IPP: This is Pamela Price, and Ellen Ryan and I are interviewing Diane Carpenter on the fifteenth of February in her home, Loma de Guadelupe. Thank you for allowing us to interview you for the Alamos History Association. First we will ask you to give us your full name.

DC: Diane Carpenter.

PP: And where were you born?

DC: I was born in Palm Beach, Florida.

PP: Palm Beach, Florida. And if you don't mind telling us what is the date of your birth.

DC: 1932.

PP: 1932. Okay. Now you obviously came to Alamos at some point, because you are here now. We would also like to ask you to tell us something about your life before you came to Alamos. Now we understand that that could take another couple hours in itself, (Diane laughs) but I must say, that I remember that you were a violinist when you were young. You studied the violin and were very serious about it, so maybe you could tell us something about how you got from the the violin, to helping your husband, to your academic position teaching indigenous people English literature and studies.

DC: Well, we - I went to music school at the University of Louisville and played in the symphony orchestra for full time and I was actually a violist.

PP: A violist.

DC: And although I started out with the violin, and I taught music in elementary school. This was while my husband was in - elementary and high school - while my husband was in Korea. When he came back from Korea, I had lived in Santa Monica for a year, and I had wanted to get out of Louisville. We had traveled all over the country when I was growing up, and when he came back I was involved, “I am not sure I am the wife for you.” I think, he was a very stable person, and I was very wild and (Pam laughs) I said, “I just can’t see myself settling down in Louisville and being … I am not sure I want to be a musician anymore. I want adventure. I want to go different places, do something important, and I know you're more settled than that.” He said, “well in the time I was in Korea, and I went to Japan and the South Seas and other places and he said, “I agree with you.” He had gone all the way from Kindergarten through dental school with some of the same people, and we had very different backgrounds. So he said, let’s do it, let’s go somewhere.

PP: What a great guy.

DC: So we thought we would like to join the World Health Organization, but they were doing large scale things. They weren't doing anything more individual at that time. Then we tried to go to the South Seas to a - to one of the islands there that were under the division of territories and island possessions. I wrote them a letter, and they wrote back and said that all there work was done by native personnel, but they had forwarded our letter to the Alaskan Navy mail service which had just taken over native health in Alaska from the VIA which had done a terrible job. Through a - we were totally uninterested, but we kept getting letters and everything, and then I started doing some research at the library and a couple weeks later, we said, “let’s go to Alaska.” We were only going to take a two year tour of duty there to give us some public health experience so we could go other places. We ended up staying fifty years. Alaska was still a territory at the time, and it was so exciting. It was just, you just can’t, and it was not like anything else in the United States. Then in 1959 there was statehood, and then there was so much to do with the new state. We were just so in the middle of social and political and economic change, and there were so few people up there that we all had felt responsibility to help shape what happened, and especially for Bob and me because at the time we moved out to Bethel, there were like ten percent non-native people there, and the native people had not been involved in anything political, so we had to try to get them to a point where they felt that they could participate in what was going on and it was - so anyway, they would have state - they would have meetings coming in for people coming in from the bush, and there were just so few people there. My husband had been the first Mayor of Bethel and then I was Mayor later, and so they needed to have some knowledge there, but we always made sure we had native people that we could draw in to this kind of activity.

PP: You assisted you husband for awhile.

DC: Yes, just traveling, yes when we first went up there, traveling to the villages. We went to the villages on the Yukon and the Kuskoquim Delta, and they never had a dentist there before. People, people would actually commit suicide because of intractable pain. No way to deal with it. They couldn't handle it.

PP: But then you decided to go back to college, university, whatever, and you did work in English, didn't you?

DC: Well I got my masters, finished my masters’ degree and started teaching at the community college in Bethel, and then it became a four year university and I got and I did more - I’d get more education and ended up being a Humanities professor there. But in the mean time we homesteaded for ten years in a very remote part of western Alaska. About two hundred miles from anything. Two hundred miles from Bethel, two hundred miles from Anchorage. That was, we raised four kids there, and our fifth child was born there, as well.

PP: Well the theme of community participation is something I’ve seen in your work in Alamos. Could you say something about where you, or you and your husband became involved in issues of community participation?

DC: At the time that we moved to Bethel, it was hardly in the twentieth century. We, I was, I felt so fortunate that we were able to see these wonderful Indian and Eskimo villages at the time when their culture was almost intact. It was, the people and the villages were so wonderful. It was, and my husband said he was so surprised that I reacted to the them the way I did because I had been in Appalachia for some time they tried, they were trying at the University to get people to teach in Appalachia and I was just, I just was horrified by the conditions there. I had no interest what so ever in going to a small village, but these villages were so different. I loved the native culture, and the way people related to each other, and it was just something I felt very fortunate to be a part of. And the people - I had never been around people who had not had a formal education. But the wisdom they had was so amazing.

PP: So you invited these people to have a role in their own future in the state.

DC: Absolutely, I just felt that it was essential. If we hadn't made that effort I don't think it would have happened at that time. It would have eventually happened. For example, in the late, in the late sixties, they had the Alaska Native Claim Settlement Act which permitted oil exploration in and give some economic and political power to the native people, but that was much later. In the seventies, well at the time we were there, there was very little outside influence. Then in seventies they got a native newspaper. I mean, yes, in the seventies, a native newspaper, statewide paper, was developed. We got television. It was only PBS. There was no commercial station, but it was TV. Everybody watched Sesame Street. (Diane laughs) We got a local radio station, and then we had a local newspaper, so in the space of about, of less than ten years, all kinds of outside influences came in and at the same time, there were changes in education, and students started going to high school. So it was a time of just tremendous social change, and whenever that happens, it’s very hard for people. A part of the population takes to it well, but there’s a lot of casualties, too. It was very important that the people in Juno and in Anchorage which was willing to have some understanding of native culture and what native people wanted and didn't want.

PP: Now, can you tell us how you, your family, became involved in Alamos, and we can keep this Alamos/Alaska connection.

DC: A friend of mine at the university was a counselor there and she was also a resident of Alamos. She’s one of Alamos’ great characters, Gay Billington. Anybody that’s been here a long time has heard of her.

PP: I have heard her name, but I never knew her. Right.

DC: She and another friend who had been down here, named Linda Watson, wanted to start a school, a school program for Alaska kids internationally. So they developed the curriculum, and then I wrote the grant for it. It was back at the time when the state had lots of oil money, and we had opportunity for innovative things like that. So they started Escuela del Sol, and our son was in the program. We came down here in - over Christmas to visit with him. We had been traveling throughout Mexico for over twenty years.

PP: Oh, you had. Oh, had you been to Alamos before?

DC: No.

PP: No.

DC: We started in 1954, and we made several long trips to Mexico and ended up having been pretty much all over the country.

PP: Was this is in the winter time mostly would you would do this?

DC: Yes, we’d get, we’d have a long winter break. When we saw Alamos we knew what a treasure it was. We’d had some background, and we fell in love with it immediately, and the third day we were here, instead of going on a cruise we were going on, we bought a house, and used the refund from the cruise to pay for the down payment.

PP: Where did you buy a house? Where was it?

DC: In La Capilla.

PP: In La Capilla. Okay.

DC: And we were going to restore a ruin, and live in that while we restored a ruin. But then the next year my mother came down for a vacation, and she saw Lavant Alcorn took her on a trip, on a tour, and she saw this house. She came back and she said, “I just saw the most wonderful house.” I said, “Mom we love that house, too, but we could never afford it, but if you went in with us, we could buy it, and then you could retire here.” She was about ready to retire from her job in Anchorage. That’s what we did. We bought it here, and then she lived here for thirteen years.

PP: She did?

DC: Yes, and then I had an aunt that lived here for fifteen years. Meanwhile it was the vacation home for our whole family and from Alaska. So although we've had the house since 1979, we, I really didn't really live here. We would come down for two long trips a year of about a month to six weeks each. So it wasn't until I retired that I actually lived in Alamos.

PP: But can you tell us a little more about the project that you and Gay worked on, because there were Alamos students who went to Alaska. I guess Alaska students who went to Alamos.

DC: Okay, Gail arranged for the Alaska student to come to Alamos, and then she stayed down here after that. She moved down here. Meanwhile the following year I was acting campus President, because the President had been fired in October, and it takes the whole year process to get a new one, so I was the campus President, and I had applied for a couple of grants, and we had some money left over, and I had been down here when the students were here and I had met the Alamos students, and they were so good and so kind to our Alaska kids, and so I got the idea of having them come to Alaska doing, making it an exchange program. So I got permission to use that money, and we paid for their fares. We put them up in family homes in Bethel and they took a six week summer course that I developed where they learned: they spent the morning in English and the afternoon studied computers and that was back in the time when computer knowledge was pretty limited down here. It was a great trip. People in Mexico or Alaska, in Bethel still remember the students there. What a good time they had.

PP: Tony Estrada was one of them.

DC: Tony Estrada was one, and he said he got the museum job because of that program, because of his English and his computer skills. It put him ahead of other people that were looking for the job. What was the most interesting thing to me as a feminist was what happened with the four girls that were in the program. One of them was supposed to get married right after she got out - in just about three months. The rest of them, although they were in a preparatoria, they had never been around, they never had made much of their own decisions or done really anything, because they were from well to do families, and they were pretty sheltered. They went to Bethel, and they found a completely different kind of young people their age. I though it would be fun for them. It wasn’t, really. I didn't realize how stressful it is to make your own decisions when you've never been when you’ve never done that before. They were just exposed to so many new attitudes and everything that it was really a time of change, but then when they came back, the young woman that was going to get married, she put it off for a year and said, “the only way the I get married is if I can go to college.” She did and the other three women also completed college. None of them are living in Mexico anymore. They all have professional careers, and they’re living in other places. The boys ended up - most of them are teachers, and so it had a shaping effect on their lives just like it did on the Alaska kids that came down here. You don't really understand your own culture. Until you've seen it kind of in contrast to another one it makes you think of things in a different way.

PP: But you've said something the other day about there being an Alaska/Alamos axis or that Bethel became the sort of Alamos in Alaska or something like that.

DC: It was at the time that was going on, so many parents came down here, parents of the kids. School board members came down. A lot of people bought houses. Over the last thirty-five years, that’s faded somewhat, but there was about a ten or fifteen year period when there was just a great influence from primarily Bethel, but also other parts of Alaska.

PP: But how many students from Alaska were involved in Gail’s program?

DC: In Gay’s program?

PP: Gay’s program.

DC: Forty.

PP: Forty! Oh my.

DC: There were twenty each semester.

PP: And then how many Alamos students were involved in coming to Bethel?

DC: In going to Bethel that was just ten students that went up there. Actually it was the director of the Preparatoria and Father Felipe who was the chaperone who decided on the number. I would have accepted more but those were the ones that he felt were prepared for it and who would be a good representative from Alamos to go.

PP: But you said that the students also traveled through the US as they were coming back to Mexico.

DC: Yes, Father Felipe arranged through the work with the Anza Trail. The whole Catholic Mission group of what Father Felipe and other people that worked with him did, they brought the students down, because they were from Alamos they got special treatment, and they went to several of the missions.

PP: Great, yes.

DC: And were put up by the church.

PP: Oh he sounds like a very clever fellow, this Father Felipe.

DC: Yes.

PP: That was a smart thing to do.

DC: So anyway, they spent two weeks coming back down. That was all arranged by the church. That was separate from what I did.

PP: So when did you finally retire and start living here most of the year?

DC: Not until - I was 74 when I retired and that - it was a very traumatic - I don't think most people who retire really think about it. In Bethel nobody, nobody was retired. The Navy people didn't think, didn't think about retirement. They just did, gradually did different things, but they became elders and had some authority and were very much involved in daily life. I had never been around retired people or (wind sounds) where the whole retirement lifestyle. It’s just so in contrast with what we did in Alaska and our life there, our life there was just so intense and so focused. And taking care of yourself was not a, was not a high priority. I had no idea when I first came down here how close to total burnout I was.

PP: Oh really.

DC: And my stress level was off the charts. My health was terrible and I would say that is one of the most immediate benefits of being in Alamos. I wouldn’t, I don’t think I would have lived more than four or five years if it hadn’t been for Alamos. This lifestyle here is just so healthful and so secure. It’s almost like being in a spa or something like that. In terms of the attitudes of daily living.

PP: But you said it was kind of a stressful situation for you to you though. You began by saying something about you don't think people realize what change comes into their lives when they retire. I relate to that because I didn't realize that either, so I wanted to hear what you had to say about that.

DC: About change in ….

PP: Well you have a busy life, you have authority, people look up to you, you used to serve laying down what the game is and then suddenly there is no game anymore.

DC: It is stressful. It’s an identity issue. I was used to having purpose in life and all of a sudden, my own interest, what I wanted to do with my day was all focused on myself and i didn't really - I guess, I don't know it wasn't a good feeling.

ER: But was that a kick start into getting involved in Alamos?

DC: Pardon.

ER: Was that the kick start to getting involved in Alamos?

DC: Yes, in a way, but I wanted to do things that were not realistic in a foreign country. For example, I had started the first women’s center in Bethel. I had been the lead organizer for that. We were fighting against sexual assault and domestic violence. Later on I got involved with it on a statewide basis and ended up being the statewide chair of the Council of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. I had and still have incredible resources and experience in how to set up a women’s center, and I knew from my experience from local people I know that domestic violence and sexual assault are problems here. I just thought I could start working with the local people and getting a women’s center going. When we - in Alaska what we did in Bethel, we started with just having a system of safe houses. If we moved somebody that was….

PP: Being assaulted?

DC: Being assaulted or being - or having serious domestic violence, the word would get to us and we’d put them in a secret safe house, so you don't need a lot of resources just to get started. It is better to let it happen gradually and to make sure that the local people are taking charge of it. I pictured myself just being in the background and providing some knowledge and experience, but it’s just, so that was one of the disappointments is that it’s just not possible to do things like that in a foreign country.

PP: Well you did develop projects. You are always having some kind of project ??

DC: But it’s - I had a lot of things. One of the things that I had thought would be a great project to do down here would be to just have a mini-think tank.

PP: Well.

DC: A place where people could go, because in Bethel we were always having interesting conferences on innovative new ideas and things like that. I thought, gosh, you don't need a lot of people to get a group of interesting people who are willing to brainstorm new approaches to complex situations, and so that was another thing that I thought would be very fun to do, but in order to do that I had to - there are so many - you had to have housing, you had to ?? I ended up restoring this house and starting a bed and breakfast, and as that became busier it took more and more of my time. Now I - and then I started having some health problems which I have pretty much got out of the way now, so now I’d really like to pass that work on to other people in the family hopefully my brother and get back to some other things that I’d like to do.

PP: Right. Right. How do you feel about your capacity in Spanish, and how have you learned Spanish?

DC: Taken classes. It never…. Learning was always easy for me. It never even occurred to me that I would have any trouble becoming fluent in Spanish. It’s not going to happen. I can communicate with my staff. I can communicate in public. I can communicate with workmen that come up here, and I can pretty much understand what people are saying to me. I can read the newspaper and get the main idea from an article, but not the important details. I’ve had a Spanish coach up until last Fall and now that I am back, I want to get going on that again, and I probably have every Spanish book in the world ….

PP: (Pam laughs) ?? woman.

DC: Plus half a dozen programs on my computer, and I’m still not making great progress.

PP: Yes, it is very frustrating for me, too.

DC: It’s a relatively easy language.

PP: Well, I don't think it is, but that’s …(Laughs)

DC: The pronunciation is easy, the structure is regular, a lot of the words are the same as in English. It’s not like - I had studies Yup’ik, which is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn, because it’s not based on any other language that’s nearby. I’ve studied German in college, so I thought that Spanish would be easy, but that’s not the case.

PP: Right. Right. You have people working for you who have been with you or have been with this house for years. Can you say something about your relationship with people in this very spacious place.

DC: Well, I have six employees, but they’re just not just employees. They’re really the living, the heart of this place and whenever people write reviews that’s what they mention is how wonderful my staff is. I was used to being an employer in Alaska and I - because I’ve run every organizations, and I think there were some principles that I have learned over the years that made it - that make it more fun for a person, for people to work. I think people need to have as much authority as they can. They need to be able to operate without being micro-managed. I like for all my employees to have chances to grow, to get promoted, to do different work, to get extra training. Then we like to have fun together. It is a little different. The approach I was used to in Alaska was a collaborative management of things, and people here are much more used to a top down thing where people just took direction, and that was it. I just couldn't operate like that, so anyway it’s one of the joys of my life is the wonderful people I’m around all day. Watching people grow and do different things, like Sylvia who had been a part time housekeeper for three people - for three different homes, never pictured doing anything more and now she is a skilled manager. She supervises people well. She manages a complicated schedule. She keeps records. She handles payroll. She does a million different things. And Rigo as well. And Nocho ?? and others. It’s just - I think there are many many people here because of the employment situation and the jobs that are available are employed at far less than their capacity. They’re just wonderful people. What it reminds me of is back in the forties and fifties, when there were no jobs for very intelligent educated women, and the high school that I went to, the Latin teacher was a Greek and Latin scholar who today would be at a top university. She was teaching junior high school Latin. We just were exposed to such good people because they didn't have other options. That’s the same situation that I see here now.

PP: But your family has been involved, beyond yourself. Members of your family have lived in Alamos or married people from Alamos, spent time ….

DC: My brother married a woman from Alamos twenty-five years ago, and they have two children. My grandson, well, my daughter was engaged to a young man down here. a pilot from Alamos, who was a pilot for one of the commuter airlines and then, they were never married but they had a son, Dan - Daniel. Then he married and moved to La Paz, but the two families kept in touch and Danny visited them in La Paz. Martine’s daughter went up and lived with Julie in Alaska - went to the university for a year. He died very young from a rare kind of cancer, but that connection between Alaska and between the two families was strong, and then Steve was very involved with Lulu’s family down here and is close to all of her relatives, so that was another link we had here.

PP: Right. Right. What do you remember from when you first arrived in Alamos? Do you have any recollection of that?

DC: Yes, I do. My mother lived here, and she was - that was a different time, and they still had “white glove” parties. It was a very formal time. There were kind of a lot of socialites here, and people for whom money and status were important which is just the opposite of Alaska. Money and status are just not big deals. If you are a jerk it doesn't matter how good a job you have or who your family was or anything like that, you are still a jerk. I came down and I just felt like a fish out of water. I just thought I can’t relate to people here. Well, I didn't realize that that was just a small percentage of the people who were here. What really changed it for me was joining the book club, and it was starting up and all of the women in that book club were so interesting. One of them shows how we can have stereotypes without realizing it. One of them was in this group that I had snobbishly rejected, and she just looked the part completely, and she was an heiress, and it turned out she was a Rhodes Scholar, she was an architect. She was very liberal, and she had had a very interesting and productive life. I thought, well, that really showed me that you can be ….

PP: Can’t tell a book by its cover!

DC: That’s right.

PP: Right. Right. Right.

DC: So anyway, I gradually felt more comfortable in this environment.

PP: Well, what are your favorite memories of Alamos and what is your least favorite memory of Alamos?

DC: Well my - I think because of my particular situation with my health having been so bad, I think the thing that interested me the most was just what a healthful environment this was. The good seafood, the sunshine, the opportunity to just take care of yourself. The healthy activities that there are here. It was just just having time to enjoy people - to sit down. I had a friend visiting and she said, “It’s so different just having a meal here with a friend, because when you do you can focus on the meal.” She said, “ If I go out to lunch with somebody in Anchorage, I’m looking at my watch, I’m thinking about what I’ve got to do later in the afternoon. The other person is busy. You are not really focused.” And it was just so much more without making a fetish of it - a new age kind of a thing - it was just more living in the present and enjoying daily life. I think that was one of the first things that made an impression on me. It is still, it’s still very, very true.

PP: Is there any least favorite memory? You don't have to dig something up if you don't want to. (Laughs)

DC: Nothing comes immediately to mind. There are things that are less …. There is no really - nothing really strong .…

PP: Nothing sticks out?

DC: No nothing that sticks out. There is all - no place is perfect, so there’s definitely things that, where I prefer the culture up north, but they are not, they’re not that important. Every place you go there are differences, so ….

PP: What changes have you seen in Alamos over the years, let’s say inside the expat community? You’ve mentioned that in a way already, saying it’s not as formal at least among the section of people. It used to be very formal, but also in terms of the local people.

DC: Well the community has grown, and it is not as close as it was. (Siren noise)

PP: Which community is this?

DC: The whole community. For example, it used to, one of the things I used to love was going down to the plaza and everybody being there. Now, the local people have cell phones, and they have vehicles, and they have lost a lot of that closeness, as well. A lot more of North American culture has crept in as far as people working more. I know, I remember people here used to say, “ Americans, you people from the United States, you just live to work, and we only work to live.” And then after that they had fun. I do think that people in years past, the local people had more time for festivals on weekends and fiestas and family gatherings and things and they’re not - they still exist, but they’re not as pervasive ….

PP: Interesting.

DC: As they used to be. So that’s something that I really did notice and I think there is more materialism now, and I think that is an impact not from the people that live here so much as from the pervasiveness of western culture all over the world.

ER: Television.

DC: Because of media being so international and so much a part of everybody’s life now. I think one thing is and I don't know how to assess it, but I think Facebook has had a big influence on local people. I told Sylvia, “You’ve got to learn the computers. I know you can do it,” and she said, “she didn't think she could.” Well, she discovered Facebook (laughs) and that was the impetus and now she is - now she is very good. We used to have a joke with her because she is such a good cook and we’ve have these wonderful meals. We said after Sylvia discovered the computers, we’d say, “Sylvia, it’s getting kind of late, do you have any ideas for dinner?” And she would say, “Oh, dinner. Well there’s tortillas in the fridge, make yourself a quesadilla.” (Laughs)

PP: I wonder if your food is burning up over there?

DC: No. Steve is watching it. He is smoking some ribs.

PP: Okay.

DC: Anyway, computers have made a big difference down here.

PP: What about the expat community? Do you seen changes in that? You've been here ….

DC: It was a lot more close knit community …

PP: Oh really.

DC: … in years past and you know the weekly gatherings we used to have and that kind of brought people together. Then as the community grew it did break down into different kinds of groups, and now you can run into somebody that’s lived here and you realize, I haven't seen this person for two years. So it’s - but a good thing about Alamos is that it’s kind of a blank slate in a way, you can come down here and develop your own lifestyle. You don't have to live a prescribed way to be here, and so if you want to come down here and be a recluse, you can do that. People just understand - well, he never goes out very much …

PP: Right. Right.

DC: … so if you want to see him, you just have to go to his house. It’s kind of nice that there is that kind of flexibility here. One of the things that I like about living here is that being a small place it’s a walkable town. I don't see it when I go to Phoenix. I could not live in a large city anymore. I don't like the freeways or the complexity of life like that anymore. Alamos is just such a wonderful home base. If I want to go someplace on a trip, I can. I could go to Mazatlan. I can go back to Alaska. I can go up to Phoenix for various things. I took a three month trip to Thailand that I enjoyed a lot. I hope to go to Spain this Spring. It’s just a wonderful home base and people say, “Well isn't it boring there?” It’s not, people. Look - we were talking the other day about the Dorells ?? in Korfu. People go to foreign countries in Europe and live in small towns in France and Italy that are perfectly happy, so it’s the same kind of thing. You aren't limited by - one of the special things in my life is having this B&B, and having enough of a staff that I don't have to do anything I don't want to do. I don't have to make a bed in the middle of the night for somebody unexpected (siren noise) or anything like that, but I see people from all over the world: from Europe, from Canada, from the U. S., occasionally from Asia and I just meet so many interesting people. It’s a nice balance with having people around that you know well and then also having the influence of somebody interesting that you just met. I have made a lot of friends - people that I’m now in close touch with that came here originally as guests.

PP: What are the activities which have most engaged you in Alamos? You have done a lot of different things over the years apart from your business here, because I remember for example, I guess it was about four or five years ago when I first retired, you had courses, Spanish courses that you organized here. But you’ve also, I know you have been active in the History Association. You have done stuff for that.

DC: That’s one of my disappointments here. A vocation has always been my main focus, and community education is very important to me. Adult education. Just people making learning part of their everyday life, and just always, for personal growth, for professional growth, for just enjoyment of life - learning something new all the time. I wanted to have more in the way of courses here. It’s just very difficult here. People are just on such a transient schedule. They are in and out. I finally, I just got discouraged trying to do it. There is not a large enough group to arrange. This is the kind of thing in college towns all over the country. Retired people are moving to these towns, because of the stimulating environment there is around a college: lectures and discussion groups and thing like that. I still have high hopes that we can do more in that direction. I think the History Association has just made a tremendous contribution to the town by its encouragement of thoughtful lectures and biographies, and then with the interview project, too, which Bev had started many many years ago and then I took over on it for three or four years and collected quite a few interviews, and mainly got it just kind of organized. So I think there’s much more of a role for the History Association as a permanent influence. I think, not so much something I don't like about Alamos, but something that is less common up here is just the world of ideas. I would like to see more, and I don't think it would take much more to do it, but for example, after several years, our book club finally died because of people leaving, that sort of thing. But I would love to have a good discussion group here, ongoing discussion group, that would involve some reading and involve dealing with controversial ideas. There are some formats that I love. One is called Better Angels. I don't know if you have heard of it. It’s an international organization that is set up to enable people who have starkly different political ideas to talk to each other and to really listen to each other and to share insights and to get closer to each other and to find out what they have in common.

PP: Right.

DC: That’s one format. There is another one called World Cafe. This builds on the whole concept of people exploring ideas. I was a long time member of the Alaska Humanities Council and then chaired it. When it was, when we started a wonderful story telling project that lasted for three years. The humanities forum in Alaska was so active and had so many innovative projects. they had an urban/rural exchange where you had Anchorage high school kids going out to Eskimo villages and living for two weeks and then exchanging. That had been such a divide before and they broke down - that program broke down so many stereotypes and divides and then those young people in Anchorage who were getting up to be leaders, they had a different, much different idea about native culture than other high school kids.

PP: I hope - you’ve talked about, now that you are feeling better after your last bout of body stuff you talked about starting something up again. That would be great. I hope we can do that. Now is there anything you’d like to ask about? Ellen.

ER: I am thinking - David found a video clip of an interview that the - I don't know if it was in Bethel or if it was another town - a video clip where you talked about your VW.

DC: Oh that was part of that story telling project.

ER: That was wonderful. That was wonderful. That is on video somewhere, but what a good - I was think that might have been part of these projects. Yes, good.

PP: Was there anything else you wanted to mention, Diane?

DC: I think all the expats here are so fortunate to be in Alamos. I think it is a wonderful community. I think Mexico is a wonderful - and I am glad we are on the fun side of “The Wall”. I wish there were more that we could do to help international relations between Mexico and the United States. I don't know if there is or not at this point, but you never know what with Facebook and other kinds of - and YouTube. You can do something and it can have an impact on life and maybe change some peoples’ attitudes. So it’s a possibility, but anyway, I just appreciate the understanding and the hospitality that the people down here have shown and the friendship. It’s just been a real high point in my life. I have been living here full time now for thirteen years, and I - other than making my trip to Alaska every year, I am very happy to be coming back here. Doing other, I am doing other travel, too, but I am very glad this is my home.

PP: This has been delightful. Thanks so much Diane.

ER: Yes, thank you.

.Transcribed by Ellen Ryan, Alamos History Association

June 16, 2019