Ashley Lopez

AP English

February 11, 2004

Interview

Ethel Petersen: Retired Kansas Legislator

On Halloween night of 1933, Ethel Petersen was born, the sixth of seven children. Never a quiet child, Ethel knew from the time she was born that she was destined to help people, be it by teaching or standing up for other's rights. She has lived through the Depression, the Dust Bowl, WWII, and Vietnam. Ethel has been both an educator and a politician. Her accounts of childhood, family, and work are remarkable. She has so many interesting stories that everyone should have the chance to hear them. This past year, Ethel retired from the Kansas Legislature to begin a new era in her life, and pursue other interests.

I was actually born at a time when you weren't using hospitals, I guess. I was born on a farm in northern Ford County, real close to the Hodgeman county line. I was the sixth of seven children. I was born during the Depression when everybody was poor. I was born on Halloween night of 1933. I would suspect that under most circumstances you might not be the most welcome person in the world when your family was poor, but they never gave me any indication if I was. I had five brothers and sisters.

[You have]* lots of happy memories when you grow up on a farm, you know a lot of good things. My father was also a baseball umpire. Because he'd been born in Denmark, he came here when he was ten years old. He thought the way to learn the country was to learn its sport; and so the best way to learn a sport, is to officiate because then you have to know all its rules and how everything works. So, he was a baseball umpire in his spare time. The little rural communities, mostly church communities in the area, all had their own baseball teams. There would be the Lutheran team from over by Offerle, and there was a Lutheran team out at St. Michael's,--that was the area just north of where I grew up--and there [were] Catholic teams and so on; and various churches would play ball against each other. And he umpired on Sunday afternoons, and I went along with him quite often because, I suppose, partly because a little kid likes to go with their dad. He was a good umpire and was popular with the guys, and so they kidded with him a lot. They would hollar, you know, "Kill the ump", and I thought they meant it. So, I went along to protect him, I thought he needed a defender. He parked his car up close to the fence, and I sat on the fender mostly--you were safe from fly balls 'cause there was a fence there. I was safe enough sitting there, but I could hear all the comments; and by the time I finally got old enough to catch on that they weren't going to kill him, I had became a died and loyal baseball fan, which I am to this day. So, that’s kind of a memory I have.

At that time, my father was a farmer; however, not very long after that he went to work for the federal government as a credit union field man. When they started credit unions in the United States and had a national department for it, he was one of the thirteen original ones that organized rural credit unions all over the country. That was what he was to do all of the years I was growing up. He traveled and we kept our farm, but my brothers and cousins ran the farm for the most part. He traveled for a while. He had quite a few states, which was lucky for me because it was a time when there wouldn’t have been money enough to just travel for fun; but in the summertime, he frequently took my mother, and my brother, and I with him so we could travel and see things. So it was kinda nice.

[When I was a child], for fun, oh golly, we did a lot of [fun things like] climbing around on a creek, we lived on the saw log creek bank. We did an awfully lot of horseback riding. I think my first paying job ever--we got paid, I think some huge sum, I think maybe ten or fifteen cents, I don’t know--to ride horseback and go clear around the pasture and check fences. We rented the pasture out to people who wanted to be able to pasture big herds of cattle on really good grassland. My brothers and I [would] ride horseback, going up and down the fence rows, making sure that the fences were good -- keeping the cows in. We'd count the cows to make sure that nobody had gone out and got the cows, or done something, you know, either stolen them, or that no cow had fallen down or gotten sick or something. And we'd do that in the summertime, and my memories of that are really fun. It was a good thing to do. It was enjoyable, we had 4-H clubs, we played party games at 4-H clubs, people now are beginning to write little books of what the party games were, they were things called the "Virginia Reel," "Happy as a Miller boy." If we didn’t have a big lighted area, we'd park cars in a circle so it was lit; and we'd play party games, all the kids in the neighborhood.

The Dust Bowl happened--and thank goodness we've learned a lot of things now--I can’t remember the worst of the dust storms, I can remember a few of them. At any rate, what happened [was], my dad's business (the farm)* was so bad because of that (the dust storms). At one point, right after I was born, he had mortgaged the land to buy seed money for the next year. And then when there was no crop; you couldn’t pay back what you borrowed the year before. So you either borrowed more, or your interest built up or whatever. Everybody we knew was poor. We were poor, but we didn’t know it because, you know, everybody was that way. And one group after another, sure enough, were losing their farms. The guy actually came out to foreclose on the farm when I was--oh, I don’t know how old, just a couple, three months old; I was really young. Babies, I think, for the first six weeks of their life were supposed to be immune--as if they'd had shots, and don’t catch things. I had a cousin, though, that had whooping cough; and she came over to see the new baby, and I broke the rules and got whooping cough. I guess I couldn’t of been very old. Anyway, it made me a colic baby. My brothers and sisters had never been that way. It was the first time they had a bawl baby in the house. The guys came out to foreclose, and here's this family with six kids and this baby so puny lookin', and bawling all over the place. They backed off, they gave him (my father) time. They didn’t go ahead and run the family off. Right after that they passed the law, the federal law, that said even if you foreclosed on somebody's farm you couldn’t take the farmstead they were living on--the homestead. And so they couldn’t take our farm away, and eventually we were able to climb back out and overcome it. [We had a] mortgage burning ceremony later on down the line. I always swore it was because they had me there as their good luck charm. Now, my six brothers and sisters never believed that. But I told them it was because I was there.

I remember one time, we had a cousin that lived two farms north of us who came and worked and helped while my dad was workin' for the government. We'd take him [home] in the evening, when the day was finished, because he stayed at home. My oldest brother, who's ten years older than me, was driving the old international truck to take him home. Norman, and my brother just older than me, [and myself] wanted to ride along. We didn’t have all those rules that said you couldn’t ride in the back of a truck, and that was what was fun to do, stand up in the back of the truck and let the wind hit your face. So, my brother, and cousin got in the truck and we took him home. And as we were coming back, we're standing up, looking, and coming back over the hill to go back home. We could look and see off across to the west, huge clouds; but they were right by the ground, and they were rolling. I didn’t know what they were, but my brother just -- older than me -- did. He pounded on the top of the truck to let my brother that was driving know. Well, at first he thought we were pounding to be funny; and he started to yell back and tell us something, but we managed to get him to see. So he slowed down enough to turn around and say to us, "Hang on really tight, 'cause I'm gonna drive fast; and the minute we get in the shed at home, run for the house as fast as you can go." The clouds were rolling fast, I mean just really coming at us; so he made the big turn into our driveway, to turn around and go into [what] we called the shed. As he was heading toward it, he realized he didn’t have hardly any brakes left at all. He hit the end of the garage, which knocked out some boards on the end, but we did as we were told. As soon as we hit and got stopped, we jumped out and ran to the house as fast as we could go. My mother was with my father on a trip that time, so my oldest sister, who was twelve years older than me, was in charge of things and was fixing supper. We ran into the house, and told her the clouds were coming. We were supposed to run and get some rags and stuff them in around the windows as quick as we could. My brother, brought a bucket of water from the pump outside. We put blankets over the door, [but] sure enough, the dirt came, and it just got so dark. I don’t think we were frightened. It just seemed we knew what we were supposed to do because the older ones did know. She (my sister) finished fixing supper and told us to set the table; but turn the plates upside down, which we did. We got along fine. That’s my only dust storm to remember. But after that, they weren't as bad; but my brothers and sisters, who were older; could of told you about it happening again and again. That was a thing they knew and understood. Took a lot of courage for those folks to live in those days.

My dad lived [a long life]. He actually did some interviews for the Kansas Heritage, that's here in Dodge. They started it with a grant years ago. They'd go out and tape people, talk about various things. Once it was just to get first generation accents, the people that come from France or Germany or wherever. Or to talk about the Dust Bowl days, or talk about the rural schools that were once here, you know. They came once and talked to him about his experience during the Dust Bowl. One of the tapes they use in school today. He talks about a memory he has of April the fourteenth. I can't remember what year, [but it was] black Sunday. He was actually out working in the field, I don’t know if he was plowing or what, since it was in April; but at any rate, he was on the tractor and he looked over and he saw the dark cloud coming over, and this one was a black cloud already. He needed to hurry and get back over to the truck because he wanted to get home to his wife and kids. He couldn’t make it all the way. He got off the tractor and ran; but before he could get to the truck, the clouds got there and it just turned dark as night. He had to grope his way. He knew he was close, but he didn’t know how close. He was leaning in, trying to keep his face away from it, with his bandana held up across his nose, and he bumped into the truck really hard with his head. But at least he knew the truck was there. So he groped until he found the door, and he got inside; and he couldn’t see anything-- he thought he'd bumped his head harder than he'd thought, and he was afraid he was blind. So he thought, "Now what am I gonna do? I got a wife, and seven kids." He couldn’t see a thing, and he tried turning the inner light on the truck, it didn’t have the bright dash you have now; but he still couldn’t see anything, so he decided we was blind. He said, "I just sat there panicking. I don’t know what to do. What's gonna happen?" And then it dawned on him, and he got a match. Struck the match on the dash of the old truck, and he could see the flame. For years, he said that was the most welcome site he [could] remember because he knew he wasn't blind. He was just sitting in that truck, and it was dark as night, [even] the chickens went to roost, 'cause they thought it was night. He just had to sit and wait until it went away enough that he could see and get home. In the meantime, my mom was at home worried stiff about what was happening to him, where he was, had he been caught out in it, could he breath, what was going on. He talked about that. He said everything after that was easier. You know, it must have been terrible when you think about it. Hard to get people to realize how bad that really was.

We went into World War II, [there] was the scare of having the Pearl Harbor attack. I remember being terrified because I remember hearing my mother say to my father, "Now you suppose Harry will have to go fight?" and he did, that was my oldest brother. He was drafted and sent over seas, and was wounded. We had a cousin that was killed in the Battle of the Bulge. So those things kind of hit us, we probably went from the Depression to the stress of the war; and then when the war was over, times were good. We were relieved to have the war be over, and the family back together, and jobs, and money coming in. I don’t suppose we really knew the Depressions [was] over, we kind of coasted into it, from one thing to another. That’s kind of the way I would describe it anyway.

I was a little kid on the farm [when WWII broke out]. They had the radio on, on Sunday, they didn’t play the radio much because we didn’t have electricity. We had a battery radio; and we didn’t want to wear it out, there were just certain things you listened to. My dad was always tuned into the news and what was going on. He and my mom had the radio on, and immediately started talking about it--they didn’t think at first about smaller kids listening. And it was only when I said, "Are they gonna come and kill us?" that one of them said, "Oh, we need to explain this." So they started to explain. That night I had nightmares. I dreamed soldiers were coming up over the hill, and I woke up and cried. So that’s my memory of it. I was small.

In World War II, [only one of my brothers fought]; but then later on, (one) went to Korea, and Norman fought in the peace-time army. I had an incredible amount of cousins that fought. A cousin [that fought] died not long ago. (He) was kind of interesting. They had five boys in their family, one was too young to go, and one was old enough he had deferment because he had wife and kids, the other three went to the army. The oldest one was a conscientious objector, he didn’t believe in killing anybody; but he was willing to go to war, so they sent him--but not to carry a gun. He was in Sipan, which is an island in the pacific, and his job was to bring wounded people off the battlefield, bring bodies back. That's what he did the whole time he was in the service. His next brother didn’t sign up that way. He was trained to be a tail-gunner in a B-24, and he flew, I think it was thirty-eight missions from England to Germany. When he died, he was eighty some years old, eighty-six or eighty-eight. His son was back home, and it was the first time he knew his dad had the Distinguish Flying Cross (medal); and he discovered in his things, a journal, that I hope to get a look at one of these days. He kept a diary of all his missions, and they found it in there, along with the censor's note in front. He had been given permission to bring it home, and there were only various things that had been marked out. By the time he came back home, the worst of it was over and everything. But they had to mark out, [some parts of the journal]--he actually told where they went, which amazed me [that it] got by the censor. It told which place they'd been, how many planes they lost in that particular mission, and so on. It (has) just gotta be a fascinating diary to see, but they didn’t know he had all those tucked away in a drawer. And I remember him telling about once, somebody asking if he believed in God, and he said, "I have to believe in God," because he was in the tail gunner. [It] was [in] like a bubble, he was sitting back in there (the back of the tail of the plane); and at one point, what they call tracer bullets, ripped through the canopy that was over his head. It just caught that, and ripped the whole thing off--and ripped his (gun) shells off--but didn’t hurt him, expect leave a burn across his back. And he said, "So yeah, I believe in God," 'cause he didn’t think he'd be alive otherwise. He was just a short, stalky guy, kinda quiet; you never heard two things out of him hardly. It's funny, in one family you have the conscientious objector, and the other that did that, and the third one, he was younger, he was in the Paratroops. He didn’t see much combat, he saw some, but not much. But, as they say, that generations dying. Every day more of them die.

Well, as I say, I lost a cousin in [the Battle of the Bulge]. What happened was that we didn’t find out right away that he had died. We got a message that said he was missing in action, and presumed dead--and that was my dad's, sister's son. Not long after that, we got word that my brother was wounded in action, and we didn’t know what else. The guy that delivered the telegram said, "Don’t get your hopes up. My brother was wounded in action, and he bled to death before he ever got to a hospital." So, I remember my mother and my aunt hugging each other and crying because neither one knew if there sons were going to come back. Cousin Ervin never did come back; and they didn’t know where he was, or what had happened.

After the war was over, and the prison camps were opened up, there was a guy there, a sergeant, who had been captured by the Germans, and was in a German hospital because he had lost his legs. He contacted them, my cousin's parents, and told them the circumstances that had happened. They (the Americans) had been surrounded, and they tried to surrender 'cause they knew they couldn’t get out. Each guy that would go to raise his flag--because they tied a white handkerchief to their bayonet--they would try to raise it, and whoever tried to raise it got shot, one after another. They finally decided they couldn’t surrender, and they had no choice at all. At some point, he said, Ervin was shot. He was shot in the legs. [Later] they were using their dog tags to identify (casualties), and be sure who was where. He (the sergeant) looked over, and he said they were carrying a stretcher by him. He said the guy was too long for the stretcher, and he had red hair; and that was my cousin, probably, because he was too tall and had red hair. Afterward, because they never had anybody that knew, or [found] his grave or anything, (the) family continued to look for him. So, it may be one of those things that nobody in my family ever knows, but will always wonder.

I suppose it [the war] did [change me]. I went through a period of time when I knew what it was like to hate, you know. I couldn't understand, as a kid, why anybody would shoot my brother; and I decided I must hate all Germans. Just hated Germans, and then my father explained to me that my mother was German, and that at least half the kids in school were half-German, just as I was. My mother did a pretty good job of explaining why we didn’t hate anybody. It made a difference. But I heard the teacher, talking on the telephone at school, and I just learned that my brother had been shot. My father was a pacifist, he didn’t believe in war. So anyway, the teacher said, "I wonder what old Mr. Petersen thinks now? His sons been shot. Maybe changed his mind about the war." And I hated my teacher that day. I hated her with a passion. I didn’t want to go back to school the next day, I was really angry. To me it sounded like she was glad they shot Harry. They explained to me that it was just a careless comment, she didn’t mean what it sounded like; and then I went back and eventually got along fine. But I was mad.

I went eight years to a rural school--a one room country school, like the stories you hear--but we had a lot of fun. For two of, I think, my eight years there I was the only girl in school. So, I missed out on all the fun of having girlfriends in school with me, but that was okay. I had three brothers in my immediate age range so I was used to being around little boys at that age. It was a good education, and you learned an awfully lot about the outdoors that you couldn’t learn otherwise. Then I came to town and went to what was junior high then; and then when I was a teenager, I guess about fifteen years old, we moved to Dodge [City]. My brother moved to the farm, he and his wife. I graduated high school here (in Dodge City) and went to community college, and then I went away to school at Fort Hays.

Growing up I always thought I wanted to be a writer or an artist; but by the time I got in high school, I found out I was always helping other people with their things anyway. And, if that’s what you're doing, you might as well do it was a career; and I've never been sorry I taught. Before I finally put my gradebook away, I taught or counseled for forty-one years. That’s a long time. When I started teaching, I ran for offices in NEA (National Education Association), and I was (on the) National Board of Directors for six years. And so I traveled a lot for them, and I served on what they called a Women's Concerns Committee, I was the chair for that, nationally, for a while so I’d have to go from place to place for meetings; and NEA would send me. I got to fly all over the country at various times, or drive in some cases. So, I went a lot of places and it was fun; but it was within the United States, I didn’t travel over seas.

When I left public school teaching, its because I learned I could go to (the) Newman (Center, in Wichita)--this sounds just so mercenary--but I found I could go to work for Newman, and start drawing my KPERS (taecher's retirement), because I had been teaching long enough. You know eight-five right, you have to have enough years of teaching and your age to have eighty-five [points], and then you can take retirement. So, I was well to my eighty-five, I could get paid at Newman, and have my pension, I could sock it away. When I agreed to go to work for Newman, I had to tell them that I didn’t intend to stay longer than three years. And they said, "Okay." They thought it was the age. I didn’t intend to stay for more than three years because as soon as I had enough money, I was going to run for the legislature. Now, I knew I could do it because the guy that was in the legislature at that time wanted to retire, and he kept wanting me to run. He said it'd be a good idea; and as soon as I was ready, he'd step aside. I was really telling him to wait a little bit because I thought he was doing a good job; but he said, "I'm stepping aside. If you don’t want it, it's up for grabs. Anybody that wants to run for it can." Of course, anybody that wants to run can, but he meant it [would] be easy to move in and follow the same path.

I decided, probably way back when I was a teacher, [to run for the legislature]; but I couldn’t afford it, 'cause you couldn’t teach and work up there. We had an agreement in Dodge that if you worked somewhere else, during the time you were under contract, you could only draw one salary--you could either draw your teaching salary or that salary. If you drew that salary, they kept the teaching one. If you did the teaching one, you had to give the other one to them; and there was no way I could live in Topeka and pay for an apartment and everything. I always wanted to, because I always thought kid's issues never got what they needed. I'm absolutely convinced, and will be 'till the day I die, that the most unheard, under-represented group of people in the world isn't so much male or female, it isn't so much one particular race, its small children. They have no voice, and any time we have to cut that’s where we cut. We don’t represent children well, and I wanted to go do that. I had to wait 'till I could afford [it], so, that’s when I did it.

[Campaigning is a] lot of door-to-door stuff. After a while, you kinda learn to design your ads for the newspaper, learn to get things ready. I ended up the last two times buying time on cable television because it's very inexpensive. And of course, you go to a lot of forums and things like that where you’re allowed to talk, usually your opponent talks to. It's hard, it's hard because suddenly everything you do somebody's looking at, and questioning, and ready to be critical of. You have to have a thick skin. Somebody said, "Does God ever make mistakes? And somebody said, 'Yeah, he must because he designed a rhinoceros with a skin as thick as that, and (they don't) even care about politics'."

I was glad I was there [as a woman in the House of Representatives] when I was. There are more every year; and to my understanding, it's much easier to do it now than when there were so few. One of my favorite little speeches, when I'm talking about woman and children's issues, is that I'm not some namby-pamby talking about doilies, hearts, and flowers, and then I usually use the expression, "I'm talking about blood and guts. I'm talkin' about what's the most basic thing there is, and if you expect this country to run well, twenty years from now, or thirty years from now, then invest in it." You need to understand that every dollar you put in will have a return of seven dollars. You've missed the boat completely on what I'm talkin about (if you think I'm talking about money), because what I'm talking about is an investment in your future and in your country.

It’s a good feeling [to be a representative for your state]. Basically, people honor it. It was a good experience, and, I will miss [it]. This will be my first January not to go there. Of course, 'cause I did it for seven years, I'll really miss the people because, obviously, I really like working with people. There were several good things that happened. We started what you call the Children's Trust Fund. It (was) when (they) had the settlement about the tobacco money after the suite against the tobacco companies. There were pretty good size amounts of money; and we had the opinion that, if we were to receive that, we would probably immediately spend it because states were beginning to be poor everywhere. So we convinced people it should be put in a trust fund, and the principle kept, and we spend the interest from it. We chose to call ours Children's Trust Fund, and try to put it into approved programs for kids. Particularly (it was) to start early childhood things, a lot of people came lately to the idea--which anybody in education had known for years. The earlier you can start educating children and doing the things you need, the better it works because we learn much younger than anybody realized we learned. [The trust fund was used] to start things like, Parents as Teachers, Bright Beginnings, Head Start, and all those things and fund them enough so we could really do them. (We) offered them especially to poverty level kids; but really to all kids, everybody needs those opportunities. We think in cases where both parents are having to work, where there's no chance to interact with children, they need all the programs and enrichments that we can get for them. We did get the Children's Trust Fund established, and now its up to the people that come along after me to fight to keep them from raiding it.

[I left politics because] I was tired for one thing, I was tired, (and) there were things I wanted to do. I took a look, and it was my seventieth birthday coming up, and I thought if I keep on doing this driving back and forth all the time, then are you ever gonna get these other things done that you wanna do. You know some people have a habit of not staying with things too long, and I have a habit of staying too long. You know, I wasn’t going to stay in Dodge teaching when I looked up and it was eighteen years; and I said, "Well, one thing about it when I counsel, I won't counsel that long, because don’t think there's that many years of counseling to do. I only stayed two and a half with college teaching, but I said I wouldn’t stay that long with the legislature. I didn’t want to think I'd be there at the end of eighteen years with the legislature. I was awfully tired of the trips; you spend nine hours a week in the car,--four and a half each way, you know--and that’s if you don’t have a lot of orange cones and waiting. And January to May is when you have ice storms, and blizzards and most the time you need to come home. During that time is when you're trying to do your income tax, they're having forums, they want to know what you're doing, there are clubs that want you to talk to them, there are relatives. I'm the member to the younger part of my brothers and sisters, and I thought, its high time you do something different. I'm going to travel, and I'm redoing my house. Ultimately, I want to redo my house. That’s my plan for the first few years.

Some of my major accomplishments? Well, let's see. I was a teacher for twenty-one years, and then I was a counselor for eighteen years. I taught at a little town called Kismit, down in Seward County, close to Liberal, for three years; and then I came back here and taught at Sunnyside School, which is south of the river in Dodge. Then I became a counselor, and for eighteen years I was a counselor; and I've forgotten how many of those years, there were only two of us working. For the greatest part of those years it was the two of us (my co-worker and myself); and together we really built the counseling program, and I was always extremely proud of it. There weren't many elementary counseling programs when we started, and virtually none in the western part of the state. So, a lot of the others places came here to find out how to do it--Garden City did, Huchtison did. They'd come talk to us, and we were written up in a national book as an exemplary program. So, we were really proud of that. I really thought the fact that we did that made a lot of difference in kids lives, a big difference. When I left public school work, I went to work at the Kansas Newman Colleges, out at Wichita. They had a program, they called it Kansas Newman Western Center, and they did business, nursing, and education. And I ran the teacher ed. program there for two and a half years. From there we did the Liberal, Garden, Dodge thing and taught student teaching. I enjoyed doing that because we turned out some pretty good teachers. When I left that, was when I went to the Legislature. I served in the Legislature seven years.

There's two or three things [I've learned, and like to share] if I go into groups and talk. I guess it's just sometimes I think we forget to be kind to each other. You get caught up in the political--I'm not talking much Republican/Democrat political, just the politics of life in general. Today is all you have to operate in, and people need to take advantage of today. By that, I don’t mean take advantage and go out and see how many billions you can get; but to take advantage of the time you have, to just be kind, because in general, that comes back to you anyway. The other thing I would say is I'm glad that over the years I've seen much more opportunity for girls to achieve than they used to be able to; and that pleases me. Strangely enough, I think even if a girl doesn’t take part in sports, I think the fact that we've opened sports to girls, has made it good for all girls. Because then we tend to be more self-confident, and to do the things like that. There was a time when no girl went out and had a major career. It was considered a failure if what she didn’t (do was) stay home and marry and have kids, and that was it. Now that’s considered part of her life, not her total life. I've been really glad, and I say jokingly when I talk to young girl's groups, young women's groups, that you may have to work twice as hard to get where you’re going; yet, you don’t have to work as hard as you would have had to once. You have to work twice as hard, but who cares. You'll be twice as good. And that's a pretty good philosophy I think to take with you.

This interview was conducted by Ashley Lopez in the Spring of 2004.

*[ ] Are words not said by the interviewee.

*() Explanatory notes.