Kate: Okay. Today I'm here with Jan, who is somebody I have known for a very long time, I think since I was around six years old, and Jan is a retired school librarian and now does a lot of political activism. We're going to talk a lot about that stuff today. Welcome, Jan.
©Jan Bombeck
Jan: Thank you.
Kate: The first question I'd like to ask is, I know that you grew up in Prairie Village, so I wanted to ask you to describe what that was like. What that area of Kansas is like.
Jan: Well, it's nothing like it sounds. It's not a town. Well, I guess it is a town kind of on the prairie, but it's just a suburb of the greater Kansas City metropolitan area. It was originally, I don't know what you call it, set out, made up by a guy named J.C. Nichols, who built and developed the Country Club Plaza, which is in Kansas City, Missouri, which is very fancy elite shopping district, and Prairie Village was kind of like his baby after World War II. The guys were all coming home from the war getting married, having families, and wanted a place to live that were nice, inexpensive homes. So that's basically what Prairie Village was. The history of that which I have kind of learned more as an adult, of course, is very white. It was pretty white when I was growing up, and I never really thought about it too much. There was a lot of redlining involved. My dad got a, what do you call it? Where you're get alone because you were in the service.
Kate: Oh, yeah, like a VA loan?
Jan: VA Loan. Yes. And those were available to a lot of people, but not so much if you were black or person of color. That put them at a disadvantage for buying these homes. Everybody that I grew up with in Prairie Village was white. I don't think there were any. There was a little boy who was family was from China in my elementary school, and nobody. Well, I guess he went on to middle school and high school. In high school, I think there were a few more diverse people. A lot of, I was friends with a lot of people who were Jewish, but not. In fact, they used to call my high school, “the Synagogue on Mission Road,” because during the Jewish holidays so many people were gone.
Kate: Wow, I didn't know that. Okay, that was East, right?
Jan: Shawnee Mission East. Again, you know, you've got things going on that I wasn't aware of as a child. People who were Jewish weren't able to. There were, what do you call them? Things in the contracts in like Leawood. You couldn't buy a house in Leawood if you were Jewish.
Kate: Wow, yeah.
Jan: So, a lot of people who were Jewish bought homes in the Prairie Village, Mission Hills area.
Kate: I see, okay.
Jan: I ended up going to school with a lot of them, but that was the only diversity that was in my life, and but it was the typical Leave It to Beaver existent. My mom did not wear a dress and pearls, but a lot of the women, most of the women in my neighborhood, I can't even remember anybody that worked. I mean, there were people that kind of worked, the lady across. Well, I should say kind of. It was hard. She sold real estate, but she didn't do it full-time. So, my friends, you know, were in daycare. Everybody pretty much stayed home. My parents bought the house when I was a year old, which was like 1952.
Kate: Where were you born?
Kate: I was born in Kansas City.
Kate: Okay, over on the other side.
Jan: Yeah. I was born in the Missouri side. My parents, when I was born, lived in a little tiny town down in the boot heel of Missouri. It's called Mexico, Missouri.
Kate: Yeah, I've heard of that.
Jan: Have you heard of that?
Kate: Yes, I've seen the signs on the road.
Jan: I have no idea where they got the name, but they lived in Mexico for about the first well, my first year, and they back to Kansas City for me to be born. I guess they thought the doctors in Mexico weren't good enough or something. My parents were both from the Missouri side, Kansas City, and so she came back to have me. I don't know where I was born. Saint Mary's Hospital, I think, Kansas City, and then they went back to Mexico and then my dad got a job offer up here in Kansas City, so they moved back, and both their families were back up here. So I think it was.
Kate: Okay, that makes sense. Yeah.
Jan: They bought. They actually lived on the Missouri side for a little while, and then they bought the house in Prairie Village.
Kate: What did your dad do?
Jan: He graduated. I don't know how, well, kind of I know how he got this job. He graduated from MU in journalism with an emphasis on advertising, and he got a job with a company in Mexico. It was called the A. P. Green Fire Brick Company, and they made fire bricks. I'm not even sure what fire bricks are. He worked in their advertising department, and I always remember a story he told about getting the job. They asked him what his hobbies were, and he said, “drinking.” And they hired him.
Kate: Oh, my God.
Jan: I guess in the early fifties that was an acceptable.
Kate: That was fine. Yeah.
Jan: But he worked there, and then his uncle had an insurance agency up here in Kansas City. He moved back up here and worked, and from the time I can remember, he always sold insurance.
Kate: Okay, alright. So he was. He didn't go into journalism.
Jan: He did not use his degree. No.
Kate: Okay.
Jan: He had great handwriting, and he used to print out all the covers of my reports for me, and he could make it look really, he had graphic arts kind of ability. But he never specifically used his degree.
Kate: Your mom went to MU, too, right? Also in journalism?
Jan: That’s where they met. They both met in journalism school.
Kate: Okay, so you have two sisters? Right?
Jan: Well, yes, kind of. I have, well, one of them has died.
Kate: Oh, okay.
Jan: And I acquired one. My mom got remarried when she was 78.
Kate: I see. Okay.
Kate: He had a daughter. So I kind of have a stepsister that I acquired later in life. But we’re really close though.
Kate: Yeah, that's nice.
Jan: Growing up in Prairie Village, I had two sisters.
Kate: Okay. What were they like? Were they younger than you?
Jan: Yes, I was here first.
Kate: You were the oldest.
Jan: I don't know. They were annoying.
Kate: I should have known. Yeah, that's always the answer.
Jan: I was a little bit older, because when my sister Kathy was born, I was five and when my sister Nancy was born, I was six.
Kate: I see,
Jan: so they were closer together in age and kind of through life, they were just kind of closer, because they were closer in age because I was always five years ahead of them in school. So, we didn't go to the same schools and we actually kind of got closer as adults and did things together and took some trips together. But, when they were younger, they fought with each other all the time. Oh my God, they were always fighting.
Kate: You stayed out of it?
Jan: I was enough, you know, older.
Kate: Yeah, you were off.
Jan: Hanging out with a boyfriend or something. I remember one time, I had a guy that I was going out with, and he wanted to come over to the house and see me. My mom was at work, and I knew that she didn't want him to come over when she was gone, and so I paid my sister Nancy 50 cents to go to the swimming pool, but of course.
Kate: Did she question that at all?
Jan: Well, kind of, because she ratted me out later and told Mom that Bob had come over to the house, and I paid her 50 cents to leave.
Kate: Oh, wow.
Jan: It didn't work out well. My mom went back to work, too, when I was like fifteen, and I was in charge of Kathy and Nancy while my mom was at work, because she wrongly thought that I was mature enough to watch them, and I didn't. She'd always leave us a list of stuff to do, and I would never do any of it, and I wouldn't make them do it, and then they'd be mad if I told them they had to do whatever their job was on the list, so it didn't work out well.
Kate: What was your mom doing?
Jan: She worked at a real estate office as like a secretary.
Kate: I see.
Jan: Again, she did not use her journalism degree.
Kate: Yeah, yeah, she didn't, either. What elementary school did you go to?
Jan: I went to an elementary school called Prairie, which has a cool history. When I was going there, it had pictures on the walls. It started out as a room schoolhouse back, I think, 1800s. I think it was actually in a different spot than where the building was that I went, but the building that I went to was a really neat building. It had hardwood floors and cool little window seats, and it was built, I think, in the early or maybe late forties, early fifties. It was a neat building, and then in the last I don't know, twenty years ago maybe, it burned down, and so it's in the same spot. But it's not the old, cool, building.
Kate: Yeah, it's not familiar to me. Yeah, I don't know if I’ve heard of it.
Jan: It was big fire, I mean, I don't remember exactly what year, but I had kids by then. It was twenty, thirty years ago. I don't remember, but it was a neat school to go to, and we walked. You know I've been talking about in this cold, cold weather. First of all, they're closing schools, and I don't remember the schools being closed too much. It was just like it's snowing, get up and go. Get your boots on. The girls couldn't wear pants to school, and so, you'd have to wear a dress. But when it was so cold you’d wear pants under the dress and then you get to school and go back in the coat closet and take off your boots and take off your pants, and then we're in your dress. I remember, I don't know, it was probably five or six blocks from my house to the school. We just walked in the snow. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, uphill, two miles. I don't remember being driven, and I don't remember a bunch of snow days.
Kate: Yeah, you must have just toughed it out.
Jan: Well, you know, and now the districts are so big they've got to consider. I don't know areas of, that don’t.
Kate: The buses and stuff.
Jan: Yes, buses and things like that.
Kate: What did you like in school?
Jan: Well, I liked reading.
Kate: Yeah, that makes sense.
Jan: I always, if I liked something I would do really well in it, and if I didn't like it I would do really poorly in it, so, I got mediocre grades. I was never one of those kids that got straight A's all the way through school. But I always liked to read, and my mom read out loud to me, always. I can remember the first book really loving my mom had read me Heidi, and I just loved that book. I had a copy of it, and I remember reading it underneath my desk, like in third grade, when we were supposed to be doing something else. I think that was kind of when I first started really loving being able to read on my own. But my mom always read to me even, I remember when I was 17 she read me a book called Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.
Kate: Oh, wow!
Jan: She would do stuff around the house. She wasn't, well, maybe she was working part-time then. I don't remember. But in the afternoon, we had a screen porch, and we'd go sit on that porch and she’d read me that book. Obviously, I could read myself. But that's why I love Audible books, I guess. Because it’s like having my mom read to me.
Kate: Right.
Jan: But I think that contributed a lot to my love of reading. I hated math. Hated, hated, hated math. I did horribly in math. I still count on my fingers, sometimes, when I’m doing math. I think I have some kind of math, learning disability that nobody ever addressed back then. Everything else was okay. I didn't love school, but I didn't hate it, but reading was always the thing that I did well in.
Kate: Yeah, did you have any influential teachers?
Jan: Um, no.
Kate: No?
Jan: I had teachers that I disliked. A second-grade teacher was mean. She had the kids come up with a punishment jar, and then, when you were bad, you had to draw a punishment out of the punishment jar.
Kate: Oh, wow.
Jan: And the punishment might have nothing to do with the severity of your offense. I remember I was probably talking, and I had to draw a punishment. My punishment was, I had to sit in the corner the whole day, and not do any work, and then stay after school and do all my work. You know that totally wouldn't fly anymore. But I was just devastated. I remember going home and crying and crying.
I had a fifth grade teacher who yelled at the class all the time, and her name was Vivian Dunlap. A friend of mine and I used to call her Vivian volcano, and we would say she was erupting.
But and then my sixth-grade teacher was a man. It was the only man I ever had, and I really liked him. But looking back at the things that happened, it's just bizarre. If the boys in particular. I don't remember he ever did this to girls, but if the boys were bad, we had those desks that had the part in it where you kept your books with a little lid thing that opened up the chair was attached to it, and he'd go over and take their desk and flip it over and flip them out of the desk on the floor. And he'd leave us outside for recess,
and we’d be out there for maybe a half an hour, and I don't know what he was doing. But we'd just be out there running around on the playground with no adult supervision, and finally he'd show up and bring us in. So, things were a little bit more loosey-goosey back in the fifties and sixties. But I liked him. He was a good teacher. He was funny, but I would say I didn't really have a teacher that I felt was like totally like somebody who really influenced me, my life and gave me a love of learning until I got to Johnson County Community College.
Kate: Why don't you explain how you ended up there.
Jan: Well, my parents, my mom wasn't making a lot of money being secretary for a real estate company, and my dad's insurance company was doing poorly, and they didn't have a lot of money to send me to KU. A lot of my friends were going to KU or K-State and they just said we don't have money to do that. My mother, probably something in the paper, heard something on the radio that they were starting this new community college. It was called Johnson County Community College. She said, “You can go there.” And it's kind of inexpensive. I don't remember what it was. Something ridiculous, like $15 a credit hour or something. She said we can afford that.
We got in the car and drove by, and the community college had purchased an old grade school that was no longer being used. And it was kind of a cool building, but I thought it was hideous. My friends were going away and decorating their dorm rooms and joining sororities, and I thought, I’m stuck in this old, dilapidated grade school.
I was so depressed, but I went ahead and enrolled, and I can remember the first couple of classes that I took. It would have been 1969. The teachers were just on fire with enthusiasm. I mean, the classes I took in humanities and social science. They kind of had a theme for the whole program was creativity, and how people were creative, and what defined creativity, and everything we read had a link to that creative. The teachers were just so exciting and so excited to be there. I think they were thrilled to be part of this new kind of education program in the in the county. And of course, now it's a huge, huge campus out at, further south, and they have all kinds of programs. They have culinary programs and dental hygiene programs. And it's still a two-year community college. But I think they still have really excellent teachers. But it was so much fun to be there the first year, and it was, you know, crazy things going on in 1969, kind of like now. But it was really a good experience.
Kate: Did you know, then, that you wanted to be a teacher? Or did that come later?
Jan: Oh, that kind of came along, I don't know, I think with my social consciousness. I decided I wanted to save the world, and I was going to teach in an inner-city school and save all the black children from I don't know what. But that was kind of like my social consciousness.
Kate: I see. So that's how it came about.
Jan: Right.
Kate: So, you went there for two years, and then you went to that little school.
Jan: Then I got into a local school. Still, I still couldn't afford to go away. And I went to a school called Avila, and it was on the Missouri side. It had been a Catholic school. In fact, when I went there, it would have been 1971, ’72, there were still some nuns who were teachers. But there were people who weren’t nuns, too, but it was. It was good, I mean, I got some credits and got to stay home, and I got a loan and a grant to cover my tuition there.
Then for my senior year, I got married this summer after my junior year, and my husband and I both went to K-State. He'd been at K-State, so I transferred all my various credits to K-State and did my senior year and my student teaching and stuff at K-State.
Kate: Was Rick from that area, too? From Johnson County somewhere?
Jan: He was. Yeah, he went to Shawnee Mission East.
Kate: Oh, he did so. You already knew him in high school?
Jan: No, I didn't know.
Kate: Oh, you didn't know him. Okay.
Jan: I don't know if you know, but back then and still, I think the classes are so big. There were like 650 people in my graduating class, and he played on the basketball team. So, I kind of knew who he was. I mean, I had seen him. But no, we didn't know each other. I didn't know the person I sat next to when I graduated.
Kate: Right.
Jan: I remember thinking, well, he must have been in my homeroom class, but I don't remember him. With that many people, it's kind of hard. But we met. He went to Johnson County Community College, his first year, and so that's where we met.
Kate: You met him there. I see.
Jan: Yeah, and then he transferred to K-State. Well, I guess he just went there one year. He transferred K-State his sophomore year, and we dated our sophomore and junior year, and then got married.
Kate: Alright. So, you finished at K-State, and you majored in education, is that right?
Jan: Yes.
Kate: Okay, and then you start teaching.
Jan: Yes, I got a job. Well, you know, I don't know how it is teaching. I think that places kind of are desperate for teachers now, if I get that feeling right. But back then I think teachers were kind of a dime a dozen, and it was hard to get a job. Shawnee Mission was really hard to get into. You had to have experience. They weren't going to hire you fresh out of college. They could afford to hire more experienced people. So Shawnee Mission was hard. I remember I interviewed at Olathe. I interviewed at a school district which later turned into Blue Valley. But it was Stanley School district at the time.
When I interviewed in Kansas City, Kansas, they were the only one that actually offered me a job. And I had done student teaching like in first grade and wanted to do the little guys. But they offered me a job teaching sixth and seventh grade science at a school called Argentine Middle School in Kansas City, Kansas.
I remember, I went home and called my mom and told her I'd gotten a job, and she said, “Oh, that's great! Where is it?”
And I said, “Well, it's in Kansas City, Kansas. I'm going to be teaching sixth and seventh grade science.”
And there was this long pause, and she said, “Didn't you flunk weeks of high school biology?”
And I said, “Oh, they don't know that. They don't care.” But I hope that was probably true. They just wanted a warm body. But it was interesting, and it was definitely kind of an initiation by fire because it was a different cultural neighborhood, obviously, than I'd grown up in Prairie Village, because the school was about a third white, and a third black, and a third Hispanic.
I just thought I was going to go in and fill those kids with a fire of learning, and they would want to, I don't know what I thought they'd want. I remember saying to him one time, “Well, don't you want to go to college?”
And they just looked at me like I was nuts, and they said, “Well, I don't know.” Like their families, their uncles and aunts and parents hadn't gone to college, and they loved those people and respected them, and they just didn't really see college as something that fit in with their whole culture, kind of. I don't know. Maybe if they had someone in their family, or if they met a teacher that inspired them. But it wasn't me. And I was so young. You know, I was just 22, 23. I think I could go in. Gosh, I could go in now with a lot better understanding of all of it.
Kate: Yeah. What kind of science were you teaching?
Jan: It was just general.
Kate: General science. Okay.
Jan: They had, I don't remember. The curriculum was kind of loose. You could kind of teach whatever you wanted sort of, but they had these kits you could get like you could study bones, and the district would send you these kits with boxes with all different kinds of bones. And the kids are. We got cat skeletons, and they had to lay them out to make it look the actual skeleton and get another unit called batteries and bulbs, and they had all kinds of wires and light bulbs, and that we talked about light. It was very hands on. It was kind of cool.
I thought to be a great, wonderful, interactive science teacher that we needed pets. Some girl brought a bird that her parents didn't want, and we had a bird in a bird cage, and I don't remember how we got the guinea pigs, but we had two guinea pigs. The bird got out of the cage and flew around the room, and the kids jumped up on the desks and chased the bird around to try to catch it, and the guinea pigs had sex in the cage, and the boys were hysterically, well, everyone probably was hysterically laughing, so I had to take a towel and throw it over the cage. So it was an adventure. I’ll tell you it was.
Kate: Yeah, never a dull moment in middle school.
Jan: Yes, yes, middle schoolers. Oh, my gosh! Probably the hardest group.
Kate: Yeah, for sure. So how long were you there? How many years were you there?
Jan: I was just there a year, because they kind of, I don't know whether they do it by enrollment, but they decided they didn't need science teachers and the other guy had been there longer than I had, so I was out. I mean, I wasn’t of a job. They found a place for me at a grade school which I was thrilled about.
It was further north. It was again, a similar neighborhood, similar socioeconomic area, and I taught second grade the first year. I taught it, and it was a Title I position. They got money from Title I, and I team taught with another woman, and then I did some kind of math tutoring, again, a subject that I was so well prepared to teach. But I could do basic addition and subtraction.
Kate: Yeah, at least they were young enough you can handle it.
Jan: I did second grade Title I, and then they got rid of the Title I position and there was some kind of cuts to the program and then I taught third grade, just as a straight classroom teacher for a few years. It was interesting again, it was an interesting dynamic for which I was not prepared, having grown up in Prairie Village.
Kate: Right, yeah.
Jan: I remember we had, it was a dental hygiene week, and I had a student from the dental school come and talk to the kids. And he said to them, asked them, “So, why do you have teeth? Why do we have teeth?”
And the kids were raising their hands, and they said, “To chew! To chew!”
He said, “That's right, to chew, and there's another reason we have teeth, too,” and nobody could come up with it. He said, “Well, it's to talk.” He said, “Your teeth help you form your words and make the sounds of letters and things.”
This one little boy, I can still see him. His name was Harold, front row. He had his hand up waving around, and the guy called up, and Harold said, “My dad ain't got no teeth, and he can talk.”
Kate: Oh, God.
Jan: Oh, my God! But it's kind of those kinds of things that were always going on that were kind of foreign to me. It was an interesting experience.
Kate: Yeah, for sure. So, you were there for, was that four years total? Or three?
Jan: Four years, total, one at Argentine, and three at, it was a school called Lowell Elementary School. And then I got pregnant with Laura and had to quit and stay.
Kate: So, what was that like that transition to being from working to being a stay-at-home mom?
Jan: I'd kind of had it with teaching.
Kate: So you were glad to.
Jan: I had been thinking about quitting, anyway, and maybe selling sheets at Dillard's, or something that was restful. I still kind of feel like I was lucky to want to stay home.
Kate: Yeah.
Jan: Because, I was fine. I mean I was, I didn't want to do nothing. I never did nothing.
Kate: Yeah, yeah, you're busy all the time.
Jan: I’m a joiner person. So, I would join a group at church, or I joined a group called La Leche League, which was, women that helped other women nurse, and I nursed both my kids, and so I didn't. I did volunteer things, but I didn't work-work, and I didn't have a a burning desire to have a career. I mean, I think women should 100% have careers, 1,000%. But it it's tough.
My daughter-in-law has a super high, I wouldn't say high. Well, high pressure in some. She's a corporate executive for a company, and flies around the world, and in theory, I'm a hundred percent supportive of that. But it's hard, you know. She has a baby, and it's hard to juggle everything. So, I think the fact that I was not finding a way for a career, that I was happy to be at home, that I was okay with it, and okay with the things I was doing and the friends I made on that level made it a little bit easier. And then, later on, when I decided to go back to work, my kids were older, and it was somewhat easier.
Kate: So, when you were, when they were little, I know you read to them a lot just like your mom did. I was wondering what? I'm assuming you read, Heidi. But what else did you read to them?
Jan: I read Heidi to them. I remember reading, well, just picture books. We'd go to the library and get stack of picture books and just kind of discovered favorite authors and things through that. And some of them I remembered as a kid. But we loved Bill Peet. You remember the Bill Peet books? Did you ever read those?
Kate: I don't know. I don't think so.
Jan: He wrote like, I don't know, 50 different picture books. When I was librarian, we used to. I used to have the kids read those. So, I read those to the kids and lots and lots of picture books, you know, like Make Way for Ducklings, and all the kind of classic picture books. Then, when they got a little bit older, and Laura was really good at listening, she'd let me read. I remember when she was three or four, she would sit still for a chapter book.
Kate: Oh, wow.
Jan: And I read the Little House books.
Kate: Oh, yeah. I remember Laura talking about those. No, I remember that Laura, one of our teachers, was reading us one of those. And Laura had already, already knew it, I guess, because you read it. Laura told what was going to happen and kind of got in trouble for it. It was some dramatic moment.
Jan: Some spoiler.
Kate: Yeah, maybe when there was a plague of locusts or something that comes?
Jan: There was.
Kate: No, no, yeah, that might have been. Laura knew it what was coming. That's funny.
Jan: Yeah. But I read those and the book that Joe always credits to like kind of getting him started reading on his own were The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Kids love that book, and I read that to them. And then there are other books that go along with that. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. And I'm not a big fantasy person. I can only take so much of centaurs and magic lions. So, I read them The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Joe oh, my God. He loved that book, and he won. Then we read. The second one, I think, was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and I was done, and he wanted me to keep reading more and more and more, and I just said, “You know, here's the next one. You read it.” And he did, so. I read them A Wrinkle in Time. I remember that was another one I read them, and then just I don't know. I remember reading Brighty of the Grand Canyon, and I'm trying to think of other ones. I can't remember what we just. We always had some book we read, what's the guy, Where the Red Fern Grows. We read that.
Kate: Oh, yeah, that one's pretty sad.
Jan: There was always, you know, we always had something we were reading. Yeah, I read our Secret Garden, and The Little Princes.
Kate: Oh, yeah. That was one of my favorites, Secret Garden.
Jan: Yes, that's a great book.
Kate: So, I know you were involved in Girl Scouts, too, right, with my mom.
Jan: Yes, your mom.
Kate: That's how you met, right?
Jan: We were, well, neither one of us were working full-time, I mean, and I was doing some stuff with PTA, and they were having a carnival, and they said, “We're going to have a cakewalk. You need to put tape squares to the floor in the gym. So here's a woman, Alice Stewart.” So she helped me tape squares on the floor. So, your mom and I were taping squares and just got to talking and realized we both had think you and Laura were in second grade, maybe because you went to first grade at Arrowhead, didn't you?
Kate: No, I went to first, was when I started at Crestview.
Jan: Okay, maybe you and Laura were, it might have been first grade, and so, we said, “Oh, we've got girls, you know. Wouldn't it be great for them to be Brownies?” We thought we could do that. We can have a Brownie troop, so I don't know what we did jump through the hoops to get certified to be Brownie leaders, and started the Brownie troop.
Kate: Yeah. That was fun.
Jan: You, and Krista and Megan Loftus and, trying to think who else was in that? Jill? What was her name?
Kate: Jill Liles.
Jan: Liles, yeah.
Jan: So, it was a fun, fun group. I've helped with Madeline's Girl Scout troop.
Kate: Oh, really? Okay.
Jan: And I mean not help, I shouldn't say helped. I have attended meetings where the moms were supposed to come. I think I told your mom that I was horrified. Horrified!
Jan: Oh, really?
Jan: Oh my God, those girls were terrible. They, for like half of the meeting, at least all they did was scream all over the house, and they were jumping on the furniture and jumping on tables, and it was all I could do to say, “Sit down!”
Kate: Yeah.
Jan: “Quit screaming! Quit running!” and I don't know what. I don't know what these parents. I said, “Alice and I would not have put up with this.”
Kate: We probably did a little bit of that. I don't really remember.
Jan: Well, yeah.
Kate: I remember we met at school, I guess, after school in the cafeteria.
Jan: We met at your mom’s house.
Kate: Well, I remember we did meet at the in the cafeteria a little bit. Yeah, I don't know when we did that. But yeah, we also met at my house.
Jan: Right, but there was not a lot of running and screaming, I'm sure. I mean that, you know. Sometimes we let everybody out in the backyard and play or something, but no one was running and screaming in the house. Som it was interesting. But Madeline. quit doing Girl Scouts I think this year, because she had some other stuff. She was doing soccer and dance, and she couldn't do it all.
Kate: Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. So, how did you decide to go back to work?
Jan: Well, I had my degree in elementary education, and when Joe started first grade, I think it was, I thought, well, I have nobody at home all day long. Maybe they could use some help at school. And that's like I said, kind of how I met your mom. There were just some different things that they would say, “Oh, this person needs help,” or “that person needs help.” They said, “Well, the librarian needs help.”
And I said, “Well, I can do that. What does she need help with?”, I went in and talked to the lady who was the librarian, and she said, “Well, I need mostly help just shelving books,” and back then they had a card catalog, a card that got made for each book. Multiple cards for each book, and you were supposed to file them. And of course that was a never-ending task.
Kate: Right.
Jan: It never got done completely. I helped with that and helped just different odds and ends type things. But I was there, and she didn't always have a class, and so, we'd talk when she didn't have a class. And when she found out that I had a degree in elementary education, she said, “Oh, you ought to get certified to be a librarian.”
Because there are lots of part-time jobs in the Shawnee Mission district, and there were people that just worked like or days a week if it was a smaller school as a librarian, and I thought well, that would be great, because I’d have the same schedule as Laura and Joe, and I wouldn't have to work every day and be something that I liked, because.
Kate: You liked the libraries. Yeah.
Jan: Yeah. So, I looked into going back and getting my certification. It was through Emporia State University in Emporia, that library certification program, and so I enrolled in that and started taking classes.
Kate: Yeah. So where did you? Where was your first library job?
Jan: I got a job. Well, in the meantime, after I'd started this library certification program, I got divorced, and so I had to get a full-time job, and for a brief period of time I worked at a law library downtown, and that was horribly boring, but kind of interesting. But the whole time I wished that I, well, and I worked, to backtrack a little bit, I worked part-time at the Kansas City, Missouri, Public Library in the youth services area. And so, I did that for a while, too.
Kate: Was that at Plaza?
Jan: Yes, and I your mom kind of helped me get that. I think she put in a good word for me when I was applying for that. Because she worked at the main downtown library. But so, I worked there for about at the Plaza Library for about a year, and then I got divorced. Then I got the full-time job at the law library, but I always wanted, you know, my true love was kids’ books, not law books, and so, a friend of, well, it was kind of a weird deal. I had told the principal at Crestview that I was looking for a library job, and she mistakenly thought that I was certified. I was not completely certified at that time. But I knew that the Shawnee Mission district occasionally hired people on provisional certification, but I just told her. It was Mrs. Martin. Remember Mrs. Martin?
Kate: Yeah.
Jan: I told Mrs. Martin, “You know, I'm going to library school. I'm looking for a library job. If you hear anything, keep me in mind.”
And so, she was at some kind of principals’ breakfast a couple days before school started, and this librarian had unexpectedly quit, and they were looking for a librarian, and she said, “Well, one of my parents is a librarian,” which I technically wasn't. But anyway, that principal called me and had me come in for an interview and wanted to hire me.
And then, when I interviewed with the library head person, when he found out I wasn't certified, he said, “Oh, we, you know we can't hire somebody that's not certified.” So, I was broken-hearted and went home and cried. But that year they had so many people apply for library positions. They had so many openings that they finally were desperate, and called me back and said, “Well, we'll hire you on provisional certification.”
Kate: Okay.
Jan: That was at a school called Dorothy Moody School, now closed. It's out kind of like alternate 69 and 103rd Street. The kids that go to Dorothy Moody went to Shawnee Mission South. So, I was there for 13 years, and it was a great job. The first couple of years were hard, but after that, it was good, and I just really, really loved it.
Then, they, their enrollment changed, and they went part-time, and since I couldn't do part-time financially, I transferred to a different school, Ray Marsh was the name of it, and it was out in the Shawnee area. The kids that went to Ray Marsh went to Shawnee Mission Northwest, and it was a great school, too. I was there for 13 years. So like, 26 years total.
Kate: Wow, yeah, that's great.
Jan: Then I quit. I retired in 2017.
Kate: I guess, well, you were there when they transitioned from having a card catalog to computer.
Jan: Oh, yeah, like in my third year, yeah.
Kate: How did that go?
Jan: It was great. I was glad.
Kate: Loved it.
Jan: Catalog. Oh, my God, it was a mess! You remember that movie about the kids that all have detention.
Kate: Oh, the Breakfast Club?
Jan: The Breakfast Club. And they trash the card catalog in the library.
Kate: Yeah.
Jan: And they, you know, that card catalog was pain in the neck, because every book that you got you got like four cards that went with it. You got an author card. You had a title card. You had sometimes multiple subject cards, and you had to file all of them. You know, you had to file the title card alphabetical order by title. Then you had filed the author card alphabetical order by author, and nobody had time to do it all. And it was boring, and it got put off. When I got my job at Dorothy Moody there were boxes and boxes of unfiled cards.
Kate: Oh, wow.
Jan: Up in the librarian's office, and I said, “What is this?” Well, she just didn't like to file them. So, the card catalog in that school was like totally inaccurate. And the other thing would be, you know, if you wanted to read Frog and Toad Are Friends, you could look it up in the card catalog and see that it was by Arnold Lobel. And you should go look in the L's to find it. But you didn't know if it was there or not, you know. You could go over to the L's, and it wouldn't be there, and well, too bad you wasted your time, you know. So, it gave no indication of whether it was checked out or not. The online was just great. It was wonderful. The only thing the card catalogs are good for, is for tables in people's living rooms.
Kate: Right. People put other things in them now.
Jan: That's right.
Kate: They put wine bottles in them, I think.
Jan: Yes, yes, so I was, totally embraced the change, because my card catalog was a mess. And even if it had been up to date, there were so many things that it didn't tell you, you know, like I said, the main thing being whether or not the book was in. You could have a card for it, and it could be checked out, and you have no way of knowing.
Kate: Yeah, yeah, that must have made it a lot easier.
Kate: Were there other changes, like big changes over time?
Jan: Oh, yeah. Well, there were big changes all the way through, and it always had to do with no money, you know, when I first.
Kate: Even in Shawnee Mission, huh?
Jan: Oh, yeah. Well, you know, it goes from the state.
Kate: Oh, that's right. Yeah. You were there, I guess. Were you there during the Brownback era?
Jan: Yeah, yeah. And so, everything just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Not quite as bad as going on now, but there were still things that they looked at and, you know, we managed. But a friend of mine said that we were librarians in the golden years, because I had a really good budget. I had a part-time aid, we had what was called a processing department. When you ordered your books, they went to an office and they put them into the database, and they put spine labels on them, and they put little, you know, little scanner, the barcode, you know. They did all that. So, when the books came back to my school, they were just ready to put on the shelf.
Kate: Oh, that's great.
Jan: And they had what they called a graphic arts department, so we could send, we have old book covers. They'd make them into puzzles for us. We had a visiting author program every year we had an elementary author and middle school, high school author come visit and the kids got a chance to interact with them. I don't remember who came to Crestview. Oh, the McKissacks! Do you remember them? Anyway, there were a couple of authors that came across you.
Kate: Yeah, I do remember some coming. I don't remember who they were.
Jan: There were so many good things, and each year a little bit more went away. We lost the Graphic Arts department. I lost my aide. They lost the processing department, so we had to process all our own books. Worst thing that happened was the year before I retired, they decided that, they didn't want to call it a library anymore.
Kate: Oh, okay.
Jan: Wanted to call it a makerspace, and there was a huge makerspace revolution.
Kate: Yeah, yeah.
Jan: And which, I was fine with makerspace. I just thought that it should work with the library. You know, that you should have a library, and you should have a makerspace. And if the teacher was studying flight in science that you could go to the library and research flight, and how flight works and read books about flying, blah, blah, blah, and the librarian would do that part of it, and then you could go to the makerspace and make an airplane, or you know what I'm saying?
Kate: Yeah.
Jan: It all worked together, and that the makerspace shouldn't replace the library.
Kate: Yeah, yeah, it really has nothing to do with it.
Jan: Right. And I mean, I think that the research component could be the librarian, and the making component could be the makerspace. Everybody could work together. But to say that it should be a makerspace and not a library. I mean.
And they spent all this money. I remember there was a friend of mine who was a librarian, and they bought a sewing machine for her library, and she was just practically in tears. “I don't know how to sew,” she said, and I just had could not visualize elementary school children with a sewing machine.
That was kind of the in thing to do, and the year that I retired, they decided to rename the libraries instead of calling them libraries, they were going to call them Innovation Stations.
Kate: Okay.
Jan: So.
Kate: Did they hire anybody to do the makerspace part, or did they just expect you to run it?
Jan: They expected the librarian to do it. And they also started hiring people that weren't certified, which I was hired on provisional certification. But I had an inkling as to what was going on. When I retired, the woman who replaced me was a second-grade teacher who didn't know anything about the library. I mean she probably wouldn't know Ramona if she bit her, you know. I mean, I just. I just thought it was wrong.
Kate: Yeah.
Jan: To me, being a librarian-- and I don't mean I don't want to embrace change like I said I was, embrace the whole online card catalog. But I just thought to me a person who's a librarian ought to have a love of reading, that that's a huge part of being a librarian. I mean, there's the research part, and there's the author study part. But to me, I always tried to get the kids excited about reading. Excited about books.
Kate: Did you ever get to take them to that children's book festival in Warrensburg?
Jan: Yeah.
Kate: You did? Oh, that's great.
Jan: It was so much fun. That was a that was really a fun experience. And there's a place in town called Reading Reptile. Do you remember that?
Kate: Oh, vaguely, yeah.
Jan: They had an author visiting author program every year that was just great, and I did not take the kids. But I went as an adult, and we got to hear authors speak, and they have a place that they have expanded to. It's called the Rabbit Hole. You probably haven't heard of it, but there was a big article about it in the New Yorker.
Kate: Oh, yeah, that new museum, kind of place?
Jan: Yes, yes, same people that had Reading reptile started this Rabbit Hole. If you ever.
Kate: I would love to go there sometime.
Jan: You'd love it, you would love it. They have whole rooms devoted to Frances or, you know, the what's that? Good Night, Moon. And they have life-size characters, and they have all kinds of little chutes and ladder things to go through in the museum.
Kate: How fun.
Jan: Pete, Pete and Deb are the guys, the people that own it? They'd be they'd be somebody interesting to do a podcast.
Kate: Oh, yeah. Good idea. So what about? I was going to ask you, too, about? I mean, there's so much backlash going on now with trying to ban books, and I wanted to ask if you had to deal with that at all in those days.
Jan: You know, not really. I did, every year I did a unit during Banned Books Week. ALA
Banned Books Week every year. I did a banned books unit with my sixth-grade class, and they loved it. They just loved it. They came up with ideas of why a book might be banned. We had to talk about what the word banned meant, and then we came up with a list, and they were always kind of tentative at first, like, “Well, bad words.” And I’d write that down. “Bad words” and “blood and guts,” and I don't know. But they always came up with really good lists, and then they somebody whisper, “Well, like kissing.” I'd say, well, kissing could be part of it. But nobody wanted to say sex. But finally, something like, “being naked.” So, we'd come up with a big, long list of things that people might be unhappy about kids seeing or having in a book and then we talked about the first amendment, and I explained to him what the first amendment was, and I always tried to make it. First amendment doesn't cover everything when you're in sixth grade. You know, your say so about what you read. But we just talked about that kind of thing, and then, I got books that had been challenged. And there was, ALA has a whole list. If you go on their website now, they'll give you a list of books. And there was a big, thick book that had challenges for adult and kids’ books, and then it would say why they were challenged. And it was always just, the kids were always kind of astounded about it.
Kate: Yeah.
Jan: “Well, why would they care about that?” they'd always say to me, and there were things that the kids would say, “Well, do they think if we read about somebody doing drugs that we're going to do it?”
And I said, “Well, yeah, that's kind of a fear.” I'd hand out all these books that had been challenged, and you know they were like Junie B. Jones and Harry Potter and Shel Silverstein and all the books that they liked.
Kate: Right
Jan: A lot of them had in different places around the country had been challenged for one reason or another, and we just talked about why it had been challenged and what they you know what they thought about that. And for the most part, they thought they were stupid reasons. There were things like, oh, I'm trying to think, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. Do you remember that book? It was about the donkey who finds a magic pebble. He turns into a rock, and he can't unturn himself because he has to be touching the magic pebble to make it work. The police are involved in the story because his parents can't find him, and he doesn't come home because he's a rock, and the guy who wrote the book, all the characters are animals. Sylvester is a donkey, and so they get the police involved in looking for him, and the police are pigs.
And you know. So, we talked about how people who have certain jobs, like, if your father was a police officer, maybe you'd think that having a police officer portrayed as a pig was offensive to you, or maybe I would think it was offensive to have all the books in the fairy tale section about princesses, and they were all sitting around waiting to be rescued by princes, that I thought that was offensive.
But at the end of the whole book, the whole series, I read them a book called Mexicali Soup. Did you ever read that?
Kate: Yeah, that's familiar to me. Yeah.
Jan: About a family who, well, kind of like stone soup except backwards. A family, Hispanic family, that has this wonderful soup that they love, and they find out the mom is going to make it for dinner, and so they're thrilled. But each one of them goes to the mom during the day, and says, “Oh, I love Mexicali soup, but, you know, I don't like tomatoes. Could you leave the tomatoes out?” And, “I love Mexicali soup, but I don't like garlic. You always put too much garlic. Can you leave the garlic out?” So, as the day progresses, each person in the family, and there are about ten kids and the dad all go to the mom and say they love the soup, but could she just leave out this one ingredient? So that night for dinner, the mom goes in the kitchen, brings bowls out, and everybody has a bowl of hot water.
Kate: Yeah.
Jan: And they’re like, “What happened?” And she says, “Well, I just left out the garlic that Jose didn't like, and I left out the tomatoes that Pedro didn't like, and so, this is what you've got.” And so, we talked about how everybody might have a personal thing that they didn't like. But if you took all those things that each individual person didn't like and took it out, the part of the library is the fact that it reflects lots of different ideas that different people have.
Kate: Yeah, that's a great lesson.
Jan: It was a great lesson. I loved to teach that. Somebody asked me one time, “Well, how did you get away with that, you know, doing that? Didn't you get in trouble?” And I said, well, I think we didn't have a specific curriculum for library. We had some general things that we had to teach, but other than that we could kind of do units. If I wanted to do a unit on Gary Paulson, I would just do it, and so I didn't have anything specific that I had to teach. This was just something that I enjoy. I don't think any kid ever went home, and when the parents said, “What did you do at school today?” They said, “Mrs. Bombeck did the most fascinating lesson on banned books.” They would just say, “Oh.”
Kate: They kept quiet.
Jan: I mean, I don't think I think the kids liked it, but I don't think they would have gone home and like, expounded on it.
Kate: Yeah, that's funny. You didn't have too many parents complaining about it.
Jan: I didn't. Nobody cared that I did the lesson. Nobody, you know. Occasionally, there were parents that wanted something specifically not given to their child. Like, they would say, “Oh, you know, Tyler is scared to death of those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and he keeps bringing them home, and he, you know, it's just, he can't sleep, and so, can you kind of watch and keep an eye on him during library, and don't let him get anything super scary.” So, I was fine with that, you know.
Kate: Yeah.
Jan: If he came up with a Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, I just said, “Tyler, your mom said that those are kind of scary for you, and she'd rather you pick something else”. So, I was fine with that, and I think I told you about the little kid that thought he was being abducted by aliens.
Kate: Oh, yeah.
Jan: I did a lesson on the nonfiction section in the library and told him everything there was real, and he found a book on aliens in the nonfiction section, and told his parents he'd been abducted by aliens, and they didn't want him to get any more alien books. But I was fine with doing things like that.
Individual parents, but nobody ever really said, “I don't want.” There was a formal complaint that you could fill out, and nobody ever filled that out. And part of the formal complaint, too, was, “Have you read the whole book?”
To me, a lot of times, if you take certain things out of context, you might think, “Oh, my God!” Well, I wouldn’t, but somebody might think, “Oh, my God, that's terrible.” But if you read it in the whole context of the book, it makes more sense.
Like, I remember there's a book, My Brother Sam is Dead. Did you read that in fifth grade, on the Revolution?
Kate: It was familiar. Yeah, I might have.
Jan: The Revolutionary War was kind of supposed to be covered, I think in fifth grade.
Kate: Oh, yeah. Okay.
Jan: It was a book about boys, and the family was torn apart by the Revolution. The dad and one of the brothers was for the King. They wanted to stay a colony, and I think it was the younger brother joined the Revolution. I don't remember the whole story. Somebody was dead, one of them. Sam.
Kate: Sam!
Jan: But there was cussing in it, and you know, I remember talking about, “Gosh, if your brother died, or if you were in the middle of a battle, sometimes people cuss, you know.” It wasn't just cussing for no reason.
Kate: Yeah, yeah.
Jan: Sometimes I think it's in context, you know. I told them, “I wouldn't want you guys just to be cussing here in the library. But if you're in the middle of a battle where people are getting caught sometimes people cuss,” you know, so I don't know. We just talked about different kind of situational ethics.
Kate: How did you choose which books to order? Did you have a method?
Jan: There were kind of three things I thought about. I thought about what the kids liked. There were always series, or, like captain underpants or that they were just all hot to read. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and if there were books, too, that I know kids like the topics about race cars or aliens or cookbooks. Kids loved cookbooks. So, I would order things that I thought the kids would like, even if they weren't terribly scholarly or wonderful, and I would order the things that were scholarly and wonderful, like the books that had won the awards, the Newberry and Caldecott and William Allen White nominees and winners, and then I would order things that I knew the teachers were using in, that they had planned. So, it's kind of those things I thought about.
Kate: And then when you're getting rid of stuff, I guess. Did you just go by, you had records of what had been checked out.
Jan: No, I didn't care. If it was really ugly, I was gonna get rid of it.
Kate: If it was aust falling apart, or?
Jan: Well, you know, and it was hard, too, when we didn't have any money.
Kate: Right.
Jan: Yeah, because I did. You couldn't always go by if it was falling apart, you know, if it was falling apart but everybody just loved it, I had a hard time getting rid of it, because I knew I didn't have any money to reorder.
Kate: Yeah.
Jan: On the other hand, if there was a book that said, “Someday man will go to the moon,” you know, I wouldn't keep that because that wouldn’t last a week, so I'd look at the copyright date. I'd look at the cover if it was a really boring, ugly cover. Nobody would check stuff like that out. So, those were things I looked at. I kind of had a feeling with my collection of what got checked out, so I did never run any specific list. I think the public library did, but I had a pretty good feeling from, you know, checking things back in and looking at what things got checked out and what didn't. If things were dated and old, and things like computers and things like that got dated really quickly. A biography about Abraham Lincoln didn't so much. It was was old and ugly.
Kate: Right? Yeah, did you have to deal with-- I know this has happened when libraries and people get rid of books and people find them in the dumpster and get all enraged that people are throwing them out.
Jan: We had a process of that, and there were. I kind of quit having parents help me with it too much, because they would get enraged. Not enraged, but.
Kate: Upset.
Jan: They would just say, “How can you get rid of these books?” You know, I'd worked in libraries where nobody ever got rid of books. They were just, it gets to be too, I don't know how to say it. The shelves are just crammed with stuff, and the kids can't look through it.
“That's terrible. It's a wonderful book, you know. You ought to keep them all.” Well, you can't keep them all, because the shelves just get crammed with stuff. And the kids, they're too crowded. They can't even. They don't even know what to look at, you know. So sometimes, if the shelves are a little bit more open and you could put books face out so they can see the covers, it just makes it more appealing, and you can't keep everything.
But there was a way that we had to do it which bypass, just take them out and throw them in the dumpster. We had to scan them and remove them from the system. And then, once we did that, we marked out anything inside of it that had to do with Shawnee Mission School District with a marker. So, I let kids that were in Library Club help me do that. They thought that was great, and so if anybody found it, they technically wouldn't be able to know where it had come from. The likelihood of them finding it was not great, because we didn't just take them out and throw them in the dumpster even after that. They went to the warehouse, and then the warehouse did something with them. I think they had warehouse sales that people could come buy the books. That was not so public that people knew that they were. We didn't just put them in a pile in front of the school and burn them, or anything.
Kate: Yeah. So, you had Library Club. That sounds fun. I don't think we had that.
Jan: Oh, it was great. Library Club was so much fun.
Kate: What did they do? Did they help you out?
Jan: Yeah, they just helped me. They did things like help me sharpen pencils and go through the markers and throw out the ones that didn't mark anymore and help me straighten the shelves. Straightening was always a thing that needed to be done, because, you know.
Kate: Kids get ransacked.
Jan: Yes, and the area, the race car area or the cookbook area looked like a bomb went off in it. So, I just have, they didn't have necessarily put them in order. They just had to push up the bookends, and, you know, make it look like, and I don't know, they would help me dust the shelves and water plants just like little odds and ends things.
Kate: Yeah, that's nice.
Kate: Did you guys have Book-It when you were there? Did that go away by the time you were?
Jan: We did not, but I remember that. That was the pizza.
Kate: Yeah, we did it. Yeah, yeah.
Jan: I used to go up and take Laura and Joe over to that Pizza Hut across the street and get a personal pizza for lunch.
Kate: Guess it went away at some point.
Jan: I guess it did, because I don't remember doing that with the kids.
Kate: Hmm, okay. So I guess, when did you retire? That was.
,
Jan: I retired in, well, the end of the 2016 school year, so technically in May of 2017 was my last.
Kate: Just in time for the Trump years.
Jan: Well, that was a reason. Actually, I remember the night that he won, thinking that this kind of cemented my desire to retire, that I retired to save democracy. We can see how well that's going!
Kate: Yeah.
Jan: And my son and daughter-in-law moved back to Kansas City from California with my granddaughter Madeline. And so, I thought, well.
Kate: That made sense.
Jan: Yeah, so that was when I retired.
Kate: But you got involved in political stuff, I guess before that that was back in 2008?.
Jan: Yes, we were very involved in the Obama campaign in 2008. My sister was really active in that, and she drug me. And she said, “Well, you need to come to Missouri because Kansas is a lost cause.” And Missouri, she lived in Harrisonville at the time, and had a bunch of people living at her house that were from the Democratic party, the national Democratic party sent them out to organize the area and knock doors, and so I would drive down to Harrisonville. It's about a 45-minute drive every weekend and stay with my sister, and have Obama camp and we’d go out to knock on doors and do stuff to, and that election went well.
Kate: It did, yeah. So, these were all like young younger people who had come out.
Jan: Yes, they were all because I was probably how old was I? 40 plus and yeah, in their twenties, and they come from all over the country, and they just got people in the area that would be willing to put them up for a while and let them live while they did their political organizing.
Kate: Yeah, so you did door knocking, I guess, in that area. That was the first time you've done it, really?
Jan: Yeah.
Kate: What was it like?
Jan: You know, I mean, I don't know. There are people that are super intimidated by that, and I'm not. I was not afraid to go up and knock on somebody's door. I don't. I just wasn't, but it was Cass County, Missouri, which is a rural area. And actually, I think I'd be more afraid to go back down there now than I was in 2008. There were a couple people that were a little bit hateful. A guy told me that Obama was a baby killer. I remember that. And there were some areas that were suburban-ish, like neighborhoods. And then there were other areas that were kind of out in the country. I remember kind of going down dirt roads and people with dogs tied up in the yard, and things like that. But so, it was kind of an interesting area, and it was just fun. We just all bonded and had a good time.
Kate: Did you campaign for Hillary, I guess, when she was running?
Jan: No.
Kate: Oh, you didn't.
Jan: Well. When Hillary was running against.
Kate: In 2016, I guess it was.
Jan: No, I did not actively.
Jan: I obviously voted for her. You know, I was teaching. Well, I was teaching in 2008 too. But nobody really recruited me to do anything.
Kate: Yeah, okay.
Jan: And so, you know, I had bumper stickers and yard signs and stuff. But I didn't do any active canvassing. The next time I actively canvassed was for, well, I helped a friend who ran for state. He's a state representative. I helped him, and I helped his wife ran for school board, and I helped her. So those were some local things that I did. And then the next really big race that I worked at a lot was Cherise Davids is our state representative in congress, and she was running against a guy who was a longtime Republican, mean person. But he'd just been in for a long time, and nobody particularly liked him, and so, anyway.
Kate: That was in 2018, right?
Jan: Yes. And nobody really. I mean she was. I don't know kind of underdog, I mean, he'd been in a long time, and she, I remember I really liked her, and I said something to my son about. I thought she was really good, and he said something about, “Well, a native American kickboxing lesbian is not going to win in Johnson County.” I said, “I don't know. Give it a try.” And she did. I think she's people really like her. She's a very, you know. I worked a lot just directly with her because I worked with her primary, and it was we had a little office over in Kansas City, Kansas, and everybody was just scrunched together in that office, the volunteers and Cherise, and so we all got to know each other really well. She's just a really nice, nice, genuine person. And she's nice to her mother, too, which is so important. Her mom is great.
Kate: Does her mom live there, too?
Jan: Her mom lives in Kansas, the Kansas City area. Her mom was it was in the army.
Kate: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Jan: As a kid, they kind of traveled around. But yeah, she's just a nice caring person, which we need more of in government.
Kate: Yeah, she's responsive. I know that. Sometimes it's rare.
Jan: Yes, the only thing that I wish, and I know it's super hard. I don't know that I'd be able to do it, but I think she tries to make everybody happy. And I guess, in this environment right now, I wish she was a little bit more like AOC, you know, give them hell, but I think I don’t know, that's hard when you're trying to, you have a constituent base like we've got here in Kansas, which are a lot of people who are conservative, and they voted for her, and if she just, I don't know.
Kate: Yeah. So, her district covers, I guess it's Johnson County, and what else? There's a few other counties.
Jan: Part of Wyandotte County, I think.
Kate: Okay. Yeah.
Jan: Because they've changed. They gerrymandered. It was all of Wyandotte County, but they took a chunk of Wyandotte County and put it in a different district. So, it's part of Wyandotte County, all of Johnson County, and I think, part of Miami County, which is south from us.
Kate: Yeah, okay, in this past, or did you campaign for Biden, too? Or.
Jan: No, I did not particularly. I mean, like door knock. You know it, since when I worked for Obama, since I worked for Cherise too, and not that the national election isn't super important. But I think I've come to believe that local things are more important. I've worked quite a bit with all different kinds of local people, people running for city council and mayor, and a lot of the people that I met during the Cherise campaign, you know, they've since then gone on to run on their own. A friend of mine ran for Mayor of Mission, and she's now the Mayor of Mission. Another friend of mine is the Mayor of Lenexa, and various city council seats, and a lady that I worked for last year ran for Johnson County Board of Commissioners and won, and she's just great. So, I think, not that you can't influence what happens on a national level, but I think local stuff is important.
Kate: Yeah, for sure. That's great. It seems like a big change has happened in Kansas like with the governor.
Jan: Well, right now.
Kate: Well, I guess I mean from a few years ago, when the yes, I forget her name, the governor who won.
Jan: Democratic Governor, but and I kind of try to keep track of what's going on with the state, too. But I know she vetoed a bill, I think it was just last week on gender-affirming care for trans kids. But then it went back in the, I don't know all the details about exactly numbers that have to happen, but they approved the fact that you they didn't want to have gender affirming care for kids.
Kate: Yeah. Oh, yeah. They overrode that veto.
Jan: Right, and then they overrode her veto.
Kate: That's sad.
Jan: Yeah, so it's bad, bad. So, we've got a Democratic governor, but we've got Republican, you know, and Senate, and so sometimes her hands are tied with what she.
Kate: Yeah, that's how it is in Arizona, too. It's kind of lots of, lots of log jams, I guess.
Jan: And I don’t understand these people that are voting for a Democrat governor, but then they're voting for Republican representatives, and the, I don't know. It doesn't make sense.
Kate: Yeah, it doesn't. Yeah. Same thing.
Jan: Yeah.
Kate: I guess in in your retirement you started this group about diverse books, right? I wanted to see if you could talk about that a little bit.
Jan: Right. A friend of mine and I decided that, like I said earlier that they that we both grew up in Prairie Village and went to Shawnee Mission East, but it was kind of like my ex-husband. We didn't know each other. I think she's two years behind me. But we met. How did we meet? Oh, she was a school librarian, and so we met doing that, and we both retired about the same time, and she read a book called Waking Up White by Debbie Irving, and she said, “Oh, you've got to read this book, it's great.” And it kind of mirrored our lives in Prairie Village, too, that we lived in this little white bubble, and didn't really realize we were living in a white bubble
So we read the book, and then the author was going to be at a conference called White Privilege Conference that happens every year. We decided we wanted to go to that. So we went, and we met a man during a lunch break who was from St. Louis, and he said, found out we were school librarians, and he said, “Oh, you ought to talk to these ladies in St. Louis.” They started a group after Michael Brown was shot in St. Louis. They decided that the community needed to come together and talk about race. And so they started. This organization called We Stories, W-E S-T-O-R-I-E-S. And it was to help parents talk to their kids about race using children's books, children's literature. We thought that sounds great. So, we actually went to St. Louis and talked to these ladies and decided we wanted to do the same thing in Kansas City.
We started an organization called, we called ours Starting with Stories, and they based theirs on groups of parents that came through like cadres that came through and had you gave them a bag of books that kind of corresponded to the ages of their kids, and then they had meetings in people's homes, or at a church, or someplace to talk about talking to your kids about race, and what books they were using and how they felt that it was going. And just kind of, we had a lot of resources. We had a great website.
And you know, I think at the time we were doing this, which was four years ago, and I don't know if it get any more traction now, but we had trouble getting people to commit to being in the program. You know, it wasn't that they were averse to the information, but they didn't want to come to somebody's house and talk about it once a month.
Kate: Yeah.
Jan: And so it never really got off the ground. But we read lots of great books, kids’ books, and books, and I felt like we had a lot of good information to give to parents, and there's still some organizations out there doing that. The one that we kind of dissolved our organization last year, and the one that we gave our remaining money to that we had in our bank account is an organization called Embrace Race, and I think they're from Boston, I want to say, but I'm not sure. But it's pretty much all online, which is probably better than wanting people to drag themselves out for meetings, but they have all kinds of great webinars. You had asked me to come up with some titles of books, which I did. But they have lists of books, they have, their website is fantastic. And they have all different things. That you can do you know the theory behind what we were doing, and what the other people were doing, and what Embrace Race is doing is that talking with your kids about race is really important, and if you ignore it, it's not good, because the kids recognize as early as six months old kids recognize racial differences.
Kate: Okay.
Jan: And you know you're always saying, “Well, this is the blue block, and this is the green block, and your dress is yellow. But oh, my God! Don't look at that person and ask what color their skin is, because that's just inappropriate.” And then the kids kind of think, well, we can't ask about that, and that kind of shuts any kind of communication where they're noticing those differences anyway. And the fact that their parents won't talk about it is weird, and it is kind of hard to talk about. We always kind of equated it to talking about sex, that a lot of parents don't know where to begin or how to bring it up, and using a book helps. You know, you can say, “Oh, look at, you know, that person is a different color.”
Or with the list of books that we had, we kind of always had them divided. We had books that were specifically about race and racism, like some kid that couldn't use the public library because he was black, or a family that had to use that Green Book. That was a book that showed them where they could stay safely. That was so specifically about racism.
But then we had a lot of books where we called it race was just incidental. There was a book called The Big Bed. It's about a family that the kids all want to sleep with the mom and dad until the bed gets too full, and then the kids say, “Well, Dad, you can go sleep in the other room. You can sleep by yourself.” But it's just kind of a cute funny book, but the family just happens to be black. So, it's nothing about race. Race is never mentioned. They're just black characters doing regular stuff. And so, we had books like that. And then we also had books that were specifically about racism. We had a lot of biographies about people. To people of color. We didn't just do black. We had Asian and Hispanic and things like that. So, you know, I don't know. It's specifically sad right now that so much DEI is being removed.
Kate: It is.
Jan: And I think it's important.
Kate: It is. Well, what I'm kind of curious. What advice would you give to somebody, whether they're a school librarian or facing issues in their library, or somebody wanting to get involved in politics. Would you want to tell them anything?
Jan: Never give up, never give up. You know, I just, I don't know. I just feel like people say, “Oh, well, I'm just sick of listening to the news. I just can't stand to listen to this anymore. This is just terrible. I'm just not gonna listen. It's too upsetting.” And I think, well, obviously, you are an old white woman, because
Kate: That's what those people are saying.
Jan: If anything drastic, I guess, if my social security check gets taken away, that would be something that would be drastic for me, personally. But you, know I'm not employed by the government. I don't have a DEI position. I am not a farmer. There's nothing that's specifically happening in my life. I just feel like it's important.
There was something that Dr. Fauci, remember the guy during COVID, said. He says, “I don't understand how to explain to people, explain to you that you need to care about other people.” And I just feel like I care about what happens to people who, I have ladies that come clean my house who are Hispanic, and I don't know if they're here legally or not. I've never asked, but I mean, I worry about them, and I think about their families, and you know, I think about people.
I have a good friend who is a civil rights attorney for the federal government, and she's just a wreck right now. People are quitting, and union presidents are in the bathroom crying, and you know there are lots of people who I know then care about that, I just think we need to keep working. If we just give up and turn off the TV, I don't know, that just lets let's other people win. I just think you need to. There was something. What did somebody have on. It was this great quote that was, I don't know if I took a picture of it or not. Oh, here it is.
It says, “To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity, either by false security (they don't mean me) or by despair (there's nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.” And that's by, she's a poet, Audre, A-U-D-R-E. Lorde, L-O-R-D-E. You know her.
Kate: Yeah, oh, that's great.
Jan: I don't think. I mean, you know, I have a friend that said, “Oh, I couldn't possibly call my state rep and senators. I just, I'm, I just hate to talk on the phone. I just, that stresses me out.” Okay, well, that's okay, you know. Let somebody else who isn't. But you can do something. You can donate money, you can, you know.
Kate: You can email them.
Jan: You can email them. Yes, some friends and I are organizing a citywide march. We're calling it March for Democracy.
Kate: Oh, that's great!
Jan: So, we're planning that for the end of March. But, you know, there's always something that you could do. You can join groups. You can donate money. I don't know. I just think giving up and sitting around wringing your hands is not appropriate.
Kate: It’s not the answer. It's hard, though. Yeah, it's, it seems like it's getting harder and harder to keep going sometimes.
Jan: And I think, too, civil rights people didn't quit.
Kate: That's true. They didn't give up.
Jan: The suffragettes didn't quit.
Kate: Yeah, yeah. I know.
Jan: I mean some of the things that happened, and I don't know where I read this. I keep reading inspiring things that you know, we fought a king, you know.
Kate: Right. Sam! Sam fought a King, right? Or his brother did.
Jan: You know we fought segregation. We fought Nazis during World War II. Our history is a history of people that fought for stuff and didn't just sit, wring their hands and say, “There's nothing we can do about it.”
Kate: Yeah, that's great. You’re right, you’re totally right. Well, why don't we end on that? We can be inspired!
Kate: It's fine.
Jan: I keep trying to find things that are inspired.
Kate: That's good. That's a good idea. We should be looking for those inspiring quotes.
Jan: I saw a great sign at a political protest the other day, and it said, They're eating the checks. They're eating the balances. They're eating the democracy of the people that live here.
Kate: Oh, that's really funny. That's a great one.
Jan: So I'm not going to let him eat the checks and balances. I'm going to fight.
Kate: Yeah, good. Good for you. Okay, well, thank you. Jan.
Jan: Yeah, this is terrific.
Kate: Okay.
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