not really i was born girl grew up in china but my family are all vermonters and when we came back every five years from china we always stayed in burlington with my husband retired from g e and i retired from teaching so what did your father do that you were living in china for so he was a professor of history and political science  university in can't southern china which was originally sponsored by the american board of the congregational church but i i guess i can't remember the dates but very sharply became it was a college originally and became a university with the chinese president and and a large well often he came back he and my mother and my youngest sister who was then thirteen were interned by the japs right after pearl harbor when they took on kong and they were my parents were under house arrest by the communist chinese and the japanese too when the japanese took over and so they were there for many years and and went back after world war two for a short while but the last time they came back they my father was pretty feeble and  e but worn they retired to burlington and so but i was born in china and every five years we came back for a sabbatical and my father would go to graduate school in one of the ivy in the universities and the family would live with my grandfather and his maid who kept house for him in burlington so how many brothers and sisters do you have there were five of us there were three by my older brother the one that lived on brown now mountain and then i was a second one and then chauncey named after my grandfather was little more than a year younger than i was and the three of us were started a group and then a sister came along six years later and then my youngest sister is twelve years younger so is almost like two different family but there were five of us  went to school there when i reached high school age i went to a boarding school in shanghai i must have been interesting to go to a boarding school how many people were just all americans at the boarding school or w dating across siberia to china and shanghai was filled with a lot of russian refugees that in in there were naval kids american kids who've worn navy kids that fathers were in shanghai at the time that also were at the school and it was quite a mixed group so when you came back to the united states and you were already out of high school well i came back we came back several times because every five years and i came back when i was three and when i was in third grade in fourth grade i guess it was at the adams school and then when i was at burlington high school my sophomore year and so so you kind of had a mixed kind of schooling you would be there and then you'd come back here on sabbatical and you would go to school and then you'd go back right so when you how old were you when you came back the final time to say i was seventeen i had just graduated from high school on time that to go to college and i never went back to china than my sister youngest sister went back to visit and once and my older brother link all was in business and vietnam and he traveled back and forth and visited our old home in china and so on many times so he was kept in touch with them you know so how old were you when you when you met your husband your when forty's now was a cavalry post and he was he graduated from u mass at that time in there are o t c which was a cavalry act were they had a cat cavalry group there from math new math that were they had graduated from college but there the army was already trying to recruit more officers then we were again world war two yet but apparently they were expecting it and he was what they called a promise an officer and  he was stationed up here at the post for two years and then after that he went back to boston and we were married and for about two years and then they called him back in again and they asked him where he wanted to go and he said he'd get he did like to go to for rally which with a cavalry post so we ended up at four n well you never tell them my first thought was what was in the military yet and you never tell them where you want to go where you want to go is the third place you put on the list because otherwise they'll send you to your third one oh yes so i get you to put fort riley right to fort riley i lived in fort riley for a number of years yes it's a nice post yeah so how do you propose to you i don't think he ever did he just took for granted i think that we were going to be i don't remember ever put presented me with a ring and that meant we were engaged i guess well it was pretty  i don't know i wasn't surprised that time i remember and happy yes yes very happy so so how long were you married gathering on our seventeenth and bursaries and memorial service in because we dollars plan to have a party we had a party on our fiftieth and on our sixtieth and so we were going to have to have a party on our seventy or so how many children do you have to just chris and my son who is seventy three so no seventy two and he lives on the west coast with his wife they live on an island would be island which is off the coast not far from seattle what's this his name is dane is also  third the third yes but you have a grandson named clay right yes i do my youngest grandson many grandchildren four and two great grandchildren my grandchildren are getting very grown up now they live in minnesota so i haven't seen them in a long time they haven't been for a while so what did you do in all of these ninety eight years did you did you work out of the home or did you just stay home and i mostly took care of my family for until they were well in high school and junior high and then i started teaching and i taught for twenty years where did you teach i taught and now marra new york where we were living at the time for ten years and then in south burlington  before that and we started looking for a place we were before that we lived on  yes in south burlington and we wanted to place in the woods the house we had on speer street was right near the entrance while it was akash from the golf course and it was near the entrance to a small road that turned in and where they built a lot of condos and they cut off our view we had a beautiful view of camel's hump in the mountains from our back park when we first moved there but it was obscured by all of the buildings behind us and so we decide you want to move out of town how did you choose underhill well because christian jacquard had moved to jericho or lived there so we started looking at in this direction we would have liked maybe to live near the lake but everything was too expensive next to the lake so when you live near the lake the seem to find a way to build in front of you yes and because everything else piers street where where there was a beautiful views from the overlook and everything there's oh yeah no view there now as you said all the all downloading all the buildings there so what do you think about all of the changes that have happened in your lifetime is now was the university farm barn we used to go there as kids to as a treat to look at dolly cows and so on and  it was difficult to get out my grandfather owned a farm and were liston and although he lived in burlington he had a manager that ran the firm in williston but he still went out there several times a week and getting out there in the winter when and in the month season was difficult but my brother my older brother would usually drive my grandfather out there when and  which we dammed up to make a place so we could paddle around in the water and build a scowl a flat bottomed wooden boat that floated in the whole pile that he made from the damming up  brook when i was in high school that was my favorite place to go and three or four of my girlfriends from school we pack up the weekends worth of food and go out there enjoy it fight from various places from there now today i know i interviewed another lady from jericho mrs manner and i asked her do you remember the scrub word yes do you remember using a scrub board oh yes indeed and i talk to young kids today and they go she wasn't really a maid and i'm a and i took care of us kids every morning we get up and go for it she'd take us for a walk so our parents could sleep and the we'd come back for breakfast the cook was interesting person he he was quite he thought that americans are the foreigners were pretty funny and he used to make remarks about us that we kids understood but our parents didn't we grew up speaking chinese of course and we didn't talk pi and i used to they lived in the cellar they had their rooms were in the cellar and i used to go down there and sit on her bed in a watch or comb her hair and do everything she she was a little very little hair she had a fall bong which she fastened on to back of her head there and she had a glass jar full of some she her a hairline had to be just so and she plucked the hair her hair line to make it even across in the way she did that while she had a asst to screen a double spring here that was twisted and twisted like this and then she rolled that in the hairs would get caught in the twist and but he'd pull them out that way like plucking your eyebrows ou but anyway she was is arrest a person she thought we were pretty funny she called us monkeys she because we were hairy she could understand why we had hair on our hands and so on and one of the way she punished us were she'd take the hair like this and twist it and kill it and that was the way she instead of slapping us or spanking us and anything like that  so so when your mother came came to live permanently in the united states she didn't have servants and you know life must have been really different well that was just herself and her fat and my father and he did a lot of the cooking and stuff she developed alzheimer's and was in a nursing home for many years i got a little vegetable and he took care of her for as long as he could and then he ended up in a nursing with a well so they were both in there risking home and she for a lot a long time so how how how did your parents with a he in their eighty's yeah so what i don't know your brother lived to be ninety six yes and my grandfather lived to be ninety one great and lived to be a hundred nine hundred four and other great aunt lived to be ninety nine she left shaking and screaming because she wanted to be at least as old as her sister had been and she she she lived in burlington or she lived in brooklyn for many years  and then when she retired she came to burlington when with her daughters had built a house here that she used summers and rented  family as is on your father's side of your mother's side my father's father's side yes so what does your father's answer ancestry do you know well they came from originally from rhode island to connecticut and up from connecticut at the same time that i were nice and then our allan came to le bron al's live have lived in vermont narrow and he inherited it from his father my grandfather inherited it from his father but number none of my grandfather's family my mother my father's mother's insist brothers and sisters want to define arm so my grandfather in it and he kept it for a long time but finally it got to be during the depression it got to be too much to finance it because it wasn't making any money yet to hire a lot of people so what have you been involved in since you've lived in under i had pretty much a full time job with him for about five years so if you could list your favorite memory out of your whole life i have i don't think i could do that there's so many one leads to another one what's the first one that you have that comes up i guess living as a child in china probably things we did as kids what did you do there as a kid that you would be different than what you would do here well we had a little school which was next door i could we could run home at recess time we had usually had rabbits and various pets and the we had a mother rabbit that was to stay stupid to know how to feed her babies and so we would go home at recess time and haul out the mother rabbit and the babies and put them on her so they could eat you know course the rest of the school would come up with a helper to watch and things like that we did had horses so we did a lot of horseback riding when i was quite young i had a horse she'd given to me by a man i didn't even know he was an italian and bought this pony for  to give give away the pony he had brought her the small horse he had brought and he knew one of the professors from the college who was a horseman and he said i could have the horse as long as i fears and they all died i guess some kind of brain parasite or something so and we didn't have it horses any more after that but we had them until i was  ten or so anyway when your children were small do you have any stories about either of your children that are funny or i'd have to think about that they were both pretty funny enough with toys older my son he was not very well behaved in school i remember everybody went home for lunch and there were two little girls who used to chase all the way home for lunch and their mother complained so i had to go to school and pick him up in the car and bring him home for lunch so he wouldn't bother th girls any more wasn't that he was a didn't like them he liked him very well who is the way of getting attention i think and they had i can remember the christmas pageant that they put on school in those days it wasn't considered politically wrong to have christmas celebrations in school when chris was in she was an angel on christmas she was the one that the teacher taught chose to take up there because she was well behaved i think so i like to think so so so what do you like about voting how long did you vote well we didn't yell we got up here and my son was a boater from what we could start building his own boats when he was in junior high school  and he had he made the first boat was a kit boat that he bought the parts for and put together in the second one he built was a little speedboat the kind th rage that scare you well i didn't approve of it but technically but we was to take put it on a rack on the top of the car and take it places for us and when time we went  to the races that up near niagara falls where they had those great big speed boats like wild root child a and what were some of the others that the kind that had the huge rooster tail that comes out back when they speed and they were having races up there so he put his little boat in the water nearby and motor neuron between the boats it looked so funny with this little bitty boat with a kid in it all the big boat getting lined up for the racing there and he took it to college with him and he and two of his fraternity brothers took  the st lawrence river from college they went to went to the university of rochester and so he was a boater from way back and he was also a naval art arrow a whole new keel on it because it leaked so badly we called it splash because every other day after i got through a school i had to go down and pump it out because it was always full of water then the next one was a small hole progenitor and then the next one was a little bigger pro drug and we finally ended up with the main ship which was call you in a car and all the others were called pussycat but  do you like to travel yes but my husband was not a very good traveler he didn't like to travel very well we did go skiing again in italy once we went over space available on military great big ole military cargo ship plane and we made the mistake of taking our skis with us which we had to l i had this great big hole and the cold air was rushing up like this and our chairs were right next to the hall and it was frozen they gave us blankets to put around us but and no windows so you couldn't really enjoy it but anyway that was interesting but bill didn't like to travel very much he had enough during the war he was overseas for three and a half years and he had had enough guess it was only three months maybe and then up through rome when when the italians birds and of course i have bears and i had a big fat parker drop in the creek for a long time and he hit the window when unfortunately you brokers net can landed now is there a major difference between the weather here in the weather where you live when you are in china oh yes that was semi tropical more like two are the south china north china gets very cold shanghai hot in the summer and cold in the winter so do you mind the called i am beginning to wear i don't think it's because i lived in china i think it because i'm old do you go out and about a lot or do you not i haven't the last couple of winters so much i knew drive still but my family don't like to have me drive in winter ro and that means that i after be chauffeured which means i have to call on my daughter who takes very good care babe are right i don't go out very much in the winter well i i cook for senior meals and stocks were up oh yes i have a gentleman who drives himself to the senior meals and his name is bill james and he sauntered into yet good for him and people have said to him you need to stop driving and he went down to middlebury yes and he got retested yes and passed yes and he said now you guys leave me alone yes just leave me alone like i to right i costed off a lot of consternation the time i got christian jack were away and i saw an ad in the paper for and called up and they still had had rum and that was the next week so i looked at my map and found out where it was and i figured i could get there by myself and i didn't think that i had to mention it to anybody so i went off and it was one of those things that took most of the day or supposed to bring your lunch in and i didn't get home till about four o'clock or so on the afternoon the phone was ringing people were calling me where was i wearing i gone are you on the floor dead what's going on i said yes maybe they had wife daughter in law had called even called my doctor to see if i was there and sets my grandson had taken off from his work it come all the way at my house and saw that my car was gone and they really were upset with me and i felt like such a naughty girl played ok that never dawned on me that i had a talent a body i thought everybody knew so pleased with me for going to that class and how were you then how where how old were you when you did that was just a couple of years ago ah i was yeah no wonder they were crazy kid yeah but you know it after you get a certain age your kids seem to think you are well that's right i've discovered chris's my momma most of the time is that good yes she was a very good mama but she place to live here and i enjoy i thoroughly and you can't see the mountain from here though oh yes you can out that window you can see in the summer you can't see it because of the foliage but able to build on moments feel again because they built well at the end of the road be out there all the way up to thaw yeah and she said she used to be able to see the whole valley yet and like you you can't see the mountain she can't see down here now and they still charge your taxes for the view oh yes they do well they don't because usually when they come to inspect they they can't see the mountain from here  that's that's what sarah said she says they've charged them for years for the view yeah and she says pretty soon there won't be any view of the trees will be too tall they won't be able to see the  yeah right so do you like maple syrup oh indeed yes i always have some on hand what is your what is your favorite food i don't know what i would choose the pie somebody said you would have only had one food what would you like i enjoy food i know i guess they come from south america and places like that like mango go down country to the farm and then he'd come back and then you'd have another daughter ok yeah but then came the time when and i don't know whether it was when the japs sort of the communists took over there and the campus was covered with refugees from the bill ijaz around and they ran a soup kitchen for them and a little school for the kids and there was a con in little boys and one of the by seems very bright and one of the chinese mother said oh going to know that your son your cooks and turned out he had got another wife in the bill my father was quite incensed not so much because he had a concubine but because he was feeding tube families from our store so did you have to purchase all your own foods or was it provided for you or you know we we had to purchase we had ordered most of it from the city had come by boat to the university was on an island across from canton city we had to go everywhere by boat sampan are a lot a lot chad regular schedule but if you wanted to go across the river when the launch wasn't on schedule you it took a sampath and but now there are bridges two or three bridges across from the island to the city and of course cars that there weren't any cars on the island at all and very few on the mainland there now there are cars and everything and i guess the island is getting built up what do you think about the changes that have happened in your lifetime  n just say like the telephone or electronics or well in china when we didn't have electricity and till i was in fifth grade and that's a matter of that guy remember when the the year that i was in fourth grade we were in burlington and i remember my parents buying all the fixtures to take back to china and then we had electricity after that before that we had kerosene lamps where would you look where did you like tricity come from and china has electric power plant in the city now and they're so you had to you had to put all the wiring in your house for them to connect you up yeah right and then i guess about the same time we got a telephone one of those wall things where you had to ring it up and talk  tank and we had a cistern in the attic and a pump in the cellar and every morning had to go down and pump water from that came in below and pump it up to the cistern up for the days supply of water but i don't remember that we ever tried to conserve water so i guess we always as enough prolonged rainy season we had their  always seem to be plenty of water so if you could tell children young people anything today about how to live and be happy what do you think it might be i've always been happy i don't know exactly what i would say what grades did you teach when you top third grade to third grade i started that teaching in a nursery school then i taught for a year or next kindergarten and then i taught first grade and then i taught third grade and i never graduated from third  grade so you third grade math skills are still pretty good yes that's about it yes i guess you add and subtract they don't just add and subtract anymore now full i've learned  math nine different ways wonderful while i have a no there were that many different ways i didn't either i thought there was just the right way and the wrong way but the right way can be many ways oh i have i have nine children yet and the first two were taught math one way and that every two years seems to be a change there's a new man yes yes so now that the youngest one is ten years old i have been told that i really haven't a clue how to do math so yes as long as i can get two and two make four i'm happy well i taught math fashion way i guess but even not too long after i retired i was helping out down here at the i d f school and and they were teaching math very differently so what did you do with the id school did you volunteer or yeah i volunteered to help in the library but that developed into story hour are and helping kids that had worked had done their work but couldn't go out for recess that had to stay in the library and do their homework or their work that they had neglected and read to the kindergarteners doing bit of everything repair books  help with an act supply art project or make a puppet show or you know oh yes i loved it but i had to quit because i hurt my back and  i couldn't stoop down to shelve books and i i was in great pain for a while until i finally got over it any other i did you should do fish in south burlington where you took people that needed to be taken to the doctors or to other appointments and so forth but i didn't do that anymore if we moved double church and all the time until the kids got through high school i guess we had it went to and to school teacher they were both brought up in the church but backslidden as soon as they got through high school and we would try a church once in a while but once we got to vermont we were too busy skiing and bo into busying your enjoying god's church yeah exactly where do you like where do you where do you like to go when you go you go out now do you go out and do things or i been fairly restricted to the house this winter and even in the summer i don't go very far i do i think i do drive but i don't drive in burlington are places where there a lot of traffic i and i never i don't dare invite anybody to drive with me because i always figure if i have an accident somebody will get hurt so i don't dare ask well is there anything else that you would like to talk about i can't think of anything and i've been wandering back and forth them all around i don't know interesting that you know it's very interesting to find out how people can help people and operate under you know yeah and how people end up in vermont yeah you know i mean part of your that's interesting yeah why why why would you think yourself as a vermonter even though you were born in china because your parents were vermonters or my father was my mother came from massachusetts but she went to you v m so she felt like a vermonter too i think pretty much although she and my father used to make fun of each other their accents for massachusetts that for boston accent and his vermeil back sam do you think you have an accent no no way i do you sound more like your dad or your mother i don't know when i we were little we used to depended on who we were talking to if we were talking to dad we were had a vermont accent if we're talking to our mother we would have a boston  year no it's not what the cartoon people or the comics make it is to me it's perfectly normal is it's the wager i see so you're not from the northern came back from china to go to college people thought i had an accent but what i did was i talked very slowly and and distinctly because i was used to talking to i guess nobody does really you know you're right you don't think you have an accent when like other people do but you know what is it that you feel has allowed you to live so long well i think having good genes obviously i think is because i come up from a long life family and you know i've lived a healthy life by did smoke for a while when i was in college because i thought it was she and i my husband smoked a lot he was about forty and he suddenly decided to quit quick called turkey and i never smoked very much time that early times the first time he ever skied i guess he'd been on the country club a couple of times was when he was stationed  bill on a couple of other guys never skied before up to the top of mt mann stealed they hiked to the top and they spent the night in the cabin up there and then they should be down there was the first time he'd ever really skied but he was cause he loved it i was a very good skier we brought up all our kids and grandchildren to ski downstairs in the cellar i have a large bulletin board there that's completely covered with all our season tickets from way back so your brother lived to be ninety six to how old are you the only one still living are by youngest sister who is trail years younger than i am a still living and she lives in south hero and her husband just died friday chris and i were out there yesterday the afternoon with her she was the last one she was healthy and you i think i'm here well good for you i like to think i and she was she and turns by the japanese kong during world war two along with my parents she has lots of great memories she'd make a good person to talk or anything else that you can tell us that has changed it's really made a big difference in your life throughout your lifetime so everything changes and i but it's  gradual no great huge changes the changes of course when i started teaching and changes when i retired and changes in my life when we went into the army and changes when they all went overseas and changes when he finally got home and so did you have children already when he when i will was was three months old when he that was the address that he had on his whatever army records and i know that any messages from him would come there but i spent a lot of time burlington and i did for the better part of a year in connecticut with a another friend whose husband was overseas and and she had a little boy too and i looked after her little boy along with mine while she were she was worked in chinese steel mills where they made parachute nylon for the  from for a boat load of prisoners from china and they took the sickest ones from shanghai and japan and they took the whole american contingent from hong kong which was not not a very large there were many more british in the camps and then the americans but they were running out of supplies and hong kong they had there didn't even have another supplies for all their soldiers that they had stationed in hong kong there had been a supply if you'd been to hong kong harbor for six months and so they were glad to get rid of these american prisoners the british prisoners and the state all in the war but my family were there for only about six months and they were exchanged they were put on a swedish ship the  was a neutral country and they went to lawrence omar in south africa and there they were put on a little it was a japanese ship that took them to lorenzo marks and there they got a swedish ship that brought them back to the states so they came back before the war was over and i stayed with them for a year and swarthmore and then my father got jobs at various colleges for the rest of the war where professors had left to join the forces and so he talked to several different colleges until the war was over and then they went back to your mind seems to be very sharp you do anything to keep your mind sharp do you do crossword puzzles or do puzzles number puzzles because i don't i'm not very good at numbers and i figure i need that and i do word puzzles and i do  puzzles but i read a lot what's your favorite arthur i i have so many and i have a very never afraid or i read all different kinds i guess i i written if you know of a good book i actually read the course i've read most of the bold rally ends and the mystery writer from the southern part of the state i've read some of his i don't usually read his anymore yeah and sam's house was right there where that big brick building the bank is now right on that point there at five said when he was a boy all the streets in essex were cobblestone yeah and the cavalry from the fort would drill you and you could hear them coming clap clap clap all the way you could hear that you could hear the horses alan but they had camp hour here in underhill that most of the summer they were camped out here in underhill that was my first no my not my they were that wasn't the first by that road stone just past the school if you're going in that direction goes out to big great big pasture out there where they would have their horses they went to county thayer's everywhere in new hampshire and met me in they go by with a dried their horses all the way there or take them several days sometimes to get to these county fairs where they put on a show of usually a gym kind of type thing where they would put on a performance of roman riding where they would stand up on they went to boston gardens and up to canada where they jumped against canadian horses up there and  so you want to live to be a hundred and what i don't care to live to be a hundred i don't feel that's a great ambition always your biggest ambition in life i don't know as i had right now there was telling kids you know that think ahead and yes sure i don't think i not very inspiring i guess well it's inspiring just to know that that you've lived a good life has been a lot of places yet and you've enjoyed your life yes i have and you  beautiful young people that your children grow up to be wonderful people and you have great grandchildren and i know from doing the article on your husband and on jack and on clay that there was a there's a military background and a half and a heritage that they're proud of and right to give you something to be very proud of i am well i want to thank you very much for letting us into your home where thank you for coming it's been a real pleasure to hear your story and and and learn about where you came from and and how life has changed for you and well kind of a