EPC

A College Experience: An Oral History

By Kathleen Currie Hall

Elmyr Park Currie and Kathleen Currie Hall, 1982

Elmyr Park Currie, née Elmyr Park, was born on the thirteenth of October, 1907, in Macon, Georgia. Her father, Orville Augustus Park, was a lawyer and a professor at Mercer University; her mother, Fannie Elmyr Taylor, was an invalid for much of Elmyr's childhood. Elmyr was raised in Macon with her older sister, Frances, and her older brother, Orville. Life in Georgia at the beginning of the twentieth century often differed greatly from life at the end of the century, but in many ways, the children were just children and the adults were just adults. Many of the modern “conveniences” did not exist, of course -- there were no teddy bears, disposable diapers, Kleenex, refrigerators, washing machines, or votes for women -- but life went on nevertheless. As she explains in Macon Days, Elmyr Park grew up with ice cream, Santa Claus, Sunday School, dolls, and childhood mischief.

The Parks were a fairly liberal-minded family when it came to women's rights, and the nineteen twenties was certainly an era of liberation. Although the nineteenth amendment allowing women's suffrage was not passed until Elmyr Park was almost thirteen, both she and her mother were free to and did attend college. Fannie Taylor went to the National Park Seminary in Washington, D.C.; her daughter attended Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. Goucher, which first opened for students in September of 1888, was, when Elmyr went there, a women's college under the control of a power-hungry but dying man. President William Guth had eliminated the school's debt, increased the faculty and endowment, and had made plans for moving the school to a larger space in Towson, Maryland, before he fell ill in 1926. From 1926 to Guth's death in 1929, Goucher was plagued with a “power vacuum,” because nobody dared to take control from a man who was “considered by many both blunt and tactless in speech and sometimes ruthless in action, but basically honest and sincere” (Musser 3-4).

College life, like life in general in this era, was both very different from and yet remarkably the same as life today. Because Goucher was an all-women's school, no men were allowed to sing in the Glee club or be in any school productions until 1932 and 1933; before 1908, men were not even allowed in the audience (Musser 26-27)! But, as is common at many educational institutions even now, the students complained about the food: they did not like the selection, cooking, or serving of it at Goucher (Musser 27). Students were trying to learn how to live on their own and deal with new freedoms, responsibilities, and stresses; money, of course, inevitably becomes an issue in day-to-day college life. In the following interview, Elmyr Park Currie discusses her own dealings with money and her allowance while at Goucher.

A College Experience: Elmyr Park Currie

**For an audio sample of the dialog, click here.**

JTH: “When you were in school at Goucher, did you go to concerts or other events, the theatre in Baltimore, during the school year?”
EPC: “Not very much.”
JTH: “Was it permitted, or too expensive, or what . . . ?”
EPC: “Yes. 'Twas too expensive. It was permitted; encouraged, in fact . . . it was . . . it was rather expensive. We didn’t have all that much money. Of course, well, I graduated in 1929, which was the, right at the . . . beg--, in the worst of the Depression; it’d just hit. So . . . .”
JTH: “Yeah. When you were in school, did you have an allowance? Or did you have that many expenses, personal expenses?”
EPC: “Yeah, I had an allowance, but it was, it was a fairly meagreone. But nobody had much.”
JTH: “Well, do you remember, was it like five dollars a month, or five dollars a week, or five dollars a year, or . . . ?”
EPC: (Laughter) “It was . . . you know, I think it was more like twenty-five dollars for a month. But: you were supposed to do things in those days . . . . We wore stockings, for instance, and you had to buy, you had to, I mean, you had to take care of all the things like that as well as, as any things like your little snacky and things.”
KCH: “What about stuff like laundry? [Hm?] What about laundry?”
EPC: “You could, uh, get your heavy laundry, sheets and things like that, were done for you at, by the school. But any personal laundry – most of the time, we kind of did either in the washbasin – we did, did not have a washing machine.”
KCH: “But you didn’t have to pay for it.”
EPC: “No. If you -- We did have a lot, fair number of things that, well, had to be dry cleaned, though, in those days. It was not this ‘wash and wear’ business. So, you know, we would have wool skirts, for instance, people didn’t wear slacks . . . [Right.] . . . But you had wool dresses and wool skirts, and they would occasionally have to be dry cleaned, and that would have to come out of your allowance.”

* EPC is Elmyr Park Currie, JTH is John Thomas Hall III (Ms. Currie's son-in-law), and KCH is Kathleen Currie Hall (Ms. Currie's granddaughter).

Analysis of Orality:

Ms. Currie's education and upbringing are clearly evident in her speech. In stressed syllables, she tends to lengthen her vowels, so that "hit" becomes [hI:t], "meagre" becomes [mi:gr], "clean" becomes [kli:n], and "wool" becomes [wU:l]. She tends to drop final "r"s ("rather" becomes "rathuh" and "cylinder" becomes "cylinduh").     Furthermore, she pronounces the first person singular nominative pronoun "I" as [a:]. These linguistic realizations are indicative of her childhood in the south; her dialect and "accent" reveal her background. Ms. Currie comes from a fairly wealthy family -- she did, after all, attend college right before the Depression -- and her relative wealth and education are revealed through her choice of words. She tends to search for the word she wants to use: she changes "permitted" to "encouraged," for example, and stalls before choosing the word "meagre." These attempts to "edit" her speech indicate her familiarity with writing and reading; she is used to being able to re-write her words rather than having to speak flowingly without stopping. She is well-read and uses mainly high-register words; there are very few slang words, even in this casual interview (her use of "yeah" is certainly casual, but it is not slang). The one exception to this is her use of the word "snacky" -- the addition of the [i] is a diminutive form of the word, which would probably be used with children. Ms. Currie has three children, six grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren; her use of "snacky" tells of her numerous experiences with children. A few other word choices are interesting; she uses "washbasin" for "sink," a relic of her time period, and she says that "people didn't wear slacks" when it is clear from the context that she means that women did not wear slacks. Another example of her age status is her use of "none of this," followed by a modern term (such as "wash and wear business"). Although she is not disparaging, she certainly sounds detached from the items she mentions. This example of an oral history clearly does not come from a primary oral speaker, but an examination of the oral characteristics does reveal much of the speaker's background.

Works Cited / Consulted

Cone, Stephen, Erika Gentry, Dorothy Hoskins, and Ann Marie Williams. “Women’s Heritage: History.” Online. Internet. 6 September 1999. Available
    http://www.womensheritage.org/herstory/1920.htm.
Currie, Elmyr Park. Macon Days. N.p.: 1995.
---. Personal interview. 28 August 1999.
Musser, Frederic D. The History of Goucher College, 1930-1985.     Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.

*This page was created as part of a freshman seminar on Orality and Literacy in the Fall of 1999 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by Kathleen Currie Hall, under the direction of Dr. James Noblitt.