Legacies Project Oral History: Nancy Wheeler

Mon, 08/29/2022 - 12:12pm

When: 2022

Transcript

[00:00:10] INTERVIEWER: Directly. Then each videotape. How many minutes on?
[00:00:19] Nancy Wheeler: It's about an hour or so.
[00:00:21] INTERVIEWER: About an hour or so, but there's no tape. That we have to turn off cell phones. Silence everything. Is everything silenced? Great. Then we can call break at anytime if need to. I'm first going to ask you some simple demographic questions. While these questions may jog some memories, we're going to try to keep the answers brief and to the point for now. We can always elaborate later in the interview. Please say and spell your name.
[00:01:14] Nancy Wheeler: Nancy Cornelia Wheeler. Do I have spell my whole middle name? [LAUGHTER] I could do it. Nancy, N-A-N-C-Y. Cornelia, C-O-R-N-E-L-I-A, Wheeler, W-H-E-E-L-E-R.
[00:01:35] INTERVIEWER: What is your birth date including the year?
[00:01:40] Nancy Wheeler: 10/4/44.
[00:01:41] INTERVIEWER: How would you describe your ethnic background?
[00:01:44] Nancy Wheeler: I consider myself an African-American.
[00:01:49] INTERVIEWER: What is your religious affiliation, if any?
[00:01:53] Nancy Wheeler: I don't have any right now. I spent many years as a Roman Catholic.
[00:02:01] INTERVIEWER: What is the highest level of formal education you have completed? Did you attend any additional school or formal career training beyond what you completed?
[00:02:09] Nancy Wheeler: Well, I finished high school, I finished college, I got a bachelor's degree, and then I went on to law school and I got a JD.
[00:02:22] INTERVIEWER: What is your marital status?
[00:02:24] Nancy Wheeler: I'm single.
[00:02:26] INTERVIEWER: How many children do you have?
[00:02:28] Nancy Wheeler: One.
[00:02:29] INTERVIEWER: How many siblings do you have?
[00:02:32] Nancy Wheeler: I have two right now.
[00:02:35] INTERVIEWER: What would you consider your primary occupation to have been?
[00:02:40] Nancy Wheeler: I was an attorney, and I became a judge, and you have to be sure any to be a judge.
[00:02:48] INTERVIEWER: At what age did you retire?
[00:02:53] Nancy Wheeler: I believe it was 69.
[00:03:00] INTERVIEWER: Now, we can begin the first part of our interview beginning with some of the things you can recall about your family history. We're beginning with family naming history. By this we mean any story about your last or family name or family traditions in selecting your first or middle names. Do you know any stories about your family name?
[00:03:20] Nancy Wheeler: Well, my mother has told me that I'm named after my great-great-grandmother. She was born a slave and she was freed. I remember that my mother said she sold crops that she grew after she was released from slavery. She was married and had 12 children. She had 16 children [LAUGHTER], and she was supposed to be very mean, but I hope my mother didn't name me that because she thought I was going to be mean, but that's where my first name came from. My second name came because my godmother wanted me to be named after her. Her name was Alice, and my mother didn't want any of her children to be named Alice. They settled on Cornelia. I don't know why [LAUGHTER], but I've grown to really like that name. Of course, my last name came through my father's family.
[00:04:48] INTERVIEWER: Are there any naming traditions in your family?
[00:04:52] Nancy Wheeler: Well, not really, but we all tend to pick up names from past history of our family.
[00:05:03] INTERVIEWER: Why did your ancestors leave to come to the United States?
[00:05:06] Nancy Wheeler: Pardon me?
[00:05:07] INTERVIEWER: Why did your ancestors leave to come to the United States?
[00:05:12] Nancy Wheeler: Because they were chained and brought over on boats, and they lived, they survived.
[00:05:22] INTERVIEWER: Do you know any stories about how your family first came to the United States where they first settled?
[00:05:31] Nancy Wheeler: I don't really have any idea. Like most African-American people, we don't know, but the history is that we come from Western Africa. My oldest sister just had an ancestry study done on herself [LAUGHTER]. I don't know why but she did. Her study came out that she has Cameroon in her background. I suppose that's where we originated. I have no real idea, but I knew before she had that study done that there were a lot of Scottish people in our background. I don't know where the Caucasian came from in my father's family. We always thought he had some American Indian in him, but I don't know. My mother's grand there. Her paternal grandfather was Scottish, and I don't know where everything comes from.
[00:07:00] INTERVIEWER: How did they make a living, either in the old country or in the United States?
[00:07:05] Nancy Wheeler: I don't know how they made a living in Africa. I do know that, and of course, they were slaves for, I don't know how many years, and then when they were free, they, as most slaves, they turn to working in the soil and farming. My great-grandfather was a minister. Of course, a lot of that developed during slavery because they picked up the Christian religion from their slave masters. As I understand that most of the slaves were prohibited from engaging in religious services, but others were allowed to. I have no idea how it was with my ancestors. I know nothing about my father's ancestors. My oldest sister is trying to do some genealogy studies. She says she has quite an intensive study that she's done on both families. I understand. I don't know how she did it [LAUGHTER], but I'll be happy to see it. I'm not really prepared to answer any more than that.
[00:08:44] INTERVIEWER: Describe any family migration once they arrived in the United States and they came to live in this area. We covered that a little bit, but-
[00:08:53] Nancy Wheeler: Yes. Well, my father was from St. Louis. I don't know how in the world he got there [LAUGHTER]. He and his family got there. My mother was from South Carolina and I can't swear to this, but well, at least her grandmother and that family was from a plantation in South Carolina, not too far away from where she lived, where she was born, and lived the early part of her life. I'm not much help on that. I don't know of anybody who came from further South or further North, I just know South Carolina for my mom and St. Louis for my dad.
[00:09:49] INTERVIEWER: What possessions did they bring with them and why?
[00:09:53] Nancy Wheeler: You mean my ancestors? I don't know that they were allowed to bring any possessions with them. We certainly don't have anything that they may have tried to bring with them.
[00:10:13] INTERVIEWER: Which family members came along or stayed behind?
[00:10:18] Nancy Wheeler: I don't know.
[00:10:21] INTERVIEWER: To your knowledge, did they make an effort to preserve any traditions or customs from their country of origin?
[00:10:27] Nancy Wheeler: I don't know that either. I'm sorry. I know that generally slaves lost their African traditions over the passage of time. By the time they were emancipated, many of them had no memory of anything, but they retained the musical traditions and the beat. That goes on today.
[00:10:56] INTERVIEWER: Are there traditions that your family has given up or changed?
[00:11:01] Nancy Wheeler: I don't know.
[00:11:04] INTERVIEWER: Why did you leave to come up? What stories have come down to you about your parents and grandparents or more distant ancestors?
[00:11:16] Nancy Wheeler: Well, as I said, my great-great-grandmother was supposed to have been mean, but I'm sure she was very kind sometimes [LAUGHTER]
[00:11:37] Nancy Wheeler: They of course went through some real painful times because they were segregated. My parents went to desegregated schools and so did my grandparents and one of my great aunts, I'm trying to remember how she was related to me. But one of my great grandmother, Nancy's daughters, was one of the founders of a school in Georgia, I hadn't thought about this for a long time, which is, well, I have to come back to you with the name of it, but it's quite a famous black school in Georgia. I had found some letters from the women in that family. They were very courageous and very determined to get things done and to change the way that people were treated after they were relieved from slavery.
[00:13:03] INTERVIEWER: Do you know any courtship stories, how your parents or grandparents or other relatives came to meet?
[00:13:14] Nancy Wheeler: I can only tell you about my parents. My dad was a very good student in St. Louis. He was convinced by one of his neighbors to go to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania because that's where the neighbor went to school, another black university. He went there. I believe that he got a scholarship. That's in Pennsylvania. He went there. This is around the question, I guess. Then he went to Iowa State for a master's degree. I don't know why he went there. [LAUGHTER] That's not too far from St. Louis. Then he taught at Howard University, another originally black school, and he taught there. No, that was later. After he left Iowa State, he went to the University of Michigan. That was in 1936 and he went to get another master's degree. My mother had finished college. She had taught school for a year or two. Then one of her older sisters died and she left an insurance policy to my mother and my mother decided that she was going to use that insurance policy to come North and go to public health school. They were both at the University of Michigan at the same time and they met and they fell in love, I guess. Neither one of them has ever said that they fell in love with the other one, but that's civically them. My mother tells me a story about how they went out on a date when they were in college and they finally got little one knee, [inaudible 00:15:57] on the date. He was heading towards her to give her a kiss and he fell off the porch because he missed her. That's the only story I know about their courtship. That was a long story to tell you to get to that story, but that's how it happened.
[00:16:21] INTERVIEWER: Thank you. This interview is also about your childhood and how you began attending school. Even if these questions jog memories about other times in your life, just try to respond with memories from this early part of your life. Where did you grow up and what are your strongest memories of that place?
[00:16:48] Nancy Wheeler: Well, I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, unlike the rest of my sisters. Once again, I don't know how true the story is. My parents joked around an awful lot. But my dad didn't have a car at that time that he rode his bicycle back and forth to the university. My mother called him and said she was ready to go to the hospital. They claim that she rode on the front of the bike and he took her to the hospital to deliver me. I have no idea about this story. We were living on Brown Street in Ann Arbor at that time. Brown is down behind the stadium, it meets with Hoover and green. That felt a little pocket of an area where African-American people were allowed to live in Ann Arbor. We were living there and we lived there for about a year. I have no memory of that, but my sisters tell many stories about things that happened there, such as one of them pushing me out in the street and my baby buggy and a car coming. [NOISE] My mother running out of the house and tried to grab me. But fortunately, the car stopped and parking cars that went to the University of Michigan football games. I don't remember anything about Brown Street because I was just a year-old. Then my family decided to move to Eighth Street, which is right in front of Slauson school or right in back of it or right outside of it, however you describe the front of Slauson Junior High School. I guess it's called Middle School now. They bought a house right at the bottom of two hills on Eighth Street. It was in a completely white neighborhood. The only reason that they were able to buy it because of course at that time, no, we'll get back to that. I guess I'm veering off track. They moved to Eighth Street and gradually I began to remember things as I got a little older. I had a lot of friends because the kids on Eighth Street were mostly acceptable. I remember one guy who spit on my oldest sister. But other than that, the kids were very friendly. At least those that came to play with, that may have been others who were hanging out. But I remember having two especially good friend. Well, they were just a lot of childhood things that happened. There were two brothers who lived up the street from me who just got into everything. They took me into the way of the Slauson School. They no longer have swings and teeter-totter there, I don't think, but they had them there then. Back where they were behind them, there was a whole woods, and we used to call it the Indian trails. We would start at the beginning of it was about a quarter mile or a little more. We'd started at the beginning of it and we tramped through all these woods and trees and vines and we found a couple of arrowheads, and that's why we started calling that the Indian trails. These two brothers took me back there and somebody had a play house back there. These brothers said constantly, go into this play house and they had limited to around that and taken things from that. They took me there one day and they were undressing themselves and they said, why don't you get undressed. I said no way. My mother told me never get undressed. I left. In later years, I got a call from the oldest brother and he was in Maxey Training School.
[00:22:30] Nancy Wheeler: I also remember I had a very happy childhood. I also remember that my little girlfriend and I, I don't know what got into us, but there were two parks on that street. There was a Slawson school playground which was right next to us and then right across the street from us, this what is now known as Waterworks Park. It may have always been known as waterworks park, but it didn't have any name then. It has got a sign on it now. We used to play in both of those parks. One day we were playing in one of the park and Marty and I, I don't know why we did it, but there was a woman who lived right next to the Waterworks Park and she had beautiful tulips in their backyard. We went and cut all of her tulips, and she came out of the back door. She was an older woman and she was very angry. She said, Nancy Wheeler, Marty Woodruff, I'm going to call your parents. I mean, that was the worst thing that could happen to you in those days. You fear your get contacted about your behavior. We ran away and that night I broke down in tears and told my mother how we took these tulips. My mother was a great gardener and she loved flowers and vegetables, and she told me about that and the way that people feel when you take away their growth products. I guess Marty's mother and father talked to her the same way. [LAUGHTER] We crept back the next day and apologized to Mrs. Schindler? I don't know. It was a very German neighborhood. It had been settled by Germans, and right next to us lived two single women who were sisters. They lived on the bottom floor of their house and they always rented out the top floor. They were both very, very short. They were not dwarfs, but they were very, very short. One of them was about like this and the other one was about like that. Well, maybe that's a little exaggerated. The younger one was named Ms. Id. Well she was named Ida. We called her Ms. Id, and her older sister was Lucy. So we call them little Id and big Lucy. Not to their faces, but that's the way we referred to them. I remember my mother trying to make friends with Ms. Id because she stayed home and took care of the house and Ms. Lucy went out to work. She said, I went out to talk to Ms. Ida today, and I started talking to her and she backed up all the way to the school driveway to get away from me. Then eventually, they became friendly. Years later, my dad ran for mayor and we were trying to get out every vote we could. Ida had died and big Lucy was left alone. We picked her up to take her to the polls, and of course, she voted Republican so that was a useless vote. But the entire neighborhood was stiff, and my father was very concerned about that, I understand. When we moved into the house, he sent us all back to South Carolina with my mother to be safe in South Carolina of all things. He stayed there at the house in Ann Arbor to just watch what happened. [NOISE]
[00:27:36] INTERVIEWER: Could you stop for a minute? How did your family come to live in Ann Arbor?
[00:27:52] Nancy Wheeler: My father got a job in Ann Arbor. They had been here before, as I told you, to go to graduate school. Then he went to Howard to teach in the medical school there, and my mother lived in South Carolina because they decided it was too expensive for him to have an apartment with two of them, I guess. But I think that she was really weaning herself off of South Carolina. She had lived there and she had a very happy and close family. She went back there after their first daughter was born. Mary is my oldest sister, and she had two cousins at that time. They were both boys and the three of them just played. They have pictures of the three cousins all the time playing and having a good time and imitating turkeys, and walking with the chickens, [LAUGHTER] doing all sorts of things on my grandmother's farm. Then Mary was, well, I guess she was about two years. Well, it doesn't make any difference about that.
[00:29:34] Nancy Wheeler: My mother and father, I don't know how often they got together. It seems like every time they got together, my mother got pregnant. But she was pregnant and she had a midwife because of course, it was very difficult to get healthcare in the South for Black people, but her midwife was really a registered nurse. I remember her telling me a story about this nurse going to court to testify about something, and the judge said bring the midwife up, and she said, "I am not a midwife, I am a registered nurse." He said, "Well, I don't care what you are, come on up," and she came up and they kept referring to her as aunt Jenny, and she said, "I am not Aunt Jenny, I am this Tread Lao." I'll never forget that story, it just impressed me so much. First, the activity of the way that judge treated her and the way she responded, and she told me at lunch. But Black women were pretty safe in the South. They could say things that Black men could not, and I'm off the subject, excuse me. She had twins from that pregnancy and that was my sister Alma and her twin Lucille, who was named after my mother's sister who had given her the life insurance, and they were about two years old, and my mother went downtown or somewhere, and she left the children in the care of her sister-in-law, whom she loved dearly till the day she died. Somehow Lucille got away from her and she set herself on fire, and when she found her, she couldn't call an ambulance because they had no Black ambulances. She called the Black funeral home and they took a long time to get there. The child died on the way to the hospital and flipped the story of Bessie Smith, but she's not in my family. My sister Alma she was moved by that relatively long time, and it wasn't until I was born that she really came back to life, and she felt like she had a twin back, I guess. Well, I didn't look anything like or I'm sure, but, she has always been my guardian. Even in our old age, she's still my protector, so my father stayed at Howard for a while. He came down of course, because of the baby's death, and then he came back about two or three months later and he said to my mother, whose name was Emma, "I've got a job in Michigan. It sounds very interesting. Let's go." He came back and he found her with S offended around her neck. You know what that is? It's a charm, it's an herb, and people put it in a little bag and they hang out on a chain and put it around their neck. That's supposed to keep the devil away somebody [LAUGHTER] germ and devil and whatever you want to keep away, it keeps it away, and he said, "What is that thing that you're wearing?" This is all from my mother and father telling me this I knew nothing about this, of course, because I wasn't even born. She told him and he said, "I'm going to Ann Arbor. If you want to come, pack your bag and let's go. Otherwise, I'm going without you," and she said to me, "I never move so fast in my whole life," and she packed her bag and she grabbed her kids and they came to Ann Arbor, and that was in 1943, I guess.
[00:35:17] INTERVIEWER: What was your house like?
[00:35:20] Nancy Wheeler: The house on Eighth Street? The house on Eighth Street is still stands and it's quite beautiful. I always thought it's just an ordinary [LAUGHTER] house I guess. But the man who built it lived in that house, so he put some extra touches on it, and it's got a basement, attic and two stories in between and the first floor had a bay window that was in what we call the dining room, and it looks out on the Slawson school park, what a beautiful site. We could see everybody playing field hockey and all the stuff they played, and it's got beams in the ceiling. It just has a plain ceiling, a flat screen, but he's got wooden beams across, it`s got beautiful woodwork in it, and it has a glass break front at the wood break front at the back of the dining room. But it has a China cabinet on both sides of the break front and many drawers and cabinets underneath that and a beautiful leaded glass window in the middle of it. The living room is just a ordinary living room accepted left front of it. As you enter it, it's got a big arch way to enter it, and it has, well, they're not pillars, but there two wooden columns with a space in between, and there's one on each side of this archway. As sound an archway with campus that's a flat top archway and there's word work all over this house. [LAUGHTER]
[00:37:53] Nancy Wheeler: Then it's got wooden steps going up to the second floor and a beautiful wooden door. The kitchen is an ordinary kitchen. I remember it had wooden cabinets when we moved into it. Probably the first memory I have of 8th Street is that I came into the kitchen one afternoon, and I hit my head against a square root off panel in the kitchen. My father came home later, and of course I had to tell everybody about my injury. I hurt my head. [LAUGHTER] I told my sisters, and I told my mother, I told everybody. My father came home, and he said, what hit you? I said the corner of that cabinet, and he said, well, I'm going to take care of that. He went to the garage and got a saw and sawed it off. The corner stayed sawed off for many years. We kept that cabinet in the garage when we changed the kitchen. Everybody laughs about that in my family. But I was so pleased that all the pain went away. The rest of my house, the upstairs had three bedrooms. My parent's bedroom had a big window in the front of it. We all had closets, and in years later, my parents converted the attic into a bedroom for the three of us girls, and then they fixed up the basement until the Allen Creek drains started making water come into it. But last year my sister was in this legacy program, and it turned out that a man who used to live in the house on 8th Street was also in it. They met, and they started talking about the house. All of us came to the house which my nephew owns now, and we met there, and we talked about everything that we remembered happening. He said, I lived there before Slawson school was built. There used to be a body of water that ran right by this house. That was the famous Allen Creek drain. There was no school, and there was no park. [LAUGHTER] He said it was so much fun. I can remember my mother sailing down this waterway. Then she'd sit out on the edge of it and look at it, and it was really very fascinating to talk to that man.
[00:41:09] INTERVIEWER: How many people lived in the house with you when you were growing up, and what was their relationship to you?
[00:41:15] Nancy Wheeler: My two sisters and my two parents and I lived in the house, and we always had an animal, a pet. As we got older, my mother used to let people without homes stay there for a period of time. But we were the five people who were principally the residents.
[00:41:49] INTERVIEWER: What languages were spoken in or around your household?
[00:41:58] Nancy Wheeler: English of various types. My mother had kind of a Southern accent about some words. She pronounced orange, and she is the mother of pronunciations that we used to make fun of all the time, which she didn't appreciate, but she kept that accent for many years. I think for all of her life. Other than that, there were no other languages spoken there until I went to the university and took a Spanish class. I just love Spanish, so I would speak Spanish to everybody. My father spoke German because he got a PhD, and he had this fluent in three languages to get a PhD, at least in the old days. I don't know how it is now. He spoke German and French and English. But he didn't ever say anything to us except [FOREIGN], which means come to me right now. We always did. We ran very fast. My sister took French and she would speak a little French. Those were the only languages that were spoken there. I think after my oldest sister got married and left home, was when my both of my parents started having graduate students from foreign countries living in the home. They had three of them every year, for three years, and then they went off to something else. But they had a woman from China, a woman from Japan, and a man from Venezuela. We all tried to speak those languages, but not with much luck with the Chinese and the Japanese. English was the primary language.
[00:44:42] INTERVIEWER: Were different languages spoken in different settings, such as at home, in the neighborhood or in local stores?
[00:44:51] Nancy Wheeler: There was a lot of German spoken by our neighbors. The neighborhood is quite diverse right now, but it used to be, as I said, a heavily German neighborhood. We had two neighbors who had been single women all their lives to my knowledge. But the other houses in that neighborhood were primarily occupied by widowed German women. They spoke the German language, but they also spoke English very well too. But of course, unless they said [FOREIGN], I didn't know what they were talking about. That's all that I remember. There was a Japanese family that lived across Lawson Park, and lived right on the fence, but fenced off the park. But they never spoke Japanese to us.
[00:46:11] INTERVIEWER: What was your family like when you were a child?
[00:46:14] Nancy Wheeler: It was very loving. The three of us were kept in order. We weren't wild kids, but we had a lot of fun, but we were very obedient to our parents, of course, until we get in junior high, and then we all went off doing something crazy, and then we come back to the family. But I remember it was very loving. My oldest sister would have taken both, my sister Mary and me everywhere she went when she went to college, when she went to the University of Michigan. But l was kind of a stick in the mud, didn't want to go. But I used to go everywhere with Mary when she was in college. She didn't mind taking me. I was, I think in the eighth grade when she started college, and she went a lot of places without me, but she was one of the founders of the SDS, which is the Students for Democratic Society. You'll not read that in any of the papers that talk about SDS because that was a man's [inaudible 00:47:52] They only talk about the men who develop that group. But she was one of the founders of it, and she was on the Student Government Council in the Human Relations Commission, and what else? I don't remember, but she was into everything. She'd take me to the conventions and conferences, and she and I were a better way.
[00:48:26] INTERVIEWER: We're going to stop the interview for now.
[00:48:33] Nancy Wheeler: Okay.
[00:48:34] INTERVIEWER: We are going to make a mark, so we can start where we left off.
[00:48:37] INTERVIEWER: Yes.
[00:48:38] INTERVIEWER: The bell is going to ring in like minute.
[00:48:40] Nancy Wheeler: Okay.
[00:48:45] INTERVIEWER: Did you go to kindergarten? Where and what do you remember about it?
[00:48:50] Nancy Wheeler: Went to kindergarten at BA school and in Ann Arbor of course. The only thing I remember about it is that we had the same kindergarten teacher that everybody in Ann Arbor had. Every time I say I went to kindergarten, somebody says, oh, did you add Mrs. Robinson? I said yes. I had Mrs. Robinson and she had a little dog that she brought with her to class every day.
[00:49:19] INTERVIEWER: Did you go to elementary school?
[00:49:21] Nancy Wheeler: Yes.
[00:49:22] INTERVIEWER: Where was that and what do you remember about it?
[00:49:24] Nancy Wheeler: I went to St. Thomas School here in Ann Arbor, and I remember that I enjoyed what I was a very good student and I liked most of my teachers. I was in that Catholic school at the time that there were still nuns or sisters teaching there. There were all sisters in the school at that time there were no lay teachers when I was in the elementary school.
[00:50:01] INTERVIEWER: Did you go to high school?
[00:50:02] Nancy Wheeler: Yes.
[00:50:03] INTERVIEWER: Where was that and what do you remember about it?
[00:50:06] Nancy Wheeler: It was St. Thomas the same school that I went from first grade through 12th grade. I remember that I learned about picking up friends, making projects that were meaningful and I learned that while I went to that school, which was a middle-class school and it was just about all white that I have a life outside of that. That was much more [LAUGHTER] exciting. But I was still a student at the same time that I was in this other world with my parents and my sisters. That's a little hard to explain, but I've said some more about that in the other interviews.
[00:51:03] INTERVIEWER: Did you go to school or career training beyond high school?
[00:51:07] Nancy Wheeler: I went to the University of Michigan when I finished St. Thomas and I did well there. Although I did better in the beginning than I did at the later years because I decided to become social. [LAUGHTER] That make me do not so well in school. But I did okay. After that, I went into the United States Peace Corps and when I finished that, I came home and I did all kinds of things. My oldest sister was running for the school board in city where she lived and she needed someone to take care of her. At that time, she had two children and I went and lived there for a while with her. Then I came back home. While I was there, I decided that I wanted to go law school. All my life I had wanted to be a veterinarian because I always had animals and I loved them. Then as I grew up, I said there are a lot of problems in this country and I would like to help solve them. I decided that going to law school would be the best way for me to do that. I came down here to Ann Arbor and I took the LSAT law school aptitude test. I didn't think about it anymore. I came back and help my sister and then I came back home and I got a part-time job here in Ann Arbor. Then I realized that my LSAT scores were good. [LAUGHTER] I took them too and I applied to go to the law school. At that time, I had a little baby. He was six months old when I came back home. Nothing else but him right now. I tried to figure out where I wanted to go law school. Wayne has a night school, and I thought maybe I could do that. I knew that [inaudible 00:53:40] was a private school and I didn't want to go there because that was entirely too much money. I tried with the University of Michigan, I knew they were a day school, but the admissions director said that they would be very happy to have me and they would put me on a lesser schedule number of hours. I don't know why that was less service hours. It was 12 hours a semester. I went to the University of Michigan and then I worked part-time for a lawyer in Ann Arbor while I was going to law school. I finished law school. I finished a little early. There was a man who taught at the law school and my last seminar was with him. He was also on the school board in Ann Arbor. There was a riot at the school. They called it a riot, I will call it an uprising. Some of the kids got arrested and some of the, well, my good friend Shirley Beckley, who is also one of the people being interviewed in this session got arrested. She was working at the school. Well, I was working for this lawyer. A couple of cases came to her and I worked very hard on those cases. We ended up suing the school board. I remember serving the members of it and they serve this law professor. He remembered me when I came back to school. I never finished the seminar. Seminar was on education on the law and I never turned in a paper that I was supposed to turn in during the course so that's why I figured I'd have another semester to go with the university. Well, he loved me graduate. [LAUGHTER] He said you've learned enough about education on the law and he had a life to be able to go get a grade and this without actually doing the presenting your work to me. I graduated little bit early and that was the last school I went to.
[00:56:20] INTERVIEWER: What kinds of work that you do in the Peace Corps?
[00:56:22] Nancy Wheeler: I was in Peru and I was a nutritionist. I was an English teacher and I did something else. I've forgotten what else I did. Probably something that wasn't assigned to me, like making trouble. [LAUGHTER] They had a lot of workers just like here. They had field workers, but they were paid extremely low wages. They had no sanitation in their living borders. There was a friar in one of the monasteries who are, whatever they call the places where they don't call it the monasteries. But wherever friars live, who was a radical in his order, he was a definite radical. He and I met each other somewhere and we worked together and we got a few more people involved with us. We worked very hard to make some changes in those situations for the workers. We did a little bit, but not as much as I would like. That's what I did there.
[00:57:58] INTERVIEWER: Did you play any sports or engage in the other extracurricular activities?
[00:58:05] Nancy Wheeler: When I was in school, anywhere in school? Well, when I was in school, I went to kindergarten some time in the '50s, and then I went on from there. I graduated from high school in '62. It was before titled line was passed and people didn't consider women worth anything in sports. But I will say that our high school coach, and we [LAUGHTER] had one coach. He was the football coach and the athletic director and pretty soon they hired a new basketball coach then the wrestling coach. All these sports were for boys. Some of the girls were showing a lot of athletic prowess. He got interested in getting started and things that I was on the basketball team and the baseball team. But that was about all. In college, I was not any teams because they too were forced to have any women be allowed to play. But I was, if you can believe this, as short as I am, I was a coach for the Catholic youth organization in Detroit at the time, my first couple of years in college.
[00:59:44] INTERVIEWER: What about your school experience is different from school as you know it today?
[00:59:49] Nancy Wheeler: Well, they have a lot of different laws. There's an opportunity to have non-discrimination. There's much more advanced education and opportunity for women than there was when I was a student. The school I went to, I believe that women were very fairly treated in the educational part of the school, not in the sports part of school.
[01:00:34] Nancy Wheeler: At the University of Michigan, we always worked on discrimination wherever we were and there was a young woman from Detroit and I who worked a lot on local issues of discrimination. I remember that we gathered a lot of people together to stay here and work in the North, telling them that the problems in the North were just as severe for African-American people as they were in the South. Even though there was discrimination by law in the South, there were certainly discrimination de facto in the North. It was much harder to work with, but just something that Martin Luther King discovered when he came to try to change things in Chicago in the late '60s, just before he died. Well, shortly before he died. That was the kind thing I did.
[01:01:50] INTERVIEWER: Could you describe the popular music of this time? Describe one when you're younger.
[01:01:56] Nancy Wheeler: Well, I grew up in the age of Motown and I listened to that all the time, and I was a lover of rhythm and blues. I used to listen to a station in Tennessee and they came on at night. While I was doing my homework, we had this music playing [LAUGHTER] in the background. I liked all kinds of music, very little jazz. I wasn't fond of jazz, but I like that most.
[01:02:35] INTERVIEWER: Did the music have any particular dances associated with it?
[01:02:40] Nancy Wheeler: Oh, lots of them. There are so many names. I can't remember the names. I just can't remember all the name. There were so many dances.
[01:02:57] INTERVIEWER: What were the popular clothing or hairstyles at this time?
[01:03:06] Nancy Wheeler: Well, sometimes in the '50s, we wore longer dresses. Lower knee, halfway between our knee and our ankle. Then of course in the '60s, dresses and skirts were very short. That's when the mini skirt came in. But we weren't allowed to wear pants and shorts in school. I think that was even true in the public schools in those days, and wore a lot of saddle shoes and loafers. There were poodle skirts. They were made out of felt and they had little animals down at the bottom of them, and that's about the most that I can remember.
[01:04:15] INTERVIEWER: Can you describe any other fads or styles from this era?
[01:04:20] Nancy Wheeler: There was a hula hoop. You all probably have them still in your gym. But hula hoop was a big fad when I was growing up, and everybody was doing the hula hoop. My oldest sister was very good at it. I was not as good as she was, but let's see. They've all escaped my memory. But I remember that one in particular. Well, that's later in my life. I can't think of anything else right now off the top of my head.
[01:05:08] INTERVIEWER: Were there any slang terms or phrases or words use then that aren't really common today?
[01:05:22] Nancy Wheeler: I'll have to think about that, and talk to you about it later.
[01:05:28] INTERVIEWER: What was a typical day like for you in this time period?
[01:05:33] Nancy Wheeler: Well, in high school or college?
[01:05:39] INTERVIEWER: In high school.
[01:05:44] Nancy Wheeler: Well, at St. Thomas, you had to start school by going to mass every day. You're supposed to get there at eight o'clock in the morning and go to mass, and we always got there by 08:30, and so it was just about over and then we'd go to school. We were Catholic because after my sister's twin died, my mother was very broken up about it. Both of my parents were but my mother more obviously. She had been a Baptist all her life, but she was not satisfied with what she was getting at the Baptist church, and she met with a priest of the Catholic church, and she was comforted by that. She decided to join that church and she pulled my father along with her, who was not a church going person of any type. They were very good Catholics and they raised us as such. Later in life, all of us except my oldest sister fell away from the church. But that was a different story. That different question you asked me about a normal day. We'd start the day by going to mass late and then we will go to class and being kind of a dull day, but it wasn't really dull when it happened. It's just the dull, as I talk about it now. I went to class and then we have lunch break, which at the time I was in high-school. We took lunch in the cafeteria and then in later years they had just assumed gathering in the in the gymnasium or what used to be the gymnasium and then we go home. That was it. In college it was much less confined. We ran all over the campus to go to our various classes. We eat lunch on the grab, and then went home. I lived in my parents on the whole time I was going to college, because it was much cheaper for us. I didn't mind that, they were great people and I loved being there. That was all right.
[01:08:43] INTERVIEWER: What did you do for fun?
[01:08:47] Nancy Wheeler: Well, I had great friends. We did lot of things. We probably the same kinds of things that well, I have no idea, so I won't even say that. But we used to have sleepovers, and I remember in our junior year there were about six of us that stay overnight. I can't remember one girl's house on election night and it was the election between Kennedy and Nixon. We stayed up all night until 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning before the results came in. We stayed awake all night and then we slept all the afternoon. Even though we should've been in school that day, but we took it off. We went to football games, the basketball games. I just can't remember everything that we did. We did a lot of talking. I had a friend's mother who call this the intellectual elite, which we weren't. Maybe we were, she called us that anyway. Somehow I was elected as a class officer all four years that I was in high school, and I don't know quite how that happened, but it happened. I'd have class officer meetings.
[01:10:49] Nancy Wheeler: I was the head of the Press Club. We had a newspaper that we produced for the school. I was the editor of that in my senior year and I was a member of the staff all the years before that. In college. I had a lot of fun, but it was ad hoc. It wasn't planned or prepared for, it just happened.
[01:11:26] INTERVIEWER: Were there any special days, events or family traditions you remember from his time?
[01:11:31] Nancy Wheeler: No.
[01:11:38] INTERVIEWER: Were there any like historical events that were big in the news?
[01:11:44] Nancy Wheeler: Well, my second year in college, many people in Ann Arbor got together and had forgotten what to call it was a celebration. Mostly my parents, they called it for the wheel or family, but it was a recognition and they had a dinner for it. We all got together and celebrated at the union with the dinner and a little speech and people said what they wanted to say. I remember that very strongly. I'm having trouble remembering much that they have done then we didn't have any family reunions. We barely knew anybody in her father's family except the aunt who raised him. We knew his mother was alive, but we never really saw him. She had put him out of the house when he was five or six. He ran to live with his paternal grandmother. I really don't know how he knew her. But somehow he knew both sides of his family. His parents were never married. But somehow he knew both sides of his family and she ended up raising him. By she, I mean his aunt who was the daughter of his grandmother. I knew very little about his family. My mother's family was very close and she was very close to them. We spent a lot of time in the South, was with them until my oldest sister was 13, I believe. Then she said she wanted to stay home more. By that time, I think my mother was weaned off of South Carolina, so we didn't go down there anymore.
[01:14:13] INTERVIEWER: Did your family have any special sayings or expressions during this time?
[01:14:24] Nancy Wheeler: [LAUGHTER] Well, they're hard to explain. My father didn't laugh very much. He chuckled at things, but every now and then something would hit him. He would laugh and laugh and he wouldn't stop laughing. We always were afraid he was going to have a heart attack or something. It was usually about something that one of us said or did. It wasn't really funny to anybody else, but he found it so enjoyable and he would just keep laughing. Every now and then we repeat those things that caused him to laugh so much. Um, one day we were watching television, we girls loved to watch rawhide, which you may not know anything about, but we were watching the program and they interrupted it with advertisements, of course. The end of one section of the movie, they were waiting for somebody to come. They were waiting for a man called [inaudible 01:15:50] to come and join them. At the break they had this advertisement and somebody was going down the store, a store aisles looking for some particular oatmeal or something. They finally found it. Then somebody else was driving a car to get some place and they finally got there and then somebody else who's doing something else. My mother said everybody was jubilant a horse and it became a family saying. My sisters said it to me the other day and we couldn't stop laughing. But there were there were just things that we're family jokes that happened. Then we keep repeating them and now they're family sayings.
[01:16:43] INTERVIEWER: Were there any changes in your family life during your school years?
[01:16:46] Nancy Wheeler: No.
[01:16:48] INTERVIEWER: Were there any, okay. There are two minutes. To the bell? I guess. [inaudible 01:16:59] Yeah. We're not in the middle. That works. Okay. We're going to stop now.
[01:17:06] Nancy Wheeler: I couldn't hear anything from them [inaudible 01:17:08]
[01:17:10] INTERVIEWER: Which holidays did your family celebrate?
[01:17:14] Nancy Wheeler: We celebrated the usual ones. Fourth of July, Easter, Christmas, New Years. We didn't celebrate Halloween. We never went out and tricker treaters. We always greeted people at the door, but we we never did trick or treating. I don't know why that was, but I think it was because my parents were afraid about how we received when we went to people's houses .
[01:17:53] INTERVIEWER: How were holidays traditionally celebrated in your family.
[01:17:57] Nancy Wheeler: The usual way, eating [LAUGHTER] and giving presents. The usual way.
[01:18:06] INTERVIEWER: Has your family created its own traditions and celebrations?
[01:18:09] Nancy Wheeler: No.
[01:18:21] Nancy Wheeler: In later life, my three sisters and I have gotten together all of our children and any existing grandchildren. We've had at all family adventure, sports or educational or something for two weeks in the summer every other year. We all get together and we do that family reunion. It's a lot of fun. The first time we did it, we went, think of it zip lining. I went zip lining, [LAUGHTER] my sister Alma went zip lining, but I don't think my oldest sister went she may have, but I don't remember that she went, she was there though. The funny thing about men is that when they're young, they do all these exciting things and then when they grow up, they get all stiff and funny and they don't want to do it. So they all stood around and watched us, but the little boys did it, and the little girls too. We had a good time with that. This year we're planning to go to DC and go to the African-American Museum and just spend the day doing that. Then spending some time in a place where the kids can have fun. Then we're going to visit the two colleges in that area that my dad well, one he went to and one he taught at and we're going to go and visit those places.
[01:20:19] Interviewer: What special food traditions does your family have? Have any recipes been preserved and passed down?
[01:20:25] Nancy Wheeler: Yes. Once the three of us gathered and tried to write down all the recipes that our mother had told us that were special and that she had taught us when we were growing up, and also that she had tried to give us measurements for. She always cooked just by throwing spices in, and saying it looks right and she never gave us a measurement for whatever spices she used. So we had to learn what that was. She had one called corn pudding that we just loved and we still haven't quite figured out the measurements for it, but we're getting closer. Her potato salad is the most wonderful potato salad I've ever had in my life. She didn't love things special like that. Then we reach down some special things. One of my nieces have put it together into a family cookbook and we keep adding to it. So we do have that tradition.
[01:21:47] Interviewer: Are there family stories connected to the preparation of special foods?
[01:21:55] Nancy Wheeler: Yes, there are some about how it originated and how my mother fixed it differently from anybody else in her family. Now it's getting so, my older sister's youngest daughter, who is a very good cook and I have a squabble over a year about how you fix the best potato salad. [LAUGHTER] I say I fix it just like your grandma did. She says, no, I do. We have a squabble about that, but we do have some arguments, but not that many.
[01:22:39] Interviewer: When thinking back on your school years. What important social or historical events were taking place at that time, and how did they personally affect you and your family?
[01:22:51] Nancy Wheeler: Well, the Vietnam War was going on for part of it. It started directly with the United States when I was in college. When I was in college, all the motivations were against civil discrimination. Then as soon as I got out, they changed to the Vietnam War, and students and people my age then of course, were mostly against the war. Then gradually you could see them convincing their parents, convincing others, and pretty soon, much of the country was against the war. It ended in a very disastrous way for the United States. But it needed to end just like other wars need to end. But that one ended by force of civil persuasion. The other thing was that John Kennedy, of course, was assassinated in 1963 when I was in college. I remember walking home from school one day and I heard two kids on the sidewalk saying, one of them was saying, well, I didn't vote for him, but he shouldn't have been killed. I said I wonder what that is. I came home and my sister came out of the front door and she said, Kennedy has been killed. I remember that very plainly. Then we just sat in front of the TV for three days or four days, however long it took for all of us to close up. Then in 1968, again was my sister Mary. I had just come back from Peace Corps and she called home and said, I'm scared to stay home alone in the dark. [LAUGHTER] My husband has gone out of town for two weeks so until one of you comes down, I'm not doing anything. I went down there and she had just had a baby, it was a little boy. That's the first time we all learned about little boys just peeing straight up in the air over a meal. [LAUGHTER] That was not what I was talking about, but when I was down there, someone killed his brother, Robert Kennedy. Then, later on, Martin Luther King was assassinated. That was quite a year. Those were the most startling national things that went on, as I recall. When I was in high school, they sent the satellite to the moon.
[01:26:41] Nancy Wheeler: I can't remember anything else that happened when I visited my school, but they're most certainly have been.
[01:26:49] INTERVIEWER: This parkour is, it covers a relatively longer period of your life. It's from the time you completed your education, entered the labor force and started a family, until you retired from work. After you finished high school, where did you live?
[01:27:09] Nancy Wheeler: I lived on a street home.
[01:27:13] INTERVIEWER: How did you come to live there?
[01:27:17] Nancy Wheeler: Well, that's where my parents live. I told you all about how they bought the house before and we were still there.
[01:27:27] INTERVIEWER: Did you remain there or did you move around through your working adult life?
[01:27:32] Nancy Wheeler: I stayed there until I finished college and then I went into the Peace Corps. When I came back, I came back to that same house. But when I was in Peoria, after I came back from the Peace Corps, I became pregnant. I got married to this guy and we had a baby. I remember being a doctor coming to me and say, "How did pretty woman like you have this huge baby?" [LAUGHTER] I looked at him and I said, Well, he doesn't look so huge to me, but I wasn't really familiar with babies. I have been carried for my sister's kids and they were toddlers most of the time. There have been much bigger babies, but my son, he was just short of nine pounds but he was 23" long. If any of you who know anything about babies when he is now six foot four. I guess that means something. Then I left there and came back to my parent's home because he slapped me a couple of times for no good reason that I could think of and that I can remember. He slapped me once and I was so shocked, but I disobeyed my mother's order. She had told all three of her daughters that if a man ever slapped once he'll slap you twice anyway as well, get out when he slept through the first time. Well, I kept saying well, it's just one time, maybe just was not feeling well that day. He slapped me again and he picked up a knife out of the kitchen and he came after me and my dog, thank goodness. She was just about that high. She was a hairy thing. She was supposed to be part of German Shepherd and part Kali. But she wasn't, she was obviously Park Kelly, but I didn't see any German Shepherd enter. My sister, my oldest sister had given her to me as a wedding present. I sure needed her because she grows and barked and barked and came running towards him. He put the knife down and I took the dog and I went in the other room where the baby was sleeping. Then I decided I was going to go home that week. I did and I took my baby but I left the dog because I didn't tell him that I was not coming back and I was scared to death all the time I was gone. He was going to kill the dog. I talked to my dad and that was the first time I learned about his life. His mother was a prostitute and she had men in the house all the time. There was one night he said when there was a man in the house who got really angry with his mother. He had taken out of the knife, was going after her. My dad, who was five years old or six years old at the time, little kid, he had a little brother that was younger than he was. But he also grabbed a knife and jumped on the man's back and started threatening them only the man couldn't feel a thing. He was a lot bigger and stronger than my dad. But she hollered at my father and said, you get out of this house. I don't want you here. She put him out and he figured out how to get to his grandmother's house. She said and don't come back. He left and he didn't go there. When they were married, my mother said, well, we should send your mother's some money every month. He said, I'm not sending any money. I'm not doing anything that's here. Well, my mother was much kinder about and so she sent her money every month and she invited her to our house when my oldest sister got married. Other than that, I've only seen her once. One other time. I don't know how I got off on that, but what was the question again?
[01:32:55] INTERVIEWER: Did you move around?
[01:32:59] Nancy Wheeler: No. Well, that was irrelevant to that question, wasn't it? Well, I was telling you about what happened during my marriage and so I left. I took the baby and I left. I told my dad about what had happened to me and he told me about his life. But he took me back to Peoria where I was living. He and I packed up my stuff, got my dog, and went home. I sued this guy for divorce and Illinois. My brother-in-law's partner, represented me. He was a lawyer. I went through the trial and they ordered that a certain amount of child support be paid. I went to Jim, who was the lawyer who worked for me and I didn't go to him. I wrote him a letter and asked him if he would try to collect so much child support because I hadn't paid any. He started the case. I get $44 worth of child support and I paid Jim 90. Those were that was caused in those days [inaudible 01:34:24] to do that. I said, this is crazy. I'm not going to do this the rest of my life. Try to collect child support from this guy and pay more than I ever get back so, I let him go. I said, I made my own life and I knew my parents were willing to help me. They were willing to help all of us. I remember when I was still living there, my older sister who was married and had two children, had to move out of the house that she and her husband and children are renting [inaudible 01:35:07] Pontiac trail and the landlord wanted to raise the rent and most other people in there, and [LAUGHTER] they didn't have time to warm. Get a new house. They came to live in my parents house. They came by Washington Street and they were going under the Washington Street Bridge and the truck was too tall, [LAUGHTER]. He hit the bridge and not the corner off the truck. They came around and came down and pulled at our house of the truck was sitting in the driveway with the big hole in the time. He said, I'm so embarrassed, I don't know how to take this thing back and it's got all of our belongings. Somehow he talked to the guy who was in charge of the rental truck place where he went to. He said, I made a hole in your truck. He said, I know I lived right up the street from your parents. [LAUGHTER] He had been seen in the truck every day. Everybody came back there, whenever they had problems, and we all live together there for awhile. My oldest sister never left her stupid husband though she should have. Well, she did leave them, but they were married for 44, 45 years. Finally they got divorced. We used to go there every other Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then we decided we wouldn't go there anymore because he was such a fore. We just couldn't deal with them. We lost a lot of contact with my oldest sister. After that, we'd call and we'd write to her every now and then she taught mostly to our parents. But we kept up with her through that. But we never went back. Well, and then I finally did meet this very nice, very good man. I married him and he adopted my son. We went to see Mary and her family time. My husband was a great tennis player. He went to play tennis with my brother-in-law who thought he was a great tennis player and beat him three times in three sets. He could see that this guy was getting all friends via an angry. He let him beat him last two times and then they call it a day. He said, Let's never go back there again. [LAUGHTER] He said I wish I had my sister and her kids out of there.
[01:38:30] Nancy Wheeler: But it was awful. The worst thing about it was that my sister never accepted that he was the way he was until he asked her for a divorce. Then all of these things came back to her. She again, see them the way that we saw them. Well, that's the story about her. But when I got married, the second time, my parents knew that man before I knew him. He was 13 years older than I was. My father was all right with it but my mother didn't speak to me for a year. I didn't go to her house because I didn't want to start any trouble. I was very sad about that. I said I wonder if we'll ever talk again. In those days, the local NAACP had this one celebration for a year where they had a dinner and a dance that went through with it. There was a cocktail party before it and we went to the cocktail party and my mother came over and started talking to my husband and everything was all right after that. We were all friends. [LAUGHTER] He died of kidney failure several years ago. He had a son of his own who died of kidney failure about a month after he did. It was the strangest thing. I have to keep my mind on the question. That's how it was. We moved, of course, into our own house. I'm still living there.
[01:40:46] INTERVIEWER: The bell is supposed to ring for the last time. We're going to stop your machine. Read the little intro.
[01:40:56] Nancy Wheeler: Okay.
[01:40:57] INTERVIEWER: It's time to turn off or to silence cell phones, pagers, or anything else that beeps, chimes, or otherwise makes noise. You can call for a break anytime that you want, I guess anyone. You can also decline any question and end the interview for any reason and time. We really enjoyed learning about you in the fall and we're very happy to see you again. We're going to be asking questions this time that'll help us produce a 3-5 minute video. We'll ask some questions more than once so we can portray the best answers. For our video project, we wanted to focus on your very supportive family and your very remarkable career. We remember that you come from a very strong, and supportive, and close-knit family. Could you describe your relationship with your father?
[01:42:03] Nancy Wheeler: We had a wonderful relationship. I, of course, thought I was the favorite daughter because that was the last one. He treated me differently, but that's because I was so little. [LAUGHTER] I can remember getting prouder and prouder of him as I got older, he was a professor at the medical school and he was always involved in civil rights work. I think he must have started that in the 40s. He was on the 1945 state championship baseball team in the I don't know what they call it, the Citizens League or something they played ball in the city and they called it maxes have legs, but they had a state championship too and I just saw that picture yesterday. In fact, he taught me later how to play for a space because that was the position I wanted on the team. I learned all the techniques for that. He coached high school boys basketball team in the Y which was segregated at the time. They had one day when African-American people could come in. He coached that team and also worked on integrating the Y. He became quite a civil leader. He was instrumental in getting many ordinances passed in Ann Arbor that increased the civil rights capability of the city. He was a very good father. He taught me math in particular, but he worked me all the time on my homework as he did with my sisters. We just had a wonderful relationship. He was very funny. There were times when he thought I was too. I remember there were about three or four times of my life where I said something that just tickled him so much and he would go into gales of laughter. He just couldn't stop laughing. They weren't really funny things. They were just comments that I made. He thought they were very funny. That was my feeling with him.
[01:45:10] INTERVIEWER: Could you describe your relationship with your sisters too?
[01:45:14] Nancy Wheeler: My sisters were extremely supportive of me. I remember we had two bicycles in a family of three girls. I didn't have one until I went to college. But I never missed the excitement of riding a bike because they would freely give me one of theirs. We used to use the bike all over in our neighborhood and further away from our neighborhood. My oldest sister, she's five years older than I am. She was particularly loving to me. I remember when she was in college she was one of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society as she used to take me to her meetings with her. Well, she was just very supportive and she and I both became lawyers and she's a state appellate judge now in Illinois. She calls sometimes or I call her and we talk about the case that she's doing. She lives in Peoria, Illinois. When her husband had to go somewhere, she was always afraid to stay at home alone even though she had small children. When I was three, I went down there and stayed with her. Of course, I got to know her children very well. Except the last one he was born after a time when I couldn't come at the drop of a hat anymore. Then my older sister, who's three years older than I am, was an identical twin. I think I told you this before, her twin died in a fire when she was about two years old so I never knew her. But she was extremely depressed, I suppose, and upset. She kept asking for her sister. My mother told me that when they moved to Ann Arbor or even before that, she would always say, where's Til? Because that's what she called her sister, whose name was Lucille. Then my mom and dad had me and she took me over as a parent. She was always that way with me and she was extremely loving and still is and makes sure that I get everywhere I need to go. Well, they're both just wonderful. She was a state senator for three terms, I believe, and then a member of the House of Representatives here in Michigan after that. But she was on term limits, so she's no longer in the Senate, but she's very active in the community. She's run a number of boards and active in Lansing too she just won the Eleanor Roosevelt Award from the Michigan Democratic Party. They're both just wonderful sisters.
[01:49:20] INTERVIEWER: How did you and your first husband meet?
[01:49:27] Nancy Wheeler: I worked with him. I worked in the same office in period, Illinois. It was the bed setup an urban renewal program. They had a relocation office for the people who lived in the community and we were supposed to find new places for them to live while the reconstruction in the area went on. That was our job. We did that together and that's how we met. Later on I married him and we stayed together for six months. [LAUGHTER]. He was the biological father of my child. I left Tim and came back to Ann Arbor. He was abusive.
[01:50:24] INTERVIEWER: How old were you when you guys have met?
[01:50:28] Nancy Wheeler: Let's see. I had finished college and I got into the Peace Corps. Then I come back and stayed with Mary a couple of years, I was 24 when my son was born. I guess we were 23 when we met.
[01:50:53] INTERVIEWER: What decade or time period was that?
[01:50:56] Nancy Wheeler: That was at the end of the 1960s.
[01:51:01] INTERVIEWER: How would you describe his personality?
[01:51:07] Nancy Wheeler: I don't really know. He could be humorous, but he was very controlling. As I said, he was physically abusive to me. He wrote a couple of letters to me when I was in Ann Arbor and they just made no sense at all. But I became very uncomfortable with them. I invited my parents over for dinner one time when they were visiting my sister in Illinois. They came over and they told me later that they both came out of the house. One of them said to the other, did you ever think that your daughter would come out of her house feet first meeting, I'd be carried out in burry bag. The other one said, "No, but I believe at now." My mother always told us if a man hit you once, he'll hit you again. But I gave this guy another chance and he hit me again, so I left.
[01:52:29] INTERVIEWER: Describe the support that you received from your father and your sisters during this time?
[01:52:38] Nancy Wheeler: Well, it was the same support, but I was living with my oldest sister until I got married. I don't know, they were just generally supportive. My sister who was in Illinois who was very helpful to me and very loving and I didn't have too much contact with my sister, [inaudible 01:53:31]. But I remember sometime the year before I got married, I think I came back home in November because I couldn't figure out how to vote in Illinois, and I wanted to vote for the president and not for the guy who won, but for its opponent. I said I was going to drive to Ann Arbor so I could be there in time to vote. I took my sisters, two oldest children who were then four and two, I think, with me and somehow I had a one car accident. I don't remember how that happened to this day. I have worked out memory of it. I was in the hospital for two weeks. I woke up and I saw Almash. She was sitting next to me, so I was out for three days. Then I woke up and she was right there. My parents and Alma had driven down from Ann Arbor. My dad got a speeding ticket [LAUGHTER] and he told the officer that he was going to see his daughter who had just done a terrible automobile accident. He said, "Well, you're going to end up dead if you won't stop driving this fast." But I'm sure he picked up driving that fast after he got the ticket. They were just there for me whenever I needed them as they were for the other girls.
[01:55:25] INTERVIEWER: We remember that you did find love again. How did you and your second husband meet?
[01:55:32] Nancy Wheeler: Well, we had met years before, but he was married to somebody else at the time. Then years after he got divorced, I met him again. Oh, I remember I was practicing law and I was walking to the courthouse and he was sitting on one of the benches. He said, "Oh, there you are. " I said, "What are you talking about?" He says, "Well, I've been waiting for you." Which wasn't really true. His son had been charged with something that he was there for him. After that, we started dating and we had a whirlwind romance of about 30 days. Then we got married. I know my mother really didn't want me to get married to him. She said he's a womanizer. I felt that I was very loved by him. He used to take our dogs out, walk in, and I'd take my little boy with me as well. My mom and dad went away to a convention from where I think it was one of my dad's medical conventions and she went with him. While they were gone, I got married and I hit a one night honeymoon. Then we picked up my son from my sister's home. That was the end of the honeymoon. We got along extremely well. It's hard to remember all this stuff and he died. We were married for 20 years.
[01:57:46] INTERVIEWER: How old were you when you met and what time period?
[01:57:54] Nancy Wheeler: It was in 1975. [NOISE]. That meant I was 31 years old.
[01:58:05] INTERVIEWER: The second set of questions focuses on how your family supported your career choices. How did your father become mayor of Ann Arbor?
[01:58:23] Nancy Wheeler: The Democratic Party was interviewing candidates and they decided they'd interview him. He had been so active in the community and he was one of the founders of the modern, well, I shouldn't say modern because he wouldn't have had anything to do with the Democrats who were presumably in office, but he was one of the people who helped rejuvenate the Democratic Party in Ann Arbor. I remember when he died, the day after he died, Elmer started her campaign for the Senate. She had been planning on doing that anyway, but she went ahead with it. I ran into a man who had been one of the people who worked with my dad on founding or rejuvenating the party. He said, your dad was always the conscience of us. We would talk about various aspects that we wanted to develop in the party, and after we all spoke, he would begin to say what he had to say about it and there was always so much conscience in what he said. Anyway, they came back to him in, it was sometime in the early '70s that he ran for office. What had happened was that they had three parties running at the time, the Democrats, the Republicans, and something called the Human Rights Party because at that time students were allowed to vote either in their home city or in the city where they went to school. They had a big student party here. They got into the Charter, a section that set up preferential voting, which is what they do in Australia or at least what they did, I don't think they've changed. What they would do was have a run-off or primary and whoever got 50% of the vote would win the election. We had three candidates in that election. The incumbent mayor was a Republican, and then there was my dad who was a Democrat, and candidates from Human Rights Party. Everybody had two choices, a first choice and a second choice for mayor. Of course, the Republican had the most votes, but he didn't have 50%. My dad had just about everybody's second place vote. He had the Democrats first place vote and then he had everybody else's second place vote. He was the winner of that election, but it took them forever to count those votes. This is the only time that they ever used this process at Ann Arbor. They had all gone to the armory and that's where they set up the vote counting. They were at that for two weeks, I believe. They finally decided that my dad had won the vote and that was passed. I think it was the city canvassers okay then. It went to the county canvassers who usually just rubber stamp what the city say, but in this instance, they had a big battle over it. But there was one Democrat in the county canvassers and she voted for my dad and then one of the Republican women voted for him. I heard her speaking to him once and she said, I have always thought that you were a very honest person. She said, I remember when you ran the first Black candidate in Ann Arbor for the seat that my husband held on the city council. I believe that guy won by one vote over the candidate that my father had supported. She said, I'll never forget when you said to him, it's over, let's not go any further with it. She said, I always remember how fair that was. After a month, they finally swore him in the office. He was finally Mayor. The Republicans went to court and they sued saying that preferential voting was unconstitutional. They had a visiting judge. He ruled in favor of my dad, so he was able to serve out that term. He ran the second time for the next election and he won by one vote. Of course, everybody thought that vote was theirs. They all had a story about what difficulty they had getting to the polls or how hard it was to get in. The Republicans asked for a recount and they lost the recount. But then they had a student working in the city clerk's office, a Michigan student, who discovered that there were small township islands inside the city, and those people had incorrectly believed that they were citizens of Ann Arbor. He brought this up and the Republicans sued my dad again. They came to a settlement in that case that they would have a re-election. The Republican won by 200 votes. My dad was no longer mayor.
[02:05:40] INTERVIEWER: Why did you decide to go into law?
[02:05:45] Nancy Wheeler: I always wanted to be a veterinarian. That's what I worked towards in school. Then I went off to the Peace Corps. It was the mid to late '60s. It was the heart of the civil rights campaign in the US. I was really torn about whether to go into what I always wanted to go into or whether to do something very helpful, in my opinion, for the progress of African-American people. Of course, I went off to the Peace Corps, which had nothing to do with African-American people. Then when I came back, my sister needed me again because she was running for the school board in Illinois, I recall. I went there to take care of her kids while she did all of her campaigning. She was not a lawyer then either, so she didn't have an influence on me, except she had started law school at the U of M. She went one year and then she got married. It came to me. I did a lot of things in the community there after she won her election, but I just stayed there in her home. I gradually decided that I would go to law school. I came back here and I took the law school, I've forgotten what the A stands for, it's the LSAT, which was the law school admissions exam. Then I wandered back to Peoria. I didn't think about it for two years, though I got my grades back and they were very good. Then I decided to go to law school when I came back home. That's the way I got into law school, and that's why I decided to go.
[02:08:25] INTERVIEWER: Did your father's political career influence your decision to pursue legal career?
[02:08:31] Nancy Wheeler: Not his political career so much as his career as an advocate and a champion of civil rights.
[02:08:49] INTERVIEWER: When did you serve as a judge, and how long did you serve on the bench?
[02:08:54] Nancy Wheeler: I served for 24 years. In Michigan, you have to retire either when you reach 70 or the earliest time after your 70th birthday. I served until I was 70 and then I had to go. I was not elected. I ran for a position in 1988 for the circuit court. I won the primary, but then I lost the general election. But I lost it to the first woman. We knew by the end of the primary that there was finally going to be a woman judge in Washtenaw County. She won the election. That was 1988. Then I was appointed probate judge in 1990.
[02:10:04] Nancy Wheeler: I was in the Juvenile Division of the probate court and I stayed there until 2001. In the late 1990s, the state passed a new law that removed the juvenile division from the probate court and put it in the circuit court which I thought was crazy but they did that and they called that court the trial court. They left the probate court but they left it without the juvenile division. I stayed in my position until 2001, and then they moved me into the circuit court and they turned the juvenile court over to about five judges who did different things. [LAUGHTER] Before it had always been one judge who did everything. I loved working in the juvenile court it had not just a mindset, it had a requirement that you do what's best for the progress of the child. We did juvenile delinquency cases which were essentially crimes that were committed by children and also abuse and neglect cases where parents or whoever was in charge of a child neglected that child or abused the child physically, and we had to move the child or children to another home for a period of time while we set up a plan for the parents to learn about parenting and learn about treating the child. Sometimes it worked out and sometimes it didn't and we'd have to move towards termination of parental rights. We also had [inaudible 02:12:29] the adoption part of the court was moved to the juvenile court. We had those three jurisdictions and our purpose was to help kids and parents learn and grow and we did that a fair amount. But then there were some kids who just they weren't able for various reasons to take advantage of that interim treatment, and they went on to prison and they're somewhere in there for life still.
[02:13:17] Interviewer: Were there any other kinds of cases that you presided over?
[02:13:21] Nancy Wheeler: In the juvenile division. [OVERLAPPING] No. Well, when I was moved to a circuit court, I was not a favorite among the judges [LAUGHTER] so I was given the divorce caseload because nobody else wanted it. I did that and I did that exclusively until I retired. Well, not exclusively I was also assigned personal protection cases, that was a new creation. It started in states and then the federal government got involved and they required it all over the country. These were cases that had to go very, very fast. There was a petitioner filed by somebody saying that he or she had been harassed or abused by another person and they'd bring that case to court and most of them were brought by the people themselves. They didn't have lawyers and they'd file a petition and I was supposed to answer that petition within 24 hours. I was either supposed to give them an emergency first-time order or not and if I didn't give them the order, they had rights. They'd have a hearing in front of me three days after that petition was filed and I couldn't adjourn the case. It could only be adjourned if they asked for it to be adjourned and of course, the people who are representing themselves never asked for it to be adjourned. [LAUGHTER] So I had to give a decision right away. At that time apparently, I had been diagnosed with that years before but it just started to show effects on me at that time, and that was glaucoma which is a disease of the eyes. It eats away cells in your eyes and dims your vision and many people used to go blind from it. I suppose if I live long enough, I'll go blind from it too but right now I've got some vision, I'm blind in one eye. At that time it became harder and harder for me to write out the orders which I always did. I would take those things home with me at night and work on them and then bring him back the next day. After that, my secretary had to sit with me and I'd tell her what I wanted and she'd write up the orders and then she had to read the petitions to me when it got worse. That was what I did. I would take over the probate court's mental health docket where the probate judge was not available and that's about all that I did. It was a lot of work but it was that small jurisdiction I did when I was moved to a circuit.
[02:17:01] Interviewer: We recall that you were a trailblazer in terms of your interpretation of custody rights in homosexual couples, what do you consider your greatest accomplishments in that field?
[02:17:18] Nancy Wheeler: Well, I believed in trying to get shared custody between parents whenever I could and I tried to make that most of the time. Sometimes parents would come back and they'd have complaints about the other parent and we'd have to have a hearing and I'd be satisfied that the shared custody arrangement wasn't working. I never minded giving custody to fathers when they deserved it and that had always been something that was rarely if ever done in that court before. I believe I had an effect on other judges a little part of the divorce docket was given to two other judges. It seemed that they were more and more giving shared custody. In terms of lesbians and homosexuals, I allowed them to adopt as couples when I was in the juvenile court and I interpreted the statute so that two people of the same sex could adopt a child. They had all kinds of rules about adoption that changed over the years. Many years ago, they wouldn't allow the foster parents who had had a child in their care for a long time to adopt the child, that had to be somebody else which was a ridiculous thing. Then they finally passed two statutes, one that allowed a single person to adapt and the other one that allowed set parents to adapt if they could prove that the parental rights of the original parents should be terminated. We gradually improved even though I was one of the few judges in the state who would grant homosexual adoptions. Most of the adoptions were done by lesbians in my court, there were a few men who came in also. When the judge was appointed head of the juvenile court who followed me, the casework supervisor who was a great champion of these same-sex couples adopting children, spoke to him about it and said, Judge Francis has been doing this and I think you should continue it. They talked about it for a while and he did agree to continue doing that and there was quite a squabble about it but I won't get into that. I think those were the two principle things.
[02:20:53] Interviewer: How do judges balance their personal values with a job that requires being impartial?
[02:21:05] Nancy Wheeler: Well, you have to be impartial regarding the entrance of people into your court. You should develop the facts of the case as the facts of the case get developed before you. Of course, you're going to take sides one way or the other but you have to follow the written law.
[02:21:34] Nancy Wheeler: But there's a lot of discretion and divorce work and criminal law you're supposed to follow the written statutory law. In divorce work you have a lot more discretion, but you still have to follow the statutory law. As long as you started out neutral in the beginning, everybody knows you're gonna be swayed one way or the other by the presentation of evidence. But that's what you're supposed to do is follow the evidence. There were cases in that court where the judges, I don't know. [LAUGHTER] I remember this one terrible case that a friend of mine was representing the father of the child. The mother didn't want to be a mother, and she wanted the child the child would go to her parents. They never even had a hearing or a process for which they decided that he was really a boy, but he was about 17. Were they decided that the father was the father and they're supposed to do that first. Then they had a trial. During the trial presented evidence, but the judge went out on his own and what through the internet to find out about various people they had talked about. He used that as evidence rather than what had been presented to him in court. Well, that case gout peeled and the father won the appeal and they sent the case back to the probate judge and had originally gone to a circuit judge. The probate judge made a very fair result. The father became the only parent the child land because they terminated the mother's rights. But just to show how gorgeous something's out of the hip and in court.
[02:24:13] INTERVIEWER: You ever nervous that you might lose your job because of your passions and certain areas?
[02:24:20] Nancy Wheeler: Well, the only way for a judge to lose the job is if he or she has persuaded that they should go, or if they're mentally incapable or morally and capable of being a judge anymore, and then the State Judiciary Committee can take action against them. The only thing that made me fearful was my stand on same-sex partner adoptions but I talked to the then Chief Judge about it and he said, no, that's okay, that's the way it should be. But then a few years later when I was out of a job, he had gotten word from the Supreme Court. Now there any official word, but they've just heard about it and they said you'd need to stop that in Indiana. He took off after the judge who took my place and he he met with him and he stripped all the adoption cases from him. He was no longer able to do that. But then another state judge took that over and at first he decided he could only handle those cases for people who lived in this county. But I pointed out to him that the adoption statute says that the court who is where the child is, has jurisdiction over the case. I would always interpreted that to mean, well, wherever a child is found, that's what it is. I interpreted that to mean any county that were in the county that had jurisdiction over the adoption case.
[02:26:30] INTERVIEWER: What advice would you give to young people today who are considering a career in the law?
[02:26:41] Nancy Wheeler: That they have to be very knowledgeable about the statutory law, constitutional law, and be very well versed in whatever specific area they want to practice in and they can't let any bias show. Of course they're going to be biased towards their client but it can't be based on any sexual or racial, or religious or international beliefs they have to represent that person as honestly as they can. They can't lie, they shouldn't lie. Of course I can emphasize more are what they want to emphasize that's favorable to their client. But I think that those are good general rules. They just have to be prepared for every case they argue. I remember one time I went into Oakland County and there was a judge there who was famous for being very hard on attorney. I had to argue this case and traveling. I'm sure my voice shocked the whole thing was there because I was representing a lesbian woman who wanted to have visitation was her child. Her former husband had just terminated the visitation. I went and used her case the judge was extremely fair he set up a very good visitation plan for her to start with. Then he went back into his office and the court came out and said he wants to see you talking to me. Well, I was terrified, I didn't know I had done I want a pair of slacks to the court. That was the days when there weren't very many women wearing slacks to court. I thought he was going to chastise me about that. I came back to his office and he said, you were the most well-prepared attorney that I've seen in weeks. You knew what you had to argue and you argued it fairly. I never forgot that. [LAUGHTER] It encouraged me to keep on doing it.
[02:29:48] INTERVIEWER: That is the end of all my question.
[02:29:51] Nancy Wheeler: Okay.
[02:29:53] INTERVIEWER: Yeah.
[02:29:56] Nancy Wheeler: Anything else?
[02:29:59] INTERVIEWER: That's really good.
[02:30:01] Nancy Wheeler: Thank you.
[02:30:02] INTERVIEWER: Yeah. It's just very cool how your families so like active and political.
[02:30:11] Nancy Wheeler: I'm good with her because my phone I call. [LAUGHTER]
[02:30:16] INTERVIEWER: I can take my microphone.

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2022

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