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1979, uh, radical elder artist Oral History Project, and we're speaking to Ms. Emmylou Packard. Um, I guess we can get started, um, uh, Ms. Packard, uh. Could you tell us about your background when you were born and and the circumstances that influenced your life in the

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beginning? Yeah, I'll do my best. It's um it's kind I've written it out and I'll I'll try to uh to read from it without getting too boring, um, and it jumps from place to place. The first part that I have here really is um. Is my

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father's background. And um I'll starting when I was born in El Centro, Imperial Valley, California in 1914, April 15th. And um as to la uh you ask about class backgrounds, I'd say that both my parents' backgrounds would be called middle class or or uh slightly lower,

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slightly above uh middle class, although they're undoubtedly were, uh, working class, but unfortunately in biographies, which are these are taken from. They often leave out people except college graduates or accept people who've done things in, uh, you know, uh, that are they consider worth mentioning. Honest

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labor is often not worth mentioning. Um, My father was uh named Walter Eugene Packard, and he came from French Huguenot ancestors, which I think has an uh still an influence on um. On me, certainly the, the kind of personality that uh Huguenots on both sides of

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the family, um. Um, had they called in the encyclopedia honest, hardworking with strongly held religious beliefs, which led to their persecution in the 16th and 17th centuries. Uh, they were Protestants, um, one of the members of the reformed a Calvinistic communion, uh, in France they were

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named Picard and then they fled because of Huguenot persecution. They fled to England where the name was changed to Packard. This was the 17th century, yeah, well, let's see. Now right there, I don't have that date down, um. It probably turn out. It'll probably turn up

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in the other paper where I go into my mother's background. Um, But you have, you can't trace your family back to the the French origins. Uh, well, yes, to, to 11 person, uh, named Samuel Packard. Who came um. Well, there, there is a, a hiatus uh

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there between the French ancestors and exactly who went to England at what time, but a biography was written by um A great great grandfather named Theophilus Packer Junior, uh, which is still in existence and uh traces the family back, uh. For quite some distance, but um.

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He mainly starts as far as the United States is concerned. Um, The first Packard that arrived here was Samuel Packard, uh, who was christened in in 1612. He came from Wyndham, uh, Norfolk County, England aboard the ship Diligence, which arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1638. His

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wife's name was Elizabeth Stream, but we know nothing about her. Samuel settled in Hingham, Massachusetts, and then moved to Bridgewater. He was a constable and a tavern tavern keeper. Nearly all the Packards in the United States can be traced finely to Bridgewater. Uh, Samuel had 14

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children. He, uh, he was apparently more interested in political liberties than religious. He was primarily interested in freedom of expression. There's no, uh, indication as to how they came to that, uh, particular conclusion. My great great grandfather was born in North Bridgeport, Massachusetts in 1765. His

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name was Theophilus Packard, and he became a Doctor of Divinity. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1796. This is all from a genealogy of Samuel Packard by Reverend Theophilus Packard Junior, 1871, published by GW Wheat and Company in 1871. Uh, the first Theophilus was, uh, on

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the board of trustees of Williams College. He represented Shelburne in the state legislature in 1829, 1939 and received his doctorate from Dartmouth in 1824. His son Theophilus Packard Junior was my great grandfather. He was born in Shelburne, Mass, uh, February 1st, 1802 and married Elizabeth Parsons

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Ware. Daughter of Reverend Samuel Ware, who was born in Ware, Mass, they had 6 children. And the life of these two people was of particular interest. Um, and I. Made it here as briefly as I can. Um, my great great grandfather, Reverend Theoppolis Packer Junior, kept

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a neat handwritten diary, all of his adult life. It still exists in good condition in Bancroft Library at UC in Berkeley. Theophilus was a fundamentalist, masochistic Christian who worried constantly about his, his wife's, and his children's immortal souls. On the birth of his first son, he

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writes, quote, Oh, what a painful anxiety I felt for the soul of this dear son. From early childhood he has been prayed for day by day and his Been interested in the matter of personal piety and has been taught to pray himself, but all this may

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not save his soul. Oh God, make him a Christian. The entire diaries, uh, I, I read it is filled with his own sin and fear of sin and damnation and so forth, um. His third son, Samuel Ware Packard, was born in 1847. He was my grandfather.

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Theophilus writes, quote, My heart's desire and prayer to God is that this son Samuel may become a Bible Christian and serve God faithfully, unquote. But Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard, uh, Theophilus's wife, was a very different temperament. Her background was Unitarian, and her disposition was positive and

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logical. She taught in her husband's Sunday school and argued theological questions with his church elders. This bothered Theophilus, and he accused her of undermining the faith of his church elders. At that time, the 1850s, uh, husbands who found their wives annoying could report that the wife

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was acting crazy, sign commitment papers, and have her sent to an insane asylum. This is exactly what my great grandfather Theophilus Junior did to my great grandmother Elizabeth. Her case has become famous in psychiatric history, and several recent books have included her in their case studies.

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He committed her in 1860 while in the institution, she organized the patients and cleaned up the highly unsanitary conditions, managed to slip a letter out of the asylum. At that time, the US mail did not deliver or pick up mail from insane sizes. Uh, and the

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letter exposed conditions inside, uh, and went to a close friend. The papers picked up the story, and Elizabeth was released from the asylum for causing so much trouble. The director of the asylum was having too much trouble with her. She then wrote a book exposing conditions

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inside the asylum, organized a publishing house, and went on a lecture tour selling her books on the way. Um, she published some 8 books, one of which is still in the books in print list in all bookstores that all bookstores carry. Um, through an appeal to

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the wife of President Ulysses Grant. She was able to meet with the committee in Congress who as a result, had a law passed that required the US mail to go to and from insane asylums. Elizabeth then appealed to the Illinois state legislature on the question of

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a husband committing his wife, and as a direct result of this and the publicity surrounding it, the state legislature passed the first law on mental health in the United States that no person could be committed without a jury trial. Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's wife, was

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the first person tried under this law. All this time, Elizabeth supported herself and her children by writing and publishing. She secured a divorce from her husband and bought a house in Chicago. Um, This whole story is in um her writing and in various newspaper articles in

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Chicago papers and could no doubt be much better written than I've done it here. It was very brief. In one of Elizabeth Elizabeth's books, she tells of standing on the platform of the train leaving for the insane asylum. She says, quote, Little Samuel ran after the

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train crying, Mother, mother, unquote. Little Samuel was my grandfather, Samuel Ware Packard. He was a strange and colorful character. He left home when he was 12 and apprenticed himself to a lawyer in Chicago. At the age of 21, he argued his first case before the US

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Supreme Court. His office was destroyed in the famous Chicago fire of 1871. Then he went west for a time. His train slowed or stopped many times because of huge herds of buffalo on the tracks. His law practice prospered, and he retired to Pasadena at the age

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of 35. He remained deeply religious, a congregationalist, and was dead set against drink and gambling. Yet in Pasadena he invested heavily in the stock market, always praying, making bargains with the Lord, that if the Lord would cause the stock to rise, he, Samuel, would give the

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Lord 10% of the profit they made. He really did that. The congressional mission. Uh, the congressional mission in Pasadena received some $60,000 in this manner, but Grandfather Packard died deeply in debt. When I knew him, he looked much like Mark Twain in his old age, white

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flowing hair and mustache. He gave me a small Bible and the 23rd Psalm as my verse. I memorized it, and years later it saved me from flunking an English exam. As I was able to quote it exactly and say a few appropriate words on the King

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James Bible as an example of English literature, I think that's the only good that religion did. Do you still know the word? I, I have forgotten part of it. I can still go some of the way through. Um, Yeah, and and My parents tried to make

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me religious too, or at least they want me exposed to it so I would have that experience when I was about 12 and I went to a Presbyterian Sunday school and um. Um, I really wasn't, uh, I wasn't the material they needed. I decided that um

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since I had fallen madly in love with, with Douglas Fairbanks Senior, the movie star. Um, that I would pray that I would meet him and we would test God's, uh, strength and um. So I prayed every night for about 6 months, and when I didn't ever

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meet Douglas Fairbanks, my faith in prayer was destroyed forever. Sounds like you had a very practical mind anyway. Um, well, we get back to Grandfather Packard. His wife was named Clara Adelaide Fish, quote, a most esteemed and popular young lady, unquote, from the Chicago Daily Legal

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News in 1874, whom he married in her hometown of Lombard, Illinois. Although Clara was a profession was a professed Christian and also a member of the Congregational Church, she never accepted her husband's fundamentalism. Uh, she and her husband were rather like Theophilus and Elizabeth. Uh, they

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lived in the um. Uh, suburb of Chicago, and here I have to skip to, it became a rather fancy suburb later, but here I skipped to page 5 from my father describes it in in his childhood, um. Uh, Oak Park, uh, in 1881 was a rural

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village with dirt streets. There were only kerosene lamps for light and only outside privies. The principal of the grammar school told my father's mother that he had given the school more trouble than any other student. He took a mouse to the school in his pocket with

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a string tied on its tail. When the teacher wasn't looking, he would let it out on the floor to scare the girls. No, all right, that's good, where were we? Um, Sorry OK, OK, they lived in um uh Oak Park, um, which then was a. A

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muddy suburb of Chicago. Um, Grandmother Clara's interest was centered in social work. She organized a reading room for servant girls whose pay in those days was $3 a week. She was an active supporter of women's suffrage and of Jane Adams' work at Hull House in Chicago.

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She became interested in the labor movement and served on a state committee to investigate the causes of a mine disaster. Her father was a postal employee whose ancestors went back to pre-revolutionary days. She was eligible for the Daughters of the American Revolution but never chose to

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join because she was out of sympathy with their objectives. Clara's sister Ellen was the first woman graduate of a medical school in Chicago and became a doctor. My father's oldest sister Stella worked with Jane Adams at Hull House also for some time after graduating from Smith

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College. His sister Laura graduated from Vassar, where she had become a socialist. She married Ed Redmond, a Phi BD Kappa graduate of Dartmouth. Of their three children, one became a reactionary Republican, one a Democrat, and one a communist. spectrum. The youngest sister Esther graduated from Smith

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College and became a social worker in New York State, appearing before the state legislature in Albany on various occasions in support of social legislation. Her husband Philip Chadburn became a special representative of the State Department of Russia during the W I I say Wilson administration, I

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think it was. Well, it was during, it was. It was 1917 because their first son was born in Petrograd during the first week of the Russian Revolution. My father's young brother John became a lawyer and a socialist partly as a result of my father's argument in

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favor and partly because of Grandmother Clara's friendship with Upton Sinclair. And partly because his wife Rosemary Hutchison was a close friend of uh the Upton Sinclairs, he became a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Party and an active member of the Democratic Party during

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the New Deal days in 1936, John. Uh, became Roosevelt's campaign manager in Southern California. He helped organize civil liberties union there. On 2 occasions he went to Imperial Valley to defend arrested agricultural workers who had been on strike and had to be escorted out of the

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valley by motorcycle police for fear of attacks by vigilante groups. Uh, further note on my grandfather Packard. He was an exceptionally good trial lawyer apparently, but never took divorce or criminal cases, only civil suits, and he had the 2nd largest private law library in Chicago. Well,

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that ends for the moment, the Packard side, um, this next. Goes into um some of my mother's uh history um this repeats a little since I started it the same way I was born in El Centro at that time my father Walter Packard was in charge

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of the University of California agricultural station in the Imperial Valley. He graduated from Iowa State University at Ames in 1907 with a degree in agricultural science. He received his master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley two years later. In the Imperial Valley. His work

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pioneered the introduction of successful farming in that region. While at Ames, my father had met and married my mother, Emma Leonard in 1909. My sister Clara Eleanor Packard was born in 1910 in Pasadena. I think my answers to your questions about ethnic background, class consciousness, and

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religion will be more interesting if I quote from a few ancient letters written by and about my ancestors. My maternal grandmother at the age of 80 in 1922, wrote a 48 page letter telling what she could remember of her life in County Carlow, Ireland, Ireland. Her

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name was Sophia Maria Smith, I think they call it Mariah Smith. The name was originally Schmidt, and the family were Dutch Huguenots who fled to Ireland because of religious persecution. My grandmother Sophia's letter tells something about her own grandparents. Grandfather James was a bearer of dispatches

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in the time of the Irish rebellion. His wife Elizabeth Salter James, who lived to be 90 and raised 7 children. They could not be educated because Grandfather James had died and she had a little money. But her daughter Sophia's mother spoke of her with such love

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love and reverence and quoted her so often that her son said, quote, Grandmother and Solomon were the greatest men that ever lived, unquote. Sophia Sophia, I guess. Sophia Mora. Sophia remembers that when she was about 7, they lived in a house called Ballantrane House near Carlow,

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the county seat. The house was one story with a thatched roof. In the center of the room was a big round table on which the community tailor used to sit cross-legged while making father's clothes. We children loved to hear him sing. The kitchen was large with

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a great fireplace, which was the only place to cook. There was a long table, and in the potato digging season, the harvest hands ate at the table. We children held up to cover the corners of the tablecloth, and a big black pot of potatoes boiled in

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their jackets was poured on the table cloth. No one had a plate, only a tin knife and fork and a cup of buttermilk. Potatoes and buttermilk formed the chief sustenance of the poorer classes. We had our meals in mother's room, never eating with the servants, unquote.

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No, I think Mother was a lady's maid to a local estate owner, a better paid kind of domestic service servant, quote. We had an orchard and a garden and a row of beehives. We lived in a land of milk and honey. We never knew what hardship

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meant until we came to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Father didn't like the government. He wanted in a state of his own, and America was the land of promise. In Ireland, we went to an infant school. I could read the

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Bible when I was 4. When I was old enough, I walked the mile from school past fine mansions on the edge-lined robes. Through the big iron gates we got glimpses of a paradise of beauty, and not far from there wretched hovels where men and beasts often

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lived under the same roof. We finally left Ireland on a sailing vessel, and after 6 weeks we landed in New York. From there we went to Pittsburgh. The house we lived in was a shanty built of one thickness of boards. It was very small. We used

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a trunk for a table. Cholera swept over the city in 1852. It was terrible. Unquote. There is much more to this letter, a bit indicating anti-Catholic sentiments. Uh, grandmother Sophia grew up and married a pioneer settler named Henry Lee Leonard. Known affectionately in his hometown of

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Vermont as hell let loose because of his initials HLL Henry Lee Lennon. And he's bad tempered. They settled in Waukee, Iowa, uh very small town, and Grandpa Le. Led the farmers in the area in tile draining the land, selecting seed corn and importing good breeding stock

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for his Hereford cattle. Sophia became the woman people sought out in the small country town. which had about 200 people in it and was 15 miles from Des Moines, the capital of Iowa. When they needed help, she delivered babies, gave simple medical care when it was

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needed. She raised 8 children, my mother Emma, the youngest. I myself remember harvest dinners in the summers in Iowa. When the corn was ready, all relatives female gathered at the ranch where the corn was being harvested, bringing dozens of pies, cakes, cooking gallons of mashed potatoes,

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making gallons of coleslaw with a sweet milk dressing, huge platters of fresh corn, ears a foot long in my memory. Everyone eating 6 to 12 of them, piles of fried chicken, homemade ice cream for dessert after the pie and cake. The dinner was at noon, of

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course. The harvest hands worked from dawn to dark, only stopping for lunch. On Sunday, most everyone went to the Way Christian church. My grandmother Sophia was intensely religious and would not allow dancing on Sunday. The uncles argued politics and religion all Sunday afternoon, but at 4,

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everyone went home to milk the cows. My mother's oldest sister got up every morning at 4 to start the day's work, washing clothes by hand, drying on a clothesline, ironing, saving milk and big yellow crocs in the cellar, skimming off the thick cream to make butter,

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making cottage cheese out of the milk with sour. It was a life of continual hard work for the whole family. Grandpa Leonard died of a heart attack when he was 50, but Sophia lived to be 105, still reading the Bible without glasses and singing washed in

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the blood of the lamb at the top of her quavering voice. My mother Emma Leonard determined to leave the farm and attended college at Ames. She majored in domestic science and worked in the library. After graduation, she and my father were married in a simple home

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ceremony. In my grandparents' home in Waukes. This is what I know of my mother's background, hardworking middle class Protestant farmers. Yet Grandpa Leonard was a member of the populist party, a radical party of its time. He established a bank in Waukee to get better credit terms

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for the local farmers and was president of it until he died. Sophia did attend Knox College, Illinois, and she wanted all of her children to to have an education. Um, The writing ends here. OK, I can make up from then on, but if you want to

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stop and uh very young. Oh, could you start again. My first memories are of Imperial Valley when I was very, very young. I, I think we left there when I was, uh, not more than 2 years old, uh, but I do remember. Um Some of the

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some of the things, uh, my father was planting the first crops that are still grown there, uh, cantaloupes and winter peas and um Um, Well, those, those are the two that happened to come to mind, um. I remember um. And incident, I had many um. Many

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illnesses or accidents throughout my life that I think affected it probably, um, 11 of these, I'm sure gave me a guilt complex. I'd been told, and I was only about 15, 2 years old. I've been told not to climb up to the, to the hay loft,

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uh, because I might, it was dangerous, and yet I knew that there was a um a mother cat up there with kittens. So I clearly remember climbing around the barricade that had been put on the steps to keep me from doing this and feeling very guilty

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about it, and I did get up to the top and I, I found the cat and I picked up the the mother cat who was about as big as I was. And um did exactly what they had prophesized. I backed up with the mother cat and

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backed off the edge of the hammo, fell 10 ft. Luckily landed on top of the cat, which killed the cat, but, uh, otherwise, um, probably would have killed me, but um. Uh, as a result, I had pneumonia and I'm sure it gave me a permanent guilt

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complex. About doing things I wasn't supposed to do, but it was quite a trauma at the time. Uh, and then when I was a year and a half old, my mother, um, was discovered to have a severe, um, um. Tubercular abscess of the lung and was

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taken to a sanatorium in Monrovia, California. Uh, so there I was, uh, literally deserted. My father was working. I was put in a in a converted chicken pen in the in the yard where I had shade, but I was all alone most of the day. There

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was a woman there who who looked after me now and then, but mostly I spent my time trying to get out of the chicken pen, and, uh, I'm told that separation from uh the mother at the age of a year and a half is a very

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damaging thing, almost like brain brain injury. In any case, I think it did affect my my ability to relate to people throughout my life, but that that may be not true. I don't know. In any case, she was in the sanatorium for at least a year

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and um. Uh, part of the time my sister and I were put in a, um, in a foster home where apparently my sister says they beat me and um. When my parents immediately took took us out of there. My mother said that I my my usually

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affectionate um response to her and everyone else was totally absent and I and I never regained this. I always had a um what she called a mask like expression, but anyway, that's just one of those things I guess all children go through such things. Um, let's

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see. From Imperial Valley, um. We did go to San Diego where my mother. Who did try her best to um. To um I exposed her to her 22 daughters. My, my older sister, she was 3 years older than I, Clara, and um Madam Montessori of the

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um Progressive education um was, was traveling around the country and she was in San Diego for a while. And um So Mother took my sister and me and we we had the Montessori. Experience which apparently I rather enjoyed. But my sister, when we were when we

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were walking around in a circle, which is part of the training just why I don't know. Everyone walked very nicely except my sister who was bored by walking in a circle, and her only interest was in seeing how close she could come to the to the

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child in front of her without stepping on her feet. That more interesting than walking around a circle. That's right, yes, so I think my sister showed far more imagination. Uh, anyway, that's just an anecdote. Um. Let's see, I haven't got this, um. Maybe you better push

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that button till I, yeah, how could you describe the, uh, some of the uh. So