ROZ BORNSTEIN:  This is Roz Bornstein.  I am at the home of Carolyn Danz in Seattle, Washington, and I am here interviewing Carolyn for the Jewish Women’s Archive Weaving Women’s Words Project. The date is May 12, 2001. Carolyn, do I have your permission to interview you on tape? 

CAROLYN DANZ:  Yes, you certainly do, Roz.

RB:  Thank you very much.  Why don’t we start with where and when you were born?

CD:  Okay.  I was born in Seattle, Washington on July 30, 1918, and I was born at Providence Hospital.  Now, when I was born the country and especially the West Coast had this horrible flu problem.  Some of the people I know that are born around my time were born at home because of it, but I was born at the hospital, and only my father was allowed to come to see me.  Nobody else was allowed in the hospital.  Anyway, that’s kind of beside the point.  But my parents bought the home at 1020 15th Avenue North across the street from Volunteer Park, and they bought that just about a month before I was born. I lived there for twenty-one and a half years until I got married, and my parents lived there for about thirty-one years and then they sold the house and moved into an apartment.  But it was a wonderful place to live.  We always thought Volunteer Park was our front yard and we had a very, very good time.  And what else?  [laughter]

RB:  Let’s see.  You mentioned that your house was near Volunteer Park.  It might be fun to hear a little bit about your neighborhood.  Was it a Jewish neighborhood?

CD:  No, it was not a – well, I shouldn’t say, no, it was not a Jewish neighborhood; it was partly a Jewish neighborhood but it was also partly a Catholic neighborhood, and living two doors from us was a Catholic family, and I remember their last name was Nester.  And one of the girls’ names was Caroline, so I never wanted to be called Caroline because I didn’t like her because she was kind of mean when we were young.  [laughter]  But her brother was adorable.  My sister, Marion – see, I was the third of five children, and Marion – Rosen – her name is now – is just fifteen months older than I am.  So she and I were very, very close.  My older brother, Stanley, is three and a half years older than I am.  Since I’m on the subject, my next brother is Herman Blumenthal and he is two years younger than I am, and then our baby sister, Priscilla, came along three years later.  So that’s our family.  But my sister, Marion, and I – we were in love with Caroline’s brother.  But anyway – so there was a little bit of – every once in a while a little bit of the Catholics, you know, saying something at that point, because, you see, there were two big Catholic schools in our neighborhood.  There was one that was a boys school on 19th Avenue and the girls, I think it’s on 17th and that was Holy Names Academy, which has now moved, of course, over to the East Side quite a while ago.  But so there was quite a bit, but we lived on 15th and just off Prospect Street, and the next street was Aloha and then Roy and then Mercer.  But the point is that between where we lived and Roy Street there was a big family called the Metzenbaums, and that was a wonderful Jewish family.  And then the Friedlanders, the ones that had the jewelry store – Lou Friedlander – lived across the street and about a block and a half away, and they had two sons.  Just across the street from them lived the Rodgers family with their eight children.  So there were Jewish people in – oh, and then a block up the hill from us towards Broadway was the Shafer – the Julius Shafer family, and they had five children.  So there were Jewish people around, and they weren’t our best friends but in our area the children that I went to Sunday school with – most everybody in that time lived in Capitol Hill or the Broadway District.

RB:  Very interesting.

CD:  And Capitol Hill was not the Broadway District as it is today.  It’s called – the whole thing’s called Capitol Hill, but it used to be the Broadway District.  And they lived, – it’s kind of hard to explain but my aunt lived a little bit north and down there towards the Broadway District, and all their friends lived in this same area.  

RB:  Could you describe a few of the boundaries for this area for those who are outside of Seattle that may not know?

CD:  Well, if you’re outside of Seattle, of course, you don’t really know where everything is.  [laughter]  But Temple De Hirsch was on 15th and that was approximately – I can’t say exactly – but I would say approximately a mile and a half to two miles from our house.

RB:  And that was a reform synagogue?

CD:  That’s the very reform Ashkenazi and, in fact – well, I don’t want to get off the subject of the boundaries but when I went to Sunday school and et cetera Rabbi Koch was the head rabbi.  Of course, at that time nobody wore yalmukes to temple.  Nobody wore – 

RB:  Tallis?

CD:  Yes, tallis.  [laughter] I couldn’t say the word – to temple.  We were brought up very reformed.  We really were.  But, of course, they had bar mitzvahs and confirmations and all that.  But anyway, the neighborhood – then the neighborhood went east down towards 20th, 21st, even 22nd.  And that was Stevens School down there and that’s where we all went to school down on 19th there.  In fact, my husband, Bill Danz, was raised on 22nd Street just off Aloha and there were a lot of Jewish families around in that area.  Then it went west as far as Broadway Street, and then north down into what was Roanoke Park and down into the Seward School area where a lot of our friends lived down that way on the way towards the university.

RB:  Very interesting.

CD:  And I don’t know if you yourself know what I’m talking about but – [laughter]. Okay, good.  But of course, where I lived on 15th, that was the boundary line between Garfield High School and Broadway High School.  So we went to Broadway and my mother went to Broadway.  But Bill, who was down on 22nd, they went to Garfield, and, in fact, anybody who lived on 16th down towards 23rd, they all went to Garfield and we went to Broadway.

RB:  Would you describe your neighborhood primarily as – of the Jewish families that lived in your neighborhood, were they primarily reform Jews?

CD:  Yes.

RB:  Ashkenazic Jews?

CD:  Yes, they were all – they were all that way.  My grandfather was one of the founders of the original Bikur Cholim and of course that was on Yessler, in fact, when I was born my family had already had two children and they were named at Temple de Hirsch.  But when I was born my –  I don’t remember this, obviously – my grandfather said, “Well, I think it’s time that one of them was named at the Bikur Cholim.”  So I was named at the Bikur Cholim instead of the Temple De Hirsch.  But my grandmother was one of the founders of Temple De Hirsch, one of the original members.  This is my mother’s family I’m talking about, not my father’s family.  But – 

RB:  Excuse me.  Your grandfather, when you mentioned, he was one of the founding members of Bikur Cholim.

CD:  Yes.

RB:  That was an Orthodox – or is it an Orthodox synagogue? 

CD:  Yes.  Oh, he was Orthodox in a way.  I mean, he did not keep true Orthodoxism, if that’s a word.  He was orthodox and when my grandma – well, the story of their meeting and all is another story, but when she went to shul with him she realized that she had to sit upstairs and she wouldn’t do that.  She just would not go. I know that once when we kids were – I don’t know, before our teens, when we were quite young, we went there a couple of times and we sat upstairs with our aunts – our great aunts really.  But my grandma still wouldn’t go.  So that’s why when they started the Temple De Hirsch my grandma wanted to be part of that because she’s from Germany and she was brought up more or less reformed from Germany.  They were not orthodox and Grandpa was from Russia.  But anyway, so we’ve really been longtime [laughter] members.  I don’t say members of the Bikur Cholim because none of our generation or my mother’s generation were members of Bikur Cholim, but we still have an attachment to it.  [laughter] 

RB:  That’s a great story.

CD:  Yeah.

RB:  Would you say that many of the Reform Jewish neighbors in your area were also of German descent or background?

CD:  Well, I can’t really answer that. I think the Friedlanders were.  The Rodgers – you’d have to ask them.  I’m not really sure where they were from.  Metzenbaum is certainly more of a Jewish name but the Metzenbaum family, I’ve lost track of them entirely.  There were six children in that family, five in ours and eight in the Rodgers family.  [laughter]  At temple they used to have Hanukah shows and one year Roy Rosenthal, who wrote all the shows – he was so clever – wrote a song  – and it ended up with, “And it was the Rodgers, the Blumenthals and the Metzenbaums.”  And it was always this – it was all of this family and so it was – you know, that’s beside the point too.  But anyway, as far as our neighborhood is concerned, I never had a chip on my shoulder about being Jewish, you know.  I think we were brought up so lovingly and naturally that nothing affected us, and I know that. I can’t really answer for my brothers, although I can’t remember anything that would ever occur.  But I know with my sisters, we never felt anything about that –  that we were different. The only time I felt different – it didn’t bother me but I knew I was different – was when I went to the university and was going to pledge a sorority.  But I knew that there was only one sorority I could pledge and that was Alpha Epsilon Phi.  As time went on Jewish girls, of course, joined non-Jewish sororities.  But when I went to the university – I started in the fall of 1935 – you never even considered it.  But that didn’t bother me whatsoever at all.  Now, I had some friends that really did bother me.  So they did not want to join this sorority.  They didn’t want to go through the whole thing or anything because it bothered them that they couldn’t do the other, but I don’t know.  I think I felt secure in my way, you know, which, of course, comes from the fact that I was brought up properly.  [laughter]  Yeah.

RB:  Well, that’s a great story too about the sorority.  I wonder if we could backtrack a little bit – 

CD:  Sure, I know; I’m just kind of wandering.  

RB:  No, actually it’s wonderful.  I wondered if you could tell us the names of your parents. 

CD:  Certainly.  My mother’s name is Helen – Helen Sarah Berkman Blumenthal.  Her parents were Jacob Berkman and Mina.  And her maiden name is Freudenberger Berkman.

RB:  Excuse me.  Could you spell that for us?

CD:  F-R-E-U-D-E-N-B-E-R-G.  Grandpa was from Minsk, or was it Pinsk?  [laughter]  Isn’t that silly, I forget – Russia.  And should I just quickly tell you about why he came to the United States?

RB:  Sure.

CD:  Well, when he was fourteen he was the oldest boy in the family, and he had – I don’t exactly recall but he had something like a couple of brothers and a couple of sisters.  And at that time, of course, the Russian Army was taking the oldest son into their Army and the prospect wasn’t too good.  So my grandfather’s father – my great-grandfather got him out of Russia and there was a family in Sweden that took him in.  When he was about sixteen I guess he decided that he wanted to come to the United States because he knew he had relatives here, and there was some kind of a cousin or uncle in New York City that we have never been able to figure out who that was, and he got over here steerage, of course, and was in New York City for a little over a year, I guess.  And he could not stand the hustle and bustle of that big city.  Well, in those days, that would have been in the late 1870s and he didn’t like the hustle and bustle of that big city.  So he started across the United States by himself, and he spoke very little English.  His story to us children, as we would sit on his lap and listen to him was that he traveled across the United States and it took him over three years. He stayed at farms and he was like peddling a little bit here and there, and he learned English from all the farm girls, he told us.  [laughter]  But anyway, he got to Seattle because he knew he had relatives here, and that was the original members that came here of the Gottstein family.  Joe Gottstein, who – his fame in the city besides doing other very good things is that he built Longacres Race Track, and he was Grandpa’s second cousin. Joe’s parents were not here at the time but he had a lot of cousins.  There were about four Gottstein cousins here, and so Grandpa came here and settled, and in 1888 all of his relatives had found wives by importing them from Russia or Germany.  And he didn’t want to do that, but in the meantime, my grandmother, Mina Freudenberger, was 18 years old and had graduated from what was called a high – it wasn’t called high school; it was called – I’m sorry, I can’t say the name.  But it was like she graduated from high school, and she had this aunt who decided to bring her to the United States to visit relatives in Chicago.  So she did and she visited these relatives in Chicago, and then the aunt knew that she had some relatives here in Seattle by the name of Marcussen.  So she decided before she would go back to Germany to come to Seattle.  Well, they did and my grandpa saw Grandma someplace.  Truthfully, even if I showed you pictures when Grandma was young, she didn’t look the least bit Jewish, and nobody in the family really got her exact looks.  She had jet-black hair and a cute, round face and very blue, blue eyes, although there are blue eyes – a lot of blue eyes in the family, and a cute little nose, and she was adorable.  Grandpa didn’t believe that she was Jewish when she was with these people.  So, yes, she was.  Well, she spoke practically no English and he didn’t speak German but he did not want her to leave this country.  So anyway, in the meantime, they wrote to her parents, et cetera. Grandma and Grandpa got married here in 1889 in Seattle.  Yeah, so we really are natives and my mother was – their first child passed away practically at birth.  Mother was their second child.  She was born in 1892 and by that time Grandpa had built a house up on 29th and Yesler.  And so they lived there and then after Mother was born, her brother, about a year and a half later, was Milton Berkman.  And then a couple of years later on Mother’s – well, it was on Mother’s third birthday, so it was not a couple of years – they just had them one, two, three – her sister was born.  And that’s Cora Lewis and they were very, very, very close sisters who both lived a long life. So that’s my mother’s background.  In fact, she was one of the first people that went to Broadway High School, and she graduated in 1910 and then all five of her children graduated from Broadway High School.

RB:  Wasn’t she part of the first graduating class of Broadway High?

CD:  I think the first graduating class – I’m not sure if she was the first or the second, but she always sang, “Come again, 1910, da, da, da, da, da.”  Mother, with two of her friends from Seattle – oh, boy – Edith Lindenberger, but I can’t say her maiden name.  That’s terrible.  But anyway – listen, I’m almost eighty-three so I can’t remember all the names.

RB:  You’re doing beautifully.

CD:  [laughter]  No, but Mother and her two friends, when they graduated high school, did the unbelievable thing of going to New York City for finishing school.

RB:  From Seattle?  All the way from Seattle?

CD:  Yes, and it was because Grandpa traveled a lot in this men’s clothing business and he had friends in New York that he knew whose daughters went there.  So he decided that his daughter would go there, and, of course, that was the beginning of a really forming part of my mother’s definite character, because she got to love opera back there.  She got to love stage things, concerts, you know, beautiful things.  In fact, I just gave to the Opera Guild here in Seattle about 150 librettos from operas that – of course, I’ve been going for years myself – but some of them go way, way back to the ones in New York.  So, she went one year to school there and it really formed wonderful friendships, and that is how she happened to meet my father, but then that’s another story.  So, now, do you want to hear about my father’s parents?

RB:  That would be great, just to give us a summary of your family. 

CD:  Ya, well, Daddy’s father was born in Germany and came here – I’m not quite sure when – but he came and he settled in Iowa.  He had a wife and they had either four or five children and she died, so he went back to Germany and married a young girl who didn’t know that he had all these children.  The poor thing came anyway.  She had four more children and by the time my grandmother was born, they moved from Iowa to, first Omaha, then Nebraska.  Even my father never knew quite why his father moved there.  I think they had one son and eight daughters – something like that.

RB:  Excuse me.

CD:  And – 

RB:  Excuse me just a moment.  Could you tell me their names?

CD:  Oh, excuse me.  My grandpa’s name was Herman Blumenthal and my grandma’s name was Julia Meyers Blumenthal.  Her maiden name was Meyers.  That I know because that was my father’s middle name.  [laughter]  They’re all from Germany.  They’re both from Germany and so they were living – well, now, wait a minute.  You’re asking me my great-grandparents’ names.

RB:  Your grandparents settled in Nebraska, is that – 

CD:  Well, my grandmother did.

RB:  Okay.

CD:  My grandmother.  And she was one of these eight girls.  Her parents’ names, I’d really have to look it up.

RB:  That’s okay.

CD:  I just can’t remember them.  And anyway, there were a lot of peddlers going back and forth in that part of the country.  So whenever a Jewish peddler would come through my grandpa would bring [laughter] him home to introduce him to his daughters, and two of his daughters got married that way.  And there were about four of the daughters that never did get married, but Grandma married Herman Blumenthal, who had come through peddling.  Then Herman and Julia – was her name – moved to the town of Fremont, Nebraska, which is approximately 50 miles or so outside of Omaha, and that’s where my father was born in Fremont, Nebraska.  He is the middle of three sons – three boys, and when he was sixteen Grandma and Grandpa decided to move out to the West Coast.  Daddy never quite knew – I mean, you know, I – Well, I don’t know.  My father just decided to come, you know.  So they settled in Los Angeles and my grandpa opened a men’s clothing store there because he was in the men’s clothing business.  It was called the Nebraska Clothing Company, and I have a piece of stationery still from that.  Anyway, the boys were about eighteen, sixteen, and fifteen and they all went to work, so my father never finished high school.  They all went to work and they had a store down in – I guess downtown Los Angeles.  It wasn’t spread out then, you know.  Daddy was living there and my mother had met this very good friend at finishing school in New York who lived in Los Angeles.  So she went down to visit her in the fall of 1912 and Connie, her name was, gave a party.  Connie’s date was Stanley Blumenthal and Mother’s date was Harold Blumenthal. I guess they were in a touring car or some such thing, and when they got out of the car they – the party was on the pier at Santa Monica, which is still there, you know.  So when they got out of the car my father said to my mother – and they both swear that this is the truth, “You’re going to be the mother of my children,”  and he had just met her.  A week later my mother wrote a letter to her parents, and I’ve got one page from that letter that mother had saved.  I don’t know where the rest of it was, but anyway, saying, “I have met this wonderful man and he really wants to marry me but, of course, I will come home and he’ll come here and you’ll meet him,” and et cetera.  So they were married in April of 1913, you know, and they had a very happy life together.  My father died much too young.  He was just sixty-four and he had heart trouble for quite a few years before, of course, they didn’t have all the medications and the operations that they have today, so he died quite young.  But my mother was just short of ninety-one when she passed away, so it’s been good. [laughter] 

RB:  Do you consider your parents role models?

CD:  Do I consider my parents role models?  Well, I know that my mother became a role model for me because I mean – I didn’t think of her as a role model but I did kind of follow a lot of what she did.  But my father – I never thought of him as a role model.  He was just such a fun person.  He was – in fact, in all the years that I can remember the only time I ever heard him really yelling or getting mad at any of us children was the day my sister, Marion, got married, because in those days it wasn’t quite so unusual as it would be today, but she was only eighteen. She was Daddy’s first daughter and, of course, Daddy was brought up with only boys – I mean, he wanted only girls.  But his first one was a boy [laughter] and then he had the rest.  Anyway, he was very nervous and upset that day, I guess, as – you know, as I’ve looked back on it, and he was screaming and yelling at my two brothers because I guess they were getting into kind of a little scuffle or something.  I seriously can – I can just never remember when he would scream or yell at any of us.  He was just the most fun-loving father and he was just, you know, you could sit on his lap or cuddle up or anything.  He was just always telling just these fantastic dumb tales, and we’d say, “Oh, Daddy, you’re teasing.”  “Oh, Daddy, don’t do that.”  And then he’d get, “Well, what do you mean?  You don’t believe me?”  Okay, you’d finally believe him and then he’d laugh at you, you know, it’s not true, or something.  But he was just great and we had an awful lot of friends, all of us, and they’d come in and out of the house and he’d just – he was just great.  And, of course, he’d play jokes sometimes on people and, you know, and they just had a wonderful life.  They had an awful lot of friends, wonderful friends that lived here, and the children of their friends are my friends still.

RB:  So you all grew up together?

CD:  Yes, and we talk about it still sometimes about our parents and how wonderful it was and everything, you know?

RB:  So, was your father in the clothing business?

CD:  Yes, he also was in the men’s clothing business. I guess when he first moved to Seattle he was traveling some because when my mother passed away I – in fact, I had cleaned out her whole apartment before that because I wanted a lady to be living there. So I cleaned out this whole apartment –  and I never knew about any of this, but what I’m going to say is that when she did pass away there was a locker downstairs.  She lived at the Nettleton Apartments down at Eighth and Madison – or Ninth.  And there was this brown paper bag like a grocery bag.  And I looked at it and it was filled with letters, so I took them home and started to go through them.  They were all letters – almost all letters written by my father to my mother and I have them and I pressed them out carefully and I’ve got them in a file according to the years that they were.  At first – you see, I don’t think that any of us ever knew this – that Daddy was traveling for the first couple of years. See, they were married in Seattle and Mother and Daddy lived in Los Angeles for the first two years of their marriage.  My brother, Stanley, was born in Los Angeles and when he was a baby they decided to move back to Seattle.  And I think he was – he had a couple of lines at that time that he was traveling with.  But then I don’t think that lasted too long and he opened up a store down on First Avenue – First and Marion, in fact, and my sister was named Marion [laughter] but he said it was never after that.  But I don’t know.  

RB:  So your mother was the primary childcare. Was she at home while your father worked?

CD:  Well, let’s put it this way.  My mother was [laughter] the most – I mean, you know, I absolutely adored her and admired her and everything, but my mother always had help at home.  When we were little kids we had a “nursie” and a cook and our nursie was with us until I was about – well, not the same one.  She came when I was about eight or nine, I guess, and Priscilla was about five.  But the ones we had before – we had other nursies before that, because my brother, Stanley, remembers having a nursie ever since he was little.  So my mother was not – what do you call it – an at-home mother today?  

RB:  Yeah.

CD:  [Laughter]  But she ran a wonderful household and our nursie that we had for so many years became just part of our family, and she had been brought up Catholic, as it so happened.  But she took us to Sunday school.  She learned Hebrew.  She helped my brothers with their bar mitzvahs, [laughter] and stuff like that.  She was our best friend until she passed away – I mean, even after she didn’t live with us.  And then there was always a cook but Mother once said to me years later – she says, “You know, after all, it’s the manager that gets the money, not the help.”  [laughter]  You know?  So she was the manager and managed it but my mother was not a cook – definitely not a cook.  I can never say, like some of my friends say, “Oh, my mother used to make this and my mother used to make that,” because my mother made three things in her life.  Well, I shouldn’t say in her life because in later years she had to – she made divinity candy, bourbon ball cookies, and sweet and sour fish.  She made the best sweet and sour fish in the whole world, and my sisters have made it since, so I haven’t bothered because they make it.  

RB:  So it’s a family recipe.

CD:  Yes.  But during the Second World War when people didn’t have help at home and Mother and Daddy, after the war had been on for about a year and a half or so, moved out of the big house and into an apartment, Mother started to cook because she didn’t have any help.  She turned out to be a very good cook, but a very sloppy one.  Her kitchen was horrible.  [laughter]  We used to tease her so about that but she turned out to be a pretty good cook; she really did, you know.  

RB:  Now, while she was managing the household – 

CD:  What was she doing?

RB:   – I read that she was also very active in philanthropic work.

CD:  She was, and that’s it.  I don’t know where she started or what but she became very active in the Sisterhood of the Temple De Hirsch, and she ended up being one of the national officers and she did a lot of traveling for the Sisterhood, and that’s when some of these letters from my father are written to her when she was traveling.  Then Mother, because of a blind rabbi back east that she met while she was with the Sisterhood back there, through him she met Helen Keller once.  Through all that she became very interested in blind, and there were no blind organizations here in Seattle.  Mother, with some other people – but she was very influential – really started the work for the blind in the city of Seattle. The original – in fact, I just got a phone call yesterday that they’re going to have a big open house at the Lighthouse for the Blind.  And they thought maybe I’d like to come and see what’s going on, because they’ve kind of kept contact with our family, you know, because of that.  Mother was greatly honored by them at one point.  But then the Community Services for the Blind was – she was helpful in instrumenting in starting that.  But when we were younger – let’s see, when I started college, I guess I was about seventeen, so that’s a long time ago, Mother started with Braille and you know what Braille is, what the blind read, and my sister, Marion, and I and a lot of our friends learned how to do Braille, how to write Braille.

RB:  Really?

CD:  In those days you had a board with a metal thing that had all these little holes in it going along, and you punched the holes for each letter, and then, of course, you had to proofread it.  But I never learned to read it by feel.  I had to learn to read it the other way.  And we would read to some students at the university who were blind.

RB:  Really?  How old were you when you did that?

CD:  Well, I started college when I was just seventeen and we were doing that most of the way off and on through – when I was in college, and I know that they were still doing it.  And maybe they still are, because I had a friend who unfortunately passed away recently, that used to read to the blind.  This is within the past ten years, so I presume they’re still doing it.  But I remember once I was reading to a law student and [laughter] I couldn’t pronounce the words, and he would say the words for me, you know.  But then there was this Mr. Bailey who rang the chimes at the university.  I think they’re now rung by rote, you know, by mechanism.  But he was blind and Mother became very friendly with him, and, in fact, he’d come to our house.  But we used to go there sometimes and he’d let us ring the chimes, you know.

RB:  No kidding.

CD:  But then Mother – 

[End of side 1, tape 1]

CD:   – also had the first Braille typewriter in this area, and that was wonderful.  That Braille typewriter – we had it for a long time but I have a feeling that we gave it to probably the Community Services for the Blind, you know.

RB:  How did all of her work influence you?

CD:  Well, I guess I just Marion also, Priscilla some, but not quite as much – but, let’s see, what was I going to say?  Something about Mother, she did this sort of thing.  But I must tell you that she also was a great bridge player and she played a lot of bridge and she had a lot of friends, and then she played a lot of duplicate bridge.  At the age of eighty-something, she was the oldest person to get their master’s card in bridge in this whole area anyway – maybe not in the United States.  And they gave a huge party for her where we put on a big show, but I did a lot of duplicate bridge.  I played a lot of duplicate bridge with her so that’s how I got into that.  But when I got married – well, I graduated from college first and Mother, she wasn’t just – I mean, she was very interested in what all us kids did and made sure that we all did our things and we were all very close, you know.  But just because she didn’t do all the – what do I want to say – the work part of it – she did all the fun part of it, let’s put it that way.  But I got married and I moved to Portland.  The first year I was married I lived in Portland; that’s with Jerry Taylor.

RB:  What year was that?

CD:  I got married on February 11, 1940.  I graduated from the University in ’39 and got married in 1940.  We lived in Portland and it was just, like, ingrained to me.  I mean, I didn’t get involved in the Sisterhood down there because I didn’t join temple but I got involved in the National Council of Jewish Women down there.

RB:  I see.

CD:  And – 

RB:  Excuse me, you said, “It was ingrained in me.”  What was ingrained in you?

CD:  To do some kind of community work, you know?  I mean, I really wanted to and I know that Mother had some friends down there because Mother was also in the National Council of Jewish Women but she was never an officer because she was too busy with the Sisterhood.  But a couple of the ladies down there that knew that I had come down there and that I was my mother’s daughter called me and asked me if I would like to come to their meetings and pretty soon – I wasn’t an officer there but I was doing, you know, things in that first year.  Some of my friends that I had in Portland, because we had a lot of friends there – a couple of the girls were also involved in the Council of Jewish Women.

RB:  Was it strictly volunteer work or did you – 

CD:  Oh, yes.

RB:  Were you also involved in paid work or just volunteer work at that point?

CD:  No, not in paid work.

RB:  Okay.

CD:  It was volunteer.  And, in fact, I was just trying to think what we did and I think we were doing things like – I don’t know.  I can’t remember what I was doing down there.  I really can’t.  [laughter] 

RB:  Okay.

CD:  But then we moved to Seattle after just one year and – thank goodness. [laughter] I mean, I loved Portland but I just have to be back with my family. We moved back here and I still never got really involved with the Sisterhood.  I was more involved with the Council at that time.  In fact, I became the assistant treasurer of the Council.  Then when I was pregnant with my second child they wanted me to be a vice president to work up, and I knew at that time that I would not have the time to give all that time to it.  So I said that I wouldn’t go on with the officer’s part of it.  But I was always more active – between those two organizations – in the Council of Jewish Women than I was in the Sisterhood, although I did do things in the Sisterhood, not a lot.  Yeah. 

RB:  Wow.  Could we go back a little bit in time?

CD:  Yes.

RB:  Back to your childhood?  

CD:  Yes. 

RB:  You mentioned you were born in nineteen – ?

CD:  Eighteen.

RB:  And what grade school did you go to?

CD:  I went to Stevens School, 19th and East Highland and Gaylor, and had, you know, a lot of friends there, some Jewish, some non-Jewish.  In fact, I had a friend, whose name is Marjorie and she was born on July thirtieth also, but she was born the year after I was.  We became very, very friendly, and to this day – she lives out in West Seattle and I do not see her very often anymore, but every once in a while we still talk to each other. Of course, she and I went to Broadway High School together, and the first day that we went to Broadway [laughter] my daddy took us to school the first day and walked in with us.  He never let Margie, in all the years, forget that she wore a fur coat.  Now, where she got the fur coat I don’t know because her daddy was in, as I thought, the most wonderful business in the whole world – 

RB:  Which was?

CD:   – which was his basement was filled with candy because he went around and put candy and gum in vending machines.  [laughter]  So we just loved to go to her basement because just the smell of all that chocolate, you know, was so wonderful.  But I had another non-Jewish friend that I can remember so well too. In school I had both, I really did.  But our family never had a Christmas tree, even though my father was brought up non-Jewish because there were no Jewish people where he was brought up.  But then he got to Los Angeles and he found out he was Jewish and he was with all the Jewish people there. But he never was a temple goer and the only time he ever went to temple was with one of us five kids, which, of course, was kind of often with five children.  [laughter]  But my mother was – as I’ve told you – very active in temple.  So what was I talking about?  [laughter]

RB:  We were talking about school and – 

CD:  Yes, about – oh, I was going to tell you that we never had a Christmas tree.

RB:  Yeah.

CD:  And a lot of our friends, our Jewish friends, did have them.  But we celebrated Hanukah and my father was the Hanukah man and each of us kids would have our little spot in the living room, and he would dole out presents, like that and stuff, and we never really missed it.  But at school when they decorated the Christmas tree I always wanted to help decorate the Christmas tree.  [laughter]  I always went to school early to decorate the Christmas tree.  You too, huh?  [laughter]  Well, there’s something about it, you know.  And my husband, Jerry Taylor, was brought up in Portland and Rabbi Berkowitz was the rabbi there, and he was ultra-reform.  The boys were not bar mitzvahed unless the parents really insisted on it, and there was only one or two bar mitzvahs a year. Jerry wasn’t bar mitzvahed or anything and his family was, you know, definitely Jewish but they all went to Sunday school.  He was one of five children – the oldest of five children also. Well, they always had a Christmas tree.  So, anyway, after Jerry got sick and we couldn’t go to Portland – we always went to Portland at Christmas time because he worked for a Portland company called M. Seller Company, which is no longer in existence, and it was wholesale housewares.  He worked for them and they decided to open an office in Seattle and he was sent up here to manage this office in Seattle. So that’s how we got to come back to Seattle.  But after he was working for them – for the week between Christmas and New Year’s they always had meetings and stuff where the people got together at M. Seller, so we always went to Portland for that week. I’d take the children, of course, to Portland, and they always had Christmas down there but they were little kids, because when Jerry got too sick to work and to go – the first year that he was sick like that he wanted a Christmas tree at home.  By that time my sons were about four and six or seven by that time and so [laughter] the little guy, Kenny – I had a Christmas tree, went right up to the ceiling of our little house.  But on it I only put yellow satin bows.  All over the Christmas tree were yellow satin bows.  So we had our Christmas. So then the next Christmas Kenny says – my younger boy – “If you have a Christmas tree I’m going to move next door to Auntie Lil’s because they don’t have one,” because by then he was going to preschool up at Sunday school, you know.  [laughter]  He was about five.  So we didn’t have one after that; I had my one Christmas tree but that was it.

RB:  That’s a great story.  Did you celebrate other Jewish holidays growing up as well?

CD:  Oh, very much.

RB:  Shabbat or Passover?

CD:  As I grew up, every Friday night we lit the Shabbos candles and had bread and wine – every Friday night.  After I had my family, my children I tried doing it but I’ve always felt bad about that, because it just meant nothing to my husband, and the children then, as they started really Sunday school and all – it was just the three of us.  My husband was already sick by then.  I just didn’t do it and every once in a while I’d do it because I felt badly about it.  But we always had it.  And, of course, for Sukkot –  remember, Mother – well, she didn’t make it but she must have bought it someplace, like a little sukkah that was on our buffet, and we always had that.  Of course, we always had Passovers but those were mostly at my grandparent’s house.  By the time they couldn’t do it my sister, Marion, was married, as I say, quite young, so then she always wanted it at her house.  Mother might have had it once or twice but I think it was always at Grandma’s and then it was at Marion’s and now, for thirty-five years, it’s been here at my house.  We take this table, we turn it down and we go from here to in the kitchen, which of course you can’t see on the tape, down to – the couch gets moved up against the fireplace.  And this year I had twenty-two and last year I had twenty-seven.  But, of course, it’s not our whole family.  I mean, we divide up, you know, now, but Passover and then we always had Hanukah and, of course – 

RB:  Did you all have a bar and bat mitzvah?

CD:  Oh, well, they didn’t have bat mitzvahs when I was young, you know.  This started – 

RB:  Later.

CD:   – later.  

RB:  I see.

CD:  But, yes, both my sons were bar mitzvahed, and it was wonderful.  In fact, I have a tape of the younger one, and [laughter] Jimmy, the oldest – my oldest boy, he was a sports fan, et cetera.  He did a great bar mitzvah but he was very happy when it was all over. But Kenny, when it was all over he wanted to do it again next week. You know, [laughter] he loved being up there and speaking and, in fact, he ended up in his life with kind of doing this sort of thing in a way with the IBM stuff, you know.

RB:  That’s wonderful.

CD:  And then he worked with and became part owner of a motivation – 

RB:  Oh, uh-huh.  Sure.

CD:  You know, where they teach people and they have classes for the businesses who send their salesmen to these classes motivating them how to get out there and sell stuff.  And he’d sell a lot.  [laughter] 

RB:  That’s wonderful.

CD:  Yes.

RB:  What were your family’s expectations regarding marriage and work when you were growing up, and was it different for boys and girls in your family?

CD:  Well, no, because – pardon?  Let’s see, My boys were bar mitzvahed, they were both confirmed and they were both graduated from Sunday school.

RB:  Wonderful.

CD:  Yes.  But – 

RB:  I asked you about your parents’ expectations regarding education.

CD:  Oh.  Yes, that’s right.  Well, I’ll tell you.  You see now when my oldest brother graduated from high school – if I graduated in ’35 he probably graduated in ’32 or something like that – he went to college the first year.  But he just was only interested in the newspaper and stuff at college, and he just didn’t seem to care.  Well, he quit and my uncle got him a – I know we’re not going into his life – but a small-town newspaper in Toledo, Washington, and he ran that.  Then he was in small-town newspapers and he never went to school again.  My sister, Marion, got married when she was eighteen so that was it.  I really wanted to go to college and [laughter] I was very lucky to be able to go because in 1935 my father was still suffering from the Depression.  He and his brother-in-law, my uncle, and his brother – my uncle’s brother, had bought properties around Seattle.  Of course, there’s no use going into all that because a lot of people lost everything, and they lost everything but two little pieces of property that Daddy owned.  His business was, you know – I can’t tell you the details of it because I don’t know the details.  All I know is that a lot of people had lost almost everything.  So I wanted to go to college and in those days, you won’t believe it but it was $35 a quarter. Daddy said that he could afford that but, then one of his brothers who was doing quite well, sent me a hundred dollars, which was a lot of money.  So I could go to college and then I wanted to join the sorority, as I told you, and my closest friends that I had at that time did not want to join the sorority.  But I went ahead and did it.  But Daddy didn’t think he could afford that, so anyway, they let me in on a scholarship or something.  [laughter]  Then things got a little better and everything was all right.  But – in fact, I ended up becoming president of the sorority and stuff like that.  But anyway, then my next brother, Herman – he and a very close friend of his decided not to go to college, that they would travel for a year first and then go.  Well, in those days that was quite something to say that you were going to do that.  Now, when I tell you this, you see, you can see that my parents were not – I mean, “You have to go to college,” or “You have to do this.”  In fact, my father thought that I was the most brilliant person in the world because I was going to college, you see?  [laughter]  I mean, almost anything we kids did – almost anything – we had very, very wonderful parents [laughter] as far as kids are concerned, and we all turned out just great.  There were not these laws put down and, “You have to do this,” and “You have to do that.”  With my brothers – of course, my second brother, when he was back – they got as far as New York, he and his friends, and they were working there when the war broke out, you see.  When my younger sister was ready to go to school, she went to the university for the first year.  But after that, they were starting to recruit even, and she went into the SPARS, which is the women’s organization for the Coast Guard.  It doesn’t truly exist anymore.  But she decided that she would rather do that and have a little fun.  And she was only twenty and she went into the SPARS and was trained in Florida and was in Boston and then came to Seattle.  Both my brothers, of course, were in the service.

RB:  It sounds like your parents were very open-minded and supportive of each of you.

CD:  They were.  Whatever we did was wonderful.  The only time that I can remember my father wanting me to do anything different was when I graduated from the university I got engaged almost right away, because I was already kind of going steady with Jerry, and got engaged.  And he really said, “Don’t you want to do something?  Don’t you want to do something instead of getting married now that you’ve got this college education?”  My education was in art, I was very into costume design and sewing and art and stuff like that.  He says, “You know, you can go to New York and maybe get a job, you know, working for some designer or something.”  But, you know, even if I had to do it over again I suppose I would still say, “No, I want to get married,” and, you know, all my friends were getting married anyway.  But that wasn’t it about the friends, I felt the time had come.  I was going to be twenty-one and, gee, in those days if you were twenty-one and not married you were an old maid.

RB:  Is that right?

CD:  [laughter]  Yes.  

RB:  But with your sister, eighteen seemed young.  

CD:  Well, I didn’t think she was too young because she was my older sister but as I thought back on it, you know, well, I thought, “Well, my goodness!”  You know.  [laughter] 

RB:  So the window, it sounds like, at that time was anywhere from eighteen to – 

CD:  Ya, she had her two best friends – Bernice Stern was one of them, and Florence Schoenfeld – she was married to Ralph Schoenfeld.  She passed away quite a while ago.  They both got married when they were eighteen – they – all of them did, you know?  But after twenty-one or twenty-two, wow!  [laughter]  And now, if you’re thirty and not married it’s okay.

RB:  Right.  Times have changed.

CD:  Yes.  [laughter] 

RB:  How did you meet Jerry?

CD:  Well, you see, this is where the story becomes kind of intriguing, we shall say.  One of my closest friends was Selma Goldstein –  that was her name at that time.  Later – I’ll just tell you quickly – her father changed the name to Bernard, which was the name of his shoe store that he had been in all those years because his son was going to go to Stanford and the name Goldstein was not good in those days.

RB:  Really?

CD:  I mean, it just really wasn’t.

RB:  For admission to Stanford?

CD:  Yes, so they changed their name to Bernard.  I mean, in admission, they would still know he was Jewish but to just get along and have – anyway, that’s a different story.  So Selma and I were very close friends.  Her mother, Minnie Bernard – you’ve probably heard of her – and my mother were very close friends.  And Minnie’s husband’s family – Moe’s family had this great home in Longbeach, Washington.  And I used to go with them down there for a couple of weeks in the summer.  And Jerry, whose mother was Moe Bernard’s sister – his family would come there.  That’s how I met Jerry because he was Selma’s first cousin, okay?  Now, to make a very long story short or whatever, Selma was going with Bill Danz.  When Selma was eighteen – no she was just nineteen – she and Bill got married. I was her bridesmaid and Jerry was at the party also as a cousin, because she had a lot of attendants. Jerry and I were going together at that time.  And so anyway, Selma and Bill got married and they had their family of three wonderful daughters, and then Jerry and I got married two and a half years later, I guess because I wanted to finish college and all that.  When I married Jerry I wore the wedding dress that Selma wore when she married Bill.  I wore Selma’s wedding dress and we were all very, very close.  And as the years went on Selma decided – but I won’t go into that whole thing – that she wanted a different life.  Let’s put it that way.  So she called me up one day and I was working and she says, “I’ve got to tell you something because I want to tell you before you hear it from anybody else.  I’ve asked Bill to leave.”  I said, “Well, you can’t do that.  He’s just a nice guy.  I mean, what’s the matter with him?”  Well, anyway, as I’ve told her daughters many a time, I tried to talk her out of it.  Of course, my life has been wonderful because I did not talk her out of it.  The thing was that then Bill and I were still – I mean, we were all very close friends.  Jerry was in the nursing home, of course, by this time.  And so then there would be affairs given by our friends and Bill would call me up and say, “Let me pick you up and I’ll take you,” and – 

RB:  Well, excuse me.  I’m worried about the tape running out.

CD:  Okay.

RB:  But I’ll be right back.  Okay?

[End of side 2, tape 1] 

RB:  Hi.  We’re back today and this is tape two.  This is Roz Bornstein with the Jewish Women’s Archive “Weaving Women’s Words” Project, and it’s tape two for the oral history of Carolyn Blumenthal Danz.  In the first tape, I mentioned that it was May 12, 2001, but it’s actually May 11, 2001.  And where we left off is, Carolyn, you were describing the circumstances of your meeting Jerry and then also Bill Danz.  So if you can continue with that story that would be great.  Also, do I have your permission to continue taping you?

CD:  Yes, you do.

RB:  Thank you.

CD:  You do.  But just quickly, I don’t know quite where we were but anyway, I guess Bill, I think, was taking me to a couple of parties and stuff.  And, you know, one thing led to another and we realized that we were really very much attuned to each other and it kind of – well, anyway, there’s a lot of other circumstances that lead to it but it ended up in a very wonderful relationship.  And, well, I don’t know – I’m not going to go into everything, but we were going together for quite a few years.  But I should get back to Jerry because there’s a lot of story there and then it comes up to this.  So should we just hop back to where I got married and – 

RB:  Sure, that would be great.

CD:  Jerry and I had met through his cousin, Selma, and then we knew each other, and we’d write back and forth from Portland.  He’d come here and then he came here to the university for one year, and we kind of went together some, but he took out other girls.  Then in about 1938, I think, we decided that we were meant for each other, but I wanted to finish college and he was just kind of recently working for this company.  So anyway, we were married in 1940 and we lived in Portland for the first year.  His parents were very lovely people, and, as I say, he was the eldest of five great children.  There were three boys and then twin girls were the last.  The twin girls are still alive – all three boys have passed away – and I still keep very close touch with them, and I talk to them quite a bit.  One lives in Phoenix and one lives in Portland.  But anyway, Jerry and I were married and his parents – I was going to tell you – his father had a furniture store downtown in Portland, but his mother had an antique shop up on Burnside, which is not – I mean, up towards 20th, which is not really downtown.  The reason she did was that my father-in-law, before he became my father-in-law, also lost a lot of properties and stuff in the Depression.  She had always been interested in antiques and decided to open a little shop with some of her things and other things.  She had a beautiful – it was called the Old Time Shop – and that’s why around here you’ll see pieces of antique furniture and those cups and saucers are very old, beautiful antiques.  I’ve got some lovely things that have come – you know, through her and wedding gifts from her shop, but a lot of different things.  Anyway, after a year Jerry was told that they were going to open this showroom in Seattle and they sent him up here to run it and to be the main salesman.  And he was a fantastic salesperson and, in fact, I still have some of the Revere Ware and Pyrex bowls that were given to him by the companies because he had done so well.  It’s been sixty-one years and my Revere Ware is not as shiny as it used to be.  [laughter]  The copper is not shiny but it’s still my favorite stuff to use, you know.

RB:  Now, were you at home during this time?  Were you raising the boys at this time or were you – 

CD:  Well, when we moved to Seattle – in fact when we lived in Portland – we didn’t have much money at all. I wanted to go to work and Jerry wouldn’t let me.  He said, “My mother has been working for a long time, and I’ve seen her working and then coming home and, you know, and the house and the children” – he says, “I don’t want my wife to work.”  So then that was just the first year.  Then we moved to Seattle and I got pregnant very soon – a couple of months after we moved to Seattle.  So there wasn’t any talk about my going to work at that time whatsoever.  But I did do a lot of sewing and I loved it. In fact, my best friend, Selma, already had two daughters, and I used to make dresses for them besides my niece, Helen Stusser.  That was one of my favorite things to do, that smocking.  Do you know what smocking is?

RB:  Why don’t you describe it?

CD:  Well, I can’t describe it.

RB:  Okay.

CD:  I’d have to do it with my hands to show you.  It’s where, you know, the material goes real close together and you put your stitches back and forth by hand, you know.  But they don’t do it by hand anymore.  Anyway, I did a lot of – always did a lot of sewing.  We had Jimmy in January of 1942, and we lived in a little apartment up on 16th, just five blocks from where my parents lived on 15th.  We lived at 16th and Republican, and it was on the third floor and you walked up.  Then I got pregnant again and Kenny was born in October of 1944.  By that time Jerry was beginning not to feel so well, and he had trouble holding onto things sometimes and then it would go away, et cetera.  So he went down to Portland because his parents had this Dr. Goldsmith – I remember the name – that wanted to see him because he had a feeling that he had something the matter.  Well, anyway, it turned out that he had multiple sclerosis.  Multiple sclerosis, as you may or may not know, can come on very quickly and debilitate quickly in a way of just a few years or – I have one friend who’s in her late eighties.  Her mind is perfect; she still likes to play bridge but her hands don’t work and she’s in a wheelchair.  But, you know, people help her with everything.  She’s had it for maybe forty years, at least, that I know of.  But it hits people when they’re young, you see.  Anyway, we didn’t think that much about it, and then one time – Jerry had a very dark beard and, you know – he’d have to shave at least once a day.  [laughter]  One time he’d see splotches where his beard didn’t grow.  They said, “Well, that’s got something to do with it.”  Then it would come back.  Well, anyway, we had Kenny, luckily, because, within six months to a year after that, we never could have had children.  So he went on working but then he got so that he couldn’t drive.  So then I would drive him, you know, places and stuff.  In the fall of – isn’t that awful – the fall of 1948 when we went to Portland for the meetings between Christmas and New Year’s he lost his job at that time, which was inevitable, you know.  So we kind of knew he was going to.  Things weren’t working – we lived in this – by now we had moved here to Madison Park.  In fact, as of yesterday, I have lived in Madison Park for fifty-six years.

RB:  Isn’t that something?

CD:  I love it.

RB:  Beautiful.

CD:  But we lived over on the other side of Madison in a cute little white house, and it had two bedrooms and one little bath.  And to diverse a minute, when the boys were getting to be a little bit older – I guess Jimmy was about thirteen and so Kenny would be ten – I decided that we had to have another bedroom because the boys were just too big for this one little bedroom.  At that time I was a woman – now, I’m diverting but – 

RB:  That’s okay.

CD:   – on my own, you know.  I had my dressmaking business and I did not have a husband that – well, Jerry was still alive but he was in a nursing home.

RB:  Excuse me.  Just to take a step back for a minute, what were your children’s ages when Jerry needed to go to the nursing home?

CD:  Well, that’s it.  You see when we moved into the house Kenny was six months old so Jimmy was about three.  And by the time Kenny was – well, wait a minute now – Kenny was a little over three.  The youngest one was a little over three when I went to work.  Yes, let’s continue with that because Jerry started to get sicker and sicker and he lost his job then in the fall of ’48.  So, Kenny, I guess he was four, and I knew that we could not stay home together.  His parents were going to send me a little money every month to help.  Because he got nothing from the business.  In those days it was not required that you had something and there was no Social Security.  So I knew that I had to go to work or something.  Besides that, it was too difficult at home. Jerry was, you know, kind of nervous.  I don’t want to go into that whole thing.  But that disease, you kind of get quick, and he had kind of a quicker temper anyhow.  So it was not good for the two of us at home and he needed something to do, and he could do something.  So I knew that I had to go to work and let him stay home with Kenny.  But Jimmy was now in the first grade, you see.  So he’d have something to do and he could do that.  So I went looking for a job in the fall of 1948.  Nobody wanted to hire me.  I didn’t know anything. Even as a salesgirl, I guess business wasn’t so great and it was really just after Christmas, I guess, or around that time. I guess I waited until after Christmas and I didn’t know anything about secretarial work. I went to the stores and decided that I could, you know, work in their alterations department because I could sew so well.  Well, nobody needed anybody.  I had this wonderful brother-in-law, married to my sister, Marion.  His name is Kermit Rosen.  He said, “Well, why don’t you open your own shop?”  And I said, “I can’t do that.”  He said, “Sure, you can.”  So he backed me and I opened a shop in the Shafer Building, which is at Sixth and Pine, right across the street from the Sixth and Pine entrance of Frederick and Nelson’s, you know, which is now Nordstrom’s, of course.  In that building, there were quite a few dressmakers and milliners and also in that building there were – I’m not sure if it was two or three – abortionists.

RB:  Really?

CD:  Yes.  [laughter]  Later on, I found out that right across the hall from me, these two sisters, who I thought were doing some kind of medical work were abortionists, you know.  So my sister, Marion, and some of her friends, when they would come to me, they always had a dress over their arms to make sure that people wouldn’t think they were going to an abortionist, you know.  [laughter]  But anyway, I opened this dressmaking shop and I was only going to do original work.  That’s what I wanted to do, design and make clothes for people.  But the first week I had people coming up, you know, to do alterations, so I started alterations because, you know, you have to take in some money.  And I did both.  I did a lot of alterations. That year was the time when they were taking away the big, broad shoulders that Joan Crawford made famous, you know?  Those big, broad-shouldered clothes. I learned how to really adjust clothes by taking out the great big pads.  Of course, then they came back again a few years ago, I think.  Besides that, the dresses were very short and I was very good at lengthening clothes, like putting – well, I don’t want to explain it now but doing different things to add some length to the clothes at that time. I made a lot of original clothes too.  I did not make a lot of money in the dressmaking business but I made enough to take care of everything for myself and for part of the household.  But, of course, I still needed that help from Jerry’s family.  Then I had been in there – oh, God, you’d think I would know this just exactly – but I think it was a little over five – let’s see.  No, it couldn’t have been.  I was downtown for about four years and Jerry got too sick.  And then by that time, I had a lady working for me.  Well, at one time I had two ladies working for me but – 

RB:  This was in the shop?

CD:  In my shop, yes.  But when I decided that I needed somebody I went to the School of Design downtown to find somebody who knew how to cut patterns, because I could make original clothes but I never really learned how to cut patterns.  I would just do it, you know, and it turned out.  But you can’t just keep on doing that, especially with suits, you know.  Dresses are one thing; suits are another.  So I went there to see somebody that really knew how to cut patterns besides doing the sewing.  There was this one Black lady and the head of the school told me that she was excellent but she could not hire her out; nobody wanted the Black lady [Maude].  Now, this was in about 1950, you know?  So Maude and I became very close friends.  Maude worked for me until about 1940 she got very sick and she had cancer and passed away.

RB:  You mean 1950 or – 

CD:  Hmm?

RB:  1950, or when you were – 

CD:  No, no, not 1950.  She started working for me in 1950.  I’m sorry. 1959.  But anyway – 

RB:  So, excuse me.

CD:  Yes.

RB:  You were one of the first people in your business to hire Black designers?

CD:  Well, I can’t really answer that, you know, correctly but this girl – Maude Kemper, her name was – was excellent. She was married and just nobody wanted to hire her because she was Black.  This is what the head of the school told me and I said, “Well, it’s fine with me,” and she was just a lovely person.  She always wanted children and couldn’t, so they had a foster child and they wanted to adopt him.  He was a little boy about two years old by this time.  He was adorable, you know, a little Black boy, and I went to court with her to talk about her integrity and personality and stuff, so that she could adopt this child.  But, anyway, unfortunately, she passed away and at that time she was always going to make the dress that I would wear when I married Bill.  But I ended up making it myself.  [laughter]  Anyway, that was always too bad.  But – I had this – but then Jerry got kind of sick.  I would have to stay home part of the time and Maude would take care of the business because it got to the point where – in fact, I even had to learn how to give shots – he was such a good sport about that.  Oh, my goodness!  I’d give it to him in his thigh and I would be so scared to stick the needle in and he would be laughing about it, you know.  But anyway, it got to the point where I couldn’t get him out of bed. I couldn’t handle him.  So – 

RB:  What was that like for you at that time?

CD:  Pardon?

RB:  What was it like for you at that time?

CD:  Well, there were times – you see, I take after my mother very strongly in that I tend to cry easily.  [laughter]  Sentimental, and when I’m really happy, you know, or something.  But when I think back at some of the times, when I was working downtown my father did not have his own store.  He was working for somebody else and he and I would have lunch together quite often.  He loved that because he felt so sorry about his daughter, you know, having to – and I realize now that if, you know – in those days, you see, the daughters didn’t go to work.  These days Bill’s two daughters, who are like mine – I mean, one of them is Dr. Barbara Daniels and the other one is Carolee Danz, who has done all kinds of fantastic work in this city.  They both have worked and had wonderful – I mean, and Barbara is still –  she says she’s going to retire but she doesn’t really.  But in the days when I was doing this, you see – well, anyway, I used to tell Daddy not to feel sorry for me because I enjoyed what I was doing.  But there were times when things were really bad at home, and Jerry was getting so bad.  I can recall times when I’d be driving downtown to work and say to myself, “I just think I’ll go on driving and never come back, if it weren’t for my two little boys,” because it was hard and I was young, you know.  

RB:  What strikes me is that you managed it and I wondered how did you manage it?
CD:  I don’t know.  I think I just was born with it or something because I felt very lucky, and especially in my later life when I think back, that I had that kind of personality that – or the wherewithal within me that I could do this.  Now, maybe it’s because I’m a middle child.  [laughter]  Are you?

RB:  No, but I have a middle child.

CD:  Yes.

RB:  And what qualities – 

CD:  I think the middle child copes more.  I don’t know why.  I see it in other people too.  I don’t know.

RB:  What are some of your qualities, whether they’re middle child related or not, but what are some of the qualities that give you strength?

CD:  Oh, gosh.  I don’t know.  Well, I know one thing. I never envied people for what they had and I didn’t have.  What I had was, you know – it wasn’t that I was always just satisfied with what I had but maybe I did something about it.  Maybe that was it, I don’t know.  I did things in my life that weren’t, you know, perfect but I’m not going to talk about all those things.  [laughter]  No, but I was a very capable person and I think I was kind of a caretaker in our family.  And Marion, who – I adore my sister.  Now, it’s very heartbreaking because she’s so far into Alzheimer’s, you know?  But she was very young and kind of, you know, more devil may care stuff. I think I was just more down to earth.  I don’t know why, I don’t know.  How does a person know?  Do you know how you got to be what you are?  [laughter]  

RB:  Hard to say, isn’t it?
CD:  Ya, it is.  But I think that I was capable of knowing that I could open up this little shop, and I think I had confidence in myself, I guess.  I don’t know.  I know that I’m a caretaker type of person.  That I know because that has shown up in all these years. When my husband had knee surgery he got tired of me hovering around him, you know.  He didn’t like that.  I said, “Well, you liked it when I put on your socks for you.”  “Yes, yes, yes.”  But he doesn’t like to be mothered, as they say. I think that’s why I’ve been able to be with the Galland Home for these forty years, you know, is that I have this – I don’t know – what do you call it?  A loving feeling of helping and stuff.

RB:  You are compassionate to others in need.

CD:  Yes, and as I say, there was only once or twice that I thought – you know, the whole thing was getting too much for me.  Then things would turn out better and then Jerry went to this nursing home.  That was a story in itself but anyway.  He started out at one nursing home here in Seattle and then he went to another one because they didn’t want to keep him any longer out in – about 160th and Aurora. It’s still there, the Arden Nursing Home.  For a long time, especially when he was here on Capitol Hill, I would go every day, and that was fine.  But after he was out there he got to where he didn’t know – anyway, he lived on for eight more years in a nursing home – seven or eight.  I’d have to figure that out.  But when he went into the nursing home I moved my business into my home here in Madison Park because I wanted to be home for the boys.  At that time they were both in school and, anyway, I had this little house but I made the dining room into my sewing room, and the boys got very used to the fact that they didn’t just burst into the house.  [laughter]  They kind of knocked to see if – well, I don’t know if they always knocked, to tell you the truth because we lived in this wonderful neighborhood where there were all these children and most of them were boys.  To this day some of those boys are my sons’ very closest friends.  We lived next door to a family that I had never met until Jerry and I bought the house, and it was Lil and Sid Thal.

RB:  Excuse me, was this a Jewish neighborhood or was it – 

CD:  Well, it turned out to be a lot of Jewish kids in our neighborhood.  Now, when we bought the house we didn’t know anybody that lived down there at all.  We looked at other homes, and when I think of other neighborhoods that we might have lived in, this was without a doubt the best neighborhood in town.  It turned out that next door to us was a Jewish family, and I had never met them.  Saul is a brother of – or was because Saul is not alive – but Sid Thal, who has Foxes Gem Shop – and Saul used to accuse me of not being Jewish because they used Yiddish expressions and I didn’t know any.  The only things I knew were meshuginah or something like that.  But my family never used the Yiddish expressions.  But we got very, very close, and they had one son who was a couple of years older than Jimmy, and on our block then it was all non-Jewish families.  But there was another boy and across the street, there were some boys there, and I tell you this neighborhood, it was just – in fact, for a long time, I was just known as Jim and Kenny Taylor’s mother.  I mean, nobody knew who I was, you know, [laughter] except that’s who it was.  But then my boys were always very sports-minded because Jerry was very sports-minded and they learned how to – well, in fact, they learned how to read from a racing form, I always say because [laughter] – we were very into the races and all that.  But when the first Little League team started in the city of Seattle Jimmy was in one of the first teams, the Windy Langley Giants.  They had about – I don’t know how many teams they had in the city –  all around, maybe fifteen, twenty teams.  They played down in Washington Park and I was the team's mother.

RB:  My goodness!

CD:  Because I could quit work at four o’clock if I had to and the other mothers all had to be home for dinner.  Of course, I didn’t because Jerry was in the nursing home, and so we were just – I tell you, those years of the Little League were absolutely wonderful for my boys and for me too.  That first year they had a thing at Sicks Seattle Stadium where they invited all the teams to come and when they got there they picked the teams that were going to play.  They were going to have nine teams.  No, that isn’t right.  They must have had – they were going to play three innings each so they were only going to have six teams. Windy Langley Giants were the first ones picked and my son, Jimmy Taylor, was the first little boy, at ten years old, up to bat in that park.  I could not breathe.  You know how little those kids must have looked in that big baseball stadium, although they had it closed off partly because if you went past a certain place it was counted a home run, see, and I couldn’t even breathe.  And he got a hit immediately and my mother [laughter] stood up behind me and she screamed, “That’s my grandson!” I about died, you know.  Nowadays, if that were my grandson I would have done the same thing.  But anyway, we had a wonderful time with that.  They went to McGilvra School where they had lots of friends, and there were lots of Jewish families along – we were on 42nd.  On 41st there were quite a few and on McGilvra there were quite a few.

RB:  Excuse me.  Were these Ashkenazic Jews?

CD:  Yes, they were. Almost all the kids went to Temple De Hirsch.

RB:  Okay.

CD:  There was one very close friend of my son, Kenny’s, who went to Hertzel.  But there were none from the orthodox that I knew.  There might have been some but I didn’t know any at that time, I really can’t think of any.  But most of them all went to Temple, although the Thals next door to me, now, belonged to the Bikur Cholim and the Temple De Hirsch.  They did; I forgot about that.  But they went mostly to the Temple.  Their children went to Temple and Lil and I became such close friends.  I can’t tell you – closer than sisters because she has three sisters and I have two.  And she had a lot of problems in her life and I had my problems.  We were closer – there was something about a relationship like that that you can tell things and talk over things that you can’t talk over with your sisters. 

RB:  So you provided each other a lot of support.

CD:  A lot of support, the two of us.  She stayed in that house until she died.  They were living there when we moved in and that was in 1945, and sixteen years later is when I married Bill and moved out of there.  Lil passed away – I would say, I suppose it’s five years but it’s hard to remember whether it’s four or five years, and she was still living in that house.  This is not a locket, it was the top of a gold key that she had made for my front door here when Bill and I moved into this house that we built thirty-five years ago.  When I wasn’t using the key.  It kept falling off and everything and then I found it one day and I said to Lil, “You know, I’m going to have it put on a chain because I love it so.”  It’s got my initials on it, you see. I’ve been wearing it ever since and when she passed away – I don’t know, even when she was sick – she had cancer and I used to go – well, anyway, it was a wonderful, wonderful relationship.  I’m still very friendly with her daughter who lives in California.  We talk all the time.  Her granddaughter who lives here, we’re very – we’re all very friendly still, you know.  But anyway – I don’t know where I was before I digressed again.  But anyway, I did my dressmaking in my home and I did very well in my home, you know.  At that time I could take care of myself and my sons.  And, as I say, I was paying the rent, which was – it wasn’t the rent – I mean, the monthly payments on the house because we had bought the house – the monthly payments over a twenty-year period and I think they were something like $55 a month.  I know it’s hard to believe today. Jerry’s parents were paying for the nursing home entirely.  Then when I knew I had to just get this other bedroom and I went to the bank and they wouldn’t talk to me because I was a woman alone.  

RB:  So that was common?

 CD:  Things have rather changed, haven’t they?  Yes, it was.  So my brother-in-law went to the bank with me to sign the papers, and I never got over that, you know, that that was the way it was.  My brother-in-law said, “You know, you’re taking out another twenty-year loan,”  and I said, “Well, I don’t care.”  I said, “They’ve lowered the payments.”  I remember the payments were something like $39 a month, you know, from what I was paying.  [laughter]  So it didn’t make any difference to me how long I paid them.  So anyway, we added the bedroom onto the house and there was still just this one little bathroom that we all used.  But it had a full basement, Jerry and I had built a playroom down there in half the basement.  The neighborhood lived in our playroom and the only rule I had was that – even when I was doing my dressmaking the boys would come and play down there – and the big rule I had, and I had signs up all over that room was, “Do not use any foul language,” because [laughter] you know the boys, how they would like to use words if they would.  We had a pool table down there and Kenny had an electric train.  I mean, my boys were brought up – I used to accuse them of this – that they were brought up to think that we were millionaires, because they really had – really, not that they were spoiled because they didn’t ask for a lot of things or anything, but the family was always good to them.  My family was wonderful – absolutely wonderful, especially my sister, Marion.  But they never wanted a lot and we never did a lot.  Jimmy went to camp one year and he hated it when he was young, so he never went again.  But Kenny went to camp a few times and, you know, they had their birthday parties and things.  But we didn’t live extravagantly; goodness only knows.  I don’t think they ever asked for things that they didn’t – well, I don’t remember them ever wanting something that they didn’t have. 

RB:  That’s remarkable, given you were single parenting during that time.

CD:  Yeah, my boys have both done very, very well.  They both graduated from college and they both have done very well, and they both worked part of the time through college.  And even down here in the neighborhood, you know, in the stores.  In fact, Jimmy, when he was – I don’t know; how old would he have been?  Twelve or thirteen or something like that, he had a paper route.  The PI – he’d do it in the morning.  I get him up and he’d go and do it and come back, but on Sundays, I always drove around with him because the papers were too heavy.  So my boys knew there was a work ethic and I think they learned that from their mother too, you know?  And they both have done very, very well. 

RB:  You sound very proud of them.

CD:  Very proud of them and we have a great relationship.

RB:  Wonderful.  Sounds like you were a wonderful mom to them.

CD:  Well, I hope so.  I didn’t, you know, try [laughter] but I think I was – I’ve often tried to get out of them if they missed having a father around, because Kenny really never knew what it was to have a real father.  Jimmy remembers a little bit because his dad took him to baseball games when he was really little, but not much.  But they never seemed to miss it.  They said, “Jeez, Mom” – he said with their friends if they wanted to do something and then the mother and father would argue about whether they should do it or not.  He said the only thing that they would know is that if I said, “Well, we’ll see,” that usually meant yes.  [laughter]  You know?  But I put my foot down.  Believe me, I would.  Then, of course, I realized in later years that maybe there were some things I didn’t put my foot down enough about, and part of it was, you know – well, I – 

[End of side 1, tape 2]

CD:  gambling in a way – but I couldn’t stop that. Jimmy always loved the horse races show and he was very much into that.  But his father had done that.  Now, Bill is not into a lot of gambling.  But he still does some but nothing like that.

RB:  So, what year or age did you remarry Bill?

CD:  Well, Bill and I started going together in 1954, and we were really going together for about five years before we got married because I could never – well, in the first place, he wasn’t really ready to get married.  He had a lot of obligations.  Second place, I could never get married as long as Jerry was alive.  I felt that I could not do that. In 1959, my father-in-law had passed away already.  He passed away, I think, in ’58, and my mother-in-law would come up here to see Jerry and she said to me once that it’s just very silly for you to go on with life like this.  It was her instigation that she and I should just quietly get a divorce.  I mean, she would be his – what’s the word?  I can’t say.  This isn’t something that the whole public has to know.  But anyway, we did that very quietly – get a divorce.  Well, it wasn’t that quiet because everybody knew that I got a divorce but, I mean, we didn’t make a big thing about it.  She took Jerry to Portland, which is what she wanted to do and he was in a facility there quite near where she lived, as I say, she didn’t have her husband at that time, but her girls were living there, and all that.  But if he had been aware of what was going on I never could have done it.  I never would have done it.  But he was not aware and at that time – he had been a well-built man and now he was down to about eighty pounds. I had not taken the boys to see him in quite a while.  It was just too difficult and in those days, of course, obviously I was still working.  But at the time I said to those nurses out there at that nursing home, “There is a special place in heaven for people like you.”  Absolutely.  And I, of course, still feel that way being so connected with the Galland Home and seeing the care that the people get from people that don’t know them at all or anything.  Well, that’s another book, you know.  [laughter]  But anyway, I would go down once a month to see him, but he didn’t really know me. I always took a chocolate cake because he loved chocolate cake.  He couldn’t eat hardly at all.  He had – you see, multiple sclerosis – I don’t know if you know about what it is, but it is a disease that affects the nerves in the body.  So the good thing about multiple sclerosis is that there is no pain because your nerves are dying.  When he had it his parents sent him to New York to this famous man once that was supposed to know something about it.  We went to Tacoma.  I used to take him to Tacoma when Kenny was real little and I guess Jimmy must have been in nursery school because we’d go back and forth to Tacoma.  To this day – and I know that I still support the MS Society and all that – but to this day they are no closer than they were fifty years ago.  Now, somebody might dispute my statement but I don’t know of anything any closer than they are to any cure, because people have multiple sclerosis at such different stages, and within twelve to fourteen years Jerry was gone.  But then others have it in a milder state; you know what I mean.  So anyway, Jerry lived – then Jerry and I were divorced and Bill and I got married in the fall of 1959.  Bill and I got married.  His children and my children are true second cousins to each other.  Did you figure that one out?

RB:  Why don’t you tell us how?

CD:  Well, because my husband, Jerry, and Bill’s wife, Selma, were first cousins because Jerry’s mother and Selma’s father were brother and sister.  See?  So it was a very close relationship.  You know, sometimes people get married and the husband has children, and the wife has children, and the children don’t really know each other, but with our kids, they knew each other and they have spent a lot of time together.  So it’s always been a very close relationship, and I’ve been very lucky because they like to kiddingly call me their wicked stepmother.  But you should see the Mother’s Day cards I get from them, you know.  Their mother passed away.  It’s been almost three years now.  Selma, very soon after she and Bill got a divorce, moved to Los Angeles and took the youngest daughter, Penny, with her. Barbara and Carolee stayed with Bill and went to the university here.  When Barbara was getting – she hadn’t graduated and she went back down to Los Angeles.  She thought maybe she should do something down there, but she didn’t and she came back.  So Carolee and Barbara stayed here and then Barbara married Ted Daniels, and they’ve been a very stable part of this community. Ted is absolutely a wonderful person.  They were married in June of 1959 and then Selma got married down south in – no, she got married in May of 1959 and then Barbara got married in June of 1959 and we got married in December of 1959.  [laughter]  So, at our wedding Barbara says, well, she’s glad that her mother and father are finally getting married, [laughter] and she’d been married already.  So, anyway, we got married and Carolee was still living with us and my two boys.  Then Carolee graduated from college and got married and then the next year Jimmy graduated from college and he moved into an apartment with a friend. Then I guess in 19 – let’s see, was it one year or two years after that Kenny graduated?  He got married very soon after graduation and also, got married quite young.

RB:  Carolyn, did you go back to work after you were married? 

CD:  No, I didn’t. I closed up my shop and I had a lot of very unhappy women, and one of the women who was so unhappy was my brother, Herman’s, mother-in-law, Sarah Weisfield, because I used to make her clothes.  She had the kind of figure that was very difficult.  But, yes, Sarah Weisfield.  So I still made her some clothes after I got married and a couple of other people I kind of worked on a little bit.  But after about a year I gave that up because Bill wanted me to learn how to play golf because he played golf, and then I was at the golf club.  We got married in December of ’59.  In the spring of 1960, I’m at the golf club and one of the ladies that I knew said, “You know, Carolyn, at the Kline Galland home, you know, they have a sewing group,” or something.  She said, “And we’re going to have a bazaar and those clothes need help.  Would you go out there?”  This is when it was still in the old house.  I don’t know if you remember that at all.  Do you remember that?

RB:  Yes.  But excuse me for just a moment.

CD:  Yes.

RB:  When you mentioned the golf club, which one are you talking about?

CD:  Glendale Golf Club.

RB:  Okay.

CD:  In those years it was all Jewish.  Now it’s about thirty percent Jewish.

RB:  Is that right?

CD:  Yes.

RB:  At what point – 

CD:  And it’s about fifteen percent Oriental.  [laughter] 

RB:  Very interesting.  

CD:  Yes.

RB:  So the demographics are changing.

CD:  Yes.  Let’s see.  I can’t tell you the exact year that it started to change and I don’t remember the year that Bill was president, the two years.  Isn’t that awful that I can’t remember the dates at all?  I really can’t.  But – 

RB:  So Glendale was the golf club that you were at when someone mentioned the Kline Galland Home.

CD:  Yes.

RB:  Can you describe that for people who don’t live in Seattle?  What is the Kline Galland Home?

CD:  Oh, the Caroline Kline Galland Home is a home for the Jewish aged.  It was opened in 1914 in a house out in the Seward Park area, which at that time was not a Jewish area.  Now it is a Jewish area but at that time it was not.  But it was close enough to Yesler Way where the Jewish area was, you know.  Anyway, it was kind of far out in those days but they bought this house with money that Caroline Kline Galland left for the Jewish indigent aged.  Okay?  Now, it was, in fact – as I was a little girl and my mother used to volunteer out there – it was called, you know, the Jewish Old People’s Home.  It was thought that nobody we knew would go there because it was for the poorer people.  Well, anyway, it changed a lot and it’s had a wonderful history, and I could go into that history but that’s another story.  In fact, two weeks ago we had the grand opening ceremonies for the Summit, which is the building that we have now built for retirement living on First Hill.  And at that time they did go into some of the history at that meeting that day.  But she left – at that time it was a tremendous amount of money.  She left $3 million for the Kline Galland Home.  So they bought this property and it was a home for the aged and there were approximately twenty people living in this house, and it was not kosher at the time, of course, at all, which nobody seemed to bother about.  My mother’s friends formed a group and I know the name of it so well, but that doesn’t make any difference, and once a month they had a birthday party.  They would find out which residents’ birthdays it was and have a birthday party and buy them each a gift.  And when we were young – my sister Marion and I – we used to go out there with her and stuff.  Then there was a lady, Miss Myers.  She was a maiden lady who sewed beautifully, and she used to come – Mother would pick her up and bring her to our house and she would do any kind of mending or something that we needed. Mother’s group of – they were all kind of friends, you know, and it was just great and then they had a big Hanukkah party there every year, and we used to help wrap all the presents and the Hanukkah candy.  Do you remember when they had the Hanukkah candy?  Oh, no, because – you wouldn’t.  You’re too young for that.  But they had these wonderful Hanukkah candies that used to be made and wrap them up.  Well, anyway, and then – how did we get to the Kline Galland Home?  Oh, because that’s how I got started there.  So I was at the golf club and this girl said – so I went out there.  Truthfully, I enjoyed it very, very much because, in the first place, I could use some of my skills, and these ladies were just darling ladies.  And very interestingly, I will tell you that they were all German ladies.  At that time, and this is in 1960 – I think almost everybody in the home at that time was German.  Then I got very involved and I had a group and that’s when I started, that year in 1960, of once a week going out there and we’d make aprons, and we’d make potholders, and we’d make all this stuff, and the ladies really sewed. Some of them did crocheting and knitting and I would help them with that too, although they taught me more than – at that time – than I knew.  There was this one lady, Susie Cohen.  I will never forget her.  She is a darling lady and she was a fantastic crocheter. She came into our little group and these other ladies were not talking to her because she was a Sephardic.  At that time I didn’t have many Sephardic friends myself at all and I didn’t really – well, I just didn’t know – but I knew that, after all, this lady deserved the same as everybody else. I got very disgusted one day and I said to these ladies, “If she isn’t in your group I’m not going to be here either.”  I said, “She deserves just as much attention and camaraderie as you do,” and, okay, they did.  Well, of course, then the home became, you know, more than fifty percent Sephardic and, you know, some of my best friends are Sephardic.  [laughter]  I love to kid about that because it’s like “Some of my best friends are Jews,” you know.  But, you see, as we grew up we didn’t know any Sephardic people because they lived in a different part of town and et cetera.  But anyway – and there weren’t that many then, I don’t think.  Although now, I think – what are we – the third largest Sephardic, I think – ?

RB:  It has grown, hasn’t it?

CD:  Yes, something like that.  Anyway, so I guess we really got very involved, and two years later I was asked to come on the board of the home.  So I’ve been on the board now for thirty-eight years. I keep telling these young people, as I call them, and of course, they’re getting older themselves, that – you know, that maybe they – but I can see it’s a good stable thing to have somebody on the board that’s been on there for this long.  Up until last year, there were others.  But within a year and a half, we lost three of our wonderful men.  Of course, they were all, you know, well in their eighties but had stayed with the board all that time.  And now there’s only one other person that’s been on the board as long as I have, but I’m now the oldest person on the board so I tell them now they’ve got to really listen to me.  [laughter] But I don’t know about all the other boards in the city but this has got to be the most wonderful organization because, I mean, it was the Kline Galland Home Board that just went through this last eleven years of building the Summit.

RB:  Could you describe the Summit very briefly?

CD:  The Summit is called a retirement home.  There are a lot of them in the city.  There’s going to be more and more all over the country because of the age group.  Some of them – my brother lives in what’s called the Exeter House downtown.  He lives on his own but he has three meals a day there, but they also have assisted living and hospitalization.  Now, the Summit has one whole floor of assisted living where they get three meals a day and care on the floor all the time.  The rest of the building – there are thirteen floors – is independent living with one meal a day, just the evening meal.  It’s a gorgeous facility.  Of course, I’ve been involved in it so I know.  But it’s got a beautiful synagogue.  It’s got a spa.  It’s got an exercise room.  It’s got a gorgeous library and the units are beautiful.  Of course, it’s brand new and I’ve been there quite a bit lately.  A lot of my friends have moved in there.  You know, widows and there’s a couple of couples in there that I’m very friendly with too, but – 

RB:  So you were instrumental in its creation?

CD:  Well, the actual creation – sure, I’ve been on the board but I will say that there were four young men – now, when I say young they’re now in their fifties, you know, but that’s young – were really the ones that for two years looked for the property, finally found the right piece of property, made the deals, then worked on the thing of getting all the permits and all this.  Then we had a lot of different committees, and I was on the Decoration Committee, you might say picking out the furniture for all the public rooms and the carpeting and all that in all the public rooms.

RB:  How fortunate for them, given your design background.

CD:  Well, yes, but the other women – there were mostly women on that committee, truthfully.  I guess there were a couple of men.  But most of them – you know Becky Benaroya, she was the head of it, and Jeanie Alhadeff, and we all had our input.  

RB:  Tell me, what were the rewards and challenges?  What have been the rewards and challenges over the years of volunteering for the Kline Galland Home?

CD:  Well, as a lot of volunteers will tell you, you get more out of it yourself than you’re putting in.  But there’s something – I don’t want to sound like I’m blowing my own horn or anything like that, but there’s something about my personality that kind of – maybe the loving part in me or something goes to it because I go out there and I’m with other volunteers and I see this.  They come to me and they put their arms around me and they – [laughter]. We have quite a few Russian people out there.  Some of them don’t speak any English but there are three of them that come to the Day Center.  And I was out there yesterday. This one couple – she is learning some English but he hasn’t really learned any yet.  So when she walks into the room there she just puts her arms around me and everything, and I notice that she doesn’t to the other people. I don’t know, maybe there’s something inside of me that gives out, and that’s what I think I get from my mother, because she had this where everybody loved her, you know?

RB:  Yes.

CD:  It’s a wonderful feeling you get.  We were talking earlier, but that’s another story about the picnics that I have here.  You know, it’s not so easy anymore to do it as it was, and yet, I just can’t stop because they love it so and they talk to me about it all year long.

RB:  Oh, so you’ve been hosting picnics for residents at the Kline Galland Home here at your home?

CD:  For thirty-five years.  We lived in a very old house up by the street.  It was built in 1900.  Bill’s parents, Jessie and John Danz had bought this piece of property to use in the summer.  They lived up on Queen Anne, and they bought this to use in the summer and the house they used when John would hire people to work in his business from out of town; they would live here for a while, see.  When we got married they gave us this piece of property, which was a beautiful gift.  We lived in that old house, and after about four or five years we started planning the house on this side of the property.  This was all just grass from the street down, you see.  We moved in here in 1966, which makes it thirty-five years ago in January.  So that summer I had my first little picnic here for just my sewing group.  And I gave them lunch and everything on the porch.  Now, you understand at the Home it’s kosher.  Here they eat anything they want, you know.  [Laughter]  Nobody cares. I think for two years I had just my sewing group, which was smaller.  But then the others wanted to come, and I started this thing and so I’ve been doing it ever since.  And for quite a while we had about fifty to sixty residents with other people that came to help and this and that.  But now the residents of the home are more debilitated than they used to be, you know.  So we have about forty-five residents, but I end up with about ninety people here because a lot of people come to help.  They all like to and they come to volunteer and it really is a wonderful thing.  In all those years, three times we had – once I moved everything over to the Jewish Community Center because it was raining and that was a lot of work.  Then the Council House was there so we did it upstairs in the Council House.  But that was horrible because they had that one elevator we could use, and that was awful.  So I swore if it ever rained I’d never do it again.  So once again, it rained and I just gave all the cakes that I baked to the Council House because they couldn’t go to the home because they weren’t kosher and we just canceled it.  But ever since then, it’s been a beautiful day.

RB:  And you baked for every – 

CD:  It’s the thing I like to do.  I bake all the cakes.

RB:  Wow.

CD:  Well, at first I used to bake them from scratch but I don’t anymore.  You bake them from a mix.  [laughter]   You know.  

RB:  You know, it’s been just wonderful.

CD:  Yes, I know.

RB:  Wonderful talking.

CD:  Let’s say goodbye for today.

RB:  Okay, let's say goodbye for today.  You’re amazing.

CD:  Oh, I don’t know about that but – 
 
[End of side 2, tape 2]

RB:  This is Roz Bornstein and I am here with Carolyn Blumenthal Danz at Carolyn’s home in Seattle, Washington, and we’re meeting for the second half of her oral history interview for the Weaving Women’s Words Project for the Jewish Women’s Archive.  The date is May 16, 2001.  Carolyn, do I have your permission to continue taping?

CD:  Yes, you do, Roz. 

RB:  Thank you.  So Carolyn, where would you like to start today?

CD:  Well, you see, I can’t remember everything I told you last time [laughter] and what I’ve said and what I haven’t said.  But I don’t know.  What don’t I just start by saying that I was born in Seattle, Washington on July 30, 1918, and I was born in Providence Hospital when it was just one small building instead of what it is today. I was the third of what turned out to be five children.  I’m the middle child and we lived at 1020 15th North, which is now 15th East right across from Volunteer Park, and it was a wonderful place to grow up.  It was half Catholic and half Jewish and I guess there were some just in-betweens there too, you know.  [laughter]  But we went to Stevens School and then to Broadway High School.  But my father thought that we kids should have some place in the summertime.  So he bought a home at Three Tree Point and that is just the other side of Burien.  It’s on the Puget Sound.  In those days there were few people that lived there all the time but it was more of a summer place because the roads weren’t – you didn’t get out there in twenty minutes to half an hour like you do today. We went out there the day school was out and we came home just before school started in September.  

RB:  Would your entire family spend the summer there?

CD:  Yes.  We all spent the summer there.  We had a lovely home.  Now, as time went on some of Mother’s very good friends rented homes there for the summer.  We had at one time a family living next door to us that was my mother’s closest friends, Therese, and Harold Offer.  In fact, her family – her maiden name was Morgenstern and her father was one of the founders of the temple.

RB:  Temple De Hirsch?

CD:  Temple De Hirsch, yes.  But there were different ones. My mother just has one sister and they built a small house on our property there we were right out on the point, and it was just wonderful.  I mean, we kids had a ball.  And the Julia Shafer family lived kind of around the bend from us, and there were five kids in that family.  But they were brought up that they couldn’t go out and play with other kids.  And – [laughter] we used to go over there and climb their trees and make a mess of things.  But we were right on the water and we used to do clamming and we’d go into the water and just – I mean, we just had a ball all summer.  All of us kids – that’s the way we grew up.  And my mother’s sister, Cora Lewis, just had one child and that’s Mina, and her name’s Mina Fleiser now.  She is just a few months younger than I am, and she and I were just – she was like our sister also.  In fact, in some of our old family pictures, she’s in there just like one of us children.  

RB:  Carolyn, do you have any favorite childhood memories from that house?

CD:  Well yes, there’s quite a few.  [laughter]  There was a garage on the front of the property when you drove into this place, and Daddy turned that into like a little guesthouse.  My youngest sister’s name is Priscilla, so he named it Priscilla Villa.  So we lived at Priscilla Villa, Three Tree Point.  That’s all the address you had to put on it and they knew what it was.  But, oh, yes, my sister, Marion, and I, we used to have little boyfriends out there and we – oh, and of course, the fireworks were fantastic.  My daddy and some of the other men out there would take charge and they would do big fireworks things.  There was a group of young girls and we all had Patsy dolls.  Now, you’ve probably never heard of a Patsy doll, but it was more of a doll, not like – 

RB:  Barbie dolls?

CD:   – Barbie.  Because, you know, they’re so small.  But this was a doll you could hold onto. Patsy dolls had all kinds of clothes you could buy and we girls – that was the thing, you see when we were young.  For some reason – and I don’t know why – I could sew, even when I was little, and I would make clothes for the Patsy doll.  While everybody was playing I would make clothes.  My mother, to the day she passed away, couldn’t thread a needle.  I mean, I don’t think she ever threaded a needle.

RB:  So, who taught you how to sew?

CD:  I don’t know.  Of course, we had a nursie, as we called her but she was, you know – well, she was part of our household, and she might have.  I can’t remember but I look back on it and I think it’s really something because I can remember some of the things I used to make.

RB:  Do you have any of them?

CD:  No, no, I really don’t.  But we had a great time and then Marion and I – she’s a year and a half older than I am – went to Girl Scout Camp one year.  I guess we were about eleven and twelve or something like that, and I loved it and she hated it.  So I went to Girl Scout Camp a couple of weeks a year as I grew up but, I don’t know, it was just a wonderful time of life.  I mean, it’s wonderful memories of our little friends out there.  And I remember there’s one boy.  In fact, he’s still alive.  I see him every once in a while at temple – Louis Levy – and he never did marry.  But when he became thirteen and was going to be bar mitzvahed he had a party including girls.  And he was the first boy that we ever knew that did that.  But he did that because they lived at Three Tree Point and he wanted to have all of his girlfriends from Three Tree Point.  [laughter]  So I think that was the first time any girls went to a bar mitzvah party that we knew about, you know.

RB:  How were they celebrated prior to that?

CD:  Well, I know my brothers just had like family dinners and stuff and then they took their boyfriends to – I don’t know, they had something for the boys.  My oldest son, when he was thirteen at Temple De Hirsch – wasn’t the least bit interested in girls – not the least bit.  I took about fifteen boys to a Washington basketball game that evening after we had our big family luncheon downtown someplace.  But my second son, two years later – wanted girls.  So we had an ice skating party for him – no, roller skating – for him out in the University district.

RB:  How fun.

CD:  Yeah, that was a lot of fun.  But anyway, that’s beside the point.  Then I was very interested in Girl Scouting and as I went through high school I still went to Girl Scouts and the closest chapter for older girls – because I don’t know if they have them for older girls now.  The Girl Scouts all look so young around me now [laughter] when I see them selling their cookies and stuff.  But it was over at Garfield High School and I used to take the bus over there from Broadway, and then I’d sleep at my grandparents’ house.  They lived at 28th and Yesler.  And then Grandma would drive me to school the next day, see?

RB:  So it was really important to you?

CD:  It really was.

RB:  How so?  What do you remember about it?

CD:  Well, I don’t know.  I think I liked the idea of working with other girls and getting those badges, you know.  I was so proud of my badges. In fact, my granddaughter down in California – she just turned sixteen but when she was about ten or eleven or twelve – I don’t know – anyway, she became a Girl Scout, and I still had my pin and I sent it to her. I don’t know if she still has it [laughter] but anyway.

RB:  Do you remember who your troop leader was?

CD:  Oh, no. Oh, my goodness, no.

RB:  Was it a Jewish troop?

CD:  No, it was not. In fact, there were some girls of color.  I had this thing, I liked to be part of groups or something like that, you know?  And then when I was in college I used to go out to a day camp, a Girl Scout Day Camp out in – well, it seemed so far away.  It was out there in Bellevue someplace, you know?  [laughter]  I went there, I know, for two weeks at one time every day.  And I taught the girls how to make – oh, my gosh – silhouette puppets.  We did, you know, where you put up a sheet and then you put on a little show?

RB:  Yes.

CD:  That I remember very well and I just enjoyed doing things with people like that.  Of course, being at Three Tree Point I learned how to swim very, very well.  And when the Washington Athletic Club started, my daddy was one of the first members down there, and I was on their swim team when I was thirteen years old and was the champion swimmer of the city of Seattle for the thirteen-year-olds.  Now I would no more go into that water.  [laughter]  

RB:  That’s a great story.  So I didn’t know that the Washington Athletic Club had a swim team.

CD:  Well, you know, we used to – I don’t know.  They did, I guess.

RB:  What other teams did you compete against?

CD:  Well, you know, come to think of it, now that I said that, we swam in the pool down there is what we did.  But I think, truthfully, now that I said that, it wasn’t that.  It was that I was the champion Girl Scout swimmer when I was thirteen.  That was it – of the Girl Scouts.  But we used their pool, I guess, was it.

RB:  To work out?

CD:  Yes.  And the other night I went to the Moore Theater to see this incredibly funny, funny, funny person, this Dame Edna that is appearing at the Moore Theater.  Of course, also when we were young there was a big swimming pool there at the Moore where the hotel is, and we used to swim there too.  But that was before the Washington Athletic Club, see?

RB:  What year do you remember was the Washington Athletic Club opened?

CD:  Well, I don’t know, because I also took dancing there and I must have been around twelve, which would have made it – what’s 1918 – eighteen and twelve is thirty so it must have been around 1930-ish that it opened.  It must have been because truthfully, if my daddy was one of the first members, he could afford it and after the Depression hit – I mean, and really hit, then Daddy couldn’t afford it anymore.  I know that then we couldn’t be members after a while, you know because he lost just too much at that time.  But I don’t know.  We kids – everything was still fine as far as we were concerned, you know.  In high school, I didn’t do anything too outstanding.  In fact, my grades were very mediocre but I had an awful good time.  [laughter] 

RB:  How so?

CD:  I was not, you know, one of the Magna Cum Laude.  Then I went on to the university and I went into the School of Art and I took a lot of painting at high school too besides the sewing, you know, that I enjoyed so much.  But they don’t even teach sewing at high school anymore, do they?

RB:  I don’t think so.

CD:  They don’t.  That’s really too bad; it really is.  Anyway, after the first year of being in the School of Art and Design, I knew that I didn’t belong there.  I mean, there were students that were just really – I mean, really good.  [chuckles]  And I was okay but I could see that that wasn’t for me.  So I went into the School of Home Economics, which is – which had the sewing and the design and all that.  When I graduated I graduated with a degree in what was called sewing and design.  My grades at college were nothing to write home about.  In fact, my parents were never strict so it wasn’t like that.  But for the things that I was interested in I got very good grades.  But you probably got good grades in everything.

RB:  [laughter]  Please – not necessarily.

CD:  Yeah. At the university, I was a member of the AE Phi Sorority, which was only about five years old at that time.

RB:  Could you tell us a little bit about that sorority and its impact on you?

CD:  Well, I think I must have said something in my last time about that, that I think you can tell by now that I like to be part of a group.  I like to have a lot of friends around, you know, and stuff like that.  A lot of my friends that I went through high school with didn’t think that that was – I don’t know, they didn’t think that the girls were good enough for them or something. I don’t want to say that because the girls were just – you know, they were nice girls but they weren’t the girls that were our close friends up ‘til then.  There was a social sorority and a social fraternity in the city of Seattle, a Jewish one.  And the boys – 

RB:  Do you remember the names? 
 
CD:  Yeah, the boys were called the Pi Tau Pi and the girls were Sigma Theta Pi.  They were national but they were definitely just social, and they just couldn’t exist today because they were a very, very snobbish sort of thing.  I mean – 

RB:  Can you give an example?

CD:  There were four of us girls that were very friendly.  I mean, you know, we had lots of friends.  So a couple of us – our sisters were already in the Sigma Theta Pi and they were going to have their pledging for the year, and so I was asked to pledge.  I wasn’t going to be told who else was until the evening came when – see, these were all young girls, you know.  And so we get there and they have us blindfolded; I’ll never forget this.  So when they unblindfolded us, this one girl and I – I don’t want to mention any names now – we look at each other, kind of looking around for the rest of those girls that are our good friends. I said, “Where’s so and so?  Where’s” – you know, kind of to her.  And she says, “I don’t know.  I don’t know.”  So anyway, they just took the two of us in, and then when I got home I asked my sister – I said, “What went on?”  You know, “How am I going to go back to school tomorrow and face these other girls?”  And she says, “Caroline, a couple of the girls in it didn’t like the girls.”  Well, you know, you get a bunch of girls that are fifteen through eighteen and they’ve got their opinions about other girls.  I suppose it’s still the same way in this world and for a while there I kind of didn’t want to be part of it, you know.  Well, then I was.  Anyway, they took in this one girl a few months later and everything.  So it was this group of girls at the Sigma Theta Pi that didn’t want to go into the AE Phi’s.  None of them had but I wanted to.  So I didn’t find out ‘til later that since they knew – some of the girls knew I wanted to go in at the AE Phi – they really saw that I got out there like one of them would call up and say, “Oh, I just happen to be going out.  Can I take you to the campus?”  You know, or something – you know, for rush time and everything. I very innocently said, “Oh, sure.  Fine.”  You know, I didn’t know that they were kind of – you know, they should be kind of together.  Well, anyway, listen, when I was in the AE Phi’s there’s a couple of women that you know that I’m definitely not going to mention their names that were going to be blackballed.  I really started talking, because they said, “Oh, you know, they’re” – well, they weren’t members of the Temple De Hirsch, okay?  Put it that way?  You know, anyway, they got in and everything was fine.  [laughter]  But – 

RB:  So just take a step back.

CD:  Yes.

RB:  Can you describe the differences between the two sororities?  You said – 
CD:  Well, the one sorority, you only really were active in it until, you know – gosh, I can’t remember what we did after we went to college.  Well, it couldn’t have been just a high school thing because when I was a pledge they – like, they grilled you.  Do you know?  One day, at one meeting this one girl said – I don’t know, they were talking about the ages – and she said to me, “Well, how old do you think I am?”  And I said, “Well, I don’t know.”  I was scared to say anything.  She says, “Well, I’m only twenty-one.”  I said, “Twenty-one and not married?”  I’ve never forgotten that because in those days they were married by – [laughter] and oh, my God, it broke up the place.  But that I’ve never forgotten.  But we were still Sigma Theta Pi’s and, of course, they had national conventions and this and that.  They once had one here and the Pi Tau Pi’s also, boys thing.  But they broke up. I mean, it didn’t last forever.  I don’t know how long ago it broke up but, believe me, it did and I’m sure that it must have by 1940. 

RB:  Do you remember why you wanted to join the other one – the AE?

CD:  Oh, Alpha Epsilon Phi.

RB:  Yes.

CD:  At that time it was the only Jewish sorority on campus. I can’t remember the name of the other one now that came on.  It came on while I was still in school.

RB:  I can’t remember the name of it.

CD:  Oh, isn’t that awful?  But I wanted to be part of campus life.  I mean, what’s the use of going out there and then just coming home? Because you live at home, and to not have – be part of campus life, and I wanted to be, you know?

RB:  So it was a nice way of connecting you to a community on campus?

CD:  Well, of course. Our sorority was part of the group, or the organization that had all the sororities in it.  When you were president you went to those meetings and then they had a big party at one of these places which seemed far out then, like Lake Sammamish and stuff like that.  All the presidents of the sororities went and, you know, took a date.  I took this fellow that I grew up with.  He was not a real date; he was just a very, very good friend.  But I took him because he was a big man on campus by that time.

RB:  Is that right?  [laughter]  How so?  How was he – 

CD:  Well, I mean, he was very well known on campus doing different things and stuff like that.

RB:  I see.

CD:  So I took him to that party.  [laughter]  But I really enjoyed the years at the university, and by the time I was a junior at the university, I was going with Jerry Taylor, who I married six months after I graduated from college, and we lived one year in Portland and, as I told you, I was down in Portland this last weekend visiting my granddaughter.  She lives in an apartment just four blocks away from where I used to live that year.

RB:  Oh.

CD:  When we moved in it was a little court – six units in a court and that was sixty-one years ago and it was brand new, and it didn’t look too bad.  I go by it every time I’m there. Jerry’s folks – his father had a furniture store downtown and his mother had an antique shop halfway downtown on Burnside.  He had two brothers and twin sisters and all three of the boys have passed away in that family, but the girls are still there.

RB:  Carolyn, you mentioned your grandchildren – or granddaughter in Portland.  How many grandchildren do you have?

CD:  Well, I have six of my own, and Bill, my husband, has six but it’s like they’re both of ours – 

RB:  That’s wonderful. 

CD:   – because we were very close.  All the children have been close and the grandchildren were all born after we were married to each other.  And so we’re all very close and we have the twelve grandchildren and one, two, three are married, I guess – yes, three, and we have four great-grandchildren.

RB:  That’s wonderful.

CD:  So we’re a very good, happy family.  But what I was going to say is that after I married Jerry down in Portland is when I started to do some community work like that, and I was active in the Council of Jewish Women down there.  But after one year we moved back to Seattle, and then I was more active in the Council of Jewish Women than I was in the Sisterhood of Temple De Hirsch, but we weren’t members of the temple.  We didn’t become members until we had children.  I think that’s kind of – do families still do it that way?  Yeah.

RB:  It seems like a trend.

CD:  Yes, well, sure.  We didn’t have a lot of money in those days anyway, so. But anyway, as I’ve told you before, my mother was – Helen Blumenthal was very active in the Sisterhood. I told you about the work for the blind and all that.  Anyway, so we had two boys and by the time I had my second son, which was in the fall of 1944 – we were married in 1940 – by 1945 we knew that Jerry had this multiple sclerosis.  He was just so-so and by 1948 he had to quit work, and that’s when I did the only thing I could do and that was to open up a dressmaking shop, and if I had known as – if I had realized how little I knew I would have been scared to death to do it.  [laughter]  But you kind of have confidence in yourself that you think you can do this.  And I learned and I hired – after I’d been there for just a couple of months I – well, I don’t know if this is interesting or not, but I learned how to make new dresses, you know, and all that by just measuring and draping, you see.  I never learned how to cut patterns.  Well, I realized that I would have to do that.  So I went to a school here in Seattle that taught that sort of thing and I hired a lady that was a graduate of that school then, and she would cut the pattern. She was the most lovely person and she was a black lady, and – did I tell you this already?  I told you that already.

RB:  That’s a wonderful story.

CD:  She was just wonderful.  So the whole time that I worked downtown in the Shafer Building she worked for me downtown there.  But when I had to move my business home, when Jerry had to go to the nursing home – I can’t say the exact year – that’s really too bad.

RB:  Was it ’59 or – 

CD:  Hmm?

RB:  Was it ’59?

CD:  Yeah, I can’t – no, in the fall of ’59 is when I married Bill.

RB:  That’s right.

CD:  So he was in the nursing home since about 19 – let’s see.  I opened the shop in January of ’49.  So I think I was downtown for five years.  Yes, I was because I know I was downtown in 1952 when they had that earthquake that was kind of bad.  But anyway, so I was downtown for five years and then he had to go to a nursing home.  So I moved my business into our house and Maude still did work for me but she did it from her house, you see?  She still did some things. If I say so myself, I did make some beautiful clothes.  In fact, upstairs in a closet, I still have some things I made for myself because – of course, they don’t fit at all.  But I always said my clothes looked almost as good inside as they did outside.

RB:  Is that right?

CD:  When I look at some of the clothes today they cost a fortune and you look at the inside of them, which I can’t help but do, it’s unbelievable, you know?

RB:  I would love to see those outfits that you have.

CD:  Well.

RB:  It would be wonderful.

CD:  I could show you some of that.  But I did a lot of really good things if I say so myself, but one of the greatest things was my darling niece, Helen Stusser when she married Pat Stusser – her name was Helen Rosen, married Pat Stusser, I made her wedding gown and five bridesmaids dresses and a dress for the flower girl, who was my niece, Julie, who is – you know, does beautiful things herself now. My sister, the mother of the bride, I made her dress and I made my dress.  But Helen’s dress was – let me just think – about fifteen yards – a beautiful, heavy, heavy satin.  I appliqued on – coming down kind of sparsely down the dress until it got to the bottom, and then the train – appliqued lace flowers on it.  But on each lace flower, I sewed pearls and there were something like 3,000 pearls on that dress that I put on by hand and then around the neck.  And she wore that and a year later her brother got married and his wife wore it.  Then about twenty-one years later – Helen’s oldest daughter wore it, and it still looked beautiful.  We wrapped it up so that it was kept nicely.  Of course, Kathy was thinner even than Helen was, and so I fixed that.  It had long sleeves with the points coming down over the hand with the lace down there, and she wanted short sleeves because she was being married in the summer.  So we changed that and I said, “I don’t know if I can really sew on that stuff now,” you know.  [laughter]  But anyway, I redid that dress for her then.

RB:  That must have been some dress.

CD:  It was gorgeous.  The thing is my boys never could get over it because they’ve seen me do a lot of stuff and they didn’t even pay attention most of the time anymore.  But on her dress, instead of a zipper up the back, I put the loops – the satin loops with the satin buttons all the way up the back.  And it was so funny because they could never get over that because that was the only time they had ever seen it.  [laughter]  

RB:  Were they with you when you were making it?

CD:  My boys?  Oh, sure.  We all lived in the same house, you know.  It was a little house and they have told me lately, and I’m telling – within the last year they have told me that they used to sneak looks at the ladies when they [laughter] were getting their – I said, “You did?”  “Yes, Mom.  You didn’t know that but we snuck looks.”  But, yeah, they went to school and came home, and I was working there but the nice thing about it was – and I think I already told you this – when they were young and did things at school I could leave and be part of that because I was right there.  And then they went to high school but by the time they were fifteen – when Jimmy, the eldest, was fifteen I was going with Bill and he taught them how to drive because that made me too nervous.  So when Bill and I got married in the fall of ’59, then, as I say, I started in with community work again, and we were lucky.  I know I’m repeating myself now that we were given this piece of property, which is so beautiful.

RB:  It is so beautiful.

CD:  And we lived here and Bill’s middle daughter, Carolee, lived with us.  But a year later she got married.  My boys were both in high school when we got married, but then they went to college. Bill used to drive them to high school and teach them how to drive on the way to Garfield, you know, and stuff like that.

RB:  That’s great.

CD:  But – 

RB:  What was it like in those early years – the first years of marriage with Bill?  What was that like for you and your boys?

CD:  Well, it was wonderful. 

RB:  How so?

CD:  I don’t know.  Bill and I just – I just should hope that my children all have as good relationships with their husbands as he and I have.  First place, we both had been through some tough times.  We were very tuned to each other and very – he’s a very loving person and I think I am too, and it showed.  The children could feel it too, and it was good.  Bill was not earning a lot of money when we first got married and all.  He’d had some ups and downs and he wasn’t working for his father anymore.  He hadn’t been for a while.  But he had some ups and down but he stuck with it and he belonged to Glendale and he was very interested in golf. I was not a golfer, although my sister and her husband, Kermit Rosen were real golfers, you know, and that’s all they ever talked about.  So I took up golf.  I was never very good at it.  But to kind of skip through, about fifteen, sixteen years ago they restarted croquet in Seattle.  There used to be a lot of croquet.  I’m not talking about our family croquet, which we always played and we had big fights, you know, and stuff and everything.  But when we lived at Three Tree Point that was one of the big things, the croquet.  We all played croquet.  But this is a little more sophisticated, this tournament croquet, as I call it.  It comes from England and Australia and it’s only six wickets if you know anything about croquet.

RB:  Are those the – 

CD:  Yes, that’s the hoops and in backyard croquet, which we still play here in the summertime, the hoops are about ten inches wide and the balls are about three inches wide.  Well, in this croquet that I play the hoops are only about a sixteenth of an inch wider than the ball, and they’re made out of wrought iron.  You know, they’re made out of really heavy stuff.  The croquet mallets are heavy and the balls are heavy.  It’s not like the other sets.  My brother, Herman’s best friend, Ned Skinner, who’s a wonderful man here in the city of Seattle, a non-Jewish man, and their wonderful family – they got very interested again in this croquet.  So Herman asked me to come out and play one day because they needed somebody extra, and I really loved it.  So Bill and I kind of joined this club and we were playing but Bill was too interested in golf, and so, truthfully, I gave up golf for croquet and he gave up croquet for golf.  But it didn’t – you know, we’re still very compatible about everything.  There are tournaments all the time that you can go to, and I’ve gone to tournaments – well, I mean, he’s gone with me to the ones – we’ve been to Bermuda and to Florida where the headquarters is in West Palm Beach, Florida.  I’ve been to Minnesota and I’ve been to Denver and been up and down the coast, Victoria, and Vancouver.  Victoria has wonderful tournaments; I love to go there.  And Oregon and, of course, California and all up and down California I’ve played in tournaments, and in Phoenix, they have a big group and I’ve been to Phoenix for many years to play croquet.

RB:  So how often do you attend these tournaments?

CD:  Well, I was going three to four times a year but now, truthfully, I was at the one in Palm Springs they always have – Mission Hills has a big tournament every year at the end of February, and I’ve been going to that one.  But this last year – I guess I’m getting older or something – I got very, very tired and worn out.  In fact, a lot of my friends here in Seattle are going – my croquet friends are going to a tournament this – well, tomorrow – Thursday and it runs through Sunday and it’s down at the foot of Mount Hood in Oregon.  Oh, it’s just beautiful.  I’ve been to a tournament there and it’s just beautiful.  Just beautiful.  But it’s just a little too much for me to go to too many of them so I don’t, now.  I think I’m going to go to the one in Victoria pretty soon.  But in this croquet group, I’m the treasurer of it and I have been for quite a few years and so I know everybody in the group.  Well, we all know each other very well because it’s only thirty-two people, see.  But there’s an awful lot of croquet clubs in the United States, but some of them are only five or ten people, you know.  But there’s a lot of players in the United States and some tournaments – like, we have one here every year and it’s going to be in the middle of July.  It’s called the Seattle Open and people come from all over the United States to come here.  Last year we had fifty-five people competing in it, and we have trophies and all that.  But I’m the only Jewish person in the city of Seattle that – 

RB:  Is that right?

CD:   – is a member of this club.

RB:  And has it been that way over the years?

CD:  I was the first Jewish person and I’m the only one.  I’ve tried to get some of my friends interested and they love it, but they’re all such golfers. Now they’re kind of older but I’ve had them out to the courts and it’s a lot of fun.  It really is and we just play a simple game, you know, and stuff like that, because, see the courts are very large.  They’re 80 feet by 120 feet.

RB:  Where are they?

CD:  They’re out in – between Kirkland and Redmond.  Where the Costco is out there in Kirkland?  They’re about a mile from that, down east and then a little bit north.  What we did was six couples of us bought this piece of land ten years ago, because we had some courts but then they had to be taken away because the land was developed, you see?  Do you know where Carillon Point is?  Well, that was owned by the Skinner family.  It still is – I mean, that land. Ned Skinner had built six courts there.  That’s where the Seahawks used to practice.  He had built six courts there.  Well, then they decided they had to develop that land.  I mean, after all, so that’s when we lost those courts.  So then a couple of the men looked around and looked around.  We found this piece of land, and so six couples of us bought this piece of land and developed it into croquet, and then we get our members to join, you see, and then – but we own the property so, you know, it’s – 

[End of side 1, tape 3]    

CD:   – become about four times as valuable since we bought it because, you know, everybody wants to develop out there now.  But it’s a lot of fun and I have won about thirty-six trophies.

RB:  Thirty-six!

CD:  I think it’s something like that – about thirty-six trophies in different tournaments.

RB:  So, what does it take to win a trophy?  Tell me what the process is, since I’m not a croquet player.

CD:  The process.  [laughter] 

RB:  Ya, tell me about the game.  Do you have to – 

CD:  Well, you see, first place – it starts out where – oh, goodness!  Of course, there are different types.  It’s like anything else.  You work yourself into the last day.

RB:  Uh-huh.  

CD:  See, by the last day three-quarters of the people are out of the tournament, you see.  The first time that ever happened to me was this last February.  

RB:  So your first time – that was just this year, huh?

CD:  Yes, because I just – 

RB:  [laughter]  Oh, my!

CD:   – kind of poop out, you know.  The games are an hour and a half long and you have to – besides being able to hit the ball fairly decent you have to think because it’s a very strategic game.  They compare it to chess, thinking ahead about the moves, you see, what you have to do. Anyway, I’ve done very well in my day.

RB:  It sounds like it.  What part of the game do you enjoy the most?

CD:  Well, of course, the camaraderie is great and I guess I’m very competitive.  That’s what they tell me.  [laughter]  You know?  And I guess I’m competitive and it’s just a great thing.  You’re out there, supposedly in the sun and this beautiful grass, and everybody wears whites when you’re in the tournaments.  When we just go out and play for the weekend or whenever, you know, you don’t do that.  But I don’t know.  It is just different than other things that I do in life and it’s a great hobby for me. I still love all my golf friends and et cetera but I just – I think – I don’t know.  As I say, the reason there are so few croquet players and there are so many golfers is that it takes brains to play croquet.  [laughter]  Because you really have to – you see, in golf, you don’t worry about what the other guy is doing; you just try to play your best, you know.  But here if you make a mistake and you leave your ball for that other next fellow, you’re cooked [laughter] until he makes a mistake. So, anyway, it’s fun.  But as far as the fun part of my life – you know, I mean, the fun – everything’s fun.  I feel very blessed about my life – very, very blessed.  I really do.  

RB:  In what – 

CD:  I got in on kind of the ground floor, you might say, of the Kline Galland Home, you know, because I say the home opened in 1914 and my mother and my grandmother were interested in it.  They used to do things for them out there.  But it was really run by the bank. I’m not going to go into that whole thing because that’s another whole story.  But they finally got a board and you see, Caroline Kline Galland in her will said that the president of the Hebrew Benevolent Society, who was a man at the time, and the president of the Temple De Hirsch would be the people who, you know, took care of the Kline Galland Home.

RB:  So they were connected in that way?

CD:  Yes.  So when I was asked to come on the board it was just beginning to be a regular board.  Up until then, it was the president and the secretary of the temple and the president and the secretary of the Jewish – at that time it was called the Jewish Family and Child Service – because it had gone through different names.  And they were men, it was all men.  By that time they had about six or seven – something like that – and my friend, Arva Gray, had been asked to go on that board.  She was, I think, the first lady on it, and then she got me to come on because she was married to Dr. Bernard Gray and we were very close friends. We were playing a lot of golf together and stuff – but we were close friends anyway.  I think she was president of the Board of the Jewish Family and Child Service when I went on the board there.  And then after a couple of years – oh, sure, she was president.  That’s how she got on the Board of the Kline Galland Home because she was president of that board.  Then she got me to come on that board because she knew that by that time I was already volunteering out there with my sewing class, see, which I started doing in 1960.  

RB:  What was it like serving on both boards?

CD:  It was interesting.

RB:  How so?

CD:  But, you know, there’s a lot of people in Seattle that serve on more than one board.

RB:  Of course.  But how was it for you?

CD:  It was interesting.  I enjoyed it. Of course, the Jewish Family Service –  I knew a lot about it to start with.  But my mother-in-law, Jessie Danz, at that time had been the president of that for seventeen years.  Of course, she now wasn’t doing, you know, anything with it at all.  But I was very interested in that and it was a great board and, truthfully, I didn’t know a lot of people on that board at the time I went on.  But I got to know them, you know, quite well. It was interesting to me because, you see, I had never been involved in social work, see, and it was interesting to me to find out what they did and all that.  And in later years – 19 – oh, boy – well, let’s just see – we moved into this house that we’re in here in January of 1966 and I think I told you briefly.  In 1967 – ’67, something like that –  a year or two later, I think it was just a year later my mother-in-law lived at the top of Queen Anne.  The Danzes owned a big apartment up there and they lived on the top floor where you could see the world. She was a widow by then and she was very sick.  She had the flu really badly.  So I went to get her because it was snowing and I am no good at driving in snow.  But I did.  I went up to the top of Queen Anne Hill – 

RB:  Which is very steep.

CD:   – which is very, very, very steep and it was very scary and I said, “Come on, Jessie.  We’re going to pack you up and I’m going to take you home because I can’t come back here.”  Anyway, we got back home here and she stayed here a week with us, and she was well and the snow was gone.  So I took her home and the next day she called up and she says, “I want to move back” because she had been looking for a different place, like an apartment around here in this Madison Park area anyway.  So my younger son was going to be married that year in March and the older boy had already moved out.  So we had built this home that we’re in and the upstairs is just like a half upstairs.  It’s got two nice bedrooms and a bath.  So I said to Jessie, “You know, seriously, it’s fine with me if you want to move in here.”  I know, some of my friends couldn’t believe it – and I said, “But you just don’t know this” – I mean, everybody knew Jessie but she just is the easiest person in the world to deal with.  Now, my mother, who I adored – was much too talkative and too active.  I used to tell Mother, “No way could you move in with me.”  But I said, “But Jessie could.”  You know, and she was not a big talker, just like my husband’s not a big talker.  You know, as you can tell, I’m the talker.  [laughter]  But anyway, she did move in with us and one time I was in the kitchen and she came in and I said, “How come you never say to me, ‘I never cooked stuff like this.’”  And she says, “Why should I say a word?”  She says, “I don’t have to cook so why should I say anything?”  But we had an awfully good time.  When the Jewish Family Service was going to have its 80th Anniversary I persuaded – it was Jerry Grossfeld – Jerry Grossfeld was the head of it, I persuaded him to let me be in charge of a really big affair because we never had had one.  We would have it in the auditorium at the Temple de Hirsch, and we’d put on a program showing what the Jewish Family Service had been like from the beginning to now.  I said, “I really want to do this in honor of my mother-in-law, Jessie.  I really want to do it.”  So we did with a lot of help, and one of the men in the city, Roy Rosenthal, who was fantastic at writing shows and songs and everything wrote the program.  Sam Goldfarb, who was the – did you ever hear of Sam Goldfarb?  He was the organist in the choir and everything at Temple De Hirsch.  He was going to do his bit with it.  Then a couple of my very good friends wrote a skit where we had different people dress like – you know, in the olden days like – you see, when the Jews started to come from Germany and other places, but mostly from Germany in the 1940s the Jewish Family Service was very, very big at helping and all that.  A couple of my mother’s friends would meet every boat and every train and everything.  So we had people dressed like them and, you know, and things that the Jewish Family Service had done the whole time.   It was just wonderful and this was the first time they ever had anything that big.  It was a big deal because I think about 300 people came and that was a big deal.  Well, since then, of course, the Jewish Family Service has its huge things, and, truthfully, our daughter, Carolee Danz is the one that really has put on some very big things for them too.  So it’s gone down in the family.

RB:  How was that for you the night of the gala?

CD:  Oh, it was terribly exciting.  It was just wonderful and we had all the past presidents there, and they all got up and, you know, we introduced everybody.  That’s one of the things I’ve always been very happy that I went on through with and made sure that we did that.

RB:  Was your mother-in-law present for that?

CD:  Oh, yes.  Of course, and that was the thing and she was very well.  In fact, the papers came out and they took some pictures of her with some of the people who were working on the program, you know, with her.  That was in – I think in May of – now, just a minute.  Let’s see – twenty-eight years ago – May of 19 – 

RB:  ’73?

CD:  ’53.  What?

RB:  ’73?

CD:  Wouldn’t have been – oh, would have been ’73.  Yes, you’re right.  I’m sorry.  Yes, May of 1973 so – wait a minute.  See, no, it would be May of 1972 – May of 1972 was when that was, and in June of 1972 or July I had my little granddaughter up here from California staying with us, and she was only six months old.  She’s the one that I went to visit in Portland that has three children now.  Anyway, she was staying with us and her parents went on a vacation. Jessie had been upstairs taking her nap when she woke up she told me afterward that she heard the little one and she just couldn’t wait to get downstairs to see her, and she fell down these stairs.  That’s a day and a night I’ll never forget because, of course, we had to rush her – and 911 and all that.  Well, she never really recovered from that.

RB:  Oh.

CD:  She lived a whole year after that and I kept her here at home upstairs and we had nurses around the clock.  It was too bad but at the Kline Galland Home, I see people that last, which may not be the right thing to say, but much too long.  Well, we put an electric chair on the stairs so that she could come downstairs and enjoy the family and all that.  But she lost part of her sensibility and, of course, couldn’t walk, you know, or anything.  So – 

RB:  How was that for the rest of you when that – you know, to see her like that?

CD:  Well, it was tough at the time but we all got very used to it, and she was a very loving person.  All the children and grandchildren would come over and see her.  It was a tough year but anyway, in the meantime, I was on the board, as I say, of the Galland Home and doing volunteer work there.  I should have looked up some dates but that’s all right; you don’t care.  So that started in 1967.  I would say around 1970 we were going to build a new facility for the Kline Galland Home and we built that stage and the old house was torn down. Of course, they have lots of pictures of it and all that.  But anyway, I’ve really been with – 

RB:  Carolyn, it’s remarkable.

CD:   – with them through three stages of building and I’ve been on the board.  Now the Kline Galland Home was at first 72 beds, and then we added to it and it was – I think it was 144 beds.  The third addition was about eight years ago, I would say, something like that, and we called that the Litvan Pavilion because Mr. and Mrs. Litvan gave $3 million to the home for the building of it.  But she had died, before that and she was still alive but she was not well.  She has been in the Galland Home for about – I don’t know, three, four years – something like that.  She just passed away last week.  In fact, tomorrow they’re going to have a big service for her out at the home.  But so that was the third addition and now, of course, we just opened up this wonderful new assisted living and – which is not connected with the Kline Galland Home.  The Kline Galland Home is in the south part of the city in Seward Park, and this is in the central part of the city up on top of what’s called First Hill up above downtown.  It’s a beautiful facility.  It’s all been done by the Kline Galland Home Board and I feel very lucky that I’ve been on the board through all these years.  We started taking on the board – these – of course, obviously take on younger people, because we were getting older, some of us.  But all of a sudden on the board about ten, twelve years ago we started to get these young men that were in the finance business, in the realty business, in the this and that.  Now they’re talking about buying property and building this and that. I got very upset at a meeting one night and I said, “But that’s not what the Kline Galland Home’s about.  It’s about taking care of people who need it.”  “But you need more facilities to take care of these people, Carolyn.”  We opened up the Summit last month to this gorgeous place that they’d been working on for eleven years, and, you know, finding the land, raising the money, getting the permits and all that.  I said to the man who was in charge – I still call him one of the boys but, you know, [laughter] he’s in his fifties – I said, “You see, when you boys first started this I just couldn’t see that we should buy land and we should do this and we should do that.”  But, I said, “Of course, you were right and I was just too old-fashioned because you’re still taking care of people this way.”

RB:  Although it sounds as though you need a combination of both perspectives – 

CD:  You do, and, in fact, I’m the only person on the board now.  I have been all the time, except now there’s one other lady but she doesn’t do that much, that works with the residents besides being on the board.  I tell the fellows – I say, “You know, maybe I’m too old to be on the board.  Maybe you don’t want me anymore.”  “No, no, we need you.  We need somebody that has been there all this time.”  There used to be – up until last year there were three of my dear friends that were older than I was – three men that have all three passed away within this past year.  And so now I’m the eldest person on the board.  [laughter]  But it’s been a wonderful part of my life and I just know so many people through it, and these ladies, like yesterday at that meeting that we had for this group that you're taking these for – 

RB:  Yes.

CD:  There were three different ladies there that I know so well because of the connection with the Galland Home.  The two of them come to the Day Center Program that is there, you see.  Everybody kind of knows me, “Oh, Mrs. Danz.  Yes, I know you because of the home.”  Now, one other thing that I did and I started it thirty-five years ago because we’ve been in this house thirty-six years – I have a picnic for the Galland Home here once a year.  Oh, maybe I told you this the last time – and I keep thinking I just can’t keep on doing it, but all year long they say, “Oh, just can’t wait to go to your home again – just can’t wait to go.”  You and I were speaking before we turned on the tape about the rabbis. Rabbi Jim Mirel comes every year and he’s been coming since his girls were little girls, and they would come with him and sing, and his wife would come, you know.

RB:  Is that right?  So they would provide entertainment.

CD:  They’d come and provide entertainment.  He plays and sings and they put together a songbook of old popular songs.  He plays and sings and then he does a lot of the Jewish songs and he does the Sephardic and the – you know, in the Ladino language.  Mr. Gortler, who is the head of the Kline Galland home – he comes and there’s always one song that he always sings and dances to.  And it’s absolutely a wonderful thing and I hope I can keep going on doing it.

RB:  It’s marvelous.

CD:  Besides that, I’ve been very active in the – not real active but I’ve been part of the Northwest Needlework Society.

RB:  That’s right.

CD:  I do a lot of cross-stitch.  I make cross-stitch samplers and it’s kind of gotten to be a habit, I’m afraid.  It’s very hard for me to sit in the evening and watch television without something in my hands, but I love it.  I really do and I’ve created lots of family samplers for the children and for weddings and for things.

RB:  What part do you enjoy the most about it?

CD:  Well, when I design them myself I enjoy that very much, but it’s gotten a little bit harder for me to do that.  [laughter]  It was a few years – you know, even last year.  But I love the creation of it; I really do.  I guess it’s the little bit of an artist in me, you know, or something.  But speaking of marriage samplers, quite a few years ago –  I’ve tried everything – I mean, I’ve got to do everything – I took up calligraphy.  I was taking lessons from a girl who was teaching at the university but this was on the side.  She had a class in calligraphy and she was in an apartment in the university district.  We’d go to her place and here were – she is a Jewish girl, and please don’t ask me her name because I can’t remember.  But anyway, she does make – what is that called?  The Jewish weddings – 

RB:  Oh, ketubah.

CD:  The ketubah.  So here were two of them that were kind of sitting up on a stand there.  And I said, “Oh, my God, those are so beautiful.”  I said, “You know, we don’t do that in the Reform. I’ve never – but those are so beautiful.”  I said, “Where do you get those?”  She said, “Well, I made that.”  And I said, “It’s too perfect.”  And she said, “Well, thank you very much.”  [laughter]  They are so beautiful.  Do you have one?

RB:  You know what?  We don’t have one, I’m embarrassed to say.

CD:  Yeah.

RB:  You know what?  I think in a few minutes we’re going to have to stop this tape and – 

CD:  Okay, I’m talking too much.

RB:  You’re not talking too much at all.  It’s terrific but I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to stop you for a moment.

CD:  Okay.

RB:  So that I can switch the tape, okay?

CD:  Okay.

RB:  Hang on just a second.  Carolyn, we have just a couple more minutes left with this wonderful interview and I wondered what else you’d like to share.

CD:  Well, let me just say that if it’s about my life, I’ve had a very, very wonderful life and I feel very lucky with the way it’s been and what I’ve been able to do in the community.  But I also think that after meeting all the other women who are going to be interviewed for this that you will get a very overall rounded view of the Jewish women in the city of Seattle and their history. I think others will go more into the history of the actual temples and all that because I was interested but not as active in it. I feel very, very lucky to have had the parents that I’ve had, and the in-laws that I’ve had, and the family that I have, and the children that I have, and my son-in-law, Ted Daniels, who’s doing wonderful things in the city for the Jewish community.  My stepdaughter, really, but she seems like my daughter, Carolee Danz, is doing wonderful things.  So it’s going on and now our grandson, Will Daniels, is becoming active.  So the fifth generation is going in the city and it’s been a wonderful life and I’ve loved being part of the Jewish community and I’ve never ever felt that I’ve wanted to be anything but a Jewish woman.  Okay?

RB:  Thank you so much. 

CD:  Yes.  Well, it’s been wonderful to do this. Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]