Mignon Scherer | Interview 1 | December 31, 2011

DUNHAM: Today is December 31, 2011, New Year's Eve.

SCHERER: Last day of the year.

DUNHAM: I'm here this afternoon with Mignon Scherer. This is David Dunham from the Rosie the Riveter Oral History Project. Thank you so much for inviting me to your beautiful home today. We usually start at the beginning. Can you tell me your full name and date of birth?

SCHERER: Mignon Scherer, June 27, 1924.

DUNHAM: Where were you born?

SCHERER: Detroit, Michigan.

DUNHAM: What do you remember about growing up in Detroit?

SCHERER: Well, I was proud to live there because it was a big city, and we had a lot of big things, big theaters and stores and lots of people.

DUNHAM: What was the ethnic makeup of Detroit at the time?

SCHERER: Well, all kinds of people. There were Caucasian, a lot of black people; 00:01:00there was a Polish section called Hamtramck. It was mixed.

DUNHAM: What was your family's background?

SCHERER: My mother's parents came from Western Russia around Latvia and Lithuania. They were Jewish, and they came around the turn of the century to escape the persecution. My father's parents came here also at the same time from Germany.

DUNHAM: Also Jewish, your father's side?

SCHERER: Yes.

DUNHAM: What role did Judaism play in your life growing up?

SCHERER: Well, I grew up Reformed Jewish; I went to Sunday school. But I became an atheist after I was confirmed.

DUNHAM: What made you come to atheism?

SCHERER: Well, it was a wealthy congregation, but at that time my father had lost his shirt in the Depression. But because he was an original founder of the congregation, he was allowed to send his children there at a very reduced price. I was one of the poor ones, and not only that, I was the third of three girls and the second youngest of all the cousins. All I ever had was hand-me-downs my whole life, clothing and toys, everything. I had gone to many confirmations seeing all these lavish gifts that my relatives received, but that year in preparation for the confirmation the rabbi begged and beseeched us ask our friends and relatives, instead of giving us expensive gifts, to send the money 00:03:00to Jews in Germany because there was a little period in the late thirties when if they had enough money they could get out. After a year we voted on it. There were a hundred and four of us, and only four of us voted to give up their gifts. I was one of them, and I thought, "This doesn't sound the way it should be to me."

DUNHAM: So that was the moment that you--did you officially at that time point, did you stop going to synagogue and--?

SCHERER: Well, I was confirmed by then; I was considered like an adult, and it was up to me whether I wanted to continue. But people ask me why I say I'm Jewish when I'm not religious, but it's also a people. And if I say to people, "I'm not Jewish," you would say to me, "Why are you denying it?"

DUNHAM: What was it like, when you were growing up, for your parents? You already mentioned the hardships of the Depression.

SCHERER: Yeah, my father had a fairly prosperous shoe store, and he lost that in '29. I don't remember the years before that because I was only five in 1929. I remember we moved out to the country, my mother and my sisters and I, because it was cheaper. And I didn't get to go to kindergarten because the school was a mile away. My sisters were in school all day and I only a half day, so nobody could walk me home. Then we moved back to Detroit, and I had not gone to kindergarten. I went to a two-story school, and I had three different lockers to remember and different seats in six rooms.

DUNHAM: As a first grader?

SCHERER: Yeah, my mother said I was a nervous wreck.

DUNHAM: I would imagine, wow. Well, what was that like once you were in the classroom? How was it?

SCHERER: Well, it was okay after that. I was a good student, and I had friends. But, of course, there was a lot of anti-Semitism at that time in Detroit, Henry Ford and Father Coughlin.

DUNHAM: How did that manifest itself with kids, or how did you--?

SCHERER: I always had good friends because I guess I was a nice girl and I'm smart. But of course I did experience some comments. I remember a boy told me once that I killed Christ. I don't know where it came from; I think I was nine, and from that point on I always had smart aleck answers. I said to him, "Well, Jesus was Jewish, and he loved everybody." The kid didn't know what to say after that. That's the way I've been most of my life, but when I worked in the defense 00:06:00plant there were some women who had just come up from the South and were making enormous amounts of money compared to what they would in the South. And they said, "We're just fighting this war for the Jews." I said, "Well, don't fight it for the Jews; go fight it for Hitler."

DUNHAM: So you developed the snappy comebacks to deal with all of that.

SCHERER: Right.

DUNHAM: Were there any other people of Jewish descent in your school and neighborhood?

SCHERER: No, we were the only Jewish family in the neighborhood. We didn't live in the Jewish neighborhood because my father started another shoe store eventually, and we all had to help in the store as we grew older. We didn't have a car, so we had to walk. So we didn't live in the Jewish neighborhood. But I don't regret that. I'm kind of glad because I saw a lot of different aspects of life.

DUNHAM: How do you think it might have been different if you hadn't been exposed 00:07:00to that?

SCHERER: Well, I'm not sure.

DUNHAM: What was it like working in the shoe store growing up?

SCHERER: Well, I didn't like it, but from the time I was fourteen, worked part-time, but I liked the money. Fifty cents an hour; that was big money, and I always had a little spending money. Of course, I had to buy everything myself. I had all hand-me-down clothes, and so if I wanted to go to a movie or anything I had to pay for it. But that was more than some kids had so--and I think I learned the work ethic, and my father was a very honest man. So I think it was good for me.

DUNHAM: What was school like as you got into high school? Do you remember--did you have any particular ambitions of what you wanted to be when you grew up so to speak?

SCHERER: No. I was kind of a rebel, and--

DUNHAM: How so?

SCHERER: My mother wanted me to go to college, of course. That's very important 00:08:00among Jewish people, education. What I did--well, let's see--I worked in the defense plant, and then I went out to New York by myself when I was twenty, which is how my mother got all her gray hair. She had been nagging me to go to college. So when I finally came back home I thought, "Oh, I'll go for two weeks and shut her up, and I'll tell her I didn't like it." But I liked it.

DUNHAM: So then it stuck and you continued on?

SCHERER: Right.

DUNHAM: Well, we'll come back to that. So you were in high school when the war started?

SCHERER: Well, let's see I was born in '24, yeah, eighteen.

DUNHAM: Junior or senior year?

SCHERER: Was that '48?

DUNHAM: Did you graduate maybe in '42?

SCHERER: Yeah, '42.

DUNHAM: So do you remember where you were in December of '41 when you heard 00:09:00about Pearl Harbor, how you heard?

SCHERER: I don't remember.

DUNHAM: Do you remember how things changed at the start of the war? Did a lot of the male students leave the high school and--?

SCHERER: Not the high school. There weren't many guys around, I remember.

DUNHAM: What was that like with--?

SCHERER: Well, I remember the years going by, and if you weren't married by twenty-one you're going to be an old maid back then. But then there weren't many guys around. There was a song, [sings] "They're either too young or too old; they're either too gray or too grassy green; the best are in the Army; the rest will never harm me; they're either too young or too old."

DUNHAM: You wrote about that in your bio; that sums it up pretty well. But did you get to do any dating in high school or--?

SCHERER: Oh, yeah.

DUNHAM: What was that like, dating at that time?

SCHERER: Well, what do you mean, "what was it like"?

DUNHAM: I don't know, what did you do; where did you go out on dates? Did you go--?

SCHERER: Well, he didn't have a car, so we'd walk to what's called Belle Isle. That was an island seven miles around, a mile from my house. They had everything there, of course, swimming and hiking and bicycling and tennis courts, and in the summer the Detroit Symphony Orchestra played for free. It meant freedom to me because I could go without my parents.

But my mother broke the dating up. He was Italian, and she thought Italy was Syria. I guess Syria's always been very anti-Semitic. He stopped coming around. I called, and he told me my mother said, "Don't come around anymore."

DUNHAM: Your mother told him.

SCHERER: My mother said that, yeah. Of course, there's a lot of prejudice among Jewish people, too; there's good and bad in every group and--

DUNHAM: Did you ever speak to her about it or--?

SCHERER: Well, when I did become engaged, he was not Jewish, my husband. And my mother would tell everybody, "Well, he's not Jewish, but he's a very fine young man; he's going to be a lawyer." I said to her one day, "Well, would you tell everybody, 'he's a very fine young man, he's not Jewish, but he's a very fine young man, he's a trash collector'?" Then I remember one day an aunt called me and asked what I was doing. I said, "I'm doing dishes." She said "Jewish girls don't do dishes." Well, this one does. So there's prejudice among all people.

DUNHAM: Did your mom respond to the point you made about the trash collector?

SCHERER: No, she didn't say anything. But my mother was a wonderful person, very 00:12:00different from a lot of my relatives. They were Reformed, and my mother was very liberal. She was the Civilian Defense Leader in the neighborhood, and there were a few black people. She said they were her best workers. My parents were very liberal, very pro-labor and--because I think partly they were Reformed. My mother did volunteer work, and she belonged to a book club, and not as narrow as a lot of my relatives.

DUNHAM: Did they have any conflict with any of your relatives over those more liberal views?

SCHERER: Well, I don't know if they openly argued about it, but I know there was 00:13:00a difference.

DUNHAM: How did your life change during the war? How did you come to work at Murray Body?

SCHERER: Good paying job. I went from making eighteen dollars a week selling shoes downtown to seventy-five dollars a week at the defense plant. When I became a schoolteacher five or six years later, that was what I made, seventy-five dollars a week, so that was very good money.

DUNHAM: How did you find out about the job?

SCHERER: Oh, everybody knew they wanted defense workers.

DUNHAM: Did they have a test or anything when applied do you know?

SCHERER: I don't remember. It took me a while to get hired.

DUNHAM: Do you remember what that process was like? Did you have to join a union?

SCHERER: No. I don't remember if there even was a union. I don't remember that.

DUNHAM: Do you remember what your first day on the job was like?

SCHERER: Well, it was training.

DUNHAM: How long was the training?

SCHERER: Probably a couple months.

DUNHAM: Was it at the site of the job?

SCHERER: Yeah.

DUNHAM: Was it like a class?

SCHERER: No, it was like one on one.

DUNHAM: What were you learning to do?

SCHERER: Rivet.

DUNHAM: Was it predominantly women who were working there? Or did that change during the course of the war?

SCHERER: Well, I don't remember what the percentages were.

DUNHAM: Do you remember what the racial makeup of the employees were, and were they mostly local or were they people coming from other parts of the country?

SCHERER: Well, I do remember a lot of people came from the South for a better paying job, and the men were mostly the older men, either 4-F or older because the younger ones were all in the service.

DUNHAM: How did the men take to the women coming into the workplace there?

SCHERER: Well, there was a lot of childish behavior that went on like putting signs on your back: "Kick me." And they all said they were single. We knew they weren't.

DUNHAM: Wow, so was there any ever mischievous behavior, a lot of flirting, or hanky panky, say?

SCHERER: A little, yeah. A few of would go out after work sometimes, a bar or something.

DUNHAM: Did you enjoy the work that you were doing there?

SCHERER: Well, I didn't hate it. But I didn't love it either.

DUNHAM: Were you able to save money, or did you, since you were making--?

SCHERER: Well, I saved a little because I went to New York. Then I fell, so I saved some money, to tide me over.

DUNHAM: So what exactly were you working on over there?

SCHERER: I think I started out with the P-47, which was a pursuit plane. Yeah, 00:16:00P-47s, and then I became an inspector, but I don't remember of what--I mean they were planes; I don't remember which kind. Then I became an installer of electrical wiring in the B-29 bombers. I didn't know it at the time, but the Enola Gay, of course, was a B-29.

I had to do everything by feel inside the wings. I couldn't see anything, and I'm a very, very unmechanical woman. But I was very conscientious about my work, as I would have been at any kind of work. But I always worried that maybe I had made a mistake and the plane would blow up or something. I knew that it was 00:17:00electrical wiring that I was installing. Of course, there were inspectors that followed, but I think they were short on good workers because ordinarily I would never be hired for a job like that. I'm not very mechanical or even well-coordinated.

DUNHAM: You didn't feel that confident about doing it, or did you got the hang of it--

SCHERER: Well, I was very conscientious, as I said; I always did my very best work because I realized the enormity of it.

DUNHAM: Was the work demanding; were you constantly busy and getting a lot done?

SCHERER: Yeah. Well, not too busy.

DUNHAM: You had mentioned a few things in your bio, experiences that came up. I think you talked about the noise; in all the jobs you did it was a very loud environment.

SCHERER: Deafening, yeah, deafening.

DUNHAM: Do you know what types of injuries may have occurred there?

SCHERER: Well, I don't know. I remember when I was training to be a riveter that the drill came out one day and whisked by my--it was actually my friend, it whisked by her face. Could have been tragic.

DUNHAM: But you didn't hear of any kind of injuries that might have occurred, minor or severe?

SCHERER: Oh, I'm sure there were, but I just don't recall being aware of it.

DUNHAM: You mentioned something about a woman with a strong Irish accent; do you recall that?

SCHERER: When I was a riveter. See, on one side is the riveter and the other side is the bucker, and so she had to always let me know when to rivet. We couldn't see each other, and you had to be careful not to drill a hole through somebody rushing by, so she'd say, "Shoot the rivet," a thousand times a day.

DUNHAM: Oh, that was your partner for a while.

SCHERER: Yeah.

DUNHAM: You already mentioned about the inspectors putting the signs back that said--you said something about when there wasn't enough work to do, doing some reading in the bathroom. What was that?

SCHERER: Well, if you stayed in there too long they'd take your badge number. Like I say, I did all my work, and I was very conscientious, but sometimes I didn't have enough work to do. I got so I'd visit my boss's badge number because if you got your badge number taken too many times you could be suspended.

DUNHAM: Specifically for being caught reading in the bathroom or being in the bathroom?

SCHERER: Well, just hanging out there too long, yeah.

DUNHAM: Did your boss ever know that you did that or--?

SCHERER: Not that I'm aware of.

DUNHAM: You mentioned there was a friend that told you about some of the 00:20:00Southerners who made anti-Semitic remarks, but did you ever experience that first hand?

SCHERER: No, when I first became an inspector, and that was a whole different crew of people, and this girl came up to me after I'd been there about a week--I guess she had wanted to be friends with me from the beginning. She told me that she was very hurt or something, and I said, "What? What's going on?" She told me that they had made anti-Semitic remarks about me.

DUNHAM: Then you also did have from some of the same type of women remarks because you befriended some of your African-American coworkers. Is that right?

SCHERER: Oh, I worked next this, for a while--I don't remember which job it was--but he was a black man, young, very good looking, very nice, he was 00:21:00married, and pretty soon rumors got around that we were dating and I was a "nigger lover."

DUNHAM: Did you ever hear that first hand, or again friends told you that people kind of said that?

SCHERER: That got back to me.

DUNHAM: Yeah, so was that kind of from the folks who had come from the South, white folks who had come from the South?

SCHERER: I don't know who they were. I just know that from the time I could remember I knew there was a lot of anti-Semitism. In fact, I looked at some of the pictures; they drew them like they were witches and dragons. And, of course, I believed it when I was five or six, and I thought, "Gee, my family doesn't look like that, they must be very different." Because when you're five or six you don't have all your marbles there.

DUNHAM: Where had you seen pictures like that?

SCHERER: Oh, all around, yeah. I think I always had the sense of injustice 00:22:00because I had experienced it--and there's good and bad in every group; there's Jews that I wouldn't give you two cents for, but you can say that about any group.

DUNHAM: Sure. Was there much of a sense of patriotism at the plant? I know you said that it was good money, and that's certainly why people were coming across the country to do different jobs.

SCHERER: Well, I didn't hear talk like that. I don't know. I mean I was young, eighteen and twenty. And of course I was certainly aware that a war was going on and the enormity of it, but I didn't think about it too much. I was interested in dating but, of course, there weren't many guys around.

DUNHAM: Yeah, was there anyone to date while you were working there--?

SCHERER: I did date a man in the factory, and he was my first great love. He was thirty-one; I was nineteen. That ended because I guess he had a record, and I 00:23:00was warned about him. But I didn't believe it.

DUNHAM: Who let you know about that, someone at your office, someone at your job?

SCHERER: Yes, people subtly mentioned things.

DUNHAM: So while you doubted it at first, ultimately that led you to end the relationship?

SCHERER: Yeah, but when you're nineteen you don't have a lot of sense.

DUNHAM: Was he Jewish?

SCHERER: No.

DUNHAM: No, but that was not a concern for you.

SCHERER: No.

DUNHAM: Did your parents know about the relationship?

SCHERER: They knew I was dating somebody, but they only met him once.

DUNHAM: Were you living at home while working there?

SCHERER: Yes.

DUNHAM: And what was your commute like?

SCHERER: Well, I took the bus, yeah. I worked the late shift, like from about 3:00 to midnight.

DUNHAM: What was Detroit--in Richmond and the Bay Area there's lots of talk of I 00:24:00think it was swing, graveyard, and day shift, kind of twenty-four hour town of activities and things to do late at night even after a swing shift. Was Detroit like that at all, of kind of a late night social scene or--?

SCHERER: Well, there were places that were open, bars I guess.

DUNHAM: Okay, did you go to those much after work or was it--?

SCHERER: About once or twice a week, but I didn't drink. I found out that I can't drink; I don't get happy; I get sick after three or four drinks.

DUNHAM: That's the same for me. It just takes one sip, I'm allergic I think. What else did you do for fun during those early war years in your free time?

SCHERER: Well, I had girlfriends that I would see during the day.

DUNHAM: Did you go to the movies?

SCHERER: Yeah.

DUNHAM: How did you get most of your news about the war? Was it from newsreels, or radio or paper?

SCHERER: Newsreels, paper. There was very little visual, of course, and we knew 00:25:00that Roosevelt was a cripple, but we hardly ever thought of it because there wasn't much visual media.

DUNHAM: You mentioned the dehumanizing depictions of Jewish people that you grew up with. Do you remember the cartoons during World War II, and did you have any feeling about them, of the enemy in this case Germans and Japanese?

SCHERER: Well, they were definitely considered very bad people.

DUNHAM: I just meant if you recalled the cartoon and their exaggerated depictions.

SCHERER: I don't recall that too much.

DUNHAM: Sure, well, what do you remember about recycling or rationing?

SCHERER: I remember the rationing. Of course, my father had a shoe store, so you 00:26:00could only buy two pair of shoes a year. There was rationing of meat, and, of course, you couldn't buy a new car; no tires were being made. But that didn't bother me. I didn't consider that any big deal when we knew that people were dying; that was very minor.

DUNHAM: Right, and nylons or cigarettes, did you smoke--?

SCHERER: I smoked in New York. That's what I did, I was a cigarette girl.

DUNHAM: All right. Well, let's talk about that. When did you decide to go to New York, and how did that transpire?

SCHERER: Well, that was towards the end of the war. I had broken up with the boyfriend by then; I guess he found somebody else. I was a rebel, of course; well, I loved the ballet and show business, but I didn't have any talent. But I thought if I could be a cigarette girl I could be around it. That would be fun, and so I saved some money and I went to New York all by myself.

DUNHAM: Did you go out on the bus or--?

SCHERER: Train.

DUNHAM: Had you ever been to New York?

SCHERER: I don't think I had.

DUNHAM: Did you have any idea of what it would be like?

SCHERER: Well, I knew there was a lot of show business there, theater and all that. I heard about cigarette girls from somewhere.

DUNHAM: But you knew that was the job you planned on getting?

SCHERER: Yeah, I wanted to get away, and like I say, I think I was always a rebel. So my mother had a married cousin there, and I contacted them when I first got there. I stayed with them the first night, but then I got my own place, a brownstone. The next day I went to--what was it the famous place in New 00:28:00York, was it the Stork Club? Or is that in LA? Very famous, expensive place, and they didn't need me. I went to another expensive place, and they said, "Well, talk to that cigar guy out in the lobby." There was a little stand there, and, of course, there was a shortage of workers during the war. So he told me about this concessionaire that dealt with a lot of different night clubs. So I called him, and I got hired on the spot. Actually I worked in eighteen different night clubs, wherever they needed somebody.

DUNHAM: Wow. So they just told you each sort of night which one to go to or--?

SCHERER: Yeah, sometimes I worked in one place for several weeks. I worked in the Madison Square Garden Night Club and Tavern on the Green, and I can't even remember. I should have got the pictures out to show you.

DUNHAM: Oh, well, if you have that, I'd love to see, although--

SCHERER: I didn't make much money. I had just enough to pay my bills. But it was fun being around all the talent. I saw the Ink Spots, the original Ink Spots one night, and just a lot of famous talent.

DUNHAM: Now you were making less money. Could you have continued at Murray Body, or were they beginning to lay off yet?

SCHERER: Oh, yeah, I could. Oh, eventually I would have been let go.

DUNHAM: But at the time you left it was still going strong?

SCHERER: Oh, yeah.

DUNHAM: You just wanted to do this.

SCHERER: Right.

DUNHAM: So was it everything you'd hoped it'd be?

SCHERER: I really loved it. But then one night it was towards the end of the war, and this young sailor from Detroit came in. It was a quiet night, and we talked a lot. He was a real nice, clean-cut young man. When it was time to go home he asked if he could accompany me home, and I said, "Well, I just take the subway if you want to tag along," so he did. I had never invited any man up to 00:30:00my room, but I was thinking, "Oh, well, this seemed such a nice, clean-cut young man if he wanted to come up for a cup of coffee. He said to me, "Are you promiscuous?" I thought, "He would not have said that if I had lived at home in Detroit." I got to thinking; I thought, "I'm branded by my work. And there's no sense living in New York if I'm going to be a sales lady or a bank teller or something like that." So I decided to come home. My mother always nagged me to go to college, and I thought I'll go for two weeks and shut her up, but I liked it and stayed.

DUNHAM: How long were you in New York, about?

SCHERER: Four months.

DUNHAM: So you got to see a lot of music. I forgot to ask, at Murray Body what 00:31:00was the outfit that you wore, what were your work clothes and--?

SCHERER: Oh, I could wear what I want with pants and top.

DUNHAM: You mentioned I think before we got started that you had worn pants some as a student, is that right? As a high school student. Was that unusual?

SCHERER: Yes.

DUNHAM: Was that just your tendency, or where did that come from since it was less than usual?

SCHERER: Well, being a rebel--well, Katherine Hepburn wore them. But I'm not Katherine Hepburn.

DUNHAM: Did you get any negative feedback about wearing pants as a young girl?

SCHERER: In school?

DUNHAM: Yeah.

SCHERER: From the teachers?

DUNHAM: Yes.

SCHERER: Well, two teachers told me they wouldn't let me in class. I went to the principal, and he said they had the right to exclude me. So I went home, and I told me my parents I was quitting high school. My parents and my sisters' friends they sat up with me all night, and they said, "Well, okay, you don't 00:32:00have to go to college, but you're going to finish high school." So I did.

DUNHAM: Why did you feel so strongly about wearing pants?

SCHERER: Well, I couldn't see why anybody could exclude me from--what was the harm? It seems stupid.

DUNHAM: So as the war went on did you notice fashion changing, particularly among women and wearing pants more outside of the workplace, too?

SCHERER: Oh, yeah, that was the beginning, I guess, of women's lib, not as a formal protest movement, but it just happened. They wanted us to wear pants; they didn't want us to wear skirts or dresses.

DUNHAM: On the job, but then did women--were they still mostly switching into skirts and dresses outside of work?

SCHERER: Yeah.

DUNHAM: I've heard that starting to see a little more where women were wearing pants in part because they were wearing them so much at work, it just started to--what about when you were the concessionaire, what was your outfit for that?

SCHERER: I wore my own clothes, except one place, but it wasn't real scanty or anything like that.

DUNHAM: Would it have been pants, or would it have been more a dress or skirt?

SCHERER: A dress or skirt, sometimes like I say I wore my own clothes. They were more dressy clothes, but I was mostly allowed to wear my own.

DUNHAM: Aside from that one encounter with the man who took you home on the subway, had you done much dating while you were there in New York?

SCHERER: I had a boyfriend for a while. He was a musician at one of the night clubs. But I began to not like some of his offensive behavior, and I broke up with him, yeah. I had never been abused as a child, so I think I was instantly leery of anything like that.

DUNHAM: Yeah, anything else about your few months in New York that you'd like to share?

SCHERER: Well, I remember seeing an "Oklahoma" matinee, second row, $5.00.

DUNHAM: Oh, wow.

SCHERER: Oh, then this boyfriend I had--he was going to get me a job in some of the really high-class places, and we went out one night to a night club with some man that was supposed to get me a better job. I said something, and my boyfriend kicked me under the table, that I wasn't supposed to talk about.

DUNHAM: Do you have any idea of what it may have been about?

SCHERER: Probably he was just leading me on that I could get a better job through him.

DUNHAM: Oh, you were mentioning the job basically.

SCHERER: Yeah, I'm lucky I came out of that unscathed because, looking back, it was dangerous. So my mother got all her gray hair, and then they sent my middle 00:35:00sister out to check up on me, and she got scared. The place I was living in, she went and stayed with my mother's aunt and her husband.

DUNHAM: And reported back that she was scared that made your mother more nervous.

SCHERER: Probably. Well, I think my mother realized why I was the way I was. My older sister was seven years older, and the Depression didn't hit until she was twelve. So they led a pretty stable middle-class life before then. Then my other sister came along five years later, and she was sickly. Then I came along two years after that; I'm sure it was an accident. My mother had a nervous breakdown when she was pregnant with me, I understand. I always held it against my mother that she didn't give me what I needed, but I think she did according to what she 00:36:00thought was what I needed. I mean I always had good medical care. And I had good food; my mother bought the best of food. But nobody ever hugged me or kissed me or said, "I love you." I guess that just wasn't in their nature. So I thought of myself as the ugliest female alive. I really did. I remember sitting on a streetcar once when I was ten, and there was an old--we called them bums then, just bedraggled and old and everything; and I remember saying to myself, "Gee, I wonder if someday somebody even like that would want to marry me." Very low self-esteem so that I guess I always felt angry at any injustice.

DUNHAM: What other types of injustices early on or during the war years did you 00:37:00confront or anyway, bring out that anger? Do you recall?

SCHERER: Well, of course, the racial. When I got in college I remember picketing restaurants that wouldn't allow black people.

DUNHAM: Where was that?

SCHERER: In Detroit. There was one particular one across the street from the Wayne University, and they wouldn't let black people in at the counter to eat.

DUNHAM: Did it have positive results, the picketing?

SCHERER: Well, I don't know. We weren't necessarily organized then. That was before Martin Luther King. But I guess I always was angry about injustice I guess because I felt that I had been treated unjust.

DUNHAM: Yeah, what about were there other issues around discrimination against women at that time that you--?

SCHERER: Well, by the time I started working--well, I worked in my dad's store 00:38:00so I didn't have to go hunt a job. But then when the war broke out, of course, the women were needed. There was discrimination, of course, mostly verbal kinds of discrimination. But any kind of injustice got me very annoyed.

DUNHAM: So what college did you go to when you--?

SCHERER: It was Wayne State University. It was a city college.

DUNHAM: So were you living at home while going there?

SCHERER: Yes. I got married halfway through.

DUNHAM: How did you meet your husband?

SCHERER: At school.

DUNHAM: You were studying to become a teacher?

SCHERER: Um-hm.

DUNHAM: Was he also?

SCHERER: No, he was going to be a lawyer.

DUNHAM: Oh, that's right, excuse me. So do you remember where you were at the 00:39:00end of the war, you remember V-E Day and V-J Day?

SCHERER: Not too well. I remember my mother had gone to--I think it was New Jersey, or maybe it was Manhattan--to see my sister and her husband. But she didn't know it was going to be D-Day, and she got caught in all that, yeah.

DUNHAM: When did you graduate from college, then?

SCHERER: It was 19--I was born in '24; I think I was 25, so it must have been '45, 1945.

DUNHAM: Just before the war ended?

SCHERER: Wait a minute--no, it was later than that.

DUNHAM: Forty-nine.

SCHERER: Forty-nine, yeah.

DUNHAM: Because you were in New York near the end of the war.

SCHERER: Yeah, it was 1949.

DUNHAM: Are there any other thoughts you have about the end of the war and how things had changed during the war and soon thereafter?

SCHERER: Well, I guess I'm ashamed to say I didn't think a whole lot about it. When I first met my husband I thought he was a jerk because he said he liked being in the service. But then I found out that he was drafted when he was eighteen and he was training to be a pilot, and he lived in a high-rise in Miami Beach. This was his first experience away from home, and he wasn't in battle or anything, and then I realized that he wasn't a jerk.

But my older sister's husband, he was drafted. Before he was drafted he enlisted because he knew if he didn't, he would be drafted. And he had just graduated 00:41:00dental college, and he tried to enlist in the Navy, but from what I understood they were very anti-Semitic, and first they lost his blood bottle; then the blood bottle broke, and all this and that. By that time he was drafted as a private, $21 a month. Here he was a dentist, and he was sent to New Guinea and--terrible; he had shrapnel wounds and malaria a number of times. It was hell. I was certainly aware of that, and I was aware of a few who had not come back. Now I knew it was a terrible time, but it wasn't where my focus was at that time in life.

DUNHAM: As a young person. What did your sisters do during the war, your two 00:42:00older sisters during the war years?

SCHERER: Well, my older sister had started out as a schoolteacher, and she got fed up with the school system back then. It was very old fashioned and all; they wanted to hear a pin drop in the room. She was an art teacher, and so when he was in the states, she'd save up her money and go be with him for a little while till the money ran out. And she worked for somebody who made hats at that time; she was very artistic, I remember. And she too worked in the inner city as a 00:43:00teacher, and she bought all her kids toothbrushes with her own money. We mostly used our own money to buy things for the kids because we were conscientious.

DUNHAM: It's a lot the same today.

SCHERER: And he was gone four years during the war. Like I say and malaria, shrapnel wounds; he'd help the doctors. The sad thing was they met when they were sixteen, and they dated seven years because he had to get through dental school and then was drafted. So they got married right before he left and went through all this hell. Then he came back, and they started their family. Then she got cancer and died at age thirty-eight.

DUNHAM: I'm sorry.

SCHERER: We used to envy her because she was so beautiful and had this wonderful 00:44:00husband, but there wasn't anything much to envy really.

My middle sister was a bookkeeper. She was sickly as a child; she was scared of her own shadow. But she got all the attention because she was pretty and sickly, and I kind of resented that. But she got married and had two children eventually.

DUNHAM: Was that during the war years, or was that after--?

SCHERER: No, she married after the war.

DUNHAM: Was she in school during the war years?

SCHERER: No, she was a bookkeeper; she didn't have an extensive training.

DUNHAM: Well, after you got married and got your teaching credential, you taught first in Detroit?

SCHERER: Right. They asked if I minded working in the inner city, and I said, "No, I prefer it," because I wanted to reach out to underprivileged children." I had forty-six children in the first grade--

DUNHAM: Wow.

SCHERER: With no instructional aides and a principal that walked in the room every day and told me I was going to have all failures because there was too much noise and too much fun in the room. But she did the testing, and I was the only teacher that never had a failure. But I couldn't have stayed at that job too much longer. It was killing me because I was having all these interesting projects to make their day interesting, and if you can imagine forty-six children in a room--

DUNHAM: Was that just the standard number of students?

SCHERER: Yeah, it was after the war and people were having a lot of children. There was a shortage of teachers.

DUNHAM: What was the racial mix of students, do you recall?

SCHERER: Well, they were mostly black in the school I taught in.

DUNHAM: How long did you work there?

SCHERER: I worked there three years, and then my husband and I, we got married. Yeah, we were in college when we got married. Then we moved to San Francisco, 00:46:00and I had to start out as a substitute teacher there. Then I had a kindergarten class in the gymnasium that I shared with three other teachers because there were so many children. There weren't enough classrooms, and we each had a corner.

DUNHAM: This for the whole year?

SCHERER: I taught there for two years, yeah.

DUNHAM: And it was in the gymnasium?

SCHERER: Well, then I got a regular school, and it was in a middle-class neighborhood. To tell you the truth, I was a little bored because it wasn't a problem class, and it was a smaller class.

DUNHAM: So one took almost too much energy, but then this was the other extreme and just not engaging enough, not challenging enough?

SCHERER: Yeah.

DUNHAM: What brought you to San Francisco?

SCHERER: Well, we wanted to leave Detroit. Interesting, exciting city.

DUNHAM: And what was your impression of San Francisco?

SCHERER: Oh, I loved it, loved it.

DUNHAM: What did you like about it?

SCHERER: Well, cosmopolitan, and the entertainment there. There was only one thing I was disappointed in, and that was the theater was not as great as in Detroit because in Detroit we got the first-class theater right from New York because it wasn't that far. But they didn't usually come all the way out to San Francisco.

DUNHAM: Did they have their own independent productions, then, that they produced here in San Francisco?

SCHERER: A lot, yeah, a lot. But there was a lot of wonderful entertainment, and the cosmopolitanness of it. When we first got there I was off for the summer, being a teacher. But I decided to get a job because my husband had a job, and I didn't know anybody. So I thought, "Well, I'll get a really stupid job so I won't feel guilty when I quit at the end of the summer." So I got a job working an adding machine at the Bank of America. And I was flabbergasted that ordinary 00:48:00clerks, they went to the theater. Well, that wasn't true in Detroit. It was mostly the more educated middle-class people that went to the theater there.

DUNHAM: Was it more reasonably priced, or was it the sign of the times that people had more--?

SCHERER: No, just different kinds of people on the whole.

DUNHAM: Interesting, and where did you live in San Francisco?

SCHERER: We lived in the Richmond. We bought a big old Victorian house, and it was fun. We had lived in the garage of my husband's home the first five years we were married because he and his father fixed it up, and it was free rent, and we were college students.

DUNHAM: You saved money in college and then saved money--?

SCHERER: Yeah, the second two years when we both worked, we saved enough for a down payment on a home. It was a block from Golden Gate Park.

DUNHAM: What was the Richmond community like at that time?

SCHERER: Well, it was mixed. It wasn't a wealthy neighborhood, but--

DUNHAM: Did you get around on public transportation?

SCHERER: We had one car between us, so we'd share it.

DUNHAM: That was your first car?

SCHERER: Right.

DUNHAM: You hadn't minded not having a car before, but was that a big deal now that you had a car or--?

SCHERER: Well, we had a car the last two years in Detroit, yeah.

DUNHAM: Did you come across the country in that car?

SCHERER: We drove, yeah.

DUNHAM: How long did you teach in San Francisco?

SCHERER: Well, I only taught--maybe it was three, no, it was only two years because then when I was thirty we started our family.

[brief interruption]

DUNHAM: So you started your family in San Francisco?

SCHERER: Um-hmm. We had one, and then we moved to San Diego. Had two more.

DUNHAM: And that's where you've been ever since, in San Diego?

SCHERER: Well, we did leave San Diego after nine years and moved to Bellevue, Washington, for two years and then came back.

DUNHAM: Okay. Your husband had to work there?

SCHERER: Yeah, he worked at Boeing.

DUNHAM: As a lawyer. He was in the legal profession ever since?

SCHERER: Right.

DUNHAM: You mentioned early, was it Belle Isle? I know we talked a little on the phone about how you developed a great passion for environment. Could you tell us a little bit about your work as an environmentalist?

SCHERER: Well, I always loved nature, as I say. Maybe I connected it with freedom because by the time I could go someplace by myself, when I was twelve, it was mostly Belle Isle. Then we moved to San Diego, like I said. At the point when the children were all in school I decided to do a little volunteer work, and I offered my services free as a remedial reader part-time, but they never called me back.

So then I joined the Sierra Club, and I thought. "Well, I'll work in the office one day a week while the kids are in school as a volunteer." So I joined, and then I heard they were having this big symposium, study groups, and my husband 00:52:00was willing to come with me. And there were eight different groups; I wanted to join the one that said, "Save our Forests." But my husband said, "No, let's join this one, 'The Myth Growth is Progress.'" "What is that?" So he was nice enough to come so I went along with him, and that group divided up into two groups, the study group and the action group. He joined the study group; I joined the action group. Somebody said that there was a lesser Seattle and a lesser Los Angeles and why didn't we start a lesser San Diego? Everybody agreed to that.

There were only two of us that wanted to be active and do anything. This guy, he was a PR man, and I was the secretary. So he did this big PR about lesser San 00:53:00Diego, and then he said, "That's it." There I was, the leader of lesser San Diego. So I had all this information by then and studied it a lot and learned that the bigger the city, the more expensive it is to live in, and all the other problems that ensue from it, but you want the city to be big enough to have some culture and different things, but beyond that, what's the point?

So I'd go around and talk to different groups and speak at City Hall on issues that pertain to that, and it got to be the hottest thing in town. I wasn't even trying, and I joined all the environmental groups, and well, we had an environmental coalition. And Roger Hedgecock--you know Roger?--one day he 00:54:00decided that this was the big thing. He was eager for publicity. So he put me in as the chair of the slow growth committee of the Sierra Club, and in the meantime I had met a gentleman. He had called me. He was very interested in what I was doing and how could he help, and I said, "Well, I don't know. People thought it was a big group of people to me." But people liked the idea because, see, we were getting to be like LA and a lot of people didn't like that. So anyway, I said, "I don't know what you can do," to this fellow. I said I'm giving a talk to some group of men tomorrow morning at 7:00 if you want to join me. So he came down and he asked if he could speak first. He was a ball of fire, a brilliant man, a genius, and we got to talking about maybe we could do an 00:55:00initiative petition to slow the growth to the national growth rate because ours was 3 percent and the national growth rate was 1 percent--to slow it down through limiting the amount of housing, and we worked out this initiative petition.

So Roger put me in as head of this committee, and I had to devise a publication to justify the petition, but I didn't write most of it myself. I knew some professors with PhDs; one was Willard Johnson; he had been in the UN on population control. Then there was one who studied air pollution, air quality, and he wrote his part. They were mostly professors, and I just put it together. And, of course, Roger signed his name to it. Nobody had their name assigned to any particular part.

Well, the Sierra Club loved it, and they decided it should be presented to the 00:56:00City Council. But, of course, stupid little female me. They had Roger Hedgecock present it to the City Council. So it was a big thing in the city. Then, unbeknownst to me, my husband, being an attorney, and that's where the idea came from originally, was--because I had said to my husband in the fifties when Conder was on the fritz, I said, "Oh, we'll have to get more industry here." He said, "What for? It just brings more people." But he kept out of it; by then he was the head of the legal department of Solar. But unbeknownst to me, the Sierra Club interviewed him from a legal standpoint; I wish they had asked Roger Hedgecock to do that. Well, there was a little thing in the paper, and I didn't 00:57:00connect it at first. Different people at Solar at the different social events they had, they'd tell me that the President was making my husband's life one living hell. I didn't know why, and that was why, because he said they asked him in the interview whether it would be legal, and he said, "We don't know"; it had never been done, but he wasn't against it.

So my husband finally just quit, and that made a big drastic change in our life. So then I had to go to work. I had three teenagers at home, and I had this project, and working. Something had to give, so I gave up the project. My partner, he wasn't very tactful, screwed it up. But--

DUNHAM: Did it become an initiative; did it go through the initiative process?

SCHERER: No, no.

DUNHAM: It didn't make it.

SCHERER: If I had not had to go back to work I would have swung it, but my partner was not very tactful.

DUNHAM: Did the growth stay?

SCHERER: Yes.

DUNHAM: I know that San Diego's huge, but I don't know what it was then. What was the population when you first came to San Diego?

SCHERER: First came? Oh, maybe about five hundred thousand.

DUNHAM: Well, I think we're close to wrapping up. As an atheist, is that something you've been sort of open about, and have there been any issues with that in your life? Or what's your perspective as an atheist all these years?

SCHERER: Well, I don't go around advertising it, but, well, if people ask me, "What's your religion?" I say, "My religion is 'do unto other as you would have them do unto you.'"

"DUNHAM: The Golden Rule, yeah, that's fair. It seems almost like there's been 00:59:00maybe a resurgence, particularly in politics, maybe, where you see this compulsory reference to God or something. And we can all take that, I guess, in many different ways. But for me, I also identify as an atheist, so I was just curious.

SCHERER: Yeah, well, what gets me is what do people look like when they're in heaven, like supposing you die when you're ninety and you lost a child when the child was three months old, well, when you get to heaven, is the child still three months old, or what? Then I read a letter; this person said they were very religious and they believed they were going to heaven, but what could they do about certain relatives that they didn't like? How could they handle them in heaven? This gets to be ridiculous.

DUNHAM: I hadn't considered that. Well I was just thinking, as one being so 01:00:00interested in fighting injustice, I just see that there can be prejudice against all religions, and there's prejudice against "lack of religion" or atheism, it seems to me, too. So that's what I was sort of referencing and if you'd ever experienced that.

SCHERER: Well, my granddaughter is twenty. Her mother, my oldest daughter, has become an Episcopalian, and she decided she's going to be an Orthodox Jew. We don't care, except that it makes it difficult visiting because of all this Kosher stuff. That's a shock to me. I mean I don't care if she becomes Jewish, but an Orthodox Jew!

DUNHAM: Well, go figure. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add today about your experiences?

SCHERER: Well, I don't feel I talked too much about being Rosie the Riveter, but, of course, what was all the fuss about Rosie the Riveter?

DUNHAM: Well, I guess one other related question would be--thinking of it that way--during the war years, or since then even, how have you felt about the iconography, the image of Rosie the Riveter and the songs and all of that; what's your take on that?

SCHERER: Well, I just don't buy it because the ones who fought in the war, yes, they're heroic, and the ones who died, horrible, tragic. But I never thought that we were heroes or anything. I mean, I can only speak for myself, but I don't think most people did it for patriotic reasons.

DUNHAM: Well, it could be a win-win, too, though. People making money and still contributing in some way.

SCHERER: Well, the war got us out of the Depression.