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Jim Wise: Well, this is Jim Wise for the Durham Public Library. It’s August 10, 2012, and we’re talking with Eileen Welch at her office at the Center for Child and Family Services. Eileen Welch: And Family Health. JW: And Family Health. Sorry. Glad you corrected that. Well, you were talking about… You… You grew up in Durham and went away, and you were saying that if things… if Durham had not changed, you would not have come back here. EW: And I guess as much… as much Durham as the South, and that’s what I’m alluding to. But of course, Durham changed because of… My mother used to say to me... We lived in Reston, Virginia, from 1970; my husband and I moved up there from Atlanta, and my mother used to say, “Eileen you should come back home. There are all these young people who are professionals and working in offices and, you know, doing… that you’d like to meet, that I think you’d enjoy meeting.” And so I would come back to visit them--is it recording?

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JW: Just making sure. EW: I would come back- - JW: Yes, it is. EW: - and visit them. We would bring the kids down. My mom and dad kept my children, you know, when we would go on vacation. Bring ‘em down and come back and pick ‘em up in the summers. My mom wasn’t working outside of the home full time then. And so, most often, as with a lot of the families in Durham--it's something I remember fondly--there would be a reception or something that she would have because we were going to come to town, and she would bring people over to the house for... after… like punch and cookies or something like that hat she thought I would enjoy meeting. I met a lot of people who I never thought would live in Durham either.

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JW: Ah. EW: And so I think the loss of intellectual capital of the African Americans who could leave was detrimental to… to Durham. JW: Sure. EW: And once we found there was opportunity here and in my generation a lot of us were already, you know… at the end of our careers. So when I moved back in ’96, I was recruited back by Duke, and interestingly enough, that happened because my father… my father was going through some health issues, and he was a member of the Durham Rotary, and he was sitting beside Susan Ross.

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JW: Oh! EW: Who you know. JW: Yes. EW: She might be doing one of these interviews.

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JW: [laughs] EW: He was one of the first African Americans to join the Durham Rotary, he and Bill Clement, I believe. Some others. And he knew Susan was a development officer at Duke, and that’s what I was doing in Northern Virginia - JW: Ah. EW: - at Inova Health System. And so he told her that he wanted his daughter… his words: “I want my daughter to come home. Can you help her get a job at Duke?” So I think that between Susan and another friend of mine who worked with me in… at Inova… her name was Libby Puckett, and she and… She married Andrew Puckett, who wason the faculty here at Duke and moved to Durham. And Libby knew that in that time… In ’96 Duke was recruiting for their first big campaign, for Buck Duke Campaign. But it was in the silent phases, and she kept seeing at the back of that "Inside Duke" publication that used to come out that they were recruiting for development officers. And she would… she’s from South Africa -

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JW: Ah! EW: - by the way. And she would… she would call me and say, “You must come home! Your mother-” And she would mail me those things, so between Susan and Libby, I ended up interviewing with John Piver over a Thanksgiving, just before Thanksgiving holiday--I came early--and he then introduced me to Mary Champagne, who was the dean of the School of Nursing at the time. And they had an opening, and they ended up moving me home, which was really good. I was here a good fifteen years actually before my dad died. JW: Oh, good. Uh huh. EW: And it was in his demise… during the years of his demise, when he was in and out of hospitals a lot. I’m the oldest of four, and I sort of was coming down when crises would happen, and then it… it was nice to be able to be here and to be flexible enough that I could take care of things for him and be also connected to Duke and Duke Medical side so I knew some of the in’s and out’s of how to help him through the system -

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JW: Yeah. EW: - during that time. JW: I’m sure that helped a lot. EW: I think it did. Yeah. It was good… time for me to be with him ’cause as a teenager I was probably not the easiest teenager to manage. And he was pretty tough. He was a tough dad, so we had a nice few years of collegial-ness, and him appreciating my knowledge and me having a chance to calmly enjoy him and his points of view and get to see... In fact, when he founded Lincoln Community Health Center was in 1970, ’71, and I was then raising… I was pregnant with my children. My children are… were born in ’70 and ’72, and I remember calling down, you know, with things, ’cause he’s a doctor… about ear infections and, you know, things going on with babies. And I had no clue that he was so involved in doing something so wonderful as, you know, founding this… understanding what health centers were, community health centers, and the movement in that direction, and going to the NIH, and going to the… I guess he went to other agencies looking for funding, through Operation Breakthrough and all of that. He wasn’t a fundraiser. I wasn’t a fundraiser then. I was actually teaching elementary school, but he… he learned how to do… how to find ways to... I think he had help writing a proposal . He hired Evie Schmidt, and they worked very closely, as a medical director. So when I look at what happened there and where I was in my mind at that point, you know, there was kind of a nice meeting of that time, when he was sick, when I could… he would tell me about… during that time… because in the ‘70s and ‘80s I wasn’t here.

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JW: Right. EW: And so much different was going on. JW: Things changed a lot , a lot in the ‘70s. EW: Yes.

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JW: I guess that was really the critical decade. EW: I think so. JW: Things were… Things were different. It is always kind of enlightening when parent and child can get together, and they’re both adults - EW: Exactly.

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JW: - and they both recognize that each other are adults. [laughs] EW: Yeah. JW: Well, tell me about Durham when you were growing up here. EW: Well, when I was growing up, it was, you know… I was… I… I…We first moved here… Let me start…We were… I can start from when I was a baby, or I can start when I was growing up. But when we… when we came down, he was in medical school at Howard when they got married, or he was in an internship. And they came back when Mom got pregnant and blah blah blah because she could no longer work at the Pentagon. She was having morning sickness on the bus stops.

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JW: [laughs] Ew. EW: They were living in like a rented one-room apartment up there for him to finish his studies. And so they came back, and they lived in a little duplex down on Fayetteville Street. And then I was born. And we lived with my grandmother, Lyda Moore Merrick, and Ed Merrick at 906 Fayetteville Street until I was in the fourth grade. Actually I skipped something. We… I was born, and then, actually, Dad went back to DC. Charles Drew recruited him back to come and finish his surgical residency, and then he came back. So he really… I was born in ’46, and we went back to DC probably a year after that. And then he worked at Lincoln, but he would… Charles Drew was calling him all the time to come back. He had this slot for him. So we went back to DC, and my sister, who’s three years younger than me, was born while we were in DC. So we probably moved back here in ’50. And then from 1950 until I was about nine years old, we lived with my grandmother. And so it was a long time. We had two bedrooms upstairs in that house. It was a very nice house. It was given to them, my grandparents, when they got married. And Ed Merrick was John Merrick’s oldest son, and Lyda Moore Merrick was Aaron Moore… JW: Oh. EW: …his oldest daughter. And so they gave them this house, 906, which was on the corner of Fayetteville and Fowler Avenues. Not... in very close walking distance from what you now know as the Hayti Heritage Center. It was St. Joseph’s A.M.E. Church, and the Heritage Center wing wasn’t on it then. But we could walk down… I think now it’s called Old Fayetteville, but we could walk there to church. That was the church that we went to. And the community was very close. I knew people on both sides of the house and around the back corner on Fowler. I have a picture on my Facebook page of my sister and I playing in the back, in the driveway behind the house. You know with the… I think it was an Oldsmobile, like a 1940 Oldsmobile or something, in the garage. But Granddaddy was Ed, and he would go to work in the mornings. My grandmother, LyBo, we called her. Lyda Moore Merrick was translated into LyBo when my older cousin couldn’t say “Lyda.” Ed would call her “Lyda Moore” all the time, and she… We all called her LyBo, including my dad and my uncle. Everybody began to call her LyBo. But, he would leave in the morning with a hat and a suit on and go to the Mutual. He was the treasurer, and he would go to work every… you know, every day as the treasurer. And they had a lady who would come and help LyBo in the house, Miss Annie. And she would help in the kitchen, and she would run the vacuum and, you know, clean. We would get up and play and be dirty and play mud pies in the driveway and in the backyard. And there was a coal… It was a coal-heated house, so I remember the coal truck coming and dumping the coal down the chute that would go into the furnace under the bottom, the basement of the house. It had plumbing. [both laugh] Had a big living room and dining room, and my grandmother was a seamstress and an artist and a musician. She sewed, made all of her own clothes and some clothes for us, and she would… was an artist. She was…. She painted in oils with charcoal sketches. I have a lot of her artwork. There’s a painting in the Hayti Heritage Center now of hers, her work as oil. It’s a painting of her mother, Cottie Moore, who was Aaron Moore’s wife. Sarah McCotta [Dancy] Moore was her full name. Knitting – er, crocheting… sitting in a rocking chair crocheting. It’s a big painting. If you go into the sanctuary from the… the Education Building, they call it, it’s to the left, hanging right to the left in the sanctuary, but that’s her… her work of her mother. And so we would, you know... LyBo would let us do things. She would teach us as children, my sister and myself, crafts and, you know, making… learning crochet. And I remember crocheting potholders and doilies and things. So, it was a… a nice way to grow up. My grandmother was very… She spent a lot of time with us in addition to always doing something that we liked to watch. And we’d come in at lunch time. She’d have lunch ready for us, and my mom was there. Mom did a lot of volunteering. Was able to because LyBo was around. She was a founder of… Well, she… She was a president I know of the Delta Sigma Theta chapter, alumni chapter, here in Durham. She and her sister had both graduated from Talladega in Alabama.

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JW: Oh. Uh hum. EW: And at first, she actually worked at the Mutual before she married Dad. As… And she went to Columbia University in New York for a masters in economics. She went one year, and the year she was there was the year Pearl Harbor was born- bombed. And Granddaddy was not going to have his baby girl in New York because he knew that the next time they bombed something, it was going to be New York. He just knew that. And he sent a car up there and brought her home, so she didn’t finish her masters. But she then went to work at the Mutual, and she met Daddy when my… her older sister Vivian Sansom married Joe Sansom. And Joe and daddy were friends at the Moore house, and so Daddy came back to be in Joe’s wedding. And he… He used to say he couldn’t take her- his eyes off of her. So then they courted for a while. But… but… so she was out of the house often, and there was a guy, Mr. Holloway, who actually drove. LyBo never learned how to drive. The story was she drove, and she hit somebody one time and… or hit a post or something. And then she never wanted to drive again, so Mr. Holloway drove her to the grocery store or whatever she needed. Her club meetings. And she was a club lady, and so was Cottie Moore. There was the Federation of Women’s Clubs, and then there was the Dorcas Club . and there was… it wasn’t Links and Deltas and the ones I know. These were old-timey named clubs that she… LyBo taught us how to sing this song. What was the song? I’ll remember it in a minute. But we had… “Every time a newborn baby cries, and I…” “I Believe.” JW: Oh, yes. EW: Okay.

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JW: Yep. EW: She taught us how to sing that song, and I had this baby doll. It was a black baby doll. Her name was Nancy, and she squealed. She was rubber. So it had that [imitates a sound – “EEE err EEE err”] when you’d squeal- squeeze her stomach, and she… she taught us. She would play for her club. Her club members would come. I mean, club day was big. She would cook all day and make hot rolls, and we would make the pocketbook rolls and help with… with all of that and chicken salad and whatever else she served. And the club ladies would come and sit around the… the living room, and she’d played the piano, and we’d come down and sing. And when it got, I, you know… [sings:] “I hear a newborn baby cry or touch a leaf or duhduhduh,” the baby would have to go [imitates the “EEE err EEE err” sounds of the baby doll]. [both laugh] And my sister and I were… were the stars, the entertainment. And so, you know, then they would… they would go into the dining room and have their lunch. And often their meeting would be around that, and we’d have to be quiet and disappear. But when Granddaddy would come back home from work every day, I remember, he would come in, and he would say, “Where are those young'uns?” And he would get really quiet, and we would go hide. We knew. You know, we would be giggling, so he definitely knew where we were. Sometimes we’d be under the dining room table, sometimes we’d be in the coat closet, sometimes we’d be… And he’d say… He would pretend he didn’t know where we were. And he would then eventually toss his hat where one of us was, and then we would just come out squealing, and, “Granddaddy!” We… In fact, the whole time he was looking for us we’re singing “Granddaddy, come find me. Granddaddy, come find.” So you knew he knew where we were. JW: Yeah. EW: But it was like a game we played every day with him. And he was… he was full of fun. He was always making jokes and laughing and…. We had the best time with him. So, skip forward a few… I mean, I went to… to elementary school at… I went to preschool at W. D. Hill Recreation Center down on Fayetteville Street. Mr. Holmes was… Irwin Holmes’s dad, was the, I guess, executive director now or something, and then I went to elementary school at W. D. Pearson--W. G. Pearson. And I went there until sixth grade, and then dad built our house on Lawson Street, across from Chidley Hall, from the men’s dorm at NCCU. It was at 829 Lawson up there on the corner, and we moved there in time for me to have to go to sixth grade at Burton… Burton Elementary down in McDougald Terrace and had a lot of friends who grew up in McDougald Terrace and no problems. Just go to their house, they should go to our house. And, I just…. You know, I knew my teachers. A lot of my teachers went to the same church. There was just a tight community, you know. The teachers were a part of the community. They knew your parents. You knew if you got in trouble, your parents would know, if you didn’t turn in your paper or whatever happened. I went to Whitted Junior High and Hillside High. And you know, the… Whitted, it was all the elementary schools coming together, so it was a lot of kids. Some of the kids we knew, some didn’t. But it was sports, and there was the band, and there was, you know… a lot of different things to do when you went to Whitted. The… My second year at Whitted … I guess seventh, eighth, and ninth was our… the junior high years and in the…. We were going into the ninth grade, or maybe it was the year we were going into the… we were ending the ninth grade. I don’t… I’m not sure about the exact date. I just know that in that… at that date was when they did… Floyd McKissick decided that his children, Andree and Joycelyn, his two daughters, would integrate Durham High, and that year she didn’t come back to school with us. And we were all good friends, and it was very… It was hard for her, and it was hard for us. And her mom, Evelyn McKissick, would always try to bridge that gap for her because there was… they weren’t kind to her. There was no group of girls to get to know there. They were isolating her, and so Evelyn would always have things on weekends. And we would go out to her house and do crafts or just have little club meetings, pretend club meetings, and things to try to bridge that gap for Andree. Andree was the one that was my age, and Joycelyn was probably a junior in high school or maybe a senior by then. But… so that sort of stands out in my mind as a… a tough time.

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JW: I imagine so. Did they talk… Joycelyn and Andree, did they talk a lot about what it was like at Durham High? EW: You know, I don’t remember. I… I know they didn’t want to go. I know Andree cried, and Floyd said, “No, Daddy says that we have to go,” and all of that. But I don’t think they wanted to talk about it when they came back home. I mean, all I know about it was what was in the paper really much, you know, that the people was throwing spitballs at ‘em, and, you know, they didn’t have good friends. And all of that. I know Andree ended up going to Howard undergrad, and she’s done very well. She’s a lawyer in DC. I’ve seen her. She’s come back. Came back when her mom died for the funeral. But they didn’t talk a lot about it. It’s almost like when my great-grandmother--my grandmother… when I used to ask her about who her mother’s parents were and she wouldn’t talk about it because I think they were… at least one of them was the master… the father was probably the master, and so it was kind of not something to talk about. JW: Yeah. EW: It’s better to just get away from it when you’re not having to deal with it every day.

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JW: Oh, I can certainly imagine that. EW: And that’s the day, you know, that’s … going through puberty and that stage when now all of us were talking about boyfriends and girlfriends, and, you know, somebody walked me home from school and, you know, that kind of stuff, and that wasn’t happening for her over there. So, it’s a different… very different growing up when you’re isolated. JW: Yeah. Yeah, I bet. EW: Yeah.

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JW: That would just be an awful experience and to be at that point of life. EW: It’s a…You know a lot of families don’t want to move when the hus-, when there’s a transfer in jobs if the child is high school. JW: Oh, yes. EW: You always want to let them finish high school with a group of people that they know because I remember it being really difficult to become… to come into the community. Cheryl… Lucas, John Lucas and Blondie [Blondola] Lucas’s daughter, was in my high school class.

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JW: Oh. EW: And they moved here after we had been through junior high. So she had to kind of get herself into a group, and the same thing... There were a few new girls, you know, so… but that was different. She could be… She could become a part of us, whereas Andree couldn’t become a part of them. Never invited to people’s houses after school, never study together. You know, so it was very different. Now, she may have different memories now that she is pulling out. I haven’t talked to her about it, so I don’t know. JW: But you were able to go all the way through high school at Hillside. EW: mmhmm. Yeah, yeah, at Hillside, at the old Hillside building.

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JW: Well, why Spelman? EW: Well, my dad was from Atlanta. I had an uncle in Atlanta, his brother. His eldest brother was in Atlanta, and we would go there for vacation sometimes. My… his mother… We called her Grandma Watts, but her name was Ida Halls Watts--finished AU, Atlanta University, in "aught-one," [both laugh] we always said… so there was some history there, and then he finished Morehouse. And his other– he had another brother who finished Morehouse. His oldest brother who stayed in Atlanta finished Clark University, and I didn’t want to go to NCCU ’cause I lived right across the street. And I also didn’t want to integrate Duke or Carolina, so it was just sort of a place that I wanted to go. My mother didn’t want me to go to Howard, because she thought Howard was a city school, and she liked the idea of a girl's school for me. And I think she was right, and then there was Fisk University as another choice. And the rumor, the… I guess the impression about Fisk during that time was that the girls there were mainly… were dressing and looking for husbands. JW: Oh. EW: So it was a diff-… It wasn’t as academic from… it could have been, but from the impressions that my mom had…. We had an aunt. I had an aunt. My dad… my granddaddy’s sister went to Fisk and didn’t go all the way through. Her nickname was “Party.”

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JW: Oh. Yup. [both laugh] EW: That was her…her name was Martha Merrick. Martha Merrick Donnell. She married Dr. Clyde Donnell, who was medical director at the Mutual for a while, but she was very social. And I remember how Party would come by our house after church on Sunday, and she always wore an outfit that matched her Cadillac. JW: Oh, wow. EW: So she had a… I mean if she had a pink Cadillac, she had on pink. If she had a white Cadillac, she had on white. And she lived in the Merrick home. It… John Merrick’s home. She’s the baby girl of that family and… and renovated it, and she and Dr. Donnell lived there until urban renewal moved it? and destroyed it. So their house was destroyed, the Merrick’s house was destroyed, the Moore’s house was destroyed, and LyBo and Granddaddy’s house was destroyed –

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JW: Oh, no. EW: - when they put the freeway through. LyBo and Granddaddy’s house was probably not where the freeway is. It is where Few Gardens? those… the low-income housing that they just tore down. JW: Oh, right. Um… EW: Is it..?

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JW: Fayette Place…? EW: It was right on the right side of where the freeway is, where the… you know,it was the right side of the church. JW: Right. EW: So it was further down Fayetteville. It was more like where the low-income housing area is. But the Merrick’s house and the Moore’s house was where the freeway is pretty much, and White Rock Church, which is the church that the Moores went to, is… was totally destroyed and moved all the way up Fayetteville Street.

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JW: This was going on while you were at Spelman? EW: While I was at Spelman. JW: So it must have been kind of a shock coming home and seeing - EW: It was. It was.

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JW: - the destroyed homes. EW: And I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t… You know. I didn’t read the Durham paper. It wasn’t on the Internet. So, it was what I heard from Mom and Dad, and I believe Mom and Dad were very much concerned about Granddaddy. Granddaddy was really… went very… was very depressed about it because this house…his parents’ house was gone. LyBo, I think, dealt with it, but he was retired. Power was not his, you know. Not only because he was black, male, but also because he now was retired and not involved in the community as a, you know… as a professional in that sense. And they took his house. They sent just a blank ticket. They didn’t ask. It was…what do you call it when you…? JW: Eminent domain. EW: It was essentially eminent domain, and there wasn’t a lot that you could do about it. So they moved into a house that my aunt Vivian and my uncle Joe had owned and lived in for a while. But they weren’t living in it then. They were renting it. And it was down Fayetteville Street kind of across from the NCCU law school.

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JW: Oh. EW: It was a little house, a lot smaller than their house. They had to renovate it to get my grandmother’s baby grand piano in it, in the living room, and, he didn’t die. He died very soon after that. And I think it was pretty much from just depression. JW: Yeah. EW: Nothing he could do about it.

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JW: I know that the… the painful memories of that have never gone away. EW: hm-mmm. JW: Always be [unintelligible]. EW: The neighborhood was gone. The people around us had to move. You know, we used to know what everybody’s…you know, who… who drove what kind of car. So you knew if you saw that car coming, it was… you know, it was the Clements, or it was the Randolphs, or it was the…you know…. That was their car this year… and you knew…. It was just a close enough community that…. Then they were all dispersed and found other places to live, if they stayed here, but it was… it was devastating economically as well as emotionally.

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JW: Well, how did… how did you feel about that emotionally? EW: Well, I-- JW: You must have come home fairly regularly and-- EW: - I came home.

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JW: - and seen. EW: I didn’t come home that regularly. We didn’t have a lot of money for me to come a lot. I was the oldest of four. I came at Christmas. I didn’t come at Thanksgiving. I usually did Thanksgiving with Uncle Albert in Atlanta. He would come pick me up, and we’d go to his house, and his wife and some family down there would get together. But for Christmas, I would come home, and then I’d come home again in the summer. And I came home for my… my granddaddy’s funeral, in the middle… it was in February, in the middle of the semester. But I went on the train, you know. Wasn’t flying. I think the first time I flew was maybe when…maybe after I was married. JW: Oh! EW: You know, after I’d graduated from college. I don’t remember flying home from Atlanta from Spelman. So I’d take the train down. I packed this trunk up every year and get the trunk on the train. And after the second year, I think, I stored it at Uncle Albert’s, in his garage. [laughs] But, it was different to come home. I would… I did drive. I was driving Mom’s car, and I'd try to, you know, get back with my friends. But it… it probably didn’t hit me like the people who were here every day or the people who were going to NCCU and saw the devastation and saw the construction torn down. It was… it was not like we'd... go that way anymore. It was bulldozers and, you know, so you… you took a different route to where you were going. The other… I just kind of want to go back to what… to some of the other things when I was in maybe elementary and junior high.

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JW: Sure. EW: Thinking about downtown Durham, as that drives me to think about, “Okay, what did I ever do downtown?” My grandmother used to take me with her shopping, and Mr. Holloway would take us. We would… he would drop us downtown, and then we would go into Belk’s to pick out a fabric for her. And she taught me about feeling the different textures and the fabric. You know, this is wool. This is cotton. This is silk. I just remember by doing my fingers like that, she used to do her fingers like that. Rub ’em left, her thumb across her fingers and say, “Feel this honey.” You know, like, “This would make a nice coat,” or “This would make a nice summer dress.” And we would pick out fabric, and she'd always made hats to match her church outfits. You know, she would redo hats with new flowers on ’em depending on the colors or whatever she was going to wear to church. She would make me dresses, and she had a sewing machine that you pedaled. And so I remember once we were in the store and this lady was all over us, you know. “Can I help you, Mrs. Merrick?” “Can I help you, Mrs. Merrick?”--a white clerk, and that was kind of the only time I ran into white people was when we would go downtown. I didn’t to school with ’em. I didn’t to church with ’em. I really didn’t have an integrated experience until I went to Spelman and there were exchange students. JW: Oh. EW: Who came from Bryn Mawr and other white girls's schools. Sarah Lawrence. And I didn’t even know where those schools were. I just knew these girls came from somewhere else. They came from the Northeast somewhere. So my… my… my impression was that this lady was trying to be my grandmother’s friend ’cause she was just so – I was probably nine or ten years old. And we went back out of the store, and we were walking down the street, and she passed us, this lady did, and didn’t even look our way. And I asked LyBo, I said, “Isn’t that that lady that we just were talking to?” and she said, “Don’t worry about it, baby.” And that’s all I knew, but it was just… I… you know, later realized okay, she was all over my grandmother because she knew my grandmother had the money to spend, had spent money before there, and she wanted to be her clerk. But when we were on the street we just like any… we were not… we were not visible. And that struck me, you know, like, I thought she was trying to be your friend. So the other experience I had with integration here was Christmas cards. We always got a Christmas card from Mary Semans because Mary Semans’s mother and my grandmother were good friends. Mary Semans’s mother sat on the board of Lincoln Hospital –

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JW: Oh! EW: - when my grandmother did, and they gave money. The… the Dukes gave money to help Lincoln be built-- JW: Right. EW: - and then she sat on the board. And then later Mary Semans sat on the board. And she used to sit by my dad on the board for that meeting because she said she needed to sit by a doctor who could tell her what was going… what they were talking about. But we got this Christmas card. If you’ve… have you ever seen the card that Mary Semans used to always send?

00:35:16.150 - 00:37:31.070

JW: Yes. EW: With all the families and all these white people on this card. And I’m… I asked LyBo, I said, “Who are these white people?” And I have since then told… I told Mary Semans that, when I got to know her after I came back home, I said, “You know, your Christmas card stands out to me from way when I was six years old.” And then the other thing that used to happen in my grandmother’s house was the start of the Merrick Washington magazine, which was the… It was the Negro Braille magazine, she named it in 1951 or ‘2. She had befriended… become friends with--probably is a better way to say it--with Johnny Washington, who was born blind, and he was a baby... he was probably only six months younger than my mother. They were born in the same year, 1920. And when he was born, he was abandoned. And he was…the… the hospital… at Lincoln Hospital, which was a clapboard house then, the nurses and the people were taking care of him, and then there was a fire at Lincoln. That house was… had a fire, so my grandmother ended up having Johnny live at our hou-… at her house. She had a three-year-old and a… less maybe… a sixteen- month-old and a one-year-old in the house, and this little boy was blind. So that’s how far back their relationship went. Now, between then and when Johnny… Johnny then went to, at some point, another family to live, and then he went to the North Carolina School for the Blind, which is a boarding school. And then he got kicked out. JW: Uh, oh. EW: He says he got kicked out. He was always asking too many questions, he says. And so he would…. There was a community of blind people that knew each other well. And they would come to Stanford L. Warren Library, and LyBo would read--

00:37:31.070 - 00:39:43.370

JW: Oh! EW: --to them from news media that they… that wasn’t printed in Braille. Stories that… about African Americans that they… you know, you’re not going to hear about on the radio, that the main media wasn’t publicizing. So Jet magazine, Ebony magazine, Carolina Times, all of the African-American media that was carried at Stanford L. Warren. She would…they called it the… the blind corner of Stanford L. Warren, and she would read. So Johnny said to her one day, and I’m saying “Johnny.” He was… my grandmother’s age… John Washington is more proper, but she called him Johnny. And he said to her one day, “You know, I’d really like to be able to read this for myself,” which is the kind of person he was. He was very independent. And so she then said, “Well, let’s see how we can do that.” So she investigated ways to have this material clipped and sent to a publisher and published in Braille and brought back here and then mailed out to a public mailing list. And Johnny would come to her house. She… I know… I have hard copies of her clippings, and I’ve donated this, the… all that I can find about it a lot of it I donated to the North Carolina Room at the library because I’m not… my house is not a library. I want the world to be able to access it, anybody who wants to do research about this, and I want to be able to access it without having to find it in the dusty shopping bag. But she would cut it out, tape it with Scotch tape to a cardboard…you know, when you get your shirts done? JW: Yeah. EW: The… The cardboard the cleaners used to put to hold it. Granddaddy’s cardboard from his shirts ’cause he always had a fresh…freshly done shirts. She would tape it and put ’em in a big brown envelope and send ’em to this publisher, and they would then reprint it. I guess retype it all and…and emboss it in Braille on these big tablets, a brown tablet thing that when you turn the page, it’s like this. And you know with Braille you can only do it on one side ’cause it’d mess up the other side. And he would come to the house and read that first, the editor’s copy of that in Braille ‘cause of course she couldn’t read it, and tell her where they made editorial errors. And she would write them back, and they would fix the editorial errors, and then they would publish it, and then they would mail it to her mailing list. And that’s… has been going on since 1954.

00:40:38.750 - 00:40:45.410

JW: Wow. And it’s still coming out? EW: And I’m the president. JW: Wow. [both laugh] EW: I found all this stuff… When I first moved back home in ’96 my mother and friends were still running this committee. Before that, probably in the ‘70s, my grandmother decided that she couldn’t do it anymore. She was putting out four issues a year, and it was constantly finding clippings and then the mounting and the… and paying for the publishing of it out of her own pocket. And then she essentially retired and let it now be known that when she retired somebody else could either do it, or it was just going to die. And so John Wheeler, who was alive then and was the chair of the board of the Stanford L. Warren Library… and that was before it was a part of the Durham Library system… had… and I know the other person right off the top of my head was a member of that board was Josephine Clement. But there were… Burnette – Frank Burnette - was another one. And they voted that they would take on the magazine as a project so the… the nonprofit that… that had… that has a non-profit status is the Durham Colored Library Inc., and I have the Durham Colored Library board now meets at my house. And we do that away from whatever else I do for a living. And then the project that they have taken on and took on then was the publication of the magazine, and they changed the name of it then to the "Merrick-Washington Magazine in honor of Lyda Merrick and John Washington." John Washington is still living.

00:41:58.370 - 00:42:38.350

JW: Is he? EW: mmhmm. He would be- JW: Is he around here? EW: He lives somewhere around here. I know he goes to Mt. Vernon Church, and he… his daughter, Melva… He may be in a nursing home now, but I know his daughter, Melva. And for a while, Melva… Melva Washington… the disease that he had that caused his blindness is hereditary, and it passes through the female to the male son. So she has a blind son, and her daughter has a blind son.

00:42:38.350 - 00:44:02.070

JW: Oh. EW: So when Melva’s son Chris was in high school, Melva bought… She used to work for the EPA--and she bought… she bought material… embossing equipment and set up in her garage a way that she could type his book chapters ahead of time and emboss them for him so he could read them himself in Braille. And so then when I came home around that time she was making a proposal to the committee for the magazine that my mom was running. My mom was always the treasurer. And then... they contracted with her to publish the magazine out of her garage, and she did that for a while. But now we’re using a publisher in Pennsylvania – JW: Ah. EW: - because it became more than she wanted to do anymore. But we’re still in... in contact with her, and her son, Chris, sent us ideas. He’s now employed at the… somewhere at the University of Maryland. And he… Now the technology’s changed so he has a Braille reader for his computer.

00:44:02.070 - 00:44:58.510

JW: mmmhmmm. Oh! EW: So you know how that works? Usually you need a screen. You can just read in Braille what’s on the screen. It… It shows up down here somewhere where the keyboard is, and then he can type and read it and know that it’s typing what he had read. And so he’ll send us articles. Course, you know, we try to stay in touch with him, and I’d love for him to be on the board. But it’s, you know… distance is a problem. JW: Right. So is it still taking clips from other publications? EW: Yeah, actually I have on the board one of my cousins, my aunt Vivian’s granddaughter, who finished Duke and is a… was a journalism major. Left here and was working in… is working in New York. She was working for Fortune magazine for a little while and that kind of stuff. So when she finished Duke, I said, “Don’t you want to be on this committee?” And so she is enjoying learning more of the virtual stuff, and she’s actually gathering articles virtually.

00:44:58.510 - 00:45:35.430

JW: Ah. EW: Producing a Word document essentially, sending that to the publisher, and as long as we give citation to where it came from, it’s fine. JW: Ah. EW: So we send it to our publisher. She embosses it and then mails it for us, and we keep a mailing list up.

00:45:35.430 - 00:46:25.950

JW: Oh, okay. EW: So she can send… and we decided to publish it in large print, too. So we publish it in a large print that’s embossed so it… because visually impairment is an issue as much as blindnesss now ’cause a lot of people as they get older… glaucoma and macular degeneration become issues, and therefore the visually impaired. And we’re… we’re saying who have an interest in African Am… in stories about African America… American achievement and successes. So that, you know, it doesn’t have to just be African Americans that we’re mailing it to, but people who would have an interest in that subject matter. JW: Well, that’s great. Very good. EW: So that’s my… That’s what I do for nothing. [both laugh]

00:46:26.670 - 00:46:58.330

JW: Well, that must feel good to have, to keep the family tradition going. EW: And I don’t want it to die. I’m… my… my… One thing I would like to make sure happens is that it has some sustainability before… you know… so if something happens to me there’s a…. that it is an organization that has, you know, a board and a… that will continue. So that it doesn’t die. JW: So that’s still the Durham Colored Library? EW: The organization is the Durham Colored Library. We called it DCL, Inc. in some cases. But that is the full name of it. And we have a website. Brandy has put a website up for us and learned how to do html and all that stuff so… It’s all volunteer-run.

00:47:16.090 - 00:48:02.730

JW: Well, it’s a lot of work. EW: Well, we only… we don’t do four a year. We only do two a year. That’s only because of the totally volunteer run and resources to offset the cost of the… the… paying the publisher. You don’t have to pay for postage because the post office doesn’t charge you if it’s large print or Braille, but you do have to pay the publisher. So the numbers of magazines you publish is limited by resources availability. So I do a… I do some fundraising for it every year. I mail a letter out to all the people who always supported it to just get enough to offset the cost of the publishing. JW: How large is your circulation? EW: About 300.

00:48:02.730 - 00:48:33.290

JW: Ah. EW: Yeah. We’re trying to increase that. We send it to the libraries. There’s a North Carolina Braille Library for the Blind, and every state has some libraries for the blind, so we’re sending it to those and with a card in it that if someone wants their own, they can add to our mailing list. JW: Oh. EW: But then we have individuals who’ve been on it a long time. And they tell each other.

00:48:37.130 - 00:49:40.890

JW: Well, you are also continuing family tradition by being involved with… with health care-- EW: Yeah, that’s-- JW: - but you started out after college… You started out in a different direction or a couple of different directions. EW: Yeah, it’s interesting. I was… I majored in psychology and elementary ed. I taught elementary school for a few years til I had children, and I decided… I didn’t think I could do it. I’m not as… as gifted as some people who can have children at home and then go take care of 30 all day.

00:49:40.890 - 00:49:40.900

JW: Yeah. EW: Somebody, I felt, would probably be neglected. [both laugh] EW: My patience might not hang out there. But… So I did that until I had children, and then, luckily, I did not… because of my husband’s success, I did not have to work full time while the kids were little. So I just dabbled in a lot of things. And he knew how much I enjoyed reading, and it was his idea that we start those bookstores. JW: Ahh.

00:49:40.900 - 00:49:56.310

EW: Because I was always spending money in bookstores and I was buying children’s books and, you know, books for me and books about all kinds of things. So a few of our neighbors in Reston… Reston was seven miles away from Tyson’s Corner- JW: Okay. EW:-- where the nearest bookstore was, Walden’s Books at Tyson’s Corner in 1970-something. And… I guess it was 1980 by the time we did that. And… so we got involved with three… two other couples and put resources together and did a demographic study of the Reston community, and I think the average education level was a freshman in college, you know. A lot of PhDs and Masters people out there - JW: Yeah.

00:50:19.970 - 00:50:40.970

EW: - who I knew, so we knew there was going to be a demand for books. And actually, the first year or second year we were open we beat out Walden’s. JW: Oh! [both laugh] EW: That branch. But then the… and… and I was officially the juvenile book buyer, and that was fun. I’d go in part time and meet with the publishers, Random House and Harper and Row, all the publishers of the children’s book sections. And they would show me the ones that were going to be coming out the next year, and we’d guess which ones to buy to sell, you know. And we developed our own inventory control system on index cards. All of that before computer… computerization. But then it… so we were in business ten years, and near the end it was… the writing was on the wall with independent bookstore was not going to – JW: Yeah.

00:51:15.050 - 00:53:47.930

EW: - have an easy time of it. And it wasn’t much of a margin in your books with the discounting and the competition with all the chains, and it was about time for us to start seriously thinking about putting money aside for children to go to college. And so we… I decided I’d go do something else, and we sold it. We sold the… I had a lot of… of business… sort of… trials through fire. I learned. I learned how to read a spreadsheet, how to read financial reports, and also market and do all of these things without formal school. So I always knew I wanted to go to grad school, and then I knew I really… if I was going to be an entrepreneur, I really needed to learn ahead of time [both laugh] what the… what was needed to run a successful business, though. We ended up being the final owners of that….the other two partners faded away, and we ran it for probably the last four years on our own. JW: Oh. EW: And then I did the selling of it and opened up a book jobber mainly because what I found was the market, the clientele who were coming in there wanted specialized books than, you know. They were going to these chains to buy their bestsellers and coming to us looking for something that they couldn’t find on the shelf. That they’d read about but they couldn’t find. So we were doing a lot of special orders. And that was fine, but it wasn’t a high enough volume. So I had a couple of contracts with government agencies that I knew. I… I figured out how to get a contract… some contracts with government agencies under a… another business title, and we’d do special orders for them. And it was a little bit more lucrative that way. Then… Then I had a higher volume. So I learned all that stuff and did it for another ten years while working at the employment agency, [both laugh] getting my credentials as an employment counselor and… So, hey. I just… I always… I have always worked, except for like the first two years when I had children, til they were potty trained and I could get them to preschool. JW: So you like being out in the business world?

00:53:48.370 - 00:55:00.030

EW: I do. I do. I… I really enjoy… I just enjoy thinking like a business person and strategically thinking through and spending my time where the benefit is good, trying to, you know… “first things first” kind of pattern but with a goal in mind. I really like to... The reason I like development is because I know that I can be measured. When you’re… I transitioned from community relations work at Inova Health Systems into development because what I saw was as a community relations manager, I could run all the health fairs in the world, and I could get all the… the employees involved in the community and maybe the board of supervisors over some issue about the health system that they had, I could create enough positives to have them feel good about us again. But when that was over, they only thought of me as a balloons and t-shirts person. JW: Yeah. EW: And I… I knew I could do more than that. And at Inova my boss… There were three places between us, and he wasn’t going anywhere. And they weren’t going to fill in between. JW: Oh.

00:55:00.030 - 00:55:44.870

EW: I was a manager. I wasn’t ever going to be director, and he was vice president. And I still talk to him a lot. In fact, his name is Jim Scott, and he… he’s a Virginia legislator. He stayed in the… in the House of Representatives in Virginia, part time, I think. He might be retired from Inova now, just doing that full time, but then he was part time. He was Vice President of Public Relations - JW: Okay. EW: - and so that was logical. But he’s a great guy. He finished Carolina. He was – JW: Oh!

00:55:44.870 - 00:56:42.830

EW: - David Price’s friend at Carolina. JW: Oh, really? EW: He comes back to games, and we go for… for coffee whenever he’s coming back to do something over at… His daughter finished Carolina. So I have a great relationship with him. So he supported me in moving into development at Inova, and they sent me for training. And it’s the same skill set pretty much. It’s building relationships with, you know, the right people who can support what your cause is. But it’s strategically thinking about how to spend your time and how to listen and understand what they’re interested in and trying to match their interest to your need. And really, I enjoy that. As long as I believe in the cause, and I believed. I wouldn’t work where I didn’t. So, turned out well. JW: You were saying that your dad really wanted you to come back to Durham, but what… what got you… what made you interested in the nursing school… in ’96?

00:56:50.510 - 00:57:25.370

EW: Well, I was working in development by then at Inova Health System, and they… there was a… one of the funding priorities at Inova at the time was raising funds for the practicing nurses’ program. It wasn’t nursing education. And I didn’t know anything about nursing education. My dad had to sit down and tell me this before I came for an interview. JW: Ah. EW: Really. And he didn’t know as much as he… as I learned later. But that… because I was in healthcare and because I knew the nursing school was looking for somebody, when I came to meet John [?] , then I told him about what I was doing with nurses at Inova, even though that wasn’t all I was doing. I was also raising money for a physicians’ conference center at… at Fair Oaks Hospital out in Reston, but… but my interest was in coming home at that point. So I sold myself, and then I learned about nursing education. And… oh, I remember what my father told me was, “There’s a nurse, there’s a nurse, and then there’s a nurse.” And what he meant was… now I know, you know, there’s a CNA who knows how to care for daily patients, but they can be called nurse. They’re called nurse, too. Then there’s the… and often their education level is maybe a… a hospital-based nursing program or Durham Tech, technical level, but not a bachelor’s. And then there’s the nurse who has a bachelor’s degree who, you know, can do… who has a little more scientific education and can direct a CNA. And then there’s a nurse who has a master’s degree or a PhD who’s actually teaching others to get these degrees. JW: Ah.

00:59:00.770 - 01:01:09.210

EW: And they may be the nurse supervisor if they’re in the hospital, too. You can have a master’s, you know, a nurse practitioner who specifically is a pediatric nurse practitioner or a med-surg practitioner. You know, at that level then they are close enough to what the physician’s knowledge is that they really partner with the physician. Or they work in the physician’s office as nurse practitioner. They can offset a lot of what the physician has to do with the patient. And I had to learn all of that, really. I… I had no clue about that. I always thought, “nurse RN was RN.” All of them em had RNs. All of 'em had to take the RN exam. That’s not the level of education. That doesn’t connote. It just connotes that you are certified by the state to be an RN. [both laugh] And I used to fight. I used to say, “Okay, now it’d really be nice” if in the hospitals - especially when I was in there a lot with him - if on their tag it said, “BSN,” “CNA,” and “practitioner” so you know who you were talking to. And I think patients need to know. I still think patients need to know that, but there’s this culture of… in the nursing profession, where… you know, they don’t want to wear the white hats anymore. They want to be looked at differently. The CNAs of course don’t want to be under my… un-… looking like they’re underneath somebody. They have a skill set that is important to patient care, and they don’t want to look like they’re less than. So no, they don’t want “CNA” on their tag. So, it’s just, you know, who’s the patient here? Who’s the customer? was my question. But… So, it’s something that the medical system has not fought with. They just let it be. JW: Not dealt with. EW: Not dealt with. JW: If I recall right, Duke had discon-… had a nursing school, discontinued the nursing school and then reactivated it…?

01:01:11.010 - 01:02:10.610

EW: They didn’t discontinue it. They discontinued the undergraduate program. JW: Oh, okay. EW: So they no longer offered a BS in it. They went to master’s prepared only. And the reason for that was economic. They really… It’s very expensive to run a BSN program, and there were other BSN programs around. Carolina had one, and in the state, there are several bachelor’s of nursing programs. Wilmington has one. Car- And… I’m not sure all the rest of them now, but… And then there’s the… the Durham Tech level ones, and then there was the Watt’s School of Nursing and the Lincoln School of Nursing. So Duke decided with… What was the dean’s name or the president’s name who made the decisions about cutting back on that nursing school? I can’t remember. JW: Was that Brody?

01:02:11.110 - 01:02:14.310

EW: Brody. JW: Keith Brody. EW: Exact – No, it wasn’t Keith Brody. JW: Or Sanford.

01:02:16.320 - 01:02:40.730

EW: uh-uh. It was a provost. During the time… I think it was during Sanford’s time. JW: Kenneth Pye. EW: Pye! That’s exactly who it was. And so all of the BSN nursing students hate him. [both laugh] EW: The BSN alumni. So yeah, they… they decided to close the School of Forestry, the BSN program, and some other sort of programs where, according to the nursing alum… where you’re not going to make enough money to give a lot back. I don’t really think that was the reason. I think it had to do with the cost of the education program they needed to put in place and the lack of funding from NIH and places where you could get funding for programs. And you could get funding for the masters programs, so it was a resource. Like everything, it all comes back to the dollar, right?

01:02:40.730 - 01:04:52.850

JW: Yeah. EW: Economics. So, the… the challenge when I took this position at the School of Nursing was to bring back into the fold alumni as donors who would sit in front of the dean, [Mary] Champagne and I, who would go visit them and say, “They closed our school,” and I would say, “And she’s the dean of what?” [both laugh] But they did close the undergraduate school, and so the challenge was to have them value the fact that it’s still existing because a lot of schools of nursing did close. A lot of bachelor’s schools did close, and there was no school for those alumni like Hopkins to come back to until they reopened to the masters programs. But they closed completely some other… So we would compare that to that. We would say, “You do have a school. It’s still here. You attended Duke. Why not support this school as it moves forward and keeps pace with the development of the profession?” And many of them had gone other places and gotten master’s, or they stayed here, practiced at Duke, and got master’s part time while they were practicing. So the school was always there. And then we were able to identify funding, which was… One of the biggest gifts I ever got was a $6 million gift from a… a foundation I unearthed to fund an ABSN program. JW: Ah. EW: And that sort of helped them to then feel better, you know, that… that group that wasn’t coming around. That, “Okay, you do have some kind of BSN.” With the ABSN, you have to have a bachelor’s from another undergraduate school in something. Could be English. It could be biology, chemistry, but if you didn’t have enough sciences, you would have to do prereqs at the… at maybe Durham Tech or somewhere until you got your science prereqs in place. And then you could enroll, and in sixteen months you'd have a BSN.

01:04:52.850 - 01:05:53.170

JW: Ah. EW: And BSN is the key to moving forward because if you have a BSN, you can go to master’s program and you can become a PhD even. You can do it. The… The sky’s the limit in the nursing profession. If you don’t have a BSN, if you only have a Durham Tech degree or a Watts School of Nursing degree, you have to get a BSN before you can move forward, so that’s just how it works. Whether it’s right or not, it’s up to them. But, once we got the ABSN program and it’s flourishing, and it’s… it’s oversubscribed. The demand for it, I know, is still very high. And it’s tops in the nation compared to other BSN programs that other universities have brought in. Students are graduating from it and employed all over the place. It gives…gives Duke a really good name now for their nursing school, and alumni started giving back. But my first crunch was to… a trip to bring a few back who would then talk to some others about, “Hey, it’s okay. That dean’s really nice.” You know. “Let’s go see her. Let’s have a little party at our house. Let’s…” You know. And then we began to… to move it forward, but it’s… It was… It was… First couple of… But we surprised… the campaign goal setting in the silent phases…We surprised all of Duke about… We… We reached what they thought we could raise in the campaign in the first year. JW: Wow. That’s… EW: Yeah.

01:07:06.890 - 01:07:25.650

JW: That’s… That’s good. [laughs] That’s very good. EW: Yeah. So then they allowed us to be in the campaign. [both laugh] JW: I was like, “Oh, okay.” But it was… it was fun, and that’s the kind of thing I like to do. JW: So was that… Did that lead you directly into the… the Child and Family Health Center?

01:07:25.650 - 01:09:06.970

EW: Well, at that point, you know… The development officers at Duke travel a lot. The new campaign is beginning to start now, and they’re… you know… Duke’s all over the place. The… you know, worldwide, so there’s got to be major gifts officers talking to these people all the time and alumni affairs people everywhere. So I wasn’t home very much. I was… When something would happen with dad, I would say, “I can’t come.” But, most of the time, I was gone. I was home probably a week out of every month in the fall and spring because you just needed to get…You had to have appointments. You had to set ‘em up. You had to get reports out after you got back, and you had to go and be face to face with folks. And I was doing… The nursing school didn’t have a lot of depth in their staff. It was me and a secretary. And some support from the central core, you know, for publications and things like that, for medical. But… so I was on the road and making appointments and on the phone and emailing and, you know, setting things up for the dean to visit and me in between. So, that was for nine years. So when the… There was a transition between deans. Mary Champagne decided that she didn’t want to sit for reappointment again, and I helped to identify the new dean, Catherine Gilliss, who is there still. And after a year with Catherine I sorta said, “You know, I think I’m going to look around.” And Mary Champagne happened to have been on this board. JW: Ah. EW: Now I was looking at some other things, and I told her… I was actually thinking about moving and going to an… Daddy was gone, and my mom is a… at the Forest [Forest at Duke Retirement Community]. And I thought, “Okay, I could go anywhere.” My husband wasn’t too hot on places that didn’t have year-round golf, but… [both laugh] but I was looking at other schools because the other thing that I did at the nursing school was to... I would go to conferences with the dean, so there’s the American Association of Nurses that met in DC in the spring. And I would accompany her when she would go to these meetings and then set up appointments with donors at night. We would go to dinners with different donors at night. And I would then go to some of the meetings, and I got to meet some of the other deans. And they would say, “Why are you here with the dean?” And I’m like, “Well, she’s traveling anyway. She’s not going to be there, and I know her nights will be free when you all are having a night meeting. And we can then piggyback, and my… my ticket is all this..., you know, assigned to development at this point. If she was coming with me on another trip, so we can piggyback on this trip.” And they would say… And a lot of them didn’t even have development officers. JW: Oh!

01:10:23.490 - 01:11:47.230

EW: They didn’t have development programs. So I would tell themem what I was doing, and she would then tell them what she was doing. And we’re not talking about the big schools, but the smaller schools. And so ultimately, they began to start bringing their… Well, they… they would come. I did a training session for deans at that conference, you know. So I… I set up a training session for deans on development and gave them data about what we were doing at Duke. And of course they didn’t expect to do what Duke was doing, but they were interested to know. And, like, it’s… it’s alumni affairs, it’s the next thing you do after you get them interested as alumni, and it’s a little bit more than just a direct mail and a membership fee. And I gave ‘em the one-on-one development, and then they started hiring development officers. And then we would… We had a side committee of development officers who would meet there, and we would then do… a track along with the deans, and they would come. And they… And then they’d have meetings after their dinner. So, I guess for five years we got to that point, and so some of the other schools were interested in, you know, entertaining me as a possibility. And some of it would have meant either me relocating or being… or moving. But heck, I was gone anyway – JW: Yeah. JW: - so what difference did it make? But Mary, said, “You know, that organization… You could do… You could make a difference over there.” And she’d been on this board, and I didn’t even know it, from the beginning. And it had begun in ’96, the year I moved here to work for her, and so she told me about it, and I gave her my resume. I didn’t think they would hire me, but they did. And it’s worked out really well. And I get to stay home more. JW: Yeah.

01:12:15.610 - 01:13:40.630

EW: Yeah. And the… It interests me because I grew up in Durham, and what they work with here is children who… They’re trying to prevent maltreatment, and then they’re helping the ones who have been either maltreated or exposed to violence, in the clinic. But the prevention end is very important, just visiting these young… young moms who are at risk for abusing, for maltreating. Not necessarily that they will, but if you give them enough child development understanding and teach them about how to spend time with their children and where resources are in the community, then often you can re-… you can change their point of view about their child and their baby. And the risk factors from a social, you know… a social worker’s perspective are that the mom is either going to be isolated, admits to having maybe been abused themselves, has some psychological problems. So these are high-risk people. It’s not just everybody. Now, the truth is, I think everybody could benefit from what we do, but these are the ones that are picked out by the hospital to be recommended to us, and then they’re assigned a social worker who works with them up to three years. And they’re like the children’s fairy godmother. JW: Ah. EW: Some of them have said that because… I remember… My kids were fifteen months apart, and I remember sitting there one night with the young one who wouldn’t go to sleep and the other was. As soon as one would woke up, the other one would go to sleep. And they were in one bedroom with two cribs, and I’m like, “Oh, God. When is this child ever going to sleep?” Well, if I had had alcohol, some problems, psychological issue going on, I might not have been as controlled. [both laugh] So… So… there was… I know it’s valuable. My husband traveled a lot. I was home a lot with just the two of them. I knew, you know, to go and get a neighbor if I needed help or to just put the baby down and go to cry. You know. Or as long as they weren’t wet and were fed, you know, then there’s things to do. And plus, I had education background, so I also knew reading, and, you know, other things to do with children, toys to play with, and stuff. So, it was very different for me, but a lot of moms don’t have that kind of background. JW: Right.

01:14:52.950 - 01:15:15.690

EW: And so, yeah, I feel good about raising money for this organization. JW: So this… Does the center… Is most of its work in Durham County, or is it spread all over? EW: Well, the activity with the families and children are mostly in the Triangle or maybe the Triad. The thing is, if you’re… if you’re coming to the clinic because you definitely have… you know, you need to go through a therapy model, which is, average, about twenty-six sessions, once a week or twice a week, you’re not going to drive from, you know, New Bern here. JW: Right.

01:15:39.250 - 01:17:38.030

EW: So, those… the clinic patients may come for an assessment, but then they may be referred to somebody closer to them who we have trained. One of the things that we do is train clinicians all over the state in these therapy models, and then we make sure that they are doing efficacy of care by going and visiting or by doing it virtually, reviewing cases with them, and that kind of thing. So we’re spreading, disseminating the practice, the best practice models, without having to be there with a sa-… a satellite. But if they come to the clinic, they’re most likely coming no further than, say, the Triad, but we go to Greensboro and Anne Arundel County and Mecklenburg County, and, you know, do training in… Well, they do training in Tennessee, and they do training in Utah, too. But… And then they can refer to people who they know are good clinicians in the area. Some of our grants are also from the Duke Endowment, and you know the Duke Endowment likes North and South Carolina. So we have really close relationships with South Carolina and North Carolina for one model, especially… it’s called Parent Interactive Therapy. PCIT. Parent Child Interactive Therapy, which we are the trainer… the designated trainers for that model, for both states. In other words, if you’re going to practice that, you have to come through us – JW: Ah. EW: - and be certified before you can… allowed to practice that model. So, the answer to the question is, we’re all over, but one-on-one face-to-face kind of work is usually local. JW: Is Durham… Living here now, does Durham seem like your hometown, or…

01:17:38.030 - 01:17:45.510

EW: Yeah. JW: …or is it like, you lived there and went away and - EW: Well, you know. JW: - then you there and there and there and there, and now you happen to be in this place? Is… Do you feel like a connection?

01:17:52.310 - 01:18:06.390

EW: Yes, I do. I never… I never felt like anywhere was my hometown except Durham. JW: Ah. EW: I always tried to make where I was like Durham. [both laugh] When I was in Reston… I think we chose Reston because it was small. I mean, we were first living… when we first moved up with no children and he was in the service, we lived in Arlington. So I know the whole metropolitan area, but I felt like Reston was closer… a closer feeling. You know, it was a new town. Plain community. There was a strong African-American network there that I always felt very close to, and that felt like being home. Like I was similar to Durham, but I never found a church like St. Joseph’s. [both laugh] I found some churches… There were some churches in Fairfax that were African-American churches. But here’s the difference. In Fairfax, Virginia… I don’t know if you knew this. Fairfax, Virginia’s history… There was no high school where African Americans could go until 1960s. JW: Good grief.

01:19:18.030 - 01:20:58.010

EW: They didn’t even have a segregated high school. If a child wanted to go… If a family wanted their child to go to high school, they would send them…would live with an aunt or uncle in DC, a family member in Washington, DC, where there were segregated high schools or even in Richmond or other parts of Virginia, but that not in Fairfax County. Fairfax County, Virginia was white flight. The families there appreciated having maids and butlers and gardeners and tradesmen who were African American, but they didn’t see the value in educating. So, I remember we were… This group of African Americans who moved to Reston often were very highly educated. Like I said, when we started our bookstore, you know, the median was freshman in college, so the African American families that we knew well… we got to know well, they had something called Reston Black Focus, which was an organization that if you were… There was one grocery store in 1970, a Safeway in the Village, the main Village downtown… downtown within the Village of Reston. And if you saw another black person shopping, then you made sure you got to know them, and you invited them to come to the next – JW: Ah! EW: - Black Focus meeting. And every Labor Day weekend we had a festival where we brought out some African drummers and people from Howard and book vendors, and, you know, we had tables and, like a festival. And people would come from all over to the Black Focus Festival in Reston. Now this was from like 1970 to probably ’80, and then we found all the women who were kinda running the Black Focus, cause the men were usually commuting, like my husband was commuting into DC, and a lot of them were. That was before a lot of businesses came out to Reston. There were small businesses. There was a pharmacy, and, you know, it was… But there wasn’t like TRW and IBM, and Nortel - JW: Right.

01:21:29.950 - 01:21:48.270

EW: - and… like there are now. And the Dulles Toll Road was not accessible from Reston and it is now. And all that. Route 7 was one road, two ways… you know, two-lane – JW: Yeah. EW: - road with cows on the other side. So it was very different, but… So, we were our own little enclave, but a lot of people worked at Howard and lived out there. So there was some faculty members were out there. So, you know, I found it to be a nice place to live and get to know people and have friends and house visits, visiting homes. Like, we always had house visiting here on my side of town, on – JW: Yeah.

01:22:09.430 - 01:23:36.870

JW: - the black side of town. We didn’t have… We couldn’t go to the hotels, and we couldn’t go to different things for entertainment here, except our own, so there were house parties. So in Reston we had house parties all the time. It wasn’t anywhere to go anyway unless you went into DC. So where was I going with that? So, in the… What I found in the church that we would take the kids to, to, you know, sing in the choir and go to Sunday school and that, was that the education level was so... I mean, there were nice people. There were people who were making money, but they were carpenters, and they were brick layers, and they were cleaners or, you know, tradespeople. And there wasn’t this intellectual… The church was very country. Probably like the country church but like at… at… The minister didn’t have the message that I was used to getting here at… at St. Joseph’s, you know. Somebody who had gone to school had had… had had a bachelor’s, you know. So it was a different… It was different that way. JW: Yeah. EW: I never could… I remember we went once to.. I don’t want to say it because it sounds bad. But I’m used to Mother’s Day at church… Mother’s Day Sunday was a time where I always… If you had a living mother, you wore a red rose. If your mother was deceased, you wore a white rose, and that was the culture. And I put on these roses on my children. [both laugh] I was the only family with roses on Sunday. But, you know, so stuff like that was what I was missing from Durham. And, you know, Durham’s African-American community was highly educated, and a lot of it… I mean, ‘course there were people who were or who weren’t, but there wasn’t this division. And people who… who lived in St. MacDougald Terrace and maybe they were tobacco workers or textile workers or something, they had this view of education for their children as what they wanted, and they had an anticipation that their children would do better than they would. And there was always… in elementary school, everybody was encouraged to think forward and to think about going to college. It was NCCU, was the model. So, there there just wasn’t. There wasn’t the possibility, so why would they promote it? So it was a different psychological… I mean, my husband and his friends went to the Reston guys. We found out that they were going to celebrate Slave Day in the high school. And my kids were babies, but my husband went with the rest of the guys who had children already in the main high school in Fairfax County. And it was Herndon High, and that… Reston’s high school hadn’t been built yet. And we went… They went down. Put on their suits. They had suits. They wore suits every day to work, and went to the superintendent’s office. And they walked in, and there was a black guy who was… I guess he was janitorial or something , and he told them they were “messing things up.” JW: Oh. [both laugh]

01:24:06.410 - 01:26:07.690

EW: So, it was a mentality, you know. He’s lived there. JW: Yeah. EW: -and he’s a local, and we coming in there uppity and telling them they can’t have Slave Day. I’m like, “I’m not sending my kids to a high school where they goin’ celebrate Slave Day. Give me a break.” So, anyway… It was just very different that way. JW: So what was Slave Day?

01:26:08.130 - 01:26:51.530

EW: Well, the black kids pretended to be slaves, and the white kids pretended to not to be, to be the masters. And they put ’em on the block, and they talked about how slavery used to be. [both laugh] JW: That’s hard to imagine. EW: Yeah. So, they found… you know, this family whose children were.... I mean, some of the families’ kids were already in high school, and they brought it back to the Focus Group. And the… I said, “We’re going to go down here and talk to the superintendent about this. This is not something…” But it’s not unusual. I mean, I’ve heard it happened be- not too long ago. Who was it? I have to think back. But it’s not… it’s not unusual that they celebrate-- in Georgia somewhere. EW: Excuse me, I need... I’m busy. So… Sorry.

01:26:55.570 - 01:26:59.970

JW: That’s okay. EW: So. JW: That’s the kind of thing I can edit out. EW: Okay.

01:27:00.970 - 01:28:07.330

EW: So, it’s not that it doesn’t happen, but in… It just wasn’t going to happen for our kids. And later, you know, we got active in the school system on the… in the school board. Elected some people to the school board who were from Reston and were able to impact the change and that. But the school system as a whole was very good. Academic level was already well thought of. The numbers of kids who were going to college and all that kind of stuff, so a lot of people moved there because it was a good school system, public school system. They wouldn’t have to pay for private school – JW: Right. EW: - in DC. And in DC at that point, you did if you wanted your kids to be academically ready. Private high schools were pretty much important. So, you know, that was the mentality. So, finding home was… I always thought of Durham as home. Yeah, I did. JW: Does it feel good to be back?

01:28:07.590 - 01:28:17.490

EW: It does. It does. JW: You’ve been here so long it’s not being back anymore. EW: Right. Yeah. And I’ve been able to be more involved in the community since I’ve been here at the Center than when I was with the… the nursing school because I’m home more. So I get tickets. I go to DPAC, you know. I go to American Dance Festival. And I didn’t buy tickets like American Dance Festival tickets ‘cause I never knew if I would be here to use ’em before. JW: That’s right.

01:28:35.350 - 01:29:55.330

EW: But to get involved in those kinds of things, and go over to the Hayti Heritage Center and do things… So, yeah. And I joined the Durham chapter of the LINKS. I transferred my LINKS membership to the Durham chapter when I first moved here. My mom was one of the founding members of that chapter, and I was vice president at one point. Now alumni member. Yay. So I don’t have to… But going to… I mean, just the one thing I see… I did miss probably twenty years or thirty years of not being here with, you know, between 1970 and ’96, and so there were families whose children… I have three siblings under me who they knew better than they knew me, you know. JW: Yeah. EW: So, for instance, Barbara Moore, Dr. Don Moore’s wife, passed away recently, so going to her funeral and seeing people who come back for her funeral and, you know, their children. All of that is…is… feels good to be here, you know. JW: Well, is there anything you’d like to talk about that we’ve not covered?

01:29:55.710 - 01:30:04.270

EW: I think we’ve talked about a lot. [laughs] JW: It’s been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time. EW: Thank you for inviting me to do this.