I went to Lorena Street [Elementary] School, and everything was in walking distance. [During] World War II and with the Korean War later on, but World War II, we had bond drives and we had paper drives. We gathered our dimes—my friend said they were pennies—but we gathered whatever money we had on Friday and contributed to a war bond, which I guess the school bought. I'm not too sure how it worked. I had an uncle in the Pacific and I had cousins that were in the war, too, and I would make cookies and I would write to them, and I also wrote to students. This was encouraged by the school, maybe whatever teacher, the fifth-grade teacher, to write to other children who had less than we had and to send them things, send them used Crayolas and send them pencils. The school was very active in getting children to be aware of what was happening in other nations and what was happening in the world. It was a very good experience and—

01-00:04:58 Tewes: Well, and Los Angeles was a military town, especially during World War II. Did you get a sense of, I don't know, troop mobilization or anything like that?

01-00:05:09 Fowler: No, no, except that when Japanese left, I was very aware of something happening to the Japanese. My neighbor, a Mexican family next door—I used to play Monopoly with them—their boy went off to the service, he went off to be a pilot. I think it was that. I got a phone call—my grandparents didn't speak a lot of English or they weren't home—and so I was asked what kind of a person he was and general characteristics, and I was just a kid. And so you knew that they were interested in what kind of people they were inducting into the military, and I'm sure that happened to my cousins, too.

01-00:05:41 I remember going to a dance with my grandparents, and I was young, I was maybe twelve years old, but I remember it was a military dance because you danced with all of the military boys who were there. I would see people in uniform when we went downtown. I went downtown frequently with my girlfriends—this is when I'm in high school—to do different things, and, yes, there were a lot of military there.

01-00:06:05 But the interesting part that I didn't share with you is that my grandmother is married to somebody else when she first comes [to the United States], and she

has four children. Two of those children were in World War II, but her husband took the four children and went back to Italy. So my grandmother's two children—they were twins—fought on the Italian side in the war, and so they were prisoners of war in California during my childhood. Maybe I'm in junior high, and we go out—it's near Oxnard or someplace out there. We have to drive about an hour and a half away, and we'd visit them in this war camp. She's written up in the LA Times, and I don't have that article anymore. Her maiden name was Danze, D-A-N-Z-E, but I don't remember her first married name. She's written up because they're American citizens, they were born in West Virginia. It was an interesting case. I didn't tell you that before. I don't know if it fits into this background.

01-00:07:10 Tewes: No, that is really interesting and a good segue. Please tell me about your grandparents and your family life growing up.

01-00:07:18 Fowler: Okay, my grandparents met in West Virginia, and she was married to somebody else, who went back to Italy with the four children. He committed suicide, so he had problems. She may have come with money, because I know she had a boarding house and she met my grandfather there. She was pregnant with my mother, and this is about—I think it's like 1917, and then they moved to Colorado, right? Oh, my grandfather worked in the mines in West Virginia. He didn't like the mines; it was really bad for his health. They left there, and I think they went to some relatives in Colorado. In the meantime, I have to tell you that my grandfather had a brother, and my grandfather's brother married my [grand]mother's sister, so two brothers married two sisters. This is a big, Italian family, and they were [proud] of being Italian, and they [all] moved to Los Angeles.

01-00:08:23 My grandparents always worked very hard. I thought of them as being poor, but in the neighborhood that we lived in, my grandparents weren't poor, because my grandparents had a big house [and a restaurant]. One day, I let everybody lick my ice cream cone, and my grandfather said, "You don't do that. You buy everybody an ice cream." I remember that they were highly thought of [there]. If you were to judge them by this—I think they're just working class, that's what they are, they're working-class people.

01-00:08:55 Okay, so my grandfather finds a job in Los Angeles in a company. I remember it was called Braun. [Wernher von] Braun is a famous [rocket] scientist who works for the Nazis. And so my grandfather gets a job in this Braun Manufacturing Company [Inc.], I guess it is, and maybe he's a janitor there and maybe he's a machinist, but I know he [joins] the Machinists Union. My grandmother is a cook, a good cook, an excellent cook. She's at the Biltmore in Los Angeles and then she's at a cafeteria called the Pig 'N Whistle. And then they have their own restaurant, the Hilltop Cafe, and it's on Hill Street in

downtown Los Angeles, and it attracts a lunch crowd. I can remember when he gets up very early in the morning and the house is deserted, 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, to buy vegetables, and she's—my grandmother's in this [business] with another lady called DeGrazio, the family name is DeGrazio and they're neighbors. And so these two ladies were in this restaurant with my grandfather's help, and they get home very late at night.

01-00:10:03 Later on, I find out that this is how my dad meets my mother, because my dad runs away from his Mormon family in Ogden, Utah. My [paternal] grandfather apparently is the poorest, least responsible—he may drink and smoke, I'm pretty sure about that, because I read it in the genealogy of this huge Mormon family. My dad comes [to] Los Angeles and goes to work first at some market with his twin brother. He has a twin brother. My dad comes from a big family; maybe they're eight or nine children. His mom took in wash to make the family function. He taught himself how to read, and he read by light in the railroad station. There was no electricity in his home.

01-00:10:03 Okay. So, my dad then goes to work for my grandfather's restaurant, and that's where he meets my mother. I don't find this out really until college, and that's where I really connect with my dad. My dad becomes influential in my life at that point because he lives in Belmont, [south] of San Francisco. He has a second wife and a second family, and he works at Blum's in San Francisco. It's a famous bakery. I don't know if it's still there; probably you wouldn't know. It was very elegant. Maybe it was attached to Jay Magnin or I. Magnin. I'd go there in college and wait for him to pick me up and then I'd spend the weekends my first two years with him and his family, and I got to know him better.

01-00:11:42 That's when he tells me what his views are, that he almost joined the Communist Party. I didn't know this before. I mean, I am a college student, and he is very anxious to read everything I have, all my books, my anthropology books, my history books. And so he reads them, and he tells me where he stands. He never said he joined the Communist Party—he skirted around that—but he said that everyone in those days was so poor and were so affected by the Depression that he felt that there were a number of people who joined who didn't say so or who believed and maybe weren't too vocal about it. So then, I knew that he was much more political than my grandparents, and he certainly influenced me, because I admired him for doing all this by himself.

01-00:12:25 Tewes: Yeah, I would love to hear more about your grandparents' political views and that environment that you grew up in.

01-00:12:32 Fowler: Right. My grandfather was in touch with people in Italy. You know, he never lost tie, connection—maybe his brother, too. During World War II, I remember that they all were anti-Hitler, and he would get pictures of these people, they're [at] Auschwitz and they were murdered and dumped in a big pit, and so I saw those pictures as a child. My grandparents were quite aware of what was going on in World War II and how the Jews had been persecuted—and other people later on, too, but first the Jews—and they were very upset by that. And so they were very anxious [for the US to enter] the war. I didn't know [Franklin D.] Roosevelt at the time was holding back, I had no idea. But the fact that he didn't enter the war later until Pearl Harbor was bombed, really that surprised me. I thought he was anxious to go. I didn't know, because I hadn't heard about the Lend-Lease Act and all of that. They were all pro-Roosevelt, well, the whole neighborhood was, and significant things that happened when he died—by the way, all of our information is coming from either a foreign newspaper or from the radio. I don't remember anything on TV. I mean, I remember maybe in high school that it's the end of I Love Lucy or the beginning of I Love Lucy, a couple of programs like that, but certainly no commentator. Oh, I mean, I [also] remember The Lawrence Welk [Show]; my grandmother liked Lawrence Welk. So the neighborhood is very pro-Roosevelt, and when he dies, people are out there sitting in their cars crying—and it's later on when I remember about [John F.] Kennedy dying when people are just stopped in their tracks and people are crying in the street.

01-00:14:25 There weren't many political talks in my family, except for the war and the McCarthy hearings. I tried to understand that when I was very—when I was in junior high, because that's when it starts. But I would ask my teachers about it, and they wouldn't answer. The history teacher, I can't remember his point of view, but he wasn't clear on it. I remember I asked the Spanish teacher, and she wasn't much better off, so I really didn't have clear picture. I never even mentioned it to my stepfather, but he's very conservative, because I know that he is active in the American Legion. Later on when I became involved in SLATE and have to rent something—I had to rent an American Legion hall trying to get these UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] people together—that I'd go to him and I asked him to rent it for me, but I don't tell him it's political. I just tell him, "It's a party, we're going to have a party, we're going to have a big party, and could you rent the hall for me?" He says, "Of course, I can do that," and so there was no trouble. I never mentioned SLATE to my grandparents or to my stepdad, but I mentioned it to my real dad, and he thought it was fine. He thought, you know, Just keep a low profile, just keep out of the spotlight and everything will be fine. I wonder if I should have told him.

01-00:15:47 Tewes: Wow, that's really interesting. Well, given that politics wasn't necessarily a day-to-day conversation in your youth, I'm wondering if you were involved in anything approaching politics or activism in high school.

01-00:16:07 Fowler: Right. I did participate in student government; I was the student body treasurer. I remember I won by one vote. [laughs] I think that hurt my feelings. But no, I don't think it was very political. It was just based on, what, the yearbook and then the dances, the weekly dances and maybe preventing fights. But I did have a group of friends, including—she becomes my college roommate, and her name is Elmira Shroeggin, and she's Jewish, she's quite liberal. She—I think she was the instigator—started a club, a girl's club where we were going to self-educate ourselves. We did different things that we felt the high school hadn't covered for our education, because we knew that people read Shakespeare in high school and we didn't, okay, and we knew that other people had Latin and we didn't, and we knew these things were not in our curriculum. We went to see cultural things. We went to José Greco and we went to Ella Fitzgerald and I can't remember what [else]. We took the streetcar. I remember that, we took the streetcar. The streetcar was a very big thing, because we didn't have cars. We did different things, but I don't remember that politics entered into it. We may have read something, but I can't remember, I wouldn't remember specifically. I didn't have a political formation when I went to [University of California], Berkeley. I cannot say, "My folks were socialists, and therefore I was a—" or "I was a solid Democrat, we always went to the Democratic [conventions]," no, not even that. Except my grandparents always voted for the Democrats and my grandparents always were pro-union. The union was there to protect you, so—

01-00:18:05 Tewes: Well, that's what I think makes your story so interesting, and we'll get into a little more of that in just a moment. But I want to talk about your decision to attend Berkeley. You started in 1955 for your BA. What brought you to Berkeley, of all places?

01-00:18:22 Fowler: Well, really, I had a [school] counselor. There was a woman counselor who really wanted to direct me when I was a high school senior, and so she got me to apply for these scholarships, and I got them. It was an alumni scholarship and a Panhellenic scholarship. At one point she said to me, "It's very important that you do well when you're there, because this is the first time they're giving a Panhellenic scholarship." I didn't even know what "Panhellenic" meant, but [laughs] I soon found out. She helped me. And then my grandfather, in the back of my mind, had always said, "You're going to go to college." I mean, this was not something to be taken lightly. If my grandmother asked me to clean the house, my grandfather said, "No, JoAnn has to study." I thought it was a great thing, [laughs] so I wouldn't have to clean the house. But this counselor was instrumental in getting me to Berkeley, and I don't know how I ever arranged the housing, but she must have done that, too. She said, "You have limited resources, so you need to go to this co-op," and so I went to a co-op.

01-00:19:20 And I worked. I think with those same group of friends in high school, we went down to Downtown Los Angeles and we got Social Security cards, and we got our first jobs in the public library. The library was always a focal point. They may have had talks and things to help us decide on different issues or maybe even colleges. I made money. One of my friends, Sheila Wells—and she was one of the few African American students in my high school—she got a job, an enviable job: she got to set print. Those are the days they used print, and so I thought that was great. From there, I branched out, and I had a job, I think that very first summer or maybe that first Christmas—I was still a high school student—at Bullock's department store. Every year I went home, I worked at Bullock's. I liked it, because you worked on commission, and because I was so young, I could run faster than the other salesladies, and so I'd actually run down the hall to greet people at the elevator, so I would [get the customer], you know?

01-00:20:24 So I had enough money between what I had saved, my grandparents had bought me some kind of savings when I was first born to go to college, and then I worked every summer, and then I had those two scholarships. I went to the co-op, and it was called Hoyt Hall. It was, of course, all girls, and it was on Ridge Road on the northside of campus. This is not the politically active side, this is the northside, this is not Sather Gate. There is a boys' co-op near there, and I'm not too sure what it was called. I remember the names: one was Oxford and one was Cloyne, but I'm not too sure what's near us.

01-00:21:13 But before I move on, that first year I made some very good friends, because we're all freshmen and we're all maybe in the same room. Maybe there are four people in the same room or maybe they're connecting rooms, I'm not too sure. Maybe it's two and two and one bathroom. There was an African American girl named Joan, I think, Coleman, and she wanted—everybody stated what they wanted to be that first year, and she wanted to be a social worker, and I wanted to be a teacher. My girlfriend, Nancy, I don't remember her [full] name, but she wanted to be dentist; I don't know if she made it. Then a very good friend who later joined on that Executive Committee of the student government is Shirley Duncan, and she wants to be an elementary schoolteacher. She becomes very active in a group called the Welfare Committee, and this is a student government group that is concerned with [issues] on campus. It's concerned with the price of books, and maybe if you work what your wages will be; nothing international or nothing even national, but everything that benefits the student immediately. I become involved in that. Well anyway, I'll get back to that. So that's my first sort of touch with anything involving student government there in that co-op. Shirley led me into it. So we're all good friends.

01-00:22:44 I remember the panty raid. The panty raid did not affect us, maybe [only] for a couple of days. I think we heard it was coming, maybe it came in spurts, I have no idea. We weren't too involved in that, but we did grab [our underwear]. Now, Joan Coleman was having a shower in our only bathroom, and so we ran in there with all of our underwear and just locked the door, and then it was pandemonium, then I don't remember. There were boys yelling and screaming, and then that's it. [laughs] But it was not significant in my mind. I mean, it was just a couple of days.

01-00:23:14 Tewes: Well, we should say that's in 1956. But in general, I'm interested: what it was like to be a woman on campus at Berkeley in the 1950s?

01-00:23:23 Fowler: Okay, it is a unique experience, because you are one woman to every maybe nine or ten boys or men, so you have your pick of the crop. I mean, you are treated, as far as I'm concerned, very well, because you can't walk out the door [but] somebody's inviting you to coffee or somebody after class would say, "Come have a sandwich with me." For example, in high school, I think I went to [dances] and maybe I had one [sometime] boyfriend that liked me and one that I liked. And here, I can go out with whomever I want. So being a woman to me is quite [overwhelming].

01-00:23:23 [What] else do I think about it? I think the first [experiences] that overwhelmed—what affected me most of all, these classes that were so huge. I did not expect to go into a class of 100 or 200 people [with a few women]. My undergraduate years were a complete not-great experience. When I hear about these other people that had—my roommate had Nathan Glazer [as a professor]—by then she's a junior. My roommate is Elmira from my high school. Elmira comes up [from the University of California, Los Angeles] in her junior year, and [I] move out of the co-ops. But maybe I'm getting ahead.

01-00:24:36 Getting back to the co-op, in the co-op you worked. There were pretty unpleasant jobs like cleaning the bathrooms or cooking the pancakes where nobody paid any attention to you. I mean, it was just laughable. One would say, "The pancakes are too thin," or "The pancakes are too thick"; you could spend your whole life making the pancakes. So the best job I had was supply chairman, and that was cutting open the boxes. I thought that was great; you just opened the boxes, and nobody bothered you. The one I ended up with in my last year there [I] was social chairman, and so that gave me connections with the boys' co-ops. I was organizing dances and I was recruiting these girls to go to the dances, and "Yes, there'll be x number of boys," and "Yes, you have to dress this way, and this is what we're going to do," and, blah, blah, blah. That was probably my introduction to SLATE, too. Mike Miller was active in one of those co-ops, maybe Cloyne, I'm not too sure. I don't know

where I become involved really with SLATE or how, but that may have been the connection there that I was a social chairman and got around or maybe I was more visible than most people because of that.

01-00:25:45 Now, getting back to [being] a woman on campus. Yeah, you were outstanding, because there were so few of you, you know? My other friend there was Judy, and she wanted to be a chemist. She said in her chemistry classes that she was the only woman, she came back reporting when we were freshmen [that] she was the only woman. This is a unique experience, I don't know. Is that what happened when you went to school?

01-00:26:08 Tewes: No, I think certainly the gender parity in numbers has improved considerably since then.

01-00:26:15 Fowler: Oh, yeah.

01-00:26:16 Tewes: I mean, I know at that time that women in campus dorms had curfews. Was that the same for co-op?

01-00:26:26 Fowler: Oh yes, there was a curfew. I think sometimes you could get other people to sign in for you, but it was sort of ridiculous, because anything that you could do at night, you could do during the day. It was not going to restrict you from whatever you wanted to do. I didn't pay too much attention to it, and I don't think I ever met—maybe there was a lady who controlled behavior there, I don't know, who kept the books. I can't remember who kept the books, or maybe there's a house manager. Those girls that I mentioned I met freshman year, most of them stayed in the co-op, but I didn't. I moved out, I wanted to get out, I wanted the experience of having to cook your own food and being independent and doing your own thing. While I had problems convincing my grandparents of other things, I had no problems convincing them it would be better for me to be in an apartment, so that was good. Is there anything else about the co-op experience I should tell you?

01-00:27:35 Tewes: Well, I am interested in the nondiscrimination work that you were doing at the co-op.

01-00:27:42 Fowler: Right. The nondiscrimination is we wanted to have no discrimination in any kind of housing, whether it be fraternity or sorority or city housing or any [place]. There should be no discrimination against any minority in any of those [places]. I think part of the research I did for that act that came out of [the] Welfare group—I had to go to the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union]. That report was very detailed, maybe naming percentages and ways

that people were being kept out of housing, maybe the price, or maybe actually a written discrimination. It was very detailed, and I was very pleased. It went over very well with the Executive Committee, but especially the president. His name was Roger Samuelsen. I really had a good feeling about giving that report so that later on when I'm asked to run for Executive Committee, I don't have any misgivings about going to that committee and presenting a report. I do have misgivings later on about running and—well, we can talk about what happens after I get there, but my first experience had been a good one.

01-00:28:58 What did I do exactly besides giving that report? Well, when I get to SLATE, I hand out innumerous pamphlets and I protest, but just marching around a sign maybe at Sather Gate or maybe at Sproul Hall with local things, with things, you know, no discrimination or whatever or maybe—no, I'm doing more than that, because I remember when I'm in the Executive Committee, I present a motion to support marching in Washington for integrated schools. I give that report, I march around, and I do things once I get—again, I submit [propositions] once I get to the Executive Committee, so—

01-00:29:53 Tewes: Can I ask about this report? Was this specifically about student housing or community housing in Berkeley, as well?

01-00:30:00 Fowler: I think it had to do with community housing primarily. Yes, I think it had to do primarily with community housing. I think maybe that this report may have led into the Berkeley law that prohibits discrimination in housing. I think that we asked the Executive Committee to take a stand on that, and I don't know if they did or not, but maybe it aroused the students, those students who are able to vote that live in Berkeley and they're old enough to vote, to vote against discrimination. So yeah, it led into the Berkeley housing [bill].

01-00:30:48 Tewes: Did you see that work as political?

01-00:30:53 Fowler: Well, no. I mean, political if it were organized by SLATE. If it had come up in that general meeting of SLATE and said, "Okay, this is one of the things you want to attack at the Executive Committee," so, yeah, it was political. But when I first began, I don't think I saw it as political.

01-00:31:15 Tewes: Okay. Before we get to SLATE, I do just have a few more questions about campus life at Berkeley in the fifties, because you mentioned growing up and not really understanding McCarthyism or the Red Scare. Did you have a sense of what that was when you came to Berkeley's campus?

01-00:31:36 Fowler: Oh yes, I had a very good sense when I came to [campus]. [laughs] I mean, I knew right away. Either maybe it was mentioned in some class or students talked about it, but it's that [Joseph] McCarthy was this evil man that was trying to get people that were innocent that maybe wanted to voice their opinion on any matter at all, and he was going to squash them.

01-00:32:00 Well, in that very first [SLATE] meeting, I am labeled. At the first general assembly meeting, I am labeled, as [are] other people, by a [House] Un- American Activities Committee in the State Legislature, in the California State Legislature. If you type in "California Legislature, Fowlerism, Hallinanism," we are accused of being communist, or the title is "Communism on University Campuses." You read along and they accuse us of, I guess, representing the communist point of view when SLATE has its first general assembly, and they're trying to decide how the organization—or maybe it's before that, it's before the general assembly, and the SLATE is trying to decide how SLATE should be organized. I get written up because of my point of view in the minutes sent by the House Un-American Activities Committee to the California Legislature.

01-00:33:14 That made me take my breath away at that point. I mean, I am like nineteen years old, I have to have a future, I'm going to have to have a job, there's no way that I am going to do anymore of this routine, I am not going to try to make any waves at all, I am going to keep a very low profile. But I had a feeling at that point that no matter what I could have done, I was sort of written up. Yeah, it affected me. I don't remember what the question was, but I became aware, I became personally aware. Not only did I become aware as a concerned citizen, but then I became personally involved, which made me twice as aware.

01-00:33:52 Later on, when I really get into [SLATE] and there are these Russians who have been invited, they've been invited to the Berkeley campus. They're called student representatives of student groups in Russia or student newspapers in Russia, and they have been invited, I think, by Glenn Seaborg or by the—not by the student government, but maybe by the Chancellor's Office, not by SLATE. They're in my apartment, and when I look out the window, there were these two men standing outside. My phone, at that point I'm aware of the fact that there were clicks on my phone line, so either I'm getting really paranoid or there's something going on. So, okay, I was aware.

01-00:34:42 What was the question?

01-00:34:50 Tewes: Well, I was interested in McCarthyism and your awareness there. But another thing that really impacted campus in these years is the legacy of the Loyalty

Oath, and I'm wondering if that's something you talked about or were concerned about while being connected to the university campus.

01-00:35:05 Fowler: Right. There were a couple of things going on that impeded freedom of speech, and the Loyalty Oath that professors had to sign, a loyalty oath that said they not only would be loyal to the United States government, but that they weren't communists, it said in so many words, and "I did not participate in the Communist Party." Well, you had many innocent people that could have participated in the Communist Party merely because they were trying to get out of the Depression, they were trying to change the political system; they were not going to overthrow the government. At any rate, there were a lot of good people that were forced into it and, I think, suffered emotionally. I was very aware of it.

01-00:35:44 The other part of it is that these professors, when you went to them to talk about a given matter—but I sort of knew it was happening—the government could step in and ask them about, "What did JoAnn say about politics, what did—" so maybe you confided in somebody that was your mentor in the department you're studying in, and he in turn feels that that he has to report you. There was that aspect of freedom of speech [that] was being impeded upon. Yeah, I was aware of that, and I certainly was against those repressive measures.

01-00:36:25 Tewes: Well, let's shift gears and talk about SLATE. How did you become involved with the people who would eventually form SLATE?

01-00:36:36 Fowler: Okay. I'm sure I was recruited by Mike Miller. I am sure that Mike Miller recruited all the people who were going to be visible. I'm not too sure, maybe all of the women, I don't know how clear this is, but he certainly got me in it. I'm not too sure when. I'm not too sure if it had to do with my involvement with the co-op or if it had been standing at Sather Gate. I can't really pinpoint it. My first involvement is going to—it's not the spring of '58, it is the fall of '57, so that I'm still—and maybe it's the tail end of the co-op or maybe it's the beginning, but I doubt there's any time in the beginning of spring of '58, because so many things happened—is that I go to innumerable meetings where they're just men, there are only men. This is not the group I become active with later on. There is Fritjof Thygeson, and Fritjof Thygeson is older. He's a good ten years older than I am, and he, I feel, is a professional student, and he's married. He's off with his group, and I think his group are people that believe exactly what he says, maybe Rick White, I'm not too sure. And then there are Mike Miller and Peter Franck, and they are very stable, just one year older than I am, and I think are really the founders, the people that bring everybody else together. Then there are two people that I admire a lot, but they're in and out. They're not always there at every single meeting, and I

went to maybe, I don't remember, ten or twelve of these meetings. They are [Wilson] Carey McWilliams, Jr., whose dad was the owner, I think, and an editor of The Nation. I liked his book, I think it's called Up from Mexico or North [from] Mexico. It has to do with the fact that the United States opens up its boundaries when it needs migrants, and it closes them up when it doesn't need them. This is part of my political formation here. This is the part where I feel that this situation of browbeating the migrants and this treating of the migrants has to be addressed, and so I become active in Davis [later on]. So there's Carey McWilliams, Jr., then there's [Hank di Suvero].

01-00:39:07 But the most influential for me is Carey McWilliams, because he can talk about anything in terms I can understand, but he can always draw upon some political theory and tell me that, "Ah, Hobbes was influential here," or "You talk about Veblen there," or "This comes from C. Wright Mills," but then he'll make it very concrete so that I can understand. The other one I think who's very intellectual is the one you didn't interview, Hank di Suvero, who I think goes off [to law school]. He basically runs the newspaper, it's called the Cal Reporter, and his girlfriend is Gloria Martocchia, where I maybe meet her twice but she's not very visible, nor is Fritjof Thygeson's wife, I don't think I ever meet her or if I meet her, her name isn't the same. Those are the two women I can remember in this group of men. Then there's Pat Hallinan, and he's in there. Well, his folks—I don't know, but you probably heard this already—they are very active, the two of them, in a San Francisco-based liberal, political organization. The dad runs for, I don't know, something in San Francisco. I don't think he wins, but he's a famous, rich, outspoken liberal lawyer. He has six boys, and three of these boys are in Berkeley at the same time, and I'm at Berkeley, so [Pat's] there, too. My opinion is [he and I are going] to represent the group. We are going to be these all-American—we had this look, we have this look that we fit in with everybody else. That's basically what I think, but that's just my—in retrospect, I can see this, I don't know if it's really true.

01-00:40:58 So I go to these meetings, and my first impression when I walked into these meetings is, What language are they speaking, what country are they from, because it is not anything I can understand, it is not terms that I know. I mean, these people have majored in political science or economics maybe, but it's something I don't know. It's a language that they are very comfortable throwing around. It takes me about two or three weeks to figure out what's going on and so then I can label them; once I get into it, I can sort of label them. This is Fritj's party. Fritj is an idealist. I don't know if Fritjes can operate in this world. Okay, that's my opinion. Over here we have a socialist. I can relate to that, that's not a bad word for me, I can understand redistributing the wealth. Here we have members of the Communist Party, but maybe not really members, maybe they're just factions within the Communist Party. I know they're different one from the other, and I know they're close together.

So you have all these factions, and I sit around for about these ten or twelve meetings, and I basically feel that we have to move on with our lives, okay? I feel that this is not for me, this is—and the direction this is taking.

01-00:42:10 I'm very verbal, I'm not shy at all, I speak right up, I don't care, I have nothing to lose here. I say that, "You have to do something within the campus, you have to work within the campus. If you want to get all these things done, you have to get elected and do things on campus." Whereby I think Fritj is saying that we have to have a lot of committees set up so people can study these issues so they thoroughly understand them before the participants do government. I'm thinking, What that means to me is ten or twelve more of these meetings, and it's not going to work. So that's the position I take, and that's the position that Pat Hallinan takes, and so we win over the majority of these people and we go off and become—oh, but maybe we are too much of a faction, maybe we're too off. I think Mike Miller and Peter Franck kind of stepped in and they become the middle ground, and [Mike is] really the spokesperson for the group. But while we win the vote—well, Pat and I win the vote—we don't necessarily win the electorate, and so Mike Miller becomes the president of SLATE and Pat becomes the vice president, et cetera. That's in the SLATE organization. So that was my introduction.

01-00:43:41 The grad student, the grad student, in my mind, is very different than the undergraduate. I mean, he has many more ideas, he's older. A lot of the grad students are at International House, and they're very sensible. That's where my colleague [lives] who gets elected the same time I get elected—his name is Mike Gucovsky. I don't know where he was from, but he was from another country. He spoke with an accent and he was older and he lived at I-House, and he brought his friends into SLATE. He brought his friend Owen Hill and he brought his friend—his last name was Oscar; I can't remember his first name.

01-00:44:34 Tewes: In these early meetings that you say were probably like fall of 1957, about that time, the pre-SLATE people were involved in something called TASC, Towards an Active Student Community. Do you think that's what this was that you were attending?

01-00:44:51 Fowler: I think that was it. I don't remember that phrase. I mean, when somebody describes SLATE to you, I know what it is. I know SLATE, these students that ran on the slate [of candidates], and this group came out of there. But I don't know where TASC [originated]. There is a language that's common to them. I [sat] there [and thought], "Ah, I don't know where they come from, I don't know where they get these terms." [laughs] But yeah, they obviously are [political theorists], and so that I stand out in that I am a nonpolitical person

that gets involved with these theoretical people, these people that I think are the theoreticians or the strategists behind the formation of SLATE.

01-00:45:46 Tewes: We should also say that SLATE forms officially in February of 1958, so these are part of several months of conversations that you had been having. Do you remember about the organizing convention itself, which happened in February and March of 1958, about the specific conversations and the wheeling and dealing that was happening then?

01-00:46:12 Fowler: Well, I think that everything I'm talking to you about, about [how] I represent the majority and Pat represents the majority, and Fritj represents the minority, and Mike comes in as the conciliatory faction, with the conciliatory faction, is all at that assembly. You know, actually, when he says it has a hundred people, I never remember a hundred people. At most, whatever group I was in, it was maybe thirty or fifty, but I may not have [an accurate] recollection. I do have the pamphlet that is written about that group, and I am down there as the administrative officer. Well, that sounds terrible, because that's the last thing I want to do, but I must have been there. See, at that point, I was so active, because I am on the slate [of candidates]. Soon we have to worry about the slate not being abolished, about being allowed to be elected, about running with the word SLATE. So I am on this slate, and I must have been at that first assembly because I'm in that booklet, but I can't remember. I can't remember that specific meeting, but I remember others.

01-00:47:19 Now, I remember one meeting where I think that I am the only woman there, and I know that there are two others. I turn around behind me, and I see Cindy Lembcke. She's behind me, and she ends up on the slate [of candidates] that I'm running on. I'm running to be a rep-at-large, and she's running for the women's—or vice president, woman. She's running for women's vice president, and she loses; and Pat was running for [men's] vice president, and he loses; and Manuel Aragon, who's a newcomer to the group just that spring, he's running for president, and he loses. Now, Mike Miller is not on that slate, because Mike Miller can't run because he's going to leave. At the end of this year, '58, he's going to be out of there, so he can't be on that slate. I was not aware of the other people. This is my first and maybe my only time that I ever see these other two women. I'm sorry that I wasn't more friendly. I'm sorry I didn't turn around and say, "Hey, my name is JoAnn Fowler, and let me tell you what is going to happen to you. Let me show you what's—" [laughs] When I became aware of these oral histories, I read those two ladies, [who] I think are outstanding: Susan—oh, I've forgotten. Is it Griffin, Griffin?

01-00:48:50 Tewes: Susan Griffin and Julianne Morris.

01-00:48:52 Fowler: Yes, and I read—I'm so interested to have [read their oral histories], because I think they really developed as [inspiring] people. I think that what made me want to give my oral history was I went through many of the same things they did, but I didn't know that at the time. I thought I was unique; I didn't realize that. So yeah, I must have been at that first meeting, because I'm representing the majority view and my name is in the pamphlet, but I can't remember it specifically.

01-00:49:25 Tewes: Do you remember discussion at that meeting or others about the idea of the lowest significant common denominator?

01-00:49:34 Fowler: No, I don't, but as I think about it now, I think what bothered me was the word "lowest." Get rid of that "lowest," I don't know what that's—"significant" is very good. "Significant common denominator" is what draws all these people together, what keeps all of these people together. It's important, it's very important. I think I used at the time "broad based." The term "lowest common denominator" bothers me. I want the most significant common denominator. I don't think it was used in my time. But I understand the idea, and I think it's true. I think that if you want to get all these people—all of these people certainly want to fight any kind of injustice out there. They all have that in common. You know, they want better wages, they want lower book prices, they want better housing, so I agree with that term.

01-00:50:45 Tewes: Well, given that you had people from [across] the political spectrum meeting together in this one political group, SLATE, what were some of the big ideas that brought people together that everyone could agree on?

01-00:51:00 Fowler: Well, I think we could all agree we wanted to improve the plight of the African American all over, because you know that he wasn't given a fair chance. You also wanted to [call attention to injustice]. You want the Cal student to be well informed, you wanted him to leave Cal being a well- informed citizen. You want him to be able to act on anything. On a national level, on the international level, you want him to be articulate and to know what he's talking about. That is what I think the administration doesn't realize when the administration says, "Oh, you can only have speakers, like, off the campus." Well, what are we talking about? Part of your education should be to have every speaker possible so that you have a student who's well informed.

01-00:52:52 Tewes: But did you have a certain ideal that was most important to you? Because I'm really interested in following how this nonpolitical person who doesn't have a background in politics, doesn't understand the political theory, decides that, yes, you want to be involved in a political group and even run for office for that. What were you most passionate about?

01-00:53:12 Fowler: Right. I think that that is what I—because I was so disillusioned with the classroom. I don't think the classroom met what I thought an education should be, because there's some days I'd walk down the street, I'd just walk down the street [and think], I didn't learn anything today, what am I doing here? I didn't learn anything today. I think SLATE met that need for me. I became more highly educated and I would not—maybe if I hadn't run into SLATE, I wouldn't have read all the things that I read. All the books that were popular in those days all had to do with, I think, structure of society or they were all sociological matters. There was The Ugly American and The Organization Man and The Lonely Crowd, and those books all become popular, but maybe I wouldn't have read them so soon if I hadn't been aware of SLATE. So my involvement in SLATE is because it's giving me a better education. It's part of what the university should have done for me, they should. The Cal Reporter had books to read, and Cal Reporter led to speakers. I think that's what it did for me.

01-00:54:23 Now, I tried to get my roommate, Kim, who's very bright, to join. She wouldn't join. Later on—she becomes a very significant feminist writer, and I think she becomes a good friend of Susan Griffin—my roommate, Kim Kusnitz—she has a last name that was different—Chernin. She was my roommate in that last semester I was at Berkeley. I could not get anybody to join, I don't think. So it wasn't that idea of the proselytizing and get people to follow, that did not appeal to me. What appealed to me was that it was really making me a better-educated person, yeah.

01-00:55:24 Even those first meetings I went to with SLATE—not the ones with TASC, I think, or some place along in there—many of the meetings are social, and they end up with guitar playing, music playing. All of those songs, the Pete Seeger songs become very significant for me, and especially the ones he did on the Spanish Civil War, because the Spanish Civil War is where—most of my Spanish professors come out of the Spanish Civil War, they migrate from Spain to the United States, and so that was very interesting. I learned all these songs. There was one about the Lincoln Brigade, and there was another one in Spanish, the song that was "La Bandera Roja." Bandera roja means red flag. My first teaching job I teach these little kids "[La] Bandera Roja," and then I start to think about it. It means red flag. Ah, this is a communist song I'm teaching to little kids, and so I stopped it at the end of the first year, I never taught it again. All of these songs that are so significant. All the songs are very significant, and I learned them [in SLATE]. So that was part of my education.

01-00:56:36 Tewes: Oh.

01-00:56:35 Fowler: Yeah, I think that's why it's so important for me.

01-00:56:37 Tewes: You know, as we close out our session today, I do want to ask: when you joined SLATE, what would you have described your politics as?

01-00:56:49 Fowler: I think that I would probably say I was liberal, that I was a Democrat. I hadn't voted yet, I wasn't twenty-one yet. I'm liberal, but I'm not going to go out on a limb and vote for somebody like Fritjof Thygeson, who ran for US Senate, who was a political activist outside of SLATE. At one time he asked me to borrow money. I had inherited money, I only had $4,000 from my stepfather, and Fritjof asked to borrow that 4,000. I was just shocked, because to me, to put my 4,000 into a political campaign that is not going to win, that's [only] going to educate the public, is not what I'm going to do, whereas somebody else who's more idealistic might do that. I think I'm pragmatic, I'm practical— well, I'm idealistic to a certain extent.

01-00:58:09 Tewes: Okay. Well, is there anything you would like to add in [about] what we've discussed today?

01-00:58:15 Fowler: No, I think I covered—I met some people in SLATE that I should talk about later and people I ran with, because I found—they were Mike Gucovsky and Manuel Aragon, and those people I did things with in San Francisco. I went to San Francisco with them, and I went to hungry i and the Purple Onion, I went to North Beach. I went to some bongo drum in some warehouse some place, but I remember being moved by the just primitive kind of music. [laughs] I remember these people were very sensible. Mike Gucovsky and Manuel Aragon would say, "You know, you're a political candidate or whatever, we have to be more rational. We're not to be easily swayed by this, whatever, bongo drums or—"

01-00:59:22 Tewes: Certainly we want to talk more about those relationships in our next session, but thank you so much for your time today, JoAnn.

01-00:59:30 Fowler: Okay, thank you.

Interview 2: September 17, 2020

02-00:00:04 Tewes: This is the second interview with JoAnn Fowler for the SLATE Oral History Project. The interview is being conducted by Amanda Tewes on September 17, 2020. Ms. Fowler joins this remote interview from Davis, California, and I am in Walnut Creek, California. So thank you for joining me again today.

02-00:00:23 We should pick up this week speaking more about SLATE and your time with the group. I really want to touch back again on the political repercussions that were possible by being involved in this very overt political group on campus. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

02-00:00:44 Fowler: Right. That was really of great concern to me, because I had these scholarships and so I didn't want anything to jeopardize my scholarships. I realized that I was being investigated when I had a group of Russian students in my apartment one night. It was in June of 1958 when I had already been elected to the Executive Committee but wasn't yet serving, and there were four or five SLATE members, and there were maybe four or five Russian students, but they were really pretty old. They had brought a lot of vodka and they drank a lot, and there was a lot of talking about freedom of speech and how things were in Russia and how things were in the United States. They were really impressed with the United States and how much freedom there was, but they also were concerned about the lack of freedom of speech, which the SLATE members had brought up on campus, and so they agreed to meet with some of them—no, I wasn't involved—the next day.

02-00:01:49 Well somehow—I neglected to tell you this before—the administration got wind of this, and so the Russian students the following day were taken off on a tour of San Francisco. They never showed up for their meeting with SLATE, which was just as well, because it turns out that the Russian government was watching them and knew what they were up to; maybe they had a spy in the group, I have no idea. But had they spoken out at the lack of the freedom of speech, the Russian government was going to use that as a reason to stop those exchanges. Actually, it was a very good thing that they didn't follow through, and I wanted you to know about that on the record, because I hadn't mentioned it before.

02-00:02:28 And then, of course, I told you before the fact that I was mentioned in the [California] State Legislature as a pro-SLATE person and SLATE was procommunist, et cetera. I didn't like that, and so I tried to keep a really low profile. Yeah, I was concerned.

02-00:02:48 Tewes: I think that brings up the question of—your scholarships were so interesting here, because you are thinking towards the future, you're here at college. But how did that impact the way you approached being involved in SLATE and what you were willing to participate in, be it a protest or anything like that?

02-00:03:06 Fowler: Right. In my time, the activities were not full-grown protests like they were later for the [House] Un-American Activities [Committee]. I think I would never have done anything violent. I remember being in huge protests at Sather Gate or maybe right outside of Sather Gate, or maybe some SLATE members were on top of cars or maybe at Sproul Hall, but I never did anything further than that. I can't tell how I would react. It would depend on what the group was going to do, I think, but I would be one of the ones more reticent. I would stand back and not do that much. That would just be my personality and my generation.

02-00:03:50 My activities revolved around basically handing out pamphlets at the Sather Gate and talking to people—now, that's when I could become a campaigner— and also passing out the—that's daily—but passing out these Cal Reporters, the newspaper, the SLATE newspaper, which came out twelve times in the period I was very active from: February to June of '58. I passed that out, but I had nothing to do with writing the articles, which would have been interesting, or mimeographing or any of that business, because that was a completely different part. I would have just been handed them or gone to somebody's house to pick them up.

02-00:04:32 I had seen other campaigners who weren't in SLATE. I had seen them primarily at North Gate standing there and saying, "Oh, my name is—" for example, "My name is Bill Smith, I'm running for president, vote for me." Well, I thought that was so stupid. I mean, how can a man [laughs] vote for you, because he knows your name and he shakes your hand? So I made a point of anybody I stopped, saying, "Hey, I'm JoAnn Fowler, and I believe that you should have better wages when you work and your book prices should be lower, and if you like that, then vote for me." I would mention these issues that I thought were right to their immediate benefit, and that's what I did. Should I talk about my campaign at this point?

02-00:05:13 Tewes: Yeah. So you're starting to speak about [that] you ran for office in spring of 1958 for ASUC [Associated Students of the University of California]. What were your issues, what were you running on?

02-00:05:24 Fowler: Okay. Well, first of all, this slate [of candidates] is the first one that is endorsed by the organization, SLATE, that is pulled together at the beginning of March or the end of February. This SLATE has people running on the same

issues, and there were a wide range of them. There was a booklet that was put out, it was called SLATE, and it had in it—[looks for booklet] I don't know if you can hear me, Amanda, I'm trying to get the book. It had everything in it. It had student welfare, a number of things that were local, campus affairs, local affairs, national affairs. If you were to name anything, we ran on all of it, but not all of that could be addressed during the campaign. Basically, it was: freedom of speech was addressed through [being] against the [House] Un- American Activities Committee and also by the relationship between professors and the students that should be confidential and the anti-Loyalty Oath. Then there was civil liberties in the South; in Berkeley with that housing ordinance that came up for vote; and on the campus that no fraternity or sorority should discriminate. So it was basically a lot of things. So it was basically a lot of things.

02-00:07:00 This was encouraged by Mike Miller. I didn't mind running—that was going to be great—but I did mind speaking to big groups. I hadn't had a lot of experience doing that, so he encouraged me to do that. I went around only two nights that I remember, and it was only to men—I never spoke to women— and only at the co-ops. That was my background; I'd come out of co-ops. I'd go in at dinnertime and I would speak for two minutes, maybe somebody introduced me and maybe somebody didn't. I'd speak for two minutes to those very immediate concerns that I thought would be very appealing, and I would have this overwhelming applause. But I felt that anybody, any woman could have stood up there and gotten this overwhelming applause, because that's the kind of applause I felt it was. I don't know, maybe that's just me. I don't know who else spoke there. I don't know if men spoke there, if other independents have reached out, I have no idea. That was it.

02-00:08:02 Now, on this slate that ran, there is [Manuel] Mike Aragon, who's a very reasonable fellow. You don't hear a lot about him, but he's active in SLATE that year. He graduates when I do, but he was still active in SLATE when he didn't win. And then there was [Patrick] Pat Hallinan, [who] was known from a very liberal family, and he didn't win. Then there was Cindy Lembcke, who was a year younger than I, who ran, and she didn't win. She was running for the women's vice president. Then there were four others from SLATE who ran for my position, representatives-at-large, and they didn't win. I want to bring all this up—I don't want to brag—because it was left out of the SLATE archives, so I have to speak up right here and say this is why I was so taken aback when I looked in the archives and saw that my name was there, but nobody seems to know what I've done.

02-00:09:01 Well anyway, I won on that first SLATE, as did Mike Gucovsky. He was a graduate student, he lived at I-House [International House], and he was very liberal, but he was also one of the people that felt that every—all political change should be for students, should go through the Executive Committee of

the student government. He didn't believe in going out to the Young Socialist [Alliance] or reaching out to the Young Democrats [of America]. He believed that it should be an organization basically at Berkeley. We agreed on a lot of things and we all—we presented everything together—"Mike Gucovsky and JoAnn Fowler present" or "So-and-so and JoAnn Fowler seconds"—so that it would be more effective.

02-00:09:46 Now, the bad thing about that year is half of our time is devoted to trying to keep SLATE as a political party. There's so much anti-administration sentiment that pours in. The Executive Committee, members on there saying, "Oh well, we will table this and discuss it next time, or we'll send it off to another committee," so there's always that, and you had to fight that. There were things that had to do with SLATE organization that you had to combat before you could ever get to an issue that we wanted SLATE to look at. Let's say integration in the South, or should we vote on the housing proposition that's up in Berkeley that's being presented in Berkeley. So we didn't get very far. We did a lot of presenting, but I don't think there was a lot of action.

02-00:10:40 What was a good thing we did? We did cause a lot more student interest in student government, and we made the Executive Committee take stands on things, at least present their position, whereby if we hadn't been there, they wouldn't have done it. In the scheme of things, I think we opened the door for the next slate, which is the slate that [David] Dave Armor wins with his slate. So that's our importance, that we did it and we did it together.

02-00:11:11 Some of those [Executive Committee] meetings were from 2:00 in the afternoon to 9:00 at night, and it was like a nightmare. So you asked, "Oh well, how come you weren't more active in SLATE?" Well, it was just overwhelming. There's so many things, there's so many administrative things you were involved in. You had about twenty committees that reported to the Executive Committee. There was a committee on academic affairs, there was a committee on athletics, there was a committee on the ASUC—

02-00:11:42 Tewes: ASUC.

02-00:11:42 Fowler: —ASUC bookstore, there was a committee—I can't remember—the welfare. So you had to hear all these committees and hopefully take a stand on those [issues], so there was quite a bit to do.

02-00:11:56 Tewes: Well, I'm wondering in thinking about yourself as one of the first people in SLATE to make it to the student government, what did that mean for you at the moment?

02-00:12:07 Fowler: Oh, I think I was very proud. I was very proud and I think Mike Gucovsky was, too, that we had opened the door. I think we had to constantly remind the constituency that this was important, this was an important way to go. Because, remember, that was the other faction that I felt wanted to sit around and talk these things to death and not try to take any kind of action. I think it was very significant. No, I was pretty happy.

02-00:12:33 But I wasn't happy at the end when I look back at that semester and look back, because we started the minute we were elected. We were elected in early May, so we went to meetings in May and in June, and we got involved in a lot of the Finance Committee meetings. That was to analyze the profit that was coming in from the bookstore and whether the students who owned this bookstore were really benefitting from that profit. I think we felt that the profits were being shuffled off into maybe the football part or whatever or maybe into the social aspects of the Executive Committee, and they're having parties and picnics and things like that. I wasn't capable of analyzing those things and so I worried—not worried about it, but I thought, Well, this is another dead end. We are not accountants, Mike and I can't sit down and do this. I think a lot of things going on there that I felt I couldn't get a handle on.

02-00:13:39 Tewes: I think we should clarify again that you ran and were elected in May of 1958. You started doing meetings then, but your term of service was in the fall of '58, I believe.

02-00:13:52 Fowler: Right. Now, before we get to the fall, that August, that August of '58, I drove across the country in a carpool with Bill Petrocelli, who was another Executive Committee member, and his term—I don't know how his term went. But he was in that car, and Peter Franck, who was going to start his graduate school, drove the car. I had a really bad experience, because I had arranged with my stepmother to have my Mormon relatives put me up when I got to Ogden. I didn't have a lot of money, and I called them on the phone, and they just sounded like I was a person from outer space, and they didn't want to have anything to do with me, and I had never met this Mormon part of the family anyway. So anyway, that day I slept on the grass, and so I was very embarrassed about it, and I'll never forget that incident. That's why I'll never forget the trip across the country either. I don't remember where [the conference] was, but I did look [it] up. I tried to research it for this talk, and the NSA had records, they have sealed boxes. I can't remember. I couldn't locate it exactly, but they usually have their meetings in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin. I've narrowed it down, I think, [to] Michigan or Ohio. But that's not too important.

02-00:15:17 Tewes: Now, well—

02-00:15:17 Fowler: The important thing—

02-00:15:17 Tewes: —I just want to say that's the NSA, the National Student Association that you were at the conference there that summer.

02-00:15:24 Fowler: Right. Later on in '67, somehow, it—we found out or it came up in the newspapers that the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] had backed the NSA all the time. The CIA had members and paid people to be in NSA. I thought that that was very interesting that Bill Petrocelli, when we get back from this meeting—well, the people at the meeting, they were other kids just the way we were. They had sort of the same values, except there was one far-out group, and they were called SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society? Well, they didn't seem so democratic. It seemed a little violent to me, it seemed a little far out, but I didn't know, I really didn't know, but I was aware of them.

02-00:16:16 Maybe that's why when we got back, Bill wanted to vote—that was another thing we spent a lot of time in when we got back in the fall of '58: on whether or not we should stay in the NSA. Mike Hone, who was very conservative, said, "Oh, let's start our own regional group here in the Bay Area," reaching out to universities and colleges in the Bay Area. I think it was Dave Yamada who said, "We need to table this—" and he was a liberal, co-op kind of person—"we need to table this for further discussion." Somebody else said, "We'll send it to a committee." And so a lot of time, again, was wasted on something I didn't think was very effectual: whether or not we should be in NSA. I don't remember the end of that conversation.

02-00:17:10 Tewes: To clarify, was this a conversation you were having with ASUC or with SLATE?

02-00:17:14 Fowler: Oh no, with ASUC, with ASUC, because then there was no doubt that SLATE wanted NSA, and SLATE wanted to be heard on a national level, and SLATE wanted to unify liberal voices, young liberal voices all over the nation. No, it was the ASUC. They had given me money actually to participate in this convention.

02-00:17:38 Now, I want to just mention that I was comfortable there, but I wanted to mention something where I had to step out [of my comfort zone]. I was also asked in that year by Mike Miller to organize a meeting at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles]. I want to mention this because this is something where the other ladies behind me said, "Oh, I was only asked to make coffee."

Well, I was asked to go down to UCLA. My grandparents lived in Los Angeles anyway, so maybe that's what initiated it.

02-00:18:05 I was given a list of names, maybe a whole page of names to call. So obviously, Mike Miller knew people at UCLA that were interested in organizing UCLA. Now, how did he know them? Well, he obviously knew them from NSA. I think maybe NSA stood—comes to mind, that's how he got the list, but he gave me the list and he told me just to organize a party. I borrowed a record player from Gloria Martocchia, and I remember her because of this, because she was very angry because I forgot the record player down in Los Angeles. [laughs] We had rented a car, so it was in the trunk of the rental car, so I had a few problems in those days. At any rate, my grandparents were very angry at me because of this, because I ran up a phone bill, a hundred-dollar phone bill calling all of these people. You see, in those days, you had to pay when you reached out to little suburbs in Los Angeles. I had met two girls who were from that area who were going to help me out, and so I have a feeling that they picked me up.

02-00:19:14 But I also got my stepfather—without telling him what it was about, I told him I wanted to have a dance, a college dance, and could he get the hall, the American Legion Hall, because he was active in the American Legion in Westwood, I think it was, or Brentwood. He got the hall for me, and I called the people, and I had the record player. That's all I did, but it was a very successful gathering. I don't remember it being a political gathering, but obviously it was, but it was very social and everybody was very happy to be there. I needed to mention that I did do something for SLATE that may be slightly uncomfortable, because to get on the phone and talk to somebody that you don't know—you know? But they all wanted to come, and that was fine, so it worked out.

02-00:20:02 Tewes: Well, that actually brings up a good point. That was something you had to learn to do or make yourself a little more comfortable doing: cold calling. But also, when you were campaigning and speaking in front of people, that was something you mentioned was difficult. What did you learn from the entire experience of being in SLATE, and probably even just taking these leadership positions?

02-00:20:24 Fowler: Right. Had I not had those experiences, I would not have stepped out later in my life to do things like that, that were very unpleasant. There was a time when I had a group of Japanese students who were going to come here. I think it was called The Experiment in International Living, I don't remember. They asked me to recruit the families of these Japanese students to stay here. I remember I was calling a bunch of families here in Davis and asking if they'd take a student. They wouldn't be paid or anything, but they had the student

live there for two weeks. I remember that, yes, people will do this. In my mind, I thought to myself, Okay, every fifteen calls, somebody's going to say yes, and I knew that from whatever calling I had to do before.

02-00:21:11 And then I was asked in the early eighties to take over the leadership of the Davis Teachers Association. I knew it involved a lot of speaking and so I didn't want to do it. In fact, nobody—I think none of the teachers [did]. Even though they were pro-organizing the teachers, nobody really wanted to do it. Finally I said I'd do it, because the man had done it initially or for years in front of me was not effective and so I thought, Maybe I can do a better job. I was willing to give these innumerable speeches, and I had the same experience with this overwhelming applause, but then I knew this was for the cause, because everything I spoke about was to benefit the teachers.

02-00:21:58 What happened then? Okay, what was the primary thing? Well, the primary thing was a teacher's salary raise, because they hadn't had a raise in five years. They finally got a raise that year for 3 percent, which wasn't much. But this has carried on in Davis, because Davis is a special community where professors come to town and their wives or maybe, whatever, the other mate wants to stay in town, whether it be a man or a woman, and take a teaching job in Davis, because it's close to the children, to their children. So they have a huge pool of very competent people to draw from, at least in those days, and so they were willing to take a salary, a lesser salary. Well, Davis has fallen way behind here, 10, 15, [or] $20,000 behind in beginning salaries to teachers, as opposed to Woodland, Dixon, Fairfield, surrounding towns. This has carried on, wasn't very effective, because Davis has never considered teachers' benefits and salaries when they do the whole budget. They frame the budget around everything else: the building, everything, the administration, everything, everything, and then they say, "We have this much left for the teacher," and so that hasn't changed, unfortunately. But I did my bit and so without SLATE, I wouldn't have—

02-00:23:28 Tewes: You wouldn't have tried?

02-00:23:29 Fowler: I wouldn't have tried, no, I wouldn't have tried.

02-00:23:32 Tewes: Well, I also want to back up for a moment and think about the social aspect of SLATE. You mentioned last time that you would go into North Beach with some of the folks in the group. I guess I'm just wondering what the relationships were like within the organization, the actual people who were doing this work, what relationships you had with one another.

02-00:23:58 Fowler: Okay. Well, I have to be very honest, my memories are bittersweet, because I fell in love with somebody at SLATE who did not love me. This was very tragic. At age nineteen, this was tragic. That's one of the reasons I didn't— really never wanted to go back or maybe too much to look back, so I'm just going to mention that and then we'll move on.

02-00:24:23 My good memories include parties. For a while, I lived in the Northside and so I would always go to Caffè Mediterraneum, because it had a lot of Latin music and it had a lot of boys from South America, and I like to dance. Did I tell you I went frequently to San Francisco with a group, not my initial group that I associated with when I first got into SLATE, but after I was elected? Did I tell you I went in there with Mike Aragon and this—

02-00:24:52 Tewes: Yes, the—

02-00:24:53 Fowler: —group—

02-00:24:53 Tewes: —Purple Onion?

02-00:24:55 Fowler: Yes, yes, did I tell you about the bongo drums? I told you about that?

02-00:24:58 Tewes: Yes.

02-00:24:58 Fowler: Okay, so I wanted to mention that Manuel Aragon was always the voice of reason, "You have to be more rational, you can't get—be moved away—you can't be carried away by these bongo drums and march around all the streets like other people and—" [laughs] it was the beginning of the beatnik era.

02-00:25:17 In terms of relationships within the group, the people that I associated with initially, many of them were married and they didn't live in Berkeley. They lived in Albany or they lived in Oakland, so they didn't socialize a lot. That would be Rick White and Fritjof Thygeson and Carey McWilliams, [Jr.], and those older people.

02-00:25:39 So about the relationships, I feel bad. I feel that I didn't do what I should have done in terms of the women. I never looked for the two women that I knew were active. That's Gloria Martocchia, who wrote a lot of the articles in the Cal Reporter and was obviously very bright, and this Charleen Rains, who lived at I-House and I think was a candidate someplace along the line. But I never reached out, I never talked to them, I never said, "Let's go and have a

cup coffee," I just didn't. And then I never looked back at women who became very active in the same period I was active where I started to run on that slate [of candidates], where I'm in those meetings, the first assembly and form the ideology. They stepped in right about then. I never looked back and said, "Hey, let me tell you about this," or "Let's get together and talk about that." I think that that would have added something to the cohesive nature. You're only in that group for a couple of years, you know, and so I feel sorry I didn't do that. But I think that that could have been very—the beginning of a spectacular community for all involved if it had been pushed a little bit more, if I had helped push it, but I didn't.

02-00:27:04 I think it does become [more social], because when they do more things, when they start to go down the valley [to support farm workers with] César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, one of the other people remarked about what a social experience it was or how cohesive that kind of a protest could be to the relationship in the group and the good feeling, yeah. You need that kind of thing because you want it to be a good experience. You want everything to be, but it was just getting started then. I think I mentioned everything I want to about that.

02-00:27:41 Tewes: Right. No, I think that's a really good point to bring up, though, that you were here at the very beginnings of SLATE, and so those relationships are just being built, and there's a lot of things that are still unsettled at that moment. [laughs] So that's good thinking. Well, you already started speaking about some of the women. I'm wondering if you had opinions on the gender relations that were happening in SLATE when you were there in the late 1950s.

02-00:28:11 Fowler: There were so few women, wherever you were in your classes, there were so few women. Walking down the campus, there were so few women. I didn't have any of that feeling of I haven't achieved something, or I mean I would speak up in class anyway, because I am outspoken, and even in high school, I was outspoken even though I knew it wasn't too popular. But I never felt that I was repressed or—no, I didn't feel anything like that. I was very aware of things like that happening later once I went out to work. I'll tell you about one of my first jobs.

02-00:28:57 I flew from New Jersey to Chicago. There was an opening at a junior college, and I had an interview with the dean. At the end of the interview, he—and it was discussed it would be a full-time, Spanish position, and I said, "Oh, fine, thank you very much." I said, "Where's the contract?" He said to me, "My dear young lady, you have the word of the City of Chicago." Well, that's very nice. Okay, I come back in, we move to Chicago, I go back in in September. I now have half the job promised at half the salary. I went to the dean, and I

said to him, "Dean [So and so], you told me I had the word of the City of Chicago." He looked at me, I mean, with his very angry face, and he said, "Yes, that's right," and he brought out a full-time contract, and I got the job. But word went out all over the City of Chicago not to hire me, because I had to scramble to get another job, and so I did.

02-00:29:58 I mean, the chairman of the Foreign Language Department thought very highly of me. I was very effective, and I was very good. We're talking about when I was—I mean, I'm like twenty-five years old, and I'm really very good. In fact, I was offered the job there of doing the TV program. So I got another job at Teachers College, and the lady told me, she's the one that told me, "You've been blackballed all over the City of Chicago." I've talked about this part of my career with other women teachers here in Davis, and they had very similar experiences in their career. In fact, they rerouted and didn't go on for their PhD or they knew they had been blackballed at a certain university. It sounds strange. In the beginning, you think, Oh, all these people are paranoid, but no, that's what happened. But it didn't happen at Berkeley, that's all I can say, and it certainly didn't happen in SLATE.

02-00:31:01 Tewes: Well, that's a good transition to start thinking about your move away from not only Berkeley, but SLATE. You mentioned before that you were less active in the spring of 1959, and that's your last semester on campus. So what happened after you graduated in '59?

02-00:31:21 Fowler: After I graduated in '59—first of all, I wanted to tell you that I graduate with honors. I was Phi Beta Kappa, and I had a full fellowship, which was like $4,000, to Columbia [University], and so I went very happy. But that is going to show you the direction my life will take. I will live within the box, I am going to be—definitely not step out of having a good job or whatever, feeling comfortable the rest of my life.

02-00:31:46 I had met my husband. He was a graduate student; he was a TA in the Spanish Department. I knew him all my life as a friend, and I had just gotten through some personal difficulties, and he helped me out. He was from Argentina, and he had a job. He was working at his PhD, and he had a job at Rutgers [University]. I was very pleased that we could go to New Jersey, and I could finish up and get the master's degree within a year.

02-00:32:18 And then I was aware of what was going on at Berkeley, because then I see all of a sudden in the newspaper, FSM, [Free] Speech Movement. I'd look for names, I'd look for names, SLATE names. I was sure they were all involved, but I had no idea. I didn't have time at that time really to enjoy New York. I had been in New York before at the end of the NSA convention, and I did a

lot with my roommate from Berkeley. I look back at Berkeley fondly, and I saw that they were very active, and that made me very happy.

02-00:32:59 I started teaching and I had my son, and so my whole attention is redirected for, Where is the best place for my son to live? I mean, my husband had his PhD, he decides where he wants to teach, and certainly that was a factor. What is the best environment for him to grow up in, et cetera? With that in mind, we always wanted to come back to California.

02-00:33:27 I did a lot of consulting, and that's another thing about how SLATE affected me. I was asked to do a lot of book demonstrations for different teachers, for teachers at different high schools to work for the publisher and take the book and show teachers how to use a given book. A lot of that, my comfort in front of a group, all came out of SLATE. I never would have done that if it hadn't been for SLATE. But that was only something I did on the side as I was teaching in a regular place. Now—

02-00:33:59 Tewes: To clarify that, while your husband was working at Rutgers, you were attending Columbia University in '59?

02-00:34:06 Fowler: I went in on the train. I couldn't be politically active at Columbia, because it was very departmentalized. I don't know where that all started. I was only in the building that dealt with Spanish literature. There were famous people at Columbia: [Federico] García Lorca, who is a famous playwright and poet from Spain, his brother was there, and so that was an expert on [Miguel de] Unamuno and [José] Ortega y Gasset, who are Spanish philosophers and believe very much that man—el hombre es de sus circunstancias, the man is a product of his circumstances, a man is a product of his community and his family and whatever art, music he's exposed to. I firmly believe that, and I think that that's where my philosophy is reinforced. I don't do anything politically, because I'm pregnant, and I'm running in there at 4:00 in the afternoon and I'm coming at 9:00 in the evening. I mean, I'm barely surviving, I'm just keeping my eye on the goal. So, no, being politically active was not in my mind.

02-00:35:14 My husband examines all of his job offers, and we have one. My grandparents were very interested that we come back to California, so we come back to Davis, which is very—I didn't appreciate when I was at Berkeley. It was called the farm, and I thought that a bunch of hicks were in Davis. But it's really lovely, it's a very nice place. When we moved here, you could ride your horse up and down, tie your horse to a limb of—[laughs] but it was the beginning of the big art movement on campus. There was Wayne Thiebaud, who's now a hundred years old, and there was Manuel Neri, this famous

sculptor, and there were all these famous artists, so I became interested in art. Let's see, I wanted to tell you about some of my—

02-00:35:59 Tewes: When did you come back to Davis?

02-00:36:02 Fowler: In '65, I came back in '65. With my colleague, we did some things that were out of the norm. Let's see. First of all, I wanted to tell you about my initial attempt before—oh, I went to work to make extra money at a Hunt's tomato factory, and so I worked in the office. I never told you this before, but in the office, you made maybe $5 an hour, and if you're a worker, you made $15 an hour, so I tried to organize the office workers. That would come from my SLATE background. It wasn't successful, because they didn't want to be called members of a union, so that was okay. What I did was I went to work in the factory, and I thought it was a good move. It was a good move, I enjoyed it, I made a lot more money. I encouraged my half-brother and my half-sister to come down to Davis, and the following summer they did. They were very young, and actually she was maybe twenty and he was twenty-five, and he had just returned I think from Vietnam maybe, because he had extra status— he was a vet, and the only people in that personnel office that had preference were vets. If you came back from the war, you were put in the front, and I thought that was very good. But no one in that office cheated. You didn't see anybody get their job, because they were—had their brother or because they were white or—no, there was nothing, no discrimination at all. But the veterans had priority, and I thought that was a good thing.

02-00:37:37 When I [started at] the high school, it was very hot. It's about 104 degrees, there was no air-conditioning, so I circulated a petition, and everyone signed the petition, okay. This took about five years. Yes, everyone signed the petition, no doubt, and yes, the board of education voted in air-conditioning in the administrative offices—yes, can you believe it—and in the multipurpose room, and that was about five years later. But at any rate, I did try. I wanted you to know that I did try to do this.

02-00:38:09 Tewes: No, I think—

02-00:38:09 Fowler: It was—

02-00:38:09 Tewes: —it sounds like more extension of your political organizing. You're thinking about what is an effective result or how to get there.

02-00:38:19 Fowler: [laughs] Right. I love Davis High [School], because the students are not average at Davis. I mean, if you're called average, you were really pretty darn

bright, because you have a very supportive environment where you have all of these—first of all, your parents are either in the [State] Legislature or they're at the University [of California, Davis], and they want the best for their child and so they were very vocal. The parents of this community are very vocal, and they wanted everything for their kids.

02-00:38:50 I wanted to mention some unsuccessful things. One of the things we started very soon is we started, as a community effort, to raise money to take these kids down to Mexico. We did it for five or six years, and I did it with my colleague. She was a little older than I was, but I was more effective as an organizer. Big community dinners to raise money to take the kids down to Mexico for them to learn Spanish and to build an orphanage. The cooks at the high school volunteered, because their kids, a couple of their kids were in the Spanish club; and the bus driver volunteered, because his daughter was in the Spanish club; and the shop teacher volunteered to build the Porta Potties, because his daughter was in the Spanish club; and parents, all the parents wanted to come. We only took two, so they could drive their cars in case somebody should become sick. And then the Catholic Church stepped in, and we took a nun and a nurse from their private school. So we had all these people in the community with us backing us, and we went down for about five consecutive years to build this orphanage, and it was coming along nicely. We slept on the roof. It was in Guaymas, it was in Hermosillo in Guaymas. Along the route, we slept in gyms from different schools where it had some kind of a connection with the Spanish teacher, so that the kids didn't—if you had to pay $20 for the whole week, it was a miracle. You didn't have to pay much, and the [Davis] community had donated clothes and money.

02-00:40:31 Well, in the fifth year, the junior high principal—I think his name was Fitzpatrick or Fitzgerald—his daughter was on the trip, and he wanted to make sure she was safe, so he came down with his wife and they went fishing. They were not with our group; they're in some motel. The fishermen told him that we were building a motel, that it wasn't an orphanage. Well, this was very sad news indeed after all of our efforts. I just wanted to mention that as a cause that we did support, and it went awry at the end.

02-00:41:04 At the end of that, I redirected, and by then, I had a grant. I had something called an NDEA [National Defense Education Act] grant that was granted for teachers of languages. They went all over the world, because then Sputnik had occurred and so we had to be prepared, we had to be prepared for this world effort to understand different cultures and to speak their language. So off I went to Spain with all expenses paid for six weeks, and it involved classroom study and trips all over Spain in a bus and living with a family. It was the greatest experience I ever had. This is in like '69—'68, '69, I think.

02-00:41:53 When I got back in '69, I said to my colleague, the same colleague—she's still teaching; she started later than I did—I said, "You know, Audrey, instead of Mexico, we should go to Spain. We can do it, we can do Spain," and we did. For two years, we joined up with Sac [Sacramento] State [University], because they had been involved in the NDEA grant, and so our students got credit at Sac for being in college. It's a couple of college credits if they would take this and this involved more money, so this involved where you had to get kids to pay. At first, we could take everybody that applied who was qualified—they had to have maybe a C average—even if they didn't have the money, because Audrey and I raised enough money through these community dinners and by soliciting merchants for all kinds of prizes, door prizes, that we could take. But in the end, we couldn't do it, and in the end, the kids had to pay $2,000, but it was still a bargain for six weeks in Spain with college credit. That went on for about five or six years. It's one of the achievements I'm very proud of, because that achieved my goal of making the kids love some other culture and be bilingual. In fact, two or three of my students that I'm still in touch with married Spaniards, and they came back to the United States. Two of them were successful; the third wasn't.

02-00:43:23 Tewes: Thank you. And how long did you teach at Davis High?

02-00:43:28 Fowler: I taught [there] really my entire career until 1998, and I became very active in workshops for teachers and students with AP [Advanced Placement]. I had AP students, the beginning of the AP, and so I also went back east and graded the AP tests from all over the nation. It really took off here in Davis, because that was the beginning, too, of Spanish immersion, and I cannot take credit for [that]. That was a parental-driven elementary school coming up. When those kids hit the high school, I was just leaving as they began. But my colleague told me it was highly successful. I wasn't as effective, I think, as a teacher the last eight years. I was just dying to step out. I was dying to just retire. And then I cut back to part-time, and I hired the UC students to help me grade the papers or whatever, so I lightened my load as much as I could to still be effective because I didn't have the energy that I had earlier.

02-00:44:35 Then I went off and traveled a great deal, because my second husband that I met in 1984—now, maybe we should stop there and say—tell you why I didn't go to the [SLATE] reunion?

02-00:44:46 Tewes: No, we could pick that up later, unless—

02-00:44:48 Fowler: Okay, we'll pick that up later. Where should I continue on? We are in 1984.

02-00:44:57 Tewes: You met your second husband in 1984. What were you doing?

02-00:45:03 Fowler: Should I go to 1984, or should I go to 1998? I can—

02-00:45:10 Tewes: Let's say—

02-00:45:11 Fowler: Okay, I'll start back to 1984 when I meet my second husband, who is so anti- SLATE, it's not even going to be funny, because his background is he's from Chile. He was at Columbia when I was at Columbia in '59, studying to be an electrical engineer. He was thirty years old, he was married to somebody else. I didn't know them, but what a coincidence. We had a lot in common. We loved to travel. I loved to speak Spanish. When I first met him, we were on an airplane, and he had gone back to take—his wife had died, and he'd gone back to take her belongings back east to her mother, and so it was a sad time for him. But he recited a poem on the airplane, he recited a poem, and—it was in the New York airport—we gathered [a group] and he sang a song, a Spanish song, I can't remember, oh my God, and he took me by the elbow and helped me up some stairs, and I just fell madly in love. [laughs] It's okay. [laughs] It was just like a knight in shining armor comes by, and that's the end of it for me. But his political views were very—he was very dogmatic. In fact, he was dogmatic, he was a businessman in Silicon Valley for National Semiconductor. He had taken a psychological test, and one of his bosses had been a colleague of mine at Berkeley, and he becomes a capital venture guy who's very successful. He told me later that when Gustavo was tested for a personality test, he was off the spectrum for rigidity, he was way off. [laughs]

02-00:46:51 So my interest was very high in Gustavo, and then I'm invited to the SLATE reunion. Well, two things happened: I had met Gustavo, he's very important to me, and I didn't want to lose that relationship; although maybe he would have grumbled and not said anything. But at the same time, I'd become very active in an organization called BAGEP. It's Bay Area Global Education Project, and this is out of Stanford and the World Affairs Council, they have lots of money to educate teachers so that teachers will be more active and more aware of global differences, global differences in cultures. I have this grant, and the next morning [after the SLATE reunion] at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, I was supposed to be at the San Francisco Airport to fly to Korea and then the Philippines, where I'll be for six weeks so that I will understand why children react the way they do in my classroom—why Korean children sit there very quietly and don't ask questions, why they'll follow you with their eyes; why Philippine children maybe will have three different side jobs, why they'll be easily distracted—so I will understand these things when we get to the classroom. But I'll bring this back, and I did start an international kind of fair when I got back with the help of a Korean teacher who was interested in the

very same things. So it's very important to me, this was an important direction. And so those are two reasons I didn't go to the reunion. However, I feel if I had gone to the reunion, I would have been remembered a little bit more when they gave their oral histories. So that's neither here nor there. Where should we go now?

02-00:48:39 Tewes: Well, okay. I think you bring up a good point in thinking about what happens after SLATE's disbanded in the early sixties. You've mentioned following the Free Speech Movement, but did you follow anything at all related to SLATE after you had left? Had you been thinking about SLATE over the years?

02-00:48:58 Fowler: I only thought about SLATE when this COVID[-19]—no, not very much. I never ran into any SLATE people. I did follow it in the newspapers, as you say, the freedom of speech. But when COVID came along, I couldn't get out of the house here in Davis. I have read I don't know how many novels, I mean, I have book clubs up here. So I started to look on the computer for—oh, and I became very interested in art, and I'd take art classes, and first oil and then watercolor, and so I'm really interested in art. I'm a member of the UC Davis art museum [Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art]. And so I run across Mark di Suvero, and Mark di Suvero is the older brother of Hank di Suvero. Mark's a world-famous sculptor. And I see when I get to his site flashed up that his brother, [who had been in SLATE], had died about two months ago. From there, I looked to see who else had died, and I typed in names in Google, and I typed in the name, and I read a lot of obituaries. This was very sad.

02-00:50:03 Then I went to SLATE and then I went to SLATE Archives, and then I found the oral histories and I read the oral histories. Well, I thought they were very interesting. I love the first two women that I didn't know anything about, [Julianne] Julie Morris and Griffin, Susan Griffin. I thought, I wish I had been born in their generation. Well, they're only a few years behind me, but still they are so effective and they're so active, I just thought it was just great. And then I look at Cindy [Lembcke], and she doesn't remember me, oh dear, and then I looked at Peter [Franck] and Mike [Miller], who I know well, and they don't remember. Well, that's when I contacted the oral history people and told them. Amanda, did you see Hamilton?

02-00:50:57 Tewes: I regret I'm one of the very few people who has not seen Hamilton. [laughs]

02-00:51:00 Fowler: Oh, you need to do this, because Hamilton has a couple of songs, and one of them is ["Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story"]. Who will tell my story? The other one is ["The Room Where It Happens"]. So I thought about those two, and I thought, Well, I'm going to write to them. No, first, I

consulted my friends here in town, a couple of them. One is in LA now, she's ninety-one years old, and I said, "I don't know if I should reach out to them, because I really wasn't a woman activist, and these women are so fantastic." She said, "No, JoAnn, remember when you tried to organize" blah, blah, blah. And she remembered, made me remember the Hunt's cannery episode. Then the other one who really is my age and who is quite a feminist, she actually finds things to notice that I don't find, and she said, "Oh yes, you must speak up, you must do something," and so I did. I contacted Mr. [Martin] Meeker, who put me in touch with you. And so I'm as happy as a clam, because while I don't think I'm a true civil libertarian in all aspects of my life, I certainly think I have affected a lot of people, and I want to have my place in that history, in SLATE history.

02-00:52:14 Tewes: I think that is wonderful for you to share that now, that story. That also makes me wonder about the long-term effectiveness of SLATE, and anything else you'd like to say about how your experiences with the group have impacted your life.

02-00:52:33 Fowler: Right. I don't know. I'm not too sure about SLATE. When you study South American politics, every nation in South America or Central America—and probably Spain, if you look back, and France, I'm not too sure—have students that are very politically active. What happens there is as they join society and have an active role in—or have a profession, they cease being politically active, they become more stable. That was never true in the United States, maybe in the United States students were never active except at Berkeley. I don't know that that's the case. But SLATE to me was something that I knew was happening all over the Latin world, and so I didn't see this as out of the ordinary, that it didn't continue [with me]. These people have to go out, they have to have families, they have to pursue a career. But the fact that you could do that and be an organizer or be a civil liberties lawyer is a great thing.

02-00:53:47 Yes, I think they impacted California, because when I got to Texas—I lived in Texas for a while—I started a book club. Well, when I joined that book club, they asked where I went to school and I said, "Berkeley." Well, all they could think about was [Free] Speech Movement. When I chose a book to read that had to do with the Roosevelts, I mean, that was far out. I mean, these people were pretty darn narrow-minded, except for one, she'd come from California. But seriously, some had never heard about World War II, but they were very young, they were in their twenties. In terms of religion, they were even more narrow. They said, "What religion are you?" I said, "Well, my dad was a Mormon and my mother was a Catholic," and so there I went to the Presbyterian church so I'd fit in with my neighbors. They have a social structure whereby the Mormons and the Catholics are at the bottom; the Mormons and the Catholics don't count in Texas, I don't know if you're aware of that. [laughs] They maybe have one or two of those churches and then you

have fifteen, whatever, Episcopalians and fifteen Methodists and fifteen, whatever, came from the Anglican church, so it was a different experience.

02-00:55:04 So I think that I was aware SLATE or this freedom of speech movement was well known all over the nation. I mean, they really had an effect. I think given when I was, because it's at the beginning, SLATE is at the beginning of a generation that is so locked in lockstep. You're going to go out and be a businessman, The Organization Man and the silent generation, and all that.

02-00:55:35 Now, I think that the dynamics are just right for Berkeley to be the place, because Berkeley is a place that has a lot of veterans returning. They're returning from the Korean War and they don't want to have any silliness, they don't want to have any foolishness. They want to ban the bomb, they want to disarm, I think they're all for peace because they've been there. And then it has in sociology—I'm not too sure of the other fields, because I wasn't in those fields—they have a lot of professors writing about the importance of social change. The Ugly American, The Organization Man, you have all of these books hitting the public. All of this comes together at the same time, so they have the right dynamics for a group like SLATE. You have the older people, you have these books coming out, you have young political science majors and young sociology majors in that group, so just right for Berkeley. I think Berkeley does reach out—at least in California from my experience, they're reaching out. They're helping the movement all over California.

02-00:56:51 Tewes: Yeah, as we wrap up today, I know we did not nearly give the rest of your life the justice that it deserves, but how do you think about your own legacy in your personal life and in your work?

02-00:57:04 Fowler: I think that one of my main goals has always been to have the students be comfortable around all nationalities and all colors and never feel that it's something different, there was always something you have in common. I always wanted them to be bilingual, whether it's Spanish or some other language. And so, yeah, to that, I think I've been very effective. I mean, some of my students are teaching at Sac State, some of them are teaching down in the valley, some of them are teaching at San Francisco State, some of them have written novels about these kinds of concerns, one is a bilingual librarian. I think I've been very effective, and so I'm happy with myself. It's nice to be in a place where I can see that, because I'll go to a store like the Apple store, and a boy from twenty years ago will say, "Hi, Mrs. Fowler," and I will say, "Oh, hi," and then I won't remember who they are, but we'll have this long conversation. [laughs] So it's great, and it's great to be in a place where you have that sense of unity where people remember you, that you could be here and see—I've taught the parent and the child, and never the grandparent, I didn't get that far, but I taught the family. Yeah, it's a nice feeling.

02-00:58:26 Tewes: Yeah, many generations—

02-00:58:28 Fowler: Yeah.

02-00:58:29 Tewes: —there. Well, that is all the questions I have for you. Is there anything you would like to add, JoAnn, about your life or SLATE in general, that we haven't discussed?

02-00:58:40 Fowler: No, I think it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I never would have been as politically aware. I didn't have that background, I didn't take political science, I didn't take sociology; I took economics, I took psychology. I never would have been as aware or as active as I was, I wouldn't have had a group. When I lived in an apartment, I didn't have a social group or I didn't have—you were going to come on campus and leave campus because you certainly didn't meet too many people coming out of that lecture hall of 500 people. I'm glad I have that experience, very much so. It was a good time in my life.

02-00:59:25 Tewes: Great. Well, thank you so much for your time and your help[ing] us learn more about SLATE. Thank you.

02-00:59:33 Fowler: Oh, thank you, Amanda.

[End of Interview]