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MARY FREDERICKSON:

When you think about your family background, do you have any sense of how your own values, the values that led you into such progressive causes later, where they came from in that background?

MARY PRICE ADAMSON:

I have wondered about that. The only answer I have that I was very much influenced by my sister Mildred, but that isn't an adequate answer. Mildred got an M. A. in sociology at the University of Chicago, and then she got acquainted with the YWCA when she was in Chicago. She went to work for the YWCA as the industrial secretary. I was of an impressionable early teen age, and she was working in Lynchburg, Virginia. I went up to stay at the YW camp with her, and there was just a whole new approach to life as far as I was concerned. Mildred is a very decisive kind of person. She never takes a mild stance. She has keen ideas. She and Branson both were much influenced by men they met-Edward Linderman, a sociologist, who was at the Women's College in Greensboro when they were there. He befriended them and my sister Teenie also and had a tremendous influence. He was an editor later of the New Republic. He was concerned with what was going on in the world. So I got from them that interest in current events, current affairs. But there must have been other things, but I have never been able to figure out just what they were.