DIVISION STREET REVISITED EPISODE 7: BLANCHE GATES: Anywhere My Children Are [MUSIC: “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN?”] One summer night when Blanche Sipple Gates was in the middle of her life, her husband fell off a cliff and died. This was a long time ago, in Eastern Kentucky. A beautiful land. Of hills and hollers and rivers. A land of music. It was also a place of hard work and hard luck, and on the night she lost her husband, Blanche’s life got harder. She was 42 years old. The mother of 15 children.   Joseph. James. Harold. Kathleen. Grady. Charles. Bobby. Freddy. Jack. Bernard. Billy. Kenneth. Danny. Mary. And Darrell. [PAUSE] Raising all those kids wasn’t exactly the life Blanche had dreamed of. BLANCHE GATES: When I was a little girl, I always wanted to be a nurse. I always had that in my mind to be a nurse, and I’d still like to be, but I’m too old now, you know. Blanche was born in 1908. Back when women were literally second-class citizens. Not allowed to vote. Rarely paid for their work. In Blanche’s world, most paid work happened underground, in the dark and dirt of the coal mines. And mining was men’s work. So Blanche dropped out of high school and became a miner’s wife. She worked hard–cooking and cleaning for her husband and children. And then – while her 15th child was still in diapers – came the night that changed everything. It was August, 1950. In the summer twilight, Blanche’s husband headed off on foot to a remote spot outside town to buy a little moonshine. Out there, in the dark, he toppled off that cliff. Landed on the railroad tracks below.  And that’s where he died. No one was ever sure exactly what happened.  But one thing was clear: Blanche Gates was left alone. To raise all those children. [MUSIC]        This is the story of how she did it. But it's more than that.  This is a story about two powerful forces: work and family. Through Blanche’s story, we can see how these two forces – family and work – determine so much in all our lives: the places we live. The people we live near. Our sense of who we are. And how we matter. I’m Mary Schmich. This is Division Street Revisited. I first learned about Blanche Gates from an old book by Studs Terkel. These days, Studs is called legendary, but back in 1965, he was just a Chicago radio host who’d set out to do something new. He was roaming around, interviewing regular people about the big issues of the time. Civil rights. The atomic bomb. How machines were replacing humans in the workplace. He recorded those interviews, and in 1967, published them in a book — Division Street: America.  Division Street became a bestseller, praised as a portrait of a country in the storm of a social revolution. But what happened to those people? To their descendants? How can their lives help us understand the changes we’re living through? We created this series because we wanted to find out. Today: the tale of a woman who relied on two things – work and family – to get through the hard times.  STUDS [BUBBLING UP]: You had to leave school early, did you? BLANCHE: Oh yes I married young.        When we set out to find Blanche’s descendants, we hit a few roadblocks.  We found obituaries for several of her sons. We called some wrong numbers. We finally unearthed a Kentucky number that looked promising. A woman answered. And hung up on us. [PHONE HANG UP] But it was, in fact, Blanche’s daughter. And we finally connected.   We sent her a recording of Studs’ interview with her mother.
 She’d had no idea it existed. And now, half a century later, she listened to her mother speak. And she cried.     MARY MULLINS: I just couldn’t believe it. Tell you the truth, I needed that from the Lord. I needed her voice. [MUSIC/PAUSE] The more I explored Blanche’s life, the more I thought about how Appalachians were depicted when I was a kid, back in the 1950s and 60s. There was The Real McCoys, a TV sitcom about an Appalachian family that moved to California. [MUSIC FROM THE REAL MCCOYS] There was Li’l Abner, a comic strip full of clownish hillbillies who lived in the fictional town of Dogpatch.  It even became a movie. [MUSIC FROM THE LI’L ABNER MOVIE] A lot of the stereotypes were designed to make you laugh. But Appalachians were also viewed with pity and dismay. If you go back and read old stories about Central Appalachia in those days, you’ll find words like bleak. Blighted. Stunted. Depressed. That’s not remotely the way Blanche’s kids remember things. MARY MULLINS: We just played outside, you know, and just run the hills and the riverbanks… But Blanche did struggle. To support her family, she cleaned other people’s houses. She took in other people’s laundry. Boiled the water, carted it to a wringer washer, then hung the laundry on a line to dry.  Try to picture Blanche as she works: She’s five-foot-one. Heavyset. Wears her short black hair in small, tight waves. Wears cotton house dresses, ironed and starched. She sings to herself.             [“THE OLD RUGGED CROSS”] At one point, Blanche opened a roadside sandwich hangout in a little cinderblock room attached to the family’s rented home. She sold burgers - and bootleg whiskey. Through the years, she moved her kids from small house to small house. doing whatever it took to keep them fed. Clothed. Together.  Whatever it took. let people gossip about what it took. And they did gossip. But if the mean words hurt her, Blanche never let it show. [MUSIC] Blanche’s kids got older. And before long, they needed jobs. But by the 1960s, the Kentucky coal mines were being mechanized. Coal jobs were disappearing.  Appalachians desperate for work were fleeing north by the millions. Several of Blanche's boys hit the road too – headed for the factories of Chicago. [SOUND DESIGN] The Gates boys arrived in Chicago with nothing but each other. Not even any dishes. They’d heat chili on a burner and eat it straight from the can. One day, in the summer of 1964, a couple of the boys drove back to Kentucky to pick up something they couldn’t live without – their mother.  Blanche. BLANCHE GATES: I can live anywhere my children is… We never did figure out how Studs Terkel found Blanche Gates.  All we know is that one day he appeared in the Chicago apartment where Blanche settled in with four of her sons. In a neighborhood called Uptown. Studs arrived lugging his big reel-to-reel tape recorder. Someone offered him a cola. Blanche sat down in a rocker by the window.  And they talked. STUDS TERKEL: Your feelings? I know you’ve been up here just six months. Even in the six months, what’s your feelings? What’s your first reaction to Chicago? BLANCHE GATES: Well, I’m very well satisfied with Chicago. Of course I don’t know too much about it. I don’t get out very much. But I like down South the best. I like the South the best. And, I just, well, Chicago, I don’t like this hoodlum business that goes on in Chicago. Cuz I'm always afraid the boys will get out and get into trouble. And down home, it’s the quietest place on earth. We don’t have such as that…somebody being cut all to pieces or shot or something like that. Now, you may be wondering who Blanche is talking about when she says “This hoodlum business that goes on in Chicago.” She means the young, white, Southern men who surged into Chicago in the 1950s and ‘60s, looking for work. They crowded into rundown apartments. Shared kitchens and toilets. So many Appalachian migrants flooded into Uptown that it got another name: Hillbilly Heaven. That history seems pretty much forgotten among people in Uptown now. MARY SCHMICH: Do you know that this neighborhood used to be called Hillbilly Heaven? GUY: I did not. Hillbilly what? MARY SCHMICH: Heaven. GUY: No. I did not. Uptown’s still a neighborhood that draws newcomers in search of a better life. All you have to do is look at the restaurant signs: Ethiopian, Mexican, Nigerian, Vietnamese. But the hillbilly bars? They’re mostly gone. The Appalachian kids who once played in the alleys and the courtyards of the old brick apartment buildings? Gone. The building where Studs interviewed Blanche Gates? It was demolished to make way for a city college. [MUSIC] But Darrell Gates remembers. He’s the youngest of Blanche’s kids. [AMBI: PHONE INTRO]   We tracked Darrell down in Reedley, a small town in California’s Central Valley.  He’s in his mid-70s now, a retired truck driver.  He was thrilled to hear his mother’s voice on Studs’ recording and think about his childhood. DARRELL: Most wonderful childhood a person could ask for. But then he adds: They were very poor. MARY SCHMICH: How did you know you were poor? DARRELL: Almost seven days a week, our meal, our dinner meal, consisted of pinto beans, fried potatoes, and cornbread…That’s what we lived on. Darrell was the last of the Gates kids to go to Chicago.  One day – when he was 15 years old – he came back to Kentucky after visiting a brother in Florida. DARRELL:.This sounds worse... When I got to Kentucky, they had all just moved off and went to Chicago. The family house was empty, except for the furniture.  DARRELL: It sounds worse than it is. Blanche didn’t have a phone, but she’d left word with a neighbor to tell Darrell where she’d gone. So Darrell knew what he had to do. DARRELL: A friend of mine had just gotten out of the Navy and I borrowed one of his uniforms to hitchhike from Kentucky to Chicago. MARY SCHMICH: You thought it would be easier to get a ride if you were wearing a sailor's uniform? DARRELL: Oh, absolutely it was. Yes. In Chicago, Darrell moved into a bedroom with three of his brothers – and before long – at the age of 15 – he had a job pushing tubes into TV sets at a Motorola plant. [PAUSE] The Gates Family was pursuing the classic American Dream: You want a better life? Move. [BEAT] But many of the Appalachians who moved north – like the ones Blanche called hoodlums – they felt rootless.  Some banded together in gangs. Drank too much. Got into street fights. In the late ‘50s, the Chicago Tribune ran a series it promoted with this headline: “Southern White Hillbillies Invade Chicago.”  One story hyperventilated: “Most authorities rate them at the bottom of the heap, socially, morally, mentally.” But the Gates boys had something those other boys didn’t. They had Blanche.  The mother they didn’t want to disappoint. Eventually, big city life began to wear on Blanche’s family.  The boys missed hunting and fishing. The sense of space. And belonging. So – just as they’d left Kentucky – they left Chicago. [MUSIC] As for Blanche? She had her own dreams. BLANCHE: Now I’d like to be a diesel engine driver. I figure someday to get to take a trip across the country in one of those diesels. I won't get to drive it, but I might take a trip. Not long after she talked to Studs, Blanche did pick up and go across the country. In a train, all the way to California. She made a home there, near three of her sons. In an apartment with orange trees out front. In California, Blanche faced new hardships. She lost a leg to diabetes.Then lost the other leg. Once again, she adapted.  She learned how to cook from her wheelchair. To wash dishes from her wheelchair. All in all, Blanche was happy out West. And yet, home would always be Kentucky. We knew that if we were going to understand her life – and the forces that shaped her – we had to go see that place, and meet the descendants who still live there.         That’s after the break. [BREAK]    I’m Mary Schmich and this is Division Street Revisited. A show exploring what’s happened to seven of the people profiled in StudsTerkel’s 1967 book Division Street: America. [MUSIC] One spring day, when the daffodils are in bloom, my colleague Melissa and I drive into Pike County, Kentucky. The place Blanche Gates raised her 15 children. A few facts about Pike County today: Population: around 57,000.  Nearly 98 percent white.  In the last three presidential elections, 80 percent of voters went for Donald Trump. Also: it’s the birthplace of the famous country singer Patty Loveless. [PATTY LOVELESS: "YOU'LL NEVER LEAVE HARLAN ALIVE"] If you know this part of Kentucky only from the news, you may have heard only the bad news. About the scourge of opioids and meth. About high rates of poverty, unemployment and diabetes.  And all of that’s true. But it’s not the whole of the place. On the wide, smooth road into Pikeville, the county seat, we pass a giant modern medical center. In the quaint downtown, we gaze up a steep hill to where the old coal miners’ hospital used to sit. Now the University of Pikeville is up there. It specializes in things like optometry and dentistry.  But when we head south, for the half hour drive to Elkhorn City, the scenery changes. 
We pass little houses and trailers. Here and there, a small church. GPS: In a quarter mile turn right onto Center Street/Patty Loveless Drive. MARY SCHMICH: I love that Patty Loveless gets her own road. MELISSA HARRIS: And it’s like the main road. MARY SCHMICH: Yeah, right. We’ve come to this town of a thousand people to meet Blanche’s daughter Mary Mullins. MARY: I was borned up on the hill here, back behind this church a little bit. We sit down in a quiet room at the Elkhorn City Church of Christ in the center of town. Mary tells us how in the 1960s, when she was 16, she joined her family in Chicago. but she and her husband came back to Elkhorn City in the ‘70s, when the coal industry picked up. Her husband went to work underground. And Mary took all sorts of jobs while she raised her three kids. Just before she retired, she was a housekeeper at the Pikeville Hospital. MARY MULLINS: There's years I didn't even take a vacation other than a day here or there, a day there. I've been blessed. The Lord give me strength to do it. The girls at the hospital, they'd say—I was older, I'd say about 60. And they'd say, "Mary, you look tired." And I'd say, "It's a good tired," I said, "because the Lord blessed me to do it.”  She doesn’t have a lot of patience for people who don’t work. She thinks people have grown lazy because the government gives away too much money. MARY MULLINS: I blame the government for a whole lot of what’s going on today, a whole lot. She means grandparents raising their grandkids. People on welfare. The plague of drugs. She sees these things all around her community.  And she thinks there’s too much emphasis on college. MARY MULLINS: They’re making ‘em believe: You have to go to college, you have to go to college, you have to go to college, you have to go to college. No! There's labor. You've got strength in your body. There's labor to do labor jobs. I mean: You can be a plumber. You can be an electrician. There's big money in that. We ask her: If you were President, what would be the first thing you’d do? MARY MULLINS: I would try to get the jobs back for one thing. That would be the first thing. I wouldn’t be against fossil fuels. Because I don’t think they’re damaging, like people thinks they are. Fossil fuels. Meaning coal. The work Mary’s father did. And her husband. And her son Kenneth. [AMBI: RAINING COAL] KENNETH: Here, so you can hear that coal coming out right now. [COAL] KENNETH: That’s what pays the bills. Black stuff. That’s what pays the bills. Coal. Black stuff. That’s what pays the bills. Kenneth Mullins is a broad-chested man who wears a gray ponytail and talks fast. He’s offered to show us a mine, so we climb into his big black Ram 1300 truck, and he drives us to one, a few miles outside of town. It’s a small mine along a winding road. A towering metal shaft carries the subterranean coal into the sky, then rains black chunks onto the ground. In his truck, Kenneth tells us his most vivid memory of his granny, Blanche. He was five  or six. By then, both of Blanche’s legs had been amputated. KENNETH: She was at my house and I must have done something wrong. She said, "I'll spank your a**." I said, "No you won't. I'll run." And she said, "Well, I'll catch you." I said, "You ain't got no legs". She said, "I'll throw one of them at you." I shut up. I did. She had false legs. And she was just that spunky. She didn’t let you trash talk her, you know, she always had some comeback. She was just that spunky. Kenneth started in the coal mines in the 1980s, right after he graduated from high school. Worked underground for 35 years.  He’s seen how hard the job can be, and how painful. He tells a story about a guy who worked under him who cut his hand badly. KENNETH: I still feel guilty about that. Cuz the boy got actually got on drugs, pain pills. And it ruined his life over it.    But Kenneth survived as the industry changed.  KENNETH: Nowadays it’s all just bigger companies…And it’s taken the small man out. Cuz it’s the price of getting started.  MARY SCHMICH: But it sounds like there’s some good aspects of the corporations? Running more efficient and safer operations? KENNETH: Oh yeah, it’s been safer even since I started, it gets safer. But it’s not primarily the company that makes things safer, Kenneth says. It’s the workers. A few years ago, Kenneth retired on the advice of his doctor. All that crawling around left him with a bad back. Bad knees. He’s been told he has black lung disease. He’s not convinced. Kenneth misses work and the brotherhood of the mines. KENNETH: But yeah, it’s real hard for me to not work. Your self-esteem ain’t there when you ain’t working. You can’t beat your chest when you come home and say, ‘Well, I’s the man of the family.” Sometimes he wishes that he’d gone to college, gotten a job that would have allowed him to work longer. He sees lots of people finding alternatives to coal mining. Though not in Elkhorn City. He knows guys who drive three hours to work in a Toyota factory. Others who travel far and wide to work construction. Of his two sons, one works as an assistant manager at a Dollar General. The other is a body piercer, who co-owns a tattoo parlor in Pikeville. In other words, neither is a miner. KENNETH: You know, I wish coal could be here another 20 years, but you don’t ever know.  Chances are that Kenneth will be the last coal miner in Blanche Gates’ family. [MUSIC] Blanche Sipple Gates never made it back to Kentucky. She lived out her life in California. And that’s where she died, in 1976, at the age of 68. DARRELL: Our mother died in jail… That’s Darrell again. He enjoys that joke, about his mother dying in jail. The truth is that when Blanche was dying in a hospital in Santa Clara, California, so many relatives came to visit that she was moved into the jail ward. There was more space there for all the visitors. They came to say goodbye to the woman who’d made sure they understood her highest values: Work and family. Family and work. MARY MULLINS: We had the closest family. We were scattered all over the United States, but they were no closer family. Of Blanche’s 15 kids, only Mary and Darrell are left.  From their opposite sides of the continent, they talk by phone sometimes. About how the flip side of having all those people to love and be loved by, means you have so many more to lose. There’s no one left but the two of them – Mary and Darrell – to remember how, when they were kids, they slept two or three to a bed. How Blanche commanded they all sit at the huge round table for their dinner of pinto beans and cornbread. How when Blanche spanked you, she made you go out and pick the switch off a tree yourself. It’s the nature of the past to fade. For stories to get lost in time. Mary and Darrell take comfort in knowing that the past they share lives on – in their mother’s voice, preserved by Studs Terkel. A guy who believed that the way we come to understand the world and each other — is to listen. Listen. [MUSIC: “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN”] STUDS TERKEL: I’m thinking about us now, right now thinking of all us poor mortals, bound to die, born to die, and yet we’re also, aren’t we born to live, too? BLANCHE: No. We’re born to die. Man wasn’t born to live, we’s born to die. No, we don’t want to rush it, but when our time comes, we’re going. Division Street Revisited is the brainchild of Executive Producer Melissa Harris. Bill Healy produced this podcast. Cate Cahan and Mark Jacob were our editors. Sound Design and Mixing by Libby Lussenhop. Our Associate Producer is Chijioke Williams. The show features original music by Chris Walz. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions and Patty Loveless. Special thanks to Ruby Coleman. Major funding for this podcast comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Additional funders include M. Harris & Co., the Field Foundation of Illinois, the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, the Susan H. Schwartz Charitable Trust, Debra Schwartz, and Julia Stasch. Archival audio comes from the Studs Terkel Radio Archive at WFMT, and the Chicago History Museum. It was digitized by the Library of Congress. Division Street Revisited is distributed by PRX. Our theme song is “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” one of Studs’ favorites. I’m Mary Schmich.