Jim Roth’s Website

Student Example--Living History Interview Example #2

Please Note: This is an actual student example used by permission. I have changed the names to respect privacy.

Doris Norton

The day on which Doris Norton and I met was a gray, windy Sunday. We sat in the tiny church office where, once a month, she types up prayer requests to be sent out to church members. Upstairs, Sunday school classes were in session, and all was quiet. She was a cheerful little lady, almost a foot shorter than me, who, although she was troubled by arthritis and walked with a cane, was still spry at heart.

Doris was born in Spokane in the year 1930, and she grew up by the Spokane River with her mother, father, and three sisters. Her mother, she said, was outgoing and her father was very much a family man. "Whenever we would go to the movies we would all go," she said and added that they also spent lots of time outdoors camping and hiking.

When Doris was twenty, she attended college at Eastern Washington University. She spent her freshman year studying general courses and foreign languages, particularly Spanish and French. Doris was also part of the college band. In the winter of 1950, the band set forth for Seattle and adventure, riding a Greyhound Bus across the state. Going across the pass, the bus was caught in the record-setting snowfall which cascaded from the sky that year. Doris recalled how the boys had to climb from the bus to help push the cars that were stalled ahead of them. She laughed as she told me that when they finally reached Seattle and called home to reassure their families, no one had been worrying about them at all.

Doris was still just twenty when she married. Soon afterwards, another big part of her life came along—her kids. Her first child—a son who was named Michael—was born only one year after her marriage. The boy's father was overseas in Japan at the time, and Doris had to be driven to the hospital by her dad. Fifteen months later, when the couple was living in Cheney, their first daughter, Melanie, was born. Two years after that, a second daughter came along. At this time, Doris' husband was working evenings, and she actually picked him up to go to the hospital for the delivery. After their third baby, the Nortons moved to California, where their fourth child, a girl named Jeanie, was born.

Doris would have loved to be able to focus entirely on taking care of her children, but she had to continue working. For some time, she worked as a licensed babysitter and had a daycare in her home. She took care of a few children besides her own—including one little boy who had trouble parting with his blanket. Following that, she worked at a peach cannery. She remarked that she was glad that she worked in the office doing bookkeeping, because the workers who actually managed the peaches would get motion sickness from watching all of the moving parts of the assembly line and would leave work looking, as she described it, "pretty green." Doris worked at several other jobs in California. For a while she held the position of a legal secretary, but she finally ended up as a substitute school teacher. This led to the next step of her life.

Doris and her husband had experienced growing tension in their marriage. Among other things, he was upset that she was only working part time and could spend more time at home with the kids than he was able to. She had attempted leaving her husband once before and had been persuaded to stay; but, finally, things got bad enough that the pair filed for a divorce. At the time, her husband had gone on a trip to visit his sister, taking with him the couple's youngest daughter, Jeanie. Doris told me that she moved most of her things back to Spokane, keeping only the essentials with her in California while waiting for the two to return from their trip. On the day of their return, she packed her Volkswagen bus until it was full "up to the gills" with her things. Stuffed in among the boxes they had a cat which they kept in a cage and a dog which they had to tranquilize so that he wouldn't make a fuss. Doris and her kids squeezed into the vehicle, drove to the airport, and waited. When the father and daughter finally climbed off the plane, the waiting family members snatched Jeanie away and sped off toward northern California. With mixed laughter and regret, she told me that her son had pulled the distributor cap on her husband's car so that he couldn't follow them.

The family moved back to Spokane where Doris still lives today in an apartment built for her, adjoining her son's home. She volunteers as a tutor at Barton school, an all-adult school at the First Presbyterian Church, where immigrants are taught English as a second language. She seems to enjoy her work, and is kept extra busy by her ten grandchildren (with an eleventh due soon, for whom she is sewing a quilt).

Despite the troubles she has faced, Doris still shows an irrepressible joy in life. Her continued exuberance turns her fairly ordinary story into something special.