Sally Luther Narrator

Arvonne Fraser Interviewer

March 30, 1975

Sally Luther -SL Sara Luther -Sara Arvonne Fraser -AF

AF: Sally Luther—an interview on March 30, 1975 in Poughkeepsie, New York. And you, Sally, served from 1950 to 1962 in the legislature. And I must have been active when you were first elected.

SL: Oh, you were.

AF: Yeah—now, why did you run?

SL: Why did I run? Well, there were so many different factors. One was that I had been working, I had been employed in the Star and Tribune for three years, or really four years, and during that time—it was ‘47 to ’50—Mike Halloran was a reporter and Hubert used to come into that office and talk to him down the aisle from where I sat, and I was fascinated to watch that, to watch the political reporting. And then [Miriam Algren] was the women’s editor, and it worked out so that I could pretty much choose my assignments on the women’s page, and over and over again I could get to interview women who were prominent, like Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Kenyon, Brynhild Haugland from North Dakota, and, each one, I could learn from them at the same time I was interviewing them. Then that year I went to the National League of Women Voters Convention. Nineteen fifty it was in Atlantic City. Of course, I think by then I had already decided to run, so that that was more of a help after making the decision. I’m not sure … oh, I also had learned, really two or three years earlier, that I was never going to have any more children. Of course, I had two more. I wasn’t going to have any more, so that that wasn’t going to be a drag on me, and my little boy was ten, Charlie was ten. And then there was a vacancy in the district. I always said when I give my talks that that was really the biggest reason of all, because Alf Bergerud had been the legislator from that district, and he really lived in Edina. Puglisi—do you remember Puglisi? He brought a lawsuit against Alf Bergerud, because, he said, it was a fake address. He listed himself at the University Club there, on Mount Curve—you know where it used to be on Mount Curve?

AF: Oh, yeah.

SL: And, it was true. Bergerud just listed this in his leaflet and had for a couple of years, and I think the judge said that’s right—next time you can’t run in that district. You’re going to have to

1 run from where you are. So Bergerud had made his plans to run out in Edina, and I suppose Puglisi had made his plans to run for the slot that he’d opened up. But something happened. For some reason Puglisi withdrew, or there’s some reason … so anyhow, it was a chance that I didn’t have to go after somebody to unseat them. And all those were factors. Then, of course, I had a deep interest in political action.

AF: Were you already active in the DFL by that time?

SL: Yes, I think I had been pulled into the DFL by a variety of people, but one of them was Blanche McIntosh …

AF: Yeah, I figured. [Chuckles]

SL: … in a great year, when we were supposedly throwing—I hate to tell all of this, because I’m ashamed of much of it—much of it. But this doesn’t become public right away, either…

AF: No.

SL: … because, you see, we were really [Unclear], and this whole thing had been set up, between you and me, I see it now, but I didn’t see it at the time, and innocent young people [Unclear] would have been—she wouldn’t be as innocent today as I was, and I must have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and the big deal was to go to the precinct caucus. I don’t think I’d ever been to a precinct caucus before, and horrible night at Douglas School—you nod your head—do you remember all of this? Were you doing it where you were?

AF: No, see, I was a little bit behind …

SL: Yeah, you’re younger than I.

AF: … yeah, and I knew all about it and I debated, and I debated, and I finally did not go that night.

SL: You didn’t!

AF: I didn’t go.

SL: Did you vote for [Wallach]?

AF: I might have, I might have been on that side if I had voted.

SL: See, Don was.

AF: But, see, I was on … I know I was on campus at the time, you see.

SL: He should really be here for this interview. Would you like that?

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AF: Well, he can, sure.

SL: It would be fun.

AF: Well, maybe what we’ll do is we’ll proceed with the legislature here, then we’ll go back and we’ll do that, because that would be very …

SL: Because he’s helped me see, of course, what we really did. And Blanche stood there at the door of that Douglas School, the grade school auditorium, and she said—you can’t come in! You can’t come in! I know you from the old days—no, you don’t fit here! It’s just a wild maniac. And I was innocently occupying the three seats that were for our precinct. I just didn’t know what she was really doing, but I knew some of the people that she wasn’t letting in I didn’t like anyhow. I didn’t admire their stands. I am reluctant to mention one name.

AF: That’s all right [Chuckles].

SL: So I won’t. But I wasn’t sorry to see him leave with his tail between his legs, but the others I really didn’t know. She seemed to have all these tentacles out, and of course Emily Kneu Buhl was a big influence in my life.

AF: Oh, I’d almost forgotten her.

SL: Big influence right from the start. But she and I both got into these precinct caucuses together. She’d been to many before, but we went to the home of the—oh, what was their name; you might remember them. Fairly well-to-do. The husband was associated with Young Quinlan's. Lafferty or some such name. And they had agreed to have this preliminary meeting at their home. I’m way before the legislature …

AF: That’s all right.

SL: … too far before, probably, to be of interest to you. Anyhow, Blanche lived on the north side of the district, and these people lived in the ritzy side of my district. Of course, it wasn’t my district then. And they let her have this training session, as it were. And Emily and I both went. I think that’s just about when I met Emily, and we both got elected, of course. Well, you know how the process works, and we were delegates from our precinct, and so we went to the ward session—it was the ward session I described up at Douglas School, and on to the county session, and then, of course, to the state, and that was in Brainerd. Was it in Brainerd that year or Willmar?

AF: Yeah, it was in Brainerd.

SL: Brainerd. And these same people whose name I can’t remember, the Young Quinlan man, had a cottage up there, so they were going to be up there, too, and kind of … and we were going to focus around there, and Emily and I both went. We drove up together. She educated me all the way up.

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AF: Explain who Emily Kneu Buhl was.

SL: She educated me all the way back. Emily Kneu Buhl. Well, she had had a terrific career already by then. Do you know about her?

AF: Well no. I remember her, and I can see her, but …

SL: She lived with a wealthy family that was her uncle and her aunt. They were named Wagner, and they lived over on DuPont, and she grew up in Minneapolis as their niece, and they gave her many advantages that she wouldn’t have had otherwise, because her own father had had a terrific alcohol problem. She was a devout Christian Scientist. That never became a problem between us, really, and she went to the university, and I think she did graduate work at the University of Syracuse, and before she did that she became a teacher in Minneapolis, became a grade school principal, went into World War I with the servicemen’s organization—USO, something like that, was overseas in Europe. Came back and went into city planning. Her career took her to Rochester, where she was a good friend with Eastman.

AF: You mean Rochester, New York?

SL: Rochester, New York, where they set up a new form of city government, then Cincinnati, where she was closely identified with the city manager plan that they adopted there, and there are a lot of gaps in this, but eventually she was in Washington as the executive secretary, I think, or very close to that, of the Business and Professional Women. And then came the deep split between her and them on the question of the Equal Rights Amendment.

AF: Really? Well, I knew there was something in that …

SL: You know, they supported the Equal Rights Amendment, but many of us, and I have to include myself, if I could jump forward to the ‘50s, were opposed to it, because we thought it would destroy the protective legislation. And, of course, the way it was lined up then, you did see the right wing supporting the Equal Rights Amendment, and you suspected that led you to believe that you were right in thinking one of its purposes was going to be to do that. All that’s changed now; the sides are all different. But Emily then split with them, came home to Minnesota. That would be around 1940, ’41, and I suspect she was also retirement age.

AF: Yeah, because I remember her as being an older, retired lady, but very active.

SL: Well, she was very active, and in fact the party chose her in ’44 to be the running mate with Barney Allen. She ran as secretary of state.

AF: Oh, I didn’t know that.

SL: And somehow I had gotten onto her mailing list. I was trying to identify with some of these liberal groups, but I never really found my way to it, my family was so conservative, and my husband was conservative. Although, I identified myself as a Democrat in my own mind, and [Unclear]said—and I would get little postcards saying come to this meeting for Emily Kneu

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Buhl, but, still, we really had never gotten acquainted until this night we went together to the caucus, and then to the convention, as I say, in Brainerd together, and I remember that—were you at that?

AF: No, I then kept the DFL office open while everybody else went.

SL: Well, then, you couldn’t have voted for [Wallace] if you were keeping the DFL office open.

AF: But, you see, you should know how I got the job. Well, I suppose … well anyhow, that’s another tape.

SL: That’s another interview. [Both laugh] Well, anyhow, Francis X. Smith was there in the gallery, and he sought recognition, and he was thrown out by boos and shouts and I did have a qualm, thinking—what kind of democracy is this? But I was so innocent, so swept off my feet by the ability of Humphrey who really was the dominating force there, and Art Naftalin, too, was that I thought, boy, these are real Democrats. I’m with the right crowd. And so it went, and I voted for Truman and saw a lot of [Unclear] in Philadelphia, and carried that banner. Subsequently, I must have seen it on film and been repelled by the manipulation, but at the moment I didn’t see the manipulation. Others did, but I’d become closely associated with … [Both laugh]

AF: Well, let’s see—now that was ’48 …

SL: So that’s the long way of saying that’s what got me into politics.

AF: … that was your background in the party.

SL: So Emily called me, I suspect, when Blanche called her and said—let’s go to a caucus. And that was when we went, in ’48. Now I don’t know how that happened. Anyhow, by then I became aware of the structure of the party, but when ’50 came along I was going to run as a Democrat, but, obviously, there was no party designation, and I didn’t have to … there’s a long story about how I got through the primary.

AF: All right. That’s the next story we need—the long story about how you got through the primary.

SL: Well, of course, everybody thought I was kind of a nut when I filed, because here I worked at the paper. I remember—gee, I wish we could think of her name, the girl who married somebody—[Jeanne Baron]—do you remember [Baron]?

AF: Oh, yeah.

SL: She was a reporter at the paper, and I remember sitting with them all at lunch at the cafeteria, and suddenly I became aware of the fact that they were all laughing at me, because I had filed for office. I was about to quit the next day, and I had announced this, and they said— you really think you’re going to do this? And I thought I was going to do it, and there were some

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good friends there who helped me a lot—Jane Thomas and—oh, what was her name?—Goff, I think. People that I’d met when I was working at the Star and Tribune who came and campaigned with me. Anyhow, I filed for office, went to this national convention of the League of Women Voters, which was a big thrill. Barb [Struman] was with us. We were driving together, down and back, and talked about the campaign all the way down and all the way back—at least I tried to talk about it. They tried to talk about a few other things, but that’s all I was interested in. That must have been in the middle of June, and the struggle then came because seven or eight people had filed in the primary, and one of them saw himself as a Democrat and got the labor endorsement …

AF: Which was then the important endorsement.

SL: … which was then the important … there was no such thing, I don’t think, as a DFL endorsement. I don’t think so.

AF: Probably no.

SL: We didn’t endorse in those days. And so I had to go and get that labor endorsement if I possibly could, and it had happened in committee, and I knew it was coming before the whole group, so I went over to the old Central Labor Union Temple—this innocent, really—and went before the Trades Union Council, whatever we called it.

AF: Screening committee, I think.

SL: Well, no, this was the whole body.

AF: Oh, the whole body.

SL: Stood up in front of them and told them about myself and why I thought I was qualified, hoping that they would [run] for me, and then this old man—I think his name was Knight, and he was a grocer, and he had a little grocery store down on the corner of LaSalle and Loring Park, and oh, how I used to drive past that little mom and pop grocery store and just grind my teeth because he was making so much trouble for me, and he obviously had the inside track. He, then, got up and I left, and then I learned afterward that they had endorsed him. So, in a way, I subsequently used it to my advantage, because I could say, after all, I was not endorsed; they had no hold on me. And I beat him in the primary. I’d have to look back on all of this.

AF: Four of you would come through the primary.

SL: Four of us came through the primary. There was one [Unclear].

AF: Who was the other one?

SL: Tom Christie.

AF: Oh, yeah.

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SL: Tom Christie was the incumbent. Well, he and I won, but there was, it was a big struggle before I won, because Wilbur [Lindsten] was the Republican candidate, and how they, all the Republicans, gathered around Wilbur [Lindsten], and they were really trying to catch up with the fact that I was even a Democrat. Everything about me spelled Republican to all my friends and associates, so the word spread not very rapidly, fortunately, because I managed to win. But Wilbur [Lindsten]—right across the street from us lived Bradshaw [Mintner]. Do you remember Bradshaw [Mintner]?

AF: Oh, yes, yes.

SL: He lives in Washington now, I think. Well, he was Wilbur [Lindsten’s] campaign manager. Of course, most of these people never get into politics at all, just the one-shot deal like that. Although Bradshaw [Lintner] went on into the Eisenhower administration. And he had a big sign in his yard—it was just the beginning of the signs that you and Don used so much as the years went on—so here we’d wake up every morning and look across, and see Wilbur [Lindsten]. We had a sign in our yard—Sally Luther—and Charlie was about ten at the time. Remember this story? [Chuckles] Shall I tell you this?

AF: Yes.

SL: It’s a long … I don’t want to use up too much time. Well, anyhow, Charlie called me up one Sunday morning. Then we went to church. God, I did everything, you know, to be respected. So I was going to take Charlie to Sunday school that morning. All of a sudden his little voice was on the telephone, about fifteen minutes before we were going to go, and it sounded utterly strained, and he said—Mom, could you come get me? And I said—well, where are you? Then I heard him say—where am I? I heard this deep voice say—you’re at Bradshaw [Mintner’s]. So I said—well, let me speak to Mr. [Mintner] what’s it all about? Because he couldn’t even talk to me anymore. And it turned out that Charlie had ripped up the Wilbur [Lindsten] sign, and [Mintner] said to me on the phone—it isn’t the first time. If it were the first time that would be one thing. I mean, you can come over and get him. I forget how it all worked out. I think I went over and did get him, and I explained to [Mintner] that, gosh, this was just childish ardor and it was nothing malicious, and I later learned from Charlie that he was systematically doing this throughout Kenwood. My innocent [Unclear]. He had his friends doing it, too. Well, Mrs. [Mintner] had a great sense of humor, and she used to tell this story—I learned this from other people—she’d say—can you imagine this poor little boy out in the front yard, and Bradshaw with his white hair streaming, looking just like Jehovah coming out and saying—young man, I could have you arrested. It scared Charlie. Well, eventually I squeaked in second. I never came in first in all the elections.

AF: Oh, I sort of remember that.

SL: Because there were four running, and this was really an advantage, I felt, for a woman. Hard to figure these things out for sure, but for somebody who was hard to get elected, having the four slots means that there’s never a clear-cut opponent for you. They can always vote for the one they want, and then they can throw their other vote to the woman, and that happened to me time and time again.

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AF: Did you occasionally use the technique of urging people, when there were three Republicans and you, just to vote for you?

SL: Not only occasionally—systematically. Bullet ballot was the only way I felt many times that I was able to come through. If I had an ardent supporter I’d say—forget … I’d just say that orally, never in writing, because it was supposedly undemocratic to do.

AF: How did you campaign?

SL: Sometimes I even did it … as the years went on the Democratic Party got organized, came with sample ballots. I don’t think they came along until ’54 or ’56. Sample ballots were a blessing, because then you’d have …

AF: You keep saying Democratic Party—that shows how long you’ve been gone from Minnesota.

SL: DFL!

AF: DFL! Because it was the DFL by then.

SL: That’s right, it was the DFL right from the start for me.

AF: Yeah, for you.

SL: The DFL had been already organized and run in ’44, ’46.

AF: Forty-four, I think, it started.

SL: So these sample ballots were invaluable to legislators because of the absence of party designation, and people did want to vote their party conviction. And sometimes I would get those sample ballots ahead of time by prearrangement with the party and take a rubber stamp and stamp right on there—vote for one only. And I was the only endorsed candidate. That helped a few times.

AF: The first time you ran, what was your campaign like?

SL: Oh, yeah, well—you see, I went to Mabeth Paige.

AF: There we are, because she’s one of my other ones.

SL: Mabeth Paige. You have her book, Lady in Waiting?

AF: Yup.

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SL: Well, she’s the first person I went to see. Emily advised me an awful lot, because Emily knew politics from these experiences in Rochester and Cincinnati, and she had a wonderful old house down on Dell Place, and she had been a friend of my family, friend of Mother’s …

AF: Mabeth Paige, yeah.

SL: … yes, for years, so that she immediately just welcomed me in her tight, Maine way, with her eastern, Maine accent. But she told me what to do, and she said—now you must do this; you must visit every home in the district. You must, on the two days before the election, you must remind them again of your candidacy with a flier that covers the entire area. And then Emily said—you’ve got to get a block worker in charge of each block. On and on. And I was just devout in doing these things. I had a map and I’d go door to door, block by block, and ink the block off on my map. You know, I quit working. I’d been working full-time at the Star and Tribune as a reporter and quit working at the end of June, so I had July, August, September, and October to do this, and I really kind of did it. I found that maybe ten percent of the people were home, otherwise you never could do it, so I’d leave a note at the other places, a practice widely copied, I might say, by legislative candidates as the years went on.

AF: Sorry I missed you?

SL: Yeah, sorry I missed you and my signature. I’d sit at night and sign hundreds of these things. That was the technique—just to meet people and they were so stunned to meet candidates. Every candidate always says he does this, but very few really do it, and I quit doing it as the years went by and that’s one of the reasons I lost, too, I’m sure, but if you just go around and meet people and look in their eyes and let them see that you’re real, they’re so stunned.

AF: Well, that district had Mabeth Paige before you.

SL: Twenty years. She quit in ’44.

AF: So there was really only six years between her vacating the seat and your taking it, so in some ways that district was used to having a woman.

SL: Right, and I used that as I went door to door. Of course, there’s such a turnover in our mobile society that there weren’t many of the people left, I don’t think.

AF: Tell me a little bit about Mabeth Paige, because she’s one of the other people that I’m writing about. I did do her book, but …

SL: You know, she got on the rules committee.

AF: Oh, I guess I’d forgotten that if I knew it. And Don’s father talked about her and how her husband campaigned.

SL: Oh, God, he must have been a tyrant. When you read that book, reading between the lines, he just sounded impossible.

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AF: I guess he was kind of a tyrant.

SL: He was the dean of the law school. I think he was dean of the law school before Don’s father?

AF: I think he preceded Don’s father, had it only for a few years, and then taught for years after …

SL: Jimmy.

AF: Yeah, Jimmy Paige.

SL: I never met him.

AF: I didn’t either, but I heard about him.

SL: He was gone by the time I went to her house. Then I used to go every two years to see her, and she would sit there in her chair, and she had kind of a retarded woman as her servant, who was very hostile to me. Well, maybe she wasn’t retarded—she sure was hostile. [Chuckles]

AF: She mentions her, I think, in her book or something.

SL: Did Mabeth write a book? No, [Dara Aldrich].

AF: No, [Dara Aldrich] wrote it.

SL: [Whispers something]

AF: Really? [Chuckles]

SL: It revealed so much of this, that’s where it tells what Jimmy Paige was like.

AF: Yeah, exactly.

SL: I’ve forgotten—it’s been years since I read it.

AF: Well, I sort of remember, since I just read it awhile ago. But, well …

SL: I had a darling factor enter my political life about then, 1950. In fact he was an encouragement to me right then, and that was Mack Martin. I’m going to give all his papers to the historical society, too.

AF: Oh, good.

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SL: All that I have—he was a terrific amateur photographer. He was like a professional. I have all of his pictures, as well as many of his books. You know he married my mother in 1952, and he and Mother were very good friends in 1950, had been since 1945 or ‘6, but he had a wife who was ill in a mental hospital, in the East for many years, and she died 1952, and my mother got married to him. Well, anyhow, Mack knew—he was about the age of Jimmy Paige, and he knew Mabeth very well, and he knew Emily, because they’d gone to grade school together.

AF: Oh, my goodness.

SL: And so that all these older people tied together and helped me and encouraged me and loved me—it was just marvelous. Mack was my treasurer.

AF: Oh, that’s right.

SL: And of course that helped curl the hair of some of the people who were so mad that I was running as a Democrat … reach across party lines. He was a prominent Republican. He didn’t give a damn about the party.

AF: He was in advertising, right?

SL: Yeah, he was the president of Erwin Wasey, and many of these lovely things, the antiques in this house, like that chest, are his. When he died he left everything, of course, to Mother, and then when she remarried, she sold his beautiful house and broke it up, and just didn’t have room for his lovely things. I know he would have loved to have had this table, for example, and that chest is really the nicest piece of all. And he loved [Unclear] chair. This little game table over here, and then most of the beautiful books that have beautiful bindings. He was a terrific collector of beautiful things, admirer, creator—a wonderful person.

AF: Did he help you design your campaign literature, too?

SL: Yes, after awhile. I, of course, I like to control things myself, because I always feel like I’m doing well, and I did my own leaflets, but now and then I would turn to him for suggestions and guidance.

AF: OK, so you got elected and reelected and so on—now, what was it like being a legislator?

SL: Well, I don’t think I’d ever been in the Capitol before I got elected.

AF: You had to figure out what to do. Did anybody tell you what to do?

SL: Well, I found that most of them didn’t know what to do either. Hardly anybody knows. I think there’s a third of the legislature is new every time, and probably another third hardly know what they’re doing most of the time, so that you have just a handful running the show, and I suppose that continued, except that I was conscientious and wanted to see what it was about. We were in the minority the first year, and, of course, it was such a novelty to have these two women elected in 1950. We got our pictures in the paper. I met Coya for the first time at the caucus in

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Saint Paul. There was some doubt as to who was going to caucus which way, and … imagine, the candidates did not declare whether they were Democrats or Republicans until after they’d been elected! Tom Christie, the day after he got elected, announced that he was switching from Democrat to Republican, and he went to the Republican caucus. Well, everybody had a feeling that was what he was going to do, but that kind of thing could go on and on. Well, I, naturally, went to the Democratic caucus, and that was such an experience. I think I met Don Wozniak for the first time. I don’t think Peter Popovich was elected until ’52. [Unclear] was such a [Unclear].

AF: Well, Freddy Cina? Was he the majority then?

SL: He was elected majority leader at that meeting—but minority leader, because we knew we were in the minority—I don’t think there were more than forty of us. And I think he was competing with A. I. Johnson for that slot, and we were meeting in the Saint Paul Hotel, some place like that. No, no, probably the Ryan, and it was all so new to me I hardly knew what was happening—I’d have to go back, look at pictures, I guess, to remember. And then the session came along, and I was so stunned by the processes, It’s hard to recall what my first reactions were. Choosing seats—I think it was like kindergarten—you spent hours choosing seats.

AF: Oh, you had assigned seats!

SL: Well, there was a priority. The handicapped, lame, halt and blind got first, and then based on the number of years in service, and on down, till you finally got your place.

AF: In the back row.

SL: Yeah, I was close to the back row. I do remember the terrible getting used to the smoke and the cigar smoke.

AF: Oh, really! [Chuckles]

SL: [Chuckles] It was ghastly—both sides of you, smoking all the time. Let me think about the process. I studied the rules with great care. George Leahy was the chief clerk and I spent an awful lot of time visiting with him and learning about the process. Cap Bjornson was the sergeant-at-arms. I happened to see—do you remember Cap Bjornson?

AF: No.

SL: I happened to see him last September out at Saint Louis Park at the Methodist Hospital where my mother was having some surgery. Imagine—Cap Bjornson—we just about fell over. He must be eighty now. Well, anyhow, he was hired not only to be the sergeant-at-arms, but obviously they were constantly working on these young Democrats—what do we call ourselves? Conservatives and liberals?

AF: Yeah, liberals.

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SL: The liberals, we were the liberals. The term has become so repugnant to me now I hate to think that I [Unclear] out of that label. The liberals—that was the name of our group. Cap Bjornson would visit with us. He’d draw us aside and have a little chat, and we’d have an ice cream cone together, and obviously, he was trying to get us to go over to the conservative side. That was how deep party roots went. And Larry Yetka was my partner, sat beside me, and Vladimir Shipka.

AF: Oh, yes!

SL: And we formed a little trio there together. I remember so well where we sat. Of course, the house is so crowded it’s just like being in bed together for twenty-four hours a day toward the end of the session when you were there all the time. And you always were in your place—it’s not like congress where you were never there. And Larry Yetka was the youngest member of the legislature. To think of him now. He’s a federal …

AF: Supreme Court judge!

SL: Supreme Court judge! I just about fell over. Well, I think he even had his eye on that then. I didn’t have my eye on anything. I think this is one of the differences between men and women— we don’t plan our careers. There were some … I shouldn’t say we—I certainly didn’t.

AF: No, I think that’s true.

SL: You kind of fluke it along. By fluke I was there. If I could stay there, fine. If I could be of service, fine. I think that first year we had the terrible teachers’ strike in Minneapolis.

AF: Oh, that’s right.

SL: And they shoved through the no-strike legislation. I was on the education committee, and I was able … I remember one glorious moment in the education committee where I could bring out something that I had learned by careful study and reading that nobody else knew. They were staggered that this freshman could say anything important, least of all something relevant to that particular moment. Ed Chilgren was there—he was also on the education committee, [Unclear] beside me, he said—you go on like that, you’ll really make a name for yourself, and, oh, I felt so proud.

AF: What did you do? Do you remember what it was?

SL: I think I told about what the legislation was like in another state where they had not taken the route that George French was pushing through in our legislature. I, of course, was nervous as could be, because back in my neighborhood the sentiment against the teachers was very strong, and my inclination …

[Break in taping]

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AF: … committees, and that you were on the education committee, and we’ll check and see what other committees, or maybe it will come out.

SL: I got on the education committee, I’m sure, because Mabeth wrote a letter on my behalf to the speaker—who was the speaker? You know, Roy Dunn was the majority leader, and I think she wrote to him and said help her get on there. I was very happy to get that assignment. It’s a nice spot.

AF: And, probably, you having been a reporter made you a better legislator than an awful lot of them.

SL: Well, I certainly was a little better informed, but not much, not much.

AF: Most of … they were either lawyers or farmers, weren’t they?

SL: Yes, I did some studies like that. I think a third are lawyers, but it took me a couple of sessions to realize how they worked that, that they were taking their law practice interlocked with their service in the legislature. In fact, your husband, Don, helped me see all that, and he had that marvelous bill, was one of the great moments of the legislative session when I introduced a companion amendment to an amendment he had offered in the senate, which was that lawyers who were members of the legislature could not practice before regulatory commissions of the state.

AF: Oh, yeah, yeah.

SL: And I had a terrific session on that, on the floor, and was shouted down, beaten down, of course, by my colleagues on my side as well as on the other side. That’s one of the things about the Minnesota legislature, too, by the way—there are no sides; they mingle them all together, the Democrats and the Republicans, the liberals and the conservatives.

AF: Oh, so you could just as well be sitting next …

SL: Yes, there’s no seating arrangement, and that prevents any sense of solidarity from developing, along with a dozen other factors. But I’m remembering in that first session of the legislature, Roy Dunn was so eager to be sweet to us that on February 14th, Valentine’s Day, we came into the session and here was a box of candy on my desk and one on Coya’s desk, with a note from Roy Dunn.

AF: Two boxes.

SL: Well, as the session wore on, Roy Dunn discovered that I was far from his cup of tea. I think this was the session when [Prudence Cutwright] was offered as a member of the board of regents—what do we call them? University regents, and they’d never had a woman on the board of regents, and I took courage in my hands—and it was something for a freshman, plus a freshwoman, to speak in that whole house, because when men spoke nobody listened, because they were just bored with it and all, but as soon as they heard the timbre of the voice was

14

different, a female voice—utter silence, and then you suddenly had the attention of absolutely everybody, and you said what you had to say, and I didn’t even do this in a house session, I did it in a joint session—the senate and the house all together—so that the senators were equally stunned, because they’d never heard a woman’s voice since 1939. And I got up and got the attention of the clerk, whoever it was, and told what a terrible thing it was that they were electing, once again, all men to the board of regents. I nearly fainted after I did that, and I was a strong person, I thought. But that wasn’t the fight that I was going to mention. The fight that tickled me was when there was this fellow from Macalester who got himself elected to the legislature and decided to be neither a Republican nor a Democrat—he was a teacher—Tucker, professor. Political scientist, typical—I now know he was a typical political science professor, and so he was an outcast, didn’t identify with either one. And he found this little item in the house rules that said we could do something—we could censure the house. If five members wanted to they could censure the house, and nobody had ever done this, and he got me to join with him—or two members could censure the house, I guess. So these two members, in my innocence I said—why not? I was so mad at them by then. I’d have to look up to see what we censured them for, but they did enough that we could have censured them every day, and this motion was properly introduced to censure the house. I never saw Roy Dunn get so angry. He must have had a tummy like this, and he always wore tailor-made suits with vests that covered this enormous tummy. [Unclear] Oh, he was just a priceless person [Unclear]. And these suits were green or pale lavender or different shades like this, and he got up and he thundered at Tucker and me for having done this, and said we were out of order and so forth. Well, I was just a-tremble. I left the house during the committee of the whole which followed on this, went out, found a member of the Supreme Court, I think. I think I just buttonholed somebody in the hall and said—what about this? Isn’t this right? Can’t I do this? They didn’t know what to say—they were stunned. Anyhow, I think I had the nerve—I hope I did, as I remember this—you always remember it better than it was—that I came back and asked for the floor again, after the session had reconvened, and reiterated the righteousness of my position. Oh, I think that Dunn was ready to write me off forever. There were moments like that. I’d really have to really go day-by-day and look at the news clippings [Unclear] would refresh your memory. You know, I want to write a book, and I can see this would be a way to approach.

AF: You should. [Unclear]

SL: It’s kind of boring.

AF: [Chuckles] It’s not really boring, is it, Sara?

Sara: Fascinating.

AF: Yeah, it really is.

SL: I always used to tell an anecdote about one of these guys. I didn’t really know what counties were. County is a very important unit of government, as we now know! Counties—I got there and lo and behold, you were identified by county. I was the lady from Hennepin, the way Mabeth had been. Well, I found there were eighty-seven counties in Minnesota and I found you had an allegiance to a county just like allegiance to a nation. And then I found many of these fellows

15

came from remote rural counties I’d never heard of, hardly any people in them, and I remember in particular this guy came around from Red Lake, or he came from where they harvested wild rice. I can’t think of his name right now. But he told a story at one of the meetings that we went to together. We talked to a citizen group in Minneapolis, and he told how when he came down to the legislature the first time he brought a constituent with him who was a farmer, and they entered that rotunda, and you know what it’s like—that huge, huge dome up above—and he said this farmer next to him—they were both farmers, but the farmer next to him, he looked up there and he said—boy, could you get a lot of hay in here. [Both chuckle] And I loved it! I told the story over and over again, because it was kind of the way we all were. It would have been a good hay mow.

AF: That gorgeous rotunda. [Laughs]

SL: With all the paintings of the naked women.

AF: I was just there the other day, and it is so pretty.

SL: Oh, were you in the Capitol?

AF: Yeah.

SL: I hear they have a new office building for the legislators.

AF: Well, they have …

SL: Every legislator has his own office.

AF: Has an office, yeah, yeah. That’s something. I can’t get used to that, and all kinds of staff.

SL: Your office was out in those big corridors—you’d sit on the wooden benches and talk to your constituents, drink coffee and breathe the cigar smoke. Once I went up to North Dakota to visit Brynhild Haugland—remember I told you she was the one I’d interviewed. She was a great encourager for me, too. Oh, she said, you must run—why not? You’ll win. There’s no question—you’ll win. She was a farm woman. Her father had homesteaded, a Norwegian, had been a homesteader outside of Minot, and she now has this farm. She’s still in the legislature today.

AF: Yeah, that’s right.

SL: She’s just one of the most distinguished citizens in North Dakota. Well, anyhow, she wanted me to come up and visit her. And February 12 was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday in Minnesota, and the legislature didn’t meet, so I thought this was a good time to do it, and I went up to North Dakota. They didn’t know I was going—Roy Dunn didn’t know I was going—but when you get to North Dakota if you’re from Minnesota, you’re important, you’re a visitor. Well, I was a visitor from the Minnesota legislature. So I was introduced by the speaker, taken over to the senate and introduced, asked to bring greetings from the Minnesota legislature, which I brought.

16

I had to laugh when I told them—they don’t know I’m bringing you these greetings—but I did. And they had a big dinner in my honor, it was just as though I was very distinguished. And then the reporter interviewed me. I didn’t have anything particular to say, except I said that I did notice that I could still smell this terrible cigar smoke, so they had a little item in print, it was very cute: The faces are different, but the smell is the same.

AF: [Chuckles] Oh, boy—well, it’s six o’clock.

[Break in taping]

AF: You mentioned that you were on the education committee. As I recall there were … did you serve on lots of committees?

SL: Well, I know I was always on the education committee for the twelve years, the six terms. I was on the welfare committee, chairman of that, for two terms, and chairman of the civil administration committee for two terms.

AF: What’s civil administration?

SL: Civil administration handles all the administrative legislation, the governor’s office, and all the different …

AF: Like we might call in the federal level government ops, government operations.

SL: I don’t know what you call them there, but actually all federal programs, and they were burgeoning in the late ‘50s. No, they really weren’t burgeoning till the early ‘60s, and by then this committee wasn’t so active. But then all that legislation had to pass through there. And it all depended, too, whether we were majority or minority. During the years that I was in the minority, which was the first, second and sixth terms of the six terms. First, second, and sixth I was in the minority. You’re fairly useless, and the session is really run by the majority group, so that in that first term—I gave you some comments about that—education is very important, the no-strike legislation, election of the university board of regents, and a beginning of understanding, on my part, of what the state aid program was all about. I slowly became fairly good at that. In the second session of the legislature, second term, I was a member of the appropriations committee, and I was chairman of—I couldn’t have been chairman if we were still in the minority—but on the welfare sub-committee of the appropriations committee, which gave me a chance to get well-acquainted with the state institutional program and welfare programs, most of which, as you know, are really set up by federal legislation. All the state does is implement. And then in the next two sessions I was chairman of the welfare committee, and, of course, the shoe was on the other foot right away, because you have to take responsibility; you can’t just be a protestor and a negator. And that was a lot more difficult and exciting work, but we didn’t really make any, in my opinion, any basic changes, because I really am convinced that ever since Social Security legislation, welfare legislation has been dominated by [Unclear] and except for what the state would pay, x-percent, and the county would pay x-percent of the total percentage that wasn’t paid by the federal. We had a lot of big fights about that. We had a lot of fights about nursing homes.

17

AF: Yeah, old senator—what’s his name?—ban the nursing homes.

SL: Yeah, I think Wright was way into nursing homes, too. I’d really have to refresh my memory on these pieces of legislation, and the more I was thinking about it during dinner I think that the further away I get from it the more clearly I see that state legislatures play around on the edges of the real issues. They don’t have much to do with what’s important. In Minnesota, like in most states, in different ways, in Minnesota the legislature is owned and dominated by the iron ore interests and the corporate interests, and anything of real importance would be decided privately between key legislators and those corporate interests. And I didn’t happen to be one of the elite key legislators, so I very seldom found myself in that kind of position.

AF: Yeah, who were the key ones when you were …?

SL: Well, I mentioned Dunn and Cina, and one was a so-called liberal Democrat and one a so- called Republican conservative. But between the two of them they cooked up this atrocity that was an eight-member, interim permanent—interim? How can it be permanent and interim? But it was a permanent interim commission that was supposed to study iron ore. And by doing that they put off for ten years, fifteen years, forever! I don’t imagine it’s still been redressed—the way in which Minnesota would tax the iron ore interests. And that was going to be a bi- partisan—four of each party, and each of the three that weren’t Cina and the three that weren’t Dunn were in the hip pocket of Cina and Dunn. And so that eight-member group kept that issue under wraps. Power interests—we had a terrific fight to try to bring the power companies under the control of the state regulatory agencies, and I was the chairman of the civil administration committee in that year, so I was in a position of real power, supposedly. Wasn’t able to get it through. Couldn’t even find the support among the members of my own party, who made up the majority of the committee. That’s when I began to see it didn’t matter which party you were in. Couldn’t. Now, one should really talk a long, long time about this and refresh one’s memory to be able to give you chapter and verse, but I slowly came to the conclusion that state legislatures simply don’t function—I don’t think they function any better than congress, so I’m not pointing the finger at them anymore, but I really haven’t got much faith in how the democratic process works in this country, because it’s so subject to the controls of the power groups that can manipulate it.

AF: Yeah. You mentioned the iron ore interests and …

SL: Welfare, education, aid to junior colleges. We were able to get that through—it was a big break-through. Improved the support of the state college system.

AF: Partly there’s a tradition of support of education in Minnesota.

SL: Well, even that has to … Yes, compared nationally, we stand fairly high, though New York stands much higher. But a whole separate political battle in Minnesota is the power of the university over the legislature and over the rest of the entities of the education hierarchy. Just staggering, and, again, the further one gets away from it, looking back, the more it falls into shape, how [Morrow] would … I remember one year that I was on the education subcommittee

18 and the appropriations committee—I must have been on two sessions then, because this would have been another year—and the appropriations bill was unacceptable to [Morrow], and this private summons came, and we unimportant little legislators were shepherded quietly over to a key dining room on the university campus, and the five or six big cheeses of the university were present, and we had a steak dinner, and then they explained to us lovingly how this could not go through—it would destroy the university!

[Break in taping]

AF: We are talking about the university and its role in the legislature. We’ve said enough about that. You mentioned Prudence Cutwright, Cartwright—Cutwright it was, wasn’t it?

SL: I think it was Cutwright.

AF: Refresh my memory—who was she?

SL: I never met her—she was in the education faculty at Macalester.

AF: Did she get to be a regent?

SL: Kindergarten education—no, she never made it.

AF: She didn’t make it, that’s right.

SL: I’m sure she was conservative. But then as a result of our big fight, Marge Howard made it the next year.

AF: The next time.

SL: Or the next vacancy, actually. Marge Howard lobbied us. We went down to the Minnesota Club and [sat around].

AF: And now there always has to be a woman.

SL: Apparently a token woman now.

AF: Sometimes she’s black. In fact twice we’ve had it.

SL: Black woman on the board of regents?

AF: Oh, yeah. Josie Johnson—you remember her?

SL: Oh, yeah, yeah.

AF: And now Wenda Moore.

19

SL: What’s happened to Josie Johnson?

AF: Josie Johnson went with her husband to Denver.

SL: [Unclear]

AF: No, no, no—he works for Honeywell, so she went to Denver.

SL: [Unclear]

AF: She is, very interesting. I think we will stop here and … I’m going to stop here and then we’ll start a new one. [End of Track 1]

Track 2

AF: You were talking about your bus tours.

SL: Yeah, the bus tours proved to be … of course, [he] didn’t get re-elected, so they weren’t … I always felt we were goal oriented, and our orientation was re-election—in the governor’s office. I never was as goal oriented, I don’t think, in my own case, although, probably I was—maybe I don’t admit it. But we did have these tours around the state where we organized community groups and visited prisons or the state institutions for the retarded or the state colleges or the junior colleges—any place. Bureaucracy, plus elected officials, are so far removed from what they’re governing. I was stunned, when I was in the legislature, to discover how few legislators had ever been in the state prisons or ever been in the state institutions for the retarded. Of course, I found that Rolvaag was as remiss there as most of the rest of them, so he was delighted to do [Unclear], and it was a good focus for publicity [Unclear].

AF: What about the stresses and strains in the Rolvaag office? You mentioned Quigley and [Shovel], but then pretty soon there was …

SL: Rice.

AF: … Jim Rice.

SL: God. I just never encountered more incompetent, unprincipled, unconscionable people in my … well, I met them all in the legislature—I don’t know why I’m surprised. Really, the waspishness, the brutishness of man [Chuckles] was laid before you in the political process, I hate to say. Man, I suppose, and women—if the women had been there—because I’m not a bit satisfied …

AF: You were the only one?

SL: In the governor’s office?

20

AF: Yeah.

SL: Yeah, but I was …

AF: The only, you know, professional, one would say.

SL: Well, Mary Lou Hill came along after a little while—you remember Mary Lou Hill?

AF: Yeah, yeah.

SL: And she did some of this work with the agencies and with the constituents, too.

AF: Back, you also sort of worked with Freeman, and with Dorothy Jacobson.

SL: That’s right.

AF: And in some ways with [Eugenie], I suppose, in political things. Did you have much to do with [Eugenie]?

SL: No, I didn’t.

AF: Well, of course, she went off to Denmark and so on.

SL: I knew her as a newspaper reporter, and I always have my memory—a dinner, a great, big dinner—you were probably there at the Nicollet Hotel, that they gave for her before she went to Denmark, and here was this big handclap from us—still in my innocence—I don’t know when it is ever going to dissolve—but she came in looking regal and beautiful in orchid and gave a speech, and in her speech—and I thought how curious that she should do that—she emphasized over and over and over again how we should try to work together. How bickering should be kept to a minimum. Of course, I wasn’t in any of this—I thought, boy, so where’s all this bickering? What is all this work together? Only as the years went on and I got into the governor’s office myself did I discover what she must have meant, but … even in … when was that, ’50? ’51? that she went?

AF: When did she go?

SL: Well, she was a Truman appointee, so it must have been ’50, ’51.

AF: That’s right.

SL: So even then there must have been … oh, that must be, it’s …

[Break in taping]

AF: I wonder what the reference was.

21

SL: [Unclear] just to have a party structure [Unclear].

AF: Yeah, yeah.

SL: [Unclear] combat is what it [Unclear].

AF: Forever! Some of the people I remember so active in the Freeman administration—of course, that was on taxes and education—where Jerry [Hamie] and Joe Robertson and Walter Heller and Frank [Botter].

SL: Yes, and Jerry [Hamie] in particular we worked with an awful lot on the legislation.

AF: Fascinating guy. [Chuckles] Why do you smile like that?

SL: I don’t know—I just don’t feel I can trust to tape any more.

AF: OK! [Both laugh] I’ll save that for when we’re …

SL: I have too many awful things to say about too many people. I hate to think what they would be saying about me [Unclear].

AF: Let’s then go back, clear back, to what do you think ever made you run for office? Let’s go back almost into childhood and education, because I guess I figure we get the way we are—I mean we’re raised, not born, this way. Maybe we’re born partly this way, but … so you went to school in Minneapolis. Public school? Northrop.

SL: Um-hum. I couldn’t have had a more sheltered childhood and teens, just couldn’t have. With only a few references to politicians, and one that I always remember. My father would take me out to the Minikahda Club when we’d have dinner or something, and either he would go speak to somebody or he would see somebody else going from table to table, and he’d always make the joke. He’d say—well, Joe, how are you? You must be running for office. And in this way I got to know that when people ran for office they must go from table to table to shake hands. No other reference to … and then I think that …

AF: Your father was a lawyer?

SL: Yeah. Do you remember … of course you don’t remember when Floyd Olson was down there?

AF: Yeah.

SL: He was anathema in our house.

AF: Yeah. He was anathema in Mabeth Paige’s household. In our household he was a great hero. Yeah. But, so you knew about politics. Everybody has to [Unclear].

22

SL: I knew that it was something that people kind of looked down on. You ran around and shook hands. And a friend of the family ran for the legislature once in about 1941 or ’42, in the same district that I was elected from, and we always used to giggle because his name was Arthur P. Smith, and he has his card printed up—he was in the insurance business, like an awful lot of people who run for the legislature—and he said Arthur P. (for protection)—this was his slogan. [Both chuckle] And this we made a lot of fun of, too. Well, Arthur P. Smith was a close friend of my father’s, and was a very conservative person. That was in the early days, that was long before I ever dreamed I would run for office in the same district and get elected.

AF: Then that would have been … did he oppose or succeed Mabeth Paige? Do you ever remember her as a legislator?

SL: No.

AF: No, you would have been too young.

SL: No, I wouldn’t have been too young, and I would have voted for her if I had any recollection. I came back to Minnesota and I graduated from college and …

AF: Let’s back up—all right, so you went to Northrop, and then where did you go to high school?

SL: I graduated from Northrop High School in ’36 and I went on to Vassar College. I graduated in June of 1940, came home, got married in February of ’41. I voted in November 1940 for Franklin Roosevelt—I was the only person in my entire circle of acquaintances voted for Franklin Roosevelt.

AF: What made you vote for Roosevelt?

SL: I suppose it was exposure at Vassar is the only thing I can [Unclear].

AF: All right, let’s talk a little bit about Vassar, because here you are back again. Why did you go to Vassar?

SL: My father wanted me to go to a prominent women’s college, and I had a teacher at Northrop, Carolyn Mercer. She was a Vassar graduate and had gone back to Vassar. No, she hadn’t gone back yet when I went there—she was my teacher there. Those were two reasons, and I think there was a girl across the street from my father and mother, had lived long before, who had gone to Vassar.

AF: And done well?

SL: I don’t know whether she’d done well or not—she’d gone. So, for those reasons I applied and was accepted, along with several other girls from Minneapolis. We all went off and it was a very exciting experience.

23

AF: Why was it exciting?

SL: Well, a new world. Freedom. Living in the dormitory, meeting other young women. I became involved with the college newspaper and became a managing editor, and that was where the left wing faction on campus was active, so I …

AF: What were the left wing issues then?

SL: How secure are we? [Both chuckle] Is somebody going to listen to this before it’s put away?

AF: Oh, I don’t think so.

SL: Is it going to be put away and not listened to for twenty-five years?

AF: Yeah, yeah. I won’t even give it to them for some time. You don’t have to … just what were some of the issues?

SL: Pretty far left. These were pretty far left people. And so the issues of the time in 1938 and ’39 was Soviet Russia and its position in the world and the Communist Party in this country and its role in the united front and evolving, the changes. In 1939 I went to this labor school across the river, as a matter of fact, where Bryn Mawr College had for years started a labor school for women. Women in labor unions, and during the summer months when all of the elite who went to Bryn Mawr College were home, they would bring in women from laundry workers’ unions. Of course there weren’t even unions then in the ‘20s. Well, there may have been then—they faded out. But this thing kept alive up until about ’37 or ‘8, and then Bryn Mawr phased it out completely [Unclear]. And so, a wonderful woman named Hilda Smith, who had an old mansion—it’s still over there—in West Park—you know, it’s about two houses away from Stewart Place—I think I’ve shown it to you—offered her home, and it became the Hudson Shore Labor School, and the unions then were in the ascendency—CIO, particular, and the UAW and the IUE and so forth would pick women in their membership—there weren’t very many women then. Laundry workers, Puerto Ricans from New York, black women from Boston, Washington. Household workers, and this, maybe, an enrollment of a hundred. And then in order to expose young elite women, they had an undergraduate intern program, and I applied and was accepted as an intern from Vassar. There was a Smith girl, a Wellesley girl, and a Holyoke girl, and me. And we were kind of assistants. Well, it was terrific exposure—you can imagine. The only other workers I had ever met in my life were the household help that we’d had in my mother and father’s house. And here we were all living together and trying to understand some of the issues, labor history …

AF: What was your role as an intern?

SL: Well, my major at Vassar was in dramatics, and the professor, Esther Porter-Power, also had gotten a full-time summer teaching job at this camp. So fine, she said, since I knew her, and we’d worked together in drama here at Vassar, I’d be her helper. And so that’s what I was. And we tried to do guerilla theater, we tried to ...

24

AF: It wasn’t called guerilla theater then.

SL: No, it wasn’t, but the same kind of thing. Make our own stuff and relate it to the civil war in Spain and any issue that was then appeared to be important, and songs we’d sing, did a lot of singing, and talk about organizing. “The Union Makes Us Strong,” I learned all of the labor songs and had a marvelous time. I just loved it, but it was like every other experience for me, just going gung ho, and experienced these terrible moments of disillusionment, because here I thought at last I’ll find people who can live together in harmony—blacks and whites. We’ll work together, there won’t be hatred. I discovered that the Polish and Russian, Jewish girls from Chicago were contemptuous in a way I could hardly believe of the big black woman from Boston and of the black woman from Washington that I mentioned, and this powerful Puerto Rican laundry worker from New York—I often think about her; I wonder where she is today. Really, just the dominant force. And the tensions between these people was like the United Nations all over again. And, of course, that was hard for me. I thought where’s that sisterly love? But [Unclear] it was still a great opportunity for understanding the [Unclear]. So while those things, I think, were at work, and there was some exposure here—Hallie Flanagan, whose name may not ring a bell with you, but who was the head of our drama department, who was the head of the federal theater project under WPA in Washington, and who went before the Dies Committee and was read out as a Red, which she was not, but she certainly was full of radical ideas for change, so that I saw that and thought about it, and then, as managing editor of the paper, in a very modest way, I think now, looking back, but at the time in a rather strong way we agitated for black admissions on campus, for change of make-up of the faculty. We brought Marc Blitztein— you don’t remember this, but there was a great musical that he wrote called The Cradle Will Rock, and we brought it from New York, the company, was a traveling company that put it on. The campus was ... it just turned the campus upside down. Apparently it‘s a real Communist propaganda piece. And that was a big no-no. But all of this mixed together with my teenage growth, my boyfriends, my family back home—where was it all going to connect? In the end we formed our own little theater company. We toured up and down the Hudson Valley putting on plays about the history of the Hudson Valley, with social content. In the end I went home to Minneapolis. It was a struggle going on inside me, and when I got home to Minneapolis I renewed my faltering romance, which then burgeoned into marriage, and the trap was closed, and I was there for twenty years. During those twenty years this seemed a logical, exciting way to use some [Unclear].

AF: How long did you work as a reporter all the time? I mean, you got married, and then when did you start … were you ever just a plain housewife?

SL: Really not. I got married in February of ’41, and I certainly … I was a housewife for about a year, and then my father died, and we had to fix up our income a little bit, because we really didn’t have any—Ham was in law school, and so I went to work, and really worked … that was about ’43, spring of ’43, and I really worked until I resigned to run for the legislature in 1950. I worked for the paper for about a year, and then I went to Honeywell, there was a war, and I edited the house organ there, because I had learned at college how to edit papers, and I did that for three years, and then I went back to the paper, the Star and Tribune, and I worked there as a reporter for three years, then I quit.

25

AF: And had one child.

SL: Had one child and he was about eight or ten when I ran for the legislature. I told you about that. And then I told you that they told me I wasn’t going to have any more and then I got over there in the legislature and my hormones started jumping around and I had a terrible stomach ache, and I said to Bill Carlson—remember Bill Carlson?

AF: Yeah!

SL: Father of six. I said—I have such terrible pains in my stomach. I just can’t understand it—I think I’m dying of cancer. This was about April of 1953.

Sara: When was Mark born?

SL: April of ’51, then. It was the first session of the legislature. He said—sounds dangerous to me—I recognize those symptoms. And I thought he was crazy, but then Ham and I went to Mexico after the session was over, and I really got very sick. I was sick in the bathroom and all that, and when we got home I said—this is it—I think I can feel the cancer. I could feel this hard lump. I went to the doctor and discovered that, lo and behold, I was pregnant. [Unclear] doctor.

AF: So you had two children while you were in the legislature.

SL: Well, yes, and everything was a crisis, because I would think of these tensions about men and women and their roles in society are something you could go on about for a long, long time, but I think that Ham felt, after Mark was born, his first one, that certainly this thing would now take her off. I’d come to my senses. And I said I just didn’t see that at all. I thought it was very important to go on in the legislature. I loved it and I wanted to do it, and it was a way that I could contribute, I thought. And that was a very rough time. And I had to get babysitters in, and that’s always complicated, but I did it. In a way, I used to say that we should have a lot more women in the legislature, but very difficult for them to do if they didn’t live within driving distance the way I did.

AF: Oh, I think that’s right.

SL: Very, very difficult. You just couldn’t have young children. And I realized that after it happened to me.

AF: I wonder, it will be interesting to look—I think you’re probably the only, well …

SL: One with children.

AF: The only one with children. Coya had one son, but …

SL: He was the same age as Charlie. That would be interesting to look at. Helen certainly didn’t have any.

26

AF: And Alpha’s kids were older. Connie , I guess.

SL: Joyce Lund was childless. Esther from up there, Detroit Lakes or wherever it was—I don’t think she had any children.

AF: No. Was she on our list?

SL: If she isn’t, she should be. Feldman!

AF: That’s right. Oh, yeah. They’ve got her Fieldman, yeah.

SL: Well, Fieldman.

AF: Fieldman, Feldman, I don’t know. That’s right. She came a little later. What do you think the stresses and strains are, special stresses and strains? You’ve alluded to an awful lot of them, being a woman legislator. It’s interesting, when we look at the whole list, they come essentially from Minneapolis or what we used to call the old Ninth District, which is the old liberal … except then a few later, but Joyce and Helen and then McMillan, come again from outside. Never one from Saint Paul until this election.

SL: It’s so difficult to find the man, in the first place, who’s willing to live in partnership with a woman and let her be a partner. It’s just …

AF: Oh, I agree.

SL: … very, very difficult. And I would say that Ham was unusual in the willingness that he showed to let it happen. But he surely was never enthusiastic or in any way supporting and pushing me [Unclear]. Only by being very strong a person could I have come through it, and I didn’t come through it in the end, as you know; we got a divorce. It’s just our culture so far, and it’s changing now a little bit.

AF: But it’s still tough.

SL: Oh, very tough. You can see it wherever we go. In every social group it’s the men who do the talking. It’s in any meeting, it’s the men who have to get the prestige out of it, unless you’re willing to just struggle and be twice as tough.

AF: Do you think your training in dramatics was an asset? I can tell you can project your voice. You’ve always had this very strong, resonant, distinctive voice.

SL: Well, I don’t know. I look at the other people, women in the legislature, and they could do that. Maybe Coya had musical training so that she would do that. I don’t know that that’s an advantage.

AF: Public speaking, I’m sure.

27

SL: Public speaking, yeah. But I think that inner thing is so much more important. That confidence somehow to believe your fight is worthwhile and that you are as good as the person who is sitting next to you, which is hard for women from the day they’re born to believe that they are. I think they are … my mother and your grandmother was a big factor, don’t you? Because she was a feminist without knowing it, really, but utterly determined that nobody was going to put you into second slot.

AF: She was active in the League of Women Voters.

SL: Well, of course, she didn’t have public speaking ability, so that proves your point. And she always felt insecure. I saw her once get up to speak at the Women’s Club, and I just trembled for her; I could see it on her, how insecure she was. So that was a drawback for her. And then she had this gung-ho thing about men—they’ve got to be more important, otherwise they’re not going to be happy, you aren’t going to have a happy home. She said to me a thousand times, so it was ambivalence, because at the one time she convinced me I was worthy, on the other hand she kept saying till I was destroyed by it, almost—you’ll never get a husband. You’ll never make it. You can’t possibly. I mean, your children won’t be happy, nothing will be normal—on and on and on—unless you let the man be the dominant one and the smart one, the talker, and so forth. So she was caught between the poles, but, I think I gained as much as I suffered. I’m not complaining now. But you look at your own children—I don’t know if you look at yours [Unclear]. I’ve conveyed something to her that’s useful that I’m afraid has been negative to my sons.

AF: Oh, you think so?

Sara: I think the same thing coming out of me proved positive with Sara and proved negative with them [Unclear].

AF: Oh, really?

Sara: I think that’s partly true. I think it draws along the lines all the time. I think the men stick to the men. They look to find things to admire in their father, and your daughters look for things to admire in their mother. And it may be in this case that—I don’t know, I think it was a great deal to admire in you, and dad wasn’t that outgoing and that outspoken, and so they may have [Unclear] and manufactured things or found things or identified things that he had that may not have been so strong [Unclear] as strong. I know that Mark [Unclear] constantly talks about father. He always likes to use the term [Unclear]. I always use dad.

AF: He uses father, yeah.

Sara: Well Father thinks this and Father thinks that, and he has a great admiration, which is fine, and [Unclear] if we talk about mother, he’ll say things like—you know, [Unclear] going to work all the time. See, because my dad doesn’t. [Unclear]

AF: That’s very interesting. Because I was looking, as you were saying, at my own kids, and in some ways … Don does like to work, and I like to work. That may not be just female, what

28

you’re talking about, so far as your sons are concerned. And I look at my own, you see, and in some ways I think that it’s been my two middle girls that have suffered the most from my ambivalence. Of course, you weren’t ambivalent, and that’s the difference. I, I think …

Sara: How many children?

AF: Well, we had six and we lost one, so that we’d have the little one, like you, the last one, and then we have the big kids. And the two boys identify in some ways a great deal with me, but then in many ways their father was always so busy. And I think—well, I don’t know what I think. They sort of respect him but … and enjoy him somewhat, but never were quite as close, it seems to me. And Tom, especially, has a very liberated marriage. I’m quite interested. And then we talked about John. And Jeannie is …

Sara: John’s not married?

AF: No. And Jeannie is a very strong young woman. She’s twelve, only.

Sara: [Surprised sound]

AF: Well, she is—her teacher said the other day she knows who she is already. I think that’s partly my activities, but partly also that she is the youngest. I think that … there’s something …

SL: I was just going to say it’s all so complicated, whether younger, older, sex …

AF: Only one, yeah.

SL: …your relationship to these other people. You can’t really [Unclear].

AF: What was going on in the family at the time and all those things?

Sara: Charlie claims that, and he claims … and grandma was much more of a tyrant and strong arms, whereas she’s eighty-five now when I’m in my teens …

AF: The little one.

Sara: … so I couldn’t ...

AF: Your mother was quite a force in your life?

SL: Well, I would think so, yes. At times an intolerable force, and never an intellectual force. An emotional force.

AF: Demanding of you?

SL: Demanding—still is, really. Of course, it was great to move. I hope she never [Unclear]. [Chuckles]

29

AF: She won’t! [Chuckles]

SL: Yeah, I was really always stronger than mother, so it hasn’t been overpowering [Unclear].

AF: But you were the only daughter?

SL: I was the only one.

AF: So lots of things got projected onto you.

SL: No question [Unclear].

AF: Tell me a little bit about Coya, since I have to find her.

SL: Coya …

AF: You mentioned her musical training—I had forgotten that.

SL: Yeah, she sang at church. She’d sing at weddings and funerals in her district. She was married to … I have been to Oklee, and I have visited the hotel, met Andy and met the little boy, and [Unclear]. I was so angry—I’m still so angry; my blood just boils to think that those people, including that Ben Wichterman that I loved and sat next to, intimately—as I told you how close you are when you sit in a session together; he and I were seatmates for one year. But he helped do it, and they went out to get her because she was female, and they could do it—she was vulnerable. If the situation had been reversed and anybody had written a letter to the CBS saying this woman wants her husband to come home, CBS would have torn it up, instead of it turning up on the news. And here I heard this awful letter over the nation-wide news. You know how that was done? Coya Knutson went to congress. She was two terms in the Minnesota legislature, the first two that I was there, then she ran and was elected to congress from the …

AF: And she ran against an endorsed candidate, originally, didn’t she?

SL: Yes, she beat that fellow who had been on the postmaster’s committee for so many years, can’t think of his name. Yes.

AF: She was a Kefauver person.

SL: Yeah, in ’52, would have been. Yeah, she was for Kefauver, too, but she didn’t run until ’54, and Kefauver came in and gave her a boost, I think. So when she got to congress, the DFL enemies of hers, up in her district, which is the northwestern part of Minnesota, including Moorhead, wrote letters to CBS news. No, no, they didn’t write them—they wrote a letter, took it over to her aggrieved husband, who was running this two-bit hotel that they lived in, in Oklee, Minnesota, and they got Andy to sign this letter. And the letter was called—Coya Come Home. And the letter said—Coya, I miss you. The house needs you, the child needs you—where are

30

you? I’ve really got to have you. Signed Andy. And CBS read it on the CBS news, and this was the beginning—I don’t know if that’s the wrong word—but this was the beginning …

AF: Demise.

SL: … of the destruction of Coya. They trailed her, tracked her, and Time Magazine, Life Magazine loved it.

Sara: [Unclear]

SL: No, she got re-elected, in spite of this, or maybe that was in ’56.

AF: I can’t remember.

SL: She served two terms, maybe it was in the second term that they got her, but they got her. Oh, then they said she was having a romance with her administrative aide. And they got the newspapers to track down where she was with her administrative aide.

Sara: Was she young, was she pretty, or …?

SL: She was my age, I think.

AF: No, she wasn’t that young and pretty, but ...

SL: She was fat.

AF: Yeah, jolly.

SL: Jolly—likeable, and she was fun to have around. She’d be in the room, she’d laugh real loud like a farm woman. Oh, she [Unclear] through, and she toughed it out with the legislators a lot. She adapted much more readily to the process than [Unclear], because it was more rural men than urban men. It was a new milieu for me, but …

AF: But she would, running a hotel, she’d be used to those men, huh?

SL: Yup. She was conscientious, stuck right with it. I always liked Coya and worked with her well. In fact, that one summer then we made a deal …

[Break in taping]

AF: Well, let’s talk two big issues, while you were in the legislature, were the fight for FEPC— Fair Employment Practices Commission, I guess we called it. And then, second, fair housing. What do you remember about these?

SL: Right off I remember it. First—you probably remember this, too—we called fair housing open housing.

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AF: Open housing—you’re right.

SL: And then, my God, we started holding meetings and realized there was a terrible public misunderstanding about open housing. They thought it meant the house had to be open, and so that’s when we changed it to fair housing. I wasn’t, I don’t think, in the immediate planning circles. Of course, the way that legislation was done, it was planned by outside groups, that is, non-legislative groups—church and NAACP and outfits like that. [Denzel Carty], people of that sort. And then they would bring their united front to us, and we would take the legislation and run with it. I worked closely with them, and we lobbied hard and faced some tremendous battles in the legislature. I’ll never forget the day Duxbury amended the Equal Opportunity Act. Were you there by any chance?

AF: No.

SL: To … just the same kind of thing they did in the federal ten years later when they made it apply to women and thought it was kind of a joke. And, of course, that’s proved to be a great thing for all of us. But in this case he offered an amendment on the floor to include bald people, and it was adopted. They were that, oh, awful about this subject, the members of the legislature. They just thought we were crazy people, pushing do-good legislation. I remember that awful F. Gordon Wright. He would say over and over again—this kind of thing can’t be done by coercion. It’s got to be done by education, by persuasion, but you can’t do it legislatively, forcing it down people’s throats. All the same arguments [Unclear] many times. Eventually both pieces of legislation passed.

AF: But it took at least a couple of sessions.

SL: Oh, yes, each one, and terrible fight on the part of the legislators. I know Don was very courageous. I was not anywhere near as courageous as Don, and at one point I was so frightened that I was about to lose an election as a result of this, of the previous session. Of course, the elections were never held close to the sessions, that I had developed a special little card and circulated it throughout the conservative part of my district to reassure people that I had not, in fact, done what my opponent was alleging. In retrospect I think how violently I should have printed a card and said—God, yes, I am for every possible way you could interpret fair housing and fair employment, but instead I was so anxious …

AF: And then you wouldn’t have been re-elected and then you wouldn’t have …

SL: Ach, what would have been the loss?

AF: Well, I’m not so sure. You know, these things only get passed when there are people there to do it.

SL: Yes, but what good have they done? I am living here in Poughkeepsie, with New York City—in this state we see what terrible racism there is that permeates the North.

32

AF: Yeah, that’s true, but living in Washington, DC, in an integrated development, I figure, well, there … I mean, we’ve come some way. Gee, I remember my first shock when people that I thought were my age told me about going to segregated schools. And on the street, on I Street Southwest—we live on M—there are two junior high schools. One used to be the black one and one the white one, within four blocks of each other. And we have three elementary schools. I don’t know what the one was, but maybe there were two black and one white, but there they are to remind you.

SL: Reminders, but now what is ninety-five percent of your school enrollment’s black.

AF: That’s right—the good white liberals went to the suburbs.

SL: Of course, so see, this is what I’m saying, and I live here for [Unclear] …

AF: It’s not an easy subject, I agree.

SL: Well, in this little city they have a line right down the middle.

AF: Also, the good blacks left the public schools, too, the rich blacks.

SL: Well, there are very, very few, comparatively, rich blacks.

AF: Well, that’s right. Well, that’s the view of education in the East is a whole different thing.

SL: Of course. We were hardly dealing with problems in Minnesota when we [coped with] …

AF: And there weren’t any private schools and there weren’t any blacks.

SL: Very little tension—no black people!

AF: That’s right—and there still aren’t.

SL: Two percent, maybe, in the population in Minnesota, or of the Twin City area, perhaps.

AF: I think the Twin City area gets up to about six.

SL: Oh, does it?

AF: Yeah. Well, counting Indians. Were Indian issues at all an issue?

SL: No. I remember this same fellow, the one that I told you about with the hay—get a lot of hay in here. He was very strong on the Indian question, and he made a terrible fuss when we named some kind of a Centennial Commission. That’s it! It was the Minnesota Centennial, I think, when I was in the legislature, and he didn’t want to celebrate the Centennial, because he said the original inhabitants of Minnesota didn’t like the idea of a Centennial. And that was about the biggest Indian issue that came up. Most of them were terribly prejudiced. I remember—I shan’t

33

mention his name right now—but a wonderful old lawyer legislator over and again would tell me—only good Indian is a dead Indian. Meant it. And, of course, the prejudice against black people was just enormous.

AF: Yeah, yeah.

SL: And the legislature was so unrepresentative. Never any women. No young people to speak of. All conservative old farmers. It was set up to accommodate the rural Minnesota timetable. And then, of course, we didn’t have redistricting. When did we finally get that?

AF: Nineteen sixty.

SL: Fifty-nine, ’60, so you had over-represented rural Minnesota. I just couldn’t get over how strong that rural [centering] was, how much it dominated. Oleomargarine gives an example. Banking legislation. And I was going to tell you about some of the black marks in my history, and I hate to bring them up.

AF: That’s all right—we can put a date on this. After we’re both dead.

SL: I mentioned June Cedarleaf in the Women and Children’s Bureau, and she was … we became friendly. And I was very concerned, and still am, about the terrible exploitation of labor, and, of course, you see the exploitation working on those least able to defend themselves, and that tends to be women and children, now as then. And so protective legislation to me made great sense, and still does. And, of course, we’ve got the Equal Rights Amendment, that we’ve got to get the protective legislation for both men, women, and children. But I did, after a suggestion, put in a bill once to limit the amount of weight that women could carry on the job. And I really became a good laughing stock on that one, because …

AF: Oh, in the legislature?

SL: Um-hum. Twenty-five pounds June felt, and I felt so, too, was all a woman should be asked to carry anyplace. Well, of course, the Business and Professional Women came out passionately against me, speaking for the employers, and the legislators made tremendous fun of it, and eventually the bill was withdrawn, and I see, in retrospect, that maybe that wasn’t the soundest way to approach it. But there were other ones where we tried to set the hours, you know, I think women are prohibited from working more than fifty-four hours a week in Minnesota and more than ten hours a day. All of this sounds huge when you think of ten hours a day for five or six days.

AF: But an awful lot of women then were in non-covered employment. In other words, so they didn’t get any protection any other way.

SL: Right, of course, and none of them organized by the unions—they didn’t speak for them. But I remember this old legislator from Faribault telling me if I should … this was not a black mark in my record. I was proud I was for the legislation, and I don’t know if I got it passed, but I was happy to be working for it. But he said—now look. I have these young girls working at my

34

drive-in. They work seventy hours a week and they love it. They are making money to put themselves through college. You’re going to destroy their opportunity to do this. He was absolutely [Unclear]. [Unclear] I think was his name.

AF: Seventy hours a week, that’s a lot.

SL: So in protective legislation, I got myself … Oh, I got myself in another bind, because, as I mentioned, when you’re in the majority you carry more responsibility. Right off, the first thing you become beholden to is the bureaucracy. I don’t know if you remember it, but I’m sure you do, who was the commissioner of welfare. [Unclear]

AF: [Morrie Hirsch]. [Chuckles]

SL: Well, he and I worked together very closely during the years that I was chairman of the welfare committee. But he would give me some sleepers, and I wasn’t quick enough to identify them, and I got one out on the floor of the house. The chairman had to carry these bills, and, of course, I suppose the conservatives on my committee were delighted with this one, which was something like—if the husband of a woman on ADC—as I said, all of these are little fringe bills, playing around with the federal legislation.

AF: But important to individuals.

SL: Yes, but really most of them should hardly been taking up time. Tremendous cost of the legislature, the whole thing. So this bill was going to be that if a husband refused to take rehabilitation training if he were disabled, then aid should be terminated.

AF: For the whole family.

SL: Yeah. And I really didn’t read this carefully until I had it out on the floor, and ...

AF: Somebody pointed it out to you! [Chuckles]

SL: That I should have had to have this pointed out to me by my sometimes friends. Gee, Don Wozniak was so humiliated. But, of course, you know what it’s like, a lot of things like these when you were a little kid. You remember those desperate, vile moments much more than you remember your moments of success.

AF: I remember somebody telling me once about you having a terrible fight, and then finally … or a bitter defeat, and just sitting at your desk and crying. And I remember this being talked about, and I remember you saying—yes! afterwards. Do you remember what this was about?

SL: No, I don’t remember that.

AF: It would have been …

SL: I did leave the floor once and go to my office and cry.

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AF: Maybe this was it, and what was it over?

SL: It was a terrible encounter, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. And I do remember another terrible time I didn’t cry, but I felt like crying. And that was when I was chairman of the civil administration committee, where the members of my own team let me down on a bill, with great pleasure. I mean, it was a moment for them. They never really wanted [Unclear] and didn’t want me to be chairman of that very important and powerful committee. I mean, it was almost equivalent to taxes and appropriation. And I knew I could do it and I did do it for two terms, but on that particular issue, and I’d have to look it up to remember, but they had a delightful moment of [torturing me].

AF: This was chairman of the welfare committee?

SL: No, civil administration.

AF: Civil administration, that’s right.

SL: For the first two terms we were in the majority; I was chairman of welfare, and for the next two terms that we were in the majority, I had to fight, but I won the fight to get them to accept me as chairman of the civil administration committee.

AF: Who did you have to fight?

SL: With the rules committee that made those key appointments.

AF: And this would be our own men.

SL: Our own team, right. But it was such an important, prestigious job, and, of course, for some of them it would have been a plum in other ways. That they didn’t see the logic in giving it to me, although I had the seniority, as well as the ability. Finally they took a secret vote on it and I got it. But you know they were really waiting to see a woman, especially a strong and sometimes to them very disagreeable woman break down. And while these two instances that we’ve mentioned, the one you’ve remembered and the one I’ve remembered …

AF: I think the one I remember was fair housing.

SL: Could have been. But I’ll remember another one for you, and to show you how this went, I had a beloved uncle who lived in Wisconsin, my father’s brother, Uncle Chester. And I think in 1953, about February—but it could have been ’55 in February, he died unexpectedly; he was about sixty. And I had a telephone call at work where I was, in the legislature, and Aunt Marge told me that Uncle Chester had died of a heart attack in Appleton, and I said of course I’ll come to the funeral. And I was just distraught, and put my head on my desk and cried and cried and cried after the phone call was over. And this SOB that I mentioned to you earlier—the sergeant- at-arms who supposedly kept an eye on us all the time—said to me, you know … he found me later in the day, he said—shouldn’t let these issues get to you like that, Sally. I mean, you don’t

36 want to break down like that and cry. Obviously I knew he was savoring his … I knew he was spreading it to any legislator he could gossip with, that we got her again, she really fell apart, without … no issue involved! And I told the old fool it was on my uncle’s death, but it reminded me of how they were ready and waiting to see that happen.

AF: How did they treat you and Coya when you both came in? You mentioned there was a fair amount of publicity, and she was there then for two terms, then you were alone for …

SL: Two terms [Unclear] Joyce Lund, I think, came in in … Coya was there the first and the second that I was there. The third I was alone …

AF: Oh, Connie Burchett was there.

SL: Connie and Joyce together?

AF: Joyce who?

SL: Lund.

AF: Lund, Lund, Lund—Joyce Lund came in ’55.

SL: Well, that was when Coya left, then, so that there was …

AF: Oh no, Connie Burchett was later—she was in the ‘60s. I’m sorry.

SL: So then Joyce lost in ’56, so I was alone in the ’57 session, and, I think, alone in the ’59 session.

AF: Yeah, yeah.

SL: And then I think that a woman was elected in ’61, but I’m not sure.

AF: I don’t see anybody.

SL: It may have been those three sessions that I was alone.

AF: Yeah, I think so. Because I think until Alpha and Helen McMillan came in there was nobody.

SL: That’s right--1962.

AF: Yeah.

SL: So those sessions you really were a sitting duck, and you were just too much fun to not keep your eye on the one woman, as far as the rest of them were concerned.

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AF: So how did you get defeated?

SL: Oh, yeah, well—that’s a long story, too. Oh, by the way, there were two crucial issues in the ’59 session that were of great importance to me and to Don. They were the sewers and the pensions. I used to get a big kick out of the fact that these two things that seemed so remote from where I would ever be became what I was [Unclear], partly because of the civil administration committee that I was chairman of handled the metropolitan sewer legislation, and it also handled all the pension legislation.

AF: All the state employees.

SL: Right, the state employees, city, county, municipal, city of Minneapolis. Tremendously complicated subject, and we worked endlessly on it, and I enjoyed it very much and saw how much reform was needed in both areas, and really felt I made some contributions there. Well, then along came ’61, and we lost control of the legislature. I think Duxbury became speaker.

AF: Probably again here.

SL: I think so, and we were in the minority slot and had really very little to say about anything. Elmer Anderson was governor, so we didn’t have a Democrat there. When we had Orville [Unclear] there was much back and forth and planning in the sessions and things of that kind. [Unclear] explanation of tax bills and appropriation of funds and budget. Well, then came the ’62 election, and that was when I lost and Len Johnson—is he still around?

AF: Oh, yeah.

SL: Where is he now?

AF: He’s out at General Mills.

SL: Probably a vice president.

AF: Probably.

SL: Well, he was city clerk, I think.

AF: That’s right, he was.

SL: Or clerk of elections, I don’t know which. Anyhow, he was able to set up the machines, and he set up the machines …

AF: Wait a minute, wait a minute. Len Johnson—I’m thinking, it wasn’t Leonard Johnson.

SL: You’re thinking of the one who was with Citizens’ League.

AF: That’s right.

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SL: I’m thinking of the one who was in the legislature [Unclear].

AF: Yeah, yeah, that’s Leonard Johnson.

SL: Still a city employee, though …?

AF: No, he retired and he’s doing something else. Anyhow …

SL: Well, snake in the grass. He was a member of the legislature for a long time. I crossed paths with him. I crossed, I’m afraid, ninety percent of them. But Leonard rearranged the voting machine.

AF: That’s right.

SL: It was going to be a real reform of some kind. And he had the columns down like this, DFL and the Republican, and your names were over here. That can’t be right. But somehow it was rotated so that sometimes your name was under the Democratic column and sometimes it was under the Republican column. But there was a cut-off line here, so that the Republican and the Democrat really didn’t apply to the legislature, except that the columns happened to coincide. All right, so the voter comes into his machine. He wants to vote the straight DFL column. He goes right down, he comes to the cut-off point, goes under the cut-off point, continues down, and votes DFL. The Republican comes in and he wants to vote straight GOP, and he goes straight down the Republican column, comes to the cut-off line, comes under the Republican line, and if he’s in a precinct where I have been moved into that line, because of this rotation process, he sees the name Sally Luther. Oh, no, I know she’s a Democrat, so he goes over and votes for the Republican. Whereas the Democrats tend to be less … DFL in Minnesota, in my district, tend to be less well-educated, less able to manage this machine, to shape their own destiny, if you want, and so they’d come to that and think—well, must be she’s a Republican. They didn’t know for sure so they voted Democratic all the way. So if you compared the precincts you could find this pattern, and as a result I lost enough Democrats and gained no Republicans in exchange, so that I lost. But now, few people would understand that explanation, except you.

AF: Yeah, well, except I was there. I remember it.

SL: It happened to other people, there were …

AF: Frank Adams, who was in our district, it also happened to, I think. That system, of course, is now changed. So then you went to work for Rolvaag, or was there a year in between?

SL: Not immediately. I lost in November. In January Art was looking for some help in his office, Art Naftalin, and I was tickled to death. He called me up and asked me to come to work for him, and so I did, and helped on some TV shows he wanted to do. He had Irene as his chief of staff, Irene Wiggins, and I would have loved to apply for that job, but I don’t think he saw me at all as capable of that. I don’t think he had as much confidence in me as I wish he had had, and as I felt I had merited. But we worked together successfully for two or three months, and then his

39

campaign started and I took the title of manager of the campaign, but he lost the primary to Kenny Peterson, I remember this. Didn’t lose it, but Peterson came in higher than he did. Oh! It just tore him apart, he was so nervous, and so then he went out and got Ron Stinnett …

AF: Again.

SL: … to be the real manager. And so Ron was in the inner room really managing, and I was kind of the front person out here, and it was an uncomfortable relation all the way. And, of course, he won in that election anyhow, as was anticipated—anybody could have told him—but having been a politician myself, I know how utterly anxious you get every time you start into the process, and that’s the way he was. So then I was through working for him in June after he had won the election, and I had been applying all along to Rolvaag, who was in the recount process from the previous November. And I’d go down to where they were doing the recounting and see what the chances were and so forth. And they kept putting it off and putting it off. I went on over to his office—by then he won …

AF: Fourteen votes or something.

SL: So he [Unclear] must have won in March. I don’t know how that court case was decided. So I went over to the governor’s office and applied there. He said—well, you’re second in line; there’s a woman in Rochester. You may know this woman. This isn’t coming off … [Chuckles]

AF: No, this will be forever.

SL: I think her name is Margaret Thompson—did you remember her?

AF: Yeah, yeah, she’s still ...

SL: From Rochester? What does she do? I never met her.

AF: She was something in the Mayo Clinic.

SL: Well, she had first dibs on the job.

AF: But she was very active in the DFL.

SL: Right. Apparently she didn’t take it. And so I came in. I’m sure Bill Shovell didn’t want me. He was an old enemy from the legislature, too, and he by now was Karl’s right hand, supposedly. I hadn’t had time, yet, to make an enemy out of Quigley, but it didn’t take me long. So Shovell wasn’t enthusiastic, and by then, of course, I was in all kinds of other trouble, and we won’t go into all that, but that, too, was brought to the attention of the governor, and he was told … actually … you’re confident that this—how long is this safe?

AF: This is safe for whatever we write into the thing, but it’s going to be long after.

SL: Twenty-five years, after we’re all dead and gone?

40

AF: Yeah.

SL: But I think that Sam [Bratley] went into the governor and …

AF: And talked to him, huh?

SL: … Just cannot do that. So that that was one more fight. There were others, too, but I’ll let it alone at that? [Chuckles] Anyhow, I think probably he was desperate, she didn’t want the job, so I got the job, certainly not because I was his first choice.

AF: Except I think he came to … Karl always respected you.

SL: No question about it. I delivered once I got there.

AF: You did a good job there.

SL: And he was very happy, I think, that he had me. I was really very useful.

AF: What did you do in the governor’s office?

SL: Oh, I would handle the education and the welfare legislation and the … by then, that’s when the Great Society legislation, and we had to build the capability to accept all this new federal stuff that was just pouring in on us. Set up state agencies to determine, make the plan that you always had to make, and then decide which of the ongoing state agencies would administer the program. It was a huge task, especially higher education and in elementary and secondary, although they had more of a capacity in the education department. But we had nothing in the way of statewide agency in higher education, because of this situation we have alluded to earlier where the university dominated the scene and kept the college board and kept the junior college board at minimum growth level. So I was able to help him there and in correspondence and dealing with constituents and then planning some eye-catching public things like the tours of the mental hospitals and the institutions for the retarded, and I particularly worked on the whole retardation planning program that also had been generated under the Kennedys and had come out to each state to make a retardation plan, and we located that right in the governor’s office to get maximum exposure through it, and also to have, we thought, maximum impact on the conditions in the state institutions and the community programs for the retarded. I worked very closely there with [Marilyn? Mary Ann? Collins], our longtime friend in the state department of welfare. She had also become a friend during my legislative career. And Morrie, too, for that matter.

AF: I think we’re almost to the end of this, let’s …

[End of Track 2]

Track 3

AF: If you’re willing … about Coya.

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SL: Well, I drove up there and met Andy, and she took Terry, and the two of us got in the car, and we decided to drive around and visit our friends in the legislature. And we drove first down to Roy Dunn’s place, and he took us in and showed us … you know, he had that beautiful resort—have you ever been to his resort?

AF: No.

SL: Beautiful resort, up in the arrow region, between Park Rapids and Alexandria, half-way, someplace like that. And he had an office and one wall was just plastered with all of the pictures of all of his political cronies that he’d met. And, of course, awful, as his political views were, such a reactionary, such a bigot, such a male chauvinist—everything that you can think of—such a corporation lackey! He was utterly charming. And we sat and visited with him. Of course, he wanted us to stay, stay all night. We didn’t want him to [Unclear] like that, but we would be drawing favors off him, so we packed up the boys and went out our way, and went on to visit a darling friend of mine that I loved in the legislature so much. I think his name was Nelson. He was from Denmark, and he raised Morgan horses, and he lived out there near where Steve Keating came from, in fact, the same town as Steve Keating came from—you know, the president of Honeywell. Steve was a rural, Irish farm boy before he became the president of Honeywell. Well—if I could only—I feel like a villain not remembering this man’s name; he was such a sweetheart. It was about ’72, and we just hit it off in the legislature and personally. He was so honorable, such a kind person. And so Coya and I came there and visited with him and met his horses and his wife and his family and had a lot of fun. And then we drove down to Montevideo and spent the night with the Hunts.

AF: [Speaks simultaneously] With the Hunts?

SL: How did you know?

AF: Because—who else would be in Montevideo …

SL: I can hardly believe it now.

AF: Iona and Doug Hunt.

SL: Are they still there?

AF: Yup, and somehow … well, Ione, I saw her in Washington not too long ago. She doesn’t look a lot different than she always did.

SL: Well, it was an experience. And we slept overnight in that huge house and well, there are some things that are best … [Both laugh] unsaid.

AF: Unsaid.

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SL: Then, Al Hofstead—you probably don’t remember Al Hofstead—from Madison. Of course, he died.

AF: Was that his name?

SL: No, this is another guy.

AF: Same name.

SL: Oh, yeah, a lot like Hofstede—it was spelled differently, Hofstead. This one was Al Hofstead. And he and Rose, his wife, they were childless, lived in a big, rich farm they had there, and we went and visited him. And he was so proud of being in the legislature. It gave me a perspective that I didn’t have. I kind of looked down on this when I was elected. I wanted to serve; I loved the give and take of political process. The issues were terribly important to me, but I didn’t think it was really important, overall. I was still a woman, my husband was important, his social life, his position at the company—that’s what counted, and this was kind of apart from that. Get out there in the country and discover these were live people who had been sent to the United States Congress, they were so important. And Hofstead had his room all lined with all these crazy legislative reports that we put together all the time, which were just … I don’t remember some of the guys at legislative council—what did we call it? Supposedly a big reform that we were going to have, an ongoing, permanent study body. His name began with a D that was the head of that, and his wife was big in the League of Women Voters. And he was such a fool. And he was a full-time, paid legislative fool. He wasn’t a member of the legislature, he ran this research arm, and they’d grind out reports.

AF: The Legislative Research Service?

SL: Right.

AF: No, the Legislative … I still call it the guy in the … not the reviser of statutes, no …?

SL: No, no, but he at least knew what he was doing, but this poor guy, the statute said that he couldn’t come out with any conclusions, because they were so afraid of having this legislative research arm shape policy, and the League of Women Voters had tried to get this bill passed. It had been passed before I came to the legislature, so once they were there, they’d study and study and study, but they had to be damn sure they didn’t really say anything. So these reports … well, anyhow Al Hofstead had his walls, specially built bookshelves, everything lined with those … it was the most important thing that ever happened to him. And then we stopped. We just weren’t content—we went on and on—I don’t know how we did all of this. Had a darling fellow in Kandiyohi County—do you remember him?

AF: Yeah—not Gene …?

SL: Yeah, Gene was his first name.

AF: Maminga?

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SL: No, it was more like Johnson or Halstead or something. Anyhow, Gene was his first name. His wife died and he married again.

AF: Yup. Was he a lawyer or …?

SL: No, a farmer.

AF: But he was active, sort of left-wing, not quite.

SL: Yeah.

AF: And there was also that newspaper editor in Willmar. Gene …

SL: Well, anyhow, we stopped at Gene’s and visited with him and had some fun, and then I think our trip was over. I don’t know how we ended up, how she got back up to Oklee. But speaking of Kandiyohi County, I’ll throw in something. Before I [Unclear], talking about Coya now. But I discovered after I got to the legislature that I had had a great uncle who was a member of the legislature, and he was Uncle Charlie, and he served in 1905, 1907, and 1909, and he came from Kandiyohi County.

AF: And his name was Charlie …?

SL: Johnson.

AF: Oh, Johnson.

SL: It’s all in there. I looked him up and found him with handlebar mustaches and all this, in the blue book. And, of course, Gene, my friend who came from Kandiyohi County knew the nephew of this old man, Harris Johnson, who by then was an old man, who was my second cousin or whatever. So I’d go visit Harris and Gene would be all tied together and had a nice little thing going there. My cousins still live in Kandiyohi County, the land that my great-grandfather settled on when he came from Sweden. Well, going back to Coya …

AF: What did she do in the legislature? Did she author any bills?

SL: It seemed to me she did a lot of agriculture bills, dairy bills, and cheese bills and things like that.

AF: Things for her area.

SL: Yeah, yeah, she really would have.

AF: And she was … let me see...

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SL: I think everybody was stunned when she declared for congress. I remember one person coming to me and saying—and this was a person I liked—A. I. Johnson [Unclear] A. I. did die, didn’t he?

AF: I don’t know if he’s dead—his son is active now.

SL: Well, A. I. said it was just a case of a person without the capability for such a big job. I mean, they were so condescending. When you look at the quality of the congressmen, and then let them cut her down just because she was a woman. I was offended every inch of the way.

AF: [Sven Wickteman] ran for congress, and Coya was equally capable.

SL: Absolutely.

AF: Who else ran up there? Oh, Bob Berglund, I’m sure Coya’s husband …

SL: Odin Langen was in there for years—he’d been in the legislature sitting right behind us. He was very tall. He had good basketball playing sons. Oh, he [Unclear]. More than that I can’t remember about Coya. She came over to the house a couple of times in Minneapolis. I introduced her to Ham. He was not sent.

AF: [Chuckles] I remember her after she was defeated, and then she was in civil defense, and she worked at the Pentagon, and she would come over occasionally. And then the last I heard of her she was in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

SL: Right, that’s what I heard, too. In the government, still the federal government. She came to Minnesota once to talk to me. She was going to write a column. One of her plans was that she would write a column for some national magazine, and she wanted me to write something for her, and I did draft a little column about some experience in the legislature. But we were both pretty bitter, and exchanged our feelings of bitterness about our experiences in the legislative arena. She felt very deeply about the injustices that had been done to her.

AF: In the legislature?

SL: No, by then she was through with the congress, so this must have been ’57 or ’8 when she came to talk to me.

AF: I can’t remember why she first ran for the legislature, but I’ll have to find out all this. Well, anything else you want to say?

SL: You’ve started the fires flaming. I’ll start work myself on my papers and my [Unclear].

AF: That’d be great.

SL: I feel as though I haven’t told you, and I know there’s not time to tell you, how in retrospect—I did mention this—how remote it seems from what really was going on either then

45

or now. I remember, dimly, one day two women—I think they must have been Communists— coming over from Richfield about the Korean War, and they wanted ... this must have been the ’53 session. They wanted a resolution introduced, and I couldn’t hold them far enough away from me, I was so nervous about it. That’s about as close as I ever came to anything that was happening on the international scene, except, of course, I did vote, happily, against the amendment that limited the terms of the presidents to two terms.

AF: Oh, the constitutional amendment.

SL: Right. Otherwise, the years of the ‘50s the federal government was moribund. The legislature was just a holding action, fiddling around and unimportant. So when Orville came in he pushed through …

AF: You did do a fair amount for education.

SL: Right, major changes in education, and withholding was adopted.

AF: Oh, that’s right, and taxation, those two main things.

SL: [Unclear] reforms. Of course we had been pushing for withholding during the conservatives’ control of the legislature, and then when we got it …

AF: Were you there … did you get the taconite amendment through, or did that …?

SL: The original taconite amendment that reduced their taxes so much?

AF: No, no, no, the one to build the plants. Don’t you remember that big fight over taconite? Don’t tell me that …?

SL: I must have been …

AF: You must have been there. The DFL …

SL: You mean to build the big plants where the tailings went into the lake?

AF: Um-hum.

SL: I just can’t believe that I wouldn’t recall that. I do remember many an excursion up there, taken up by the steel companies to see it all.

AF: That’s one thing you saw—you didn’t see the institutions, but you saw the …

SL: Oh, I saw the institutions—it was the rest of the legislators I felt didn’t see them.

AF: Well, I’ll have to ask Don when that taconite fight was. Maybe it was after. Maybe it was the ‘60s. Must have been in the ‘60s.

46

SL: Couldn’t have been.

AF: Well, Sally, it’s now ’75.

Sara: [Unclear]

SL: Silver Bay?

Sara: Because Laurie [Unclear] …

SL: When was Silver Bay built?

Sara: ... and Laurie was born in Duluth and maybe up there for a year, and she’s my age—that’s ’56.

AF: Isn’t that something?

SL: Well, I tell you, they owned the [Unclear]—

Sara: That’s very [Unclear].

SL: Probably was passed in ’51 or ’53 when the conservatives were in control. Let’s hope.

AF: Boy, you’ve got me thinking now. But, all right, there’s one other thing. While you were in, I think …

SL: Of course, at the time we saw those as bonanzas.

AF: Oh, that’s right.

SL: New jobs, ways of making taconite and expanding the production up there. No, I think probably if I did it, I probably did it proudly.

AF: Well, I’m not so sure, because there was a real fight in the DFL, the taconite amendment.

SL: Amendment, when you say this you mean like a constitutional amendment?

AF: Yup, there had to be a constitutional amendment, because iron ore taxes were built in the constitution—I know Don was in the legislature. [Groans]

SL: I’ll have to read it up.

AF: All right, we’ll have to go through that. Another question—oh, constitutional convention— don’t you remember, was it the League of Women Voters that was always interested in a constitutional …

47

SL: I gave some marvelous speeches on the constitutional convention.

AF: Yeah, and I don’t know when the decision was made, but at some point they decided …

SL: I remember that—go by the amendment process.

AF: Amendment—piece by piece by piece, and we practically amended the whole state constitution.

SL: I think we were dreaming, but of course we looked to other states and saw where they had constitutional conventions—New York, New Jersey, Missouri. I think those were three prime examples that seemed to us to make sense. But the railroads always killed that off. Mike [Gallivan].

AF: Oh, yes.

SL: The Dungeness crabs. The dinners, night after night after night, the dinners.

AF: And did you go to the dinners?

SL: Oh, I’d go to maybe three or four in a session. There were some spectacular ones when the whole house would go. But the small ones you just couldn’t stomach.

AF: That’s like [Unclear].

SL: Yeah [Unclear] but you could watch the newcomers come in and watch them slowly fatten up and redden up as the session went on.

AF: [Chuckles]

SL: And then the ones with the tendency to alcoholism—it was just a tragedy to watch them. I remember that Floyd Anderson—I think he’s been back in the legislature a couple times—from Duluth? Do you ever remember Floyd?

AF: Oh, I think so.

SL: Terrific alcoholic, but the sweetest guy in the world, but they just pressed drinks on him, and he’d be drunk from morning till night. And then of course one session, that awful old man, he was from Duluth, and he was so insulting to Mabeth Paige—you’ve probably heard this. He was Irish, and they say that he would just take out this wad of his pocket and [Unclear] the bills and say—look, I got this much this week. And he would just take a five dollar bill from everybody all the time.Well, anyhow he sat in the back row, he’d talk in this enormous voice, and he had gold teeth, and he always wore a big, fat necktie, and he’d say—when you weren’t in Duluth you were just campin’ out. And then I’ll tell you this story. Once he got in a fight with Mabeth Paige, and he said—tell you what, the lady from Hennepin, one of these days I’m just going to take

48 your pants down and show them what makes you tick. And they all just … I mean, he just talked this way—he was just wild! Well, he was only there that one session. He didn’t come back the following … he must have retired or died. I was just so stunned as my exposure to these characters increased. What kind of people were they? There was a funny little man from Sleepy Eye whose hair, who had a crew cut, his gray hair, and it grew straight up, so it just looked like about an inch growing straight up out of his head, and he and this awful man from Duluth—let’s say his name was O’Leary; it was something like that—were having a big fight across the whole length of the chamber, and the one over here was trying to make a joke and also cut him down, and then he’d try to cut him down, then he tried to cut him down, and finally O’Leary got in the last remark, and he looked at him [Unclear] and says—well, I will say one thing; at least I don’t have hair growing up out of cement. And the place just collapsed, because it was just what it looked like, and we all knew this man was just a [Unclear]. He had a stickpin, and he was like, you know, in Boston, the last hurrah type …

AF: Oh, yeah, what was his name?

SL: He had all those [Unclear].

AF: I can’t even remember the mayor of Boston—Curly!

SL: This was our own little Duluth man.

AF: That wasn’t his name. Well, I think this has been great.

[Break in taping]

SL: I offered an amendment that said—all right, if you’re going to publish in the newspaper every time I went to the doctor, let’s publish the name of the doctor that they went to, because I knew that the doctors were making money out of this. Well, says the man in front of me, who was this old reactionary who had proposed the bill who hated doctors as much as he hated taxes, fortunately. He said—say, for a change, she’s got a good idea. I support that amendment, we’ll put it on the bill! So by voice vote they put this amendment on the bill. Well, once you get an amendment on the bill in committee as a whole, when you adjourn the committee as a whole, you come back into formal session, you can’t take that amendment off, except by some parliamentary maneuver that puts everybody on record. Well, they were just hog-tied. But then they wanted to pass the bill, and they didn’t want this amendment, and they didn’t know what to do with it. I was ecstatic, because I was only a second termer, and this was my …

AF: Coup!

SL: … my coup—kill the bill! [And it would bother them.]

AF: One of the other questions here that we’ve got that we haven’t talked about here is how did you finance your campaigns?

49

SL: Well, I would raise money—because, in those days it really didn’t cost much. I think the first campaign I spent four hundred dollars. I sent out a letter asking people to contribute, and they’d contribute like ten dollars in [Unclear]. I’d just fall over when the contributions came in. Mabeth Paige gave me a lot of money, fifty dollars. But there were some flukes here and there that would be interesting to tell about. You know, Skid Row was in my district. And I’d go down to Skid Row and campaign, and one day I met a woman who still stands in my mind. Julia Boyum, an old Norwegian, and for some reason she took a real shine to me, and she owned some of these flop houses, but she lived in them, too. She wasn’t a landlord out here—but she had these grimy … we’d go and have coffee together in the Bowery-type places with these old mugs that looked as though they had been … a thousand chips. And we’d visit, then she’d slide ten dollars across the table or twenty-five, fifty. In the end she gave maybe a hundred dollars to the campaign—with absolutely nothing to gain. She didn’t even care or know about urban renewal or whatever might be coming. And then she gave me Norwegian embroidery material that she had too—it was crazy. But once a man across the street invited me over—his wife wanted … and she said … Mr. [Unclear] would like you to come over and have coffee with us. And I’d go any place, any time anybody asked me to be friends. I said sure and went over there. (I’ve told you this story) So we sat down in their little breakfast nook. It was the McCarthys’ house, next door to where we lived in [Unclear]. He said—you know, I really want to help you. He owned a bar downtown, and he slid across the table a hundred dollar bill, and I slid it right back and said—no, I really appreciate it, but … So those were two examples. And another thing that happened is—I don’t know if you remember that guy who lobbied for the policemen—tall, skinny guy. Lobbied and lobbied for the policemen. As soon as I declared my candidacy he called me and said I want to have lunch with you. Lunch with me? So we did, and he said—we want to help you, and he gave me twenty-five, fifty dollars. He lived to regret it, because in the end, you know, with pension legislation they [Unclear]. In my innocence in the early years I didn’t know where to look and I didn’t know which to turn down, except I knew enough not to take the liquor money. But mostly it just came from [Unclear]. And as the years went on the party provided the sample ballot. The costs were really very modest.

AF: Your district wasn’t very big, as I remember.

SL: Very small district. Way over-represented, I think. Of course, [Unclear] had lost all the population.

AF: Remember any terrible opponents?

SL: Oh, that’s … of course, the one that beat me, I remember him. He was a family friend. It was like Roddy Bruce or something like that. Dick White—did you ever know Dick?

AF: Hmm …

SL: Oh, I could have just [Unclear]. You remember Dick--lived across the street [Unclear]. His daughter’s your age—Julie [Unclear].

Sara: I remember, though, we had him [Unclear].

50

SL: Yeah, well, he just decided he wanted to be in the legislature, and so when he came in second and I came in third, but it was also that voting machine thing. Christie was always awful, and I had two recounts and maybe three, we went through the recount process.

AF: Christie was always a kind of a thorn, wasn’t he?

SL: Yes, but, of course, poor fellow—he didn’t last very long. [Unclear]

AF: Tom Christie—well, he lived long after he was out of the legislature, didn’t he?

SL: He died in the legislature.

AF: Oh, he did?

SL: Well, he wasn’t right in there at the moment, but he was a member. It was during a term. Orville went to his funeral [Unclear].

AF: Oh, yeah.

SL: Vernon Johnson, remember—he was in that [Unclear]

AF: Oh, that’s right—that’s the one I was thinking of that was at …

SL: Vern was in one term with us. With me. But then he lost the next time around.

AF: Well, now, I guess.

[Taping interrupted]

AF: OK, after you came to Vassar …

SL: I worked in many … Poughkeepsie is one of the two or three cities in New York that’s a model city, got a Model Cities Program, this little tiny city. They were in the throes of understanding that and trying to make it work in ‘69, ’68—actually ’68, and I came in September and I started right away going to the committee meetings—the housing committee, the health committee, and I could quickly see that the racism was so powerful that the elite and the controlling groups were taking hold of this thing and squeezing out the poor and the black—just the opposite of what supposedly was going to happen. And I started to say that right off and went to a big meeting in October and said it again and stood up and called up a wonderful woman from Minneapolis. I needed some moral support. You remember—you’ll die when I tell you this! Gwen Jones [Unclear]. Called her up because I knew she knew about Model City fights and the struggle, and she told me to get right in there and help them see there’s no good to take half a loaf, because then you would just be getting what you’d be getting—worth nothing. Well, I won the affection of one of the key black leaders, [Reverend Dixie], [Unclear]. Well, I’m still a friend. And he is the one who led the walk-out, and there was a three-month boycott, the blacks boycotted the thing, and there was a committee to adjudicate. I wasn’t in on any of that, but I’d

51

helped fire it up so it would happen, and finally they did reshape the whole structure from the initial structure, so that you did have fairer citizen representation. Of course, by now the whole thing had been co-opted, and it’s located in city hall, it’s just turned into another arm of the bureaucracy. But that’s to be expected. At that time there was a ferment. Well, then, he decided he’d run for mayor and in about April of, by then, ’69, he came to us and said he was going to run for mayor—would I be his campaign manager? You just could have knocked me over, and I went home and thought about that and thought about that. I knew I was going to get married to John in the fall and living in [Unclear] Falls, but if I was the only white—and he wanted to have a bi-racial committee—he had a black [chairman], and that was commendable. So I finally said yes. Of course, I really couldn’t help him very much, but he did get ten, twelve percent of the vote, which was pretty good. That, of course, marked me at Vassar [Unclear] as the months wore on [Unclear]. Not as much publicity as we should have had, by any means, but it was [Unclear]. So that was another piece of political involvement. I still expect Poughkeepsie will get a black mayor and they need a black mayor, but that’s the only place I can look for political leadership in the East, in fact. In politics in general. I think the exciting ideas are coming out of the black community, the hope.

AF: Some are not escaping the problems that other politicians have.

SL: Absolutely.

AF: That’s one of the problems that we all have to face, I guess, that new groups …

SL: But it was at Vassar, too, and I mentioned that, how the real, the drive for academic change and reform came from the new wave of black students, which is now, as Sara told us, been tempered by [Unclear] the forces that drive [Unclear]. And then we worked on the McGovern campaign. By then I was teaching high school and Sara was … that’s when we came to visit you, and one of our students was a candidate to be one of the young person’s elected, and we all campaigned [Unclear]. Just can’t see the Democratic Party [Unclear] what’s needed in this country.

AF: I know. It’s just, yeah, yeah … nothing. Well, OK …

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