JP: Okay so just to get started when I mention, like, protests in the 1960s in general what is the

first thing that pops into your brain, what is the first thing you think about?

BS: Vietnam

JP: Really? What about it?

BS: Well, it was uh, it was everywhere. It was all over the news. It was, you know, it went from
peaceful to pretty nasty stuff. It- it was sorta the first time people seriously began to doubt that
the government of the united states was on the right path. They began to doubt that they were
being told the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And of course, it was- it was college-age
kids that were being drafted and inducted into the army and you would have to be and you can't
imagine, I mean, I don’t know how many people were being killed in Vietnam but every day we
had the young people in our country who are considered to be the future of our nation many of
them were university students which means they would have grown up to be educated
contributors to the society were coming home in body bags.

JP: Oh no, that must have been awful.

BS: It was awful.

JP: mhm

BS: You know by the airplane load, And um it was also pretty easy to see that uh there was a
disproportionate number of black young men and young men from more disadvantaged
households that were being recruited and uh you know protest erupted on basically every
college campus and students took to the streets and it was that whole whip e and it spawned an
entire genre in our country of poetry of literature and specific types of music. People walked
around talking about peace and the country was exceedingly divided. And of course, everything
came to a head when uh there was the massacre at Kent State University. The nation guard
was called to, uh, quell a protest on the college campus and I don't think anyone is still exactly
clear how it happened but they uh opened- opened fire on the protesters. Who were unarmed.
And there are classic photographs from that event. It was pretty traumatic.

JP: Yeah, yeah I can imagine. Do you or your family, what were your views on what was going
on? What were your opinions on what was happening?

BS: Well. That’s interesting because I was raised in a very very conservative
southern-baptist-Christian community. Uh until Vietnam came, and I got into college, I had never
really questioned the status quo very much and that’s-that’s the real danger. People learn what
they live with. Unless you are encouraged to ask questions, to think critically from the time that
you were very young it's hard to begin to do that as an adult. It's very very difficult to go against
what you have always been, what you have accepted as the social norm. So it was really
vietnam that started, you know, started my critical thinking about what is your responsibility and I
came to the conclusion that I have a responsibility, what does it mean to be a responsible
patriotic citizen, does that mean you fall into lockstep and you believe things and you go the way
all the people around you do or does that actually mean, that you know, question. That was a
huge shift in how I started to look at things. Now I was never out in the street protesting, or
doing anything like that because I had your mother when I was 21. So I was, you know, I was at
home during my crazy twenties get out and run a muck years *laughs*.

JP: *laughs*

BS: So I watched everything on television and of course heard the people around me talk.

JP: So you mentioned when you were talking about this that uh you talked about your family
and people around you, what were you pushed to follow or believe growing up.

BS: Well I grew up in a segregated community, so that's the scary thing about prejudice.
Children learn what they live with and you just accept what's happening around you and what
the adults in your life are saying and what the preacher is saying and you just accept it as true
and you don't question. Or you just turn a blind eye and ignore things that you see that in the
back of your mind you say ‘well that's not right” but you go along with it especially you do that if
you are on the end of the stick where you don't get the beating you get the reward. And my
community around me was, they were very much, pro-segregation pro-Vietnam. And you know
there wasn't a whole lot, well there wasn't any debate around it, I assume there where there had
to have been other people in the community that disagreed but you just didn't, it hard to be one
voice in a football stadium.

JP: Yeah.

BS: I learned a lot and I grew a lot and I um and it certainly set me on a different path for the
rest of my life. Where I grew up people hated Martin Luther King.

JP: Really?

BS: I mean they hated him. I’m not sure, you know, hate is a word that is used so often that its
true meaning gets diluted. If you can think of a stronger word than hate, that is what the people
in my community felt for Martin Luther King. And about the whole civil rights movement. People
called him the antichrist.

JP: Are you serious?

BS: Oh I am totally serious. Yes. People were thrilled when he was assassinated. I mean I
wasn't but people around me were. And it's an interesting thing, you know. Martin Luther King
won the Nobel Peace Prize. And it's so interesting - I remember so clearly when I heard that
Martin Luther King had won the Nobel Peace Prize. And the very first thing I thought of was
‘somebody is not telling me the truth about Martin Luther King. There is more to this story
*laughs* than I’m getting to read,’. So that's my coming of age to this from the 60s to the
mid-70s i would say was just a series of events like that. Water-shed moments where I would
think ‘wait a minute, that's not right’ *laughs*. So it was a pretty dramatic time for a change.

(gets off topic and starts talking about prejudice)

BS: I totally understand how hard it is for people to look objectively at their lives and what they
have done, or in the case of many whites from the south, it's not what you did - you didn’t even
have to do it. You just had to be born white and you were already gifted with these massive
advantages. And when you start to look at the system and the atrocities that were there from the
day you were born. I didn’t start the fire, the house was on fire when I got there. I benefited
enormously from the fact that I was white and for no other reason than the fact that I was white.
When you finally reach a point in your life when you can look at your life critical and can begin to
realize the kind of advantages you have had in your life and how many of those advantages you
gleely - you took advantage of them - you gleefully, you know, ‘you want to sit at the front of the
bus’ ‘sure I would love to sit at the front of the bus, the view is much better and you just do it
without thinking. And so when you get to the point in your life, you not only have to look at
yourself and the kind of life you lived and wonder ‘why didn't I question that?’ ‘Why didn't I
recognize that as being horrifically horrible?’ ‘How could I just accept treating other human
beings in that fashion?’. The next step is you have to look at the people in your life that raised
you. You have to look at your parents, your teachers, your pastor. Now as a little kid you can't be
expected to understand what's right and what's wrong and what's fair and what's just.
Somebody has to point that out to you. Little kids, I believe, deserve a pass. But that pastor at
my church should have known that it was not right. He should have known.

JP: So is there a reason why you keep using a pastor or religious figure as an example?

BS: Well I do because, you know I think that, well this is gonna show my personal beliefs but I
feel that the conservative-evangelical… conservative-evangelical in the south was a huge
source of the problem, and frankly still is.

JP: Source of what problem specifically?

BS: The problem of going to war, don't try to use diplomacy, go in there and beat everyone
down that doesn’t believe the way you do, don't accept people who are different. The color of
their skin or who they choose to love and, um, it just goes on and on. And I think the church
allowed us to do terrible things to people and believe that we were the good guys. The church is
the community's moral compass.

JP: I see what you are talking about. That must have been really hard to break away from.

BS: Yeah, it was.

JP: While we are talking about the civil war protests and what that was like, do you remember
hearing about the March on Washington or Bloody Sunday?

BS: Oh of course! Of course. I remember all of that. The million man march on DC and Martin
Luther King’s extraordinary I Have a Dream speech and various other marches. And I remember
how angry white people were that they had been allowed to march and you hear the very same
complaints about peaceful marches today. That they are thugs and they just want something for
free and they are going to break into the electronic store and steal the TVs. the very same fears
and redirects were used on those marches. And of course, I remember bloody Sunday.
JP: Yeah?

BS: Oh yeah! The thing about it is that it was not, I mean you know you got black people singing
‘we shall overcome’ arm and arm marching over a bridge ‘how threatening is that?’ ‘How
horrible is that?’ On a scale from 1-10 in law enforcement. The police just charged in and beat
them to death - actually I'm not sure that anyone dies but you know swinging batons and
knowing people down.

JP: Absolutely awful.

BS: Mhm, mhm. In the name of peace. In the name of democracy. In the name of law.

JP: Which, I think, maybe the worst part.

BS: Yeah, exactly.

JP: I remember from my research that one other big movement happening was the Women’s
Liberation Movement. Right?

BS: Yeah. Huge.

JP: Why do you have that reaction?

BS: Well it was the same thing. People who had been told their entire lives and treated as
second class citizens, now keep in mind not anything like the way people of color were treated,
but you know the husband was in charge of everything and the wife, a good wife, her role is to
be basically a submissive house mate. More and more women started going to university, that
the root of all evil you know *sarcastically* getting an education, more and more people joined
the workforce which made the traditional role that women had held in this society harder and
harder. There was a clear distinction- a clear division of what was women's work and what was
man's work. Guys would go to the office and when they got home the wife was supposed to
have, well the house was clean the dinner was on the table, laundry washed and folded, you
clean up after dinner, help the kids with homework, put them to bed and it didn't matter that the
women had spent all day in the office. Times just started changing. We still know it is much
better than it's ever been, but we still don't have gender equality in this country. Women do not
get paid as much for the same amount of labor as a man does. The arguments that define that
come back to conservative religion- you hear a lot of preachers argue that god says women are
supposed to be submissive and the man controls everything and if you pay women the same
amount of money you pay a man it will be bad for the American family. I have actually heard
certain republicans make that argument. So anyhow, Women's liberation. It's kinda a caricature
women started, you know, protesting and laughing about burning bras and the bras sorta
became a symbol for physical control of a female. A guy gets stressed in the morning and goes
to work. A woman, at that time, put on heels and pantyhose and gurtles and all sorts of very
restrictive underwear. And there are certain ways you can walk and when you sit down there are
certain ways you have to sit down, it's very restrictive. Cosmopolitan magazine became sort of
the banner magazine that was easy to get and began sort of the banner magazine for women's
liberation. And one of the first things they did, and they were controversial, oh my gosh, they
were controversial. Some stores wouldn’t sell them. They would sell playboy but not
cosmopolitan.

JP: Really?

BS: Yes *laughs*. Cosmopolitan started to talk openly about women and sex. Which is
something that no one had even, you just wouldn't say it out loud. It was just unthinkable that a
woman was a sexual being just like a man is. But for some reason, we just weren’t supposed to
do that. That was one of the reasons Cosmopolitan got on the blacklist in so many stores. Then
they started publishing lists of things women should do to become more economically
independent. Don’t misunderstand what I am saying here, it didn’t mean that women should not
get married or that they should get divorced or that they should separate themselves from their
husbands but they started to say that a woman needed to be treated as an equal in the home at
all levels and especially economically. It happened over and over again, I mean I saw it happen
to friends, to my mother’s friends, that when their spouse dies they are clueless! Absolutely
clueless! And they are at a tremendous disadvantage. Not only did they have to deal with being
alone, losing a partner, but they didn't know how to do anything. They don’t know where the
money is, they don’t know how to write checks. They found out that their names, now this was
very common, this is a situation that I was in, their names are not on any of the paperwork for
joint property. And so somebody dies, especially if they die without a year, you have to go to
court, you have to figure everything out. It was just hellacious for women. So cosmopolitan
magazine started publishing step-by-step advice on what you should do to establish an
economic presence as a woman. I was working outside the home at a research lab and making
good money so I started thinking about it and started checking into how our stuff was set up and
realized, and don’t misunderstand me here, I had gone along with it.

JP: Mhm.

BS: Just blindly because that's the way it was done and so that's the way I had done it too. And
it never occurred to me that it was a disadvantage to me to not have my name on any of the
paperwork.

JP: Do you think that this shift in thought processes is part of what led you to get divorced?

BS: Uh, I think it was. Yeah. I mean you know I don’t, the huge disclaimer that comes with this is
that (my grandpa) is not here to speak from himself, and I’m sure he has a very different view on
what happened in our relationship. And I don't mean to imply that the men of my generation
were all thugs and deliberately suppressing the women they were married to. They were victims
just like women were. They were victims of a system that was already in place and they just
accepted it. When people got ideas about how other people should be treated it was painful, it's
not easy to change. You're not gonna fix the problem unless you are willing to accept that there
is a problem. Along with that acceptance comes a certain amount of ownership and it's hard you
know? It's hard and it's scary and you don't know where it's going and where it's going to end.
Cosmopolitan magazine published kinda a road map of what women should begin to do so that
if you went back to what I was saying earlier they weren’t able to establish credit cards of any
kind. They couldn't access bank accounts because they didn’t have credit they didn't have any
credit. It was like they had never- it's just like they weren’t there.

JP: Yeah.

BS: I’ll tell you a story, Julia, of what brought it home to me about how bad it was. I had great
aunt, we lived in this tiny town, she had been born there and she lived to a right-old-age. Had a
million kids. She was a pillar of the community. Her and her husband were very well respected
and, uh, when she died it was a lovely obituary in the local paper. In it she was married to a
name (censored) in her own obituary; her first name was never used.

JP: What?

BS: In her obituary, that wrote glowing things about her, every time she was mentioned she was
called Mrs. (censored). And I just thought that was so sad. She was basically anonymous.

JP: In her own obituary.

BS: In her own obituary. Because she personally was not given any credit for the life she lived.
And that was the way it was. And again she went along with that, and he went along with that,
and the town went along with that because that's just how it was. And it was not until that whole
period of volcanic *laughs* earthquake change of the 60s started. People just hadn't thought of
it and when they started thinking about it the country was divided. Half the country said ‘oh my
gosh that's awful, we have to fix that and the other half said ‘well what difference does it make?
It’s always been that way. It’s the way it’s supposed to be.’. It was a very tumultuous time
*laughs*.

JP: Oh yea *laughs*

BS: So, that whole process of starting a bank account at working up to getting a car took about-
took me a good 2 years to make it happen.

JP: Oh my gosh.

BS: It wasn’t easy.

At this point of the interview, we started getting a little off-topic so if you want to hear the last 15
minutes of random stories click the below link