Norma Jean Crago, Union County

Interviewee: Norma Jean Crago
Interviewer: Kate Scott
Date of Interview: 11/05/07      
Run Time: Approximately 75M

Cassettes (2)
Biographical Data Form
Oral History Release
Newsclippings: “New Hope Has Most Eighth Graders”; “Norma Jean Crago Keeps Studying Despite Illness”; “Norma Jean Crago, 12, Completes Sixth Grade in University Hospital”; “Accessible to Everyone,” n.p., June 14, 1997
Photographs: 1) Norma at Age 3, 2) Photograph of Norma’s House
Transcript
                   
Norma Jean Crago of Creston, was born in a farmhouse in Union County, Iowa on January 4, 1928. In this excerpt from her oral history interview, Crago reflects on the way her parents and her grandmother handled the sad news of her diagnosis on November 22, 1939. Crago was 11 years old. She remembered, “My father – I never in my life ever saw him cry or be defeated.  He was a strong man – a strong-willed man. They went through that depression and all those things.  When the doctor told him what I had it just killed him almost. My mother, she walked down away from the bed with her back to me and stood there for a few minutes and she turned around and from that day on she braced herself and she more or less just took over. When they took me out of the house that day (my grandmother lived with us) and my grandmother was crying.  It was like a funeral and that’s why I said that everybody thought I was going to die but I knew that I wasn’t.  For some reason, I don’t know how or why, I knew. But, I also knew what I had ahead of me and I also knew that if they felt that bad about this that I had to be the one that would always be upbeat and cheerful and I had to make sure that I shouldn’t complain and be thoughtful about it.”