STORY FOR LISA (recorded on tape July 26, 2007)
SIDE A
The first part of this story , which doesn’t have a name at the moment, concerns a trip that Ruth, the children and I took from Preville (in 1952), where we lived in Quebec on the south shore of the river, on the other side of Montreal. I had taken a two-year leave from McGill to do a study in southern California for which I had a grant from the National Institute of Health. It all started with a discovery – somebody had sent me some information – that in Whittier there was a group of adoptive parents who called themselves the Adopted Children’s Association, and it wasn’t an association of adopted children at all, it was adoptive parents and the question was why the name? Well, it fitted into a conceptual system I’d been developing toward a theory which I did not yet have in my head, but it was one of the variables. Anyway I got a grant and it was not a very large grant, but it meant living on very tight money for about two years. I had to hire assistants in the field and we took our VW bus and I’d had a cupboard built for the back and Deborah slept between the back seat and the cupboard in a little space about a foot wide – how she managed this nobody knows, but she survived. Peter and Francie slept on the inside benches. Ruth slept on a board that went across from front to back and I have no idea where I slept. Maybe I didn’t, but I drove most of the nights and then slept some during the day and Bill slept on the front seat. So the six of us went in a very tight little thing and we managed to get to the West Coast. When we arrived, I set up shop at Whittier College and my work was actually in three communities. It was at Redlands, where there was a similar association. It was in part of Los Angeles where there was such an association, but the head place was at Whittier and I had received an agreement from Whittier College that I would, for ten per cent of the monies that were coming to me for the study, Whittier would administer the funds and would give me two offices for my assistants and myself to be able to do the work.
During that time we became acquainted with the participants in the Whittier’s so-called Adopted Children’s Association and, as I indicated earlier, it was not an association of children, but of parents, and I became intrigued with the information that there was such an association because the question was - why didn’t they call themselves adoptive parents? and we decided it was a way of avoiding the reality of their own status, which I had called ‘rejection of difference’. It doesn’t matter about the name, only we were there and I got involved almost immediately in a small study that occurred by chance. One of the members of the faculty came to me one day, maybe during the first week. Ruth and I went to a tea given by the ladies of the faculty and, during the tea I think, one of the women instructors came to me and said was I aware of the fact that McCall’s magazine had just put out an article called “To My Adopted Daughter – I Wish I Hadn’t Told You”. And I said to myself “Hey, that’s interesting” and the next morning – this was a Sunday afternoon tea – on Monday morning I telephoned McCall’s, wherever they are in the East, and talked to the publisher and said that I’m doing a study under the Public Health Service grant and I’m normally at McGill University, I’m an American citizen (I was at that time) and I said that I’d very much like to see the letters you get in answer to your article – would you be willing to share it with me? and, Mr.Mais was his name, said to me “I’ll do that for you if you give me a report of what you are doing with it” and I said, “It’s a deal”. I said however, you cannot give me some letters. All the letters that come to you within a certain period have to be sent to me. They will be sent back after I make copies – which I did, and then I did a very specific content analysis and found some things interesting that aren’t important for this story.
I then published an article in the Canadian Social Worker about this because this was a social perception that adoptive parents should tell the child - here was an article that said ‘no I wish I hadn’t told my daughter’ and so we wanted to know who was writing it. Was it adoptees, was it adoptive parents, was it social workers, was it psychiatrists, was it just people standing by and, when I broke it down in terms of the source it was very clear that adoptive parents did not like the tone of the article, but that some adoptees did, interestingly. When I sent Mr. Mais my answers he got furious at me and said, “I wish I hadn’t dealt with you in the first place – you are a rotter!” and I remember his words, they are wonderful, and I had a special party called the Rotter Party and I invited the lady who had given me the information in the beginning and we had a very nice tea – I don’t think anybody understood what the issue was and it didn’t matter. So this was my beginning at Whittier and now I have to tell you about this association.
I would say there must have been about thirty odd couples who were members in Whittier, many more in Redlands and Los Angeles, but I dealt in depth with the Whittier group and the Whittier group would have, at special times of the year, would have parties. Since the children almost all came from Korea – remember what the year was, it was 1959 – and, what ten years later would have been called politically not correct, they would dress the little girls in Korean costumes and they would do Korean dances, four-year olds or three-year olds, on a stage at the college auditorium and I got interested in this because I said to myself, “What are these families trying to prove”, but looking back on it they did well, by the children, by themselves. Now came Christmas and we had arrived in, I think mid-August or the beginning of September and I set up housekeeping in a rather leaky house, which occasionally rained in on us and we had to put pots and pans down to get the drips, but it was cheap and it had a lovely garden and we enjoyed ourselves in spite of small vicissitudes. In any case it was an interesting beginning of an even more, as you will discover in a very short time, very interesting two years. Something I had not expected - nor would have come had I known how things would develop.
Now comes October, November and the association meetings were full of planning for a Christmas party and one of the things I learned was that at the coming Christmas party, in a large auditorium, there would be a wall of photographs of some hundred children and their parents to celebrate the special event of Christmas, and I was thinking with Ruth what should we bring for this wall of photographs or pictures when the idea occurred to me to do something very different because, after all, I was there to study and not just to go to parties. About a year or two earlier Ruth had begun to sculpt children’s heads for other people as well as for our children, and she had first done the head of Francie at, I would say about seven years old or so, Peter at about the same age, Bill at five, or four and a half, and Debora at (are there dates in it? – I didn’t think she put dates in there?). So I got a very exciting research plan in my head, off the cuff, and I said to Ruth - and I always had to be very careful what I said to Ruth because she always suspected that I had something up my sleeve, which of course I did – and I said to her, “What would you think if I made a little ‘stage’ as it were, something that could be put on the table in front of the wall with the photographs, and that this little stage would be at two levels and would be covered with black cloth, and the light-coloured heads would be on display there with a special light that I would also provide?”. And Ruth was pleased with the idea, but also as usual suspicious of me. Now Ruth had agreed to come along as part of the research team and she was trained as a – well, she had some psychological training - and it was understood that she would assist with some interviews. So, when I told her what I planned to do and I got permission from the lady who was making the arrangements for the party, Ruth kept saying to me, “What do you really have in mind?” and I said, “Take it on faith that’s it’s just going to be fun”. And the exhibit came, the evening came and, of course, what I’d expected happened exactly. People stood in line for her afterwards after asking for arrangements for their own child, or children and, as we went home, Ruth said, “Had you expected this?” and I said, “Well, I have to be honest with you, I thought it might just happen and she said, “Well you know I’m not going to charge those people” and I said “That’s just fine with me, why not by all means” but she said, “Do you have anything else in mind” and I said “Give me a chance, I’ll think about how to tell you something that I do think about as making it part of our project.”
So a day or two later we sat together over tea and I said, “Look Ruth, there’s an issue we know nothing about and I never thought that I would ever be able to explore it but, let me try you on this issue. You’re an adoptive mother, you couldn’t have a child, you had a tubal pregnancy, then everything blew up for you. But there are people in this group who adopted thinking they could not have a child, and there are at least five or six of the mothers we know who had a child later born to them. Now, it is there know as being fecund adoptive mothers, know as such to other people in the group. Wouldn’t it be important for us to know under what circumstances women would still expect or hope for a birth after they adopted? And not only would they, but what would initiate such thinking and feeling. For instance; if a sister had a child and the sister knows that her sister has (and I’m putting in quotes) “only” an adopted child, how would that women then feel? What would she think about herself? Well, Ruth was quite unhappy about the idea and she said, “I think that’s an invasion of the other person’s “self-picture” and I said to her, “I’m not interested in knowing the woman who said it to you. I would like very much if you would be willing to have you write a report that talks about a woman, aged so-and-so, who adopted at age such-and-such, and who did or did not have a child either before or afterwards. You can give such a woman a number. I’m not interested in identifying her in the book. I’m interested in impersonal information.” And Ruth said, “OK, I’m prepared to do that, but how do I proceed?” and I said, “My proposal is this. Let the woman, with whom you have agreed to create a model of her child’s head, come with the child to the first meeting to your studio and, after that, you get acquainted with her, you get acquainted with her and the child. After that, the second meeting is no longer with the child – it is with an album of her early months and years with the child, and her husband. Then she will talk about herself, probably – see what happens. Ruth did that and there evolved some, fifteen or so, of the most remarkable interviews I’ve ever seen. Under ordinary circumstances they would have been called depth interviews and Ruth was very careful not to let me see anything about the identity of the member of the group that I was studying.
Well, by January or so I had her dozen or more reports on these mothers and their children and, by February, I was expected to do a semi-annual report for the National Institute of Health, which took me at least a week to work on. We had done much else – we had created a questionnaire for people in the community because I was interested, not only in the association but also how the association was understood by locals, or what contact they had and how freely they spoke about themselves to other people – their neighbours and their friends. We also did interviews, my assistants helped doing interviews with the members themselves. Now I had other people in the field and I now sat down in my office and put together, it was only half a year that we were working, or less, and I made clear to the people in Washington that what I had to report could only be very anticipatory. But, I was so excited about these particular interviews that Ruth had done with the mothers, that I wrote a special part of the report about it and described, in some detail, some of the results. I had the results typed up, Ruth and I looked over the material, and it was sent it in to Washington. Now, I can’t tell when this next event occurred, but a major disaster hit me from Washington and it is at the heart of the first part of my story. I was in the field away from Whittier when I got a telephone call from Ruth saying, “You are to return immediately, somebody in Washington wants to talk to you urgently at the Institutes.” So, I drove back from where I was – I may have been at Redlands, I don’t know. When I returned I went to the telephone centre at the college and the lady at the switchboard said here’s the information - you are to call Washington during the day at such and such a number and this was too late in the day. The next morning I immediately called and, being three hours difference, and I got up very early and I made the call. Doctor X – and I do not know what he was – was he a sociologist, a psychologist, a psychiatrist – I did not know until later. I got hold of this gentleman who, when he heard that I was on the phone, started shouting viciously into the phone. He said, “You damned *** You’re *** … he used all kinds of epithets and then he said, “We’re cutting you off immediately as of now. You will get no further funds from us and nor will the college!” I said, “What’s happened?” He said, “You engaged in a …. he described something that meant that we had exploited people’s privacy and that we were destroying the confidentiality of the work and he said, “You will never get another grant from the National Institutes.” I was so lamed by this call that I didn’t know what to answer and I knew my study technically was over and I’d only just begun and I sat down and literally and literally sat down for a day, crying and thinking what is to be done. When I discussed it with Ruth she said, “I don’t get it – let me see your report.” And she went back over the report and she said, “Why didn’t you say how we neutralised the data?” and I said, “I don’t know – I left it out.” And so the people in Washington, very early in a time when the whole of the human services began to think about protecting clients, it only was organised later in the ….(this was ’59) … it didn’t happen until the early seventies that it became standardised – that there were questionnaires you had to fill out when you applied for a grant. But, in fact, we had anticipated the problem themselves and had made sure that no exploitation of others would take place. But I had been unable – number one, I had not spelled it out in the report and, number two, I had not been able to answer because I was too thrown by the entire episode. I’m now confronted by two interconnected problems. I have a study that’s going – I have three assistants, one a former student who came from Quebec to be with me there. I had my family here. I had no income at all. Everything depended on the grant. And furthermore, I have two offices, I have telephones, how will anything be paid now? And so, I literally didn’t know what to do and then came the next blow. Dean Spencer called me in and he said, “We’ve just had a letter from the Institute that they are cutting off your grant. We don’t know why and we will have no money. What do you intend to do here? Do you have funds to carry on?
Now I have to remind you of something. Whittier College is an old Quaker college – and remember the poet Whittier was a Quaker so it was named after him. So I said to myself, “I’d better think about this before I give Dr. Spencer an answer.” And I said to Dr. Spencer, “All this has happened very fast” and I gave him a bit of a picture of what had happened, but he said, “That’s really not my affair. My affair is to run the finances for the college and what are you planning to do about this?” So I said, “Give me a week to work things out.” And I started thinking what to do and, after a while, I had a plan in my head. The first thing I did was to call a friend who was the head of the Department of Sociology at Los Angeles State College. And I said, “Jones tell me, could you use an instructor?” and he said “Yes, we need somebody to teach two courses at night and we don’t have anybody” and I said, “What are they?” and he told me and I said, “I can do both.” So, he gave me the courses and so I immediately had six and a half thousand dollars ahead of me except I would have to travel an hour up the mountain to the college at night and I’d have to go back, but gasoline was cheap, and my time was now cheap and I had enough money to pay my assistants for three months and, maybe, even pay the college. How we would live was another matter. So, the next day, after working this out with Jones at LA State, I went to Dr. Spencer and I said, “Dr. Spencer, now you know that I am a member of the Society of Friends. I need to ask you a very intimate question – are you a betting Quaker? (Quakers don’t take bets) But, on the sly, are you a betting Quaker?” So he started to laugh and he said, “Horses I don’t play. The occasional card game I play – Why?” and I said, “Well, I have a proposal for you. Something happened about a month ago that I haven’t ever even thought about very much and that I’ll discuss with you in a few minutes. But, as a result of this talk that I gave at a mental health clinic in Los Angeles on invitation from Dr. X, the psychiatrist who had heard about my study, I gave a talk and I prepared some statistical information about my work prior to coming here, including a few data I have from here. And I gave this and it was a bang-up success and I’ve been thinking since that I have really better data than I knew, starting with my doctoral and about five years of studies since the Cornell study.” Dr. Spencer said, “That’s very interesting but we were talking about money.” And I said, “Yes, Dr. Spencer, I’m coming to that. The truth is that I have a proposal for you that will include a risk. As in any gaming issue there’s a risk isn’t there? But the risk is also - could be on your side. I now, after I gave my talk in Los Angeles, I started making notes about what I had just discovered about the connection between my earlier studies and what is happening here in Whittier and I decided that I really have enough stuff for some public lectures.” I said, “Dr. Spencer we have two and a half thousand names in the Los Angeles area, Whittier, Redlands, Los Angeles and we’ve interviewed at least a third of these people and the study is known to all of them. And there are three associations that have had me come and talk and we’ve worked with them. I think it would be possible, if the college were interested, I would be prepared to write five or six lectures which would be announced over the radio. The college would undertake all expenses – any ads in newspapers, etc and all I would do is provide the lectures. You’d provide the space and all the expenses for it. I’ve estimated if there’s six lectures, five or six lectures, the expenses might be ‘so much’ but the chances are that we would be able to sell a minimum of one hundred and fifty tickets. If we charge ten dollars per couple, per evening, we would in fact get fifteen hundred dollars per lecture. If it’s two hundred people, so much more and my estimate is that you would get at least four thousand dollars and possibly ten. I said, “Are you a betting Quaker?” He said, “Well, you’re quite a damned fellow aren’t you?” He said, “If you’ll not tell anybody, I’m willing to play it”. So we made an arrangement and I sat down every week and this was advertised every other week that there would be a lecture at the college and we immediately sold over a hundred tickets. In the end there were more than two hundred sold – not always two hundred people came – but two hundred sets of tickets were sold and so the college made a fair amount of money beyond the four thousand dollars they would have had that year from the grant. So, now I sat down every week and would write one lecture that was then typed up and made into a little booklet and when people came they would get the copy of the lecture before given to them and so five lectures were turned out and, as far as the college was concerned, I got rid of my debt. They made a little money. When I had five lectures on paper and they were all nicely bound - it was just cheaply done – I sent the five of them to various people I knew and one of them was my then brother-in-law and Ohio state historian, and he immediately wrote back saying, “You’ve got a book chum, so send it in to some publisher.” I sent it in the Free Press and a month and a half later I had a contract for a book, which became Shared Fate. And these five lectures can be seen as nice parallels (I expanded everything) and there was much more material, but this was in fact the ‘horrible thing’ that happened that led to Shared Fate and the beginning of a very different orientation to my work.
So, now what happened to the study. I was absolutely determined to finish the study – to pay my assistant – we decided to have even less money for food and for entertainment. And since we already had a house that was the occasional rainstorm, in southern California luckily very few of these, we knew what rooms to avoid, or what units of material we would put underneath. So, my assistants were paid, the study seemed to go on successfully, and we struggled along as best we could, when something else happened. One day I had another note from the telephone office - I had an urgent call from Kansas City, Missouri and I said, “I know nobody in Kansas City, Missouri – it may be a mistake.” But the lady at the phone said. “I think you’d better. This is a judge who wants to talk to you.” And I said, “I don’t know a judge in Kansas City, Missouri” and she said, “Well, here’s the number.” So, the next day I called Judge Reiderer in Kansas City, Missouri and I got this gentleman who spoke with a very thick southern accent and said, “Well, I heard that y’all doing a big study on adoptive people. He said, “I’m interested in your work” and I said, “Judge Reidered, I’m sorry – I’m in the midst of a study. I can’t – what is your interest?” He said, “Well, the niggras here – they ain’t adopting as much as I want them to.” And I said, “Well, what do you have to do with the people you call niggras?” He said, “My court runs the local agency.’ Oh, I said, that’s really interesting.” He said, “Look – I’d like you to clear it up. Find why those rascals aren’t adopting. And I said, “Well Judge Reiderer, I have other work to do here. I really can’t promise you anything”. (But, oh yes – what I’ve forgotten of course – this happened at the beginning of the second year that we were. Now the study’s running. I’m able to pay everybody. I got some more courses at LA state. I now have some extra money for the second year. We’re still struggling but its working and I’m determined I will finish this study). So I said to Judge Reiderer, “Well, Judge – I can’t do anything to promise you but I will try to see whether, by June, when my study here has to end, whether I could put in a month or six weeks to work on what you consider your problem. He said, “I’ll pay you!” I said, “Well, of course you will have to pay, but Judge Reiderer, I have a rule. Judge, I don’t work directly for the people who want a problem solved. I may not be able to solve it for you - but that’s your problem. If you think you want to hire me, let me find out what happens at the University of Missouri and see if I could work with them and then you could pay them.” He said, “OK, let me know”. So I next called the Head of Sociology at the University of Missouri and I got a gentleman who said, “We have an Institute of Urban Studies and if you can get Reiderer to pay us, we will make you a faculty associate for the period that you’re here and you can work in connection with us and, if he pays the institute, fine – then we’ll pay you.” I said, “Fine, I’m willing to do it that way.” So, June is very close, and all we have money for is for the gasoline to drive back, but we don’t have much else to get back to Quebec. We have after all four children and a lady and I’m to be in Kansas City. Well, luckily I got another bid to teach summer school in Alleghany College in Pennsylvania. So I now have a two and a half month arrangement – one month or one and a half months for Alleghany College which joins up with an early time in Kansas City. So I now have a three months period set up between – and I was going to charge Reiderer, or I said I’d work for the Institute at a thousand dollars a month, which was approximately what I got at McGill, and I said, “I’ll do what I can.” So, my next part of the story is to do with what happened in Kansas City and then what happened at Alleghany College, which is much less important for the story.
Incidentally, I’m telling this story because Lisa had heard it once and got very excited, particularly about what happened in Kansas City and, since I owe Lisa a vote of thanks for coming all this way from Washington DC, I’d like to put it on tape for her so that she can have something tangible rather than just a memory of what I’d told her. I hope it’s fairly close to what she heard a couple of months ago here.
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SIDE B
This continues my story about Judge Reiderer and Kansas City, Missouri, but I’d like to take a quick vaulting over that summer - our return to Montreal, or rather our house in Preville and Ruth had, in the meantime, arrived bringing the children, visiting friends on the way and I arrived after my work at Alleghany a week or two after she had come home. But, upon arriving in Montreal I discovered that, in my mail, was an urgent letter from Dr. Spencer saying, “I’m afraid some money is outstanding and you owe us – and the amount was very close to four thousand dollars.” And I said to myself, “I don’t have that and, if I had it I certainly wouldn’t want to pay that now. What am I going to do about it?”…….…. I think maybe I’m making a mistake – maybe what happened was more complicated. Dr. Spencer wrote to me that the Institutes had said, “You owe us the money for the second year.”, when in fact they hadn’t even paid it, but they assumed because I had got a two-year study. Something had gone wrong and they held the college responsible for the money that they said they had paid. Now it maybe they tried to get the money back from the first year for all I know – I can’t recall that. But I knew that I was in hock for four thousand dollars and the question was what could I do about.
So I sat down and I spent a little time talking to myself and I said, “Let’s look at the whole Whittier story. Who was at Whittier? And I said to myself, “Aha. Nixon, Vice President at the time.” And Nixon was one of the Whittier’s students. He played football for Whittier and he considered himself an important alumnus and the alumni association had a special picture of Nixon in their hall. I said, “Nixon!” So I set up a letter to the US public Health Service, copy to Dr. Spencer and I said, “Gentlemen, you have given me a very bad time. And you’ve given me a very bad time for things I did not commit. Unfortunately I was at fault at not identifying that I anticipated rules that were not even announced by the association. I secured my respondents in such a way that I could never identify their persons. So let me now say what I should have said in my first report. But, let me say more. You’re trying to collect money that may or may not have been paid to Whittier College - I cannot tell that. But I do know one thing - that Vice President Nixon, in whose aunt’s house I slept during the war on furloughs, meaning the Milhous ranch. I know that I can turn to Vice President Nixon and get justice against you and your faulty claim to the college.” I had this notarised and I sent a notarised letter with a copy to Dr. Spencer and I asked Dr. Spencer by telephone to let me know what happened. Neither I nor Dr. Spencer ever heard from the National Institute of Health again. So it was very helpful that I once slept in a Milhous bed during World War II on furlough. So, here’s to Nixon whatever else he may have done later when he became president. And, may I say, here’s to myself for being so quick to think of a political response to a vicious attempt to extract money that I did not have - and now to Judge Reiderer.
Well, as I’ve told you I had arranged to make sure that I would not work directly for Judge Reiderer and that I would be as an associate of the Urban Studies Centre of the University of Missouri and that I would be a free agent. So I now called on Judge Reiderer and became acquainted with a very much southern gentleman, who immediately invited me to dinner the next weekend and I met Mrs. Reiderer and eleven children, of whom one was retarded and the other ten looked after the little retarded boy like the most wonderful team of trained helpers. They loved him and gave him tremendous support, fed him during dinner. Dinner was an enormous ham and, although Judge Reiderer knew he had a Jew with a Scots name in me, he nevertheless stayed by the special meals that would be normally served at the Reiderer house. And the first dinner at the Reiderer house, and I had at least half a dozen of them during that month, was a great place for studying power. Well, it so happened that Judge Reiderer said to me on the second meeting that I must meet the lady who, technically, was in charge of the adoption agency, which the Judge however ran. And I met the lady whose name I don’t remember, but she was a very gentle lady, very southern again and, when I spoke to her that I had the free run of her agency records as far as the judge was concerned, she now let me have the information I needed and I decided to do a - ask her to draw a systematic random sample of people who had children placed with them – blacks, or as the judge would say ‘niggras’ and those who were refused. First of all I discovered that I don’t know whether anyone was refused and I had some twenty odd people chosen over a series of years. A systematic random sample is a sample done by the nth number of files in the records and so I had some twenty records to read, dealing with several consecutive years. I spent about a couple of hours at the agency during the day for the next two weeks.
Now I need to tell you about the apartment house where I lived - I had previously been given – I had called the NAACP, or one of the black civil rights associations, and been told that their person in Kansas City, Missouri was a Mrs. So-and-so, who was a social worker as it turns out. And so I called her and she said, “We’ve heard about your coming and I made that call already from Whittier.” And I said, “I need a place, an apartment to sublet for at least a month and I would like to be in an apartment house of – I don’t remember how I phrased it, but I meant middle class blacks – and middle class blacks in America at that time in history meant school teachers, people who worked for the American government and the Post Office and nurses - so, at that low professional lifestyle. And Mrs. ‘Smith’ I shall call her, had arranged for me to live in a house in which the apartments were mainly black and in which an apartment was available for the summer, which I rented for longer than the period I would be there because it would be my opportunity to take this apartment - it was very inexpensive. When I arrived, Mrs. Smith met with me and introduced me to some of the people in the house, where she also lived. My apartment turned out to be on the fifth floor of a five floor walk-up, which was very nice because it meant that I passed many doors. I got acquainted with people whose doors were open, where there was music, and I would stick my head in and introduce myself and, within a very short time, I had quite a number of acquaintances in the house. Now, one of my specialties is home-made cooking and I love cooking and I was among people who loved food. And, within a day or two, I was invited to meals at several apartments and, at the end of that week, I started inviting others and, within ten days, I had – there was network of people who were speaking to me by my first name and vice-versa. Now it was known that I worked for Reiderer, and I did not keep that a secret – or that I worked on issues that Reiderer had raised, and I made it very plain that I would not work directly for him. I also learned very quickly that he was not held in high regard by the black community and - I don’t remember if it was in the first week or ten days that I already was told things that I later had to find out for myself but, you’ll see what it was that I found out.
After my first reading of adoption records, I noticed something very strange. These records showed that at least half of the adoptive fathers had a prison record - not serious perhaps – but a prison record. And that this prison record was in fact meted out in Judge Reiderer’s court. At first I couldn’t understand this at all because forty of fifty per cent of the people who were randomly selected having a prison record and then becoming adoptive parents? They didn’t have a prison record afterwards, but prior to that. It seemed to make no sense to me at all, so I decided to ask Judge Reiderer whether he would object to my sitting in court. And from then on I spent every morning, or whenever there was a court sitting, I would spend at least two hours listening to cases. When I saw his behaviour with people who, say, had a driving infraction or whatever, I discovered he talked to them like a slave master to a slave. He was crude, insulting, but fatherly, in the way that, if you ever read southern literature of the slave period, you’d discover that the ‘good’ slave holder cared for ‘his’ people. That was Judge Reiderer in family and court.
When I took this to the dinners at the apartment house, people said, “Of course, we know that. Why do you think people go to adopt in Kansas City, Kansas?” I said, “Well, that’s it is it?” They said, “More than that” (now I don’t remember whether Mrs. Smith told me that or if somebody else levelled on it). But they said, “If you adopt in Kansas City, Missouri, the application costs you two hundred dollars, whether it results in a child being placed or not.” In Kansas City (No, I’m sorry – in Kansas City, Kansas) it costs you two hundred dollars to apply whether a child is placed or not and whether you’re white or black. In Kansas City, Missouri it’s free - which now makes this story even more interesting. Why, if it’s free, did people go across the river to Kansas City, Missouri? (Kansas?) - people who did not have easy two hundred dollars to spend. And, of course, what I’d found was that here was a slave master who – and now comes the story when I had somebody who had in fact worked at the court or had some connection with the court. He said to me, “Don’t you get it? If you had a prison record, you were easier to manipulate than someone who could come free and had nothing.” So I now discover a part of southern history in this remarkable place with those remarkable fellows and so I wrote two things. I wrote a report that would go to the University to the Research Centre and a copy to be sent to Reiderer, knowing of course that Reiderer would blow his stack and that I would never be able to show my face in the area again. I wrote a second thing which became a paper that I published in a southern journal called “Negroes Resistance to Adoption ….or so” in which I dealt briefly with the court but not with Reiderer or any of these difficult issues. In any case, there is a third part of the story, which takes me back to McGill. I’m leaving out Allegheny College, which was pleasant and that taught a family course and there were interesting students and I had some lovely times, but nothing terribly interesting. But something did happen upon my return some of which I’ve already told about the four thousand dollars that was trying to be collected by the Institute of Health.
Before I left Missouri, I had a meeting with the members of the Institute, all of whom, or most of whom were members of the Sociology Department and they had now receive – they had seen my report which was being sent also to Judge Reiderer and the Head of the Research Centre had a private meeting with me and said, “Look … (…Oh, yes I haven’t told of one research method which I call the dirty hand method because after all, when you cook you wash your hands carefully, but when you go and do laundry – you don’t necessarily, and I’ve forgotten to talk about that, because, in addition to cooking for people - these were black middle-class people, teachers, people who worked for the post office and nurses and social workers, but, what about working class people, people who were much more on the edge of society – what did they do about either fostering or adoption, both of which came under Judge Reiderer’s agency? So, I decided to take my laundry to the same laundromat at different times of the day. Some mornings, some noon, early afternoon and some evenings because different women given different family constellations would work - do their laundry at different times. I would run the same laundry through the machines and stick around and talk, and I found out precisely the same material that I had found among the middle-class blacks with people who could not afford to adopt but who were taking children, with pay, as foster children, which was also administered by the court. I firmly believe that research and sociology is often done without regard for what I call ‘dirty hand’ activity. You have to be able to be somebody else than a professor and, if you are willing to do that, you can get information you can’t do by making up questionnaires or interviewing in your technical capacity.
Anyway, I should now end my story with the interview with the Head of the Research body at the University of Missouri. Dr. X said to me, “We like the way you work. We like how you get data. We like the way you write a report. What we need here is somebody who is imaginative to identify issues and help us make proposals for studies. We’d like to hire you.” And when I heard what they would to pay me it was considerably more than I was getting from McGill. And my answer to this was, “I took a three year leave from McGill, I agreed to go back – I’m going back, whatever happens later.” But then I thought that, since this interview took place a day or two before my leaving, I made a counter proposal and I said, “Let me assume that I can come to you for three to four days in the middle of two months. I could meet with you on what you think are your issues and I will then try to develop a study design. If it gets funds, forty per cent has to go to McGill. I knew it was a wild idea, but they were willing to hire me on their faculty. I was proposing that they pay me nothing except my expenses for coming for four days every two months, and then I would work with them intensively during that time. They accepted that as an intervening thing, as a stepping thing to joining them in time. I went back to McGill and I (oh! before going back, I telephoned the Head of Social Work, Dr. Moore, who by this time disliked me intensely because I was much too successful for him and I didn’t kowtow, and when I wrote him this proposal that I would do that and I would have, if I got a grant through my proposals, that I would have extra money for research for the school. His answer to me was, “Please see a psychiatrist!” Well, I thought this is just the way John Moore is and I forgot about it and I went back to McGill and one of the first people I called on was the Dean of Science who had, in earlier years, been very sceptical of me when I said to him that I wanted to found a research institute– a social science institute at McGill and he said, “Show me the first ten papers you’ve published and we’ll talk.” And of course he was great, and I liked that even though it was unpleasant because I had only one paper that had been published - and, of course it was early on in my career. Dean Mallot - I called on him now and he, in the meantime had fallen on the ice, had smashed his nose. He was in very bad shape and was not well. So, when I sat with him I told him about Dr. Moore’s response and he said, “Why in hell did you tell that idiot? You come to me and I would work something out with you obviously.” Well, I should have known better because we had a previous, two and a half years before that Moore had refused to sign a request to the Research Office or Research Committee of the University when I asked for fifteen hundred dollars for postage for a mail questionnaire across the country and Moore said to me, “I won’t sign that request. It’s more money than we’ve ever had here for research. I’ll sign it for half.” And I said to myself, “Excellent.” I said, “Sure, of course. I’ll just put it in this way.” So he crossed out fifteen hundred dollars and put down seven fifty and signed that, and I sent it in and I got a cheque from Dean Mallot saying, “Here’s your cheque, but obviously you never passed elementary arithmetic” - because I had all the other figures there. I figured this was great so I went to him and I said, “Dean Mallot, I didn’t pass the calculus, but I did pass elementary math. Look, Moore did this.” And he said, “Don’t go to this idiot. There’s a rule – remember – that the Department Head has to sign.” So he said, “Right.” So I got another cheque for seven fifty and I could do the job. I should have know never go to Moore with this additional proposal. Anyway, my time at McGill was running down and, by ‘64 I left to go to Waterloo. It was the time that Moore was retiring and when he had a retirement party he mentioned all the people who were no longer staying and were going and, with me, he just gave my name and not where I was going. Anyway, that was my ten years at McGill and, non-glorious as they were, I look back with fond memories to exciting times.
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So, Lisa – here we are. You’ve got your story and I hope you’re not disappointed.
