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AI: Well, before we go further, I wanted to ask you to just tell a little bit about your childhood. Maybe a little bit about the area that you grew up, and a little bit about the nature of your schools, your school experience.

HM: Well, Bloomfield was a suburban town, a bedroom community. My father used to commute to New York. He'd go to the station and it was about a twenty-minute train ride, and then a ferry ride over to New York. And I think it was a town of about 40,000. We had several manufacturing industries. And I can't say that there was anything special. I was an only child, my parents were older than most parents, so when I was in high school, there were four of us girls who were almost inseparable. And my father would take us various places for evening affairs, but he was always very strict about my getting home on time, and when I didn't get home on time he would appear in the doorway of the school dance and embarrass me terribly. [Laughs]

And the other aspect, when I was in high school, my aunt was the art teacher. And I had grown up knowing all of her fellow high school teachers as "Aunt" this and "Aunt" that. And here I came along, and I learned to call Aunt Maude "Miss Gay," and Aunt Angeline "Miss Hartz," and it was sort of a state secret that I was really known to all of these people much better than either one of us, I guess, wanted to admit. And I played in the school orchestra. I was active in the Girl Scouts. And otherwise, had a pretty normal growing up.

AI: Did you enjoy school?

HM: Yes, I did. I had excellent teachers, and, of course, my parents being older and stricter, expected nothing less than an "A," and when I came home with a "B," I might as well have flunked the course. But thanks to my teachers, I didn't.

AI: Well, now, in high school, did you have some idea of what you might be interested in? A field to pursue, or, what were some of your hopes and dreams at that time?

HM: Well, I had an aunt who was a social worker, and so, in an effort to understand personal relationships, she guided me to many social work books, and I think I always had in the back of my mind that I wanted to do something in the way of social work, and my college major was sociology, but I took supervised case work, and then I, after college, I worked for a former professor who had become the registrar of Michigan State...

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.