ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH DR. CAROLYN RHODES Digital Services Center, Perry Library Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia Part 6:  June 12, 29 and July 17, 2009 by Karen Vaughan   Listen to Interview Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Biblio

Vaughan:  This is June 12th now and we’re probably on the last part of our interview with Carolyn Rhodes.  We’ve covered a lot and we’re kind of wrapping up, so I want to know what have been your chief satisfactions, during your time at ODU?

Rhodes:  In my teaching, I've enjoyed creating courses I didn't foresee when I was in graduate school, like science fiction that I’ve discussed and some of those interdisciplinary studies, including psychological perspectives for many of them. I've already described a few favorite courses I developed while I was a Fulbrighter in Romania and in China. But probably I haven't emphasized enough that teaching has been my most steady focus, even while I volunteered a lot of time for activist causes. What has mattered most to me has been trying to encourage students to become eager readers as well as thoughtful ones. My literature classes let me have students read fiction, poetry, essays and often books about issues, along with scholarly criticism.

I was 30 years old before I settled on this career rather than one in Psychology. When I began to prepare, I was twelve years older than most graduate students in English at the University of Kentucky. From 1959 to 1965, as I completed my MA and then my PhD, I taught but only part time and mostly first-year students -- lots of composition classes and not much literature. I was 44 years old in 1969 before I was ready to teach at ODU with a fulltime schedule including advanced classes in literature.

During my 25 years here on the faculty I kept re-discovering what a wide range of reactions students can have to any assignment. That happened in first year composition classes and sophomore surveys but most often with seniors and graduate students writing much more complicated papers. Their varied responses kept my work interesting when the assignments were the same from section to section and more so with individualized courses. Of course not every student can become an ardent reader, the kind who's excited about moving beyond plot to theme and craft and symbolism and ambiguities. Some resist searching for meaning in grim events and sad endings. Still those who find joy in reading   typically became meditative. It's always a special joy for me too, to watch students care deeply about what they read, and mull over it.

Robert Frost says "Poetry, like love, begins in delight and ends in wisdom." With that analogy of literature to love, he's stretching out, widening his insight so that he says “enjoyment can lead toward deep recognitions.”

When I try to describe how reading and studying can become transcendental experiences, I'm certainly not satisfied with these explanations. Maybe you need to have been there -- transported by books, transformed by books. So I turn to another aspect of teaching that has meant a lot to me.

I didn’t foresee this – designing courses – I really like to do that.  It’s officially called curriculum development. I knew that my college teachers liked to decide which survey textbooks to assign and for their advanced classes of course added their own choices of authors to mix with required classic works, and so did I. As a founding teacher in ODU's Honors Program, I was asked to develop the first sophomore Survey of Literature for Honors Classes. The students--honors students were, of course, both bright and striving -- and their classes were small – lots of ideal circumstances for a teacher.

My first involvement with Asian studies came in the 1970's when I was asked to create a guide for introducing the Haiku into the poetry section of our survey of literature.  I gathered definitions and translations of this short Japanese form – 17 syllables in the original so that teachers in the many sections of the course that we were teaching could choose examples of Haiku poetry as they were translated into English.  I also recommended texts where they could study further and find more examples.  Then team teaching.

Team teaching gave me the chance to join with colleagues to develop syllabi. In our classrooms, we let students hear our contrasting viewpoints, so we learned from them and from each other.  We represented different disciplines -- one from the humanities – me -- and the other usually from social sciences. I've already spoken of colleagues who joined me in teaching science fiction courses, in our course on death and dying and in the introduction to women's studies. Many of the courses we initiated continued later and were taught by other faculty. The two I developed on utopias, however, were not subjects that someone here could take over.         

Vaughan:  OK, earlier you mentioned that the reference book that you edited first led you to offer courses in autobiography as a genre.  How did that all develop?

Rhodes:  I may have spoken of aspects of how it all developed earlier but to put it in orderly sequence I had this original interest in women's autobiography because I was trying to find good examples; examples of achieving women telling in their own voice how they chose their fields of endeavor and then succeeded. Entries for my reference book about those autobiographies were submitted by over 200 contributors; all of them like me wanted to help women's studies teachers to find real-life narratives to counterbalance the grim fates that were being dramatized in fiction. As I said before, the novels and stories of the ‘50s, ‘60s, and a long time after too often showed women becoming victims or passively leading stereotyped lives. As I was assembling so many narratives by women who defined their own existence, their own choices I found that a number of books to be featured in First Person Female American met high literary standards. So I began to design courses on women's autobiographies both as English Department offerings and elsewhere. One that I mentioned earlier included men's life narratives as well as women's, but generally I focused on women and mostly twentieth century women.

Most frequently during the 1980's, I taught multiple versions multiple . . . revisions and different reading lists to go with a course I call "When Women Tell." I could give it for credit as a women’s studies course and students there would be required to recognize the literary merits of the writings, while we were also analyzing factors--aspects related to women's issues.

Coincidentally, at that time certainly by the 1980s popular interest in life stories began to surge. Narratives told-as-­true, continue to sell very well, and to compete with novels. Also my colleagues in other departments became interested in leading students to life records and would make assigned readings or corollary readings. Plus people were more convinced by testimony from life. For faculty in history and the social sciences, I researched categories of life narratives, such as those by immigrants, by African Americans, and by feminist leaders – polemic declarations.  These and other topical perspectives began to bring me invitations to speak to non-academic audiences. Certainly a particularly satisfying part of my career was presenting lectures to the public. Voluntary readers make fine listeners and some of them excellent questioners.

Faculty members are invited to speak to a variety of audiences, from high school students to book groups at city libraries to the Rotary club – almost any group that gets together looking for lecturers. Sometimes I was asked to select and read poetry on topics they specified such as the sea, once to a garden club on bushes and flowers and whatever, and there are plenty of examples of poetry. I wanted to do birds but nobody asked. For library groups I gave presentations much more formally -- like what you’d say almost to graduate students -- on Jill Ker Conway's autobiography The Road from Coorain and on Gail Godwin's novels particularly A Southern Family.

After I began teaching women's studies classes, invitations increased every March, when organizations wanted some feminist topic for Women's History Month.  Usually they let me pick which topic, so I could do some conversions I hoped.

A particularly interesting outreach class that I organized was offered in spring of 1986 soon after the first meeting of the Friends of Women's Studies. A number of our founding members came from community groups not at all from academia. They were eager to support academic feminists, but they really didn't know much about our educational efforts, certainly not in detail. They were well aware that women still struggled for equality in most professions and they encouraged girls and young women to become self-confident, assertive, and interested in community service, contributing to community service. Still, they wondered how faculty in college could contribute in their various disciplines, so some of our faculty took part in a series of sessions for new members of friends.  It became a non-credit course. Teachers in the departments of English (that’s me) and History and Psychology and Sociology and the Schools of Business and Health Professions described how their fields were changing and expanding because of feminist perspectives and research, and they were sharing these new developments with students, and now with community women.

As faculty members, we were able to explain in the ways that each discipline had been changing since women had begun to ask questions about the gaps and misconceptions in our fields of study. We surveyed the new research that focused on neglected issues. These sessions went very well, and they reverberated because the members of Friends who attended informally shared ideas with others. The Women's Studies Program also began to attract Friends to its regular on-campus lecture series that previously had been publicized only for students and our colleagues.

Now that I've had two decades to look back over the memorable and rewarding aspects of my 25 years at ODU, I'm really tempted to make lists of people and of books that stand out in my memory, very satisfying connections but there are just too many to catalog. I'm greatful for students who were eager to learn,      for friendships with colleagues and enthusiasts, for getting to discover books and share them and for the way all of these rewards interweave with teaching. The life of the mind flourishes in good company.

Vaughan:  Ok, it sounds like you had a pretty satisfying time.

Rhodes:  Well I have traced the satisfying parts. [Laughter]

Vaughan:  There are usually disappointments as well. Now do you care to share any disappointments you may have had during your time at ODU?

Rhodes:  Well, some do jump into memory.  In a way I really don’t want to because I think that reviewing downers can lead further down but I’m not.  I’m not Miss Twinkle Toes even though when I listed all those satisfactions I probably sounded like it.  So, let’s see about disappointments.  Remember how the Women’s Caucus kept a list of goals? We have yet to see the establishment of a Chair in Women’s Studies. Remember how happy I was to administer the grant year that started women’s studies?  Later I took a temporary administrative post in Asian Studies and liked that very well. But in 1983 I reluctantly accepted the position of Director of Freshman English or maybe Director of English Composition.  I repressed a lot about it.  I knew then that many of its duties would be tedious and very likely stressful but our Chairman, Dr. Festa, persuaded me to give it a try. “The department needs someone now.” It turned out to be a serious mistake.  I kept at it for one year before resigning.  I really regret that year.  What disappointed me is the time spent miserably and my own poor judgment to attempt such uncongenial work.  Other disappointments – I’ve alluded to some of them, they were predictable and transient; times when trusted people turned out unreliable, times of conflict with authorities when they prevailed.  I was shocked as well as disappointed when some of my colleagues in English opposed certain changes in our curriculum.  Some insisted on keeping course patterns established decades ago, they wanted to preserve tradition and resist living writers really.  I found it even more offensive when they heeled in against courses redesigned to add cultural and social diversity, even more so to courses entirely featuring multiculturalism.

What was I saying . . . My worst disappointments have been my own unfinished projects.  I’ve done tentative outlines and even begun research for scholarly papers that I never found time to publish.  With a colleague, Bill Gibson, I also had some unfinished endeavor we began to create a proposal for bringing peace studies to ODU.  Our Dean, Heinz Meier, was interested but we both were too busy with other commitments to follow through . . . Let me tell you one more.  This too is obvious and predictable. It was very disappointing to me when treasured colleagues left ODU to teach elsewhere but in those cases I was also glad for them.  For I could name a dozen people whose moves advanced their careers, as they sort of knew when they left.

Vaughan:  It was bittersweet.

Rhodes:  Yeah, yeah. Eased a little bit because almost all of them have kept in touch. That's enough.

Vaughan:  Do you want to look back now and talk a little bit about how the university has changed in the years since 1965 when you took the job at ODU?

Rhodes:  Let me think about that, 25 years here and almost 20 years more but of course the main thing is growth!! When the millennium history of ODU came out, that was in 2001, the editors did such a fine job with decade by decade analysis or recording from the 1930's through the 1990's. And their photos show the look of the campus and the text traces the number of students and faculty-those were startling increases-as well as the way we here reflected the times across 70 years. I go back to that book when I can't recall the dates of a trend or the size of the student body back in the 20th century. Changes may be coming even faster now in the 21st century.  But older people always say that. [Laughter]

I no longer visit the campus day by day not even week by week sometimes but whenever I get here I see new buildings, new landscaping, and even entire new neighborhoods, like the Monarch Way shops and the big apartment housing beyond. In the mid 60's and for a while after those days we used to joke that we were a "trolley college," meaning that most students lived at home and got here actually by car or bus. Now Webb Center keeps expanding and redecorating and we have acres of dorms. Maglev is a joke so far, and by my values, football is a disaster going to begin all too soon. However, our spaces for the arts and for lectures and the growth of the library really are impressive, and so are the many special­ use places, like the international office and the orchid house more than we could possibly imagine in 1965. At that time I taught some classes in a former high school building on the corner of Hampton and 59th street—Hampton and on that street where our campus ends.

Vaughan:  Bolling.

Rhodes:  Bolling, Hampton and Bolling, yes.

Vaughan:  That was an elementary school.

Rhodes:  I thought it was a high school well it had great big tall classrooms with wide windows and you know it had that feel of probably the 1920s.  I did my teaching in a classroom equipped for nursing students, with medical posters of internal organs on the walls, and in a corner there was a hospital cot with a full-sized dummy patient for them to practice on.

Vaughan:  Was the English department office in that building or just classes?

Rhodes:  Oh no, but the English department office was in a little place beside the old administration near what became the Science building.  We shifted around a lot.

Vaughan:  O.K., well then what about changes in Norfolk?

Rhodes:  Well, again growth, growth. Norfolk's expansions really have been spectacular. The traffic just gets more and more grim, you try to deal with it.  On the other hand, yet the places we want to drive are really worth making alternate routes or just being delayed-we go to the Naro--it's our cozy neighborhood movie theatre yet it brings some international films. I forget exactly when it started but I think it was a little bit after I got here. We've always liked the Azalea garden, that is now the Norfolk Botanical Garden, and we enjoy very much nearby restaurants in Ghent, where the menu choices are much more various than 20 or 30 years ago.

Now that Ernest and I look over the downtown and the Elizabeth River from our 10th story balcony in Hague Towers, we really gasp to see the constant construction.  Everyone who visits and walks out there says, "Who's going to live in all those new condos and apartments and hotels?" We don’t know. We look right down also on the path for light rail set to start in 2010 and on clear days we can see Town Center to the East in Virginia Beach. Our special treat is watching fireworks during Harbor Festivals and on every Fourth of July.

When I first met Ernest he was writing reviews of local drama productions, including dinner theaters. Plays by local companies still flourish, while now Norfolk also has Broadway hits on tour, and places to show them to perform in fancy halls and there’s the Harrison Opera house, also Harbor Park, the home of a triple A baseball team feeding and repairing players -- Ernest gave me that phrase – repairing players for the New York Mets and the Baltimore Orioles.           

I’m getting to sound like a pamphlet for tourists, so for closure I'll mention just one more category of impressive growth, although I don’t always enjoy it.  We have outstanding hospitals and medical research facilities clustered all around us.          

Interview Continued: June 29, 2009

Vaughan:   Today is the 29th of June and could be the final interview with Carolyn Rhodes.  I wanted to ask about what you have been doing in your retirement. You retired in 1990.  Tell me, how did that change your life?

Rhodes:  Well, the very first thing sort of arranged before I retired. It might sound minor, but it was really important to me. I was coming into emeritus status and I wanted that to name both of my academic fields I mean Women's Studies as well as English. But I had held no rank or title in Women's Studies as a department. The double designation would be unusual – a stretch. Mary Ann Tetreault and some other feminists went with me to the Provost to ask for his support (that was Myron Henry). He was very kind and gracious and even complimentary. He liked the idea and I suppose he was the one who brought it to the Board of Visitors for official approval, which came on.

Then after I retired we were able to travel more.  We always loved it but starting in 1980 when Ernest finished teaching, we had hit the road a lot in our van for weeks every summer, and sometimes at Christmas holidays and semester breaks but you know not for any great distances, rarely across the Mississippi except to see my mother.  She was living in Texas in a retirement community and we went there several times a year just to see her but also to help with a number of things.  That gave us a chance to schedule and get to Elderhostels in places along the southern Mississippi and even down on the Gulf Coast. We could go to places like that after we had seen her if it wasn’t Christmas—if it was summer.

Our dream plan – we had this for a long time from our first Elderhostel in the ‘70s – would be to go to two Elderhostels every year, one easily reachable in the USA and one in some foreign country. We came closer to fulfilling that dream of ours after I retired. Our overseas trips in the 1990's included Costa Rica, Brazil, Ecuador connected with getting to the Galapagos, and all of those were places where we could see the very birds we wanted to and spectacular scenery. In our earlier years when we went to Europe in summer, we saw historic places.  Places that we'd been reading about all our lives, I guess and later professionally we had also studied and taught about the writers who had came from those places. Ernest made sure we visited ancient Greek and Roman theaters and the place where the Shakespearean playhouses had been in London. He had centered a lot of his scholarship on the Rose theatre there.

In 1993 Ernest was also the planner and I was delighted to go along on a really memorable trip to New Zealand and Australia.  Fifty years earlier in World War II, from June 1943 to June 1944, he had been stationed in Wellington, New Zealand recuperating from malaria that he contacted in the Solomon Islands. We visited spots he recalled, mostly in Wellington, a little bit around there as well as just about every natural wonder in New Zealand. It was wonderful. Birding was great there and it was Australia, too.  Ernest didn’t get stationed in Australia, though he says he spent one day in Brisbane.

Vaughan:  How long was that total trip?

Rhodes:  Oh, that trip must have been three weeks or so because we got two different tours arranged in advance, in other words sometime around in Wellington and then a tour southward to the very tip where you sort of, or throwing distance of the south pole.  It was wonderful Elderhostel we had a home to stay with people who cooked us lamb and we saw all the things you see there and then we had a friend of a friend who when we rented a car escorted us all around the northern island where there was really good birding and really interesting scenery.

After 1993, I have forgotten the exact dates but we explored Brazil and we went to some Caribbean Islands.  And pretty recently I think since 2000 we went through the Panama Canal and we took a riverboat trip in Peru. So that adds up to 20 years of traipsing around the world, which we were very glad we could do--we did when we could. [Laughter]

Vaughan:  That’s wonderful. Have you still been doing some teaching?

Rhodes:  Yes, yes, you know in the 1990s I did for about ten years. I taught mostly as a guest lecturer, and sometimes I had a chance design courses.  Of course, all that traveling happened during 2 or 3 months a year at most and usually in January and February because we were exploring countries in the Southern Hemisphere.  We noticed that our weeks and seasons were pretty much like our old working rhythms. We planned in terms of semesters and summers and we saved our weekends for social events. After all most of our friends were living by their teaching schedules but we had some good retired friends, too.  We often came to campus to attend events.  If you did all of those you wouldn’t have time for anything else. [Laughter]

Since I retired, I haven't taught courses for credit. I've been very glad to be done with tests and grades. So during the 1990's I liked giving guest lectures sometimes for friends and colleagues who invited me to teach one or two meetings in their classes. And the most significant thing like that happened was Anita Fellman structured a course on International Women Writers, in which many sessions were colleagues who had a specialty in the nation or the section, you know Central America maybe and we would give the assignments and lead the discussions and actually in my case you had to give a lot of context.  In general it was European countries, Canada, and South American countries, and Mexico, and in my case, China. It was pleasant to select stories to assign by Chinese women writers.  I had been giving some talks on them already. Then as guest lecturer I had to sort of cover or distill social-historical contexts because the students didn’t have any background as they would have had with sophomore survey of lit for England or France and of course I discussed the literary techniques and themes.

Sometimes I was asked to teach a class about a leading feminist or trends in feminism. I thought visiting lectures like that were very easy. I could prepare them quickly because I saved my papers and I could choose the topics I knew well to focus on and to choose the writers whose works I had taught before.

Much of that’s on campus but I really had more invitations increasingly across the ‘90s to make presentations for off campus groups -- lifetime learners, really more requests than I could fulfill. But I’m always a resource person I tell them somebody else to go to.  Anyway, there are two I enjoyed finding the topics because if I was talking about American women writers I could add current novels that I had never taught and was excited about and the same would be with autobiographies.  It was a double chance to teach old favorites and some recent stirring ones. I was also quite a bringer of handouts.  I could never cover all I wanted to talk about so I would give a handout with titles and annotations, and suggested readings beyond what we could do.  Some of those sessions were three hours and some of them were only one.  Two or three different elder centers had mornings with professors. That business with making booklists was that I’d been doing all during my teaching because I would teach my classes, recommend books that they really had to read, titles beyond their class assignments and I always said, “Put this on your lifetime reading list.”  I don’t know how many actually did but those volunteer students who attended "Mornings with the Professors" and some of the special-interest groups... There was one very . . . sophisticated student at one of these churches, I have forgotten the name of it [Ghent Venture], and they organized ahead and they had a list of lecturers who came more than once.  I think people in places like that would take those handouts and follow up on at least some of my advice.

[Click here for a sample handout on the strengths of women writers. It was first developed as a handout for non-academic listeners in the 1980s.]

I taught a couple of times when ODU was offering Elderhostel things.  A pattern for an Elderhostel section usually included three courses and I did a course with a double approach to autobiography; I would chose passages as models to read and discuss with them.  Passages that I thought were in the scope of a fairly unpracticed person.  You know, there are wonderful books which tell about childhood – pick a page or two.  A lot of the people besides that I set up meetings—I set up from one meeting to the next you meet them three times for an hour and a half each so they could start composing their own narratives because a lot of them took the course to do something with family history.  They wanted to write for their children and grandchildren about themselves or about cousins and their ancestors.  So, with their own recollections they would talk to others and edit their stories and that way they got some much older people.

By the end of the 1990's, I fully retired myself from teaching. Before that, however, I joined a book club, and eventually a second one. The books we choose – I’m still in both of them – the books we choose and the discussions we have with one another seem to pretty much satisfy the social side of what Benjamin Franklin called a “bookish inclination.” It's good also to follow book reviews and perhaps even better to learn from friends.

Vaughan:  Yeah, I was going to ask you about the whole book club thing because I know that you recommend a lot of good books to the library -- new writing, old writing too.  So, that’s good -- did you start any of these book clubs? 

Rhodes:  No, I was a founding member in both of them.  Zelda Silverman started a book club which initially and to some extent still was Wellesley women who just felt they wanted to have more book talk and more ideas, and Zelda was a close friend of mine.  So, at the start I was the only kind of outlier but we’ve had two or three people move away and other people come in.  The other book club, Anita Fellman started it and it’s unusually narrow in the scope of what it deals with but the books are deep and complex. It’s only women writers and its only Jewish women writers.  So, there again I’m a permanent outlier, the other members are all Jewish but I’m fascinated with that world.  My first husband was Jewish.  I haven’t gotten my children to take much interest but its beautiful books they pick.

Vaughan:  Have you continued with your scholarly writing or with poetry?

Rhodes:  Well, I thought I would do more poetry in retirement having leisure but I’m not a fine poet.  They write poetry every day but I have to be inspired and I’ve written very little poetry and I fact, I’ve written none in this century that takes you back ten years.  But during the 1990's I was meeting with a writing group and at that time I was contributing mostly drafts for family essays, like those people I was teaching in Elderhostels.  I wanted to leave a record of my mother, my father, and his mother who—and well his mother and my mother’s mothers, too. I knew a little bit about them and they were interesting to try and write up and they’re still in draft.  I started a few poems but I didn’t finish very many. There's really only one and it’s longish that I'm proud of enough to show around to friends. It grew out of a trip that I forgot to mention. Ernest and I went with Eleanor and Sterling Williamson to Mexico for a couple of weeks on an Elderhostel the subject being the Day of the Dead and it was very thorough for the week before November 1st.  We learned the history of the customs and saw the crafts and preparations and we went to homes where they were putting up a kind of alters that they do. So, the Day of the Dead is quite an ancient custom, or set of rituals that goes back to the ancient Indians at that time and as we learned has a lot of analogs – the Halloween and all hollows night and the Christian and European legends about that particular time. We could see altars set up everywhere, in our hotel, multiple hotels because we mainly went to Morelia but a number of other places, too.  And they were in every home, and they were in the courtyards and the plazas and the restaurants, in the entry halls of colleges, and they were decorated with flowers, an awful lot of marigolds and autumn flowers usually gold and orange and yellow, and skulls -- memento mori of all kinds. On the final night, just the celebration – they had two featured days one for the children who died and one in general and so that final night when everybody gets involved we saw people of all ages gathering at a cemetery.  It was candle-lighted, it was a little bus trip out from Morelia and they were going to spend—they did spend the night at the graves of their families, complete with food and kids running around.  They are very at ease with death and some, maybe many believe that on All Souls Night that the dead in spirit can return at that time. So I wrote a poem later called "The Hungry Ghosts," and I describe pretty fully what I saw and I try to explain what I felt and thought.

Vaughan:  We’ll have to link that to our interview. [Click here for the poem.]

Rhodes:  O.K.  My impulses toward creative writing of my own have mostly faded. But I've enjoyed being on call when people I know want a reader for things they’re writing, articles and in a couple of cases books.  I actually like to proofread and I do cautiously comment on the content of what I read. It’s not really editing; it’s just advising, and I’m always very careful to say take-it-or-leave­-it or maybe it will give you an idea that you can change that passage, not the way I think but the way you think. As I consider the people I’ve worked with, I was reading friends' scholarly writing and trading mine off with them, like Nancy Bazin, always. But these are much more of human writing, two were autobiographies.  One that I just got a copy of is not exactly an autobiography, it’s a memoir in poetry of Valerie Chronis Bickett’s mother who was my very good friend from college and we exchanged letters.

Vaughan:  Was that published—the autobiography?

Rhodes:  Oh yes, it’s published and among the things she does—it’s really about her whole family but particularly her mother and the mother-daughter relationship.  Three sections in it, you know just a page or two are letters that her mother wrote to me that tells what was happening to her and in her family in the ‘40s.  So, I know another poet, Renee Olander, who shows me most of her drafts and second drafts and third drafts.  Oh, you know to keep my hand in.

Vaughan:  That’s good. I know that you were working on a project of your own, weren't you, when you came to the library to learn how to use computers?  Can you talk about that project?

Rhodes:  Yes, yes, yes.  I started in 2004 and gave a very great deal I devoted of time to assembling a sort of memoir about Ruth Lilienthal, my high school biology teacher. She became my mentor when I was 14 in 1939 and just entered Hunter College High School. I leaned on her a lot at school and she gave me plenty of advice about how to run my life and shape up.  I began to write to her when I was out of town like summer holidays starting in 1940. Later when I went to Alabama to college and I sent her frequent letters. She replied intermittently, I think about one in four. [Laughter] But she had remembered what I said in the other ones, and that pleased me even although her comments were often critical certainly about my grades and sometimes about my goals with what I wanted to do later in life. We became friends after I returned to New York for graduate study that was in ‘45. When I moved to Kentucky in ‘57, after I married, we still kept in touch, mostly by letter, but also we could get together when I came back to New York where I had relatives or my husband did.  I always kept her letters, although I didn't reread them I just tied them up and tucked them away along with the Christmas cards I hadn’t answered. Then in 2003 our house on Larchmont Crescent was flooded by Hurricane Isabel.  And I had to sort through all kinds of papers.  The bottom of everything – bookcases and file cabinets and everything was flooded and that stuff was lost but there was plenty left that was shelved up too high to drown and I discovered that I had bundles of her letters that I had saved or actually the early ones my mother had saved for me when I was going to various schools and didn’t yet own a house after I married.

Mrs. Lilienthal died in 1997at the age of 89. That was thirty-five years after she retired from teaching at Hunter. She had quite an extraordinary career there, from 1930 till 1962, but it seemed to have been forgotten. I could find no notices certainly nothing in the alumni stuff.  One very simple notice -- you know beloved wife of -- in the New York Times—paid notice. But her letters, her part of our 50-year correspondence, were just delightful and stimulating. They were full of wit and charm and wisdom. I wanted to preserve them somehow, for other readers. So I decided to gather recollections from students that had known her and her friends and family. I used—I put notices—two different kinds of notices in Hunter's Alumni Association, one in their publication and one on their web site and gradually was able to hear from more than 50 women who were willing to tell me something about her and how she had impacted on their lives.  Some were very short that were little anecdotes of revealing incidents or amusing ones, which I was delighted to see that they remembered very clearly you know they gave me sharp, little presentations but even more interesting there were others who told me not only how they felt and responded to her in high school but how she became an influence upon them, particularly in choosing scientific careers, careers in biology but also medical doctors and teachers of say high school.  They were greatful, everyone greatful for having known Mrs. Lilienthal as such a superb teacher and often moved on as she did with me to be kind of a guide. She would even go and talk to their parents or she would have parents come in and talk to her about possibilities in girls’ future lives that the parents weren’t quite ready to accept and support.  I was able to reach seven or eight people who like me kept up with her the rest of her life. Almost better than me; they lived in New York but I had a record and they didn’t.  So I see the assembly of all this material as kind of a patchwork, a quilted memoir. I have her own words transcribed from those letters and for me and the other students and some friends of mine who read it her vivid personality comes right through, and of course stuff she’s writing about her interests in books, theater, music, society and politics, and travel. We were both hooked on travel. Her students' recollections along with my comments make up the rest of the memoir besides what I’ve selected a lot from the letters.

By 2007 I had edited and written sections largely chronological that I was ready to show to Mrs. Lilienthal’s family who after all I couldn’t have used those letters if I didn’t have the family permission, it was intricate. And to the dozens of former students who had contributed something and wanted to read each others’ stuff. So I put it on a web site or rather Ernie did – set up a web site where everybody could read each other's comments. I titled it:  What the Teacher Taught. Remembering Ruth Lilienthal And now you can make a link to . . .

Vaughan:  I will.

Rhodes:  chrhodes.com.  I think we’ll keep it up a while more. We just renewed this year. Now, that whole project is still a work in progress. I’m ashamed that I put it aside for awhile doing other things that seemed urgent, and I do plan to return to it sometime. I need revise to revise some sections and certainly I need to add acknowledgements, oh my, many, many. Meanwhile, the sections that matter most are on the web for everyone to read and in terms of my schoolmates it’s a finished work.  They got all they could get out of it I think and for me you know I’ve got odds and ends I want to do.  Curious thing happened with the final chapter I call that “Zen: Ruth Becomes Chigetsu,” because in the last 25 years of her life beginning almost when she retired in the early ‘60s she became more and more involved with Zen Buddhism and I learned a lot about Renzi Zen Buddhism; koans, and sutras.  Thanks to following up on that I was able to discover that the leader of the group which she worked—with whom she worked they called Roshi like the bishop or Pope almost for his group.  He had written a beautiful obituary statement in the Zen Studies Newsletter, and eventually I went and interviewed him and got a really interesting chapter out of it which started with saying she had alluded to this preoccupation, devotion in some of my letters but not enough to make me realize how very important it was to her.  So I did the research and I had a happy occasion last week. Google took that chapter and coded it under Zen, pulled it out and a person, a young woman I’m assuming she had a daughter in high school and guess which high school, Hunter College High School. [Laughter] And she stumbled on that one chapter and that led her to the total thing and she was so sweet about it and also was very reassuring to me because she said I got the Zen right, which was, you know, all new to me.

Vaughan:  That worldwide web, I tell you [Laughter] . . . well one other thing that you know a lot of stuff you’ve been doing lately and you’re still going back to your interest in life narratives and biography/autobiography.  One thing that we talked about early in your interview was your interest in research and we really focused on the life narrative –the reference book that you wrote first person narrative . . .

Rhodes: First Person Female American.

Vaughan:  Yeah, American, O.K. Do want to spend just a little bit of time talking about your other research that you were involved in way back—way back when?

Rhodes:  Oh yeah, yes, yes, yes.  We noticed—I told all about First Person American—First Person Female American.

Vaughan:  I know there was a lot of other research that you did.

Rhodes: Well, you know you have links to a distilled resume of mine, everything is listed there but yeah, sure I’d like to talk about some of them. I’m not sure whether in our early chronological getting to Old Dominion I mentioned that in the interview that I had with Dr. Reese, the Chair of the English Department, at the MLA in December before I came here the following June—no, August—I was a little burnt out from writing a PhD and I wasn’t confident that I could both teach and write at the same time.  So, I asked him how important would it be to have scholarly publications in this Department of English at Old Dominion College--it was then?  And he was very reassuring he said, “If you don’t publish, you just won’t get to teach graduate classes.”  Actually, in 1965 we had very few members of the department who were publishers.  When I received my tenure three years later in 1968 without having a thing in print; those days are gone. [Laughter]  It’s not now a seller’s market. By then I had settled down and realized of course I could write some more and that there were tremendous advantages to publishing.  It’s not so simple as publish or perish you know if you publish, you get better salary your rank rises faster if at all and your colleagues respect you and furthermore, we had a department which was forever having differences of opinion.  I mentioned the ones on multiculturalism, and the more you publish the more you can talk back [Laughter] . . . to the patriarchy.

So the very first thing I did leaned on my dissertation. I had some chapters on dystopias and I was able to partly rewrite and partly enlarge and publish an article on intelligence testing in fictional future societies, leaning very heavily featuring the book that made the most of intelligence testing which was Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano.  And then I wrote other articles about science fiction writers beyond my dissertation because I was getting involved in student eagerness for Science Fiction and I learned more and more stuff on my own and from then I wrote an article about Roger Zelazny and some computers who become human after the human race has died out.  That’s an old theme in Science Fiction but he does it his way beautifully.  And James Tiptree who’s actually a woman named Roxanna Sheldon, I think.  Anyway, she published a lot under the name James Tiptree, Jr.  A pseudonym that initially was very helpful to her in getting published.  I took one story of hers that I found very powerful and analyzed it to show the feminist theme in it. It basically was about this—“Take Back the Night” -- the threats to women if they dared to walk abroad without protection.  And Tillie Olson interested me, too.  In her novel Yonnondio I was able to identify the real-life psychologist who designed the speed-up system that’s dramatized there.  His name is Bedaux.

Vaughan:  We talked about that.

Rhodes: Did we talk about that?  

Vaughan:  Yeah.

Rhodes: All right.  The factory workers hated that system and she was very vivid on it. 

Perhaps my most widely-read article appeared in a book called Women Writers of the Contemporary South that was 1984, and it was “Gail Godwin and the Ideal of Southern Womanhood.”  In there I illustrated and discussed how she had many examples and comments about that ideal in her fictional characters but also did a great job of exposing the drawback being on a pedestal and that kind of thing.  Gail Godwin’s novels really enchanted me up through the ‘80s.  I included one or another of them in my courses on American Women Writers.  When I lobbied to bring her here to campus, I was just thrilled that she did get invited – thank you Heinz Meier.  She not only gave a really fine public lecture, but she interacted with creative writing classes which was so stimulating for them.  In 1985, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities funded a series of presentations about families depicted in fiction. For that, I discussed Godwin’s novel A Mother and Two Daughters.  In the Archives you have the video tape of that.

Vaughan:  Oh, O.K.

Rhodes: Two of the talks I gave at scholarly meetings in China were later published there in books to be used by teachers of American Literature in China.

Interview Continued: July 17, 2009

Vaughan: This is Karen Vaughan and its July 17, 2009 and we’re finishing the very final of our interviews with Carolyn Rhodes. We’ve covered a lot of your professional and personal life Carolyn and I know there’s more to cover -- lots more -- but let’s talk about what you’re doing now as far as how have you and Ernest dealt with advancing years?

Rhodes: Well, I’m 84 and Ern is 94, so of course we are well advanced. We find out we tire easily, but I understand that’s standard. And . . . though we are old we sometimes feel pretty spunky.  Like most of our retired friends, of course we visit doctors’ offices often and dentists and we both have some problems with hearing and vision you know but we cope.  I would say the worst thing that we have to deal with – in Ernie’s case it's dramatic -- decreasing mobility -- and in my case there is a prospect of some knee replacements and so of all the crumbling that’s the most dramatic.

Vaughan:  Do you get to spend time with your families?

Rhodes: Oh sure, yeah. Our four children do pretty well in keeping in touch.  My daughter Babette has lived in Boston for more than 16 years. She does social work and she manages half-way houses where people are sheltered and fed and so forth who need medical and psychological help and monitoring, lots of monitoring. My son, remember his professional name is Richard Hell, he hasn’t entirely left the rock music world where he got his start way back, way back when he was seventeen.  Now he’s a freelance writer in New York -- he’s published three novels so far and countless articles, he does some film criticism and he does essays on artists and their works, especially and including rock artists.  His wife Sheelagh Bevan works on collections for the displays that are going to be opening or have opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Ernest has two sons, Stanley and Lloyd, and they’re regular visitors.  Lloyd lives near Baltimore and he’s doing real well; flourishing. He sells medical supplies.  Stanley and his wife Patti are now both retired from the City of Norfolk, they live in Chesapeake, and they’re near enough for both of us to really impose on them. They don’t act as if they’re imposed but they are our mainstays for errands and grocery shopping.

We keep pretty busy staying close to home.  Now, home is downtown. We live on the 10th floor of Hague Towers and on the 21st floor we swim every day; a wonderful swimming pool.  I get back to the campus for Women‘s Studies events and some Literary Festival readings and of course the library.  And I enjoy going out to the meetings of two book clubs that I belong to.  Mostly we read novels, but also non-fiction.  Once a year, when it’s my turn to choose, we do poetry.

Ernie is most regularly attending at ODU’s basketball.  He has a couple of buddies and they all get season tickets for all the games—women’s and men’s.

I forgot to mention that I do get back to campus sometimes just not to attend things but to take part. Early in 2008, which was the year Anita Fellman retired, I got in on the secret fundraising for the new Scholarship in her name.  Jennifer Fish, who has become Chair of Women’s Studies after Anita, Jennifer took on the hard work of contacting really ever so many of Anita’s family and students and colleagues, and the community people who shared Anita’s interests—clubs and things.  I was amazed that with so many contributors the secret could be kept.  But we did and at her retirement dinner we fully surprised Anita, announcing the scholarship named for her and which was carefully designed to support projects she had long wanted to do more with -- students doing service learning projects. 
           
Jennifer is already putting these new scholarships to use.  She gathers students to travel to South Africa to service agencies and schools and community centers where they help with the projects that are needed over there.  Of course the things they’re doing that benefit others lets them get a very special kind of learning by doing.

Vaughan:  What other kinds of activities outside ODU are you still involved in?

Rhodes: Well, recently I was very excited last summer and fall, full of hope that Barack Obama would be elected.  I have been a Democrat all of my life. But for many years I’ve supported candidates just with conversation and maybe some minimal funds—not getting out and doing anything.  Although ages ago in Kentucky, I'm talking when my kids were in preschool, 60 years ago nearly, I did distribute pamphlets for Adlai Stevenson and later I took these youngin’s with me to rallies for John Kennedy over at the University of Kentucky.  It made me feel young again last fall to get myself down to the Obama Campaign Office on Church Street and volunteer to work for his election.  They wanted me to go out from door-to-door, and those folks I very much admire, but instead I just worked on the telephone pool which did as I say make me feel younger--although not as young as those who were canvassing.  So, I may have rounded up some potential voters; anyway I alerted a lot of them. 
           
And Ernie keeps busy too. He stays at his computer with his various projects.   More than a decade ago, he wrote his family’s history, actually he finished it just when we were moving because of the flood in ’03. It covers a whole century from the 1890’s through nearly the present – the present then, 2000 and it covers the lives of parents and a little bit of grandparents, and the four children mostly in their years at Mooseheart, which is the place for children of the Moose who—as those who have died as his father did. It’s a school and a residence and it took care of those four children and their mother.  It trained the young'uns and educated them after their father had died in 1925.  He calls this memoir Dorothy’s Album, because he’s honoring his sister Dorothy, you know how women sometimes do all the record keeping.  She treasured and saved family pictures and papers and Mooseheart news articles.  She also–to his surprise–he didn’t know it existed--preserved her mother’s diary from the 1920’s and that helped him; about ten years I think of the diary. So by 2005, he was sending copies to his siblings and to their many children and I think they gave them to their children.  So on his 90th birthday, he picked a new project. He began writing about his experiences in the Pacific; WWII.  He finished those stories or chapters in a couple of years and has been occasionally—well intermittently looking for an agent or a publisher.  While he does that, he has gone back to Dorothy’s Album and is retooling it for a clear title—maybe this was a sub-title before; A Coal Miner’s Family in the City of Children.

Vaughan: So speaking of Ernest’s writing, are you still working on the memorial to your teacher at Hunter High School?  Or have you turned to any other creative projects?

Rhodes:  Well all I could learn about Ruth Lilienthal, I organized into chapters that I posted on a website that Ernie set up for me chrhodes.com. Ruth’s family and many decades of students who remember her have read it, and quite a few of them have said they were greatful, which I found heartwarming.
           
A surprise happened to me recently.  I heard from a woman who never knew Ruth as connected with Hunter College High School. She knew her as Chigetsu, which was her Buddhist name.  Ruth took up Buddhism after she retired and during the 1970's, she and this younger woman took part in sessions at the Zen Studies Studio—Zen Studies Society Temple, a place of gathering in New York.  So during the 1970s—they had sessions there and Chigetsu was a mentor and consequently then a treasured friend of the person half her age; who was learning Zen Buddhist practices and philosophy. I guess less than half her age. This young woman would be in her twenties when Ruth was in her sixties and seventies.
           
When I was facing retirement I thought I’d take up quilting. I have never gotten around to that. I also mulled over writing a memoir of my own.  All those years when I was teaching autobiography my students would say, “what are you doing, what are you doing?" But I didn’t get very far. I chose a title, Leaning Toward the Light but I think now it’s not likely that I’m going to get back to that project. So, these interviews are going to have to be my life-narrative instead.
           
I can’t thank you enough, Karen.  Thank you ever so much.

Karen: You’re welcome. I would like to thank you also, for all the information, all the many hours we’ve spent talking and rehashing all these interesting events and ideas from your past. So I really want to thank you very much.

End of Interview