22
D: Yes,I go up at Thanksgiving, Christmas and during summers, but they don't
get down here.
R: You went to Burma after the girls married, right?
D: Yes we did.
R: It must have been a wonderful experience for you.
D: It was. We were there two years and that was a Ford Foundation grant.
We were in Mandalay. We were teaching at the University of Mandalay.
Bob and Miriam Williams were there, and Helen and Dick Edwards.
R: We had quite a contingent of the University of Florida people over there,
didn't we?
D: Three professors. We stayed two years, they stayed four. It was a wonderful
experience and educational in many ways.
R: John travels between the towns you had _while you were there active
in the clubs in Gainesville. Tell us about what organizations you belonged
to.
D: When I first came here I joined the Women's Club and the University
Women's Club, the Ag. Women's club and all of the interest groups. It
was all a new life to me because I had been working those years during
the war.
R: Are you a member of AAW?
D: No, I had been a member of AAW in Memphis and then very active in that,
actually, but I didn't join it when I came down here. I don't think I did.
At first I joined everything and then I had to resign a lot of them because
I had too much to do. After we came back from Burma I worked with Shands
auxiliary at the crippled childrens' clinic for quite a few years and enjoyed
that very much. But you were asking about when I left College Court.
We came back from Burma in 1960 and bought a house on 1729 Eighth Avenue, and
at that time the other side of the street was outside the city limits. Eighth
Avenue was a dead end at the bottom of the hill on 23rd Street. No sooner had
we bought it than they started widening the street. We thought they never
would because that was Shands' property, and we didn't think that he would
want anybody going through it. He didn't mind.
R: Then the edge of town had become the middle of town, so you decided that it
was too north, and you had trouble coming out of your driveway because of
the traffic, didn't you?
D: Well, I never did but the reason we moved--we loved the place, and John had
a garden there that he liked very much, he had started getting heart I
trouble and so he couldn't handle that hill anymore and we decided that we
better move to a place we could manage. John retired in 1969 and he started
to do full-time consulting. He had been consulting for years with the Army
engineers because they were doing a big project in the everglades for water
management and he did ecological surveys for that. After he retired he did
full-time consulting with a lot of different development companies who needed