UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #900
BERKOWITZ, NORMA

BERKOWITZ, NORMA (née Norma Nesbitt, 1929- )
Clinical Assistant Professor Emerita in the UW-Madison School of Social Work 
At UW: 1967-1993

Interviewed: 	January 6, 2008 (1 session)	
Interviewer: 	Sandy Pfahler
Transcriptionist: Allison Page
Auditor:	Ellen Jacks
Length: 	1 hour, 41 minutes

See index for abstract and key words.
First Interview Session (January 6, 2008): Digital File
00:00:00 Start of Interview

SP:  	Today is Sunday, January 6, 2008. My name is Sandy Pfahler and I’m an interviewer with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Oral History Program. Today I’m interviewing Norma Berkowitz, Clinical Assistant Professor Emeritus in the UW-Madison School of Social Work. Norma Berkowitz began her career at Wisconsin in 1967 and retired in 1993. She is the founder and current president of Friends of Chernobyl Centers, United States or FOCCUS. We’ll learn more about FOCCUS in the interview. Good morning!

NB: 	Good morning. 

00:00:42

SP: 	We’re going to start the interview by asking you to talk about your early life, when and where you were born, talk about your family, your early schooling, any people that influenced you in your career.

NB: 	Okay. Well I can tell you where I was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, which is about thirty-two miles from Pittsburg. So I grew up in a basically a coal mining, steel kind of city, it was a small town.

SP: 	What year was that?

NB: 	1929 [laughs]. And in terms of my family background, my grandparents both came from Scotland and Wales, on both my mother and father’s side. And we had a small family; it was my mother and dad, and I had a sister who was killed in an automobile accident with her three children in the 1950s. And my mother had a sister and my father had two sisters. Neither of my father’s sisters had any children, and so I was probably spoiled [laughs].

SP: 	What did your father do?

NB: 	My father was—my grandfather had a dry-goods store in this small town in which we lived and when he died my father ran the store, but they lost it during the Depression so my father went into sales and he did life insurance and a bunch of other things and finally ended up working for a company that did, that made gasoline pumps. And eventually my dad became a distributor for them.

SP: 	Did he have to travel then?

NB:	 Mmm hmm. Yeah he had eastern United States territory. My mother did not have a career. My father only had a grade school education. My mother had a kind of a secretarial kind of very brief—and she had a problem with her back that kept her pretty, not as easy to get around as she would have liked. So she was always a homebody, but she was very musical and she was a soloist in many of the churches and community functions and she belonged to a quartette, women’s quartette, and I can still see them in their taffeta printed gowns. So I also had a very musical family. And one of my dad’s sisters was the person of the world in the family and she started a college career but gave it up and then went in to secretarial work and business work and eventually lived in Chicago and New York City, and then came back to hometown and as a secretary for a chief executive of a steel firm. But she’s the one who got me interested in the world and in music and theater.

SP: 	Were you able to visit her in Chicago?

NB: 	No, that was when I was young.

SP: 	Oh.

NB: 	Oh once I remember we went to the World’s Fair when she was there in ’49. So I remember that. But when she came back to Beaver Falls, she was opera buff and ever Saturday afternoon, there were no excuses, I went to her place and we listened to the Metropolitan Opera and we had the librettos right in front of us and most of them she had already seen and she’d say now here’s Aida and here’s where they actually bring an elephant on the stage [laughs].

SP: 	[laughs].

NB: 	So it made it very real. 

SP: 	Oh I’m sure. 

00:05:50

SP: 	What about your—now this was a small town.

NB: 	Yeah about fourteen, sixteen thousand at the time.

SP: 	Oh okay, well that isn’t—that’s a lot.

NB: 	Well it’s not big.

SP: 	No it’s not big but it—what was the, you went to public school?

NB: 	Oh yeah. 

SP: 	Was it a good school system?

NB: 	Yes, I think so. Yeah, I think so. My high school—yeah, I would say yes, it was very good. I almost flunked Latin, but the rest of them—I was good enough to get into the National Honors Society, but I nearly flunked Latin.

SP: 	Now was that just because you weren’t interested and didn’t study or you--?

NB: 	I just didn’t get it [laughs] and we had a teacher that was so severe and so critical, nobody wanted to open their mouths so you didn’t [laughs].

SP: 	I see. 

NB: 	And I was never very good at math either. But I had a great time in school and very active.

SP: 	Were you involved in music in school?

NB: 	Yeah. I played the piano, not very well, well enough to play for the chorus. And I was a member of the Ushers Club at the high school and we ushered for all concerts that came to the city. They all played, we only had one concert hall and it was in the high school and if you were a good student and you were well liked, you got elected to the Ushers Club—it was all girls—and then you got into the concerts for free. That was a time when—that would be in the ‘40s, late ‘40s—when a lot of small towns were bringing, had, there was some sort of program where they could bring nationally known artists to small communities. So that’s how I got my, a lot more to music education. 

SP: 	Now you, but you were fairly close to Pittsburg---

NB: 	Yeah.

SP: 	Where the cultural—

NB: 	And I had a girlfriend that also loved music and so did her mother and I still remember going to my first opera at Pittsburg—oh what’s the name of the, not Rotary Club—

SP: 	Lions?

NB: 	No, the Masons, the Masonic Temple in Pittsburg was the biggest place and I remember going to my first opera there and sitting up in peanut heaven. Then once in a while we’d get to the opera that way and I was in high school when I went the first time. So music has always been a part of my life.

SP:	 Did you go to college then right after high school?

NB: 	Mmm hmm. 

SP: 	And did you know when you were in high school that that was what you were going to [do]?

NB:	 I thought so.

SP: 	And your parents supported that?

NB: 	Yeah, and half a block from our house was Geneva College and Geneva College was a liberal arts college, very small and run by the Reformed Presbyterian Church, the Covenant of—. And of course I could live at home and so the cost wasn’t too great. But I used to get teased; yeah you roll out of bed and into your class [laughs] because I was so close!

SP: 	Well how big a student body was it?

NB: 	Six hundred maybe at the most. And when I started out I wanted to be an anthropologist or an archeologist and then I quickly learned that there was no future in that unless you got a PhD and if you got a PhD there still wasn’t much of a future. So I decided to major in sociology. And I worked my way through two years there and then I decided I really didn’t know what I wanted to do and I quit. 

00:10:30

SP: 	And then what?

NB: 	Well I became, I got a job on one of the local newspapers and I wrote obituaries [laughs].

SP:	 [laughs]. 

NB:	It was a small town, even smaller than Beaver Falls. So I did that for a while, while I was—

SP: 	Was that a full-time job?

NB: 	Mmhm. Yeah. I mean I did proofreading, I mean you know, I just got the whole spiel. And it was while I was trying to decide—I mean I didn’t want to keep on going to the college and not knowing what I wanted to do. And sociology was fine, but I didn’t want to, again, you know, what do you do with a sociology major? Without a PhD? I figured this can’t, this isn’t right. Oh at one point I wanted to be a nurse and my parents said what do you want to that for, you want to carry bedpans the rest of your life and I didn’t know if I wanted to that. So—

SP: 	So they didn’t try to influence you in a particular—if they didn’t like the idea they didn’t try—

NB: 	They didn’t—well they didn’t like the nursing idea but they didn’t put pressure on me to do this or to do that, or go here or go there. And while I was working that year off of college, or year and a half, whatever it was; we were close enough to Pittsburg and the trains ran often enough, I took a couple of courses at the University of Pittsburg on criminology and something else I forget. But then I decided I really wanted to go and settle down to something and there was a wonderful woman that lived in a rental apartment of my aunt’s and she was a social worker. And one day she said you know I have to take this mentally retarded child to the state hospital and I don’t want to do it by myself, would you go along? So I said sure and of course we had plenty of time to talk on the way and I got in to this institution, which I never would have gotten into alone and she talked a lot about what she did as a social worker and I thought oh well that sounds pretty good and then maybe I could—and I knew social workers worked in hospitals so I thought well, you know, I don’t want to be there as a nurse but maybe as a social worker. So, I decided to go finish my education, college education, sort of getting ready to be a social worker and I decided to go to Penn State. So I spent my last two years at Penn State. And you asked if my parent encouraged me? They did and it wasn’t easy for them, they didn’t have whole lot of money. By the way my sister decided to be a nurse [laughs].

SP: 	Oh! [laughs].

NB: 	She was a nurse. But you know I remember ever time wrote a check for ten dollars, I had to call my dad and say I just wrote a check worth of ten dollars is there enough money in the bank to cover it? So it was tight.

SP:	Did you work while you were in school?

NB: 	I would say no but I was—you mean at Penn State?

SP:	Yeah, at Penn State.

NB: 	No. Because of the nature of the town and so on it wasn’t a good place where you could work and go to school—at that point, now you can because it’s a big kind of populated area. But I became—what did they call them? At the dormitory, a councilor, at the dormitory and I got free housing and that was better than having a job.

SP: 	Oh sure. 

NB: 	So that’s how that went.

SP: 	Did you enjoy your two years at Penn State?

NB: 	Oh yeah. I got involved in—well yes. When I was at Geneva College I also got involved in drama and so when I went to Penn State I got involved in the theater club there. What else did I do? 

SP: 	Did you continue the music?

NB: 	No, no just more as an observer, not as a participant. 

SP: 	And what about the education, your education, were your classes--?

NB: 	They were good.

SP: 	They were good classes?

NB: 	Yeah, and they didn’t have an undergraduate degree in social work at those times, but I had a good instructor and knew what I wanted to do and he said:  “Well, you know, over about an hour and a half bus ride here across the mountains is the only institution for mentally retarded women of childbearing age in the whole country. So if you really want to get some social work experience, I will give you independent credit and if we can arrange for you to go there.” So that’s what we did [laughs].

SP: 	Wow. So how did you do—what did you do spend like a semester or something?

NB: 	I don’t know if it was a semester or a whole year. Trudging over across campus to the bus, hoping on the bus, over the mountains da-da-da-da-da and that was my first experience with the mentally handicapped. 

SP: 	Talk about it. What was—and you still wanted to be a social or even more you wanted to be a social worker?

NB: 	Oh yeah, yeah. And so I completed the bachelor’s degree with a sociology and psychology majors, or major and minor. And I had pretty much decided that I wanted to be a social—then I went back to my medical thinking, well I can be, you know, this is fine I can be a medical social [worker]. Well I got out and found out you couldn’t be a medical social worker without a master’s degree. That was a blow [laughs].

00:17:26

SP:	Now was it—you weren’t opposed to doing that, it’s just that you wanted to get out and work. Is that it? 

NB: 	You mean opposed to what?

SP: 	Well you—it was a blow that you were going to have to have a master’s degree.

NB: 	Yeah, because I had no way to get a master’s degree. 

SP: 	Okay, okay. Right. I get it.

NB: 	Yeah it was—my sister was in nursing school and they were supporting and you know there were very limited resources. And I didn’t put any pressure on them say oh thanks for the bachelor’s degree but how bout—[laughs]. So I ended up getting a job as a caseworker in a welfare department up near the New York border in Montrose, Pennsylvania. It’s not too far from the New York border. And so I worked up there for a year and a half, two years maybe. That was a different experience too.

SP: 	Now in what way? What were the things you had to?

NB: 	Well the most vibrant memory I have was that I was a junior visitor because I wasn’t qualified quite as a social worker, and one of the things I had to do was go out and make calls on people, pre-adoption, who were taking care of kids who were pending adoption. So that was—and just come back and say okay everything looks okay or not. Well I went—and I had a relationship with this family—we had placed a newborn there and plans were moving ahead for the adoption and then they just heard that they were going to have to take the baby to the office to meet potentially adoptive parents. Well, the farmer came out with his shotgun. Get away from here! You know I didn’t argue [laughs].

SP: 	I guess not! 

NB: 	I left and called quick to the office and they had to call the police and come. So that’s the most vivid memory I have of that time. And it was an interesting experience to live in such a small agricultural area away from any kind of academic or environment or anything. It was kind of a lonely time, but it was okay and then my college boyfriend called and came up and wanted to get married and I said okay [laughs]. So that ended that experience. 

SP: 	So then where did you go? 

NB: 	Penn Sta—at State College, Penn State. 

SP: 	Okay you went back there.

NB: 	Yeah he got a job as a field representative for the National Holstein Association. He was a, he got his degree at Penn State, that’s where I met him, and he was an Ag [agricultural] major and he’d grown up on a farm. So this was a good match for him and he could open up his office anywhere he wanted and State College is right in the center of the state so it was no big deal. I mean you didn’t have to go across state every time you need to go somewhere.

SP: 	So did you work then?

NB: 	Yeah I worked as the office secretary. And this was a membership organization—I learned a lot—it was a membership organization and they did teaching and training and held annual meetings and blah, blah, blah you know that whole thing. And I ran the office out of our home so that was my first kind of office experience and it went pretty well.

00:21:59

SP: 	And how long did you do that?

NB: 	Well let’s see by this time it must have been [pause] ’51? No we were married in ’51. So I did that till about [pause] ’55 or something like that. Then we came out into Wisconsin.

SP: 	Was that his job that brought him to Madison?

NB: 	He got a new job.

SP: 	Okay.

NB: 	He became a sales manager for National Agricultural Supply Company, NASCO, which is headquartered in Fort Atkinson [Wisconsin].

SP: 	So was that, in your mind, was that a positive move? Were you excited about that?

NB: 	Yeah I think so, although it meant being farther from home. But it was a new adventure and a new part of the world and I’d been out here to one of the national conferences with him so it wasn’t like going to some place I had never been before and we had a chance to come out here before and see and talk to people before he accepted the job. So yeah, it was okay.

SP: 	And when you got here, how long—did you know that there was a school of social work here?

NB: 	No. I wasn’t even thinking about that. I had two kids by this time and that was the center of life [laughs].

SP: 	So did you not work out of the home for a while when you--?

NB: 	That’s right. Yeah for a couple of years I didn’t.

SP: 	And then what? 

NB: 	Well I think one of the things that was—a big thing was when my sister was killed in the automobile accident with three of her kids. And one, the only one that lived - her husband was out of the car so he survived and the oldest child survived but with severe brain damage. And that was tough on absolutely everybody.

SP: 	I can’t imagine. 

NB: 	That was a hard time and that’s when the strains in my marriage began to really show and we separated. I went back to Pennsylvania, and then we got together and I came back here, and then we finally got a divorce. 

00:24:53

SP: 	But you stayed here?

NB: 	Yeah. But by the time I could see the handwriting on the wall and then by that time I knew there was a school of social work here [laughs] and I eventually, after we broke up, got a job in the social work—in the welfare department in Jefferson County. And then that’s when I started to take courses, not so much on campus, but because these were all during the day, but I took courses in Janesville [Wisconsin], couple of courses in Janesville. Night courses.

SP: 	So they were sponsored by--?

NB: 	By the School of Social Work.

SP: 	Oh, okay. I didn’t know that they did that. 

NB: 	Well they did then. 

SP: 	Yeah, but not very many departments did that in those days right?

NB: 	No, no. And I had a really good instructor, Jack Sternbach, I don’t know if you’ve ever run across it, but he was good, very good. So that’s how I ended up at the University of Wisconsin.

SP: 	So you were a student then, but, and you were, when did you get, did you then eventually start working for the school before you got your degree?

NB: 	Well no, no. I continued to work in Jefferson County and I took these couple of courses.

SP: 	Now what were you doing in Jefferson County?

NB:	 I was working as a case worker in the public welfare department.

SP: 	Were there a lot of cases in Jefferson County?

NB: 	Oh yes. 

SP: 	Really?

NB: 	It’s a poor, relatively poor, agricultural community. There were some industry there, the big one is the sausage people.

SP: 	Oh Jones? No.

NB: 	No, I forget what it is and it will take me too long to remember [laughs].

SP: 	That’s okay.

NB: 	And there’s another dairy [pause] kind of manufacturing plant that’s big. But it was a good place to raise my kids. Really, it was; schools were pretty good and we lived two blocks from the elementary school.

SP: 	In which town did you live?

NB: 	Fort Atkinson.

SP: 	In Fort Atkinson. Okay. 

NB: 	And I continued to work, after we separated, I continued to work for a while but I was always finagling how to keep my finger in the academic pie so I could get my degree. And the school was wonderful to me in that we had to do a field placement, you know, and that’s a huge thing. I mean it’s half-time. Well how was I going to work full-time down there and do half-time up here? No way. But they said well there’s a mental health clinic in Jefferson and it’s run by a certified psychologist and there is psychiatric consultation there so we’ll let you make out your own schedule with them and we’ll give you credit for it. So they were, I mean they really, really were very, very good. Without the flexibility that they offered me, I would never ever have made it.

SP: 	And was that in the ‘60s?

NB: 	Mmhm. Yeah, yeah. So I was able to complete one year of my field placement down there and that was a really big thing. Then I had the courses, night courses, that I had taken. It got to the point where for the second year you just have to have full—not anymore, but back then—I could see if you are ever going to get through this you’re going to have to be free to do for a year. So we moved, I moved my kids from Fort Atkinson to Madison, Middleton rather, and that worked out just fine. The Middleton schools were fine, they had a good time, we still have friends they made there. And I could devote myself to what I needed to do.

SP: 	So you went to school full-time then for--?

NB: 	For a year.

SP: 	For a year. 

NB: 	Yeah. 

00:29:45

SP: 	Do you remember any particular faculty members that were influential?

NB: 	Sure. Yeah. Ray Munts [Raymond Munts] who was later the head, a head, or he was the head of the school then. And I was not a policy person, I mean I knew you had to know him, and Ray was a politician and he taught policy, but he did it in the most creative way because he turned our classroom into the Legislature. And we each were assigned roles and he gave us the names of real persons [laughs].

SP: 	Oh my! I bet that would be fun.

NB: 	So that’s the way he ran the course and he was a great guy, wonderful human being. And the other person that was very important to me was not a tenured faculty person, a clinical faculty person, named Imogene Higbie. She taught the practice course and she was absolutely phenomenal and very committed to real-life teaching and real-life relationships in the process of teaching. So she stands out. And then the other two were Ann Minahan and Allan Pinkus. And Ann didn’t have a PhD, but she was a member of the tenured faculty and she and Allan Pinkus came out with an approach to social work practice called the Systems Approach. It was, at the time, in the writer world, people were talking about systems and da-da-da-da-da-da and I forget the name of the guy who came up with Systems Theory. But anyhow that was their model for teaching social work practice and that was Imogene’s model for social work practice and that was me! [laughs]. I never wanted to be a psychotherapist. I was always looking for how one thing related to another and if you had a social work client, you need to know who’s involved in their lives, what agencies they’re involved with, what they are getting from this or that or whatever, you know. I never wanted to be a psychotherapist because what a psychotherapist does is look inside your head while you didn’t have anything going on inside your head, it may or may not help you. So that was not for me so this approach seemed to be who I was and the way I was living my life and that made it more meaningful. 

SP: 	Now do you know, was that unique to this social school?

NB: 	Yes.

SP: 	It was?

NB: 	It was unique to this social work school and it was eventually picked up all over the country. Some schools, which is the model for social work education, was a casework group work community organization and in most schools of social work you were on that track, or that track, or that track.

SP: 	Okay.

NB: 	And this school of social work never did that.

SP: 	I get it.

NB: 	It still doesn’t, thank god! You can still come out and you’re not a clinical social worker, or a psychotherapist, you’re not a group worker, you’re not a blah-blah-blah. You are a social worker [laughs] and you will get the contact, and you know there’s a whole bunch of that stuff. But that was me and that’s the way I saw the world and it was so wonderful to come and see that this was okay, that somebody a lot brighter and a lot older and a lot more experience than I was said this is, you know, this is a way to see the world. And it was just right for me and people also—I got my master’s degree in ’67 I think, I don’t remember, but it was—the other thing I wanted to say, and I read some of my stuff before you came, I was always prevention. You know, it’s alright if you have to do something to help people when something has happened, that’s good. But if you can prevent what has happened to them from happening to them, that’s even better and I still live by that and I still work in that way. And I, so I worked with the guy in the psychiatry department [pause], Bowman, and he was writing about prevention and basic prevention approaches to, not disease prevention, but social prevention. And that’s where I am right now and I’m still engaged in Wisconsin Cares, headed by Jack Westman, who retired from psychiatry. And this is the whole thing that we’re still doing [laughs].

00:35:46

SP: 	Well I want to hear more about that, but I want to hear how you got there because you got your degree in 1967 and did you immediately—

NB: 	I joined the faculty.

SP: 	You did? 

NB: 	[laughs]. That was the time when the federal government was pouring money into social work education because things were in such bad shape and they needed, needed people. So they were pouring money into schools of social work and our school of social work got it. And I applied to the division of mental hygiene; they had their hands on the money, so I applied to them for financial support because I wasn’t getting enough child support to do all this. So I got a stipend and the stipend came from the federal government through the state, through the mental hygiene, to the school of social work. 

SP: 	I see.

NB: 	And then between the school and the division of mental hygiene they decided who would get these stipends and so I got one. Have you heard of Martin Loeb? Oh you must have heard of Martin Loeb.

SP: 	But why?

NB: 	He was the head of the school of social work.

SP: 	Okay.

NB: 	The charismatic [laughs]—

SP: 	I think I have heard of him, yes.

NB: 	To put it mildly, charismatic. Anyway, he said given all the experience that I have had and I had done so well, he said we just got money for a position [pause] it’s not a faculty position and you can’t be a faculty member the first year, but if you do okay then I can give you the faculty position. And it was a clinical, non-tenured, I don’t remember what they called this even, we weren’t called anything [laughs] we were just there. So I worked, the first year after grad school, I worked with Harry Waisman in the child development clinic at the old University Hospital down here and actually that’s where I met [Len’s] wife and him [laughs]. So I worked for a year with Harry Waisman as a social worker in the child development clinic but with the understanding that if all went well, Martin said you’ll have a non-tenured field instructor, that’s what they called, field instructor position with us and you’re not on tenured track da-da-da-da and it’s not clear that the funding will last forever but you can start. So that’s how I got started.

SP: 	So what did you do as a field worker? 

NB: 	As a field instructor? In the school of social work you have to take two, one-year, half-time field placements.

SP: 	Like you did at the mental, or at—

NB: 	So I had students who came to the clinic on a regular basis that I supervised and then the school set up kind of a way for, because there were other positions within the school funded this way and they were called field instructors, and we didn’t teach in the classroom, but we were the ones who were supposed to teach people the skills that they needed to be a social worker. And most of us also felt we had to relate that to what they were learning in the classroom. So that’s how I started out as a field instructor. Then I was placed at the Waisman Center once the Waisman Center opened up and so on and I had a variety of experiences there.

00:40:25

SP: 	Talk about some of them.

NB: 	Well there was—oh well let me just go back and say one more thing because people kept saying to me Norma, if anybody should go on for a PhD, you should. I said you don’t know me very well [laughs].

SP: 	Well I was going to ask that question too!

NB: 	I am not interested. I don’t see the world that way. I’m not good at statistics. I want to be in a people world and at that point I didn’t have any big conceptions about being a teacher, I never wanted to be a teacher either. So here I was sort of teaching. Excuse me. I have to get a PhD was the best decision I have ever made. So I just continued as a field instructor—

SP: 	Well you were talking about the Waisman Center and you had various experiences.

NB: 	Yeah and the first experience was as a field instructor within the Waisman Center and had a diagnostic and treatment unit. Kids who were having developmental problems, from anywhere in the state, could call up and ask to be seen by the interdisciplinary team at this diagnostic and treatment unit. And this unit was a teaching unit for all the disciplines who came there and it was the most exciting thing. Every day I went to work I learned from everybody because we had teaching, nursing, speech language, neurology, psychology, you know all of these disciplines and we would all be working on the same case. So you would come together to say okay we’ve all gathered the information that we want you know before they came in and you’d get the—that was one of the things we had to do, we had to get their school reports, the doctor reports and then we all had that information and then we planned what we were going to do in terms of the evaluation of this. Then when they came in we all did our evaluation then we had a case [pause] final, and we all got together, including the parents, and we said this is what psychiatry found, this what this recommends, and then we worked with the parents and we’d bring it all together. Now that was utopia and there is no place in the country today where you could go and find that kind of experience. It was and it isn’t even happening at the Waisman Center anymore, everything is too fragmented and the disciplines—we have to teach our own blah-blah-blah. So it was an absolutely—and it so fit with my perception of the world, that people are not just this, or just that, or just this situation, or that situation.

SP: 	You have this whole system.

NB: 	It’s the whole system and what happens in the school has relevance for what happens when you go to the doctors and when you go to the doctors that has something to say about what is going on in the family. The family gets mad at the doctor, you know that whole thing. So that was wonderful.
SP: 	Sounds like it. But were able to do that, not throughout your career right?

00:44:25

NB: 	No. Well, no, that’s where I started and then they promoted me [laughs].

SP: 	Oh dear [laughs].

NB: 	And I became the coordinator for all the training, I was head of the interdisciplinary training committee. So I did that.

SP: 	Did you enjoy that?

NB: 	Oh yeah.

SP: 	Good.

NB: 	Very much. But then, I don’t know where we are, seven, six years out of grad school and even with all that excitement it was, I was beginning to feel limited and thinking about well you have a choice. Do you want to stay in this, I mean that’s the wonderful part about social work, you can work with this client group, if you get disgusted with that you can, you know don’t want to work with the mentally-ill anymore okay get a job working with the aging, blah-blah-blah. So I was happy but I was thinking there’s more out there. Len’s wife Nettie was working with me, I mean we were all at the Waisman Center, and I started telling her well I don’t know I’m getting sort of bored with this. And she said well Len and I are going to Oxford next year, why don’t you think about going to England? I said yes sure. Just poof, she said no I’m serious, write up your resume, give it to Len, he knows a couple of people over in Oxford that are high up in the social work education over there. And I put it off, and put it off, and she said come on. So I did it and he mailed it off to Oxford and what happened was the woman wrote back and she said well I don’t think Mrs. Nesbitt is qualified for an Oxford position but my very best friend is head of the council on social work education in the United Kingdom and I happen to know that they have a proposal, pending, for somebody who would have expertise in mental retardation and if they get that position maybe your friend would like to apply. Well you’re going to be amazed at this. So I’m working with a guy by [the name of] Harvey Stevens who was another big guy at Waisman Center in administration and head of mental retardation internationally. And there was going to be an international conference in Holland and he said Norma we’ll pay your way if you want to go. Oh I’ll go I said. I have to think oh my god did I really do this? I said okay I’m going to be in Holland why don’t I drop over to London [laughs]. And I did. I wrote to the woman who was the head of the social work, I had already sent in my resume and said I understand that you may be looking for somebody and here’s my resume and da-da-da. So I wrote and sort of said I’m gong to be in the neighborhood and I’d be glad to drop in for a job interview and my god that’s what I did. They said well we don’t have the funding for this yet, but I walked out of there knowing if they got the funding for that position I was going to get it. And I did. So I asked for a leave of absence here—oh and then what was I doing, but the end, that’s right—and I asked for a leave of absence here and then I went to London.

SP: 	So were your children—

NB: 	They were in college.

SP: 	They were on their own now. 

NB: 	Yeah. They were both in college and I said to my former husband okay it’s your turn. And he did. 

00:48:44

SP: 	So you went to London?

NB: 	I went to London. 

SP: 	What was that experience like?

NB: 	It was fascinating. I mean I really was impressed by the fact that we speak the same language but it doesn’t mean the same thing [laughs]. And professionally, they didn’t have a formal social work education classes in the university. This Council on Social Work Education was in charge of all of the, well let me say this differently, they didn’t have a degree in social work education but you took prepare courses at the university after you got your degree, it was called the certificate qualification in social work. So you got your degree and then you had this kind of, contributed to your degree, and you could call yourself a social worker but it wasn’t like having a bachelor’s degree in social work. So this council had to approve all of those course, that was one of the things that they did, and that was part of my job. Then they had another training course for nurses who were going to work in mental retardation facilities. It was a very different kind of educational process. And of course learning that university system is so different from ours and it took a while to get used to that but I had very good coworkers and I think they were as amazed of me as I was of them, where did she drop from, outer space?! But it was an interesting time, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

SP: 	How long did you stay in that position?

NB: 	About two years and by that time Len was courting me.

SP: 	Aha!

NB: 	[laughs]. And coaxed me back. 

SP: 	And you still had your leave of absence so you—

NB: 	Yeah, I wrote and said I’m not coming back at the end of this, you know, I mean, I don’t know what my future is. Well, Ray Munts wrote back and said your future is here and we’ll extend your leave until you decide what you want to do. I mean they were wonderful to me because I didn’t know, I mean I assumed I was coming back because Len was certainly going to come back, and if I were going to come with him [laughs] I better come. So I don’t know I would guess I was almost two years. But it was interesting, the cultural differences and the thing that just upset me the most was I’m a fairly good writer, I thought. Not over there. I would get my position papers and my reports back redlined, redlined, redlined. We don’t use active voice here, passive voice! You know things like that. And the other thing, relationships were different because I was living in London and London is a big, you know it’s a metropolitan and I had never lived in a place like that. But the people I worked with were very, very good, things were changing for the profession and it was a wonderful experience and I still have my contacts there, we still go back, and one of my best friends was one of my bosses. It was interesting and it brought me closer to Europe, which is important for further developments.

SP: 	Right, right.

00:53:35

NB: 	In terms of the international things, one of the things I did when I was—well that was when I came back and I’m not back yet so.

SP: 	Okay, well now you’re back. 

NB: 	[laughs]. And they wanted me to come back to the Waisman Center and I did, for a while, I don’t know a year, but it was a twelve month appointment and Len was on a nine month and you know we would have rather had the time together. So I went to Martin Loeb, who was a director by then, I said—I think it was Martin, maybe it was still Ray—and I said I don’t want to, I would like to stay with the school but I don’t want to stay in this position. And they said okay, how would you like to be the director of field education? That’s an assistant director’s position. Oh, okay. Oh and then in the meantime—now the first thing they did was say, okay why don’t you take charge of the, or maybe I did it at the same time, in charge of the hospital placement? So I really got back, I really got to the hospitals you see! Finally, finally. So I took on the responsibility—that’s what I did—I took on the responsibility for supervising, working with the supervisors of students who were placed in hospital and health settings. So I did that. Then I also did some teaching on health, medical social work, finally. Finally! And then they said [pause], no I think I did the director of social work first, the director of field placements first, yeah. But it was also a twelve month appointment so then I said I know, I don’t want to do this anymore, so then I just took on the medical social work then. And that was, that could be nine months. So that’s what I did. 

SP: 	And did you—so you finally got to the hospitals. Was that a positive experience [for you]?

NB: 	Oh well they had wonderful people, trained, expert social workers heading the social work students. I mean each hospital had maybe one or two students.

SP: 	And was it hospitals in the--?

NB: 	In here.

SP: 	Just in Madison?

NB: 	Madison. 

SP: 	Okay.

00:56:31

NB: 	I might have—yeah that’s right. So I think that’s what I was doing when I retired but I can’t remember that far back. But anyhow, and it was also during that time because of my experience—I mean I’d always been interested in the world—but because of my experience in England I really became internationally focused and I started a group in the school of social work called Social Work Students for International Outreach.

SP: 	That’s still in existence isn’t it?

NB: 	Well it’s been resurrected.

SP: 	Oh okay. 

NB: 	Susan Kid Webster has resurrected it and I can’t give her enough credit for that because I got so upset. Here we are, on a huge international campus. We have an international foundation, we have the department of international studies, da-da-da-da-da and where’s social work? Nowhere. So I was fighting this battle before I retired and when I left it just disappeared and thank god for Susan for resurrecting it. I mean the opportunities are there, you know, for students and even on this campus. So I’m really thrilled but I’m still disappointed because we do not have a single faculty person, we have never had a director of the social work program that has been willing to foster the international connections on this campus and I still get upset about that.

SP: 	Oh yeah. 

NB: 	And one of the answers that you hear is I’ve got my own research, you know.

SP: 	But you would think when a faculty position becomes vacant they would take that into consideration?

NB: 	I don’t think they do. Don’t quote me [laughs].

SP: 	I won’t [laughing].

NB: 	Well no, I mean I’ve just never been able to understand it. Social work has traditionally been an international profession, especially post-Second World War, but it doesn’t seem to somehow, and there are many schools of social work who have extensive international programs. And we’re supposed to be one of the best in the country and we don’t have any?

SP: 	That is odd. 

NB: 	So, anyhow.

00:59:26

SP: 	Well I wanted—I know that you’ve brought us up to your retirement and I know you’ve continued a lot of work into new areas since your retirement. But before we go into that I have to ask you, social work was and is still primarily a female profession?

NB: 	I think there was a blip maybe during the Vietnam period where we were attracting more men and I can’t say reliably whether that, whether we’re predominately female. My sense is, probably, but I don’t know. 

SP: 	Okay. Well one of the questions that I ask women on campus—and you’re in a unique position because you’re in a field where it’s primarily women—but not faculty is it?

NB: 	No I don’t think faculty.

SP: 	Well maybe you’re not in that unique—

NB: 	[laughs].

SP: 	Describe the culture for women on the Madison campus as you saw it. Did it help or hinder people?

NB: 	Well I was so involved I didn’t pay one bit of attention to that and, you know, we’re talking about the ‘60s before the women’s liberation and all that and so forth. And I was raising my family [inaudible] and just make it. So I didn’t experience any problems and I don’t think, I don’t remember my colleagues talking about [it]. One of the big issues, and it didn’t have to do with male or female, was the status of the non-tenured faculty.

SP: 	Talk about that.

NB: 	Well and I can’t talk about it in terms of pay and so forth. And the school of social work actually did pretty good, we had this association or this group of non-tenured faculty who were teaching and they made it. I mean we had our own system and we had a place to go where we commiserated with each other or we decided we’re going to present this case and so on. Then, at some point, the University developed this clinical track, clinical whatever, and you were identified as a clinical—or what did they call it? Well at first it was clinical faculty and it was not the same as adjunct faculty. Oh and what’s the other name for it?

SP: 	I can’t help you with it.

NB: 	Well just let me think a minute. You can turn that off. You know, I mean this is what morphed, it was all morphed into academic staff. But what happened was, in our department and I presume this was true across, once you got the track established then you had to meet certain criteria. And what was the criteria? Publishing. And it got to the point within my department when they started that I said no way, goodbye. Oh we don’t want you to say goodbye! I said I didn’t get a PhD because that’s, I mean they could look record, I had presented national conference papers, I had papers printed in this and that and the next thing, you know, but I wasn’t doing research. And even when I was at the Waisman Center they wouldn’t consider me the same as other, I mean I was different enough that I wasn’t considered like anybody else and so I got penalized for that. Well one of the great things that’s happened now with this interdisciplinary focus on campus is that people who are concerned about interdisciplinary matters, and are working across disciplines, will finally get noted for the fact that they’re doing interdisciplinary stuff and that’s important and you don’t have to be doing your sole research focused on your own field in order to get recognition. I think it’s one of the best things that’s happened. But I—and so I told them, I quit! And they said we don’t want you to quit. I said well I’m not going to, you know they even sent out within so many years—You know it was just like the tenure track. I said I’m not going to do it. They said okay you can stay [laughs] and I did. But I wanted to do—and I kept writing articles, I kept giving papers, you know, and so on and so forth and that was—but I was doing it on my terms and I guess that’s part of me, I’ll choose. 

01:05:23

SP: 	Alright, now talk about what you’ve been doing since you retired.

NB: 	Oh well I got a whole new life [laughs].

SP: 	I’m sure. I guess so.

NB: 	Well it was built on the foundation actually of always being interested in the world and building on the experience in England and the fact that I like to travel. Even going back to the idea that oh yeah I’d like to be an archeologist or an anthropologist. I really didn’t have any major plans for retirement.  I mean people say what are your plans for retirement? I don’t have a plan. Well you better get a plan or you’re going to be unhappy. And it wasn’t like that. It was like well when the time comes, I’ll do what I feel like doing and want to do and so on. And I thought okay maybe I would be—I was a thespian, I used to be in college performances and so forth—and one of the things I take this course on storytelling. You know this guy is very famous and I use my thespian practice and I’ll dress up and I’ll go to old age homes and group homes. I was also interested in architecture so I could go and get involved in historic preservation, that’s big in Madison. So I thought well those are two possibilities, that’s enough, you know. But a friend of mine in London—oh one of the things that I did get involved in was, I worked with University Extension and we designed little courses or we’d invite people to come. And when I was in London I met this wonderful person who was teaching at London School—social work at London School of Economics and I invited her here and she did stuff and we’ve been friends. So one day I get a note from her saying Norma I’ve got a grant from the SORIS Foundation to develop a series of books that will be used for the first textbooks teaching that will teach Russian academics how to teach social policy. And one of the ones that I would like to do—and she was doing, focusing on social policy in terms of social work practice—she said would you like to do a book on what American social workers do in health settings? And I mean this was just before I retired and I said, I wrote back and I said I’m not going to write a book, number one, and number two I will not write a book that just presents recent research findings. You know, because by the time you quote that research finding and you get it into press and people read, somebody has already said no that’s not right. Forget it, I’m not interested. But I said I’d be willing to do a concept book, you know, what are the concepts that guide social workers and give some illustrations. Okay, she said. So I started on that and that was about six months before I retired so one of my social worker academic colleagues from Fort Collins, Colorado—and he and I had worked very closely together and our heads were in the same place. And he was a member of a group called the Institute for Social Work Connection, something like that. And they were interested in and had been working in the former Soviet Union to train people who were not called social workers they were psychologists, but they were behavioral psychologists, you know because that’s the way things were in the Soviet Union. But they represented the potential for developing human services, otherwise social work profession. And he said they’re having a conference in Moscow and if, next six months or eight months from now, how are you and I going—he was going to help with the first and last chapter—he said how are we going to write about this if neither of us has ever been there or met them? Oh! I said great idea so we took ourselves off to Moscow. And at that Moscow conference I met the first, I met a group of very young, bright, wonderful professionals and psychologists, Belarus, Russian, and Ukraine. And they had just been hired by UNESCO to setup a network of community centers in Chernobyl effected areas. Could you believe it?! And of course the main issues were health and radiation and so forth so that just fit with me.

SP: 	Sure.

NB: 	So I went, talked with them, and got to know them and I went to the sessions they did and came back saying yeah I’m really interested in doing this book and I can see what some of the problems are. So we started on it and the next year I wasn’t finished, fortunately, because the next year they had a conference in Kiev and the same people, I met the same people, and I knew they were coming. So I said one of my agenda items is to have some time with them to learn more about what they’re doing and what they see as the future and so on. And after that I came back. There was a couple friends, one from Bethesda who was with me, and we came back and we said we have set up a project to support these people. They have a mission that no other group of people in the world have ever had to deal with. It was, first of all, the horrendous Chernobyl disaster and a few years the complete decline, breakup, of the Soviet Union. 

01:12:30

So we came back and [Mabs?] and I said well let’s talk with the International Connections people and see if we can get a project going. Well you know what happens when that takes place, people say oh Norma, [Mabs?], what a wonderful idea why don’t you?! So we started Friends of Chernobyl Centers, FOCCUS, [Friends of Chernobyl Centers, U.S.] as a project of this larger international organization. But it became clear that our mission was so much more focused than theirs and so much more manageable so we just agreed to separate and we went off and founded FOCCUS as a 501(c)3 nongovernmental organization. 

SP: 	And were you the original president?

NB: 	Yeah.

SP: 	And you’ve done this for how many years now?

NB: 	Oh I think it was ’94, ’96? I think it was ’94 the first time I went over and ’95 the second time I went over and by the time the organization—what was the name of the thing? They got on board and so it was about 1996 when we were actually a formalized entity and then it was in 2001 or [2002] where we got out 501(c)3 designation. So probably since ’96 that we’ve been working on this.

SP: 	Now what kind of assistance do you offer? What do you do for them?

NB: 	Well that’s—let me just say one of the things that we do for them is give them hope. In that situation and with the history of that culture and with the devastation of Chernobyl and we’ve been with them for a long time and they know they can count on us and we’re there. So hope is, if nothing else, and that has something to do with, you know, the length of time and the way we relate to them. But aside from that we’ve done, we’ve provided training for the staff, mostly over there. We’ve brought people, we’ve managed to bring some of the people here for special kinds of events or training. We now have our own request for proposals, strategy, where we set aside so much money and we say we have so much money and we’ll divide it between the centers if you pass our requirements and meet our expectations. So last year we gave twenty thousand dollars, something like that.

SP: 	And where does the money come from?

NB: 	Well that’s a good question [laughs]. The money comes from individual donations and fundraising events.

SP: 	So what kind of fundraising events have you had?

NB: 	Well, last year we had a wonderful one, we had the Swiss bicyclists—oh god, how many hours do you want to spend on?! [laughs]

SP: 	No tell me about it! This would be the--?

NB: 	The duo, the man and woman who bicycled from Switzerland to the Ukraine [Christian Boyko and Emmanuelle Plattet].

SP: 	Okay so you—oh! Yeah, I read about that.

NB: 	So then we brought them here and we had eighty some people come to the dinner at Monona Terrace. I mean that’s one of the things that did. We’ve tried to piggyback when staff is coming here for other reasons like the Circle of Love. The Bethel Lutheran Church has a project where they bring kids here for summer programs and a staff person always comes with them so we’ll have a reception or a banquet and they’ll be the speakers. One time we had the, not the ambassador, but the Deputy Ambassador from Ukraine came and we had a thing at Black Hawk. And right now—and we’ve sold greeting cards and we’ve done also, you know, that kind of stuff. But we’re at the point where we need an executive director and I told them, October I’m done as president. Everything has gotten too—and it’s not any more complicated than it used to be, we just realized how complicated it is. We have more information to work on and the things have changed, you know, it’s been twenty years so things now aren’t like they were in 1994. The other thing that’s changed is the technology, I mean how to keep in touch and relate to each other. And it’s just gotten—I don’t want to run the organization any more, but I want to stay connected and I have things that I can contribute that other people don’t seem to be able to contribute and mostly it’s the networking, and thinking ahead and getting people involved, and maintaining and learning what’s going on over there. And that’s different from making sure the minutes get done and the treasurer’s report is circulated and that kind of thing. Somebody else can do that. I mean I have to brag. We have a board now of fourteen people and they represent all disciplines and they are all involved and they’re all doing something, they’re not—

SP: 	Coming to meetings and—

NB: 	And that’s it, yeah. 

01:19:48

So we actually received a certificate of appreciation from the U.S. Congress in 2000, I don’t know I have it hanging in the wall in there, 2005 probably, recognizing the work we’ve done over there. 

SP: 	Well you’ve received some awards yourself haven’t you?

NB: 	And then I received a, let’s see, the Millennium Volunteer Award from the State Department in 2002 or [2003], something like that. What am I forgetting? Those are the big ones. Oh and then the National Association of Social Workers Award went to FOCCUS.

SP: 	I’d say that’s a big one. 

NB:	Yeah that’s a big one, yeah. The Foundation,  NASW Foundation, yeah. 

SP: 	What’s the situation like over there now twenty years later? Twenty years later?

NB: 	Yeah. It depends on who you talk to. The science part of this is debated by many people. One of the problems is that the International Atomic Energy Association is heavily involved and they want to minimize the effects. And then you have people who’ve been victimized who want to maximize. The thyroid cancer thing is pretty much, was thought to be totally, pretty much settled because it was going to be—the only people that are going to be effected are the kids who were a very young age who were close to the reactor and the iodide. They don’t use iodide salt over there so the iodide, all the iodide that was released went ckk, right into these kids’ thyroid. But now they’re beginning to see that there were kids who were not so heavily exposed and who are now grownup who are now having thyroid cancer. So it’s an ever changing situation. One of the big things is that the U.N. came out right after, not too long after the accident, with a statement—and I could kill them for this—that the biggest health problem resulting from the Chernobyl disaster is the feeling of victimization.

SP: 	Oh no!

NB: 	Oh yes! I mean, and I still get upset when I hear that because, you know, if you went through what they went through they were victimized! 

SP: 	Exactly. 

NB: 	And how do you expect people to recover from this in three to five years? 

SP: 	Well and as you said, it’s a generational problem. It’s not just the people that were—

NB: 	That’s right. And so the science of this is very, very muddy. But it’s too complicated. The latest U.N. report says okay the people don’t feel so victimized anymore so now we’re going to just start on development, start putting money into development, because economically all of these places are so economically depressed. I mean, who’s going to build a factory in an area where you might have a very weak, physically weak, manpower and you may be building a plant on ground that is contaminated and you’re not far from the Chernobyl plant, which is so dangerous it could explode again any time? I mean not explode but it could, the shelter could collapse and under there is two hundred tons of fissionable material and if the building collapsed and lets this all go into the air, it won’t be an explosion, it will just be this stuff floating through the air and coming down. Now who’s going to go into economic development? So—

01:24:51

SP: 	Well I hope they find somebody as good as you to replace you because obviously they still need your help.

NB: 	Oh there’s still need and I mean what we need to do is find, you know, an experienced executive director who can get the financial base we need. We’ve been going on a shoestring and had to been very creative in finding ways in and out of these things. So it’s, and I’m anxious about it but we’re sending a study group over there, March 7th [2008] we leave, myself and two new board members. And one of the new board members is David Utley, I don’t know if you’ve ever run across him, but he used to work for the Wisconsin Foundation.

SP: 	Oh sure.

NB: 	Yeah. Oh he’s great. Oh boy am I glad to have him on board.

SP: 	Yeah, he is, I know who he is.

NB: 	And he’s giving, and he has some international relationships and he’s really committed—he just came on our board—and he’s really committed to being our development person but he says I’m not going, I’ll be your development person, but I am not going out and asking people for money. I’ve done that. Been there. You guys do that. But he can, again, the systems and he also can teach us if we’re going to go out and ask people for money, what do we need to know and how we need to do it. So that’s good. The other person is a woman from Chicago, Halyna Traversa Young, yeah. And she is Ukrainian and her family is Ukrainian, she was born in Chicago and lives in Chicago, and she’s been a high-powered attorney for Motorola, international attorney, for Motorola and Abbott Laboratories. So the three of us are going on an eight-day, fact finding mission in March.

SP: 	So where will you go? 

NB: 	We’ll go to all the centers because neither of them have been there, most of our board has been there at least once but they haven’t. And we also work with UNDP, the United Nations Development Programme, so we’ll be meeting with them and then there’s a new rock star called Ruslana [Ruslana Stepaniva Lyzhychko] who has started her own charity and we’ve met with her once at the Ukrainian embassy in DC and we’re trying to get an appointment with her staff. Oh she is something. If I could show you a picture, you’d die. Carpathian mountains, folk rock. 

SP: 	Oh my! Can we get her music here?

NB: 	I don’t think so. And then the other person we’re trying to get an appointment with is a staff member, the First Lady of Ukraine, has started a charitable foundation for medical issues and supplies and we’re planning, we’re working with the School of Nursing here to get a shipment of hospital supplies to go over there. Because one of the centers is located, is partly, responsible to a four hundred-bed pediatric, regional hospital. So we’re working on that. 
SP: 	Well that all sounds good. I mean, that sounds optimistic. 

NB: 	Yeah, oh yeah. It’s just the leadership and the money, that’s all, just the leadership and the money [laughs]. Yeah.

01:28:47

SP: 	Well do you have time to do anything else in your retirement?! [inaudible].

NB: 	No, no. My husband would like me to not be quite so involved and quite so busy. And it’s time. You know I’m going to be eighty and I don’t remember things as well as I used to and I don’t have the energy that I used to and I feel the responsibility more than I used to. I mean, you know, when you’re young and you have responsibility, you just except it, I mean you go with it, but as you get older it’s not quite like that. So—

SP: 	Well my final question has to do with your family, but I don’t want to get to that—[Are] there are things about your life or career or focus that you haven’t said that you want to get on tape? You had mentioned something earlier about Wisconsin Cares, you said you’re still involved in it?

NB: 	Oh yeah, well that’s a new organization and it’s Jack Westman who’s from the Child Psychiatry. We initially were called the Wise Old Owls [laughs] because we were all retired. But we are working to—and Jack does most of the work, we’re his eyes and ears and consultants and so forth and it’s just a small group of us and we’re working to restructure the division of family, the state division of family services.

SP: 	Oh is that all?! [laughs].

NB: 	[laughs]. Well and as I say, Jack is doing most of this. But they are restructuring. You know we’ve created, and not just us, other people created [inaudible] that they are going to restructure but we want it renamed because if you say the division of family services, that means people are in trouble and have to come to us for a service and we’re saying no, no, no, no. You call it the division of family resources.

SP: 	Oh I like that.

NB: 	Then that mean that people, if they need something to make it better or correct a situation, you come and you come to this place that will provide the resources, whose responsibility is to provide the resources you need to make things better. What’s in a name? 

SP: 	Yeah! Oh I see the difference. 

NB: 	Yeah. So, and I don’t spend a lot of work on them, I go to a meeting once every three, once a month maybe and do some thinking about it and reading about it. But I like that because Jack Westman carries the burden, but he’s again, you’ve got a multidisciplinary group from education, public policy, economics, state legisl—you know. So, again, we’re putting the public health, and so again it’s that excitement of bringing these things together and talking to people from a different prospective and so on. But that’s the only thing other than FOCCUS that I’m—

01:32:20

SP: 	Well have you got plans when you do have a little more time on your hands of things that you haven’t done that you want to start?

NB: 	Not that I want to start, nothing I want to start [laughs].

SP: 	Spend more time on?

NB: 	Oh I’d read more, I’d have more time for reading and more time for friends. I mean that has kind of gone, one of the things that’s gone by the board, not totally, but you know I’d like to have more time just to socialize and, well you’re in the same position I am, you have friends that need help and you’d like to be there for them. And I can always, I mean I could go to Global Health Colloquium, I mean that I would get involved with. And [CRECA?], I mean I could go to school all day, every day, and I’d like to have time to do a little more of that. 

SP: 	Sure, sure.

NB: 	My motto is once you stop learning you’re dead and I don’t ever anticipate, unless I’m on life support systems and even then I could be learning something.

SP: 	Somebody could come in and read The New York Times to you!

NB:	 Or you could learn what’s it’s like to be hooked up you know. So that’s it. And did you say you wanted—something about my family?

SP: 	Yes talk about your family.

NB: 	Well Len has, I mean he probably told you he has two daughters and they have five grandkids, four of them are now in college, one’s on a PhD program and two others are graduating from University this spring, and one of them is trailing behind, he’s fourteen. My two sons, one is in trouble right now because he was a publisher of a magazine for the building industry and you read the papers, you know how bad that is. So he’s under a lot of stress and he doesn’t have any children, his wife is in real estate and they live in Bethesda, but they’re good and they’ll weather the storm okay. My other son is in Marionette, Wisconsin and he’s in radio advertising and he is doing well and his wife is a special education teacher.

SP: 	Do they have children?

NB: 	They have two kids, one is in—yeah this is the way it is for a lot of families—one’s on the west coast, ones on the east coast. The one on the west coast is in to, got a degree from here in—I forget whether his major was, I think economics—but anyway he’s big time into internet advertising and he’s with the biggest company who’s involved in internet advertising. 

SP: 	Oh boy.

NB: 	And he loves Santa Monica and he lives [I guess Californian parex alongst the surf?] is the thing you know, and he’s doing very well. My other’s grandson is in Boston and he works for a biotechnology firm and he’s a graphics, he does their graphics work for brochures and internet and that kind of thing. And he’s thinking about whether he wants to get a further degree. And he just got engaged to a social worker [laughs] and they’re living together. So that’s it and that’s all the family that I have.

SP: 	All these careers that we never even heard of—

NB:	 Oh isn’t that true. You know it’s so funny because I can remember my aunt and my parents now—you know I know you have a job, but what do you do? [laughs]. They couldn’t, you know it was so far from anything they’d experienced and now I find I say the same thing to my grandkids, I understand what my sons are doing, but grandkids?! That’s a whole different world, just terribly different world. Yeah.

01:36:53

SP: 	Well anything else before we turn the tape off? This has been an excellent interview and I really appreciate it.

NB: 	Well I had fun doing it and I have to tell you that as a result of this interview, I went back and I’d looked through my last curriculum [inaudible] but I also had saved a few of the papers that I wrote during my bachelors degree days and I am glad that I had the excuse to do that.

SP: 	Good.

NB: 	Yeah, really. It was quite amazing and brought back many memories but also a reminder that yeah years and years have gone by but I’m still me. I’m where I want to be and that’s a wonderful feeling when you’re almost eighty years old [laughs].

SP: 	I would think so. 

NB: 	Yeah.

SP: 	Well thank you very much.

NB: 	Well thank you for inviting me.

NB: 	You didn’t ask me about my married life now.

SP:	 Well, please, tell me about your married life now!

NB: 	[laughs]. Well I think that my life with Len is more than, you know, has given me more than I ever hoped for. We’ve had a great life together, we have a lot of mutual interests, music, the theater. He reads more than I have time to read for but we’re both internationalists and actually we recently joined the Madison Foreign Relations committee, chapter and enjoy that. So we have our international interests. We like to travel so we have our travel interests and—

SP: 	Is there some place you’ve been where you want to go back? Not for work, but for pleasure.

NB: 	Well we go back to London a lot and Len’s a big city guy and, you know, every so—he was raised in New York—and about every five years he’s got to go and stand on the avenue in American and look up at the high buildings so we go back there and we go to London. It doesn’t matter to me, I can go anywhere [laughs] and watch the people and think about their life—I mean there’s no place I wouldn’t go. The only thing is, he promised if I married him he’d take me to Machu Picchu but he hasn’t done it and we probably can’t. I may have to go without him, he can’t stand the high altitude. But our honeymoon, we went from, we were in England and we went to West Germany and we went to—I can’t get my geography right—and we were in India and we were in Nepal, we were in the islands and then off to Australia. That was our honeymoon.

SP: 	So this was all—was this halfway around the world trip?

NB: 	Yeah.

SP: 	Oh my goodness!

NB: 	Then we had a teaching opportunity in Australia. What’s the big one on the west coast?

SP: 	The western Australia, Perth?

NB: 	Perth. Yeah. And so we lived there for a month. Getting from England to there and taking our time, you know, and we’d just been married, we’d been married several months but that was it and that was a wonderful trip. So—

SP: 	So life is good?

NB: 	Life it terrific! [laughs]. All the way around.

SP: 	Ready to stop? Well thanks again!

NB: 	Yeah.

01:41:27	End of First Interview Session 
End of Oral History #900