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packs called "Something Great." It is fifteen dollars a mark, they send

you these thirty little sacks and you take one every morning and I get

tired of taking the damn things and forget to take them about half the

time, but I'm convinced they work. And she takes them and sends them

all over the country to her friends. And I have never seen anybody that

can work as hard as she can. God Almighty! I mean, you know, you would

think that sometime, someway, she would run down. But she was my

co-chairman in the Nixon campaign and at the same time, we got her to

run for the public service commission, so she was doing both things at

the same time and she never got to bed before midnight at the earliest,

and boy, at six o'clock the next morning, she was just as bright and

chipper as anybody that you have ever seen. And ready to go again.

W.D.V.: Disgusting! It really is.

Thomas: Yeah. And she doesn't drink or smoke and cuss. She is a very

devout Mormon and Jesus, I don't know how she gets her kicks except

loving to run and loving to tear men's asses up. She is a little bit

too quick with that knife sometimes, you know. And I am afraid that

sooner or later that will get her in trouble, because she is so sharp

and she comes back so fast that somebody is going to bump into somebody

that sets her up, you know. She kind of got set up last week if you

read the papers. She has been a bank director for three or four years

and a year ago her secretary puts out three or five hundred letters

a week, she says. but she wrote a letter to the FDIC asking them to .

she wrote it on the Public Commission stationery ..

W.D.V.: I read that.

Thomas: Oh God, that was a super colossal blunder. She shouldn't have

even written it on her personal stationery, but she damn sure hadn't

have written it on the PSC stationery. And for the first time, see, she


From the Southern Oral History Program, #4007, Interview 4-6a in the Southern Historical Collection,
University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill. FOR REFERENCE ONLY: PERMISSION TO
PUBLISH MUST BE REQUESTED. WARNING: MOST MANUSCRIPTS ARE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT.