Anne A. Jackson:  The March on Washington.  I pulled it out today.  I forgot all about it, which was – just relating the thing has such drama because my kids were all little children. [Peter a junior in college, Eric about to attend college, Ira in high school]. And Phillip went to Dorchester or Roxbury, wherever – we got on the buses.  Just describing the attitude on the buses and the lunch, and you always – [Recording paused.] Plus, I mean the attitude about the experience.  And my kids standing, Philip weeping that I’m going [Recording paused.] They threatened that they’d bomb the bridge, and we’d all be killed on the buses.  And I get goosebumps when I talk about it.  And Phillip took me, and he told the children, “Mother may never come back.  We don’t know, realistically.”  And I got on, and I said, “Children, whatever happens to me, I just feel that it’s worth – it’s worth this whole experience because I just believe it.”  And the papers carry some of the stories.  And my niece [Phyllis Ryan] was in it, the one who was under twenty-one years.  She marched right next to Martin Luther King.  That’s the one that inter-married, and the guy [William Ryan] is more Jewish than anybody at Temple Israel – speaks Yiddish, and he knows Hebrew.

Fran Putnoi:  Okay.  Let’s start at the beginning.  So let’s ask Anne to – let’s start about your early life, Anne.  About where you were born and your family, and what your life was like when you were a youngster.

Pam Goodman:  And these wonderful descriptions of your mother and father – 

AJ:  Yeah.  I was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, soon after the fire in 1909.  I don’t really remember very much about my childhood.  It’s very strange.  I just don’t.  But I do know that my mother was probably the most energetic woman I’ve ever met.  It was nothing if somebody wanted special rolls at two o’clock in the morning; she’d run down and get a bakery.  She was just full of energy.  And she was very unlike my father.  She was the antithesis to my father.  My father was learned; he was dedicated to the Talmud and to Jewish learning, and he was really scholarly.  Every morning, I remember as a child, that he was out of the house at five o’clock.  I never saw him in the morning because he went to shul and he stayed in shul until the afternoon.  And then maybe he came home and had lunch and went back to the shul when he wasn’t working.  He was in the junk and scrap iron business.  And for some time, he did very, very well, and then it went right down the creek.  When he sold the shop, he became a scholar.  He spent his time learning and going and observing every single – I remember that he – it seems to me from my childhood impression – it seemed to me that he had more fast days than he ate, the days that he ate.

FP:  What was the name of the synagogue?  Do you remember the name of the shul?  Is it still in existence?

AJ:  I don’t know.  The name of the shul.  I don’t remember.

FP:  You don’t remember what street in Chelsea it was on?

AJ:  We went – the shul – I remember – Third Street Shul.

FP:  Third Street Shul.

AJ:  We went, and I can remember as a child, I went with my girlfriend, 

Reba, and we thought it was quite a lark because the females all sat upstairs and the males all sat downstairs.  I don’t think I was too serious about the whole experience.  It’s walking to shul that was the most exciting and talking about the day and so on.  I was out of school.  And the population in Chelsea at that time was –  I don’t know what the proportion was, but it was highly Jewish.  The immigrants seemed to settle there in Chelsea and then in Roxbury at that time [inaudible].  But it wasn’t a lofty thing to go to temple because I think both – she came from a family that was Reform, and we didn’t take the whole experience too seriously.  But in retrospect, now, I adored my father.  I adored my mother in a different way.  And I didn’t.  I hated her, too.  But my father, I resent the fact that he was so learned that he never made it a compulsory experience for me to have this kind of experience.  And I did go to some Cheder.  It became sort of a laughable experience because I just hated it.  I hated the discipline, and I hated – I didn’t really feel as if I was learning.

FP:  How did they treat girls in that time?

AJ:  Oh, minimal. They didn’t even call on you to respond, so sadly – very tragically, sadly, I never, never got the cream of what my father had.  I look back, and I say what a heritage I might have had, but I didn’t.  

PG:  Anne, what about your brothers and sisters?  Did they feel the same way?

AJ:  They were more Jewish-minded.  They were older.  And they understood going to the differences.  But I had a brother.  Should I get into that?

PG:  Sure.

AJ:  My brother, [Mendel N. Fisher], was the head of the American Jewish – first, he was New England Zionist Organization, and then he was the national leader of the Zionists, the Jewish National Fund.  He was the fellow that conceived of the blue box at every Jewish home at that time.

FP:  All the little Tzedakah boxes?

AJ:  Yeah.  He was a genius.  He was a genius.  And anybody that heard him from here to Switzerland said that he was one of the outstanding spokesmen for Zionism.  But just as he was dedicated to his utopia of having Palestine become Israel, he couldn’t – he was very intolerant.  He went to Harvard, but he was still an intolerant person.  He was intolerant of anybody who would project the wonders of Communism and what it could do for this world.  He was so dynamic about it that later on, when I was married, and I had children, and they were old enough to sit at the dinner table with him.  He just absolutely couldn’t tolerate their nonsense about this wonderful – the government in Russia and Israel needing to give back the West Bank to the Palestinians and so on.  My children really were alienated from him in terms of his fanaticism.  He used to travel with Chaim Weizmann in an open cockpit.  See, I was always interested in airplanes and things that were ahead of our time.  I was so impressed that he would ride in the open cockpit plane with Chaim Weizmann.  And he would tell these wonderful tales.  I adored him.  I adored my brother, Mendel, just worshiped him.

FP:  Did he live in Boston?

AJ:  He lived on Longwood Avenue when he first got married.  His wife was a schoolteacher, and then she took up sculpting.  The ceramic center in Israel is named after her.  The student center in Ein Hod is named after my brother.  There’s a big sign.  They have an art change every month.  And it’s a very progressive art facility.  And what else can I tell you?

PG:  What about your sister?

AJ:  And my sister.  Well, my mother – well, really, in today’s terms, I’d call her –she was a [bag lady].

PG:    Your mother or your sister?

AJ:  Well, my mother.  Going back to my mother.  And my mother couldn’t speak English well.  She became a citizen.  But she would go to the head of filing.  She found out with all of her broken English who you talk to.  She would say that she knows that after things are marked down three times, they go to charity.  My mother would get bundles.  And at six o’clock in the morning, you’d see my mother like she was a bag lady.  But she was bagging charity stuff for people to have, to wear.  She was out of the house very early.  There was no one –

FP:  So she’d get clothes for other people.  She would –

AJ:  Yeah.  And she would deliver very early in the morning.  And it was hard for me to understand that, but in retrospect, I look back, and her energy was used for the greater purpose of people.  If there was a funeral and she heard there was no one to stand at the cemetery that could collect money for something charitable, she was on tap, and she would do that gladly.  Whereas my father, who was so religious, would never let her be seen doing anything like that.

FP:  So they were both religious in their own way.

AJ:  Very, very.  My mother was very – of course, my mother felt she was the queen mother of the greatest male that was ever born, and that’s Mendel Fisher.  Now shall I move to my sister?

PG:  Sure.

AJ:  My sister Elizabeth was absolutely, I think, aesthetically – in every way, she was a beautiful, beautiful person.  Her family manifested itself rather peculiarly because she was married to a man who was Jewish but had never been involved in anything Jewish.  And because he lived with my beautiful sister, Elizabeth, he became president of Temple – first president of Temple Emanuel in Chelsea.  And Arthur was an accountant, and he was a lawyer.  He was quite an intelligent, inspiring person.  I could give quotes that he used to give.  But my mother – I was born.  I was a change of life baby.  So naturally, I was so thrilled with having a sister that was older that I never looked to my mother as a child to a mother.  But I looked to my sister, Elizabeth, because there was enough years difference so that if she said wear this or buy this, it had an influence.  And then my sister lived on Washington Street in a beautiful two-decker.  And I was so proud of her house – what she did and how she did it – that if I had a date or anything exciting was happening in my life, I went to Elizabeth’s, not to my own home, because Elizabeth was everything.  

FP:  How much older was she than you, do you remember?

AJ:  I can’t even put it together.

FP:  Okay, that’s okay.

AJ:  But Ira, maybe, would know.  And she had two children.  A daughter who became – she went to Radcliffe, and she became – at five years old, she was on [the] radio, and she became a child who, in a sense, was pushed to project because she was so unusually bright.  Even though her mother was born in Russia, her mother said, “You’re not becoming an actress until you learn French, until you get an education, and you’re going to a first-class college.”  So that her children already began to inherit the things that I never inherited because my family [was] too much of an immigrant in a sense.  And her daughter went to Radcliffe, and she became an actress.

FP:  What’s her name?

AJ:  Her name is Josephine Lane.  She was married twice.  And her first marriage – she was, I think, sixteen and a half when she went to Radcliffe.  And there’s a funny story about my mother, who was her grandmother, and my niece.  Josie thought my mother was the cat’s meow because whenever she came to visit, she’d say, “Bubbe, do you have anything I could take of Annie’s?”  They used to call me Annie.  So my mother would empty the drawer of Annie’s stocking or whatever the granddaughter wanted.  Josie just adored my mother, and she wanted her to go to the reception when the president of Radcliffe was officiating.  It was some – it was the highlight of the year, of graduation year.  And my mother went through, and she shook hands with the president.  She said, “I want to tell you a long story.  This girl was always special when she was a little, little girl.”  And she had her day with the president of Radcliffe.  And my niece just was dumbfounded.  My sister, Elizabeth, was dumbfounded.

FP:  Was your sister Elizabeth [inaudible]?

AJ:  Yeah, of course, she was.  And then, she had another – some years after, there was a difference, I think, of seven years between the two girls; she had a child, Phyllis.  And Phyllis was the one who came to my father after she was grown.  She went to Northeastern.  And she met a man that she respected highly and loved, and he her.  My niece wanted to marry him.  By then, my sister was dead.  She had died at the age, I think, of forty-four of cervical cancer.  I was carrying my second child.  That was the first experience I had with death.  I never could begin to describe what it did to me.  I was carrying the child.  I never thought this child would ever be normal because of the kind of love and the kind of experience I had going through this pregnancy.  At that time, my husband was overseas in Japan. I would write every day to my husband on the same size paper every day so that he had a running picture of my pregnancy and what was happening.  And my sister was dying.  And I filled these pages with all the tragedy that was in my heart.  And my sister lived in Brookline.  And when she was very ill, I was living in a housing project [in Chelsea] because my husband couldn’t afford anything.  And my mother couldn’t really give me an apartment.

FP:  Your father was dead at this point.

AJ:  Yeah.  And I would travel from Chelsea on the streetcar with my big belly to see my sister practically every day.  And when I delivered the child, the child of that unhappiest moment of my life, I was carrying the child, and I got on the streetcar to go to the Army hospital in Waltham.  I was on the streetcar, and nobody gave me a seat.  I remember it, too, vividly.  That’s why I can recount this so vividly.  I went to the Waltham Regional Hospital alone.  When they looked at me, they said, “You’re going to deliver a baby today.”  And nobody knew that I was in to have a child.  I delivered the child, and then people knew I had a child.  But my father –

FP:  Who took care of the first child?

AJ:  Well, my father was still living.  And my father wanted only Louis Zetzel, who taught at Harvard.  He was the most religious person at Harvard.  Everybody hears the name Louis Zetzel.  He says, “He has to be the mohel of my grandchild if the child is a boy.”  It’s hard to get this all in.

FP:  Well, just keep – you’re doing a great job.

AJ:  My father was there for the bris.  And by then, of course, my mother and my nephew called to find out why I didn’t come home from the hospital. So my niece, Josephine’s first husband – she was married twice.  The first husband died at forty.  And he called the hospital to know why I didn’t come home.  And they found out the next day that I had a child.  

FP:  And Eric was –

AJ:  And I named my child Eric Elizabeth.  And in retrospect, I thought how damaging that would be to have a first name Elizabeth.  He would be penalized by the same feeling of loss.  So I named him Eric, which was the nearest I could get to Elizabeth.  The middle initial was – I used to write Elizabeth.  And then as he got a little older, I would put Eric – by the time he got into school, I made it Eric E. Jackson.  And he was a child of turbulency and love and death and just so many things.  And I nursed my first child Peter.  I didn’t even touch Peter, did I?

FP:  No.  We haven’t heard about Peter.  First we have to get back to how you met your husband.  Then tell us about – 

PG:  Let’s begin there.

AJ:  When I met my husband – [inaudible] [Recording paused.] My mother would dare not celebrate the Sabbath.  She did it traditionally.  And we always had candles, and we always – she always benched licht and said the bracha.  I learned that just from rote.  My father was serious business.  It had to be traditional.  The pot was on the stove all night long.  He wouldn’t ring the bell for anybody.  Push the button if you were locked out all night.  One night I was locked out because he wouldn’t push the button.  And my mother was out –

FP:  What was in that pot that was cooking all night?  Cholent?

AJ:  No.  My mother didn’t make that.  Chicken soup and chicken and kneidlach, all the –

FP:  Brisket?  Was she a good brisket maker?

AJ:  A wonderful brisket.  But my mother-in-law was even better.  What else can I think about?

FP:  Did she bake?

AJ:  My mother made – I felt that it was the only strudel in the country.  She really made fabulous strudel.  It was layered.  And also, she did something that we haven’t been able to figure out, even though she’s been dead many, many years.  She used to at the time that you’d make knaidel – I think it was knaidels – she made something out of beets, which was red.  And as a child, I remember they were – oh, pancakes, potato latkes.  She would make it out of beets.  She would scrape and scrape.  We didn’t have any of the fancy utensils.  They would come out white.  My sister never really knew how to do it.  I never learned how.  But before she even got them on the table, they were gone.  They were just absolutely incredible. Yeah.  What she did, she did with abandonment.  She was a person of moods.  Either she didn’t do it, or she did it magnificently.  And that’s about my mother.  I can’t go back.  See, so many – I’m so old.

FP:  And did you have traditional holidays like Pesach?  Was Passover a big holiday in your family?

AJ:  Oh yes, it was.  Pesach was.  I do remember this.  We moved to Shurtleff Street, Chelsea, and there was a little shul – I don’t know, a small shul.  My father belonged and was an integral part of that small shul.  But I remember every Sukkot that I used to say to my mother, “Why do I have to go carrying pot stuff [inaudible]?”  And my mother said, “You know, the [inaudible].”  And my mother really – she was frum because he was.  She wasn’t subservient either.  She was her own person.  My mother was more of a woman’s rights at that time.  So she said, “[inaudible].”  So I used to carry the breakfast and the lunch.  I used to have much – I was in such discord that I should have to do this because I was the youngest.  The boys never had any part of this.  And my father ate – was it eight days? – in the Sukkah.  Never ate with us.  But Passover was a big thing.

FP:  So, the family was home eating, and your father was in the Sukkah at the shul eating?

AJ:  Separate.  Like the shul, he was downstairs shaking and my mother was upstairs really busy talking about the things of the day.  

FP:  And where did you –?  So where did you meet Phillip?

AJ:  Oh, Phillip.  Truthfully, to be honest, I don’t know what it was.  Maybe I lacked female instincts.  But I never aspired like young women do today of having a child.  I never thought in terms of family.  My sister, maybe, her loss did a job on me.  I just didn’t think of – I only thought in professional terms of having a life of teaching.  When I applied to Harvard Graduate school of Education, I didn’t have a degree.  I don’t know why I was admitted.  But I’ll tell you what took place.  I entered that class, and I was the only young woman.  And at the time, I was quite attractive, young, and very vivacious.  The professor of the course was James A. Michener.  I knew from the minute I walked in the class that he was sort of mesmerized with me because I was the only girl.  I did know I was attractive.  I used to come with a linen hat.  I wore these cute little hats, a la Talbot’s, that understated style, and white little gloves, even though I came by streetcar from Chelsea.  He took a shine to me.  He even said, “Anne, I would like you to have dinner with my wife and me.”  I said, “I would just love it.”  I think I was slightly infatuated with him because he was probably fifty years older than me, or forty.  But he was just so charming and so brilliant.  That’s the writer of all the stories.  When I got to the dinner, I sat opposite him, and his wife was in the middle.  I thought to myself – see, I was way ahead of most of the teachers.  I knew about lesbians and all that.  I wanted to know.  I said to myself, “This man will not stay married very long because I know that she is a lesbian.”  At the time, we didn’t say that, but it was a lesbian.  And we prayed.  He was Quaker.  We bowed our heads, and I went along with it.  I listened to the prayer.  I don’t even remember what she served because that wasn’t what concerned me.  I was just concerned with two – with a man who was so brilliant being married to a woman like this that maybe it was another peg against marriage as far as I was concerned.  He asked me – he wanted to see me after class, and I would stay.  He said, “Anne, I hope you won’t be hurt by this, but I really don’t want you to volunteer any information about your teaching experience because we could be overwhelmed, and the class could be just taken up with your lectures on what you’re doing at [inaudible].  So I’ll call on you when I think it’s pertinent for you to inject what they should know.”  So, I complied with that.  The next thing I knew, he wanted me to become the librarian for the summer school.  There was a summer school at Harvard.  I was a staff librarian.  I was listed in the listing of the professors as the librarian for the special workshop in social studies with James A. Michener.  His purpose of having me in that position was to inject or suggest some of the things that I had experienced in education.  He felt so strongly about me that he said, “Anne, you don’t belong in Chelsea.  You belong where they’ll understand you.  And I’m going to try to move you into the Brookline or the Newton school system.”  He wrote a letter to the town of Brookline, and [Ernest] Caverly was the principal [Superintendent, I think] at the time.  And he suggested that Caverly select a school for me to – for James Michener to recommend the principal to go visit.  He came to my classroom – this is a very interesting part.  He came to the classroom, and his name was Mr. Eldridge.  He was the principal of – I don’t remember.  You could check it.  But I don’t remember the name of the school.  But I know I pass it.  And when Eldridge came, I had just returned from a field trip.  I was a great teacher for moving children out of the atmosphere of the classroom because there was more yonder to learn.  So I had taken them to the Walton Shoe Factory, which was a shoe factory in back of the Williams School in Chelsea.  We had discussed what our objectives were in going to this shoe factory.  I think they had been exposed to so much of my thinking that when they got into the shoe factory – they were wonderful – that they took notes of what they were observing.  The day that Mr. Eldridge from the Brookline School Department came to visit me, the kids were discussing what they gained at this visit.  And they talked about – they had never realized that in a factory people work so hard.  They had never realized – some of their fathers were in this facility, and they had never realized how terrible they worked and the conditions.  They commented on the conditions in the factory.  And Mr. Eldridge left.  I was working under probably the most progressive educator.  Her name was Alice M. Barker.  She was never married, and she was a Christian Scientist and lived on Clearway Street in Boston.  And when they came, she didn’t intrude and come into the classroom.  But she said, “Anne, I know it’s the saddest day of my life.  I’m going to lose you.”  And when Mr. Eldridge heard the response between the children and me, he walked out, went into Miss Barker’s office, and he said, “I wouldn’t have that teacher if she was the last teacher in the world” because he felt it was so provocative that he wouldn’t want that kind of teacher.  

FP:  Now, was it true that when you were teaching in Chelsea that women couldn’t be married to be teachers?

AJ:  They couldn’t, no.  That’s right.  I waited four years for a job.  That was probably another reason.  I didn’t want to get married anyway.  I wasn’t interested in getting married.

PG:  And how old were you then, Anne?

AJ:  When I was married, I was thirty-one.  So at that time, that was an old maid.

PG:  That’s right.

AJ:  But that wasn’t my focus.  My focus was education.  I remembered that was a damning experience.  And I said, “Look, James, I’m doing fine.  I love the woman I’m teaching with because she gives me freedom.”  I remember while I was teaching, we were talking a lot about Russia at the time.  Russia was our enemy. And I decided – I never could draw, but I decided that we should do something and not correlate it with Russia.  So there was no paper, but there was bogus paper – heavy, heavy grade bogus paper.  I went in, and I got yellow boxes of red chalk, and I had the kids do these big, big things, and I put them up on the walls all around the classroom.  The next thing I knew, the teachers – see, I was working mostly with Catholic people, and the teachers got it around that I was way out and I was a Communist.  It didn’t bother me one bit.  It didn’t bother my supervisor because she thought what the kids did was so fantastic, all that they got out of the unit of work.  So, I was always traveling sort of uphill.

FP:  You were very avant-garde even where you were.

AJ:  Yeah, I was.  And then, I remember Mr. Wingate, who was a principal of the school, was so smitten with what I was doing that he wanted me to move into junior high, and I said, “Well, so what?  I’ll be a couple of grades ahead.  But this is the [inaudible] class.  They are selected kids who really are specially endowed with abilities that should be fulfilled.”  I worked with this class, and it was a most exciting, exciting group of kids.  I have a letter that I’m going to tell you when we come to it, that I got when my husband died.  This young man followed me.  I wasn’t aware of it.  But when he had his first Ph.D., he moved to Revere.  He was vice president of Dunkin’ Donuts.  It doesn’t sound believable.

FP:  What’s his name?

AJ:  His name is – I have it on the paper.  I can’t remember.  It’s terrible.  He was vice president of Dunkin’ Donuts and had traveled all over and was most successful.  He ran for town meeting.  He was in the town meeting when my husband was in town meeting with me.  And he talked to me, and I was thrilled to see him and everything else.  The next thing, when my husband died, he was so saddened for me.  He sent me a letter.  In the letter he – I have the letter, and I could read the whole letter, but it’s too long.  He said, “That I, later on, went on, Mrs. Fisher, to get my second doctorate.  And of all the experiences I’ve had in the field of education, upper education, I can tell you that you were the spark in your …”  I have the exact language in my –

FP:  That’s great.  We’ll put it in the exhibit.

AJ:  Yeah.  I have the – I found the letter the other day.  That’s how I happened to think of it.  I don’t know where I am now.  Well, you want to know how I met –

PG:  Yes.  We want to know how you met Phillip when you were ready to get married – [Recording paused.]

AJ:  My source you want?  I said my greatest source of inspiration once I became a teacher was Alice M. Barker.  It’s almost like saying that I loved her more than anybody in the world, and I think I loved her more than my mother because she embodied everything that I thought was ideal.  She was a Christian Scientist and lived on 48 Clearway Street.  Look how I remember the things pertinent to her.  And she said, “Anne, you’d love going to the church, to the Christian Scientist church.”  It wasn’t as beautiful as it is now.  I was coming from Chelsea, and I had a long ride from Chelsea to the church.  It was Mendelsohn’s church.  [Editor’s Note: She may be confusing Mendelsohn’s Arlington Street Unitarian Church with the Christian Science Church.  Alice Barker may have been Unitarian.]  You know that name?  He was the one that brought in anybody that was on the street.  He brought them in the church.  If you had any problems –

FP:  This was in Boston?

AJ:  In Boston.

FP:  Arlington Street?  Is it the Arlington Street Church?

AJ:  Oh, Arlington Street Church, Mendelsohn.

FP:  Still does it.

AJ:  She introduced me to Mendelsohn, and I bought all kinds of dangerous things.  They had a sale of things you could buy.  I remember coming home with targets, with metal heads to – what do you call it? – bows and arrows, metal things.  My kids thought I was the most wonderful mother in the world because they had these, but they never were allowed to use them, which was so wrong.  But Alice said, “Anne, I want you to come and visit and meet the head of my church.”  She was in the Christian Science church.  So coming from Chelsea to Boston was a long ride.  So I would pick up the New York Times.  I always had a paper under my arm.  I was reading the New York Times.  When I walked into church, I was a Jewish girl who wasn’t aware of what you do in a church.  I had the paper under my arm.  While we were waiting, I was reading the paper in church.  When the reverend got through with the thing, you stand in line.  He stands at the door, greets everybody, and shakes their hand.  And he looked at me, and he said, “Where do you come from?”  I said, “Chelsea.”  He said, “What a wise young lady you are.  You brought good reading material so that you would be sure to have something if I wasn’t a good – if I didn’t have a good sermon for the day.”  [laughter] I was ready to drop dead.  But that was my introduction to church.  This woman that I’m talking about lived to be a hundred and one years old.  My husband and I never went to California without spending time with Alice because we just adored her.  When she had her hundredth birthday, financially, we weren’t in a position to go to California just for that party.  I went to Alice’s birthday party.  And I was, I think, for her, the daughter that she never had.  For me, she was the kind of mother that I really wanted to be born to.

PG:  And is this the picture that you showed us in your room?

AJ:  Yeah.  She’s in my room.  When the teacher sent a child out of the classroom because the child didn’t behave, she’d say, “How wonderful.  You’ve brightened my day.  You came to help me in the office.”  It was always a positive.  See, I had all positive commendation through this woman to my children, to whatever I did.  If I wanted to tackle a problem, I never did it in a fighting way.  I did it first with a very positive approach.  I finished Alice Barker because I could go on about a year about her.  Going back to Phillip, I think that maybe I was compensating because I wasn’t married.  But I really enjoyed the company of men far more than women.  I remember I had a friend who was married, and he had two children.  He was very – I don’t know where he taught – he was unusually bright.  He wanted to date me.  I thought, “Well, so what?  What if he’s married?  He’s entitled to be in the company of another woman.”  I really got to like him very much.  Every time I rode with him, he would take me to Harvard.  He was so proud of what I was doing, and he would want to hear what was happening.  He would play classical music.  If I identified what he had on the tapes, the next day, I got a package, and it was a record.  It was delivered to my home – or flowers.  I did tell my sister, Elizabeth, everything about whom I was dating and what I was doing.  She was really – she was very proper, and she was shocked.  I said, “Well, Elizabeth, I just like him very, very much.  If he was divorced, I might even fall in love and marry him.”  She was horrified.  Well, I would date David Biller, and I would date somebody else.  And somebody else would never know that I was seeing David Biller.  In other words, I think, in a sense, I was flirtatious.  I met a man in New York when I was going to Columbia Teachers’ College.  My brother, Mendel, was living there.  I was living with my brother, Mendel, and his wife.  They said, “It looks as if you really are having – that you like this man very much.”  I was dating somebody by the name of (Pdower?).  He was in the down business.  And he was about fifteen or eighteen years older than me.  I think the reason I was dating him – and I was attractive to him.  Look, I never let them make out with me anyway.  I couldn’t have cared less.  I used to think I’d have no sex part to me.  He would take me to the best plays.  He was so thrilled to be taking me around and showing me New York that before I knew it, I was falling – I thought I was falling for him.  I would be going to New York about every two weekends or every three weekends, and I’d stay with my brother, Mendel.  But I’d date.  I wasn’t interested in being home with Mendel and his wife.  I had a gay time.  In a sense, I think that we got to a point where I was going to become engaged to him.  I had ambivalent feelings because he wasn’t in education.  He was in a business.  He had his own horse, and he was very successful.  But they weren’t the things – the doorstops of my life.  I thought, “Well, I’m moving along in age and …”.  I was sort of committed to him in a sense.  One weekend, a friend of mine said, “Listen, do you like just waiting around for a date?”  I said, “No, I don’t.  I’d love to meet some other people.”  So, she said, “Well, I’m going to go to a Jackson household.  There are two brothers.  There’s a Selwyn, and the older brother is Phillip.  I’d like you to meet them.”

FP:  This was in New York?

AJ:  So I said, “Great.”  This was in Boston.  They lived in Dorchester.

PG:  So this is after you’ve finished at Columbia?  You came back.

AJ:  Yeah.  Came back, and I was still dating this guy.  She said, “I’ll be with his brother, Selwyn.  I think you – Phil went to Harvard, and he’s a pretty special guy.”  So, my husband, Phillip, came from a family where you had to first drink in front of your father and mother.  And if you wanted a beer, you had it with your father or mother.  They were very, very understanding parents.  I thought they were sort of a new type of parents.  Phillip’s mother spoke perfect English, and his father came from England.  And he was a perfect English-type gentleman.  I was kind of intrigued with that household because I went in, and I felt they were ahead of their time.  I met Phillip, and I remember I had a hat on.  I don’t know.  With Michener, I had a hat on, and with Phillip, I had a sort of bonnet kind of hat.  I went, and we – I think we – I don’t think we had dinner there, but we had refreshments.  He said, “How would you like to drive to Providence for a cup of coffee?”

PG:  To Providence?

AJ:  Yeah.  That was the other thing.  If you dated someone in Boston and they wanted to make out in the car with you, they’d take you to Providence, and they’d make out.  Well, the make out – what he accomplished was just looking at me and wanting to kiss me, but never did.  He put his arm around me.  And he observed me well enough to tell his brother when he got home from this trip for having the cup of coffee, “Boy, she has heavy legs.  But she’s all right on top.”  I came home the next day and ran to Elizabeth.  I said, “Elizabeth, I don’t know what it is.  But I think I met the man I’m going to marry.”  She said, “Well, you were talking about Perry.  You were talking about David.  What do you mean?”  I said, “Well, I don’t think it’ll be tomorrow morning.”  We went for three years, in and out, in and out.  I said, “He makes fifteen dollars a week in an attorney’s office as an apprentice.”  That was the price.  I taught school for a year, a thousand dollars for the year.  So I said –

FP:  Do you remember the name of the law firm he worked at?  Do you remember who he apprenticed to?  It’s okay.

AJ:  Well, anyway, Elizabeth looked at me, and she said, “I think you’re crazy.”  And she could say it to me, and I loved it.  And Phillip went into – oh, he was the head of the drug program, the big drug program.  He was the son of this guy.  Anyway, Phillip went into the law office, and he said, “I want you to know that I met the woman I’m going to marry.  Whether she’ll marry me or not.  But I’m going to marry her.”  And so there was a mutuality of feeling that somehow – and yet, he was so unlike me.  In order to get to first base with me, he one day delivered a book by Bertram Russell.  We’d had an argument the night before, so I threw the book at him.  We lived on the second floor.  It was a turbulent kind of – the excitement was always with difficulty.  He didn’t have money.  I didn’t know whether he was going places.  And I really, really liked teaching.  He was combating something very important to me.  Well, after three years of back and forth and back and forth, he was going to Washington, taking a job with housing in Washington.  And he was appointed by – I think [Endicott] Chubb Peabody made the contact for him.  And Chubb Peabody was so close to Philip.  His father started the best private school.  What’s the name of it?  Chubb Peabody’s father.  It’s the best school that was ever established-- a private school [Groton School.]

FP:  In Boston?

AJ:  Yeah.  Where was it?  Do you know, Pam?  I can look it up.  Ira can give you that information.  And Chubb used to come to – I lived in a –

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

AJ:  We decided that he was going to give me a ring.  We would be engaged and then married after that.  I was engaged.  We celebrated our engagement at the Shoreham Hotel.  As I put my arm around him I felt that every single person on that dance floor was looking at me.  I said, “Phillip, they’re all looking at me because my ring is so gorgeous.”  [laughter]  It was just funny to a point of –

FP:  And so, was everyone from your family there, and his family?

AJ:  No, just the two of us.

FP:  Just the two of you.

AJ:  I came back, and I was still teaching and –

FP:  How did you announce your engagement?  How did you tell your family?

AJ:  Well, my mother was – I told my mother that we were engaged.  My mother was really – she was the most exaggerated woman as far as liking things that were pretty.  She just didn’t like Philip.  She’d met him.  He used to come in the house and out of the house.  She just didn’t like him because she felt he was too big for me.  I think she was thinking sexually a big man.  I’m just telling you that.

FP:  How tall was Philip?

AJ:  Six, three.

FP:  Oh, okay.

AJ:  And Jewish people aren’t so, so tall.  She even questioned whether he was Jewish because –

PG:  Because he was so tall? [laughter]

AJ:  – his father came from England.  So there was a bias, a strong bias that she had about him.  As far as my father was concerned, he was so connected with me that if I was sitting in the living room on the sofa and Phillip was visiting me, all he cared about was that I go to sleep at nine o’clock.  I was just not the nine o’clock gal.  So he’d say, “It’s time to go to sleep.”  

FP:  He’d ask Phillip to leave.  

AJ:  So I can’t say that my courtship was exciting.  But when I went to Phillip’s house, I felt that I was met with more understanding and more grace.  Then I had a feeling that my mother-in-law, down deep, really felt that if he could have settled in.  He was a Harvard graduate.  They had to take loans to put him through Harvard and all that.  And I had a feeling that not my father-in-law, but my mother-in-law, would have loved seeing him settle in with a girl who was worthy of him financially.  

PG:  And was he your age?

AJ:  Phillip?

PG:  Yes.

AJ:  I was a year older, one year older.

PG:  You were thirty-one?  He was thirty?

AJ:  Thirty.  He was thirty.  I think that’s the right age.  But I can look it up, I have some papers.

PG:  So you were the older woman.  How did they feel about that?

AJ:  Oh, that didn’t matter.

FP:  Where were you married?

AJ:  I was married at the Beacon House.  And there’s something about my life that’s symbolic.  The Williams School where I taught was transformed recently by the goodwill of, what’s his name, the –

FP:  Silva.

AJ:  Silva.  Silva did a job.  I don’t know whether it still retains the same name, Williams School.  And the Hyannis Teachers’ College went out of business.  It’s no longer.  The state cut that school out, so there’s no symbol there.  And I was married at the house that I live in now.  It was called the – what was it called?  Everybody had a bar mitzvah at this building.

FP:  Gerard.  Was it The Gerard?

AJ:  No.  It didn’t have a – everybody in Brookline seemed to have an affair here.  My brother was married here.

FP:  Right here in the apartment?

AJ:  In this building.

FP:  Oh really?  This was a social hall?

AJ:  This is a – this is a HUD [Housing and Urban Development] building after they went out of business. [Editor’s Note: Anne may be referring to Southern House.] The caterer that was in this catering business, an African American, lives in this apartment now.  And he serves Mr. Sydney, who owns this building and owns Trader Joe's.  He owns many other buildings.  An MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] graduate and a marvelous Jew – very, very orthodox.  And he’s a terrific man, just terrific.  Now where am I at?

FP:  Well, you were telling us about you got married –

AJ:  I got married –

FP:  At this facility right here where you now are living.

AJ:  Yeah.

FP:  We’ll have to see the apartment –

AJ:  Everybody has had a bar mitzvah here.

FP:  We’ll have to find pictures.  

AJ:  This was famous for bar mitzvahs.  I think Ira had – one of my kids had a –

FP:  Did you get married by a rabbi at Temple Israel?

AJ:  You’re kidding.  I don’t even know the name of the rabbi.  Where was I married?  I was married at Beacon House.  My father said the only condition he would come to the wedding – and he wasn’t dictatorial about anything.  But I should know that he would not eat anything – on Kosher plates or not Kosher plates.  But it had to be a Kosher dinner in respect to people that were Kosher, and that I should understand that he wasn’t going to eat anything.  That’s how Kosher my father was.

FP:  Who made the wedding?

AJ:  My mother.  I didn’t even want to buy a gown because I felt it was a waste of money.  So there was somebody I didn’t even know too well.  She knew me, and she said, “Why couldn’t you wear my dress?  It’s beautiful.”  And I put it on.  I was a size nine.  I weighed ninety-eight pounds when I got married.  It was gorgeous.  I haven’t one picture of my wedding.  I have – what do you call it? – the dummy pictures.  What do you call it?

FP:  The proofs.

AJ:  The proofs.  I had a bunch of proofs.  And I looked at them and I said, “Look, I didn’t even have them enlarged.”  I haven’t a picture of my wedding.  That’s the kind of person I was.  

FP:  You’re pretty avant-garde.

AJ:  I was, sure was.

PG:  Were there a lot of people at the wedding?

AJ:  There were 150 or 175.

PG:  And was your sister in the wedding with you?

AJ:  My sister was dead.

PG:  She was dead.

AJ:  Yeah.  My niece, who was the flower – I don’t know – she was an attendant, the maid of honor, or matron of honor.  She was not married.  She was the maid of honor.  She [Phyllis Ryan] now has been in bed for twenty years with MS [multiple sclerosis].  She’s married to this professor, this Dr. [William] Ryan, that wrote Blaming the Victim and Equality, and is so esteemed as to Boston College that the students made a protest when he was leaving because of his age that he’s still there.  He serves his wife.  He said, “Aunt Anne, if I had it to do all over again and I knew Phyllis was going to be in bed thirty years, forty years, I would marry Phyllis just the same.”  They kissed each other in between.  He was just given the – one of the high honors at Boston College for having done more, more, far more, than – what’s the senator in New York who’s against –?

FP:  Moynihan.

AJ:  Daniel Patrick Moynihan.  He had articles against Moynihan in the – I can’t remember.  I know the name of the paper.  And had a rebuttal with Moynihan on Black people and so on.  He’s a marvelous doc, just marvelous.  He’s more of a Jew than any Jew that I meet anywhere.  His wife, who’s in bed, and was a close – one of the closest friends to Rabbi Gittelsohn – he loved them so much, he and his wife, that they would come, and he would bring – he would bring her tapes and everything else.  And she adored him, just adored him.

PG:  And after you got married – 

AJ:  I went to Washington to live.  And my first night, we couldn’t get a – we couldn’t afford really a fancy hotel.  So we went into a rooming house for the first – Mrs. Sterling, Mrs. Sterling – certain things stick in my mind.  I wouldn’t dare tell you what the next step is.  To get prepared for this marriage, I felt that I should go in and get some Margaret Sanger cream because that would prevent me from having a baby. [laughter]  I got the cream, and I told Phillip about the cream.  I’m sure that he – he had had a couple of things with women.  I told him I was safe.  We were not going to have children right away.  We had to sail along.  He had to do his thing.  I would apply for teaching in Washington.  We stayed in the rooming house, and I – I shouldn’t tell this – I used the Margaret Sanger cream.  And the nozzle – what do you call it the –?

PG:  The cap.

AJ:  The cap of the tube went in me.

PG:  Oh, no.

AJ:  And my husband, who was so sophisticated, called the doctor in the middle of the night to ask if I could die – if I could die from this experience. [laughter]  And he says when she urinates, it will all be spent [inaudible].  It was my first night in Washington D.C. in a rooming house because we just couldn’t wing things.  And I looked for – I guess I got a – I don’t know – got someplace to live.  I don’t know where it was.  Yeah, it was not fancy, and I applied for a teaching job.  They took me.  I had an assignment number of such and such a school.  I went to school every day.  And every day, I’d meet my husband at the end of the day, and I looked up at him as if he was bigger than me, congressmen, the senators, and even the vice president of the United States.  I was so excited about just having my own life and being away from every kind of involvement.  And I was very, very happy.  We took in all the concerts and the museums.  I wasn’t even conscious so much of the museums; I was conscious of the concert halls.  My husband loved music, so it was a very happy experience.  I would come home and tell him what I experienced at school.  He would tell me what he experienced at work.  The next thing I knew, the draft board came along; the Dorchester draft board located him.  He had to go back, and he was involved with the draft board.  They let it go for a little while.  But he was taken.  He was taken into the Army.  We moved back to – I moved back to my mother.

FP:  You had a child already.  Did you have a child before that?

AJ:  No.  I didn’t have a child.  But I moved back either with my mother or my mother-in-law.  I was pregnant exactly nine months to the day.  That day that he – that capsule, something must have –

PG:  You’re kidding.

FP:  Margaret Sanger wasn’t so smart.

AJ:  Nine months exactly.  Peter was born in December, and Phillip was taken in the Army.  Well, anyway, that –

FP:  So this is during World War II?  He was drafted during World War II?

AJ:  Yeah.  And what the –?

FP:  Did he serve in Japan?

AJ:  He tried to get into the Navy.  After all, he had the good educational credentials.  And somehow, he didn’t have contact, and they just didn’t take him into the Navy.  But he was an honor – he was an infantryman in the Army.  Of course, he was getting, I think, sixty-six dollars a month or something.  I had to get housing because I was determined not to bring up Peter in a household like my father’s and mother’s.  I think we got a place to live in a housing project in Chelsea.  As far as I was concerned, it was a castle.  It was beautiful.  People that knew me – I’ve got a reputation for being artistic because I went in, and I bought two chairs – they were fifty-nine dollars at Payne’s.  I decorated.  I don’t know.  Everybody that came to see me in Chelsea in this housing project – they’d either bring me a broom or something practical because they knew we were in tough straits.  I was going to have a baby.  And Peter was born at Children’s Hospital, and he was a high [inaudible] [forceps] baby.

FP:  Who delivered you?  Remember?

AJ:  I did have a – I had the best man.  I don’t remember.  But the way I had children, I never practiced.  Occasionally, my husband would put a condom on.  But we just lived natural.  That’s all.  I said, “So, what if I have twelve children?”  And my second doctor was – the doctor that I had for one of my children was a real fancy, dancy WASP-y guy from Winchester.  He said to me one day, “I don’t know how you’ve escaped not having one child after another.  It’s magical.”  And I had a hard delivery with Peter, the first child, you know [inaudible].  My husband was so – he claims that when he came in to see the baby that the baby had the cord.  And the nurses weren’t understanding about caring for him.  He said if he hadn’t been there, Peter might have died.  So, that baby became the focus of something grand to Peter – to Phillip.  If you came to see me, and I was nursing – and in the hospital, I had so much milk that they collected my extra milk and gave it to people who couldn’t be – I was the one who’d never thought about children.  I delivered and for one month – I was in the hospital for two weeks and with our meager means – [Recording paused.]

AJ:  Because he felt that I had to be treated very, very special.  I was the only mother in the United States that gave birth to a nine-pound, eight-ounce child.

[END OF TAPE 1 SIDE B]

FP:  I’m going to re-record this.  It’s February 4^th, 1997.  We’re going to start again.  Okay.

AJ:  We lived on – I don’t know how many steps up.  It was across the Beaconsfield Hotel, which is no longer in Brookline.  We felt as if we were in seventh heaven.  And then, of course, the War – I think the war was –

FP:  It was 1942?

AJ:  Yeah, yeah.  And when was Peter born?

FP:  In December of 1942.

AJ:  ’42.  So Phillip – 

FP:  The war was raging.

AJ:  Yeah.  I think Phillip was – then he was assigned to Washington.  I can’t get the sequence.  But I had to go back home because I taught in Washington for a while.  He had to go back to the Dorchester draft board and back and forth and back and forth.  And he was thirty-one or thirty-two years old when he was drafted. [Recording paused.] The group in infantry – this is a guy that went to Harvard, Harvard Law School, brought the whole average up because of his age.  He was the oldest one in there.   And we were getting – I don’t know – fifty some-odd dollars a month.  My mother surely didn’t have money.  I surely didn’t have money.  So I went back to live with my mother for a while.  I think that I realized that I couldn’t operate nursing a baby and holding a job.  So I developed a preschool situation in one of the lovely homes in Chelsea on – I can’t even think of the name of the street.  But, anyway, I had a small – I had purchased a table for nineteen dollars from the Boston Chair Company.  How I remember the most unimportant things.  I had just a group of maybe eight children, or seven, and they brought in enough so that I at least had enough of bread and this and that.  And it was – I could have had fifty kids, but I just wanted it small and not too demanding.  I would come home every day, and, of course, my mother was getting so indulgent with that first grandchild.  She had other grandchildren before.  But she was just delirious about Peter.  And my sister – I think my sister had evidence of cervical cancer.  So, I was tossed around with my feelings from one place to another.  And finally, I don’t know how, but I got into a housing project in Chelsea.  And everyone who visited me couldn’t get over the fact that I had two chairs that I bought on sale in Payne’s for fifty-nine dollars each.  And they came in, and they said, “Anne, only you could do this with a place like this.”  And it to me looked like a mansion because it was my own.  But later on, many years later on, after Peter was at the Driscoll School, he had to write an autobiography for one of the classes.  I found that thing that he wrote for the Driscoll School – I was president at the time of Driscoll School – and I thought my heart would just – it was torn out of its place because he described the vision of seeing rats and the atmosphere around the house.  He was aesthetic enough to respond to what he was seeing.  I was the first woman that was clawed by a rat.  And I was headline news in the Chelsea Evening Record as having been clawed by a rat in that housing project [Walnut Street].  I went out to throw the papers out, and a rat – and my reaction to it was that I couldn’t nurse my child because I had been contaminated by something so filthy.  But I washed my hands thoroughly and this and that.  I got over it very fast.  I felt even a greater need to nurse Peter to compensate for so much that was lacking in my life.  I could cry just telling this story.  I don’t know where to go from there.

FP:  Tell us about Eric’s birth.  

AJ:  Eric’s birth –

FP:  Which was after the war, right?  In 1946?

AJ:  I have to tell you before the preface to his birth was that my sister was dying.  That’s all that I was consumed with.  I lived in this housing project.  I was, at best, a lousy driver.  Did I drive a car?  No, I didn’t have a car then.  I would go by streetcar from Chelsea to Brookline.  My sister lived on Amory Road, 144 or 44, Amory Street, Brookline.  I would come there as many nights as I could after teaching and after nursing and so on.  I would visit with Elizabeth.  She was so beautiful.  Everything about her was so beautiful.  Even in today’s standards, she was above so much that I see.  She was like my – she was my mother, really.  I knew that the demise was fast coming.  I traveled with that belly of mine.  And when Elizabeth died, I think people looked at me and pitied me as much as they pitied Elizabeth’s early death.  She was forty-four years old when she died.  I used to go to – I couldn’t afford to go to a gynecologist because I didn’t have the funds for it.  So I signed up to have the medical service with the Army.  I hated the Army.  I hated symbolism.  I hated this war to end all wars.  What a fiasco.  So I was going to be delivered at Waltham Regional Hospital in Waltham.  I made my visits by streetcar from Chelsea in between nursings and in between juggling.  I would go to have my examination there.  In the ninth month, I went in, and I didn’t – my mother knew I was going to the hospital, but I always went to the hospital every month.  I went in, and I was kept there.  But the thing that I shall never, ever forget is the insensitivity of people to people.  I stood on that streetcar in the ninth month, and no one gave me a seat.  I cry when I think about what I went through.  When I got there, it was an Army hospital, and you had to pick it out yourself in part and so on.  And it was a dreary delivery.  Nobody, nobody in the world knew I was having a baby because I left – it was a routine visit.  Well, I delivered Eric.  I delivered him – I think he was bathed and washed and loved in tears.  And the first day, my nephew called my house, my mother’s house, to find out how everything was.  And she said, “Anne [inaudible].”  So they called the hospital.  That’s how they found out I had a child.  The child was born without anybody knowing about it.  But the next day, my sister-in-law wired or cabled my husband to tell him that a boy was born.  And before I could even move, he called.  He ordered gardenias, a simple little thing with gardenias.  I have the little vase still.  And it was a teary but sort of ecstatic thing because we had a child who was healthy.  But I did tell you – I don’t know whether we taped this – that my father, who was such a [inaudible] wouldn’t eat anything; he wouldn’t go anywhere.  But he insisted that Louis Zetzel, who was the first Harvard student – medical student – who would not go to classes on a Sabbath or take anything in on the Sabbath.  And also was so extreme that he was a [inaudible].  My father insisted that Louis Zetzel was a Mohel, and he’d come and do the circumcision.  He did come.  I don’t know.

PG:  This is for the second one, but not for the first?

AJ:  Second one, yeah.

PG:  But not the first?

AJ:  Oh, the first – 

FP:  Did everybody have a circumcision, a ritual circumcision?

AJ:  Oh, yeah.  Oh, yeah.  And the dollars – I didn’t even understand it.  We had to sell the baby.  We had that for Peter.

FP:  For the first one.

AJ:  Not for the second one.  There was too much happening in my life.

FP:  No, you only do it for the first.

AJ:  Oh really?  Well, I had it for the first.  My father was right there.  I wished he’d been there so much for making me learn Hebrew.  So that was the delivery of Eric.  And Eric, I truthfully can say that I never nursed.  I didn’t feel that the milk was diluted with my tears because every experience I had was with Elizabeth in front of me.  She was really my first death experience.  I cried it out alone.  I just can’t even explain it.  But it was like taking my arms and cutting them off, and here my body was so productive.  I had a child.  So that Eric was really a – I nursed him with much sadness but with such an insane love for him that I named him Eric after Elizabeth.  His middle name was Elizabeth until people told me that it was the most damaging thing I could ever do to a child.  So I changed it from Eric E. Jackson.  This is a very emotional time that I’m talking about.  I don’t cry easily.  So that was the delivery of Eric.  We were living in that house.  Then we moved to Brookline.  Yeah, yeah.

FP:  Where was Ira born?

AJ:  Ira was born – what’s the facility?

FP:  BLI?

AJ:  Not the – what was the other facility?

PG:  Lying-in.

AJ:  He was born.  Everything was normal.  We were living in – I think we weren’t living in – we were living in Brookline by then.  [Editor’s Note: Anne’s recollection is incorrect; the family was living in Chelsea when Ira was born in 1948, and they moved to Brookline four years later, in 1952]. Philip had come home.  There’s a span that’s a vacuum. The family lived in another, more elegant public housing project built for returning servicemen.

PG:  [inaudible]

FP:  1948.

AJ:  No.  There was a big interim.  I have a whole book.  In the meantime, while I was in the housing project, my husband came back from the Army.  There was something that happened to him with the whole Army experience that he was – he had such an incredible experience.  Having his own plane, a pilot in his own plane, and he was doing legal work picking up the murderers, the Japanese [war criminals, as part of General MacArthur’s staff].  And he had to interview them and travel them back to the headquarters and so on.  I always felt that he must have known a wonderful Japanese woman here and there because he sent me pictures.  He shared the honesty of our relationship.  But I felt that – I felt that he was really very adventuresome in his experiences and that he was really enjoying it as much as you can enjoy anything that’s in a war.  But I was very methodical in my writing to him while we were in the housing project.  I wrote what we called Peterkin papers.  I called them Peterkin papers.  And I had this gray, deco-edged paper – look how unwieldy and how awful I am now.  And I wrote to him every day so that there was an account of the development of Peter, his language, and so on, which I knew I’d never remember.  And then, when Eric was born, I continued it.  But I called it Eric-echo papers.  And when each child was married, I gave it to their wife as something that was part of me.  And Peter’s wife – Peter’s wife was the kind that really – she just ate every word of it.  Eric’s wife was fascinated that I would be involved in this kind of writing thing.  But at that time, my hands were good.  It was just part – like reading my mail – writing to my husband.

FP:  Did they save them?

AJ:  Yeah, they did.  I’m going back.  Oh, and when Phillip came out of the Army, his demeanor with me was – I wondered whether we’d ever get together mentally because he was in another world where he had a lot of excitement to be experienced.  He went through officers’ training school.  So we now had something coming in.  But when he came into the project, it was like a bomb had hit him, the strangeness of it.  He was kind of shocked.  And through his shock, I could sense that there was something that wasn’t between the two of us at the time.  And Eric was just a baby.  And he had his tonsils at that time.  It was [inaudible] to take the tonsils out.  He happened to hemorrhage.  That was the strongest evidence I had that Phillip was my husband.  He completely took over.  He took him to the hospital.  I was just in a state of such panic that he took over, and I thought, “Well, he is back with me, in a sense.”  But before, I didn’t sense that he really was with me.  That’s in all honesty.  And he got a job.  He was in the law.  But he got a job being the head of – I don’t know whether they called it the personnel board or the housing board.  He was the chairman of that board.  He was fighting for dear life for my getting into another project that was more attractive,  out of the [Recording paused.] – terrible thing.  I think the board sensed it.  But they felt that they needed an architect for a new project that was coming up.  They had chosen somebody that my husband felt was not qualified for the job.  They said, “Listen, there’s five thousand dollars in it for each one of us if we pick this guy for the project.”  My husband said, “I went to Harvard, and my father and mother had to borrow money to send me to Harvard.  I am not about to have money that’s illicit and so on.”  And so they fired him.  And so we were left.  After they fired him, we were supposed to move to another project, and they held up the move.  All of our things were on the street.  They just held up our getting into this apartment.  Well, I don’t even remember what happened to it.  It was so painful.  But Phillip sued the city of Chelsea for the damage they did to him in every way, morally, and so on and so forth.  And he lost the case.  And he had Claude Cross, [who] was one of the biggest lawyers.  We always reach for the best.  And Phillip said if he had to give up his life and his family, he was going to see this case through.  And he appealed the case, and it went to the Supreme Court.  I have the whole thing.  I have written my kids that they’re never to get rid of that book.  The judge absolutely was sensitive.  I never went to any of the courts because I was working, and I was teaching somewhere.  I don’t know.  So many things were happening to me.  And he won the case, and he got five thousand dollars.  That was a fortune.  Then we decided the first thing we’d do was get out of Chelsea where our children could be educated, and we moved to Brookline.  We bought the house on [59] Griggs Road.  And when I went to see Caverly, who was superintendent of schools, I said, “You know, Dr. Caverly, our primary reason for coming to Brookline is because we know the schools are good.  I’ve been through the schools.  I visited the schools.”  And he said, “Well, what’s your issue?”  And I said, “I want my children to go to Driscoll School because I know that Elgie Clucas is a wonderful principal.”  I learned after she wasn’t so wonderful.  I’ll tell you about that.  And so we bought the house.  We had our first down payment.  And my husband didn’t even go on – he was busy and couldn’t even go.  I went with my mother-in-law, and we saw this house.  I fell in love with it, and I said, “We’re buying it.”  And she said, “Of course you are, darling.”  My mother-in-law was the kind of woman that was – they lost the recipe for this kind of woman.  She was the kind of woman, whatever the experience was, she’d say, “If I’d died yesterday, I wouldn’t have lived to have this wonderful, wonderful experience.  I’m here where you’re going to buy this house.”  Phillip had no choice.  “This is the house you’re going to buy.”  And also, there are things about her that I just have to insert.  She was the kind of woman that if the children came to visit her – and they were little crawlers, and so they’d mark up the furniture and so on.  And she’d say, “When they leave, I kiss every mark that they leave on the table.”

FP:  What was her name?

AJ:  Rae – Rae Jackson.  And my father-in-law [Joseph] was just the sweetest, sweetest, most loving man.  My kids had their first taste of beer or wine with him.  He’s just wonderful.  And so, where am I?  I don’t know where I was.  Oh, I bought a house.  And the kids were enrolled.  They were enrolled – this is a funny story.  They were enrolled in Driscoll School.  Eric, I don’t know – Eric was already preschool age.  Eric wouldn’t go to public school.  He only wanted to go to Cheder because when I lived in Chelsea, I had to teach.  So I enrolled him in a sort of a Yeshiva – I don’t remember the name of the place – school, where he got, as a first language, Hebrew.  And he didn’t want to go to an English-speaking school.  He was riding a bike.  I think he was three and a half years old.  He wanted to go across the car tracks to Kehillath Israel.  He didn’t want to go to a – and I was under strict surveillance by him that we had nothing that was like bacon in the house, which I love, and so on.  When he entered Driscoll School, he had Hebrew as a first language.  I always marveled that he did so well in school.  He was a child that never caused me any problems.  He was easygoing.  Peter was always dominant and number one because he’d had all this trauma, which I couldn’t evaluate.  It was too close to my heart.  

FP:  Did you send the kids to religious school, too?

AJ:  Oh, sure.  They entered.  I became used to the good things immediately.  We enrolled the kids in Temple Israel.  Yeah.  And they all went, and they all went to postgraduate – Hebrew school, confirmation, then post-confirmation.

FP:  Did they all get bar mitzvahed?

AJ:  Oh, sure.  And they went to post.  I don’t know whether they were ever in class, but they went to post-class [confirmation].  Phillip and I attended practically every session that the parents were asked to take at Temple Israel.  I felt that I was in the right place.  But Eric, of course, had certain adjustments to make.  He’s the most un-Jewish of all the three kids.  It’s interesting.  You don’t know how they’ll develop.  So, where am I?  I don’t know.  I’m at Temple Israel.  I jumped around all over the place.

FP:  That’s interesting.  So they all had bar mitzvahs, and they all entered confirmation and post-confirmation –

AJ:  Yeah.  And Rabbi Gittelsohn said, “Anne, I’m so proud of you.  I think you’re the first mother to write every invitation that you had for people that you wanted there at the bar mitzvah, you wrote a personal letter.”  And he commented – and I became known to Gittelsohn because he knew I was an individual in a sense set apart from a lot of the other people.  I had a very simple Kiddush for Peter.  You know, we put our money in the – $5,000 in the house.  And we had plenty of a struggle.  Only God and I know.  When I’d go marketing, Phillip would say, “How much money do you need?”  I’d say, “Oh, I can’t tell.  I don’t know what I’ll need to spend.”  He’d say, “Well, can you do on fifteen dollars?”  You know, it was a – my kids never were aware of it, you know, but I really struggled.  Sometimes Ira will make a remark, and he’ll say, “Oh listen, my mother, she bakes steak.  It was a lousy steak.”  Well, he’s come into tasting steak that’s so perfect, the best, so that measuring it – it wasn’t a lousy steak, but it was an ordinary steak, very ordinary.  And I was a good cook if I say so.

FP:  Did you have Shabbos?  Did you spend Friday nights together as a family?

AJ:  Oh, yeah, yeah.  And one thing we did, which I can’t understand in families that have married my kids – we always ate together.  We sat together.  Breakfast time, we had a dinky television set in the kitchen, and the news went on.  There was a certain orientation that the kids had to political news, what was happening in the world.  They were very interested in what happened to Phillip and so on.  So that Shabbos was – and I lit candles, and it was a traditional home.  I learned the prayers for benching licht.  I learned the – I always said prayers in Hebrew to myself.  I don’t know whether I individualized my prayer in terms of myself.  But as I grew, I found that I was including a lot of people in my prayers.  Where am I?  So they went to Temple Israel?

PG:  And what about your mother and father-in-law?  Did they come for Friday nights or celebrate Hanukkah with you, or –?

AJ:  Well, they didn’t have a car. [They lived in a public housing project in Mattapan].  See, we were not in a car class.  No, they didn’t.  They came, but they’d come, maybe, on a Sunday, but they didn’t get there for Friday.  They were there for Friday, and they were there for all the Jewish holidays, made a brisket.

PG:  How was Passover?

AJ:  Oh, Passover.  I believe he died [inaudible].  But we always had Passover.  And I think that as I – many times, I had non-Jewish people at Passover because I felt it was an educational experience for them, along with an exciting experience.  And I don’t know whether – I had Mike Dukakis, and I had some of the staff from the Kennedy School.  That was later on when Ira was older.  But I did have people that were outside.  

FP:  Do you remember the times of the great social action?  You were at Temple Israel with Rabbi Gittelsohn when Martin Luther King came – and those kinds of occasions.  Tell us a little about that.

AJ:  Well, did tell you about being in [Roxbury] with the kids and going off to Washington.  I have pictures of it in the newspaper.  And, of course, I was more interested in the social action than anything at Temple Israel because Hebrew didn’t interest me, and so on.  I didn’t understand it.  Gittelsohn was my kind of guy.  It’s very interesting.  I told you that my father was a kind of Jew that had a dimension that’s hard to imagine.  Every request that he had for charity – I can show you the will, but it’s so personal.  Every request that he had – and he couldn’t afford to send ten dollars or five dollars.  See, he started big, and he did well the first years in junk, in the rags, and so on.  He had his own business on Elm Street in Chelsea.  But he would save every shtikl of paper in a closet that he had a key for.  He never went into that closet.  Every Father’s Day present – he would put the shirt in there, and he wouldn’t wear it.  But he had handkerchiefs tied around him like a belt because you couldn’t wear a belt, I guess, if you were so frum.

FP:  No leather.

AJ:  Yeah, no leather.  So, this is the kind of family I came from.  My father, not my mother – of this world, she was way ahead.  And why did I start to tell you about –?  Oh, every request he had for money, and he couldn’t send five dollars or ten dollars, he saved the papers in that closet.  And when he made out his will every single one of those sources from the hidden parts of Palestine – he saved those sources.  And in his will, I think he left his children maybe $200.  I have the will.  But every source we were committed to pay – they were remote parts of Palestine.  He said that he hoped that he gave his children values that were more important than money, but he wished he had money to give them.  I don’t know if he had a [inaudible] maybe $200.  It was just nothing at all, nothing.  I have a copy of the – I did save the will.  It’s coming apart, and my niece wanted to see it, the one that’s in bed.  But I told you about my niece marrying a Catholic.

FP:  Was it an ethical will?  Did he talk about his values and what he wanted you to –?

AJ:  He wanted us to perpetuate all the good things in Jewish life.  That was his mission.  And my niece, who married a Catholic, and was converted to Judaism, was such a valued friend of the Gittelsohns, Rabbi Gittelsohn.  He got to know my niece, Phyllis, the one whose mother had died, and knew the quality of that woman with arthritis and with every disease we didn’t know she had.  She marched right aside Martin Luther King on the march.  She couldn’t even walk.

FP:  What was her name, Phyllis what?

AJ:  Phyllis Ryan.  Her name is still Ryan because –

FP:  She’s still alive?

AJ:  Yeah.  And she’s in bed twenty-one years.  And Rabbi Gittelsohn never missed visiting her.  When he died, she was devastated because he was a link to everything that she thought was ideal.  And when they had – Rabbi Gittelsohn was known for the sermon at New Year’s – the New Year’s sermon.  He honored certain people.  Among them was Eleanor Roosevelt, whom my niece has written a play about it.  It was shown at the United Nations.  But my niece, Phyllis, who married this fellow called Bill Ryan, William Ryan, was – she was so involved in the politics of the day, crippled as she was and everything else, incredible cook, incredible everything, that when they named the people to be honored, the congregants at Temple Israel were horrified he named a Phyllis Ryan.  He used to pick – I think it was an international person like Eleanor Roosevelt – it was all right to have a gentile announced, but Phyllis Ryan.  And he said, “She’s a member of the congregation.”  

FP:  They’re no longer members, are they?  Are they still?

AJ:  Oh, yes, they are.

FP:  We should interview her.

AJ:  I want you to know she’s a member.  They used to send visitors, people to visit here.  IT didn’t work out well because she has nurses around the clock, most of the time.  And she’s a fascinating – she is a fascinating woman.  Her husband is more Jewish than anybody that I know that’s Jewish.  He wrote a special – I’ll give you a copy of that.  He wrote a special service for Passover that we all use, [and] he included my brother, Mendel, as a Zionist, one of the leaders of Zionism in the country.  He had Martin Luther King, and his vision about the Blacks was so ahead of its time.  And it was included.  I have somewhere – I’d have to look up.  He speaks Yiddish.  He knows the idioms.  He knows the humor.  He knows so much about it.  He’s a professor at Boston College.  He is so esteemed there that when he came to his maturity and he was supposed to be – his wife wanted him to continue to teach because he was so committed to her that she felt that his teaching was a respite for him in a sense.  While he’s serving her, and he goes into bed every day because he has a very severe heart condition, he’s written Equality, and Blaming the Victim, and a third book.  He had time to criticize Moynihan in a – I have the book, the thing, the magazine and the Nation magazine about the criticism of Moynihan, that he was not understanding enough of poverty and so forth.  So, I could go on and on.  

FP:  Unbelievable.

AJ:  Yeah.  It’s an unbelievable story.  It really is.  She is still in bed.  So, she’s in bed twenty-one years.  She has to be moved.  Her husband feeds her.  He never has left that bedside to take his nap after he gets home from Boston College without kissing her and telling her he loves her.  And one day, I said, “Bill, if you had it to do all over again, would you marry Phyllis knowing what was ahead of you?”  He said, “Marry her?  I would.  There’d be nobody in the world that would touch her.”  So it’s a most gorgeous –

FP:  A love story.

AJ:  They honored him at BC, and my Ira went with Martha.  I was told, “Don’t talk, mother.  Don’t open your mouth.”  And every time he says, “Don’t open your mouth,” I open my mouth.  The kids are really – if you saw me with the kids, you’d think I was a docile person because, I don’t know what, but they – and I spoke up, and I said, “In this audience, there must be somebody.”  I know a senator back when he used to know me, and he’d say, “Anne, if I could write the biggest, the most gorgeous love story that ever could be told, it’s the story of Bill Ryan and Phyllis Ryan.”  I told them that.  And Jack was there.  And I said, “It’s …”.  My niece is great.  The title for the book – she got the title wrong, Blaming the Victim.  IT's quoted.  It’s used as a text in any course today in psychology and so on.  And so that’s a story.  And where else?

FP:  Now tell us about how many grandchildren you have?

AJ:  How many I have?

PG:  How about their weddings?  How about the boys’ weddings?  How about –?

AJ:  The boys’ weddings?

PG:  They all went to Brookline High, right?

AJ:  Yeah.  They went to Brookline High. But I was always told with Eric that he was unusual.  You know he was a wonderful child in school.  At Driscoll, he was easy.  And every time I went for a conference, the teacher would say to me, “Oh, he’s such an easy child.”  And I used to say, “What does easy mean?  What kind of boy is he, really?  Is he developing up to his ability?  Is he kind to children?”  I’d always get this summarization that he was the easy – he’s a lovely, lovely boy.  Well, they found that Eric was quite bright in math.  So I sent him to Newton summer school.  They had a special school for Brookline kids.  My aspiration levels for my children were incredible.  Whether I had the money or I didn’t have the money, I had to have the money for certain things.  And it always worked, always.  And Philip was the – law was very slow, very slow.  Peter went to Exeter or Andover for a summer.  I thought that would give him a little more confidence in maybe his ability.  And Eric went to Exeter a summer.  In my finances, when I’d go shopping, I knew whether I had $20 or $25.  And I think that my children sense that it was quite a sacrifice, that whatever I was doing with them.  One went to Tevya, Camp Tevya.  Peter went to Tevya.  He was the oldest.  But my husband really, really felt stunned when our oldest child came home and said he was – no, I’m getting ahead of myself.  Oh, Peter went to Columbia.  I haven’t gotten into the part where Peter was at Columbia.  He was in the riots.  And Ira was at Harvard in the riots.  I don’t know whether I should put this in because it might be upsetting to Ira.  He was in the first Payne sit-in.  And Phillip was coming home from work one day, and he picked up the Advertiser because he could see Ira’s picture on it.  And Ira was in the sit-in for housing in Cambridge because they were moving poor people out of the area.  He was so upset by that.  And then Ira sat-in at Temple – what’s the name of the temple in Newton where Gold, Gold – what was his name?  [Bernard Goldfine.]  He lived on Hammond Road in a big, big house, and he was giving millions to Boston University.  They felt that his money should be turned down.  And wherever he gave money, it should be turned down.  And Ira went for that bar mitzvah, and they protested.  When we went to a party – when my husband and I went to a party or whatever we did socially, it seemed that we were always the subject of conversation because our children were so involved in so many things.  

FP:   So they got your teachings.

AJ:  Ah, there was something else – oh, there’s so much.  Ira particularly because since Ira went to the same school that Phillip went to and so on, Ira was [inaudible] his dream.  And he loved all the kids, but Peter was dominant and difficult as a result of early, early years, I believe.  Those were the most formative years.  And Eric was always easygoing.  He got to where he wanted to go easily.  But we were the subject of riots.  But even when we made – finally made a visit to my husband’s brother’s house in Ohio.  That was the time when they had – what was it when the kids were killed?

FP:  Kent State.

AJ:  Kent State.  We were at their bar mitzvah, and we were not concerned with all the bar mitzvah.  We were only concerned with what was happening.  And I think that my husband’s brother and his wife sensed that we really didn’t belong there.  We were out of place.  So she said, “You know, we have wonderful family in Ohio where the jam …”  What’s the name of the jam that’s made from Ohio?  Smuckers.  “His house is next door to Smuckers, where my sister lives, and why don’t you …?”  The bar mitzvah was over.  “Why don’t you …?  They’d love having you over for a couple of days.”  So we went to the house next to Smuckers, where my brother-in-law’s family lived.  The house had so many closets.  And in each closet there was – to me, it looked as if the whole of Filene’s Basement fit into each closet, but everything was of the best.  And this father, the father of this Jewish family – they were called Jewish – kept talking about the importance of making a living and the importance of success financially and so on.  And my husband said, “But look what’s happening around you.  How can you feel this way?  And your son” – he had one child – “Your son is in jeopardy.  He’s in jeopardy.”  I don’t remember all the details, but the riot happened when we were there.  And we were so deeply involved emotionally with this that we kept calling this family that we’d stayed with, and there was a different tone to the father after this happened as if to say, “You predicted that I should try to change.  My values were in the wrong place.”  We had the mazel to fall into all these situations.  This was our [inaudible].  And Peter, when he got through – well, Peter was in the riots.  And my mother-in-law died.  We all adored my in-laws.  We really did.  And Peter came home from Columbia for the funeral and for the Shiva period.  When he went back, Columbia was in the siege of the riot. There were sit-downs.  And the head of the architectural school – the head of the school was involved in the riot against the school because they were taking the property at Morningside.  My mind is – I don’t have all the details.  Peter was plunged into this riot situation.  The police didn’t know those who were against Morningside or for it.  And Peter was beaten and lost some of his teeth.  I remembered that he called and said that he wanted Dad to meet him at the airport.  When he came home, he was such a mess.  But what he was physically wasn’t nearly as upsetting to me as it was what happened to him from an apolitical kid.  Apolitical because there were reasons for it even though he was exposed to politics, he became so, so against the system, against this that they located our family.  And Chomsky, Professor Chomsky called the house – or he had somebody call the house, and he wanted Peter to speak at BU or [MIT].  I don’t even remember, but in Chomsky’s name.  And it’s a little sad to say how heartbreaking the world around me was crushing in on my children and what it was doing to their values.  You could see where my children became internationalists in their scope and in their thinking.  It didn’t matter whether you were Jewish, or Armenian, or Black, or white.  They didn’t have to tell it to me, but I could see it happening.  And Peter was given a fellowship to travel.  He went to Turkey.  He met a girl who was going to Bangladesh to work for Mother Teresa.  She had gone to U of Penn.  I don’t know whether she was in nursing.  I don’t even know what she was in.  But it’s so much, it isn’t believable.  And he met her, and he said, “Listen, we’ve got a van, and we’re traveling all through all Turkey.  Why don’t you join us?  What do you do in Bangladesh?”  And he said she was so attractive and so on.  What I didn’t know is that she went and did her own thing.  She left and went to Bangladesh.  And for a year and a half – I’m jumping all over the place.  For a year and a half, he kept getting these letters and letters.  And I happened to purposely look at one letter.  And she says, “I think of you as a [inaudible],” and all this euphoric stuff.  She had been writing to her mother.  I don’t know to this day whether her family were Episcopalians or – I don’t know what faction they were.  I give you my word.  And her mother –

END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A

AJ:  Is this being taped?  My mother was a dynamo.  But if anybody needed anything, I remember – and I’m not going to tell you who.  But it’s someone who’s very close to my heart, just was having a hard time, or her father was leaving her mother, and so on.  So my mother says, [inaudible], “You need money?  Whatever I have, I’ll give it.”  So my mother had a quality to her to, embracing –

FP:  So you started to tell us about the mother of this young woman.

AJ:  The mother of this Catherine assumed that she was going to bring home a Black guy.  Her father, Catherine’s father, was mayor of – I don’t know where they lived. [Maple Shade, New Jersey.]  He was mayor.  He went to MIT.  Catherine was born nearly at the same time Peter was.  But she was born of parents who were in the same hospital, but the father was Christian.  He had an MIT background and it was one of those coincidences.  But they didn’t know it for years after.  And she had the kind of mother who had an index, a color index for each child.  And in this book, she had all of their development listed.  There was so much she had in common with me.  Anyway, Peter kept – he was moping around and so on and so forth when he got back.  I said, “Listen, what’s becoming of you?  What’s going to happen?”  He said, “Well, I’ve got to get to Europe.”  He didn’t have a nickel.  I said, “Well, I can put together enough money for an Icelandic trip and give you a trip to Europe.  And you get something straightened out in your mind, what it’s all about.”  So he went to Europe.  He went to Europe.  I had been to Europe through Harvard.  That’s a long story, too.  But he went to Europe, and he stayed there.  His roommate at Columbia or – where did he go?  McGill.  He met somebody who was with the United Nations, so he stayed with him.  And he met Catherine.  Of course, when they came back, they traveled all around because she had a little money saved up, and I gave him a little.  When they came back – I’ll have to tell you this because it adds such humor.  But when he came back, he went to her house first.  And her mother – I don’t think they ever had an experience with a Jewish family.  That’s the kind of area they lived in – oh, God, I have it – in New Jersey.  They didn’t know Jews.  But they were so relieved that she was in love with a Jew, and he wasn’t Black.  Talk about prejudice.  And talk about facing history.  That their attitude was so kindly and so embarrassing.  They were a very well-educated family, the father and every one of the kids.  They were all –

FP:  Did they get married?

AJ:  And when Peter was bringing her to my house at Griggs Road for the first time, I had a gorgeous dog [Robie] that everyone in Brookline knew.  And the dog ran down the steps. We had about eight steps to the front of the house.  And the dog came down, and he was so excited he urinated because he was so excited to see Peter.  And this girl emerged and [inaudible].  She had lipstick heavy and rouge and blonde.  And I thought, “God, help me.”  He knew the kind of vision I had of the kind of woman that would be appealing.  That he went out and bought a mask that had a sense of reality but didn’t.  He put it on her.  They came by cab.  They didn’t have a car.  They came out of a taxi.  If I didn’t fall down the seven steps to greet her.  I was nearer to death than I’ve ever been in my life.  I was so horrified.  And then, when they got up to the top step – this is Peter, he’s that way about everything – he pulled off the mask.  And this lovely, lovely-looking woman who was – not only was she lovely, but she brought into my household a scent that I’ve never smelled before in my life.  The whole house smelled of India, of where she was, Bangladesh.  She traveled to India.  I was smitten with her.  I thought, “He has good taste.”  And it was Christian – my husband came from an American-speaking family.  They spoke English like English people.  They weren’t Orthodox.  I don’t know what they were.  I don’t think they went to temple.  But they were the loveliest people.  But of the two of us, I found that my husband had more prejudice against another faith for his children.  It was very interesting.  He accepted the visit.  She stayed with us.  He really liked her.  But he didn’t like the idea that the oldest was setting a pattern.  That was his contention, that the other kids would find it easy to fall into that pattern.  Of course, they did.  And the wedding – everything in my life sounds as if I made it up.  The wedding was in Connecticut.  Her father made the chuppah because she was the kind of girl that was – you’d love her.  She’s more Jewish than Jews.  The day of his wedding was the worst snowstorm.  It was in April, I think.  And I had this gold [inaudible] dress.  A long dress.  It was just beautiful.  And everybody came and they stood in mud under this chuppah in mud in ConnecticutThey had an outhouse.  They took an outhouse and had it for a bathroom.  They had Indian music.  They had Indian people sitting, and they’d play music.  And they had a [inaudible]. They knew I loved [inaudible].  So they had a cloth, not finished or anything, on the table.  They wanted no part of my indulgence.  They had the Indian food, and bagels and lox and cream cheese.  They had American food.  But they did it themselves.  Catherine did it all herself.  The person that married them was a psychiatrist.  Yeah, a psychiatrist.  He was, I guess, a rabbi, too.  And while they were being married, their dog – Peter had a dog that went through college with him.  The dog was in between them, and they were photographed with the dog.  Nobody will ever forget that wedding, nobody, nobody.  It was the worst storm of the year.  

PG:  And Eric and Ira were there?

AJ:  Yeah, of course. And did Ira have a girlfriend then?  I don’t know.

FP:  When did Eric get married?

AJ:  Ira wouldn’t like this on tape.  The day of the ballgame when I was at the ballgame – don’t tape this.  When Ira was at the ballgame, I gave him my word of honor. [Recording paused.]  And then he says, “Take Mother to Japan and have her walk the streets of Japan where you walked every day to your office.  And take her to the office building and have her see where you spent part of your life against your inner wishes.”  He didn’t write it as attractively as I’m wording it because boys don’t.  But I have a copy of the check.  And when I came to California when he was single, there were my special flowers on the table.  Eric is so loving, and he’s so good.  But he’s always been in a Christian – in a kind of environment with money, cars, and it’s a playboy of America, that area.  We stayed next to President Ford when we visited with Eric because their place was next to theirs in Palm Springs.  We stayed in Palm Springs.  Look, my life is so varied.  He was married to a woman that was so gorgeous.  I have a book she made for Phillip when he was dying of cancer.  You can see the quality.  She was a victim of a mother and father who had so much money they put her in private schools.  And she never had parents.  And when she came to visit on Griggs Road, I put her in the – we have a third floor that I used as my studio.  I put her in that room.  And she said, “Oh, I’ve never been so happy.”  In my third-floor attic, I put her.  I didn’t know what she had and what – Eric never told me.  But, listen [inaudible].  But she was Christian, and she wasn’t one thing.  She wasn’t [inaudible].  And Catherine had a bat mitzvah for her daughter at Yale.  Peter took her to her lessons to a real orthodox facility [Yale Hillel] because there’s nothing in Branford, Connecticut.  So he used to travel every Saturday.  And the boy was not bar mitzvahed.  Peter’s oldest child [Reuben] was not bar mitzvahed.  Not because he didn’t want it but because he was dyslexic. [Editor’s Note: Actually, because the Reform Temple twenty miles away wanted usurious rates for membership.] He was being tested at Yale at the time.  They felt that it would be very, very imposing to put another burden of language on him.  He said, “Grandma, someday I’ll be bar mitzvahed.  Someday I’ll be mitzvahed.”  He’s the dearest, sweetest boy [with a bachelor’s degree from Penn and a master of Architecture from Columbia.]  The girl [Shana] is in Paris now.  And she was bat mitzvahed.  She has another year at Barnard.  And the little one [Rachel], when we went back gospel singing at Harvard – her mother’s a gospel singer.  It was Hanukkah time, and I gave her some dreidels.  She knew all the symbols and what they stood for.  So it’s Catherine, it’s Peter, and getting to a school.  They live in such a peculiar spot.  But, anyway, that’s it. [Recording paused.]

PG:  Today is Monday, May 19^th.  This is our last day to interview Anne Jackson.  She will begin now.

AJ:  See, I don’t remember what went.  Did I tell you about the award I got at Mass College of Art?

PG:  You haven’t, but –and you know what?  Tell us about that as begin telling us how you got interested in doing more of your art because that came after –

FP:  Your art career is what we’re interested in.

AJ:  Did I tell you that when Phillip was living, he was quite sick for a while?  He had a lung removed.  Is it on?

PG:  Yes, it is.

AJ:  I used to go up on the third floor of my home, and I used to work on Lucite.  I’d never seen anybody do it, but I went to a hardware store and got big sheets – had them cut big sheets of Lucite into small pieces.  I worked with oil on Lucite.  Then I reversed it and put a backing to it.  I showed it to somebody at Mass College of Art, Tom Wong, who was with the museum at the time.  He said, “Honestly, Anne, this is absolutely unbelievable.  What you’re doing is what the old – what they did with glass.  They painted on it, and then they reversed it.”  And he said, “I’m intrigued with it.”  And he said, “You’re doing good work.”  And I never had – nobody ever showed me this and all.  But I had a great time. And I had a husband who was very empathetic with what I was doing.  And during that time, he insisted that I’d been under a strain with his illness, that I go off with a friend, Reba Shepherd, who did sculpting.  We went off to San Miguel.  Do I have that on here?  Went off to San Miguel for two weeks.  And I had never, ever used chalks, pastel.  And there was – I took a couple of pieces of paper to work on.  I didn’t really understand what kind of paper you use for pastels.  And each day, they had a class where a Mexican would sit and pose.  And you would just do your thing.  Well, I never did my thing.  I never had a lesson on a body or a face or anything.  And one day, the subject – didn’t come.  They got a quarter for the morning for sitting.  So the instructor sat.  I had no paper.  He told us he was going to be sitting the next day because the woman couldn’t come in.  She had problems.  So I went from one place to another.  You'd think a facility, a town, that catered to artists would have a paper place where you get supplies or anything.  Did I tell you this?  So I went into a hardware store.  They had sandpaper.  I imagined in my mind I was thinking – well, chalks on sandpaper would peel away as you work on it.  But I decided – I didn’t know anything.  I didn’t know any better, so I bought a piece of the coarsest sandpaper.  And when I came to class the next day, we were told that the instructor was going to sit for us.  I did a portrait of him, and he came around.  The only criticism – you had no criticism, but he walked around and nodded whether he thought it was good.  When he came over to me, he said, “You really caught me best.”  So I brought it back.  I have to jump into the future.  When they have a show for me at Mass College of Art of all my know-nothing paintings and whatever I did, everybody commented about this portrait on the sandpaper.  My teacher, Dorothy Leppler, said, “Don’t sell it, Anne.  It’s priceless.  I’ve never seen anything done like this.  And I don’t think anybody – nobody that I know.”  Well, I hung it, and the vice president of Mass College of Arts was determined to own that picture. [telephone rings]  And I remember at the time I didn’t want to – [Recording paused.] I sold the picture for $250.  The man lives in Florida.  I certainly wouldn’t discredit my ability to do business.  I’ve always wanted it back, but I just felt it was sold, and that’s it.  During that show, I was judged by Jeff Kehoe, who’s in charge of the museum at the college.  He came to the house.  I had lots and lots of stuff.  I was churning it out every day practically.  He selected seventeen pieces.  I don’t remember how many I sold.  But it wasn’t for the purpose of selling.  It gave me the first push that I was adequate because I felt I had really no instruction on most of it.  Maybe I had six lessons but never on figure or face and so on.  It gave me the push to keep on working.  I felt that art – in my teaching days, I remember that I worked with children on bogus paper, large, huge bogus paper, and used red chalks and yellow chalks, and produced – had the children produce things.  Or if I wanted to do a building, I’d say, “Children, just look at the newspaper.  You’ve got the beginning of a building.”  I’d say, “Just take pen and ink or take black ink and your brush and just run along the lines.  And you’ve got the building of skyscrapers.  And you can make some small or some bigger.”  I evidently had something within me that was trying to come out, and it was coming out through the children.  I got unusual effects with art with working with children.  But my own ability – my own esteem for my ability was very, very low.  You have to stop it because I can’t think that fast. [Recording paused.] The thing that I felt was that art and music should be strongly involved in these school programs.  I thought it could be correlated with whatever children were handling.  As a result, I did just that with the classes I had.  Of course, the class I’m talking about was the [inaudible] class.  And at that time, there were these very talented children.  It was a most extraordinary experience.  For instance, this was in Chelsea in a very, very poor neighborhood right in the shadow of the Walton Shoe Factory.  And I remember – did I talk about the trip to New York?  I had the children, over a year’s time, save up two dollars and fifty cents.  And we made a trip on the first magic carpet trip to New York City.  Benjamin Fine who was a reporter for the New York Times –

FP:  He was my friend.

AJ:  He was?

FP:  His daughter and I were best friends.

AJ:  Oh, God, isn’t that incredible?  Incredible.

FP:  We’ll have to talk about that afterward.

AJ:  And my principal was – she was really the greatest force of my life because she was so inspirational.  I could never describe her with giving her enough of what I think of her.  She was remarkable.  Maybe I was the daughter she never had.  She responded to all the crazy things that I was introducing and doing.  But she was battling a – she was battling prejudice within the school from a Catholic population that felt, well, maybe I was a Communist because I was doing something different.  I was handling a project on Russia.  I had all these wonderful things that the children had done on huge papers and decorating all of the room.  But she was supportive.  As a matter of fact, when she was a hundred years old, she was in San Francisco.  My husband, who wasn’t well – the two of us flew out for her birthday party.  She was the greatest source of inspiration.

FP:  What was her name again?

AJ:  Alice Barker.  I have something that she’s written in my thing.  Every book that she ever read, she had a comment written in the front of the book.  When a child was sent to the office for discipline – and discipline you could use a rattan at that time – she’d say, “Well, I knew you’d come down.  I need some help in this office, and there’s so many things you could do for me.  Now, did you ever see this book?”  And she was a source of continual inspiration whatever she did.  When I started to paint, she, too, encouraged me to keep on going.  This was years after she was already really quite an old lady like I am now.  

FP:  When you met Ben Fine, was he there to report on your trip?

AJ:  Oh yeah.  He was there to – I don’t know whether he did a story in the Times.  You think I had time to read the paper at that time?  I didn’t.  He met me, and Alice Barker went along.  But the children, the remarkable thing of this was that the children who saved two dollars and fifty cents knew that they could go.  And if they got enough money – it was two dollars and fifty cents.  They had to have a nickel or a dime for a tip on the train because I wanted them to get the full ethics of travel.  That it’s always consideration for other people too who serve you.  There’s just so much here that I can’t even begin to dislodge it.

FP:  Do you remember what year about that was?

AJ:  I could – in calling the railroad.  I just wrote them a letter telling them how wonderful this guy was to me in Hartford, Connecticut.  I’m sure I could get this figure.  When we got to New York, some of the children said – well, there were a lot of children who couldn’t save two dollars and fifty cents.  I had the children take the material – what they got out of the trip – and relate it to the children who stayed behind.  I have all of the letters.  Some of the letters stated, “I couldn’t go because my mother and father never, ever went out of Chelsea.  How could I go to New York when they …”. 

FP:  You still have the letters now?

AJ:  I don’t know when that batch –  whether I have that.  This is a farewell series of letters.  And then some children wrote, “I know that I can’t afford to go.  It’s too much money even though it’s over a year’s time we’ve saved.  But I know that my classmates are so giving that they’ll come back and they’ll share their experiences with us.”  In other words, the philosophy that these kids carried about their mothers and their fathers and the respect they had for them.  And the fact that what their parents didn’t have, they didn’t want.  First, they wanted their parents to have it.  These are values that I find are so changed in today’s world.  I could go on forever just talking about the value changes.  Shut it off.  I have to think where to lead from there.  Oh, I have so much to tell. [Recording paused.] It’s interesting to note that my mother never had crayons for me.  She came from Russia, and it was a struggle just getting through each day.  And she never was aware of museums and all the things that are enrichment for children.  But there was something that moved me into knowing that children who are even deprived – their parents don’t know it.  They’re not aware of it.  But hidden in these kids, there’s such potentiality, and we’re just skipping over some of these who have such contributions to make to our society that are tremendous.  I think that having a value system educationally that’s based on just marks misses a point.  I think there’s something in having immigration open and bringing in new ideas and new people.  Sure, anything that’s innovative and anything that’s chancy is the thing you step away from.  But those are the things that we’re missing very, very much.

[Recording paused.]

FP:  Explain your involvement with Facing History.

AJ:  My son was – what was he, with the money?

FP:  A banker?

AJ:  No, No.

PG:  He was a –

FP:  A treasurer?

AJ:  No, no.  There’s a term.  He was the commissioner of revenue for Massachusetts under Mike Dukakis.  Mike Dukakis and my son and my husband, and I were in town meeting in Brookline at the same time.  So I got to know Mike’s potentiality, and he knew mine.  And he knew us as a family.  But when Mike was doing very well, he appointed my son Ira, who is the youngest of my boys, to the commissionership.  And Ira is not artistic.  As a matter of fact, if you looked at his ties or looked at him, you’d see that he isn’t artistic.  But he had the same kind of quality, maybe, that I brought to situations.  With the amnesty program, with that position, he developed the first program for amnesty.  My husband said, “Listen, Anne, I’m going down to the revenue office to see what Ira’s doing because he’s getting a lot of press on this thing.”  He went down, and the lines were unbelievable.  There were priests, there were rabbis, there were nuns, there were teachers.  There were people that looked as if they didn’t have a dime to get a cup of coffee.  And there was my son standing with ragged clothes on.  He identified with whatever he was doing.  He was giving out – I don’t know whether it was Dunkin’ Donuts, but it was doughnuts and coffee to all the people standing in line.  He said, “Please know that you’ll be taken care of.  But we have such lines.”  This was at two o’clock in the morning.  My husband said, “It just didn’t seem believable that this kid of his could move the population so that the money could be rolling in.”  But unfortunately, the plan was taken – I don’t know – I’m not really very accurate about this.  But the plan was taken to Washington, and it was suggested that this would be a remarkable thing to do, to collect back taxes.  We’re paying for the people who don’t pay.  It was rejected because, of course, the Republicans were in power, and so they wouldn’t move it.  But Ira did really a phenomenal job.  And when they said that Dukakis – I don’t know, there was some expression that he had for the money, anyway, tax – I don’t know what the expression was.  And Ira, when I think Mike was running for governor, I think at that time – I’m not chronologically sure of this – I think that Ira was appointed to the Kennedy School of Government.  He proposed that they – in planning the building – have a large room where different disciplines and different parties and so on could meet together.  Also I think that he brought the idea to the Kennedy School that it’s to the advantage to all of us to have political people who are in power enriched by coming into the Kennedy School and learning something more than just the political strategy.  And while I’m talking about Ira, I must tell you that I have a son who graduated from U of Penn and then went on to the Wharton School and was on a doctoral program.  One of the professors said to him, “You’re going to get your Ph.D., and you’ll never get a job.”  These were hard times.  “And you just listen to me.  I’m getting out, and I’m starting a company.  You come along with me.”  We were very upset that he left in the middle of the program, a doctoral program, and went with this man.  I guess he was the – the professor that he was working for was impressed with his capability.  And he suggested – and [Eric] called my husband and said, “Dad, I don’t know what to do.  If he’s giving me such a heavy raise, then I must be worth more than that.  And I’m branching off on my own.”  And branched – he worked for – oh, God, I don’t even think – he worked for a company.  I can’t think of the name of it.  He told them he’d work for them if he could have office space and use some time to develop some of his own ideas outside of the company.  It was a big, big company in Washington, D.C.  The next thing I knew, he was doing work in conjunction with the government.  He proposed that he take the educational courses to the soldiers to the people in the Army.  And, of course, he was getting a stipend because it was an ensured fee for anybody who was doing this work.  He really, really became very, very successful with this educational program that he was taking to different parts of the country and outside of the country.  He now designs a program in which he has professors in the law and professors in environmental things doing work for him.  And he’s been most, most successful financially.  

FP:  How did you get involved in Mass College of Art through Ira?

AJ:  Oh, I’d lost sight of that.  I was appointed – in all honesty, I’m sure that it was – Mike had no way of thanking Ira for the tremendous, tremendous job he did.  But in talking with Ira, Ira said, “Well, you know my mother’s just leaped into art.  Mike, she’s going right ahead.  Maybe you could find a place for her somewhere.”  It was Mike Dukakis who appointed me to Mass College of Art.  Of course, at Mass College of Art, most of the people that are appointed to the board have either a very heavy art connection with museums, or this or that, or they’ve made their name in the art field.  And I was just a – I came on board with Elma Lewis.  We developed a very strong, empathetic feeling about what we were doing.  I just can’t say enough about her capability and the admiration and love I have for this woman.  We were sort of the renegades, maybe on the board.  When I first got on the board maybe –

FP:  Maybe you were visionaries.

AJ:   Yeah.  Maybe, because I didn’t know any better.  I spoke up more easily than I would today on the board.  And after my period of five years was over, Bill O’Neill, the president of the college, who really somehow thought that I was an all right person – I wrote to Will and told him that it would favor his desire to have me re-appointed for five years.  Well, that’s quite something for a Republican governor to appoint a strongly identified Democrat – as I was with Dukakis, with Ira – to the board.  I was appointed for five more years.  I must say that I lived through the time.  Bill O’Neill, incidentally, came on the board as an educator and certainly, nobody knew a thing about art.  When we had to do a critique of the president, I said, “He’s marvelous and this and that, but he certainly doesn’t know much about art.”  And I found with time it was – I identified with him because he was going through the struggle, in a sense, that I went through.  I didn’t know why a thing was good, but I’d say it was a good painting.  He was much in that position.  I’m happy to say that he resigned from the office when my ten years were up on the board.  And today is May 18^th or 19^th, 1997, and Bill O’Neill is president now of all the colleges that are state-supported.  And he’s a most wonderful person for that position because he knows the needs of the wanting community.  There was something I wanted to bring in here.  

PG:  How about Facing History?  Can you talk about that?

AJ:  And Bill O’Neill called me recently, and he said, “You know, Anne, I think that – I think you’ve switched your alliance and your love from Mass College of Art to Facing History and Ourselves.  And I have to talk to you about it.  I have to know why you’re so in love with this organization.”  Well, I must tell you that my son, Ira, and his wife, Martha, are strongly affiliated with Mass College – with Facing History.  But it is not really through the backdoor that I favored becoming identified with this organization, but it was rather with the first meeting I went to.  The stimulation, the level of competency, and the level of excitement that I got intellectually from the people who are on – just coming to a meeting – I had never met in any organization, even the equal of American Jewish Congress, which is a fantastic organization.  I had said that I was willing to be trained as a speaker or go into schools and try to stimulate kids to the program.  Little did I realize the expertise and the knowledge and sensitivity and what you have to bring to go into a school classroom and tell them in part about this program.  And carry on the work of the program.  I know I never could teach.  I’m too old.  They would identify me with the refugees, and that’s not the purpose of it, certainly.  But I do know that whenever there’s a teaching session or whenever there’s a speaker, or whenever there’s something that has to do with Facing History, I’m there.  Margot Strom always looks, and she says, “Well, I expected you here.”  I heard her speak at Temple Israel, Margot Strom.  Rather than pushing for the program, she talked about how she came into the program through her sensitivity to the southern situation of bias and prejudice and so on.  I just felt that this woman has magic and a majesty about her that is universal.  I’m so proud when I say that this program not only is in the United States, but I can say that when I went to Germany, they knew about the program.  I just can’t praise it.  Art is remarkable, and it should be an integral part of every person’s life.  But this program also should be because it makes statements against violence, against prejudice, against not making judgments about people quickly.  I could go on and on and on about just Facing History.  But I recommend it most strongly to schools to come forward and say I want this course.  And what’s interesting about it is, for me, the fact that Margot never superimposed this or went to the school department and said, “You have to have this because it’s so important.”  But she explained the program.  And the schools had to come to the slow realization that this should be an integral part of every child, maybe in junior high or in high school, because it’s something that they’ll carry for them and will improve their psyche about other people and soon.  And I just think it’s the most remarkable, remarkable program that’s been designed.  Now I’m so excited to say there were six doctorals on Harvard’s program, six people taking a doctoral in the whole business of Facing History.  And that the program is now in the School of Education at Harvard.  There has been a tremendously forceful, brilliant staff that’s been a voluntary staff that’s been developed who work on just constantly re-evaluating the program, making it better with each step, and bringing more to more people who really should be ready for this program.  Did I say enough?  What else? [Recording paused.] I’m eighty-seven.  And in September, I’m going to be eighty-eight years old.  So I feel qualified to make some statements as I see them.  I think going into the feeling of art, into the area of art, which has been a strong part of my life, the later part of my life – I feel that art should be taken to housing projects.  There are people that are starved for something that lifts their head up and breaks through the labyrinth of boredom.  And I think that art – each town should put the money where they would put it – maybe in high-rise buildings or something – provide that in certain buildings that they siphon off an area in which they can promote art, either through showing or art, or either to giving artists a chance to work in their studio and then use the studio at night to work in.  There are so many – there’s so much talent that’s lost because they can’t get a place to work, and they haven’t the money for facilities.  We have so much in each community that’s so special, especially in Brookline.  I envision that the Brookline Art Center, which is on Walmer Street and came about through the Berliners foreseeing that a fire station, instead of being closed up, could be an art center.

FP:  [inaudible]

AJ:  Yeah, yeah.  Now I feel we can go a step further.  There is a big building.  I think it’s the town garage where they’re already talking about what they’re going to put up.  It’s always a question of housing.  There is a need.  But we can incorporate the ultimate for what we do by injecting into that dream something that really is dream-like.  And affording an opportunity beyond just housing. And I don’t minimize the need for housing. 

FP:  Are you still painting, Anne?

AJ:  Yeah, yeah.  But I don’t paint here.  It’s very hard in the apartment.  I’m going to start working on watercolor in here.  I’ve never, you know, gone back to watercolor.  

FP:  Where do you do your painting?

AJ:  I do it at the Brookline Art Center.  I started painting with Dorothy Leppler.  I must say that when I went into – she tests every incoming student by having them do little figures.  She tested me the same way.  She said, “You know, Anne, from the way you furnished your apartment in Chelsea when Phillip was overseas, and you lived in the slum, and knew where to buy two chairs that looked as if they came out of Payne’s, I felt you were artistic, and I know that you can paint.”  I said, “Dorothy, you’re crazy.”  She said, “Anne, please do these little sketches.”  And I did.  She said, “You know what?  This is a secret between you and me, but I think it’s a secret worth telling.”  She said, “I think that you have so much potentiality, and you bring so much life to whatever you’re doing that you’ll do very, very well in art.”  She said, “Moreover, I don’t want you to pay me anything.”   I think, at the time, a lesson was ten dollars.  Today, it’s twenty dollars.  I said, “Well, I wouldn’t take it on that term.”  She said, “You’ll make up by giving me some of your attention and telling me about what you’re reading because I don’t have time to read and telling me about your activities.  That’ll be my enrichment.”  And so I must tell you, for several years, I didn’t go to anybody but Dorothy Leppler.  She wouldn’t take a dime from me.

FP:  How old were you then?

AJ:  Oh that was about thirteen, fourteen years ago.  I can’t give you the exact date.

FP:  You were just getting into your seventies.

AJ:  I was an old lady then.  Yeah.  

FP:  No, you’re not an old lady.

AJ:  And she’s also a little younger than I am.  But she was also in that age category.  And now, when I do something at the Brookline Art Center, or I’m taking courses there, she’s so thrilled.  She just feels I should spread out and I should be exposed to other teachers.  Also, Dean (Nemer?) at Mass College of Art was willing to give me – have me in his classes.  But it was a whole business that the college would insist that it was too difficult for me to take the streetcar or a taxi and come to the school.  And they would insist on servicing me by picking me up and taking me back to the college.  I didn’t want that kind of involvement.  And my husband always said, “If you’re a trustee, don’t be a student,” because as a trustee, you go in looking respectable.  As a student, you can look any damn way you want.  And I always remembered it, so I never took advantage of any of the courses at Mass College of Art, never.

FP:  Were you helpful in bringing the Terrazine Exhibit to Mass College of Art?

AJ:  No.  I wasn’t, but I was very supportive.  I didn’t even know about Facing History and Ourselves at the time.  They were involved in this.  But the Mass College of Art has a remarkable man at the head of it, and I just think they’re very, very fortunate in bringing the Terrazine Exhibit and bringing the exhibit about –

[END OF INTERVIEW]