Description:
Sisters Harriet Sears and Willa Seifert talk about their family's history and about growing up in small town Oklahoma and Oklahoma City.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Harriet J. Sears and Willa J. Seifert
Interviewer: Wendy Gabrielson
Interview Date: October 9, 2009
Interview Location: Ron J. Norick Downtown Library
File Name: Harriet Sears and Will Seifert-mastered.wav
Transcribed By: Katie Widmann
Proofed By: Alex HintonTranscriber’s Note: The two interviewees are sisters. Ms. Sears is the older of the two.
Wendy Gabrielson: My name is Wendy Gabrielson, and I am here interviewing Harriet Jane Sears and Willa Jean Seifert as part of our Oklahoma Voices program here at the Downtown Library. Today is October 9, 2009. Why don’t you all start? Please tell me your full name and your birth date.
Harriet Sears: Harriet Jane Sears. I was born 5-6-37 in Watonga, Oklahoma.
Willa Seifert: I’m Willa Jean Seifert. I was born February 19, 1944, in Pampa, Texas.
WG: Okay, that’s where you were born. Where did you all grow up, then?
HS: Mainly in Oklahoma during World War II. Willa said she was born in Pampa. We were there. I was about six years old when we went there. Willard, my dad, was part of the civilian work force at the air base. He was an airplane inspector, and one of his duties was if a plane crashed— this was a field for the B-17s, and when the pilots came in, most them only had fifteen or twenty hours flying the B-17. If they crashed, then he had to go and inspect the plane and see why it did. One of the things that he did do was they were having a lot of problems with that plane crashing, and he found the reason for it and he was given a citation from the government for it. That was a feather in his cap. Prior to that time, as I said, I was born in Oklahoma, and Mother and Dad lived in Canton. Well, my dad lived in Canton, Oklahoma and my mother lived in Longdale. Billie was from – Billie Buck is my mother – and she was from Mena, Arkansas. She grew up there, and my grandfather, William D. Allen and his wife Bertie, lived first in Rocky, which was a little town that about the only way you could get to it was by mule. Then they moved down to Potter, which was a little bit better, and then they moved to Mena and bought a sawmill. My granddad ran that. In the meantime, my mother and her sister, Helen and Jean, were growing up. Bertie was my granddad’s second wife. His first wife died and he married. He had 11 children by his first wife. All the sons except one died. All that was left were the daughters, and there was – how much detail do you want me to go into with all this?
WG: As much as you...
HS: I could stay in this area forever, but I’ll just kind of skip through. Anyways, she had the half-sisters that lived with them, and then I don’t know the story of how they ended up in Kansas City, but the half-sisters all ended up in Kansas City, which was Edna and Florence. Then it was Mother’s goal to also go to Kansas City. It was the goal of maybe all the young people in Mena because the train from Chicago, the fancy limited, took an excursion train to Galveston. It would go through Mena and all the kids in that little town would see it. Kansas City was one of the big cities, one of the roaring towns in the Midwest. Mother took piano and she decided that she wanted to try – I guess she learned from her teacher about the Kansas City Conservatory in Kansas City. She worked and worked, and she took two years in one in high school, so she graduated when she was fifteen. She played for a scholarship and she got a scholarship, and she and her sister Helen were off to Kansas City.
WG: About what year was that? Do you have any idea what year?
HS: No, but I wish I did. It was in the ‘20s. Mother was born in 1913, and she was fifteen, so it was probably, what?
Willa Seifert (WS): about 1928.
HS: Off she went, and Helen didn’t stay. Florence came back. She came back to Arkansas, but Anne and Edna by that time were married. She had her half-sisters there, but she got a work study and she played the piano for the dance class. Her roommate was a dance major. The first two years – she was there four years, but the first two years she just studied piano. The next two years she took other classes, but because she did that, the Depression came and it was time for my uncle to go to college. Grandpa didn’t have any more money for her to stay, so she had to come back. By the time she came back, there had been a fire at the sawmill in Mena and it burned up. He had put his home up for collateral, so the bank took that, took everything he had. He had a brother that was here in Oklahoma running a cotton gin. My granddad knew how to do that, so he told him to come out there. My mother came back instead of going to (unintelligible – not Mena) Arkansas, they ended up in Sayre first, which is out on the plains. They weren’t there very long before they moved to Longdale. Mother, in order to earn money, started teaching piano and when she left the Conservatory, she took all the dance routines that she had played for at the college, plus her roommate gave her all the dance routines she had. She could have a lot more pupils in a dance class than she could teaching piano, so she did both. There were about four towns in northwest Oklahoma. She went to a dance class in Watonga, Seiling, Canton, and Fairview. She would travel around and, in the meantime, my dad had a dance band.
WG: For the record, the mother that you’re referring to is Billie Buck.
HS: Right.
WG: And this is Willard Buck?
HS: Yes. He had a dance band that played on Saturday nights. She met him –
WG: What instrument did he play?
HS: He played the saxophone. They would go out – keep in mind, there were no paved roads, hardly, out there. My dad said there was many a time they were out and it’d been raining, and the roads out there would just turn to red gumbo. They were pushing themselves out. My dad, his family came to Canton in 1907 just at statehood. That was Clarence Isaac Buck, they called him “C.I.,” and Bessie Pearl was his wife. He had run a lumberyard and it was Big Jill Lumberyard in Kansas, and they asked him to go to Canton to run their lumberyard there. They moved there and my grandma said they told them they would have a house there. Well, when they got there, the house was a tar paper shack. I guess they were able to – being that he worked in a lumberyard, they were able to get some wood to improve it a little bit.
WG: Do you know, by chance, how they traveled at that time? How did they get from Kansas to Canton?
HS: Probably the train was going through there. Because things weren’t very mechanized then, I imagine they had to come by train. My mother said that when her parents moved from Arkansas, it was by wagon train. I’ve never seen where or how they got there, so it could be train. At that time, Canton was the Cheyenne-Arapaho-Kantomit. There were a lot of Indians there, and at that time, they didn’t put this tribe of Indians on a reservation. They were each given 160 acres. Because they were such warriors, they didn’t want to really farm. There were some who did, but not too many. My dad knew a lot of the early Indians there just because they were there. My granddad always wanted to be a farmer, so he farmed on the side and my dad helped him. My dad cared nothing about farming. He worked in the lumberyard, and when the Model T or Model A came out – I don’t know which one it was, but it was Ford – he ordered one through a magazine or a paper. They shipped it to him all in pieces, and then when it came, he put it all together.
WG: Wow. That’s interesting.
HS: He was very mechanical. He was probably the first one in the area to put lights on a combine so he could cut wheat at night, and anything he could put together mechanically, he would do it. He also was musical. He and my mother met that way, and that’s how their romance started.
WG: So they met at the...
HS: The Saturday night dance. Mother said that my dad had a woman piano player. Her name was Happy Hagler [pronounced, ‘Hague-ler’]. She was really good, playing that jazz and stuff. Mother was a classical pianist, but she thought that she could do this. So she talked my dad into letting her try out. She said she wasn’t very good, so Happy got her job back. Anyway, they got married (unintelligible). What did the marriage certificate say? I don’t remember what it was. I was born in ’37.
WS: ’34.
HS: Okay, they were married in 1934. They went off and got married. They didn’t marry in Canton. Mother said Grandma Buck told them to go get married [HS pauses briefly until prompted by WS] in Arapaho, Oklahoma. Then when they got back, my dad was also working at that time in Southard, which has a gypsum mill that is still in existence today. They had a big reception there because they had a big rec hall. Everybody was invited out there. After that, my dad worked out there and Mother still taught. She would never stop teaching. I came along, and when I was about three years old was also when Shirley Temple was the darling of the United States and the world. Everybody wanted their little girl to look like Shirley Temple and dance, so I started dancing. My Grandma Allen, my mother’s mother, was a great seamstress. She made all my dance costumes. My mother took me – I had straight brown hair and Shirley Temple had all of these curls. At that time they had all these permanent machines for – these steel things that had rods running down. There were steel wires and they had rods on the end, and it was done by electricity.
WG: Oh wow.
HS: They permed my hair, and my hair was so fine that when they took the rods out, I had no hair.
[all laugh]
WG: A little electrical shock to the hair, there!
HS: There was nothing left. Anyway, I recovered from that. One other incident – I danced. We were in Canton probably two or three more years, and there were boys also in this class. And in fact, when Mother died, we got on the web, a comment from one of the boys that was in her class. He’s a grown man now, probably my age. He said how much fun he had, and he reviewed one of the dances that he did when Mother was teaching. I danced, did a little routine with another Hagler. His name was Kenny Hagler. It was a little blackface dance. We ended up being brownface because all we could find was cocoa, so they made a stain out of cocoa and put it on our faces and our hands. Lo and behold, after the dance it wouldn’t come off. We were little brownfaces for a while.
WG: At that time, you had mentioned there were a lot of Native Americans in the area. Was that a controversial dance? Were there a lot of Blacks in the area at that time?
HS: There were no Blacks. In Watonga there was, because they raised a lot of cotton around Watonga. There was really nothing for a Black person to be unless you were a farmer or owned a business, because it was so small that all of the settlers that came were mainly white people. When my granddad came, he came in 1907. When we were looking at the abstracts of the farmland we own now, he didn’t buy those until the ‘30s when the Depression came and some people lost their farms. He wasn’t able to buy anything until that time. The Indians were given their land there, so they already had their land. And as I said, most of them at that time would not farm, so they leased their land to other farmers who were farming. They did have a bad problem with alcoholism. I remember growing up in the early days, on the weekends they’d be sitting on the curb in town and they were all drunk. The whole curb would be lined with drunk Indians. It was really bad. I’m sure that problem is still there but it’s not like it was. One of the stories that was told me by my dad was my grandpa, when he retired from the lumberyard he farmed full time. He was going out to buy bulls from different people, and one of the guys he bought from was name Fred Bull. He was a full-blood Indian and he farmed and raised cattle. He had really good bulls, so he went out there one day to see about getting one, and Fred came out and said he didn’t farm anymore. My dad asked why not. Because of the Indian society, if one had something, then the others had a right to come and ask for it. He had something because he’d farmed, but they’d come and ask for it and he had to give it to them. He ended up with nothing. He said he got tired of handing it out and said, ‘I make more living off the government and leasing this land than I do doing it myself.’ That was a sad statement. I don’t know if that still continues or not. Anyway, one little thing I forgot to say is that my grandad’s initials were ‘C.I.’ Well my dad’s name was Will Tracy, but all the townfolk called my dad “Ci.” [Transcriber’s Note: pronounced like “sigh.”] If you go down there today and you know any people my dad’s age, they still call him “Ci” because of my granddad.
WG: How did he get that name? Did he look like him?
HS: No, C-I. Ci. It was just how they said the initials. So anyway, they stayed there and then my dad got an offer to go work for the lumberyard in Enid, Oklahoma and we moved there. While we were there, World War II started. Mother taught piano there and belonged to the Music Club. And then my dad, when the war came, went out to work at Civil Service; and that’s when they sent him to Pampa. At the first of the story, that’s when I told you about him being there and that’s where Willa was born, of course. Mother taught dancing and piano during the war in Le Force. We actually lived in Le Force, Texas, which was a blink of an eye and you go through it. But had this huge school because there were oil camps. And at that time, they provided housing for the workers. They lived out there and they came into Le Force for school. There were hardly any children in Le Force. If I wanted to play, I had to go out there or they came to my house.
WG: To the oil camps?
HS: Uh-huh. They really had nice houses. I was impressed. Better than the one I had. But then, after the war—
WG: So there must be a station there? Willard was stationed there in Pampa, Texas and you were just there for that duration?
HS: For a short time, yeah. It was called Pampa Air Force Base. It doesn’t exist anymore. Once the war was over, it was dismantled. Then we went back to Enid and Mother started up and had her piano lessons. By that time she had stopped teaching dancing and just taught piano. She was always gung ho. I took – Willa wasn’t old enough yet –
WS: First grade, I think I started.
HS: At that time, my dad started to work for RexAir, which was the vacuum cleaner. Prior to that time, there was no electricity in rural areas. The REA was formed to provide electricity for all of the rural areas in Oklahoma.
WG: And REA stood for?
HS: Rural Electric Association, or something like that, which was a wonderful thing for the people who lived in the country. One story I can tell is when my Uncle Gene was in World War II, he was stationed in Iceland, and he married an Icelandic girl. We happened to find a letter when we were going through the stuff where he broke it to his parents that he was getting married and she was from Iceland, and there was going to have to be a lot of adjustment. Anna did not know how to cook or keep house because her father would never allow it. She was very wealthy. The Navy arrange to get them to – she and her best friend. Her best friend married a copilot of my uncle’s plane. They got them to New York, the Navy, during the war, which was very unusual. Then Anna went to his parents’ house to live, and they lived out in the country. Here was this pampered girl going to rural northwest Oklahoma without electricity, without indoor plumbing, stuck out in the country. I can’t imagine how she made it until the war was over. I guess she did. Anyway, when they did get electricity, my dad was working for the vacuum cleaner business, so he just followed the electric line, and when he saw they were putting electricity in, he would go and sell them a vacuum cleaner.
WG: That was smart.
HS: Yeah. He was made branch manager, and they ended up in Oklahoma City. My mother still continued her piano lessons and she joined the Ladies’ Music Club. They were broken up into divisions. There was a Ladies’ Music Club and pianist’s division, and she was in both. She was President many times, and she was just a very determined lady, I think you would say, because to have gone from a little town in Mena, Arkansas up to Kansas City and made her way, and then went to Oklahoma and did the same thing. She never gave up on what she wanted to do.
WG: Back to a little bit earlier time. Do you remember any other specific stories that they used to tell you about their childhoods, or their parents, or when they were growing up? Are there any stories that stick out in your mind?
HS: They were all, especially in my dad’s family, very closed-mouthed. We never did know too much. As far as what happened before my grandparents came to Oklahoma, I don’t know. I know that my dad said that he played baseball. The Indians were very good at playing baseball and they had a lot of Indians on their team, and they were always winning. They were the number one team. He said that when he was in high school, they all went out and caught a cow and took it up on the second story of the school and left it.
WG: A live cow?
HS: A live cow, yes.
WS: For a practical joke?
HS: Yeah. My grandmother said that when – was it you who asked when my dad started smoking? She said, “Six.” I doubt that, but he was very independent. My grandparents probably were the most liberal parents you ever saw because he did whatever he wanted to, even from a young age. My grandmother loved chicken. They would always butcher every year and they had plenty of whatever they wanted, but she fixed chicken all the time. My dad said he went downtown and had a hamburger practically every night instead of chicken. All I know is that my dad was very well-liked and everybody knew him, and if there was anything you wanted built or done, he knew how to do it. If he’d gone to college, probably he could have been an engineer or anything he wanted to be. But he chose the life that he did, and he was successful with what he did. Mother, when in Mena, practically everybody was related to one another. There were big families. She said all of her friends were cousins. We’ve gone down several times and I think just about everybody is gone except one set of cousins that was there.
WG: When you were talking about putting the electrical lines out in the rural area, you said after the war. About what year was that?
HS: It was in the ‘50s.
WG: In the ‘50s? That late?
HS: Yeah.
WG: So then what was it like for you two growing up? What was your childhood like? What was your daily living like? Did you have an outhouse? What did you use? You had indoor plumbing?
HS: No. We lived in town so we had indoor plumbing. It was a small house, but it had all of the needs.
WG: Did you have electricity then?
HS: Yes. My grandpa loved horses and my dad loved motorcycles. So my grandpa started putting me on horses when I was three years old, and my dad gave me a ride. We lived probably a half-mile from where my grandparents did in Canton. He put me on the motorcycle to go down there and the tailpipe wasn’t covered. My leg touched it and burned it, and I never got on a motorcycle again and I haven’t since. There was certainly a lot more – when I was growing up and going to the farm— there was certainly a lot more freedom than you would ever allow your child to do today. Like I said, my grandparents were very liberal. They trusted you to do what you were supposed to do. I would, and Willa would too, take off on the horse and go and have a day. They wouldn’t have any idea where we were. There was no such things as cell phones or whatever. We would always return.
WG: What was the most trouble the two of you ever got into then?
WS: I remember my grandpa reprimanding me one time. There’s probably more. He was a big man. He was about six feet and very gentle. I was riding the Shetland pony just out and about, and Shetland ponies have a mind of their own. When I was coming back to stop at the barn, he went straight because the pasture was about a half a mile down the road. I was very little, and I was yanking and pulling on the bridle trying to stop this pony and he wouldn’t do it. I started screaming and yanking and pulling and he wouldn’t stop, and then I started crying because I was so mad. Then the saddle was loose, so I kept going over to the side. I was really screaming then, but he still wouldn’t stop and I wouldn’t get off until the saddle had gotten underneath the pony. I fell off, and the pony walked over me and went down to the pasture. I ran home and I was crying and I told my grandpa about how the pony went on down to the pasture and how bad he was. He said, “You turn right around and walk over to that pasture and you bring that pony back here.” I had to quit crying and go over there and get it. That was the most fierce I think I’d ever seen my grandpa.
HS: I was so perfect I don’t remember anything.
WG: Never got into trouble, huh?
WS: I can remember lots of things.
WG: What kinds of things did you guys do for fun? You were obviously riding horses but –
HS: Well, when we lived in Enid, I had friends – when we lived in Canton, I was too young to really remember anybody. In Canton, the first time maybe I didn’t. I was still pretty young. Then after the war, we moved back to Enid and there was a little circle of friends all around us. One of the things I remember is Enid had a big public swimming pool. So in the summertime we’d get on the bus and go down and swim. Then polio would come, and they had to close the pool and no one could go swimming anymore. We weren’t afraid, but I’m sure our parents were very afraid. You could walk and say, “Well, that person had polio.” On the block, there was a family that one of their children had it. This went on until they did find a cure. Then, Saturday afternoon movies, we always went to the Saturday afternoon movies. Mother would make me drag Willa. I always hoped it was a scary movie so I could scare her to death. I could do that pretty well.
WS: Yes, she could.
WG: How much were the movies then, and did you get to see more than one?
[WG and HS talking over each other]
HS: Probably ten cents. Ten cents. I remember also there was a little restaurant down in downtown Enid. We probably lived two or three miles from downtown. There was a little restaurant called Dan & Bakes. And like I said, my dad loved hamburgers. You could drive down there on Friday nights and get ten hamburgers in a sack. They were probably not much bigger than the White Castle’s are. You could get ten of them for $1.
WG: Wow.
HS: We’d go down and get those and bring them home. Enid was a really nice little town. It was mid-sized and they had a square. Of course, now it’s grown so I think they have a whole— out on the highway is all the big stores, Dillard’s and all that stuff now. My grandparents would come over. My grandmother would come over maybe once a month and go shopping or whatever. She would always use the excuse for buying all these clothes, that she didn’t know if she was going to be here next year so she better be buying them now.
[WG and WS laugh]
HS: That day was always memorable, because she never stopped. She was a real goer. She could outwalk anybody. I always enjoyed my time in Enid more than I did in Oklahoma City, really.
WG: You said you got on the bus to go into town. There was an actual city bus system or something?
HS: Yeah. There was. When we lived in Oklahoma City, of course there was a bus. When I went to John Marshall, they did not have school buses. We had to ride the city bus, and where I lived in The Village, you’d have to take a city bus to 63rd and Western and change buses. Then it would take you back out to Britton, and you’d get off and you’d have to walk about four or five blocks to get to school. Sometimes I would, in the afternoons, I would just walk home. It was straight across, whereas to have to do all this transferring stuff. We did that when I was in high school.
WG: Did you ever ride the Inter-Urban? Did you know about the Inter-Urban?
HS: That was before me. We would sometimes ride the bus downtown on a Saturday with a couple of my friends, because all the stores were still downtown, like John A. Brown and all of them. They were still here. It was a special trip to do. Also, the US Navy had a naval station in Norman, and all the sailors would sometimes come to Oklahoma City on Saturday afternoon. We didn’t do anything except sit in the drugstore and talk to them, but we did that.
WG: That was the highlight, to see the sailors come into town. For all the girls, anyway.
HS: Yes.
WG: Where did you all go to school here in Oklahoma City?
HS: [HS begins to have a coughing fit here.]
WS: Well, there’s seven years’ difference between my sister and I. I don’t remember any buses or any transportation things. I went to high school at Harding, and it was more of a – they called it a college preparatory school then. They were experimenting with – you had to have a higher grade point. First, I started at John Marshall, but it just wasn’t working myself and my little group of friends. So our mothers all transferred us to Harding. It was a really good school and an enjoyable time.
WG: Then you went on to OU?
WS: I went on to OU and that was a really good experience. As my family knows, I’m a big OU Sooner fan and so is my sister. We call each other when things are good, but we never speak when it goes bad. We’re pretty big fans, long distance most of the time.
HS: [clears throat] Well, as I said, I went to John Marshall and when I’m talking about riding the buses, this was before I had a driver’s license. Riding the bus to school, I never did have a car to drive to school. If I ever drove anywhere it was after school and I would drive my mother’s car. The first time that they got a second car was -- my dad was a real fanatic about cars. He loved cars. We always had a fairly new car, because he liked to try out the newer ones. When we lived in Enid after the war, be bought—because he was traveling so much Mother needed a car— He bought this, probably a 1930s, car. It was black and we called it “The Bomb” because it was shaped just like a bomb. It was huge, but it had no shape. It was just one big round black thing. That was the first one. And then when I turned 16, I had not had driver’s ed or anything like that. All I had done was drive things to my mother, and then when I was at the farm, I would drive the pickup out in the pasture. The day that I turned 16, Mother was teaching and I poked my head in the door and I said, “I’m going to get my driver’s license.” She didn’t take me. I drove myself over there. They came out to give me my test and I told them, “I don’t parallel park and I don’t park on a hill.” He said, “Okay. I’ll mark you off on those.”
WG: Well, that was nice of him.
HS: Wasn’t it? I passed the rest of it so I got my driver’s license.
WS: Wow. Things changed.
HS: Yeah, they do.
WG: We’re probably winding down a little bit, so let me just say were there some things that maybe I didn’t ask you that you’d like to talk about? We kind of jumped around.
HS: Yeah, we did.
WG: Are there any stories or anything that you’d like to have on the record that we haven’t gotten to yet?
HS: Well, I wrote down a bunch of stuff but maybe not in an orderly manner. Most of it –
WS: I think it should be said that, and I think we kind of said it, that we really had a good childhood. I think that our grandparents had a big part in that, because we loved horses and we had such a loving, gentle grandpa. There are a lot of good memories from that. I think growing up in Oklahoma City in the ‘50s and ‘60s was also a real positive. I would say, at least for me, that our parents were strict. They were not liberal. I hated it at the time, but I think that probably, as I look back, they kept me out of a lot of trouble. I thought it was a good place to grow up. I really have good memories of growing up in Oklahoma City.
HS: I do too.
WG: Doesn’t it seem a little bit generational? Your great-grandparents were very liberal. Your grandparents were still liberal, and then your parents were strict. How do you guys view yourselves?
WS: I don’t know. That’s a good question.
HS: I would say I was certainly not liberal. I tried to be strict but of course John was part of the parenting. We didn’t let them run around until two or three in the morning. They got grounded and all that stuff. But we were so good we never got grounded. [WG and WS laugh]
WS: That’s why our grandparents were so liberal.
HS: I don’t know why my grandparents were that way, but they were.
WS: Well, they lived in a little town and wasn’t a lot you could do, probably.
HS: Right, but even with us they never set rules or anything. Anyway, I would think, as Willa does, that we had a great growing up time.
WG: When you think about growing up and having such a wonderful childhood and everything, is there any, just as a final end to the interview, are there any important lessons that you really learned and would like to pass on?
HS: Well, for me, I think because my parents and grandparents were so liberal – when I was at home, there was a lot of – you could go and do things, but there was always a time limit or whatever. You were always safe. When I was at the farm, I had to learn to rely on my own if I got into a pickle or whatever. In that respect, you learn to be self-reliant. That was teenage years, and maybe I could have gotten into a lot of trouble, but I didn’t. In that respect, [clears throat] I thought that helped me when I was growing up. Then later I could work my way out of trouble. There were a few times that I got into trouble. There was a few times I was riding my horse around the lake and I got in quicksand and there not a soul around and he was up to his belly in mud. I managed to get out, but I had to get him out and I finally did. It could have been bad.
WG: That’s very scary.
HS: In those ways, I think that was good.
WS: I think that we did learn. I was very shy growing up and I came out of that. I think that learning self-reliance, working through problems, being on a farm – maybe that is a part of that. Gaining confidence. I guess I would like to think on that a little more. I hadn’t thought about the lessons I learned because I’m sure there are a lot that we could pull from all that experience.
HS: Also of course all the piano that we learned. Mother making us go in there and do it.
[all talking over each other]
WG: Well, I think that was probably her example. She was probably very instrumental as far as her determination and going off to Kansas City in the ‘20s.
HS: Well, we didn’t know all that when we were growing up. We didn’t know that because, like I said, they were closed-mouthed and you had to drag stuff out of them. It wasn’t until Mother was older that we learned a lot of stuff. She didn’t let you off the hook.
WS: No. You had to do it. You had to practice every day. I think maybe we wouldn’t have the self-discipline we have so much, except if there was chocolate around. That probably did contribute.
HS: And good grades.
WG: Well, thank you all very much for coming and doing this interview for us. It was wonderful.
WS: Thank you. I enjoyed it.
HS: Thanks.
End of interview.