Bette+&+Dale+Ettling+Interview+Transcript


 * __Q :__** Who was president at the time, and what was your (your family’s …the area’s) opinion of him?
 * __ A : __** You know, I don’t remember my family ever talking politics at home. It wasn’t something that seemed important. Yeah, we didn’t really talk politics at home.

**__Q :__** How did you react when you first saw a piece of art done by Andy Whorhol?
 * __A :__** I honestly laughed because I was like…”this is art?” I think of art as being Rembrandt or some of the old masters. I don’t think of Andy Whorhol’s work as being art.

**__Q :__** What kind of music did you listen to?
 * __A :__** Country western, I grew up on country western. And, I liked all types. I listened to Presley, I listened to rock and roll at the time.

**__Q :__** How did you get in trouble with an Elvis song?
 * __A :__** Oh, I was working at the time and I had a squawk box on my desk and across the garage, I worked at the ground equipment maintenance at the base, there was another bunch of people working and they had a radio, I didn’t. But all of a sudden my squawk box came on and it said “uh! I’m all shook up!” and it shut off right away. My boss calls me in to the office and tells me that I’m not supposed to be doing that. And I says, “I didn’t do that”. And they says, “Well you take care of it”. And there was that dancing that got me in trouble.

**__Q :__** What kind of movies did you watch? (//The Wizard of Oz?//)
 * __A :__** There was musicals, I loved the musicals. //The South Pacific//, and //7 Brides for 7 Brothers// was one of my favorites. With all of that music and dance! And then you had the drama, you had the, uhm//, Rebel Without A Cause//. James Dean, Steve McQueen had a couple too with his driving. I can’t recall any of the names anymore. But those were action packed movies at the time! And at that time you had a movie, a cartoon, the world news, and another movie. You were there all afternoon, seeing movies. A movie then was only about an hour to an hour and a half long. Well, and at that time too if you wanted to see the first run movies you went to St. Louis, because by the time they got to us they were so cut down; there were scenes that were actually cut out, to make them shorter still. The first run movies were at the big theaters, like the Fox, at that time. That’s when Stan Kann, used to come up out of the floor playing the organ. Oh, that was gorgeous; it was like magic.

**__Q :__** What kind of classes did you take to prepare you for the “real world”? **__Q :__** Who was your (least) favorite teacher? What qualities about them made them your favorite?
 * __A :__** I took, autoshop, sheet metal, drafting, woodworking, and I said drafting. And, there was another one. Well, I took the office occupations type classes, and I went into office type business when I first started working. And in fact, my senior year, I worked half a day at the hospital and they taught me different lab techniques that I could help them with. And then I went to school in the afternoon and got credit for the working. Before I graduated I took my civil service test, and I got the job out at the base. But I couldn’t start working yet because I was still in school. I gave them my date of graduation, and when I would be available. I had like a week between graduation and my start of work out at the base.
 * __A :__** She was an English teacher, and on a final exam I misspelled four words and she flunked me for that. One of my favorite teachers was Mrs. McGravey. She was very very sweet. She was very good about literature. Except I got into trouble for reading one of Steinbeck’s books because she didn’t know that it was in our library. She told us we could read anything we wanted, and I liked the books about real people and I liked Steinbeck. I read one of his books and made a book report for it. She called me out in the hall, because she didn’t think the book was appropriate for high school. I’m not sure which one it was anymore. I think it was //The Grapes of Wrath// because of the ending. She didn’t feel the ending was appropriate for high school reading. And, sorry about that. She asked me where I got the idea for reading it and I said the librarian suggested it because she knew what kind of books I liked. And it was in our library. I really did like her because she put a lot of influence on literature.

**__Q :__** What was your first impression of Toyota vehicles?
 * __A :__** I didn’t even get it a thought. Ford, Chevy, and Chrysler were the only cars I thought were any good. Well, I think as a society we really didn’t think it was going to last. We thought, “oh, well these foreigners coming in with foreign cars…Americans aren’t going to buy that.” And now! Back then unions were a big thing, and unions kept a lot of things out.

**__Q :__** How did you like the high school campus?
 * __A :__** It was great! I loved it because of the fact you could get out and you weren’t cooped up indoors. The full time you were in school you were in and out of the buildings. It was nice, except for when it was raining. There was a sundial! Between the main building and the auditorium. The freshmen from Signal Hill used to have to come around and do an Indian dance around the sundial for initiation. I don’t remember a fountain. Somebody said the Sunken Garden had one but I don’t ever remember seeing it. We took gym class out there and I don’t ever remember seeing it.

**__Q :__** What was your everyday attire like?
 * __A :__** Jeans…tee shirt…letter sweater, you usually gave to your girlfriend. I wore circle skirts, baby doll blouses, and white buck shoes with bobby socks. We were cool. And our jeans were rolled up too!

**__Q :__** What did you do in your free time?
 * __A :__** You went to the clubhouse. Go hunting, fishing, taking care of the chickens and the hogs. I went with my friends and we’d go shopping uptown. We’d walk. You didn’t spend money on the bus. We went to football games and basketball games, we walked! We walked from Swansea to Central Junior High, and in elementary school we walked to Franklin. But then whenever we would go to games I started out in Swansea, by the time we got to the square we had maybe two or three girls and we’d walk from the square all the way out to Belleville Township High. And then when the game was over we walked back. My mom didn’t drive, so I couldn’t call anyone to come get me. I walked everywhere we went. There were payphones everywhere, too. You never had to worry about anybody bothering you.

**__Q :__** What kind of new technology was there at the time? **__Q :__** How did you react to attending school with some students of a different race?
 * __A :__** Transitor Radio that you can carry with you, and of course the T.V. was becoming more and more popular. Our family had the only T.V. in our area at the time in the early 50s. Air conditioning was quite new at the time. In ’52, we got a room air conditioner, when it got over a hundred degrees. We slept under a window fan. We had upstairs bedrooms and it was hot! Dad put an attic fan to pull the cool air in, but still it was too hot so we’d sleep on the floor in the living room. School was hot! Windows opened, but you went to school, no heat schedule. No such thing. In the winter time, it had to be eight inches or more of snow before school was canceled. We always walked. I don’t remember ever being let out of school from bad weather. You never heard about this on the radio! Look out, oh well its raining. No minute by minute that you have now.
 * __A :__** Didn’t bother us at all. I had Warren Mitchel from grade school, and I always felt we were friends. We still are. There were very few black families in Belleville at the time. I can’t ever remember any trouble. They were just one of the students. I don’t remember any segregation. I don’t know how he felt about it. I can remember when my cousins from down south would come up and visit and they said, “ya’ll gotta go to with dem negroes?” and I says, “…yes.” “Ya’ll gotta sit next to them in class?!” “…yeah?” “Oh my!”. And when I would go down and visit them I would see the segregation. It was a whole different world. They were not allowed at the swimming pools at all. That’s what they liked. They were just kids like we were. It’s not like we were brought up to not like them, it was just indifferent. My family was raised in the South. My dad did not always feel this way but he didn’t push his beliefs on us, and mom too. We took these kids as part of our class, just as they were.

**__Q :__** What were relationships like then? What did you do for dates?
 * __A :__** We’d generally go to the show, and different parties. We’d gather at a friend’s house. It was group stuff. Well, when I started dating it was all group stuff, no pairs. I was in church activities and that too, so we did all that kind of stuff too. Hay rides. You actually had to tell someone that you liked them.

**__Q :__** What did you want to do with your life? I just think that we had a very good highschool experience because we had so much more freedom than you kids have now. Especially with the fact that we could walk everywhere. We didn’t need to worry about anything. You could leave your house open, no one ever bothered. Who locked their house those days? Neighbors knew neighbors too. We took care of each other. When we would play and you did something wrong you heard about it there, and by the time you got back home your parents already knew about it and you were punished again. **__Q :__** How did dances work?
 * __A :__** I don’t remember! Working that my senior year they encouraged me to be a nurse, or a lab technician. I had strong feelings about being a lab tech, I kind of liked that idea. They showed me certain jobs I could do in the lab. I made serums for allergy medicines. They let me chart the EKGs. They showed me how to cut them out. They really showed me how to do a bunch of stuff. I really got a feeling for the billing, and filling out insurance forms. There wasn’t a lot of insurance forms. The filing was my big thing for the people who were coming in for the next couple of days. I got to meet a lot of the patients and put them in their rooms. I had some experience when I went into the work force. Course I ended up working for the government and the medical field had nothing to do for that. Every now and then I’d go back and visit Dr. Hasus and help him clean out his files.
 * __A :__** We had sock hops in the gym, by class. I can remember my freshman sock hop with Johnny Gain, he later became a professional dancer. Us girls would go to the USO or places like that and we learned how to do ballroom dancing. The guys at that time didn’t do much dancing, they’d just sit there and girls danced with girls. But Johnny and I danced the whole evening! We did the ramba, we did the samba, we did the tango. They played real music. It was records, and live bands for prom. It was pretty well a local deal. No limos for prom. You would probably go out to dinner and do pictures out by the car.

**__Q :__** Hobo Day?
 * __A :__** A few kids would go down to East St. Louis and play pranks. They’d throw eggs or something like that but we were never really involved in that. I liked the parade. It was just a great big pep rally. The popular kids usually took care of the floats. You would go down and it would be so cold! Thanksgiving morning they played football, one year in Belleville and the next in East St. Louis. Every once and awhile you had a fight but it really wasn’t a big thing. It was very big with all the parents and everybody. The women would get up and put their turkeys on early, or the moms would stay home and cook while everyone would go and watch the game. I remember eating some of the best bologna sandwiches I’ve ever had. Me and mom went to the football game and sat in the stands and it was so cold! And there were some neighbors of ours sitting behind us and they had hot cocoa and bologna sandwiches and oh, they were so good. That was the day to look forward to. I wasn’t involved in a lot of the social things going on at school, but I don’t recall a lot.