Interview with my grandmother

For this blog entry I chose to interview my grandmother. Kathryn B. was born on February 18, 1942 in a small town outside of Hershey, PA. She grew up in a small home with her Mom and Dad and three older brothers. When I asked about her childhood she mostly talked about how she was always trying to hang out with her brothers but they rarely wanted her around because she was so young. Some of her favorite memories included going to Hershey with her family and driving through Pennsylvania. Her mother stayed at home and my grandmother helped around the house and went to school. When she was 12, they moved to Detroit, Michigan where her father had a job playing the trumpet for a local band. My grandmother loved to go watch him play and drink sodas with her best friend. When she was a teenager she got a job as a soda jerk downtown at the Hudson store. Her brother still did not want to hang out with her but she still tagged along because she was older then. I asked my grandmother to tell me more about her role in the house and what her mom did. She said that she always helped with cooking and cleaning but she also had her own job and did her own thing. After she graduated from high school, my grandmother went to Wayne State University to attend their nursing program. She was only in the program for a couple weeks; she left after being heartbroken by patients who would come into her life and go. Also, the blood was too much for her stomach to handle. After she dropped out of the nursing program my grandmother decided to get a job but unfortunately she did not have a lot of skills. She first worked as a switch operator but grew tired of that job. After she took a couple prep courses she got a job with Ford Motor Company, where she worked for over 40 years.
All of this surprised me because she lived a normal teenage life like I sort of am doing. She did not get married right after high school and she said that was because she wanted to travel the world. This reminded me of the article in class “The Feminine Mystique.” My grandmother worked at the Ford Motor Company first as a secretary. She mentioned that that was a typical job for someone with her skills; they also mentioned this in the article “A Day Without Feminism.” Although she tried to go to college and finish with a degree, she found that it was too hard to work full time and go to school. After she started at Ford Motor Company she met her husband Dudley. They had one child, Michael, and then my grandmother became pregnant with my mother, Kathy. Unfortunately, my grandfather left my grandmother when she was pregnant with my mother. This was hard for my grandma because she had to work full time and take care of two very young children. This was not typical back in those times; there were not a lot of single mothers. My grandmother said that she was very busy but still found time to play cards and drink gin with her friends. What helped her most was moving in with her brother’s ex-wife who also had children. The two women worked together to take care of their children.

I was proud to know how strong and hard working my grandmother was in order to take care of her family, especially since she was living a different life than most women in that era. She said that she found her life to be very tough but wonderful at the same time. Now that she is older, she is now retired and loves to travel. Her favorite things to do are shopping, talking and traveling. Just like me! Now my grandmother is living a typical grandmother life. She is always cooking and taking care of our family. My uncle is married but has no children of his own but my cousins from his wife’s side have children, who my grandma loves to spoil. Although I am an adult now, she still loves to spoil me like I am still her little granddaughter. Her plans for the future are to keep fit and healthy and to go back to Australia.
I believe that my grandmother is a very strong woman for dealing with what she had to back when she was a mother. Not only was she a homemaker but she was a full time employee at a booming company. She rose from being a secretary to working along with the top CEOs of the company which was not typical during that era. There were some similar things from our readings that my grandmother did but mostly she had a different lifestyle that she loved.