 My name is Gayle Clayson. I live in Medford, Oregon, and I have lived here for most of my adult life. I was born in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, which is in western Nebraska, very near the Wyoming border. I turned 21, and that was the age where you could begin to vote. And I lived at home and commuted to my classroom, so I drove with my parents to the polling place. And because we lived in the country, we didn't even have to register to vote. We just had to show up, which is an interesting quirk. And as we drove to vote, my father, who was conservative and a bit biased, said to me, don't vote for John Kennedy. And I said, but daddy, this is a secret ballot. And having the attitude and having been raised to be independent and self-confident, I walked in the polling place and voted for John Kennedy. No one has ever been able to tell me how to think. And I'm outspoken about what I believe. Nobody ever has to guess what I'm thinking, because I'm willing to stand behind what I believe. I have been a liberal ever since then, and probably the most liberal member of my family. As I graduated as a senior, the AUW branch in Fort Collins, Colorado, where CSU was located, gave a breakfast for all the graduating senior women and explained what AUW was. I agreed with the philosophy of the organization, so when I went home, I joined my hometown branch of AUW. And there I was a member along with many of my former high school and college teachers. That was kind of an interesting thing. And I have been a lifelong member of AUW ever since then. And I have found that as I have moved around the country, it has given me an instant connection to women who have things in common with me, who believe what I believe, and we became friends. So I have many AUW friends across the country. We moved because of my husband's job. I came to Medford in 1964 at the end of my honeymoon. And I had never been in the Rogue Valley before, although I had been along the Oregon coast as a child. And as we drove down I-5 on our way to Medford from our honeymoon, my husband taught me how to pronounce Willamette and Umpqua and all of those things. He was a huge promoter of Southern Oregon. And we always have loved living here and it has been a real joy to be here. I've lived through a lot of smoke and a lot of sunshine and a lot of good friends and that's just fine with me. So I started holding office at the local level and I held practically every office except treasure because I have this math phobia and eventually became the branch president. And I enjoyed it so much because it gave me a break from my young children and it gave me adult conversation and information that I could learn through the programs and presentations that were given at AUW meetings. After I lived here for 11 years, my husband was transferred to Eugene. And living in a college town is a real fun thing. I missed the direct sunshine that we had in Medford but I really enjoyed the cultural life that Eugene had to offer. And I was active in that branch too, mostly in interest groups and that kind of thing. We lived there for four years and during that time I started teaching part time in Springfield. I taught at the senior high and junior high level. I taught at Thurston High School and Springfield Junior High. And at that time, especially in junior high, I had both boys and girls in my classroom which was a change from my earliest teaching days when I had all girls. The boys sometimes looked at me and would say, why do I have to learn how to sew? And I would say, well just try it and see if you like it. And some of those who objected the most were the ones who would come in after school and ask to do extra projects because they enjoyed that. And that brought me a great pleasure. After living there for four years, my husband was transferred to the BLM office in Washington, D.C. and we lived in Springfield, Virginia. Again, I joined AUW and while I was there, I was really active and we had a great time. The Washington, D.C. area is an interesting place to live. And the opportunity to become a member of the AUW Lobby Corps was presented and I thought, well that will be interesting and so I volunteered to be a member of the Lobby Corps. As a member of the Lobby Corps, we are paired up with somebody. As a new Lobby Corps member, we're paired up with somebody who has had some experience and we were given training on whatever the issue was that was of importance to AUW. One of the chief things at that time, the years were 1979 to 1983, was passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. So, during the course of visiting the offices, particularly of the Senate, my partner and I visited 30 of the Senate offices over a period of probably a year or more. The interesting thing to me is we were delegated states, senators according to whether or not we had any background or information about the states that we were going to visit because of course that was an advantage. But then they assigned us states randomly when no one on the Lobby Corps had an association with them. So, she and I did Nebraska where I grew up, Washington where she had lived, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, Iowa. And I'm stunned today that Chuck Grassley is still the senator from Iowa and he was the senator in those early 1980s. And so we have the same old white guys making policy that we're making policy that long ago. Somehow that to me seems like things become a little stagnant. I think in any organization making room for new people, new enthusiasm, new ideas is a good thing. I don't think staying in office forever is a worthwhile thing. The other thing that surprised me is when I visited Mark Hatfield's office for the first time, I learned that he had a staff of 60. Now just being a normal citizen I had no idea how many people it took to help a senator do his job and that was very, very interesting. The other thing, at that time, Bob Packwood was a senator from Oregon and he was the darling of AEW because he always, always voted for the things that were important to AEW. And he had a very high rating with AEW on his voting positions. It stunned us all when he was accused of sexually harassing the women in his office and of course that to me was a real disgrace. Interesting times. After four years in Springfield we were transferred back to Medford, Oregon and what a delight it was to come back here. I had decided that I had served on the local level of AEW, on the national level of AEW and it was probably time to work on the state level. So the nominating committee recommended that I become the recording secretary and that would have been probably 1984 and I agreed and off I went to participate in state AEW meetings. It was really hard because I didn't know the people who were there and I was supposed to take the notes. In those days some of those meetings lasted four or five hours and people would stand up and give reports for whatever their committee was that would last 45 minutes and I was not a good typist and in those days we typed reports because we were not having computers at that time. So that was a real challenge. I ended up telling them I needed a tape recorder and that whoever was speaking had to identify themselves as they started their report and then when I got home from meetings I would transcribe those by hand and I hired somebody to do the typing so that was kind of an interesting proposition. You do what you have to do to accomplish the job and when you have no skills it surely does pay to hire a professional. Okay so I had many many jobs as a member of the Oregon State of Oregon AEW. I was the educational foundation chair for the state and they raised funds for scholarships for women and I was the program vice president in 1991 when the National Convention was held in Portland and all of the rest of the people on the state board who lived closer to Portland were involved in the details of planning that convention so I planned the state convention all by myself. Normally that was a committee thing but it was a real challenge and I had the time and they didn't because they were busy. Hosting the National Convention is a really big deal. I have attended local meetings, district meetings, regional meetings, national meetings, national conventions all around stretching from Hawaii to Washington D.C., Minneapolis all of these places and always learn something new at all of these times. As the educational chair they sent me to Washington D.C. for training where I learned how to ask people for money and that once people give money they're likely to repeat that and the amounts are likely to grow and that the way you convince people to donate money to your cause is to start out by donating yourself and that has been a useful tool for me as my life has gone on. I was elected president of Oregon AUW and served the term from 1991 to 1993. Again we had a state presidents meeting in Washington D.C. and we got to experience that. While I was president of Oregon AUW it was the largest women's organization in the state. We had 2,700 members and we had 43 branches. Unfortunately today in 2020 like many organizations our numbers have dwindled and we have about 1,300 members in Oregon and Medford, Ashland and Grants Pass are the 3 largest branches in the state. One of the things that I did after I moved back from Washington D.C. was I attended Volt training. That's volunteer training and it was to encourage women to make policy, not coffee. I used to have a poster like that. We were assigned teams and then we did workshops around the state to promote training of people to join board of directors, run for public office and we were successful because many of the members around the state then started participating. I worked with Florence Snyder presenting these workshops and she was important. She was a wonderful, brilliant woman who was dedicated to service and education. She was co-founder of the Snyder Art Museum and the childcare facilities for faculty and students on the Southern Oregon University campus and she was a great mentor and role model for me. I just really thought she was someone special. Short changing girls, short changing America and Oregon AUW received a $10,000 grant from the Department of Education to hold educational roundtables around the state which brought together educators, businessmen, the public, movers and shakers to help them understand that girls had bias against them in a classroom because of normal classroom procedures. Boys were called on either because they were doing positive things or negative things and the girls sort of sat quietly even if they knew the right answer and did not speak up. I understand that because when I was young in a school girl it wasn't smart to appear intelligent in a classroom because the boys didn't like to be shown up and we've meekly allowed that to happen. Well unfortunately in the 1990s it was still happening. The other thing that we promoted at that time was STEM which is science, technology, engineering and math which would help girls obtain better paying jobs as they grew up and that is still an emphasis today. I hosted a roundtable at the World Trade Center in Portland and we had the state superintendent of public education, we had the mayor, we had the governor, we had all kinds of people and all kinds of press and this was a really important positive step for equality for girls in a classroom and then later we held a southern Oregon roundtable and we had people from both Jackson and Josephine counties and here we had the same discussion group and the same kind of activity and those were important things to do and we're still working on those issues for girls. Let me see. I think I'm done. Think about how you want to kind of... My parents were married during the depression and I thought that that influenced what they thought and some of their own behavior. It was an interesting time. It interrupted their plans for higher education. My mother had started a business college and my father had started a junior college mainly because he wanted to play football. So they had a very strong influence in trying to encourage us three girls, I am the youngest, to pursue a higher education. They felt that it was an insurance policy if we were married and had a family which was the expected norm at that time and that if something happened we were able to support ourselves or our family and of course the usual choices were either teaching, nursing or a business degree. All three of us chose education and I think that teaching is a very noble profession and in my heart I'm still a teacher and I try to help as many people as I can with the information that I have trying to impart that to others to help them. My mother was an avid gardener and she had a very green thumb and loved to sew and so she taught all of us to sew as well and two of us became home economics education teachers so that we taught sewing, foods, skills, family life, consumer education and it was kind of an offshoot because my mother was forever taking adult education classes and it gave us the idea that education went on for your whole life. My father was a concrete contractor and house mover and that had been a generational thing in his family and he was a CB during World War II which was the construction unit of the Navy. He was gone from the time I was two until I was four or five without a break coming home. Those were tough times and it sort of, for instance, we went through rationing and saving tin cans and doing blackouts even in Nebraska because it was part of the political scene. It made us patriotic and it was just the way we lived. It is amusing to me now because now I'm saving tin cans to help the environment so what goes around comes around and I think that's kind of an interesting thing although in no way do we have any rationing today. I graduated from Scott's Bluff High School in 1956. In those days girls at school wore skirts or dresses most of the time and I had always had a sort of a math phobia and didn't like anything that had to do with numbers. I wanted to be a dietician and then I found out how much math was involved and so I changed my major later on in college to home economics education because it allowed me also to do the sewing that I grew up to love. Let's see. After I graduated from high school I started at Scott's Bluff Junior College and went three semesters. I was the only girl in a chemistry class of 35 students and that I think is a sign of that era as well. Some of the students in that class were returning Korean vets and so we had some older students in our class as well as recent high school graduates like myself. Let's see. After three semesters I learned that the classes that I needed to take for my education I couldn't pursue any more credits at the junior college so I transferred to Texas Women's University. That's in Denton, Texas and that was a very interesting experience because everybody on campus of course all the students were women and all of the leadership positions on campus were the girls that attended the school and it was a whole new thing because most of the time on a college campus at that time the student leadership was male except maybe for the secretary or something like that of a student council or whatever it was because there was a division between the genders. So that was a very interesting thing. It also was interesting to compare some of my western Nebraska attitudes to the attitudes of the southern girls that attended that school. They thought I had a funny accent. It was very interesting. I sort of missed dating because I had a normal dating life while I was at the junior college so they agreed to set me up on a blind date with somebody where we would go as a group and so as the date approached I asked them, what are we going to do on this date? Are we going to go bowling? Are we going to go to a movie? What's an appropriate dress to wear for this date? And they said, oh no, we're going to Corten and I said, Corten, what on earth is that? And they said, yeah. And I said, I don't think I'll go. I said, I can't imagine going out just to neck with a stranger because that to me was not an appropriate thing but to them it seemed perfectly normal. A strange difference in attitudes between where I grew up and where they grew up. Since we had no boys on campus I transferred to Colorado State University which was closer to home and had men on campus. And there I pursued my goals and let's see, my major was home education and I had to attend summer school classes in order to have enough credits to graduate. In this major you have a lot of classes with a lot of labs and at one point I had something like 28 hours of class a week including the labs whereas my friend down the hall had one hour of class a week and she skipped it most of the time. The other thing was I had picked up a southern accent while I was at Texas to Colorado to study and my room rate was from Memphis and it seemed to me that my southern accent came back because it's very very contagious. It took a long time to get that out of my system but it's gone now. I have enough chemistry hours which was 30 credit hours so that I was absolutely qualified to teach chemistry in my mind I was not qualified to teach chemistry because I eked through the classes and passed them but there was no way that I was confident enough to teach that and luckily I didn't ever have to so that was a good deal. I started my teaching career after my senior year teaching in moral Nebraska is even closer to the Wyoming line in western Nebraska than I grew up and I lived at home and commuted to moral. After I taught for two years in Nebraska I became a county extension agent in Cheyenne County which is also in western Nebraska and one of the things we did that I helped coordinate while we were there was to establish a bookmobile which was very handy for a rural county and I became acquainted with the library director of the state of Nebraska at that time and she and I became good friends and because we had reading and libraries as part of our ambitions then when I came back from volt training I took the opportunity to join the Jackson County library system board of directors and I served until I was ineligible to serve anymore and learned a lot about libraries and worked on lots of levees which provide operating expenses for libraries and running a campaign like that is a roller coaster ride when the letters to the editor and the comments are favorable you're on a real high and when somebody says books are obsolete I never use a library I pay for it you come crashing down and it is a really interesting way to live your life and of course I'm sure many campaigns are like that after I served on the library board I don't need it I served on the library foundation and it was during that time that we decided that the libraries that we had in the county were inadequate to small for the growth of the population we really needed to have a bond measure to provide new libraries in the various entities of the county we spent many many hours trying to prepare to get this bond measure on the ballot including as the deadline for approval by the county commissioners approached we met every day of the week during Christmas week in order to help convince the commissioners to put the library bond on the ballot in May they didn't want to so we worked and worked they said no we've got police issue on the board we don't want to have two money measures on the same ballot we pushed and pushed and finally convinced them that this was such a great need it needed to go on the ballot in May luckily for us the library bond passed the first time it was on the ballot because today in 2020 we have twenty brand new libraries in the county at least newer than the hundred year old ones we did have and they are all paid for because the bond measure was a twenty year bond the bond paid for the basic building the shelving, the furniture the necessary stuff to run a library but the design of the building and the artwork that was included was done by local committees in each community that has a library they paid for that with donations from their own community members and so each library has its own local flavor and it provided meeting rooms that were so necessary for the public to have a place to meet to have important meetings concerning what was going on in their community I feel really proud to have been a part of that effort because that's part of democracy is to have a place and a chance for people to have access to all kinds of information and to have access to a place where they can meet and make decisions concerning their community it has been important and I'm proud of that fact after that was accomplished then I still had an interest in libraries and so I was nominated for and chosen to be the Southern Oregon representative on a subcommittee of the State Library Board this subcommittee and I think it was LSTA Library Services and Technology, something or other and our task was to review the proposals for grants that would be funded by the United States government as their contribution to state libraries and then to suggest additions or whatever was needed for these grants to be acceptable so that we could recommend them to the state board to be funded this was a really interesting job we met three times a year and in those days we met in person so that we traveled around the state to various libraries which was a really interesting thing how different the libraries were in various communities and including the state library of course it broke my heart when the Roseburg Library closed and they sold the building recently and that was a beautiful library and a great asset to that community and it's just unfortunate that it no longer is there but this funds were allocated to public libraries to private libraries like the one at OHSU and to the libraries that were on Indian reservations so that we had a variety of things very interesting proposals, very unique and that was so much fun and so educational for me I think every volunteer task that you do teaches you something these experiences that I've had growing up during these times I've witnessed a lot of change and much of it has changed for the better when I started teaching in 1960 my salary was $3100 a year but in 1960 a dollar was worth a dollar and that was a full-time job I taught 192 days a year and I was proud to do that and I felt rich I don't think $3100 today would support people my activities in my jobs and through my participation in AUW and on the library boards and committees has been an enrichment opportunity for me and it has made me feel like I was making a contribution that I was making new friends and has helped form my attitudes about how to live a life and I am pleased if I fall over dead right now I will be happy and say that my life has been fulfilled