Oral history interview with Elizabeth "Betsy" A. Toth, 2010

HT: Today is Thursday, August 5, 2010. My name is Hermann Trojanowski. I'm in Sperryville, Virginia with Betsy Toth, and we're here to conduct an oral history interview for the UNCG Institutional Memory Collection. Betsy, thank you so much. If you would, give me your full name. We'll use this as a test on this tape.

BT: Including my middle name, yes?

HT: That will be fine.

BT: Elizabeth Aurelia Toth.

HT: Okay. Great. Betsy, if you would tell me something about your background, about when and where you were born, and that sort of thing.

BT: Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1940, October 12th.

HT: And can you tell me a little bit about your family and home life growing up?

BT: Hum. It was interesting, and I don't think I knew at the time how interesting it was. Okay. So, my father was off to war, but he wasn't in the Armed Services. He was Merchant Marines. He was a radio officer. His name is 00:01:00Frank Toth. He was not my biological father, but he is the only father I have ever known. My mother had--okay, he is Presbyterian. My mother was Jewish. It was an interesting upbringing. So--and I had two sets of relatives in Pittsburgh: dad's set, the Hungarian Presbyterians--oh, there was also the Hungarian Catholics. They were split. This doesn't mean anything now. It meant a lot then. And, of course, my mother's side of the family, which was the fun side of the family, well, actually my dad's relatives were pretty much fun, too. They drank and danced a lot. And my mother's side was pretty intellectual, very witty, educated Jewish people that I just enjoyed tremendously. And, so, I got a little bit of both. I got brought up both religions simultaneously. It was kind of a weird upbringing.

HT: And what did your mom do?

BT: Well, my mother at that time was--I mean she's dead now. So, is my father. At that time, you know, she was a mother, a wife.

HT: Right.

BT: What she did to make money particularly while dad was away was she was secretary.

HT: Did you have any siblings?

BT: Did she have--

HT: Did you have any siblings?

BT: Oh, yes. In 1947 my brother was born. And by this time--by that time we were in Falls Church, Virginia, which is a suburb of Washington, DC. And my father worked for the Federal Communication Commission.

HT: And where did you go to high school?

BT: Went to high school at Falls Church High, which is in Falls Church.

HT: Right. And did you have any favorite subjects?

BT: I, yes, I had favorite teachers. My favorite subjects always depended on who was teaching it. I really did like English a lot, but my favorite--my favorite 00:03:00of all was creative writing with a woman named Betty Lou Toome.

HT: How do you spell her last name?

BT: T-O-O-M-E.

HT: Betty Lou?

BT: Betty Lou Toome. We called her BLT: bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

HT: So, when did you graduate from high school?

BT: I graduated in '58. Betty Lou Toome is how I got into UNCG.

HT: Was she a graduate by any chance?

BT: She wasn't, but she knew somebody who, I guess, had at least enough clout to write a letter who had been a graduate. And I guess of some note. I don't know what exactly, but Betty Lou was in literature and writing. I'm going to assume this person was maybe in literature and writing. I don't know. Anyway, so, she wrote a letter. And I got a letter in August. I was on a waiting list. And, 00:04:00then, finally about one week before school opened I got the letter saying, "You've hit the jackpot." No, that I could come.

HT: So, this would have been summer of 1958?

BT: Yes.

HT: And had you ever been to North Carolina prior to that?

BT: No.

HT: And how did you--

BT: I went sight unseen.

HT: How did you go from Falls Church down to Greensboro?

BT: Mother and I packed up a couple of trunks with all my stuff and shipped it down. I had a suitcase, got on the train.

HT: And what--

BT: I say this because my father was against me going to college. He thought that college for women was a waste of time, and a waste of money. He thought I should be a secretary.

HT: So, he did not support your college ambition at all?

BT: Not a bit.

HT: Did he give you any money to help pay your expenses?

BT: No, what happened eventually is the--let's see. There was separation between my mother and my father. He was not always a very nice guy. He was a good guy outside of the family, inside of the family, not so great. And, so, of course there were child support payments and mother pushed all those--she took those payments, and that paid for half of my college education. The other half I made by working in the summer, working in school.

HT: And what kind of work did you do at school?

BT: Let me see. What did I do? I didn't work in the cafeteria. I knew I couldn't do that. I worked for Katherine Taylor.

HT: Oh, Okay.

BT: In the speech lab. And I also worked for Susan Barksdale in the art department, cleaning and cleaning up prints of--art prints that people had 00:06:00gotten and checked out. It was like they had a library of art prints. And I would clean those up and get them back into their proper drawers. They had like military map drawers.

HT: A lending library type situation?

BT: Yeah. And, so, I was just sort of--I don't know custodian. More like I was a maintenance person.

HT: Oh, gosh. Well, what do you recall from your initial visit to what was then called Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina]?

BT: Woman's College. Well, I arrived and went, and my trunks had arrived. And I unpacked them. And I--I didn't know what to think. I mean I had no--I had no preconceived ideas.

HT: Because you had not visited.

BT: I had not visited. Betty Lou Toome told me as much as she could tell me. My mother was very fearful about all of this in that here I was going off on my own 00:07:00to God knows what, right? But it was college. You know, how bad can this be? So, and then, you know, I realized I had a roommate. But I knew that ahead of time and realized that living for me was going to be very, very different. And I was just mostly interested in the classes. It's not that I was a great student, or I was an academic genius. But I realized that I had a chance--that's what that gave me, a chance. See, the details like who I roomed with, or playing bridge at night, seemed to me to be very beside the point.

HT: But before you got there, had you decided what your major was going to be?

BT: In the back of my head, I knew I was going to be a theater major. And the one time I mentioned this to my mother it was such a resounding putdown. She 00:08:00wanted me to be an English major. And, of course, the idea was that I would go for two years, and I would become a teacher or something like that. Get some sort of certificate. And I thought, I'm going to do four years. They just don't know it now. I'll say yeah, "Two years, fine. I'll get the certificate." But I paid no attention to that.

HT: Do you recall which dorm you were in that first year that you were on campus?

BT: Coit [Residence Hall].

HT: Coit, okay.

BT: Yes. And Barbara Boner was the, whatever it was. All the freshmen dorms had a junior person who lived there.

HT: Like a counselor-type? BT: Yeah.

HT: What was her last name, again?

BT: Boner. She's pretty well known, I think. Barbara Boner, she ended up being student government this and that and the other. And I thought she was a pretty cool person. She's had a wonderful career. In fact I met her at the alumni thing this year. So, she graduated in '60. And she's had a great career in teaching 00:09:00and university administration and all of that.

HT: Well, did you enjoy your time at WC [Woman's College]?

BT: That's a yes and no answer. Some of it I thought was just frightfully awful. But in general I have to say when I add up the classes, and the professors I had, and some of the students I knew, and some of the trouble we got into, and all the wonderful things that opened up for me, I would have to say yeah. I don't know if the words "enjoyment," it transcends the word enjoyment.

HT: Well, tell me about some of the professors you had.

BT: I had Randall Jarrell, which was--yeah, that was enjoyable. That was more than enjoyable. That was a prize. And a guy named Bobby Watson, Robert Watson, who taught world literature. He was--because of the books and the literature he 00:10:00chose just--I wasn't getting that stuff in any other class. Arthur W. Dixon, "AWD," as we called him--every Thursday he had a little salon at his place. And we had a little--we had a little rhyme, "T Day, T Day, AWD Day." That was every--I got a lot of this from--when I was a freshman--from the upper class women who already were in [the] New Guilford [Residence Hall] Black Stockings [Girls]. And certainly I bonded with them more than I ever bonded with any of the people in my freshman class. And the reason was that they had the kind of style of life, or learning, or adventure, or discovery that I wanted. And I recognized that real fast. And knew that what happened in New Guilford, and from 00:11:00those people, was going to be very important in my life. And, indeed, it was. They're the ones who turned me on to who the professors were, people like [Warren] Ashby, and, you know, and the history professors, [Richard] Bardolph, and [Eugene] Pfaff. Well, I got Pfaff anyway, because that was just part of the required history course. [John] Beeler and Bardolph were Chinese gods in one of our plays. I [laughing]--they were great. And like I said Randall Jarrell was a treasure. There were some people in the classics department, a guy named Michael [Dunn]. I cannot remember a last name. And he was kind of interesting. I think I 00:12:00had a little crush on him for awhile. But it was not a big thing. It was more that he was the youngest of all the professors, and he was so academically bright that, you know, you couldn't help but be attracted to that.

HT: So, did you move over to New Guilford in your second year--or?

BT: I was pretty much entrenched in there by the end of my first semester, freshman. I would technically live in the freshman dorm, because you did. But, basically-- HT: Did you live there?

BT: Yeah. New Guilford--it was pretty much third floor. It wasn't the whole dorm. Third floor is where all the Black Stockings [Girls], or the weirdoes were, or whatever they were called.

HT: How did that name come about, do you know?

BT: Oh, because they wore black stockings.

HT: Was that sort of the beatnik type--

BT: Yes, it was beatnik association. And people thought it was just weird, just outstandingly weird, because it reminded people of like witches or something. I'm sure. And, actually, in the winter black stockings made so much sense. And I 00:13:00mean I didn't wear black stockings when it was warm, because that was kind of like not fun. But I understood what the beatnik thing was. And, of course, everybody thought they were weird. But I think it was kind of--in the back of people's minds even though they didn't use the word, I think there was a witch association.

HT: How long had the Black Stocking Girls been around to your knowledge?

BT: I'm not too sure--certainly, at least two years before me, and three, maybe, because Bertha Harris, Carolyn Harris, Laura Lingle. I can't remember all the names now, which is unfortunate, Nancy Honeycutt, and there were more. Mary 00:14:00Minkins. She had a middle name, too. And they always used the whole name, and I cannot remember that. So, they were--yeah, they were what I wanted to be.

HT: So, they were not freshmen. I assume they were probably upper classmen.

BT: Yes, they were juniors and seniors. And the thing was in New Guilford there was--on the third floor there was half of the floor that had, obviously, been repaired, and it was a different color than the rest of the floor. And when--at the beginning of the year when they would assign people, and you would find out that you had been assigned a roommate who was a home ec[onomics] major or something, Laura Lingle, would give them a tour, and as they passed that patch she would say, "Oh, that. That's where the baby bones are buried." That was a joke.

HT: But that frightened off--

BT: Well, that among other various things. We never did anything reprehensible. We just created a kind of atmosphere in which they were only too happy to leave. 00:15:00And what that meant is that you ended up with single rooms, single, yeah. And--Because nobody else wanted to be put [things] in there that wasn't already there. So, even my freshman year there was always a place where I could drop [off] my stuff and, you know, have a part of a closet or something like that. I really didn't sleep there or stay there, but it was my home away from home.

HT: Oh, gosh. What about the dress code? What do you recall about the dress code in those days?

BT: Oh, that--that was something you just, boy did that get under my skin. Yeah, on Sunday you were supposed to wear little flats, or little heels, and hose, and proper dress and your class jacket or something else. And, of course, I'm working over at the theater. Sunday is a big day. You got a lot done, because 00:16:00there were no classes. So, you'd show up in jeans. Well, that wasn't good enough. So, we would always have a wrap around skirt to put over the jeans. Well, that wasn't good enough either. Because we didn't have hose, and we didn't have heels. And a lot of us just got really--like we'd had enough. And there was enough people who went to enough people and said, "Look, you don't do this on Saturday." And for the Jewish girls that's their Sunday. That's their Sabbath, and you don't require this on Saturday. So, you're making a distinction. And that distinction is not appreciated. And you're requiring that everybody do this because it's a Sunday thing because of religious connotation and church and all of that. And not everybody is there. And especially things like the art majors, 00:17:00music majors, the theater majors, you've got to give them a little leeway. They're getting their extracurricular stuff done at that time. Anyway, you get the idea, so.

HT: So, what did you and some of the girls do?

BT: Well, we did speak to some people using those words of what we hoped were of persuasion. The other thing we did one year is we all got dressed up like them. All the theater majors, and some of the music majors, and some of the other people who lived in New Guilford, we all got in our little plaid blouses that we had got from the store called The Villager. That was the thing. And little round circle pins, and the perfect little pleated skirts, and the little cardigan, and the hose, and the flats or the heels. And did our hair the way they did it, in 00:18:00big bouffants. And we went in on a Sunday one day. And everybody is in there, and we all went in as a group. And people stared. I mean they noticed. And we went through the line. And we sat down at a table, or tables in the middle, and we did a conversation. Hey, we were theater people. We knew how to do this. We did a conversation like they did. Not discussing politics, or the important things of the day, but discussing how you were going to do your fingernails that night, or what kind of shirt your boyfriend wore, or how you were going to buy a new pair of Weejun's loafers, the kind of what we considered insipid and we thought that we were better than them. That's obvious. And I don't know that we were, but we thought we had a handle on something that was beyond all that. And, you know, and how you would play the bridge hand the night before, right? All of 00:19:00us knew how to play bridge; we just thought it was stupid to waste your time doing it. I mean to the point that they did. I mean hours were spent. So, we did that whole conversation. And we did it just loud enough--

HT: Was this in the dining hall?

BT: Yes. So, then, everybody could hear us and get the point. We can do what you do. We know how to do this. We can do this every day. We choose not to. I mean that was the point. And, yes, we're here to make you look silly. We weren't trying to disguise that in any way. So, you see by the time I sat in, I [laughing]--all of us had some history of being ready to step into that kind of a role in a dissident--we were dissidents. There was no doubt about it. You 00:20:00know, and another--if it had been another ten years later, we would have been SES or whatever, student--whether any of us would have been Weather [Underground] people, I do not know. But we--I don't know that we would have gone into bombing. But we would have definitely--and, in fact, I was part of the anti-war movement in the early '70s, May Day, and DC, and et cetera. Saw my friends killed during that. And, yeah, they actually killed people--they always talked about Penn State. More people died because of what was called May Day, May 1971, then died at Kent State.

HT: I'm not familiar with May Day. Can you tell me about that?

BT: It was to demonstrate against the war, and we had all of these--Potomac Park, and we had--and the people stayed in tents there overnight. And we had, 00:21:00you know, whatever you got permission. We had a permit for that. And in the morning at about 4:00 to 4:30 in the morning the park police rode through there on horses. Just like they did against the American Indians, trampling the tents. Some people died right there. The others that they arrested and took to RFK [Robert F. Kennedy Memorial] Stadium. There were thousands of them being held in RFK for two weeks, at least. And they were held there without being able to talk to lawyers, or anybody, and they often went days without food or water. And some of them died. I mean they had been beat up to begin with, and there was no--and it was sort of part of the untold story of that. But they weren't violent. What was done against them was violent, et cetera. So, I've always been on that side 00:22:00of the line.

HT: Well, if we can go back to WC.

BT: Right.

HT: Tell me about some of the extracurricular activities you were involved with, such as clubs. I know you were a theater person.

BT: Theater, theater, theater, theater. But I had this one little thing. When I was in high school I was a three-scored, four-year letter. Women's hockey, field hockey, basketball, and softball. And I was fairly athletic, and I was fairly good at it, not scholarship good. But, hey, Woman's College wasn't giving scholarships for it anyway, so. But even if they had been, I wasn't scholarship good. But I was good enough. And when the fall came, which, you know, once the weather turned with a little bit of a nip, when I wasn't in class, on the 00:23:00weekends, and I wasn't at the theater, I would just make my way over to the playing fields. And there was usually a scrimmage, a field hockey scrimmage going on. And I had my field hockey stick with me, and I would just take it with me over there, hang around. And, eventually, I'd get into the scrimmage. And I loved it. It was my one little oddity. The theater majors thought it was weird for that. The phys[ical] ed[ucation] majors that were there, and knew I was a theater major, wondered what in the heck I was doing there. But I was as good as them on the field, absolutely. And all their coaches had gone to what--the school that turned out a lot of phys. ed. teachers, UNC [University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill], WC was starting to. But a lot of them, particularly in field hockey, field hockey was still very new for North Carolina. It's not now. They're a power, actually. But at that time it was Virginia. It was Virginia, 00:24:00Massachusetts, Maryland, and Pennsylvania pretty much. And, so, a lot of the coaches for that came out of Madison [College] in Virginia, which is now called James Madison [College]. It was Dolley Madison [College] then. It should have stayed Dolley Madison, anyway. They came out of there, and they knew my coaches from high school. So, whenever they needed--when they were short a person for a game, they'd ask me if I would come play for the team. And I could play as well as the coaches, because I had grown up learning that style of hockey. I could play it better than any of the phys. ed. majors, that was for sure. But that was because it was very new to them. So, I had this funny little quirk. It wasn't a club or anything, but I had--I was definitely drawn to going over and doing athletic things on my free time, which made me kind of a weirdo to my weirdo 00:25:00friends. [laughing]

HT: Now, I guess you had your theater classes, and your theater productions were all in Aycock Auditorium, is that correct?

BT: That is correct.

HT: At lunchtime we talked about some of the ghosts on campus.

BT: There was a ghost in Aycock, absolutely.

HT: Did you have any tales you can relate about that, that you recall?

BT: No, because I'm kind of different than some people about ghosts. I--if nothing happens that's really scary, then you just accept the ghost. You know that there is a presence. I mean you're certainly aware of somebody in the way back of the upper tier. And sometimes at night when everybody had gone home, I'd stay with the work light on stage, and work on pieces I was working on. And I would play to that ghost in the back row whether I saw the ghost or not. That 00:26:00was who I was projecting to, playing to, absolutely. So, there was a sense of that person there. And we, you know, every now and then there was some odd happenings. But nothing that I thought was scary. I mean finding the little pints of vodka and liquor up in the flies, underneath the ropes, was more of an eye opening thing to me than the ghosts. Aycock was a roadhouse for all the union shows that came through, the Broadway shows. And there was a good group of union guys in Greensboro and around. And they would call them in to work the union shows. And up on the fourth floor in the fly gallery you worked on the ropes of the counterweight system. And, so, when they kept their little bottles underneath the ropes. And I found some one day. And I thought, "What?" And, 00:27:00then, I realized what was going on there. So, there was a lot of interesting stuff like that going on. I didn't have to look at the ghost. And this ghost never did anything that was entre or over the line, a very benign ghost.

HT: Do you recall anything that did happen?

BT: Oh, it was the ball of fire that went from the catwalk at the lighting board and went straight up to the roof and disappeared. I realized that probably came out of the lighting board, but a green ball of flames says the word "gas" to me, and there was no gas. So, that was the only thing that I thought was maybe beyond the norm, yeah.

HT: Do you know the story behind the ghost by any chance?

BT: I don't actually, because I mean I think at the time I was not even aware it was Jane Aycock. It was just "the ghost."

HT: Well, I think students gave her that name sometimes in the '80s or something like that.

BT: Right.

HT: This is a fairly new name, I understand.

BT: Right. Well, she may have manifested and let somebody know that.

HT: What were some of the theater productions that you participated in?

BT: Oh, yeah. Let's see. In the musicals there was South Pacific, The King and I, which almost killed--by dropping the scenery that was coming down to the flies. I let it come down too fast and almost killed some of the actors. Anyway, and, then, I learned how to do that better after that.

HT: So, you were--

BT: I was on stage crew and lighting a lot. I was an actor in things that weren't the musicals. No voice here. No voice. Couldn't help that out at all. But let's see. We did The King and I. We did Annie Get your Gun. We did South Pacific. Marilyn [Lott] was Bloody Mary in the South Pacific as a matter of 00:29:00fact. But I liked the straight plays. We did Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Setzuan, which I thought was just fabulous. And a whole new concept of set design than anything I had ever been exposed to. And, then, of course, there was Beeler and Bardolph, our history professors. And the third one might have been Pfaff. They were the three Chinese gods. They come down from the flies. So, one night, not during a performance, it was dress rehearsal, the flies got stuck, and they were neither in heaven, nor in hell.

HT: They were in purgatory.

BT: They were standing--they were in between, and we couldn't get them up, and we couldn't get them down. I wasn't flies for that, but I went up to help, because by that time I knew a lot. I was a junior or something. I don't know. 00:30:00And, so, after about fifteen minutes passed, and those poor history professors