Kathleen Tripp

Following Dreams

"I always have fresh flowers in my house because it's cheaper than a psychiatrist."

Kathleen Tripp.mp3

Interview with Katheen Tripp and Caitlen Cameron above, also available on Cleveland Voices.

Kathleen Tripp [00:00:40] Oh, well, I was born in a small town called Stratford, Connecticut, which is about sixty miles outside of New York City along the Long Island Sound, which meant that childhood was very much about living in a Cape Cod house with a father who was a very enthusiastic gardener and a mother who was a very enthusiastic cook. So together they comprised, I guess, what one might call a typical New England upbringing. And the kids spent the summers on the beach barefoot and innocent. And from that, Stratford, Connecticut, whose only fame to claim really is that it housed, it's now, it no longer exists, the only American Shakespearean theater in the country. Authentic or bona fide or whatever you want to call it. And it was really quite wonderful with all the actors coming into town in that sort of thing.

Kathleen Tripp [00:02:08] I left at 17 and I went to university, and I studied to be a teacher, and it was the outbreak of the Vietnam War. So I had a little bit of difficulty getting my qualifications because all the protests, all that... Well, all the professors were protesting. So you had to sort of really, you know, meet in a field or something. And finally, I did get the training that I wanted and all of that. And that was in New York State, and after that, I got my I went back to Connecticut to look for my first teaching job. But the jobs were given mostly to males who also had trained to be teachers, but wanted to have a deferment to not fight in the Vietnam War. So there weren't very many primary school teaching jobs available at the time. So I went to work in publishing for three years and it was the most fun I'd had ever because I'd never had a job and really, throughout all of my career, for the most part, with the few exceptions, didn't have a job which allowed me to travel, whereas the publishing job was great for that.

Caitlen Cameron [00:03:20] So what did you do in the publishing job?

Kathleen Tripp [00:03:25] Well, because I was trained to teach small primary school children, I worked in the Education Department and they were publishing, within this small publishing company, they were... They had an education book, and it was our job to go out and sell them to the universities to be used in the courses. So we would go to large meetings, education meetings, and talk with teachers and talk with professors at universities who were teaching teachers and all of that sort of thing. It was great fun. It was really very, very interesting. And then eventually the Vietnam War ended. Eventually. 1974 or whenever it was, and jobs opened up. And I decided that, you know, I had trained to be a teacher and by golly, I wanted to get to it. So I found a job in Connecticut and I stayed there for a couple of years.

Vietnam War

Caitlen Cameron [00:04:21] How did [the Vietnam War] impact you at all? Like your family?

Kathleen Tripp [00:04:35] It made me... Coming from a small town where it was fairly homogeneous, almost completely homogeneous, everyone was white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant to an awakening, a political awakening, that the world was a more complicated place. It was a kind of growing up experience, if you want to think of it that way, broadening in one sense, but also just realizing that the world was a different place than I had imagined. Well, in fact, the world was different, but so was I, if that makes any sense at all. And it, well, it affected a lot of people. It changed the way in which marriages were organized so that the divorce rate was very high during that period of time because people, women's lib and lots of other things were happening where people were starting to say, well, this isn't really what I want. It's just the only choice I had when I was 17.

I've thought it through and I want to do something differently. And so it kind of blew open the way in which people lived and the assumptions that we had and the ones that we grew up with, which was very difficult on a lot of families. And society at large, I think. I'm not saying it wasn't worth it. I'm just saying that it was it happened. And it's part of our national story.

World Traveler

Kathleen Tripp [00:15:40] I retired and John and I spent about eight or nine years just traveling. So we just, you know, we had enough money and nobody needed to work. And so we said, well, let's just go. So we'd go to England for two months and come back and...John traveled a lot for for his work. Conferences and things like that. So he would go to Asia and things like that. But no, we basically, when we lived there, we had a Volvo and we went around in a tent. And we just we just camped. We loved it.

It was wonderful. It was just wonderful. And we'd go through France. And so if people say, you know, if you've been to these big places and the answer's probably not. I mean, maybe here and there, we did a city, but mostly we were in the small towns in the countryside just messing around really. Just going around the chateaus or the churches or the wineries or whatever the case may be always with a swimming pool and some mini golf, you know, kind of thing. So we did that for, well, the twenty years. Seventeen, actually. And yeah. So and then after that we just, we'd travel from here in this house.

Caitlen Cameron [00:17:29] Oh, did you have a favorite place? Like a favorite town that you visited, like fond memories, when you were traveling?

Kathleen Tripp [00:17:36] Ooh, that's difficult. I would have to divide that by climate, I think. Warm weather climate, probably somewhere like Provence. And then over toward the, well, over toward the coast of France, all the way up to Brittany. Saint-Émilion in the south and toward the Spanish border, and then up the coast, I found the French Atlantic coast to be particularly fascinating, and particularly in the northern part where it was more regional, particularly in the food, and it was absolutely wonderful. Everything was, you know, regionally grown, and especially in places like Normandy where the cheeses were so exquisite and all that. And the wines, of course, and Italy, it's hard to beat.

I don't know. We would stay up in the hillside towns in our tent and and then, you know, come down into Florence or whatever, whatever the other places were, we'd go to the museums and do all the tourist attractions if we felt like it. If not, and then, you know, catch a pizza or go back to the camp and cook or something or, you didn't takeaway in those... And of course, you wouldn't do that in a place like Italy!

Where food is paramount to the society. You know, food is life and living. And but I just speaking of that, I do remember one adventure. I don't know why this comes to mind. Just to underscore how much food is part of it all, we were driving along and we had the windows down in the car and we saw this woman with a sort of bow, wooden bow over her, over her neck and carrying two buckets. And she'd been out in the fields and she picked basil.

We put down the windows just to put down the window, so we allow her to cross the road. And as she went by, we could smell the aroma from this basil. [laughs] I mean, I don't know why I haven't thought of that in twenty-five years probably, but it was a pretty, you know, that kind of thing, little things like that. I just so, so important, I think, to the traveling experience, much more so than... We avoided four-star hotels. We couldn't afford them anyway.

Joining the Club and Seeing Change

Caitlen Cameron [00:25:47] How do you see change? What did year did you join?

Kathleen Tripp [00:25:53] 2003. So I came back in 2002 and Bobbie Farrell and Susan Dahm didn't let it go on too long, and said Okay, and invited me in. And I'm very grateful to them for having done so because it's a very, very vitally important part of my life on many, for many reasons, on many levels. The beauty and the commitment and the friendship and all of it. And the way the club lives itself with the way it is itself through the tree projects. And when we die, we plant a tree, but not in a sad way. It's a celebration tree, not a cemetery by any means. It's just... It makes us all so happy. And when we visit, we think of that person and it's such a good thing. And when I think about what I like to have as a memorial to my life and a tree is about as good as I can come up with.

Caitlen Cameron [00:27:05] It will be there hundreds of years, and it continues your legacy.

Kathleen Tripp [00:27:09] Well, and brings beauty. So it gives you something positive to stand on, something very firm, firmer than yourself in your own life. It's just a beautiful thing, and it's good for the environment as well. It helps to clean the air and it's just good, good, good. You go on and on and on and on and gives us all something positive to do and something positive to do with our money and all. It's expensive to look after trees.

[00:31:06] [The club's] just been regenerated and reimagined and in a very, very good way at many. Well, I should give a plug. Many thanks to the new ladies, I think they're all ladies, who have come in and along with the oral histories and the other things that they brought on board, have established a lot of outreach to us. And I am assuming to other people as well, it's still early days and it was Covid. But so. It's very exciting.

So the answer is, how has the club changed, it's getting bigger. It's getting bigger and there's a lot of interest in the club at the moment. And we're having a lot of new members come in. And the first man. There's one man. He's in the Cleveland Orchestra. And he started coming around to help his wife. Young. They were... They're quite young. They're in their thirties, I think. And they started coming around when they knew we were having cleanup days and helping. And several the members got—I'm not one of those people—but several of the other members got talking to them and saw how keen they were. And they said, well, we want to join in. So they brought their names forward and they were sponsored and adopted a tree. And so, yeah, it was a change.

[00:48:55] [The future is] rosy. Because when people are enthusiastic about things and successful with that enthusiasm, it's contagious. And when people go to the Grove and just sit in the Grove or walk in the Grove, no matter what the season, you feel honored to be amidst what I call nature's cathedrals.

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