Liz Hague here—Marchesa of the Nimble Thimble and glad to be with you and here is my story:

I am born (to quote David Copperfield) in 1931—early in the Great Depression and I didn’t have anything to do with it, either (the Great Depression, that is).

Akron, Ohio is where I began my life. My parents and my sister were born in Italy. My father came here in 1923 and my mother and sister in April 1929. What a year to arrive in this country! Fortunately, even though the Depression hit everyone, my father was able to keep his job at Goodrich and was there his entire working life. We lived in a working-class neighborhood and most men worked at one of the rubber factories. That was life in Akron!

I spoke only Italian until I was about 3 or 4, and when I went out to play with other children, soon learned “American.” My Uncle Frank came to live with us for a while sometime in 1935. He was my father’s brother. He was single and at the time he came to live with us, I had not started school yet. He was appalled that I never spoke Italian when I was home and feared I would forget the language. Since he was a bachelor and working, he promised me a dime every week if I would speak Italian at home. And boy, did I. You can imagine what a dime at that time meant, but my mother made me save it!

In 1938, my Uncle Salvatore (Sam, for short) brought his family here from Italy—his wife, two daughters and two sons. They lived with us for about six months and then bought a house several doors away from us across the street. The two daughters had been to school in Italy (they had reached 3 rd and 5 th grades), and needed to continue their education here. Because the girls didn’t know English, they were put in the first grade at my grade school. By then I was in the second grade and whenever the teacher couldn’t get her “message” through to them, I was sent for to translate. What an ego booster for me! (The boys were only age 2 and 4 and would learn English playing with other children in the neighborhood, as I did.)

In 1941, my Aunt Concetta and her family—husband, a son and a daughter—moved to Akron as well and moved across the street and a few doors away. My mother’s family was now all here and we had some great times together. To this day the cousins are all as close as brothers and sisters.

The neighborhood I grew up in, as I said, was a working-class one, with a true ethnic mixture—Czechs, Polish, WASPS, Hungarian, Italian, etc. What a great way to grow up. Times were hard for everyone but we didn’t know it because everyone had the same kinds of problems. We played ball and my not being very athletic meant I was always the last one to be chosen and always in the outfield. I didn’t really care, because then I didn’t have to work very hard! Only a few kids had roller skates and those skates were those that could be adjusted. I’m sure some of you will remember skate keys and how we could adjust those skates. We all tried to learn from their borrowed skates. Some of us did OK and others of us (me) fell down a lot.

Sometime in the late ‘30’s we had the WPA come through and improve our street—they put in gutters that were fairly deep and what a fun place it was when it rained. We could take off our shoes and follow the water down the hill and in the fall it was a great place to burn leaves and roast marshmallows. The street was still dirt, but the gutters were wonderful! Sounds strange, doesn’t it? If you didn’t have such an opportunity as a kid, you missed out on a whole lot of fun.

No one took vacations then. The most that any of us did was to go visit family in another town (not far, though). Some Sunday afternoons we went to visit my godparents who lived in Wadsworth. They lived on a farm and had an outhouse, which I hated, but loved them and loved to visit them in spite of the outhouse. They kind of took the place of the grandparents I never got to know.

My cousin, Mary and I, grew to be best friends and remained so until her death 12 years ago. We shared everything from the time we were in grade school. Because I was born in January, I was in the B semester class, which meant I started school in January and would have graduated high school in January. Mary and I went to summer school in the 8 th grade and I skipped a half grade while Mary skipped a whole grade, so that we would graduate in June!

High school was fun and I made a lot of friends but I was somewhat shy and self-conscious. I was so envious of those who were “popular” and good looking, etc., not knowing they were going through the same “doubts” and self-esteem problems I was facing. Most of all I hated gym class because we had to wear those awful blue bloomers and because I just couldn’t climb that damn rope! I took Spanish while in high school and did very well because of my knowing Italian.

Sometime in early high school, my mother and father divorced and my sister, her husband and twins came to live with my mother and me. It was a very tough time for my mother—being Italian and Catholic.

All through high school I intended and wanted to go to college. There wasn’t too much money, but my mother somehow scraped together enough to send me to Akron University for two years. I also worked to earn some of the money. I didn’t want to be a nurse or teacher and the one school I did want to attend (a secretarial school who taught one how to work in the diplomatic field) was too far out of my reach, out of town, and even if we did have the money, a nice Italian girl just didn’t go live somewhere else and out of town at that! Therefore, I took some secretarial courses while at Akron U and went on from there following my two years there.

During my time at Akron U, though, I came into my own. I made some wonderful friendships, dated several guys and started going steady with one I met at Spanish Club. We dated for quite a while and broke up when he was drafted. It never was serious, but in the meantime, he had introduced me to his next-door neighbor and friend, Denver Hague, and I remember thinking at the time, “what a strange name!”

I started dating Joe, who lived across the street from both of them! This was purely coincidence. I met Joe through Newman Club and didn’t have any idea all these guys lived near each other! What a good-looking guy Joe was and what a dancer. We went to polka dances, square dances and just plain everyday ballroom dances. But that “romance” didn’t take either. We were just good friends who loved to dance.

My first job after leaving Akron U in 1950 was at Goodrich as a clerk-secretary. After a year I learned of a job at an export company and went there and that started my career of working with international people.

One evening I got a call from Denver, who was studying architecture at OSU, and the rest is history, as they say! This month we will have been married 52 years and I guess he is what is called a “keeper.”

We married on July 18, 1953, following Denver’s graduation, and he left for the Army on July 21 st. Needless to say, there wasn’t much of a honeymoon. Following basic training, he was sent to Ft. Lee, Virginia, where I joined him. I went to work on base as a secretary and learned a whole new way of doing things—the Army way. I worked for a Lt. Col. and a Major. The Major took Denver and I under his wing and became a very good friend. We left the Army in 1955 and moved to Columbus.

I went to work for the Ohio Turnpike Commission just after the turnpike had opened and worked in the Executive Office. What an experience that was! I quit in 1956 and soon found I was pregnant and didn’t bother to look for another job.

We bought a house in Worthington and moved in on Thanksgiving 1956. Our son, Dan, was born in March 1957, and I became the typical suburban housewife—sharing coffee with the neighbors, becoming active in the community through the Worthington Jaycees and later very active in PTA.

Jaycees was truly a life-learning experience, too. Today we have many people we can count as friends from those years we were involved with Jaycees. It was a very positive time for us.

About the time our son, Dan, was 16 I realized that if we were going to send him to college, I’d better think about a full-time job. Off I went to work at an insurance company for about 18 months and since secretaries seldom get promoted, I started looking for another job and got one at Tracy-Wells and that lasted about the same amount of time. Neither of these had anything to do with international work and I soon became bored with them.

Then came an opportunity to work for Adria Laboratories in Dublin (no longer there). Adria was a joint venture between Hercules and Montessori, an Italian company. Their main product was Adriamycin, a chemotherapy drug. My job was with the General Counsel and I grew to love the job and him. I learned an enormous amount about the pharmaceutical industry, as well. (Ironically, when I had breast cancer, I was given Adriamycin as on one of the cancer-fighting drugs. Little did I know that what I was learning about this drug would be of immense interest later on.)

Within two years I had a call from a headhunter telling me there was an opportunity to work for Dresser Industries (International Division). The division was just being formed and what an opportunity to make my own job and to work for the president of the division. I hated leaving Adria, but couldn’t pass this one up. We talked with South Africa in the morning and Australia late afternoon. It was great fun, but it wasn’t a very profitable department and within two years I was out of a job (they dismantled the entire department).

Well, what to do except start looking around again. I must have sent out at least 50 resumes and finally one day I had a call from Liebert Corporation. It was to work for the President of a newly formed international department at Liebert. I got the job because of my knowledge of the two languages. There were 5 of us when we started the department and it grew and grew until we had distributors all over the world and a staff of about 25. What a gem of a person my boss was and what a great company it was to work for. I stayed for almost 17 years until I retired. During that time, because of our wide distributor network, if I wanted to and traveled very much, I could have found a friend in almost any country I visited. And I talked with people from all over the world, as well as acting as hostess at times when there were visitors to our office and they wanted to see some of this place they had hardly ever heard of—Columbus. And my knowledge of geography grew by leaps and bounds at the same time.

In December 1999, I retired and have been active in volunteering ever since. My days are filled with Columbus Literacy Council, Circle of Grandparents in Worthington, Ohio Historical Society, and recently I started a roundtable at the Worthington Griswold Senior Center on the American Revolution. We are in our second year with this project and everyone’s learning a lot about our beginnings and how we became independent.

One of my greatest loves and interest is history—whether it’s American or world. Unfortunately, the world never learns its lessons from what history tries to teach us, but we can always hope, can’t we?

One day last year at a meeting at the Ohio Historical Society, in a conversation with Cyndy Hoskey, I learned that she belonged to a really fun Red Hat group. (I had earlier tried to attend a couple meetings with another group, but found their thinking was too old for me. I never went back.) Cyndy invited me to join and I have enjoyed every minute being with all of you. I love the way this group thinks about everything and I had such fun with the calendar. Can’t wait to do the next one.