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AI: So, that was 1986 that you retired?

EH: Uh-huh.

AI: Well, in between that time, before, before you retired in 1986, lots of things were happening in the country and here locally as well. You had mentioned, of course, that people were coming as refugees from Vietnam in the '70s, because of the Vietnam War, and I wanted to ask you, when the Vietnam War was going on, were you or your family members involved at all in some of the protests that were going on? Or what was your thought at that time?

EH: (Yes), when we were in Berkeley, Berkeley, in '65, '66, Berkeley had its first anti-Vietnam march, and that was an experience. And we knew that that was once-in-a-lifetime. Berkeley had, by then, the reputation. So we did, Ralph and I went, and a bunch of John Hay Whitney fellows that were there, couples, families were there, we all went to participate, not so much, not so much to be anti-, anti-war, but to experience it. I just came back from a visit in North Carolina where one of the fellows was, from North Carolina to Berkeley, and she writes, she ends up writing a book of, as a Southerner, Berkeley Through Bifocals. And she writes about this Vietnam experience, and it was significant. There was masses of us, it was dark, it was probably fall, but the Berkeley police would not let us get past Prince Street, which is the street that divides Oakland and Berkeley. They would, the marchers were, wanted to go down to Oakland to boycott the army depot down there, but they were not (going to) let us get into Oakland, so we had to turn around and come back to the city park in Berkeley. But Berkeley was very livewire that way. When Candy got back to Seattle, she was regretting having to leave Berkeley, because as a... and she, she might have gotten her activist start there. But she remembered vividly as a junior-higher, going around that junior high neighborhood, I suppose, tying yellow ribbons on lampposts as a, signifying being an anti-war, Vietnam, and she got to Berkeley, and -- I mean, she got back to Seattle, none of that was going on. She just thought Seattle was a stay back community. [Laughs] But, (yes), Berkeley was a real livewire.

AI: And in comparison, back here in Seattle, it wasn't as active as far as anti-war activism.

EH: No, but there were some anti-Vietnam movement going on. We were, I guess we were at the Unitarian church by then, and there was, there will always be peaceniks. Interestingly, Larry, her older brother wouldn't have been that much, but Candy would have been out there marching. But that was an era when -- in Public Health, witnessing all these Vietnam refugees coming on was a real learning experience, 'cause I had to kind of calm the daycare staff, because they were so afraid that we were (going to) get swamped with all kinds of bugs. One of the things they did find in, among the refugees was worms, intestinal worms. And, but they were getting, they would get medicated for that. When the child was not picking up weight as they should, then there was always a suspect that there may be worms. The other thing that happened was tuberculosis... a lot of the refugees -- not a lot, but some of them were getting medication for TB, and the daycare staff would get so upset and call me and say, "How come we're getting patients that have, people that have a potential for TB?" And you'd have to explain that once it's under control, it's controlled.

Though I had a, a black army vet who apparently had been a cook in the army, and to become a cook in the infant center, he had to have, have cleared the Public Health's food handler's permit, that kind of thing, and have, he had had a discharge, medical exam. But one day at Public Health, one of the nurses said, "Hey, Elaine, is Washington one of your centers?" I said, "(Yes)," and he says, "Well, you need to know, the cook, I just isolated the cook for TB." And I thought, "How could that be?" And I went up to the TB clinic, and I said, "Why does this happen?" But it did, and then I had to go to the center and calm the staff down. [Laughs] But they all had to take skin tests by then, and I don't think anybody found any danger items.

But in infant centers, you had to be particularly careful because things like diarrhea would travel so fast. We had a new item called giardia, which was strange around here. It's, it's kind of known as a diarrhea that kids picked up in the woods, it's a natural, I've called, I've heard it called "beaverrhea," because that's one of the suspects of a carrier. And one of the nurses at, one of my friends at Public Health came down with it, and they could never find out what the cause was, because it was so strange around here. And she should have known, because she had that bug in Colorado as a Public Health nurse, and she was a mountain climber. But it was interesting because gradually, by the time I left in '86, we had had an infant center with giardia, there was a daycare home in Bothell that had giardia, and a couple of centers. But I think they had to close the home in Bothell, and there they assumed that the dog had gone out to, to the woods, the streams in the woods and had picked it up and brought it home. But they, that situation, they, they vacuumed the, Public Health came in and vacuumed the rugs thoroughly and took all the samples with them.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.