Judith C. Areen Interview 1

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Oral History of DEAN JUDITH C. AREEN
October 15, 2003
This first interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project for
the District of Columbia Circuit. It is the first interview of Judith C. Areen, Dean of Georgetown
University Law Center. The Interviewer is Timothy G. Lynch. The interview took place at
Georgetown, in Dean Areen’s office, on October 15, 2003.
Mr. Lynch: Today is October 15, 2003. We’re in Dean Areen’s office. My name is Timothy
Grant. I look forward to your leading me with whatever questions seem most
appropriate.
Mr. Lynch: Well, I’ll try not to ask leading questions. I’ll try to ask open-ended questions.
Dean Areen: O.K. [Laughter]
Mr. Lynch: When were you born?
Dean Areen: I was born in Chicago, Illinois, August 2, 1944.
Mr. Lynch: How long did you live in Chicago?
Dean Areen: I was just over three when we moved. My father was an accountant, and he was
hired by one of the client companies that he’d audited in South Bend, Indiana. So
we moved, and I spent the rest of my childhood growing up in South Bend, which
is about eighty miles east of Chicago. My parents had both been born and grew
up in Chicago. They were in the same high school, and they started dating,
although they didn’t in the end get married until they were both twenty-six. My
mother in particular was very hesitant about this step called marriage. My
grandparents, the three who were alive – I never met my mother’s mother, she
died when my mother was only nineteen. But the other three grandparents were
alive and continued to live in Chicago; so, my childhood memories are driving
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several times a year into Chicago to see grandparents and other relatives. That
was the great big city growing up.
Mr. Lynch: Where did your grandparents come from? Where did they grow up?
Dean Areen: The three who were still alive were all Scandinavian. My father’s parents, Tilly
and Eric, were both from Sweden, and my mother’s father was from Denmark.
Her mother’s parents were Canadian, and there’s some tension, if you know
anything about Sweden and Denmark, between the two countries; so, there was
lots of teasing about the Swedes and the Danes as I grew up.
Mr. Lynch: And what was everyone’s name?
Dean Areen: My father is Gordon Eric Areen and my mother is Pauline Jeannette Payberg
Areen.
Mr. Lynch: And the grandparents?
Dean Areen: Eric and Tilly Areen, and Peter and Gertrude Payberg. My grandparents were
born in other countries. Three of the four grandparents were Scandinavian
immigrants. My Swedish grandfather was a carpenter, my Danish grandfather
was a milkman, and that became very important during the Depression. There
were lots of family stories, because the milkman could still get work, and the
carpenter couldn’t. So, there’s one family story about literally taking the last
dollar and going to the movies. You could take a whole family to the movies on a
dollar in those days, and the next day he got work. A very interesting message
from that.
Mr. Lynch: Do you remember what the movie was?
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Dean Areen: That didn’t come down as part of the story. One more story about my
grandmother, which is one I’ve thought about at difficult times. She was only
fourteen, the age of confirmation in Sweden, and in a very large family. There
were at that point still ten children alive. I think several had died, but she was the
oldest at that point of the surviving children. Another family in the village – they
lived in a very small town in Sweden – had emigrated to the States. They had
only one daughter, and she had died tragically. So, they sent a letter back to the
village. If anyone has a daughter who would be willing to come and join us on
our farm in Wisconsin, we need help. I remember interviewing my grandmother
in her nineties as she talked about it, with still some emotion, saying she really
didn’t want to go, but she knew how difficult it was for the family just to have
enough food, so she agreed to go. She was fourteen and they literally put a sign
around her neck, put her on a boat by herself – so this would be about 1900 – sent
her off, and she had to make the connections from the boat to the train to get her
to Wisconsin. She, of course, didn’t speak any English, but through the help of
strangers and folks along the way, she made it all the way to Wisconsin. It was
apparently a pretty tough time for the next three or four years, and when she was
eighteen and so old enough, she left and went to Chicago and made her way from
there.
Mr. Lynch: Sounds like a remarkable woman.
Dean Areen: Pretty tough way to start.
Mr. Lynch: Was she a pretty important part of your life, growing up?
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Dean Areen: All three of the grandparents were important, at least when I was fairly young.
Mr. Lynch: But you recalled going back to Chicago —
Dean Areen: Quite regularly, two or three times a year, or they’d come to South Bend. I just
remember lots and lots of relatives. They weren’t all relatives. They were
friends, but, you know, you’d say uncle and aunt, even if they weren’t, and
everybody had a Swedish accent, so growing up my name was “Udie,” because
no one could pronounce the “J.”
Mr. Lynch: What about languages spoken at home?
Dean Areen: Only English. My father does not speak any Swedish, although I can remember
as a child listening to him, and when he’d get on the phone with his mom and dad,
he’d speak with the thickest Swedish accent you can imagine. It was part of –
they arrived early in the century, and it was not a good thing to be an immigrant,
and they wanted their children to grow up speaking English. So there was no
maintaining of the language, which today we would say is too bad, but that was
the ethic of the time.
Mr. Lynch: Your father was an accountant?
Dean Areen: Yes. CPA.
Mr. Lynch: Where did he go to school?
Dean Areen: He went to Northwestern. There were interesting family disagreements about
education. His parents were reluctant, I think it’s fair to say, so he went to work.
He worked at a bank, (in fact, both of my parents worked from high school on)
and put himself through Northwestern at night. CPA was an undergraduate
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degree. He had just finished, and it’s 1941 and joins the Illinois National Guard
for what was to be a six-month commitment. It was extended, and during the
time it was extended, it was Pearl Harbor. So, five years later he leaves the Army,
having started in the National Guard at the equivalent of a private. He was then
sent off for officer training and so he did his service in France as an officer and
ended up a major.
Mr. Lynch: I want to go back just a little bit. You said that your grandparents were reluctant,
was that about him going to school?
Dean Areen: Yes, about college. It wasn’t clear to them that that was a good use of his time, so
I find it interesting that he cared enough to want to do it.
Mr. Lynch: Did there come a time later on where there was a recognition that what he had
done had been the right path?
Dean Areen: Oh, they were clearly always very, very proud. He could do no wrong. It was
even harder for my mother, and I think about this one because education is going
to be a theme here. She was very athletic, she had music talent, she was admitted
to a conservatory in Chicago and really wanted to go.
Mr. Lynch: What did she play?
Dean Areen: Piano. In fact, they gave her a special scholarship that they had, but there was a
restriction on the scholarship. Part of the scholarship was arranging that you
could be an accompanist for other soloists and that would cover a large part of
your tuition. But they didn’t want a first-year student to work. It was a workstudy
package, and so she had to have part of the tuition covered the first year.
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Her mother was dead at that point, and my grandfather, Peter, said women don’t
need an education. He could have afforded it but refused. So, she, to this day I
think, regrets she didn’t have the opportunity to have education beyond high
school, and I know that was an influence on all three of us.
Mr. Lynch: Does she still play?
Dean Areen: She does.
Mr. Lynch: Were you born when your father was in the service?
Dean Areen: I was.
Mr. Lynch: That’s what I thought.
Dean Areen: Yes. Exactly right, and indeed I’ve learned it was a conscious choice they made.
There was some discussion of it, and my mother said she thought even if she lost
my father, it was important to have the baby. So they made that choice, and he
went off to France. I was I think eighteen months old, when he returned. One of
the family stories that’s come down is that that first night, here he is back, and my
mother said, “Judy, kiss Daddy goodnight.” So, I did what I learned to do. I went
over to the photograph on the table and kissed him goodnight.
Mr. Lynch: That’s really touching. You are the oldest of three children. What are the names
of your siblings?
Dean Areen: The second child, also a girl, is my sister, Patricia. She goes by Tricia. Now her
last name is Marshall, married, the mother of two girls. She and my brother-inlaw
David Marshall live just outside of Boston in a suburb called Wayland. She’s
a college graduate and has her master’s in teaching and taught American history
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for a while. Once the girls came she stopped teaching, but she has spent a lot of
time the last several years now that the girls are away tutoring in the inner city in
Boston. My brother, Richard, the youngest, is a doctor, and he and my sister-inlaw
have a boy and a girl. They live in California, in Sacramento.
Mr. Lynch: How old is Tricia, and how old is Richard?
Dean Areen: My sister is fifty-six and my brother is fifty-two.
Mr. Lynch: What was life like growing up at home?
Dean Areen: South Bend is just a wonderful, fairly small town. In retrospect I wonder if it
wasn’t very quiet for my parents, but as kids, I have memories of long summers,
running around the neighbors’ yards for blocks around, riding bikes. There was a
dry, sort of gulch we’d say today, but we called it a creek, and occasionally
there’d be water in it after a heavy rain. We spent lots of time exploring up the
creek, pretty typical small town, very comfortable growing up.
Mr. Lynch: You mentioned that you thought it was maybe too quiet for your parents. Did you
have images of them being more cosmopolitan than South Bend?
Dean Areen: I certainly didn’t think it at the time. I wonder looking back, I guess I’m so happy
being in this urban environment. I have memories of going to concerts, and they
would take us occasionally into Chicago for a play as an indication that it would
have been nice if there had been more of those opportunities for them. But they
were very happy, they chose it.
Mr. Lynch: What are some of your earliest, earliest memories?
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Dean Areen: That’s a good one. I have one. I’m out in the garden with my grandpa Peter. I
don’t know if I still remember it. There’s also a photograph, so you get this
overlay. I think I was two and a half or three in the photograph.
Mr. Lynch: And was this in South Bend?
Dean Areen: I don’t have a clear memory whether it was in Chicago or South Bend.
Mr. Lynch: Did your mom work outside the home when you were growing up?
Dean Areen: She did not. Full-time mom.
Mr. Lynch: And your dad, he worked, what was the —
Dean Areen: It was called the Associates Investment Co., a private finance company.
Mr. Lynch: And that was a client —
Dean Areen: He’d been the outside auditor and was offered the position and stayed there until I
was in college. The Department of Justice had decided that it was inappropriate
for the automobile companies to have finance subsidiaries and they issued a
ruling, or took that position. Chrysler and Ford got rid of their finance
subsidiaries, but General Motors held onto theirs and protested. I don’t know if
there was litigation, but they resisted. So, it’s now 1963, I guess. There’s a
reversal in the Justice Department, so General Motors, which had kept General
Motors Acceptance Corporation, just continued. Chrysler decided they wanted to
start a finance subsidiary and they needed someone with that experience, so they
came and recruited him. My parents moved to the Detroit area during my
sophomore year at college.
Mr. Lynch: Is South Bend a locus of any family life anymore?
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Dean Areen: No, because of that. I do have some feeling of having lost my childhood home.
Mr. Lynch: Did you have any pets?
Dean Areen: No.
Mr. Lynch: So, what is the age split?
Dean Areen: It’s basically three and a-half years between each of us, so seven between myself
and my brother.
Mr. Lynch: And what was your relationship like with your siblings growing up?
Dean Areen: Great. Normal. I should qualify that. One of my other earlier memories, not so
early, because I would have been three and a half. I still have this little bit of an
image of the new baby in a high chair, a little bit of sibling rivalry. The nice thing
is, if anything, I would say we’ve become closer as adults. Age differences seem
huge when you’re growing up, now they don’t. We all have kids, and we get
together as often as we can at family gatherings.
Mr. Lynch: Family celebrations.
Dean Areen: Absolutely.
Mr. Lynch: What kind of family celebrations?
Dean Areen: Well, we try and do something together, and we certainly did as our kids were
growing up at least every year. We planned to vacation in the same place, we had
major celebrations around my parents’ anniversary. They just had their 60th, so
we were together for that.
Mr. Lynch: What about big family celebrations growing up?
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Dean Areen: I think of the relatives all coming to South Bend for birthdays. My husband and I
have talked about this. He has an equally vivid sense that extended families were
much more a part of our lives when we were kids than is true today for our kids.
It’s too bad. It’s a function of, with my sister in Boston, my brother in California,
you can’t do things the same way. We’re much more spread out. Although it
makes the times we get together, I think, that much more special, particularly for
the cousins.
Mr. Lynch: So, you were the only family that you had in South Bend.
Dean Areen: In South Bend. Right. Everyone else was in Chicago.
Mr. Lynch: Any notable neighbors that you remember, any relationships with neighbors?
Dean Areen: In South Bend?
Mr. Lynch: In growing up.
Dean Areen: One funny story – I don’t know if it’s notable but when my brother Richard was
five or six, the new coach of the Notre Dame football team moved in down the
block. He’s out somewhere and runs into the son of the coach, who’s also five
years old, and they have one of these “I bet my father can beat up your father.”
Nothing came of it.
Mr. Lynch: What about religion growing up?
Dean Areen: The Presbyterian Church. I haven’t had much of a conversation with my parents
about it. It’s obviously an issue of some importance to them. They were both
brought up as Lutherans as you might imagine given their Scandinavian
background, but it’s one of the things that changed when my father came back
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from the War. He had some very strong feelings about things he was willing to
commit to in theology and things that he wasn’t. When they came to South Bend,
they did not go to the Lutheran Church. They quite deliberately chose the
Presbyterian Church, which I think of in retrospect as not having a lot of theology,
which I’m sure is unfair.
Mr. Lynch: What happened in Europe that caused –?
Dean Areen: I think just the War, just the experiences.
Mr. Lynch: Did he ever talk to you about his experiences?
Dean Areen: Not in terms of theology. He saw action, he was with an antiaircraft division in
France and before then his unit was supposed to be part of D2 of D-Day. I have
heard, it’s one of the few stories he has told. Whoever was the head of his larger
unit, maybe it was a colonel rather than a general, got into a debate and there was
a general who wasn’t supposed to go until D8, and he wanted to be sooner so they
swapped, so my father did not go in on the second day of D-Day, and I’m very
grateful for that. But, it’s one of those incidents you have no control over that
shape a life.
Mr. Lynch: When were you aware he had these experiences and then came back and had sort
of a shift in his theological views? Were there family discussions?
Dean Areen: No, and I’ve pieced this together after the fact because we noticed that our
grandparents all were Lutherans, and asked how come we go to the Presbyterian
Church?
Mr. Lynch: Was it a big part of your parents’ life? Was it a big part of your life growing up?
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Dean Areen: It was a consistent part. I wouldn’t say a big part, but it was Sunday school and
church every Sunday, a youth group Sunday afternoon. We went through it with
our kids, who complained mightily. My husband is Jewish and we brought our
boys up in the Jewish tradition, and they complained a lot about Hebrew school. I
think it’s sort of consistent across religious traditions. There’s a lot of
complaining about it, but in retrospect I’m glad my parents made me do it.
Mr. Lynch: Were you confirmed?
Dean Areen: Yes, but it’s not as important as, for example, a bar mitzvah would be.
Mr. Lynch: How many hours every Sunday, if you had Sunday school and youth group?
Dean Areen: I guess a couple of hours in the morning and another couple in the afternoon.
Mr. Lynch: But, it was every Sunday.
Dean Areen: Almost every Sunday. The youth groups didn’t meet in the summer.
Mr. Lynch: Do you remember any sermons? Did the preachers cover any of the political
topics of the day when you were growing up?
Dean Areen: I don’t have those memories from the sermons, which is interesting. I guess
where I started to have some rebellious memories was about 10th grade. The
person who taught our Sunday school section had gone through divinity school
but did not have his own church at that point. He was really into an interfaith
perspective. I remember that year we learned about Buddhists. We went through
major religious groups and I found it really very interesting. It made me ask some
very serious questions about exactly what theology is, as it goes with being a
Presbyterian.
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Mr. Lynch: Do you remember some of those questions?
Dean Areen: I don’t know if my parents were pleased with this, and I don’t know how much I
want to go into this. I remember distinctly when we visited a synagogue. I felt
very comfortable with Christian faith as to the ethic of it and commitment of
charity and service. I wasn’t so sure about this notion of the divinity of Christ. I
remember thinking “Oh, this Jewish view, you know, there’s a lot to it.” Now,
who knows, I certainly wasn’t thinking of it when I met my husband, but in
retrospect, those thoughts you have as a teenager, I think they come back at
interesting times in your later adult life.
Mr. Lynch: Sounds like an interesting fellow. Did you ever have any contact with him?
Dean Areen: No, can’t say that I did.
Mr. Lynch: And what about sports growing up?
Dean Areen: Girls didn’t play sports in South Bend when I was growing up. Literally, you just
didn’t. There weren’t any.
Mr. Lynch: Do you remember wanting to?
Dean Areen: Well, I wouldn’t say that. That would overstate, but the one thing you were
allowed to do was to be a cheerleader, so I was a cheerleader for a couple of years
in junior high school. I mean it was like, you know, when you’d go and jump at
least and so forth, but it was so unthinkable to play sports. I didn’t think of it.
Nothing makes me happier today than to see as many girls as boys out starting
when they’re four, learning to play soccer. Now I think physical activity is a
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great thing, and I’m trying to make up for lost time. I jog on a treadmill and I’m
probably in better shape than I was in college.
One of the themes will be this issue about what women are supposed to do and
what women are not supposed to do. I guess I’d say we were brought up to think
for ourselves. None of us was rebellious in obvious ways, but there’s no doubt
there was some independence that started early on. Where it came from, I’m not
sure. As I mused about our talking, I wondered, too. I think my mother’s regret
to this day is that she didn’t have a college education. One more piece – it’s
obviously not something I knew growing up, because I literally sat down with my
own grandmother when she was in her nineties with a tape recorder to get some of
the story; and I remember asking her, “Is there anything you wish you would have
done differently?” She said, “I am really sorry I didn’t get a nursing degree.”
She’s ninety. She’s had this wonderful life, three children, lots of grandchildren.
So there’s — Betty Friedan would say, Simone de Beauvoir would say, there’s
some pent up feeling on the side of the women wanting to be like her. My
relationship with my father is part of it. When I was in law school, when I was a
third-year student, we could take courses throughout the university, which was
quite wonderful. One of the things I did, I went off and took a child development
course because I was interested and because Ed Ziegler, who was one of the
founders of Headstart, was on the faculty and teaching the course. He had us read
lots of the professional literature on child development. I remember one thing he
assigned was a monograph with the title something like: “Children of Servicemen
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Who Returned After the Child Was No Longer an Infant.” The point of the
monograph was that it creates in families this sort of unrealistic expectations
because the father wasn’t there from the time the infant was born, the infant’s
eighteen months or two years, and they expect them to do lots of things. It creates
an environment of striving to meet those expectations. I don’t know, maybe you
put all of that together.
Mr. Lynch: Did your father convey this desire to have you excel?
Dean Areen: Not in ways I remember, which is why I found reading the monograph interesting.
It’s not as if my mother ever to my memory said to me, “You need to go to
college.” But, as I think back and try and understand where some of the choices
that I’ve made came from. You asked about sports. We were brought up to think
for ourselves, to work hard. That was certainly an ethic, to imagine that we could
do things. But we were also brought up to feel that there were appropriate ways
to behave, and we followed them. So, I just never thought about sports.
Mr. Lynch: How would you characterize your parents’ parenting style?
Dean Areen: Well, you remind me of one story. We were interviewed. There was some
research project going on when I was a senior, and they came and interviewed me
with my parents. One of the questions they asked me was, “Did your parents
forbid you to smoke?” I answered truthfully, “No.” My mother said, “Now, wait
a minute.” I said, “Well, you didn’t.” And she said, “Yes, but I would have if
you’d ever tried.” So, that was the kind of relationship. We were given freedom,
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but thinking back on it, there were expectations conveyed that had we pushed, we
might have been limited a bit more.
Mr. Lynch: What was your average day like? Was your father able to come home for dinner?
Do you remember a family dinner time? Or, anything like that?
Dean Areen: Yes, regular family dinner. Growing up there was only one car, so when mother
had shopping days we would pick him up from work. I remember we’d be
waiting, and at 5:05, all these people would pour out of the building, and my
mother would say, with obvious disapproval, “Well, those are the clock watchers
who are rushing to get out.” What was conveyed is you were supposed to be
there and really work, and the fact that my father didn’t come out until 5:20 or
something showed that he was a really serious hard worker.
Mr. Lynch: What kind of foods did you have? Any significant foods? Did you have the
lutefisk Garrison Keillor talks about?
Dean Areen: No, it was not Swedish at all. I assume they weren’t available. I think the only
fish we had were frozen fish sticks, so discovering fresh fish in my adult life
has been just wonderful. It was very much Saturday Evening Post bland,
Midwestern America food. Fine, but in retrospect, a lot of red meat, things we
wouldn’t do now.
Mr. Lynch: What about books, growing up as a young girl? What kind of books did you think
of?
Dean Areen: Lots of books. Books were very important. When I was in second or third grade,
the library had a contest that summer, and for every five books you got a feather
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and an Indian headband, and I thought this was great. You could only take out
five at a time. Every day, I’d get on my bike and go over to the local public
library, get five books, and read them. At the end of the summer, I’d read 256
books, but there was someone who’d read 400. (Laughter)
Mr. Lynch: What was the lesson you took from that?
Dean Areen: I’m not sure, but I sure got hooked on reading and read a lot, not particularly
distinguished things, but I just read all the time. Some of them were important in
retrospect. Nancy Drew was probably very important.
Mr. Lynch: It sounds like you had a pretty full headdress. Were the Nancy Drew books
important to you? Did you read the whole series?
Dean Areen: Not all.
Mr. Lynch: Did your parents read to you? Do you have any memories like that?
Dean Areen: Absolutely, I still have snatches. I can recite all of the Mother Goose rhymes.
Mr. Lynch: Was that your mom or your dad or both?
Dean Areen: Both.
Mr. Lynch: Any books when you were young that really sort of stuck with you? Were there
any books that you read when you were younger than ten that you wanted to read
to your own kids?
Dean Areen: Well, I did do the Mother Goose rhymes. There were no great childhood
favorites. I did read the Bobbsey Twins, and with our own boys. We also read
some of the Hardy Boys as opposed to Nancy Drew, which were favorites for a
while. But they quickly got into a great series on sports. I think maybe if I had a
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daughter, some of the things I read would have been more relevant. There’s a lot
of gender to middle school.
Mr. Lynch: How did you occupy your time when you were a young child, when you weren’t
in school?
Dean Areen: Part of it was to have the freedom that you didn’t feel that you had to occupy it,
but obviously I was in school, and there were lots of activities. For music, I had
violin lessons, starting in third grade and piano lessons, starting in about fifth
grade. Organized activities: I was in Campfire Girls and Bluebirds– it’s like Girl
Scouts, a variation. A lot of it was just playing with kids in the neighborhood. I
remember in middle school and into junior high, we had a regular group that
played a lot of monopoly, a lot of chess, checkers, you name it. This was before
video games, so we made our own.
Mr. Lynch: Who were some of those kids?
Dean Areen: Tommy Frank, the boy next door; Ricky Berringer, the boy across the street and
down; with girl friends, there was a circle of about a dozen of us, lots and lots of
sleepovers. Endless sleepovers with curling each other’s hair and pizza and cold
pizza for breakfast in the morning.
Mr. Lynch: Sounds delightful. Do you have contacts with any of those kids anymore?
Dean Areen: I’ve seen a couple of them one or two times, when I’ve gone back and when they
come through Washington.
Mr. Lynch: What elementary school did you go to?
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Dean Areen: It was Lincoln Junior High. I’m not sure I remember the name of the elementary
school.
Mr. Lynch: Any elementary school teachers who were your favorites or with whom you had a
bond?
Dean Areen: Mrs. Johnson in the second grade was just wonderful, and that’s when reading
really took off. I think she was first grade. I don’t want to confuse the two, but
just opening up reading.
Mr. Lynch: What made her wonderful?
Dean Areen: I just remember feeling excited and the possibilities opened up the way she
reached out, and I’ll contrast her with sort of a cloud comes in. There was one
teacher in seventh or eighth grade, I’ve forgotten his name which is just as well. I
remember as I got my grades mid-semester, and I was very conscientious, lots of
girls are, and did all the projects and everything. The grades were all fine, but
then they did satisfactory or unsatisfactory on attitude essentially, and he marked
me unsatisfactory in math. I was a straight-A student in math, so I dared to ask
him about it, and he said, “Well, there’s a number of times when I’ve given you
assignments, and I noticed you were reading a book.” I truthfully answered
looking back on it, “Well, I would do that only when I finished the math
homework.” So, there were teachers who didn’t seem to want to encourage you
to like reading and ideas, subject matter. Back in second grade Mrs. Johnson did.
Mr. Lynch: You did well in school.
Dean Areen: I did well in school.
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Mr. Lynch: Did your parents have any reward structures for grades, or was it just an expectation?
Dean Areen: It was an expectation, which was fine for me and very hard on my sister.
Mr. Lynch: Why is that?
Dean Areen: Her grades weren’t as good, and she always felt diminished in comparison; three
and a half years separation wasn’t enough. One family story I think I’ve
mentioned – I was in college when they moved to Detroit and they moved just
before her senior year. They gave her the option of staying, saying we’d work it
out with a neighboring family because high school is important – she was going to
be a senior. She wanted to move. She went to a new high school in suburban
Detroit that was clearly much more demanding academically (the majority of the
kids went to college, for example, which was not true in South Bend. Only about
half the kids went to college, and of those, 80 percent went to Indiana University
extension in South Bend, so it was not really preparing people for college.) She
went to this much harder school, and she went from being a very average student
to a straight-A student; it was almost as if she said, “Well, since nobody can
compare me to my older sister, I’ll show them what I can do” and went on from
there.
Mr. Lynch: Were there ever direct comparisons made in your presence?
Dean Areen: No, my parents were good about that, but it didn’t mean she didn’t feel it.
Mr. Lynch: And how did your brother fit into this equation?
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Dean Areen: Well, he just stayed out of that dispute. He was very wise and the youngest. He
had it all worked out and still does. He is just a wonderful man and good at what
he does and makes friends easily, the sort of the youngest child you’d expect who
is really good on all those dimensions.
Mr. Lynch: Who was the first lawyer you met?
Dean Areen: I probably met lawyers once my father was at Chrysler Financial. I have a vague
memory that he introduced me to his general counsel. But, the first lawyer I saw
being a lawyer – and I have a pretty clear memory of it – was during my senior
year at Cornell. Vietnam was a major, major issue – this was 1966 – and the
campuses were starting to be very critical of the policy. Cornell was the first Ivy
League school in which the student government held a referendum in opposition
to the war, at least voted on it, so there’s lots of discussion going on about it.
Some of the students involved in the protest sat in the president’s office. There
was an undergraduate judiciary board that I was on. For reasons I don’t have a
clear memory of, some, but not all, of the protesters – I guess the ones who had
physically gone into his office – were brought up before the board. They had a
real lawyer, which you could do. I don’t recall if he was with the local ACLU or
what, I mean it was Ithaca, New York. He was just terrific, and I have a clear
memory of thinking, “Wow, so this is what a good lawyer can do.” Well, he
made very effective arguments on behalf of his clients. I think there was
something about double jeopardy, I don’t recall now what it was all about
listening to it. But, just the sense of “A lawyer can come into a situation like this,
22
can make a difference for protecting the rights of people to express their political
views,” and thinking altogether that this is pretty good stuff.
Mr. Lynch: What year in college did you say?
Dean Areen: That was my senior year.
Mr. Lynch: Senior year?
Dean Areen: Yes.
Mr. Lynch: I want to go back and pick up details that I remember, and I hope it’s not too
disjointed. You said you started the violin in third grade and the piano in fifth
grade. Did you keep on with those?
Dean Areen: Yes, I stayed the violin through the eighth grade. What I liked about it a lot was
playing in an orchestra, and we played both in the school and occasionally there
would be a citywide concert. It was really nice not only to be making music but
to be part of a group that together sounded even better. I sang in choirs all the
way, too, for much the same reason. My voice isn’t good alone, but in a choir, I
can feel comfortable and it’s really nice to do.
Mr. Lynch: And the piano?
Dean Areen: The piano was different because it was mostly solo at first, but then I – I don’t
quite know how it happened – I was in the chorus in high school and they had a
student accompany the choir. I guess after my freshman year, I was invited to do
that, and so I played both for the chorus and for some of the musical plays that
they did. Then again it was sort of social. You were making music, but it was
with a play or with a chorus.
23
Mr. Lynch: Who was your piano teacher?
Dean Areen: Oh, I had three different ones over the course of time.
Mr. Lynch: Did your mom teach you at all?
Dean Areen: No. Well, I’m sure when I was very, very little, but she made the choice, and I
think it was a good choice that she wanted to be our mom. Each of us had lots of
lessons and that meant somebody else would be the teacher and impose the
discipline. She could always encourage in terms of practice, and we were all
pretty terrible about practice. I loved it, but I knew then as I was going through it
I didn’t have great talent, and so I didn’t practice much. I do remember Mrs.
Bancroft was my teacher through tenth grade. She was obviously very smart and
she gave me a book. I can remember to this day the title of it was “Music with a
Feather Duster.” It was about a student who could speed-read music and didn’t
practice. – (Laughter) Found out.
Mr. Lynch: Piano teachers can see right through us.
Dean Areen: Exactly.
Mr. Lynch: How about just to do this somewhat chronologically – how about any prominent
memories from middle school?
Dean Areen: Not really.
Mr. Lynch: Was it six, seven, eight or seven, eight, nine?
Dean Areen: It was seven, eight the way they did it, and then high school was nine-twelve.
Mr. Lynch: What was the name of your high school?
24
Dean Areen: James Whitcomb Riley High School, the Hoosier poet. He is a poet who has
some not very memorable poetry.
Mr. Lynch: Do you remember any of his poems?
Dean Areen: No. We were not forced to learn them. It’s just as well. (Laughter)
Mr. Lynch: What was high school like for you?
Dean Areen: It was mostly good. I think back on it as a teacher sometimes for the teachers
who were wonderful and the teachers who weren’t. I remember two of my
English teachers and for all four years the same woman was the math teacher. So,
for all four years, Mrs. Murphy was the math teacher and what the two English
teachers, my freshman year and twelfth grade, and the math teacher throughout
had in common – (there was also a great chemistry and a great physics teacher) –
was they made it seem as if there was always more to learn to do. They made the
subject larger rather than smaller and I contrast that with the teacher – I’ve
forgotten his name – who taught a course called economics. Wow, economics,
that sounds pretty interesting. We learned to make out a check. We spent a week
on how to write a check, balance a checkbook, I mean they were good, practical
things, but it was a wasted year essentially.
Mr. Lynch: It sounds more like home economics than –
Dean Areen: At the end, thank you, and it took me a long while to get over. Fortunately, I had
a good economics course in college, but, you know, it poisoned the subject by
diminishing it, so I felt even if you didn’t know about some of these things, and
all of us have limits in teaching, the capacity to encourage the students to go
25
further and know there’s still more to learn and to do as opposed to “this is what it
is, memorize this.” History was a little bit like economics because in my high
school almost every year it was taught by one of the athletic coaches. I guess that
was a subject they considered they could teach, and so they would drill us on
memorizing names and dates. I didn’t get over that in college. I didn’t take
history in college to my regret, so a lot of my adult reading has been in history. It
had been spoiled by the way it was taught.
Mr. Lynch: What were your favorite classes ?
Dear Areen: I came out determined to be a math major and a physics minor, and was clearly
shaped by the teachers who supported our imagination and enthusiasm and went
off to college with those interests.
Mr. Lynch: Is that what you intended to major in in college?
Dean Areen: Yes. I did for my first year and a half, but by the end of my first semester I
discovered there was something called liberal arts. We didn’t know about that in
Indiana. There were all of these wonderful books I didn’t know about. So, in the
end I became an English major because that gave me a chance to read all of these
books, although I’ve sometimes wondered if I’d had literature in high school,
would I have gone to the math and science path?
Mr. Lynch: Sounds like you had the best of both worlds?
Dean Areen: I can’t complain at all.
Mr. Lynch: Let me go back a little bit because there are things I wanted to talk about with
you. How big was the high school, how many students?
26
Dean Areen: Our graduating class I want to say was 300-340 students, so, I guess just over a
thousand overall.
Mr. Lynch: How would you characterize your parents’ politics?
Dean Areen: Rock-ribbed Republican.
Mr. Lynch: Was this expressed at the dinner table at home?
Dean Areen: No.
Mr. Lynch: No political conversations with the kids.
Dean Areen: My father is very expressive of his views to this day, so I’m sure there was more
expressed than I recall. I am saying this with a smile because I do remember
getting to college and it was civil rights, it was Vietnam. I discovered there was a
lot of poverty in this country and going home and saying to my parents, “But did
you realize this, did you realize that?” because I had in my analysis become, well
at the least, a Democrat, (even Democrats would be a little to the right of what
was happening on the college campuses.) My husband and I met later working
for the Democratic National Committee, so that our politics are established as
different from my parents’. There were lots of difficult discussions during my
time in college with my father because I truly believed, well, if I just explain to
him the things I was learning, he’d become more left, too, and it didn’t happen.
So, that’s when I learned he was rock-ribbed. Growing up it didn’t seem to be as
much of a passion, at least not around me.
Mr. Lynch: Do you recall any political discussions?
Dean Areen: All of them are from college as opposed to things growing up.
27
Mr. Lynch: How about your dad or mom talking about politicians or people running for
President or anything like that? Do you remember hearing any discussions like
that?
Dean Areen: Well, I remember my father explaining to us the Social Security Trust Fund was
going to run out, and that’s why it was really important that John Kennedy not be
elected. So, there I was in high school, and I say this with some embarrassment
today, given where I’ve come out politically, being the person in the class
defending Richard Nixon. There, I’ve said it. [Laughter]
Mr. Lynch: We can stop the tape right there. It’s all been worthwhile. [More laughter] How
did you defend Richard Nixon?
Dean Areen: I don’t recall, but I’m sure I was at that point parroting, because this is high
school, my father’s analysis, which had to do with Social Security and tax and
spend. I don’t know if he used the phrase then, but I’m sure that was the message.
Mr. Lynch: Do you remember having debates with your high school classmates at all?
Dean Areen: Well, there were certainly discussions about it, so I have this memory that that
was the side I was on, I don’t have details.
Mr. Lynch: How about South Bend to the extent you can recall?
Dean Areen: It’s pretty blue collar. Lots of my classmates had parents who worked for Bendix
or Studebaker – this was before it closed.
Mr. Lynch: What did Bendix make?
Dean Areen: Still does, a range of products, industrial products. I can’t be more specific than
that. I mean it’s not like appliances.
28
Mr. Lynch: Do they supply the auto industry?
Dean Areen: I think it’s a mix. I’m hazy. We ought to go look and see, dial them up on the
web and see if they’re still in business.
Mr. Lynch: So, it was mostly blue collar. What about the political culture?
Dean Areen: I’d have to jump ahead to jump back. You don’t know it at the time sometimes. I
mean I didn’t know what it meant to feel American until I went to Europe. I
didn’t understand the politics and how class related they were in South Bend until
I came back. I came back in 1968 from law school, because I had worked the
summer between college and law school for the congressman from South Bend, a
wonderful man named John Brademas. It was a really tough election. We’d
stayed friends, and he needed help, so I took ten days off from law school and
flew back that fall. I have this distinct memory of 1968 – that’s quite a year – of
being ridiculed by a lot of my classmates in law school for doing something as
conservative as working for a Democrat. I remember arriving in South Bend and
stuffing envelopes or whatever. There wasn’t much you could do, but I did go to
church because it had been all those years for me and my parents had left, I guess,
three years earlier. Person after person came up to me in the church because they
remembered our family. They said, “Oh, so nice to see you, send our best to
Pauline and Gordon, how are you, why are you here?” I would answer, and they
would freeze. “Oh, well it is really very nice to see you.” I don’t think there was
a single Democrat in the Presbyterian Church. That’s when I learned more about
class politics and how deeply felt the divisions were that I’d never experienced
29
growing up because it wasn’t an issue within our family. Later it became an
issue, it’s still an issue. My sister is still arguing with my father.
Mr. Lynch: How about your mom? Her politics?
Dean Areen: Politics? She still believes that Richard Nixon was mostly a good president.
Mr. Lynch: How did she communicate her views?
Dean Areen: Quietly, but effectively. My father is the one who would dominate. I have a
memory, and I did a little bit consciously for our kids. She’s one of four girls and,
as I mentioned, she was eighteen when her mother died. They were six years
apart, so the oldest sister, twenty-four, had married and left. She had gone to
California. There’s my mother at eighteen, she has one sister, Lois, who’s twelve,
one sister Jean, who’s six, and part of why I think she did not marry till her midtwenties
is she essentially had to be mother for the two younger sisters. To this
day, I sometimes mix names and she would do it, too. Consistently she calls me
Lois and my younger sister, Jean. So, in a way we were her second family.
When we were growing up, she’d have one or both of her sisters there, and they’d
talk about everything in life, politics to food to you name it, in the kitchen. We’d
sometimes be there or we’d be nearby thinking, well, they don’t really know that
we’re listening, and, of course, it’s a wonderful way to teach kids all kinds of
lessons because that’s when the kids think they’re hearing something they
shouldn’t hear and you make sure you’re saying things you want them to hear. I
think a lot of teaching went on in the kitchen conversations with her sisters or
sometimes with neighbors.
30
Mr. Lynch: Was your mom a good cook?
Dean Areen: Yes, a good cook.
Mr. Lynch: What kind of things?
Dean Areen: Oh, meat and potatoes and vegetables, you know, a good cook.
Mr. Lynch: More on high school. What was your adolescence like?
Dean Areen: The whole thing starts in junior high, and suddenly the girls are talking about the
boys and the boys are talking about the girls. Now, the culture was interesting in
retrospect. First of all, it was absolutely separated. So, the girls did things
together, but you didn’t have groups with boys and girls – watching my kids grow
up it’s entirely different. They both have had good friends who are girls, they
aren’t girlfriends, and they would do things in groups. When I was growing up
the groups were all of one gender. So, that’s why the girls would be at slumber
parties and the boys would drink and the girls didn’t. So, drinking was never an
issue for me as a girl. What else do I want to say? I was a good student. I was
valedictorian in the end. It set up a dynamic that is independent of gender, and
I’ve had conversations with lots of my colleagues on the faculty about it. I have a
theory that the people who become professors are people who didn’t quite fit in in
high school because the ethos does not support academic work. So, if you talk to
most people on the faculty today and ask them if there’s an in-group in the law
school, they will say yes and they’re not in it. But almost everybody on the
faculty has the same view, and it was shaped for all of us in high school. So, I
31
have some of that sense. I couldn’t quite be in the in-group because I was
involved as a student. The culture clearly didn’t approve of that.
Mr. Lynch: There’s a lot there, if you want to talk more about it. What did you say in your
valedictorian address?
Dean Areen: I don’t remember in detail. It’s so trite in retrospect. Astronauts were everything.
This was 1962, we hadn’t gotten to the moon yet, but we’d seen countdowns for
satellites going up, so the theme running through it was 10, 9, 8, etc. counting
down towards our graduation, but I haven’t kept it so I don’t remember.
Mr. Lynch: You remember quite a bit about it. Any friends that you made in high school who
were important to you then.
Dean Areen: Yes, absolutely, and both boys and girls – it’s hard to say men and women. I had
a close girl friend and we spent a lot of time together. With boys it was harder to
have friends. I’d had them growing up in the neighborhood, but suddenly, you
couldn’t do that, you couldn’t play across gender lines. It was all the emotional
baggage that went along with dating. During my freshman year, the
Westinghouse Science Talent Search came to South Bend. There were five high
schools in town. They gave some kind of test, and, based on the test, they picked
40 students from the five high schools. It lasted through the next three-and-a-half
years for me. We’d call it academic supplements, most of them at Notre Dame.
We’d have a series of lectures, some on chemistry and molecular structure.
They’d bring in University faculty, quite a bit on computers, which was very
interesting, and learning how to program computers before there were personal
32
computers – they were just big machines, and so forth. From my perspective it
was really interesting. It was an important part of my life. I was part of why I
later went off to be a math and science major, but more importantly most of the
forty were guys, and some of them were very cute, so I had a series of dates that
came out of that program. That was a very good thing. It was sort of a social
salvation because I wasn’t being asked out a lot by the guys in my own high
school. It wasn’t so offensive to these guys that I was a good student. It set off a
hope that college was going to be that way, and it was.
Mr. Lynch: What were some of the kinds of things you would do with the girlfriends you
had?
Dean Areen: Mostly, sleepovers. That’s how we’d get together.
Mr. Lynch: Were there any African Americans living in the community?
Dean Areen: Yes, absolutely, but very few in our high school. I think it was exacerbated by
academic tracking. I didn’t think about it at the time but, in retrospect. Academic
tracking was basically for two of the courses – I’m sure it just further segregated
the environment.
Mr. Lynch: Was there any kind of geographical segregation so far as you knew?
Dean Areen: No.
Mr. Lynch: Were there any Jews in your high school?
Dean Areen: Small numbers. One of the girls in our group, again it’s one of those, you know,
when I think back on it, I was just oblivious to all of that. I mentioned to you the
names of my next-door neighbor and across-the-street neighbor, and as an adult, I
33
hear the names, and say oh, those were Jewish families. Growing up, I didn’t
know that. Sort of what you notice and what you don’t. I feel that I missed some
of those issues and that’s why going to Cornell more than anything brought home
religious lines. There was a very uncomfortable divide at Cornell between Jewish
students and Christian students. There were no Islamic students and there were
very few black students. More of that later. You may have seen the famous
photographs of 1969, just after I left, black students take over the student union.
There’s a big open space called the Ivy Room with sort of picnic-table style
seating in groups and it was divided. There were Christian fraternities and
sororities and then Jewish. It was so evident I noticed it and was very offended
by it and spent my time – I did go into a sorority and became the rush chairman
because I was determined that we would break down the lines between.
Mr. Lynch: Anything else about your time in Chicago and then South Bend?
Dean Areen: One last story and then we’ll get me to college. The story about wanting to work;
this has to do with expectations. I was graduating, I was going to Cornell, I was
going to be a math major, and I thought well, high time I get a job. My parents
didn’t think that, my father in particular, and so that’s when gender roles really
hit. If your wife worked, you were viewed as not a good provider, and my guess
in retrospect, I don’t know that he analyzed it that way, but I assume part of what
he was thinking was well, my daughter goes to work, people will think I’m not
providing. I, on the other hand, was sort of primed growing up in an environment
where work was praised and so thought I’m going to go to work. They refused to
34
do anything, so I started going through the want ads in the newspaper. I’m a
senior in high school. I noticed for the first time that virtually every job required
experience. I mean I couldn’t be a waitress. Everything – experience required.
There was one ad in the whole newspaper. So, I, of course, answered the ad the
next Monday or whatever. For two days I sold magazine subscriptions
Mr. Lynch: Door to door?
Dean Areen: No, over the phone. And I can still almost remember the script. They had you
look in a mirror and you had your numbers to call and a little script, which I can’t
do it now, but for ten years I could recite the script. The mirror was so you would
keep smiling and get through to Mr. Smith or Mrs. Green. My parents were either
so horrified at that or at least persuaded that I really was serious about working
that they called somebody who called somebody and so by the next week I got a
job as the summer assistant typist to the secretary to the controller of Notre Dame.
I was literally in the sub-sub-basement under the golden dome. I learned a lot
about work there. Anyway, the lessons were learned and I was just applying them
but had run into an exception that I didn’t know about.
Mr. Lynch: Were you able to sell any magazines?
Dean Areen: I don’t remember. [Laughter] Not many. I just remember my getting the phone
slammed and turned down a lot. It’s pretty awful work to have to do.
Mr. Lynch: What was the influence of Notre Dame on life in South Bend growing up?
Dean Areen: Not much. Football games were obviously one of the most important things for
everybody, but it’s not located in the city. It’s really on the edge. There was sort
35
of a – coming from my parents – the father of a girl going through great hesitation
about college boys that was ominous. It wasn’t Notre Dame, it was just anybody
who was too old, so there was not much interaction.
Mr. Lynch: We could do college now, or —
Dean Areen: Well, tell me about your time. We’re sort of at 7:15, so why don’t we break.
Mr. Lynch: Can we do college next time?
Dean Areen: Yes.
Mr. Lynch: Terrific. This is the end of the first session.