. . . [laughter] the meat and crust and so on were just plastered on to bones. There hadn't been a new leg, properly, in a long time.

They hadn't the shape of a leg when you got it. It was just something that held the meat together.

[Interruption]

Yesterday we were talking about your family, and I asked how they dealt with race relations, and about relationships between blacks and whites in the South when you were growing up. And today I wonder if you could say just a little bit about the way you were taught about class lines in the South as you were growing up.

Warrington Dawson was an Englishman who espoused the Confederate cause; he contrived to conceal himself, I think, on a Confederate warship, the "Shenandoah" or some such name, that was in an English harbor. He got over here and joined the Confederate Navy, later he shifted from the Navy to the Army and fought through the War. And having been acquainted with the economy of England, he more clearly than most people saw the need for changing the productive habits of the South, and he made his News and Courier an engine for encouraging the establishment of cotton factories, It was called the Cotton Mill Campaign, which continued for several years. He would publicize every project for starting a factory in Kannapolis, North Carolina, or Gastonia or Columbia or wherever. So I had some little background by the time I went down to talk with the people who had built the mills. It was my good fortune to be able to interview a number of those who had been in on the development from the very start. For example, Mr. Cannon, Sr. had been a merchant in China Grove, North Carolina, I think, a little town. And when it was proposed to establish a cotton factory there or nearby, he was chosen President. He had no industrial experience, but he was a businessman of ability and he had some credit, and he was deputed to rally capital, to induce local people to subscribe, often in the form of their work on the factory itself, brickmasons or carpenters, and a farmer would give his field and take stock in the mill. And then Mr. Cannon would post off to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where the machinery was made, and offer stock in the factory in return for machinery. He would engage an experienced superintendent in New England, and he managed it. His efforts succeeded, and at the time I talked to him, when he was an elderly man, he already had a group of mills, the Cannon Mills. It has since developed much beyond that. But he was more or less typical of those with whom I talked who had gone from a local merchant or banker to be cotton mill president and a great industrialist. I remember people in Greenville and Gastonia and Augusta and other places. Sometimes they were people who had come into the industry a little later; they were younger. Sometimes they were New Englanders who had come down as superintendents of the mills, supplying the technical knowledge and experience. But sometimes they were just public people. I remember one in Greensboro, North Carolina, who was, I think, a local judge or had been a judge or something, and he knew the whole community and what its resources were and how they were gathered to start this adventure in industry. Sometimes they were politicians. I talked to Cotton Ed Smith, for instance, who was a senator from South Carolina and a very prejudiced man who traded on white supremacy and that kind of thing. I remember joining him on a train somewhere in the upcountry of South Carolina. He was very busy but said that if I would join him, say, at Greenville and ride with him to Spartanburg or whatever, and we would talk in the smoking car, and I had a very pleasant meeting with him. And he knew a lot, though he wasn't an industrialist himself. He was aware of everything that was happening in the community. And so with others. One of those who had come into the industry a little later was a Mr. Separk at Gastonia, North Carolina. He had been, I think, the principal of the local school and married the daughter of Mr. George A. Gray, if I'm not mistaken, who was the promoter of several cotton mills in Gastonia. And Mr. Separk had then left teaching for the position of superintendent of the Gray Mills after Mr. Gray's death. I talked with him and with Mr. Gray's son, who helped me very much, a young man. I was sorry I couldn't have met Mr. Gray, because he was one of those who came from the typical southern small mill and was able to develop a great complex of factories. Maybe it's worth saying a word about him. George A. Gray very early went to work in a small cotton factory. I think he was only ten years old. His father was killed, and he had to help to support his mother. And he worked in this little mill, a primitive sort of affair, and was told that on winter mornings he'd have to go out and cut the ice from the water wheel to get a day's run in the factory. By the time he was seventeen or eighteen, his extraordinary mechanical faculties were apparent to people of some means around there. And when they wanted to establish a cotton factory, they sent this young fellow, not more than a youth, up to New England to buy machinery. And when he went up, these men with whom he talked couldn't believe that he was properly deputed or that he knew what he was about. They said to him, "Mr. Gray, where do you come from in North Carolina?" "Pinhook," he said. They said, "What the hell kind of name is that for a town?" "Well," he said, "that's the name of our town, Pinhook." [laughter] I guess it was where he'd worked in this little mill. But he knew all about it, and he got the machinery, and before his death I think he had five mills. The largest, 50,000 spindles, was the Lo-Ray Mill at Gastonia. He was the man who started Gastonia, town and Gaston County, as a great southern industrial center. It became and still is, I think, in many ways, the Pawtucket of the South, so to speak. And it has drained much from New England.

This man was the son of a prominent white man in the community who set his mulatto son up in a cotton mill. It didn't succeed for a number of reasons. Also, blacks were employed in cotton factories in Charleston, but the experience of the employers was not good. I talked with them. It was because the workers were unaccustomed to the rigors of long hours and confinement in a mill and that kind of thing, and they were accustomed to a different kind of life. And in strawberry time, many would leave [laughter] the mills, and when they went oystering they would have a high absent rate.

A lot of the same problems they face with white workers, though.

Yes, I'm sure. I know that. But I was going on to say that the employment of blacks developed gradually. I remember seeing in a mill in Charlotte staircases built on the outside of the factory so that the blacks could get up to the floor where they worked without passing by the white workers in the other departments of the mill. It's been fascinating to see how industrial practice has filtered into a very different society in the South, and to see prejudice diminishing due to many causes. But southern industry generally, I think—or the textile industry, anyway—is a refuge for employers running away from union participation.

. . . actually to leave, but he asked me whether he could introduce me to Mr. Dubinsky, the President of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, and Mr. Fred Umhey, who was the Secretary, and, if they approved, I might try to stand in for him while he was gone. So I was teaching at New York University on a temporary basis, an appointment, by the way, which Lois MacDonald got for me. I had been unemployed for a year after I left Occidental College, and Lois was very kind. And she was teaching in Washington Square College in the Economics Department, and she engineered this invitation to me, and I went there first for a year, I think, and then I stayed on, maybe teaching in the evening, for a year or two afterwards; I've forgotten. Anyhow, I had been there and that was giving out, because everybody was encouraged to take any good opportunity that came along in order to relieve the budget of the University. The University was very good about keeping everybody, if possible, but if you had an opportunity to join the staff of the War Labor Board or something else, it was understood that you would respond. I did, and I had a nice meeting with the officers of the Union, and Lazar invited me to come sit in his office and see what went on in the afternoons after I finished with summer school teaching in the morning at NYU. Well, it was a hard undertaking for me. I knew something about industry and something about unions, but I didn't know anything about the clothing industry or the Jewish-Italian unionists, and none of their officers. And I wondered how I would possibly assume responsibility when Lazar, who was thoroughly familiar with the whole situation, was no longer there. He had a good assistant, Nathan Weinberg, who was a Brooklyn boy and who had grown up in that acquaintance, and Nathan was a great help to me afterwards. But I'll never forget [laughter] how, after Lazar left, I would have a long distance call from St. Louis or from Seattle, Washington, a local union manager who was speaking with a strong accent about things that were utterly unfamiliar to me, and I had to do something. Oh, I would finally make out that he wanted the particular terms of another contract or something of that sort. I thought I would never be able to serve them, really, but Nathan was kind and so were others in the office. We had about ten members of the research staff. And after some months, I got to know the local officers and participated in their problems in numbers of ways, what went on in their office, and our relations with the War Labor Board and with the rest. I never learned Yiddish, but I got so I could at least talk with my employers. And I guess I was in charge for a couple of years before Lazar came back, and then they asked me to stay on as Co-Director, but I didn't want to do that. I couldn't claim any such privilege. And I did continue as consultant for maybe a year more; I don't know. By that time, one of our workers in the Research Department had gone over to Rutgers University to join the Economics faculty because they had an influx of GI's that had come in and they had to expand the Economics Department from maybe six or eight to thirty teachers. And Frank Hauser went over, and Frank suggested to Eugene Agar, who was the head of the department, that he invite me to come, so it was through Frank Hauser that I went from the Union to teaching at Rutgers. I remember I went for the beginning of the second semester. It must have been about 1945 or something like that. And I at first was Visiting Lecturer, and after three years in this rather tenuous status I thought if I was going to stay there I might have a little more in the way of a title and assurance. And a friend in the History Department felt the same way about it, and he helped me in an application for advancement. I was older than a good many that they had on the faculty, and the Dean was very reluctant to give tenure to a person of my age, partly because, I think, the insurance was higher and so on. But a committee was appointed to interview me, and Professor French in the English Department, whom I knew well afterwards, was the chairman of the committee and he seemed sympathetic and asked me what I had published. But they were a little suspicious because I had left Johns Hopkins; I had left Occidental College; I had gone to something different in New York; and so on. But I was made professor, and I remained there until 1958, I think, at Rutgers. I was there, say, nine years. I liked it very much indeed. My term there was memorable to me because it fell in the McCarthy period when the University dismissed three members of the faculty because they had invoked the Fifth Amendment in appearances before the [Un] American Activities Committee or a similar committee in the case of a law professor; I think he was before a different committee. Anatole Murad in the Economics Department, whom I'd known in California, joined several of us: Robert Alexander, who is still at Rutgers, a distinguished professor and a specialist in South American economics; and others; a man from Bowdoin, I remember very well, was active. A couple of people from Princeton came over first and said, "Aren't you going to organize an opposition to this expulsion of colleagues?" And yes, we were. And we organized in every way that we could. A mass meeting of the faculty condemned the action of the trustees. Pretty soon, the Association of University Professors listed Rutgers in its "unfair" list, its blacklist, along with some smaller institutions which hadn't the standing or the experience of Rutgers. The President and the Vice-President or Provost resisted it. We begged them as earnestly as we knew how, and we talked with the Senate of the University and the rest and said, "This is a witch hunt, and don't yield to the prejudices which are so inflamed." But they wouldn't listen, and they didn't take these men back. But the President of the University pretty soon left. I think really his opposition to academic freedom was responsible for his leaving. And they mollified the Association of University Professors. But this ran along for a couple of years, I guess. And one of the men was Moses Finley, who had been a member of the staff of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences at Columbia, and he was a scholarly man whose interest was remote as possible from any of the things that McCarthy was charging. He was a specialist in ancient Greek law, especially real estate law, and he had written a book on that subject, using the markers that were put in the fields showing to whom it belonged and what the survey was and all that kind of thing. Of course he was familiar with Greek and the rest. Well, he was dropped. His wife was a teacher in the public schools of New York, and the University paid his salary for a year so they got along, and Moses wrote a book during that year. But then he was invited to lecture at Oxford for a semester, and after that at Cambridge, and then he became Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University. So a man that wasn't suitable for Rutgers went to the highest post in the academic world in his specialty, in his field of ancient history. We tried in every way to get the University to retract its expulsion of these people, invite them back and so on. They wouldn't do it, but only a couple years ago they did invite Professor Finley to come over and lecture and he did, and they gave him a luncheon. Another man, Heimlich, who taught physics and mathematics in the Pharmacy School and who had been in Rutgers for thirty years and was a much loved professor, couldn't find any academic post. He was skillful as an amateur carpenter, and he got a job with a construction company and later built a house or two himself, I think, in Livingston, New Jersey, but then shifted to selling mutual funds. You see, these people were thrown out of the socket entirely. But Heimlich before very long died of a heart condition. Epstein, the man from the Law School who was Associate Professor there, lost all his clients and so on. He had to resort to writing briefs for other lawyers because he had been condemned, and he had been marked as anti-American. He afterwards went to Puerto Rico and prospered, but died only a year ago. That was the story of the three of them. We went to see the Finleys in Cambridge. They happened to be in Greece so we didn't see them, but I saw him when he came here. He's a fine person and he was going on with publications and so on. Anatole Murad was of great assistance in that. He had been born in Vienna and had come to this country and graduated both in undergraduate and graduate departments at Columbia, and then had taught in California, and was a man of principle and vigor and candor and high intelligence. And Anatole did a great deal to correct a very bad situation at Rutgers. And Rutgers learned a lot from the episode. And afterwards they defended a member of their History Department who was similarly attacked.

A short time afterward?

No, some years. Genovese, who wrote a book, among other things, on southern slavery, and who went then to another university—I think Rochester, perhaps—and now, I believe, is at McGill. And when he was similarly attacked the University came to his defense, and I'm sure that ran back to this earlier episode.

Did you ever feel threatened at all? You had been involved in things that were similar to that, with Elisabeth Gilman in Baltimore, with your stand on.

Somewhat similar. Elisabeth Gilman was a daughter of President Gilman, who organized the first faculty and presided over the earlier years of the Johns Hopkins University, which was a university on a new plan of exclusive devotion to research and graduate work. They hadn't undergraduate classes at that time. And Elisabeth in her girlhood years didn't have the contacts or the opinions for which she was later noted. In her living room were chairs with petitpoint seats that she had made, embroidery and that kind of thing she had done as a young woman. She didn't go to college when she was a girl. Later, when she was in her fifties, she enrolled as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins and took her degree. After her father and mother's death she lived in their home, a fine big house at I think 513 Park Avenue in Baltimore, near the center of the city. And she concerned herself first in the Family Welfare Society. And she was a member of the local board of the Family Welfare Society which had its headquarters on Packer Street, a poor neighborhood. Professor Barnett at Johns Hopkins University was a member of that board, and he very kindly took some of us graduate students to sit in on meetings of the board and hear discussions of cases that the social workers were dealing with. And that was my first acquaintance with Elisabeth Gilman. She would always offer to put in milk or whatever it was for the particular family. But her interests hadn't expanded beyond that. What gave her the impulse toward a different kind of life was having enrolled as a worker in World War I overseas in the hospitals—I think it was hospitals—and she had met there friends, the Mercer Johnsons, who were doing some volunteer work. He was a clergyman who had very similar interests to Elisabeth's. When she came back she took an active part in the Family Welfare Association. And then she went on from that to reviving a Sunday afternoon open forum in Baltimore which had been started by Reverend Richard Hogue, an Episcopal clergyman, who started this in his parish house of the Church of the Ascension. He was a man of very liberal views and in every way an admirable person, whom we all admired. But his was a conservative congregation, and his open forum was viewed askance by some of his supporters. And after several years in which he had held these meetings Sunday evenings after the regular service in the church, that was shifted to a downtown theater on Sunday afternoons. And Hogue was still the principal promoter of that. But for some reason I think Mr. Hogue gave up, or it lapsed for a while, I've forgotten; anyway, Elisabeth Gilman took it over as chairman, and she presided. And she had wide contacts, and her prestige and her family connections enabled her to secure excellent speakers Sunday after Sunday. She would get Harry Elmer Barnes or Scott Nearing or Norman Thomas or the man who later became senator from Alaska, a very fine person whose name I don't recall at the moment, and many, many others. Maverick from Texas I remember, and English people, the girl who married the leader of the British Labor Party afterwards. I've forgotten her first name. And also Henderson, the Secretary of the British Labor Party, came and was Elisabeth's guest. [laughter] I remember he was there for several days, and we had been to an evening meeting or something and came back to Elisabeth's house only to find that the door was locked, and even Elisabeth didn't have a key because she had given the key to a young student who was her house guest. And he'd gone to a dance and she thought he would be back in plenty of time to admit us to the house, but he wasn't, so Mr. Henderson and Elisabeth and I and some others had to sit on the front steps until this young fellow turned up. She continued this with success, took up a collection every Sunday; the expenses weren't very high, and all the speakers came for just their travel expense, I'm sure.

To begin to sort of finish up, I wanted to ask you about the importance of the ties with your family. During all of these years how close were you to your brothers and to your sister? Did you lend each other support? At least you and your brothers were in very similar kinds of work in any case.

Oh, yes, we were each thoroughly acquainted with what the others were doing, and Father and Mother gave every approval of what we were doing. We were separated geographically, partly because my second brother Morris was during much of this time in Buffalo, New York, the head of a country day school; George was in Washington or in Atlanta; and my sister was identified as a volunteer with the People's World College, which my brother Morris had promoted early on the north shore of Long Island, a Quaker College. He wrote a book about it and other similar things afterwards. The students were taken to foreign countries for part of a semester, to North Africa, to Sweden, to Japan, and so on, and it was a college on a wholly different plan, unconventional, to acquaint them with world problems and situations where Quaker philosophy could be applied, perhaps. So we didn't see each other as often as we would have liked. Our bringing up on the campus of Richmond College was sort of like a missionary thing. It was tense, and it was an emotional commitment that my father felt and my mother felt, so we grew up feeling a responsibility to the community. I mean we couldn't escape it. And as we were younger and had different interests and lived in different parts of the country, we branched out into different projects from those that our parents had had. I'm sure that my father was always enrolled as a Democrat, I afterwards as a Socialist and later an Independent. My father had a little political experience which may be worth mentioning in this connection. I remember as a child a telegraph . . .

. . . my father. It was an invitation from the brother of Governor Farrell, I think. The Governor had just died, and his brother asked if my father would be an honorary pallbearer. And my father replied instantly that he had always admired Governor Farrell and of course he would be an honorary pallbearer, and he was. But later he asked the Governor's brother, "Why was I invited to come? I didn't know Governor Farrell." He said, "Well, back in the period of the contest between Bryan and Grover Cleveland over gold, you wrote a letter to a newspaper supporting Governor Farrell as a gold Democrat, and he appreciated that and left directions that you should be honored in any way [laughter] connected with him. And so that's the way it happened. He, however, never raised any eyebrow at my joining the Socialist Party or at Morris's educational projects, which were way to the left. Morris taught in New College at Columbia for several years, which was under the influence of Dewey and Fitzpatrick, and then in his own projects I don't think any educator was to the left of Morris. I've never heard of one. [laughter] But Father thought these were desirable endeavors on our part, and similarly George's work with the Southern Regional Council was closest to what Father had done. George had taken over from Will Alexander, who was the first head of the Southern Regional Council, and he was in that post for I don't know how long, eight or ten years anyhow, much of the time trying to prepare the way for the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court. And one of his last projects was one of his best. The Social Service Division, or some such name, of the Congregational Church invited him to make a color movie of a lecture that he had given many times explaining the racial situation in the South, and it was beautifully produced and my brother gave the most expert presentation in a movie that lasts nearly half an hour called "The Face of the South." Have you ever seen it?

No.

You ought to ask to see it. You'd find a great deal of interest in it. And he rehearsed the background and the foreground of race relations in the South, from the most intimate experience. It's a beautiful thing. And he retired shortly after that, and he and Alice and their two daughters went to Scotland to live. George was named for our great-grandfather, George Sinclair, and had a strong attachment to whatever of the Scotch we had in our family, and they went to Glencoe in the Highlands and built a little house. But he didn't live long after that; he died in 1962, fifteen years ago now. He was the youngest of us and died the first. There was a singular thing in my father's family. He was the youngest of thirteen children, and all of those between the eldest and my father died first. I met my Uncle John, who was then nearly a hundred, in Memphis, and he and my father looked strikingly alike except that Uncle John was much older. But it was an experience I've never forgotten of meeting my father in a different guise, but the same accent, the same manner, the same looks, except for greater age and my uncle was taller.

How does the work which your generation did and the ties between your family extend to the next generation? Why don't you explain just a little bit about your own immediate family and the next generation coming along? Have they followed in any of the same traditions?

My daughter Barbara, who is Mrs. Grove divorced now, is a social worker in Maryland in charge of protecting children in Baltimore County against neglect and abuse. It's a distressing post but a very important one that she occupies. She was in charge of that. She has a little staff of seven or eight who are devoted to that. My son Sidney is a professor of English at Mary Washington College at Fredericksburg, Virginia, thoroughly liberal but not so much concerned with affairs in the community aside from occupying an important place in the life of that college and, to a lesser extent, the town. My daughter Theodora Dyer, who is across the street this summer, is married to a Negro, James Dyer, a very fine person who is a member of the staff of the Carnegie Foundation, which is concerned with opening opportunities in professional education for blacks, particularly, education is James' work. And Theodora herself worked as an assistant in the research department of the Urban League in New York before she was married and I think for a while after she was married. And she graduated from Mount Holyoke College and then studied in the School of Industrial Relations at Cornell. That's where she and James met. She has been consumer protection agent for a part of Westchester County. So these have been her interests, too. And my son Christopher, who's coming here this afternoon, is Associate Professor of Political Science at New York University and is concerned with Latin-American politics and history. He went with us to the University of Puerto Rico for a year when both of us taught there. He was sixteen and had been admitted to Harvard, but he decided to postpone entering Harvard and take a year down in Puerto Rico. And he learned Spanish, and that got him started on South American explorations. His specialty is politics. He knows about it as a student of political science, and I'm sure he has liberal ideas about academic freedom and unionism and social improvement, and so does his wife, who is also a Harvard graduate and a teacher in New Jersey public schools. And so, yes, I guess we are a teaching family. We don't have any clergymen any longer; we used to have clergymen always. But after other related, similar occupations opened in the South, younger people were more apt to become teachers or lawyers or doctors or whatever, businessmen. But I suppose we received our impulse in this direction from our childhood associations and environment. Except for my brother Terry, who is living still in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. He was trained in engineering, first at the University of Delaware and then at MIT, and early took a job which he held for the rest of his life at Frick Company that makes refrigerating machinery. Terry's been an engineer and associated in a business community all his life. Not that he was lacking in sympathy with these things. But first of all, Waynesboro is a rather secluded community; I guess it's about fifty miles northwest of Baltimore, but in Pennsylvania. But he never had the occasion to participate in community affairs in the way that we did. He has worked very hard as a member of the staff of this engineering company. But he's the only one of us that hasn't been identified in one way or another with public projects.

. . . classmate tied for first place.

[laughter]

The colleague's parents had met when her mother, who was a doctor, removed the tonsils of her father, and that and our meeting over corrections and additions to manuscripts were considered to be the most unusual ways in which people had met.

When did you get into teaching? You have been teaching.

For the first three years after I finished my master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania, I taught in a girls' boarding school. It's a life not fit for a dog. [laughter] And after three years I found this interesting job in Washington on the DAB, which added enormously to my fund of information and research techniques and I don't know what-all else. And I went there and lived very happily for several years doing research and some editing and a few original sketches for the DAB. And then when that job was coming to an end, I got a job with the National Resources Committee of the Department of the Interior, which was doing a study of population problems in the United States. And in that connection, incidentally, I knew Rupert Vance. He was a member of our advisory committee and came for meetings several times while I was on that.

I did research and editorial work for that population study. The head of it was Frank Lorimer, who was one of the principal demographers in the United States at the time. I'm not sure whether Frank is still living, but he was a wonderful man to work for and I enjoyed it very much. I left that job when I was married at the end of December, 1936, and I went to Baltimore to live. And I didn't work again from that time until we went to New York to live in the fall of 1942. I got a job then at Adelphi College, and I commuted. We had a sixteen-month-old child, but I did the commuting out. Broadus was at NYU at the time. And that's what got me into college teaching. They were beating the bushes for anybody with any pretensions to academic training, and by that time I had had these other jobs including teaching and had edited a book and done a variety of things. Oh, and Broadus and I did a book together during that period when I wasn't working outside. And so they took me on in the Economics Department. You wouldn't believe what salaries were then. I was offered what was supposed to be a parttime job— this was September, 1942—nine hours' teaching, which would now be considered a fulltime job, for $1,100, and I said, "Sorry, I can do better than that, and if you'll pay me $1,500 I'll come. Otherwise, look for somebody else." So they met my figure. I was also lucky in that I was ushered from the President's office when I arrived for an interview into a room where there was a faculty personnel committee to look me over. And a classmate of mine [laughter] was a member of the committee. She was a member of the Chemistry Department. So that gave me a little kind of entree which I wouldn't otherwise have had. I was on the Adelphi campus two years, the second year of which I divided my time between an affiliated institution in New York preparing teachers for young children. They took their work in New York but got an Adelphi degree, and some of the Adelphi faculty did their liberal arts courses. During that year I had a midday jump twice a week with an hour's leeway between the end of a class in New York and the beginning of a class in Garden City, and I became an expert in broken field running from the subway station where I got off the train to the Long Island track where I took the train that would get me there in time for my class, puffing a little perhaps but nevertheless I made it. The end of that year I was pregnant with our son, and I decided that I really wanted to work only parttime, and so I hung on to the New York part of my job and never went back to Garden City, although I was carried in the Adelphi catalog until Mills, where I was teaching, became an independent, degree-granting institution itself. And I went back to work fulltime when our son was two and a half and ready to go to nursery school. I worked from that time until I was involuntarily retired in the summer of 1972 at the same place, and I enjoyed it very much. It was a free place to teach; I was free to do what I wanted to do; nobody interfered with what I said or did. And the college was a casualty of two things, of the shrinking market for teachers and a greedy neighbor, the New School for Social Research. We were supposed to have an affiliation with the New School, and it turned out that what they wanted was the real estate on Fifth Avenue in lower Manhattan. And all of us were dismissed in the middle of the summer, not precisely how I had planned to retire, although I was of retirement age. And it took me about a year to recover from the rage that that created in my psyche. But since then I've found other things that interest me to do, and I think I'm as busy as I was when I was working. Am I?

Oh, equally so.

The only time I take off is in the summer. I'm a member of the Women's City Club; I'm now the Chairman of its Education Committee. The Women's City Club is an organization of women whose purpose is to know something about life in New York City and to try and make it a little bit better. And one of the things that the Education Committee has done over the years—I've been a member now twenty-odd years—is to do studies of a variety of things that come up in connection with education. And they are, I must say, although I've been responsible for three of them, really first-class pieces of work, which satisfies my research technique and interest. The most recent one that we've done was a study that took us three years, of open admissions in the city university. We decided that it was important that we should investigate what was happening, what had been happening. And it turned out to have been a fortunate time to do it, because we were able to study five years of open admissions just at the point where the financial crisis, the state and public hostility, damaged the program of open admissions to the point where it really can't be so described anymore. And that came out in February, 1976, and since that time, while we haven't been doing any research studies except a little study of reading in the early grades in twenty New York public schools (and I didn't really participate in that), the ongoing work of the Education Committee has pretty much occupied my time.

It sounds like an exciting thing, a good thing.