ORAL HISTORY ROBERTA COOPER RAMO

Transcription

1 ABA Senior Lawyers Division Women Trailblazers in the Law ORAL HISTORY of ROBERTA COOPER RAMO Interviewer: Elizabeth Meers Dates of Interviews: April 28, 2010 January 11, 2011 March 15, 2011 May 14, 2012 May 31, 2012

2 ORAL HISTORY OF ROBERTA COOPER RAMO FIRST INTERVIEW April 28, 2010 This transcript is the first interview of the oral history of Roberta Cooper Ramo, which is being taken on behalf of Women Trailblazers in the Law, a Project of the American Bar Association Senior Lawyers Division. It was conducted by Elizabeth Meers on Wednesday, April 28, 2010, at Hogan & Hartson LLP, th Street, NW, Washington, DC Ms. Meers: We are here at Hogan & Hartson, and I'm taking Roberta's oral history for the Women Trailblazer's Project. So, Roberta, could you please start by telling us where you were born and how that came about. [Laughter] Ms. Ramo: Well, we both know how that came about. [Laughter] I was born on August 8, 1942 in Denver. And the reason that I was born in Denver at the outset of World War II: My father and mother had been married for little over a year. My dad had enlisted in the Air Force, and they had given him leave to wait until after my birth. And he had moved my mother to Cheyenne, where her parents were. But my grandmother who had strong opinions about everything didn't really think Cheyenne, Wyoming, even though she had lived there for a very long time since almost the turn of the century, was the right place for a lady to be born. Or a baby to be born to a lady, since they didn't know what I was in those DC ; vl 1

3 days. And so she insisted that my mother go to Denver, where she thought there was much better accommodation for such a momentous event as her first grandchild. And so that's why I was born in Denver. Ms. Meers: Great, and so tell me a bit about your grandparents. Ms. Ramo: Well, my mother's parents lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming. They were married there I think about They were very interesting people, especially my grandmother. My grandmother had been born in New York City. She was very proud of that because she was the only one of my four grandparents born in this country. She was very smart, graduated from high school when she was I think fifteen. Her mother ran a boarding house in New York because her father was a Talmudic scholar. And he would only work long enough to barely keep things together and then he would go back to studying. So she decided that they needed a more steady source of income and so she bought a boarding house which she ran, based upon what I remember of my grandmother, I'm sure with an iron hand. My grandfather came through he was on his way to Cheyenne, Wyoming he came through Ellis Island. He stayed there and fell in love with my grandmother who, unusually for a Jewish girl, had red hair and blue eyes. He very cleverly kept in touch with her mother my greatgrandmother and ultimately when my grandmother was sixteen, suggested that they come out to the wild west on the train and just see what there was to see. So my great-grandmother thought this was a great adventure, put my grandmother on the train, and they went off. It was a DC , vl 2

4 semi-arranged marriage, but my grandmother was very happy I suspect to have her own house and her own world, although she missed New York very much. Through her entire life she continued to order antiques, furniture, fabrics, and anything else they could possibly afford from New York. [Laughter] She had very elegant tastes in all things. She was very smart. She continued her education by basically reading through the state library. Cheyenne was the capital. She was involved in all things. She was the president of the Order of the Eastern Star. She was a suffragette. Interestingly, people will remember I think Wyoming in fact had the first woman governor of any state, and it was one of the first states I think to give women the vote. I'm quite sure they did it so that my grandmother would leave them alone. She was just a very interesting person. Wonderful in both the intensity of her views and her intellect, and at the same time, caring very much about all the aesthetic things in life, like having the right china, and people's table manners, and serving everything properly. And having a wonderful grand piano in the living room, which, again in Cheyenne, Wyoming, at the time was not exactly a common thing. She was very strong about her beliefs that women should be involved in everything. The famous story in our family is that my grandfather came home, when Teddy Roosevelt was at the fort in Cheyenne for a visit, to change his clothes into his fanciest suit to find my grandmother all dressed up with her furs and whatever jewelry she thought was appropriate for the occasion. He said, "Anne, where are you going?" DC vl 3

5 She said, "I'm going to see the President." He said, "No, no, it's just for men." And my grandmother said, "Not anymore!" [Laughter] And it wasn't! [Laughter] So, it just never occurred to her that there was an important thing going on in Wyoming that she shouldn't be directly involved in. Very interesting person. My father's parents came from the old country, but I think they were turned away at Baltimore, where they had a relative. So they had to come in through Canada. They lived in Vancouver for a number of years, and my dad was born there. And then they quite illegally somehow made their way through the Canadian border to Denver because one of their children I think had asthma and they had heard that Denver was a wonderful place. My grandfather, my father's father, also a very smart person, very outgoing, wonderful personality. Everybody always loved him, which made his wife crazy because she was sure all the widows in Denver were after him because he was a very handy person. He was often called to help people to do things and came back with many cakes. [Laughter] So it was not a good situation. My dad and mother met in Denver, got married, went on their honeymoon to Albuquerque, where my father's best friend who had been in their wedding lived. They fell in love with New Mexico. After World War II they moved down. My dad was gone from virtually the time I was one because the first year he was in training in Casper, Wyoming, where they trained a lot of people for the Air Force at the time. He had very strong DC vl 4

6 feelings about what it meant to be a good citizen and I think he probably would have helped that way anyway. But he was a navigator in England and flying over Germany. One day the commanding officer called him and said we're going to promote you. We need you to leave the plane that you've been with and become a lead navigator for a squadron. And he always said he was very reluctant to do that, but of course he did. The next day his old squadron went out, and the plane that he would have been on was shot down, and everyone was killed. And he didn't talk about anything about the war until very late in his life. But he really felt that he'd been saved for a purpose. He -- in spite of the -- had the very distinguished flying cross. Flying over Germany at the end of the war was not an easy or a safe thing to do. He felt very strongly when he came back that he needed to be a good citizen in all ways. That meant to him being involved in politics, not as a political person, but as supporter of whoever he thought was right. Also very important to him was being philanthropic. When he died, although we knew a great deal about the extent of his philanthropy, he was still a person that if he saw someone on the street that needed a hand, he would be right there to help that person. Ms. Meers: Mm-hmm. Tell me about his parents. Ms. Ramo: His parents again, like lots of Jewish families we don't know exactly but they came from a smaller place. It was either Russia or Poland depending on where the line was at the particular time. They would never talk about the old country because there was nothing happy to say about it. DC vl 5

7 They lived through pogroms. It was not an easy place to be Jewish in any way. My grandfather came to Denver and opened a store, as many people do. He was a very handy person. The only thing they had was a sewing machine, which he bought because he originally did the tailoring. It was a men's clothing store that they had. He was a very outgoing, charming, darling sort of man who my grandmother was sure all the widows in Denver were after because when anything needed fixing they would call Mr. Cooper and he would come and fix things. He would come back with baked goods of all manner which my grandmother never thought were to her taste. [Laughter] She never was quite sure what he had done to earn all those wonderful sweets. [Laughter] But they were interesting people, and I was very lucky because all four of them were extremely loving. Although my mother's mother, who could be tough to everybody else, was to me she thought I was the perfect person and wanted to teach me everything she knew. So it was really fun for me. Ms. Meers: Your maternal grandparents were in Cheyenne and your paternal grandparents were in Denver Ms. Ramo: Exactly... Ms. Meers: So you were back and forth a bit as a child? Ms. Ramo: As a little child I was, although primarily in Cheyenne. When we moved to Albuquerque, as was the way at the time, in the summers, my mother would put us all in the car and drive us up to Cheyenne. We would spend the summer in Cheyenne. Which was one of the luckiest breaks in my life DC , vl 6

8 because, although I had some freedom as a kid in Albuquerque, Cheyenne was an even smaller place. I could walk from my grandparents' house to the state library and read anything I wanted to read, which I did, and could walk downtown and had a charge account at both the restaurant and the drug store there. So it was really complete heaven on earth for a seven or eight or nine year old girl to be able just to walk wherever I wanted. It was just wonderful. Ms. Meers: That's great. So tell me a bit more about your parents. You talked about your dad and his work in the Army Air Corps. And your mom? Ms. Ramo: My mother was the most glamorous and very funny person. She had a wicked sense of humor. In fact, my daughter who is equally glamorous and is a lawyer in Albuquerque really tickles me because she is so much like my mother, which is why she was my father's favorite person on the face of the planet. But my mother was always the best dressed person and gave wonderful parties, but was also really very, very funny. And very sarcastic. Not in a mean way, but my father had a big personality, and I think it took somebody like my mother to equal him. So our family dinners. I have two sisters. One of my sisters is a lawyer. Corinne Cooper has said quite properly that trying to talk at dinner in our family was like to trying to get in the on ramp at the LA freeway on a bad day. And so all of us learned how to do that very quickly. Ms. Meers: That's very good. Your father, after he came out of the Army, what did he do? What did the family do? DC , vi 7

9 Ms. Ramo: He came down to Albuquerque. He had absolutely no idea what he was going to do. So he went to work for his friend, who had a sporting goods store. Shortly after arriving his friend lent him the giant sum of $2,000, which was really a lot of money, and the bank lent him $2,000, and he opened an Army surplus store. That morphed over many years into a large Western wear chain. At the end before my family sold it, they had at one point 30 stores in four states. He was a really, really good merchant. He had a wonderful way with everybody he employed and had a great risktaking sense and just saw everything as a great opportunity. And that gave me an opportunity. Because it was a retail store, I started working when I was six because there are a lot of things you can do organizing cowboy boots and dusting things. When I was nine, I felt that I didn't want to be dependent on my father, and so I went to work at the sporting goods store of his best friend. It wasn't until I was about 20 that I realized, because I worked there for many years, that he paid me out of his pocket. [Laughter] It was great. So I always worked. Ms. Meers: Ms. Ramo: And what was your parents' attitude toward having three daughters? You know I didn't fully appreciate it until later. Probably the most important thing is it never occurred to my father that we couldn't do anything we wanted to do. He had extremely high standards for us in terms of academic accomplishments and everything else. Later in life when he was asked if he didn't wish he had a son, he would say, to anybody who dared to say that to him, that they were right that he was DC , vl 8

10 sorry they hadn't have a fourth child because he thought three daughters weren't quite enough and a fourth one would really be the icing on the cake. It literally never occurred to either one of them I think that any of us couldn't and shouldn't do whatever was possible. Ms. Meers: It sounds as if both your parents and grandparents were quite engaged in the community. Are there particular activities or interests that any of them had that had an influence on you? Ms. Ramo: I think two things. One is the idea that even if you didn't have any money, and my parents didn't have I mean, they were comfortable, but that was about it for many years that you always had to give money away. That was a very important part. That was very important. They were not religious people, although we belonged to the synagogue. I went to Hebrew school and Sunday school. Their view of their religious obligations, but their obligation as a citizen, was that they give money away. And it didn't have anything to do with religion at all. We lived in New Mexico. My father was a frequent giver to Catholic charities of all kinds when he thought they did a good job. So they were very involved in the philanthropy of the whole community. And Albuquerque was a magical place to grow up for a lot of reasons. One is that it was a place with almost no bias. So being Jewish there, again I didn't even appreciate this until I left because I just thought that was the way it was, had nothing to do with whether you were in the country club or the Junior League or places where Jews were not welcome any place else. And it gave them a DC , vl 9

11 wide range of friends. And they felt a real obligation to support political people that were there. And also because we were on the railroad, I do remember probably the first five to ten years after World War II there was a kind of it wasn't underground but there was a network of people who helped people who were called DPs. I remember that as a child, displaced people, who were coming from the DP camps and had somehow ended up in Albuquerque on their way somewhere or it was something to do. I know my parents somehow always with the other parts of the Jewish community always found places for them to live. They set people up in apartments and gave them money. So that was an important thing to see as child. And I would say the other thing that I didn't appreciate until later, there was a very small black community in Albuquerque. And it happened that the most elegant catering person in town was a wonderful black woman who was an aunt of one of the founders of the modern jazz quartet in Albuquerque. When she came into our home, she was treated as an honored person that we were lucky to have there. I didn't grow up around anybody who wasn't treated that way. It just changed my view. Or formed my view, would be better, about people. I think they produced sort of color-blind kids that in an age, until I left, I didn't appreciate how unusual that was. Ms. Meers: And so your family moved from Denver to Albuquerque, and how did that come about? DC vl -10-

12 Ms. Ramo: My dad had decided that if he lived through the war, he was going to Albuquerque to live. It seemed like such a beautiful, wonderful place to him. He didn't have anything, and so his friend said come and I'll give you a job. And that's how they did it. Both my sisters, I have two sisters, were born there. It is even now a place remarkably free of bias. The most elegant people always were Hispanic. Many of them looked like they came out of the pictures that you would see at the Prado in Madrid. They still do. The oval eyes, these wonderful aristocratic noses. They were the best educated people in town. They all went to Georgetown to law school if they were lawyers. It was really quite an extraordinary place to grow up. It was a place where I felt totally deprived because I didn't have a first communion, because those dresses were so great. All of my Catholic and other Christian friends thought Chanukah was the best thing that ever happened, and everyone came to bar and bat mitzvahs, and we went to celebrations everywhere. It was not a melting pot. It was better than that. It was a place where people had shared values in one another and appreciated the differences in people as an enriching part of their lives, not a demeaning part of anybody's life. It was one of the reasons I was so anxious to go back and raise my children there, and I think it's still true. Ms. Meers: Wonderful city. And so you mentioned you have two sisters there. You're the eldest? DC vi

13 Ms. Ramo: I am. I am the oldest. My middle sister is five years younger than I am. She lives in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. My youngest sister is ten years younger than I am, and she lives in Tucson. Ms. Meers: And what are their occupations now? Ms. Ramo: My middle sister married a lawyer in Steamboat Springs. She is the only honest politician in our family. She was on the Steamboat Springs City Council for many, many years. She kept refusing to run for mayor, but finally recently retired from City Council and is president of their community foundation. Her husband died suddenly when their daughter was twelve, and she is my greatest hero really for a lot of reasons. She raised a wonderful daughter who is a death penalty defense lawyer in Houston. And she lives a happy, wonderful life. My youngest sister was a professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City Law School. She retired a few years ago to start a consulting firm. Ms. Meers: So tell me a bit about your elementary and secondary schooling. You moved from Denver to Albuquerque before you started school? Ms. Ramo: Yes, yes, we did. I went to the public schools all the way through. And they were both wonderful and interesting. The elementary school that I went to, called Zia School, was a brand new school in Albuquerque, and the principal had survived the Bataan Death March. And when I came back to practice, I'll tell you about that because it ended up being a very interesting thing. We all knew that. I don't think we had any idea what that meant, but we knew he was a remarkable person. He was the kindest DC vl -12-

14 possible person. A big man who loved little children. I have no idea what education he had. Obviously he graduated from college. He ended up the principal of an elementary school in Albuquerque. It was really wonderful. I went all the way through high school in Albuquerque. Ms. Meers: Did you have particular teachers, other than your principal, who are memorable in your Ms. Ramo: I was very lucky. I had very good teachers. I would say the most important when I was in high school there was an English teacher. I never worked that hard in high school, and he really found that impossible to understand. And just really made my life extremely difficult until I reached a point when he thought I could write like a decent human being of any intellect ought to write. I always loved reading, and I thought I was the world's best writer, and he was just quite convinced that I could be better. And he was really the first teacher that said I don't care that you got all the answers right. You're getting bad grades until you can really write very well. That was important. Again, I was very involved in speech and debate and all those kinds of things since I was the world's worst athlete. I was president of the student body in my high school. That gave me an opportunity to do all kinds of things. I ended up having a chance to go to Girl's Nation and met Jack Kennedy at a time when anyone would understand why every woman would fall in love with him. [Laughter] All, all amazing. Ms. Meers: Were there other extracurricular activities that you were involved in? DC , vl -13-

15 Ms. Ramo: I was a very serious ballet dancer until I was sixteen. Again, for health reasons, we ended up having this fabulous woman named Natalia Krasnov who danced with the Ballet Rus de Monte Carlo. And she, because of the asthma of her husband, came to live in Albuquerque and started a ballet school. And until about ten years ago, the principal ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera, a friend, was trained in Albuquerque. A remarkable number of ballet dancers for the time. But that was the time when you had to decide if you were going to go to college or you were going to dance. I really wanted to go to college, but I was so afraid of her that my mother had to call to tell her that I wasn't going to go on with ballet in a serious way. But I think she was everything to me that coaches must be to boys. She was extremely strict. She walked around the way you see in all the old movies with a long stick and was free to use it if your leg was in the wrong place and made you do things over and over and over again until it was perfect. She was a very, very important influence. At the same time when she said you were ready to take a significant part, you felt total confidence because she would never let you do that if she didn't think you were superb. So I think she was probably more of an influence on me than anybody at school was. Probably because I paid far more attention to ballet than I did to school. Ms. Meers: And her name was? Ms. Ramo: Natalia Krasnov. DC of -14-

16 Ms. Meers: And you mentioned that your father had the western wear store that started up in Albuquerque. How did you become involved with that? Ms. Ramo: When I was little, I always wanted to make my own money. My father and my mother would let me come to work when there wasn't school. A couple of days a week I would go with my dad, which was the most wonderful thing in the world. He would find things for me to do. I could walk downtown and have my own lunch by myself when I was 8 or 9. There were all kinds of things you could do. Organize buckles, dust cowboy boots. I was a very busy person. As I got a little older, I decided I didn't want to depend on my father for my living. So I went to work for his friend who had first employed him in his sporting goods business down the street. I worked there summers and Christmases until after my first year in college. It never occurred to me until much later that I was the only employee that he paid out of his pocket. [Laughter] It was important because you could be around all kinds of people. I had a lot of responsibilities. After I was nine or ten, I would go to work on the bus by myself. It was really an amazingly lucky thing. Luckily, because my dad had the retail business, both my children were able to start working at a very young age. I thought it was terrific. I worry about our grandchildren because we don't have that business any more, so I have to figure out what to do with them. [Laughter] Ms. Meers: What was the social life like in Albuquerque when you were in school? DC X vl -15-

17 Ms. Ramo: You know, Albuquerque is a really interesting place. People either love it, or it's just not the right place. This is less true now, there are no certain neighborhoods that people ought to live in. It's all mixed up. The good part about that is the public schools are economically mixed up in all kinds of good ways. The social life was not one where people cared who your parents were. Everybody got into the country club. In fact the Albuquerque country club was founded by people who included Jews and the most elegant people in the community, Hispanics, were there. The Junior League was the first Junior League in the country that admitted Jews and Hispanics, and I think probably one of the first that had black members. The first black doctor moved to Albuquerque and there wasn't any question about whether they would be invited to join the country club or not, or the Junior League, or anything else. It's really an amazing kind of place. There were some Asians there. In fact, I was confused for many years as a child because the best Chinese restaurant there was run by people called "the Jius," and it just took me a long time to figure out how that could be. [Laughter] They always explained to me that we were cousins. [Laughter] That made sense to me so that was fine. Ms. Meers: Ms. Ramo: What about your personal social life. Friends from school years that are It was just a completely great place. I suspect most of my friends were always boys, but I had several friends and part of that was because the ballet was where I met most of the girls my age. More than in school. The things I was interested in school were more things that boys were DC s 1-16-

18 interested in. To this day among my best friends are men that I've known since I was six. We're still friends. Ms. Meers: Do you have any special memories of your childhood, family stories? I guess you probably don't have a very clear memory of yourself before Albuquerque. Ms. Ramo: There was just great freedom, and it was wonderful. I took the bus downtown to the library starting when I was nine, by myself. The rule was that you could take out, I think, seven books at a time. That was the most you could take out. I remember one day I decided I wanted to go into the adult section, and I remember taking a note from my mother telling them that it was alright with my mother and father. They let me take out any books that I wanted to. I think they figured I was so short that I couldn't reach any really bad books. The librarians taught me a kind of respect for books and reading that was amazing. I remember, when I was ten or eleven, they had a huge exhibit of [End of Side Al Ms. Meers: We're continuing with Roberta Ramo's oral history. This is Elizabeth Meers at Hogan & Hartson on April 28, 2010, and this is Side B of Tape 1. Ms. Ramo: They had this amazing exhibit. There were many traveling exhibits in those days. They had one that I think probably came from the Smithsonian, actually. And somebody had put together things that looked like the machines that Leonardo da Vinci had drawn. And they had DC vl -17-

19 replicas of his drawings, some of the mirror writing that he did. But mainly the elegant and crazy blueprints that he drew of all kinds of things, as well as the human body. And I remember going back again and again completely fascinated by the elegance of what he had done. And I think part of my love for all things Italian really started then. And I began to read about the Renaissance and what Italy was about with the good help of the librarians at the Albuquerque public library. Ms. Meers: Ms. Ramo: Ms. Meers: Well, why don't we pause there and we can Right. And we can resume next time. So I'm stopping the tape for now. DC vl - 18-