Neva Vandersall interview

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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
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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
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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
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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?
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
•
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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 ....
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Transcribed and edited by
Marjorie Mithoff Miller
and William Eldridge Miller, Jr .
June, 1989
12511 Brewster Lane
Bowie, Maryland 20715