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Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Eleanor Josephine Danner Bilimoria 
May 13, 1985 
Cassette 5, Side 1 
 
 
Elizabeth Gallery-Fox  00:01 
Today is May 13, 1985. I'm Elizabeth Leslie Gallery-Fox, interviewing with Eleanor Danner 
Bilimoria. And we are on our third interview today, and we're going to be starting off with the 
year 1947. 
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  00:18 
I hope that we haven't omitted a few years here. Anne was born on February 4 of that year, so 
that was the biggest event, probably. That was my second daughter. And in the summer of that 
year, we started West Wind Nursery School. Have we covered that?  
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  00:42 
We have. One very nice thing that happened that year was a weekend trip to Pune, which is on 
the plateau in the Western Ghats. Ghats are the mountains of India, not very high. And because 
we belonged to the Turf Club in Bombay, we could stay at the Pune Turf Club. And this is a little 
hill station right out in the country. And it was such a relief to get away from the heat and the 
humidity of Bombay and enjoy the lawns and the flowers and the trees in Pune. They have a 
beautiful clubhouse, but the nicest part are little cottages, which are right on the race track. So at 
five o'clock every morning, we'd hear these horses thundering by on their gallops, and it was fun 
to get up early to go out and watch them. We had a tidal wave in Bombay, and I'm not sure just 
which year that was. Did I speak about that part?  
 
Elizabeth Gallery-Fox  00:42 
Yes, yeah. 
 
Elizabeth Gallery-Fox  00:44 
Yeah, you spoke of the tidal wave. 
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  00:44 
So that's covered. Very good. 
 
Elizabeth Gallery-Fox  00:44 
Where it ended up killing several people in... yeah.  
 
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Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  00:44 
Yeah. In April 1 of 1948, I took over the administration of West Wind. The mother whose home 
it had been in was leaving. One mother rode the bus every morning, and one acted as the 
treasurer of the school. One handled the applications, and then one helped at school every day; 
took turns. I dealt mainly with the labor, the hiring and the training. And when you get a hamal 
to take care of the property and to guard it, you have to check with the police to be sure that he's 
all right. And there were several I had before we finally got one that was satisfactory. One stayed 
in the little hut to the back of the one that we were using for the school, and he stayed one night 
and said the place was haunted and he couldn't stay anymore [they laugh]. We had a hurricane 
that November which brought down half the trees in Bombay and blighted the rest of them with 
the salt spray from the sea. One of the living room windows blew out in the night, but we didn't 
hear it. The noise of the wind was so great. And the sand barge was washed up on the large black 
rocks. Our flat looked out to the Arabian Sea, and there were these huge black rocks going out 
from the beach. And at night, the fishermen would come with their torches and catch crab and 
lobster out there, and it was fun to watch then. But this barge was washed up on the rocks and 
was very picturesque until the monsoon came along and pounded it to pieces so that there was 
nothing left. And the rupee was devalued that year, so that was a bit of a blow to everyone.  
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  04:09 
In '49, Soli was doing very well in golf and winning lots of championships and bringing home-- 
brought home the [?TWA?] trophy, which was a huge one with a miniature one to keep. We 
went swimming a lot at the Willingdon Club, and the girls loved it. Anne would jump in with 
any chance she had. She was only two and a half then, and then somebody had to be in the pool 
to catch her. Kathy had her tonsils out the very day that the polio epidemic broke, so we were 
isolated for a couple of weeks until she recovered from that. Then I began a series of articles on 
children for Illustrated Weekly which was the magazine section of the Times of India. And I 
took ages one to six, and did one age each time and would find a child in Bombay who was that 
age and take photographs of them to illustrate it. So I used Parsi children and Hindu children and 
my children, and [?Swiss?]. And then I was-- when I was doing the weekly film reviews; I don't 
know whether that's on tape or I just told you... 
 
Elizabeth Gallery-Fox  05:29 
Were you were on the radio?  
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  05:32 
Yeah. 
 
Elizabeth Gallery-Fox  05:33 
Yeah, that's on tape. 
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  05:35 
Very good. Our nursery school children had gained in age, and so we started a kindergarten at 
West Wind and then I-- the-- it was a child psychologist from the Tata Institute of Social 
Sciences who was working with us, and she would send her students to us to do their internship, 
and she said it was the only school in Bombay worth a name. And the last I heard, it was still 
functioning. That I've always been very [inaudible]. 
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Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  06:08 
In 1950, Ruth Hayes and Ruth [?Ketchum?] came to visit me in Bombay. In all the years in 
Bombay, these were the only friends who came out. Of course, now it's very common. A lot have 
been out since I left, but Ruth Hayes, I had known... She was still in college and I was just out of 
college when I first met Ruth, and she's been a very good friend ever since. They came by 
[inaudible]. It was very nice. We had a Parsi wedding to take them to and a Mohammedan 
wedding down in the maidan in front of our balcony so that we could lean over the balcony and 
watch the whole proceedings. They were very intrigued, because there was a whole bedroom set 
on display, the bed and the almirah for the clothes and the nightstand. And the Begum and the 
Aga Khan were there that afternoon at the wedding. And then there were the Independence Day 
illuminations in January. They got to see Bombay turned into a fairy land of lights when they do 
that. They'll run electric lights around the windows of the big buildings and the Hindus will put 
out little vessels holding oil or ghee and a wick in them and set them all along the balconies and 
light them. 
 
Elizabeth Gallery-Fox  07:35 
Beautiful. 
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  07:36 
It is; it really is beautiful. So we took the two young women on a trip and went up to see the 
Buddhist caves, which are Ajanta and Ellora. And the Ajanta frescoes date back to the 7th 
century. And this is in a-- these caves where the Buddhists were living are-- is in a curve of the 
river, and it'd had been hidden by the growth of the trees for over 100 years and was discovered 
very-- rediscovered accidentally by the British Army riding by one day in 1819. And then Ellora 
had these massive sculptures. An old temple was carved out of solid rock. Had great friezes and 
passageways. And that was the year of the royal wedding that we've already talked about.  
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  08:41 
In April, we went up to Kodaikanal for six months, and that's in the south of India. We flew by 
air from Bombay to Madras and then took a small plane from Madras to [?Tiruchirappalli?]. It 
was 110 degrees and we only went up to 9000 feet. That wasn't very high. And the heat waves 
were so intense that it was very, very bumpy on the plane and kept dropping. And we were sick. 
Oh, were we sick. I was sitting there with the two little-- Kathy in the seat beside me and Anne 
on my lap, holding little bags for them, and the stewardess was leaning over my shoulder holding 
my little bag. Much too good for the purpose they were put to. Somebody was sitting in the seat 
behind me [?drinking?] very, very [?sad?]. Kodaikanal was, and still is, one of the hill stations. It 
was established when the British wanted to get away from the heat of the plains, they'd go up 
into the hills and build cottages and landscape little gardens around them. And it's up about 7000 
feet. Has the solar physics observatory, which was one of the seven or eight in the world at that 
time. And lots of wild animals. And they had two years, I believe, of drought before that. The 
English had made a little lake right near the center of Kokaikanal, as you could say. And the wild 
animals would come down to this lake, and there were jackal and tigers and leopards and black 
panthers all coming to the lake. And that year-- the black panthers, I think, were the most 
dangerous [inaudible]. Of the men that we knew lived there alone with his servants. Saw panther 
marks on the door one day. And Anne loved the little rolly [?poochies?], which are little 
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[inaudible] in a black shell. You pick them up and they curl and close up. She played with those. 
And then she loved the frogs. The "floggies," she called them, and she gathered them up into her 
sand pail and put the sand pail under the bed at night. [Laughs] You can imagine where the frogs 
were by morning. And one day we went out for a walk, and I looked at her and she had five frogs 
in her hands with legs sticking out all between her fingers. And one day I heard a big commotion 
outside, and I went out to see what was going on, and Anne had picked up a poisonous snake, 
and they had got her to drop it and they killed it and there was quite a bit of excitement over that. 
I was scolding her one day for talking baby talk, and I said, [inaudible]. Anne used to speak 
Tamil. She knew more of the language than I did. And while Soli was there, he did a lot of 
golfing and won the VE Day Cup, which had lion's head on the handle. then he had to go back to 
Bombay before the big luncheon. So I had to go to the luncheon and accept the cup on his behalf 
and fill it with champagne. And it was passed around for everybody to drink from. The hyenas 
would go past at night, or jackals. Would go down the road to the lake at night, and there'd be a 
group of them, and they have the strangest laugh. It sounds just like a bunch of boys laughing 
and having a good time. But was  a very eerie sounding thing. I didn't like it.  
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  09:41 
In 1951, we came to America. Did I talk about the Vassar Summer Institute?  
 
Elizabeth Gallery-Fox  12:37 
No. [Tape noises.] [They laugh.] 
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  13:52 
Yes, I was offered a scholarship to the Vassar Summer Institute at Vassar College for myself and 
the two girls. And the program is set up so that the children are in a separate dormitory and you 
see them in the morning about-- well, after breakfast, you meet them, and you have them for an 
hour or an hour and a half, two hours, I forgot what. And then they go back to their dorm, and 
they have their classes, and you have yours. And Arthur Miller's wife was there. This was before 
the Marilyn Monroe era. And she came up to me one morning; I didn't know her, and she said, 
"You have two children about the age of my two children, let's go together." She had a car. That 
was nice. We could take little trips. So every morning, we would meet and do something with 
our youngsters, go walking, or play games or whatnot. I took classes in child psychology, 
elementary education, art, and radio. One, I made a huge animal out of paper mâché in the art 
class, and when we started to come west in the car, I had the two little girls in the back seat and 
this animal sitting on the seat beside me and somebody came along and they were so interested 
in it that they were afraid I'd get hit. I kept it in the front seat, and drivers would be looking at 
that instead of where they were going. So I had to take it out. At the Institute, we had so many 
interesting things to do. It used to be a joke. People would say, well, that the class-- during class 
time, they had one thing to do, and during free time, they had five things to do. And that was 
when Eleanor Roosevelt came and spoke to us one night. This was also the beginning of the 
permissive era in child raising. And there was a woman coming up from New York who worked 
with disturbed children, and everybody was very anxious to meet her and to hear what she had to 
say about handling some of these delinquents that she dealt with. And so when she got to it, she 
was-- to her speech that night, she was talking about this one boy who was just very difficult to 
deal with, and he came after her with a knife. Everybody was just on the edge of their seats 
waiting to see how she dealt with this situation in a permissive manner. And she said, "Well, 
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when you have a child like John, the only thing you can do is knock him down." [Laughs] And 
she was such a little thing; no one could visualize this. 
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  17:10 
When I had been talking about coming to America for the Summer Institute, I wanted to stay for 
the year, and we thought maybe Soli'd be able to come and we'd stay in America, I had written to 
the Seattle Public Schools to see if I could get a job for the year. And they sent me out a contract 
which I had to take to the American Consulate and get notarized, and it got a beautiful, big, gold 
seal and a red ribbon on it. I wrote back that I would like very much to have the contract, but that 
I didn't have a teaching certificate. It expired. And that while I'd get some credit at Vassar, it 
wouldn't be enough to reinstate the certificate for the State of Washington. Nobody answered my 
letter, and I didn't hear anything all summer. So I bought a car in Poughkeepsie, got my driver's 
license renewed. I put the two little girls in the backseat, and we started across the continent, 
stopping at every dime store on the way to get something new for them to play with [laughs]. 
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  18:33 
Anne had been riding her tricycle down a little hill. How long was that? About a week or so 
before we were ready to leave, and she broke her arm. And, oh, she cried and cried and cried that 
night. I took her to the doctor's, and he put a plaster cast on it, and they permitted me to stay all 
night with Anne in her dormitory, and I could not get her to stop crying. And she cried and cried 
and cried. Finally, I found out she was afraid that plaster cast was never going to come off. So 
when I understood that and could console her and tell her that, "Yes, in a couple of weeks it 
would come off," she quieted down and went to sleep. So her arm was still in the cast, I think, 
when we took off to come West. Somebody in the dorm had come down with the mumps. So all 
of these children from all over the United States were exposed to the mumps. A man who had 
offered Soli a job in New York had invited us to come and spend the weekend with them, and 
they had a little boy, but I had to tell him that we'd been exposed to the mumps and so he said, 
"Don't come. Don't come." So we started to cross the continent, and it was a it was quite some 
trip. We had a terrible time in the Dakotas with bad roads and hail storms. And then we got to-- 
almost to Yellowstone Park and Anne came down with a fever, and I could see the mumps 
coming on. And finally-- we stayed there a couple of days, and then I decided, "Well, there'd be 
a doctor at Yellowstone and a hospital maybe," so we'd go on. So at the gate, I had to tell them I 
thought we had the mumps, so they sent us to the hospital. Sure enough. And we got a cabin, and 
I wasn't supposed to cook in the cabin, but I couldn't take Anne out, so I didn't know what else to 
do. So Kathy would run and get our grocery for us, and I'd cook on the stove surreptitiously, 
hiding everything afterwards. And one day, Kathy was out exploring, and then I saw her going 
past the window of the cottage and up at the little porch and through the door like lightning. And 
then here came the bear behind her [they laugh]. Oh.  
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  21:36 
Well, we got to Seattle safely, and I taught two days, and I got a telephone call from the Seattle 
administration office. "You have no certificate; you cannot teach tomorrow." Well, I was s-- and, 
"Come down to the office right after school." Well, I was trying to find a place to live. I had the 
two little girls to take care of. I had the classes to prepare for. I didn't have time to go down and 
talk to them, so I didn't go [laughs]. The next day, I got a call, "Turn in your keys. You cannot 
teach tomorrow." So I turned in my keys, and I went down to see him. And I said, "I wrote you, 
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'I didn't have a certificate.' I never had an answer." So they looked it up. Sure enough, nobody 
had answered. The assistant superintendent, I guess, who-- to whom the letter was addressed, 
was on vacation when it came and somebody had just filed it away. So they said, "Well, there 
was nothing they could do." Well, before I'd-- somehow during the week or so before school 
started, I had gone to Annie Wright to see about getting a position there, because I couldn't find a 
place to live that I could afford. And I thought that would be a good solution, a boarding school. 
But they couldn't pay enough. Didn't even compare with what Seattle would pay me. Well, then I 
didn't have a job, so Friday morning of the first week of school, I trotted over to Tacoma and 
signed up. My board and room and a small salary and board and room for the girls and tuition for 
the girls. So it wasn't such a bad deal. No, that was Saturday I went over there, because all of 
Saturday, my brother was on the telephone practically all day to the Seattle schools and to the 
Superintendent of Instruction in Olympia and got a temporary certificate for me. So I came back. 
I had a job in Seattle, too. So Monday morning, they call-- or I talked to them, I guess, Monday, 
and I said, "I'm sorry. I've signed up at Tacoma. There's no way I can get out of it now, after 
going after it twice." So I went to Tacoma for the year, and Anne was in the four year old 
kindergarten, and Kathy was in third grade? First grade? I don't know what she was in. Anyhow, 
she was there. So I taught art, and I had all of the lower school records to keep, and I worked in 
the office. And it was very nice. There's-- there was no discipline, and a great deal of 
appreciation for anything you did. And if the girls didn't have their work done, they went to 
Saturday morning study hall, and no faculty had to supervise the evening study halls. You did 
have to supervise Saturday because it was felt the people there needed help, probably, but you 
only got that duty once every two months or so. And-- I really liked the year there, and it was 
very good for Kathy. I don't know that it was so good for Anne. 
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  25:36 
I don't think I mentioned when we were in Bombay -- and I don't know which years these were -- 
Khrushchev came. We saw Khrushchev. Haile Selassie came to visit. We saw him. The Shah of 
Iran was there with [?Soraya?]. We saw them, all at close range. We saw Lord and Lady 
Mountbatten on the street one day when they were the viceroy. 
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  26:12 
So after the year at Annie Wright Seminary, we took a [?camp?] to Whidbey Island for two 
weeks in the summer, and the girls just loved that. Playing on the beach, and we had good 
neighbors and good friends. And my brother Earl had a cabin at Whidbey, and I telephoned them 
and wanted them drive over for the evening and discovered that Whidbey's one of the largest 
islands in the United States, would be a 60 mile drive each way [laughs]. So I learned a little 
geography at that. Kathy took some art classes at the university when we came back and had one 
of her paintings kept for the exhibit that was to be held afterwards. And Anne won a prize in the 
kiddies' parade. She went as if she were going-- she dressed as if she were going to a birthday 
party and carried a birthday cake that said, "Happy Birthday, Seattle." It was Seattle's-- what, 
centenary? 1952? Then Soli didn't make it to the States, so a Halloween, we left to go back to the 
States-- to go back to India. And we stopped in Chicago to visit my cousins [inaudible] and were 
in New York for election night. Went up to Times Square to see the election results flashed on 
the screen. Then in November, we left on-- sailed on the Independence. Anne fell down over a 
bulkhead to a door and cut her chin open, and the doctor put clamps in it. We got to Genoa and 
visited Columbus's birthplace and had some interesting trips, and went to Rome, and someplace 
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in there, Anne fell down again and drove these clips into her chin. So I had to rush her to a 
doctor. I had to find a doctor who could speak English in Rome, and that took a long time, and 
then rush her to the doctor's and get the clamps taken out. And onboard ship, the doctor had been 
so cruel. When I took her in with this open cut, he put a sheet around her and wrapped her up so 
tight she couldn't move, and put her down on this table, and two nurses held her down while he 
put those clamps in. So she was in no mood to go to another doctor, but the one in Rome was so 
gentle and so kind. And he let me hold her on my lap while he took the clamps out and fixed up 
her chin, so then she was ready to go again. And she was so tiny, and the lira paper money was a 
such small value that people carried around great wads of them, and they were always dropping 
them. So Anne would pick up lira after lira off to the street, 5 lira notes and 10 lira notes. So she 
had a whole handful when we got to the airport [laughs]. Anne spent it in the airport shop buying 
these cute little wooden toys that they have. We-- I still hang them on the Christmas tree. Oh, 
while there, we visited all the sculpture and Michelangelo sculpture and St Peter's and... 
 
Eleanor Danner Bilimoria  30:28 
Oh, while we were at this clinic getting her chin fixed, I would have been in absolute panic, 
except we'd been notified just before we left the hotel that the plane would be two hours late 
taking off for Bombay. So that was a lifesaver. Oh [laughs] and on the way back to the hotel, the 
taxi stopped with a jerk and threw Kathy against a broken door handle. So she [laughs] arrived at 
the hotel with her hand cut and bleeding profusely, and then we took off for the airport. We got 
to Cairo at two o'clock in the morning and Bombay 5pm in, yeah, afternoon. It was suffocatingly 
hot, and because we'd stopped in Cairo and might have picked up a yellow fever, why, they-- 
 