Revised interview (Childhood memories) Carol Cole Kleinman, M.D.

00:02 My name is Ellie Kleinman, and I'm 53 years old. Today is December 7, 2023, and I'm speaking with my mother, Carol Cole Kleinman. I should say Dr. Carol Cole Kleinman. This is a repeat of an interview that we conducted about a week ago where much of the interview, unfortunately, did not upload properly. So we're redoing it.

00:31 My name is Dr. Carol Cole Kleinman. I'm 78 years old, and I'm the mother of Ellie Kleinman, who is interviewing me today. And it's December 7, 2023.

00:47 Thanks. And we are sitting right now in Chevy Chase, Maryland, right outside of Washington, D.C. to conduct this inter. Interview. So, mom, the first question that I have is, can you tell me about where you grew up and what it was like?

01:05 Okay. I was born in Greeley, Colorado, on January 24, 1945. And the reason that I was in Colorado, or my mother was in Colorado, and my father was that my father was stationed. He was in the US army, and he was stationed at a German prisoner of war camp in Greeley, Colorado, where he was an interpreter. And my mother was there, too, and that's where she gave birth to me. And we were there for about a year. And of course, I don't really have any memory of that time, but my parents moved to St. Louis after the war because my dad had a friend from the army who owned an apartment building in St. Louis and offered him one that he could rent. And it was very hard to find housing after World War II. And so we were there from about 1946, six, I guess, for the next four or five years. My sister was born in 1948 in St. Louis. And I remember we had a very nice apartment. It was very big. And I remember walking, being walked by, I guess, a babysitter or someone to kindergarten. And I think it was a good time in our life. My mother was working as a dress designer, and my dad was working, and they could afford some help, take care of the kids. And so I think it was a pretty comfortable time. What happened is my dad got into the wholesale floor covering business. And my mother's aunt, Aunt Millie Green, who. She was the sister of my grandmother, my mother's mother, and she lived in Kansas City. And she and her husband, Uncle Herman Green, had sponsored my mother when she came to the United States. So I think my mother at that point knew that both of her parents had been killed in the concentration camps. And I think she wanted to be near family. She was close to Aunt Millie and she wanted my sister and I to have a sense of family. And that was the most important family at that time that we had. So I believe I went to kindergarten in St. Louis and then we moved to Kansas City and we lived in an apartment house called President Gardens, where a lot of people, young people, lived after the war. And I remember there were a lot of kids there and, you know, it was a nice time. There were lots of fireflies outside and you'd go out after dinner because it was apartment, there were a lot of kids. And, you know, so it was kind of an idyllic way to spend your time as a kid. And then I guess when I was in, I can't remember maybe the. The third grade, we moved. My parents were able to buy a small home in Meadow Lake, which was part of Prairie Village, Kansas, in Johnson County. And it was a two bedroom house with one bathroom. It was brand new. And my sister and I shared a room, as I said, one bathroom. But it was very comfortable. And my mom, who was very handy, she had been a dress designer, I think I mentioned. She made curtains, she made slipcovers. Everything looked very nice. So I went to Corinth Elementary School and I took a bus from Meadow Lake, where our house was, to Corinth School, which still exists, by the way. It's on 75th. Admission in Prairie Village or Johnson County, Kansas. When I was in sixth grade, let me mention one thing. Across from our school at that time was a big horse ranch. And actually I could look out the window and I would see these horses running around on a track. And when I got older, I learned that actually the horse that I was looking at won, I believe it was the Kentucky Derby. You know, it was a winning horse. Of course, as Kansas City developed, that became a shopping center. And, you know, that's all history. But I thought that was interesting because I didn't appreciate it at the time. So then when I went to junior high school, now Kansas City or Johnson county was basically just kind of starting to grow. And Johnson county was. A lot of people were moving there and they were building new schools right and left. So, like in sixth grade, I had to change schools. Public school from Corinth to, I think it was called Somerset School. And so that's where I went for sixth grade. And then in junior high, that's what they called it. Then I first went to Indian Hills Junior High for seventh and eighth grade. And then they built another junior high called Meadowbrook. And I went there for ninth grade for the first semester, the second Semester. By that time, my mother had given birth to a second, a third child, my brother Steve. And they needed more space. And so they bought a house on Wood Parkway in Kansas City. And we moved across the county line from Kansas into Missouri. And that was a completely different school district at the time. It happened to be actually, academically the best school district in Kansas City and actually one of the best in the country. But it was very disruptive socially because, you know, most of the kids there had gone to school all the way through elementary school and junior high. I had gone in a different system. Kansas was the development. There was new Southwest High School, where we moved, and Kansas City, Missouri, was a much older system. And as I said, the kids all knew each other. They still had high school sororities and fraternities then. So socially, it was kind of awkward. I considered going, joining a sorority, but it just wasn't a good fit for me. It wasn't a system that I felt comfortable going into. And I guess I was a pretty serious student, too. And there was a lot of. I don't think I was that interested in a lot of the activities that they were doing. So I went to Southwest High School. And I went there from the second semester, ninth grade, through high school. I graduated from high school in 1962. I was in a class of 404, and I was number four in the class. And I studied really hard in high school, had decided that I wanted to, if I could, go to a school, a more competitive school outside of Kansas City and outside of Missouri. So that's what I tried to do. And, you know, my parents had limited spending money. They were immigrants to the United States, and they were still trying to establish roots here and raise a family. So I knew that I had to get a scholarship, and so I studied really hard. But I did have friends there. I had a lot of friends, actually, but they were mostly people in my classes and all kids in my Sunday school. I went to school. I went to Sunday school. I was involved. I was president of a literary society that we had in high school at that time. I didn't want to do this, but the person who was the sponsor of that literary society was called Safo. Literary Society told me I had to give a speech because I was the president, and they had to have somebody enter in every category. That was very difficult for me. I remember practicing over and over and over again in front of a mirror. And I believe I talked about Latin America, and, you know, Kennedy was president in that time, and talking about how America could support a growing democracy in Latin America. Anyway, I practiced so hard that I actually won first place. But it was. It really took a lot out of me. I remember that. I don't know. Oh, I'm in high school. I was chosen by my chemistry teacher, Mr. Gustafson, and my Spanish teacher, Ms. Norris. They were both involved, apparently, in the Red Cross and had been asked to identify a good Spanish student to go to South America with the Red Cross. And they had young people from other places in the country, and so they selected me. And they also selected another fellow who was a friend. And we were both able to go on the trip, which at that time was kind of amazing. I mean, this was 1961, and I believe the Red Cross had to pay $7,000, which was a lot of money for each of us, and we had to fly to Washington. I was the first person in my family to go on an airplane. And, I mean, I remember it was a propeller plane. I don't think they had jets then, but it was very nice. We went to Washington. We got to travel all over the city and see parts of Washington, which I fell in love with. And then we were divided. The group was divided. I was assigned to go to Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico. And some people went to Argentina. Some people went to Peru. Other people went to Chile. Anyway, we lived with families in each of those places, and it was a short trip. I mean, the whole thing only lasted about four or five weeks. So spending a week in Washington, it was three weeks in South America. But that was really a new experience for me. I was traveling without my parents. I asked my mother once how she could let me go because it was pretty risky to fly on airplanes down to. We spent the night, I think, in Panama, and then we went down to. To Colombia at that time, Venezuela. They were very hostile to the United States. And it was right after Richard Nixon had gone there and he had had tomato. He was vice president then. He had had tomatoes thrown at him. I just asked her, I said, how could you let us let me go on this trip? You know, because she was very careful about any risks that we took her kids. And she said, well, how could I not let you go? Because it was a wonderful opportunity, which I'm happy they did let me do it. It turned out to really influence me, because I felt really strongly that if I had an opportunity, I wanted to come back to Washington. I thought for me, at that time, 1966, you said 61. Well, 61 was when I went to South America, when I went to college. I went to Northwestern University from 1962 to 1966. I was a political science major and I did have a full tuition scholarship. So I kind of forgot what I was just going to say.

15:33 Well, you were talking about Washington and wanting to come here and how that had been. That was very formidable, that experience in helping you determine what you wanted to do.

15:42 Right. Because I felt. And again, things are different now, but we're talking about the mid-1960s. And I had thought I wanted to have a career. And that was very unusual in Kansas City for a woman to want to have a career. I knew one woman who was a lawyer and I knew one woman who was a doctor, and I didn't know them very well, but that was all. And you know, it was a very kind of provincial community in the sense that there's a very strong social network and a lot of pressure to be very social and be part of a country club and get into the whole Jewish social scene. But that wasn't me. And so I really didn't see how I would fit. I worried that I would be always feeling I didn't fit in. So when I discovered Washington, and of course on the east coast, women had many more opportunities. I decided that if I had an opportunity to go back to Washington, I would definitely try to do it. When I was in college, my parents wanted me to graduate and be able to get a job, so they wanted me to get an education degree. But what happened is when I was in college one summer, I applied for a fellowship program in Kansas City and was selected as one of the people who was selected. And I was assigned to Kansas City General Hospital, which I'd never been in a hospital before, since most of my relatives, sadly, were killed. I really didn't have any experience being in a hospital because nobody was sick. They were all pretty young. But I liked the people who worked in the hospital. And I could see I felt very satisfied working there. I think I felt that I had kind of a little calling, that I felt I had a lot of empathy and I could be helpful to people. So when I. I changed my majors, I was a political science major. But during my last two years of college, I talked to the advisors there about applying to medical school. And I rearranged my schedule so that I could do almost all the pre med requirements except for physics. And I think that was the only one I hadn't taken. I applied to University of Missouri and a couple of other schools. But then during that time, this was my senior year in college, I Also met my former husband, Ted Kleinman. We met through a friend of mine who was married to a former law school roommate of Tez. And he was actually trying. He was in the obscenity division at the Justice Department. He was trying an obscenity case out in Sioux City, Iowa. And why Sioux City? Because they chose a venue to bring their case where they thought they would get a sympathetic jury. And so he would visit his friend Mike Fox and my friend Ruthie Fox. So they introduced us and so we got to know each other. And I think that I talked with him about possibly getting a job in Washington one summer. In any event, over time, we fell in love and we decided we wanted to get married and was just trying to squeeze so much into such a short time because here I was already accepted to medical school.

20:10 Where did you get in?

20:11 I got into the University of Missouri, but then Ted suggested I apply to Georgetown and GW in case we lived in Washington, which is where he was living at the time. And I did that. And actually I did get accepted. And I think I planned. My memory is I planned to go to GW because I felt quite comfortable there. I thought that that would be a good fit for me. You know, I hadn't taken that much science and so I thought I could manage GW but then Ted was 8 years older than I was. And I think reality kind of set in when I realized that, like we were going to get married. I was 21, he was a couple days short of being 29. And if I then went to eight years of medical school and residency, that he would be in his mid-30s. And, you know, I thought I should finish school before I started to have a family because I knew the limitations of how much stress I could handle. But Ted's sister and brother in law lived in Baltimore, were both lawyers and they were. My sister in law had a small child and she was working part time as a lawyer and then eventually went into full time practice. But she was kind of a role model for me because there was an example of a woman who did have a career and was able to have a family. And you know, it was in those days, was before women's libs. So I, and you know, I was, I was alone in my circle in Kansas City. It's not like I had lots of girlfriends that wanted to do the same thing that I did. So I, I think that I looked upon. Her name was Sheila, Sheila Sacks and her husband Steve Sacks. I kind of looked at them as role models at the time. We're talking about 1966. And I decided, okay, I'm not going to go to medical school because I was going to get married. And Ted would have been too old. I thought in those days it was very old for a man to be 35 or so when he became a father for the first time. I guess I was worried that if he were older father that he could die young and my kids wouldn't have both parents. Anyway, I had all these concerns, so I decided to apply to law school instead. And I was able to get into law school again. I got into both GW and Georgetown, and I decided to go to GW. So in 1966, after I graduated from college, I enrolled at GW Law School in Washington. And Ted and I got married on July 3, 1966, in Kansas City. And it was a very stressful time because I didn't even get to go to my graduation because we were getting married the beginning of July. And so I only had a month.

24:14 This was your college graduation.

24:20 Marriage and starting a new family and all that was very, very important to my parents, having lost all their family. And so my mother wouldn't let me go back and forth, you know, to go to the graduation or anything. So I did miss, you know, some of the festivities there when I graduated. But anyway, so we got married. And so then I began my Life in Washington D.C.

24:53 One thing I wanted to touch on was when you were thinking originally about your career. I think I recall you saying you had wanted to be a nurse. Is that right after you worked in the hospital as a candy striper, but your mother told you not to be a nurse if you could be a doctor?

25:13 My mother had had aspirations of being a. A very educated woman. She was very smart, very hard working, and she would have gone to college if she had lived at any other time. But she unfortunately graduated from high school in 1933, which is just when the Nazis and Hitler were really coming into power. And in Germany and it wasn't possible for Jews, boys or girls to go to college. And she had to get. She had to be able to support herself. So she instead learned to be a dress designer, which was a complicated thing. I mean, in Germany people do apprenticeships and, you know, even if you're going to be a waiter, you learn how to be a really good waiter. So that's what she put her interest in. But I think she had aspirations for me because she always encouraged me to make really good grades and try and be as good a student as I could. So after working in that hospital that summer, I wasn't a candy striper because that was a volunteer. I was assigned to do some kind of a hospital administration internship. I think I was to help evaluate the. The system where they supplied all the necessities of wards and, you know, all the things you need in the hospital was more of a business kind of position than it was doctors. But I enjoyed working there. I enjoyed the people who worked there. And so I told my mother I wanted to be a nurse. She said, now, if you, if you're going to go into medicine, you should not be a nurse, you should be a doctor. I think she thought the way things were at that time, you know, nurses had a much more subordinate role to doctors. And I guess she thought that, you know, that would be a much more responsible position. So that's. That seemed to feel right. That's how I got onto that tract, actually.

27:53 I just remembered her. Them coming to your medical school graduations. I'm sure she was very proud of you.

28:00 I think so, yes.

28:02 Okay, well, tell me a little bit about what it was like in Kansas City when you were growing up. What was it like there?

28:16 Well, you know, there were two parts for me. Until the age of 13, I lived in Johnson county and brand new suburbs. And we lived in an area near Leawood. Leawood at that time was a restricted area. It was owned. Had been owned by a company called the Crow Brothers that had been in charge of developing it. And they had restrictive covenants on the property so people couldn't sell to Jews and they couldn't sell to black people. That has all been eliminated. You know, the laws were changed and so forth over the years. But so a lot of the people who were in my school lived in Leawood in those areas. And their parents, a lot of their fathers, were pilots for twa because TWA was headquartered in Kansas City. There were some Jewish kids and a lot of them, the people that I knew lived in Meadow Lake. And you know what? I remember playing games with them. And I remember playing games with my parents, had a lot of friends in Kansas City. And, you know, it was a kind of custom at that time. There was not television and all that, so people would visit each other on Sundays. And my Uncle Carl, who was my grandmother's brother, he was also Aunt Millie's brother, he lived in Kansas City and he had a big farm out in Hickman Mills, Missouri. And all the German Jewish refugees, who were kind of. Some were closely related, some were distantly related, would come out there on Sundays because we didn't have air conditioning, and it was cooler out there. So I remember, you know, my aunt. My Aunt Irma, that was his wife, used to make delicious chocolate chip cookies. And, you know, all the people would sit around the dining room table and have coffee and cake, and kids would go outside and play. It was a nice, nice way to spend your time. Holidays were spent, like some of the major holidays again, getting together with some of the other German Jewish refugees and some distantly related, some closely related. And so one of the members of the family, a distant relative, was very successful in the jewelry business, costume jewelry business. And he had belonged to the Jewish country club in Kansas City, which was called Oakwood. And so he would reserve a room there, and we would have our Passover seders there, and everyone would get together. I would get new clothes, my sister would get new clothes. And, you know, we did that every year. It was something. It was fun. And it was like getting a new dress for Easter kind of thing. My mother always worked very hard to make sure we were all dressed well. And they, you know, they didn't have a lot of spending money to go out to dinner, but they did pay for those dinners so that we could go to the family seder. One thing I do remember was my mother's Aunt Millie and my Aunt Millie, Uncle Herman. They had one son. His name was Rudy, Rudy Green. And when I was a young girl, he was drafted into the Korean. Into the army. He fought in Korea. He was 16 years older than I was. So, you know, I remember visiting Aunt Millie and Uncle Herman. And, you know, there was this big bedroom there that was his, but it was empty because he wasn't there. He was in Korea. But we used to kid him because he was already in his late 20s, early 30s when he came home. We teased him about not being married, but we were all, you know, he was very kind to us. I remember he brought us little Oriental shoes, kind of the thong kind, and different things from Korea when he came home. And when we would visit my Aunt Millie, my mother would talk with her and with my uncle, and my sister and I would go in Rudy's room and play all kinds of games with pennies. And, you know, it was a peaceful time. It was kind of a. In retrospect, the 1950s and the early 60s were a very nice time to be an American because America had won the war and they were at peace. And Kansas City was a very stable place to live in the Midwest.

33:57 You know, it's the first night of Hanukkah, and So I thought I would ask if you had any special memories of Hanukkah from when you were a kid.

34:08 Oh, that's a good question. Thank you. Yes, I do. I mean, we celebrate Hanukkah every year. And my mother, you know, she's the one who kind of set the like in many families. You know, she set the customs for the family, and we celebrated for eight days, and we got presents every night, even if they were very small. I think once I got a comb, you know. But we usually got one really nice present. I think one of my favorites was this big doll, which was about the size of a baby or maybe bigger. But there's some pictures I have of me holding this doll. And also I had other dolls. My mother was so handy. She made beautiful doll clothes, and she built a dollhouse. And, you know, Hanukkah was a nice time. We played games with friends. You know, it was a nice time to grow up.

35:20 That's great. Well, we have about eight minutes left. Maybe you could tell me a little more about your relationship with your parents and perhaps if you can remember a time when you felt particularly close to either one of them.

35:36 Well, I have a different perspective on my parents now as an adult than I did growing up. I was the eldest child. I was three years older than my sister. I was their first child they had. Although they had an aunt here, they had no grandparents and no one really to support them. And they both worked very hard. My mom was very strict. I think that's the way she was brought up. And, you know, I can remember if I didn't do what she said. I mean, I remember running around the dining room table. She was trying to hit me with a hairbrush. And I remember the same thing happened to my sister. It wasn't just me. Hairbrushes were used in Germany, I think, for discipline. I was a very picky eater. And there were a lot of things that I hated growing up. I didn't like eggs. I didn't like cheese. I didn't like sauerkraut, many of the German cheeses and things that my father's aunt, who lived in New York, would send him because they knew he liked. I couldn't even stand the smell of. So there would be many, many meals when I would just have to sit there because I wouldn't eat sauerkraut or I'd try to put sugar on it or kind of hide it. I don't remember how those meals ended, but I just remember sitting there a long time. And then as I Got older, you know, I wanted to wear lipstick or I wanted to shave my legs or whatever. It was all kind of forbidden. I had to get my hair cut the way my mother wanted me to wear my hair. I had to wear the clothes that she made for us. Otherwise, she said, I wouldn't have new clothes. There were shoes that everybody else had. There was a saddle oxford called a Spalding. I remember they cost $15 and they were really nice. I really wanted to have them. But my mom bought everything on sale and that was not possible. And again, my sister has similar experience. I think as adults, we've both been always very concerned about fashion and looking nice and the quality of clothes. We didn't appreciate growing up how lucky we were because we really had good quality clothes. It's just that our mother made them. And now I wish I had my own dressmaker. But growing up, I certainly didn't. In high school, I worked Thursday evenings and Saturdays at a department store to earn spending money. I used to tell my father that he was hen pecked. That was because he always wanted to keep peace in the family. I think his parents had argued a lot. My paternal grandfather had been a very successful businessman in Germany, Koblenz, Germany. And he would go out late at night and play cards, some game called scad with his friends. He was very prosperous and he played with the businessmen and Copelands and my grandmother, my father's mother, Selma. My dad was very close to her. And I think she was very broken hearted and sad that he wouldn't come home in the evening. He didn't want to celebrate holidays particularly. And so he wanted to have a different kind of a family. And he really. I thought he was hen pet because he did what my mother wanted to do. But I think in retrospect, his eye was on creating a new, happy, healthy family. And he was successful at that. He was very loving, he was very nurturing. And he and my mother raised two girls and one boy. And we've all three, in our own way, been able to stand on our own two feet and become successful in America. And I think the way we were raised, when you move away to a different city like Washington, and you see people who come from all over the world. And if you work like I did as a psychiatrist and you get to know people and their backgrounds, it makes. It has made me really appreciate what I had. Even things that I resented, you know, the discipline that I had. I got mad about it. But, you know, I knew what was right and what's wrong. Wrong in today's world, a lot of people don't know that. And I knew what was safe and what was not safe and how I should behave. And, you know, again, I felt it as restrictions growing up. But as I got more mature and learned more about the world, I have come to respect my picture parents and their values and their choices. I'm very grateful for my father for staying with my mother and making a happy, peaceful household, which is what they did. Even though money was tight and we lacked a lot of things materially. We did take vacations. We went to the national parks in Colorado. We went to the Ozarks, or went to a wedding in New York of one of my father's cousins. We had a happy family life. We didn't get to go to the fanciest resorts or take car trips all over the country and see the United States, but we had a nice family life.

42:26 Yeah. Well, with that, I'm gonna say just thank you for spending this time with me tonight, and I love you very much. And hopefully we'll have the chance to do some more interviews very soon.

42:39 I love you too, Ellie, very much. I'm so proud of you. Thank you.