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Our Families - Our Lives. Write-Link Project
Emily G.
A Letdown in Culture
June 20, 2005 An interview with Derexia M.
How much have things changed in the last 60 years? According to Derexia
M., quite a bit. "Everything has changed." M. says, "Culture
has changed, it's gotten worse since I've lived here."
She says she comes from the "greatest generation," because
it has weathered so many changes with such grace. Her stories of Ypsilanti
during World War II prove her right. She spoke of living with rations
on gas, meat, and sugar and a lack of adequate housing for the thousands
of people who traveled north to work in the factories made necessary
by the war effort. She talked about living in a one room apartment and
sharing a bathroom with her neighbors while having a small child. She
made light of the hardship of having ration books stolen, and not being
able to always buy her two children the clothes or the shoes that they
needed. "We always had enough." Derexia says, making light
of difficulties I can not even imagine; "I never really thought
about it because everyone was living the same."
Born in Eastern Kentucky, in what she called "the hills."
in 1916, she has seen technology boom, science develop and possibly
most importantly, society change. She graduated from high school in
1936 and was married in 1938 at the age of 22. Derexia moved here with
her husband from Kentucky so that he could have a better paying job
in the bomber plants of willow Run during World War II.
Derexia's life in Kentucky was very different from mine as well. She
attended a parochial boarding school that was five or six miles from
her home and about one mile from the town. She was not allowed to leave
the campus unless she had some sort of business in town, and had to
work in the school to compensate for her room and board. That seems
unreal to me since my friends and I try to spend as little time as possible
on our own high school campus.
Derexia says she wishes she would have been able to attend college even
though many people did not when in the late 1930's. 'When I moved here
I thought everyone would have a college education, there was so much
education around, what with Eastern of course, and the University of
Michigan,' she said, "I was so surprised to find that many people
hadn't even finished high school."
She discussed almost longingly of how life used to be, when Washtenaw
was a mostly residential street and Eastern Michigan University only
had 4,200 students. She doesn't watch much television and computers
are foreign to her. She does many of the activities now as she used
to, sewing quilts to donate to different charities, reading "voraciously,"
and working in her vegetable garden during the summer. Life is definitely
different now, but it's just one more change.
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