Louise Warner's Oral History

Louise Warner Oral History

Interview with Louise Warner

Date of Interview: November 6, 2007; Alpine, Utah

Interviewer: Lindsey Olson

Transcriber Lindsey Olson

Lindsey Olson: I will be taking an oral history of you with some focus on your association and memories of the media.

Lindsey: What’s your full name?

Louise: Betty Louise Stowell Warner.

Lindsey: What year were you born/

Louise: 1930

Lindsey: Where were you born?

Louise: Pasadena California.

Lindsey: How many siblings do you have?

Louise: 3.

Lindsey: Older, younger?

Louise: older sister two younger brothers

Lindsey: What were their names/

Louise: My sister’s Norma Jean, my two brothers are Paul and Robert.

Lindsey: What do you remember most about your early years?

Louise: Well my earliest years I remember a lot of sitting in the hot sand on the beach getting sunburned and, uh early years, they were depression years. We didn’t have much, I remember.. . man you should have warned me to go back that far. I’m trying to think of the earliest, I mean I was only about 18 months because I’ve seen pictures of myself but I remember sitting on the hot sand, we went to the beach a lot beach a lot because we lived in long beach at this time. And we used to go camping at Mirror Lake, I remember that and my sister and I had to sleep in the car. I didn’t have my younger brothers because they weren’t born then, it was just my sister and I and my mother and father slept in the tent and I was afraid that a bear would come up and break the window and grab me and haul me away. Let me think for a minute, my earliest recollection, we went to a lot of movies in those days.

Lindsey: Which ones do you remember specifically?

Louise: Well my parents wouldn’t let us see anything that had a murder in it so most of them were musicals or comedies.

Lindsey: So was the violence well known?

Louise: Oh no there was no violence, no you’d sit through a whole picture waiting for the kiss at the end, there was nothing just squeaky clean.

Lindsey: How would they know what movies you could or couldn’t go to/

Louise: Oh by the advertisements in the newspapers.

Lindsey: Did you read a lot of those as well.

Louise: Oh we studied them all week long to see which one we were going to go to cause it was always on a Saturday.

Lindsey: Would you always go on a Saturday or were they always played on a Saturday?

Louise: We always went on a Saturday, yah. But oh I can remember doing a lot of acrobats and tap dancing out in front of the house. I remember the earth quake. It was a very serious earthquake, California is known for that. I remember sleeping outside in a tent and there was this tripod with a pot hanging from it and I wanted to go in the house and take a nap in my own bed and I wasn’t allowed to go in the house and I could not understand that I thought they were just being mean. The gas mains had broken in long beach and there was a tremendous amount of damage so we had to stay outside until those were fixed then we could go back in our house.

Lindsey: Where did you get the information about the earthquake/

Louise: I just remember sleeping in the backyard, I was taking a nap but the earthquake happened at four o’clock in the afternoon, which was a blessing, because the kids were out of school, because the schools were demolished. This was an earthquake where the ground actually opened up and objects would fall into it and the earth would close up. It was one of the worst earthquakes and our front porch, the whole side caved in on our house, but the house structure itself was fine. We have pictures, I still have pictures of the destruction of it but I was asleep, I never felt it.

Lindsey: Did you listen to any news reports on the radio?

Louise: Oh, I was only four, just barley. All I remember is that tripod, in my vision and sleeping in the tent and wanting to go take a nap in my own bed.

Lindsey: So what was your first experience with the media, what do you remember most, about radio or TV.

Louise: Well you really want to know the truth?

Lindsey: Yah.

Louise: This is really the truth, um, we used to go watch Shirley Temple movies and of course everybody just adored her, and um, I used to always go out in front of the house, because I loved to tap dance. I would watch the movies and I would see the steps and I would practice the steps and I was about five. And, there was this car sitting across the street with this man in it and I didn’t pay too much attention but he sat there for several weeks and then. The next thing I remember I was in a back room of my house with all the windows and the shades pulled down and I thought oh, they’re hiding me from that man cause he’s kidnapper. Kidnapping at that time was common for ransoms during the depression; people would do anything for money. And, after the Limburg kidnapping, it was, everybody was self-conscious about it. So years later I asked my mother, what was that all about? She said well, when you were in the back room with the windows down you had measles, but the man in the car was a talent scout. The neighbors had called the studio and the sent him out and he had been observing me and he wanted to have me do a screen test but my father wouldn’t allow it because he was fanatic you know. It would just not be, no one of his children were going to have anything to do in the media or entertainment world because his father was a violinist and his father had forced him to take violin lessons when he didn’t want to. And this was the truth, grandpa used to go all over, the, what were they called the Mormon corridor, which it was from Salt Lake to Mexico and play concerts on his violin. He was really very good. So anyway my father was very prejudice against the media and so he wouldn’t allow it. So that was my first real, at that time I didn’t know but from then on, well that’s not important, that’s not important. Anyway, from then on I was not allowed to play out in front any more.

Lindsey: Did that prejudice against the media affect your intake of the media in any other way?

Louise: Just my father.

Lindsey: Did that affect

Louise: no see I didn’t know

Lindsey: the way you used the media, your exposure to it at all?

Louise: oh no no no, I loved the movies and I loved the singing and the dancing and the radio. That’s all we had in those days was a radio. We would lay down on our stomachs in front of the radio, and we would listen to superman, little orphan Annie, um, oh what was his name, Alice? his wife’s name was Alice?..., Jack Benny, grew up the Benny Show, the Jack Benny show. And we would, we would watch, listen to those, just before dinner. Just like nowadays when kids watch cartoons when mom’s cooking dinner. But that’s what we would hear. We would never miss, especially Superman, he was our favorite. But that’s all we had was the radio. So we really weren’t aware of a media existence. We were going through a depression and then the war started on December 7^th. I can remember exactly where I was. We were having a picnic, it was on a Sunday, in the park right across the street from the Ward house. We’d go to church than we’d go have a picnic at the recreation golf course and everybody was running from one group of picnickers to the other and it was you know a commotion and it brought an alarming to us and when they come up to us they said uh, they bombed Pearl Harbor. So everybody hurried home to turn on the radio and from that time the media became very important in our lives. The weekly news was always on the screen when you’d go to a picture show. You would have fifteen minutes of news on a film at the picture show. It was always about what was happening around the world but mainly about the War. And everything on the radio was always about the war and the progress and we became much more attached to this radio. This instrument you know. And my love was music and on Saturday afternoons I would lay on the couch and listen to the Opera. Texaco, sponsored by the Texaco company the uh New York Metropolitan Opera. Every Saturday and I never missed. It was wonderful but it was still just the radio at this time. We had nothing else; we didn’t even have a telephone. My father was like I say, he was kind of a fanatic and he didn’t let us have a telephone he didn’t want my mother to sit all day long and talk on the phone. That’s what he would say. He just had a strange outlook on life, but that was his problem. Where I made my mistake was I let his problem become my problem. It affected me too much, but as far as the media is concerned in those days there really wasn’t any. They weren’t running around interviewing people there weren’t any demonstrations there weren’t any marches there wasn’t really anything newsworthy except the war. And of course that brought an end of depression and people started making money and the factories. Douglas aircraft was built just a few miles from our house. And the war effort still did not, what you would call, real media interest. There are the newspapers and that was our really only connection was the newspaper and the radio. And then after the war of course somebody said there’s a thing called television. And you could go down to a store, an electronics store, and look outside and they’d have this TV on in the window. I know it sounds funny to you kids but, there’d be a group of people standing around watching this box. It had a big screen and it was it had pro.. you know people were on it and we began to realize, oh my word, there was something added. Radio was no longer important it was television, and so everybody was buying A television black and white and we watched, oh we’d sit and watch that for hours. You know that was the greatest thing next to ice cream.

Lindsey: What programs did you watch?

Louise: In those days? By this time I was graduated from high school. We ourselves never had a television, but, and by this time and by this time my parents had divorced and I went to work with Uncle Milo who had made his life, he was an acrobat. And I went to work with him in the circus and he had a television in the trailer that we traveled in and we’d just sit and just watch stupid programs. You know whatever mystery. I can’t remember exactly what we would watch, anything. Anything seemed entertaining to us after just listening all our life to radio, just sound. Now we’ve got sight that was exciting. It really didn’t matter, we probably watched a lot of stupid programs but it was still exciting for us. But then as far as the media is concerned. Being in the circus for two years I had a lot of articles written up about us. My picture was on the front page of newspapers and I’d have radio interviews. Not TV just radio interviews. And I had been invited to news luncheons with newspaper people. And I remember this one woman bragging at the table that she was going to go to Korea and I was so shocked because I didn’t think women did things like that in those days. And I said what in the world would you want to go to Korea for, there was a war on. And she looked at me like I was really stupid so I just didn’t say anymore. But, I got kind of tired to be frankly honest with you having newspaper people coming wanting your picture and wanting to interview you. I could never see what was so interesting about the whole thing. Course I didn’t realize that the places that we performed were charitable organizations like the Lions Club the Moose’s and the Children’s Hospitals. These they would sponsor a big celebration and they would hire several, quite a few, even a lot of these circus acts to come together to bring people in to fund money. And um so it was, they weren’t interviewing me because I was who I was. They were interviewing me because they were just interviewing… an attraction that was going to appear at their money raising funds. You follow me?

Lindsey: Um hum.

Louise: Well we played some real exciting places, I mean I’ve slept in the Orange Bowl, I’ve slept in Soldier’s field in Chicago and I’ve slept in Dallas Texas, is it I don’t’ remember now what the name of that bowl was, oh man. Anyway as far as media is concerned. When I quit and went home I became more serious in my thought and began to realize what was going on around the world and television was wonderful. Media that brought things to our attention that when I stop to think when I was a child in the thirties we never would have been aware of.

Lindsey: What things were these?

Louise: The things that were important, politics.

Lindsey: like elections?

Louise: right, elections. Um the fact that, how our democracy worked. Um, you became a part of that. You voted. We um, when you’re growing up as a kid in school in high school in my day because like I say there was only a radio, there was a very lack of media and the newspaper was all we had . When the media really started like National Geographic all of a sudden came up and of course on television you could watch the programs that they would have. And Wild Kingdom and we’d watch Walt Disney and we just became more educated because of the media. It informed us, we were just backwards growing up. We didn’t know anything about anything until the war started. And the media really played a larger role in our life. It brought the world closer to us. And that was wonderful.

Lindsey: When did you own your first TV?

Louise: Let’s see. Ray and I bought our first TV when we graduated from college and went down to St. George to live. We uh, we bought some furniture for the first time. Otherwise everything was DI, you know how that is. And we bough this television black and white. We watched that thing for years. We didn’t buy a color television until we were living in Mclean Virginia.

Lindsey: What year was that?

Louise: Well, we moved there in ’63, um and we moved into, oh about maybe 3 or 4 years. Maybe ’65 we finally bought a color TV. A fancy one. We were making more money then. And of course we were living in the shadows of the nation’s country and then of course living so close to Washington and giving Ray working for the federal government we became very aware of the media and how much it it really played in our lives. I can remember the assassination of President Kennedy I was ironing and I was watching TV while I was ironing. I mean people had TV’s I their kitchen’s they couldn’t even eat with out watching television. It was all absorbing it was just wild. Of course it’s worse now because people have blackberry’s all their…

Lindsey: Ipods?

Louise: Ipods, and they’re never without those. The world isn’t getting any better it’s getting worse. More media driven and then you can download your music the other days. We had to go buy records. Old fashioned records at the, we used to go into, when I was in high school on our way home from school we’d stop off at this music store and we would pick our records we’d go in the record both and play them. That’s how you would decide if you want to buy it. You got to play it first. And then all of a sudden we went, we went down to. What was that tower’s down in the district that sold records and DVD’s? Did you ever go down there?

Lindsey: I don’t know.

Louise: Oh my gosh it was 6 floors. Towers something, and we went into

Lindsey: Tower Records?

Louise: Maybe that’s just what it was and that’s what we went into buy was the record. There wasn’t a single record and we hadn’t purchased a record because we’d just turn on our television. We went to buy a record, and there was all these little skinny things called, what were they called, uh.

Lindsey: CD’s?

Louise: Yah CDs, yah just a just a CD and that was your music was all on a small CD and we were looking for big records. We didn’t have anything to play a CD on. We had to go get a CD player.

Lindsey: Did you ever do the A-track thing? Or cassettes before that?

Louise: Yah, we do have, we do have some track music. Yah we do. Ray still, we still play them, cassettes. We still play them. We have never purchased CD’s with that same music, you know to replace it. They play fine. You know, it works good. But uh, we don’t sit down as a family and listen to a CD, we watch it on television. You know the only time we play a CD around here is in the car when you’re traveling you turn the radio on you got your chart. But if you’re traveling the radio doesn’t always work. You get into areas where there’s no reception so it’s always nice to take some CD’s along. But we don’t sit down the way we used to when I was little and listen to music on the radio as a family. We just don’t do that. We lost that you know. But um, we still don’t have all these. We’re too old we don’t want to learn. We, I can’t even, I can’t operate my computer.

Lindsey: What are your first memories of the internet?

Louise: My first experience with the internet was I think when Vincent (her son) gave me an old computer. And he was showing me what you could do with it and he was clicking and clicking and clicking and moving this mouse and all of these frames were all coming up on top of each other and my head was totally spinning and I though there’s no way, there’s no way I could handle something like that. So he gives me this old computer and, and then he says you’ve got to subscribe to internet so I did. Then I had to learn to use the e-mail. That was kind of confusing for quite a while to me. But after I started you know it came, it came slow. But it, I was, I’m trying to think, did I we didn’t have a computer when we lived in Virginia, I didn’t have, we did not, no I didn’t.

Lindsey: So what year did you get one?

Louise: We moved out here (Alpine Ut) in 1989 and sometime after, after that Vincent gave me an old computer and um then something happened to it and I’d heard these advertisements on the radio of Totally Awesome Computers so I took it down there and, to get it fixed and he told me well it wasn’t worth fixing it was just a piece of junk and then told me what he could do and blah blah blah. When I walked out the door I think I’d spent about a thousand dollars and didn’t know what for. So I got a little better computer but not much and I don’t know. Like you say there weren’t the search engines at that time were not that sophisticated, and I wasn’t sophisticated either so we got along fine. As long as I just knew what button to push. And um, then I, I was having trouble, that was it, lightning hit it, lightning hit it. It was right here in this room, lightning hit it, blew it out. I went back to Totally Awesome and I had to have the whole thing rebuilt and it was another thousand dollars or whatever it was in those days, and but it had upgraded, I got better, a better, a larger, um memory, memory board, a mother board, memory board, memory. Yah. So anyway. I slowly worked my way up until finally, yah, but the internet um Google actually didn’t come into play until what about five years ago?

Lindsey: Um, probably a little more than that, no more, more than that,

Louise: More than that? There was non Google, I’m trying to think what search engines we, Explorer, Internet explorer I think is what we used.