Page 1 of 12 
 
Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Delphine Bowers 
February 5, 1998 
Cassette 3, Side 1 
 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  00:01 
It's Thursday, February 5, and I'm on my way to interview Delphine Bowers. This is our second 
interview, and this is the third tape so far. So I was wondering where you would like to go today? 
 
Delphine Bowers  00:21 
Well, what did I say? Did I tell you that I thought that one of the reasons that we both wanted 
children is that neither of us had a very good sense of self, and we probably had some idea way 
in the back of our minds that this was a way to find out who we were. This is not a good reason 
for having children, but it often comes from people who are very empty inside. That's real sad. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  00:54 
Do you feel it affected your children's lives? 
 
Delphine Bowers  00:58 
Oh, yeah, I really believe that I had a more of a sense of who I was than Jack did in terms of 
having a center, maybe not. And children who are reared or spawned by such parents quickly get 
the idea that it's their business to provide their parents with a sense of who they are, and they 
take care of the parents. And they, if they're-- Or else they rebel completely and say, you know, 
"Forget it. I'm not going to just," you know, "look, I'm not your mother. I won't do it."  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:45 
Did any of your kids rebel in that way? 
 
Delphine Bowers  01:49 
Well, Sarah did, but she was very quiet about it, it wasn't real blatant. She was, you know, she 
was like getting straight A's and president of the Honor Society, but walking down the street and 
snapping off people's radio antennas on their car.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  02:06 
Wow.  
 
Delphine Bowers  02:08 
I mean, that's how angry she was.  
Page 2 of 12 
 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  02:09 
She was your eldest, right?  
 
Delphine Bowers  02:10 
No, she's the youngest. And came along, really, when there were lots and lots of problems and 
she got less, less attention and probably less good parenting. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  02:32 
How did that make you feel, having your child so angry? 
 
Delphine Bowers  02:36 
Well, [?because?] I didn't know it.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  02:37 
Oh, you didn't?  
 
Delphine Bowers  02:38 
No, I was too wrapped up in myself, in my own stuff. And in being married to an alcoholic, it 
was a real typical family with an alcoholic parent in terms of where the energy was. And I didn't 
know it, I didn't know it for years, and she is still angry. She does very well with it. And her 
brother her sister say she's really prickly, that's the way they describe it. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  03:01 
Prickly?  
 
Delphine Bowers  03:02 
Prickly. She is prickly. She's had lots of therapy. And that happens. And she did not want 
children, she doesn't have any, and she worked for Microsoft, on Internet Explorer, as a software 
tester. So that's pretty interesting, too. And will not discuss all the current stuff going on about it. 
Just simply says, essentially, she says, "We're right."  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  03:53 
"We're right?" 
 
Delphine Bowers  03:54 
Yeah, she doesn't think, "Well, maybe it is a monopoly. Maybe it is, has violated [inaudible]." 
Just wouldn't consider it. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  03:58 
Oh, with Microsoft. 
 
Delphine Bowers  03:59 
Yeah, with Microsoft, yeah. That's pretty funny too, because she's very loyal to them.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  04:02 
Page 3 of 12 
 
Do your children keep contact with Jack? 
 
Delphine Bowers  04:11 
Sarah sends him 50 dollars a month, to contribute toward his rent, because they, they doubled the 
rent where he was staying so that everybody would have to move, because they were going to 
remake it and fix it up so they could charge more, and he couldn't find any other places 
inexpensive. So Sarah contributes that, but really wants nothing to do with him. That's her 
contribution. Mary sends him cookies and writes him letters, calls him on the phone, and Claire 
takes him to buy his groceries and drops him with his laundry and all kinds of things like that.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  04:56 
So, some of them have quite a lot of involvement.  
 
Delphine Bowers  04:58 
Yeah. And Bill will help in a pinch, but really doesn't want anything to do with him either. He 
and Sarah are both wanting a lot of distance from their father.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  05:01 
What about you?  
 
Delphine Bowers  05:12 
I will tolerate being with him if it's a family thing, you know, a birthday, well, not so much a 
birthday, but Christmas or grandchild's birthday or something like that. I don't seek him out. I 
don't like talking to him. I won't, I won't contribute when the kids say, "Oh, dad needs a new bed. 
Will you help pay for it?" No, I will not. I went without for a long time so that he could have 
things and so that he could drink. And I am not married to him anymore, I don't need to do that. 
And I've learned that the kids really don't expect me to, but they always take the swing at it. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:02 
Worth a shot.  
 
Delphine Bowers  06:02 
Yeah, it's worth a shot. And so I still have not gotten to that and I, I think that boundary is very 
important for me, to know that I'm not responsible for him. And he's, he's a pretty miserable 
human being. He'll be 80 in a few days, and is still drinking, living on Capitol Hill, and kind of.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:24 
Just in Capitol Hill, in Seattle?  
 
Delphine Bowers  06:26 
Mm-hmm. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:27 
Oh, close.  
 
Delphine Bowers  06:27 
Page 4 of 12 
 
Shuffling around. I don't run into him. And he's, everyone knows not to call him in the evening 
because he's always drunk and won't remember that you called. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:47 
When did you get divorced? 
 
Delphine Bowers  06:48 
It would have to have been 1980 and [inaudible], I wasn't divorced until '81 because he was on 
my dental insurance and he needed to have his teeth fixed.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:54 
And that was after 30 years of marriage. 
 
Delphine Bowers  07:01 
We married in 1950. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  07:05 
What was the, what-- How did you do it? 
 
Delphine Bowers  07:09 
Well, I told him in 1978, when I was admitted to graduate school, that if he was not through 
drinking when I got through graduate school that I would leave him. And he said, "Oh, I don't 
want you to leave me," and, "I will be. I'll stop drinking." And of course, he didn't. And he didn't 
want me to stay and I didn't want to. There was nothing left between us, absolutely no reason for 
us to be together. And he-- I mean, we couldn't even pretend to be friends. We didn't enjoy doing 
the same things. We didn't enjoy being with the same people. We even liked, I mean, he's a 
musician, we even liked different music. He didn't like early music, and I'm very fond of 
Renaissance and medieval music and that kind of thing, and he considered it primitive. If it was 
before [inaudible], then it didn't exist. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:12 
No harpsichords for him.  
 
Delphine Bowers  08:13 
No. He, we had a little harpsichord that was from a friend that died, and he used to kind of beat 
on it, I mean, he would play it. He didn't have a, he didn't play it gently, and he had a master's in 
piano. So it was, it wasn't, the only purpose for that marriage was to have children.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:37 
So when you finished graduate school, you were--  
 
Delphine Bowers  08:40 
I had an aunt die, opportun-- opportunely, and she left me about 15,000 dollars which was 
enough to make a down payment on a little co-op apartment.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:54 
Page 5 of 12 
 
This one? 
 
Delphine Bowers  08:55 
No, It was one on Queen Anne. It was a little, tiny place, it was one and a half bedrooms. I 
stayed there for six years, I think because it was so cheap. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:55 
Was it the first time you had lived alone?  
 
Delphine Bowers  09:12 
Yeah. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:16 
What was that like, living by yourself? 
 
Delphine Bowers  09:21 
The first year was fine, and then I got very depressed. Because the first year I could say, well, 
you know, "All my, I'm rid of him, all my problems are solved." And like a lot of other people 
who go through divorces, I found out that a lot of the same stuff was there, even though he 
wasn't, That it was not all his fault. And so then I went into therapy in 1983, [?which was?] good. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:52 
I think, I'm curious about-- We left off, I think you were talking about your work at the National 
Opinion Research Center, and, and then, and now, we're 30 years in the future. So, I'm curious 
about some of your experiences in that time, what your work was like, or how you got to work. 
 
Delphine Bowers  10:17 
I started out, well, I started out, I had a degree in microbiology, and I worked a couple of years as 
a microbiologist. I wasn't very good, I dropped things and I spilled things, and I was not good 
with my hands. And I always stayed late, did things over because I was accurate, I was very 
accurate, but I worried about maybe I hadn't done it right, so I'd do stuff over again. And it was 
not a very happy arrangement, and so I decided to not do that. And then for a few years, I didn't 
work because the babies were coming pretty fast. And then-- 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  10:50 
What was, what was childbirth like for you? 
 
Delphine Bowers  10:58 
It wasn't easy and pleasant, but it wasn't awful. I read Dr. Grantly Dick-Read's Childbirth 
Without Fear, was the, that was, was one of the early natural childbirth things and, couldn't get 
my doctor to have anything to do with it, of course. But I was not, I didn't have much anesthetic, 
very little. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  11:26 
Was Jack there with you?  
 
Page 6 of 12 
 
Delphine Bowers  11:28 
Oh, no. I think he would have fainted, he didn't want to. I would have loved to have had him 
with me, and the doctor didn't want him to, and he didn't want to, so that was that. And it wasn't, 
there was never a time of feeling honored or pampered or taken care of. It was very 
disappointing. I think I had an illusion that, that-- I mean, he did help with the baby, he did a lot 
of the cleaning and so forth. But I came home to a really dirty, disorganized house, and he wasn't 
dirty and disorganized. He just said, "Oh, I didn't even notice." And was, it was not, it was, it was 
not the things that you read about in the women's magazines, where they bring flowers to the 
hospital and all of that stuff. And, you know, he knew I needed naps, and he would do things like 
take the older children and leave me with the baby so I could have a nap. And like, he was good 
about those things, but there wasn't any, any tenderness, or any, any real support on any 
emotional level. Well, I mean, the marriage was over before it ever began. It was very sad, but it, 
it couldn't have happened. It couldn't have been, it was a marriage that couldn't have happened. 
Neither one of us was in, any way, able to be really intimate. And he was gay, he wanted 
children, but he really, except for perhaps the first month or two when we were engaged, he 
really didn't have any interest in women, not just in me, it was in women. And those were, that 
was the way the times were. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  13:28 
Were you emotionally intimate with him at all during your pre-- before you were engaged, 
during your friendship, at all?  
 
Delphine Bowers  13:35 
Well, I thought I was, but it was the kind of a thing where I was so angry with my parents that he 
would listen to me and and reinforce it that we both hated my parents. That was the the 
emotional intimacy, it was really sad. That, and of course, my parents were completely baffled 
by the whole thing. They didn't have any idea what I was upset about, never did understand that, 
which was their lack of emotional support and their, their belief that buying things for people 
was the way you showed them love and, you know, all those things. There were just all kinds of 
examples of their not knowing what I was talking about or what I wanted. And even if they had 
known, they couldn't have supplied it because my stepmother was from a set of very harsh, cold 
family and my father, I don't think the family was harsh and cold, but I think that, that by the 
time he came along, everybody was pretty worn down, 10 to 11 kids, and life was not easy in 
Bridgeport in the 1880s, 1890s. So, they, even if they had had it spelled out to them by someone 
who was very good at explaining things, they would have said, "That's ridiculous. That's absurd. 
What is she talking about? It doesn't make any sense." 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  15:21 
They wouldn't have had any, you're saying they wouldn't have understood at all? 
 
Delphine Bowers  15:27 
No. So when I would say, "I know you don't love me," they would say, "How can you say that?" 
Well, I know now that they did love me, but they had no, no glimmer of how to show love 
anyway, except buying people things. I went away to summer camp, and my mother, as a 
surprise for me, redecorated my room, but I had no input into that at all. I was, like eight, nine 
years old, and it was okay, but it wasn't mine. And that's the kind of thing where she would have 
Page 7 of 12 
 
said, I'm sure she did say, long and loud to all of her friends, "She doesn't appreciate it. I spent 
hours on it and a considerable sum of money, and she doesn't appreciate it. And it's just a lovely 
little room." Well, nobody asked me what I wanted. Tulips were not my thing. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  16:24 
During your marriage, did you have a friend where you did have an emotional intimacy with?  
 
Delphine Bowers  16:30 
No, people, unless you happen to have a next door neighbor whose husband is also an alcoholic. 
And I may have had that, but I didn't know it, because people were very private about those 
things. You don't, you, [?and I?] was afraid that if anyone found out, he would lose both his jobs 
because he was a school teacher and a church organist. And no, I didn't tell anybody anything. 
And it was one of the really, really sad things about the neighborhood, because there were 
women there that would have given me a lot of support if I told them what was going on. They 
had no idea what was going on.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  17:16 
And then you said there were a couple of women that did know, but yet they weren't friendly.  
 
Delphine Bowers  17:22 
No, they weren't friendly. They were women who didn't like me, and they're still pretty weird.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  17:33 
Oh, you still know them?  
 
Delphine Bowers  17:34 
Well, we all got together for lunch in August. And one woman, I just couldn't believe she's, she 
was the youngest in the neighborhood, so she's probably not quite 60. No, she's, yeah, I'd say 
she's 60, maybe 61 or 62. And she was talking about her reasons for wanting a, wanting a van. 
Or, you know, what do they call them? 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:16 
Like a minivan?  
 
Delphine Bowers  18:17 
Yeah, a minivan or something. And it was so that, boy, people would have to get out of her way. 
It's not like, "I have so much to haul," or, "I liked the visibility," it's, "I want to be the big one on 
the road. I want people to get out of my way for a change." I remember looking at her and 
saying, "Oh, charming." And everybody laughed. Said, "You haven't lost your sense of humor." I 
mean, that's, this is, this is, this is-- She's not [?mental?], she hasn't, she's very harsh in her view 
of life. And the other woman that, that I had friction with never asked about anybody else's 
children, not one word, and talked a lot about hers, several people noticed that. But here, Nancy 
had known all these people when they were little kids, but never said, "Well, what's Susie 
doing?" You know, and it was like, so they were people, they're people that hurt. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  19:27 
Page 8 of 12 
 
Yeah. 
 
Delphine Bowers  19:31 
And there's no wonder that they couldn't be supportive of me. They're still not supportive of 
anyone, and I expect that one woman gets a lot of support at home. She's married to kind of a 
milquetoast that she-- 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  19:49 
A what? 
 
Delphine Bowers  19:49 
A milque-- Oh, you're too young. There used to be a comic strip called Casper Milquetoast.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  19:56 
Milquetoast?  
 
Delphine Bowers  19:57 
Yes, and it was spelled M-I-L-Q-U-E-toast  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  20:00 
Oh. 
 
Delphine Bowers  20:01 
And he was, he was a milquetoast, he just did everything his wife said. Everything was, "Yes, 
dear."  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  20:12 
Oh. 
 
Delphine Bowers  20:12 
She was always bossing him and running him and criticizing him and yelling at him. So, they, 
the neighbor-- Getting together with those neighbors was very interesting. It was very sad too 
because the woman who came to town and everyone got together to see, most of the women 
knew because they kept up with her, but I didn't, two of us didn't know that she had terminal 
cancer. And she died in December, or at the end of November. It was wonderful to see her, she 
was one of these women who gives and gives and gives and never takes anything for herself. 
And I'm sure it killed her, because she never got mad, and, you know, that kind of stuff. And she 
was wonderful, but the neighbors all getting together were always all pretty much the same.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  21:08 
How did they find you? Had you kept in touch with any of them or did they just look you up? 
 
Delphine Bowers  21:14 
Well, I'm in the phonebook. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  21:15 
Page 9 of 12 
 
Yeah.  
 
Delphine Bowers  21:15 
And I've been here about 10 or 12 years, 10, 11 years, and, in this place. And we've had some 
get-togethers where we've all kind of kept in touch with each other. So, I wasn't hard to find. 
They, I've seen some of them since I moved here.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  21:43 
So how did you find this job with the National Opinion Research Center? 
 
Delphine Bowers  21:48 
Well, I, when the kids were little, someone-- I think we were living at Lakeshore apartments, 
which is a real slum, and still is a slum, I understand.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  22:00 
In Bellevue? 
 
Delphine Bowers  22:00 
No, this is down by Seward Park, down near Rainier Beach High school-- 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  22:01 
Was this before you moved to Bellevue? 
 
Delphine Bowers  22:10 
Yeah, this was in between Bainbridge Island and Bellevue. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  22:13 
Okay. 
 
Delphine Bowers  22:14 
And someone in the complex, apartment complex had taken on a job of doing some telephone 
interviewing. And it wasn't selling, it was just asking people, I think they had to go to their 
cupboards and find out how many cans of this and that they had. And they had more than they 
could do, so they asked me if I'd help them. I said, "Sure," it was great to do when the kids were 
napping or out playing. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  22:36 
Because you could just do it at home.  
 
Delphine Bowers  22:36 
Yeah, you did it at home. And so I did that.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  22:40 
And you got paid? 
 
Delphine Bowers  22:41 
Page 10 of 12 
 
I got paid. And so they sent me more work. And then one day they sent me some work, but they 
hadn't warned me they were going to. Usually, they called and said, "Can you do it?" And it was 
when I had a week that was just too busy to do it, and I sent it all back to them and said, "I can't 
do this. You need to let me know." And they never did again, but I liked doing that, it was fun. 
So, I looked up and found some market research people in the phonebook, and did some work 
for them. And then there was one study that I did that was really fun. It was in depth 
interviewing for, with teenagers, and it was, the interviews were going to be used for an article in 
Mademoiselle, you know, this kind of thing. And it was, oh, I had such a good time. And I said 
to one of my friends, "Boy, did I have fun doing that? Now that's what I really want to do. I'm 
not really interested in what they think about potato chips, or deodorant, or Cheerios, or 
whatever." I once was, do you know, there's a snack called Bugles that are little--  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  22:41 
Yeah.  
 
Delphine Bowers  23:21 
I did one of the early, you know, market things on that and, and we got to keep the leftovers. If 
we had too many boxes, they would let us keep those. And I can remember, my little boy was, 
Bill, was probably six, maybe in first grade, and he said, "Buggles." So, they've always been 
buggles in our family.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  24:05 
Are you permanently sick of them now or?  
 
Delphine Bowers  24:07 
No, I didn't, I never liked them very much, I'm not into those things very much. So she said, my 
friend Sally said, "Well, you know, I have a friend who is a supervisor, and I know they do, she 
does that kind of interviewing." So, I called her up and I said, "Sally says that you do social 
research." She said, "Yes." And I said, "Well, I think I want to, I want to do this kind of work." 
And so I just went over to her house and she talked to me, and then pretty soon I was working.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  24:39 
What about it did you like so much? 
 
Delphine Bowers  24:44 
It was real genuine contact with people, where nobody had to pretend, and where, ideally, I 
would present myself as someone who was safe, enough that they could talk to. And they were 
very interesting, very intimate surveys that we did. They were not, "What do you think about the 
Ding Dong?" And very well designed. I wish I had some of them, I'd show them to you, but I 
cleaned out my files and threw them all away years ago. Because I used to keep one [inaudible] 
of everything we did, and I had drawers and. And I think I was very, very hungry for real contact 
with people. And my stepmother had been so interested in appearances, so afraid that things, she 
wouldn't do things right. Jack was the same way, and it was, I craved reality. I craved the kind of 
contact with people that I'd had in prison camp, which was not based on who your mother was or 
something. 
 
Page 11 of 12 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  26:08 
What was it like to have this, this real contact with people and then leave? I mean, it wasn't a 
[?sustained?] relationship. 
 
Delphine Bowers  26:18 
No, it wasn't. Well, it, one of the major studies that I worked on was a long longitudinal study. 
So we interviewed people over time, so we go back to the same people again, and that was pretty 
neat. It was better than nothing. And of course, I didn't talk about myself at all. So, it wasn't that I 
got to talk about being married to an alcoholic or I was worried about my kids or anything. It 
would have been very inappropriate, but there was this feeling of reality about it, and Lake Hills 
was very much a Boeing [inaudible] group community, and pretty unreal. Good housekeeping 
ladies. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  27:12 
How had you afforded to move from Seward Park to Lake Hills? 
 
Delphine Bowers  27:18 
Well, Lake Hills was cheaper. Seward Park was pretty cheap because we were renting, but we 
wanted a-- We'd had a house on Bainbridge Island, and we were renting it. And we moved to 
town because it was only two bedrooms, and we were expecting a third child, and also the 
Seattle school district paid 1,000 dollars a year more than Bainbridge Island. But the major 
reason we moved, and of course, I didn't know that, was because living on Bainbridge Island 
interfered with Jack's drinking. Because he'd go to a tavern and people would recognize him as a 
school teacher in the tavern, but in the city, he could lose himself. And that was, I think, the 
major reason.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  28:04 
And then why did, why did you move to Bellevue then? 
 
Delphine Bowers  28:06 
Well, we want, I wanted a big old house on Capitol Hill, but they all needed new roofs, and new 
furnaces, and new, new piping, and new wiring. And so we couldn't afford that and we're not 
good do-it-yourselfers. Neither one of us could do that very easily, or do it at all, and so we got 
[?much more house than money?] by buying a tract home out there. It wasn't about being able to 
afford to live in Bellevue, that was cheap. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  28:45 
Did you miss the city? Did you miss the-- Well, I guess you got to go in for your research. 
 
Delphine Bowers  28:50 
Yeah, that was another thing. I'm very much of a city person because at the university, I pretty 
well stuck to the University District. And then we lived a year, we lived a few months on 
Brooklyn, and then we lived about a year in Ravenna, we moved around a lot in the beginning. It 
was trying the, trying the geographical cure for the bad marriage, and obviously it wasn't going 
to help. So when we got the house in Bellevue, we stayed there 20 years, 22 years. And yes, I 
missed the city and none of the women in the neighborhood were the least bit interested in the 
Page 12 of 12 
 
city. Didn't want to go into the city, didn't, were kind of afraid to go in by themselves, right? Tell 
them I was walking around in the Central District at night, they would just be horrified and say 
things like, "My husband would never let me do a thing like that." I probably said that last time I 
was talking to you, because it really stuck in my mind. And I'm really a city person, I didn't like 
the lack of diversity out there. I did like that the neighborhood was, was close and that we all 
could leave our doors open, the kids all came and went in all of our houses. There was always 
someone for everyone to play with, because there were so many children in the neighborhood. 
And just last month, Sally died, and a month after she died, her kids had a memorial for her up 
here. And everybody went and we saw, we saw her kids and some, and some of the other kids 
were there, and it was really nice to see the kids just standing around, talking, having the best 
time, just like they used to out the street when they were little. There were 32 children at the bus 
stop. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  30:53 
Wow. Baby boomer neighborhood. 
 
Delphine Bowers  30:59 
Baby boom-- [recording ends]. 
 