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Interview with Ernestine S. Heck

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Interview with Ernestine S. Heck Library of Congress Interview with Ernestine S. Heck The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project ERNESTINE S. HECK Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: December 11, 1997 Copyright 2002 ADST Q: Ernie and I are old friends going back from Vietnam days and thereafter. I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. Ernie, let's start sort of at the beginning. Could you tell me when and where you were born and something about your family. HECK: I was born in 1940 in Clapskanie, Oregon. At that point it probably had 400 people. I was born in a little hospital which was over the bank. My family had come to the big city. They were posted out in a place called Silver Lake, Oregon, which is out in what we call the high desert of eastern Oregon, where my father was the principal of what amounted to basically a six-room school comprising grade school and high school. We had come home, my mother had come home to have the baby with her parents. I grew up in Oregon. I had never lived in a town of more than 250 people till I went away to college, although I had lived on the outskirts of these metropoles like Clatskanie. I lived in what amounted to an idyllic situation, I thought. My father remained a school teacher throughout his life. My mother went back to teaching when I was about 12, and my sister and I had the sort of country-style living which was very, very lovely. We did a lot of work in the fields in the summer working not for our own fields necessarily but picking fruits and stringing beans and weeding peppermint, and we supplemented our money by peeling bark off of a tree which is familiarly called in Oregon the chism tree. It's something that is used in laxatives. Interview with Ernestine S. Heck http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001360 Library of Congress We would peel these trees and dry the bark and sell it to pharmaceuticals. I went away to college at the age of 17, going from a high school graduating class of 48 to Oregon State University in Corvallis, which at that time had about 9,000 or 10,000 students. It was of the two state universities, both land grant schools in Oregon, the one that was considered to be the cow college because it concentrated on things like the various sciences and agriculture and forestry, the things that made Oregon at that point, which was 1958, run. I majored in business. In fact, I majored in something called secretarial science, which no longer exists, but it was one of the three schools in the School of Business. I was very active in college, took part in a lot of activities, was on the student council, was president of my dormitory and of all of the dorms for women, had a lot of other activities, ended up as one of four women honored in our senior year as the outstanding four women of the senior class. I worked hard, I maintained a grade point that was very high, and worked in the summers. I put myself through college with scholarships and by working. I worked up to 40 hours a week and maintained a full school load and did all my activities. In the summers I ran an office for the concessionaire at Crater Lake National Park, which was great fun, and at the end of the summer, which would be somewhere in the second week of September, I would take back to my dorm at Oregon State in Corvallis boxes and boxes and boxes of paper. Then for the next nine months I ran the office from under my dorm bed. That meant a few hours a week at the beginning, and by spring term I was working 40 hours a week as we had reservations come in and orders out for materials and so on. I also worked in various other things in the dormitory itself. I worked for the School of Oceanography doing papers for the head of the department. I graded papers for the Shakespeare professor, also for the Economics section I graded for the finance professor. So I had quite a busy a period in my life there. I graduated in 1962. There was a little bit of money in the pot, because my mother had died when I was in high school, and so both my younger sister and I got a little bit of money from Social Security, from SSI. We had put it in the bank, and I had my $600 left, and we bought a car with my $600, a 1958 Chevrolet, used, and she and I bummed around the country for three months. We made it a point to hit every state in the United States except Hawaii. We did drive up the dirt road which was Interview with Ernestine S. Heck http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001360 Library of Congress the Al-Can Highway to Fairbanks, Alaska, and we covered most of Canada also but not all, but certainly we hit all 50 states in the United States. We started out doing this on a real shoestring. We also had saved a little money on the way, of course, but we started out by allowing ourselves a dollar a day for food. Now this was 1962, but even then a dollar a day for food was not a great deal. We tried to keep our rooms under five dollars a night, a room for the two of us. I suppose that would be in 1997 dollars maybe 30, 25 or 30. We got as far as Flagstaff, Arizona, on this very strict regimen, and in Flagstaff we stayed in a hotel which turned out to be a red light place. Some men tried to break into our room, and we blocked the door with chairs and took turns staying up the rest of the night. When we came out the next morning, somebody had slashed all four of our tires, and that was the end of our one dollar a day for food and five dollars a day for a place to stay. I had always known that I wanted to travel and, in fact, in our little grade school, which had 26 people in the graduating class of the grade school, we had a little cyclostyled bulletin which was our yearbook. In it, it said that I was going to marry a Peruvian diplomat and travel. By the time I got to high school, it said something to the effect that I was going to be a traveling secretary and travel. So I always knew I wanted to travel. I applied for the Foreign Service while I was still in university as a secretary, because at that point it never occurred to me that I could do anything else higher than a secretary. Q: I want to go back just a touch. In grade school and later on in high school, and then we'll get to college, what sort of things - did you read much? You were in a pretty limited place. HECK: You're only limited by your imagination. I never knew that I was “lower middle class” until a college professor told me this. It seemed to me that being the daughter of a school teacher was a pretty nice thing to be. In the town that I lived in from ages six to 12, there was a one-room library which was open two nights a week, and the entire family, my sister and I and my two parents, always trekked over to the library every Tuesday and every Friday, and we always brought back large numbers of books, and we read voraciously. This was long before other things like television came into our lives. Interview with Ernestine S. Heck http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001360 Library of Congress I've always read a lot. I always worked in the library. When I was in high school, I was president of the library club. I not only read, I catalogued, I pasted, I did everything there was to do with books. Yes, we certainly always read. Q: Any kind of books? I realize pretty much across the board, but did anything grab your fancy particularly, authors, books, types of books? HECK: When you live in a town this small, you read what you can get your hands on. I do remember having my mother absolutely livid when she found out at age 12 that I was reading something that she considered to be X-rated, which had been a pretty steamy novel in her college days, that I had found in the grade school library. She grabbed it out of my hand and took it to the PTA, and that caused a good deal of trouble. Q: Was it Forever Amber by any chance? HECK: No, it wasn't. I've forgotten the name of it. I just remember it had some love scenes that she thought were totally inappropriate for a 12-year-old. Believe me, I probably would have agreed if I were an adult. By the time I got into college, there was very little time for recreational reading, because I was working so hard. But yes, I've always read, and I much prefer history and biography, and for traveling I like murder mysteries and that sort of what I call airport reading. I saved them up and read them later.
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