Interview with Rita Birge Click for bio
Rita Birge
Topics:
So in the 1960s How old were you? What age group were you in?
Rita Birge* : I was born in 54 so by 1960 I was six years old. So for the whole 60s, I would have been from six to 16.
Ben DeWitt* : Do you remember a lot of what was happening around the world?
Rita Birge* : What I remember the most was the Vietnam War. From being a small girl, I lived with my folks in Spokane Valley. And by the time I was 12, that was 67, we were already involved in Vietnam, and it was on the Nightly News. And the Nightly News was something that my mother and father watched every night, and so it was always on the TV during dinner time or shortly after. We watched the news, and every night, the top of the news was Vietnam. What battles have been fought, how many lives had been lost, and how many people were missing. It doesn't really touch you as closely until something happens to you. I grew up in that first house I was raised in, and there was a whole neighborhood of kids, just huge amount of kids, and we all knew each other. We all knew each other's brothers and sisters. We played at each other's houses. It was just this huge array of kids. And one of the kids families across the street from us. Their last name was Moss, M-o-s-s and they had like, six kids, and their eldest son, Larry, was in Vietnam at that time, and he was boots on the ground. In those early years, he was shot and killed. It became a whole neighborhood of closeness to Vietnam, and brought it to life for all of us, that someone in our little neck of the woods, our little neighborhood, would actually have someone who was there and died, and he received all kinds of awards posthumously, or, however you say that, and his parents went to, you know, to meet the mayor and all that kind of stuff, and got his medals and whatnot. But it was, it was a big deal in our neighborhoods. So the Vietnam War was a big deal when I was growing up.
Ben DeWitt* : Other than just the impact in your community, were there any other instances like that where you remember a large impact made by the Vietnam War in that time period?
Rita Birge* : Not necessarily about The Vietnam War, other than it was just a nightly news thing, it was just something you got accustomed to watching, as far as battles and numbers of people dead and that kind of thing. The other big event that happened when I was 10 was when John F Kennedy was shot, and I was in the fourth grade. My teacher's name was Mrs. Parrott. I remember very clearly that morning, the loudspeaker went on, and everyone was told to go home. And as kids, we didn't know what was happening. The busses came and those that walked home walked home, and we all went home, and I remember arriving home and my mom was in the middle of the living room crying, and our big old black and white TV set was in the middle of the living room, and they were doing all this business about John F Kennedy being shot and killed, so that was a big event in my life as a child,
Ben DeWitt* : You mentioned that you watched the nightly news a lot. Do you remember anything specifically about the Civil Rights Movement and all of that stuff happening?
Rita Birge* : I remember little bits and pieces, and that it was on the news. There wasn't a lot of conversation around the kitchen table. I knew that there were black people that lived somewhere, but there were none where I lived. There were none in Spokane Valley. There were none in my schools. There were none anywhere around me, or any place that I went. The first time I even saw a black man was with my mom. I was young, and my mom had her dad with us, and we drove to downtown Spokane early in the morning for him to see somebody. And there was a black man standing on the side of the street, and I remember my sister and I staring at him wildly because we'd never seen anybody like that before, and my mom and dad never talked about it. And I know my dad didn't work with any black people. There weren't any black people around us anywhere. So what we saw in the news was something that was happening someplace else. You know, all those other places, all those other states, were so far away.
Ben DeWitt* : Did you see like an uptick in the increase of the black population, kind of around Spokane after the 1960s?
Rita Birge* : Yeah, After the 1960s after grandpa and I were married in 73, there was an influx of African Americans. There was more of an influx of Asians and at that time, there was also women that had been married to Vietnam vets, and they were coming over and they had children. Your mom: Amy, and Kenny, they had some half white, half Asian kids in their school. I don't remember if they had any black kids. But even those kids were treated poorly because they weren't white. And Kenny had a friend that lived near us when your mom and Kenny were growing up, and they weren't treated right. And so the influx happened, you know, later in our lives, as far as becoming more mixed in our area. But up until that point, up until the 70s, we were a pretty white white area for sure.
Ben DeWitt* : Help me paint a picture of what life was like. Did you ever go to the movies or watch anything other than the news on TV? Tell me about that.
Rita Birge* : Okay, so as a kid, growing up with my little sister, we had lots of kids in the neighborhood. We walked to school. We walked a mile to school. We were outside playing all the time. We didn't watch we didn't watch cartoons or watch TV after school. We didn't have computers, we didn't have phones, we didn't have all that other stuff. So unless you had chores to do. You were outside playing. So we biked all over the place. We went over to other kids' houses. Some kids had above ground pools that we'd swim in in the summertime, or we'd play baseball out in the field. We always had something to do, and we had free rein in the neighborhood. There weren't any bad guys out there. There wasn't anybody that was going to bother the kids. All the kids had free rein in the neighborhood, and they were all over. And all you knew was, when it started to get dark, you better get home, or you're going to miss dinner. And on Saturdays, you woke up as early as you can, and you ate your cold cereal, and you hit the door, and you were outside again, and you played all day outside. When we trick or treated. When I was a little kid, my sister and I would be gone for hours. Our moms never took us trick or treating. We just took off and had to come back. Nobody was ever going to hurt you. Nobody was afraid for their kids.It was a safe environment that somebody hurting you or abducting you or anything was not even on people's minds. It just didn't happen, not in the neighborhood I grew up in. We did go to the movies. Mom had let us go to the movies., Not very often, because we didn't have a lot of money. But we did get to go to the movies. Sharon (Rita's Sister) and I belonged to a church that had a big youth group, and once a month we'd get to go roller skating clear out on the north side of Spokane. We got to go roller skating once a month. So we used to roller skate quite a bit. We had a sledding hill. We had a sledding hill not too far from where we lived. And so all the kids in the wintertime walked to sledding hill, and we'd sled all day. We just had runner sleds. Some kids had tubes, but I just had a runner sled. And we had about mile and a half, close to two miles away from our house, was a little store, and I mean a little store, but it had penny candy. Underneath the window were bins and bins and bins of penny candy. And you could go buy penny candy, and mom would give us a little bit of money. Every once while, we could all ride our bikes down to buy penny candy, and we had lemonade stands and the ice cream truck came by in the summertime, and mom would buy us ice cream from the ice cream truck. We had a good life as kids. We played a lot. We had lots of friends.
Ben DeWitt* : Do you remember what the first movie you ever went to the theater to see was?
Rita Birge* : The one that stands out in my mind is Gone With The Wind. We didn't go to a lot of movies. We did go to some, but that one stands out in my mind.
Ben DeWitt* : Was it a drive-in theater?
Rita Birge* : It was the old Dishman theater in the valley. It was an inside theater. I have an older sister, Judy, and Judy's 11 or 12 years older than I am, and when she was dating, if my mom and dad didn't like who she was dating or was concerned about her for any reason. She could go to the movies with her boyfriend if they took Sharon and I. So Sharon and I would we were just little girls. We'd be dressed in our jammies, and we'd sit in the backseat of whoever's car when she got to go to the drive in movies. I remember doing that
Ben DeWitt* : Do you remember listening to any music?
Rita Birge* : When I was turned 12 years old, I loved Herman's Hermits. Ever heard of Herman's Hermits? I think they came out just before the Beatles. You'd have to research that. If they came out at the same time, or just a little bit before the Beatles. They were also from England, and that was one of the first albums I ever bought.
Ben DeWitt* : And was that like a vinyl record?
Rita Birge* : Yes. It was vinyl record. I had a phonograph, and my mom and dad had a phonograph, and they had lots of old records.That was one of the first records I ever bought. And I also loved The Monkeys, and I listened to the monkeys and I watched their TV show. I was madly in love with Davy Jones, of course.
Ben DeWitt* : What did your parents do for a living?
Rita Birge* : Okay, so my dad worked for Consolidated Freightways. It was a trucking firm in Spokane, and in his early years working for them, he drove trucks from here to Cle Elum. Cle Elum is on the way to Seattle. So he drove back and forth to Cle Elum, and then as he got older, he stopped driving, and he worked on the docks. To work on the docks meant you loaded and unloaded all the trucks. So my dad worked for them for over 30 years. I think it was 33 years i. And he worked the docks mostly, and he went to work at a very early time. He left the house somewhere between one and two o'clock in the morning. And my mom was a stay at home mom, as were all the moms I ever knew. All my friend's moms that I knew were stay at home moms. We had a couple moms in our neighborhood when I was growing up that were nurses and they worked in doctor's offices, but everybody else was a stay at home mom. So my mom had a big garden out in the back yard. My mom sewed a lot of our clothes, and she canned fruit and vegetables and all that kind of stuff in the fall. My dad hunted with his brothers. He had two brothers. So we always had deer meat. We always had birds. He hunted a lot of birds. My mom and dad fished a lot, so we had a lot of fish to eat. They were farmers. My dad grew up on a farm.
Ben DeWitt* : Do you remember where you went to Highschool
Rita Birge* : University Highschool in Spokane.My brother and sister went to Central Valley High School. But as the valley grew and more people came, they had to build University High School. I graduated in 72.
Ben DeWitt* : How would you sum up life in kind of the Spokane area in the 1960s?
Rita Birge* : I look back on it as a kid, you just take it for granted. But to look back on it. I realized how safe we all were. We all came from families, moms and dads and families. We were all cared for, all the neighbor moms and dads knew who we were. It was friendly. If somebody was sick, everybody, you know, everybody bring over a pot of soup or a cake. I mean, everybody took care of one another. It was fun. I didn't worry. I wasn't scared. It was a good time. It was a good time to be a kid.
Ben DeWitt* : Is there anything from the 1960s that you remember that seems oddly familiar, or you see happening again in America today?
Rita Birge* : I think political unrest was always there, and the ebbs and flows as far as as what's happening in the world. Of course, we were in Vietnam, and so that was a war, and the political unrest because of the assassination of a president, and here we are now today, with the political unrest that we have heating up in the Middle East, with war. I suppose that that could be, you know, as close as I could come to that there. There seemed to be a calming after all of Vietnam and everybody getting back on their feet and readjusting to life as it was then and now. It seems to be bubbling up again in other ways, not only unrest here, but politically with the violence and whatnot that's going on here in our own country. It's heating up.
Ben DeWitt* : Do you remember kind of what the general consensus about the the Vietnam War was? How did the people around you feel about the Vietnam War?
Rita Birge* : My father was a World War Two vet, and most of the people that he knew were World War Two vets, I think they probably felt whether it was necessary or not. I think the consensus was, "let's just get the job done." And I think for the most part, people felt that we weren't being aggressive enough to get the job done, that it went on for much too long, that it we just didn't go in and get the job done quick enough that we needed to be more forceful or do whatever we had to do to get the job done. And the fact that we just walked away after all that time and all those people that died, we walked away, and I think that left, that left a scar on a lot of people at that time. Going to war was one thing, but to let it go on for as long as it did, and then walk away was something else. Where they came from a generation that you just went in and you got it done, and it was your duty, and that's what you did as Americans. You went in and you got it done and you came home. And that's not exactly what happened. So I think there was some frustration with that
Ben DeWitt* : The Vietnam War is heavily characterized with the amount of war journalists that got sent over there, and people were seeing the war themselves on television. Do you personally remember seeing anything on TV or on the news about the Vietnam War that stuck with you?
Rita Birge* : They didn't show a lot of, you know, fields full of dead bodies or or things like that. What I do remember seeing toward the end, where they would show the screaming and crying of the women and the children and that kind of stuff, and that was always hard to see, but they didn't do that till toward the end. So no, nothing, no picture rings out in my head about it just, it was just a generalized, yeah, they were pretty they were very cautious on TV back then, black and white TV and all back then of showing anything bloody or too graphic. So it was generalized pictures. But toward the end, they showed more. They were a little bit more graphic, and that was hard to take.
Ben DeWitt* : And you were also alive at the height of the Cold War. Does anything stick out? Or do you remember what life was like? Like living under potential nuclear threat from the east.
Rita Birge* : In the 50s and early 60s, we were kids. People make fun of it now because they show them on TV and it's more of a joke where we had to hide under our desks. So we had bomb drills in school. It was just like you had fire drills, and we had bomb drills. And so when the drill alarm would go off, kids were told to crawl under their desks, or crawl under the teacher's desks, or some could get into the closet if there wasn't enough room. But that was the kind of cover we took for a nuclear war. It was to crawl under our desk. It seemed like the right thing to do, you know, now it's hilarious to think that crawling under a desk is going to do anything for you.
Ben DeWitt* : And do you ever remember anyone around you, perhaps your parents or a teacher or some other adult in your life talk about the communists, or share any kind of concern over the Cold War?
Rita Birge* : Not at my house, not at my house. I don't remember any like that. The only other thing I remember, as far as bomb threats was that most most people had basements. We had a basement, and the basement was stocked with canned goods, food, blankets, and shelter. So if anything was to happen, we were to run to the basement. But I don't ever remember my parents talking about it.
Ben DeWitt* : Did you ever feel any kind of anxiety from the Cold War, or was it just not on your radar
Rita Birge* : Yeah, as a child, it just wasn't on my radar. But as a kid, I didn't think anything else about it. The rest of my life was great. We had air raid siren right at right across the street from my house, went off every Wednesday at noon. Wow. That was justt commonplace. It's what we grew up with. I suppose maybe if my parents had talked about it more, or talked anxiously about it, or anything like that at the kitchen table, maybe Sharon and I would have been more afraid or or thought more about it, but my parents never talked about it in front of us. I'm sure it was something that they talked about or, that they thought about, but nothing that they ever shared with us showed that they were afraid.
Ben DeWitt* : Do you have any memories of the feminist movement or it affecting gender roles at all?
Rita Birge* : I was probably too young for that. But the only thing I do remember, as far as feminism or anything like that was Roe v. Wade My mother, for whatever reason, was a proponent of Roe v. Wade, and went to Ladies groups and had meetings and all that kind of stuff. I don't know where she took it from there, other than if there was a vote of some sort. But anyway, she was a proponent of that, and I just remember her voicing her opinion to us.
Ben DeWitt* : You've been extremely helpful to me. I think this interview has gone very well. You've given me a lot to work with. Thank you so much for your time!
- Title:
- Interview with Rita Birge
- Date Created:
- 2024-10-08
- Description:
- Rita Birge talks about her early life in the 1960s. She was a child growing up in a poor neighborhood in Spokane Washington during this time. She shares what life was like and major events through her eyes.
- Subjects:
- Childhood ColdWar Vietnam CRM Culture
- Location:
- Moscow, ID
- Latitude:
- 46.72821545
- Longitude:
- -117.0124598
- Type:
- text
- Format:
- record
- Preferred Citation:
- "Interview with Rita Birge", The Long 1960s - 2024 Fall, Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL)
- Reference Link:
- /thelong1960s/items/birge.html
- Rights:
- In copyright, educational use permitted. Educational use includes non-commercial reproduction of text and images in materials for teaching and research purposes. For other contexts beyond fair use, including digital reproduction, please contact the University of Idaho Library Special Collections and Archives Department at libspec@uidaho.edu. The University of Idaho Library is not liable for any violations of the law by users.
- Standardized Rights:
- http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/