Louis got his doctorate at the University of Southern California. He was a planner, and I just wasn’t used to people who planned those things, you know? I was so impressed. So I’d go and register for him at SC and then I’d come back and substitute in his class while he’d go and start the classes. And then I’d take the notes in the classes some of the time.

I actually had a teaching degree. Well, there’s not a lot to tell. You go through school, like I was going and I was in education, and then you have to do practice teaching. So I did practice teaching in the sixth grade, and didn’t learn a lot. A little bit, but not too much. And then you get a degree, and then you go out and you start teaching. And that’s when you learn, because, boy, it’s different from… nobody can tell you what a group of kids are like until you’re in front of them working with them.

I never taught regularly very long at all. I’d teach a semester here, and I’d teach a semester there, and I taught about two years total and then I was made a principal. And so I was a principal for several years. And then we moved to—I remember yet Louie calling me on the phone and saying, “Button up your overcoat, da da da…” He was going to the other coast, and we were going to be with the American Association of School Administrators, and he was there as the executive director for ten years. It was nice being on that coast. We had never been on that, you know.

Well, we ended up in (laughs) just out of Washington, D.C. and I’m trying to think of the little town… I can’t think of it. I’ll think of it later. It’s Annandale. So we lived in Annandale for a while. It was neat being married to Louie. He had plans. He had goals. He went on and got his doctorate and I had never even thought of, imagined, that. You know, and I’d go register for him and take the first two weeks of classes sometimes and then he’d take over. The only thing I found that troublesome with was statistics. That’s a tough subject! Louie did too! But I was glad when I turned it over to him. (Laughs.)

So then when we were finished with the war, why, we didn’t have any kids while we were at the war. And I was really, really pleased with that because that would have been hard, really hard.

Well, after we got back here, got back into California, why, then I finally had Debbie. Have you seen a picture of Debbie? Here she is. This is how she is now. This is when she was awarded Outstanding Woman in Broadcasting from here, and he—Walter Cronkite—got an award too. And then we had Jan, and four years later, and that’s all we had. And we had fun. It was so darn much fun being married to Louie because he never saw a side road he didn’t want to take. He liked to do everything. We took up SCUBA diving when we were in our forties. We just did a lot of stuff.

I worked off and on. I substituted some in school, and I never did teach again or become a principal—you know, do the principal work again. But I was a much better principal then I was a teacher. I didn’t teach long enough to be a good teacher, but I could work with the teachers who were in the classroom. They came through with some really crazy rules right around that time, the whole State of California. And some of the schools were trying to accomplish all of them, and I said, “Hey, let’s pick one of the bunch that came out, and work with that now. You pick your group in your room. You identify your kids that need that. Let’s work on that. See what we can do.”

I had a hunch that this was just one of those great big bubbles that goes through and then it becomes, if you try to follow it all the way, it’s going to be impossible. And it did. So we had already started. And I loved being a principal. I was a good principal. But then Louie went to the east coast for AASA, and then I never worked again then. I did. I wrote, “Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies” for the March of Dimes.

It was a book. And I was very interested in that because their whole setup was to prevent birth defects. And in those days we were pussyfooting around the idea that alcohol and tobacco can harm unborn babies. We were talking with a language that was not, didn’t quite ever pinpoint it, because it wasn’t clear enough yet. We could have been sued. So we buckled around that, but we brought it out. And I can remember talking to the different people, the high mucky-mucks on the east coast there who were very into that. But we were still fudging on the way we brought it up. And I did the “Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies” book and then I wrote a curriculum in reading for principals for that local area, and so they were using it for all their principals. That was fun. I enjoyed doing that. I enjoyed the “Healthy Mothers” better.