Oral History Program Brigadier General Constance M. Von Hoffman Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 22 November 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Brigadier General Constance M. Von Hoffman Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 22 November 2019 Copyright © 2021 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Beyond Suffrage Project was initiated to examine the impact women have had on northern Utah. Weber State University explored and documented women past and present who have influenced the history of the community, the development of education, and are bringing the area forward for the next generation. The project looked at how the 19th Amendment gave women a voice and representation, and was the catalyst for the way women became involved in the progress of the local area. The project examines the 50 years (1870-1920) before the amendment, the decades to follow and how women are making history today. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Von Hoffman, Constance M., an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 22 November 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Brigadier General Contance M. Von Hoffman Circa 2018 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with General Constance Von Hoffman, conducted on November 22, 2019, at Hill Air Force Base, by Lorrie Rands. General Von Hoffman discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Sarah Storey, the video technician, and Kendall Johnson are present during this interview. LR: Today is November 22, 2019 and where are we? GV: You’re at Hill Air Force Base in building 849 Price Hall. LR: Thank you, we are with General Von Hoffman, and I am Lorrie Rands conducting the interview, Sarah Storey is on the camera. DJ: I’m Doug James, I work for General Von Hoffman, Commanders actually... LR: Okay, and... KJ: Kendall Johnson. LR: Again thank you so much for your time, and your willingness I greatly appreciate it. This is for the Women 2020 project at Weber State University. So with that being said, when and where were you born? GV: I was born August 10, 1967 in Oxford, Mississippi. LR: Were you raised in Oxford? GV: I was born in Oxford ‘cause that’s where the University of Mississippi is and my parents were both about to graduate. So I was born in Oxford in the Ole Miss Hospital but raised in Columbus, Mississippi. LR: Okay, and growing up in Columbus, Mississippi, what are some of your memories of that? 2 GV: That’s where my entire family is from, for generations and generations, so lots of family there, and generational friends of family. I remember that and I was a big swimmer. I swam on a swim team, that was a big part of my childhood from the time I was six until about seventeen, and it was a big deal. So small town but we had a Hero Swim League, if you will. That was just a big part of it, I remember that and sports in general. LR: Okay. What are some of your memories of elementary school? And what school did you attend? GV: I went to elementary school at Heritage Academy, it’s a little private school in Columbus, Mississippi. Like I said, generations of families are from that small town so you know everybody’s parents and all the kids in that family, so very close-knit. Then your elementary school teachers, and back then it was one teacher for all the subjects for all the way through sixth grade, so they were a very important person in your life at that time. I remember a lot about that from elementary school. LR: Okay, you mentioned your parents, so what were your parents’ names and their occupations? GV: My mother’s name is Heddi, Pilkington is her maiden name, and her last name at the time was Kelly, which my maiden name is. Primarily, she was a school teacher most of her life, elementary school teacher. LR: Okay, and your father. GV: My parents divorced when I was five or six, but my dad is a third-generation lumber business, lumberman. 3 LR: Okay, growing up in this small town—how many siblings did you have? GV: I have a younger brother and well, I have a mixed family, but I have three younger brothers and a younger sister. LR: Okay, as you were growing up in this small town, would you ever go and, you said three generations of lumber, would you ever go and help in that business? GV: Yes, my dad’s business is actually in south Alabama. When I was there with him, he definitely drug me around. Columbus is a very rural town, there’s a lot of farmland around and my family has been farmers for many generations and I spent a lot of time out in soybean farms, year round in Columbus. LR: As you were helping your father, and you said you spent a lot of time in the soybean farm, were you actually working in those farms or was it...? GV: No, but I had care chores. I have spent time feeding cows and horses hay, and doing all of those things, but not summer jobs or something like that, not to that extent for sure. LR: Okay. Alright, was just curious about that. As a young girl, who were some of the women you looked up to and why? GV: I come from a very, I would characterize, matriarchal, southern lineage, so very strongly influenced. My great-grandmother went to college in the early 1900s, I think she graduated in 1907, so that would be rare back then. Then every part, every aunt, every grandmother, all of those, have all been college graduates, and education is very important in my family and definitely driven by the mothers. My great-grandmother was, at ninety-two, still in an elected position in Columbus. She was the county registrar and that was really neat, very independent person. 4 My great-aunt, my grandfather’s sister, had a private pilot’s license in the 1940s when she was twenty-something years old and went by herself to New Orleans to be a journalist in the 1940s. She was a very independent person and worked all the way through until she retired in the 1980s. Really interesting and strong, very opinionated person; loved to debate, and it didn’t matter which side, you could give her either side and she’d debate either way, she was really a strong person. Those two for sure, and then my mother. My mother was a divorcee with two young children and she supported us for a long time until she remarried, and then still continued to work when she didn’t really have to because she is just driven that way. LR: You’re talking about these women, and how exactly do you think their example helped as you were growing up? GV: I have never known anything but a woman being able to express their opinion. I’ve neglected to mention my father’s mother, my paternal grandmother, also the very same way, never worked but ran the family and all of them did not defer to men. Even though they didn’t work necessarily out of a traditional role, they were married, had children, raised those children, were responsible for that, but they were one hundred percent the equal partner in the relationship, if not more. Just being able to express their opinion and have that valued by people around them, and not just their husbands and their children but people in the community. LR: Okay, thank you. I think you’ve already answered this, but were you encouraged to pursue an education? 5 GV: Oh, yes. When I first came in the Air Force, I came in the Air Force in 1989, and I came into a Fuels Flight, they refuel the aircraft and there’s two officers and there are a hundred enlisted people in this organization. I remember in the first couple of months, I had graduated and then gone out to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, and I was on the flight line with them and one of them said, “What made you decide to go to college?” It was the first time I had ever been asked that question or anything like that, because for me that was never in the decisions base, it was “Where are you going to go to college?” Not, “Are you going to college?” That is a very privileged position and I understand that, but it was so much a priority in our family that it just wasn’t even a question. I was encouraged, but it was almost like it was just in your DNA. It’s part of you. LR: You mentioned, I’m going to go back to the swim team, were you on teams throughout all of your early years, and then in high school you were on the...? GV: Yes, this is a city team, if you will, the way the structure is. It isn’t associated with schools or high schools or anything, it’s like what travel softball or something like that would be today. It started when you were four. If you could swim a lap, they’d put you in the pool and start training you all the way through your senior year in high school, if you stayed that long. LR: Okay, so you weren’t actually on the swim team in high school. It was a separate... GV: It’s a club team, a travel team. They would’ve been much higher level than a high school swim team. SS: Like a competition team? 6 GV: Yes. So Utah doesn’t call it travel, you call it comp, right? Comp-ball, it’s the equivalent. LR: Okay, I understand now. What are some of your favorite memories of high school? GV: Favorite memories of high school...I have a lot. The swim team was important. There’s a lot of competition and I love competition, so it was one of my favorite sports. It’s terrible to say that my favorite thing about high school was all the sports but it was. I played tennis, played basketball, loved that part of it. My high school was a prep boarding school in Birmingham. It was two hours from my home, so I was there during the week and came home on the weekends. It’s very academic focused, but my best impressions would be skipping out of an exam when I got an ‘A,’ I mean, we were dorks that way. We would get really excited about something like that versus somebody asking you out on a date or whatever. SS: You mentioned at Nellis Air Force Base, when that gentleman asked you, “What made you decide to go to college?” That is a really great question, so how did you respond to that? I mean, did anybody treat you differently because you had gotten your education at that point? GV: Well, the structure of the Air Force is you’re treated differently anyway. I was a Second Lieutenant and, these days, there are a lot of enlisted with college degrees, but back then, in general, you didn’t have a college degree you were enlisted. So there’s an officer, and that’s just different authorities and different levels of responsibility. It’s naturally treated different, it’s not just because of your 7 education, although your education is part of what qualifies you to be an officer. If that makes sense. This was just a young person who was not quite my age, but also my age, but hadn’t gone to college and he was just looking at me as sort of a peer in age saying, “What made you go,” because obviously he didn’t have either the resources or the same encouragement and somebody saying, “Hey, go to school.” LR: Right, interesting. What led to you wanting to join the Air Force? GV: The Air Force sent me to school. I wanted really badly to go to what I thought was an upper-tier school, and those are private schools and they’re crazy expensive and my parents were like, “Good luck! Go figure it out.” At the time, it was the end of the Reagan years and we had lots of scholarship money for ROTC students, so I got a full-ride to Vanderbilt University, in Nashville. LR: Okay. You were already used to living away from home, but is that the furthest you had traveled at that point? GV: No, no. My mother’s a big experience person, take your kids to give them experiences versus just give them things. We traveled, not overseas back then, but definitely outside of Mississippi and outside of the South. LR: Right, you were accustomed to not being at home, so when you were gone away to college it was...? GV: Right, that was not a big deal. I did not have the freshman crazies that everybody else had, I was good. LR: Alright. I know from experience that moving into Air Force experience without any previous knowledge, is very culture shock. So how was that for you? 8 GV: ROTC gives you a little bit, they send to school on a scholarship, but the twist is you get to go take some Air Force classes from them. Literally I was driving from Mississippi to Las Vegas with a rental van of hand-me-down furniture and that kind of stuff to start my first apartment and my first job. It literally felt like sailing off the edge of the Earth into the great unknown. LR: Okay, thank you. So as you’re moving throughout your career, and your first duty station was at Nellis, but what were some of the challenges that you faced? And I’m not just saying from a woman’s perspective, but from a— GV: Right, just challenges? LR: That you faced throughout your career. GV: It’s funny, looking back now, it’s hard to remember what it was like when you were twenty-three or twenty-four years old. I think, initially, challenges are the same for anybody starting out in a career, you want to learn as much as you can as fast as you can, but you’re still young and immature. I think the challenges, for men and women, just coming in the first few years in the Air Force or in the military are the same. You’re a Second Lieutenant and you’re a First Lieutenant, and when you’re wearing Lieutenant rank, it’s the same thing, it’s like wearing a badge that says, “Immature, doesn’t know anything yet, young puppy, full of energy but no vectors.” They’re all true, but they’re all very smart but just learning, just inexperienced, so those initial challenges. It is, in my line of business, I came up in a support side so it’s maintaining aircraft and refueling aircraft, those kind of things, out on the flight line. It was then and still is very much male-dominated business and I don’t know that it was a challenge but I 9 was different. In all of my squadrons up until not so long ago, there was just very few female officers in the unit. There’s a little bit of difference there, I don’t know that it was any more challenging, because of that. When I was a younger officer, I used to always bristle ‘cause people would say, “You’re the best female Officer I’ve ever seen.” Now this was in the early 1980s and ‘90s, people don’t say that anymore, but back then, and that was obviously a man saying that, in their mind that was a compliment. But for me, I was just like, “I want to be the best Officer you’ve ever seen, not the best female officer.” We talked about how you pursued an education and that you used the Air Force as a vector to get there, would you mind sharing what you actually went to school for? GV: Those ROTC scholarships, they ask for a technical degree and I thought about Engineering, that didn’t last very long, lasted a semester, wasn’t my thing. My personal interest was History and so I have a double major with Applied Mathematics and American History. SS: Oh, that’s wonderful. LR: That’s cool. When in this time did you get married? GV: I got married after I left Nellis and I went to Kunsan Air Base, South Korea. I was still a Lieutenant and there was a Lieutenant Von Hoffman that lived three doors down. They have dormitory style housing, ‘cause it’s a remote assignment, no families go, it’s like college for grownups or something, living style. That’s where we met. 10 LR: Okay, that changes the whole question then. So as you’re working in your career and starting to raise a family, how did you balance your responsibilities between the workplace and home? GV: That’s a great question, and it’s actually a question that a lot of junior female Officers still ask me. My husband and I, when our first daughter was born, we were both stationed in Germany. He was in a Fighter Squadron and he was home for six weeks, deployed for six weeks, home for six weeks, deployed for six weeks. I was in another Fighter Squadron as Aircraft Maintenance Officer, that also had a lot of responsibility and fortunately for me, my husband was like fifty-fifty. We were, “If you’ve got this, if you’ve got her tonight, I’ve got her...” so I had a lot of shared responsibility. We’ve made the priority to build the best support network that we could that would help facilitate having those types of careers. What I quickly learned the hard way is that you can’t be a hundred percent Officer, you can’t be a hundred percent work anymore, and you can’t be a hundred percent Momma. Somewhere along the lines you realize that you’ve been A-plus in everything that you’ve done so far and a B-plus, if it gets the job done then it just gets the job done. You’d really like to read another chapter to your kid tonight ‘cause their begging and you’re like, “Nope, you’ve got to get to bed,” or “We both do.” Sometimes it’s the family that has to take a backseat and sometimes it’s the career piece that’s had to take a backseat. For sure I took assignments that weren’t the best for my career and my husband has made compromises from his side for mine. It is definitely something you learn, and no matter how 11 many people you have coaching you along the way, you still learn a lot of things the hard way. It is a balance and it’s not always a fifty-fifty balance. A lot of the times, one wins and the other doesn’t and you just have to hang on and hope it’s all going to come out. SS: You talked about how you balanced, so how did your kids respond to moving around? It sounds like you guys were very busy and had a lot going on between your husband and yourself. Did your kids respond well to the arrangements of that? GV: They have. They are amazingly resilient. We’re truly blessed with three amazingly resilient girls. There were tears every time we moved because they’re very gregarious, they make close friends pretty quickly, and then we pick up and leave and we’re all crying because it’s hard to peel your kids out of something that they’ve built. You didn’t build it for them, they built their own friends, they made a sports team, they did all that, so that part’s hard. But they have been quick to do the same thing at the next spot, and my husband and I, we’re still holding our breath going, “We’re going to get that, ‘You messed me up, because we had to move and all this stuff.’” We haven’t got that hurled at us yet, it may come later I don’t know, but they have been amazingly resilient. I think that’s— most military kids, once they’ve survived their childhood will say, “It made me a better, stronger person.” We’ve been truly fortunate that they’ve been able to handle that. 12 LR: That’s great. I just got to thinking about when you joined, and you were at Nellis just as the Berlin Wall fell. I’m wondering what your perspective of that was being in the Military. GV: That was strange. Timing-wise, I’m a very young officer. I come into ROTC ‘cause really that’s when you start learning Air Force history and Military history and we were very much still in the Cold War. I’m coming out of ROTC into Nellis Air Force Base and literally that’s when the Wall’s coming down and the Soviet Union begins to disintegrate and that was weird, that was different. We were like, “Well, now what’s our threat? What’s the purpose for what we do? How do we exercise?” Because we used to exercise for the Big Red Bear, and now what is our training going to look like and all of that? That was quickly followed by Desert Storm. I deployed from Nellis Air Force Base to Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates and I was there for a little over seven and a half months. When we left, now we know that there’s no serious existential threat to a military, but at the time, we thought that that was a very capable military. We knew we would win, in our mind, we just thought it was going to be more costly than it ended up being and nobody knew how long those deployments were going to be. We went straight from Cold War to Desert Storm and that was literally within I think a twenty-four to thirty month period. LR: Right, so once you’re back from Desert Storm and settling in, ‘cause from a civilian perspective, not a whole lot happened, really until 9/11. So as you’re settling into your career, what was your focus? Did you have a plan in your head, “This is what I’m going to do, by the time that I retire? 13 GV: No, I’m not sure I have a plan. I met my husband in Korea and I thought, I wasn’t really sure about an Air Force career at that point. I really thought coming out of Vanderbilt, what I wanted to do was finish my commitment, which was four years, and then go to Law School. I loved being in the Air Force, when I met my husband, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that I was going to stick around. He was a pilot, so his service commitment was much longer than mine and I go, “Well, if he’s still sticking around, I’m going to stick around for as long as he did.” Then one thing led to another and there’ve been great assignments. When we had young children, we got to a point where he was part-time guardsman, pilot, and I was still active-duty. It got to the point where we were not going to be able to live together and I had almost a one-year-old, almost a two-year- old, and a seven-year-old. I was going to go with the girls somewhere, get a Master’s, and then go do another really tough job and that’s when I cried, “Uncle” and went into the Reserve. I went into the Reserve in July 2003 and in November, I was on a C-130 headed to Kyrgyzstan, deployed, so it didn’t exactly work out like I thought it was going to work out. But that was at a point where even though I knew I still wanted a career in the Air Force, there was no way I could do that and still have what I felt like was an intact family, like a fully-functioning family. We just cried, “Uncle” and got out and went into the Reserve, thought it was going to be a little bit easier but we figured it out. LR: Yeah, it sounds like it. So how many children do you have? GV: I have three daughters. 14 LR: Oh, wow. Let’s talk a little bit about what 9/11 was like for you and how that affected your family. I know how it affected mine, my ex-husband is Guard and so I do understand a lot of the military, but how did that affect you and your family moving forward? GV: Right. Well, 9/11 started, for the entire military, certainly my family, the whole cycle of you’re either in a deployment, or training for a deployment, or prepping your unit for a deployment. My husband was a Fighter Pilot with a Guard unit in Montgomery, Alabama and I was in a C-130 Reserve unit, actually, let me take that back. 9/11 I had not gotten out. On 9/11, I was in Washington D.C. I was across the street from the Pentagon and I felt it in the building that I was in. I spent about four and a half days trying to figure out how to get home, because everything was grounded and nobody turned in a rental car ‘cause they’re all, “This might be the only car I have forever.” It affected our family in that we knew we were back in that cycle of your Air Force needs you, your nation needs you. We were fortunate enough, like I mentioned before, support networks, we both were in a Guard and Reserve unit that was in Montgomery and we were able to serve and build a support network around that, and that support network carried us through because my husband, I think, had four or five deployments before he retired out of his unit, all in. It was 9/11 and then it was this, and then it’s this, but the Air Force has not been “back home” all in gear since 9/11. Some Army pieces have come back in between, but the Air Force has been deployed since 9/11.That started that cycle of deployments or training your unit to be in one. 15 LR: Oh, okay. So you’ve mentioned the support network that you’ve created for yourself, what does that consist of for you? GV: First and foremost, family. My mother was on call, she and her husband actually moved to Montgomery, not just for us, it worked for them also. Then, I call her a nanny just so people understand how the relationship started but she’s really like the girls, other aunt, she’s been very much part of the family since the beginning. But I hired her to take care of our kids and she did so much more, but her name’s Loretta Hannah and I say to this day, I would not be a General Officer if it had not been for her. She absolutely facilitated for my husband and I to be able to serve. We were both TDY one time and she had a planned vacation to go to Tennessee, she took my kids with her. So she’s like, “Nobody else can take care of them. I know you all.” She was a military spouse also. Her husband had retired, but she knew, people had done that for her and her family and she was like, “Nope, I’ve got the girls. Just go do what you have to do.” That was the support network, and then my sister has flown in on emergency, short notice to do things for us. LR: Okay, that’s awesome. We’ve been talking about your role as a mother, how do you think that role has changed over the years? GV: Changed for me? LR: Like if you compare your grandmother, your mother, and then yourself, how has that role changed? GV: Right. Both of my grandmothers did not work while they were raising their children, so they solely functioned on running the household and kids. My mother 16 was in that transition place, she didn’t have to work, she did, but not the entire time. There were times in our childhood where she wasn’t working and all of that. I was the first person in that line that was a full-time in the Air Force and full-time mom at the same time. I think figuring out what that was going to be like and the biggest change was figuring out that you have to have help and it’s not just writing a check to have a babysitter or a nanny or something like that, it’s having the mindset to understand that this is a time in your life where asking for help is okay and that’s not a weakness. It’s not that you’re not the best mother and that asking for help means that you’re not a good example of a working mom. So learning that people need help whether you’re working or not and it’s okay to ask for support because your time will come around when you get to be the person doing the same thing for somebody else. I think military-working mothers have now figured that out. You can serve and be a mother and asking for help when you need it is a good thing, that’s a smart thing and that’s the only way to make it work. LR: Thank you, alright. I have three more questions. GV: Okay. LR: These three questions we’ve been asking everyone we’ve interviewed. So what does the term women’s work mean to you? GV: Nothing. I’ve raised three daughters and when I grew up, there weren’t any chores that were the girls’ chores or the boys’ chores, we just did everything. Even though both my dad and my step-father were traditional southern men, 17 except in the regard that they didn’t have any different expectations of me than they did of my brothers, so that term means nothing to me. LR: Okay, that’s great. As a woman, how do you define courage? GV: I define courage no differently as a woman. Courage is knowing that something’s scary, or intimidating, or hard and realizing that it’s scary, intimidating, and hard and doing it anyway. It takes courage for me to walk in a room that I need to “work,” that I need to meet everybody that’s there, and those people are intimidating, and going and doing it anyway. Or it’s sailing off to Las Vegas, Nevada, not knowing what it’s going to be, and saying, “This is what I’ve signed up for, I’m going to go do it anyway.” I don’t know that I would say that would differ whether a man was looking at it or whether I was. I love it when there’s young women that look at a military career and say, “That’s what I want to go do,” ‘cause I still think when you think of somebody in uniform, you think of a man. I do think that that’s a little bit different, when they see that. I think that’s very courageous, when they see themselves in that role. SS: You had mentioned about when you were having a hard time keeping your family intact and then you mentioned Reserves. I think I misunderstood, did you actually move into the Reserves or your husband did? GV: Yes, we were both active-duty. He finished his active-duty commitment and went into the Guard. The Guard, because you fly, it’s not two days a month, two weeks a year, he flew six or seven days a month, so I don’t even know how to describe it, it’s a lot and he was flying for FedEx. We had a FedEx job, we had his Guard job, and then my Reserve job because I was active-duty then I went into the 18 Reserve but I’ve never been anything but full-time Reserve, not by choice but that’s how it happened. SS: So you came back into active-duty after? GV: Yes, it’s full-time status. I’m a Reservist in a full-time role. SS: Okay, thank you. Then I have one other quick question. You had mentioned that on 9/11 you were across the street from the Pentagon and you could feel you had family, did that like make you question your career? Did you say, “I don’t know if I want to do this anymore?” What kind of emotions were attached to that? Or make you more loyal? GV: Yes, absolutely made me more loyal. When that happened, I was not in a unit that would have deployed and it made me sick to my stomach because I wasn’t going to be a part of doing whatever was going to come next. On that day, everybody was just in full-shock so that was probably not what I was thinking that day. Everybody, literally, was just trying to figure out what happened and what comes next. SS: Yeah, absolutely. LR: Okay. Before I ask the final question, two things. First, if you were in a room with a group of young women and had an opportunity to share with them some advice, what would that be? GV: You got to it in the other question. I would say, follow whatever your career path, wherever your arrow is pointing you, go after it a hundred percent. If you want a family and children and all those things, you can do it. It’s not one or the other. Your path will be different and it can go many ways depending on the career. 19 Some are more easier, more flexible for families than others, but it’s a hundred percent doable. I would say that, and then the biggest thing is that you don’t have to make choices because of your gender. You can really, truly manage whatever you decide that it is that you want to do. LR: Okay, is there any other story you’d like to share that’s just come into your head before I ask the final question? GV: Another story? I can’t think of any, there’s too many good ones. LR: I know, I’m sure. What was the first one that you thought of though? GV: When I made General Officer, there was a lot of people that came from Mississippi and Alabama, my dad’s side of the family and my mother’s side of the family, they came out all the way to Utah and it was January of 2017 when it was like three below, high. They were like, “This is crazy. What are we doing? We can’t even process how cold it is.” But they all came and they were so proud, they were proud of me, but they were proud to have a General Officer in the family and because I’m female, I think that made it even more special. It was a celebration for the entire family. LR: Okay. I thought of another question. Coming here to Utah and not ever having been a part of this culture before, and I realize how weird it is, this is my home. What was that like, coming into Utah to the culture that’s here? GV: I love the culture. Interestingly, Utah and Mississippi have very, very similar cultures. Utah, their hospitality beyond belief. Your neighbors, it’s like you’ve known them for years after you have the first handshake and everybody takes care of each other, it’s very similar to living in a small town in the South, growing 20 up that way. The family that I grew up with, I mentioned was very matriarchal, a lot of power in the women in our family. Not so for a lot of Mississippi, in the Mississippi I grew up in anyway, that wasn’t always the way. Sometimes I feel like Utah is still getting there, with that part, so there’s some similarity there as well. If you’re not from Utah, then you think Utah culture is one monolith. The biggest shock or surprise, I think, was that stereotypes are exactly what they are, they’re stereotypes. There’s no person that says, “I’m a Utahn and thus I am this, this, and this.” You should know that before you come, but coming here and experiencing all of that has been what I’ve felt the most. LR: Alright, final question. How do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped or influenced history, your community, and you personally? GV: History, I would say that’s the starting point where we said, “It wasn’t the individual,” that was fifty-fifty in a business relationship or in a personal, in a marriage, or anything else. That is the starting point from which I believe, American History, that we say, “Okay, we’re equal.” It didn’t, in practice, happen, and some people would argue it still hasn’t. But I think that’s the point in history that we can point to where that voice was loud enough that people had to start paying attention to it and other things happened from there. That was truly the starting point. Historically I think, gender equality for what we have right now really started at that point, that was the starting line, if you will. My community, I’ll just say my community in Mississippi, that would have been a much slower start. I mean, that was still a very structured white male, then maybe white female, then African American. There probably wasn’t anything 21 else in the 1920s in Mississippi, any other group, but that stratification, if you will, continues to this day. My community, it’s certainly much better, of course, they are leap years from where we were in the 1920s. But different communities, I think, process that differently and that makes sense. For me personally, I can’t imagine having stronger female role models. I wish I could have the conversation with my great-grandmother because in the early 1920s as that movement is going through, start to finish, that would’ve been her young adulthood through her thirties. From the start of courageous women saying, “Let’s start a movement to get the right to vote,” to when it happened, to when people were actually voting, and there were places that didn’t actually discourage it even if you were. I would have loved to have the conversation, “How did that change things for her? Did she become the person that really drove us having matriarchs in our family because of that? Or was it just her individually?” I know for me, that’s where it started. It started with her, and her formative years would’ve been there, and because she was a strong person, my great-aunt was very much strong, courageous, didn’t hold back kind of person, thus my mother and me. I would love to have that conversation with her. SS: That was great. LR: Thank you very much for your time, GV: You bet, thank you for yours. This is fun.