Mary Alice Stout: Teacher, Administrator, Entrepreneur, Landyke

Interview by Rose Norman at the Community House at Alapine Village, in northeast Alabama, on February 29, 2020, and June 19, 2022.

MAS: But what is it? She said to call her. I called Ellen, and she explained it. I said, okay. It was a psychic reading.

ES: You were kind of interested. It wasn’t as strange as you thought it might be, because I also offered phone consultations for women there if they wanted to continue with them. I did quite a few individual [consultations] as well as this weekend workshop for the group.

RN: The workshop was on…?

MAS: Was it inner child stuff?

ES: Probably. There may have been a topic at the time, but the workshop was about healing at all levels, ourselves and, for some of them, how you reach out to somebody else in a way that doesn’t interfere, in a way that’s comforting to them or—it probably was some of that.

RN: How did you get over it, the strangeness? I mean, the psychic reading, was that—

MAS: Well, we had a good talk, you know. Kind of like we’re doing now. Then I think someone asked me to drive Ellen to the croning in South Carolina. I did that, and that was weird too.

RN: The croning? 

MAS: Yeah!  

ES: We were outside, it was a women’s circle.

MAS: Some of the women had promised not to speak, but I didn’t know that.

ES: Until the circle. At their decision, they wanted not to interact until after the circle or something. You thought it was interesting, and you all stayed all night. 

MAS: We did?

ES: I think you did, because it was late at night, and to drive back.

MAS: I didn’t remember that. 

ES:  Maybe I’m wrong. We just kind of had a chance to visit. Well, partly there was this younger woman. I have no idea her name now.

MAS: Oh, I can picture her.

ES: But she came to that workshop that you didn’t come to, and…

MAS: She started playing matchmaker.  

ES: Yes, she just thought we would be a good match. Quietly, she was working on Mary Alice. We did talk on the phone some, and you came down… 

MAS: But the other woman that had me drive her to the croning, she kept trying to not have us get together.

ES: Oh! 

MAS: Is it OK to say somebody’s name that’s deceased?

RN: Yes.

MAS: OK, it was Minnie Jane. Kept trying to keep us from visiting and stuff.

ES: Oh, yes.

RN: Why do you think she was doing that?

MAS: Because she wanted to be with Ellen.

RN: Oh.

MAS: Didn’t want me to be…Or maybe she wanted to be with me, you know? (laughter) I didn’t ask.

RN: Knoxville, Tennessee and Anderson, South Carolina are a pretty good distance there.

MAS: Yes, it was a long drive. Sometimes, I’d get ready to go home, and I would say, “Oh, I’m not ready to go home. Come on and go with me.” She’d go as far as the Comfort Inn in Asheville [North Carolina], where we’d spend the night, and then, I would drive on to Knoxville. 

ES: Which was about halfway. 

MAS: I’d drive to work early the next morning,

RN: Go ahead and say what kind of work you did.

MAS : I was the executive director of the Knox County Education Association. I had to be very careful.

RN: I guess so. You were closeted, I assume. 

MAS: Yes. Minnie Jane helped pull me out some, I believe.

ES: Then with this weird woman, I mean, who would be considered weird in the structure you were in.

MAS: It was a fun job. I tried to get Ellen to come, you know. I had a big house. I had a basement. I thought we could fix an apartment down there, and she could be my renter. She wouldn’t do it.

ES: I said no. I was where I was. That’s where all the students were. I had classes going all the time.

MAS: I was a lobbyist and lobbying for teachers. I was a contract negotiator and taught the teachers how to do it. After I left, the Republicans came along and did away with all those laws that we had fought for years for and gotten. I’m glad I wasn’t there. They do collective begging now.

ES: But we kept kind of getting acquainted, and we were kind of interested, and both loved to travel.

MAS: She said if I moved down there, we would close up the business in three months, and we’d take the camper, and we’d drive all the way to Alaska. Oh, that was tempting, yes. And we did!

RN: Wow–you weren’t old enough to retire. You moved to South Carolina. Did you have a job? 

MAS: Nope! 

RN: You just moved.

MAS:   Yep!

ES: You retired.

MAS:   It hurt my Social Security and my teacher retirement [benefits] some. When I got of the right age, I started applying for them. When we saw I wasn’t putting money into Social Security, and that I didn’t have enough years, we had me be her employee for a while. So, she would pay me. We sold books and rocks and crystals, and we ran workshops.  

ES: You taught a few classes on gardening. You were really good at—

MAS: Eat your “weedies”! We’d go collect weeds, and we’d fix lunch out in the woods.

ES: These are edible, these are not— 

MAS: That was fun. We sold a lot of vegetables.

RN: How old were you when you did that?

MAS: What year was it, Ellen?  Oh, I know: it was ‘89, because I had a birthday. It was in December, and I moved on my birthday.

ES: That’s right.

MAS: It was ’89. Okay, I was born in ’45, so how old was I?

RN: Forty-four.

MAS: I was forty-four? Wow.

RN: That is young to be taking that kind of step.

MAS: My mom and dad wanted to have me committed. 

RN: To leave a big job, that was…

Early Life and Education

MAS: “But you see,” I said, “Dad, you did the same thing. You left the paper company. It was a good steady, sturdy job. And you moved the whole family up there to Gatlinburg where it was…pitiful, you know?”

We’d have to go steal some Coke bottles to have money to put some gas in the car. I started school in Decatur, Georgia, outside of Atlanta. I wasn’t six years old yet, because I was born in December, but they let me start. Then they realized there were too many of us. If you weren’t six before September 1, you had to go back home. It was awful. I felt so hurt.

Then I ended up being just a little bit older than everybody else. I got to drive sooner than others. We had a little Volkswagen with no gas gauge. It was a 1952 Volkswagen, this was in 1962; and when you ran out of gas, it just jumped. You flicked this little thing with your foot, and you’d go take two Coke bottles or six Coke bottles to get six cents to put some gas in the car, and take it home to Daddy. (laughter)

RN: You grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and then you all moved to Gatlinburg.

MAS: No, I started school in Decatur, but we had lived in Atlanta before that and moved to Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi. Dad rode the train into New Orleans to do public relations work for Keep America Green, or something like that. That was kindergarten time. We’d go out fishing a lot. We’d bring the crabs and the fish back, put them in the bathtub, and I would stand them all up—remember, I taught biology, too—I’d stand those fish back up and get them swimming again. I’d pick those crabs up and—“No, don’t put them in the boiling water! Oh, we’re going to eat them – okay, do it!”

Then, we moved back to Atlanta. That’s when I started the first grade, outside of Decatur. From there, we moved to Washington, D.C. Daddy worked for American Forest Products doing public relations. There’s a book called A Man Called Peter, Peter Marshall.

RN: Also they made into a movie.

MAS: A movie, too. Some woman connected with him, I think it might have been his wife or his secretary, was my dad’s secretary for a while, too.

Then, they opened up Bowater Paper Company in Athens, Tennessee. Dad quit the one in Washington, D.C., and we moved to Athens, Tennessee. That was at Easter time of the fourth grade. I went to that school in Athens through the eighth grade. I did the ninth grade at the high school there, too. We moved to Gatlinburg because Dad quit that job. That’s when everybody had to go to work. I earned money, and didn’t want to go to the University of Tennessee. I had my own money. I told my daddy that I could go wherever I wanted. I sent for catalogues everywhere. Then I learned how much they [the other colleges and universities] cost, and I decided to go to the University of Tennessee. “Not because you want me to, Daddy. It’s just ‘cause I’ve decided to.” (laughter) Because it was the cheapest. 

ES: Well, you were a resident of Tennessee.   

Teaching High School in Rural Tennessee

MAS: Yes. I looked at other places. There was a Methodist college in Maryville. I talked to them awhile. Hiwassee College [in Madisonville, Tennessee] and Tennessee Wesleyan in Athens. I could ride the Trailways bus back and forth [to Knoxville] if I wanted to come home from the dorm, you know, to Gatlinburg. Sometimes, I was the only person on the bus.

RN: What was your major?

MAS: I started off in elementary education, and I found out how boring that was for me. I changed into science education, and I got my master’s degree in botany. Lots of people wanted to hire a master’s-level science teacher in 1970. I went to Clinton, Tennessee, where they wanted somebody to start a biology program at this junior high that was the old high school turned to a junior high.

It was fun starting the biology class and having my way of what I wanted. We had to sell donuts to buy microscopes.

Clinton is where they had done some of the first integrating in Tennessee. There was a movie of a thing called You Are There with Edward R. Murrow. The film was locked in the vault, and we had fifty-four teachers at that junior high with 1,200 kids. They had that film locked. There were about twelve new teachers the year I came, and we talked the principal into letting us see that movie. We needed to know the background of this area. It was a big controversy, but we got it.
[The very well-known journalist Edward R. Murrow hosted the radio show You Are There, which lasted 1947-1950. It focused on historical events, including current events. CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite hosted the televised version on CBS from 1953 to 1957. Some of the televised episodes are available on VHS tape or DVD format. These were also made available to schools as 16 mm film, and that is probably what the Clinton school had in their vault.]

It was fun starting the biology class and having my way of what I wanted. We had to sell donuts to buy microscopes and to get equipment that they didn’t have for me. Then the whole science wing burned. I was home with the flu, and I said, “Y’all are teasing me. Don’t tease me like that. Okay, I’m coming to see it.”  It was awful. It was like… I had a nervous breakdown looking at these sculptured microscopes that were all cowpies and stuff [melted]. It was hard.

ES: Very hard. It would have been hard if somebody else had created it, and you were just teaching. But you were…  

MAS: But I ended up getting some real lab tables and sinks. Instead of just two sinks, I ended up with eight sinks. There was this hole in the back, the big sink in the floor, that they never patched for some reason. You could look in that hole, and you could see the kitchen of the cafeteria. We were putting away our frogs one day. They had places to put them away so we could bring them back out the next day. They [the students] could identify theirs because they had a colored bread tag on its toes: the red one was yours, the orange one was hers, and the one with two red ones is his. They were all back there around that sink, and I couldn’t figure out why. I went and looked, and they had one of the frogs dangling on a piece of string, and it was flying around in the kitchen. I said, “Oh, come on, give me a turn.” The [cafeteria] ladies would turn and holler.

I had fun teaching. I started a camp for kids. We went for a week to Life Science camp, and the seventh graders were the students who lived in these cabins. The ninth graders were the counselors. There was a story about me in the Tennessee Conservationist magazine because of what we had started.

There was this teacher near retirement who sat down with me and said, “You’re just getting started. What’s something you really want to do?” I said, “I want to get the kids out of the classroom. Let’s come up with something where we can take them to Big Ridge State Park for a week. And we did it. It was fun.

ES: You were very creative and inventive. Kids do well with that.

MAS: I had some humor. One day, I think it was about the third or fourth year, this one girl got so angry.

ES: You took the difficult students. 

MAS: That was my second year.

ES: OK.

MAS: I asked for the kids that couldn’t read after I learned about this biology program written for them. I just didn’t know that they would give me forty-four of them during the lunch time and have them for two hours! They wanted to sneak off and smoke, and I wanted to sneak off and smoke, too. We had to work out our supervised smoking time. We did, we worked it out. But this one girl got really mad at me, and she hollered, “Miss Stout, you’re a bitch!” You could hear a pin drop. I looked at her. I thought, now how am I going to get out of this, and get back to what we were doing? You know, thinking, thinking… And I said, “Well, Joan, I really appreciate that. Thank you. I’ve been here four years now. I have tried to be the best bitch Clinton Junior High has, and you have finally recognized it. Thank you! Let’s get back to work now.” She got even madder. 

RN: How long were you at Clinton? 

MAS: Ten years.

RN: That is a very rough area, as I recall.

MAS: Well, it’s because we had people who had jobs in Oak Ridge, and their parents would walk into the walls because they were so blindfolded with their jobs and their brains. [Oak Ridge, TN, is the home of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a government-sponsored research lab developing nuclear technology during WWII. It was taken over by Union Carbide and other private corporations. The town was created for the purpose of building the lab, similar to Los Alamos. It still has a very high percentage of people with advanced degrees.]

“How come you had to walk, Rodney?”
“Well, my mom had one of her customers last night, and she wouldn’t let me stay in the mobile home. I slept outside, and I just overslept. The bus came and went, and I didn’t know it.”

I required students to keep a biology notebook. They had to keep notes of what we were doing, and certain things had to be in them. One kid turned in a Xeroxed copy of another kid’s. His dad fixed his notebook for him. I said, “This ain’t your dad’s notebook. It’s yours. Don’t do that again!”

Then I had these kids, like around here, that were living in the mobile homes. Like the boy that I noticed who wasn’t there in the morning and showed up later. When I saw him going into the cafeteria, I asked, “Well, Rodney, where have you been all day?” He said, “Well, Miss Stout, I had to walk to school today.” He lived way out of town. “How come you had to walk?” “Well, my mom had one of her customers last night, and she wouldn’t let me stay in the mobile home. I slept outside, and I just overslept. The bus came and went, and I didn’t know it. When I woke up, I just started walking. And here I am.” She had one of her customers! I said, “That makes it hard, doesn’t it, Rodney?”

Becoming an Administrator and Lobbyist

RN: Did you go to the administrative job after that? 

MAS: After that, the Professional Negotiations Act of 19-whatever-it-was passed in Tennessee. I happened to be the president of our local association. We took it to the Representative Assembly, and they voted unanimously. “Here’s the law, here’s what it says. Do you want to follow this law and begin negotiating a contract?” They voted unanimously. Partially, there had been this woman in a central office embezzling our share of the Blue Cross Blue Shield money we had been putting in. People had been learning that they didn’t have insurance that they had been paying for. The central office staff just drug us right into it, just abusing us. We went through every step, and we did it all, negotiating our contract. We were the first ones in the State of Tennessee to do it, and we were working on our contract when Knoxville decided that they were big enough – Knox County. Knoxville already had a staff person. Knox County surrounded it. It was like the donut around Knoxville. They decided they were big enough to have their own staff person, and they wanted the NEA (National Education Association union) and the TEA (Tennessee Education Association) to help them to hire somebody. I applied and got the job.

I was at a school board meeting where we were having a fight with the school board over our contract. We decided we couldn’t go on strike. It was illegal, but we were all standing up. We would not sit down during the school board meeting. They had to move us to the court room upstairs because there were so many of us. We all had our rulers with tension on them like this [demonstrating] with our chief teacher-negotiator talking about how you can push a ruler so long that it finally just smacks you in the face, doesn’t it? She told them,”We’re not talking. Y’all are just sitting there not talking with us like the law says.”

That was the meeting where they had to approve my resignation, and the school board voted not to approve it. I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Bostick, would you talk with the school board about how they have no choice on this? They just have to say yes, we understand that you are resigning.” Okay. I had to work out like four weeks, or six weeks, or something, and I could leave.

I set up a new program again. I was the first staff person they had for the Knox County Education Association. Right about the time that I met Ellen, it was after another ten years, they had merged the two school systems together with the guy that had been in the Knoxville group with me. He did not know where all his schools were. When we did the merger of the associations together, the boards asked for the governing documents, a directory of the staff, and the membership list, and all this kind of stuff. I brought the big folders to my board. The Knoxville people said, “Well, where are ours?” I said, “You’re going to have to ask Mr. Sisk where yours are. I have no access to any of that. I’m sorry.”It was easy for me to leave.

Followup Phone Call (not recorded). Date not noted, but probably March 2020. These are Rose Norman’s notes.

Building an Earth-Sheltered House

In the follow-up phone call, Mary Alice Stout and Ellen Spangler went on talking about building the earth-sheltered house, adding some stories. Mary Alice is good at finding building materials at good prices or for barter. Ellen was more the architect, and head of construction on the project. Mary Alice was the one to run errands and she was the building assistant. “A good partnership.” Ellen told Mary Alice what she needed, and Mary Alice could usually find it within twenty-four hours, serendipitously. For example, while doing U.S. Census work, the same day Ellen told Mary Alice that they would need some hay for the roof. Mary Alice ran across some hay that she was able to swap for a peanut butter pie that Ellen had made. Similarly, when they needed dirt, Mary Alice ran into a guy digging a pond who was glad to get rid of the dirt.

The sand truck driver was amazed that four women and a man could do all that.

Friends often visited them while they were building the house, camping on the land and helping build the house. A lesbian couple they knew from South Carolina, but who had moved to Missouri, Marty and Sharon, visited while they were hauling two dump truck loads of sand for the foundation. They were spreading four inches of sand over the ground they had leveled by hand. They ran out of sand, and had to order more. The friends helped shovel that third load of sand. The sand truck driver was amazed that four women and a man (James Earl) could do all that. By the end of the day, they were done. Mary Alice says that she told Marty she had to work hard to keep up with her shoveling that sand. Marty said she thought she was just keeping up with Mary Alice.

Locals were interested, too. They met James Earl at a restaurant and got talking about the workshop they were going to up North to earn to build an earth-sheltered house. It turned out that James Earl had the original book [about building earth-sheltered houses] by that author and was eager to help them build it. He was a retired carpenter and a hard worker, very knowledgeable, and willing to work for $12-15/hour, much less than they would have had to pay most carpenters. He had tools they didn’t have, like a rivet gun. He wasn’t bossy, but was a pleasure to work with. He had a long ponytail and wore bib overalls. His wife was from France, and he had taken her last name. (A French name I didn’t catch and they can’t remember.)

ES: You were kind of interested. It wasn’t as strange as you thought it might be, because I also offered phone consultations for women there if they wanted to continue on. I did quite a few individual [consultations] as well as this weekend workshop for the group.

College and Pride of the Southland Band

RN:  This is the mid-sixties. You graduated high school, what…

MAS: I graduated high school in 1964. I went to three different high schools. McMinn County High in Athens, Tennessee. We were living and working in Gatlinburg [Tennessee]. But we went back and lived in Athens one more year so that my brother could finish his high school at Athens. They moved me and my sister to Gatlinburg.

RN: Gatlinburg has a high school?

MAS: Well, it did. It was started by the Pi Beta Phi Sorority. I went one year to Pi Beta Phi High School while they were building Gatlinburg Pittman Center Consolidated High School. They consolidated us with Pittman Center and we had, I think, about thirty-three kids in my senior class when we consolidated. We had no band program, and I loved playing my flute with the band in McMinn County Tennessee. So, I made friends with the Methodist organist, and she’d have me play some. Then I went to UT [the University of Tennessee, Knoxville]. When I went to UT, I got involved in the marching band there; that was fun.

RN: Oh, you played in the UT marching band!

MAS: Yeah, yeah, it was fun! If we went away for a trip, they’d give us a $20 bill so we could buy meals. Since I was paying my way through school, I’d eat Krystal [hamburgers] and I’d come back with $10 that I could spend on books or something there in Knoxville. Several of us did that.

RN: All four years?

MAS: I played in the band all four years. I enjoyed it a lot! They also had a thing called Lab Band to teach students to be conductors. But they had to have guinea pigs to conduct. It was a real easy “A” to go and play with these student conductors. It was kind of sadistic to watch them get fussed at when they did it wrong, you know? I was so glad it was them and not me! Dr. J. Julian was the band director when I was there, and he was just really scary. We’d practice on Saturday mornings for a Saturday game. We’d be down there on this thing called Lower Something Field, at 8 am, in our spot. He could just look and see what spot was empty and he’d say, “Where’s Johnny Jones?” and nobody would say anything. He had a little Mercedes, and he’d jump in his Mercedes and off he’d go. Ten minutes later he’d be back with Johnny Jones, trying to pull his hair out of his eyes and button his shirt. Johnny had had a rude awakening.

RN: Is this a precision band, where you’re marching in formation?

MAS: Yeah, we were—he had started some sort of circle drills or something that we did, yeah. Pride of the Southland was the name of it.

RN: That’s the name of the band?

MAS: Yeah, Pride of the Southland. The lab band didn’t have any kind of name. It was just helping the conductors learn how to conduct by being their guinea pigs. I had made friends with some of my customers that I’d had in Gatlinburg. One time we went to a bowl game in Houston and I contacted one of my customers who was older than I, and she came, picked me up, and we went and did some things around Houston. She knew I liked plants, so we went to look at a huge greenhouse. She was probably a lesbian. It’s probably why I connected with her and her with me. But she was a little older, you know?

RN: By the seventies—you graduated in the sixties, probably 1964 to 1968—

MAS: I graduated, I think it was early in ’70. I started teaching then. I got two degrees. I started teaching in August of 1970, I believe it was, at Clinton, Tennessee. I almost went to LaFayette, Georgia, right up the road here. They wanted someone to come to a team teaching at a new junior high, and it sounded really interesting, but for some reason they wouldn’t let me meet the woman I would be team teaching with. That just ran all kind of red flags around my eyes, and I said, no, I don’t want this job; if I can’t meet Miss Jones, I don’t want it.

RN: What were the two degrees you had?

MAS: I got one in Secondary Science Education. I could teach Chemistry, Physics, Biology, General Science. Then the other one was a masters in Botany.

RN: So that’s why it took you until’70, because you went straight to a graduate program.

MAS: Right. I went straight into graduate school. But I never went in the summer because I was working in Gatlinburg, earning my money to pay to go to school.

RN: They had a pretty significant counterculture then, in the Fort Sanders area.

MAS: Yes, I lived in an apartment on 16^th Street in Fort Sanders.

RN: Were you part of that counterculture?

MAS: Nope, I was always real serious about what I was doing with my money.

When I started teaching, I went to one of my high school friends, and I asked him to light up some marijuana so I could smell it to know what it was like when my kids were lighting it up in the bathrooms at the school.

RN: So, you weren’t smoking pot or…

MAS: Oh no—

RN: LSD or—

MAS: Nuh uh—

RN: But did you see it going on around you?

MAS: Some, yeah. When I started teaching, I went to one of my high school friends that had a motel in Gatlinburg and I asked him to light up some marijuana so I could smell it. Then I would know what it was like when my kids were lighting it up in the bathrooms at the school. I wanted to know. He said, “Sure. I’ll just close the motel, and we’ll go and smoke pot.” I said, “No, you’re smoking the pot. I’m just doing a science experiment.” He lit his cigarette up, kicked his shoes off, and rubbed his feet on the carpet. He said, “Oh, it feels so good to smoke this marijuana and rub my feet on the carpet.” I said, “Well, Tombo, I can kick my shoes off and rub my feet on the carpet, and not even have to smoke marijuana. It smells great!”

RN: But marijuana doesn’t smell great to me.

MAS: No, it feels great. Sorry. It FEELS great without any marijuana. I don’t have to do that. Plus, I can drink half a glass of wine and it puts me to sleep and I don’t know what’s going on, so I figured it would be worse if I started doing this other stuff.

RN: So you were a serious student, paying your way…

MAS: Serious student. I finally convinced my dad how much cheaper it would be if I left the dorm and lived in an apartment. It would be cheaper on my finances. He believed it (laughter).

RN: You talked a bit in your other interview about teaching in Clinton, you know, kind of a rough combination of Oak Ridge and also very rural—

MAS: Two classes of people; two levels. But now, those country kids knew a lot about biology that the city kids didn’t.

Finding Feminism Through Working for the Tennessee Educational Association (TEA)

RN: I want you to talk about feminism and whether you got any of that when you were in college and graduate school, or when you did come across it.

MAS: I got into it more when I started working for the Tennessee Educational Association (TEA), and they had just started a Status of Women Committee. My mentor getting me into the job as a field rep for the TEA was the leader of the Status of Women Committee. She was the staff contact, and she got me to be a second one, and later I was the staff contact for it. Something interesting [happened] when Ellen and I moved in together and were unpacking some of my stuff. I had a certificate from that committee that had honored me as the Outstanding Woman Leader in the State of Tennessee for one year when they had picked one and had presented to me it at their annual meeting. Ellen had one too, award winner for excellence in helping women.

RN: The seventies were a very good time for advances of that kind.

MAS: Yes, and that was when I taught, all through the seventies. At the end of the seventies, I started working for the TEA and worked there all through the eighties. Then I met Ellen at the end of the eighties. I quit and shifted from conventional jobs to unconventional jobs like selling rocks and gems and teaching courses at a holistic healing center, Starcrest.

I had the teachers of Knoxville carrying signs when state law said that you couldn’t go on strike. We had little banners on our chests that said, “Just practicing!” We’re just practicing going on strike.

RN: Starcrest was what we were focused on during that previous interview [which is published on the website as an interview with Ellen Spangler]. This is 1980, then, that you got into feminism.

MAS: You know, when I was in college, there were students that were blocking the administration office buildings at the top of the University of Tennessee hill and taking over the President’s office. Students were getting arrested. How was I supposed to go to my class and learn what I was supposed to learn if I was in jail? I’d take the long way around that building to get to my botany class so I wouldn’t get involved in that.

RN: So, none of the campus politics touched you?

MAS: No. But later, when I worked for the TEA, I had the teachers of Knoxville carrying signs when it was a state law that you couldn’t go on strike. We carried little signs and had little banners on our chests that said, “Just practicing!” We’re just practicing going on strike, because we knew someone would have to bring us beans and cornbread if we broke the state law and got put in jail.

RN: So that was your idea!

MAS: I helped them make signs reading, “Just practicing!” We didn’t want to break the state law. It made the president of the school board in Knoxville so angry! He said, “Oh, it just makes my stomach so upset to see those teachers out there doing that.” So, we got little boxes and we wrapped them and put bottles of Pepto Bismol in them and sent him all kinds of boxes of Pepto Bismol for his sick stomach. We didn’t want him to be suffering.

RN: Well, what was the result of that activism?

MAS: We finally got somewhere, you know, with our contract we were negotiating. At one point, they had an assistant superintendent that was a woman, and she was a cigarette smoker at that time, and so was I. We ran into each other in the women’s bathroom, and she says to me, “I don’t understand why y’all are wanting blah blah blah,” and I say, “Well, let me just tell you,

Sarah, why they are wanting that.” She said, “Oh, Okay, okay, I’ll take that back to the superintendent and see where we are. We didn’t understand that part.”

Then she said, “Now we want to know why y’all were laughing so hard at our last counterproposal we gave y’all.” I said, “The reason why is because I had little wind-up toys in my briefcase. One little mouse was boxing and dancing around with his boxing gloves, and another one would fall down every time that mouse would hit it. We named the one with the boxing gloves that was winning Jim after the teacher negotiator. The one that kept falling down all the time we named Joe after the school board negotiator. They were fighting with each other, the little toys, and we were laughing at them.” “We thought you were laughing at us,” she says. “No, we were laughing at the toys, not y’all.” (Laughter)

I did some other things, like we wouldn’t have a counter proposal, and we were supposed to meet, and we never could write up anything to counter what they had given us. So I took one piece of paper that had some typing on it and put it on top of about 400 pieces of paper, and I put a colored sheet, and I put another hundred sheets of white and then another colored sheet, and another hundred sheets, like I had different pages ready to give the school board to counter what they’d said, but they were all blank. (Laughter)

RN: Well, that was clever!

MAS: But they thought we had a whole pile of stuff to work on that night and weren’t expecting it. I forgot to tell our teacher negotiator. Jim, the teacher negotiator, about fell out of his chair when he saw me coming in carrying this pile of “counter proposals” (that’s in quotes.) I said, “Jim, take a look at some of them before you fall out of your chair.” (Laughter)

RN: He wondered where you got all that!

MAS: He saw they were all blank.

RN: This kind of reminds me, when you were teaching ten years in Clinton, is that Clinton County?

MAS: No, it’s Anderson County, Tennessee. It’s in Clinton, Tennessee. There’s a Clinton City School System and then there’s the county system.

RN: You came up with some pretty clever stuff there. It sounds to me like you were able to carry that over into your administrative work.

MAS: My father taught me that. When he was in the Army, he learned that rules were just there to learn ways to get around them and still not break the rule. Like, we were “just practicing” being on strike. We weren’t breaking the law. We’re “just practicing.” We were sorry it made that school board member so sick. (Laughter) When I was teaching, I took one of the superintendent’s reports and took his header and then cut and pasted and put my version of what kind of newsletter we needed, and that caused a little bit of upset stomachs from people when I wrote my own newsletter. But it was like it came from him. That was fun!

Becoming a Lesbian

RN: Let’s move on into some lesbian feminism activism—

MAS: Let me say one thing about college. I would say it was in college where I really decided, “I think I’m a lesbian.”

RN: Tell us about that!

MAS: No, I don’t like the way you’re smiling! (Laughter)

RN: Well, I want to know if you fell in love with somebody or what?

MAS: Oh yeah, and attracted to several people.

RN: Nobody hit on you? (Silence) Somebody hit on you. But you didn’t hit on somebody, or what? Which one was it?

MAS: Yeah, I’m kind of bashful. I don’t want to tell about that. We were together for quite a while.

RN: All the time you were teaching?

MAS: Yes. But she kept wanting to keep it hidden, and I did too, because I was a teacher. But it wasn’t until I got to work for the TEA that I started coming out a little bit more.

RN: Was that because you felt more confident, or…

MAS: I guess. I wouldn’t be hurting my students, but then I would be hurting the teachers I worked for. When I finally knew I was going to leave TEA, and that Ellen and I were going to have a commitment ceremony, I came out to a lot of people, even some of the other staff at TEA.

RN: But you had had one long-term relationship—

MAS: Hidden—

Meeting Ellen Spangler and Coming Out to Others

RN: Hidden. But when you met Ellen, you were out of it?

MAS: Yes. I was out of that relationship. I met Ellen, and it was like, wow! This is the kind of person I’d like to live with. She likes the things I do, and I like the things she does, and she had a book she wanted us to read, Centering and the Art of Intimacy by Gay Hendricks. He and his daughter, I think, wrote it together. We worked through that book, Ellen and I did, together, with questions like, “Well, Ellen, why don’t you have a credit card? How do you function without a credit card?” I didn’t know that divorced women had trouble getting credit; I didn’t know that. I’ve never had trouble with that because I’ve never been divorced, and I’ve always had my own money. It had a lot of good, deep questions to think about, you know, and also about relationships. It’s a good book. Then we decided we needed to quit talking and just do something.

If it hadn’t been for those other partners, the path and the doorway for both of us would have never opened. We talked about that.

RN: Was Ellen reading that book before she met you or because she met you?

MAS: One of us had it already. It might have been me. We got another copy so we could both read it.

RN: Ellen had been in a sort of long-term relationship.

MAS: Yes, with Rose [DeBernardo, in Florida].

RN: When she moved to South Carolina, I think, they—

MAS: Rose helped her move [to South Carolina], but it was kinda during that move that Ellen decided “this is just not what I want.” It’s time to do something different. And, you know, we talked through some of the things that happened with the other person, and why we wanted it to be different this time. If it hadn’t been for those other people, the path and the doorway for both of us would have never opened. We talked about that. “Here’s what I learned being with my friend, and here’s what you learned being with yours, and what stopped us from moving.” It was some serious discussions like I’d never had with anybody before.

RN: Ellen was really good at that.

MAS: Yeah, and I was, too. (Laughter) Why do you think we were together? I was telling somebody, it might have been while we were waiting on church today. I didn’t have anybody to play music with [this morning]. I was sitting in the sanctuary by myself, and this woman that’s Ellen’s age came in. I said [to her], “We were talking about people being thankful about things.” I said, “You know, the last few months that Ellen was alive, she couldn’t dress and undress herself. I realized that, and I went and offered to help so she could like stand up and hold onto my shoulders with me sitting down and I could help her change her underwear and get on clean stuff after, help her use some handy-wipes and get her dressed. But then she’d start fussing at me. I’d say, “Now wait a minute, Ellen. I don’t mind helping you, but as long as you criticize what I’m doing and find fault with me, it makes it really hard for me to enjoy doing this, or appreciate doing this with you, or for you.” She said, “Oh! OK. Thank you very much for helping me!” She never gave me directions on what to do again. For the next couple months, she was just real thankful.

Committing to Ellen and Moving to Starcrest in South Carolina

Ellen and I were camping somewhere outside of Asheville, which was kind of halfway between Knoxville and where she was in South Carolina. We were camping, and we started writing an invitation for people to come to a commitment ceremony. We ended up getting it printed up and sent it out. That was my idea. We had about a hundred people come.

RN: Wow—and when was that?

MAS: It was in ’89, in October. I moved about two months after that. I moved on December 15, 1989. I can remember that because that’s my birthday! It snowed, and we weren’t sure we could make it or not.

RN: We’re going to get to Alapine and talk about that huge piece of activism that you were very involved in. But before we do, I just have one more topic I want you to say more about, which was how in the world at the age of forty-four you were willing to turn your back on a fairly traditional career path and…

MAS: You mean working for the Teachers Association?

RN: Yeah…were you just tired of it and ready to be doing something else, or…

MAS: I saw in that document you had me proofreading about how the city and the county had merged together, and they had put me as a co-person, co-staff person with an alcoholic who didn’t do much, and his people wanted me to do his stuff for him, and so that pretty much angered me. I don’t think I want to say “pissed me off” on this tape recorder. (Laughter) About that time, I met Ellen, and as we talked, it was just like so many things that I had been looking for to be part of me, and part of my life, and so we wrote that in our commitment ceremony that we would be committed to each other. We danced off together.

RN: So circumstances were such that…

MAS: I would leave a really good paying job—I was paid like the level of a school superintendent—a good paying job. I’m glad my dad got me putting IRAs [Individual Retirement Accounts] away.

RN: You chose a personal relationship over professional success?

MAS: Yeah…I had money, I had a car, a real good health insurance, dental, all that kind of stuff. I was a lobbyist too. We went to see a movie with friends. We went to eat, and we went to a mall and saw a movie with friends that were activist women. Then we all departed there, us going toward South Carolina with Ellen’s van and my van. I had a car I had to get over there sometime, too.

RN: So those are two big pieces of activism. You were in South Carolina at what became Starcrest—or was it already Starcrest?

MAS: She [Ellen] had started it, but she was just doing it all in her living room. There wasn’t room to keep doing that. Plus, it was hard to be eating supper right before class and having people come in to talk to you about problems they’re having, wanting to continue their counseling session with Ellen while we were trying to eat supper. It just didn’t work so well. You couldn’t swallow your meal, you know, hearing about problems.

RN: So, you and Ellen built a classroom.

MAS: Right. She took one of her bedrooms in that house and made it into her counseling room. Another bedroom we made into the store and had rocks and crystals. We ordered things from a group called New Leaf in Atlanta. If you ordered a book today and got the order in by noon tomorrow, it would be at the house by 5:00. You could come after work and pick it up and pay for it.

RN: Had you done any retail work before that?

MAS: In Gatlinburg, where I sold those paintings, those twirl paintings. Something my dad invented. Spin art? That was my dad. You put a 5×7 piece of paper down in this dishpan that had a shaft coming out of it attached to an electric motor, and then it had a bracket that would hold a 5×7 piece of paper. This is how I earned my money. I kept this hand covered with paint and this hand perfectly clean, so I could, like, put their pictures up on the clothesline and let them dry while they were shopping.

RN: But people made it themselves?

MAS: Yes. But I had ones I had played with enough that I could make too. I could make the moon over the mountain. I could teach you how to do that, and it would only be similar. There were never two exactly alike. We’d use centrifugal force to do it, the force of the spinning. “Oh, that first one you did was so nice! They’re only 35 cents or three for a dollar. Why don’t you just go ahead and make two more? I’ll just put your dollar right here so we’ll remember you paid. Here’s your clean paper!” (Laughter)

RN: So, you had a lot of experience with selling and teaching. There was a combination of those two things in much of that Starcrest period, I gather.

MAS: I taught a class called “Eat Your Weedies.” It was about eating plants, wild plants. We made lunch. When you picked it, you made it.

RN: Ok, we can come back to that. I’m just mindful of the time. So, choosing a life with Ellen over this other life you had had was one kind of activism, but then choosing to move here to Alapine…

MAS: I tried to talk her out of it.

RN: Really? Let’s hear that story.

Fostering Two Children

MAS: I thought that we had such a good business going right then, and it was really fun, and we could just go up there and visit [Alapine]. We had two kids we had taken in, too, at that time. We didn’t tell you that?

RN: No!

We had a good friend who was dying of ovarian cancer. She came to us one day and said, “I just may as well die. Social Security has turned me down. Nobody’s going to help me.” I said, “What do you need?”

MAS: Well, that detoured me off on another bunch of thoughts.

RN: Well, I’d like to hear those.

MAS: We had a good friend, Chris, who was dying of ovarian cancer. She came to Ellen and me one day and said, “I just may as well die, Social Security has turned me down. Nobody’s going to help me.” I said, “Well, I can deal with Social Security. What do they need?” They needed somebody to file the rebuttal to where they had declined their application. I had a friend who came to Starcrest that worked with AIDS patients, helping them rebut their denials. She knew Chris, and she told me what words to use so that the Social Security people would understand. I said, “Chris, I’ll do this for you, but if something happens where you decide you’re tired of me helping you and you’re upset with me, just tell me that I’ve done something that’s upset you. Don’t come around behind the trees and blindside me.” We ended up getting it!

She had two children, so she took her first check and we went to see an attorney about what to do with them. Could we take the two children? He agreed he would go to court for her, because that’s what she wanted, to block the minister at the First Baptist Church, blah blah blah, who really thought the two children should come to his house. She didn’t want that. Her sister would not take them because she knew how they had been raised. Chris kind of pampered them a lot. So, we agreed to take them. The attorney helped us. A South Carolina judge said, “You have custody of these children.”

RN: How old?

MAS: Sixth and seventh graders.

While Chris was in the hospital getting radiation and chemotherapy stuff, we would organize committees around the children so they could stay at their apartment and go to their school. Different people would come and stay with them when they got back from school. They’d stay there and bring meals and stuff for Chris. It was really hard when Chris came home after having chemo. It was hard because the kids wanted so much of her, and she was just worn out. So, we had her come and stay at our house the first night she was out of the hospital. About the third time she did that, this horrible smell developed in our house: the chemo was killing our septic tank. We had to put a lot of Rid-X in it to get it going again.

We built two rooms on our house, and the kids did come and stay. The father of the little girl got upset. He was having to pay child support because we really insisted on it after being in court, to help us. One time, they came back from being at the little girl’s father’s house (the children had different fathers), and told us that her father said we were stealing their Social Security money (about $300 a month each). He told them that they didn’t have to have an allowance. They needed their whole check. Of course, we used that money to feed, clothe, and educate them, and gave them an allowance.

They also had chores, some things they were supposed to do to keep the house going, and some responsibilities. We had made a chart of some things we’d all do, like washing dishes and emptying the trash. The little girl said she was going to live with her father, and I said okay and Ellen said, “What?” I said, “Yeah, it’s okay with me!” The little boy said, “Well, I want to stay with y’all.” We were glad he wanted to stay, because we had taken them because we had thought the little boy was gay, and that it would be really hard living over there.

He helped his sister move, and then he came back and was packing his stuff and told Ellen he was going to move over there, too, because he was tired of us stealing his Social Security money. He said Jim [his sister’s father] was going to let him have the whole check and he was going to get his own credit card and get a water bed. (We had told him our floor wouldn’t support a water bed, and his father’s trailer wouldn’t either.)  It lasted about two months. It hurt me a lot that he left. I wasn’t ready for him to come back when he said he wanted to come back.

Just recently this year, I got a Facebook friend request from someone with the little girl’s name. She talked about her aunt who had gone to counseling with us, where the counselors tried to get us all working together. I knew it was really her, and I wrote her back. We talked a lot, and she sent me pictures, and then she apologized for how mean she was to Ellen and me, and said that the little boy and she both wanted to apologize.

By the way, the boy’s out in California now, and he’s getting married in another month to his boyfriend. (Laughter) I didn’t write her back and say, “Ellen and I knew that, that’s why we wanted him to stay with us.” Because he didn’t last long with her father at all. He moved out and started living with the manager of the Huddle House restaurant being the cook, and quit school. It was a good learning experience for all of us.

Moving to Alapine

RN: How close was that to when you moved?

MAS: We’d already been up here to see the property and said, no, we can’t come. We have two responsibilities back in South Carolina. Then, all of a sudden, the plates shifted, and the kids left. I said, “Ellen, let’s go back and look at that property again.” She said, “Yeah, let’s do that!” You couldn’t drive up in here. We camped in the front driveway, and we got Fayann and Morgana to come camp with us.

RN: This is the land you bought, right?

MAS: They bought it.

We were having community gatherings at our house, and we decided to survey the group, and everybody wanted to have a community building.

RN: No, I mean the lot you bought when you came here.

MAS: No, we bought one lot, and we then…

RN: A two-acre lot…

MAS: Yes, we bought a two-acre lot, the one our house is on, and the one beside us. Kay Mora (Jean’s partner) had bought the one beside us, but she decided she really didn’t want it, so she turned it back in to them. We gave them the money and just bought it outright. Then we had a four-acre lot. We liked it because we’d have a place to gather firewood. We were having community gatherings at our house, and we decided to survey the group, and everybody wanted to have a community building. You know, Mary Alice and Ellen really wanted that, too, because we kept having to clean up our living room every time we did something, or clean up our picnic area and our picnic tables so we’d have a spot for people to meet, and I didn’t like having to keep house that much! If you went and saw it right now you’d know I don’t like it at all.

So, we had a committee looking for somebody that would either sell inexpensively a spot to have our community building, or donate it. It went on and on, and it didn’t happen. I said, “Well, Ellen, we’ve put in our will to give our property to the Alapine Community group. Let’s just give them that two acres beside us. Well, on the other side of that two acres was Fayann and Morgana, and maybe Barbara Lieu was in this too, I don’t know. But the Sheeba Mountain Properties told us we couldn’t give that property to them. I asked why not? They said, “Because you’d have a lot of drunken parties and it would be noisy all the time with people coming and going, and it would disturb us and…” I said, “But we’re not the Pagoda, you know? We’re not young people.” “No, you can’t do that!” We even helped encourage it (laughter). We went down there and started cleaning dead wood off of it before they agreed to swap us for this one. We were real loud and noisy while we were cutting the trees and hollering and intentionally being obnoxious neighbors.

RN: This must have happened a number of years ago, because you moved in ’97. You had moved to South Carolina in ’89, worked with Starcrest and all that time with   Starcrest, that’s less than ten years that you worked with Starcrest.

MAS: But Ellen was tired of it. She said if she didn’t move here and build that earth sheltered house, she wanted to die. She just wanted to die! I said, “OK, let’s start packing!” (laughter)

RN: She was in her sixties then, right?

MAS: I think so. We got the concrete poured in 1998 and she died at [age] 87. She was born in ’35, I believe it was. You want to figure up her age? [Calculating]  She was in her sixties [sixty-two in January 1997]. I was fifty-two, and I couldn’t be building a house like that now. Nope.

RN: I think we probably need to go back and provide a little context. Ellen had a decades long association with the women who bought the Alapine land, and they had all been part of another intentional community, The Pagoda, in St. Augustine Florida, active 1977-99. The Pagoda had a women-only guest house with a theatre surrounded by cottages owned by lesbians.

MAS: Ellen had a t-shirt that said, “Founding Mother of the Pagoda.” She was in there at the ground level with them. She built that garage into a performing area, with a stage, and if she wanted to build something she could do it, until her vision left.

RN: Then Barbara and Morgana and Fayann formed the corporation Sheeba Mountain Properties. They were ready to leave the Pagoda. It hadn’t shut down yet, but they found this land and bought the hundred acres that is Alapine.

MAS: I don’t have all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed on what was bought, but it was a large tract and it had been surveyed by a group of men who wanted to do something, and the closing was held up because someone had mineral rights on the property, some of the lots they’d given somebody to pay them back for the money they’d put in, and it was kind of a mess. I think that Barbara, Fayann, and Morgana got it straightened out. So it could finally close. That’s why it didn’t close when they told us.

RN: Ellen had already moved here and set up camp on your lot in ’97.

MAS: Right.

RN: They were going to close in April.

MAS: I don’t know. It didn’t close when it was supposed to, when we were originally told. It had been postponed. We had cut trees and put strings and stakes in where we wanted things to be, but we stopped spending any more money, because we weren’t sure we were going to get what we had paid for. You know?

RN: They were already selling lots before—

MAS: Before it closed. I don’t know if we got a legal paper from them, you know. Ellen trusted them for everything. If Ellen trusted them, I did too. We had a little camper there. There was this woman named Donnette that showed up to help us paint Mountain Mama’s; part of it needed to get painted.

RN: That’s over in Cloudland [Georgia, nearby. Alapine is on the state line.]

MAS: At Mountain Mama’s, we sold crafts and things on consignment. Barbara was the treasurer of it all for a while, and then Ellen took it over. Apparently you wanted to pull your hair out trying to do it. I would have, because you had to keep the books of how many things Rose Norman sold, and how much Mary Alice sold, and how much check they should get, and write their check, and how much I should get. If you were an owner, you had a different consignment rate than a person who wasn’t an owner, because you had put in the money to buy the place.

RN: You had done that before you moved here, put in the money…

MAS: Yes, and we’d close up our store in South Carolina for a while and we’d come and live in our camping van in the parking area at Mountain Mama’s so Ellen could rewire that building. It had four little screw-in fuses, and they wanted to do pottery there. It wasn’t enough electricity. She had to increase it to circuit breakers. I remember being in the dining area, and she was saying, “OK, you can undo that light fixture in the dining area now.” I said, “I’m afraid to touch it, Ellen, because one of the light bulbs keeps glowing real faint, but it’s getting some electricity from somewhere, and I don’t want to touch it!” She came out of the attic, backed down the ladder, and she said, “Hm..hmm.y You’re right. There’s a little cross-over electricity going between these two wires. Let me work on it some more before you touch it.” So, we camped and got it going.

RN: For years, then. Because I think they found this land in 1995. Did you go ahead and start Mountain Mama’s right away?

MAS: I don’t remember. I remember I loaned them the money so they would have a share.

RN: But this is before ’97 when you actually moved here thinking they had closed on the property.

MAS: Yeah. We came here; I don’t know what date it was. We came here based on the paper we’d gotten saying, “Here’s when it will be yours.” Then it turned out it wasn’t, because they had found these mineral rights and these lots that other people owned, and it was like a little patchwork quilt, really. But we were already here. We were squatters living here and working on the property some, but we didn’t put big money into it until we knew. We left Donnette living with our cat and our little camper, and we went out west to Tecopa Hot Springs and to the rock show and visited her sister and got away from here for a while.

RN: I’m always wondering how you managed to do this stuff, without a regular job. You know? How do you do that?

MAS: I had had a regular job, and I had put money away because my father said, “Don’t come home until you’ve show me you bought an IRA. Don’t come home.” (Laughter) “Now show me you bought the next year.”

RN: So, you had financial…

MAS: I had put money away where we could afford to write a check for $4,000 and buy that first lot. That’s how much the lots were in the beginning.

RN: Really! Because now they’re $20,000!

MAS: I think it comes with some more things now. You know, we had no promise of electricity or water or anything like that. We could dig a well. We just had the property. We didn’t have a promise of having a road you could drive on. We got the van stuck going up the hill toward Martha’s house. Ellen did.

RN: Well, tell me more about—I’ve never heard the complete story of how all the roads got built and…

MAS: The roads were already laid out here, because these guys started some—you know, Barbara can tell you the whole details, but this is just what I’ve heard, hearsay, that this group of men had formed some sort of deal where they were going to have a summer resort and sell lots for cabins and stuff. They had a perk test done so you could have septic. The lots were kind of here, but it wasn’t easy to drive because the roads had some trees grown up in them. We had a big van, a two-ton van that could handle the roads. But Ellen got too far up or over on the muddy part and went right into the ditch. I walked back down to find her. I think I took her on up; we left it there. The next day we either got a tow truck or I got in and was used to driving in snow and could take it back out. We got it out.

RN: Where were you sleeping? Had you built the barn by then?

MAS: No, I think…we might have had that little camper we bought. We bought a Hunter Special for $3,000. It was worth less than that! It did have a nice stove and refrigerator and sink.

RN: Where would you get power—did they have power?

MAS: No, we celebrated the day it came in. We’d been here about a year before we got power.

RN: You lived on this land for a year without power. Yet you were doing work—what were you—

MAS: Well, Ellen’s dad had died and we were at Starcrest getting ready to leave, I think. Ellen had had a friend rent a place for an herbal class to happen, and we fixed a big bowl of herbal salad and stuff. When we heard that her dad died. I put all that salad into a cooler and two forks and some dressing, and put the dog in the car and some clean clothes, something to wear to a funeral, and off we went to Willmar, Minnesota.

That’s where her dad was. So she could be there for her dad’s funeral. We ate salad. Stopped at a motel somewhere.

RN: You drove from South Carolina to Minnesota in a day?

MAS: I don’t know how long it took us. I don’t know. It might have taken us two.

RN: One salad’s worth of driving.

MAS: Well, we might have had to stop and buy some more. It was a cooler full!

RN: A cooler full of salad! (Laughter)

MAS: We probably had a chunk of cheese and some bread or something, some apples, some tea bags for sure. While we had those kids, I had to quit smoking. They were smoking little candy cigarettes and I got the prescription to get a patch. I went to the drugstore, and they were sold out. A donut shop was in the parking lot. So, I got me a dozen donuts. By the time I got home, they each had two, because I ate donuts all the way home! I finally got into a patch class at the hospital, and it helped a lot. I quit smoking and coughing in the same week. ’93.

RN: ’93! So you had those kids since ’93?

MAS: Well, we took care of them while Chris was in the hospital, too. We were developing relationships. We were building two rooms on the house, they were helping us some with it, and…

RN: Now I know Ellen was skilled in carpentry and taking lots of classes. What about you?

MAS: She told me what to do.

RN: You were her helper?

MAS: Yeah. She said, “Just turn that screw a little bit more.” [Pointing to the screws in the floor of the porch where we are sitting] She wouldn’t have approved of that, because it’s not all the way down.

RN: I’m going back to, there were two very remarkable things that you two did together. One was Starcrest, and the other was building the earth-sheltered house at Alapine.

MAS: We’d been camping a lot too, you know? That first year at Starcrest, I worked for the census. Then it came getting close to Labor Day, and she put out a newsletter with my help. saying that we were going to be gone for a few months. When we came back, we had a big sale, 20% off all the new rocks we got. We paid our bills by having a big sale! We had 800 people on that mailing list. (That was when she said “I want to die, Mary Alice,” if she didn’t get to build that house. “Okay, okay.”) Then we got that nice barn finished and were living just fine, and I said, “Ellen, we could just finish the carport into like a big living room area and fix this into the kitchen and we could just live here and not have to build that other house.” “I’ll die if we don’t build that earth house.” “Okay, let’s build the earth house.” I said, “We could just take the money and go around the world. Wouldn’t you want to go around the world at least once before you die?” “No, I’ll just die right now if we’re not going to build that house.”

RN: Yeah, she talked about that in one of those interviews.

MAS: “Gonna die!”

RN: Well, she talked about how it was a life ambition to build an earth-sheltered house.

MAS: We went to classes on how to do it, up in New York State. Made some friends.

RN: You moved here in ’97, but you didn’t start building—

MAS: We poured that concrete floor in ’98, because the date is in the concrete, back where that sink is. You know I have a flush toilet now?

RN: I remember that, yeah. You did not when I was here in 2012.

MAS: She almost died over that, too! It was supposed to go somewhere else, but we couldn’t find where we put the plumbing. It was supposed to go in that big bathroom, and we couldn’t find it outside. “Where did it come outside?” Her second oldest son says, “Mom, it’s right there. Give me a shovel.” It was!

RN: They inherited her…

MAS: …her psychic abilities! So, it’s all plumbed. If anyone wants to have a toilet in that bathroom they have to move that sink cabinet.

RN: Alapine Village is currently the most populated women’s community in the country. It has thirty residents. I don’t know how many property owners that is, but thirty residents, some full time, many are seasonal, and you’ve been full time the whole time. [This would not count places like Carefree, an RV community in south Florida, more commercial enterprises.]

MAS: …except we’ve gone camping…

RN: …you’ve gone on trips, but a lot of people come here for the summer and then go back to Florida or something. But it’s part of a larger movement that the Pagoda was part of, and that was also…

MAS: Ellen had that built in her psyche.

RN: Yeah. Yet when I think back on this, Ellen never lived at the Pagoda. She said that when I was interviewing her. She owned various things at the Pagoda…

MAS: We spent the night. We spent the night there a few times.

RN: But she was adamant that she was never a Pagoda resident, just a very active member of that community. Alapine was completely different. This is a very different community in that Pagoda was not rural, and the house lots were very small. The whole place was an acre and a half [1.67 acres to be exact] for twelve cottages, a duplex, a community house, and a swimming pool.

MAS: But you had the ocean.

RN: But one of the things they looked for when they came here because of their Pagoda experience was, “We want plenty of land around us. We don’t want cottages that are so close together that it violates all of the property rules, so that people would have trouble getting building permits for additions or remodeling.

MAS: Still does.

RN: Still does. But they have figured out how to get permits to do things there.

MAS: You don’t have to have many here. There is no building inspector. None! The only thing that has to get inspected is your septic tank.

RN: All the land perks?

MAS: It doesn’t perk where it originally did, with what those guys had on their maps. We’ve had to get new spots, have a re-perk, and it’s gotten expensive. I think it was like $3,000 to put them in at first, now it’s about $6 or 7K. To get a water meter for “city water” it’s gone from maybe $100 to $300, maybe more. Maybe $600, I don’t know.

RN: One of the questions that people always ask in programs about women’s land communities is what made you want to live in an intentional community, let alone a lesbian intentional community in the woods?

 [OLOC recorded two Zoom panels about women’s land groups, one in November 2021, the other in January 2022. The recordings are available online to OLOC affiliates at oloc.org]

MAS: It’s grown where it’s not intentional [community] any more. It’s an intentional where the group decides, yeah, this person’s going to go in here, fit really well. It was at first.

RN: The word “intentional community” can be more broadly interpreted. Intentional in the sense that Alapine intended to form a lesbian community and sold only to lesbians and had covenants that said you could not sell it without giving them right of first refusal—

MAS: That makes it hard to get a mortgage.

RN: Exactly! That part of it was intentional.

MAS: Makes you have to have cash.

RN: Yeah. What do you mean when you say it’s not intentional anymore?

MAS: I thought an intentional community was where the members of the community talked to that person and then got back together and said, yes, I think that person will fit here just fine, or no, I don’t think so. There was some of that right at first.

RN: Yes; and this large growth has been in the last two years…

MAS: It’s been because people wanted to get their money back [from the purchase of lots they never built on]

RN: But they’ve been here since the late 1990s. I started interviewing over here in 2013, so almost nine years ago. At that time there were eleven or twelve residents, now thirty.

MAS: Emily was one of the last ones [to move here] in the first wave. She wasn’t happy here. She didn’t stay long.

RN: Emily organized that whole interview that I did in 2013 with the Pagoda people. Just the Pagoda people. There were six of them that she had organized. She said that it was remarkable to get those six people together. [The audio says 2014, but I confirmed that the group interview was 4-14-13.]

[Emily sold her Alapine house and moved to Massachusetts in October 2013, the same year that she organized that group interview at Alapine, bringing together herself and five other residents who had previously lived at the Pagoda in Florida.]

MAS: Was Ellen one of them? I thought so.

RN: Yes, Ellen was there. This rapid growth from eleven or twelve residents to thirty has taken place just since COVID, I think, in the last two years.

MAS: During COVID is when people decided they wanted out of the big city and they wanted to live in a rural area away from large groups of people.

RN: I’ve interviewed a lot of landykes who’ve chosen to live on women’s land are very diverse—I mean diverse in the sense that they’re not all alike.

MAS: Yeah, some of these new women are city women, like…they don’t understand some ecological things, and they don’t understand that it’s not good to drink water out of a plastic bottle. It’s better to have it out of stainless steel. It’s like my sister saying, “If you eat slow food you’ll lose weight better than if you eat fast food. Slow food is better for you.

RN: What we were saying was, people moved here for different reasons and some of these people who are moving here now are not…what would you say they don’t understand again?

MAS: Ecology. What’s the word you use when you say it’s better health-wise to drink water out of the stainless Yeti cup than to drink it out of all these plastic bottles, because some of this plastic is known to leach into the water. I was told that when we had the Berkey system going now and that water and that stainless steel container is fine, and somebody at the group here said, “Well, if you’ve gotta have it in one of these plastic bottles from the store, why don’t you just take one of those gallon ones and just fill it from the Berkey and fill it for people to drink out of?” (sigh) I said, “Well, it’s like in the plastic bottle, which is not as healthy as having it in the stainless steel” “Well, how do you know?” I said, “Because I’ve been reading this kind of stuff and what the science says.” It’s kind of like Trump who doesn’t go with the science, he goes with what he needs.

RN: So, a great many women’s lands people—landykes—are ecologically astute, chose to—

MAS: Particularly the first ones here…

RN: So, the early Alapine was coming more out of that…

MAS: I think; that’s my opinion.

RN: But this growth is really coming from people who are –what? What is their motivation? To live in the country? I mean you’re close to a town of 7,000 or less?

MAS: I don’t know the population of Summerville [Georgia]. Well, Menlo’s even smaller—300 and something. So’s Mentone. [Menlo, GA, is the closest town, about 5.5 miles away from Alapine, population 482; Mentone, AL is next closest, about 10 miles away, population 319;  Summerville, GA, is 14 miles away, population 4534.] Pat Nolen had problems with [the isolation] when she first came. She had to go to the big city, had to go to Chattanooga and eat. Plan a trip to Atlanta where the Charis Bookstore is, and stuff like that. [Chattanooga is 57 miles from Alapine, Atlanta about 100 miles.]

 Mountain people are different. You’d be at the post office watching women come in, and you’d think, boy there went three lesbians in, and then they’d be coming back out with their husbands. They’re strong women.

RN: Yeah, this is rural Alabama. Although in the very first interview I did, Jean Adele said, “well, it’s not like the rest of Alabama. People are different here.” She was talking about mountain people.

MAS: I would agree with that. Some of them, you’d be at the post office watching women come in, you’d think, boy there went three lesbians in, and then they’d be coming back out with their husbands. They’re strong women. You know, I was part of the fire department here. They organized one right at the state line, volunteer fire and rescue, and we covered two states, three counties and two time zones. One time it was just the women showed up, and they wanted to have Lesbianism 101. I said, “OK, let’s have it! What do you want to know?”

RN: So, you were out to them? Everybody here is out to them?

MAS: I was. I don’t know. I was out to that volunteer fire department, but it went out of business when the county started paying for fire stuff. I am also out to my Sunday school class. We do a lot of community work, looking for ways we can help people in the community. We send cards to bereaved people. When Ellen died, I was hurt that they didn’t send me a card. I wondered if they disapproved of our relationship. Then, a few months after her death, I got a card in the mail that had been forwarded all over the place. Somehow it had been addressed wrong and sent to lots of places called Mentone, but it finally got back to me. It had a big check in it. I used that check to pay for lots of things to do with Ellen’s memorial service, and some occasions I had here at the house. At the next church service, I stood up and thanked them for it. I was very touched and glad that I was wrong about why I didn’t get a card sooner.

These interview notes have been edited by the interviewer and the interviewee. Extraneous material and repetitions have been removed, and in some cases, material has been rearranged for coherence. The interviewee has been encouraged to change or add anything attributed to or about her in these edited notes.

See also:

Jessye Ina-Lee, video interview with Ellen Spangler and Mary Alice Stout at their Alapine home in Alabama, Lesbian & Landdyke Documentary Media Project, 2005. For information, contact email jaehaggard@gmail.com, see website www.womenearthandspirit.org, and postal mail address: Women, Earth, and Spirit, PO Box 130, Serafina NM 87569.

Rose Norman, “Ellen Spangler and Starcrest,” Sinister Wisdom 124 (Spring 2022): 67-72.