SUSAN ROTH Narrator DAVID GRABITSKE Interviewer SUSAN ROTH Narrator DAVID GRABITSKE Interviewer Copyright © 2012 by Minnesota Historical Society All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy and recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Oral History Office, Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul, Minnesota 55102. Susan Roth 4 Minnesota State Historic Preservation Office Staff, 2011. 6 THE INTERVIEW Susan Roth Narrator David Grabitske Interviewer March 1, 2012 Minnesota History Center, Saint Paul, Minnesota Susan Roth - SR David Grabitske - DG DG: Today is Thursday, March 1, 2012. My name is David Grabitske and, today, I’m interviewing Susan Roth, recently retired National Registered historian, in the Gale Conference Room on the second floor of the Minnesota History Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Susan, thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. It’s a great honor for me to be here today. SR: Thank you. It’s my pleasure to talk with you today. DG: You and I share something of a background in the sense that we’re from the same part of the state, you from Silver Lake and me from Arlington. I remember riding my bicycle up to Glencoe and occasionally passing through Silver Lake as a kid. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that I’d get to work with someone from Silver Lake. It just didn’t cross my mind in those days. To me, Silver Lake provides something of a context for you, so I’d like to begin with your origins. Tell me about your parents and the circumstances under which you were born and what it was like growing up in Silver Lake. SR: Silver Lake, at the time that I was growing up there in the 1950s and 1960s, was a community of about 600 people. Except for an occasional organized bus trip to the roller rink in Hutchinson or to summer swimming lessons at Lake Marion, which was south of Hutchinson, there weren’t a lot of organized things for kids to do like there are today. So we were left to our own devices. We could go ice-skating on Silver Lake. We could go sledding down the big hill behind Saint Joseph Catholic Church. We had marathon softball games in the park, which was right across the street from where I lived. Or the good thing is, as you said, you could get on your bike and you could ride all over town. The only requirements were, of course, that you came home for lunch and dinner and you got home before sunset. That was very good, because kids today can’t experience that kind of autonomy. In large measure, you had to find your own entertainment. I think at the end of the day, all the kids, and myself included, were pretty worn out. It was a good place to live as a youngster. 10 DG: I can certainly imagine that autonomy helped you as you grew in your professional career, too. SR: Well, it did, because it made you be aware of things, and it made you look for opportunities, and it gave you a certain amount of curiosity. If you weren’t curious about poking around or discovering places, then you were at home and that’s not where you wanted to be. It really gives children an imagination, which, I think, served me well all through life. DG: You mentioned the Catholic Church and you’ve often mentioned to me your Catholic education upon which you’ve drawn extensively, I think. Tell me about that. SR: I attended Saint Joseph’s Catholic parochial school for eight years, grades one through eight. The teachers were Notre Dame nuns, whose motherhouse was in Mankato. At that time, of course, there were sufficient numbers of nuns so that all of the grades were staffed by teaching sisters. The education, at the time, I would say, was fundamental. The sisters drilled you in reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithcmentic with great emphasis, of course, on religion. They were pretty good disciplinarians. The education was fundamental. They taught you to be good students. I think that also served me well because getting into, then, public high school was a real awakening. But what you learn the first eight years, you take with you. All in all, it was a pretty good experience. DG: You’ve often told me about your trip to Mankato to see the house. DR: That was interesting. Sometimes I thought the sisters were recruiters. Unfortunately, they didn’t recruit enough. But they did take us to Mankato once. I think they were trying to impress upon us the need to go to high school at Good Counsel [Girls] Academy. We walked through and I noticed that the girls were in large dormitories. I walked into one room where there must have been a dozen beds in this room. That was for the underclassmen. When you got to be a senior, you were able to share a room. I took one look at that and then thought about my bedroom at home, which was nicely appointed and which I had to share with no one. I decided at that point that that definitely wasn’t the life for me, but, then also, decided, too, that if the sisters were looking to recruit any of us for a career, that wasn’t it either. While they were very able teachers, that sense of autonomy that I had experienced as a youngster would certainly be given up for that. Grateful for the reading, writing, and arithmetic, but didn’t want to pursue that career choice any further. DG: Do you recall any of you classmates actually going in that direction? SR: None. None. You know that was during the time of Vatican [Council] II. The Catholic Church was opening up. Even the sisters themselves were putting away their traditional habits and the church was becoming modern and, quite frankly, the young women of the time, being influenced by the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, were no longer interested in that. What is so telling is that in 2011, the Catholic school closed. There were no longer even enough students or families who wanted to send their children there and it was too expensive to maintain because there were no more teaching sisters. DG: This is the school at Silver Lake. 11 SR: That’s correct, yes. DG: Following that, you did go to high school. SR: I attended Silver Lake Public High School, again not a large school. Today, Silver Lake has merged with Glencoe, as many schools have had to do in order to survive. At the time, however, Silver Lake was its own independent school district. I had a class of forty-seven. It seemed large to me. Of course, when you compare it to some of my colleagues in the office who went to school with hundreds of students in their class, it doesn’t seem possible. The classes were, again, fundamental. There were not a lot of classes outside of the ordinary. Bringing in in a Spanish class was considered quite novel at the time. But the teachers were good. They were animated. They were interested in you. On the whole, high school was fine…none of the issues that you read about happening in high schools today, so it was a good four years. I was involved in a few activities, which was enough to keep me busy, not again like today where students need to be involved eighteen hours a day. There was certainly adequate time for homework and, you know, weekends were free. DG: From there, you went to Southwest [Minnesota State University], which I’ve always thought was interesting, being that you’re a historian and you love history and, yet, that’s a rather new school. SR: Well, the choice was intentional, because of my classmates who went to college or a university, most of them went to Mankato [State University] or Saint Cloud [State University]. I had looked at Mankato and, at the time, I didn’t like the split campus. Surprisingly, Saint Cloud to me seemed to too big. I came from a town of 600 people. I was looking at both Southwest in Marshall and at Bemidji [State University], because they were far away and they were smaller. In the end, I decided on Southwest, because it was new. I thought this was the time to try something new. It was a decision I have never regretted. Going there, it was still small, not a lot of students. In fact, (in 1968) there were only two grades: freshmen and sophomores. The campus was small. It was a lot like Silver Lake because there weren’t a lot of organized activities. This college was still trying to gain a foothold. So you had to find your own entertainment. You made friends with the students. The students were bright, energetic. They were interested in course work. Of course, being out on the prairies, you might think, well, that’s not all that far from Silver Lake. But Silver Lakeis on the edge of the Big Woods. Marshall is the prairies. When I got there, I couldn’t believe how hot, dusty, dry, and windy it was. After a while, you really came to like it. The other thing, too, is that first winter there in 1968 and 1969 was a terrible winter and you didn’t dare leave the campus for fear that you’d get caught on the highway and, literally, get found in a ditch.