Q:
What was it like to grow up in Kansas City?
:A
Well, Kansas City has always been kind of spread out, so—typical Midwest town. We have lots of room, so we use all of it. I grew up on both sides of the state line: Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri. We moved around a lot, but we were always pretty much in this area. I did spend five years of my childhood in Iowa, so that was a little bit different, because any time there was a holiday or any reason, really, we came back to Kansas City. We always considered it our home base, even though I didn’t necessarily have one house that I considered home, because we moved around a lot. But I guess Kansas City in general was home. We rarely went to downtown Kansas City, Missouri. There seemed to be a lot of crime and that sort of thing at that time, but that has been all revitalized now and there’s so much new things to do and it doesn’t seem as scary as it used to be when I was a kid. It was always touted as being a scary place, but I don’t really see that now at all, so I think that’s a good change.
Q:
Growing up, who was your role model?
:A
My maternal grandmother was my role model. My Grandma was a kind and loving person who had suffered many trials in her life. She was left by two husbands, and then the third one died. She had eleven children and little to no education. She was born in 1911 and grew up on a farm in Ransom Kansas. She would tell stories of riding to “town” on the back of a wagon to sell their vegetables and she rode a cow to school at a one room school house as they only had two horses and those were being used in the fields. She survived two World Wars and the Great Depression.
She grew up in the Depression and she grew up on a farm, so she saved everything that she could possibly use. You hear stories of people saving tinfoil and twist ties and things like that, and she always saved those things. She would save these little berry baskets all year long, any time she would buy berries, and she had lots and lots of grandchildren, as you would imagine, with eleven kids. She would make these little Easter baskets out of these little berry baskets and pipe cleaners, or whatever, and she would always put a couple extra pieces of candy in mine and say, “don’t tell anyone, you’re my favorite!” She would always do that. But I was also the one sitting there and making baskets with her every time, too. I was also the one who would take her to the grocery store with my mom. I was always the one who was there every weekend. So, I think it was kind of funny that she would do things like that all of the time—“don’t tell anyone, you’re my favorite.” She was funny.
I guess I always felt like she was a survivor and still seemed to smile and make do with what she had, and tackled problems as they appeared and only when they appeared. Some of her kids had a world of trouble and I know she worried about them but she always seemed at least to me as a child to be happy. Now as an adult, I wonder how she did that. She died before I was able to get married and she never met my husband or children. I wish so much that she had. When she was at the end of her life, she lived with us, and I put off going away to college so that I could care for her. I was her primary caregiver until the end even holding her hand as she passed away when I was 19 years old.
Q:
What was your school like?
Well, it was very small. I had ten people in my class, nine of which were girls, so not a lot of dating choices there. No one wanted to date him anyway; he was kind of a goober. It was just really small, and I feel like my parents chose to put us in that situation to protect us from the outside world. Even as a small child, like I said, we didn’t have a lot of money. We were living in an area where the public school wasn’t the best. Now, as a parent, looking back, I see that. But as a child, it was very awkward to go to a school that nobody else was going to. . .We had one Bunsen burner for the whole school to share. We never got to touch it. The teacher did all the experiments, if they did any. There weren’t any advanced classes. I was really good at math, but I took all the math classes they offered, and the highest one was Algebra II. There was nowhere to go. There was nothing to do. We had limited sports activities. Basically, if you tried out for a team, you made it, because they needed the bodies. We did things, and we made the best of our little world, but it was very exclusive and very little: very closed-minded but also very closed physically, because there weren’t that many of us. . .in that environment, they mostly looked at women—I know it’s a very old-fashioned way, and we think that it didn’t happen in the eighties and nineties, but it did—they looked at women as a very traditional, female role. And nobody really encouraged us to go to college, unless you were going to find a husband. And then, it was “go to a Christian college,” and I didn’t know what else to do. I felt like I had to do that, because what else do you do?
:A
Q:
How did you start working at a bank?
My grandmother got very sick and lived with us, and so I worked at a bank, and it was pretty much down the road from where we lived, so I could come home and check on her, and so I would come in and check on her on my breaks, and then I was her primary caregiver when I wasn’t at work. I just chose to go to the local community college after that, because I knew I was good at numbers, and I needed to do something with numbers, so that’s kind of how that worked. . . I didn’t have a lot of working experience, and I don’t know. It seems like now that that would be a lot to put on an eighteen or nineteen-year-old person, but I always seemed to end up taking on responsibilities like that. I was the oldest of two children, which isn’t a lot, but I was the oldest, so I was always left home alone. When my parents went to college, I was always in charge and home alone. I was cooking dinner every night when I was in fourth grade. That was just part of my responsibilities. You are just told to do it. It sounds like a lot now, but it didn’t seem like a lot then, it just seemed like that is how it was.