14,194 research outputs found
Madison Price Family History
No full textMadison L. Price authored this family history as part of the course requirements for HIST 550/700 Your Family in History offered online in Fall 2019 and was submitted to the Pittsburg State University Digital Commons. Please contact the author directly with any questions or comments: [email protected]
The Family History of Madison P. Rexwinkle
No full textMadison Rexwinkle authored this family history as part of the course requirements for HIST 550 Your Family in History offered online in Spring 2019 and was submitted to the Pittsburg State University Digital Commons. Please contact the author directly with any questions or comments: [email protected]
Madison Discovery
No full textIn 2014, Dr. Kerry Cresawn developed a traveling life science outreach program called“Madison Discovery”, with the goal of peaking an early interest in science by making the science enrichment experiences often only available to select populations of students accessible to all students regardless of academic readiness, socioeconomic factors, language and cultural barriers. The bridge to her research and her work with K-12 students is her interest in preparing future K-12 science teachers. She teaches several biology content and pedagogy courses for future teachers and invites future biologists and future teachers to work collaboratively as part of Madison Discovery
Gift inscription in Minions of the Moon: a little book of song and story
No full textThis edition includes a gift inscription possibly penned by the author, Madison Julius Cawein, "Frank on Valentines Day, 1914. M.J." Madison Julius Cawein (1865-1914).Cawein, Madison Julius, 1865-1914
K. Duane Norman
No full textK. Duane Norman oral history interview as conducted by Mark Madison.
While in college, Mr. Norman served as a student aide at Bear River National Wildlife Refuge working on the botulism research program with Dr. Wayne Jensen. Upon graduation he went to work in Woodsville, Massachusetts as a fisheries research biologist. In refuges, he would take up flying while working with the Wetlands Acquisition Program in North Dakota. Mr. Norman would retire as Chief of Waterfowl Population Surveys Program.
Organization: FWS
Name: K. Duane Norman
Years: 1956-1983
Program: Refuges
Keywords: Biography, Biologists (USFWS), Employees (USFWS), History, Wetlands, Waterfowl, Wildlife refuges, Aircraft, Aviation, Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge, Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, Frank Bellrose1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: K. Duane Norman
Date of Interview: April 19, 2006
Location of Interview: Shepherdstown, WV
Interviewer: Mark Madison
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 27
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Student aide at Bear River National Wildlife working on botulism research project; Fisheries Research Biologist at in Woodsville, Massachusetts; Assistant Manager at Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge; Refuge Manager at Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, Illinois; Wildlife Biologist working on Wetlands Acquisition Program; worked on Refuge Acquisition Program in Atlanta; Flyway Biologist in Washington D.C.; Pacific Flyway Biologist in Portland; Chief of Waterfowl Population Surveys Program, from Portland.
Colleagues: Dr.Wayne Jensen, Frank Bellrose, John Koerner
Brief Summary of Interview: While in college, Mr. Norman served as a student aide at Bear River National Wildlife refuge working on the botulism research program with Dr. Wayne Jensen and upon graduation went to work in Woodsville, Massachusetts as a fisheries research biologist. He then moved on into refuges and would take up flying while working with the Wetlands Acquisition Program in North Dakota. He would make serval more moves before retiring as Chief of Waterfowl Population Surveys Program. He shares several stories of his time flying and a memory of Frank Bellrose, whom he felt was interesting to work with.
2
Mark: It is April 19th, 2006 and we are at the National Conservation Training Center with Duane Norman doing an oral history. And the other person in the room is Mark Madison. And Duane we usually start with the first question, how did you come to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service?
Duane: How’d I come to work?
Mark: Yeah.
Duane: Man that was about the only place you could be [unintelligible].
Mark: [laughing] What was your background before you came to work for Fish and Wildlife Service?
Duane: You mean during my school time?
Mark: Yeah, what you studied?
Duane: I went to what is now called Colorado State University in Fort Collins, which happened to be my hometown, and took up game management; graduated in ’56. And before that, the year before I worked as a student aide on Bear River Refuge.
Mark: Oh yeah, Utah.
Duane: Yeah, with Wayne Jensen working on the botulism program, research program. And then…
Mark: What year would that have been?
Duane: 1955.
Mark: ’55 okay.
Duane: And in ’56 I graduated with a degree in game management. And the only job available was with Public Health in Denver, or, and then I was offered the fisheries research biologist in Woodsville, Massachusetts which I took.
Mark: Good choice; Cape Cod’s nice.
Duane: Yeah. I worked with the sea scaup research. I was the first one to observe the spawning of the sea scaup in the wild, which is pure luck I guess.
Mark: So how the heck did you go from fisheries to migratory waterfowl?
Duane: Well I wasn’t a very good sailor. We had the Albatross, which is…
Mark: Research Vessel.
Duane: …research vessel, long and narrow like a sea [unintelligible]. Of course we were on eight hour shifts, more or less, at sea anchored out, you know.
Mark: Right.
Duane: And sit there and just roll and roll and roll.
Mark: So you thought planes would be more comfortable.
Duane: I said, no I’ve got to get out of this. So I talked to, I don’t know who it was, Salyer I think, and I wrote a letter to him in D.C. asking for any opening in refuges.
Mark: Right.
Duane: And Forest Carpenter got a hold of me and asked me if I would go out to 3
Sand Lake Refuge in Columbia, South Dakota. “You bet!” So I was assistant manager there for roughly a year and a half. And then I went to Chautauqua, you know in Havana, Illinois as the refuge manager.
Mark: I didn’t know we had a refuge called Chautauqua.
Duane: Oh yeah.
Mark: In Illinois?
Duane: Yeah, it’s right on the Illinois River, the Illinois Natural History Research Center is there, with Frank Bellrose; I worked with Frank.
Mark: Okay. So how long were you at Chautauqua?
Duane: Four years. Then Harvey Nelson called me and he says, “How would you like to go to North Dakota as a wildlife biologist?” Well that wasn’t very keen, I wanted to stay in management, but I went on up there to work in the Wetlands Acquisition Program. And at that time I took up flying; could see the land and the potholes much better, so I got my private license up there. And transferred down to Atlanta in the Refuge Acquisition Program and that was more or less a dead end; they weren’t acquiring any refuges, or adding to any of them, so. Don Smith, who took Fred Glover’s place, asked me if I wanted to come up there and be flyway biologist; jumped to the fact.
Mark: You had enough of Atlanta.
Duane: Yeah, went up there and that’s where it all started.
Mark: So where was up there?
Duane: Washington D.C.
Mark: Washington D.C. Interior Building, yeah.
Duane: I was there four years, and in 1968 I got married and moved to Portland and was the Pacific Flyway biologist there.
Mark: So you worked in at least three of the flyways.
Duane: Oh yeah, yeah. And then let’s see, 1977 I was made Chief of the Waterfowl Population Surveys Program, which I served in until I was forced into retirement in 1983.
Mark: Did that mean going back to D.C. or did you do that from Portland?
Duane: Well they tried to get me back to D.C. and I refused to go, so they relented I guess; ‘cause they had to advertise twice to people, they were trying to get people to go to Washington. I said, I’d been there, done that, I don’t need to come back here.
Mark: So what was your job as Chief of Waterfowl Surveys?
Duane: Well mainly administrating people, and keeping track of funds and so forth and making assignments to various biologists and so forth. And then getting the waterfowl banding program, running that which we employee about 30 students; we didn’t employee them really, we paid GS 2, I guess I call it, wages and we’d have to supervise them. But generally the flyway biologists were easy to take care 4
of, satisfy, except there was not; never had enough money to do things, and that was always a big stumbling block.
Mark: Are there some memorable instances in your career you care to share?
Duane: My flying career you mean?
Mark: Yeah, let’s talk about your flying career, ‘cause you’ve got a big plane beyond you.
[Laughing]
Duane: Well I, let’s see the first airplane I had was a hand me down 180 from Horton Jensen. It was a good airplane except the radios the in it weren’t the best. The only experience I had with that aircraft that was bad, I was flying IFR back to Washington D.C. and I was above the clouds and so forth in the clear and my radios went out. And I had no navigation at all and the only emergency radio I had was way in the back in the baggage compartment, so I had to keep rolling the trim ahead on it trying to get back there, and it’s start up, roll the trim some more. I finally got to it and I got into Fort Wayne, Indiana I guess and they said, after I landed there they said they could tell I was desperate. But I got the radios fixed and went on in to Washington. So with the 210 up at Edmonton Industrial Airport, which is an airport right downtown Edmonton, buildings all around. Took off out of there and blew a jug on the engine, and my heart sank, we’re going to crash. Well my observer John Koerner, I believe it was, turned white and [unintelligible] turned downwind and landed just fine.
Mark: In downtown Edmonton.
Duane: We made it back to the airport.
Mark: Did you have any other incidents when you were a pilot?
Duane: Well yeah, in 712, which was a 206 Amphib floats; well a couple experiences with that one. Just before the surveys one year I fueled the airplane full, it was an airplane I didn’t fly commonly all the time; full of fuel and loaded the observer on and I went out west of Edmonton and there’s a big lake out there, said, “Well we’ll land here and see how it performs.” Well we taxied around a little bit and went to take off, the darn thing would not get in the air; kept running out of space. And we did several attempts, you know, back and forth trying to make waves and so forth that would help us into the air without success. And I said, “John there’s only one way we’re going to get this out of here and that’s if we lighten the load.” So I taxied put pretty close to shore and said, “Get out.” [chuckled] So he got out and I made a couple of runs and was able to get it off the water, and then I came back in a 180 and landed in the field out there and picked him up there. So yeah, the other incident was with the same 206 flying just at the edge of the bush in northern Alberta, going over to the Coal Lake restricted area, military area. And of course we always flew up to almost tree top level so never really bothered about calling people when we flew through the restricted area. And anyhow we were right on the very edge of it anyway, but all a sudden the engine goes [makes noise]. And my gosh, I said “Well something has to be wrong.” I switched tanks and the engine died, switched it back again and it starts 5
sparking and I said, “We’ve got to land, or we’re going in the trees.” So I called Coal Lake tower and declared an emergency and they cleared us to land there; they were very nice to us and refueled us. It turned it out the filter, the gas filter caps were worn out and were venting fuel. And so I spent, I supposed a year’s time explaining that, why I was in the restricted area and why it was necessary to land there. So that’s basically it.
Mark: Any memorable people you worked with?
Duane: Frank Bellrose.
Mark: Tell us about Frank.
Duane: Well he was a, he worked with the wood duck. And every year when I was at Chautauqua, he would say, “Well I’m going to finish my book on the wood duck.” As far as I know, he never did finish it, but he kept finding new things in research with it. He was a very interesting fellow to work with.
Mark: Anybody else you worked with that sticks with you.
Duane: No.
Mark: Well anything else you’d like to recount from your career?
Duane: Not really I guess.
Mark: [laughing] Well then we’re done.
End of interview
Poetical Works of James Madison Bell
No full textThis volume of poetry includes a bigraphical sketch of the author, James Madison Bell (1826-1902), by Bishop Benjamin William Arnett (1838-1906). According to Arnett, Bell was an African-American poet, orator, and political activist. He was an Ohio native who lived in Canada and San Francisco before settling with his family in Toledo in 1865
Madison County, Alabama Deed Book 'K'
No full textA photocopy of the Madison County Deed Book 'K' pages 120-121 that mentions Thomas and Rebecca Gray
James Madison University to Host ACE Fellow, Dr. Mary K. Ramsey
No full textJames Madison University President Jonathan Alger announced today that Dr. Mary K. Ramsey, professor of English at Eastern Michigan University, a 2021-2022 American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow, will spend the full academic year on the James Madison University campus.
Established in 1965, the ACE Fellows Program is designed to strengthen institutional and leadership capacity in American higher education by identifying and preparing faculty and staff for senior positions in college and university administration. Fifty-two Fellows, nominated by the senior administration of their institutions, will comprise the 2021-22 cohort at colleges and universities across the nation
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
- …
