Zena Beth McGlashan, Teacher & Journalist

Oral History Transcript of Zena Beth McGlashan

Interviewer: Clark Grant
Interview Date: July 6th, 2020
Location: Wordz & Ink Publishing Office, Carpenters Union Hall
Transcribed: February 12th, 2021 by Nora Saks

CLARK GRANT: Well, this is about you , so well anyway, well, we got this grant and we're recording a hundred oral histories. And if you look into oral history as an art form or as an academic discipline, there are different kinds.

And the kind that we're doing is called a life history.

[00:02:00]

So when we sit down with someone, we ask them to tell the story of their life. And I know that you can't encapsulate a life in an hour or 90 minutes, but we do what we can.

So, I know you're a PhD, you're an author. You're a mother, there's a lot in a life. So I kind want to do a survey of your life. And typically we ask people to start with recollections of their grandparents.

ZENA BETH MCGLASHAN: Oh, well my grandma, Emma Beth Jones, was from an abolitionist family in Iowa, and that had a great influence on my life. I was probably the only child I ever knew my generation who would get Black dolls because grandma believed in abolition so much, it was part of her life.

And in fact, as mother recalled once it, she said the word nigger in front of her mother. And she said it was not pretty, that it was not a pretty scene. She said she could have said any other word, but she was testing the water. She was little. Yeah. And so, I mean this whole Black Lives Matter thing that's going on currently is an extension of looking at equity.

So, there were moments in my life, and I taught Women Minorities in Media, which was a sexist, racist name for a class, but it was a step in the right direction. And well, see my dad was in the, he got drafted into the military really early because one of his specialties was ceramics and they were using some of the principles of ceramics in aircraft production.

So we moved from base to base in the U.S. And dad, he started out as a Second Lieutenant and then rose up to the ranks. But anyway, so one of my first memories was when we went to Alabama. Was it Alabama or Arkansas? Anyway, where's Birmingham?

GRANT: Alabama.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. Okay. So it was Alabama and my mother was, of course, the daughter of Emma Beth. So she was very critical of the maltreatment of the Black people. And she also thought that, this is the way I grew up - ‘the Southern women were lazy because all they did was drink Coke, play cards and let the colored people take care of their, raise their children'. That was my mother's opinion.

GRANT: Wow.

MCGLASHAN: So there. And we lived in an apartment complex and there was an old Black man that was a caretaker. And my mother was bound and determined to get rid of the cockroaches. And so according to her - I never, don’t remember this - it was her memory of him. She'd say, ‘he'd look at me and say, Mrs, you, ain't going to get rid of them roaches until all them other ladies do, and they're not going to'.

[00:06:00]

And then the one memory I have of him, is he took me - there were walnuts or some kind of nut on our tree. And we went picking them and I had this blue wooden bucket and I rode on his shoulders and put my blue wooden bucket on top of his head. And I picked the walnuts. It was just wonderful. So then we moved to Ohio. And Ohio was, there were more solid memories because I was older. I was about four.

So we used to have a blackouts. It was World War Two. And we'd sit in the dark in the living room, 'cause we were near an air base, and we'd sit in a dark in the living room and listen to the radio. And I thought that was so cool.

GRANT: When were you born?

MCGLASHAN: I was born in '39. So, and dad was called up. Well see, he was with the Rainbow Division. 'Cause he was in ROTC when he was in high school, and all the way through college. And then the U.S. Army Air Corps was formed out of the army. So they pulled him out of the Rainbow Division, put him in the Air Corps. So anyway we were, we lived in Springfield and Dad took me, we went swimming. And I went with Dad and we got there and the pool was filled with Black people. And we couldn't go swimming. And I could not understand that. And that was the one pool day in the municipal pool that was for Blacks only, which my father hadn't realized. And so we had to go home.

And I thought, that's not fair. Well, then I realized how unfair it was because six days a week, the municipal pool was white and you know. So I'm not obsessing with, well, it's been a lifelong study of mine. But it ties my life into current events.

GRANT: Race?

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. As with any social movement, they're going overboard a little bit, but what the hell.

GRANT: I'd like to hear more about your grandmother and how did she come to have those beliefs? Do you know much about that?

MCGLASHAN: No, I don't know. Iowa was a free state and I remember her talking about coming out from Iowa to Eastern Washington and the Palouse country around Walla Walla. They came out on the train. And my grandmother remembered guys shooting buffalo with their long guns as they were going along, over the plains.

[00:09:00]

GRANT: So, shoot them from the train?

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. Oh yeah. They shot quite a few of them.

But - my mother was the youngest of Emma Beth's children. And Emma Beth's first three children died young. They died within six months of each other. Oldest one, Carl, was five and there was a middle one, and then there was a baby. And later on the doctor said that he thought it was…oh, what was it? I can't remember. I'll have to fill that in.

So she started, literally started over again and she had four more children.

GRANT: Wow.

MCGLASHAN: And she wasn't a very happy person because my grandpa Willard Jones was a fine carpenter. But he was also an alcoholic. And when prohibition came in, Will stopped drinking because that was the law.

And so those were the happier times. And then the minute the Democrats took over and prohibition went out, then he went out and got shocked. And so that turned my grandmother, who had already been a Republican, even further into a Republican. And grandmother too. I mean, mother too.

[00:11:00]

And when I was working in Los Angeles, I read a letter to the editor by a couple who were Jewish. And they had a son who was a drug addict and they wrote all about how they finally had to just walk away from him. That they just couldn't deal with it. They tried everything and in the course of that letter, they said that Jews didn't name their children after living people.

And I thought, how cool is that? Because I was named Zena after my rigidly right-wing aunt Zena, who thought she knew everything. And with whom I started fighting when I was young. And I was named after my grandmother. So I didn't have my own identity. You don't know what it's like to go through life with someone saying, 'what a lovely name'. When you're goin', ‘oh God’.

And so, I learned to say, ‘thank you’. I hate my name, I've hated my name all my life. And naming a child something weird is also hard on the child. Okay.

GRANT: Would you rather have been a Lindsey or something?

MCGLASHAN: I would rather have been Elizabeth. Emma Beth's middle name was Elizabeth. And I've always thought, Elizabeth, of course I'm a Royal. For instance, Elizabeth and her sister were important to me when I was a child. So that fits right in. Now my grandparents McGlashan, my dad couldn't stand his dad. And so it wasn't a happy relationship. And they lived down in Twin Falls, Idaho and Grandpa McGlashan was also a carpenter. And they come from the Midwest. I think they, I don't remember where. I'd have to look in the - but anyway, he didn't want my dad to go to college. So my dad worked his way through college, by his own self. Which included things like boxing behind the stadium, to collect his bets on the fact that Idaho's football team would lose. And all the fraternity boys thought they'd win. And when dad was right, he had to collect his money. So that's part of what he did. He went to free church dinners because they were dinner. I think that's where he met mother.

[00:14:00]

GRANT: Really.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. 'Cause I mean, there were no student loans or any of that kind of thing. So you just started scraped by. He rode the rails when he started in Pocatello, in Idaho State. And he rode the rails up from Twin Falls and then he switched over to University of Idaho. So.

GRANT: Did you ever meet his dad?

MCGLASHAN: Yeah, they were a weird couple. Grandma McGlashan, whose name was Nellie, had a heart condition. So she would hold her hankie in between her breasts, like she was expecting something horrendous. She didn't talk much. 'Cause grandpa and dad didn't get along, it was just really weird. And then dad had a sister, weird Aunt Vivian. And weird Aunt Vivian was weird all of her life.

GRANT: Weird like - homosexual?

MCGLASHAN: No. She just was - let me give you an example. She had a set of Sterling silver and she polished it with cleansing powder. And ruined all the silver on it. I mean, she just did weird things like that, and she never had any kids. And she was married to Uncle Bill, who was a positive delight. Because he was big, tall, and he had a great sense of humor.

And I had an internship, for my junior and senior year in college, so I was in San Francisco. And he was going to be there, he worked for the Forest Service. And he was pretty much a mucky muck, higher up. And so I was informed that Uncle Bill was coming through town. So he wanted to take me out to dinner and I was excited about it. Because I knew he could afford to go to Trader Vic's, which is where I wanted to go in San Francisco and I couldn't figure out how to get there.

And so we met, and I'll never forget, Bill Calender, his name was, he walked in that place and he looked around, and all the Tiki lamps and all the stuff, and he says, 'hell honey, this ain't nothing but a tourist trap'.

[00:17:00]

He said it really boisterously, which is why I wasn't appalled. I was absolutely delighted. 'Cause that was about the only time I ever saw him. So I don't know.

GRANT: Can we return to your recollections of World War II?

MCGLASHAN: Oh, okay.

GRANT: Because I thought that was really interesting, obviously listening to the radio. But I don't know much about the blackouts. Was there fear that there would be bombardment of the mainland?

MCGLASHAN: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

GRANT: So everybody would turn all the lights out in the whole city?

MCGLASHAN: Oh yeah. They were blackouts, just like they used to have in London. When they thought that there was a danger coming, or I don't know if they were practicing or they were wishful thinking - that the Luftwaffe would get to Ohio...

GRANT: Seems ridiculous.

MCGLASHAN: And then we lived in, we ended up living in California. There was a Boeing plant, I remember, near us. And there were soybean fields. And the little kid across the street and I would play World War Two, let's shoot people and stuff.

GRANT: Cool.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah.

GRANT: And did you have a sense of what was going on?

MCGLASHAN: Oh yeah. Well, when I got to Butte, I got here the summer before I entered second grade.

And then that next summer I went to Girl Scout camp. I was eight. The counselors that camp would get me to talk. They'd go, ’say something'. ‘Cause I, all I had done was talk to adults. I listened to my parents who are articulate, and they liked each other, so they talked a lot. And then they explained things to me.

And so I was kind of an anomaly because I talked like an adult. And they thought it was just fascinating. So I remember one time, we had a black Ford Coupe. Dad said it was one of the last off the lines before they transferred over to war production. Because he went in a year early, so he had a chance to buy this car.

[00:20:00]

And we drove around the U.S. on two lane highways. I mean, there were no interstates. And we had a water bag, on the front of the car for the radiator. And one time when we were gonna stop to have a snack or something there were a bunch of gypsies camped and they had wagons and everything.

And so we couldn't go there because my Grandmother Jones - Colfax was a town was on the railroad, and it was also a major intersection in Washington. And gypsies used to come through. And she was always afraid that my mother who had dark hair, dark braids was going to get kidnapped by gypsies.

So, which transferred into a fear of gypsies. So we couldn't stay there, but I remember them. And then the other thing I remember about it crossing the country, was the trains. You'd come to a train track and then you could wave, and the engineer would blow the train whistle - that was just cool! I've always liked trains.

So once when we were in California, we went to a parade. It was for some general, but I don't remember what general. And it was the beginning of supermarkets. I mean, there were carts and stuff. I thought that was interesting.

GRANT: That was new.

MCGLASHAN: And I remember one night I heard that President Roosevelt had died. And mother was out working in the garden. And I thought it was important to tell her because it affected me because it canceled The Lone Ranger, for coverage of the president? Well, when you're six, you know?

And so I went out and I said, 'the President died'. And mother said, 'that's too bad'. Went back to gardening because she just hated him just like Grandma Jones hated him. And then she didn't become a Democrat until...

GRANT: Yes?

MCGLASHAN: Hello?

GRANT: Hello? Do you want to come in?

[00:23:00]

MCGLASHAN: Okay. So, but anyway, enough of World War Two. The upshot of it was that my dad finally - and he was a major by the - finally got his orders cut to go to Europe. And then they canceled it because the war ended. So he spent his entire military career, state side. And it was really sad because he really wanted to go to war.

GRANT: Why?

MCGLASHAN: Because well, he'd grown up in the ROTC. And in addition to being a mining engineer, he was an amateur historian and he specialized in the Civil War. Because I can remember when my mother worked and I were downtown in L.A. and we picked up the final volume of, or one of the volumes of Liesel Jenets. Which dad read. My dad was the only person that I've ever known, who read that kind of stuff. Those were thick, yeah.

GRANT: What do you think he would have made of people nowadays saying the Civil War was not about slavery?

MCGLASHAN: I don't know, because that was the way was raised, that it wasn't about slavery. But there is an argument that you have to understand the economics of it. And then the South was so, I know Grant was a brilliant general, but of course that was, I grew up with General Grant. Appomattox was on my mother's birthday, April 9th.

[00:25:00]

There was one year that he got up, we were living over on Porphyry Street, so yeah, I had to be home visiting. Because it was when I was older. He got up that morning and he said that he had a dream, that he was in the tent with Grant. And then he named all these other military men who are adjutants and stuff who were there with him.

I mean, that's how gung ho he was about the Civil War. And he had a great sense of humor. Part of his dedication to history was not just the Civil War. He loved the American West. And he loved the troopers and the Indians equally. Well when they had that house over on Porphyry, he had this great big Russell print. It was a wagon master. And Meg was convinced that was him.

'Cause she was little and she'd sit there on the couch and he'd tell her all these stories about goin' and meeting up with the Indians. And I swear to God, that was the reason she was the only sorority girl that I knew that was an Indian studies minor. She'll still tell the story that she was a certain age when she finally figured out that wasn't grandpa.

So it was a really neat background to have in terms of history, because I don't know...

GRANT: Did he later express regret about not going overseas?

MCGLASHAN: Oh, at the time he was just devastated. It wasn't later on, it was at the time. We’d dumped him off in Salt Lake and driven back to Twin Falls and mother and I were going to live with grandma and grandpa, which would have been really interesting.

We got there and we turned around and went back. We had picked him up and, he didn't get to go. And that's one of the reasons she liked my Uncle Mitch so much. My Uncle Mitch was a real, well now they talk about shell shock, but he was weird before he went. My Uncle Mitch served in the European campaign. And then he served in the Pacific.

GRANT: In both wars?

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. Well in World War II, we had that European campaign. And then he got transferred somehow to the Pacific.

GRANT: So he saw both theaters.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. Oh, and dad just thought the world of him. Most people didn't because, he was a very interesting character.

GRANT: How was he related?

MCGLASHAN: He was my mother's brother. Yeah. Grandma had two sons, Uncle Mitch and Uncle Glen, and Glen was the apple of her eye. And Mitch was the bad boy.

GRANT: Oh, okay. Was he in the army then, or?

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. He got drafted.

GRANT: Oh, and saw combat?

MCGLASHAN: Well one of his friends, they were in a convoy and he was a driver. And one of his friends was driving a truck ahead of him. And the Germans blew the truck up. And Mitch never drove after that.

GRANT: Ever.

[00:29:00]

MCGLASHAN: And Mitch would tell dad stuff that I'm sure was true, like when they were training to go off landing craft, they were at a swimming pool, and this guy would not jump into the water. They had all their gear on, and he wouldn't jump into the water. And the Sergeant shot him.

GRANT: Whoa.

MCGLASHAN: Reality of war.

GRANT: And what did he do when he returned? Mitch.

MCGLASHAN: He worked in the most wonderful hardware store, which hadn't been modernized yet. And it had all kinds of bins full of nails. And it smelled lovely. And oh God, that was the most wonderful hardware store, because I was little and it was way back in the day. Because I'm old.

And then there was Uncle Bill, who was Aunt Nora's husband, and he was a barber in this little one stop town in Eastern Washington. And he was one of my favorite uncles. 'Cause he was really interesting. And I can remember him saying about farmers, ‘they never had a good crop ever’. And then he said, ‘then they'd sit. Then they'd get up from having their hair cut and sitting around the barbershop and go out and get in their Cadillacs and drive home’. This wonderful attitude.

And then my Aunt Maude, who was my great aunt, she was one of Emma Beth's sisters - when they were doing the harvest and Emma Beth started working in the kitchen with the women to feed the men - and when she was small enough, she had to stand on a box. But Maudy never worked in the kitchen.

Maude was always out hustling the horses and feeding the cattle and feeding the pigs. And, she was an outdoor person. I just loved my Aunt Maude. And she was married three times and I never bothered to ask mother who the first two were.

Her third husband was a great big Indian. And he was Nez Perce. And Uncle Bill was very tall. I mean, he's gotta have been over six feet tall. So there probably was some Anglo mixed in. But my dad was just thrilled that the family did have, even though it was just by marriage, we had our Indian.

[00:32:00]

I can remember, my mother collected antiques early on and that was - after the war, people were trying to modernize. So they were selling the things that we covet now cheap at yard sales and stuff. Well, they had rummage sales on the East Side. Anyway, Uncle Ben and Aunt Maude came to my eighth grade graduation, which was a big deal in Butte, at the time. Uncle Ben walked in to the living room and at that tiny little house upon Quartz Street. And mother was really into candles before anybody else was.

And so she had all these candelabras and stuff that she'd gotten from yard sales and rummage sales. Bill looked at her, and said, 'hell, Ellen, what are you going to, what are you doing? Finding a wake?' And I just loved that. I remembered that. And then Aunt Maude said that she had two hats, one for marrying and one for burying, one for weddings and one for funerals.

Yeah. And then I met Uncle George once and that was Emma Beth's brother. And God, talk about interviews. George really had an interesting life, but I only met him once. So.

GRANT: It sounds like all these people influenced you one way or another?

MCGLASHAN: Well, yeah, because I was just this only little kid, I was an only child. And my world was largely built out of grownups.

[00:34:00]

I remember that little boy in California, because he was the first little neighbor child. I had, I was six. So I had this influence of, I've never thought about it that way. No wonder I'm so weird.

So yeah. And dad just loved Butte, he really loved Butte. Because he was a mining man.

GRANT: So this was after the military.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah, see well, he worked on his, he got his masters at the School of Mines before he went to Penn State. He went to Penn State to get his doctorate.

And that's when he and mother got married, because she rode on the train all the way out there to marry him. And then I was born about a year and a half after they were married. And that was early on. It was about a year before the U.S. involvement in World War Two. And that's when dad got drafted, because he was working on his doctorate.

Well, then when he got out, his major professor who had been head of the mineral dressing department, mineral processing, here, wanted dad to take over. And back in those days, dad had some students who were older than he was. But he just, he was totally dedicated to the School of Mines.

GRANT: So what was his position there when he arrived?

MCGLASHAN: Well when he got out he must have been an assistant professor. I don't think that they started him out as an associate when he was head of his department. But then it was a one-man department. And there's a building, well it's the chemistry building, but I can remember when his office was on this end of this building.

[00:36:00]

And it was the whole space. And now it's cubicles, for fitting people in. But my mother didn't like Butte at all.

GRANT: From the beginning?

MCGLASHAN: She gradually got to like it. But she didn't like it at all. Because she'd grown up in Lewiston, Idaho, where they have spring and summer, and flowers and they don't have the kind of weather we have here.

GRANT: So when you arrived in Butte, you were eight years old.

MCGLASHAN: Um no, I just turned seven.

GRANT: Seven. And so that would have been in '46?

MCGLASHAN: Yeah I guess so.

GRANT: So what can you tell me about the Butte of the late 1940s?

MCGLASHAN: Well, it was really - that wasn't one thing that my mother, I'll give her credit for, she didn't want me to be a clinging vine. In other words, she wanted me to develop a sense of independence So she'd let me walk up to the library from I think the first time I walked out from the library, yeah, we were living over on Park Street. We lived on Park Street in those apartments that are on their way up the Hill to the School of Mines.

And it was, Butte was teaming with people, it was just busy. And mother didn't drive. Oh, this is a story about Butte, and mothers not liking Butte. Okay. She said one night to my dad, 'I was walking by the M and M, this guy asked me for some money'. And my dad said, 'well, I hope you gave him some'.

[00:38:00]

And she said, 'of course I didn't'. Well, he chewed her out. He said, 'never turn somebody down. Even if it's only a quarter, give him some money'. And that was the difference between his background of being on the street poor. And her background.

The Uptown had bars, and I love bars because my parents didn't drink, obviously. And I just walked by them and look in the doors. And it had the shops, Weinberg's upscale, women's shops. And then these little ladies who were from the old time came up town and shopped with their little white gloves and their purses, hats and everything. Just, when I came back to Butte and I worked at that antique shop - that's where Harrington's was. It's not an antique shop anymore. It's where Sarge - Sarge was over near Harrington's. Well anyway, there was this guy that came in because I worked down at the Dumas too. When Rudy had it as an antique shop.

GRANT: I was gonna say, what do you mean you worked at the Dumas?

MCGLASHAN: That was a cool antique shop, it's too bad that he was such a lousy manager. I was, I had the front parlor on the left-hand side for one whole summer.

Anyway, this guy came in and we were talking about the old days in Butte. And he said, ‘everybody wonders why the sidewalks are so wide’. He said, ‘they had to be wide because there were a lot of people.’ And I said, 'boy, you're not kidding'. ‘Cause I remembered it, from just being little.

The thing was my mother never, I was never allowed to walk on the East side. When I got to Main Street, I had to stop there. Because the East Side had more bars and the red light district. And I never even knew the red light district was there, till after I got to be an adult. So.

GRANT: I didn't get the sense earlier that your dad grew up poor. Can you tell me more about that?

MCGLASHAN: Well, yeah, because, well, it was perfectly all right when he was going to be a farmer and a carpenter.

[00:41:00]

But Theodore McGlashan threw him out when he was going to go to school, and he didn't give him a nickel. He rode the rails from Twin Falls to Idaho Falls, or Pocatello, to go to Idaho State where he started out.

And he went two years there, but there was no support at all. None, not even a kind word. And then when we'd go down there to visit, oh, that was, I liked it because it was flat and I could - one time I took, picked up my bicycle and I drove around outside Twin Falls. But no, there was no support at all.

GRANT: That particular anecdote you shared reminds me of, I think it was Eskimo knocking on the door earlier.

MCGLASHAN: Oh.

GRANT: Does that come from your dad, you think? Your willingness to just give people money? Not a bad quality.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. And mother was - for example, I love to play in the stock market because my mother never let my dad play in the stock market. And, with his knowledge and mining, he probably could have made some money.

GRANT: Yeah really.

MCGLASHAN: But they were a rather odd couple. But then I was an odd child.

GRANT: When she was in Butte, how did she stay busy? Did she work?

MCGLASHAN: That was another thing that - she was, they were part of that old thing where if a man made it, then his wife didn't work. And it was a faculty wives club, that you'd belong to. And I think in my grade school, there were probably maybe two or three mothers that worked, you know because the West Side wasn't like living on Anaconda Road, so. Anyway, but she worked - when Gaylord and I came back here, because he was with the newspaper. And we lived here. Grant was born here, but we went to the Midwest and then back to Missoula.

[00:44:00]

But we lived here the year that my mother worked at Hannifin's, Hannifin's jewelry, which was just, I mean, it was so elegant. Do you have any concept of where, what it was? Oh, well, I'll give you a handout on the Hannifin girls, but they were sisters and they owned a jewelry store right up there, right above, well, right on Main Street above the bank building. Which is now, I don't know some business.

But the way to judge what it looked like was to go up to the mining museum, go in the hoist house, and look at those mahogany cases that are filled with mining equipment. They were filled with Sterling silver and fine China. And I mean, it was just, my mother just loved it. And they loved her because she was a hard worker. She was steady. She was really good with people and she only lasted a year there because my father finally told her that he was tired of having lunch out. Then he'd rather come home. So she had to return to her, you know. It was a transition period, that, well, I don't know.

We spent a summer in Havana, Cuba. In ’57, which is the year I graduated from high school. Because dad's old boss or old professor who was at MIT by then, he got dad a contract - they were working on manganese. And it was an extraction contract. And so, dad said he wouldn't go without me and mother.

And so we spent three months in Cuba with mother and me cheering on Fidel. And, that's when I became a liberal. Because I could see all - dad was working for this multimillionaire who had us to dinner at his house, the three of us, when we first arrived in Havana. Which was not fair because we'd been up - that's when O'Hare airport was sort of not, it was kind of like a warehouse, I mean, a warehouse with planes. There weren't the amenities that - anyway, we had dinner at their house. And it was the kind of place setting you only see in magazines, the gold utensils and the gold rimmed, and the servants and the whole nine yards. And it was a big, big house.

[00:48:00]

And then, we were housed in a high rise hotel, which was right on the waterfront, a particular, nice area. And we had, I think that there were these young men who were the auto valets, take the cars. And they wore black jackets. And they looked at us with such hatred when we got out of the car, I don't think my parents were even aware of it, but I sure was. 'Cause I was 18 and I knew pure hatred when I saw it.

I just, it wasn't a grand epiphany. I didn't say, 'I'm not going to be a Republican anymore', but it led to my choosing the party that had not represented so much wealth and stuff like that. And it was, I'm old enough to see myself as a historical relic because I can understand why grandma and mother loved the Republicans so much, because look at this way - the Republican party was the party of the progressives. It was Theodore Roosevelt's party.

And so anyway, being in Cuba the whole time. And then, as a journalist - and I had decided that I was going to be a journalist when I was in the sixth grade - and I was the sixth grade correspondent for the McKinley Monitor. And by the time I was in the eighth grade, I was editor of the McKinley Monitor, which was a mimeograph sheet, which came out once a month.

GRANT: Wow.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah, right! Big time. Anyway. But when I was down there, there was an English paper for the Americans, largely Americans, and it was censored. So you'd pick it up and there'd be a great big hole cut. And they cut them. Every single edition was cut by hand. So you'd have sort of this piece of lace, you could only wonder what that story was that Batista didn't want the public to see.

GRANT: Wow.

MCGLASHAN: And that was really a journalistic thing that has stuck with me all these years. And now our country has evolved to the point where we have a president who would love to do that, so. Are we done yet?

GRANT: Not quite. Do you want to be done?

MCGLASHAN: No, but I think all this is boring.

[00:51:00]

GRANT: Not at all. It isn't. I think it's fascinating. I'm learning a lot too, about your life. Yeah. I didn't know you went to Cuba at all. I mean, as an 18 year old were, did you go out at all?

MCGLASHAN: No, because my parents didn't drink. That was the time - which Godfather movie is that, that they go to Havana, and there's this really rich guy that - that was the time. I mean, Johnny Mathis was playing in the clubs and the named performers were, in the Hotel Nacional was - mother and I used to stop there once in a while just to walk through it. All the little gift shops and the diamonds and, but we didn't go out. So now when we went out a few times with, oh, what was her name? Anyway, her husband was an engineer with this company that - what's his name? If I thought about it, I'd know what his name was, but anyway. So his wife, if she came to town, would take us out. She had grown up with Minnie Pearl. She was from Arkansas and Minnie Pearl was an entertainer. You saw her, I mean, did you watch that Ken Burns thing about music?

GRANT: I haven't watched that yet. The country one?

MCGLASHAN: Oh yeah. It's just absolutely marvelous. It's just, anyway it explains Minnie Pearl. And God, what was that woman's name?

Anyway, she was the same age as Minnie. And she said Grinders Switch, which Minnie always said she was from, was a train crossing where they would make the trains go on either track or whatever. And I always thought that was just wonderful, that she knew somebody famous.

[00:53:00]

Yeah. And she took us to lunch at Hemingway's favorite downtown bar. And, but mother and I didn't - I was such a snob. I wanted to learn French. And so that would've been a perfect time to learn Spanish, but el stupido, I didn't. But mother and I would take a cab downtown and wander around.

And I remember one time we were looking at a window, by a park downtown, and this American woman came up and said, 'can you tell me where the Parqueo Centrale is? And mother and I, I think I spoke first. I said, 'I think it's a couple of blocks down’. And the woman was just shocked, because we were Americans, but we were dark.

See, we looked like Cubans. And people would use to speak Spanish to us and we didn't have a clue. So we were the ugly Americans. Well, no. I guess that's a characterization of that book that it doesn't deserve. But anyway, so that was interesting.

GRANT: And that was right after high school then? Well, we skipped a period of time, between like second grade in high school. And you briefly mentioned going to McKinley.

MCGLASHAN: I know, but the reason that I mentioned McKinley, was that's where I started my journalistic career.

GRANT: Yeah. I walked past that building almost every day.

[00:55:00]

MCGLASHAN: It became a church.

GRANT: Yeah. Regrettably.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. Well, what do you do with these old buildings though, I mean?

GRANT: That's a whole other topic, but I wanted to hear more, I guess, about - did you finally make friends when you were in Butte and going to public school?

MCGLASHAN: Oh yeah. Well that's where Judy and I met, in second grade. Yeah. We met when I first was in Butte in second grade, I went to five or six different first grades. Because we were in California and then we went up to Idaho and then we went to Pennsylvania and then we went back to... but we met in second grade. So we've been friends all these years.

GRANT: I didn't know it went back that far.

MCGLASHAN: It does. Just amazing isn't it? And it was amazing that we both ended up back in Butte.

GRANT: Yeah. Well, what about notable events? I mean, you mentioned the eighth grade graduation. Did things like that take place at the Gardens, or...?

MCGLASHAN: Are you kidding? I think that's why I don't mention high school a lot because I wasn't, I wanted to be popular. But I ended up being editor of the Mountaineer, you know, a co-editor of the yearbook.

GRANT: And is that at Butte High?

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. And I didn't go to very many social events.

GRANT: Would you cover them?

MCGLASHAN: No, we didn't cover them.

GRANT: Okay. What kinds of stories were you getting into in high school?

MCGLASHAN: I have a vague recollection of that. I know we had the system of passes, and you couldn't walk down the hall without a hall pass. 'Cause it was, it was a control thing. So Robin Jordan, her dad was the high school journalism teacher. And Mr. Taylor was just, I just loved him. And Fay Beaucoults was a single music teacher. She was after either him or Bill Berry.

Bill Berry was the sexy biology teacher who was new. And she didn't make any headway with Bill, but she did with Bob Taylor, who was still living with his mother. So, but anyway. He kept hall passes, he mimeographed them. And they were a little slips of paper. And he kept them in his desk. And if you wanted to go out to the hall and wander around during one of his periods of journalism, you just got one of those.

[00:58:00]

And our whole ad staff was not particularly dedicated to journalism, but they get a building pass, and they could go out to Donna Bell and sell one ad for the paper.

GRANT: It's hard to imagine even our community newspaper nowadays selling advertising. To imagine a high school newspaper selling advertising, it just indicates a whole different economy.

MCGLASHAN: Oh yeah. Well, it was thriving. The Anaconda Company was never going to end. It was either Anaconda or the Power, and those were the two really powerful entities. And it was funny, Judy was driving, she worked for Western Montana Mental Health when she got back. And she was with this guy who was one of the counselors over there.

Anyway, they were going down Platinum Street and Judy said, 'that's the Courette house'. And he didn't even know who the Courettes were. I mean, it was that kind of mentality, that you just knew who they were.

I guess there are some families here now that would be the equivalent, but not nearly representing as much power as they had.

GRANT: Can we talk a little bit about the Berkeley Pit and your recollections of the beginnings of that? Were you tracking that much?

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. Well we'd take relatives out there to the viewing stand.

GRANT: Now you do?

MCGLASHAN: No, but back in the days when the trucks would go all the way down to the bottom. And back up again, before they turned off the pumps. When they turned off the pumps, that's what became a toxic lake. But before that, sure.

GRANT: I mean, was your dad going underground and was he consulting with the company at all in his capacity as an engineer?

MCGLASHAN: Well, he turned out some wonderful engineers for them. And he knew a lot of people.

GRANT: When the Berkeley Pit started, were you aware of it?

[01:01:00]

MCGLASHAN: Yeah, because we'd take relatives, visiting relatives out there to watch the trucks.

GRANT: And that's it. It didn't concern you they were tearing the town down?

MCGLASHAN: Well, I didn't find out about that, but there was a movement to tear the whole town down. You've heard about that.

GRANT: Butte Forward.

MCGLASHAN: And well, there are some things on the East Side that wouldn't have been torn down if the company hadn't wanted it. They tore down that wonderful old church. That one. See that?

GRANT: Oh yeah. Now is that Holy Savior?

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. Well, they were they were going to tear down St Lawrence. The Company told them they could and the church agreed. Oh yeah.

[01:02:00]

GRANT: What happened? People fought it?

MCGLASHAN: Oh God, people came out of the woodwork, but that's in my book. So you can read about it in there. But Pat Kearney, for example, well, God, what's her name? She was at the Council North meeting when they proposed, or they were talking about plans to tear down St. Lawrence. And this woman went home and she told her husband and they alerted the whole community. I mean, everybody. They raised money and they interviewed and they saved that church.

And it's funny about the Catholics. They've changed. They used to be people who had 12 children. And because Mrs. Fitzpatrick across the street was a really good Catholic and one of her sons had gotten killed in World War Two. And on the anniversary of his death, the Monsignor used to call on her or wherever. And it's just not that powerful anymore.

So that when the company wanted to take out St. Lawrence, that was my generation of people or younger, like Pat Carney. And they just raised holy hell. So, I mean, and it wasn't just Paul Ulrich or Don Ulrich, or the big State Farm guy, he was a Presbyterian. He was on the committee to save St. Lawrence. So it was kind of more ecumenical. It used to be this town was so Catholic that it was, they were still having the Central football game against Butte High, when I came back to town. And I came back about 25 years ago.

And that was just stupid. It was a slaughter, I mean, Jesus Christ. But that was so traditional, so ingrained in the town, it took them all that time to figure out that, that wasn't right.

[01:05:00]

I like to put it this way. You were either a Catholic or not. And the 'nots' included the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Greek Orthodox, the Jews. And I mean, that's the way the town was divided.

GRANT: Well, like you say, we could talk about Butte stories all day long. You've written books on it. Or, a book, and then re-issued other books. But anyway, let's get back to the story of your personal experience. And then, so after Cuba, did you guys return here? When did you flee?

MCGLASHAN: Well I fled in '61 when I graduated from the University Montana. And that's when I married Gaylord, because that was part of that transition period. Where you were expected to be really smart in school, and then you were expected to be a housewife.

GRANT: And you were okay with that?

MCGLASHAN: No, well yeah, the marriage part. I wanted to be someone's wife. And it didn't take very long for me to figure out when Gaylord was tapped by Lloyd Schermer, who's a son-in-law of the guy, Phil Adler, that owned the Lee Newspapers. And we went to the Midwest. For him to be in a management program? Well, it didn't take very long for me to figure out that Gaylord hated the management program and all that it - and I loved it. And then if I had been a man, I would have been a lead newspaperman, cause I would have...

[01:07:00]

But even back then, I couldn't get hired because he was on the paper. So I worked for United Way and I had a wonderful boss, Bill Stameten. He had gotten his master’s in social management or whatever from, I think it was Wisconsin, and was this radical professor. And Bill was working with - it was back in the Lyndon Johnson days - where they were talking about bringing people up, and it was pretty radical.

And Bill had this, he dealt with this board. I was his secretary, I got hired as a secretary. Which I really enjoyed, because being a secretary is - you can have a lot of fun and none of the responsibility. Anyway. He would he worked with this board of directors? The war on poverty. Was that Lyndon Johnson?

GRANT: Yeah.

MCGLASHAN: Well, Bill worked for the board of directors, which included Phil Adler, the head of Lee Newspapers, whose father actually established Lee Newspapers. And worked with all these bankers and lawyers. And he was so good about these radical programs because in conducting these meetings, he would all of a sudden, I realized he was getting them to carry the message of these programs, and he was the best people manipulator ever. I just loved him. And I loved working for him because they didn't even know what hit them. They were so gung ho about Lyndon Johnson's poverty programs. It was almost as though they'd been drugged.

[01:09:00]

Bill and I got along really well because as a journalist, the first time he had me come in the office to take dictation, I got the gist of what he was saying. And I said, 'why don't you just let me write the letter and then you can approve it'.

And that's the way he carried on all of his correspondence, is he'd talk to me about something and then I presented it in letter form.

GRANT: Wow.

MCGLASHAN: It was just a really fun job.

GRANT: It'd be a lot of trust there.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah, well there was, but I was very good at it. I mean both times I've been a secretary, I've done that with my bosses. The other boss was after Gaylord and I got divorced and was over at the Missoula Alumni Association. And I can't remember that guy's name either. John, somebody, just a short little guy. He'd been a union man, I think. Anyway, he ran the Alumni Association and he was, well, he was better off after I left because before his first board meeting, I said, ‘John, look at it this way. These are just human beings, as much as they do. Think of them all naked’. I mean that old cliche. And he went, 'really? I never thought of it that way'... He did. We blossomed. I didn't stay long.

GRANT: What about married life in this first marriage? And was this the father of your children?

[01:11:00]

MCGLASHAN: Gaylord? Yeah. He didn't want to have children. I wanted children. And I had them too close together. Well that's ‘cause my Aunt Zena had her children close together, and Timmy and Sally, my cousins, were always very close to one another.

And how did I know that Meg and Grant would hate each other? I mean, it was just a gamble, so I don't know. That's what you did back then, is have kids. I don't regret it.

GRANT: Yeah. What happened with him?

MCGLASHAN: Um, did I put that thing away? We went to Aspen, when Nikki Papas owned the Aspen Illustrated News, he hired Gaylord to be editor of it. And Gaylord was already a skier. He was a very good skier. And that's what essentially broke up our marriage.

GRANT: Skiing?

MCGLASHAN: No, it was the whole lifestyle thing. And Aspen wasn't even crass then. It was kind of charming. But, I mean, it's just not my kind of life. So I went packing.

GRANT: With the kids?

MCGLASHAN: Well, what was I going to do? Leave them there?

GRANT: I don't know.

MCGLASHAN: I mean, he didn't want them in the first place. So yes, they were always my children. They were never our children because he was just not capable of that. He was the nicest guy and when he finally settled down in Aspen, he had, Oh God, he had several skiing related jobs.

[01:13:00]

I kept in touch with his parents and mother did too. 'Cause they were the kids grandparents. So one year mother said, 'I haven't heard from Evelyn. I didn't get a Christmas card from her'. And his mother and my mother were both named Evelyn. Weird. So I called and his mother was in the hospital and she was dying of cancer.

And I said to Harley, I was with Harley by then. And I said, 'what should I do'? And he said, ‘call him up’. And so I called him up and I got the secretary because he was working for a skier who was internationally known at the time, and had some kind of ski school or whatever. And she said, 'busy. Who should I say is calling'?

I said, 'this is his ex-wife'. I said, 'I'm the one that had his children. You tell Gaylord to get on the phone this minute'. And apparently it worked because the secretary… so then he said to me, 'what should I do'? I said, 'fly to Billings and hope that you make it before your mother dies'. And he did. And she was still cognizant. But I mean, duh. He made a great bartender though.

GRANT: Is that what he ended up doing?

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. Woody Creek Bar. Woody Creek is just south, it's between Glenwood Springs and Aspen.

GRANT: Hm, wow. Well, and then you mentioned Harley. He was your second husband.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. So he was - I remember on our first date. We talked about fiscal responsibility. And that was just music to my ears because Gaylord would go down to Bob Ward and Son's and come back with a $200 pair of skis, on time payments. And I was not working. It was just a nightmare.

So, and then Harley had a great influence on me because we were both in the same field, but he was, I think, smarter than I was. For example, when I finished my PhD and Harley was still working on - he never did finish his PhD, he didn't finish his dissertation - but there's another story.

[01:16:00]

But so we had this deal that when we were looking to leave Iowa that whoever got the first job would be where the other one would go. And of course, back then, this was '78. I don't know. I'd have to look on my resume. But it was in that crisis period where, God love him, Richard Nixon had approved the EOC. That equal opportunity was a Nixon program. And everybody was looking around - well, let me put it this way. When I got to Penn State, this one senior professor said 'we're so glad to have a woman on the staff. We had one once but she didn't work out’.

And Harley was the one that said 'Zena Beth, you can either be yourself or play their game. But if you're gonna play it like you want, then you're going to have to take the consequences'. So he predicted right away that I'd get in trouble with my faculty and it didn't take very long.

GRANT: Was Harley basically raising your kids?

MCGLASHAN: Well, he was responsible.

GRANT: He was the father figure?

MCGLASHAN: No. Well, yeah, kind of.

GRANT: I guess I don't know how much time there was in between, and how old your kids were.

MCGLASHAN: Well, I was single for five years in LA when I got my masters.

GRANT: Oh, we skipped that.

MCGLASHAN: I had an orange and white bikini and I lived in one of those California apartments with a pool.

GRANT: Nice.

MCGLASHAN: And one of the things that happened when we lived there was, it was winter time. And of course it wasn't nice out, but Meg had her little red jacket on and she was riding her trike down alongside the pool. And she rode her trike into the pool. And I was on second floor and I heard Grant say, 'my sister!' Well, I ran to the balcony and I could see her under the water. I said, 'Grant, stay right where you are. And when she comes up, pull her out.' And he did. 'Cause I couldn't have gotten down there, down the steps in time to do that. So that's when Grant rescued his sister.

GRANT: Wow. So you were raising two kids and getting a master's degree?

MCGLASHAN: And I was teaching too.

GRANT: How'd you do it?

MCGLASHAN: I don't know. Judy and I often say that we don't know how we did it. Cause she had a lot harder life than I did. Because her her mother died and she didn't have the kind of support. And her husband Ray went off with this bimbo woman.

[01:19:00]

So, anyway, I don't know how we did it. But I can remember when we were being accredited, the accrediting team came and it was my third year there. And by then I was teaching two sections - one section of editing and one reporting and all three reporting labs. And a woman on the accrediting team said, 'you're doing a lot more than if you were full-time'. And I was, but I loved it. I love the students.

That's one of the reasons I got in trouble at Penn State, because there were certain traditions and one of the traditions was that the senior professor and his junior professor and news department would have - the last class was a luncheon at the French restaurant.

It was because the senior professor, the one with all the power, loved all things French and was a wine connoisseur. And so they invited me to bring my editing class and I said, 'well, I'll take a poll'. So I went into class and I said, ‘does anybody want to go down and eat at that French restaurant for your last class'?

And they all went - they'd all heard about this tradition. And I said, 'well, we won't be doing it'. So, that was fatal. That was really fatal.

GRANT: They took that as a slap in the face?

MCGLASHAN: That and the fact that they had a reporting closet and it was shelves of various handouts that you could have them write stories off of.

And I would make up things that were not in the reporting closet. And have my students do them and that wasn't right either. So Harley was right. And so then when I had my review for renewal of my contract as an assistant professor, it was a renewal with serious reservations.

And so that's when I got out. Well, I did it to myself. I love my editing students. They were just the wildest bunch and they were good too. They were really smart. 'Cause see the main campus of Penn State only gets the cream of the crop. The Pennsylvania state university system has 27 units.

[01:22:00]

And to get to the main campus, you have to really be super. So the students were super. And on my evaluation, when they were doing my evaluation, I said, 'well, for God's sake, don't say she never lets us discuss anything'. And every single one of them said, 'she never lets us discuss anything,' because they thought it was absolutely a joke.

And I did too, but I thought, 'Oh God', so.

GRANT: What about your PhD? When did that come?

MCGLASHAN: My PhD came - see my dad had never finished his doctorate. And I had to get one and so I applied when I graduated from Cal State -Northridge with my masters, I applied all these different places.

And of course they were hot to get a woman on the faculty because they had one once. So that's when I went to Iowa, back to Iowa. I'd already worked there in Iowa, in Davenport. I went to university and then taught and took classes. And was hated because it was all the politics from the radio station.

I mean, all the politics come out. And they say, academics fight so hard because they have so little to fight over.

GRANT: The stakes are so low.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. So, but that's when I got my PhD.

GRANT: I'm sorry. Was that before or after Penn?

[01:24:00]

MCGLASHAN: That was before. And they had this visiting professor named Jim Carey who was just fabulous. I just loved him. Jim at one time had been a cab driver in Chicago. So you can imagine his personality was - and he was brilliant. And he had been a visiting professor at Penn State. So I made an appointment with him and I said, 'I've got a chance to go to Penn State'. And he said, 'happy valley'.

And that's what the Penn State people called it - happy valley. He said, 'there has to be some kind of gas that they put out over there'. And it was the weirdest, well the idea that a good friend of Joe Paterno's turned out to be a raving pedophile was just because it was Penn State. I mean the culture.

Harley and I went to this reception one time. I think it was my second year there. And we talked to this really nice man from the library. It was one of the administrators in the library. And he wanted to know how long we'd been there. And I said 'we've only been here a couple years'. And I said, 'how long have you been here'? He said, 'I'm a newcomer too, I've been here 17 years'.

I mean, it was happy valley. That Jim was right. It was really weird. And then the other thing that was weird was, because I had been born there, I was born in Belfont, which is where the hospital was - and it was the county seat of Center County.

[01:26:00]

And Penn State had a quota on women, that they only allow so many women at the - I mean, that was, it was really weird. I mean it was truly weird. But great antiques. I wish I had some money.

GRANT: So did Harley have a job after that? Or where were you guys off to...

MCGLASHAN: Harley was always part-time, but Harley did get on - I think he got one class and then when we went to North Dakota, he taught two classes and he just acted like he was regular faculty. He made up an interdisciplinary photo thing. He really blossomed at North Dakota. And then our final year together before he died, was down in El Paso.

GRANT: Wow.

MCGLASHAN: And that was a blessing that Harley had that we didn't foresee, because they had a big photo facility and he had an advanced lab and a beginning lab and he never had that before. It was just like, manna from heaven.

GRANT: So you all went from Penn State to North Dakota, to El Paso.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah, we were only down in El Paso for a year.

GRANT: How did he die?

MCGLASHAN: He had cancer. So that was interesting. His father died of cancer. And so I was a hospice volunteer. Which helps you greatly if you're dealing with the death of a loved one, all the rules.

[01:28:00]

GRANT: I don’t…

MCGLASHAN: Well, I mean, like if I hadn't been a hospice volunteer, I would have tried to feed him, you know, when he was dying, and it's not important that he eat. I mean I fixed him whole meals. And then the thing is that people associate food with being healthy. And you cannot cure cancer with chicken soup.

So when Sherry Schmidt's dad was dying. I said, 'don't force feed him. He doesn't want to eat and if he wants something and he's not supposed to have it, give it to him anyway'. But I said keep up the regularity of meals, but don't try to get him to eat because he's not going to get well'. And she thanked me.

She said, 'you're absolutely right. 'Cause everybody wanted dad to eat'. And she said, 'I knew he wasn't going to cause you told me'. So that was cool.

GRANT: And how old were the kids when Harley died?

MCGLASHAN: Oh, Grant was already in San Francisco. He worked for Industrial Light and Magic, I mean, Lucas's outfit. And Meg was in college. And Meg, she was living in the sorority house. And so she'd come over and visit with Harley.

[01:30:00]

I was thankful that Harley's mother had already died. She died a year - she died while we were down in El Paso and Harley hadn't discovered his cancer yet. She died that fall. And she died in L.A. Because they gave up the house in Minot. But that worked out really well.

Well, I mean, you're dealing with a parental unit, of course, you have more of a support system from your brothers. Don't you?

GRANT: You mean for my mom? Yeah. There's two of them close to her. At least physically close.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. Well, she strikes me as kind of a free spirit.

GRANT: Oh yeah. I'm glad you got to meet her.

MCGLASHAN: Oh yeah, I am too. I met your dad too, that was a surprise. Oh, what did he go with a heart attack or?

GRANT: Yup. He just dropped dead. He was gone. Gone.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. Well, it was kind of like Harley's uncle. Uncle Ben was on the golf course with some friends and he raised his hand up to wave at people that were driving by and that's, when he went. He just went. I mean, no one could believe it because he was 73 or something. Your dad was young too.

GRANT: Yeah, 66. 67. Something like that. Well, I mean, when I met you, you were with another man, Mike Gamble, and he's number three.

[01:32:00]

MCGLASHAN: Oh God. I know. Can we believe that we've been together almost 30 years?

GRANT: Really? So I'm curious how you got from El Paso to here.

MCGLASHAN: Well, I came home after Harley died. I didn't want to stay in North Dakota.

So I came back to Butte and I figured I'd get a job, teaching someplace. Well, if you're a full professor, you're not going to get a job teaching someplace because they're never going to hire a full professor. And even if you decide you'd rather be an assistant professor, they're going to know that you were once a full professor and yeah. It just, yeah, yada, yada, yada.

And he remembered me from high school French class. Which he failed, but the teacher had broken her foot, or leg or, and I was the class monitor. I was the one that gave out the assignments and brought him back in, 'cause our substitute teacher only spoke Spanish. So anyway he knew a friend of mine and she told him that I was back in town and he called me up. So that's what happened.

GRANT: Pretty soon after you got back?

MCGLASHAN: Yes. Yeah. My mother was just appalled. My mother was just appalled, because here I was, as my friend Marie put it, 'she expected you to go on and be the queen of China. And here you were going with a guy who didn't even finish college and was a Butte rat'.

So anyway, so, but eventually I got her to come around. Thanks to Marie. But it's, it's been interesting.

GRANT: I'm curious if you could describe academia just generally for me and your experience.

MCGLASHAN: The students are great. The administrators are not so great. It's kinda like any chain of command. The further up you go, the less reality - I mean, these people, the administrators, do not have a great sense of reality because they've lost track of why they're there. My students were always the important things.

John Astle said that's why he quit teaching down at Butte High. He said, 'I loved the kids', but he said, ''I just couldn't stand the administration’.

[01:35:00]

And I only ever worked at one university that had a decent president. And that was the University of North Dakota. And Tom Clifford, he had a business master's. And he'd only gone to North Dakota and he was the antithesis of glossy credentials, but he knew the names of all of his faculty. And he knew the names of all of the caretakers and secretaries, I mean, that was his university. And he was a remarkable man and that's the only time I've ever worked for, where I felt like someone had a handle on it.

The woman who was president down at El Paso, my God, what a bitch she was. Jesus Christ. And she had a Hispanic last name because her ex-husband was Hispanic, but she wasn't Hispanic, I mean, she was riding on somebody else's name. Oh Jesus. Oh God. What a bitch. Okay. I'm sorry.

GRANT: That's the Zena Beth I know.

MCGLASHAN: Well, yes. And then when I went up to Tech, and I was Director of Continuing Education for a year, till that guy who was Academic Vice-President figured out that he didn't have enough money to hire me.

That came as a real shock. But Tech was so different because they had absolutely no standards for these guys. Everywhere else I'd been, we had to publish or perish, and stuff like that. Well, at Tech, there wasn't that kind of rigor. Some of the professors are really good, but their standards were not so hot. But you know, my dad just loved Montana Tech. He just, it was his life blood. He, well, I'll tell you how much dad loved Montana Tech. He had a student that ended up heading the mining department, at the University of Utah. And he called dad and he said, 'Don, if you come down here and just spend a couple of semester, I don't give a shit what you write as your PhD, then I'm guaranteeing you a PhD. Because that's a stopper, if you don't have one'.

Dad, wouldn't do it. He would not do it.

[01:38:00]

Found a letter in his files where he was a reserve officer in the Air Force and he wrote to his commander or whatever, and said, 'I'm too busy with my students. I'd like to opt out'. So he gave up the retirement of a white Colonel, for his students.

Now, needless to say, his students loved him. But I mean, I was up at the mining museum on Miner's Union Day and I was working with one of the other volunteers. And this woman, I don't know how she got to know who I was, but she said 'McGlashan. Did your father teach at the School of Mines’? And I said, 'yeah'. And she said, 'let me get my husband'. And she brought this guy over and he told me the story about how he got his undergraduate. And then he was sitting around with some of his friends and they were talking about what they were going to do. And the guy, he said, 'I thought I'd like to get a masters'. So he went over and talked to my dad.

And Don kept saying to him, ''well, what are you going to do for me? And finally the guy said to him, 'I'll work my butt off for you. I guarantee it'. Well, a few days went by and it was the end of the semester. And he got this notification that he was supposed to go to this award ceremony. And he said, 'I had never won anything in my entire life', but he said, 'I went'. And he said, 'I won the fellowship. in your father's department'. And he said, 'that's how I got my masters'. And then he went up to South America and he made some big money. But he had never forgotten that it was Donald W. McGlashan who made him, he gave dad credit. I don't know. And that was the way my dad was, they were his boys. And my students called me Mother Zena, so.

[01:41:00]

Oh, dad had this wonderful story about when we were down in Birmingham he was in charge of this barracks full of raw recruits. And they had this one guy who worked as a, he was a competent butcher. And he was very competent until he got drunk. And then he'd start swinging his knife around. And military police did not want a single thing to do with him because he was so dangerous. So they'd call my dad.

And he said, 'whatever time of the night, I'd go down, and I was his commanding officer. He'd give me his knife'. I think that was the best story, my dad.

But it was a strange time. It was a strange time for women. This has been a really interesting period for me to be a woman's studies person.

GRANT: Do you see positive change?

MCGLASHAN: Oh my God. I see positive change - when I was at Penn State, I had my Women, Minorities, and the Media class - it was just very popular, used to get to a lot of men and women.

And then there were not very many Blacks on campus then. I think there were two male professors, sociology. They were the only Black faculty members. But anyway. So I knew that there was a, I've been trying to write it down 'cause it would make a really good column. But there was this internship for the summer for minorities, and ASNE, American Society for Newspaper Editors, was sponsoring it.

[01:43:00]

And there wasn't any classier outfit than ASNE. And so I got the student, I said, 'I want to talk to you about something'. And he was a Black kid and I said, 'perfect timing. ASNE has got these internships, and you could get one year at a major university. And I think you could get one'.

And he was just an average student, but he was polite and he never missed a class. And, I could see potential in him. He said, 'I don't know'. He says, 'there are so many people who are so much better than I am'. And he meant the white students. He said, 'why should I get this? Because I'm Black?'

I said, listen, I said 'you like my class, don't you?’ And he went, 'yeah', and we laughed. And I said, 'I wouldn't be here if somebody hadn't noticed that there were no women on faculty. And it was a national thing, a federal mandate'. And I said, 'the reason I'm here is affirmative action. The reason that you're eligible for this is affirmative action. And we owe it to those people who've gone before us to take advantage of this'.

And I don't know whether the kid got it or not. I mean, I was not in charge of the internships, but I was the one that… but you see the difference is that when I look at these Black Lives Matters, I was sometimes moved to tears by the crowd because there were Asian Americans, there were white Americans, there were Hispanic Americans. There were old Americans, they were young. It wasn't just BLM. It was the principles that we've been fighting for come to life. Sure there's some bad asses, and there's some burned down places because of it, but it was just...

[01:45:00]

And then the media itself is, I mean there are women correspondents and, I mean, I don't like... when I got my PhD, there was this woman who was a, oh God, now what's her name. She was up at McGill and she was down at Iowa. She knew a bunch of those guys. But Gertrude somebody. Anyway, at her visiting lecture, she talked about equity, women in the media. And she said it won't happen for a hundred years. And that was in 1978 or something like that. And she's right. She's right.

But we've made such progress. But we're not there yet, and I mean, Nora, what's her name, who's on the CBS evening news. They have her on a set that looks like Barbie's dollhouse, and she wears these brilliant outfits and she's shown full figure a lot. And, on the weekends when somebody else takes over, they sit down and they're a regular anchor. But she's prominent, and that's the wrong approach. And her bosses haven't reached that level of understanding.

I don't know. Does that make any sense?

GRANT: Oh yeah, it definitely does.

MCGLASHAN: So, but I'm hopeful. Yeah. I don't know, if we don't all die of the virus.

GRANT: No shit. Well, we're almost at two hours. So I just had a couple more questions. I wanted to ask, I feel like I've gotten a really good overview of your career and I have a better understanding of where you came from, which I'm grateful for. But I'm curious about how you first came into this office we're sitting in.

MCGLASHAN: Oh, that was - here's the button. This is a writers and readers...well let's backtrack. North Dakota had an annual event and they invite authors to speak, and workshops, and students attended. And it was a big deal.

[01:48:00]

So when I was up at Tech, I decided we'd have Writers and Readers Celebrate. And then Rick D. Marinas, do you recognize the name? He was an author of some note, Harley and I ran into Rick and Cheryl down in El Paso. So I recruited him and Connie Dougherty and John Astle. And we invited five or six authors, and we raised the money to pay for their housing and we didn't even give a stipend.

We were the first ones, they used to have that Festival of the Book in Missoula? Ours was first, because Rick used to say that. And John Astle was on the committee. And so we had the first one up at Tech and it was just a couple of panel, and I can't even remember who was there.

So when I got canned up there, I said to John, 'well, let's continue Writers and Readers Celebrate, 'cause we thought it was a good idea. And we had some neat people. And I said, 'it's too bad there isn't an office'. And he said we could have it at the Carpenter's Union Hall. And he came down and this office was vacant. He said, 'why don't you try to talk to Larry and see if he'd rent it for you'.

GRANT: Larry Mayo?

MCGLASHAN: Uh huh. And that's when I moved in here. And we did Writers and Readers Celebrate for, ah, God, I just think three years, or I don't know. Maybe Diane Campbell will remember. Most of the people that worked on it are dead. Oh, no kidding. I mean, Rick's dead, Carol's dead, Connie Dougherty's dead. Oh God.

GRANT: What was the mission statement, if there was one, of this event?

MCGLASHAN: Well, it was it was tied into Butte St. Patrick's Day celebration and it didn't have an Irish theme.

It was just a literary event coupled with the idea of a festival, a local festival. And we made, God, I worked my buns off on that thing. And one time John came in, Oh God, did you ever know him? John Astle?

GRANT: No.

[01:51:00]

MCGLASHAN: Oh God. He was peach. Anyway, he came in, and had to be in the second or third year, I said, 'we're finally getting people to give us money'. And I said, 'why are they giving us money?' And John said, 'it's simple Zena Beth. They feel guilty because they don't show up'. And we did, we were getting contributions and we really were able to increase the stipend, pay the well, Frankie was the deal with the Finlen, but anyway, but nobody showed up. Connie Dougherty, did you ever know her?

GRANT: No. I don't know these folks.

MCGLASHAN: Oh God. She was a little peach. I found this picture of her and she was on the Judy Jacobson election committee. And she worked up at Tech, in the library, but anyway, she would - that's when AUW was so popular, and a lot of us belonged. And she said, 'they have all these book clubs'. And then she said, 'and then we bring them alive authors and they don't show up'. And she'd just get furious. Anyway. And Duncan Adams was a wonderful writer. Oh God. So anyway, where were we going?

GRANT: Well, that's how you came into this office. And the event took place here?

MCGLASHAN: Yeah.

GRANT: In that room back there? Huh.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. Well, Oh my memory's not that good. Diane Kimball, who's husband Jim Johnson, was on the committee, though they were both on the committee, she might remember. Because she's got a better memory than I do.

[01:53:00]

And then the thing that happened was I said, 'enough'. I could not do it. Gus - Helen Guthrie. Well, you should have interviewed her. Jesus. Anyway. She's dead too.

GRANT: Gus - was she married to Shag Miller?

MCGLASHAN: Yeah.

GRANT: I've met her.

MCGLASHAN: Oh, okay.

GRANT: 'Cause I know her daughter, Eden.

MCGLASHAN: Oh God Eden. Did you know that Eden took a picture of her mother dead and put it on Facebook when Gus died? I mean, honest to God.

But anyway, Gus Miller was on the committee. And she was the one that wanted us to ask Ivan Doig, and I said, 'well, you ask him'. And she said, 'no, you ask. I'll get you his phone number'.

And the reason I don't like Ivan Doig was I called him up, and then I explained that we had this conference with various writers. They were reading their things and it was in Butte, on St. Patrick's Day. And we'd very much like him to come. And he said, 'why would I want to do a thing like that?'

And I thought - fuck you. Jesus. I couldn't even read his books. I mean, it biased me so much against him, so.

GRANT: Interesting. Well, the event fell off, but you stuck around in this building?

MCGLASHAN: Well, I was going to make a living. I mean, I was going to be a serious desktop publisher. I even joined a desktop publisher national association. And found out that if you wanted to starve, you could start by being a desktop publisher in Butte, Montana.

[01:55:00]

I got a few contracts, my first one was Insty Prints. Insty Prints had the only Mac in town. And I went in there and once in a while, rented it for a couple of hours and then they did a newsletter. So they had me do it. But I had Harley's estate, his annuities, and I had my retirement. I could afford to - well, I mean, getting me out of the house was great.

GRANT: Yeah. Is that the function it serves nowadays, most of all, you think?

MCGLASHAN: I'm just so used to being here? I'm used to going somewhere. I'm like the mule that you know was around the trees because he went on the winch path, when they were doing the mine. So.

And besides that, where would we put all this stuff? When I leave here, I'm going to have an estate sale, so don't raise my rent.

GRANT: Right. We were joking at the last carpenter's hall board meeting that we were going to send you a letter, like on nice letterhead. Maybe that one I made, that says 'due to ongoing maintenance costs, including the repair of windows, we've had to raise your rent' and, like make this big formal thing. And then at the end, just put, 'hahaha'.

MCGLASHAN: I paid for my own window, so. But I've really enjoyed it.

GRANT: Being in here?

[01:57:00]

MCGLASHAN: I Yeah. And being with the unions and, we used to have the giant Christmas party. It's just, it's been nice. And then when Judy was Chief Executive, she was a smoker, and that's back when I was a smoker and we could smoke in the building. So she'd come truckin' across the street and have a cigarette.

GRANT: That's pretty cool.

MCGLASHAN: Well, it was, because we discussed a lot of - some of the stuff she did, I didn't approve of, but at least she had a sounding board. She was good. When she first was in there, what's his name? Oh, God the planning director .

GRANT: Dave Schultz?

MCGLASHAN: No.

GRANT: Sesso.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah, Sesso. And Jimmy Johnson, who was the public works director, she said, 'they started screaming at each other'. We were in the conference room. And she said, 'I just looked at them', and I said, 'gentlemen, I don't tolerate that behavior. If you want to talk, we'll talk'. And I said, 'what do you attribute that way with people that you had'?

And she said, 'it's because I'm a mother'. And she said, 'they were just like two kids'.

But she was a real, that was a coup though. That campaign. I remember when we were, we had our election night party upstairs at the KC, in this small room. There was probably maximum, maybe 15 or 20 of us.

[01:59:00]

I mean, JD was down the street with a filled Elks Hall, and Judy very quietly said - and we had this little tiny TV that somebody had brought - and Judy said, 'I think I won'. I said, 'what do you mean'? She said, 'the person that wins the absentee generally wins the election'. And she said, 'I'm pretty sure I won'. So we all went home and she did. It was just cool. I've got a picture of the two of us. Do you want to see it?

GRANT: Yeah, for sure. Should we move this thing?

MCGLASHAN: It's in that cupboard.

GRANT: Okay.

MCGLASHAN: Well, open up the cupboard and you'll see it. Cause I've got it back there where I can see it.

GRANT: Up here?

MCGLASHAN: Yep. There. Hail to the chief. We had a really good - that campaign we ran very well. And the fact that Judy came over here and all the union secretaries knew her, I think really helped.

That was one of the funnest things I've ever done in my life, was that campaign. So.

GRANT: Are you hopeful about Butte and its local government, in the coming years?

[02:01:00]

MCGLASHAN: Oh yeah. Well, I mean it's a lot better than it was. Good God. I mean, when I was working at The Standard, and this is in the Buried in Butte book, the little reporter who goes to the chief of police, and the chief of police used to stand out in front of city hall in a Hawaiian shirt, chewing on a cigar with a porkpie hat on. I went up to him, because I was working at The Standard that summer, it was the summer before I married Gaylord. And I said, 'do you want to say anything about school starting’? And he looked at me, and he said,' yous the nice girl. Yous can figure out what I'm going to say, can't you'?

And I said, 'you got it mayor'. And I went back and wrote all these wonderful sentences that he did not say. I mean, when I worked at The Standard, the summer of '61, somebody took the tires off of a car that was parked down by Hennessy's, which is a block from the police station.

They took all the wheels off this car. I mean, hello. I mean, we were talking about the other night, Mike will tell you. Yeah. Some stories about cops that curl your hair - now they're gentle. And I mean, they're nothing like they used to be.

GRANT: In Butte.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. And the whole town - it’s not in the palm of the hands of a company. And the, well, there's that one walk down by the chamber building that has one of those arches on it.

[02:03:00]

And what's his name? Who did all those arches? His wife basically had all the money. But anyway, that one guy that it's named after, he was the one that led the - Dorothy Bradley wanted to cut this town off from the interstate.

She wanted the interstate to go through Bozeman and then back of the East Ridge and up through there. And, Oh God, what was that? That guy's name is on the walking trail, but he was the one that led the troops to fight for taking the interstate serious. Can you imagine how much the town would suffer if we didn't have that?

GRANT: It’s kind of like this new deal, if they put passenger rail back in and it skips Butte.

MCGLASHAN: Did you talk to him?

GRANT: I did. I'll have to play you the news story I made and get a critique.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. What - does he think it's a real possibility?

GRANT: Yeah, I'll play it for you. I'll play it for you.

MCGLASHAN: Okay. Oh, that'd be great. Yeah she would have made a good governor, but she shot herself in the foot, Dorothy. She's still around. I saw a story about her the other day.

But it's changed, and you're part of the change. Because, bringing life back to the Hill...

GRANT: There's only so much one person can do. I realized that about five years into living here, it was like, Oh, well I can't single handedly transformed the entire place.

[02:05:00]

MCGLASHAN: God. That'll make you live longer.

GRANT: Yeah really.

MCGLASHAN: So what are you and Nora going to do about Nora's -

GRANT: Shall I stop the tape?

MCGLASHAN: Huh?

GRANT: Shall I stop the tape?

MCGLASHAN: Well I don't know if you want it on tape. I mean, she's got her eyes on NPR nationally. I think.

GRANT: Well, I don't know. It depends on the day. She really likes horses too.

MCGLASHAN: Okay. Now does she come from a well-to-do family?

GRANT: I don't know. I don't think so.

MCGLASHAN: Oh, well I was just thinking about her. Well play it as it lays.

GRANT: Well, thanks for your time on this.

MCGLASHAN: You're welcome.

GRANT: I enjoyed it. It wasn't too excruciating. Was it?

MCGLASHAN: No, because the thing is that, an interview like this - there isn't anything that people like to do more than talk about themselves. I have done so many interviews and I can remember this one time, these two women did in New Mexico, or in Albuquerque, they didn't say anything.

They collected something, or. And after the story was printed, the woman called the editor and said, 'I don't know how she did it, but the quotes from us were exactly what we said'. And duh. I made up 98% of it, but it was just, I mean, you can't get people to shut up.

GRANT: That's a good thing when you're doing an oral history.

MCGLASHAN: Yeah. Well, you find that. Have you ever had one that's hard?

[02:07:00]

GRANT: Yeah. Larry Cyr. 'Cause everything’s classified. 'Cause he was a spy.

MCGLASHAN: Well, he was more back at the headquarters. But I remember when Will Wallace, who's a mutual friend, we went to high school with him, when he was back there one time, he said it was the only time he was ever in a house that had a map of Russia in Russian.

GRANT: Right? Exactly.

MCGLASHAN: So yeah, he's an interesting guy.

GRANT: Well, I'll turn this thing off. This is where I pretend to turn it off and get you to keep talking.

[END OF RECORDING]