160 research outputs found
Bette Duff
No full textBette Duff oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison and Paul Tritaik. Bette Duffs’s mother worked for the Department of Interior in the Bureau of Mines for over 40 years, and through her mother would end up as a research assistant for Rachel Carson during the writing of Silent Spring. She talks about the work she did for Rachel Carson, which included going to libraries and taking notes from books, pre Xerox days, doing some interviews, and occasionally entertaining Roger, Rachel’s adopted son and she mentions where the idea for Silent Spring came from. Ms. Duff and Rachel became good friends, Rachel Carson even went to Bette’s wedding. Also mentioned are Dorothy Freeman, Linda Lear, Olaus Murie, Dr. William Beebe, Howard and Alice Zahniser.1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Bette Duff
Date of Interview: April 5, 2010
Location of Interview: Sanibel, Florida
Interviewer: Mark Madison and Paul Tritaik
Brief Summary of Interview: Bette Duffs’s mother worked for the Department of Interior in the Bureau of Mines for over 40 years, and through her mother would end up as a research assistant for Rachel Carson during the writing of Silent Spring. She talks about the work she did for Rachel Carson, which included going to libraries and taking notes from books, pre Xerox days, doing some interviews, and occasionally entertaining Roger, Rachel’s adopted son and she mentions where the idea for Silent Spring came from. Ms. Duff and Rachel became good friends, Rachel Carson even went to Bette’s wedding. Also mentioned are Dorothy Freeman, Linda Lear, Olas Murie, Dr. William Beebe, Howard and Alice Zahniser. 2
Indistinct conversations
Mark Madison – Alright, today is April 5th 2010, and we are in Sanibel, Florida, doing an oral history with Bette Duff -- B E T T E D U F F. Also in the room is Paul Tritaik – T R I T A I K, and Mark Madison. And Bette, thanks for doing this.
Bette Duff – Oh, it’s my pleasure.
Mark Madison – Our first question is, what, if any, affiliation did you have with the Fish and Wildlife Service… you might have had a familial affiliation.
Bette Duff – Actually, my mother worked for Interior Department for over 40 years. She worked in the Bureau of Mines…
Mark Madison – Okay.
Bette Duff – … in Interior. And… but, you know, when you work there, you get to know everybody. and so she… actually the summer I graduated from high school, she knew someone in Fish and Wildlife, and she had had me take the civil service exam and do all my typing. So I worked in College Park at the Fish and Wildlife Service...
Mark Madison – Sure.
Bette Duff – … with Visual Information, the Chief there was Rex Gary Schmidt. And it was a wonderful summer. I saw all the photographs… I saw the first photographs of Rachel and the tidal pools, and all the historical photographs, which I hope you have now, up in Shepherdstown. There were just tons of them.
Mark Madison – A lot of them came to my archive.
Bette Duff – Did they?
Mark Madison – And a lot of them were shot by Rex.
Bette Duff – Is that right?
Mark Madison – He was a heck of a photographer.
Bette Duff – Yeah, he was, and a good friend of Bob Hines. So anyway, that was my summer. And that was my connection to Interior. And then it was my mother who got… went down to see Mr. Banks, in the library at Interior, ‘cause she worked with him, and she said I was looking for a job. This was between my junior and senior year in college, summer of that year. And he said “Well, Rachel Carson had just called and asking if he knew anybody.” So my mother raced back to the office and called me at home, and I called Rachel, and it had only been about a half hour since she had talked with Mr. Banks, and she said, ‘So soon, he got somebody?’
General laughter 3
Bette Duff – And I said yes. And so she questioned me carefully and found out I was a biology major, and I’d done a lot of scientific research, you know, as much as you can have done by the time your 21. So she said, well, come out and we’ll interview. So that’s how it all started. And she lived in Silver Spring and I lived in College Park, so it was nearby.
Mark Madison – Oh, yeah. You know, her house in Silver Spring is still part of the Rachel Carson Council.
Bette Duff – Is that right?
Mark Madison – And in two weeks I’m going to give a talk… once a year they have an open house and…
Bette Duff – Oh, neat.
Mark Madison – … do Carson stuff. It’s preserved like when she lived there…
Bette Duff – That’s really wonderful.
Mark Madison – … and it looks like 1964, basically, when you go in the house.
Bette Duff – Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Madison – It’s very neat.
Bette Duff – Yeah.
Mark Madison – Well, what was the interview like with Rachel? What questions did she ask?
Bette Duff – Oh, it was wonderful. Well, first of all, you know, when I saw her I thought ‘can this be a famous author?’ ‘Cause, you know, she looked really tired, you know, and she had on an old skirt and sneakers, and, you know, I thought ‘this is not the way a famous author looks.’ But I… you know, she had me sit down and asked me questions, and we talked. And she soon was comfortable with my credentials. And then she found out that I’d left my mother sitting out in the car, in the 90 degree Washington, D.C. heat, which is where I thought all parents belonged when their offspring were having interviews with famous people. Right? And she said ‘That’s terrible.’ So she went running out with me, and she apologized to my mother. Of course, I had completely overlooked the fact that, if it hadn’t been for my mother, I never would have gotten the job. That’s a typical offspring for you. So, we set up a system. I would go to her home and she would have the 3 by 5 cards out that she kept her references on. And she would hand them to me, tell me which libraries they were in, and then… I had a small notebook, and I just set off to Agriculture Library, or Interior Library, or NIH Library sometimes. And I’d find the books and stack them up, and go through them and take notes. It was an all day job. It was before xerox. 4
Mark Madison – Yeah.
Bette Duff – People forget this, you know. I later did research, and I’d just go and xerox them all, you know, give them the whole book. But Rachel had to take… rely on the notes to see if that was something worth doing. So that’s what… that’s what we did.
Mark Madison – Bette, we should ask you, what year was this that you were…
Bette Duff – Yeah. This was… I wrote it down ‘cause it just seems like yesterday, but I know it wasn’t. It was the summer of 1958.
Mark Madison – Okay.
Bette Duff – So she must have just moved into her new home in Silver Spring. Roger was there, her… very active, and he was about six. She had her hands full. She had her hands full.
General laughter
Mark Madison – What type of information was Rachel trying to have you research, specifically?
Bette Duff – Some of it was just case histories, where these sprayings had happened and what had been the result. And she tried to get these from as many different varieties as possible. And ironically, a lot of the sources were the chemical companies magazines, because they… they would say, you know, what had happened. And Agriculture was pretty open about it, at least then they were pretty open about it. They got kind of nervous about it later because… of course, Rachel was not, you know, against all pesticides. She was very… she knew that they… DDT had played an important role or two in saving many soldiers’ lives when they got into these infested… mosquito-infested islands. But she just knew that it had gone too far. And something people don’t realize, maybe, but the Washington, D.C., area in the 1950s, there was a frenzy to get rid of mosquitoes. And we had these big trucks that had, like, fire hose nozzles. And they’d go up and down the street, and they’d spray everything. And this was before air conditioning, so when the windows were open it would go in your house. If your baby happened to be out in a playpen, it would go over the baby. It would go over your clothes. And of course, they also… so that was what they did in our neighborhood, like College Park and Silver Spring. And, I mean, they did this once a week or so. And pretty soon some of the neighbors, who were bird people, began to notice the birds were disappearing. And they, you know, nobody quite knew what to do about it. It was at that stage. And if you made a protest they’d say ‘Well, the University knows what they’re doing’ or ‘The Government knows what they’re doing.’ And of course, that was an attitude she was especially against and trying to combat in this book. She once said ‘It’s not just a book about the, you know, foolish use of pesticides. It’s a book about society…’ well, as she put it, ‘man against himself, or society against itself.’ ‘They’re not being careful; they’re not being reflective; they’re too willing to take people’s opinions of what’s right, and not investigate for themselves; and they want fast and easy answers.’ And she knew, and rightly so, this was a path for disaster. I don’t think our 5
neighborhoods ever really recovered from that, in that area. And this was where Howard Sonheiser lived too, so he knew what it was about.
Mark Madison – Sure. How did Rachel describe the book when you first came to work for her in 1958? She must have given you an overview so you could focus your research.
Bette Duff – Well, yeah, she told me that it had started… well, actually, a friend of hers had called from… I think Massachusetts and an airplane had come over and sprayed this whole refuge area, which this friend and her husband had saved and conservation… and soon they saw these… they hadn’t known the airplane was coming, they saw all these dead animals and birds. So they called Rachel, who was their good friend, and I think they said something, like, ‘Can’t you do something about this?’.
Mark Madison – Right.
Bette Duff – And she said… well, I… the way she explained it to me was, she tried to get other people to do something about it, and write this article. So she started writing an article -- it was going to just be an article. And I guess she showed it to William Shawn, at the New Yorker, and he said ‘This is terrific and I want (I think he said) 500,000 words.’ You know, he wanted it serialized in the New Yorker. So then she had her hands full. And some of her friends… well, Dorothy Freeman, who was a good friend, called Rachel, ‘Why are you doing this, you know, at last you have some peace and quiet, your mother’s sick, and Roger’s here, and you know…’
Mark Madison – What did you think of the project? You were a junior… was it a biology major…
Bette Duff – Yeah.
Mark Madison – … at Bryn Mawr?
Bette Duff – Yeah, at Bryn Mawr. I thought it was really fun to do, fun to see all sides of the issue. And she was very good about that, very… had a lot of integrity about her work. So I would deliver them, and she would collect them I guess, and file them. And I guess, when she finally started writing, she’d write at night when Rodger was asleep. So this was… too hard to work when he was up.
Paul Tritaik – Can you explain who Roger was?
Bette Duff – Roger was her nephew. He was orphaned he was… her niece’s child, and he was orphaned when he was a little baby, and she adopted him as her own. And, you know, it… it was tough, because when you have kids, usually you have a community, you know, of mothers. And you exchange ideas, and you have play groups. She was out there in Silver Spring, with this very bright little boy who was…
Mark Madison – Right.
6
Bette Duff – And she didn’t have time to go to play groups. Sometimes she’d get me to take him to the movies, you know, to see these dragon pictures or something. But she was… that’s who Roger was.
Mark Madison – Did she have you… beyond pulling articles and so on? Did she have you interviewing people, or doing other types of things?
Bette Duff – Yes, she did. At first she did them, she did most of the interviews. But then, when I… I was on my way after… in the fall I went to medical school; I was going to be a physician. And then I decided I didn’t like medical school, so I came back. And the next summer I worked again for her, before I was married.
Mark Madison – Was that 1959?
Bette Duff – That would have been… I went… that was 1960.
Mark Madison – 1960, okay.
Bette Duff – And… yeah. And she had me go and do one or two interviews. And sometimes that worked well, and sometimes it didn’t. They were getting… people were getting pretty alarmed by then. The cranberry thing came out. I don’t remember the details, but some big cranberry alarm… and she was trying to find out the details of this. And people in the government weren’t ready to release the details. And I walked into an interview with a man, and he thought I worked for the Department of Interior, so he was giving me all this information. And then he stopped and he said ‘Where do you work?’ And I said, ‘Well, I work for Rachel Carson.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s all we have to say.’ And so I left, and I called her and I told her I had failed miserably. And she said… she said, ‘well…’ I can’t remember the guy’s name, and she said, ‘Oh, I know him,’ she said, ‘He wouldn’t… all those people are ready to hide under their desks,’ she said, you know, ‘I’ll get the information,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. I have friends. I’ll get the information.’ So I did do some of those interviews. But she was very kind. At the end of the summer, that first summer, she called and told me she really appreciated my notes. I think she just really started to read them, because she was beginning to write, and she appreciated the work I had done. And that was very nice.
Mark Madison – Of course, she must have felt an affinity for you - a young female biologist. I mean, did she ever offer you career advice or anything?
Bette Duff – No. No. She was, you know, she was a very kind of laid back lady. She wasn’t overpowering in any sense at all. We’d… when we had lunch, we’d sometimes sit outside, and I was always amazed, you know, ‘cause we’d be talking and we’d hear a bird call, and she’d say, you know, that’s the yellow-breasted something or other. And I was always… you know, ‘cause naturalist wasn’t my thing, and I was just very much in awe. No, she was a… Linda Lear mentioned that in her book, that when Rachel met me she must have had an affinity for me ‘cause I must have looked like what she had looked like when she was starting out it. It was a very kind thing to say. But she did like me. 7
We had a good sense of humor. Fortunately, she had a good sense of humor. I remember one day I said… she said something about, you know, ‘That was in the article I wrote teaching my nephew to wonder.’
Mark Madison – Mm hmm.
Bette Duff – And I said [voice drops very low – can’t hear on tape], as only a 21 year old can say [voice drops very low – can’t hear on tape], I said, ‘I thought Ann Morrow Lindbergh wrote that.’
General laughter
Bette Duff – She said, ‘No! She didn’t write that. .I wrote it!’
Mark Madison – That’s funny.
General laughter
Mark Madison – There’s a reason for that though. That original article in, like, Ladies Home Companion, and they had a picture of… I don’t know if it was Roger, but…
Bette Duff – It was Roger.
Mark Madison – … a little kid on the beach.
Bette Duff – Yeah.
Mark Madison – And then it had Ann Morrow Lindberg, who had written some other article inside, and then Carson’s name was written very small on the cover. ‘Cause we have one of the originals, and Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s name is huge.
Bette Duff – Right.
Mark Madison – And I don’t even remember what her article was.
Bette Duff – Right. Well, I feel better about that.
Mark Madison – So you had a reason for that.
Bette Duff – She might… she… from her response, she must have had other people say that.
General laughter
Mark Madison – Did you have a sense, working with Carson in ‘58 and ’60, how important this book was going to be? 8
Bette Duff – I really didn’t, you know, I… I could tell… sometimes she would have me file her correspondence and I’d get so… such bad form, I’d get so interested in these letters she had, that it would take me all day, ‘cause they were from famous people all over the world. And I knew she had a lot of support, from a lot of important people. And I know her stock broker was getting concerned, because he discovered that she had some stock in chemical companies. When I went there one day…
General laughter
Bette Duff – … ‘Oh, I just had this terrible discussion with my stock broker, you know,’ and I… she said, ‘I told him to sell those stocks.’ And he said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to do that. They’re the best stocks.’ ‘No, I told him to sell those stocks.’ So, yeah…
Mark Madison – That would have been awkward, if she’d had a lot of stock...
Bette Duff – Yeah.
Mark Madison – … in Monsanto or Dow.
General laughter
Bette Duff – Yes, that would have been discovered very quickly. Very quickly.
Mark Madison – Did she ever talk about the process of writing the book?
Bette Duff – No, just… just that she was having trouble deciding how to present it. She did mention that. and her… the woman, Jean Davis, maybe you know, who worked with her a lot, probably knows more about this, because Jean worked with her after I left, and worked with her for a long time. ‘Til her death, I think. I guess she didn’t know how to present it, whether to present it, you know… so many facts. How she could get them in. I guess she figured it out. She wrote… I think she wrote at night; she wrote on a board. And I could never have done that. I guess, when you have to, you do that.
Mark Madison – Did she send you a copy when it was done?
Bette Duff – She did. And… I have left here… I brought some xerox material for Paul, and one of the is the cover of the original book, where she wrote ‘to Bette’… it was Bette Haney, I was Bette Haney when I worked for her, H A N E Y, and she said, ‘for deep appreciation for the work when this… when the book was getting started’. So it was really the early days of the book.
Mark Madison – Well, that’s very interesting.
Bette Duff – Well, it was fun. It was a lot of fun. And then, when it was published, of course, it was beginning to get lots of fame, and so she invited us down to her publishing 9
party in New York City, which was really exciting. Houghton Mifflin gave her this big… big whoop-de-do. I’d never been to a publishing party, and… lots of people there. And I remember, she came over and I didn’t recognize her. And, this is another typical 20-year-old kind of comment; they had had… I guess the publishing company had taken her out, you know, or sent her out, to get really re-done. And she had a really beautiful… I guess it was a wig because she probably lost a lot of her hair by then, because of her cancer.
Mark Madison – Right.
Bette Duff – But she had beautiful clothes. And she said ‘Bette’ and I said, ‘Rachel, I didn’t recognize you. You look so good.’
General laughter
Bette Duff – Fortunately, she laughed. But it was true. I was thinking about that today, when she… she was always very casual at home, and of course, you know, she liked nothing better than to wade around in tidal pools and things.
Mark Madison – Right.
Bette Duff – But when she went to interview these executives, and when she even went down to the library, she was like getting armed for combat, you know, she dressed up. And in those days, sometimes, you even wore a hat.
Mark Madison – Do you have any other questions? I’ll circle back to the visual information stuff.
Paul Tritaik – Okay.
Mark Madison – ‘Cause I’m very interested in that, actually.
Paul Tritaik – Well, the whole reaction to the writing of this book… people were catching wind and starting to pull back, it seems like. How much of that was prefaced by the New York Times article, or was that… were you working with her on that?
Bette Duff – You mean the New Yorker?
Paul Tritaik – I’m sorry, the New Yorker.
Bette Duff – Probably when that came out, that was pretty near the end, I think. That got people alarmed - a lot of people. Well, one of the things I said I learned from her was, you have to be ready to accept all kinds of criticism when you’re doing a project like that, because you’re stepping on some people’s toes. And people knew… they knew that there’d been mistakes made, but nobody wanted to admit it. And the Agriculture Department would be blaming the Interior Department, and the Interior Department 10
would be blaming somebody else. Although, I understand that Stewart Udall was very supportive of this whole thing. And she had a lot of support from the Interior Department. Agriculturel… you know, I had a friend who worked… this is another kind of funny story, but he was an entomologist. I think he’d done a lot of the early work on DDT. And when I went to Agriculture, I wanted to take out some of the books, so I went up to this other neighbor of mine and asked him if I could use his library card and he said I could. So I took them out under his name. And then he found out what it was about, and he was, he told me to take the library books back, because I was working for Rachel Carson.
General laughter
Bette Duff – You know, they always said, ‘Oh, she hasn’t got her facts right.’ But the fact is, she quoted directly from these journals. I don’t think she interpolated too much, or interpreted. I think she let it kind of speak for itself. But people were concerned. And, you know, rightly so, ‘cause… oh, she got a lot of criticism, ‘cause she was just a little old lady, living out in the country, with her cats. An old maid. And then, why should she care about future generations when she was a spinster, had no children of her own. And then, one day she was asked to speak… this was just at the beginning of the book… as
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