MORNA GERRARD: The following interview was conducted as part of Georgia
State University's Activist Women Oral History Project. I am Morna Gerrard, and I am interviewing Dr. Carolyn Curry. It is November 17, 2009, and we are at Georgia State University. Carolyn, can you please tell me where you were born and when?CAROLYN CURRY: I was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1942. I was born there because
of the war years. My father was in the Air Force, and so my father was of that generation and, you know, they -- growing up in a depression and going where they had to go. So that's why I was born in Mobile.GERRARD: Was he stationed in Mobile at the time?
CURRY: Well actually, my mother just explained to me. I've said for years he
was stationed there, but he actually went down there to work. Then he was in the Air Force and stationed there later. So yes, it was because of the war 00:01:00effort and being in the Air Force that we were there.GERRARD: Where were your parents from originally?
CURRY: Both of my parents are from Fayette County, Georgia. They grew up on
farms not very far from each other. They still live in Fayette County. My father's 90. My mother's 89. And their parents were from Fayette County, so they never went very far from home, unlike myself. I've been all over the place, but one of those typical stories of farm families that just grow -- stay in the same place forever.GERRARD: What were their names?
CURRY: My mother in Frances Ellison Newton. My father is [Wayman?] Ellis
Newton, and my -- as I said, they were both born in Fayette County.GERRARD: Did they meet, like, at church or in school?
00:02:00CURRY: No, well they met in high school, wonderful story. Mother's a year
younger than my father, and she had been out of school with a serious illness for a while and got behind in her math, so the math teacher asked my father to take her outside and sit under this big tree and tutor her in math. And Mother said that that was the beginning of their romance. And she said, "He must have done a good job because I did well on the test," and she caught up in her math work, but they were married. I guess she was about 20, and then, as I said, Daddy went to the Air Force, and Mother went to business school, [Drawns?] Business School in Atlanta. A lot of people I've talked to of that generation, they didn't get a chance to go to college, particularly the women would go to this business school. And then when Daddy left to go into the 00:03:00military she took a job in Atlanta, and I lived with my grandparents, and so my mother's mother became a very important figure in my life, Carrie Ellison. And when I think back on who had a great impact on me it would be my grandmother, and you hear people say that so often, the powerful grandmother figure.GERRARD: What was it about her that influenced you?
CURRY: Well, she was the wife of a farmer, but she always maintained her own
identity. I look back on it, and I realize that she had a very strong personality and very strong opinions. She played the piano, and she taught music lessons. Her father, Wade Lester, had been known in Fayette County for 00:04:00teaching singing schools, and he was very involved in music, and she inherited that from her father, that great interest in music and teaching music lessons. And she was determined that she wasn't just going to cook and clean and be the farm woman. She had her things that she wanted to do, and her music was very important to her and teaching her students. So I can remember when I was a little girl, very little girl, staying with her, students coming in the afternoon to take piano lessons, and I had to be quiet and go outside. And thinking back on it I realize now sometimes she had to go into Atlanta, and she would ride the bus into downtown Atlanta to buy music for her students, and she was getting out, and she was taking care of her interests and what she wanted to 00:05:00do. And at some point in her life, I don't know if she always said this, but I would say she was probably in her fifties. I mean, she'd been on the farm for a long time, but she told my grandfather, "I don't want to stay here anymore. I want us to move into the city," and my grandfather opposed it. I mean he -- this was the home place, and he finally, I guess, begun to understand that this was so important to her to make her happy they moved to the big city of Fairburn. But she had neighbors, and she had people to talk to, and, you know, the church and the community, and she was very happy there. But she asserted herself and, you know, made her desires known. And then my mother came along, and my mother is in that same tradition. Mother went and got a job 00:06:00during the war. She wasn't just going to stay there and sit on the farm and wait for Daddy to get home, and --GERRARD: What did she do?
CURRY: She worked -- she lived with my aunt, my grandmother's sister, in
Atlanta, and just -- she did secretarial work, but I mean, I guess she thought she was a part of the war effort. And I look back on it she always said, "I was not able to go to college because we grew up in the depression," and her father did not believe that college was important for girls. A lot of people in the South felt that way, but I think now she did not want to be a teacher. She wanted to go into the business world. She wanted to -- I think she always enjoyed going to downtown Atlanta and working, and she worked my -- her entire life until she was 62. She had a career, worked many years for Robert Company 00:07:00architects and engineers, and to this day she can tell you all about the construction of the Atlanta airport and even facilities they built in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and all of that. She's a very intelligent woman, and she just absorbed all that, you know, through osmosis, and I think really enjoyed it. But in the beginning I thought, well poor Mother. She didn't get to go to college, and maybe she would've been a teacher, and then later on I realized I think she did more of what she wanted to do, and she's an artist too. My grandmother was a pianist and taught piano lessons, but Mother has always painted, and we call her the new Grandma Moses. She does primitive art and paints on gourds and does canvases and sells a lot of her work and has a real 00:08:00little cottage industry and has for many years. So I think that's a great joy to her, and it makes her feel good about herself. She's very happy about people wanting to collect her art.GERRARD: Did you pick up any of the artistic abilities?
CURRY: Well, I didn't pick up the musical, and I have never really painted,
but I do have a great appreciation for art. I love art, and so I have never painted, no, but I do love it.GERRARD: I can see -- you said early on there that your grandmother sort of
carved out her own identity, and that's something I feel that is really quite significant about you, like considering the life that you've led. I am really impressed with how you've been able to do that, and I'd wondered that --CURRY: One thing that we'll get into later, but it's been a theme in my
00:09:00life, and I see threads of it starting in my mother and my grandmother, I believe you can consciously invent your life, and there have been different times and stages in my life where I've said, "Okay, what do I want to do?" And I -- it may take me a while to decide, but I say, okay, this is one, two, three. I'm going to do these things, and it might happen over years, but if you deliberately invent it, think about it, work toward it, it comes about, and I think that is so important for women to do rather than just say, "This is my circumstance. This is where I am. I'm trapped. There's no way out for me." There is, especially in our culture. I mean if you live in America, you know, we've got the freedom to do that, especially now more than ever for 00:10:00women, so. And I realize now, looking back on it, that in my grandmother's simple way, she found a way, and she asserted herself. Back in the nineteenth century they said a woman was considered strong minded. That was a negative thing to say about a woman. She's strong-minded, you know. A lot of the suffragettes were called strong-minded, and women worked for women's rights. Well, I come from a long line of strong-minded women.GERRARD: Did your grandmother ever talk about being allowed to vote and the
fight for votes for women?CURRY: No, but I do know that my grandmother was born at the turn of the
century, and she talked about the first time she saw a car. It terrified her, and she climbed a tree. And, you know, the whole world changed so much. The first time you see an airplane, and she -- I'm sure she was aware. I don't 00:11:00think she was ever actively involved in the suffrage movement, but certainly she was aware of what was going on. Now, my mother has always been one to have her opinion, not be afraid to go against the grain, so to speak, and would be considered much more liberal and broad-minded than a lot of women in her station in life. She loves to talk about religion and politics, and reads a lot and follows everything, and I, quite frankly, really enjoy talking to her about things, and she will not hesitate to tell you what she thinks. And she's known for that.GERRARD: Now did you have any brothers or sisters?
CURRY: I have one brother who's three years younger than I am.
GERRARD: What's his name?
CURRY: Ronald Newton.
GERRARD: And what does he do?
00:12:00CURRY: He owns a roofing company, Mid-South Roofing in Atlanta, and they do
commercial roofing all over the southeast and even in other parts of the United States.GERRARD: Did you get along well when you were kids?
CURRY: Oh yes, I have a wonderful relationship with my brother. My husband is
always saying, "I can't believe you and your brother Ronnie get along" -- I call him Ronnie -- "get along so well." We never fought, and I think one thing -- I was the older sister, and I was very involved in my things. He was the younger brother. I was -- he played every sport you can play, and he was busy, and I was busy, and you know, we would see each other as we passed in the hall, but great affection for him.GERRARD: Were you treated any differently because you were a girl and he was a boy?
00:13:00CURRY: Well, I never felt that I was treated any differently, and I've always
had a strong sense of my value, self-worth, and looking back on my life I realize that came from my grandmother. My grandfather, her husband, was always wonderful to me, and I have great memories of sitting on the porch watching the sunset, and him talking to me and telling me stories and all of that. So I was very blessed with that self-image that I got and that sense of security. I always had that, and I'm very grateful for it.GERRARD: Who were your friends when you were younger?
CURRY: Well, I had good friends growing up. One friend -- well, in high school
-- well, in elementary school I had good friends, but I've lost touch with 00:14:00most of those. I had girlfriends in high school. Mary Sue Lunsford was a dear friend. We were cheerleaders together. I always wanted to be a good student. That was instilled in me from my parents, but I wanted to participate in everything, so I was a cheerleader. I was in the Latin club; I was in student government. In our high school they had a Ms. Activity and a Mr. Activity. Well, believe it or not I was Ms. Activity and Bill, my husband now, was Mr. Activity because we went to the same high school, but we just -- we had a wonderful time growing up in public school in College Park, and I had lots of friends, but one of my best friends was Mary Sue. Unfortunately, she died of 00:15:00melanoma when she was 59, but she was one of my best buddies, but of course my husband Bill was in my enlarged circle of friends from elementary school. I met him in the fourth grade, believe it or not. And we went through fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh grade together, same teacher, same classroom. And then when we went to high school we sort of lost touch. I liked the older boys, and I was -- Bill and I were about the same height, you know, in seventh grade, and I had laughingly said I could outrun him, and I could. He might deny it, but I could. Like there was a Sadie Hawkins game or something, and I'm sure I outran him, but, you know, we had a big circle of boys and girls, and we did a lot of things together. We had dances in the gym, the recreation center at College Park High 00:16:00School, and all that great music of the '60s. You know, it was the beginning of rock and roll and, you know, Elvis. Mary Sue, my good friend, was president of the Elvis Presley fan club, but I wasn't as crazy about Elvis. I mean, I liked him okay, but I didn't go crazy over Elvis or anything. But we had dances on Friday night after the football game. In the south at that time -- well, we're still in the south and football is still big, but the biggest thing in our little town was the football game on Friday night, and everybody in town went. And we would have the dance in the recreation center afterwards, and, you know, the mothers and fathers would chaperone, and they were milling around and the kids were there, but it was just -- it was all wonderful and very exciting. And I had wonderful teachers in high school. When I look back on the influences on my life I have to remember the great teachers I had in elementary 00:17:00school: Ms. Green in the third grade, Ms. Bolton in the fourth, Ms. Hews in the fifth, Ms. Miller in the seventh, and I can remember those women, especially in elementary school, who recognized in me that I loved -- I loved school. I was one of those strange kids that I looked forward to school starting in the fall, and they -- I was -- they tapped into that enthusiasm and encouraged me. And then when I went to high school I had the same thing. I had wonderful teachers who were just encouraging, and I had Mr. Stewart was the algebra teacher. I remember he took a great interest in me, and I thought I couldn't do math, you know girls always think they can't do math, and he was such a good teacher 00:18:00that I ended up scoring so well on the test when you go to college that they put me in advanced calculus when I went to Agnes Scott, and that was a mistake. I wasn't quite that good. I think that was when I got scared away from math, but -- and ended up in the English department, but I mean, he was such a good -- I think such a good teacher can bring that out in you and make you love something, and I loved algebra because of him. And then I had a wonderful Latin teacher Mr. Felder, and Mrs. Felder, his wife, or she was Dr. Felder then, taught Spanish, and she was a pivotal person in my life because she kept us after class one day, and this was -- I graduated 1960, so this was before the 00:19:00women's movement, and she'd ask us all where we going to college, and of course I raised my hand because my family had always said education was important, and you make good grades you can go anywhere you want to go, and oh yes, I was going to college, but since my mother had not gone, and there was no -- they didn't really know where I should go, or what I should do. It was sort up to me, and this high school teacher, I said, well, I've got to say something. So I said, "Well, I want to go to the University of Tennessee and major in home economics," and she said, "Carolyn, would you stay after class? I want to talk to you." So after class she said, "Carolyn, you're a good student. You love school, and you know that home economics stuff? You're going to be doing that the rest of your life." She said, "I'd 00:20:00like for you to visit my college. It's a woman's college, a very good college. It's Agnes Scott here in Decatur." So I went out and spent the night with one -- another girl from College Park, and I was so impressed with the women and loved the atmosphere, and that's where I ended up going. But if Dr. Felder had not taken me aside and shown an interest in me and more or less recruited me for her school, who knows where I would've ended up, and you know, maybe I would've ended up in Tennessee in home economics and had a very different life, but when I -- I want to include something here that's very important to me about my love of education and my parents. My mother's a very strong-minded woman, very outspoken. You know what she's going to think, and she always encouraged me, "You've got to go to college. You've got to go to college." And my father is very quiet, always there, and really had a 00:21:00profound impact on me by example because he fought -- he didn't -- he was never shipped out although he was in the Air Force. He was an engineer on a B-52 bomber, but he was going to be shipped out just as the war ended, but he came home, went to work with White Motor Company, but he was allowed to go to college on the GI Bill, and he came to Georgia State, what was then the University of Georgia. And when I was in elementary school and high school I can remember seeing my father -- he would work all day, and then he would -- two or three nights a week he would go to school, and then on the weekends and the other nights I'd see him sitting at his desk studying, and I have a profound memory of lying on the floor doing my homework and Daddy sitting at the desk 00:22:00doing his homework, so we were studying together. And I've always carried that image with me. He didn't have to say anything, but I knew it was important, very important, and when he graduated, his diploma says the University of Georgia School of Business Administration, but he went to Sparks Hall, and it was -- before -- I think it became George State University very soon after that, but so when I speak to alumni here I very often tell my father's story because Georgia State has been a part of my life, and a part of my legacy, and I'm very grateful for that. So I had teachers that were great encouragers and took an interest in me, and my -- both of my parents stressed 00:23:00education, and I think my generation -- I graduated in 1960. I had this love of learning. I've always had that great curiosity and love of learning, but what we did not do for young women, or no one did it for me specifically, is we didn't necessarily know what we wanted to do. It was get a college education. That was the great achievement. Just get that diploma, and you'll have something to fall back on. I heard that expression so many times. "You'll have something to fall back on. If something happens to your husband, you'll be able to support yourself." And I think that they just assumed you would probably be a teacher, or maybe you'd go to nursing school, or maybe you wouldn't even graduate. A lot of the women of my generation would go to college for a year or two and get married and never go back, and that's sad. 00:24:00I've run into a lot of women that will be in conversation, and they will say to me, "I never graduated. I wish I had," but they would meet somebody in college a year or two older and get married, and you know, a lot of people said they were going to college to find their husband.GERRARD: Well, they were going for their MRS is what they [overlapping
dialogue; inaudible] say.CURRY: Yes, well in my case I started dating Bill when we were seniors in high
school. We laughingly say when all the older boys left. And he'd gotten taller, and our first date was my 17th birthday -- I'm three days older than he is -- October the 18th, and he turns 17 three days after I do, but we go to the dance in the gym, the recreation center, and then he asks to take me home, and I said yes, and my mother had given me a surprise birthday party that night. And my aunt, she made wonderful birthday cake, so she made this huge sheet 00:25:00cake, and it was a football field, and she had goalposts on the ends and the cheerleaders and the football players, and there's a picture of me standing behind that cake with my cheerleading uniform on, and I've laughingly said little did I know that I was looking at my future life, that I was always going to have that football field in front of me in some way. But at any rate, we -- he took me home, and we started dating. Then he went to Georgia Tech, and I went to Agnes Scott, and we continued dating, but we got married when we were 20 when I was a junior in college, and --GERRARD: Was that 1964?
CURRY: No, we got married in '62. We graduated high school in 1960. Then we
00:26:00went two years, and then I started working for Delta, and I started taking some courses at Georgia State just to work toward getting my degree. Then he was drafted by the Green Bay Packers, and we went to Wisconsin, and I kept taking courses, but I decided I had worked so hard at Agnes Scott my first two years, and I wanted to graduate from Agnes Scott. So I went out to the college, and I talked to Dean Klein. Again, at Agnes Scott I had wonderful professors who took a great interest in me, and he helped me figure out how I could graduate from Agnes Scott because you had to have either your first two years and your last year there, or your last two years there to get your degree. Well, I'd had my first two years, so I took courses, I guess you'd say equivalent of my junior year, here and at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. When Bill was 00:27:00playing for the Green Bay Packers I drove 30 miles in the sleet and snow to take an Old Testament course because at Georgia, at Agnes Scott, you had to have this one year of religion, and you had to start with the Old Testament, and so I had to take the fall semester of Old Testament, and did that at Lawrence University, and then did come back here and graduate two years after my class at Agnes Scott. But because of Dean Klein and Dr. Haze, Dr. Pepperdine in the English department, wonderful professors, again, who took an interest in me and encouraged me, and so I graduate in the English department there after I was married.GERRARD: Did you like Agnes Scott?
CURRY: I loved Agnes Scott because I loved -- it was an awakening, I guess you
00:28:00would say. My -- I saw women who were very accomplished, and I saw women -- in high school at that time you could get in a lot of silly, petty things and jealousies and -- well it still goes on, that mean girl thing, and in high school I was not real happy with that. I mean I loved school. I loved all these activities, but there was a lot of petty little mean things going on. When I went out to Agnes Scott, gosh, I saw all these women who were really interested in school and studying and would sit on the hall and talk about politics and Kennedy was running for president, and it was a very interesting time. You know, it was the beginning of the civil rights movement and all that. You would -- there was great conversations, and I had so many professors, PhDs, 00:29:00that were women, and I just took that for granted. I didn't know then that it was unusual until later in my life when I was in graduate school and I would be in a seminar down here with somebody. One student told me one time, "I didn't have very many women professors when I was in college." I said, "You didn't?" Gosh, I had so many I couldn't name them all, you know, full PhDs, really accomplished women professors, and that was -- that has a great impact on me without me even realizing it, and I came to really appreciate it later, and I think the other thing that Agnes Scott did for me, and it does for women, is it -- they expected us to do well. They believed we could do well. It was just expected of us, and if they thought you could do it, then you 00:30:00thought you could do it, and they were very demanding. They said two hours out of class for every hour in class, so I mean, we had to study all the time. It was very, very demanding. And I had come from a public school background, a good public school background, but I was with a lot of girls that had come from private schools that, quite frankly, had a much better background in the classics, in mythology and all that good stuff, and I felt very intimidated my freshman year. But I began to feel better my sophomore year in thinking "I can do this," and that, you know, the hard work being able to get -- "Oh, I'm getting the hang of this. I can do this," was very good for me, and so I really liked it there. The reason -- there were two -- several things. Bill 00:31:00and I were in love and wanted to get married, and you know back then you didn't live together and stuff like you do today, and it was very expensive for my family to send me to Agnes Scott, and they were both middle-class working people. I had a partial scholarship, which was wonderful, but it didn't pay for anything, but my father had just tried to set up his own company in Florida, and he had made an -- more or less gone out on a limb. It didn't work out, so they -- it was a hard time for my family. It was hard for them to afford to send me there. Bill and I wanted to get married, so in my mind I thought, well, I looked into scholarships and all that, and then I said, well, I'll just -- we'll just get married. I'll go to work, and then I'll come back and 00:32:00graduate. This is the beginning of me inventing my life, I think, and you know, some people -- this is when a lot of women of my generation would drop out of college. They would go two years, and they'd get married, and they wouldn't come back. Well people thought -- I'm sure a lot of people thought that's what I was going to do. Never, ever did I have a glimmer of doubt that I would not graduate. I mean, I knew I was going to graduate from college. I didn't know that I was going to graduate from Agnes Scott at that time, but I knew I was going to graduate. I immediately -- we got married in December of Bill's junior year, and he was on a football scholarship at Georgia Tech. He got laundry money. I think it was like $15 -- I don't know, a month or something. I mean, we certainly couldn't live off of it. So Bill and I decided that I would support us for two years, his junior and senior year, and then he would go 00:33:00to work, and I would go back to college and graduate, but I -- while I -- I went to work for Delta Airlines, and I worked in reservations, and -- but I immediately started taking courses at Georgia State, and that's that great thing about Georgia State. It was a commuter. You could come here and take one course, and so I started taking -- I took English classes because I was going to be an English Major at that time, and I took some wonderful courses. Dr. Blunt, I remember taking Victorian literature from him, but the thing that is so amazing -- I'll have to share this with you -- I was so dedicated to this thing, that I was going to graduate, that we had rotating shifts at Delta, and there was -- and you would have to -- I'd have to get a shift where I could go to school, but I -- there was a time when I would get up at 4:00 in the morning and study, and then I would go to work and work eight hours, and then I'd go to classes, and it was just an unbelievable grind, but, you know, I was going to 00:34:00do this, and I was going to find a way, and then, Bill was not planning to play professional football. He was thinking when he graduated from Georgia Tech that he was going to have a career in the military because he was in ROTC, and he was battle group commander at Georgia Tech, and that was the top position of -- in the ROTC. See, his father had been in the military during World War II and taught at Georgia Military Academy, so this military tradition is in their family, so he's just thinking, "I'm going to get my commission when I graduate from Georgia Tech and go into the military." And lo and behold, his junior year he's drafted by the Green Bay Packers, and this is -- and they're the world champions. 00:35:00GERRARD: Were you very excited by this?
CURRY: Oh, yes. We're already married, and we're, you know, here he is all
of a sudden he's been drafted by the Green Bay Packers, and we said -- my brother called us up. We were living in an apartment at my Aunt's house, and my brother Ronnie called up one morning, and he said, "Hello, Green Bay Packer." And see back then -- now they have it on ESPN, and they make such a big deal about the draft. It's really crazy, but back then they just listed who had been drafted in the newspaper, and Bill hadn't even been following it because back then they drafted your junior year. You were considered your future instead of -- most of the time you think you'd be drafted in your senior year, but they could draft in your junior year, and that would say, "We think you're going to be good enough in your senior year that we're going to take you now and tie you up so nobody else can draft you your senior year." 00:36:00Do you see what I'm saying?GERRARD: Do they start paying you then?
CURRY: No, no, you don't -- no that means you get to go try out, but Bill was
drafted by the Green Bay Packers and the Oakland Raiders because at that time, when we get in the long history of the National Football League [inaudible], at that time there were two conferences, two leagues: National Football League and American Football League. They have now combined into just one league, but back then there was this competition between the two leagues, and this new league had come into existence, so. But anyway, he was drafted by the Green Bay Packers, but the Green Bay Packers were Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, all these legendary sports figures, and Bill just couldn't believe it. "Gosh, they drafted me," he said, "Oh, well there's no way I can probably make that team." But he was excited, and he worked very hard at Georgia Tech, and he ended up being captain of the Georgia Tech football team, and really played 00:37:00well, but he was not a superstar in college, meaning everybody -- he was not on everybody's all-American team, but he was on some, and he was second team on some, and he did do well enough to get into the college all-star game, stuff like that. So -- and he was drafted late by the Packers. When I say a future, they had seventeen rounds then, and he was the last one they picked that junior year. So see, it was not a given that he was going to make it, but we were excited nonetheless, and we got a map out, and we had to say, "Now, where's Green Bay, Wisconsin?" And we thought, "Gosh, it's up there by the great lakes. It's got to be cold." And needless to say, it was very cold, but we didn't know anything about -- really anything about the National Football League, about Wisconsin, about playing. I mean, we were just two kids trying to 00:38:00graduate from college, and so all of a sudden we have this opportunity to play football, and I say "we". Isn't it interesting I'm saying "we"? And I say "we" because we did it together, and I've been with him throughout this whole experience, but we were drafted, Bill was drafted, by the Green Bay Packers, and lo and behold his senior year, last game of the year, a Green Bay Packer coach, Ray Cochran, appears at our football game, the last game of the season, and says, "Do you want to go to Dallas, Texas tomorrow, you and Carolyn?" And the Packers are playing the Dallas Cowboys, and so they just whisked us up, and we go to Dallas, and we sit in the stands with Vince Lombardi's wife, Marie, and after the game they take Bill down on the field to meet Bart Starr and Paul Hornung, and the great coach Lombardi, the legendary 00:39:00coach Lombardi. And so we're just flabbergasted, you know. Here are these two starry-eyed kids that don't know what's going on, but we're very flattered and very excited, and that night after the game, the Packers won, and Bill got to go in the dressing room and all that, but their director of player personnel started negotiating a salary with Bill, "And we want you to play for the Green Bay Packers." You get the right -- you sign a contract, and then you go the next fall, and you have to make the team. They can still cut you, but you're there. You make an agreement as to what you're going to play for, what you'll be paid, and this was, believe it or not, back then the salaries were not very high. So Bill signed a contract, agreed to play. His salary was going to be $12,500 a year, and his bonus was going to be $12,500 a 00:40:00year. This was '65, and we just jumped up and down in the room later, thinking, "Yay! Yay! This was so great!" We thought we were rich, all set for life, and then we got back to Georgia Tech, and his team mate signed for like -- I can't remember, like four or five times as much as Bill signed for, and Joe Namath, the quarterback, great quarterback, signed for like $400,000 so something, and Bill said, "Oh, well, I'd pay to play for the Packers anyway." So we then took off for Wisconsin. Well, Bill went by himself. You go in July, and you go to training camp, and then he didn't know if he was going to make the team or not. I stayed in Atlanta, and then you go down. Each week they cut somebody. They cut somebody. It's very stressful, and then they have a roster of, I can't remember. I think at that time maybe it was 00:41:00about 40 men, and then they'll get down to a place where they have two or three places left, and you don't know how it's going to be cut, and if you make the final cut then that's a real big deal. So Bill calls me real excited, "I made it. I made it." So then I go to Wisconsin, pack up everything you -- and we went up there, and we rented a little bitty apartment, and we stayed for the football, and then you go into the playoffs. And the Packers were so great we were in the playoffs, and actually won the World Championship their very first year, and --GERRARD: That's a great first year.
CURRY: Oh, yeah, that's a great first year, and that was before the Super
Bowl. That would have been in the Super Bowl had they had it, but then we came home, and then the next year you have to go, and you have to go through the same thing again. "Am I going to be able to make the team the second time?" And he does, and we go back up there. We come home --GERRARD: So you're living in two cities then?
00:42:00CURRY: Yeah, we come to Atlanta in the off season because -- and then we go back
because we didn't move there because we didn't know that we had a future there. You're not secure enough to buy a house or anything. So we came back to Atlanta with our $6,000 of our championship money, and made a down payment on a house, and this was huge, you know. I think we paid $30,000 for the house or something, a little ranch out in Tucker, Georgia. It was wonderful though. I loved it, and then we -- we called it going to football, and we went back and forth for ten years, and he played in Green Bay for two years. Then he was traded to the Baltimore Colts. Oh, and back in Green Bay that was the first Super Bowl. That next -- our second year was the Super Bowl came into existence. You know I think now this year's going to be Super Bowl 44. I'm 00:43:00not sure, but that was the first Super Bowl and Green Bay played Kansas City in Los Angeles in the Los Angeles Coliseum, and Bill was on that Packer team. And they usually interview the -- introduce the offensive team first, and a great trivia question is, who is the first player introduced in the first Super Bowl? It would be Bill. I said, "That's a good little trivial pursuit question," but anyway. And I was pregnant with our first child Kristen at that game, and then we came back to our house here in Atlanta, and I gave birth to her in July, and then Bill, he was hoping he would be here of the birth of our first child, but I was three weeks late, and back then they let you go late. 00:44:00And so Bill had to leave and go to training camp because he was trying to make the Baltimore Colts. There was no guarantee. He had a child on the way, and so he had to go to training camp, so there's a great story. I call him up one afternoon, 5:00, and I say, "Okay, I'm going to the hospital, Bill. My Dad's going to -- Father's going to take me." Mother and Daddy took me to the hospital, and I said, "Why don't you take two aspirin and go to bed." He said, "Are you kidding me?" So he -- he went to the coach Shula, and he said, "Can I please go home? My wife's having a baby." He had to ask permission to go home, and he got permission to come home for one night, but he went to the airport and sat in the airport all night, and this was before cell phones, and she was born late that night, but we had no way of letting Bill 00:45:00know. And he flies in the next morning, and his father meets him at the airport waving a cigar with a pink ribbon or something, and that's how he knew he had a girl, and then he came to the hospital and was here for one day. Then he went back to football, and then I stayed in the hospital six days. They used to keep you in the hospital a long time with a baby, but I stayed in the hospital six days, and he got to fly home the day I went home from the hospital, but then he left, and then I didn't see him for five or six weeks, and I saw him at the end of training camp, and then Kristen and I flew to Baltimore for the season there.GERRARD: Was that tough, being on your own?
CURRY: Well, yes, in that my mother worked, and she really couldn't stay with
me. My mother-in-law stayed with me some, but I can remember -- like she stayed a week or so, and then she left, and then I'm alone there with this new baby, 00:46:00and I can remember watching a football game on television where Bill's playing, and I can't remember where he was in the United States, but just sitting there crying because I felt so sorry for myself. And, you know, babies cry, and they don't sleep, and I was so exhausted. All the pictures of me when I had her I have these dark circles under my eyes, but anyway, it was sad. It was hard to be by yourself, and -- but a lot of my life as the wife of a coach and a professional athlete was to be by myself and to be on my own, and -- because every year he would leave and go to training camp in July, and then you would wait for six weeks or so, and then you would go up there, so I was always at home for that period of time. And then when he went into coaching the hours 00:47:00were so long that we have laughingly said in our marriage that Bill took care of the important thing, football, and I took care of everything else. I mean, I would buy the houses and sell the houses and move the kids and move. I mean, you just do everything because they're gone. They're not there, and you have to make all those decisions, and do it by yourself, or get somebody to help you. Maybe you've got relatives to help you, but I know that there were some marriages that didn't make it because some of the women just rebelled and said, "First of all I'm not going to move like that. I'm not going to go back and forth and back and forth." See, for all those years Bill played professional sports I went to football and then came back to Atlanta. Atlanta was our home. That's where we had our -- we went to football in the fall, and 00:48:00then we came back, and we went to football, and we came back. And a lot of women said, "No, I'm not going to come." So there would be some women -- the men would be there, but their wives would not be with them, and then there would be men who would just finally quit trying or didn't want to play anymore because their wives would not come with them. But I never believed that I should do that. I always thought that this was such a dream for Bill, and it was so exciting for him, and it was such a big deal, and sports had always been such a part of his life that I would never deprive him of that, that I would just make the best of it. But it also had a big impact on me deciding to go back to school because I was alone so much, and we had our second child in Baltimore three years after our first child was born. We had a boy. Our first 00:49:00child Kristen, our second child was a boy, Billy, and so by this time I have two small children, and Bill's gone all the time.GERRARD: Did you have Billy in Baltimore?
CURRY: Yes, great story about that too. I'll do a little aside telling you
about that. Okay, Kristen, I told you about how she was born. Okay, so we think the second child we're going to figure it out where Bill will be home for the birth of the baby. So, well, we get sort of lucky in that he is going to be born during the football season, and I am in Baltimore and Bill is in Baltimore, but Bill is playing on Monday night Football, and he is in Green Bay again, I'm in Baltimore, and my water breaks. And I'm there with a girlfriend. We're watching the game, and then I call my doctor and everything, and he says, "Well, just wait till your husband gets home and come 00:50:00in." Bill gets home at 3:00 a.m. because they had to fly all the way back from Green Bay after the game. I meet him at the door, and I say, "You want to go to the hospital? We're going to have a baby." So we go to Greater Baltimore Hospital, and I remember Charles de Gaulle had died, and there was this funeral thing going on. I -- my water had only broken slightly. I didn't really go into labor, and they used to make you sniff something trying to make you go into labor, so all day the next day I'm in the hospital trying to go into serious labor, but don't. Bill has an injury, and his leg is propped up on the bed, but he won't go get treatment because he's afraid he's going to miss the birth of the baby. Finally, at 10:00 that night I give 00:51:00birth to our son, and Bill was there, but we had this adventure having him, but. So both of my -- the births of my -- my whole life has revolved around football. The birth of our children revolved around football. It always has some kind of impact.GERRARD: Do you think that having a home base in Atlanta was really important
to you?CURRY: Yes, we love Atlanta. We loved Atlanta then. We love Atlanta now. We
always have, and even when we went to other cities, we -- in his entire playing career, we would go to football and come back to Atlanta. We'd go to football and come back to Atlanta. He played in Green Bay two years. He played in Baltimore six years. He played in Houston one year and Los Angeles one year. We would go for -- like he would go in July. I'd go early September. We'd come back at the end of December. We would spend the fall in those cities, but we would come back to Atlanta, and when I decided, okay, Bill has this thing 00:52:00that he loves, and I love my children. I love my home. I love gardening and all that, but I need something else in my life. And I was depressed. I was not happy, I think. I -- well I was very devoted to my family, but I needed something else, so I made a conscious decision. What do -- okay, what do you want to do Carolyn? What do you love? I've always loved the academic world. I've always loved school. Well what do you want to do? I want to start taking some courses down at Georgia State. And I would come and take one -- came and took one course. In the interim -- I had been out of college ten years 00:53:00by now, and I had always read a lot, and if you remember public television -- you're too young to remember this, but public television had this wonderful series on the wives of Henry VIII, and I had just -- I loved those, that series, and I got so interested in English History, and I'd had one course in Agnes Scott in Tudor and Stuart England, and I said I'm going to go back. I'm going to study history. And so I came down to Georgia State, and I said I want to go to graduate school in history, and they said, but you have an English major. And I said, "Oh, yeah, okay." They said, "You'll have to get an equivalent degree in history, take the Graduate Record Exam, get in graduate school." I said, well okay. So I took however many hours of history you have to take. I guess maybe I had to take 30 hours of history, so I would take one 00:54:00course at a time. Now, how do I get those courses in because my husband's gone all the time, can't depend on him to help with the kids. My kids are little. When my youngest, my Billy, started Montessori school I would take him to school in the morning, and I would run down here, and I would take whatever course I could get at 10:40. I couldn't get here for a 9:00 class, but back then there was a break at 10:00, and there was a campus wide break from 10:00 to 10:40, and then the next -- second class of the day started at 10:40. I would take a course, a history course, and then I would jump in my car and run back to the Montessori School and pick up Billy. And Mrs. Kirkpatrick, bless her heart, the teacher, knew I was going to take a course, and she knew that I would 00:55:00probably be the last one to get there, so a lot of days Billy would be standing there with his teacher, the last one, and sometimes she'd even take him back in the classroom if I got caught in traffic, and I'd be so apologetic, but she said, "No, no, no, no, I know you're going to school," and then I would pick him up. So I've always laughingly said I majored in 10:40, whatever I could get at 10:40, and so that's how I got enough hours, and then I only had that little pocket of time in the morning when he was in school, so then when he got older and I guess went to full day preschool, then I started taking two classes. And then I took the graduate record exam, got in graduate school in history, and then just loved it. And I was one of those students that was taking courses for the love of knowledge. I just loved history, and I loved 00:56:00studying. I loved the classroom, and it -- I was very excited about that. Didn't know where I was going to go with it. But I just knew that I loved it.GERRARD: Were you taking lots of women's history courses?
CURRY: There were no women's history courses. Now this is very important.
Okay, we're in the '70s now, and this is the beginning of the women's movement. I'm having this searching inside myself. I start taking history courses. Every single history course I took I did my paper -- I selected a topic that had to do with a woman or a woman's issue, and I was looking for the women. Where were the women? What were the women doing? That was my great 00:57:00interest early on, and I had Dr.-- all these professors that I had, they knew that I really liked and was very interested in women's history. Dr. Grant was my advisor for my master's, and my master's thesis was "Women in the New Nation Viewed by Foreign Visitors 1776 to 1850," but I studied foreign travel journals trying to see everything they said about women, and see, I did not a have a -- there was no such thing as a women's history course and women's studies. There were little casual meetings around campus that were just beginning to start, and I went to some of those, but within the history department there was no women's history course, there was no history of feminism or anything like that. I had to research it and find it all for myself, and I did.GERRARD: That's pretty determined and also very creative to be able to find
00:58:00that within the structure that you're given.CURRY: Well and it was amazing to me, and some off my most profound experiences
happened to me sitting in this library because I remember studying -- I studied English, history, and American history. American history ended up being my field, but I would study, how did women in England get their rights? And I realized that women really had no rights, that women were like -- they were jural minors. They were, you know, in English common law, and I remember just sitting at that desk reading all about English common law. You had feme covert and feme sole. A married woman was covered by her husband's rights. She didn't need any rights of her own. She was -- her husband's rights would 00:59:00apply to her, take care of her. You know, she couldn't own property. She couldn't sue. She could not be sued. She did not even have legal guardianship of her children. A single woman, feme sole, could inherit property from her father. And I remember just reading all about this legal system and researching it on my own, and I said, "I didn't know this." And then when our country started we inherited English common law and brought it over here, and that was the beginning of our legal system. And I just never knew, and nobody had ever told. I mean, I went all the way through Agnes Scott, a woman's college, but I never understood that women had no legal identity. I never understood that women could not do -- there were so many things women 01:00:00could not do, and that they weren't allowed to enter colleges and universities, and they weren't allowed to enter a lot of professions, and I just didn't understand the discrimination against women and the real prejudice against women's abilities. And women were not capable. It was not woman's place. And so, as I said, I would -- every course I took in American History I would research it, write my papers, and my dissertation and my -- my master's thesis and my dissertation all had to do with women so that by the time I graduated I had compiled what would be equivalent to a women's history education all that I could get on my own. And all that I had read on my own, like the Feminine Mystique. I read that. I never had that assigned reading. I 01:01:00mean, I read that on my own. A lot of things I read on my own to fill in the gaps, and I remember going to an American -- it was either the Southern Association of Historians or some meeting I went to at some point, and there were a group of us of my generation in a room, and somebody asked, "How many of you have had a women's history course?" and there was nobody in the room because they were not. There was no such thing. We had to create them, and that's really exciting when you think about it. We created the courses, and later in my life, when I went to the University of Kentucky and taught, and I started doing a lot of speaking. I've always had what I -- I don't know. I've had an unusual career in that I have never been tenure track. I have 01:02:00never been a full-time professor. I've been a full-time teacher in a high school, and that came about in a very strange way too, but I've never sought a job with my degree, but a lot of things have come out of it that I have accidentally fallen into and a lot that I have created. But I've had a rich and wonderful experience because of it, but, as I say, I didn't have a women's history background, but we did create it, and that is a real sense of satisfaction that we did.GERRARD: I've often thought -- tried to figure this out for myself because I
was very passionately interested in women's history, and I don't know where that came from, why that was. Do you -- can you trace back why women's history is so interesting?CURRY: Well, I think that especially in my case, I was going through such a
01:03:00searching period in my own personal life, and I said Bill and I grew up together. We went to elementary school together. We went to high school. At our high school there was an award that was given called the Journal Cup. The Atlantic Journal Constitution gave the Journal Cup for the most outstanding student, which I got. There was National Honor Society, and I was in National Honor Society. Bill wasn't. Bill was a very good -- Bill was bright -- is bright, but he was so caught up in sports that he didn't do as well in school as he could have and should have, and he would say that if he were here today. But I was always a good student, passionately interested in school, went to a great women's college. I had always done well, and I knew I had so much 01:04:00ability that I was not using, so when he was going around pursuing his goals and accomplishing his dreams, and I'm thinking, I love my children. I love my husband. I do not want to get out of my marriage. It never occurred to me not to be in a marriage. I was happy in that, but I said I have to find my identity. And I have to go on a deliberate search and find it, and I have to understand what it means to be a woman. And so I have gone on this huge search, and so when I started the graduate school I was looking for the women, and I was 01:05:00studying their lives and looking at them, but it also related to my life because we were at a -- we were going through this women's movement, and I was hearing talk about that. And I was understanding, and when I started speaking to women, which I've done a lot of, and I still do it today, you know, I say, "How many of you have had a women's history course?" Nobody raises their hand, hardly, and women still don't understand a lot of their history just like Americans don't know history. We don't teach enough history classes. People don't have to take history. They don't really understand our legal system. They don't -- a lot of women don't even understand that women are not mentioned in the constitution. They don't understand that we didn't pass ERA, and you know. It's just like everything's fine now, but there's a lot that has gone on in our history that women don't understand. And we still need to be diligent to understand it, and my approach, the way I have done 01:06:00it, is through the academic world. I have undertaken this great search on my own, taken all these courses -- like I had a woman ask me one time, she said, "Why are you doing that? You know you've got a husband that'll support you. You don't have to work." You know, and I didn't have to work. I didn't' have to go to school. I didn't have to get a PhD, but I wanted to, and it was important to me to know that I could do it. And just like I think it's important for everybody to know they can do whatever their dream is, and I think my dream early on in life, as I say, it was stressed in my family, but early on in life I had this idea that I want to be an intelligent 01:07:00woman. I want to prove that I can do this or that. So a lot of my life has been, "I can do that," and proving it and doing it and getting the self-satisfaction that comes, and it may not get me a job. I may not make any money, or I may not do it, but I have that self-satisfaction that I can do it. And so -- I can't even remember the question you asked me. We were talking about why I did it, and --GERRARD: What guided you towards women's history?
CURRY: Oh yeah. What guided me? Well, it was just a passion. It was a
curiosity, and it was just like I was always saying, well, what were the women doing? Where are the women? There have got to be women here. And there's nothing in the history books about women, and there were -- really back then you could go through a high school or like a History 101 textbook, and I remember 01:08:00some course book where you could whip through the book and maybe find five pictures of women. Well, women would be in five pictures, and the rest of the book was men. And I also said history was written by men about men, and they left the women out. And why was that? Well, as I learned in all my studies, women were private and men were public. Women were supposed to remain in the background. It was an insult to women in the nineteenth century to be in the newspaper. You didn't want to be in the newspaper. You didn't want to have your name in the newspaper. You were supposed to stay in the background, and that's another reason that suffrage was so outrageous and so radical, but the women still dressed up, and they still put on their hats, and they still put on their gloves. They were supposed to be ladies, particularly in the South. You 01:09:00had to be a lady. You had to protect your feminine -- femininity, but you were going out saying, "We deserve this vote just like the men have," which was a radical thing, very radical.GERRARD: What you said there was very interesting because I was going to ask,
you know, how -- I've read both your thesis and your dissertation, and I enjoyed both of them very, very much, and I wondered what took you to looking at journals and diaries to see how people were envisioning the American women. In part, some of these women, it was -- it had to be private --CURRY: Well, yes I --
GERRARD: -- documentation because they weren't public people.
CURRY: That's right, and -- okay. So I learned early on, if you're going to
study women and find out about women, you're going to have to look at their letters. Women kept diaries a lot. I laughingly said they didn't have 01:10:00anything else to do. So they would keep diaries, and they would read books if they could get them. They could go to church. In the south particularly there was just a limited number of things that women could do, but I also found out that women would find a way. So they -- if they could only go to church then they had this idea. Well, we're going to form women's groups. We're going to have a women's study group, and we're going to have a women's prayer group. And they had to ask permission. They'd have to go to the minister of the church and say, "Can we have a women's prayer group?" 01:11:00Well, I don't know if they -- everything they had to work for to get a public voice, and I was astounded by that. I did not know that -- again, I remember sitting in this library reading about how astounding it was for a woman to speak in public -- that women did not stand up and speak. It was very rare. And even when they formed these first little prayer groups they had to have a man conduct them, and in the -- yes, and then they -- it was just, everything was so tentative and such a big deal, and then the first time a woman spoke at, it would be [inaudible], but the first time a woman spoke at such and such it was a big deal. So I mean, talking about women finding their voices, they literally had to get permission to speak and find their voices. And their private voice 01:12:00was their writing, talking to each other, women doing the things that women do, the little quilting bees, and their working. They did it together.GERRARD: When you think about that though then, how radical was it? How brave
were these women who first did get up and start talking publicly and --CURRY: Oh very, and the other thing that astounded me when I was going about my
work is that I had gone all the way through Agnes Scott. I had studied American history in high school and college, and this is in the '70s, and there would be one line in your history book that said, "Women got the vote in 1920." There was no history of the suffrage movement, and I've got all these figures at home, and I used to give these talks about how, you know, at Seneca Falls, New York when the women got together in the first Women's Rights Convention, 01:13:00and they wrote down their declaration of rights, and they had -- and Frederick Douglas was there and told them they should include the elective franchise, and that was so radical. And there was dissension among the women as to whether they should go for the vote because they're trying to get property rights. They were trying to get legal rights, and they're saying now, "Should we go for the vote? That's just so radical." But they decide to, so they start in 1850, and then we have these Women's Rights Conventions around the country. It's interrupted by the Civil War, and we don't get the -- 1848 is Seneca Falls, and they don't get the vote till 1920, so it takes 72 years for women to get the vote. And they're meeting in conventions. They're going to the 01:14:00legislatures of the various states. They're marching. They're having meetings. And they were going to do it state by state. They were going to -- there was dissension in the various women's groups, but I mean, all the work that went into getting the vote is astounding, and how it was thought of as being so radical. And I equate it -- I remember hearing Ann Scott speak. She was head of the history department at Duke, and she said when the ERA was being argued the arguments they were using against ERA were very similar to the arguments they used against the vote for women. They didn't need it. It's astounding, and then to the women who went along with it and bought into it is 01:15:00really astounding too. And now we take the vote so for granted that now when I speak to women I always say, "Now go out and vote." I mean, women worked forever to get that vote for you. You better go out and vote. But I remember reading where ministers in the pulpit would preach against it, and they would say, "Who knows what women would do if they got the vote. What would they vote for?" It would just be very scary, and I found a pamphlet in the archives, Georgia archives, of the Georgia Anti-Suffrage Association, and the Georgia Anti -- I've never forgotten this line. "If women get the vote it will unleash the demons of the lower world." I mean, it was just going to turn the world upside down. I just thought that was great, and there was really 01:16:00fear of what women would vote for, and would they vote as a plot? They thought women would all vote the same, and of course they never have. You know, women are going to be liberal. They're going to be conservative. They're going to be this or that, and they're going to have different opinions, and women have -- there are a lot of votes, but every woman that votes is not going to vote the same way. And I do think when the women got the vote they thought the world would change, and in some way it did, but it --GERRARD: Did you think that in looking at the suffrage movement and the looking
at the equal rights amendment the -- was it the case that at the time they were trying to get the vote that there was real fear? Because I always think there was fear mongering for -- at the time of the Equal Rights Amendment. I think there was -- to me, maybe the stuff that I read, it was more fear mongering to incite fear in others than -- before this had never happened, so -- 01:17:00CURRY: Well, it is a combination of things. There were women who had fought to
get better rights for women in the work place based on the fact they were female and had babies and all that stuff, and there was genuine fear that if you had the Equal Rights Amendment some women would lose the advantages they had gained based on the fact that they were women. There was that. Then there was just -- I'm not going to -- honest to goodness I heard this like a week ago, a woman say, "My husband was in the legislature at the time, and he voted against equal -- he was against Equal Rights Amendment because it was going to take women off their pedestal." And I think that there was that view that women 01:18:00were protected. They were on a pedestal. They did not have to go to war, all -- I mean, these were some of the arguments. But that was an affluent white woman that felt that way. What about the poor women that were working hard just to get decent wages, etcetera, and women of ethnicity and all of that? I mean, they didn't feel like they were on a pedestal and never had. But there was that sentiment too. So I think it was combination of things, and it was fear. And Phyllis Schlafly led the fight, and she was a very accomplished woman who -- 01:19:00I mean, I never really understood why. You had done a lot of things on her own, and she was recruited to speak out against it. It was very complex, but --GERRARD: Did you ever hear her speak?
CURRY: I never heard her speak.
GERRARD: I know women who did and have never forgotten it, and it's always
they've never forgotten it in anger. That she did a lot to --CURRY: Yeah, and I think that it was fear. You say fear mongering, yes. If you
can stir up fear and a powerful persuasive speaker can sway people and create fear, and I think that is exactly what happened, and they would use women are going to have to go into combat. They're going to have unisex bathrooms, and you know, you're not going to have any special privileges because you're a 01:20:00woman. And it really is astounding to me that the rights that women have gotten have come out of the Civil Rights legislation, and that you cannot discriminate against the person in those legal cases, but there's still no mention of gender in the constitution, and there should be. And I know when Ruth Bader Ginsberg was confirmed to the Supreme Court and they were questioning her that was one of the things that she said. There should be. There still should be. And it's just a shame, but there is a lot of fear, and it's just the same thing about the word feminist. When I was teaching and when I speak a lot of 01:21:00times I will say -- okay, just to a classroom. A classroom of young people today, like when I was teaching at the University of Kentucky I said, "How many of you would call yourself feminists?" And a few hands would go up, but not very many, but then I would get to talking, and I would say, "Well, how many of you feel that women should have equal pay for equal work? And how many people believe that women should --" Well they're -- they are feminists, but they're afraid to use the word, and I have said for the longest time "I am an advocate for women." That's an expression I use instead of feminist sometimes when I'm trying not to -- I want to get people's attention and get them to listen to me, and so I'll say I'm an advocate for women, and then I will get into this, and we're saying all the same things, but they've trained that word. It's just like my dissertation is entitled, "The Making 01:22:00of a Nineteenth-Century Southern Feminist," and I've had people say to me, "Well there wasn't -- was there a such thing as a feminist back in the nineteenth century?" and stuff like that, but I mean I think if you read about Ella Gertrude, she was out there working for women, and she believed in rights for women, and it's just that we've turned that word into a bad word. It's just like people have tried to make liberal a bad word, and so much good legislation has come from liberal tradition, and even legislation that we take for granted now like social security, but you could put a liberal tag on it, and you can scare people, and you could put feminist on any women's issue today and scare people, and that's -- I really think that's sad. But I think it has been my position -- I have come from the academic world, and I've always felt like I had one foot in the academic world and one foot in what I call the 01:23:00real world because I was married with a husband and children, and yet I was studying women and felt passionately about the wellbeing of women, and I was trying to understand that and was trying to help other women understand it. And I finally decided, and then this sort of gradually came onto me that I say, "Well that's my role." I'm not -- I don't have -- I don't necessarily have a full-time teaching job, or I'm not full-time in an organization that's a women's organization, but my role may be just to teach it and tell it and speak out in the real world. So I would go to speak at rotary club. I would go to speak to a women's club, and I would say, "Well 01:24:00I'm a historian of women, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about what I do, and how many of you have had a women's history course?" And nobody, and then I'd say, well this is -- I have this great passion for the wellbeing of women and the continued wellbeing of women." And then I would tell about some of the things I studied and then sometimes I liked to start off and say, "I wear two hats. I'm a coach's wife, and I 'm a historian and an advocate for women." And I confine those two, and it's really a unique approach, and sometimes I could -- they would understand where I was coming from better than if I were more radical I would frighten them. And so I had taken that more gentle approach, so to speak, but that way you can get people to say, "Well, oh. I never thought of it that way," or "I didn't understand 01:25:00that," and I've had, you know, --GERRARD: It's the difference between just getting your message across -- or
getting your message across and it being heard, and people willing to open themselves to the message, and --CURRY: And that has been a great avenue for me from the very beginning where I
would go around and do -- I did a lot of speaking in the state of Kentucky because -- well I did some in Alabama too, but, see, I finished my degree, my PhD, when Bill was the coach at Alabama, and then I worked on the oral history project over there, the Center for the Study of History and Culture, and that's where we did the oral history interviews for the [Stand in the Schoolhouse Door?] and I told you about interview -- Dr. Rose, who was the president of the University of Alabama, but we would meet -- these were people 01:26:00who taught at the university of Alabama. We would share papers with one another. We did these oral history interviews. Anyway I really enjoyed that. It was like adjunct position or group, and then I enjoyed participating in that, so it gave me an avenue, and then I went out and spoke a lot when I was there to different -- I would be invited to speak.GERRARD: I was going to ask you how -- who would approach you and [overlapping
dialogue; inaudible] --CURRY: Well it might be a woman's club, might be a rotary club, or somebody,
and they might initially invite me because I was the coach's wife, and then I would say, "Well, I wear two hats, and I love my husband, and I love my -- I like men, but I have a passion for the wellbeing of women, and I have spent my life studying women's history, and I love to tell that story, and I'm very 01:27:00concerned about the wellbeing of women." And then if I'm speaking to rotary I might say, "Okay, how many of you men have daughters?" They raise their hands -- or granddaughters. And I'll say, "As I'm speaking today I want you to think about your daughters and what you want for them." So I would go through some of the history of our legal system, and how women really didn't get guardianship rights or property rights -- that's been done state by state. They'll be astounded that they didn't get that till 1970 something or, you know. It has been a long hard legal fight to get legal recognition for women, 01:28:00and you talk about the ERA, and that we still don't have any recognition in the constitution. We do have legal rights that we have -- we've gotten in the constitution through the 14th amendment and due process and all that stuff. And we've gone about it in a roundabout way, and we got it through the same way we got civil rights. You know, we've benefitted from that. But, just to make it right, it ought to be mentioned in the constitution. That would be fair. I don't know. We'll see.GERRARD: I told a group of girl guides who came to the special collections, I
was showing them my collection, and I told them about Equal Rights Amendment and the fact that it'd never actually been ratified, and -- [overlapping dialogue; inaudible]CURRY: It passed, but it was never ratified, and it came so close.
01:29:00GERRARD: And they were just so angry, and I was really [overlapping dialogue;
inaudible] --CURRY: They don't know. They don't know that history. They don't know
the history. They don't even know about that, and that is astounding to me, and --GERRARD: Now were you -- were you active during the fight for the Equal Rights
Amendment, or were you --CURRY: No, I was raising kids and going to school, and trying to keep my head
above water.GERRARD: Were you paying attention to what was going on?
CURRY: I was paying attention -- excuse me -- but I think it was like, you know,
a lot of times when you're interested. You're paying attention. You're concerned, but I didn't have an active part, but --GERRARD: Were you disappointed when it didn't -- it didn't get ratified here?
01:30:00CURRY: Yes, but I don't remember being that -- you know, I just wasn't as --
it was at a stage in my life when I was trying to get that paper in, and trying to get the kids to school.GERRARD: I want to -- I actually want to go back and talk to you about your
thesis and your dissertation because I really enjoyed them very much, and I want you to tell me, was there anything that surprised you when you started reading all of these journals and diaries and commentaries because there were quite a few different people that you used. Was there anything that surprised you about how they viewed American women?CURRY: Well I remember getting interested in that topic, let's see. Frances
Wright was a great passion of mine. She was from Scotland, and I think that's 01:31:00what led me into the diaries, but I -- the fact that women in America were viewed with such interest -- why did they write about the women? Because we had more freedom, and what was that freedom doing to women and for women? And the reality of what happened in a pioneer culture was even though we did not have the legal rights, we were still under English common law and all that, but in a -- in the colonial period, the women would very often be blacksmiths, or they would [break in audio] -- they would not normally do in a more civilized world, but because their husbands had gone off to fight the Indians or gone out west to 01:32:00claim some land or whatever, the women stayed home and did what they had to do to make a living, and they worked on the farm. They did all the things that women normally do, but they did more. They did the shop keeping. They did the blacksmith stuff, but as soon as we got more civilized, then women go -- they lose their rights, and it's taken away, and that's not proper, and you don't need to do that. There is an ebb and flow. It's just like after World War II. Women gained so many rights, so to speak, during war time. Women always make gains during war time when they're left at home, and they get jobs and enter factories, and you know Rosie the riveter and all that. And then when 01:33:00men come back from the war they are expecting to claim their jobs back, and women get shoved out, and many women got shoved out, but some women were -- managed to stay. And that was the beginning of so many women beginning to work outside the home so that now, I don't have the current figures, but all the time, each decade, more and more women work outside the home, and it is now accepted that women can work out of the home if they want to.GERRARD: There were some things that really struck me that I think are very
interesting in the thesis, and one of them was that it seemed like unmarried women, young women, had a lot more freedom than European women, but the minute 01:34:00they got married they were closeted almost. They -- I don't know that it was that they lost their freedom. It's just that they lost the community, and they -- especially in the South I think. They ended up -- you know, your home was it, and you didn't really have the freedoms that you -- you weren't lollygagging with your girlfriends anymore and whatnot. It seemed like they really sort of shrunk their own worlds at that point, and another thing was that the American women were considered not to be as healthy. I -- there was -- some of the people -- the journalists or the diarists had talked about. I would have always thought that American women would be more robust and more healthy because I just always think Americans are so healthy, and yet they were talking about the fact that they eat excessive amounts, and the food that they were eating probably wasn't always as good for them. So there were some things I learned 01:35:00in this that were really a big surprise to me.CURRY: Well, I'm going to have to go back and read it again. [laughs]
GERRARD: You ought to. It's -- I think it's fascinating reading.
CURRY: I haven't read it in a while, but I do remember enjoying doing it and
being so fascinated that these writers told me so much about the women, and that you could always find something, and I just would go through these diaries and these books and comb. I would just go through and find what are they saying about the women per say, and it was amazing that I could find as much as I did.GERRARD: Yeah, it really was great, and there was a theme about education as
well, which really carried on right into the twentieth century where women -- they didn't consider women should be educated for education -- for the joy of education. It was -- in order to be a good mother that would then educate her children, so there was a real purpose to it. 01:36:00CURRY: And that was really the way women began to get education was so they
would be better mothers and help educate their sons particularly.GERRARD: Well, I think you should read it again because I thoroughly enjoyed it.
CURRY: I will. I will.
GERRARD: I sat down and read it in one sitting and didn't want -- I mean, it
was a fun read for me, very interested in this [overlapping dialogue; inaudible], but I also want to talk to you about your dissertation. How did you hear about Ella?CURRY: Okay, I was interested in diaries and things for my master's and Ella
Gertrude Clanton Thomas will be -- you will see her name mentioned occasionally in any kind of history or something. She's not as famous as Mary Boykin Chestnut. She's probably the most famous diarist of the Civil War. But I 01:37:00had seen her name a couple of times, but John Mathews, who taught in the history department here at Georgia State, was my advisor on my dissertation, and he knew about the diary from the Perkins Library at Duke. It had never been published, and he knew it was there, and he encouraged me to look into it, because of my interest in diaries. So again, I really have to give him credit for introducing me and encouraging me. So I went to the Duke library. I went to Durham, went in and looked at the manuscript and read it, got excited, and talked to the librarian there. And she told me a little bit about the family, and the history 01:38:00of the diary, and there was a professor who had written a paper on Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas and published it, and talked about the dairy. And I can't -- I can't remember know where she published that article, but it was in a historical journal. I had that to read, but then I just saw there was so much material in this diary that had not been studied, and that could I write her life story from this diary? Well I knew that one of her descendants lived in Atlanta, [Gail Despeaux?], and so I looked her up, and I went and visited with her. And then I found that she had a lot of newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, a number of scrapbooks that Ella Gertrude, and I guess family descendants had kept 01:39:00of hers, and they were very proud of her in the family. Then, she had grown up in Augusta, and I went to Augusta. My aunt lived in Augusta, fortunately, and I went to the courthouse to look up court records of Ella Gertrude's family, and I learned a lot there all about the legal hassles and things that went on in the family. So I was able with -- I mean, this went on for eight years. I mean, I worked on this off and on. See, I've always been, as I say, one foot over here and one foot -- while my husband is being a football coach and I'm entertaining hundreds of people and luncheons and all that stuff I'm working on this. And I'm also building a house every now and then because when we moved -- I love houses, and I built house so I -- but I always went back to Ella Gertrude. She was always in the back of my mind, and my family laughingly says 01:40:00Ella Gertrude lived with us, but I talked about her. I just got so enthusiastic. So I was able to pretty well piece together enough to write about her life, and I spent a lot of time with Gail Despeaux, her descendant, who -- she let me take those scrapbooks home with me, and I kept them and just went over and over, and I encouraged her that she should give those scrapbooks to Duke, and I don't know if she did afterwards because it was -- those were clippings about her work with the Women's Christian Temperance Union and her work in the suffrage movement, and so they probably -- hopefully she did give them to the library or some library. And then I went to the Georgia Archives 01:41:00here too to find out what I could about the suffrage movement. I was, as I say, Dr. Mathews originally led me to the diary, but then -- I've had people say that you can't write a dissertation about something unless you get really interested, but I was really interested in her life. It was an interesting topic for me, and the fact that she went from such great wealth to such poverty, and you realize that a lot of people in the South probably had that happen, but yet she fought back and tried to start -- well she started a school. Then she got interested in women's causes, and you could tell that she was a strong woman, a strong-minded woman, and she had opinion, and she had a lot to cope 01:42:00with in her life and deal with. I also think her father was such a huge influence on her life. She adored her father, and a lot of studies show that strong, independent women who feel well about themselves had a strong father figure that showed an interest in them, loved them, nurtured them, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, you can go back to different women and find that. I think that was Ella Gertrude's situation.GERRARD: What's interesting to me is I wonder if she became the activist that
she was because she had suffered because she understood what it was to suffer, and -- because she really -- I think that --CURRY: I think there are places where she says, and I need to go back and read
that again too, but she says, "I have suffered." And she suffered so it was really graphic to me too. She had ten -- gave birth to ten children and only 01:43:00four survived, but the great suffering that women went through bearing children not only giving birth, but then watching them die after they were born, and women truly suffered, grieved. A lot of their life was grieving, and I don't think I had understood that because we live in an era now where you get excited when you are ready to give birth, and you anticipate it, and by and large our children live and are healthy. But back then women would prepare to die, quite often give instructions who were to take the -- what was to happen if she didn't make it, and that was a real revelation to me from her life. So she 01:44:00suffered a lot with that, giving birth, children dying, and grieving. And then she suffered because of the Civil War and to realize that -- I mean, can you imagine army coming through and taking all of your possessions and destroying your business and losing your home, your business, your way of life, everything, so that you can't even pay the taxes on what you have left, and it was just a real, real hard period in our history, and the fact that she did have some education -- she'd been fortunate enough to go to Wesley, and that she could start a school and eke out a little bit of money, but then she would list every little cent, and you realize this woman who used to get up in the morning -- her biggest decision of the day was what she was going to wear that day. Am I going 01:45:00to wear my day dress, or my -- this dress or that dress, and she was going to go call on her friends in Augusta. This woman was brought to counting every penny, whether they would have enough money to do this or that, quite sad.GERRARD: And a lot of the problems they had financially were because of her
husband's business -- or lack of business [overlapping dialogue; inaudible] --CURRY: Yes, he did not have any business smarts, and I think again, men were
raised to be Southern gentlemen. He goes to Princeton. He grows up very affluent, and he's going to be a plantation manager. I mean, you know, run a plantation. He's going to be a gentleman. He's going to travel, and in his case he really did not know what to do, and when he did try it failed. And then 01:46:00I have -- I've -- I don't know exactly what we don't know in the diaries, but I have heard that he really had a serious drinking problem too, which I didn't really get into in my dissertation because I really didn't have any documentation for it, but there's a lot of -- lot of the diary was destroyed, and I think family descendants probably wanted to protect the reputation of the family, and did not like her saying negative things about him and revealing some of those things that were not there. But I do know that she was quite embarrassed because he brought -- bought a substitute during the war, you remember, and wealthy men could buy a substitute, so he didn't even go off and 01:47:00fight for very long. I mean, he was gone briefly, but then he came back, and he was going to fight in the home guard, or whatever that was called, but he never really did much of that. So I think she was probably very embarrassed by that. And then later in life, and this is something that I found out from other research, he would write her, and I did put it in the dissertation. He would ride into Confederate Day parades in his uniform and all that stuff, but here's a man who bought a substitute, but he's living like the confederate hero.GERRARD: Yeah, it was something that struck me. I had forgotten about that
when there are a couple of moments when I was reading about her life where the glow of young love seemed to be waning, and that was definitely one point where she really was kind of sad that he came back so quickly because she was 01:48:00embarrassed, but there was also, and it's going back to this child birth thing when she talks about being pregnant the first time how happy she is and how just wonderful this is going to be, and very soon you -- because she starts losing babies, every time she gets pregnant is a miserable -- just being pregnant is like all of these months is such a worry to her that it's like this sort of romantic notion of married life that is not the reality. It was very, very poignant to me to read that.CURRY: And these women didn't have any child -- any birth control, of course.
And they didn't have any control over that, and that was their destiny to give birth and have babies die or maybe live -- such a part of her life.GERRARD: Now when we talked before we sort of touched on the fact that you had
01:49:00considered publishing this, the dissertation, before. Who approached you about that?CURRY: Oh, gosh. We were at the University of Alabama and Charles Joyner is a
historian who wrote about the South and slavery and all that, and he was at a dinner at the University of Alabama when President Carter came, and I happened to sit at the same table with him, and we got to talking, and he asked me what I did, and I told him about my dissertation, and he said, "Oh, Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas. I know Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, and you wrote about her?" And I told him what I had done, and he said, "Oh, that sounds so interesting. I want you to send your dissertation to my publisher. It's a very good press, University of Illinois Press," and it is indeed a very good 01:50:00press. And so I had moved to Alabama, and I was building a house. This is another one of my great passions is -- I built so many houses across America. [laughs] I wouldn't go to a place and just find a house. I had to build a house. I do enjoy that too. I enjoy architecture and building and construction, all that stuff. Anyway, I was building a house, and I had a child in high school there and one child in college, and we had just started coaching at the University of Alabama and there was a lot of controversy because Bill had been selected to be the head coach there, and he had not played at Alabama, and he had not coached at Alabama before, and he was not Bear Bryant, and this is what happens in a lot of schools like that where you have a great legendary 01:51:00coach, and then every coach that follows them is compared, and he can't quite live up to that legendary coach. But at any rate, Bill was young and chosen to go from Georgia Tech to Alabama, and there's been traditionally a lot of animosity between those schools going back to a big controversy between coach Bobby Dodd at Tech and Bear Bryant at Alabama, which is another long story. But that happened back in the '60s when an Alabama player hit a Georgia Tech player, and coach Bryant supposedly didn't reprimand the player the way Tech people felt he should have been reprimanded, and it was in the newspapers, and so there's this thing Georgia Tech, between Coach Dodd and coach Bryant. Well anyway, then Alabama hires this young man to come coach who comes from Georgia Tech, and there were a lot of people who still remembered that controversy back 01:52:00in the '60s and wouldn't let go of it. So there was -- there were some death threats. The day Bill was hired there were death threats, and we even had an armed guard going to the press conference. I found out later. I said, "Why are these two men with us all day?" They just glued to us, and they -- I found out they were carrying concealed weapons and they were guarding us, and there had been a death threat called into the newspaper because Alabama had hired this Georgia Tech guy who, you know, "Why'd they hire this guy?" etc., you know. Well, it was a very controversial time, and it's -- and Bill did very well at Alabama. I mean, he had three winning seasons there, and I think his winning percentage for three years is better than Bear Bryant's 01:53:00winning. So first year we won seven games, and then we won eight or something, and then the last year we won ten, and we actually had a chance at the National Championship, played Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. But the entire time we were there, there was this undercurrent of, why is he here? The year we won the SEC Championship and beat LSU it got back to us that somebody on the board of directors said -- board of trustees said, "I don't care if we win the National Championship every year. I don't want a Georgia Tech man for a coach." But anyway, but there were so many wonderful people at the same time who were great to us. The students were great to us, faculty were great, and we 01:54:00had a good time, but it was very, very busy, very stressful, and it -- and I was building a house over there, and it was -- I was not looking to publish my dissertation at that time, and anytime you finish your dissertation you're suffering from a little bit of burn out, and I was not working. I was not tenure track. I think one thing that is good about our -- we teach, and we need to get published, and then if we get published you get tenure and all of that stuff. Well see, I was none of that. So I did this because I loved it, and it had been a labor of love, and I didn't know what I was going to do with it, but suddenly I -- then the University of Illinois Press comes back, and they would say they would like them. Yes, they accept it for publication, and I had a wonderful reader. Ann Scott was head of the history department at Duke, and she had recommended it for publication, and gosh I'm just astounded, and there 01:55:00was a woman from UNC that recommended it for publication. I'm very flattered, but I'm not ready. And it's not the time. And then there was a descendant of Ella Gertrude who was editing the diary. I had written Ella Gertrude's life story using the diary and other things, but I had to sign something with the family that I would not edit the diary. I would write her life story. And then as I'm working on it different people are calling me saying, "Could we see your dissertation?" And this woman who was working with the woman editing the diary approached me, wanted to see my -- well, I had worked so hard and long on this, and you have copy right on your dissertation, and I wasn't finished, 01:56:00and I could honestly say, "Well, I'm not finished with it, and I'm not ready." So I did not send it to UNC because they were even saying UNC would be willing -- interested in publishing it, but I knew that they were also working on this other thing, so I was guarding my research. So it was -- I mean I look back on it, and sometimes I tell people this, and they say, "Oh my gosh, you had this opportunity," but you have to understand all the circumstances, and even to the point that I got to know Ann Scott. I saw her at the Southern Historical Association meetings, and I knew she had read my dissertation. I knew she was familiar with it, and I even called her and talked to her about this situation, and with that the family and they were very guarded about the diary and all that. And so Ann said, "Well you're not -- this is not a good time for you. Why don't you put it on the back burner?" That 01:57:00was her expression. I'll never forget it. She says, "Just put it on the back burner, and when you're ready you can bring it out." So it's been on the back burner 20 years now, but I never had to do it, needed to do, unless I just wanted to do it, but I may -- I always have people telling me, "Oh, you should do it. You should do it." And recently I've had people encourage me, and you've encouraged me too, so I am encouraged to do it, and maybe now would be a good time to pursue it because I do think that her story's important, and I do -- there was so much work that has gone into it.GERRARD: It's a very interesting story as well. It's like it's an
important story, but it's really truly fascinating. It's the first time I 01:58:00ever became interested in the Civil War. I'm a historian but never was interested in the Civil War, but this is told from a very domestic perspective, and --CURRY: You really did get the feeling what it's like to live through it.
GERRARD: You really do. My stomach was clenched when she was talking about the
armies coming in and getting closer and closer. It was very -- you could feel the stress along with her, so I think it's very compelling, and I think it would be really interesting to a very broad audience, not just historians, but I think way beyond that as well.CURRY: Well I knew Provost. I was telling her about it. When we first met she
was so gracious, and she was saying universe -- LSU Press really loves Southern history, and she said, "Maybe you'd like to send it to them." And then I have another friend who published with University of Georgia Press, and she says 01:59:00maybe they would be interested, and I have never pursued it at all. The only people who ever looked at it was University of Illinois, and they wanted to publish it. They wanted me to do a little bit of revision and do -- take the -- I know Ann Scott said take the first chapter out and send it to the Georgia Historical Association and let them publish that. She wanted me to get into the family right away, and just a few little things like that. It wasn't that much, but I just decided to put it on the back burner.GERRARD: Well, think about bringing it to the front burner.
CURRY: Okay, okay.
GERRARD: If you were to publish it, is there anything that you would want to add?
CURRY: Well, I know that I would have to see what other research has been done
02:00:00on her since then, of course, but I do have -- do you remember Amanda? Well there was a house slave that lived in the house, and there was -- a historian friend of mine found something in the Freedmen's Bureau records about some of those slaves. And there's always the possibility, and she thought that there was a possibility, that some of them had been sired probably by the father, and so I think I would have to look into that. It's probably true, but it didn't -- won't affect the story that much. I mean, I think Mary Boykin 02:01:00Chestnut said it right when she said, "All the people on one plantation would look the other way," or, I can't remember exactly how she said it. I mean, you talked about the mulatto children on other people's plantations but not your own. And there was so much miscegenation, and it was a part of that history, and amazingly enough there seems to have -- my friend Kent Leslie wrote Amanda America Dixon, story of a slave that actually inherited the property of her white father. So there were situations where there was great affection that would often grow out of these situations that we don't know very much about. But that is being written about more now than it was back then. They just didn't 02:02:00want to see it at all, Ella Gertrude and her contemporaries.GERRARD: Now what -- while you were doing your thesis on your dissertation did
you see a change at Georgia State in the way that, like, was history opening up more? Were women being represented in history?CURRY: I've got to say, I took my degree in '87. I mean I -- see, I left --
I finished my classwork, gosh, I don't know what year. I'd have to look at my transcript. The last course I took would probably be early '80s or something, and then I left and was traveling and doing my dissertation and coming back and forth. But I did not see very much change in the history 02:03:00department while I was there. This was in the '70s and '80s primarily, and I will say this. I went to a female professor one time in the department. I'm not going to name her, and I said that I was thinking about doing my dissertation on a woman, that I was really interested in woman -- women's history, and she came from the old school of history, which is political history and economic history, and you know, even though she was female it was very much that kind of history. And she said, "Don't you think that's a fad?" And I just was shocked that she said that, especially being a female, and, "Don't you think that's a fad?" And I said, no, I really don't. I think it's important. And I stuck with it, and I'm so glad I did, but I 02:04:00think that the history department was still steeped in -- there were not very many women professors in the department. Come to think about it, gosh, almost all my professors were men. I don't think I had but one female, one or two female professors when I -- the whole time I was here, where I had so many at Agnes Scott. I think Georgia State was much more typical of that. Now I was -- I thought the history department was very good, and I had some wonderful experiences here, and I know I got a lot of encouragement from Dr. Grant, who 02:05:00was my master's advisor, and Dr. Mathews, who was my dissertation advisor, and Dr. Reynolds, who is still here, encouraged me. As a matter of fact, one of the greatest experiences I had while I was here was to go to -- he invited me to go to the Association of Asian historians, and they were having their meeting at Duke, and he wanted me to go present a student paper there. And I had gotten -- this is another story, but it's a wonderful story I'll share. I had, to back track a little bit, I had been teaching history at Westminster School. Again, I did not seek a job. I had a friend of mine was teaching there, and she was in graduate school here. We were both working on our PhDs. And a woman 02:06:00dropped out at Westminster pregnant, to have a baby, and they were trying to find somebody to fill in for her. So she asked me if I would come out and fill in for this woman that was having a baby and talk to the administration, and I did. So my husband was the football coach at Georgia Tech. I had two children in high school. I was in graduate school, but why I do these things like, yes, I can do this, so I started at Westminster full time and while going to graduate school. But she comes to me, and they had me teachings origins of Western society, which is -- included ancient Greece and Rome, and I'm in graduate school in American history, but you know that's how it works every time. So I 02:07:00had -- she said, "We can go to Italy with the Virgilian society this summer. We'll get five hours graduate credit." And I said, "Well I can't do that." I says, I've got children and Bill's coaching and all that. And she says, "Well Bill's going to be so busy he's not going to know where you are, and aren't your kids in high school? They can take care of themselves." And I said, "Well, yeah I guess so." So I went to Italy with the Virgilian society this summer to take a course, and it was fabulous. We studied with an archeologist and a classicist, and we stayed in a little villa in Cumae in southern Italy, and we traveled to [Herculaneum?] and Stabiae, and Pompeii and we just -- we went to all these places, and they gave these lectures, and we took notes, and then we wrote -- we had to do a paper at the end when we got home and send it back, and we got five hours credit. It was 02:08:00great. Well, I got very interested in how Romans built their cities, and there's archeological ruins of how they laid out their cities around the forum and the shops and all that and how that reflected their culture, their democracy. They would go to the forum to meet, and it came from the Greeks. And then when I studied with Dr. Reynolds, and I'm studying Chinese history in one of my five areas of credit and didn't know anything. We don't know anything about China and Japan. And he was a wonderful professor, so I got -- I decided to do my paper -- one of the few times I didn't do a paper on women I decided I would compare the way the Chinese built their ancient cities compared 02:09:00to the way the Romans built their ancient cities, and there's two cultures that were beginning to evolve. And it struck me that the Chinese found a place that had special ambiance, and that's where they built the temple, the palace of the emperor. And then they built a wall around it, and then their cities were out here. The people were excluded, and you go back to all those ancient cities, and you find out there's this place that has the wall around it that the people are not allowed to go in. So I wrote a paper called "The Cosmology of Ancient Chinese cities Contrasted and Compared to the Cities of Ancient Rome," something like that. And so Dr. Reynolds liked that paper and encouraged me to go to Duke and read it at the Association of Asian Studies, and 02:10:00students from, I don't remember all the schools that were represented, but there was a competition, and I won. So that was very exciting to me. That was -- so we've laughingly talked about the cosmology of ancient Chinese cites contrasted to ancient Greece and Rome, but it was a wonderful learning experience, and sort of an ah ha experience on my part because I happened to see this and it just -- because of that trip I had made to Italy and gotten interested in the way they built cities and how their culture evolved, and it was so interesting to me how the -- in the Chinese culture the people were separated from the emperor, and there culture has evolved so differently. So anyway. 02:11:00GERRARD: Well, I want to ask you how -- I mean, you touched on this earlier,
but how on earth did you balance studying with your duties as the coach's wife as well as being a mother to your children. How -- I mean, did you sleep?CURRY: No, well sometimes I don't know -- I mean, I look back on it now, and I
think, "How did I do that?" And I have -- when I have taught -- when I was teaching at the University of Kentucky I taught this course called women in contemporary society. I haven't really told you this story [inaudible]. But I was asked to teach that course when the dean heard me speak somewhere, and I would talk about the past and bring it to the present and relate it to women's situations. And I have told -- I've talked to you about how I've always seen myself as having one foot in the real world and one foot in the academic 02:12:00world, so when I taught that course it all sort of came into clear vision for me. What I had been doing all these years was finding a way, and women always find a way. And I tell young women, "You can find a way." It may not be the way you expect it to be. I grew up where you, you know, you go to college. You get out of college. You go to graduate school. You do this. You do that. There's a progression, a very orderly progression, Erik Erikson's, the stages of development and all that stuff. But women's lives are not like that. You 02:13:00might stop to get married. You might go back to school, and then you might stop to have a baby, and then you go back to school, and it can be very disjointed, as I call it, fits and starts. But you can do it. If you really want to do it you can find a way, and in my case I would take one course at a time, two courses at a time. I mean, I think that the whole process took me about 14 years, but I was raising children and driving carpool, and I was having luncheons and going to football games, and then I was writing papers and going to class, but you just juggled it and found a way. And I could not do it as quickly as I would have liked to have done it, and sometimes I would not even be in the same city. Like we would be -- I would take courses in the off season. 02:14:00Remember I was telling you when we went back and forth from football wherever Bill was playing? And then I would come back here and take a course. I'd take courses in the off season. Then I go to football. I couldn't take a course there, although I -- Appleton, Wisconsin I did go to Lawrence University one fall semester, but normally I didn't take a course in the fall. So I would take a course here and a course there, but I always had the intent to finish, but I just didn't go straight through. And then when the children were older, and they were in school for full time, then I would go full time, and then I finished it up. And sometimes I would be frustrated because, "Oh gee, it's just taking me so long." I was 47 when I graduated with everything, finished, but then I look back on it now and I think well, that's just the way it was. And I had one professor who had finished her PhD before 02:15:00she got married, started teaching, and then she taught, and she was having a baby and pregnant, and I was a little bit older than her, and I'd already done all of that, and I was finishing up my degree. So she was doing it her way. I was doing it my way. My daughter went straight through the University of Virginia, took a year off. I think it was just a year. Then she went to graduate school and got her PhD at Emory. She started working teaching, and then she got married. She did it her way, but she didn't find her husband. She didn't know she was going to get married. She didn't -- well she always wanted to get married, but she just didn't find the right man until later, but when she did she had already had all that behind her. And now she is the dean 02:16:00of girls at Westminster, teaches two courses in English lit, had a seven-year-old girl and a four-year-old girl, and she's juggling. She's finding a way. I help her out when I can. Her husband's great. He's an attorney, and he can sort of juggle his hours, and she has a woman who comes in and helps her in the afternoon right now. So you find a way, and I think that is really the -- that's the way women have always done it, and women are doing it more now than ever before because we can't educate women and say, "Your mind is as good as a man's," and it is. We have equal ability. We may have 02:17:00different -- you know, everybody's different, but we have just as much ability. But you can't educate women, and then tell them they can't do things because you awaken that thirst. I mean, you know, that desire, that enthusiasm, and then you say, no, no you can't do that. Well that's not fair. And what women have always had to grapple with and will always have to grapple with is that they bear the children. We carry the babies in our wombs and give birth to them and nurture them, and either you give that up, which some women have decided, "I'm not going to get married. I'm not going to have babies." But I think most women want to have it all, and I think there has been times in feminism, and you've heard the controversy, you say "They were 02:18:00telling us we could do it all, but we can't." And I look at that, and I hear that, and I say, no, you can. Yeah you can. You can do it all. You just don't do it necessarily within the same timeframe because you're going to get to a stage in your life when your children are going to be grown, or they're going to be in school full time very quickly, and I used to consciously think about, well what am I going to do when my children are grown and gone, and Bill is busy doing this or that? I'll use this somehow. I do think we need to think about at the end of our life. Are we going to look back and say I wish I had done this or that? And so I can honestly say I'm so 02:19:00grateful I went back to Agnes Scott and graduate. That was important to me. I wanted to get that degree. I'm so glad I came back to Georgia State and got my masters and PhD. That was very important to me. I'm so glad that I did the teaching that I did, even though I -- like I taught at Westminster. I taught on the college level at the University of Kentucky. Those experiences were very meaningful to me. I learned a lot, and I enjoyed it, and then, which we haven't gotten into yet, but we will. I found a way. I was again inventing my life, and I had come to a stage where I wanted to do yet again something else. So I figured that out, and I started Women Alone Together, this non-profit foundation. So again, at the end of my life I'm sure I will say, 02:20:00I'm so glad I did that. And I think if we can say -- think -- that's not a bad way to think about things. If you know you only have so much longer on this Earth, what are you going to be glad you did? And I would never give up my children or my grandchildren or my marriage to do it. But I've been able to do that and do the other, which I'm very grateful for, and I think that my life is richer for having done both. And keeping up with and hanging on to both, and realizing the importance of both for my life.GERRARD: It seems like you've really managed to capture -- there's a very
strong sense of flexibility and kind of determination. It's like keep your eye on the prize. It's just like you didn't ever give up. You just had 02:21:00find -- you just had to be -- to trust that it was going to get done along the way.CURRY: Well, I have a dear friend who's a counselor, and I ask him one time I
said, you know, I'm always worried I'm a workaholic. He said, "No, you're not a workaholic." I says well, am I obsessive-compulsive? He said -- he says, "You're not obsessive -- you do not have the disorder." He says, "But I think you have the personality." And he said, "That's not bad. Somebody has to keep the trains running on time." So I guess I have, if you call it obsessive-compulsive. I do have goals, and I stick to them, and this -- I guess my -- my PhD would be the best example of that, years. And a lot of people finish their course work and never do their dissertation, and that 02:22:00took me years, but you just do it, and I can honestly say -- I have an expression that I've used forever, and I believe that the joy is in the journey. I really enjoy -- I enjoyed going to school and taking classes. I enjoyed the, "Yah! I've got to get this paper done," and you're stressed, but then you get it done, and you make an A, and ooh, that's good. And I enjoyed going to classes and meeting people and having the discussions and all of that business, and then the accomplishment of the goal was wonderful, but I can say that at the end of it all I sort of looked around and said, well, huh. What am I going to do now? And I had -- because I've always been moving around, and I was never in one place to apply for a job and -- even though I 02:23:00taught I would be approached and say, "Would you come and do this?" And I did it until I moved, or I'd do that for a while until I moved, and so my life has been moving. So how could I -- my challenge was, okay, how can I hold onto my dreams and do something that is mine, that is important to me and stay in this marriage and do that life too? And that life was fun and exciting, and it was very important to Bill, and that's -- I -- my kids grew up, but we could -- how can we do both? And that's always been the challenge.GERRARD: Was he supportive of your academic work?
CURRY: Yes, he would look back and say -- the first time I told him that I
wanted to go back to school we were in Baltimore and the kids were little, and 02:24:00I'd begun to think about taking some courses, and I remember approaching Bill, and I said, I think I'd like to go back to school, and at first he said, "Well gosh, Carol, with the kids and all that how can you do that?" And he didn't understand, and I think I just sort of let go of it then, and I said, oh, well, you're right. And then a few months later something -- I said, no, I'm going to go take some courses, and he said okay. In other words, he didn't know -- say -- he just raised some questions, and I think he just accepted that that's the way I was, and this was important to me. But as time went on he saw what I did, and how important it was, and he grew more and more supportive until at the end he was great and has been always. But I think there 02:25:00was a realization. He didn't -- he had to get an education about women's lives and how women -- he saw his mother stay at home all of her life, and you know there was just, you know you get married, and you have children, and so many of our friends. You get married and have children, stay at home. I mean, that there's nothing wrong with that if a woman is happy doing that, and I've -- women -- I've had a lot of discussions with women about that. "Well I -- is there something wrong with me?" No, if you're happy and fulfilled, and you can find that satisfaction, that is fine for you, but if somebody else has this desire to go and do then they should have the opportunity to do that. 02:26:00GERRARD: Well, and I was -- you've got to be careful not to blame men at that
time for not really understanding the changing needs that women had because women were becoming aware themselves that they had these needs, and men -- it just took a while for them to figure this out.CURRY: Yes, and I think that there -- that's not to say that at times I was
not angry. And Bill knows that. I mean at times I would get angry, and it's like it's not fair. I mean I'm having to move again. My life has been building a house, fixing a house, getting in school, getting my life in order, be doing, like, at the University of Alabama I was going to start teaching in January, winter semester, and I already had like 30 students signed up for my class, a women's history class that I was going to create and start and all that. I was very excited about it, and he left the University of Alabama and 02:27:00went to the University of Kentucky, and he was not fired at the University of Alabama. There was a lot of controversy. He was trying to get his contract renewed, and this segment who've always said they wanted somebody from Georgia Tech, there was this -- there was always this tension and all that, and he had the University of Kentucky came after him, and that's a very long, complex story, but he decided to leave and go to the University of Kentucky. And so I had built this fabulous house over there that I really put my heart and soul in, but see, I had done that in Atlanta. I built this fabulous house, put my heart and soul there. I was going to live the rest of my life in that house, and we sold it and moved to Alabama. I built it again. I said, oh, I'll just build it again. And so I built it again, and I was working on my dissertation over there, and we have a condominium, and there'd be -- I'd go out to the job site, and they're building, and then I'd go back and work on my dissertation. And I finished it while I was there, and as a matter of fact, I 02:28:00was turning it in. I was at the very last end. That's how I got that done, but I would just up and leave, but I felt like for his situation and what was happening it was the right decision at the time for him, and then I was not earning the income. I mean, I was not the bread winner, and these were all things that I did because I wanted to do them, you know. It might have been different. Like say if I had been an attorney, and I was earning half the income, and he had been an attorney and earning half the income, then we would negotiate, where are we going to go, or you go here, and I'll go there, and you know. And maybe I was always too willing. I mean, I could've stayed at 02:29:00Alabama and taught the course, or, you know. It just didn't really occur to me to have a commuter marriage, but I had children. I couldn't do that. So I never opted to do that. Even though there are some women who say, "Well I'm going to stay here and finish this while you go and do that." I always -- and wanted to go, and thought I was supposed to go, and I moved the children with him.GERRARD: Now I want to ask about this, you know, because you're moving quite
regularly. How did that affect not just your friendships with your sort of community, within your community, and also your kids?CURRY: Well, amazingly enough, they have done very well. And one time our
daughter said -- I said, gee honey. I'm so sorry we're having to move you so often. And she said, "Well, I wouldn't have it any other way." We 02:30:00were able to time it. I think our son had the more difficult situation than our daughter. When they were little I always put them in my Montessori. I was a real big believer in Montessori schools, and I did a lot of study for -- in her work. And so they would be in a Montessori school in Atlanta, and then I'd take them Montessori school in Baltimore. Then a Montessori school here, and then a Montessori school in Huston, in California. So they had a similar kind of classroom environment when they were little even though it was a different school. Then when they started school they were little, and it was not hard to move them in first and second grade. Then we moved to Green Bay when Kristen was in elementary school, and Billy was coming up, and they -- they're really 02:31:00good public schools in Wisconsin, and Bill was an assistant coach for the Packers for three years. Then we came back to Atlanta, and he was seven years' head coach of Georgia Tech. So Kristen stayed and actually graduated from high school in Atlanta, and we moved Billy to Tuscaloosa when he was like in the 10th grade. Now that was a hard move. That was the hardest move. At one point he said he was going to stay here and finish high school, and we said, well we'll try to find a place for you to stay in [inaudible]. And then he changed his mind. He said no, we're going to go. And he played football himself and loved football so much, and he said, when Alabama called Billy said, "Oh Dad, you got to go to Alabama." So it was a family decision, but yet I think that move was hard on Billy. I think that was a hard move for Billy. But he looks back on that move and says it was really good for him because he went 02:32:00from The Lovett School, which was a private school here in Atlanta, to Tuscaloosa Central, which was a huge public school, and a lot rougher and real world, so to speak, and that he had a true experience, much more of the real world than he had at protected -- the protected environment of Lovett. And then he went to the University of Virginia from there. And so he said that that ended up being a great educational experience for him.GERRARD: Now when you were doing all of the sort of all of this, did you -- was
there a lot of socializing with the other players or coaches wives or that --CURRY: Oh yes, well, when we were -- when Bill was playing in the National
Football League here it was very interesting. There were a little handful of 02:33:00players who played in the National Football League that we became friends with. We actually, our backyards joined up with [inaudible]. He played professional football for the Los Angeles Rams. Bill was for the Baltimore Colts. Francis Tarkenton was the quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings. He lives a few miles away, and there were a couple of others that I wasn't as close to. But when our -- when those men left and went to training camp we all had little kids, and we would take them out to eat, and we'd take them to the movies, and we'd visit each other and they'd play. And we had that little, you know, we shared, and we knew what it was like. And then we all had family around, so there was that camaraderie. And then you get into coaching, and you have the coach -- the other coach's wives and a certain amount of friendship and 02:34:00camaraderie that evolves there. And I would always have friends who were coach's wives, but then I would always have friends outside that community in the academic community too. I would get to know people there, so yes, there's always been a community of people.GERRARD: That must have been really nice when you were -- especially when you
had kids, that somebody -- people close to you who actually really understand the lifestyle that you're living [overlapping dialogue; inaudible].CURRY: Yes, yes, oh yes. And we would talk about everything, and then we'd
talk about getting ready to go to football and pack up, and we had our travel gear, and we usually rented everything, like furniture and all that. And you'd take sheets and towels and clothes, and whatever you'd need for six months. It was really very much of a gypsy existence. Would you like to take a little break for the bathroom? Is it close by? 02:35:00GERRARD: Yes.
CURRY: But it is interesting. You sort of talk about your whole life and it is
-- it's been -- we've been here almost three hours. It [overlapping dialogue; inaudible].GERRARD: We have. I would never have thought that ever. I was really
surprised. But now we may as well just keep going through with it.CURRY: Yeah, let's just finish it. Talk about -- you want to talk about Women
Alone Together?GERRARD: Yes I do, and I think one question I have going into that is -- and
this has come out of the time that I actually attended your meeting. When you -- when Bill was playing, were you ever concerned about injuries? In particular head injuries?CURRY: I was never really -- I didn't think about injuries until they
happened. You always know there is a chance of injury, but I did not worry 02:36:00about him playing so much that I didn't want him to play because he might get hurt. I just knew that that was a part of football, but I've always heard Bill say that our equipment is -- you know, "We wear equipment." You know, men used to fight without head gears and padding and all that stuff. Now I realize that the equipment is so much better today than it was when Bill played. We had his old helmets, and you realize how little padding and really good protection they had, plus back then it was so macho. I mean, you know, if you were supposed to get hurt -- if you got hurt you were just supposed to jump right back up and go. And they were not as sensitive about head injuries then as they are now and concussions. And there's all this publicity about 02:37:00concussions, and people know that you've got to carry -- you've got to bring players out, and you can't send them back in, and you've got to get them examined. And when Bill played and some of his friends, John Mackey in particular, was Bill's roommate that is -- now has dementia, it -- they had so many head injuries, and they went right back in. And they -- it's like, "Are you okay? What day is it? Shake it off." You know, it was to prove that you weren't -- there was one time when Bill had a bad concussion, and he played for the Packers, and coach Lombardi came up and said, "Do you know who --" Bill didn't know who anybody was, and he was very disoriented, and there's a gathering after the -- a social event after the game, and coach Lombardi came up to him and said, "Bill, who won the game?" And Bill said, 02:38:00"We did." And he said, "He's fine." And so the next Monday, this was like on a Saturday night and he had such a bad concussion. The next Monday coach Lombardi sent him out to go head on with their great defensive lineman Ray Nitschke, middle linebacker -- our linebacker Ray Nitschke, and to prove that he was not afraid to hit, and that was insane, and that would never happen today. Hopefully it would not happen today. It should not happen today because of the awareness that they have about head injuries, but back then it was like, you know, you get foggy, and shake it off, and everything was so macho, and you got to do this or that. I think they're more sensitive now to dangers of head injuries, and the equipment is so much better today. That's not to say that it isn't a game of contact and smash, and people can get hurt. But it's 02:39:00like -- and Bill knows all of this, but it says like, yeah, but if you get in your car you could have an automobile accident or you can run into -- you know, kids are going to play games and they're going to smash, and they're going to be active. Let's do everything we can to protect them and have rules and all of that. Now Bill did have a bad knee injury when he played for the Houston Oilers, and that's what really ended his career. And once he had that injury, and I -- they had to carry him off the field, and they had to put a -- his knee was shattered, and they had to take bone from the bone bank and put a pin in there and all that. And then he want -- he tried to play again the next year. Well, I was -- you know, I was saying this is insane. I just don't think he can do it anymore. He didn't really -- I mean he realized that it was time to 02:40:00quit. So I guess I was in some kind of ignorant bliss, you know, and did not worry about it, but now when I see those guys in professional football, if you are ever on the sidelines, or if you are ever very close and see the impact of these huge men running into each other, you realize really how powerful it is, and how it can be very dangerous.GERRARD: Do you -- this is a silly question -- do you enjoy football?
CURRY: I've always enjoyed football, and I enjoyed it growing up. I like the
game. I understand the game. It's my favorite sport, but I have been to so many football games that I can now -- if I -- if we have a former player or somebody, like one of Bill's former players at Georgia Tech is the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals. Well if they're playing I might, "Oh, there's 02:41:00Ken's team. Let's watch a little bit." I'll sit down. Green bay, because Bill used to play at Green Bay, and Green Bay people have been real nice to Bill through the years, and so I have affection for them. I watch a little bit, and I -- if it's a real exciting game I watch it for a while and enjoy it. But just to sit down every weekend and watch several games, no. Bill does. I mean Bill -- and what we do now -- but Bill that's his profession and he's looking at it from a technical aspect, and how do they do this, and how do they do that? And I'm not into all of that, and I'll just leave him in one room doing that, and I'll say, I'm going to go read, or I'll go watch something else or do something else. And I'm perfectly happy with that. There was a time early in our marriage where I wanted us to do the same thing, you know. We got to do the same thing all the time, and when you get to our age you don't care. You do whatever you want to do, and I'll do whatever I want 02:42:00to do, and then we do some things together, of course. But I have enjoyed football. Like I said, I was a cheerleader in high school. My brother played. I mean, I've just had a life of football. It's always been a part of my life, and Bill has always had a job in football whether he was a player, a coach, or broadcasting. For 11 years he broadcast football games on television, so I've not known anything else. It's just what my husband does. Some men work for IBM, and fortunately I do see what he does, and I do understand what he does. I could be more involved in it than if he worked for IBM. I wouldn't participate in that at all. I wouldn't understand what he was doing, but I do with football. So I have by and large. I think he has enjoyed it. It's meant a lot of wonderful things for us. We've met a lot of great people. We 02:43:00have a lot of children around the -- former players and their families are like -- sort of like adopted children. They come back, and it's a lot like the teaching profession where you see former students, and you're very proud of them, and they come back and introduce their children to you. And now Bill, Bill's first player at Georgia State is the son of a player he had at Georgia Tech. [Bart?] Hogan is our first -- he was here by himself because he was a transfer from Brown. He was at an Ivy League school, and he wanted to play football in the South, and he wanted to play for his father's coach, and he came here.GERRARD: That's absolutely wonderful. That's actually something I was
going to ask you about. Did you get close to the players, both you and Bill?CURRY: Well, now see, I -- Bill gets closer to the players than I do because
02:44:00he's around them so much more. I see them in the recruiting process. Like I told you we were just recruiting last weekend. I'll meet them as they're being recruited, and then the ones that stay I will see them occasionally after games. I'll see their parents. You get to know their parents, but I don't get to know them nearly as well as Bill does, but then they're players in Atlanta that played for Bill at Georgia Tech that we see regularly. We -- they're successful businessmen and fathers of children and all of that. So that's nice.GERRARD: That's great. And I want to talk quickly to you about your teaching
because we've touched on it, but we haven't actually talked about it, and I think it's important that we do. I'm -- I like that wherever you went you 02:45:00found a niche for yourself, and you were teaching women's history or women's issues generally, which I think is great.CURRY: It's like -- well, when I taught at Westminster I was in graduate
school, and a friend -- I told you how she came to me and said, "Would you come?" And then I taught American history and origins of Western society in high school. And that was good, but my fondest memories and the teaching experience that I really loved was when Bill was coaching at the University of Kentucky and I was going around speaking, and we restored a 175-year-old house. I was working on the heritage council for the state of Kentucky because I've always been interested in houses and historic houses, and that's been one of 02:46:00my loves too. And the governor of the state actually appointed me to the heritage council, and we were preserving historic sites and all that. That was very interesting. So it was something I did on a volunteer basis, but it was very interesting. So I was doing that at Kentucky, and volunteering on several boards and all that stuff that coach's wives do, and then I was asked to speak at rotary club, which is usually, most communities is your business leaders and university leaders and quite a big deal. And you know, you go, "Oh, this is a big deal," and you get nervous, and -- but you prepare well, and I had done a lot of speaking. I was comfortable doing it, so that day I talked about -- I would start off usually when I spoke laughingly saying, "Well I know you 02:47:00invited me here to talk to you as the coach's wife," and I would say, "but I wear two hats, and I'm the coach's wife," and then I tell the funny story about how I met Bill in the fourth grade, and I could outrun him. He'll deny it, but I could, and I get them to laughing, and I say a few little cute things like that, and then I'll say, "But my great passion is the wellbeing of women and women's history, and that's what I love." And I say, "How many of you have had a history course?" You know, nobody has a women's history, and I would usually go into it like that. And I say, "Well, if you'll just -- if the men here will think about their daughters, and the women here will know what I'm talking about, I'm going to give you, in about 15 to 20 minutes, a very brief history of women in America." And I talk about how women had no legal identity whatsoever, and how they've had to fight for it, and how they go the right. You know, I just go real fast through that, and then I'll -- I would say, "Now where we are -- the reason it's important we 02:48:00understand our history so we understand today better. Women still do not make -- do not get equal pay for equal work, and we make 79 cents for every dollar a man makes, and there is a glass ceiling." And I would usually have some pertinent facts about how many women CEOs there were and how many men and stuff like that. And then I talk -- one of my great concerns has always been the difficulty of childcare. We're the only industrialized country in the world that does not have licensed government-funded childcare. It's such a problem for women. Has been always and still is and until we get more women in leadership positions that are sensitive to this. So I end up on current issues facing women, and I say that the battle -- we still have a way to go, and we 02:49:00must remain diligent, or something like that. Well, the dean of -- Peggy Meszaros was the dean of a school at the University of Kentucky called Human Environmental Sciences or something like that. It was unusual, but in her school was family studies and sociology, women's -- I don't know all the things that were in her school, but she said, "We have a course called women in contemporary society. It's in the curriculum, and would you teach that spring semester?" And I said, "Women in contemporary society? I'm a historian." She said, "Do it like you did today." She said, "You presented the historical perspective and you went into history, and then you talked about contemporary issues. I think that would be great. I think that 02:50:00would make a lot of sense." And I said, "Well, if I can do it like that I would be glad to do it." And so I said they'll get a big dose of women's history, and then we will talk about current issues. So that's the way I taught that course, and I created the course from zero, picked all the books and all that. And I learned a lot. And it was a great experience for me because I had -- I put it together, and we did -- I had -- I used a little paperback -- a history survey -- I think I used Divided Lives, which talks about how women's lives in America have always been divided, and used different examples. And then I used the psychology -- Carol Tavris wrote a book called The Mismeasure of Woman, and it's 02:51:00about the -- how so many medical studies have been done on men instead of women, and she's the one who really helped me understand how -- she talked about being in graduate school and studying Erik Erikson's phases of life, and how you go from school and marriage and family and career, and then she said I looked I my life and I realized my life wasn't like that. And then she said I realized women's lives are not like that. They go -- and I remember all of that. That really helped me. And then I would usually have a woman writer or two. We would read a novel about -- written by a woman and pertinent to talking about some current issue had to do with women. And I had to work really hard because I was doing some things I had not done before, but I really learned a 02:52:00lot and enjoyed it tremendously. And that course was real well received, and it was often to seniors and graduate students, and we had a good following, and I taught that several times. And I taught one course in women's studies called women's letters, diaries, and autobiographies, and I co-taught that with another woman in the department, and I presented some from my research and my work and stuff like that. But the one that I really did by myself and that was women in contemporary society and really enjoyed it. And I got into women and aging. And we would always end the course on women and aging because that's women in contemporary society. What about older women in our culture? And that sort of awakened in me this awareness that we are such a youth oriented culture, 02:53:00and older women tend to be left out or not really taken seriously, and the problems that older women have. And that's when -- we had great discussion in the class, and that's when, I have told you the story I think that women started auditing my class. And at the University of Kentucky they have a program called the Donovan Scholars where you can go back and audit classes after you turned 65 at no charge. So these -- I would just have a little entourage of women, and I remember the first time I taught that class I always liked to get to class early and see the students come in, and this woman comes 02:54:00walking into my class. One of the first people says to her, "Right on the front row." And she's about 80 years old and cute as a button, and she smiled and introduced herself, "I'm Betty Morgan." And anyway I learned later -- oh, and I did oral history. I had -- one of the assignments I did in this class was to have all of the students that were taking it for credit I asked them to do an oral history interview with an older woman and present it to the class. And one of the students, traditional aged students, interviewed Betty Morgan. And I found out that Betty had been a nurse in World War II, head of the OR in the South Pacific, had met her husband there. He was a doctor. They came back to Winchester, Kentucky, and he was in medical practice for 40 02:55:00years, and she worked with him, and he got Alzheimer's and died. And then she started coming back to university taking courses. She moved downtown into a little high-rise condominium in Lexington, walked to the university, which you can do in university. You can walk down -- walk to the campus. She walked. I mean, any kind of weather she was walking, and she wrote poetry, books of poetry, and just a delightful woman, and I got -- they would participate in the discussions. They didn't take the course -- they didn't take the test. They didn't write the papers. They weren't taking it for credit, but they would read all the books, and they would participate in discussions, and it was 02:56:00wonderful for these younger women to hear what these older women said because I remember we were talking about birth control, and when you talk about not having any, and how they had been discriminated against, and things they had seen, and the young girls would go, "Oh, really? That's amazing." So they brought a lot to the course, but I got very interested in these women, and then I invited them to my home for a covered dish dinner. I would usually do that about once a semester or so, and I got to know these women and really interested in these older women. I was drawn to them and their stories. And invariably I found out that they were widows. Their husbands had died, and they were really trying to figure out what to do with their lives, and how they could make them interesting, and how they could form community. And they were going through 02:57:00grief, and as I've come to say now, they were reinventing their lives. I don't know if I used the expression then, but I see that so clearly now. So that ended up being a real pivotal experience for me because I started thinking about doing something for these women with these women. There was such a need outside of the academic world to bring substantive information to women in a meaningful setting, particularly women who had lost their spouses. Usually it's death of spouse, but it's sometimes divorce, or Alzheimer's has become a real big part of what we do, dementia. So they are alone, either 02:58:00they're alone because of death or divorce, or alone in a marriage because their husbands really are not there mentally anymore. Or we have had some women who come because their husbands are in depression or alcoholism. Somehow they feel alone, and that was when the seeds were first planted, so to speak, for doing something. And I took notes. I remember scribbling things down about, well, how can we do this? Well, in Kentucky we did the covered dish dinners, and they came to my house, and I said, but we could do it at the university and have some place we meet at the university, and I said, well I got to figure this out. And then we left the university of Kentucky, went to our cabin in North Carolina and Bill was in broadcasting for 11 years, but this idea, that thing I have that -- I still have that on my mind. I still have to figure out how to do 02:59:00that, but it never went away. And then a real impetus happened. I kept thinking about doing it. How was I going to do it? And then our friend died in a plane crash. Payne Stewart the golfer, was very famous incident, well-known incident in our culture. Everybody saw that plan on CNN. Well, a very good friend of ours was on the plane with Payne. We knew Payne, not as well as we knew this other man. He was Bill's attorney and helped Bill do a lot. He was executor of our will. I mean he was his agent. He negotiated Bill's contracts. And he and his wife travelled with us. They didn't have any children, so they would take trips with us in the summer time, so that's how close we were. And he died in that plane crash, and we immediately went down to 03:00:00be with her, and I really saw firsthand how devastated -- how a woman can be in a very happy marriage and relationship, and then suddenly it's gone. And I talked to her a lot, and then I told her about what I had been thinking about doing, and that was just sort of an impetus. It sort of pushed me out the door, and I thought, well, I'm going to go ahead and do this, and I went to Mary Brown Bullock who was president of Agnes Scott at the time, and I said that I -- I have this idea. I would like to start this organization, and I would like to do seminars on the campus for women who are alone in our culture because of death and divorce. They -- to do substantive things, and that was about all -- I mean, it was very rough at that point. I didn't know exactly what shape it was going to take in the end.GERRARD: What year was this?
03:01:00CURRY: Well we actually started -- well, this would have been about -- was 9/11
in 2002 or 2001?GERRARD: Two-thousand-one.
CURRY: Yeah, okay it was around the time -- I remember 9/11 came into it because
I remember thinking, well if I could help all those widows in New York I would, but they're in New York, but down here we have widows too, and so she -- I had talked to Dixie, is the wife of my friend who died in the plane crash, and Dixie has to credit for the name because she says, "Well if you do it, Carolyn, you've got to call it Women Alone Together." So she gets credit for the name, and I went and told Mary Brown Bullock about it, and I told her the name. I said, "We'd like to call it Women Alone Together." She says, "Well, you got to get that copyrighted. You got to get the trademark on that." She 03:02:00was the one who said that because I hadn't even thought about that. She says, "That's so good. You got to get the trademark on that." I said, "Oh, okay." And so she sent me to the alumni association at Agnes Scott. Marilyn Hammond was the alumni director at the time, and I told her about what we were thinking about doing. And she loved the idea because it brings women onto the campus at Agnes Scott that would never come there otherwise because we opened it up to alumni of Agnes Scott, and any woman is invited. All women are welcome. So we have Agnes Scott women and women from outside the campus, and they come in. And so we meet on the Agnes Scott campus to do the seminars, and they've always been great to us. We don't pay to rent their space or anything like 03:03:00that. We have things catered, and we pay the caterer, the food service. At first they were doing our mailings for us and partnered on the mailing, but now we do all of our own mailings. We had to -- we went to a foundation and got a -- we had to write a -- well first of all we had to become a 501[c][3]. So we had to do the legal work. We have to be in existence for two years, and you have to have a track record. You get your 501[c][3] -- no we had to get -- be in existence for two years to go for grant money, but we formed a 501[c][3]. We had to pay legal fees, and I guess we paid a couple thousand dollars to get all that done, and then I gathered a few women around me. Dixie was one of them and another friend, and one of my classmates from Agnes Scott. There were just a 03:04:00handful of us, and two or three of us paid for the legal stuff, and then we went to a foundation, a community foundation, and we had to do the grant proposal. And we were trying to get money to do a website. The brochure --