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• An Interview With NEVA VANDERSALL Conducted in Bowie, Maryland August 6, 1986 As part of the celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Christian Community Presbyterian Church - - - BILL: This is August 6, 1986. We are Marge and Bill Miller in Bowie, Maryland, and we're about to interview Neva Vandersall as an oral history project in connection with the 25th anniversary year of the Christian Community Presbyterian Church in Bowie, Maryland. MARGE: Well, I' 11 ask you the questions. The first thing we wanted to ask you about is how you met Van, and married him. NEVA: When I was young, I had two brothers, one three and one five years older than I, and Christian Endeavor was one of the important things for young people. My brothers were both involved in that. I was in Junior Christian Endeavor, and then I very often was chosen to represent the juniors at the general meetings, where they wanted everybody represented, just because I had brothers to take me. I was really a very shy little girl; I never said a word, because I was the only young child there. But if you keep your eyes open, you learn a little bit, even though you don't say much. Then I was very late in having dates, just because I was very protected, but finally I did get old enough to go to one of the conventions-almost the first place I ever was, away from home, was to the Christian Endeavor convention in Cincinnati, and there we all paired off, boys and girls, and I was established then. Van was one of the young--one of the, a little bit older than I-boys in the community. His brother was one of the very important people in Christian Endeavor, Stanley Vandersall. At this convention, both my friend Cleo, who went with me, and I signed up for some kind of Christian work. But we were looking at China. In our church we had Christian Endeavor for the young people, as a general thing, and then the mission groups were women, mostly, and instead of one growing into the older women's group, you just went along with your own age, and the younger people started, so when I was twelve, I was one of the older ones in our little group, we named our circle the Ruth Hawn Circle, for a missionary who came back from China and spoke with us. So that's what oriented us to China. But Van had been with his mother in Florida for a while, he came back to go to Wooster, and initiation night, he was either exposed too long or something, but he got a violent throat infection and he came home to Canton and was in the hospital. At that time I was taking a nursing course in the hospital, and Van's sister came over and said, "Won't you go up and visit him? He needs somebody; he's very depressed because of that kind of thing." So that's where I really got closer to him. And then he came back one time and spoke in our church when he had signed up to go to Cairo, and he said, "This is what I'm going to do as soon as I graduate." He was recruited there just before the end of his senior year. Though I never told him, at that moment I decided I was going with him to Cairo, [Laughter] instead of going to China. MARGE:Forgot all about China? NEVA: And it wasn't very long after that that we did get together, and he didn't have too much time that summer before he went to Cairo, and the university had not yet opened. This was the first group of "short-termers," they called the young men who were not married. A number of the other families • - either came from the mission that was already there, who'd had experience there, or they came having had experience in other sort of mission work. Some of the people had been over in Lebanon, where there was great turmoil because the Al lies had just pushed the Turks out, and .... BILL: That was 19 . .. ? NEVA: 1917 was the--well, '18 was really the worst time over there. But this was 1920 when Van went, when he graduated and went. And before he went, we were engaged. But the university wanted to keep track of its young people; it didn't want any hippies going over there to represent the country, so they said that these young men had to live with a family, and they could not be married until they decided that they really wanted to stay permanently. If they were just coming for three years, they didn't want any family problems. So I couldn't go. My sister and I tried to go on our own, but we just couldn't seem to get through on anything. I wasn't a secretary; I didn't actually have anything except my nursing that was useful as an occupation, and that wasn't much accepted; nurses weren't considered much. In any case, we weren't able to manage it. So we were not married then until '23; Van came back in '22, because the university wanted to put on two new courses, geology and astronomy, and nobody had had any work in those courses. So they told Van, since he was going to stay permanently, if he would take that third year and go to Chicago, and get those courses ready to teach, they'd count that finished, so he came back in '22, but we were not married until '23, and then we went out. But strange how sometimes those things just strike you; I didn't really think he was much, I thought he was much too aggressive and flamboyant . [Laughter] I was always very retiring and quiet; it just seemed that maybe I wouldn't be able to hold up to it. MARGE: It worked out real well. Tell us a little bit about what--well, Van helped to start the school, then--the university? NEVA: Yes. MARGE: Tell us a little bit about what Egypt and the school were like when you first went. NEVA: Yes. I was very surprised, because I was going to the American University, and here were the boys with little below the knees socks, and short pants--the students. Of course they weren't students ready for a degree, and the university wasn't giving a degree then--it was more like a high school. Junior college, perhaps. And things were very "set"--you did it according to Hoyle. For instance, the night we arrived--it was August--and we were going to Jive with another family, as was the custom for young people, who didn't know how to manage things, and we had dinner together. Another family went back with us, who had been out before, but as workers in the Lebanon relief. The university wasn't started, but there were preparations there. And when you have people living with families, you get a big table. I mean, the dining room--the dining table--was a long thing, and after supper, Van said, "I'd like to take Neva down and show her the college." We started out, and Mrs. McCJanahan said "Where's 2 - your hat?" This was 8 o'clock at night. Wei I, I had a hat, but it never occurred to me to wear it. l mean it was ju~t that kind of thing. And they told the students you could play tennis at the university--we were two blocks and a half up the street, I iving on top, on the eighth f Joor, of a grocery store, a big fancy European grocery store. MARGE: In an apartment? NEVA: An apartment, yes. But all of the university families who were in that area were living on different floors of that apartment, and we were told if you play tennis at the tennis court, that's all right, but don't throw your shoes over your shoulder and walk home with them--that's not done. You don't carry things like that, and l soon found out, although I wasn't told soon enough, that Egyptians don't carry anything, any Egyptians of class. I was down in one of the big department stores one time, and I bought a big pot, a cooking pot. They wrapped it all up, and supposed that I had a servant at the door, waiting to carry it, I guess, but l took it and went off with it, and I met one of the students. Well, he was in a quandary--he didn't carry things like that, but he couldn't let~ carry it, and so he did carry it home for me, hoping of course that nobody would see it. I mean, it was just that type of thing. MARGE: A very rigid kind of society. NEVA: Very rigid. And when you were invited to dinner, unless you were told not to, you dressed--long dresses, long skirts, and the men wore tux. MARGE: The British influence. NEVA: British, yes. I remember one time, Mrs. McClanahan, with whom we were having our meals, she had the two of us and three short term men in addition to her own family, she said, "Now I'm having these special Egyptian guests, and I would like you to wear your most evening evening gown." Well, my mother had made me one that had a little thing inside that I could put sleeves under or I could wear it without sleeves, and I actually never had worn it absolutely without sleeves, but I did that night, and l felt very much undressed, but still, I was glad to be able to fit in to the company. And meals were pretty much organized--you had courses that were stipulated for the different meals. A later generation of people who came out--oh, perhaps five years later--they said, but we're not going to do that; we want to eat what we want when we want it. They wanted to have parties at night that were just desserts. They said it's not so much work to get ready for a dessert party as it is to get ready for a big dinner party. Of course everybody was expected to have a cook in the kitchen, and a table boy, but these younger people coming from America were independent. They said, "We never had servants, and we're not going to have them now--we'll do our own work." But the idea was that you don't send 6000 miles to bring a woman out to wash dishes and take care of babies; there are people here who need such jobs, and who can do them very well. And just that general type of formality. MARGE: So most of the wives had jobs with the university themselves? 3 • • • NEVA: Yes. Now if you had a very small baby, of course you had to take care of it, but the general plan was that you would have a live-in nursemaid. They didn't call them sitters, or-it was just at the time that the orphanages, the Near East orphanages, that were built up after the Turkish massacre of the Armenians, were closing, and those children--they were of all ages, but it was long enough after that massacre so that there were no tiny ones, but some of them had gone into that orphanage when they were three years old, or younger even, perhaps--were being sent to Cairo, and they were sent under the patronage of the Patriarch, the Armenian Patriarch, and his plan was to get the Armenian families to adopt them first, and what they were supposed to do for them was to give them room and board, and a trousseau so that they could be married. Well, one of the men--the boys--was at the university, the university had only been open a few years, and it had a big garden to it that had been a Pasha's estate. They had one of the Armenian boys go in there and clear out the brush, and just generally prune the thing and make a garden out of it, instead of the wilderness that it was, and when Van came back --because he had been there three years before, so that he was known--this boy came and said "You're going to have a baby, aren't you?" [unintelligible] Well, there wasn't any reticence on their part, as there is with us, and he said "I have a friend, a girl, and I would like you to take her for a nursemaid." MARGE: This was before you were even pregnant? NEVA: No. MARGE: Oh, you were. I thought maybe he just assumed that if you got married you were going to have a baby. NEVA: No this was--well, really, two years later. We went in '23 and Lloyd was born in '25. But of course, was around all that time. But we took her. We went down to the seashore in the summer--that was the custom, too--everybody lived in Cairo in the winter, but when summer came, Cairo was too hot, and the Egyptian government moved to Alexandria, and all the other governments had to move their diplomatic offices to Alexandria, and all of the people who considered such things as heat--many people just didn't know whether it was hot or not, that was just the way you lived--went down, so that we always went to Alexandria in the summer. Around the shore to a place that the mission group called Sidi Fisher t?J, and we went a little further, and ours was Bendara, and we built just huts of matting. Van usually went down with a couple of carpenters a little bit before it was time for us to go, and they put up the wooden supports, simply the uprights, and enough to hold them together, and then that much was left, year to year, but the rest was just flat mats woven of reeds, and we used them for floors, for sides, for ceiling, for roofs. Where we wanted a window we cut a square out, and put that little piece on a frame, and hinged it on the top, and there we lived for three months in the summer. And when we were going to go the year that Lloyd was born--he was born the 31st of May--everybody else had gone by that time, but we were a bit delayed because I got sand-fly fever just when we were 4 - - supposed to come from the hospital, and I was at home for a couple of days and I couldn't get rid of it, so I had to go back again, and at the hospital they were cleaning. They moved me from one room to another as they did the regular cleaning. First of all, the plan was that when you had a baby you had to stay a month in the hospital. They made the charts out for a month. The British doctors who were in charge, that was the plan, and if you stayed over a month, which I was then, then you had to start a new thing as a day patient, day by day. This doctor I had was very adamant. I wanted to go home one day, because I thought I was going to go home, and perhaps he'd let me go--l'd been up walking around--but he came in and he said "Oh, you haven't been out for a drive yet," so I had to go for a drive. And because the cook had made ice cream--he thought I was going to be home for supper that night--we went home and had some and then came back. That was the first night that we noticed the sand-fly fever. I had a very high fever, and they said, "Oh, these Americans, you can't let them out for a half hour; they go and eat ices." But it goes up suddenly and it comes down suddenly, but it leaves you absolutely washed out. Well, anyway, we were ready to go down then, and I had a basket, and we put Lloyd in the basket. It was a day's trip, whole morning's trip, and we had the food measured out, so he could have a bottle at the proper time, and it was very dirty, they burned coal in the engine. He was a white baby when he started from Cairo, but he wasn't a white baby when he got there, and he'd been covered over with something. When we got out of the train Van put the basket and the baby on his head and carried them there. That was the easiest way to do it. It wasn't the kind of basket they have for babies now; it was a big wash-basket type thing, and they said, "What have you got in your basket?" and Van said, "My son." But we took this nursemaid with us to the seashore, and she was then thirteen years old, but while she was there we had gotten permission from the Patriarch to pay her with money, instead of paying it to him, which was the plan. So for that summer, she had money in her hand, and she went out and found along the shore while the baby was asleep an Armenian woman who would make a trousseau for her. She spent that money for her trousseau that summer, and then she was ready to be married whenever the time came up. And a great many of them were married--the Armenian boys and the Armenian girls--which was the best plan. But that's one of the things that was more or less established. MARGE: You mentioned that the university had a Pasha's estate, so they had big buildings right from the start? NEVA: This was a big building, but it was the Pasha's house, and after that, it had been used by a cigarette factory, and they had put in a beautiful marble staircase, right from the front door, ornamental door--the whole building was ornamental, they don't build their buildings of cement and plain glass as we do now--of course, nobody else did glass then--they had a lot of the type of decorations that you see on mosques and such on all of these big Pasha's houses, so that that big staircase went straight up into the middle of the building, and the room 5 • - - right in front of it, which ordinarily was the reception room, was our library. Then there were aisles all around the sides, and rooms off it--really, a very beautiful building, and it stil 1 has been kept that way. MARGE: You didn't have any students that lived at the university at that time? NEVA: Yes--it was only for boys, of course, there were no girls. Girls weren't educated to that extent. The American mission had the highest girls' school, which was a high school, really--junior college, we called it, later, when they began coming over and we really were a university. But our students came from everywhere, mostly the elite, because nobody--none of the poorer people considered education to that extent. They had no background for it. These students, though, came from all around the Near East. MARGE: And not just from Egypt? NEVA: No. You've heard of Beirut University? It is a hundred years older than ours at Cairo. American University, just about a hundred years. They had a very interesting history of their struggles to get that established. It started out as the Near East Christian College, and until after the Second World War they weren't called a university. It was the Second World War that made the big change in those countries. It opened them up, because they felt free then to go out and see things outside, and the soldiers came back and said what they had seen. MARGE: Well, there weren't any other universities or colleges available to these young men--no national ones, or anything like that? NEVA: No, the only other thing was the famous old Al Azhar-you've probably heard of the old Muslim college which was (1,00) years old, and that's where all the important books were kept, that's where all the men, the Muslim leaders and teachers, that's where they got their education. But our university was the first in Egypt, but it was very much patterned after the Beirut University, which was the American University in Beirut. MARGE: How many students did they have when you first got there? NEVA: Three hundred. MARGE: Three hundred. NEVA: Well, I say three hundred--! don't know exactly then, but later, after a few years, we did--the faculty did, after great discussion, decide to let one of the girls from the American girls' college come. She said, "Why can the boys go to the university and get a BA degree?" It took the university a few years to get a BA; each year they added a new one [class], and finally they got four, and then they had three students who had BA's the first year, and then progressively more. And there was no place for a girl to go beyond the girls' college. We sometimes asked the girls what they did after they had been to school, and the girls said, "Well, we sit on this cushion a while, and then we go and sit on that cushion a while." There was no TV, there was no anything that we think of as entertainment, and they were not allowed to go out unless someone took them. 6 • • - MARGE! And they weren't supposed to do any work, guess, girls of the better class. NEVA: No, there were servants in the house, and there real Iy wasn't much for them to do, and they didn't have that many books, they didn't have libraries, so that this girl didn't have any brothers, and of course if there isn't a boy in the family you might expect that one of the girls would look ahead to see who was going to take over things. Her father was progressive enough to let her go to a boys' school.· She was one girl in three hundred boys. And she was always at the top of the class, and the boys said, "Oh, yes, because she's a girl the teachers give her good grades." But it actually was not true; she was very astute, and she knew how to manage these boys. Some girls would have been very embarrassed with boys about, because they just never saw them. Well, when we had parties for the boys, tea parties, we were able to have them, some of the boys said "We wish we could bring our sisters to tea like this," but because the other boys were there, they couldn't. So I had tea with the girls in the dining room, and Van had the boys in the living room. And our house--we lived in a university building then--they were built that way--the living room was an entity, and then there were sliding doors, and then the dining room was behind that, and a boy could bring his sister in, and slip her past the living room into the dining room through the hallway, and when they went home, she could momentarily perhaps see a boy who might be around. But it worked out very well; we had some very nice parties, and at that time also the custom was that when you went to a party, if it was a mixed place--well, I'm getting ahead of the story. The Egyptian government then did establish the Egyptian University, soon after ours, and then they had classes together, which was unheard of, but when they went to teas, the girls were all on one side of the room, and the boys were all on the other side of the room. But our students learned to mix, just because they didn't have any such separations, and we--our staff--was very worried about what would happen if we got these boys and girls together. But they had just enough background of separation that there wasn't any unusual mingling. MARGE: This first girl who went to the university must have been very bright to even get the idea of doing such a thing, and be able to follow through with it. NEVA: She was, and of course after she did--she was alone the first year--the next year we had three girls, and the next year we had five girls, and after that we had more and more, because other fathers decided that perhaps they could let their daughters go, too. Of course the students were all brought to school. But that was the way we got our coeducation started. At one time the university counted up ten different things in which they were originators, and then it was taken over by the government, and whatever they took over they could do very much better than we could, because they had much more money. See, this university was originated by the mission, and they were wise enough to see that you can't add a university to a 7 • • • mission budget without having the university swallow up the money. And they didn't want--they had a big establishment ·of hospitals and schools for boys and schools for girls, and they had at that time the highest education both for boys and for girls in their what they called colleges, American Girls' College, and at Aschute College for boys, than any Egyptian boy could get, except by working, learning the Arabic, and working into this big Azhar, which was so classical and so formal, but it didn't really meet the issues of life except in the traditional way that they always had had in the Koran teachings. And then coeducation was one of the others, and having physical education, where you took off your own clothes and put on play clothes, gym clothes, and then you had to have a shower afterwards, and some of the boys refused. We had just cold showers in those days, so one of the teachers said, "All right, come on and we' II go together." They actually got that started, and--1 can't think just what--oh, we had the first journalism, well, we had the first boys and girls having classes together, aside from coeducation; they were mingled in groups, and a number of other things. MARGE: So the university had a lot of influence. NEVA: It really did, and it was accepted at that time. That was the ti me of King Farouk. I don't mean King Farouk, I mean King Fouad, the father. Farouk was the prince who became a king later. MARGE: What did you do at the university when you weren't staying home with one of the babies? NEVA: Well, I wasn't staying home with the babies . MARGE: Oh, you didn't stay home hardly at all. NEVA: No, I lived right there, and I had this Armenian nursemaid. I always took care of my babies at night, but the plan was that the nursemaid always slept in the room with the baby, and we curtained off a little corner for her so that she could have a room of her own, and so that she could really sleep at night, and I took care of the baby, but she had them in the daytime. Our babies came rather close together, sixteen months apart, so that soon there was a second one, but her job was to take them out to the garden, and she washed their clothes, just generally did what you do for babies at the time, but I worked with a doctor, and the first thing he did before we did too much at the university was to set up a clinic in one of the very much congested centers, and there was an Egyptian nurse there who treated babies' eyes for trachoma, and one of our men was wanting to make a project for a degree of this, or at least for a report, so that a number of the rest of us had other jobs. Mine at the clinic was to keep the records, but it was just absolutely impossible. We had little celluloid chips they were to take home, and bring back again, so that we would be able to get them onto the same-onto the right record 1 ine, but a woman in Cairo, in Egypt, is first a daughter of somebody, and she is also wife of the man she marries, and she is also mother of her first son. For instance, if her father's name was Fouad she would be Nit Fouad, and if her husband's name was Hassan she would be Sit Hassan, which means the daughter of, the wife of, and if her 8 - - - son's name was Ibrahim she would be Um Ibrahim. And a woman coming in with three children hanging onto her skirts, maybe · one on her shoulder, one in her arms, and such, when I asked what her name was, "Oh, the chips, they went by the way, the baby chewed them up, or they lost them--they didn't have any place to keep them. Their houses were mostly mu~ houses, their storage space was a hole hollowed out in one place, where they could set something. They slept on the oven, which was just a raised place; they would fill it with hot coals and bake their bread in there, and then as they let that die down that was a nice warm place to sleep. But I soon found that I couldn't identify them--they all dressed alike, and sometimes they'd give me one name, sometimes they'd give me another name. I just didn't get anywhere with it, but they did bring those babies just regularly. And then there was a Bible woman there, who told Bible stories to the women while they were waiting their turns to see the nurse. We went out with the Bible women sometimes to visit the people in their homes, especially before feast days, and she would tell stories. And you'd find on the roof, the flat top roof, a whole community together getting ready for the feast day. Some people were baking bread, some were sewing the new dresses for the feast, and all the jobs that women do, they did together and had a grand time. I remember the first time I was out they--this bread is like pancake dough, and they have a big pallet, round thing on a handle, they put a blob of dough on the little bran [?J and then you put it like this [demonstrating], and it comes out a perfect loaf. I tried that for my dinner [unintelligible] perfect round loaf, and they laughed at anybody my age that couldn't bake bread. [Laughter] It was strange. MARGE: You have to learn how to do that when you're four years old, probably. Or start learning. What would you say were the problems, or the good things, about having your children in Egypt? NEVA: Well, for one thing, we had lots of help. I mean, I was not pressed with having children and other things to do at the same time--there always was somebody. I found at times that their general customs were different than mine, and I was a bit horrified at the way the nursemaid carried Lloyd downstairs when he was going to the garden, just before Myra was born. Their idea was to pick him up by one wrist and get him down. He got down it all right. The nursemaids would get together in the garden with all their different children of different ages; that's just the custom. We had to walk across the bridge, across the Nile, to get to the public garden from the university, and it was interesting, really, because we were just one family, nobody had any relatives there, the university had the thing so organized that they took care of all the problems that we had, and so the children called all the other mothers "aunt" and "uncle." When I got there, they had known Van, so we became "Van" and "Aunt Van." He wasn't Uncle Van, because he hadn't been old enough, or he hadn't been considered in that class. But it was just a very pleasant, comfortable arrangement, and when they were little, that was 9 - - - all the children needed--somebody to look out for them to see they got some education, or some exercise, and were kept happy. But there were really no facilities, there were no-you had to have your own books, and the nursemaids were not really educated. First the girl we had didn't know any English when she came to us. She learned it right along with Lloyd, and the family that lived above us, they were both psychologists, and it was he who was doing this project, who was having us help with this project. They had an older woman for a nursemaid, who already had a little girl of her own, and she was a little bit better educated than the younger girls that we had. But their goal was to get married, and one of the other girls that I knew said, "I'd like to come and live at your house, because your girls get married." We had nothing to do with that, they just had their own directions, but it just seemed it changed over that way. MARGE: They weren't marrying students from the university, they were marrying the other Armenians. NEVA: No, the Armenians. Not too young boys, either. The idea there is that the man chooses a much younger wife, so that this first girl that we had married a man who was sixteen years, I think, older than she. Of course she was only thirteen. But they had a family, we'd visit them after our children were old enough to go and see them. They wouldn't remember her, of course. Later nursemaids they did remember. The difficulty is then, also, there are a lot of experiences that they don't have. We had our own school when we first-when Lloyd first went to school. The American school was established, but they had to go in a carriage from our house, to the YMCA is where that one was held. And he was a bit shy, I didn't want to put him into a group like that in a horse carriage with nobody but the driver to look after him. The older boys were much more aggressive, and so I kept him at home, and we had Calvert classes--the Calvert lessons sent out. We had a work room in our house. Van had his carpenter bench in that room, I had my sewing machine, and then we set up desks for--a desk for Lloyd; that was his work. And then Myra, not much younger, and much more aggressive than Lloyd, she didn't want to go with the nursemaid to the garden by herself, and so she sat by and watched, and very soon she knew as much phonetics as he did, so that after a couple of months we let them go on together, and they gotinto the same grade. They stayed with me for a little more than a year, and we went through the first three years of Calvert, which is the first half of the elementary work, before we came home. But we put them in the French Lycee, just next to the university, but they had to go out the front door of our university, and around two half sides of the block, and the whole cross block to get into the back door of the Lycee, where that age group-because no child went to school on his own, he was brought, handed in to somebody who took responsibility for him. They played on the roof of the university when they weren't in school, when we had--Lloyd got smallpox, or chicken pox--no, no, scarlet fever--from somewhere and had to stay at home, and then we had to keep Myra too, and they could play and look 10 • • - over our parapet and see their classmates down in the Lycee, but they couldn't go down to them. But the children did have a lot of experiences that children don't have here. We got to Europe about--well, at least once in the five year period that we were there between furloughs, and we did some other travelling around, and they learned to swim in the pool there much earlier than they would have here at that time. That was a good many years ago. And we didn't really feel it was very much of a drawback for them until they got home and found that there were things that they had never done, which children do here. Lloyd used to go to the kitchen and talk to the cook, help him peel vegetables, just because he wanted to get some words. We had a man from Nubia, a cook, which was the customary thing. In general, the cooks didn't like the children, family children, in the kitchen, but Lloyd was useful and he was interesting, I guess, at least he was interested, and wanted to find out things. When .... [end of side 1) MARGE: Tell us what happened in Egypt, and to the university, when World War II broke out, and what you-all did. NEVA: When World War II broke out there were a group of American children about Lloyd's age--that was 1939, Lloyd was born in '25, he would be 14--who were in a Boy Scout troop. It was a British troop, but they were all American boys except one. And the leader of that troop wanted to go to Europe that year for his leader's group, so he said he would take all these little boys if their parents would let them go, and so he had I think seven or eight little boys, and he let them camp outside of his camp, and he kept them fed one way and another, but just at that time, the people in Europe realized that it was time to get out, and when they were ready to come home, there weren't enough ships to take care of the people, they were sleeping on the floor in the hotels in the ports, just to be there when a ship came in that might take them, and we were a bit concerned that our boys, whom we considered little boys then--they were not used to being out and away--wouldn't get back. We had given Lloyd our own passport--we didn't get a special passport for him--and he said everywhere he went they said, "Whose passport is this?" Lloyd said, "Well, I'm on it." Well, that was all right, he was on it, that's true, he was listed, but our consul said "What are you going to do if he doesn't come back with your passport? You're without a passport." Van said, "Well, that's your problem." [Laughter] But we were rather anxious, but they got back; the boats were not unloading, they simply unloaded the people and they carried the cargo that was on them back and forth, from all the ports, Italy, and France, people were just crowding there, waiting to get out of the country before there should be war. Outside of that, it didn't affect us much in Egypt. We didn't move out; some of our people went home, but around by South Africa. But they were mostly people who thought the war might keep them from getting things they needed; one lady needed liver injections continuously, and the only place she could get them was from America, and if her supply ran out and she didn't get any more--so she and her little girl went home, and another family--the wife and children--went. Some went clear 11 • • - around by India to get back, but we just stayed through. MARGE: Somewhere I'd· gotten the idea that you left during the War . NEVA: We left later. BILL: On furlough? NEVA: Well, no, we didn't--yes, that was '42 we left, and we had arranged to have one furlough later so that we could get two years together, so that Van could be home and get a Doctor's degree. BILL: University of Chicago. NEVA: Yes. He had gotten a Master's degree during that 19--the first furlough we were home, in 193O--and he wanted to get a Doctor's in physics. But when he got back they were working on the fission, and Doctor Compton, who had been a Wooster professor, was in that project, and ... BILL: Arthur. NEVA: Arthur Compton. And he said, "Van, there isn't a place in the country where you can get a degree in physics now; everybody's working on this nuclear project," so he asked Van to join the Manhattan Project, and the University said he might do it, so he spent one winter there with the Manhattan Project. l never knew what he was doing, all I knew was that he came home with very dirty clothes." MARGE: Was this in Chicago? NEVA: In Chicago. But he said at the beginning that he couldn't tell me what he was going to be doing. BILL: Was that in '43-'44? NEVA: Must have been '43-'44, because--yes, '43-'44 was the two years that we were at home together. We spent that '43 year-' 44 we were then in Vintner, another place we spent furloughs. Benton, New Jersey was a missionary home. Well, there were two groups right there together; one was set up by a mission, special mission, and the other was one set up by Mrs. Doane. Her husband was the man who wrote the hymn "How Sweet the Hour of Prayer," a number of those. And that arrangement was that you didn't pay anything in the way of rent, or any such, you just were nominated by your Mission Board, and Mrs. Doane accepted you, and told you how to live in her houses; she was very strict on how often the curtains might be washed, and all that kind of thing. [Laughter] But she had someone to take care of them, but if you wanted to have guests--some of them had more room than we needed--you had to get permission from her. She didn't want just anybody in her houses. But they never were available to people who were home on furlough during the summers; we spent the winters there, and the summers were for the people who had just returned, and wanted to get away from some small place they might be living, to get down to the seashore. MARGE: A real vacation. NEVA: So that she always had a different group in the summer than she had in the winter. MARGE: So you went back to Egypt in NEVA: And when we went back in '44, were ready to go to college then. we were in Chicago they went to a 12 '44, then. we left our children. They Well, the first year that high school, got their high • • • school diplomas. We didn't get back from Khartoum--that's where we went after the war, I didn't tel I you that--at the end of that school year, the Germans were in North Africa, and the British also, and there was just a seesaw. They had their supply lines--they at the other end, and the British at our end, and whenever the British got so far away from their supply lines that they couldn't keep up, then the Germans advanced, and the British had to go back, and when the Germans got so far away from their line--but at one time, the Germans were within fifteen minutes of Cairo by air, and the school year had ended, and our president, Dr. Watson, said we might as well all just leave. We had been, over the years, ready to leave; we each had a suitcase of canned foods packed and ready, the things that one would need, to leave on a moment's notice. But that summer, the whole group of us--thirty-nine, I think--went by train up to Khartoum, then we went on up into Ethiopia a bit further, but we had no permission to come back then to bring our children back to Egypt; they were not little children, but at the same time they had to have a visa or something to get in, so that it was decided that we would go on to America, and we went across to South America on one of the first Clipper ships, by air. Bucket seats, to begin with, but it was a rather interesting trip, very uncertain, because we never knew just where we were going to land next. MARGE: Where did you take off from? NEVA: Lagos. And then you are ready to go when there's a place available. We, l think, were able to get that place because there was a missionary who joined the Army way down there somewhere, and he and his wife had three small children, and he got her onto a plane, and if a plane was going to bother with women and children they might as well add two more. One thing Van said, that everybody seemed surprised, when we were trying to get a way to travel, "Women? You have women in your family?" BILL: And where did you go in South America? NEVA: Uh--sorry--1 can't tell you now. MARGE: You didn't stay there--you took another plane--you took another plane to the states? NEVA: No, we were there for a night, and then we came in through Miami, and somebody called Van and said "We want you to speak at church on Thursday." They had seen by the papers that these people were arriving. MARGE: And they were going to take advantage of you right away. NEVA: We were going to come to Washington to be with my sister for the first night, and as we got on to the train--we had five minutes to get on the train finally, when we cleared Customs, because of some other delays--and someone came in and said "Here's some mail," sent down by our home office, and it told us that my sister was no longer in Washington, she'd moved to Richmond, so the children and I got off the train there and stopped for her, but Van had to go on, because he was picked up in Miami, when we got out to let the children see a railway station--they had never seen a modern railway station--must not have been Miami, because we had been on for one night--in any case, the men were picked up on people who 13 - - • were draft dodgers, and Van said, "I've just come from out of the country, and am on my way now to Philadelphia to register," and the man said, "I suppose you have a passport, if you've just come," and Van said, "I did have, but they picked it up." But he did have to go right on, he couldn't delay--! mean he couldn't stop off at all, he had to go up and get registered. He was past the age, but still, when you're given a ticket you have to do something about it. MARGE: Maybe we ought to move on to talking about when you retired and came back to the United States to stay, or we won't get to Bowie. BILL: We still have a good half hour. MARGE: Yeah. But we've got several questions here about .... BILL: But she didn't cover anything after the war, though. MARGE: Tell us some more about that, and then we' 11 go on. NEVA: After the war in Egypt, things opened up a great deal for the Egyptian people, because they weren't accustomed, most of them, to being out of the country, and a good many of them then did have an opportunity to get out and see how people lived. These Christian Endeavor conventions also were one of the things that surprised me about the Christian people, the Evangelicals we called them--there are no denominations, they don't know Presbyterian and Methodist--but those organized by the missionaries were just called Evangelical Egyptian. The first missionaries went out to Egypt to work with the Muslims, but they found that it was so difficult, the rules ·were so rigid against any Muslim who broke away from his own religion and took up Christianity, that it was incumbent on the family, even, to do away with him, and they found that they weren't able to accomplish anything, and so they put their attention to the Copts. Now, the Copts are Christians, but their religion, their practice was so far beyond the people, they didn't know the language that the liturgy was in, and it just really didn't mean much to them, and that's where the Evangelical Church started, by the people who left the Coptic Church to become Evangelical Christians. The Coptic people, I was going to tell you, one particular family that I met, had gone to Europe to the Christian Endeavor convention that was in Geneva, and when the woman came back she said, "You know, over there when it rains, they just put up their parasols and walk right out in it." In Egypt it rains so seldom, that when it does rain, you don't do anything else, life stops. MARGE: You stay in the house and watch it rain? NEVA: For a long time I couldn't get my children to know what rain meant, there weren't enough drops to .... MARGE: You didn't even try to tell them about snow, guess. NEVA: No, but a lot of people, the Egyptian people, got insights to the outside, and then of course very soon radio came, and our president lived in the apartment just across from us--this was in the residential part of Cairo--he had a bigger family than his side of the house, and we had a smaller one, and there was a room right where the stairs turned from one to the other which could be turned into either apartment, and so he needed that one, and when he would get something on this first radio that he had, he said, "I won't have time for you to 14 • • - wait, I' 11 just ring your doorbell and run back to see what I hear, but come on over." And one time after another he thought he'd heard something and then we didn't get anything but finally .... BILL: Was this short wave ... NEVA: I don't know. BILL: where you pick up from overseas? NEVA: I suppose maybe. I really didn't know that much about it. MARGE: What kind of things was he getting when he got something? NEVA: Well, he was hoping to get news, and that was in--well, that was really much earlier, about '27. But the general people got it, and then a little later after the war television came in. "Televee-zee-own," they called it.We had a friend who had two daughters who were married. She went down one morning--her husband was the head of a mental hospital-she was Belgian, he was Egyptian--she went down to see about this televee-zee-own thing, and she came home with three of them. [Laughter] She was afraid they'd sell out too fast, and she wouldn't be able to have any for her family. But a number of other things--it for one thing opened up the idea that other people weren't veiled as Egyptian women were when they were out, and that did a great deal to getting the veils off. MARGE: They began to find out how the rest of the world was I iving. NEVA: Yes. And that moved very fast, once the ice was broken. MARGE: Was the government instrumental in encouraging a lot of these changes? Or was it just the people themselves? NEVA: No, it was just the people, mostly. The government went along, when it found that it was coming, anyway. MARGE: They didn't try to stop it, anyway. BILL: It says here Nasser took over in 1954. Did he help or did he hurt this opening? NEVA: Well, this was earlier than that. BILL: So he didn't turn it back, though. NEVA: No. He was a very progressive young fellow, but much closer to--much more radical than Abdul Nasser--uh, the man before him .••. BILL: Naguib, Mohammed Naguib. NEVA: No. MARGE: I thought Nasser took over when Farouk left. NEVA: No, there was a .... Yes, there was an older man that took over when Farouk left first. He's the man who went to Israel first. I can't get his name. BILL: Oh--to fight Israel? NEVA: No, Sadat .... No, Sadat was later. He went over to change this idea that the Israelis and the Egyptians couldn't be friends. They had lived together for a time before '48, before they found out that they were supposed to be enemies. MARGE: Were there very many Jewish people in Egypt? NEVA: Yes, there were Jewish people. I wouldn't say very many, perhaps, but there were mixed marriages, too, where there would be an Egyptian father and a Jewish mother, and a lot of people who had been living together found that they were supposed to be enemies. One of our offices, the extension 15 • • - thing, the man had a very good secretary, she was Jewish, but he didn't think anything about it, she was just a good secretary. After '48, of course, she was the enemy, and he was just very surprised that he had to let her go. A number of the children had names that would be one or the other; they soon changed from one name to another, just so they would not be definitely Muslim. MARGE: When did you and Van come back to the United States to stay? NEVA: In '61. That was the end of--Van was sixty-five soon after that, and our children had been home for a couple of years without us. We were glad to come back, but in any case we would have had to get a tourist visa after that, because we didn't have permission from the government to stay any longer, and just at that time, they were trying to curb the mission, and every organization, every school, was turned over to an Egyptian group, or an Egyptian headmaster or headmistress. Except the university was allowed to keep its American president, but we got an Egyptian vice-president. Wei 1, we had enough good Egyptian people on the staff to take care of that situation, but if the government hadn't been willing to appoint one of them, and had wanted to appoint one of their own people, it would have gone through. Another thing they let us do was choose our own curriculum, which was very important to us, but we couldn't get any new teacher out unless we registered with the government what ship the people who were being replaced had left the country in, and what date-- they checked very closely to see that we weren't slipping new Americans there . MARGE: So you didn't have any more Americans, didn't add any. NEVA: Yes, and then restrictions on what we could take out, and that sort of thing. But it was the people that they •.. and the government was very critical of what was done in the missions. For instance, some young girls who just came out, enthusiastic for Christianizing the world, just could not be kept from proselytizing their students, and one of the headmistresses who had been there for twenty-five years was deported just because one of her young new girls was out talking to her Egyptian students. Which we were not supposed to do then. That's when the university ceased really to be a mission group. Not only the university, but all of the mission schools. They were there then just to [serve as] schools, and there are still some there, but they are working now for Near East relief, or some other such thing. But the war did open up Egypt, and all the countries around. Beirut especially [unintelligible] Beirut is very direct in saying the advantages of the end of the war .... MARGE: So what did you and Van do when you came back to the States? NEVA: Fortunately, we were in a good position. We had a man out there as assistant registrar, or assistant bursar, at the university, and he very much wanted to stay, but his wife couldn't stand the idea of being out there where we didn't have this and that--well, there were a lot of things that we didn't have, but we weren't really too uncomfortable if we 16 • • • were willing to adjust to it--so they came back, and he was working in St. Andrews Presbyterian College, which was just being established from nine schools that that Presbytery owned--little struggling schools, some were elementary schools, some were high school type ones, and one of those definitely refused to go along, but three were combined to form the university, and it was hard to know just what to look forward to, but this man said, "Van, we need somebody here, we need somebody to run the bookstore," and so Van came back to take the bookstore, but when St. Andrews opened in August of 1961 there were so many students that they had to have teachers, and after--well, Van and I set up al I the mailboxes at different times ...• BILL: This was a new university. NEVA: It was a new university, but essentially it grew out of these other schools, and those students just came over, but there were a lot of other new ones, and so Van was soon pulled over to teach math. It was the new math; he wasn't in favor of the new math, but he did teach it for a year and a half, along with the other, and then somebody else took it on, and he went back to the old math, and taught for a couple of years. BILL: Enjoyed that better? NEVA: Very much better. And physics he did to a certain extent, but then there was another thing. The idea is that if you're going to get anywhere, and have your accreditation mean anything, you can't have a lot of old men teaching a lot of things. You have to have somebody who is the chair of this, and somebody else the chair of this, well, Van was teaching a lot of different things--in Cairo, that's what we had to do-when people went on furlough, somebody else took over those courses for that year--so that Van was teaching physics and math and geology and astronomy. And some of those courses-especially the field trips--well, that was another one the university was new with, having field trips. We went out during the season of the year, every Saturday, hiking in the desert somewhere, in the geology class, and in astronomy we had some night things, but I always went, because by that time we had girls, and you couldn't expect girls to go unless somebody was .... MARGE: You had to have a chaperone. NEVA: I enjoyed those field trips very much. They were a story in themselves, but when we did get home, then, we knew we were going to have this place in St. Andrews. My family was very surprised that we would come and sign up to go to a place we had never seen, we'd never been in North Carolina, but we finally got there, and it was quite some years we had. BILL: Eight years? NEVA: Yes, but Van only taught for four years, and then we were --1 guess five years--we.were out recruiting students after that, and then finally, Lloyd and Ruth came down one time, and they said "We travel all these Saturdays, spend Saturday night and Sunday morning with you, we travel into the night on Sunday night to get back to school, or to work, for Monday morning, why don't you move up somewhere nearer to us?" And 17 - - - so we had been looking for places. Van wanted to go very much to Montreat, which is the church school. BILL: Yeah, we've been to Montreat twice. NEVA: It's a nice place, but I wouldn't have liked to live there in the winter, because it's so steep, and it's very icy, very hard to drive, and then also that's as far from Massachusetts as here. And then we looked at a place called Tom's River, about halfway up New Jersey, but we couldn't see that; that was recommended to us, but we spent--we had a very nice Thanksgiving there one day, just while we were looking at it, Lloyd was with us, and we just went into a Howard Johnson's for Thanksgiving dinner. Really, a very lovely meal, but I couldn't see the name. MARGE: It wasn't any place you wanted to stay. NEVA: There wasn't any place I wanted to live in that ... and then, finally, we came up here. BILL: Well, was Lloyd already here? NEVA: Yes. Lloyd had been in Washington for about sixteen years as a bachelor. BILL: Working with languages? NEVA: Yes, with the government, a civilian working for the Department of Defense. MARGE: So he was already living in Bowie, or just in this area? NEVA: No, he was just in this area, he was living in these efficiency apartments. I think he only had three in that time, and he finally bought a row house in Washington as the last one, because he was thinking that he should be there, that's where the church was. This Bowie place was somewhat out, he couldn't make up his mind whether ... BILL: Did you say church? What church? NEVA: He was in First Baptist. He had actually an office in First Baptist, and when they were doing things over, he said he crawled through every one of their ducts carrying wires and getting the thing set up so they could turn on the lights, and he was very active in the dramatic group at the First Baptist. They were in First Baptist for some time after they came to Bowie, and they found that was just too much after a late meeting, to have to come out every time. MARGE: So you moved to Bowie in 1968? NEVA: '69. We came up--Lloyd and Ruth were then established in Bowie by that time--and we couldn't get possession of our house, and we lived with them for two weeks, with our furniture in on top of theirs. This has been very much worse, this last six months--very hectic. MARGE: How soon did you turn up at Christian Community Church after you moved to Bowie? NEVA: Very soon. We had visited Lloyd a number of times, and we always went--well, when he was in Washington, we'd go to the Church of the Pilgrims, but here we had gone to this Presbyterian Church, and they had different pastors, they were going through a transition right then. They were the church, the first Protestant church, in Bowie. Levitt had given them land, so that it grew up very fast, because there were Catholic churches, but the Methodists, and the Baptists, and al I the other people who wanted to go to a Protestant church, 18 - - - came to the Christian Community, and as their churches were built, then they went to their own denominations, that's why so many of our people had gone to the Methodist church, aside from the fact that we didn't have what they considered a sanctuary. The girls didn't know just how to get married in our church. BILL: I'll bet that didn't bother you much. NEVA: Well, no, it was a question of whether you spend your money for buildings, or whether you spend it for people. But when we came, Van took over the bursar's office from the treasurer--1 can't think of her name, she's in the travel agency now, it's on the tip of my tongue--well, it's gone--she wanted to leave the treasurer's job, but there was nobody to take it over. That's one of the things that Van could do, was accustomed to doing . MARGE: So he got that job right away. NEVA: He got that job right away. BILL: This was when who was pastor? NEVA: John Crock had just left. He had been gone--we had visited when John Crock was there, and then he was gone on a health vacation for a while, and then he came back to tell them that he was not going to stay. That was our first real Sunday. And then Harold Pease came after that; there had been somebody before that that we heard about . . . BILL: Dewey Dodds. NEVA: Dewey Dodds. He was not there; we just had heard that he had been ahead of Crock. MARGE: So Van got into the treasurer's office right away; did you get involved in any activities? NEVA: Yeah, I joined the flower committee pretty soon, and Irma Sweeney was the guiding light in that for most of those years. That was quite a nice group, that I enjoyed. In Cairo I had been the flower committee on my own for a number of years, because I had a gardener who grew a lot of things--we had two big square pillars as the corner of our pulpit, of our platform, so that it took two rather symmetrical baskets or vases, and every Friday I would go out to my gardens and say "What do you have for me this week?" He might have sixty snap=dragons, all about the same size, or--he always had enough to make two very Q.i_g_ arrangements for the church, and did that for more than a year, so that that was the most logical place for me. MARGE: You'd had a lot of experience. NEVA: Then, there was a time when I was secretary of the--when we changed the different days for the meetings, for the circle meetings; sorry, just when I want to say a name it isn't with me. BILL: You belonged to different circles from time to time? NEVA: Well, I belonged to the Wednesday circle for the first years, until we got to that time when the chairman decided that we must have a circle on every day, so that there couldn't be anybody who couldn't find a time, and so they said let's start a Monday one. And l put my name on for Monday, just to let somebody know that there was something on that, and a few people did come over for Monday, signed up because 19 - • • my name was there, but some of the others, like Elvira's mother [Little] and a number of the other older ladies said, "But we've always had circle on Wednesday morning." Also, just at that time there were more women working, so night circles became prominent, but the other group refused to come, so that the Wednesday one continued, and it was bigger than the Monday one. Betty Dinius was on the Monday one for a while, and it didn't grow, though. Monday wasn't a practical time, most people felt. We did at one time have twelve members, but never more than that, not for very long. MARGE: Well, at that time the church had an over-all women's organization, Women's Association. Was that what you were secretary of? NEVA: Yes, secretary of the over-all one. But that women's group was never as big as it should be. I had a strange experience there; they asked me to speak at the women's group one Monday morning, and as we were going out from church the day before, somebody stopped us and said they had been asking for the Vandersalls, they had been told to look up the Vandersalls, and it was Betty Edwards' mother and father. They were friends of some of our friends in Chicago--the Millers. We got to know the Millers very well after that. That was just before I was secretary of it. BILL: So about what year? NEVA: It was '70. See, '69 was pretty nearly finished--Labor Day was when we actually moved into our house in '69. Early '70. But the women's club was beginning to sort of falter then, and over a number of years just after that, we had people come from the Presbytery speaking about it, and other churches also were dropping off their women's clubs. MARGE: That was about the time that I went to work and stopped being active in the women's activities, and that happened to a lot of people. NEVA: And there was no one who was willing to take the coordinator's job. Elvira stayed on as the religious, the worship leader, as her mother had been before that, for a number of years, and Jane Sumner got to be the treasurer, and she's just stuck with that ever since. BILL: Did we have women on the Session when you first came? Neva: We fought that battle down in Laurinburg. We just had a difficult time to get women on. Year after year, Van and would put women's names on the suggestion list, and they never came across ..• MARGE: I went on the Session in '70 or '71, and that was the first. .. NEVA: Marie Little was the first ... she was the first one, don't remember just when. MARGE: Yeah, I guess I wasn't the first one, but it was ... NEVA: Well, then she must have been on when we came up, because I don't remember ... BILL: I don't remember that, but I do know we had a hard time getting women to say yes, they would do it. MARGE: Yeah, I wasn't the first one, but he was on the nominating committee, and he was conducting a big campaign to get more women on the Session, so when they asked me, I cou I dn' t 20 • • • very well say no. But there were several on at the same time I was. NEVA: I think Marie Little was the first one. I think she had been on the Session in the church they attended in Washington before they came here. MARGE: So she was willing to be a pioneer. And you didn't ever serve on the Session? That's too bad. NEVA: No, I don't think it's too bad. We came just at the time that the Neffs did. They were here maybe two weeks ahead of us, some such thing. We had attended every time we had visited Lloyd after he was out here, but just as visitors. The Patties we knew, because they had been with Lloyd in Cyprus. Yes, the whole family. He was Lloyd's superior when Lloyd was in Cyprus, but Lloyd was able to come to Egypt because we were there, but Pattie was not able, not allowed, so that Lloyd would come over and buy brass, aluminum, that kind of thing. BILL: When was Lloyd in Cyprus? What year? NEVA: Three years, but I think it might have been the fifties .... BILL: After World War II. NEVA: Yes, after World War II. MARGE: Well, do you have any other outstanding memories of CCPC that you'd like to tell us about in the last little bit of the tape here? NEVA: One of the first things that was really interesting, Dick [Neff) planned a retreat for families, and we were rather anxious to join it, and the Hydes, I know, I didn't know exactly who else were going, but he wasn't getting people signed up, and finally Van said "Neva tells me that the people say, oh, that's only for people who can't get along . " This was on marriage--and Dick said, no, that's not what it's for. But that was a very interesting thing, at Shepherd's House. That was my first real group, I iving with them. I had my first pants at that time .... 21 - • - Transcribed and edited by Marjorie Mithoff Miller and William Eldridge Miller, Jr . June, 1989 12511 Brewster Lane Bowie, Maryland 20715
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Title | Neva Vandersall interview |
Interviewee | Vandersall, Neva |
Date | 1986-08-06 |
Subject | American University in Cairo -- History |
Publisher | Rare Books and Special Collections Library; The American University in Cairo |
Language | English |
Type | Text |
Format | application/pdf |
Medium | oral histories (document genres) |
Source | AUC Oral Histories; Rare Books and Special Collections Library; The American University in Cairo |
License | Copyright 2017, American University in Cairo. All rights reserved. |
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Transcript | • An Interview With NEVA VANDERSALL Conducted in Bowie, Maryland August 6, 1986 As part of the celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Christian Community Presbyterian Church - - - BILL: This is August 6, 1986. We are Marge and Bill Miller in Bowie, Maryland, and we're about to interview Neva Vandersall as an oral history project in connection with the 25th anniversary year of the Christian Community Presbyterian Church in Bowie, Maryland. MARGE: Well, I' 11 ask you the questions. The first thing we wanted to ask you about is how you met Van, and married him. NEVA: When I was young, I had two brothers, one three and one five years older than I, and Christian Endeavor was one of the important things for young people. My brothers were both involved in that. I was in Junior Christian Endeavor, and then I very often was chosen to represent the juniors at the general meetings, where they wanted everybody represented, just because I had brothers to take me. I was really a very shy little girl; I never said a word, because I was the only young child there. But if you keep your eyes open, you learn a little bit, even though you don't say much. Then I was very late in having dates, just because I was very protected, but finally I did get old enough to go to one of the conventions-almost the first place I ever was, away from home, was to the Christian Endeavor convention in Cincinnati, and there we all paired off, boys and girls, and I was established then. Van was one of the young--one of the, a little bit older than I-boys in the community. His brother was one of the very important people in Christian Endeavor, Stanley Vandersall. At this convention, both my friend Cleo, who went with me, and I signed up for some kind of Christian work. But we were looking at China. In our church we had Christian Endeavor for the young people, as a general thing, and then the mission groups were women, mostly, and instead of one growing into the older women's group, you just went along with your own age, and the younger people started, so when I was twelve, I was one of the older ones in our little group, we named our circle the Ruth Hawn Circle, for a missionary who came back from China and spoke with us. So that's what oriented us to China. But Van had been with his mother in Florida for a while, he came back to go to Wooster, and initiation night, he was either exposed too long or something, but he got a violent throat infection and he came home to Canton and was in the hospital. At that time I was taking a nursing course in the hospital, and Van's sister came over and said, "Won't you go up and visit him? He needs somebody; he's very depressed because of that kind of thing." So that's where I really got closer to him. And then he came back one time and spoke in our church when he had signed up to go to Cairo, and he said, "This is what I'm going to do as soon as I graduate." He was recruited there just before the end of his senior year. Though I never told him, at that moment I decided I was going with him to Cairo, [Laughter] instead of going to China. MARGE:Forgot all about China? NEVA: And it wasn't very long after that that we did get together, and he didn't have too much time that summer before he went to Cairo, and the university had not yet opened. This was the first group of "short-termers," they called the young men who were not married. A number of the other families • - either came from the mission that was already there, who'd had experience there, or they came having had experience in other sort of mission work. Some of the people had been over in Lebanon, where there was great turmoil because the Al lies had just pushed the Turks out, and .... BILL: That was 19 . .. ? NEVA: 1917 was the--well, '18 was really the worst time over there. But this was 1920 when Van went, when he graduated and went. And before he went, we were engaged. But the university wanted to keep track of its young people; it didn't want any hippies going over there to represent the country, so they said that these young men had to live with a family, and they could not be married until they decided that they really wanted to stay permanently. If they were just coming for three years, they didn't want any family problems. So I couldn't go. My sister and I tried to go on our own, but we just couldn't seem to get through on anything. I wasn't a secretary; I didn't actually have anything except my nursing that was useful as an occupation, and that wasn't much accepted; nurses weren't considered much. In any case, we weren't able to manage it. So we were not married then until '23; Van came back in '22, because the university wanted to put on two new courses, geology and astronomy, and nobody had had any work in those courses. So they told Van, since he was going to stay permanently, if he would take that third year and go to Chicago, and get those courses ready to teach, they'd count that finished, so he came back in '22, but we were not married until '23, and then we went out. But strange how sometimes those things just strike you; I didn't really think he was much, I thought he was much too aggressive and flamboyant . [Laughter] I was always very retiring and quiet; it just seemed that maybe I wouldn't be able to hold up to it. MARGE: It worked out real well. Tell us a little bit about what--well, Van helped to start the school, then--the university? NEVA: Yes. MARGE: Tell us a little bit about what Egypt and the school were like when you first went. NEVA: Yes. I was very surprised, because I was going to the American University, and here were the boys with little below the knees socks, and short pants--the students. Of course they weren't students ready for a degree, and the university wasn't giving a degree then--it was more like a high school. Junior college, perhaps. And things were very "set"--you did it according to Hoyle. For instance, the night we arrived--it was August--and we were going to Jive with another family, as was the custom for young people, who didn't know how to manage things, and we had dinner together. Another family went back with us, who had been out before, but as workers in the Lebanon relief. The university wasn't started, but there were preparations there. And when you have people living with families, you get a big table. I mean, the dining room--the dining table--was a long thing, and after supper, Van said, "I'd like to take Neva down and show her the college." We started out, and Mrs. McCJanahan said "Where's 2 - your hat?" This was 8 o'clock at night. Wei I, I had a hat, but it never occurred to me to wear it. l mean it was ju~t that kind of thing. And they told the students you could play tennis at the university--we were two blocks and a half up the street, I iving on top, on the eighth f Joor, of a grocery store, a big fancy European grocery store. MARGE: In an apartment? NEVA: An apartment, yes. But all of the university families who were in that area were living on different floors of that apartment, and we were told if you play tennis at the tennis court, that's all right, but don't throw your shoes over your shoulder and walk home with them--that's not done. You don't carry things like that, and l soon found out, although I wasn't told soon enough, that Egyptians don't carry anything, any Egyptians of class. I was down in one of the big department stores one time, and I bought a big pot, a cooking pot. They wrapped it all up, and supposed that I had a servant at the door, waiting to carry it, I guess, but l took it and went off with it, and I met one of the students. Well, he was in a quandary--he didn't carry things like that, but he couldn't let~ carry it, and so he did carry it home for me, hoping of course that nobody would see it. I mean, it was just that type of thing. MARGE: A very rigid kind of society. NEVA: Very rigid. And when you were invited to dinner, unless you were told not to, you dressed--long dresses, long skirts, and the men wore tux. MARGE: The British influence. NEVA: British, yes. I remember one time, Mrs. McClanahan, with whom we were having our meals, she had the two of us and three short term men in addition to her own family, she said, "Now I'm having these special Egyptian guests, and I would like you to wear your most evening evening gown." Well, my mother had made me one that had a little thing inside that I could put sleeves under or I could wear it without sleeves, and I actually never had worn it absolutely without sleeves, but I did that night, and l felt very much undressed, but still, I was glad to be able to fit in to the company. And meals were pretty much organized--you had courses that were stipulated for the different meals. A later generation of people who came out--oh, perhaps five years later--they said, but we're not going to do that; we want to eat what we want when we want it. They wanted to have parties at night that were just desserts. They said it's not so much work to get ready for a dessert party as it is to get ready for a big dinner party. Of course everybody was expected to have a cook in the kitchen, and a table boy, but these younger people coming from America were independent. They said, "We never had servants, and we're not going to have them now--we'll do our own work." But the idea was that you don't send 6000 miles to bring a woman out to wash dishes and take care of babies; there are people here who need such jobs, and who can do them very well. And just that general type of formality. MARGE: So most of the wives had jobs with the university themselves? 3 • • • NEVA: Yes. Now if you had a very small baby, of course you had to take care of it, but the general plan was that you would have a live-in nursemaid. They didn't call them sitters, or-it was just at the time that the orphanages, the Near East orphanages, that were built up after the Turkish massacre of the Armenians, were closing, and those children--they were of all ages, but it was long enough after that massacre so that there were no tiny ones, but some of them had gone into that orphanage when they were three years old, or younger even, perhaps--were being sent to Cairo, and they were sent under the patronage of the Patriarch, the Armenian Patriarch, and his plan was to get the Armenian families to adopt them first, and what they were supposed to do for them was to give them room and board, and a trousseau so that they could be married. Well, one of the men--the boys--was at the university, the university had only been open a few years, and it had a big garden to it that had been a Pasha's estate. They had one of the Armenian boys go in there and clear out the brush, and just generally prune the thing and make a garden out of it, instead of the wilderness that it was, and when Van came back --because he had been there three years before, so that he was known--this boy came and said "You're going to have a baby, aren't you?" [unintelligible] Well, there wasn't any reticence on their part, as there is with us, and he said "I have a friend, a girl, and I would like you to take her for a nursemaid." MARGE: This was before you were even pregnant? NEVA: No. MARGE: Oh, you were. I thought maybe he just assumed that if you got married you were going to have a baby. NEVA: No this was--well, really, two years later. We went in '23 and Lloyd was born in '25. But of course, was around all that time. But we took her. We went down to the seashore in the summer--that was the custom, too--everybody lived in Cairo in the winter, but when summer came, Cairo was too hot, and the Egyptian government moved to Alexandria, and all the other governments had to move their diplomatic offices to Alexandria, and all of the people who considered such things as heat--many people just didn't know whether it was hot or not, that was just the way you lived--went down, so that we always went to Alexandria in the summer. Around the shore to a place that the mission group called Sidi Fisher t?J, and we went a little further, and ours was Bendara, and we built just huts of matting. Van usually went down with a couple of carpenters a little bit before it was time for us to go, and they put up the wooden supports, simply the uprights, and enough to hold them together, and then that much was left, year to year, but the rest was just flat mats woven of reeds, and we used them for floors, for sides, for ceiling, for roofs. Where we wanted a window we cut a square out, and put that little piece on a frame, and hinged it on the top, and there we lived for three months in the summer. And when we were going to go the year that Lloyd was born--he was born the 31st of May--everybody else had gone by that time, but we were a bit delayed because I got sand-fly fever just when we were 4 - - supposed to come from the hospital, and I was at home for a couple of days and I couldn't get rid of it, so I had to go back again, and at the hospital they were cleaning. They moved me from one room to another as they did the regular cleaning. First of all, the plan was that when you had a baby you had to stay a month in the hospital. They made the charts out for a month. The British doctors who were in charge, that was the plan, and if you stayed over a month, which I was then, then you had to start a new thing as a day patient, day by day. This doctor I had was very adamant. I wanted to go home one day, because I thought I was going to go home, and perhaps he'd let me go--l'd been up walking around--but he came in and he said "Oh, you haven't been out for a drive yet," so I had to go for a drive. And because the cook had made ice cream--he thought I was going to be home for supper that night--we went home and had some and then came back. That was the first night that we noticed the sand-fly fever. I had a very high fever, and they said, "Oh, these Americans, you can't let them out for a half hour; they go and eat ices." But it goes up suddenly and it comes down suddenly, but it leaves you absolutely washed out. Well, anyway, we were ready to go down then, and I had a basket, and we put Lloyd in the basket. It was a day's trip, whole morning's trip, and we had the food measured out, so he could have a bottle at the proper time, and it was very dirty, they burned coal in the engine. He was a white baby when he started from Cairo, but he wasn't a white baby when he got there, and he'd been covered over with something. When we got out of the train Van put the basket and the baby on his head and carried them there. That was the easiest way to do it. It wasn't the kind of basket they have for babies now; it was a big wash-basket type thing, and they said, "What have you got in your basket?" and Van said, "My son." But we took this nursemaid with us to the seashore, and she was then thirteen years old, but while she was there we had gotten permission from the Patriarch to pay her with money, instead of paying it to him, which was the plan. So for that summer, she had money in her hand, and she went out and found along the shore while the baby was asleep an Armenian woman who would make a trousseau for her. She spent that money for her trousseau that summer, and then she was ready to be married whenever the time came up. And a great many of them were married--the Armenian boys and the Armenian girls--which was the best plan. But that's one of the things that was more or less established. MARGE: You mentioned that the university had a Pasha's estate, so they had big buildings right from the start? NEVA: This was a big building, but it was the Pasha's house, and after that, it had been used by a cigarette factory, and they had put in a beautiful marble staircase, right from the front door, ornamental door--the whole building was ornamental, they don't build their buildings of cement and plain glass as we do now--of course, nobody else did glass then--they had a lot of the type of decorations that you see on mosques and such on all of these big Pasha's houses, so that that big staircase went straight up into the middle of the building, and the room 5 • - - right in front of it, which ordinarily was the reception room, was our library. Then there were aisles all around the sides, and rooms off it--really, a very beautiful building, and it stil 1 has been kept that way. MARGE: You didn't have any students that lived at the university at that time? NEVA: Yes--it was only for boys, of course, there were no girls. Girls weren't educated to that extent. The American mission had the highest girls' school, which was a high school, really--junior college, we called it, later, when they began coming over and we really were a university. But our students came from everywhere, mostly the elite, because nobody--none of the poorer people considered education to that extent. They had no background for it. These students, though, came from all around the Near East. MARGE: And not just from Egypt? NEVA: No. You've heard of Beirut University? It is a hundred years older than ours at Cairo. American University, just about a hundred years. They had a very interesting history of their struggles to get that established. It started out as the Near East Christian College, and until after the Second World War they weren't called a university. It was the Second World War that made the big change in those countries. It opened them up, because they felt free then to go out and see things outside, and the soldiers came back and said what they had seen. MARGE: Well, there weren't any other universities or colleges available to these young men--no national ones, or anything like that? NEVA: No, the only other thing was the famous old Al Azhar-you've probably heard of the old Muslim college which was (1,00) years old, and that's where all the important books were kept, that's where all the men, the Muslim leaders and teachers, that's where they got their education. But our university was the first in Egypt, but it was very much patterned after the Beirut University, which was the American University in Beirut. MARGE: How many students did they have when you first got there? NEVA: Three hundred. MARGE: Three hundred. NEVA: Well, I say three hundred--! don't know exactly then, but later, after a few years, we did--the faculty did, after great discussion, decide to let one of the girls from the American girls' college come. She said, "Why can the boys go to the university and get a BA degree?" It took the university a few years to get a BA; each year they added a new one [class], and finally they got four, and then they had three students who had BA's the first year, and then progressively more. And there was no place for a girl to go beyond the girls' college. We sometimes asked the girls what they did after they had been to school, and the girls said, "Well, we sit on this cushion a while, and then we go and sit on that cushion a while." There was no TV, there was no anything that we think of as entertainment, and they were not allowed to go out unless someone took them. 6 • • - MARGE! And they weren't supposed to do any work, guess, girls of the better class. NEVA: No, there were servants in the house, and there real Iy wasn't much for them to do, and they didn't have that many books, they didn't have libraries, so that this girl didn't have any brothers, and of course if there isn't a boy in the family you might expect that one of the girls would look ahead to see who was going to take over things. Her father was progressive enough to let her go to a boys' school.· She was one girl in three hundred boys. And she was always at the top of the class, and the boys said, "Oh, yes, because she's a girl the teachers give her good grades." But it actually was not true; she was very astute, and she knew how to manage these boys. Some girls would have been very embarrassed with boys about, because they just never saw them. Well, when we had parties for the boys, tea parties, we were able to have them, some of the boys said "We wish we could bring our sisters to tea like this," but because the other boys were there, they couldn't. So I had tea with the girls in the dining room, and Van had the boys in the living room. And our house--we lived in a university building then--they were built that way--the living room was an entity, and then there were sliding doors, and then the dining room was behind that, and a boy could bring his sister in, and slip her past the living room into the dining room through the hallway, and when they went home, she could momentarily perhaps see a boy who might be around. But it worked out very well; we had some very nice parties, and at that time also the custom was that when you went to a party, if it was a mixed place--well, I'm getting ahead of the story. The Egyptian government then did establish the Egyptian University, soon after ours, and then they had classes together, which was unheard of, but when they went to teas, the girls were all on one side of the room, and the boys were all on the other side of the room. But our students learned to mix, just because they didn't have any such separations, and we--our staff--was very worried about what would happen if we got these boys and girls together. But they had just enough background of separation that there wasn't any unusual mingling. MARGE: This first girl who went to the university must have been very bright to even get the idea of doing such a thing, and be able to follow through with it. NEVA: She was, and of course after she did--she was alone the first year--the next year we had three girls, and the next year we had five girls, and after that we had more and more, because other fathers decided that perhaps they could let their daughters go, too. Of course the students were all brought to school. But that was the way we got our coeducation started. At one time the university counted up ten different things in which they were originators, and then it was taken over by the government, and whatever they took over they could do very much better than we could, because they had much more money. See, this university was originated by the mission, and they were wise enough to see that you can't add a university to a 7 • • • mission budget without having the university swallow up the money. And they didn't want--they had a big establishment ·of hospitals and schools for boys and schools for girls, and they had at that time the highest education both for boys and for girls in their what they called colleges, American Girls' College, and at Aschute College for boys, than any Egyptian boy could get, except by working, learning the Arabic, and working into this big Azhar, which was so classical and so formal, but it didn't really meet the issues of life except in the traditional way that they always had had in the Koran teachings. And then coeducation was one of the others, and having physical education, where you took off your own clothes and put on play clothes, gym clothes, and then you had to have a shower afterwards, and some of the boys refused. We had just cold showers in those days, so one of the teachers said, "All right, come on and we' II go together." They actually got that started, and--1 can't think just what--oh, we had the first journalism, well, we had the first boys and girls having classes together, aside from coeducation; they were mingled in groups, and a number of other things. MARGE: So the university had a lot of influence. NEVA: It really did, and it was accepted at that time. That was the ti me of King Farouk. I don't mean King Farouk, I mean King Fouad, the father. Farouk was the prince who became a king later. MARGE: What did you do at the university when you weren't staying home with one of the babies? NEVA: Well, I wasn't staying home with the babies . MARGE: Oh, you didn't stay home hardly at all. NEVA: No, I lived right there, and I had this Armenian nursemaid. I always took care of my babies at night, but the plan was that the nursemaid always slept in the room with the baby, and we curtained off a little corner for her so that she could have a room of her own, and so that she could really sleep at night, and I took care of the baby, but she had them in the daytime. Our babies came rather close together, sixteen months apart, so that soon there was a second one, but her job was to take them out to the garden, and she washed their clothes, just generally did what you do for babies at the time, but I worked with a doctor, and the first thing he did before we did too much at the university was to set up a clinic in one of the very much congested centers, and there was an Egyptian nurse there who treated babies' eyes for trachoma, and one of our men was wanting to make a project for a degree of this, or at least for a report, so that a number of the rest of us had other jobs. Mine at the clinic was to keep the records, but it was just absolutely impossible. We had little celluloid chips they were to take home, and bring back again, so that we would be able to get them onto the same-onto the right record 1 ine, but a woman in Cairo, in Egypt, is first a daughter of somebody, and she is also wife of the man she marries, and she is also mother of her first son. For instance, if her father's name was Fouad she would be Nit Fouad, and if her husband's name was Hassan she would be Sit Hassan, which means the daughter of, the wife of, and if her 8 - - - son's name was Ibrahim she would be Um Ibrahim. And a woman coming in with three children hanging onto her skirts, maybe · one on her shoulder, one in her arms, and such, when I asked what her name was, "Oh, the chips, they went by the way, the baby chewed them up, or they lost them--they didn't have any place to keep them. Their houses were mostly mu~ houses, their storage space was a hole hollowed out in one place, where they could set something. They slept on the oven, which was just a raised place; they would fill it with hot coals and bake their bread in there, and then as they let that die down that was a nice warm place to sleep. But I soon found that I couldn't identify them--they all dressed alike, and sometimes they'd give me one name, sometimes they'd give me another name. I just didn't get anywhere with it, but they did bring those babies just regularly. And then there was a Bible woman there, who told Bible stories to the women while they were waiting their turns to see the nurse. We went out with the Bible women sometimes to visit the people in their homes, especially before feast days, and she would tell stories. And you'd find on the roof, the flat top roof, a whole community together getting ready for the feast day. Some people were baking bread, some were sewing the new dresses for the feast, and all the jobs that women do, they did together and had a grand time. I remember the first time I was out they--this bread is like pancake dough, and they have a big pallet, round thing on a handle, they put a blob of dough on the little bran [?J and then you put it like this [demonstrating], and it comes out a perfect loaf. I tried that for my dinner [unintelligible] perfect round loaf, and they laughed at anybody my age that couldn't bake bread. [Laughter] It was strange. MARGE: You have to learn how to do that when you're four years old, probably. Or start learning. What would you say were the problems, or the good things, about having your children in Egypt? NEVA: Well, for one thing, we had lots of help. I mean, I was not pressed with having children and other things to do at the same time--there always was somebody. I found at times that their general customs were different than mine, and I was a bit horrified at the way the nursemaid carried Lloyd downstairs when he was going to the garden, just before Myra was born. Their idea was to pick him up by one wrist and get him down. He got down it all right. The nursemaids would get together in the garden with all their different children of different ages; that's just the custom. We had to walk across the bridge, across the Nile, to get to the public garden from the university, and it was interesting, really, because we were just one family, nobody had any relatives there, the university had the thing so organized that they took care of all the problems that we had, and so the children called all the other mothers "aunt" and "uncle." When I got there, they had known Van, so we became "Van" and "Aunt Van." He wasn't Uncle Van, because he hadn't been old enough, or he hadn't been considered in that class. But it was just a very pleasant, comfortable arrangement, and when they were little, that was 9 - - - all the children needed--somebody to look out for them to see they got some education, or some exercise, and were kept happy. But there were really no facilities, there were no-you had to have your own books, and the nursemaids were not really educated. First the girl we had didn't know any English when she came to us. She learned it right along with Lloyd, and the family that lived above us, they were both psychologists, and it was he who was doing this project, who was having us help with this project. They had an older woman for a nursemaid, who already had a little girl of her own, and she was a little bit better educated than the younger girls that we had. But their goal was to get married, and one of the other girls that I knew said, "I'd like to come and live at your house, because your girls get married." We had nothing to do with that, they just had their own directions, but it just seemed it changed over that way. MARGE: They weren't marrying students from the university, they were marrying the other Armenians. NEVA: No, the Armenians. Not too young boys, either. The idea there is that the man chooses a much younger wife, so that this first girl that we had married a man who was sixteen years, I think, older than she. Of course she was only thirteen. But they had a family, we'd visit them after our children were old enough to go and see them. They wouldn't remember her, of course. Later nursemaids they did remember. The difficulty is then, also, there are a lot of experiences that they don't have. We had our own school when we first-when Lloyd first went to school. The American school was established, but they had to go in a carriage from our house, to the YMCA is where that one was held. And he was a bit shy, I didn't want to put him into a group like that in a horse carriage with nobody but the driver to look after him. The older boys were much more aggressive, and so I kept him at home, and we had Calvert classes--the Calvert lessons sent out. We had a work room in our house. Van had his carpenter bench in that room, I had my sewing machine, and then we set up desks for--a desk for Lloyd; that was his work. And then Myra, not much younger, and much more aggressive than Lloyd, she didn't want to go with the nursemaid to the garden by herself, and so she sat by and watched, and very soon she knew as much phonetics as he did, so that after a couple of months we let them go on together, and they gotinto the same grade. They stayed with me for a little more than a year, and we went through the first three years of Calvert, which is the first half of the elementary work, before we came home. But we put them in the French Lycee, just next to the university, but they had to go out the front door of our university, and around two half sides of the block, and the whole cross block to get into the back door of the Lycee, where that age group-because no child went to school on his own, he was brought, handed in to somebody who took responsibility for him. They played on the roof of the university when they weren't in school, when we had--Lloyd got smallpox, or chicken pox--no, no, scarlet fever--from somewhere and had to stay at home, and then we had to keep Myra too, and they could play and look 10 • • - over our parapet and see their classmates down in the Lycee, but they couldn't go down to them. But the children did have a lot of experiences that children don't have here. We got to Europe about--well, at least once in the five year period that we were there between furloughs, and we did some other travelling around, and they learned to swim in the pool there much earlier than they would have here at that time. That was a good many years ago. And we didn't really feel it was very much of a drawback for them until they got home and found that there were things that they had never done, which children do here. Lloyd used to go to the kitchen and talk to the cook, help him peel vegetables, just because he wanted to get some words. We had a man from Nubia, a cook, which was the customary thing. In general, the cooks didn't like the children, family children, in the kitchen, but Lloyd was useful and he was interesting, I guess, at least he was interested, and wanted to find out things. When .... [end of side 1) MARGE: Tell us what happened in Egypt, and to the university, when World War II broke out, and what you-all did. NEVA: When World War II broke out there were a group of American children about Lloyd's age--that was 1939, Lloyd was born in '25, he would be 14--who were in a Boy Scout troop. It was a British troop, but they were all American boys except one. And the leader of that troop wanted to go to Europe that year for his leader's group, so he said he would take all these little boys if their parents would let them go, and so he had I think seven or eight little boys, and he let them camp outside of his camp, and he kept them fed one way and another, but just at that time, the people in Europe realized that it was time to get out, and when they were ready to come home, there weren't enough ships to take care of the people, they were sleeping on the floor in the hotels in the ports, just to be there when a ship came in that might take them, and we were a bit concerned that our boys, whom we considered little boys then--they were not used to being out and away--wouldn't get back. We had given Lloyd our own passport--we didn't get a special passport for him--and he said everywhere he went they said, "Whose passport is this?" Lloyd said, "Well, I'm on it." Well, that was all right, he was on it, that's true, he was listed, but our consul said "What are you going to do if he doesn't come back with your passport? You're without a passport." Van said, "Well, that's your problem." [Laughter] But we were rather anxious, but they got back; the boats were not unloading, they simply unloaded the people and they carried the cargo that was on them back and forth, from all the ports, Italy, and France, people were just crowding there, waiting to get out of the country before there should be war. Outside of that, it didn't affect us much in Egypt. We didn't move out; some of our people went home, but around by South Africa. But they were mostly people who thought the war might keep them from getting things they needed; one lady needed liver injections continuously, and the only place she could get them was from America, and if her supply ran out and she didn't get any more--so she and her little girl went home, and another family--the wife and children--went. Some went clear 11 • • - around by India to get back, but we just stayed through. MARGE: Somewhere I'd· gotten the idea that you left during the War . NEVA: We left later. BILL: On furlough? NEVA: Well, no, we didn't--yes, that was '42 we left, and we had arranged to have one furlough later so that we could get two years together, so that Van could be home and get a Doctor's degree. BILL: University of Chicago. NEVA: Yes. He had gotten a Master's degree during that 19--the first furlough we were home, in 193O--and he wanted to get a Doctor's in physics. But when he got back they were working on the fission, and Doctor Compton, who had been a Wooster professor, was in that project, and ... BILL: Arthur. NEVA: Arthur Compton. And he said, "Van, there isn't a place in the country where you can get a degree in physics now; everybody's working on this nuclear project," so he asked Van to join the Manhattan Project, and the University said he might do it, so he spent one winter there with the Manhattan Project. l never knew what he was doing, all I knew was that he came home with very dirty clothes." MARGE: Was this in Chicago? NEVA: In Chicago. But he said at the beginning that he couldn't tell me what he was going to be doing. BILL: Was that in '43-'44? NEVA: Must have been '43-'44, because--yes, '43-'44 was the two years that we were at home together. We spent that '43 year-' 44 we were then in Vintner, another place we spent furloughs. Benton, New Jersey was a missionary home. Well, there were two groups right there together; one was set up by a mission, special mission, and the other was one set up by Mrs. Doane. Her husband was the man who wrote the hymn "How Sweet the Hour of Prayer," a number of those. And that arrangement was that you didn't pay anything in the way of rent, or any such, you just were nominated by your Mission Board, and Mrs. Doane accepted you, and told you how to live in her houses; she was very strict on how often the curtains might be washed, and all that kind of thing. [Laughter] But she had someone to take care of them, but if you wanted to have guests--some of them had more room than we needed--you had to get permission from her. She didn't want just anybody in her houses. But they never were available to people who were home on furlough during the summers; we spent the winters there, and the summers were for the people who had just returned, and wanted to get away from some small place they might be living, to get down to the seashore. MARGE: A real vacation. NEVA: So that she always had a different group in the summer than she had in the winter. MARGE: So you went back to Egypt in NEVA: And when we went back in '44, were ready to go to college then. we were in Chicago they went to a 12 '44, then. we left our children. They Well, the first year that high school, got their high • • • school diplomas. We didn't get back from Khartoum--that's where we went after the war, I didn't tel I you that--at the end of that school year, the Germans were in North Africa, and the British also, and there was just a seesaw. They had their supply lines--they at the other end, and the British at our end, and whenever the British got so far away from their supply lines that they couldn't keep up, then the Germans advanced, and the British had to go back, and when the Germans got so far away from their line--but at one time, the Germans were within fifteen minutes of Cairo by air, and the school year had ended, and our president, Dr. Watson, said we might as well all just leave. We had been, over the years, ready to leave; we each had a suitcase of canned foods packed and ready, the things that one would need, to leave on a moment's notice. But that summer, the whole group of us--thirty-nine, I think--went by train up to Khartoum, then we went on up into Ethiopia a bit further, but we had no permission to come back then to bring our children back to Egypt; they were not little children, but at the same time they had to have a visa or something to get in, so that it was decided that we would go on to America, and we went across to South America on one of the first Clipper ships, by air. Bucket seats, to begin with, but it was a rather interesting trip, very uncertain, because we never knew just where we were going to land next. MARGE: Where did you take off from? NEVA: Lagos. And then you are ready to go when there's a place available. We, l think, were able to get that place because there was a missionary who joined the Army way down there somewhere, and he and his wife had three small children, and he got her onto a plane, and if a plane was going to bother with women and children they might as well add two more. One thing Van said, that everybody seemed surprised, when we were trying to get a way to travel, "Women? You have women in your family?" BILL: And where did you go in South America? NEVA: Uh--sorry--1 can't tell you now. MARGE: You didn't stay there--you took another plane--you took another plane to the states? NEVA: No, we were there for a night, and then we came in through Miami, and somebody called Van and said "We want you to speak at church on Thursday." They had seen by the papers that these people were arriving. MARGE: And they were going to take advantage of you right away. NEVA: We were going to come to Washington to be with my sister for the first night, and as we got on to the train--we had five minutes to get on the train finally, when we cleared Customs, because of some other delays--and someone came in and said "Here's some mail," sent down by our home office, and it told us that my sister was no longer in Washington, she'd moved to Richmond, so the children and I got off the train there and stopped for her, but Van had to go on, because he was picked up in Miami, when we got out to let the children see a railway station--they had never seen a modern railway station--must not have been Miami, because we had been on for one night--in any case, the men were picked up on people who 13 - - • were draft dodgers, and Van said, "I've just come from out of the country, and am on my way now to Philadelphia to register," and the man said, "I suppose you have a passport, if you've just come," and Van said, "I did have, but they picked it up." But he did have to go right on, he couldn't delay--! mean he couldn't stop off at all, he had to go up and get registered. He was past the age, but still, when you're given a ticket you have to do something about it. MARGE: Maybe we ought to move on to talking about when you retired and came back to the United States to stay, or we won't get to Bowie. BILL: We still have a good half hour. MARGE: Yeah. But we've got several questions here about .... BILL: But she didn't cover anything after the war, though. MARGE: Tell us some more about that, and then we' 11 go on. NEVA: After the war in Egypt, things opened up a great deal for the Egyptian people, because they weren't accustomed, most of them, to being out of the country, and a good many of them then did have an opportunity to get out and see how people lived. These Christian Endeavor conventions also were one of the things that surprised me about the Christian people, the Evangelicals we called them--there are no denominations, they don't know Presbyterian and Methodist--but those organized by the missionaries were just called Evangelical Egyptian. The first missionaries went out to Egypt to work with the Muslims, but they found that it was so difficult, the rules ·were so rigid against any Muslim who broke away from his own religion and took up Christianity, that it was incumbent on the family, even, to do away with him, and they found that they weren't able to accomplish anything, and so they put their attention to the Copts. Now, the Copts are Christians, but their religion, their practice was so far beyond the people, they didn't know the language that the liturgy was in, and it just really didn't mean much to them, and that's where the Evangelical Church started, by the people who left the Coptic Church to become Evangelical Christians. The Coptic people, I was going to tell you, one particular family that I met, had gone to Europe to the Christian Endeavor convention that was in Geneva, and when the woman came back she said, "You know, over there when it rains, they just put up their parasols and walk right out in it." In Egypt it rains so seldom, that when it does rain, you don't do anything else, life stops. MARGE: You stay in the house and watch it rain? NEVA: For a long time I couldn't get my children to know what rain meant, there weren't enough drops to .... MARGE: You didn't even try to tell them about snow, guess. NEVA: No, but a lot of people, the Egyptian people, got insights to the outside, and then of course very soon radio came, and our president lived in the apartment just across from us--this was in the residential part of Cairo--he had a bigger family than his side of the house, and we had a smaller one, and there was a room right where the stairs turned from one to the other which could be turned into either apartment, and so he needed that one, and when he would get something on this first radio that he had, he said, "I won't have time for you to 14 • • - wait, I' 11 just ring your doorbell and run back to see what I hear, but come on over." And one time after another he thought he'd heard something and then we didn't get anything but finally .... BILL: Was this short wave ... NEVA: I don't know. BILL: where you pick up from overseas? NEVA: I suppose maybe. I really didn't know that much about it. MARGE: What kind of things was he getting when he got something? NEVA: Well, he was hoping to get news, and that was in--well, that was really much earlier, about '27. But the general people got it, and then a little later after the war television came in. "Televee-zee-own," they called it.We had a friend who had two daughters who were married. She went down one morning--her husband was the head of a mental hospital-she was Belgian, he was Egyptian--she went down to see about this televee-zee-own thing, and she came home with three of them. [Laughter] She was afraid they'd sell out too fast, and she wouldn't be able to have any for her family. But a number of other things--it for one thing opened up the idea that other people weren't veiled as Egyptian women were when they were out, and that did a great deal to getting the veils off. MARGE: They began to find out how the rest of the world was I iving. NEVA: Yes. And that moved very fast, once the ice was broken. MARGE: Was the government instrumental in encouraging a lot of these changes? Or was it just the people themselves? NEVA: No, it was just the people, mostly. The government went along, when it found that it was coming, anyway. MARGE: They didn't try to stop it, anyway. BILL: It says here Nasser took over in 1954. Did he help or did he hurt this opening? NEVA: Well, this was earlier than that. BILL: So he didn't turn it back, though. NEVA: No. He was a very progressive young fellow, but much closer to--much more radical than Abdul Nasser--uh, the man before him .••. BILL: Naguib, Mohammed Naguib. NEVA: No. MARGE: I thought Nasser took over when Farouk left. NEVA: No, there was a .... Yes, there was an older man that took over when Farouk left first. He's the man who went to Israel first. I can't get his name. BILL: Oh--to fight Israel? NEVA: No, Sadat .... No, Sadat was later. He went over to change this idea that the Israelis and the Egyptians couldn't be friends. They had lived together for a time before '48, before they found out that they were supposed to be enemies. MARGE: Were there very many Jewish people in Egypt? NEVA: Yes, there were Jewish people. I wouldn't say very many, perhaps, but there were mixed marriages, too, where there would be an Egyptian father and a Jewish mother, and a lot of people who had been living together found that they were supposed to be enemies. One of our offices, the extension 15 • • - thing, the man had a very good secretary, she was Jewish, but he didn't think anything about it, she was just a good secretary. After '48, of course, she was the enemy, and he was just very surprised that he had to let her go. A number of the children had names that would be one or the other; they soon changed from one name to another, just so they would not be definitely Muslim. MARGE: When did you and Van come back to the United States to stay? NEVA: In '61. That was the end of--Van was sixty-five soon after that, and our children had been home for a couple of years without us. We were glad to come back, but in any case we would have had to get a tourist visa after that, because we didn't have permission from the government to stay any longer, and just at that time, they were trying to curb the mission, and every organization, every school, was turned over to an Egyptian group, or an Egyptian headmaster or headmistress. Except the university was allowed to keep its American president, but we got an Egyptian vice-president. Wei 1, we had enough good Egyptian people on the staff to take care of that situation, but if the government hadn't been willing to appoint one of them, and had wanted to appoint one of their own people, it would have gone through. Another thing they let us do was choose our own curriculum, which was very important to us, but we couldn't get any new teacher out unless we registered with the government what ship the people who were being replaced had left the country in, and what date-- they checked very closely to see that we weren't slipping new Americans there . MARGE: So you didn't have any more Americans, didn't add any. NEVA: Yes, and then restrictions on what we could take out, and that sort of thing. But it was the people that they •.. and the government was very critical of what was done in the missions. For instance, some young girls who just came out, enthusiastic for Christianizing the world, just could not be kept from proselytizing their students, and one of the headmistresses who had been there for twenty-five years was deported just because one of her young new girls was out talking to her Egyptian students. Which we were not supposed to do then. That's when the university ceased really to be a mission group. Not only the university, but all of the mission schools. They were there then just to [serve as] schools, and there are still some there, but they are working now for Near East relief, or some other such thing. But the war did open up Egypt, and all the countries around. Beirut especially [unintelligible] Beirut is very direct in saying the advantages of the end of the war .... MARGE: So what did you and Van do when you came back to the States? NEVA: Fortunately, we were in a good position. We had a man out there as assistant registrar, or assistant bursar, at the university, and he very much wanted to stay, but his wife couldn't stand the idea of being out there where we didn't have this and that--well, there were a lot of things that we didn't have, but we weren't really too uncomfortable if we 16 • • • were willing to adjust to it--so they came back, and he was working in St. Andrews Presbyterian College, which was just being established from nine schools that that Presbytery owned--little struggling schools, some were elementary schools, some were high school type ones, and one of those definitely refused to go along, but three were combined to form the university, and it was hard to know just what to look forward to, but this man said, "Van, we need somebody here, we need somebody to run the bookstore," and so Van came back to take the bookstore, but when St. Andrews opened in August of 1961 there were so many students that they had to have teachers, and after--well, Van and I set up al I the mailboxes at different times ...• BILL: This was a new university. NEVA: It was a new university, but essentially it grew out of these other schools, and those students just came over, but there were a lot of other new ones, and so Van was soon pulled over to teach math. It was the new math; he wasn't in favor of the new math, but he did teach it for a year and a half, along with the other, and then somebody else took it on, and he went back to the old math, and taught for a couple of years. BILL: Enjoyed that better? NEVA: Very much better. And physics he did to a certain extent, but then there was another thing. The idea is that if you're going to get anywhere, and have your accreditation mean anything, you can't have a lot of old men teaching a lot of things. You have to have somebody who is the chair of this, and somebody else the chair of this, well, Van was teaching a lot of different things--in Cairo, that's what we had to do-when people went on furlough, somebody else took over those courses for that year--so that Van was teaching physics and math and geology and astronomy. And some of those courses-especially the field trips--well, that was another one the university was new with, having field trips. We went out during the season of the year, every Saturday, hiking in the desert somewhere, in the geology class, and in astronomy we had some night things, but I always went, because by that time we had girls, and you couldn't expect girls to go unless somebody was .... MARGE: You had to have a chaperone. NEVA: I enjoyed those field trips very much. They were a story in themselves, but when we did get home, then, we knew we were going to have this place in St. Andrews. My family was very surprised that we would come and sign up to go to a place we had never seen, we'd never been in North Carolina, but we finally got there, and it was quite some years we had. BILL: Eight years? NEVA: Yes, but Van only taught for four years, and then we were --1 guess five years--we.were out recruiting students after that, and then finally, Lloyd and Ruth came down one time, and they said "We travel all these Saturdays, spend Saturday night and Sunday morning with you, we travel into the night on Sunday night to get back to school, or to work, for Monday morning, why don't you move up somewhere nearer to us?" And 17 - - - so we had been looking for places. Van wanted to go very much to Montreat, which is the church school. BILL: Yeah, we've been to Montreat twice. NEVA: It's a nice place, but I wouldn't have liked to live there in the winter, because it's so steep, and it's very icy, very hard to drive, and then also that's as far from Massachusetts as here. And then we looked at a place called Tom's River, about halfway up New Jersey, but we couldn't see that; that was recommended to us, but we spent--we had a very nice Thanksgiving there one day, just while we were looking at it, Lloyd was with us, and we just went into a Howard Johnson's for Thanksgiving dinner. Really, a very lovely meal, but I couldn't see the name. MARGE: It wasn't any place you wanted to stay. NEVA: There wasn't any place I wanted to live in that ... and then, finally, we came up here. BILL: Well, was Lloyd already here? NEVA: Yes. Lloyd had been in Washington for about sixteen years as a bachelor. BILL: Working with languages? NEVA: Yes, with the government, a civilian working for the Department of Defense. MARGE: So he was already living in Bowie, or just in this area? NEVA: No, he was just in this area, he was living in these efficiency apartments. I think he only had three in that time, and he finally bought a row house in Washington as the last one, because he was thinking that he should be there, that's where the church was. This Bowie place was somewhat out, he couldn't make up his mind whether ... BILL: Did you say church? What church? NEVA: He was in First Baptist. He had actually an office in First Baptist, and when they were doing things over, he said he crawled through every one of their ducts carrying wires and getting the thing set up so they could turn on the lights, and he was very active in the dramatic group at the First Baptist. They were in First Baptist for some time after they came to Bowie, and they found that was just too much after a late meeting, to have to come out every time. MARGE: So you moved to Bowie in 1968? NEVA: '69. We came up--Lloyd and Ruth were then established in Bowie by that time--and we couldn't get possession of our house, and we lived with them for two weeks, with our furniture in on top of theirs. This has been very much worse, this last six months--very hectic. MARGE: How soon did you turn up at Christian Community Church after you moved to Bowie? NEVA: Very soon. We had visited Lloyd a number of times, and we always went--well, when he was in Washington, we'd go to the Church of the Pilgrims, but here we had gone to this Presbyterian Church, and they had different pastors, they were going through a transition right then. They were the church, the first Protestant church, in Bowie. Levitt had given them land, so that it grew up very fast, because there were Catholic churches, but the Methodists, and the Baptists, and al I the other people who wanted to go to a Protestant church, 18 - - - came to the Christian Community, and as their churches were built, then they went to their own denominations, that's why so many of our people had gone to the Methodist church, aside from the fact that we didn't have what they considered a sanctuary. The girls didn't know just how to get married in our church. BILL: I'll bet that didn't bother you much. NEVA: Well, no, it was a question of whether you spend your money for buildings, or whether you spend it for people. But when we came, Van took over the bursar's office from the treasurer--1 can't think of her name, she's in the travel agency now, it's on the tip of my tongue--well, it's gone--she wanted to leave the treasurer's job, but there was nobody to take it over. That's one of the things that Van could do, was accustomed to doing . MARGE: So he got that job right away. NEVA: He got that job right away. BILL: This was when who was pastor? NEVA: John Crock had just left. He had been gone--we had visited when John Crock was there, and then he was gone on a health vacation for a while, and then he came back to tell them that he was not going to stay. That was our first real Sunday. And then Harold Pease came after that; there had been somebody before that that we heard about . . . BILL: Dewey Dodds. NEVA: Dewey Dodds. He was not there; we just had heard that he had been ahead of Crock. MARGE: So Van got into the treasurer's office right away; did you get involved in any activities? NEVA: Yeah, I joined the flower committee pretty soon, and Irma Sweeney was the guiding light in that for most of those years. That was quite a nice group, that I enjoyed. In Cairo I had been the flower committee on my own for a number of years, because I had a gardener who grew a lot of things--we had two big square pillars as the corner of our pulpit, of our platform, so that it took two rather symmetrical baskets or vases, and every Friday I would go out to my gardens and say "What do you have for me this week?" He might have sixty snap=dragons, all about the same size, or--he always had enough to make two very Q.i_g_ arrangements for the church, and did that for more than a year, so that that was the most logical place for me. MARGE: You'd had a lot of experience. NEVA: Then, there was a time when I was secretary of the--when we changed the different days for the meetings, for the circle meetings; sorry, just when I want to say a name it isn't with me. BILL: You belonged to different circles from time to time? NEVA: Well, I belonged to the Wednesday circle for the first years, until we got to that time when the chairman decided that we must have a circle on every day, so that there couldn't be anybody who couldn't find a time, and so they said let's start a Monday one. And l put my name on for Monday, just to let somebody know that there was something on that, and a few people did come over for Monday, signed up because 19 - • • my name was there, but some of the others, like Elvira's mother [Little] and a number of the other older ladies said, "But we've always had circle on Wednesday morning." Also, just at that time there were more women working, so night circles became prominent, but the other group refused to come, so that the Wednesday one continued, and it was bigger than the Monday one. Betty Dinius was on the Monday one for a while, and it didn't grow, though. Monday wasn't a practical time, most people felt. We did at one time have twelve members, but never more than that, not for very long. MARGE: Well, at that time the church had an over-all women's organization, Women's Association. Was that what you were secretary of? NEVA: Yes, secretary of the over-all one. But that women's group was never as big as it should be. I had a strange experience there; they asked me to speak at the women's group one Monday morning, and as we were going out from church the day before, somebody stopped us and said they had been asking for the Vandersalls, they had been told to look up the Vandersalls, and it was Betty Edwards' mother and father. They were friends of some of our friends in Chicago--the Millers. We got to know the Millers very well after that. That was just before I was secretary of it. BILL: So about what year? NEVA: It was '70. See, '69 was pretty nearly finished--Labor Day was when we actually moved into our house in '69. Early '70. But the women's club was beginning to sort of falter then, and over a number of years just after that, we had people come from the Presbytery speaking about it, and other churches also were dropping off their women's clubs. MARGE: That was about the time that I went to work and stopped being active in the women's activities, and that happened to a lot of people. NEVA: And there was no one who was willing to take the coordinator's job. Elvira stayed on as the religious, the worship leader, as her mother had been before that, for a number of years, and Jane Sumner got to be the treasurer, and she's just stuck with that ever since. BILL: Did we have women on the Session when you first came? Neva: We fought that battle down in Laurinburg. We just had a difficult time to get women on. Year after year, Van and would put women's names on the suggestion list, and they never came across ..• MARGE: I went on the Session in '70 or '71, and that was the first. .. NEVA: Marie Little was the first ... she was the first one, don't remember just when. MARGE: Yeah, I guess I wasn't the first one, but it was ... NEVA: Well, then she must have been on when we came up, because I don't remember ... BILL: I don't remember that, but I do know we had a hard time getting women to say yes, they would do it. MARGE: Yeah, I wasn't the first one, but he was on the nominating committee, and he was conducting a big campaign to get more women on the Session, so when they asked me, I cou I dn' t 20 • • • very well say no. But there were several on at the same time I was. NEVA: I think Marie Little was the first one. I think she had been on the Session in the church they attended in Washington before they came here. MARGE: So she was willing to be a pioneer. And you didn't ever serve on the Session? That's too bad. NEVA: No, I don't think it's too bad. We came just at the time that the Neffs did. They were here maybe two weeks ahead of us, some such thing. We had attended every time we had visited Lloyd after he was out here, but just as visitors. The Patties we knew, because they had been with Lloyd in Cyprus. Yes, the whole family. He was Lloyd's superior when Lloyd was in Cyprus, but Lloyd was able to come to Egypt because we were there, but Pattie was not able, not allowed, so that Lloyd would come over and buy brass, aluminum, that kind of thing. BILL: When was Lloyd in Cyprus? What year? NEVA: Three years, but I think it might have been the fifties .... BILL: After World War II. NEVA: Yes, after World War II. MARGE: Well, do you have any other outstanding memories of CCPC that you'd like to tell us about in the last little bit of the tape here? NEVA: One of the first things that was really interesting, Dick [Neff) planned a retreat for families, and we were rather anxious to join it, and the Hydes, I know, I didn't know exactly who else were going, but he wasn't getting people signed up, and finally Van said "Neva tells me that the people say, oh, that's only for people who can't get along . " This was on marriage--and Dick said, no, that's not what it's for. But that was a very interesting thing, at Shepherd's House. That was my first real group, I iving with them. I had my first pants at that time .... 21 - • - Transcribed and edited by Marjorie Mithoff Miller and William Eldridge Miller, Jr . June, 1989 12511 Brewster Lane Bowie, Maryland 20715 |
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