Brynhild “Brynnie” Rowberg was born in Northfield on August 26, 1917.
While at St. Olaf College from 1917 to 1939, Brynnie served as President of the St. Olaf chapter of the League of Women Voters.
In May of 1941, she moved to Washington D.C., and, in 1945, she embarked upon a long and remarkable career as a United States Foreign Service Officer. Upon retirement, she returned with her mother to Northfield and served on several LWV committees.
The following is a transcript of an interview of Brynnie conducted by Allene Moesler, League President in 2016-17, and Keith Ketola, a St. Olaf student and League volunteer. Topics range from Brynnie’s career to League issues to reflections on the Trump Presidency.
Any statements in the transcript do not necessarily represent League views.
Keith Ketola: First of all, thanks for having the time to meet with us.
Brynhild Rowberg: You’re jolly welcome.
KK: I’m excited to hear what you have to say. So, you were born in 1917, is that correct?
BR: That’s correct.
KK: Ok, so then, I guess my first question is what do you remember about Northfield from your childhood in the 1920s?
BR: Well, I won’t go into everything. But I was making a speech here and one thing and, of course, I don’t remember World War 1, but I remember my uncle served. But one of my uncles– Uncle Dean–used to use French words every once and a while. My attention was drawn, eating breakfast at their house, and he’d ask for ‘beurre’ – butter. And I took notice of that as a very small child.
And then the next big event, which I can’t remember, which happened in 1919: the great flu pandemic. And I read a recent book where they used to think 50 million people died, [but] it’s nearer 100 million because they had so few statistics from Latin America and other places, and I remember that because the father of my very first Catholic Father had treated the flu epidemic so that is something you really remember. Since then I heard all these stories about [how] they would go to a farmhouse and find everybody dead and that’s when, recently, I am concerned about the Trump Administration’s attitude…we could have another pandemic and it could spread much faster than it did in 1919 and also to much more remote parts of the world. We just do not have people working that sort of thing and [they are] not prepared to deal with it.
The rest of it, as I say, in 1925 there was a parade with the Ku Klux Klan here [in Northfield] and my parents took me with them because they hardly disapproved and so I had seen them on the east side of the street by the square, and seeing these people march by started with men on horses and the white garb [with] the peaked hats. They were not masked, but a few were carrying torches. It was not anti-black–there were no blacks here or in Minneapolis, although there was a black population–it was anti-Catholic, and then after this was actually the high point of KKK in Minnesota. After that, it disintegrated for various reasons. I don’t know why–the article I read didn’t exactly explain–but it just lost itself. But there were lots of stories, some about about how after that [rally] this was a period when the rain fell and it fell on the Catholic farms and not the protestant farms. And there was a Mexican [Catholic] farm–very exotic at that time–and they had a bull and all they did was let the bull out to pasture, and it started tearing and some didn’t get into their cars; they just started fleeing, [and] then the farmhand went out and took the bull with him anyway, so that was it.
Then, I’d say, hearing about the stock market crash and those were hard days. Dave Swanson lost one million, and I had no idea what that was, but, anyway, that made an impression on me, and then growing up in the Depression was absolutely impossible to explain to people. I have a book I’d recommend called Growing Up by Russell Baker; he wrote for the New York Times and grew up desperately poor in Virginia [such] that his mother gave children away to in-laws because she was widowed. And there were lots of churches that didn’t believe in insurance because that showed a lack of faith in God, so many women were left penniless. He shows how they managed in that time, and Northfield wasn’t as hard hit as some places, but there was plenty of suffering; none of the Northfield banks failed, which was good [that there were] honest bankers, conscientious people. Too many people had gotten carried away by the booming stock market, and people took the disgrace seriously in those days. I had friends whose mothers who jumped off the high bridge in St. Paul because, in those days, there was a disgrace to have gotten involved in something dishonest. I suppose it still is for some, but for others you can gamble away on the stock market–look at Wells Fargo.
But my mom went to work as a social worker; she had no training for it, but she was a college grad and she had taught high school, so she was better educated than most, and teaching was a good prep anyway for being a social worker. We had plenty of contact with people working in Denfield (?), and I might go back to the League of Women Voters; my great-grandmother had been, in the 1890s, a proponent of Women’s Suffrage. She was a Norwegian immigrant, and I think of others; she grew up in a way that was a little different from my grandfather. [He] was a prosperous farmer on the border. My dad was in two states and every time he made a significant expenditure or investment he talked over everything with my grandmother so that she was well aware exactly how things work. This was in a day when most women didn’t know how to write a check, and she managed. It was very difficult and their jobs were not jobs for anybody as an untrained women. The League here was started in 1921–something like that–and mother was a member from the beginning until during the war when she was a social worker. The League met in the daytime, and it just was not possible for her to participate any longer because she had job, but she was interested [for] the rest of her life in the League’s work. My dad followed politics very closely all the time, so…I grew up hearing wonderful talk from the time I was a small child, and much of how things were going.
But I realized that it was not easy to even follow things, simply because we were unprepared in some–any ways–for World War Two because the Minneapolis paper was very Isolationist, because it was very reactionary and not interested in what was happening. Although the memory of World War 1 should have tipped them off, but it’s just that. And then, so there was resistance to being involved in another war–I can understand that–but not keeping informed is a different matter. So those were some of the things that I remember from those days. Any questions you’d like to ask?
KK: You mentioned the LWV–your mother was involved–were you yourself ever involved in that yourself?
BR: No, well at both Carleton and St. Olaf had the LWV when I was in college, but then [I] left Northfield right after college so I was not involved until I retired and came back here many years later. But I remember the president of the Carleton League was my good friend Dorothy Calling, whose father was president of Carleton and I was president of the St. Olaf one, and I wrote a short sketch for the radio station, which was acted, [and] we were invited to St. Paul by a distinguished member there, Alice O’Brien (of O’Brien State Park), and she had a house on Summit Ave, and I was just gaping when I went into that house, and dorothy and I had been friends since first grade, so after that mostly it was just too difficult to get involved.
KK: Well, I’m curious, too, about some of your career after you left Northfield. You joined the Foreign Service–
BR: Well, I went in May, 1941 to DC and worked for the state, and then ‘45–February–joined the foreign service, and I stayed for the rest of my working life until i two things happened: I lost almost all my hearing and my mother went blind, and it was just not possible anymore.
KK: I was also reading about the Pueblo, the ship–
BR: Yes, I was then an officer in the Office of Korean Affairs, and so that occupied us for 11 agonizing months, and I wrote up that experience for the Minnesota Historical Society. The whole [thing] I wrote up not that long ago, and a number of books have been written about it, but this case was from the point of view of the person working…if you looked at the TV when they were waiting for Osama Bin Laden, I knew just what they felt, because we didn’t have TV–we had the radio, and we were in the operations center of the department and the radio–the military radio–was not telling us what was happening. And you sat there, all tense and scared–they would release one person and keep the rest, and from the time when the first person came over until the very last, you just couldn’t breathe. And then, finally, the second officer reached the other side of the Demilitarized Zone, and, what a relief! You just can’t imagine, after 11 months for them (it was just horrible) and it wasn’t easy to be on, and then you have to deal with the families of 83 crewmen, all of whom are worried, and, I don’t know why, but the department, poorly staffed as we were, had to deal with them.
But the President or Congressmen didn’t always understand or refused to appreciate how difficult it was, and now the North Koreans haven’t really changed all these years, and whenever I hear talk of sanctions, I think that North Korea has so little trade, except with China, and, even there it’s not big. And then a totalitarian government can squeeze its people and they can’t protest. You know, here, if the government tried to do anything, it would get storms of protest. But over there, you take your life in your hands. And I just think, there was this college student that was protesting and was arrested there, and he’s still there and people are trying hard to get him released, and they’re trying everything, and of course it was totally inexcusable. He took a poster with him, and they arrested him, and he didn’t seem to realize souvenirs were not acceptable. Somebody should’ve told him don’t take any souvenir. Because that means, since Kim Jong Un is next to a God, it’s blasphemy as well as all the rest of it. So he took this poster–idiot. But you still feel sorry for him because I just can’t imagine what kind of treatment he’s getting, and being alone and all the rest of it must be horrible, but I just don’t think any college kid should be allowed near there. So many have what they’ve wanted all their lives and they just can’t understand that there are lots of people still in this world who won’t let you do things. No, that was a very interesting experience [the Pueblo negotiations] and I think one of the most rewarding moments I’ve ever had was to write the statement that the spokesman was to read when announcing that all 83 survivors and crew members were released. It was very satisfying.
Of course this brings me to the sad state of the State Department and most government agencies right now. It’s just terrible. And a lot of people who could retire have retired because Mr. Tillerson–it goes to a place where he doesn’t even stop by to see the staff. You don’t have a customary shaking hands and a ‘thank you for your service, etc.’ None of that for him. And to say nothing of the fact that there are all these ambassador jobs not filled. There’s no ambassador to the United Kingdom; there was nobody to go apologize or make things better when Trump was so inconsiderate, to put it mildly, and his reaction to the terrorist thing–just, if you tried to do it badly you couldn’t do any worse. I feel very strongly about it. So that is one of the [problems] they’re facing, of course. And just yesterday I had lunch with a young relative who teaches Special Ed. in farmington, and she is so concerned about Betsy DeVos. Because people teaching things like especially Special Ed. don’t even register on Mrs. DeVos’ network. And teachers are not well paid just to start out with, and then given how difficult their job is it’s really just disheartening.
Allene Moesler: Well, and you look at all the work that teachers have to go through to get money and whatever for basic classroom supplies–
BR: And for those teaching Special Ed., because you have to cope with not only teaching the kids, but also their parents. You don’t in all cases, but it’s especially true in Special Ed. And I said ‘oh, dear,’ and I couldn’t even tell her anything consoling because any good news is three and a half or four years away.
AM: Unfortunately, that seems to be where we’re at right now.
BR: Oh, it’s really disheartening and I think there are some people who work for the government [who] are not very competent, but I think the overwhelming majority are hard working people who do it not because they’re making a lot of money–they aren’t. I’m reading one of my favorite magazines which is the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer–
AM: Yes.
BR: And it’s filled with scientists and volunteers who are doing great things for the environment. And they are incomprehensible to the people around Trump, because they don’t make much money at all–they make just barely a middle class standard of living–but they’re happy and fulfilled by their jobs. This is not–there is not anyone in the administration who understands people like that.
AM: No, I think you’re right, because you don’t see them.
BR: All they think of is the money. Well it makes me feel better to blow off a little. Of course I had a chance this morning. We have a weekly discussion group here which discusses current events, but today we spent a short time with the events and then we decided everybody was up to here [makes gestures] with this and we discussed some general problems and things like transportation, agriculture, and the environment. Things we’re all interested in, but then I come up and open the mail and there are all these pleas from organizations which are having a hard time, because they can’t depend on [the government]. You know, environmental organizations, things like Lutheran Social Services–all these people are doing a great job, but they’re doing things that, in any sensible country, would be done by the government, and we’re going backwards. All the things people fought for for years are just being eliminated by the Trump people.
KK: Yeah, it’s really unfortunate to see that, for sure. Can I ask a question about your career? I was also wondering, when you were working in the foreign service, were there many other women that you were working with at that time?
BR: Actually, there have been female foreign service officers since the 1920s.
KK: Ok.
BR: But very few. And there were no new foreign service officers during WW2. It was another Congressional foolish thing. So it was very badly staffed, and so it wasn’t until well after WW2 that they started recruiting again, and I got my commission some years afterwards–after a test–and now there are lots of female foreign service officers. But this brings up–there are some problems to which there is no solution: that is, married female foreign service officers. And what does the husband do? The government can’t promise him a job. And so what if your wife is stationed in Ouagadougou? In some places, it might be possible to get a job with a non-profit or something like that, but this is very difficult. Sherman, at St. Olaf–her daughter is in this business, and her husband has had a hard time finding work. Another case I knew is this foreign service officer who married a woman who was a medical student–well then it’s almost impossible; you have to get another degree to practice in most countries. Their marriage broke up because he didn’t want to renounce his job and there was just no way she could come and they didn’t have any number of meetings about it in Washington a few years ago. I was out there and talked to a friend who was in that, and they said that this is a problem without a solution, that people have to make their own solutions to it because there is just no way the government can hire somebody. And men are much less willing to take less important jobs than are married women who might be willing to do that for a while. Men just don’t want to. I can understand that, but there’s just no solution. And I think of other jobs that are hard to fill. Look at all the places that don’t have doctors–part of that is the wives don’t want to go to Willmar, MN, because they can’t get the kind of job there that they want. And the idea that somebody should give something up, I’m afraid, is gone.
AM: And I think that is true. There’s a lot of ‘me first,’ and everything else falls by the wayside.
BR: Some of these things, it sounds as if it’s working, but there are some things about which nobody can do anything, like, I know I had some friends: Max was retired and she had a very high position in the embassy in London, and it was the most embarrassing quarrel that I ever had to have happen right in front of me. They were giving a luncheon, and, he did the cooking most of the time, but he refused to cook for lunch and wait on his wife’s guests. Men at home would understand, and, at that time, in London, there were catering people, but they expected you to find the help to carry the food; they wouldn’t provide anybody to serve it, and there was just no way they could agree on things…doing things this way is the best, because then you can have the chance to connect with people in ways you don’t in an office.
AM: Well, if you look at what’s happened in our state and federal government, one of the complaints about the policy about not allowing any gifts or exchange of materials with people in power, which is a farce of course, [is that] then there’s not an incentive for people to go to places and meet each other. A lot of that has gone, because the money is coming from lobbyists and so on, and their attention is toward fundraising rather than toward making connections with each other and with government entities.
BR: Well, one of the things that’s been bad is that it’s been very hard to explain for years to younger people about protocol, for instance, and they want to be quote “informal” and lots of cultures aren’t as informal as we are, and so they’re insulting somebody, and you just can’t tell them that, look–you just don’t do this sort of thing–because they’ve been able to do anything they wanted all their lives. And all of us brought up in the depression or WW2, we knew there were plenty of things we couldn’t do, and there were plenty of limits, and it gets harder and harder to convince people of that, and, for instance, some of the things that Trump does are just appalling from the point of view of unnecessary. Look at Qatar–he’s gotten into the business of insulting Qatar without realizing there are 10,000 American troops stationed there, but if somebody can tell him he doesn’t pay any attention and Tillerson doesn’t seem to be either strong enough or knowledgeable enough to hold him back, [then] it’s just a catastrophe. And I feel all around the world there are guys and gals doing things that are not in their job description, but there is no chance of it being rectified and, of course, other government agencies have just as many problems. What’s going to happen to our environment? Except, I feel, some of the states, especially California–but here, I think Governor Dayton wants to do it, but some of the Republicans are listening to their Trump supporter people and so even into the Conservation Volunteer there’s so much apprehension about what’s going to happen.
AM: Well, I think, to me, there’s some good news, and I think it goes back to, I mean, I look at the League of Women Voters and our position on the environment, and there are alerts coming out from the US League as well as the Minnesota League to encourage people to participate in contacting their legislators and that kind of thing.
BR: Do you know Jason Lewis?
AM: I’m one who calls his office on a fairly regular basis, and the first conversation I had with a young man in his office was the retreat on how navigable waters were identified for pollution prevention under the Clean Water Act. Obama had expanded it to include ditches and other entities that fed into bodies of water, and one of the first things that Congress did this year was to remove that, and so I called the office and explained to this young man that I was very unhappy about it, and he was saying that, you know, we’ve had so much pressure from municipalities to change that, because they can’t comply, and I said there’s a difference between ‘can’t’ and ‘won’t,’ and then I cited how, until the mid 1990s, Dundas was dumping raw sewage into the Cannon River and how even today the city of Randolph [has] straight pipes right into Shev (?) creek which enters the Cannon River and lake Byllesby about a mile from my house. And he was totally unaware of that, and I said, so what we saw was a municipality doing everything it could to avoid meeting the standards of the Clean Water Act and dealing with its waste product by just sending it down the river and a lot of our pollution is coming from these very intense small acreages where a lot of fertilizer and a lot of pesticides are used–
BR: And lots of animals.
AM: Right.
BR: One of the encouraging things I saw though was I saw, when Trump went out of the Paris Act, some of the Minnesota organizations were so supportive of the right side of things. 3M, General Mills, and Cargill have been in very strong support of the Paris [Agreement], and I thought, well, they are looking at the bottom line, too, but they’re a little more imaginative; they can see down the road what’s happening, but they’ve been very good about that and we should welcome them to support and, I think, of course, California is doing a great job but I think–I hope–we will too.
AM: Well, I think one of the things that his pulling out of the Paris agreement has done is to galvanize a lot of the organizations to work together.
BR: It’s probably a couple dozen farmers who–
AM: Well, there are people who live in town–in Randolph–you know, the little village, and there are people who are simply satisfied with having their septic systems and others who have straight pipes that they haven’t prepared despite the County having tried to bear down on them, but the City itself refuses to collectively work with the Cannon River Watershed Partnership, which has a program–
BR: –A good one.
AM: A great one, to assist small communities to deal with their wastewater treatment plants.
……….
BR: I was a member of the League for the time when my mother and I lived in Northern Virginia. [Our] county had no public place where you could have a picnic, because–you should see it now–rows and rows of townhouses, each uglier than the last, and there’s no place left to have a picnic in the whole county because of a lack of places open to the public and you just couldn’t get many of these people to cooperate in any way; it was very disheartening.
AM: So did the League make an effort to get–
BR: Well–
AM: And they were not successful?
BR: Well, [there was] the League and a couple other organizations, environmental groups and a couple other things, but they just didn’t have what the developers did, but also you had a very conservative Southern mindset, you know, they’re not open to change really and, you know, I had a very good talk with one of my old friends–now deceased–Tom married a young woman from South Carolina and they’re one of the most conservative states in the Union, and when, he was here, he and his wife would bring their bicycles along and they’d go on the trails here, and they loved it, and I said ‘are there not lots of trails in South Carolina?’ and they said there are no trails in South Carolina because nobody wants them [because] it might bring people to town who are not from there. Of course, he says that as a native of Massachusetts. But still I know just what they mean.
AM: Well, there seems to be a fairly strong attitude, in a lot of cultures, where they don’t want to be introduced to anything new, because it’s going to deal with their preconceived notions and upset the apple cart and–
BR: Well, I thought that wasn’t something I read but something I heard and his wife agreed.
AM: And when you came back to Northfield and got involved in the League, what kinds of projects were you most interested in?
BR: Well, Marilynn Carver had one I was really interested in, where we wanted to improve mental health in the county. And there were a number of changes made at that time–you know, there’s the Marilynn House down in that new section of town; I think there were three or four buildings put up that I think are still used, not for people with serious mental problems, and one’s called Marilynn House.
AM: Oh, ok.
BR: And there’s a social worker living in one, and she sees to it that these people take their medications and that there are no crises. And they did a series of interviews with neighbors explaining what this was and, as far as I know, it’s still going on just perfectly ok and it’s a tiny thing too. But for a small number of people, this has been a lifesaver and for their families, too; there are several houses and kind of a group home down there and it doesn’t look like those institutional things. But that is on the main drag as you come in from highway 3 and you turn onto that part of town, and that grew out of a League study.
AM: OK, interesting.
BR: That’s one that stands out in my mind. And then there was the redistricting of Rice County where Northfield was badly outgunned by the rest of the county and that was done eventually. So those were the things that I was particularly interested in. There would be talks on, you know, foreign affairs or something, but just on the basis of right here, those are the two that come to mind that I was most interested in. I was on the committee with Marilyn Carver and she herself had suffered from Depression, and it was very interesting: she was married to a Carleton Professor and they were both Mormons, then they separated, but they stayed living in the same house, but they constructed a separate entrance to the top floor so that they didn’t have to interact.
BR:…I just keep thinking it isn’t absolutely necessary to have a job, you know, to do an awful lot. Molly [Moreland] couldn’t have done those things if she had been working 9-5.
AM: Right. And one of the big challenges for the League now is that very thing is to–
BR: Well you can’t have day meetings anymore.
AM: No.
BR: You have to have off, and then people are usually exhausted and everything else. The trouble with evenings is you’re all just like that. I know in Washington I couldn’t have thought of belonging to the League in the first place; it meant, usually, that I had to drive at night into parts of town I didn’t want to drive through…and I know that I had other friends that had tried to get to the meetings; it’s just hard to do. And I think that all of our organizations and our mitigating organizations need to do things. You used to have launches, you used to have all these things that filled in where people worked together and it’s all gone.
AM: Well, another thing that’s changed is that companies used to sponsor their employees. My husband worked for Northwestern Bell and then AT&T in North Dakota, and we moved around quite a bit, and every place he went, they would have him join the Kiwanis or Rotary, you know, any of these service organizations, to become part of the community. But they would pay all his fees and expenses, and many of the other companies did the same thing, but that’s not a policy anymore.
BR: That’s just what’s happened to us, it’s now the bottom line and people used to be, there used to be things to join, and now it’s retired people who sort of run most of the things here…
AM: Well, one of the things we did this year was try to make the League more attractive to empty-nesters and younger people by scaling back the board so that we have an executive board, and then we have committees [where] you’ll have someone who is a leader of that committee or several people and they’re charged with certain responsibilities, but, rather than have someone say that they’re going to contribute to that for two years or a year, to say they’re going to come in for a special project, work on that project, you know, so they can be much more flexible. This will be the first year we’re trying that.
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KK: You know, I was also curious about–I’m a St. Olaf student myself–so I was wondering about your experiences at St. Olaf when you were there in the 1930s. What kind of stands out to you about your memories of St. Olaf?
BR: Well, I was one of the few kids really interested in international affairs. I had a very good history teacher who had spent a year in Germany under the Nazi time, and, of course, he was very concerned about everything, and so we got a good dose of it which was so rare in those times, because, as I say, the media was simply dominated by people who are isolationist or even more so–look at Lindbergh, you know. So that I remember.
I also had a good German teacher, and this was hard for her because she was quite aware of what was going on, and [she was] trying to find out some explanation, but there were very few, and good correspondence–foreign correspondence–really lacked in our available papers. And then things were so much more strict. Alcohol has always been a problem at both colleges, but, in my day, it was only the boys. Girls didn’t drink for very good reasons, and I just read–I’m on the list for Carleton, for their magazine–and I read, and I thought my friends at Carleton wouldn’t recognize the college, you know, from the articles and [that’s] good in some ways and in other ways not so good. Apparently Carleton had a scandal about excessive drinking. I couldn’t have imagined that happening when I was there in those days. It was never a church college; it was founded by Congregationalists, and that was still an important influence at that time, and you know they were the old puritans. In fact, in the earliest days, Carleton was a more strict college than St. Olaf, and now, of course, present-day Carleton students have no idea of the background of the college–at least a lot of them don’t.
KK: So you said you were one of the few students at St. Olaf who was kind of interested in international issues–
BR: There weren’t many.
KK: Were a lot of students more isolationist at that time?
BR: You know, it was all so remote for them, and their parents even more so, although there were families where the father had fought in the First World War, but they thought that was the war to end all wars. So it was just incredible, and not enough attention had been paid to what was going on then. Minnesota, of course, had a large population that was of German descent, and I can understand the German-American population during the First World War had suffered a certain amount of, not persecution, but very unpleasant things. So the thing is, I can see why people would have a lingering affection for the Germany of the Kaisers. Nobody felt that way about Hitler.
It was just a very different world–the people that were sympathetic were mostly new immigrants, and, of course, there weren’t any Japanese-Americans around here. And one of the things that’s nice about Minnesota–the army wanted to train Japanese-Americans, and the governor promised there would be no harassment here in Minnesota, and there wasn’t, and so they had, I think it was in Shakopee, they had Japanese-Americans training, and then I talked to a couple of Japanese-American women who had served as nurses in the Mayo Clinic and everybody was nice to them.
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AM: Well, this is a League project. Do you have any comments you want to make about the League?
BR: Well, nothing more than what I’ve already said. I hope it can keep going, flourishing, but I think the only people you can have to depend on are the people who retired yesterday. But there are plenty of younger retirees, and they may be looking for, or would be interested in something like the League, because with all the people–the women working all day long–there just isn’t energy or time.
AM: Right.
BR: Especially the younger ones who have children. They’re just overwhelmed
AM: You know, we had a membership gathering in the beginning of May, and it was, you know, a social event at Mary Carlsen’s house, and we had several mothers who brought their teenage daughters who were very interested. And–one of the things–the League has benefitted from the Trump administration because people are looking for a place they can go to get information to share ideas and experiences, and my interest is putting the alerts out so people can see the League does put out really good information with their alerts. And if you call a legislator or a Congressman with good information they tend to listen (or whoever answers the phone does) because they get so much: they get sworn at and treated–the poor kids in the office are treated very badly–but when they get someone who calls in with a sensible argument you may not change the mind of the person of the person who gets elected–
BR: But they know that it’s out there and they’re watching.
AM: That’s exactly right, and I’m hoping that League will take a much stronger role now and, coming up, it looks as if they’re preparing to do that.
BR: Well, and there are so many aspects the League is interested in; well, everything that this administration does–you start out with the environment, voting rights, things like education, those are the big things the League is interested in, and the Congressmen have to be interested in education. They want to be now.
AM: Well, I would certainly hope so.
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AM: Keith, do you have any more questions?
KK: I think I got to all of them.
BR: Oh, ok.
KK: Thank you so much for your time. I learned a lot from you.
BR: Well we talked about lots of wide-ranging things.