Rebecca Mills:This is Rebecca Mills. I am interviewing Kathleen Warren. We are at the University of Idaho Library, Room 131. It is September 27th, 2022. All right. The first question is, what music or artists were you listening to in the sixties?
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Kathleen Warren:Okay. Well, I had just gotten married in 1961. We were very busy starting our life and finishing college. And I really wasn't listening to a lot of popular music. I'm not one of these sorority or college people. I was a serious student, and I was a total idealist. I was really into the music in the fifties, Johnny Mathis, Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, and all that. When the sixties came, I liked that mellow lyrical music, like The Sounds of Silence and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Do you know who those are?
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RM:Mm-hmm (No).
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KW: That's really funny. Simon Garfunkel, The Sound of Silence, and Puff, the Magic Dragon were from the sixties. I actually was interested in classical music. In the sixties, electronic music came in, [which] was kind of interesting; we call it new music. It was atonal; it was screechy to some people's ears. And I was interested in watching that and comparing it with the literature that I was learning. I graduated from San Rafael High School and then went to Berkeley and started studying German literature, which was (included) nihilists. Do you know what nihilism is?
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KW:So, God is Dead. All these things that here as a 17-year-old coming from middle-class San Rafael, California, was (were) just shocking. I was prepared to be shocked all through, including with music. Electronic music was interesting, and I was trying to figure it all out. There were others like Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte, [who] was a Caribbean singer. That was one of the first introductions to a lot of diversity in music because it was pretty white---the Everly Brothers, BOP music until the sixties.
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RM:Interesting. Do you think that music was primarily about partying or social change?
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KW:I just told you what I listened to. I was not socially conscious. I was [a] scared to death 17-year-old going to Berkeley. And I wasn't really into too much, except I became conscious of the House Un-American Activities (HUAC) interviews. Do you know about those? Oh, good. I would say that for me, music was more about love, friendship, and transcendence. I don't really know much about Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and all those. I know they'd sang [sung] a lot of socially conscious songs, but they weren't the ones I was singing. I was singing more love songs and eternal songs and that kind of thing. From what I've researched, music had [has] a social message to a degree. In fact, Puff, the Magic Dragon, has been said to have [contained] drug overtones.
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However, my [two-year-old] son used to sing it. We thought it was a cute song, and that's how naive I was. I never smoked pot, [and] never got into any of that. But I did get into social justice, and the House Un-American Activities Committee just really grabbed me. I did go from Berkeley to San Francisco to one of the protests just to see what it was like. I was also one of the first members of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). [The NAACP] was just starting in the sixties. I was very naive and idealistic and thought that everybody should be equal. But I didn't hear that in the music.
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RM:Interesting.This brings me to a follow-up question. Did the Civil Rights movement affect your perspective on America's commitment to democracy?
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KW:When the Civil Rights Movement started, I trusted the government to help these people. I thought this is great. The government is making it so that all students should be able to go to school, and people should be able to sit any place they want on the bus. I was a real idealist. I was committed to democracy, but that stemmed from my naivete.
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RM:Interesting. What were your thoughts on the Vietnam War?
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KW:Well, my gut feeling was that it was an exercise in futility. It came from hearing all the protests because the students were leading the protests. I was a college student, so I listened to them, and I thought, boy, they're smart. And I think it is futile. I was disgusted with how many people were dying, and we seemed to be getting nowhere. I was disgusted with the war. I didn't feel like [we] should be sending boys into the war if we didn't have some real purpose, like World War II when the Nazis were killing the Jews and so forth. We didn't have that much stake in the Vietnam War for our country here. And it was really hard for me as a young person to figure out why are we sending, maybe my husband later, into the war, except he wasn't my husband at the time. It did change me, changed my feelings about the US. I'm starting to doubt that the government was always right.
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RM:Interesting. Did you know anybody who participated in any draft protests during Vietnam?
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KW:Yeah, I just read about the Kent State uprising. And a friend of mine, I found [out] later, defected to Canada, so he wouldn't have to be drafted. And he wouldn't have to participate. He was a doctor, but I didn't know.
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RM:Okay. I know it's been said that Vietnam was the first televised war. Did seeing it on the television or the nightly news make [it] seem closer to home?
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KW:Absolutely. TV was the biggest change that the sixties had. TV brought everything more immediate. We used to go to the movies and watch the news reels that told us what was happening. That's how we found out about war [and] about politics. If you didn't go to the movies, you didn't see a lot of that. TV was the biggest change that the sixties brought.
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RM:Wow. This brings me to another follow-up question. What social movements were you aware of at the time? How did you or your parents or community feel about them? How did they feel about their leaders?
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KW:I was very aware [of] the social movements, [like] desegregation, and discrimination against black people because of the NAACP meetings I went to at Berkeley and the newspapers. I did read newspapers. I had no clue what HUAC even meant until I actually saw people talking about it. TV was huge. I did participate mostly in what I've already just described.
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RM:Okay. I know you've mentioned HUAC a couple of times now. What were your thoughts on that organization? What were your thoughts on communism during the Cold War?
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KW:Well, my father was a Reagan devotee and was very conservative. When I went to Berkeley, he said, "Don't sign anything. Don't say that you're my daughter. Stay away from those commies." When you're a child, you wanna [want to] rebel a little bit, and you wanna [want to] say, what is he talking about? But of course, I accepted everything, almost everything. What was the gist of the question?
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RM:What were your feelings on HUAC? What were your feelings on communism, and have they changed over time?
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KW:When you come to the university, your mind starts to open. And I thought, what is HUAC? I didn't dare ask my father. I started listening, talking, and finding [out] about all the injustices, all the unfair interviews that they were having, and all the accusations they were making from a very narrow point of view. My feelings were that that was unfair and that they were overstepping their bounds [when they were] persecuting people for what they had to say. And I actually thought I'm gonna go [going to go] and see what this is all about. I went to San Francisco [for] one of the protests, and it was huge. The next day, the police came and washed them off the porch.
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The police came and protested against the protestors. I wasn't in on that. I don't even know if he [my father] knows I went. The other one [protest] was huge. We were walking up in crowds, being pushed, getting up to the courthouse steps, and protesting. I was probably just mimicking what anybody else was saying without a whole lot of knowledge.
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KW:My naive self was just trying to figure out what life was about, what the politics were about, and what discrimination was about. In middle-class San Rafael, California, right across the bay, I didn't have much conflict. I was more interested in boys, boyfriends, school, and getting into college.
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RM:Wow. How did that protest make you more socially aware of what was going on and change your feelings, maybe about the US?
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KW:Well, [it] definitely made me distrust government because these were people who were on the Reagan side, [and] on the Republican side. But how did it make me feel?
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RM:Maybe more socially aware?
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KW:Oh, definitely socially aware. Yeah. When I got to Berkeley, I became social[ly] aware [because] that was a whole different area. And I don't know if you know much about Berkeley, but it's pretty open, and there were lots of protests around. We didn't have any of that in high school. We only had one black student in my high school graduating class. People, of course, would've taken his side because everybody loved him. He was a good football player. Social consciousness wasn't part of my naive self.
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KW:So, yeah. Martin Luther King also raised my consciousness about social justice. When Kennedy was elected in 1960 as a young man in his forties, he would say, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." That made me start thinking that I should be doing more. When he, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy was [were] assassinated, it was just outrageous. [It] was in the late sixties [when] Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. And when was Martin Luther King [assassinated]?
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RM:Mid-sixties, I think?
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KW:Later, mid-sixties.
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KW:Of course, President Kennedy was [assassinated in] 1963. By that time, I was teaching school and had to explain to the kids [that President Kennedy was assassinated]. I was in the classroom when we got this announcement over the loudspeaker that the president has [had] been shot. And here I am in charge of all these seventh graders, almost a seventh grader myself. [What] am I going to tell them? I started doing a lot of research, and I wanted to tell 'em [them] about what the history of assassinations was. We didn't know who the perpetrator [was], [and] it could have been a racial thing at the time. It was very scary for me because I didn't know anything. I was naive. So, it definitely raised my consciousness. Yeah.
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RM:Wow. How did the social movements impact you as a teacher, and what you taught your seventh graders?
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KW:I was teaching French, English, and remedial reading. I guess it didn't, really.
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KW:[I guess it didn't really] except to tell them [about] that day. I'll never forget the day. And we let the kids go home at noon. I had to go home and look all that stuff up because I was just so apathetic until then.
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Today, we have stereotyped images of hippies and the counterculture or of Vietnam soldiers and those protesting them. Did you fill any of these roles?
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KW:My participation [in the Hippie Movement] was more in wearing long dresses. By this time, I was married, and we did some gardening out in the country. Everything was back to nature. And I definitely had enough distrust about commercialism and the government that I enjoyed being a hippie. I never smoked, and I hardly know what marijuana smells like. So it was none of that, but it was natural [and] back to earth. [It was] don't be conservative [and] don't be conforming to the government. But, [it was] from a naive point of view.
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RM:Interesting.
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KW:Self-sufficiency and growing our own food and stuff was [were] my counterculture.
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RM:Okay. Did the tendency to move away from conformity shape your desire to be nonconformist (e.g., going back to nature and avoiding commercialism)?
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KW:What shaped my desire to do that? It felt good, and it seemed right. And it was against my [parents because they] had none of that. It just seemed right, and it seemed like it was a challenge too. Let's garden and do all this stuff I didn't do when I was younger.
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RM:Interesting.
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KW:Not a very deep answer to that question. There was a magazine called Mother Earth, and we got that. We actually moved out of the country in 1965. At that point, we put in a garden, and I started growing my food. And I had a neighbor down the road who had a big garden and taught me about canning and all that kind of stuff. I had never been [into] any of that. That seems clean and healthy, with no pesticides till later. Yeah.
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RM:Interesting. I know the Cold War was still going on well into the sixties.
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KW:The war was going on into the eighties before the wall went down.
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RM:Yeah. Did the events of the Cold War make you worried [about] the future? What about today?
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KW:In Moscow, Idaho, I was totally separated from everything. They were worried, and there was talk about Russia bombing us a lot. I don't think we had bomb shelters, but we were all taught in school to put our hands on our necks and get underneath our desks [Duck and Cover Drills]. That was standard procedure when I was younger. My father actually moved from Wisconsin in the forties [before the] Cold War. He moved [because] there was a person who was in the [same] job [he was in that] did not want to come to San Francisco because they were sure that San Francisco would be the first place to be bombed. He [my father] was a salesman for some food packaging [company]. So, he stayed in [the] Midwest, and my dad and our family moved out to the West Coast. All of that always carried through. Although [when] the war ended, we didn't think too much about it, but then the Cold War started. I wasn't aware of the actual details of it, but I knew the word "Cold War." I knew the threat we had of being bombed. I didn't know what to do about it, so it didn't affect me.
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RM:Okay. That's interesting. What major historical events do you remember hearing about most of the time? Did this event even impact your life? What was your initial reaction to hearing it, and how did your family get the news?
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KW:The assassinations were probably the biggest thing, then the Vietnam War and the student uprisings. Then, TV came in, but my family didn't have a TV until quite a big later in the fifties. In the sixties, my husband and I didn't have TV that much. We got the news through the newspapers and some TV. All the kids were talking about 'em [them], of course. The assassinations were all over everything [including] the radio, TV, [and] newspapers, but there was no internet. You probably have no idea what that was like, but you had nothing to look at. The phone was in the house. When I walked into the house, we [would] say, "I wonder if anyone called today." And no one would call. There wouldn't be anyone even who would call you. Someone on the street might tell you, [which was] one way we got the news about the assassinations and so forth. People would say, "did you hear this?" Well, you were watching TV, and I wasn't. I learned it from people on the street.
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RM:Wow. How did your life and the lives of your seventh graders change after Kennedy was assassinated? How did vibes in the country change overnight when LBJ took over?
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KW:Again, I started teaching French and English. It didn't change my teaching. Maybe in the back of my head, I was more worried, but I was outraged. I would say that the sixties were a period when people learned to be outraged [about] injustice, horror, and murder. My outrage did continue. I'm kind of a calm person, and I didn't jump up and down. I don't believe in segregation, so I'm okay. I don't have to do anything, or if a black person came to my house, I'd let 'em [them] in. You already know what you're gonna [going to] do, so you don't have to go out and shout to influence other people.
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KW:I don't think I even talk[ed] to my students about [this]. We had this picture that was always in everybody's mind of the little black girl walking into the school and the feds walking with her and getting her into the school. And I thought that was great. I assumed the government was gonna [going to] take over and make it alright. It didn't always happen that way.
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RM:You've discussed a lot about [how] your [viewpoints about] the government [changed]. Can you elaborate on that a little further? What were your attitudes toward the government before, during, and after [the sixties]?
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KW:The transition would be from acceptance to doubt to outrage. Is that good enough?
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KW:Why don't they help us? My parents weren't Republicans, so that was always states' rights. It's not for the government to do; it's for individuals to do, which I learned from Barry Goldwater when [he] started giving all of his talks about how it's trickled down, and [how] this is gonna [going to] work. If we elect Republicans and powerful people, then they're gonna [going to] change employment. That's gonna [going to] help the poor people and the people at the bottom of the chain. And that's not true. I realized that [when] I saw that it wasn't happening there. Poverty was still growing, and I felt the government should step in, but I didn't do much about it.
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RM:What do you think was the best aspect of the 1960s? What do you wish American society still possessed?
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KW:Well, let's see. I think the best part was the social consciousness. We became more conscious of diversity. Folk music came back because people were talking more about the origins of American music. And we started thinking more about what our potential is, which wasn't being realized. TV was huge. I guess you would say that was a good thing because we certainly were able to inform ourselves better. I think the hippie movement (e.g., the flowers, the natural, and loving everybody) was good, except for the drug part of it. The love from churches became secular. I think that probably was a good movement. Let's see. Probably what has changed most since the sixties is the Internet, [which] is far more influential than TV. We have instant responses, [which] in a way is bad because we react rather than reflect. In a way, that's also good because everything boils to our consciousness faster. And we're able to think about what we're gonna [going to] do. I'm a naive idealist, so I can't tell you what a conservative extremist would say.
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RM:How do you think your "naive idealism" [has] shaped your world[view] about life in the sixties?
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KW:[It] just put me more into shock, [and] at least started opening up my moral mind. It didn't, except for the time at the NAACP and HUAC, lead me into too much activism, but I knew I should be. I also was always a scholar and always a student, so I was always interested. And that was a good excuse; you gotta [have to] study. I married my high school sweetheart, so we got to start our lives. My husband was not an activist at all either, so he influenced me.
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RM:Okay. Do you think your life as a student and scholar acted as its own form of activism? [Did] being able to research what was going on make you aware of US history in general?
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KW:Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. I was in communications and German. When I studied German history, [it] all of a sudden opened my eyes a little bit more. Everybody knew Nazism was bad, but no one really knew the horrors of it until you studied [the] details. And a little outrage came. I'm sorry. I'm not very deep.
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RM:This has really been great.
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KW:Well, thank you.
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KW:Women's role in the home has changed considerably. And it started changing then too. I was a little outraged that all I would be [was] a teacher or a nurse, and I was set on being something else. I could be a professor, but I ended up being a teacher, and I loved it. I loved the kids. [While] people put [being] in the home down, I liked being home, and I liked my kids. I did a lot besides that. I got my master's degree, studied, [and] I had an arch program. That made my consciousness grow about how women could do more. But I also found out that [by] being home, I could do more. I could do anything I wanted anyway, so I started an arch program, welding, and doing more outrageous things.
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RM:What things are the same now [as they were] in the sixties?
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KW:The social consciousness [is the same and has] grown. [One difference] is the church. Church attendance [has] drop[ped] considerably. [Its] influence is not there. I go to a Presbyterian Church, and that has stayed the same [for some of us]. Although, maybe I realize more of the importance of it because I see it deteriorating around me. The best thing about it [is] this consciousness-raising.
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RM:Yeah. What is one piece of advice from your experiences that you would give to young college student activists today?
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KW:Keep activising [and] keep being active. Don't put your head in the sand because that's how Trump got elected. Should I say that on there? That's how Trump got elected because we just didn't pay attention. We didn't pay attention enough to do something. I don't know how you feel about that.
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RM:I don't know if I'm much of an activist. I'm more like you were trying to hunker down and get stuff done.
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KW:Get stuff done, right? Yeah. On the other hand, we found [that] when this liar came into power, what happens when you're apathetic. During the last election, I let people give me letters to write, and I wrote letters for the Georgia election. I don't know if that helped, but we did get more. We did get that equal representation in Congress. I think it helps, and I'm still more apathetic than I should be, but I think that students should be aware that you are the next generation. You're the one[s] that [are] gonna [going to] carry on morals, and getting people elected who are fair, and getting debates back again. The Republicans won't even debate because they're so set without compromise, [and] without trying to see other people's point of view. If I would say anything to students, [it is to] stay active, keep your mind active, and do something (e.g., write a letter during an election for someone you want). Do something because you believe in it.
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KW:Is that it?
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RM:Yeah. Thank you.
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KW:You're welcome. The thing[s] that [have]come more about [now] that didn't happen then was [were] homeless, drugs, and alcohol altering people. And I think we really need to be active against the things that change your mind because we are people. Maybe that's where I was ideal when I was young because there just weren't a lot of drugs around. My parents drank socially, but it was never serious. Now, I was also very naive. In the streets of San Francisco, I'm sure there were still people drunk and doing all kinds of bad things. I wasn't unaware of 'em [them]. The main thing [to do] is to work for mental health cuz [because] homelessness and poverty are connected to our lack of activism and mental health.
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After people stopped giving a lot of attention to mental health, everything started to go down. My husband, for instance, ran away when he wanted to change majors and become an English major [instead of] a business [major]. And he hadn't read all the literature, so he ran away with a backpack full of books and stayed in a hobo camp, [which was] very poor. They were funny, but it wasn't a serious drug or violence problem. We need to keep working against homelessness and poverty and [continue to] help people. [While] the government [is] doing more now, we need to stock food banks. We need to help people. We need to bring people in, get them jobs, and that kind of thing.
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KW:That need has grown.
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RM:Definitely. Yeah.
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KW:Yeah, I think that's it. The concept of family has changed too. I guess it's good that it brought into the open people who are homosexual and don't have conventional makeup. And that's fine. We are much more accepting, and that's good because it was there and just hidden. It was affecting people that we didn't even know about. Yeah.
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RM:Would you say that [America's] more accepting attitude and the change of family [dynamics] began during the sixties?
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KW:No, it didn't begin in the sixties. The sixties were "Leave it to Beaver," [where] everything was conventional as far as family goes. You had to have a mother, [a] father, and a child. Divorce was horrible. People I knew got divorced, [which] just shocked me and hurt me. It was total naivete about human relationships.
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KW:Now I think that's good and more accepting. We're more ready to step in and help if gay people need help. I think that's a much better attitude than my father had [toward] gay people or black people. But he was still a good guy, but he was a product of his time.
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RM:Right. This has been enlightening.
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KW:Oh gosh. That's amazing.
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KW:Okay. I think that's about it.
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