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Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Delphine Bowers 
January 29, 1998 
Cassette 1, Side 1 
 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  00:01 
It is Wednesday, January 29. I am going to interview Delphine Bowers at 5901 Phinney Avenue 
North in Seattle, Washington. This is the first tape in a series of tapes for her life history 
interviews for the Northwest Women's Heritage Project sponsored by the University of 
Washington. My name is Jenny Kurzweil. Okay.  
 
Delphine Bowers  00:35 
What is the focus that you like the best? What you want to focus on?  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  00:40 
For the entire oral history? 
 
Delphine Bowers  00:41 
Well, I'm inclined to focus on emotional things, and I don't know whether that's what you want 
or not for your project. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  00:48 
That's, that's what I want. I want what you want to do and what you-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  00:54 
I mean, some people will deal entirely with facts and what happened and this and that, and I 
won't do that, I may even cry.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:01 
Yeah.  
 
Delphine Bowers  01:01 
Okay. So if you-- 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:04 
Yeah. 
 
Delphine Bowers  01:04 
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If this is going to be okay, we can start at the beginning.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:08 
Okay, I guess what my my one request is then that we get some sort of framework, or if we don't 
want to put that on tape, we can go back afterwards and figure out when things happened. 
 
Delphine Bowers  01:22 
Oh yeah, well, I'll do that. I think I'm pretty good at structuring things.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:27 
Okay, I figured. 
 
Delphine Bowers  01:30 
My mother's family were German and French Jews that came over before the Civil War and 
settled in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and by the time she married were, I mean, they were well 
established, old Jewish families. My father's family were immigrants. He was an immigrant, he 
came, he was five years old when he came over. And they were married in 1927, she was 39 and 
he was 41 and I was born less than a year after they were married, and she died in childbirth. Her 
family did not like my father, did not believe that he was a suitable person for her to have 
married. And besides that, they really didn't think she'd ever get married and that there, there 
would always be a maiden aunt, and that her share of the estate would go to, back to that family.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  02:37 
Because she was much older when she got married. 
 
Delphine Bowers  02:40 
Yeah, she was 39 and he was 41. And so they had reason to believe that she probably would 
never marry. She had a brother whose name was Morris and he and my father did not like each 
other. On my trip, my cousin David said, "My father didn't like your father. I never did know 
why, and I suspect it was probably mutual." And I said, "Yes, it was." And I do know some of 
the why that my father didn't like him, but I don't know the other side of it. And the, part of it 
started, I'm sure, with the background of the new Jews and the old Jews, and that is something 
that's been documented, and they've written quite a bit about. The-- there were several people in 
my father's family, he came from a large family, and several of his brothers and sisters wanted 
me. And another cousin, whose name was Marguerite Fischer, wanted me, and he made the 
decision that I should go to my Great Aunt Rosa and another cousin, whose name was Claire 
Lessard, a distant cousin. I think, because he felt so badly about her dying--  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  03:58 
About your mother dying?  
 
Delphine Bowers  03:59 
About my mother's dying, that he wanted me to go to someone in her family to prove that, 
somehow or other, to make up for it, I think. And that's, I'm speculating, I don't know. So, I lived 
in, on Lookout Mountain, was born in Philadelphia. A few months when I, later, when I was old 
enough to be traveled, because they didn't haul newborn babies around the way they do now, I 
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moved to Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, and lived there with Great Aunt Rosa and cousin Claire 
and an English nurse. Rich, Aunt Rosa had been advised, was very good for babies, a good 
baby's nurse, but she should not be kept after I was six months old, but she was so good that they 
kept her. And then when I was three, they heard me calling her mommy. And I don't know 
whether I generated that or whether she tried to, she thought that was a nice thing, but then they 
fired her. Then that was-- so I'd lost my mother and then I lost this one. And then, once during 
that period, my father came to see me. He was in the Philippines all this time.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  05:08 
What did he do?  
 
Delphine Bowers  05:09 
He was lawyer, and he was in the Philippines because of the discrimination that was going on.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  05:15 
Against Jews? 
 
Delphine Bowers  05:16 
Against Jews. Because he graduated, I think cum laude from Yale, but the big Jewish law firms 
would have been happy to have hired him, but he would have remained more or less a clerk 
because he didn't have the connections. And there were brothers and cousins and nephews and 
sons that would be rising in the company. And then he said-- then, he decided to go into private 
practice. He hung out his [?shingle?], and he always used to say, "And then my client died." He 
was really funny about that. So he went off to the Philippines to be a school teacher. It wasn't 
working being a lawyer in this country. And while he was there, he met some lawyers, because 
the Caucasian community hangs together, or did then, and it really didn't matter whether you 
were Jewish or not, because the important thing was to be white. It's awful. This, I'm still 
outraged by that system, but Judge Block and Judge Apisso, who were both lawyers, and I don't 
understand how they were lawyers and judges at the same time, but anyway, they had a law firm, 
and they invited my father into it. And I'm sure he started out as a junior, junior something, and 
eventually became a partner, and then bought the Iloilo office, which was down in the southern 
islands, and that's where we lived when I went to join them. My Aunt Rosa died when I was 
seven and my father and stepmother came to get me. And I'm certain that he married someone 
that he thought would be a good person to rear me. She was of English [inaudible], she was an 
American woman, she'd been raised in Laramie, Wyoming. She was a spunky, gutsy woman, had 
a college degree. Born in 1900 in Laramie Wyoming and had a college degree.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  07:24 
Wow. What was her name?  
 
Delphine Bowers  07:26 
Her name was, was Mary, Mary Maynard Greenbaum and she had no understanding whatsoever 
of feelings, because I believe that her family did not value them, and that everything was done 
correctly, and if you lived right, lived by rules, and did things nicely, then you'd be happy and 
have a good life. And that's how simple it was. And I didn't fit in. I think I'm probably quite a bit 
like my biological mother, who was an artist. I'm not an artist, but I, I'm very spontaneous and 
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impulsive, I often don't think before I talk or do things. And that was, was was frightening to her, 
It was, it was anathema. I mean-- 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:18 
I can imagine. 
 
Delphine Bowers  08:19 
 --just was really scary. I yelled in the house, and I slammed doors, and I ran in the house, and I 
couldn't keep clean, and I didn't tie my shoes, and my belt was always untied, and, you know, all 
this stuff, it was not the way little ladies were. And in some ways, I was smarter than she was, 
because she never let herself go. I think she probably was real smart, but I never saw her just let 
herself go and and have a good time or or spontaneously say whatever came into her mind, 
everything was, was careful. And in my life, nothing was careful. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:59 
How old were you when you moved from Tennessee to--  
 
Delphine Bowers  09:02 
Seven.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:03 
So you were seven. 
 
Delphine Bowers  09:04 
And I can remember just being absolutely delighted to have a mother and a father. And of 
course, I had a very firm picture in my mind of what mothers and fathers were like, mostly taken 
from first and second grade readers, because I certainly didn't know from experience. And I 
remember asking her if she would be my mother, and she said, "Yes," that she would. And I said, 
"What should I call you?" And she said, "Well, you can call me Mary, or you can call me Tia, 
which is what my niece calls me, or you can call me," And I said, "Well, can I call you 
mommy?" And she said, "No, I don't want to be called mommy. It sounds like mummy and 
mum. I don't like that. You could call me mother." And so I called her mother, and just in the 
beginning, the idea of being called mommy was-- 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:53 
Overwhelmed? 
 
Delphine Bowers  09:54 
--oh, no, not that. And she read to me at night on the boat. We came home on a ship, came to the 
Philippines, and it took 30 days or more-- 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  10:07 
Wow. 
 
Delphine Bowers  10:07 
--because it did in those days.  
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Jenny Kurzweil  10:09 
Yeah. 
 
Delphine Bowers  10:10 
And I had a little bunk, and I can remember, she read to me every night from a book called The 
Adventures of Remi and the subtitle was in French, it was san famille. And it's very interesting, 
I'm certain that she did not consciously choose that book for me, had someone just recommended 
to her as being a good book. And it was a story of a little boy who didn't have family.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  10:37 
Wow. 
 
Delphine Bowers  10:39 
Whoa. And he had been reared by a nice woman who fell on hard times and had to sell her cow, 
I remember. And then he, he, he hooked up with a traveling troupe of like actors and 
troubadours, and it was an old man and another boy, and they had a monkey, and the man's name 
was Vitalis. And he had this adventuresome life going all over France, you know, and learning 
how to perform with the this other kid and this monkey. And I loved the book, but she, she had 
no sense of how to rear a child, no sense of what, how important feelings were. And actually, 
Aunt Rosa and cousin Claire didn't either. They had not allowed me, for the first seven years, I 
was not allowed to play with other children because I might learn bad words or bad habits, and 
they were very, very conscious of-- My father loomed in the background all the time. Everybody 
wanted to rear me in a way that would please him, 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  11:53 
Even though they didn't necessarily like him? 
 
Delphine Bowers  11:55 
Even though they didn't like him, it was-- they were entrusted with me by him, and he had 
certain ideas and they were to be followed out. Everybody in the family was very honorable, full 
of integrity and pretty deficient in feelings. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  12:14 
What was it like after the English nurse got fired for that interim four years? 
 
Delphine Bowers  12:20 
I had a negro nurse. I say negro because that's what they said, that or colored. And I don't 
remember her very well. They said that she loved me a lot, and I really don't remember her. The 
one I remember was the cook, who was a black woman whose name was Ardella, and she was 
college educated.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  12:38 
What was her name?  
 
Delphine Bowers  12:40 
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Ardella. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  12:43 
Ardella.  
 
Delphine Bowers  12:44 
But Ardella couldn't get a job teaching school for which she'd been trained, or doing anything 
other than being a servant, because she was black and she was, she was an angry lady. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  12:58 
Yeah. 
 
Delphine Bowers  12:59 
But she was neat, and she, she treated me like a human being. I think that's why she stood out in 
my mind. And I had to take walks every day after school. Other children would be playing, but I 
had to walk, either with Ardella or with my nurse. I walked miles and miles and miles all over 
that mountain, and they decided that was what I needed, I'd be good for me. And of course, I got 
no large muscle training and could hardly swing or climb the bars at school or do the things that 
kids need to be doing. But I remember once, I think I called Ardella a nigger, and she slapped 
me.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  13:39 
Wow.  
 
Delphine Bowers  13:40 
And I knew that if I told Aunt Rosa that Ardella would be fired, but I also knew that I deserved 
it.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  13:47 
Yeah.  
 
Delphine Bowers  13:48 
So that was, I mean, she was, she was the real flesh and blood person in those early years who 
wasn't pussy footing around and afraid of feelings. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  14:00 
Was it a, was it a relatively wealthy family? I mean, having nannies and, and a cook and all of 
that or?  
 
Delphine Bowers  14:08 
No, that was pretty common in the south. Lookout Mountain is a residential community. The 
people up there aren't real poor. We have some poor people there still, because I, I go back and 
visit and I [?talk to?] people and there are some poor families, but in general, it's a residential 
community. It's the, kind of the bedroom for Chattanooga. It's about 10 degrees cooler than 
Chattanooga, and so people, some people had summer cottages up there, but now people live 
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there year round. And I think we were comfortable, but I can't remember, I had, of course, more 
toys and clothes than any child should have. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  14:49 
Well, you didn't have friends to play with, So I guess they made up for it.  
 
Delphine Bowers  14:52 
But I can't remember people taking trips or doing anything. I can remember going down to the 
department store in Chattanooga and getting lost and seeing the sea of legs with seams down 
them, seam stockings. And I went to school, I went to public school.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  15:14 
How many years did you go there for? 
 
Delphine Bowers  15:16 
Two years, first and second grade. I don't think they had kindergarten. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  15:21 
Do you remember anything about first and second grade there?  
 
Delphine Bowers  15:25 
Well, I learned to read. Mary Greenbaum said that she understood that I learned to read before I 
went to school, that Aunt Rosa taught me to read. And that's possible because I was lonely and 
bored. And by the time I was seven, I was reading really well, and I learned to read very easily. 
Arithmetic was a complete mystery to me. I couldn't print or write in any way that was 
acceptable and would erase big holes in my paper. I had no idea how to get along with people, 
was often in tears or mad and having temper fits. I must have been a really difficult kid and 
disruptive in the classroom, because I'd never played with other children before, and I didn't 
know how to be, I didn't know how to be. Last quarter, in the writing class, the poem I wrote 
about being born was I didn't know that I was meant to be, and that was still carrying over. 
Because not only did I know, not know that I was meant to be, I didn't know how to be. And this 
happens when kids are uprooted, they just don't know how to be. And that's a lot of what we do 
in training kids, is we teach them how to be. That, what you can say, and what you can do, and 
how you can get what you want, what is really to be afeared, what isn't. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  16:53 
Do you remember having any friends in those two grades? Do you remember any kids that you 
might have known or? 
 
Delphine Bowers  17:02 
There were two little girls, but I can't remember being friends with them at school at all, and I 
think that occasionally my aunt and their mother would arrange for us to play together. I don't 
think they were real friends. They were Ruth Alexander and Carolyn Redd.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  17:20 
You remember their names, though.  
Page 8 of 12 
 
 
Delphine Bowers  17:21 
I remember their names. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  17:22 
Wow.  
 
Delphine Bowers  17:23 
And I went through first and second grade with them. And Ruth Alexander I met. She had a child 
up here, a son or a daughter that was married and lived nearby, and so she, she, she and I got 
together once, she brought me a hand piece, painted piece, a ceramic piece, and it was really 
interesting and really beautiful, but I didn't want to give it-- I kept it for a while, and then I sent it 
to someone else, and I knew would love it, because I didn't want to give it house room. For one 
thing, it was, it was very, very French. It was a [?large?], it was a big thing. And it was a little 
boy and a little girl, sort of in shepherdist costumes, with a, with a big platter with fish on it and a 
fishing pole and, you know, just real, sort of Marie Antoinette kind of thing. And only the front 
was painted, the back had not been painted. It was such a metaphor to me that it just blew my 
mind, and that's one reason I didn't want it in the house.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:33 
What metaphor was it for you?  
 
Delphine Bowers  18:35 
The metaphor of let's have everything look good, and if it doesn't look, if it looks good, it doesn't 
matter what's underneath. And Aunt Rosa had painted it.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:46 
Oh, your aunt had painted it? 
 
Delphine Bowers  18:47 
Yes, that's why it was given to me. Great Aunt Rosa had painted this thing, and she did very nice 
work. I have some things here there, a couple of her hand painted things. I'll show you.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:49 
So how did Ruth Alexander get it?  
 
Delphine Bowers  18:50 
Well, Aunt Rosa, I think, had given it to her mother. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  19:04 
Oh, okay.  
 
Delphine Bowers  19:06 
Or someone had suggested that she take it when Aunt Rosa died, or something, and Ruth had it, 
and it had a place, place of honor at her house. And I had it in, there's a big niche book case over 
there, tall niche. And it was there, but it was completely out of place. And every time I thought 
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of that back not being painted, I'd go, "Oh, my god. Oh, my god." So my friend Leo, of whom I 
still visit, lives in, on Lookout Mountain, and he has a lady friend, most decorous relationship, 
and I, she said, "Oh, how wonderful," that I had that. And I said, "Do you want it?" She 
[?went?], "I'd love to give it a home." I said, "I think it needs to come back to the mountain." So, 
I went to one of these pack it for you and mail it places payed about 50 dollars to have it fixed 
so, because it was all full of little edges and things that would break and it came in good 
condition and it's on her mantle piece, she's just absolutely delighted.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  20:13 
Oh, good. 
 
Delphine Bowers  20:14 
And it's nice. I'm delighted that she has it, because I really didn't want it.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  20:19 
What were your teachers like, your first and second grade teachers? 
 
Delphine Bowers  20:25 
I remember them as nice. This is interesting. I've taken it way back to when they asked, my aunt 
and cousin said, "What's your teacher like?" And then they said, "Is she pretty?" And I didn't 
know. I didn't know how to define pretty. That, no one, you see, I hadn't been around a mother 
who was using makeup or little girls that played dress up. I didn't know about pretty. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  20:52 
Wow. 
 
Delphine Bowers  20:53 
And know that people could look nice, but I didn't understand pretty. And to jump way ahead, 
when I was in boarding school, when I was 11 or 12, someone said someone had a good figure. 
And I went, [sighs], that didn't compute, because my stepmother never talked about anything 
sexual, it was nasty. I didn't know what a good figure was, and so one of the big girls sat me 
down and said, "Well now, look at these girls. Barbara over there doesn't have a good figure 
because she's kind of straight up and down, but Nancy Savalo has a wonderful figure because she 
has a waistline, and then her hips come out and she can see, see her, her bosom. Now, that's 
having a nice figure, but if it gets too big, it's not nice anymore." I mean, I had to have that kind 
of-- and this is what kids know automatically, when they play around with other kids, they pick it 
up, and the huge gaps that are left, I'm very conscious of that, so I don't know whether they were 
pretty. I knew they were nice. I don't remember ever having been treated unkindly in school, and 
I'm sure I was very difficult. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  22:03 
Why did you name your cat after your second grade teacher?  
 
Delphine Bowers  22:07 
Well, it was, I had to repeat second grade when I went to the Philippines because they were using 
the Calvert System, which is-- 
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Jenny Kurzweil  22:14 
The what system?  
 
Delphine Bowers  22:15 
Calvert, which is a homeschooling system.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  22:17 
Oh, okay.  
 
Delphine Bowers  22:17 
And you finished eight grades in six in the Calvert System and the combination of, let's face it, 
the Tennessee schools are not the most advanced on Earth, and they were, I just-- I did say, I 
read, I just, I read better than anyone else in the sixth, I read as, I read as well as most of the sixth 
graders, because I just had just been reading voraciously as soon as I was-- I mean, I can 
remember, this, these were the days when they made kids show off when company came. And I 
can remember in, on Lookout Mountain, ladies coming to visit Aunt Rosa, and my being asked 
to read and picking up a book off the table. And it was called Growing Up, and Margaret Fischer 
had sent it to us because she was very sure I wasn't getting any kind of sex education. She had 
four kids, you know, and her husband was adopted, she knew I needed it. So, this was all about 
the egg and the sperm, and it doesn't quite as a little vague about how it gets there, but it's pretty 
clear about it in the development of the baby. And I just picked it up and started reading 
randomly from it out loud. And one of the ladies said, "You nasty little thing. You know, it 
doesn't say that." And this was a time when there was a book called Anthony Adverse. I have no 
idea what it was about, but it was a popular book, you know, kind of a best seller. And I can 
remember reading aloud from it, not knowing what it meant, but being able to read aloud from it, 
everybody marveling. And such puppetry, I mean, what a way to raise kids.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  24:06 
Yeah. 
 
Delphine Bowers  24:08 
So, and that was in Chattanooga. My parents, when I got to the Philippines, they didn't do things 
like that, and I was very grateful for that. And the first two years we had a little American school, 
and it was a little one room schoolhouse up on stilts so that when the rains came and it flooded, it 
wouldn't flood.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  24:30 
Now, this is in the Philip-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  24:32 
In the Philippines, and I don't think it was close enough to walk. And there were six grades, 
because they use Calvert. And one teacher taught all six grades, and the older kids helped the 
younger ones, and I might help somebody with reading, even though I had been demoted. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  24:52 
Page 11 of 12 
 
Right. 
 
Delphine Bowers  24:52 
But there, and there wasn't this big deal about who really cared what grade you were in. And 
Martha Hill was my teacher. And she was a big bosomed, kind, nice woman, and I think she 
knew how much I needed to be loved. And I think that-- I don't, can't remember her holding me 
or rocking me, or doing things like that, but in a, in a spiritual sense, she did, and that's why 
Martha's named after her.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  25:19 
That's wonderful.  
 
Delphine Bowers  25:20 
She was very dear. I have an email friend who lives in Florida, who was in camp with us. He's 
some younger than I, but Martha was his, Martha Hill was his teacher in Manila, because he 
lived in Manila, and he remembers her fondly. And we've emailed back and forth about how neat 
Martha Hill was, a teacher for little kids.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  25:41 
That's great.  
 
Delphine Bowers  25:43 
Yeah, he's a man, well into his 60s, I'm sure. So, I had second and third grade caliber there, at 
this little school. And then the woman, Martha Hill taught a year, and then there was someone 
else that taught a year, and then she decided to have a baby, and nobody really wanted to do it. 
And so they disbanded the little school, and people went off in all directions. There probably 
were no more than eight or 10 kids in it. And my stepmother then taught me for two years, and 
she was a professional teacher, but it was really awful for several reasons. One was that she 
taught, had been teaching high school kids, she didn't know much about that elementary school. 
The other was some of the material that was being taught was stuff that she'd never been exposed 
to, because Calvert's a really good course, and they had stuff like art history, Greek and Roman 
mythology, and Greek and Roman history, and things that I know she had not been exposed to in 
the schools of Wyoming.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  26:53 
Right.  
 
Delphine Bowers  26:54 
So I think that she was always behind the heap while having to learn stuff. I mean, we learned-- I 
mean, at one point, I could tell you all of the Roman emperors and what he sort of did, and that 
kind of thing, that I'd learned, like, in fourth or fifth grade.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  27:10 
Wow. 
 
Delphine Bowers  27:11 
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It was really good. And so that, I think, made it angry, and then our minds were so different, I'm 
so right brained. And we'd be doing arithmetic, and I'd come up with an answer, and it'd be the 
right answer, and she could not, for the life of her, see how I got it, because it was different from 
what the book said to do, and she didn't know what to do with that. I mean, I'd gotten the right 
answer. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  27:39 
But you didn't do it with the steps.  
 
Delphine Bowers  27:41 
I didn't do it the way the book said to. So this, it was very hard for, looking back on it, that would 
be very hard for her. It must have been terrible. And it, the other thing that was terrible was 
something that you don't think about with homeschooling, and that is that you had the same 
person for a mother and a teacher, and you're not getting the diversity that you should and there's 
no way of getting away from it. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  28:04 
Talk about boundaries, really.  
 
Delphine Bowers  28:15 
Yeah, no boundaries. That's true. [To her cat] You had the same mother, mother and teacher, too, 
don't you?  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  28:07 
She's talking to Martha right now. [They laugh.] 
 
Delphine Bowers  28:16 
I'm talking to Martha, yes.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  28:17 
You know what, Delphine, I think-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  28:20 
We spent a lot of time on a very small segment. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  28:23 
No, no, I'm just looking at the tape, and I think that it's, while we have a break we should turn it 
over.  
 
Delphine Bowers  28:30 
Okay. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  28:30 
Just 'cause it's-- [recording ends]. 
 