Women Born In The 1930s

"The apartheid government was frightened of ridicule. Everyone is frightened of laughter."

"The only times I saw black people were once in Adelaide and once at the other end of the continent, in both cases looking desperate on the street, sitting in huddles drinking beer. I realised what Australians had done to their indigenous population, to their other: they'd disappeared them."

"I often think of the women, my grandmother among them, who wore white dresses to protest the denial of their political empowerment. There were echoes of that symbolic garb during the campaigns of Shirley Chisholm, and in the glorious display of white pantsuits worn by the record number of multiracial, multicultural women who went to Congress as result of the 2018 election. I smiled when I saw them!"

"I live in Los Angeles, in the Eagle Rock neighborhood, for people who are familiar with Los Angeles. I was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma in 1933. My birthday is October 9th. In a couple of days, I’ll be 88 years of age."

"For me, it was all right. There were very few bumps along the way. I think it helps that you work very hard and you enjoy it. Yeah. That is my advice to young people. First of all, you need to find something that really you love and then do everything you can to preserve that. There’s no easy road to be creative, I think."

"I had three brothers and a sister, who died at about six weeks of age. I was the elder sister and I used my age to my maximum advantage. But I also was expected to, because as I got older and my mom worked, she needed me to help out. I had to boss my brothers sometimes because I was left in charge. For example, during high school, I was in complete charge of the household during one summer."

"Well I thought about my formula. Hard work, a little bit of luck, a little bit of talent and a lot of help from my friends, students and professors."

"Theory is part of the romance of archaeology and is vital if we want to breathe some life into the snippets of information drawn from stone and other artefacts."

"The reason why much of Stone Age history has remained a secret for so long is not that it may not be told or that it has not been told in other books, but rather that it has to be individually discovered. Because we are remote from the past, we have to find it and immerse ourselves in it, if we wish to understand it and unlock its secrets. Pursuing the past is rewarding, and we hope it is a challenge more will follow."

"is a passion with people from all walks of life, all races, all ages, and the plots they cultivate range from large country gardens to allotments, to tiny urban patches, to es. For me, it is a very personal passion. In the 1970s my husband and I and our two young children spent a year touring western Europe in a caravan, studying vegetable growing and collecting old varieties. We "rediscovered" forgotten salad plants like and , as well as the then new and green Italian Lollo lettuces. On our return we introduced them to the UK, along with the productive cut-and-come-again technique for growing salad seedlings."

"... of all the Oriental vegetables, the , a group roughly defined as members of the cabbage family, should prove the most rewarding for Westerners to get to know and grow. An amazingly diverse group, it includes the sturdy, bud-like heads of (already well known in the West), the crisp white- and green-stemmed s, and with their delicious flowering shoots, the pretty fern-leaved s and the . Within the mustards there are exceptionally hardy varieties with beautiful purple-hued leaves, compact-headed mustards and forms with weirdly swollen but highly prized stems and roots."

"Her book Grow your Own Vegetables is a masterpiece of good sense; I have read it more than once. And her Creative Vegetable Gardening is, as books go, my happy place, one I head back to whenever I feel uninspired by my own garden. So imagine how excited I was when I got an invitation to her retirement vegetable garden that sits on a windswept corner of . She and Don, her husband, converted it from a in just under 10 years. As a garden, it is everything I hoped for. Relaxed, a little messy perhaps to some (but not to the wildlife), joyous with colour and filled to the brim with food. I squished many s in return for some lemon verbena tea. If you want to read more about her garden, buy Just Vegetating. It is much more than simply a – it also takes in her travels in the pursuit of the best vegetables from Europe to China."

"The benefits of shelter cannot be exaggerated. Research has shown that sheltering s from even light winds can increase their yields by up to 30 per cent — which is equivalent to the increase in returns from optimum irrigation or optimum fertilizer use. The bents of sheltering plants from severe winds are considerably higher. In coastal areas, s also give protection from wind-borne ."

"By the 1980s we had reorganized our kitchen garden and laid it out in parallel narrow beds — a practical, efficient, centuries-old system, enabling the to develop a high state of fertility in the beds. ... Not long afterwards I made my first Little Potager, an area nor more than 6½ by 4½ m/20 by 15 ft. It was later enclosed in an undulating woven willow fence. Then followed a Winter Potage, primarily for edible plants which retain leaf, stem or flower colour in winter; these include s, hardy s, purple-flowering , hardy , , s, , 'Parcel' celery and winter pansies. Partially edged with low, stopover apples, the Winter Potager is surrounded on three sides by a of vines, and . With luck it remains colourful and decorative even in mid-winter. The full story is told in my book Creative Vegetable Gardening, but what is relevant here is the decorative potential of so many salad plants."

"Evelyn ... wrote the first (and only) bestseller on : was published in 1664 and addressed and the shortage of . ... "We had better be without gold than without timber," Evelyn wrote, because without trees there would be no iron and glass industry, no fires to warm houses in winter, nor a navy to protect the shores of England. Timber was, as Maggie Campbell-Culver points out, the oil of the 17th century, and the shortage of it created similar anxieties about fuel, manufacturing and transport as threats to oil production do today. Sylva was a response to these fears, encouraging the reader to plant trees as an act of patriotic duty. ... A Passion for Trees is beautifully illustrated with paintings and sumptuous botanical drawings. But the use of explanatory extensive "text boxes" (some are four pages long) interrupts the narrative. As with her first book The Origin of Plants, Campbell-Culver is at her strongest and most convincing when she delves into the lives of the trees, although both Evelyn himself and the age in which he lived remain elusive throughout the book."

"Even the canny invader William the Conqueror can be thought to have contributed to the total of our plant list. When he came to build what we now know as the s, he preferred use material with which he was already acquainted rather than stone from unknown English quarries, so the walls of castles like and were built from stone imported from the . Incidental to its main purpose, the stone itself carried the seeds of a double invasion — seeds of two plants we think of as being most quintessentially English. The first was the , and the second was . Both were seen blooming on the stone walls of in France, so the pretty little delicate pink which is used in the breeding of nearly all of our border pinks is the result of ."

"Trees can be record breakers: they can be one of the oldest living s in the world: Californian specimens of ', the Wellingonia or Big Tree, are believed to be at least 4,000 years old. They can also be the largest form of life: a which grows in in Mexico — and which, incidentally, is about 2,000 years old — has a circumference measuring 54 s (178) and is 40 metres (130ft) high. Its weight is estimated to be about 500 s."

"It’s not enough to be the first; it’s just really important not to be the last."

"I’ve made many mistakes in my time,” she told her lab team. I expect you to make mistakes. I expect you to tell me what those mistakes are so we can correct them."

"The only way that I will be in charge of this [lab] group is if you let me run it my way and there’s no interference from anyone."

"I'm always delighted when the response to one of my sculptures is favorable, and I know that the response to LBJ has been. I've actually seen people carry on conversations with the LBJ bust, and that's what you want to achieve."

"I was always doing something with my hands. I never remember buying a Christmas present. I carved angels out of soap and candles, did ‘paper sculptures,’ then went on to silk screening, enamel work, seashell earrings, etching glass bottles, pottery and ceramics.”"

"In addition to creating my own sculpture, I am involved in encouraging communities [to] provide original works of art in less prominent areas of our cities. I believe works of art have the potential of contributing a sense of value to the citizens of a community."

"Every sculptor tries to reveal the character of his subject"

"With the three-fingered hand? This was – well, I forget the name of the professor in the mechanical-engineering department. He passed away too. I kind of outlive all of my collaborators, but I think the student who designed it was Abramson, if I remember, three-fingered hand with a palm, and then we put some tactile pressure sensors on that, so that allow us to find where you are connecting. And actually, Ken Goldberg, who is here a professor, did his master degree with me on using these tactile sensors for recognition purposes. So, I also during that time connected with psychologists, who were prominent in this tactile perception. One of them was Susan Letterman, who is an outstanding professor-scientist in tactile perception at Queens University in Canada. And then she connected me with another professor, Roberta Klatzky, who is a professor at CMU in the psychology department, and we had a very fruitful collaboration. I learned quite a bit from these two people on how people perceive that – for example, people have certain procedures, motoric procedures when they want to find out how hard something is or what is the surface texture, and so there are these modules that people – procedures that people use for exploring. They called it “exploratory procedures.”"

"Well, no. There are many other changes. I mean, of course the speed and the memory size of the computer is phenomenally different, I mean, but the parallel isn’t that the distributed computing is also tremendously big difference and the display systems. At that time we used – when I worked at Stanford we didn’t have even a raster display. It was all just vector displays that displayed only the contours. At the end of my stay at Stanford we got the first raster display, which allowed you to display all the pixels, but in the beginning it was all just displaying contours."

"Well, that’s a different story. When I moved to Penn there was nothing, and so I had to build everything from scratch. My first master student, Adam Snyder, was an electrical engineer, and he and I built the digitizer, because we had to buy these analog cameras – camera, one camera – and then build a digitizer. And then I got some NSF initial grants that allowed me to buy a raster display so that we can visualize. The department had PDP-11, so I was working on that computer, and, as I said, it had just a very small memory, and so we were swapping things back and forth. I started to work on – I basically wanted to continue my Ph.D. work, and one of the first things that I started to look at was texture gradient and how can you interpret the three-dimensional information from the two-dimensional projection of the texture gradient. So that was the first Ph.D. with Larry Lieberman, right, was my first Ph.D. student, who then went to IBM research and worked on – had a group in robotics, because I was always interested in the three-dimensional interpretation of the visual information from the very beginning, and I always was interested in vision for, not just vision per se but what is vision for. I thought that it was a good way of testing your algorithms, if you can find the interpretation where you are or can you grasp things or move around? I mean, the robotics gives you a very good testing of your sensory processing, so that’s what I focused on. And then I think it was maybe ’73 or ’74 a man by name Britton Chance, who just passed away yesterday, 97 years old, who was a very prominent biophysicist, he invited me to look at some of these X-ray images from rat brains, because they were really interested in automating the image processing of these medical images. So he brought me into this group, and I found it very interesting, and so that started my career in medical image processing. I worked with him or for him for about six months, but then he was a very strong personality and my joke was you worked for him or you didn’t, and so I quit because I didn’t want to work for him. But then I continued with other people in the medical school at Penn on medical image processing, and I did some nice work there."

"Well, in those days there were no CCD cameras, so it was a regular camera like yours and then attached was a digitizer, which provided you digital images, and then you worked offline on these digital images. And the challenge there was that first of all the memory in computers were very small. We worked on small images, so the resolution was not very good, worked on 64 by 64 pixels or at best 128 by 128 pixels, so the resolution was rough, and in texture you really need a higher resolution in order to capture the local properties, so that was a challenge. Technology just wasn’t there. Everything had to be made in the lab. We had to build digitizers and deal with swapping the memory to disk all the time, because the memory was typically 64K or so or even – then later on I worked on PDP-11, which had a 32K memory, the cache, so it was very different time, and therefore the approaches you took were quite different than today people use millions of pictures and do statistical analysis, very different."

"Well, the first robotics system was when I got money to purchase a PUMA robot, which was one of the first robots available for academic labs. And around ’76, ’77, I started to connect the manipulation with the camera work, and grasping was one of the – and of course in those days they had only two-finger grasping, so I initiated with the Penn mechanical-engineering department to design a three-fingered robot, and so we were very much ahead of time in this regard. Around that time I also connected with a French laboratory in Toulouse, which had a rubber sensitive pressure sensor, and as part of the collaboration they made me what we called a “French finger,” which had sensors, so we were able to do this kind of a tactile connection. And so one of my first Ph.D. students – well, he wasn’t my first, but I don’t know, third or so. I think it was third or fourth. Peter Allen, who’s a professor now in Columbia University, he did the first work of this interaction of tactile and visual information, and so that was that."

"Can you imagine what it was like for a 19 year old Black female from Tupelo, Missippi who had been immersed in segregation for all her life to attend the University of Wisconsin? I underwent a major culture shock. ... I gravitated to students from Africa, a roomate from Thailand, and an office-mate from India, who was the only person to whom I could ask a mathematics question."

"I have devoted my entire life to increasing the number of highly qualified African Americans in mathematics and mathematics-related careers. High expectations, building self-confidence, and the creation of a nurturing environment have been essential components for the success of these students. They have fully justified my beliefs. Perhaps the most rewarding moments have come when younger faculty have undertaken the same goal and have surpassed my efforts reaching out to the broader community to help minorities and women achieve in mathematics"

"I guess we would call the protected fields. I could very well get a job in nursing or teaching when you're done with school."

"I didn't want to teach, but the nursing field, I always said, "I want to be a nurse." But maybe about the tenth grade, when I was about fifteen or sixteen, I decided pharmacy is something. Now, it may have something to do with going to the corner drugstore, where they had all of the candy and the ice cream. [Laughter] I'm serious. But the pharmacy, I would see the pharmacist in there, and it just looked like a good field."

"I just thought it would be fascinating. It's just something that I had thought about doing. Now, my original plans, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a nurse, but I think that was because my mother instilled that in me, because when I grew up, nursing and teaching were"

"We should not underpay any well trained, qualified person."

"I can’t think of anything more shocking than the most beautifully skilled hands-on therapist becoming a manager."

"I'd like to just throw in here at this time that I tell people that it doesn't matter what your age is or what you decide to do when you're eighteen or sixteen, it doesn't matter if you change your mind later on and change fields, because we need to be flexible."

"I will say that not just the people here, but I think I fell into it myself. We were not as friendly. And I don't mean to say real hostile. But when I grew up, if you walked six blocks to the streetcar, you spoke to everybody in every house, or who's on the porch."

"You can’t change yesterday but you can improve today and tomorrow."

"But we didn't tend to do that here. It was just a different style of living; people did things differently. And I think we were more involved in our own personal things than the rest of the neighborhood."

"The spectacular works in this book, all exemplars from Dr Shirley Sherwood's incomparable collection of contemporary botanical art, highlight an artistic practice that infuses accuracy with artistry, and deep love of plants, to create new works that rank with the greatest of the eighteenth and nineteenth century."

"A next big step forward was the building of the Shirley Sherwood Gallery by my family. It opened in the in 2008, and stands next to the Marianne North Gallery. Since then there have been over 50 exhibitions, always with some contributions from my collection and Kew's archives. I had been commissioning and acquiring paintings since 1990 and by 2018 had more than than a thousand works from artists working all over the world. Another milestone was that by 2018 we counted over one million visitors to the Shirley Sherwood Gallery. It has become the central focus of botanical art in the world today and the footfall has increased dramatically."

"Hungarian minstrels boarded the train at , played vigorously for more than two hours and finished with the ', with the chef singing a vociferous solo. The passengers were received by at his new . managed to arrange an exclusive interview with him, which he glowingly recounted in '. After the euphoria of the inaugural trip the settled into a regular routine."

"No end is ever articulate."

"»Ljubi Jezus, ti veš, komu je ta moja bolečina potrebna,« je prosila v svojem srcu. »Nakloni njene sadove tistemu, za katerega veš, da mu je potrebna. Praznik Vseh svetnikov se bliža, morda bo kdo omahoval, da bi pred praznikom stopil v spovednico. Po tej moji bolečini mu daj moči in poguma za spravo s teboj.«"

"Language is my homeland."

"Začetek pri osemindvajsetih letih je bil res težak. … Tedaj, ko nisem poznala mladega človeka bolnega, se nisem mogla sprijazniti z boleznijo. … Pater Simon Ašič (ki je bil njen spovednik in prijatelj) je bil prvi, ki mi je pomagal, da sem prišla v stik z bolniki. Bila sem na srečanju na Brezjah, ki ga že vrsto let prireja Ognjišče. Ko sem videla invalide na vozičkih, ko so mi na obisk pripeljali invalida, sem pomislila, kaj bi ta dal, da bi še hodil. Tako sem kmalu znala sprejemati, biti hvaležna Bogu za to, kar še imam moči in zdravja."

"Imam kar precej znancev, ki mi povedo, da ob prejemu Ognjišča najprej pogledajo, če je v njem kaj mojega, kar z veseljem preberejo. Nekateri me tudi okregajo, da so moje zgodbe prekratke."

"Vsaka zgodba ima resnično jedro, marsikaj pa spremenim. V vsako zgodbo pa položim nauk, čeprav nevsiljivo, a kdor želi, ga lahko najde."

"The exquisite roses that my father brought over yesterday have totally withered. I felt like I was them. How can he say he loves me if he doesn't care if I'm withering?"