Transcript of interview with Donna Newsom by Claytee White, June 11, 2009

An Interview with Donna Newsom An Oral History Conducted by Claytee D. White The Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ©Heart to Heart Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2009 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV - University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editors: Barbara Tabach Transcribers: Kristin Hicks Interviewers and Project Assistants: Barbara Tabach and Claytee D. White The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of Harold L. Boyer Charitable Foundation. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader's understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Heart to Heart Oral History Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada Las Vegas iii Table of Contents Growing up in the south; relationship with father; education through high school; experiences in Macon Hospital School of Nursing; details of life after parents' divorce; memories of nursing training 1-15 First attempt at using anesthesia during surgery; graduation with RN degree at age 19; working as graduate nurse for one year; discussion of race relations in Macon, GA; psychiatric affiliation in Milledgeville; descriptions of insulin therapy, shock therapy, and physical care of psychiatric patients; further details of relationship with father; taking the train to Houston, TX; working at Hermann and Methodist Hospitals; memory of seeing Hedy Lamar in Methodist Hospital 16-25 Working days at Southwest Blood Bank; detailed memories of living in boarding house; accepting job as nurse at Girl Scout camp near Denver, CO; recalling roommate Helen and the help she offered; road trip with roommate to Hollywood, back through Las Vegas, and finally to camp in Colorado; living in tent; accompanying injured Girl Scout to Denver General Hospital; heading back to Houston 26-34 Meeting up with mentor (Helen) again; sponsored through teacher education in Austin, TX, at University of Texas; details on grades, classes, and support from Helen; last year of school work in Galveston; dorm and social life in Galveston; meeting future husband Sam, married at 24 with help from Helen; honeymoon in Colorado; comments on using Internet today and how Helen taught her to use library 35-42 Comments on birthdays, photographs, scanners, and being introduced to real estate by Helen, teaching at Charity Hospital in New Orleans; Sam's three year residency in ophthalmology at Ochsner; leaving nursing and beginning ten year career in real estate; differences in Louisiana laws compared to other states; investing in real estate in Las Vegas through Helen; reflections on Sam's Navy career; more discussion on real estate career, Sam s second stint in Navy, stationed in San Diego; attempt to live in Oregon and opinions on Oregon law; invited by Helen to come to Las Vegas 43-52 Details on working at Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital (now UMC); recalling shocking differences in medical practices compared to down south; memories of feeling absolutely safe in a Mafia-run city; comments on taking the train into Las Vegas and flying over the Grand Canyon; life today includes working for Salvation Army, attending OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) classes at UNLV, church work, and tutoring; mention of Liza Minnelli attending Paradise Elementary School, where OLLI classes are now held; mention of Liberace's compound on Swenson; contrasting Las Vegas and New Orleans; further details about OLLI 53.59 iv List of Illustrations Following Page: High school graduate, nursing school photos 20 Early 1950s visit to Las Vegas, early marriage 37 Donna as a young mother, wife, business and community member 49 v Preface Donna Newsom shares the history of her life in great detail, beginning with her childhood in Georgia and Florida. The family moved many times, following her father's work opportunities. Donna had a close relationship with her father and recalls the many daring adventures on which he took her. After graduating from high school, Donna earned a nursing degree at the Macon Hospital School of Nursing. She remembers dorm life, long hours, and the specific training nurses received in the late forties. Her career began at age 19 with a year of working at Macon Hospital as a graduate nurse, and then she made plans to leave the South. Donna's memories include moving to Houston, living in a boarding house, her first date, and working at Hermann Hospital and then Methodist Hospital. She then answered an ad to work at a Girl Scout camp in Colorado, and her roommate there became a mentor and one of her staunchest supporters. With help from her mentor, Donna went on to earn a teaching degree in Austin, Texas, met and married her husband Sam Newsom, and got involved in real estate. She relates the many experiences they had during Sam's Navy career, her teaching experience in New Orleans, and their eventual move to Las Vegas. Sam and Donna loved Las Vegas from the moment they moved here. She recalls many details of her employment at UMC, the differences in health care compared to down south, and the feeling of being safe no matter the time of day or night. Donna stays active in tutoring, the OLLI program at UNLV, and working for the Salvation Army women's auxiliary. She and Sam also get together with his golfing buddies and their wives for dinners in their various homes. vi ORAL HISTORY RESEARCH CENTER AT UNLV Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project Name of Narrator: Name of Interviewer: Use Agreement / nuftM A. (M7AE n \Nm We, the above named, give/to laic C4ral History Research CenLer of UNLV, the recorded intcrvicvv(s) initiated on k /// as an unrestricted gift, to be used lor such scholarly and educational purposes as sh;rll be determined, and transfer to the University ol Nevada Las Vegas, legal title and all literary property rights including copyright. This gilt docs not preclude the right of the interviewer, as a representative of UNLV, to use die recordings and related materials for scholarly pursuits. There will be no compensation for any interviews. lL/J* I Signature of Narrator ( Dale Library Special Collections 4505 Maryland Parkway, Box 457010, Las Vegas, Nevada 89154-7070 C7tm RQS-77T? It is June 11th, 2009, and I am in the home of Donna Newsom this morning in Las Vegas. How are you this morning, Donna? I'm just fine. It's a gorgeous day and I'm just enjoying it so much. So happy to meet you. This is wonderful. And this is Claytee White. So, Donna, tell me about where you grew up and what your family was like. Well, I grew up in the south. I've been out of the south for over 50 years. But, you know, when I'm talking people begin to smile and I know what they're thinking. They're thinking, oh, she has a southern accent. I've never tried to get rid of it, but I think just by being out of the deep south and hearing other people that maybe a little bit of the edge of it has gone away. And another reason I think so is because when I do go back to the south and I'm talking, they say you've lost your southern drawl. So they think I have. But people out here in the west recognize it. By the way, there's one word, one southern word that I cannot talk without. I use it all the time. It just says what it says easier and better than any other word and that's y'all. Y'all is what we say and I love it. And if I really want to emphasize that I say all of y'all. And that really does not leave anyone out. It gets everybody. But I spent most of my childhood in South Georgia and north Florida. They're very much alike, those areas there. My mother was a Georgian. She lived and grew up—was born, I mean, in South Georgia. And my father was born, of course, in north Florida and has many, many relatives there. So I'm just full of relatives on my father's side and I don't know all of them. I guess you might say my childhood was typical of the time and of the area that we were living in. I don't feel that I had advantages in school like -- well, of course, like modern children have, naturally. But with moving around so much - my father did construction work. And I used to say wherever the road went we went. And that was a lot of moving. Like every other man there we had a pickup truck. When it was time to move, well, everything was put in the back of the pickup truck and we all got in the front and we took off. What are your parents' names? 1 Bonnie is my mother's name and my father's name is Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde. I know it. I know it. And so, you know, nowadays when I tell that to people, they may not have heard of the original, the famous couple, you know. But in (my) younger days when I would tell people my parents' names, they really knew who Bonnie and Clyde were. My childhood was very interesting. We were always moving. I was born in 1932 during the Great Depression. We were living the same kind of life as other people there, which was just not having very many advantages. I remember one time we lived at an apartment house. It was called a garage apartment because it was right over a garage. We had the stairs going up to it on the outside rather than inside the building. Living there was really interesting. We were the garage apartment in the back area of a very big beautiful home in Bunnell, Florida. And the owner of the home was a pharmacist. He was the drugstore man. Of course, we called pharmacies drugstores in those days. And he was also serving as our doctor -- as everybody's doctor because if we had anything we would go down to the drugstore and ask Dr. Holden what to do for it. He was really giving us medical care and telling us what medicine was the very best to use. So that sort of stood out in my life. But I loved to play. I loved to play with the kids in the neighborhood. And I loved to get lost out there because, you know, being in a different time it was safe. If you were ever lost because you wandered too far away from home, all you had to do was just ask anybody to take you home or else show you how to get there. I remember one time in our garage apartment the doorbell rang and my mother answered. There was a very nice man standing there in front of the door and he said, I wonder if I could have a cup of coffee. And she said, yes, of course. So my mother gave him a cup of coffee. I've thought about that many times because he wasn't asking for food. He was just asking for a cup of coffee. And a lot of people were going around asking for things then because of the hard times. Did coffee curb your appetite? My mother drank one cup of coffee after another. She was a real coffee drinker. And she 2 instilled that in my sister and me. We both grew up loving coffee. Also my mother had to have it at just the right temperature. She liked it very hot and so I have still to this day preferred my coffee very hot. Sometimes I stand in front of the microwave and drink the coffee so that ~ Well now, the southern drink that I remember so well is iced tea. Tell me about that. Well, I think that when every southern family gets up—the mother, the wife getting up first, and one of the first things she does is to make tea and always to put sugar in it. It was always sweet tea. I didn't know that tea was any other way. I didn't really care too much for tea when I was a child. I was still enjoying the coffee so much. So I drank ever so little iced tea. And now as an adult I don't drink iced tea at all. Earlier you were telling me that the South is not your favorite place. Tell me about the southern culture. Okay. Having lived only in the south and only among southerners I did not know any other culture. I thought we were just like everybody else and everything we did was like everybody else. And it was much, much later when I left the south that I learned that there are variations. People can be very different and that was interesting to me. But growing up in the south there was a very certain culture there. It was, of course, unwritten, but it was very strict. There were certain things that you did do and certain things that you did not do. For instance, when my mother got on the city bus on Sunday, she would never dream of getting on the bus without her white gloves on. So she wore white gloves always on Sunday. My mother seemed to just love everything about where she lived. She enjoyed cooking southern food. And being so poor my mother knew how to stretch a dollar. I have never seen anybody that could be so wise when it came to economizing. Those values were instilled in me. And still to this day I find myself just thinking how I can get a little more use out of something or how I can make something last a little bit longer. And I'm really happy to have those characteristics. My father was a person that just enjoyed doing fun things, enjoyed doing daring things. He had many brothers and sisters and they all were kind of a bit like roughnecks. And my father, wanting me to be a boy because he already had a girl, would put me on 3 horses, saddles on horses when I was very young. Now it seems very scary. But then because my father did it and I loved him so much and everything he did, I thought it was fun and I thought it would be okay. So my father's hometown in north Florida was Bunnell in Flagler County. And we were eight miles from Flagler Beach. We were eight miles inland in the town of Bunnell. So sometimes my father would saddle up horses and he and I — and here I am very young, like five years old, six years old ~ I would get on my horse and he would be on his. We would ride the horses all the way to the beach. Then we would play in the sand there on the beach for a while and then eat something from somewhere and then head back home. But he warned me about something. And it was true. He warned me that the horses are tired, they've been out, they've had a long walk, and they're heading home now and they're in a hurry. So the horse you are on, Donna, was once a racehorse. He's older now and he's no longer racing, but he still has the race blood in him. So don't ever let your horse get behind my horse, try to keep him walking even with my horse because the horse will want to just take off. He will want to be the lead horse all the time and you may not be able to hold him back. So just try to keep even with my horse. My father was always doing things with me that were scary. I loved him so much and I was having such a good time, but at the same time I was scared because I wasn't trained to do the things that he expected me to do. He was such a daredevil-type person. Both my mother and father owned motorcycles in their early life before my sister and I were born. And I had pictures of my mother and daddy each on their separate motorcycle. And, of course, it was the type motorcycle then that had the sidecar on it. So I'm glad I still have pictures of that. But my father would take me riding on the back of his motorcycle. And it was such fun and I wasn't too much afraid of that. My father liked to drink beer. And some days he would drink too much beer and he would be a little careless. He would talk very loud and shout. And I knew he was drinking too much. And my mother would call me in the apartment and tell me I had to stay inside. And years later I realized it was because of my father drinking too much. But one time he was driving a pickup truck and he asked me if I could climb up on the 4 cab, up on top of the cab. Well, anything my father asked me to do I thought would be fun. And so it was scary. I got up there and of course he stopped the truck. I climbed up and sat on top of the cab and he started slowly driving the truck. I was so scared because every time he would turn, even though slowly, I had nothing to hold onto. And so he started, you know, making right and left turns. And I thought I'm really scared, but how could I tell him? So I got so very scared because I was kind of almost lying down on there because I realized being up there with nothing to hold onto I was safer lying down. So lying down with my head very close to the windshield I tapped on the window and said I want to get down. He said aren't you having fun? I said yes, but I want to get down; I have to go to the bathroom. I thought that would make him stop. And it did. It did, yes. And then after that I told him I didn't want to ride in the truck anymore. And he said okay. That was fine. But my sister, who was about four and a half years older, did not enjoy these things. And her name? Betty. Betty enjoyed being around Mother and doing much quieter things. She liked to play with paper dolls. While she was doing those things with Mother, I was always out doing something with Daddy because I was the only boy he may ever have and I was supposed to be the boy. It was fun. And to this day I do have fond memories of that. But it was mostly scary. So where did you decide to go to school? Did Betty also go to college? No, Betty did not attend college. You mean where did I go to high school or to college? Tell me about high school and then about college. Okay. My parents divorced. It was because of my father's drinking. And he was drinking more and more. Of course, my mother had to protect me and had to keep me off of the cab of trucks and off of racehorses. So my mother moved back to her home state of Georgia. But this time we moved to a city in central Georgia, which is Macon. We moved to Macon, Georgia. Although that was not a city my mother had lived in before, we moved there because my sister had finished high school in Statesboro and decided to go into nursing school. And she would have gone into nursing school in Savannah because that was so close, but there was not an opening there. There was not a vacancy in Savannah. So we moved to 5 Macon. My sister was able to get in nursing school in Macon, the Macon Hospital School of Nursing. At that time it was a three-year program and when you finished you got a certificate. You became an RN and you didn't have any college courses along with it. However, my sister's class did have a program, which allowed the students to go to another town in Georgia for three years and get some of their courses there, their early courses. My sister got to do that. That was Milledgeville, Georgia. And Milledgeville at one time had been the capital of Georgia before Atlanta. That was a long time ago. My sister did take classes there for three months and then she was back at the Macon Hospital. Betty was in the last class of cadet nurses because World War II had just ended. And so she was in that last class, which meant that if there was another conflict or another big war my sister would be in the Cadet Nursing Corps and would have to go. But my sister enjoyed being a student nurse. She had worked hard. And when she got out of nursing school, she worked for a doctor in downtown Macon. He was a well-known ear, nose and throat doctor, Dr. Barton. And he has passed on now, of course. But right across the hall on the same floor as Dr. Barton's office was an insurance company. So my sister would be waiting on the elevator there where also people from the insurance company office would be. And that's how my sister met her future husband. He was working in his father's insurance company. And, of course, Betty was working for Dr. Barton as an office nurse. So Betty only worked a year and then she was married and became a homemaker and was very happy. And they have four children today. When it was time for me to go to high school, I went to a very different type of high school than my sister had. Macon, Georgia did not have the boys and girls going to school together. I went to a very large senior high school for girls. And then far across town was the senior high school for boys. I don't know really why that was that they separated them. But because of the culture I felt like it had something to do with that. I feel like that the culture wanted to protect young ladies and did not want the young ladies to get into any situation that would not be appropriate and to have high school boys and girls together things might happen. So that was their way of just having the two different schools. 6 When I first started there, I was more than a year ahead of myself because of all the moving that we had done in small towns in Florida and Georgia and even out in Houston. The construction work had carried my father as far as Houston. So I had to change schools probably as much as seven times in elementary school, but not once a year. Sometimes I would change schools maybe two times in one year. So I went to about seven elementary schools. And when I went to junior high, we were on the road a lot and I was really in only one grade in junior high. So when I got to Macon and went to Miller High School, it was a huge school. I don't know how many, but there were hundreds of us because Macon was a bigger city than Statesboro. And I was approximately two years — I was put in a grade two years ahead of the grade I should have been in. I was 13 years old. I should have been in junior high school. But they looked at the records and the principal of Miller High School, the senior high school, said no, this is where you belong. And I knew I didn't because I was 13 and the youngest student there was 15. So I was in a difficult situation. Of course, because of the culture I could not push the issue nor could I even question it. I do not have fond memories of the three years I spent at Miller High School. The work was unbelievably hard for me. All I did was study, study, study. We were very, very poor. Of course, the divorce had occurred just a few years before I entered Miller High School. My mother had taken a job as a saleslady in downtown Macon. And my sister was married. So it was just my mother and me. And we lived in a very, very small, almost inadequate two rooms. We had two rooms. We had a bedroom, one bed. My mother and I slept together. Then we had a little galley of a kitchen, very small. We were on the second floor of this private home. The (owner) had rented out the bottom and they had rented another part of the second floor. The family that was on the second floor across from us had five children and we shared a bath with that family. So I have known some pretty hard times. But, yet, my mother provided. She provided the things that we needed. There was nothing that we had that wasn't a necessity. I didn't have the advantage of going to church when I was growing up even though I was in an area where going to church was very, very important. The Baptist Church was probably the most dominant church there. But Sunday was my mother's day off. And that's 7 when she had to do an awful lot of work washing and ironing and shopping. We had no transportation. So another thing that was so much the culture there was little girls had to have black patent leather shoes to wear to church. I didn't have that. I had only one pair of shoes and they were brown oxfords. They were perfect for school but not for going to church, and I didn t want to be embarrassed with that. So I didn't grow up in the church. But later on when I was 17 my mother and I went to a revival in Macon given by Billy Graham. I never heard of Billy Graham. But I was so moved by that. My mother had been baptized in her early life in the Baptist Church. So that was the event I will always remember because Billy Graham really spoke to me that night. So it was the beginning of a religious life that would follow over the years. I telt very unfortunate not having been in high school where boys were because — I had no brothers — I did not get to know boys. I was not around them. I missed my father so much. Life was not fun for me. Miller High School was the most difficult time of my life in many ways. Being two years ahead of myself, being extremely immature, being very poor put me in a position to really not have anything that I would have loved to have had as a teenage girl. I went all the way through three years of senior high school without even being around boys. And I knew that some of the girls at Miller who were far better off than I was, they drove cars, some of them. Of course, many rode the bus. They drove cars and they were meeting boys; maybe at church or at other places. But I knew that they did date boys. And I knew that there was no hope of me ever dating a boy. I was embarrassed every day I went to school. I was embarrassed for the way I looked. There was one picture made. And when I saw that picture I burst into tears. I did a lot of crying those years because I was basically rejected in high school and it was very painful. And I missed my father. My mother worked hard and did the best she could, but I spent a lot of time alone. I had to ride the bus, the city bus, to school. We didn't really have enough money for me to ride the bus every day. So what I did, and my mother did not ask me to do this, but I realized myself that this is really making a big dent in our food budget if I have to ride the bus because my mother had to ride the bus to work and back home. So I thought of what can I do 8 to help? I had no time to really baby-sit and people might not have asked me anyway. I decided to walk down into what we called then the Negro quarters. I walked down there with a box, a cardboard box of clothes that had been given to me during the week when I would get off the bus coming home from school before I went in our little apartment. I wasn't interested in going in any sooner than necessary. I would walk several blocks, where the houses were nicer, and I would ring the doorbells and ask the people if they had any old clothes that they wanted to get rid of. I collected a good bit of clothes. And some of them would even say, well, not right now, I'll have to get them, but come back in a few days. I always said I would, which I did. So I collected these clothes in a cardboard box that I carried with me. Then on Saturday mornings I walked — it was the longest hike you can imagine — I walked into the Negro quarters. And they were many times sitting on their front porch or what we called then the front stoop, which was kind of a front step there. I would holler clothes, children's clothes, men's clothes, women's clothes, cheap. And some would motion me over. So I would go over there and just let them dig through the box. That was fine. And I picked up nickels and dimes and a quarter or two that way. And that was the money that I used to ride the bus. Where did you get that idea? It came from - not the idea. But my mother had a way of living with every problem and resolving it and not complaining about it. My mother, who had so little, was one of the happiest people I've ever known. At one time I said to her, momma, nobody ever comes to our house, to the apartment. She says no, they don't, and I'm glad they don't because I'm too busy anyway. And she was always cleaning something that wasn't even painted, like the windowsills. Maybe a windowpane would not have ever been in the apartment. But my mother created a way to patch the area. She was always coping with and dealing with ways to get by. But she was so happy about it. She was always humming a song or just saying, oh, now look at this, Donna, what I did here. And I was always so impressed with her particular style of creativity. But when I would stand on the comer to catch the bus to go to school, we were at an intersection and there was a traffic light. When the traffic light was on red and the cars 9 stopped, I looked around and I looked at the car. I looked inside the car. And I saw my classmates one time after another. They saw me standing there, but they never caught my eye. They had stopped for the red light. Sometimes there would be two sitting in the front seat and they would be laughing and enjoying themselves and driving a big beautiful car. And Macon, Georgia had the strongest caste system I have ever heard of since then. In other words, you are top of the class or you are much lower. And this was instilled in me, the pain of rejection, because in the small towns I had lived in — my father's hometown, small, little Bunnell, Florida and my mother's hometown, small, little Statesboro — were so friendly, so nice. Of course, I had families in each one of those towns, but everybody else was nice and friendly. I did not know what I had done when I got to Macon. I was 13. I didn't know what I had done for people not to speak to me. At first I really thought that these classmates that I recognized in the car should ask me to ride. But they didn't. And I got used to it and lived with it. But something that was kind of funny to me was I think the one who drove the most beautiful car, who was the most beautiful lady of all my classmates at Miller, in Spanish class sat in the seat right in front of me. And, now, her name was Beverley. Beverley did not speak to me because I was, you know, so much lower class-wise than Beverley was. But when we would have a pop quiz, Beverley never had a piece of notebook paper. The teacher always said get out a sheet of paper. That was the way she told us you're going to have a pop quiz. So Beverley, the lady who did not look at me, although she knew I was standing there waiting on the bus, did not turn her body around to face me, but she reached her left arm back of her. I didn't know what she was doing. And so she had to turn sideways enough just to tell me what she wanted. She never faced me. She said paper. I said oh, oh, sure. So I gave her a piece of paper to take the pop quiz. But the funny part about it, the strange part about it was that wasn't a one-time thing. That happened every time we had a pop quiz. She just put her arm back on top of my desk and I knew then. So I immediately gave her a piece of paper. How did that make you feel? But the irony of that ~ you know, life is crazy. Life is very crazy. And culture has ~ ever since my childhood in my adult life culture has always been so amazing to me. I love it so 10 much. I wish I could have gone to college and majored in sociology. I would have loved it. But I graduated. I passed every course. I know I studied more than anybody else. There was one picture made that was the graduating class. We all stood together, and because I was the smallest, I was placed center front. When I look at that picture, all I can do is break down and cry. Here is this little girl standing there with clothes on that are so small for me. I had worn them so many years. The hem was way above my knees. Every other girl standing on the front row had on a beautiful long ballerina skirt with ballerina shoes because that was the culture. That was what was in style at that time was ballerina shoes, no socks and a full long ballerina skirt. Here I stood with this print dress on, on the front row of that picture. And I never wanted to look at that picture again. I don't remember what I did with it. But I wouldn't be surprised if I had not torn it in pieces. I wish I could get rid of the memory, but I can't. It's everlasting. My high school was miserable. I did not like anything about it. I didn't like my life at that time. So when I finished high school, what was I going to do? What could I do? Get as far away from there as possible. Yes. Yes. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to run so far. But where? So at that time I felt - I remember the time my mother and sister and I, the three of us, got together to decide what am I going to do now I've finished high school? And you were only 16. Yes,