Bogue, Janet L
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project JANET L. BOGUE Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: May 18, 2007 Copyright 2015 ASDT Q: Today is May 18, 2007. This is Tape 1, Side 1, with Janet Lynn Bogue. Janet, let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? BOGUE: I was born in 1955 in Tacoma, Washington, the State of Washington not the City of Washington. Q: I knew it was going to happen. I have somebody who was born the year I entered the Foreign Service. BOGUE: My last job in the Foreign Service was handling the new entries. I started to see people who weren’t quite born when I came into the Foreign Service, but it was certainly close. Q: Let’s start on your father’s side, the Bogue family. Tell me where they came from and what you know about them. BOGUE: I don’t know a lot about them. Some of that family history is a little bit murky. My best understanding is that they were French Protestants who initially settled in the Carolinas. There is an area of North Carolina called Bogue Bay, Bogue Sound, Bogue Inlet. There is a town of Bogue. Apparently, they originally settled in that area and then spread out. My father’s father came from Illinois; they were farmers in Illinois. They had been farmers in Illinois and that area for some generations, because some of his ancestors, I think my grandfather’s grandfather, had fought in the Civil War on the Union side and had come from Illinois and Michigan. In fact, one of my Bogue ancestors was killed right here in Virginia, in the famous battle of Cold Harbor, a great slaughter. Then on my father’s mother’s side, there was the typical sort of American background: mixed German, French, and a lot of Pennsylvania Quakers on that side of family. Q: What did your grandfather on your father’s side do? BOGUE: My grandfather’s name was Freeman Bogue. He was raised on a farm, served in France in the Army in World War I. He then returned to the Midwest, married, started 1 a family, and the Depression came along. He traveled with his family out to Seattle where two of his sisters-in-law, his wife/my grandmother’s sisters worked as schoolteachers in Seattle. They told him there were jobs available in Seattle. He worked as a clerk and bookkeeper/accountant in a lumber shipping company in the port of Seattle. The job doesn’t really exist any more. He would look at a whole lot of logs and compute in his head the number of board feet of lumber that would come out of those, things like that. He would do all those calculations and work it out. He really was retired when I first remember him. He did live to be 96 years old, so I actually had a long association with him. Q: Great. And your father? BOGUE: My father was the second of three sons, born to this family. He grew up in Seattle, Washington, and went to public school there. He was in the navy during World War II. He was at the University of Washington as a student, then on active duty with the Navy. The Navy sent him to medical school at the University of Nebraska, in Omaha. He was there when the war ended and was demobilized, but finished his medical studies there. Shortly after doing his residency, he was drafted into the Army for the Korean conflict. Although he had served in the military already, he had not served as a doctor. He had become essentially a new person. So he did his army service in the Korean War. Q: He did what in the Korean War? BOGUE: He was actually in Port Townsend, Washington, of all places, at a place called Fort Warden, which is a state park now, not an army installation. He was one of the doctors at the army hospital there. Then he and my mother settled in a very small town on the Olympic Peninsula called Gig Harbor, a town at the time of about 1,000 people that needed a doctor. He became a general practitioner there. About a year later, my older brother was born, and then I was born. Then there is another younger brother. Q: How did your mother and father meet? BOGUE: They went to high school and college together in Seattle. My mother was also raised in Seattle and they both went to Roosevelt High School in Seattle, and then to the University of Washington. Like a lot of middle class kids, they went by streetcar to college and lived at home. They married during the Second World War actually when my father was in the Navy. My mother then accompanied him to Nebraska and worked while he was in medical school. When they settled in Gig Harbor, she became a housewife for several years, but was very active and involved in local government kind of issues and ended up spending 13 years as the Mayor of Gig Harbor. It was great fun for her. Q: Let’s go back on her side of the family. 2 BOGUE: Her side consists mostly of immigrants from Sweden who settled in the Midwest, mostly in Nebraska. They initially came from Sweden to Chicago, worked in foundries. Again, the typical American story, until they had some money to buy some farmland. They settled in Nebraska. Her father had grown up in Nebraska in a big farm family. He went as a young man to Alaska, just kind of on an adventure, to work in Alaska. Then World War I broke out. He enlisted in the Army, and they assigned him to Camp Lewis, which is now Fort Lewis, in Washington State. He liked it there a lot. He really liked it. So when he left the army, he stayed and went to work there, and met and married my grandmother. My grandmother’s family was originally mostly from Canada of English-Scottish descent in Canada, although some of them came down into what is now the United States’ part of the Pacific Northwest. She was actually born in Washington when it was still a territory, so one of my four grandparents was actually born in what is now Washington State. She was raised in Tacoma and met and married my grandfather there. They lived their lives mostly in Seattle. Q: Was she mainly a housewife? BOGUE: She worked as a young woman. She finished high school. She worked in a jewelry store in Tacoma until their marriage. After the marriage, she was a housewife. She was very active in her church work and did the sort of volunteer work that ladies did in those days. Q: Let’s move now to your mother and father. Speaking of church, was there a particular religion? BOGUE: Actually, we weren’t churchgoers. My mother was raised as an Episcopalian. My father was a Methodist. They did not go to church and they did not have any of their children baptized, because they thought that was a decision we should make later in life. If anything, particularly growing up during the Vietnam years, I sort of felt the influence of what had been one strain in my family, which was Quakerism, and was quite interested, as was my mother, for sometime in Quaker thinking. But we were not raised in a religious household at all. Q: The other religion, politics: where did they fall? BOGUE: I would say that when I was a small child that my parents were probably members of what seems to be a vanished species today, which is liberal Republicans. I would say that over time my father stayed there. My mother moved in a more liberal direction. She is still living and is a very much left of center Democrat. They were active in local community and school board, planning board, city council, that kind of thing. But they were not active on the large scene politically. 3 I don’t mean to jump the gun at all, but it may be the most interesting thing in that sense about my hometown. My hometown of Gig Harbor was settled mostly by immigrants from Croatia. At that time, it was a heavily Croatian town that made its living from commercial fishing. They fished for salmon in Alaska and Puget Sound in the summer. I think that was particularly interesting, more than my parents’ involvement in politics. For me, there were still mail order brides coming in the early 1960s when I was a child from the former Yugoslavia, from Croatia. Q: You are probably talking about ladies I sent there. I was in charge of the Consular Section in Belgrade in the mid-1960s. Our whole job was to stop that trade, with singular unsuccess. BOGUE: One neighbor up the hill was a lady who had come from Croatia. The people in my hometown were mostly from the Island of Brac, which lies off Split, you will remember, one of the large islands. Interestingly, in a parallel development, it used to be a fishing community and is now a tourist community. My hometown used to be a fishing community and is now a very wealthy suburb of Tacoma and a tourist environment. So they have had kind of a parallel evolution. Q: We will come back to the family. Let’s talk a little bit about Gig Harbor.