 Well, thank you for inviting me to speak with you. My name is Carol Doty. We came to the Rogue Valley. My husband and young son and I came in 1970, in September of 1970. And when we got here, we were very excited. My husband had done huge amounts of research on where we could go that didn't have down-drift. And we started looking in Eugene as our first possibility, and we couldn't afford to live in Eugene at that time, and so we came to the Medford area. We stayed with the Kellogg's. I got off the interstate and called them. I had been told to call the Kellogg's in Gold Hill, and they said, sure, they'd be happy for us to come. We had an airstream trailer that we were pulling, and to come. And we stayed there, I think maybe two weeks, parked down near Sardine Creek. And while we were there, they ran a school. They had a school at their property, and kids came and boarded there. And while we were there, they had a Quaker meeting, and it had been Quakers and Eugene who had forwarded us to them. And we met Karen Smith, who is an Ashland resident still, and we met Dennis DeBay, who is the blacksmith now here in Ashland. And Dennis invited us over to his wife and his place. They lived out on East Main Street here in Ashland. And so we pulled our airstream over, and we stayed with them for several weeks, as I believe, until we found a house that we made an offer on, on Anderson Creek Road above Talent. And we lived there 27 years. So that's my initial getting here. And then you ask about the changes that I had, that I observed, and over, sort of slowly over time, because initially we went to the library in Ashland and used the library. And we went to the story times for our son at that time, who was called Robert. No, I'm sorry, Ivan. And we also went to the Ashland Park, Lithia Park, and we did a lot of things there. But they were very child oriented. And then our goal was, after we got settled on Anderson Creek, that my husband or I would both qualify, and I would both qualify for positions and apply for positions in the valley. And the first person who got a job offer would take the job and would be employed. So I got the first job offer, which was to be the head start director. And I interviewed with John Deeson, who was a county commissioner later, and Richard McDaniel, who was working at Southern Oregon College. And he was the president of the poverty program board in Jackson County. And Dick said to me, anybody who takes this job as a damn fool. And I thought, well, okay, now I know that I've got my hands very full. And believe me, they were very full. Because I inherited a program. I was hired to run a program that had been run by a drug addict. And everything was in a mess. So my first experience with the Rogue Valley was experiencing the mess that I was going to be working for and with. And I was fortunate, because the president of the head start board was an attorney, a local attorney, and he has recently died. And I really had to rely on him, because I knew very little about the valley. And over time, I realized as I visited, I went every week to every program, every head start center. And I decided that I had to let staff go, because there was some child abuse. And I went in one day and finally said to him, I've been here this long. I've forgotten how many months it was. But it wasn't very long. It was probably five or six months. And I said, I know what's going on now in every program. My background was early childhood. And I had set up a head start program in Pennsylvania before I got here. And I said, I have to let some people go. And he said, well, we don't have personnel policies that will permit that. So he said, we will meet tonight and change the personnel policies. And so the next morning, I fired five people. I just went in and handed them letters and said, get your things and go. And of course, we got sued by one of those persons. The regional office was so pleased with my work. They had already known something about me, that they paid the settlement to the one employee. So that was sort of my beginnings in the Rogue Valley. And it took me months. My life was threatened several times by telephone, by people who did not want me stirring the pot at the head start program. So I felt like that I sort of within five years, I built the best program in Oregon. It was rated as the best head start program in the state of Oregon. And I felt at that point that I could leave there. And I was pursued by the Ashland School District. I'm just telling you this briefly, because that gets you into the county commissioner position. I was pursued by the Ashland School District who had gotten to know me. And the assistant superintendent there said, we want to bring all the private kindergartens into the school district. Will you help us do that? And I said yes. And so I was hired for a half-time position for one year. And I helped them. I built relationships with every kindergarten teacher. And talked to them about what they would need to make this happen. And facilitated that happening during the time that I worked for the school district for a year. And during that time, I also made the decision that I felt I knew the Valley well enough that I could run for county commissioner. So I set up my campaign during that same year. And in February of that year, because I started working for the school district of course in September, and by February of that coming year, that next year, I announced that I would be running for county commissioner. And I ended up being very fortunate to have lived here five years and to be able to be well known enough and to build enough of a campaign that I could be elected. And I was the third woman who was elected to the board of commissioners or who was on the board of commissioners. The first commissioner had been appointed, Marjorie O'Hara, who recently passed here in Ashland. She and I were friends until she died. And then when I was elected, Isabel Sickles was already on the board. And she and I, I learned through Ms. Magazine, were the first woman majority board of commissioners in the state of Oregon. And I would never have known that except somebody called me one morning and said, What? We just read this about you because I didn't subscribe to Ms. Magazine. I had never really considered myself a feminist, I guess, until I kind of got here and started looking at the ground. So let me say now what I experienced early on in terms of how I perceived the county. Air quality was atrocious. We lived above the smog and above the fog on Anderson Creek Road. We would always talk about getting through Andersonville, which was the lower area, and then get up to our place, which was about 2,300 feet. And we bought a log house, old log house, and knew that we would have to remodel all of it. And we lived in the trailer because somebody was already renting the house. So we lived in the trailer that we had, the Airstream trailer, for several months. And then I had given them notice to please move on, and they did that. So we had lots of work to do, it was 45 acres. And all but five was timber and wonderful timber on the North Slope. So we started just doing everything we could. And I raked, literally raked the pasture because it had shotgun shells and nails, and I mean it was just, it was a mess. And we didn't want our son to be injured, and so I raked that and picked up all of that. And that was sort of the experience of being sort of in rural Jackson County, if you will, because it was quite a ways up. It was about 20 minutes from the board of commissioner's office. But the first things that we experienced were wigwams that were belching, that were heating lumber yards and lumber companies. We also experienced smudge pots that were in the winter up smudge, oh you're getting snow. We're smudging all the orchards around us that I drove down through every morning that I went to work. And we also had smokestacks from a number of other places that were creating sawdust and blowing it into the air. And so the first, one of the first things that I was lobbied about, thank goodness, was air quality. And I was involved in appointing the first air quality committee in Jackson County. And we appointed a large board, we wanted to have a large committee, because we felt like we needed representatives from the industries that were polluting, that we needed representatives from federal and state agencies that were working, managing forest lands and working on air quality, and that we needed then local people. And we were very fortunate in that Ashland had a League of Women Voters and the President was Eleanor Bradley. And the League of Women Voters in Medford's President was Esther Jensen. And we asked the two of them if they would chair, co-chair the committee. Because the League of Women Voters I had already learned was the most active women's group that was evident in the Road Valley. And they were active. They held all of the hearings that were going on about the land use legislation. And they were all held in the courthouse and my husband and I attended all of them. And it's how I got very interested in land use immediately. I joined the Thousand Friends of Oregon, we both did, and I ultimately served on that board for several years. So air quality was really like a critical issue that had to be addressed. Because it was affecting health. And I had a neighbor, Jim Dunn, who was a neurologist, who basically said he had come from LA. He had worked on air quality there and he said, I would be happy to help you. I can contact all the doctors in the Valley and we will get access to records in the hospitals so that I can tell you what increase happens when the air gets so bad that you can't see. My first experience in getting to the board of commissioners office was I had to drive with my lights on all through the day you could not see without your lights on in the Road Valley in Medford at noon. So that's how serious it was and people's lives were being affected health-wise. And we asked the committee to start holding hearings and they did. And they were amazing hearings. People were very eager to testify. So the first changes that we got through were related to air quality. And it was remarkable to me how fast people were open to making those changes. Just working together to make that happen. We went to the legislature several times and I was already out of office by the time we got the IQMA bill through to check our cars and so on. But we kept working on that and we testified for several times before we got it through. And Nancy Peterson, who was our state representative at that time, really helped us a great deal. She was working with the governor, Kitzhaber, on healthcare. That was sort of one of her major areas and interests. And so she just picked up the ball and helped us get that done. So that was my early experience with the board of commissioners. I also worked avidly on land use and that was the thing that put me under. Because there were two attempts to recall me and the second attempt was successful. And that happened in early August of nineteen, what year, seventy-nine. And it was pretty traumatic because I was threatened over and over and over again by phone. I was, my life was threatened by phone even in the board of commissioners office. One day Don Scofield and I were having lunch together and he had gotten a call and his life was threatened. And then I got the call from, I guess, the same person. We knew who it was from who advised us to stop working on the things we were working on. And it was, I got letters, I got, I mean it was, people told me, my secretaries told me they didn't even give me all the letters and notes that came in. But it was, it was a long siege of threats. And so when I finished there I really was pretty well traumatized. And nothing like the, by subsequent clients because I became a psychotherapist as a result of having PTSD. And mine was mild compared to what I experienced as I worked with people. But you see I would never have become a psychotherapist, I don't think, if I hadn't gone through PTSD. And I was so, I really knew how to walk through that with people that I think it helped me be very effective and my, and no one's doing it now. My expertise developed into doing group therapy. And it was the most effective work I did while I was a therapist. I think I was a therapist about how many, 1983 I think I started and working privately. I had been a child therapist before that here in the valley. In fact, I helped start Southern Oregon Child Study and Treatment Center. I was on the first board and I later worked there for a short time, about three years. But that was, you know, it's like things sort of fall into place as you move along. And during the time that I was getting ready to be commissioner I was served on the county's human resources committee. And at that time they gave $200,000 a year to nonprofits. And they had people make application and I ended up being the chair of that committee and we visited all of those nonprofits that were applying for money. So I got to know all of that part of the valley. And there were women very engaged in that. One of the things I didn't say was that when we came, men ran everything here. They had everything, hospitals, the college, the board of commissioners was all male and older men. And so the women's movement was sort of quiet. I mean there were lots of active women here. They were getting together and having meetings and they were even training each other on how to be assertive. And Hunter Hill conducted probably the first class for women on how to be assertive. One's husband, Hunter. But I attended a number of those groups as they were forming. But until I was recalled I didn't really understand the whole thing. And a group of women, and I think there were probably 17, got together and had a party for me. And it was, I mean I'm still in that group. There's only four of us left in that group. But it was a wonderful experience to have, we got together once in a while and then slowly those people moved or they started their own businesses or they, I don't know, Nancy Peterson was in it. She died of course. And I'm sure there are others now who are deceased because they are no longer here. But there's still four of us, Madeleine, Karen Smith, Olive and me. And for a long time we got together fairly often. I would even come back from Bandon when I lived over there for a while and we would get together. But that group is sort of dissipated now and we never get together as a group. I still see them individually, occasionally. And I still feel that they're my closest friends here. But you know, lives have changed a lot since then. And losing Nancy was a really big one and there was also someone else. I can't, Helen Dean, Jim Dean was a very long time at the college. Helen Dean was also in this support group and Helen of course passed too long, not very, quite a few years ago now of course. So there are four of us left. And our lives have moved along and Madeleine, you know, started Mountain Meadows and she's had her struggles with that and Karen, I helped Karen get her first job because I told you she was at that Quaker meeting at the Kellogg's. And so when I knew, I was on the board of commissioners, when I knew of the opening for handling the Bear Creek Greenway, I encouraged her to apply. And she took, got the job. I wasn't involved in it beyond telling her to apply, but she got that position and she was in it until she retired. So you know, we've had some fun. Gary Streit was a clinical social worker before Olive got her license. And Gary was the person that I hired to provide the mental health coverage for the Head Start program. And so that's really, I probably met him before I met Olive. And so lots of things, you know, have sort of blossomed from there. The board of commissioners was challenging. It was John Deeson, Isabelle and me. And each of us had, no, it was Tam Moore and Isabelle and me. John had just gone off the board and I replaced him. And each of us had kind of different views about what we ought to do. And my goal, of course, was to work on air quality because I'd already been told that I had to work on air quality. And I had sort of disagreements with the other two in different ways and I'm not going to go into that much. But we had lots of, we were in the midst of having lots of land use hearings because everybody knew that I was one of those environmentalists and that I was going to, we had a comprehensive plan that was not in compliance with state law. And I had said, we were going to change the, get it into compliance. I ran on that. I handed out position papers when I ran. I ran against nine men. And that was a really wonderful experience running against nine men. Because basically I was the main one who spoke at the meetings, the community meetings. And they either said nothing or they said they thought they should be elected or they said they agreed with me. And so I ended up being the person that the public got to know. That was how I experienced it. Some of them were well known. One was a mayor. One was very involved in building dams. That was a big issue. My husband took that one on. He was a geologist and he had studied streams. And so he worked a lot on that. And so one of the first issues that I knew about, immensely knew about, was the dams. And we were only able to stop one of those, which was the Elk Creek Dam. My husband was very engaged in that effort. Well, the board had disagreements, but we dealt with those mostly in our meetings that we had weekly. We did not take each other on in public. We were taken on in public. We were having full houses doing land use hearings. And people were yelling and threatening us a lot. One day finally, after we'd done a lot of meetings, one of the reporters, and we were, by the way, that was one of the wonderful things about Jackson County at that time. Both the Ashland tidings and the male tribune had reporters covering every one of our meetings. That doesn't happen anymore. But that was wonderful. And one morning somebody said, what would you do if somebody came and shot at you? And I realized that I'd already thought about that because I'd already been through the head start threats and really had never talked about them publicly, frankly. And so I said, I think I've realized it could happen. That's what I said in the public meeting. And other people, I don't know what the other commissioners said to answer that. But we didn't always, we rarely voted, I think, as a threesome. I think we often had a two to one. And I wasn't uncomfortable about that at all. I think that we expressed ourselves, but we never attacked each other or said anything negative about each other in public. All of us were so principled, we wouldn't have even considered that, frankly. That's how I felt about each person. But the made hearings we had were land use and many of them were hostile. Hostile. And we had to hold them all over because we were working on the urban growth boundaries. And our urban growth boundaries were accepted. And the communities were often not accepted if we couldn't come to agreement. We were in agreement with almost everybody, Ashland, Talent, Phoenix, Medford. But the more rural areas, they disagreed with us. And so we both submitted our positions to the LCDC and the counties were always the ones that were accepted because they were the ones in compliance with the law. So my experience was actually rather short lived at the county, you see. Because I was there a little over two and a half years. And there were times that I was frightened. I will tell you one incident that happened over and over and over. There was a man who owned the newspaper, I believe, in Eagle Point area. And he felt he could call me any night he wanted to call me at my home and that I should be on the phone with him as long as he wanted to talk. And I was not skilled enough at that time to say, I will be happy to make an appointment for you in my office. I'm not going to talk to you further. I have a young child at that time. My son was three years old. And my husband was putting him to bed and reading to him at night if I was being interrupted by this person. And he called several nights a week. And he felt that I should be available to talk to him whenever he called. I don't know if he's still here. I think he was prominent at the time, at least in that part of the county. But now, of course, and very soon after that, I would have said, get in touch with me if you want to call me, call my secretary and make a time. But I wasn't courageous enough at that time to do that or clear enough about the fact that I had the flexibility to do that as an elected official. And that's an important piece of who I was because I grew up a lot. I've grown up a lot. My clients in therapy have helped me more than any other group, frankly, to grow up. And I certainly am now fairly strong. But it happened over time. It didn't happen. It hadn't happened even though I'd made position papers and I could express myself and interview well as a person running for office. And as a Head Start Director, I was interviewed a lot as the Head Start Director. But I wasn't strong enough to say to people, call my office and make an appointment if you want to talk to me. And that was important for you to know about me. But I feel that we, as a whole, we got a lot done because the Air Quality Committee was very effective. They were the most effective committee. And the Planning Commission was effective. And we were effective pretty much as commissioners doing the work that we had to do in public meetings. But it was hard work. It was really hard work. And when I was at Head Start, because I started and got this position that was a disaster, and I had already been told by people coming from the regional office in Seattle, I'd been in my job two weeks when five people arrived to tell me they were going to cut the program, the Head Start program. And after they were there three or four days, I invited them to leave. I said, if you will leave and go back to Seattle, I will have this program together in one year. And I did. And they left. They talked about it and told jokes about it. I've heard them tell those jokes about me, inviting them to go back to Seattle. But I had to do that in order to be able to do my job there. And maybe that was one of the first times I grew up. But that was a job that I understood because I'd already been involved in teaching and setting up Head Start programs. And the regional office hired me to go all over Washington and Oregon in hiring, interviewing and looking at programs, helping them evaluate programs. And they did that after I'd been there a few months. So they knew something about my background in terms of child development. But you see, when you become a county commissioner, you've got to be an expert in a whole different level of information. I knew the county pretty well by then. But I did not know the personalities in the county. I knew there were different groups. There were definitely rednecks. There were definitely people who were anti-environmentalists. There were definitely environmentalists. There were definitely women's groups. But women's groups were not active in county government at that time. They didn't come in and testify. So I had done just enough things to get me recalled, land use planning, having meetings around the county and people said, what do you believe in? What do you think? What are your positions about? And I didn't tell anything that wasn't true. And then we had, of course, the publicity about the dams. So that was sort of my first experience. And we had huge numbers of land use hearings because we were changing the comprehensive plan. And that was probably the most controversial issue in the county. Air quality was controversial, but not near as controversial as air quality. And so it wasn't very long before people knew my position on that. And I was recalled basically by landowners who were either involved in selling real estate or who owned property, who listed themselves as farmers. But they were really interested in selling their land for as much as they could get. So those were the two groups that fought and worked hard to recall me. And I was recalled in August. The only thing on the ballot. And so there were very few people who voted, 10,000 people voted total. And there had been over 22,000 voting when I won. So that made a huge difference. I was traumatized for a number of months, but I ended up realizing that I couldn't just lay around on the couch and drink alcohol, which I was doing. And I didn't talk to anybody except my family, which was a young son who was then about 12, 10 or 12. And my husband, who was totally supportive. I mean, he held me a lot. But it was a hard experience. And I ended up looking at the job at the Southern Oregon Trial Study and Treatment Center saying, oh, I can't apply for that. I helped start it. And I looked at it several times before. And they had already interviewed and put the ad in a second time. And I finally decided I could work there. And I went there as a child therapist. And that was the first time I did therapy with anybody. And as a result of that, I ended up being hired at an adolescent program where I got fired and also threatened statewide at that time. The threats were statewide by then. And because I was cleaning up, cleaning up another mess. And so I wasn't there terribly long, maybe 18 months. And when I got through there, I decided I'm going to become a therapist. I know how to do this. I've done children. I've done adolescents. I've done parents who were incorrigible because I had to deal with parents in the adolescent program and in the child program. And so why don't I just do this and see what happens? So I called. Let's see. How did this work? I got in touch with two people at the college because I knew that in order to qualify for any of the licensure things, and we didn't have a licensure law, I ended up being appointed to the first licensure board in Oregon. So you know, you have to get tough when you do the work that I've done. And I've been tough. I've had some really tough clients in my psychotherapy areas. And by the way, I helped a lot of people because I was on that first licensure board in Oregon and I helped develop the administrative rules. And so when it was time for people to get licensed, I got the first marriage and family license in the state of Oregon, the LMFD. But I helped every person who called me a local therapist, and that was Olive and Ann Wright and people, that was a lot of the women that had been activists that I knew. I said, yes, I'll help you. I'll have meetings with you. We can meet individually or we can meet as groups and I'll help you get your applications done. And I did that because I felt that that's what women do for women. And I have always pretty much done that of helping women who have indicated they've needed various kinds of assistance. So what I think is important to say to you is that I still am pretty active in various things. I got very involved in helping Brit. I got very involved in the public radio station. I was the president of that board for a time when it was not public what it is today, JPR. It was KSOR. And that was many years ago. And I got involved in helping the arts programs. I decided the things that I wanted to be active in as a citizen, and I did some of these when I was commissioner, was Brit. I turned the first shovel of dirt for the New Pavilion. I helped raise money for that pavilion. I really got involved in the Arts Council of Southern Oregon. I have no idea what they do today. But I was the treasurer of that group and the director dropped dead. And our office was on Main Street in Ashland and I came over one night and cleaned out the office so that we could move that stuff out of there. So I was involved in that. I was on the KSOR board. I think I had just been recalled when they asked me to be on that board. That was Alice Sowers. You knew Jim's and Alice probably. Alice was a good friend. She got me both on the Brit board and on the KSOR board. Then, as I told you, I was involved in the Thousand Friends board. I'm not going to be remembered. What I want to do is to have my life. My life right now is with my son and his son, who is six and a half years old. I spend a lot of time with him. I do music and art and literature. I take him on field trips. I take him to the coast and we go camping. Those are the kinds of things I want to do now because I'm an old woman. Relatively speaking, I've outlived an awful lot of good friends. I've had five friends die in the last 18 months, close friends, and four of them were in banding because my husband and I chose to live in banding. We went over there just to spend a winter and we stayed eight years because Robert liked it so much that we stayed and I even helped write the grants for the banding library while I was there. I am sort of a community activist, but I kind of pitch in now where I think I can be useful. I ran for the library board. I was told I wasn't supposed to run for the library board, by the way, because somebody had already selected who should be on the library board and I wasn't one of those people. So you see, I wasn't active enough in the community to be on that board. But I ran for office and I got one of the five seats. I got the lowest number of votes, but I think that I contributed something to the library board. One of the things that I've experienced, and it's been sad for me, is that I think women were very supportive of each other in the 70s and they aren't as supportive of each other now. I think women knew a lot more about problem solving in the 70s. I came out of programs that trained me in the Extension service where I worked and in college teaching where they trained us to be problem solvers. I don't see that as much now in women that I am involved with often in more intimate ways. I don't see the problem solving. I don't see the sticking together to resolve conflict. And that was something that our little group of Nancy Peterson and Olive and so on, we knew a lot about sticking together and solving problems and coming to agreement. And I wish that women were practicing that now.