Linda Woolfolk, Interview

The Muscogee (Creek) Nation
Historic and Cultural Preservation Department Oral History Program

“A Twenty-First Century Pandemic in Indian Country: The Resilience of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Against Covid-19”
As Remembered by: Mrs. Linda Woolfolk
Interview by: Ms. Midge Dellinger
Date: November 15, 2022
Transcription: The Audio Transcription Company
Edited by: Ms. Midge Dellinger
MIDGE DELLINGER: This is Midge Dellinger, oral historian for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Today is November 15, 2022 and I’m at my home in Tulsa, Oklahoma interviewing Muscogee citizen Mrs. Linda Woolfolk, who is at her home in Ruther Glen, Virginia. I’m performing this interview on behalf of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Historic and Cultural Preservation Department for the oral history project entitled A Twenty-First Century Pandemic in Indian Country: The Resilience of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Against COVID-19.
Mrs. Woolfolk, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to do this interview with me. We’re going to begin with some questions about your life and background. I want to begin with where were you born.
LINDA WOOLFOLK: I was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. I believe that Haskell was the name [00:01:00] of the hospital. Or Hastings.
DELLINGER: Hastings?
WOOLFOLK: Yeah, I believe that’s the name of it.
DELLINGER: Okay, Hastings. And now where were your parents living at the time of your birth? Were they there in Tahlequah?
WOOLFOLK: No, they were in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
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DELLINGER: Muskogee. Now who was your father? Will you please share about your father and his life?
WOOLFOLK: My father was Bruce Allen Nelson. He was born in Duluth, Minnesota and we just found out recently a lot about his background because who we thought was our grandfather, his father, was actually not. As young kids they don’t share that information with you and doing research along with all of the things they have now [00:02:00] on the computers, we were able to find relatives. We ended up going to their family reunion in Minnesota, Duluth, Minnesota. My father was married—his father’s name was Ruben, his mother’s name is LaVinia Nelson. They met in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and he took her back to Minnesota. After about two years in Minnesota he was not very nice to her, so she was rescued.
She got rescued really by a Mormon family, they hid her out, and got hold of her parents. Her parents sent money, and they put her on a train, and took her back to Oklahoma. There she met my grandfather that we know, his name was Cleveland Nelson, and [00:03:00] that’s how my father got back to Muskogee, Oklahoma.
DELLINGER: Just realizing my microphone wasn’t on. I would like for you to share as well about your mother and her life. From a previous conversation your mother lived a very busy and colorful life, so would you please talk about her?
WOOLFOLK: My mother is Sarah Louise Hope Nelson. She was born in Pierce, Oklahoma or Salem, Oklahoma. That area is kind of, you know, one street over and
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you’re in Salem. [00:04:00] She was born to Beaden and Matilda Francis Hope. She was born on March 11, 1923.
Sarah was the first of the three children in her family, then her brother, then her sister. They all were raised actually in Oklahoma and Kansas. She met my dad, Bruce Allen Nelson, in Muskogee, Oklahoma. They were married and had four children. The oldest is Martha, Mary, who is deceased, myself, and Rebecca. During their first couple years of marriage they lived in different places. They were in Detroit, Michigan where she actually was able to—she got a part-time job at we [00:05:00] believe it was Motown, the beginning of Motown, where she just set up the room for recording music. Because she was always saying that she met Cab Calloway and some other musical people. From there they moved back to Muskogee.
Then we lived in Wichita. When we were in Wichita is when my mother actually—when she was in high school she came down with either Scarlet Fever or Typhoid Fever and was unable to finish high school. That’s when she met my dad and of course their lives began. Back in Wichita my mom and dad, when I was in high school, got a divorce, and my mom had been working for Boeing Aircraft at the time, and she worked twenty-six years at Boeing Aircraft. [00:06:00]
She was a very talented young woman, always venturing out to do things that were different at work. She and three others, I believe, were picked to work on the Apollo 11. They were technical sealers at the time. They were able to seal that capsule, and they were able to put a small mark, not their name or an initial, just a small mark that they would remember. She was honored in doing that, she received a pin, a certificate, also
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she received a beautiful necklace with the Apollo 11 on it, so my sister Rebecca has all that.
My mother decided after she [00:07:00] retired from Boeing Aircraft that she wanted to go back to school and get her GED. After twenty-six years of raising children, and working at Boeing Aircraft, and going through all the things that she did, she went back and got her GED. That wasn’t enough for my mom. She went back and started at Conners State College and went there for two years. That was in Warrenton, Oklahoma. Then she went to Northeastern and that’s when my mom really bloomed. She made Who’s Who in College Students, she was on the Dean’s List. She ended up going back after she got her teaching degree and was teaching for a while, went back, got her masters [00:08:00] in special education, because she said she always raised four special children. That was her reason for it.
At the school she was teaching at in Dewar, Oklahoma, they really didn’t have a program per se for Special Ed children. Her and one other teacher decided they were going to approach the school board and the school and they were the ones that started initially this program where it was for Special Ed children.
She was working also on her PhD when she became sick and she had a heart attack, then she had a stroke, and so she never was able to finish her PhD. I think she was only about six, eight hours away from having that. [00:09:00] But she was a go-getter. My mom could fix anything. I remember our car broke, it was one of those—I think it was a ’57 Chevy or Plymouth where it had push buttons and the buttons would stick. My mom took the panel apart, went out and bought the part for the car, and replaced it, and
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fixed the car. She was always that kind of a person. She would take a radio apart and fix it. She just enjoyed that type of things that if I can fix it, I’m going to do it. She was a wonderful mom, couldn’t ask for a better mother. She always made sure that she went to see her children no matter where we were. My little sister Rebecca and I were stationed overseas. I was in Germany and [00:10:00] Becky was in Italy. I remember mom coming over, and I had gotten her this big bunch of roses and flowers to give to her when she got off the plane, and she was like a movie star, everybody kept saying, “Who is she? Why is she getting all these flowers?” We kept waving and yelling. We had the grandchildren with us. She thoroughly enjoyed herself. She stayed a month between Germany and between Italy. Becky and I took her everywhere we could possibly take her and she thoroughly enjoyed it. And would talk to anybody. She didn’t care who it was at a restaurant, she was just always curious about things that were happening in other countries.
Unfortunately she passed on. [00:11:00] We miss her terribly because she was always an inspiration. I have four or five letters that she wrote to me as an adult that when I really get depressed or down in the dumps, I have a box in my basement that I call my “Mama Box” and I will go down and I will read these letters. They are just inspiring. She talks about I’m so proud of all of your accomplishments and what you’ve done in your life. I do miss her, I really do. I know Becky does because Becky is living in my mom’s home now, so she’s reminded more so of her than any of us.
DELLINGER: What year did your mom pass away? [00:12:00]
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WOOLFOLK: It’s been about maybe eight or nine years ago.
DELLINGER: Sitting here listening to you talk about your mom, I think I would have loved to have known your mother.
WOOLFOLK: She was awesome. Nobody was a stranger, everyone was welcome. In fact, I always ask my kids, I say, “What do you remember about grandma?” And every last one of them would say she smelled like fried chicken because she was always cooking when we would be coming. She loved to wear her aprons, she was an apron wearer, and so she would be in there cooking, and they say, “Yeah, she smelled like friend chicken.”
DELLINGER: (laughs) That’s great. Now when we talked previously, you had mentioned some things, some recognition that your mom has at [00:13:00] the Smithsonian. Oh, and then isn’t it the National Air and Space Museum as well?
WOOLFOLK: She came to visit me when I was living in Woodbridge, Virginia and I had found out that the Apollo 11 was being displayed at the Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. We took her up and the moment she walked in the door, because it was sitting right up front, she got really emotional, started crying, and she walked around that capsule I know ten times if not more looking for this symbol that she had placed on it. She finally found the spot where she had placed her symbol and we
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have pictures of where she— [00:14:00] my son and her were standing there and she’s pointing to it.
Also when they were getting ready to build the Smithsonian National Indian Museum, I got the information, and I had my mom’s name put on the wall. You could have peoples’ names put on the wall. Unfortunately she did not get back to see me or to see that, but I did take pictures of it on the wall. When Becky comes to visit we always go up there. We have pictures of Becky pointing to the name. It was just a real honor to do that for my mom because she meant so much to us. But it was one of those things that I wanted to do for her, but I was really hoping she’d be able to come up and see it herself that she was actually in a Smithsonian, [00:15:00] her name as a Creek Native.
DELLINGER: Those are amazing things. Just in learning these things about your mother and with the Apollo 11, it’s been so, I don’t know, cool to me to know that this Muscogee woman from Salem, Oklahoma did all these amazing things in her life. So thank you so much for sharing that. I feel like I may be cut you off a little bit too soon when you were talking about your father. Is there anything else that you would like to share about him and his life?
WOOLFOLK: My dad, he ended up going to two years, he went to a junior college, and his degree was in auto mechanics. [00:16:00] He was able to, after leaving Detroit—he worked for Joe Lewis when he was in Detroit, and after leaving Detroit, and leaving that job, he opened his own auto mechanic shop, and he had a very large one. It had five—he had two garages for diesel engines and the other three were just regular. Plus he was able
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to get contracts through the state police. I was his helper because I was the tomboy of the family. I actually got to sit in a state trooper car, so I thought I was really cool. What other kid can sit in a state trooper car and turn on the siren? So he let me turn the siren on.
He had a good business going on until his— [00:17:00] he ended up instead of— they had a gas station in between and when that gas station went out of business, they ended up putting a liquor store in, and that was his downfall once he got starting to drink and things like that. But for years I was a kid in high school that I didn’t know what kind of car I’d be driving from one week to another because he would always take people to small claims court if they couldn’t pay for the automobile.
The best week I ever had was I got to drive what they call a Popeye Corvette. I was really cool, I just circled the school because I—and then the following week he gave me a station wagon. I had to park a couple blocks away. I didn’t know what kind of car I’d be driving [00:18:00] from one week to the next.
But I was his helper. He actually taught me how to put on brake pads, so that was probably child labor, he should have been paying me. When I got married, I knew a little bit about cars, I knew how to change a flat. Even though I try to play helpless with my husband, I could do it if I had to. My dad was a wonderful man until he got with the alcohol. He was a good provider for the family.
DELLINGER: You’ve briefly already mentioned your siblings, but I’d like for you to go back and if you would, give their full names, and tell me a little bit about each one of them. [00:19:00]
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WOOLFOLK: My oldest sister is Martha White Huling. She was married twice. She had three children by her first husband and one by her second husband. She went to Northeastern, her and her first husband were teachers. Then she ended up moving with her second husband to New Mexico. He had something to do with the university down there, dean of students or dean of something. I’m not sure what his exact title was.
Anyway, my sister did very well in her teaching. In the summers she would have me helping her. We made a dinosaur. [00:20:00] Every year she would make something different. She taught third grade and every year she would have me in her classroom making things. We had a dinosaur that we made out of paper-mache that the kids, if they did really well, could pick a book, and sit inside this dinosaur and read. One year we had brought in one of those old fashioned bathtubs, and had to pad it, and that’s what the kids went in to read. So every year she had a different thing and she always had me as her worker bee. Whatever she was doing, I got to help her out. Until I got married and then she couldn’t use me anymore.
Right now she is unfortunately in Little Rock, Arkansas with her children, all her sons, and she is in the first stages [00:21:00] of dementia. They have her in a home. I was just down there this year seeing her. She’s doing pretty good. She has her good days and her bad days. But overall her children are taking care of her and her grandchildren are there also. She’s got a lot of family around her to help her out.
My sister Mary, she passed away probably five years ago. I don’t remember the year. She was a federal worker, she worked in the hospital in Wichita, Kansas for— between Wichita, Kansas and Oklahoma City, she worked with the VA people, military folks. [00:22:00] Then she had a heart attack and was unable to continue to work, so she
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was disabled. She lived in Arlington, Texas. I enjoyed going to visit her because she lived right behind the Cowboys Stadium. They grandfathered this one group of homes back there that were for seniors. I remember going to her home, and sitting on her balcony, and listening to Paul McCartney. He had a concert but it was so loud that I had a free ticket sitting on her balcony. She died of a heart attack unfortunately.
Then it’s me. I’ll talk about myself later. Rebecca was the baby. There’s a twelve year difference [00:23:00] between Rebecca and myself. Becky was a very spoiled child. If she couldn’t get it from her mom she would call us and say, “Oh, I’ve just got to have that dress,” or “Oh, I’ve just got to have those shoes,” and one of her sisters would always come through to make sure that Becky had what she needed. But she was the one that stuck with mom during that time with my mom when she was going to college. She would go to school, they lived near—in fact, I believe the name of the school that Becky went to was Sequoyah. She hung with mom and she was there the entire time from college to college following my mom.
She ended up [00:24:00] marrying and then going into the Air Force and did very well. She retired and ended up coming back and spending most of her time in Texas, now she’s in Oklahoma. She’s a wonderful sister and I’m so proud of her because she is actually going back to college, taking a few courses, which I think is really going to help her in the long run. Of all things, I said, “What are you taking?” and she says, “Grant writing.” I said, “Lord have mercy. That’s not easy.” I could only imagine. Grant writing? But she’s good at it. She’s very outgoing. That would be a good word.
Then myself? [00:25:00] I went to Northeastern. Actually I started off in El Dorado, Kansas in a junior college there. Then I went to Bacone there in Muskogee,
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Oklahoma, and then I went to Northeastern. Unfortunately I did not finish my degree, which I’m in the process, I’m hoping soon that I can go back out and at least finish my degree because I can hear my mom now cussing at me that you need to get that degree.
That’s one of my goals, hopefully before I leave this earth, is to have my degree. I met my husband in Wichita, Kansas and I have followed him around for over twenty-three years in the military. We have lived overseas, we have lived [00:26:00] in Fort Riley, Kansas, there’s just a number of posts that we lived in. We were even at Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Bragg in North Carolina. But we moved twice when we were in Europe and I thoroughly enjoyed that because it was like a paid vacation. We would get up on Sunday mornings, go to church, have brunch, and take our children to a castle, or down the Rhine River, just different places so they can say that when they were overseas, at least they saw some things. That was important to me that my children broaden their horizons.
In fact, my children ended up going more places with the schools in Europe than I did. They have more stamps on their passports [00:27:00] than we did because my son was into wrestling, my daughters were cheerleaders. They were all over the place. I thoroughly enjoyed following my husband. Like I said, it was a paid vacation, if I didn’t like the house, I knew in two years or three years I’d have a new one. The hardest part was working for me. I would have to take part-time jobs. I was a secretary, I was a babysitter in some places, it was just a number of things.
In 1988 when we came back from Europe to Woodbridge, Virginia, that’s when I told my husband, my children were all—my son was graduating, my daughter was going to be graduating, the oldest one, [00:28:00] the following year, so we only had really one
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at home, that I was going to— this is for my career, I wanted it to take off. That’s what I did. I started off as a GS5 Clerk Typist and ended up as a GS12 training officer for the Army. I had a number of different jobs, I really thoroughly enjoyed them. With my last job I got to work with Scotland Yard, I got to work with the FBI, and I did a lot of TDY traveling. They would say, “You want to travel?” And I still travel. I just got back from Houston. I like traveling and seeing different parts of the United States that I haven’t [00:29:00] seen before. There are still places that I still want to go that I have not been.
We ended up spending the last eighteen years, my husband went overseas by himself, I didn’t go with him because the children were still in college, and my youngest was graduating from high school, so we made that sacrifice. I have had an enjoyable twenty-three years following him around because there are times that we run into people on the street, just like on Veterans Day, believe it or not. A lot of restaurants were giving away free dinners to the veterans, so we went out, they ask you, [00:30:00] “Would you like to sit with someone?” We said, “Sure.” Come to find out, the young man that we sat with was actually from the Richmond area, Richmond, Virginia, he had been a lot of the places that my husband had been, and they had a lot of things in common because my husband was a helicopter pilot. So they had a lot of things that they talked about because they were in places that they had been in the same places together. Not together but, you know, different times.
I cannot complain about my life. It’s been wonderful. The only time it was a little iffy was when they shut us down and I couldn’t travel.
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DELLINGER: I want to go back [00:31:00] because I have some questions for you based on some of these things that you just shared. Now where did you graduate from high school?
WOOLFOLK: Wichita, Kansas.
DELLINGER: And which high school was that?
WOOLFOLK: Wichita East.
DELLINGER: And what year would that have been?
WOOLFOLK: May 23, 1966.
DELLINGER: You remember the date.
WOOLFOLK: Yes. (laughter) I thought I was grown, you know?
DELLINGER: Then you went off to college, which you shared. You met your husband there in Wichita. I’d like for you to share, tell us your husband’s name, and just share a little bit more about him if you would.
WOOLFOLK: Sure. My husband’s name is Rogers J. Woolfolk. He’s originally from Caroline County, Virginia. This is the county that we live in now. [00:32:00] In fact, he
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was born probably a mile and a half from where our home is now. We are on his grandfather’s—his grandfather gave him his farm when he was a young man and so that’s where we built our home. And we have thoroughly enjoyed it.
We actually built the house and didn’t live in it off and on for about two or three years because he had retired, but I refused to retire. There were certain things I still wanted in a house and you have to have money to put all those wonderful little luxuries that you want. So I worked for an extra couple of years just to help out.
He went to school, he graduated from Virginia State here in Petersburg, Virginia. [00:33:00] He had his fixed wings license at that time, he enjoyed flying, so he was flying a small—just a small aircraft that sat I think two people or three people. When he went into the Army, that was the one thing he wanted to do was fly. He ended up after about two years getting into the aviation program and he flies anything that he can get behind. The Cobra was his favorite, that was a gunship, the Healey, Chinook, anything. He even flew a few fixed wings. He thoroughly enjoyed it.
It was a real honor for him as a captain, he was at the Pentagon, he was actually [00:34:00] given a box with only a few things in it. I think it was like a piece of a parachute, a piece of a uniform, just bits and pieces. Actually this came from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He didn’t know it at the time, but they asked him if he could possibly identify any of the things in this box. He did a lot of research on it and he was able to identify the actual—this young man I think was Air Force and they were able to identify him eventually. That was one of the things that he had done.
He also was able to work on the display that they have at the Smithsonian for the Tuskegee Airman. He was very, very fortunate to have some important things in his life
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[00:35:00] that also happened. I’m very proud of him. He’s done an excellent job as far as his military career and a father. He even worked for the State Department after he got out. That was his job at the State Department and he still had things to do with aviation, which he thoroughly enjoys.
He got to fly some of the new helicopters, the Apache, and all that that they brought out. In fact, that was the one thing that right now, in fact, if you put an Apache or any kind of helicopter in my yard, he’d be out there. (laughs) He loves them. In fact when
they fly over the house a lot of times he’ll be out there just looking, dreaming that it was him. [00:36:00] But he retired as lieutenant colonel and then he worked for about twelve years as a civilian federal worker for the State Department.
DELLINGER: Wow, yeah, thank you for sharing those things about your husband Rogers. Definitely those are some amazing accomplishments for him. How many years have you been married?
WOOLFOLK: We just celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary in February. DELLINGER: Yay, congratulations.
WOOLFOLK: We’re working on fifty-one.
DELLINGER: (laughs) Right. I’d also like for you, if you would, to talk more in detail about your children. [00:37:00]
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WOOLFOLK: My oldest is David Allen Woolfolk. David has—he didn’t want to go to college, so he’s had a number of jobs, and he’s done very well. He now works for Dole, I think it’s called, sugar company, in Baltimore, Maryland. He was married for a very short time and that didn’t work out. So he is a single man and doing very well, and checks on his parents all the time because he’s the closest.
Then there’s Barbara, my oldest daughter, she lives in Orlando, Florida, and she works for Disney. Which is one of my favorite hangouts, I love Disney. [00:38:00] I try to go visit her at least twice a year. Her and her husband Kevin Robinson, they have two sons, Kevin and Dylan, and they are both in high school now and doing very well. In fact, my oldest grandson Kevin tells me I need to come down and let him—he’s got his learner’s permit and he needs to drive his grandma around. I’m going, hmm, if you drive anything like your mom, I don’t know.
Then my youngest daughter is Rachel Hume, she’s a registered nurse. Her husband is an orthopedic surgeon and they both live in [00:39:00] Houston. Rachel was actually active duty for a while. She was active duty for probably five years and worked at Walter Reed with the veterans, which she thoroughly enjoyed. She has two children, Mariah, which just turned fifteen, and her youngest son is John, he’s eleven. In Texas they have this program where they ask the children what would they like to be in the future and they kind of have at least one course during their high school time each year towards that. So when they graduate they have [00:40:00] at least one or two credits in college. She wants to be a veterinarian, so this year has really been a challenge for them. She decided she wanted to take care of a sheep. Her sheep’s name is Magnolia Honey.
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I got to go down and I had to make a sign for Magnolia Honey to hang on the little gate. Every morning this young lady gets up at five o’clock, drives about ten miles to a barn, and takes care of her sheep, comes back home, goes to school. And then in the evenings they have to do the same thing, go out, and take care of the sheep. She’s doing very well. I said she’ll either decide she wants to be that or not wants to be that. But she seems to be doing very well. And I had a ball [00:41:00] watching her take care of this sheep. Her brother wants to—he is eleven. He hasn’t quite decided what he wants to do. He’s got a couple of years still to think about it.
All my kids are doing very well, which is a blessing nowadays. They’re able to maintain themselves. Because I know some of my friends, their children had to come back home. But I’ve been very blessed to say that my kids are doing very well for themselves.
DELLINGER: Very good. Now you mentioned that you lived in two different places when the family was in Europe. Can you be more specific about where you were in Europe?
WOOLFOLK: [00:42:00] My husband’s first assignment was in Wiesbaden, Germany. We lived in a little town called Delkenheim. It was close enough that he could ride a bike to the back of where he had to go into the gate of the military installation. So he was a bike rider because the only car we had at the time was a great big conversion van and German streets are not made for conversion vans. We eventually got a smaller car that we
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could maneuver the streets. The Germans were really curious about our van. They would walk over and look at it and want to look inside.
Then we lived in Giessen, Germany, and lived in [00:43:00] Langgöns. He of course had to drive then. But I was still working—that’s when I had started working with the Air Force, so I had to drive about sixty-five miles to my job back in Wiesbaden. But of course, the autobahn didn’t take me any time to get there. I learned how to get out there and as they say run with the best of them. Not fast-fast, but fast enough to keep up with them. We thoroughly enjoyed both of our places that we lived. In fact, the first house we lived in, I had never seen a potato [00:44:00] keeper, I guess you could call it. When you bought potatoes in Germany, you bought them by the I want to say twenty-five pound bag, and you could take them back, and there was this place in the basement that you just poured the potatoes in, and you could take them out, and I never had a rotten potato. I don’t know how they did it, but we were fortunate enough to have even a wine cellar in this house.
We didn’t want to live on post, I wanted to live out in the economy so we could learn the language and see how German people lived, you know, if they’re any different. My kids would be out in the courtyard of our home speaking in German, learning German from the German children, the neighbors, and they’d be learning English from my children. [00:45:00] It was very educational for my children to be there. Send them to the local bakery, which was right around the corner. But their sweets are not like our sweets here in the United States. They’re not as sweet like our cakes, but they’ve very good, very good.
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We thoroughly enjoyed it. I had never been to a castle to eat a gourmet dinner. So we tried to take advantage of everything and traveling to Venice, to Spain. My son went on a trip to Barcelona, my children every Easter week would be in, what is that island, there’s an island off of Spain, Majorca, they went for a week. [00:46:00] Our kids really when they came back to the United States, a lot of people, especially my youngest child, we had been to all these places and the first thing they asked, I think she was in the fifth grade when we came back, and they said, “Oh, what did you do this summer?” And she said, “Oh we went to Spain, Italy, blah, blah, blah, Venice.” And they said, “No, you didn’t.”
When my kids were in military school it was different because all those children had the same, basically, background, because their parents had traveled. The DoDEA schools were a little bit different. So coming back and my children adjusting to regular high school, it was a little different for them by them being military children. Really I noticed [00:47:00] their friends—they ended up having friends that their parents were military also. So they understood when you say, “Oh yeah, I spent the summer in Venice,” they would understand.
DELLINGER: Okay. I feel like we kind of just skimmed the surface of your grandparents and I’d like to go back to them ask you to share a little bit more, if you would, about your grandparents, and what you remember about growing up with them.
WOOLFOLK: With my dad’s parents, we would go down and spend—every summer we would spend a couple of weeks in Oklahoma when we were in Wichita. [00:48:00] That
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was kind of a summer thing for us. We would go down—when they were much younger, they lived on a farm, so we had the horses, and the cows, and we had to milk cows, and all that. That was fun. The only fun part wasn’t—was killing a chicken. My grandmother would say, “Go out and give me a couple of chickens. “Really? Okay.” But we would do that during the summer with my dad’s.
Then when they moved off the farm, when they moved into the city, I actually stayed with them when I was going to Bacone and to Northeastern, so I was able to spend a lot more time with my grandparents. My grandfather just spoiled me rotten because he would make sure my car was warmed up every morning and full of gas. [00:49:00] I was kind of a rotten kid, and my grandmother made sure I had breakfast, and had dinner on the table when I would get home. They did spoil us. They really did.
Now my mom’s, I spent as a baby, I was probably between the ages of three and five, I stayed there down on their farm, which is right there outside Henryetta, when I was a child. I had problems speaking because her mom was an older woman and didn’t speak any English whatsoever, she spoke just strictly Creek. So when I did start school I had a few problems because I wanted [00:50:00] to speak Creek and now I wish I had kept it up. Becky is still trying to teach me a few words.
But I stayed with them when I was a small child and then they got divorced so I would spend my time, when I would go down and see my mom, so my children could meet their grandfather, I mean my grandfather. They got to spend time with him too down in Henryetta. As far as my grandmother, my grandmother had moved to Wichita, Kansas and we were there all the time. We spent more time with her than any of our parents.
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I thoroughly enjoyed being raised up around her because she had—actually my mom’s mom [00:51:00] was married three times, so she had three sets of children. After my mom, her brother Beaden and Christine, then there were six boys, and then two girls from a separate marriage. So we always had someone to play with. But she was—my grandmother did not play when it came to her kids because they were all boys, you know, very mischievous kids. But she was always very sweet to me. I can’t complain about my grandma. She was a tough cookie. And her sons, she has [00:52:00] four sons that are left out of all her children, and three of them are in California, and one is in Arizona, my uncles.
DELLINGER: During our previous conversation, you talked about one of your grandmothers, I can’t remember which grandmother, who had the Sunday meal every Sunday? That was a great—
WOOLFOLK: That was my dad’s mom. She was a domestic worker and she worked for an attorney as a domestic maid and also a doctor part-time. It was mandatory that when we were there on Sundays, at that time you wore the stockings with the line down the back that you had to hook onto a girdle, so we had to be checked out going to church, and she said, “You don’t carry gloves, you wear gloves.” So we were raised with the gloves and the hats, so it was mandatory that we did that. We would come home and you could not change clothes. Because I was a tomboy, I hated dresses, I wanted my jeans. Of course I had to stay in my dress, and she would make us sit down to dinner, and that’s when we learned really etiquette for going out and eating because most families
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nowadays are in such a speeding, you know, I’ve got to go here, I’ve got to go there, you grab a sandwich, blah, blah blah. You don’t really sit down as a family. But that’s one thing that I tried to do in raising my children is sit down at dinnertime.
Now, my husband wasn’t always there because of his job, but I sat down with my children and we ate dinner. Then you could get up, and go, and do whatever else you had to do. But that was one [00:54:00] thing that my grandmother, especially on Sunday, she might put three or four forks on the table. She was teaching us everything that she had actually learned from being a domestic maid. Which was helpful—I know it was helpful to me because I was actually thrown into a military—my mother’s sister, Aunt Christine, was married to a military person, so there were always—my cousins were [00:55:00] basically raised in Madrid, Spain, is where they were located a lot. I didn’t know much about military, so my first outing was a formal dinner with the military. People at the table, I was always taught that if the thing is served, you have to wait till that entire table is served. That is proper etiquette before you start. I was lucky that I knew that. There were some people at the table that went ahead and ate.
But you’d be surprised. Unfortunately my husband, [00:56:00] being the only Black officer in this organization, they kind of look at you like hmm, what are you going to do next. I learned very quickly that as much as I wanted to put my elbows on the table and eat like I want to eat, I knew that number one, I was representing myself, and then my family, and I didn’t want to misrepresent my family. But I thoroughly enjoyed those. At the time I thought it was a pain in the tushy, my grandmother wouldn’t let me put my jeans on, but the lessons that you learned from that, I still use today. [00:57:00]
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I probably mentioned I’m with a group out of Northern Virginia that we do a debutante ball every two years. We are working now with sixteen girls and I’m one of those that does the etiquette part of it because we want to make sure that they know how to properly sit down and eat because a lot of people now don’t sit down as a family and eat. It’s always busy.
DELLINGER: Why don’t you go ahead, if you’d like, because I was coming to this question anyway, to ask you how you do like to spend your time in Ruther Glen, and I know this organization that you [00:58:00] just mentioned is one of the things you do there. Will you go ahead and mention the name of that organization? And you can talk about it a little bit more if you’d like.
WOOLFOLK: The name of the organization is Women in Community Action and it started off with actually four professional women that decided that they needed something in their community, up in the Dale City area of Virginia, for children to do. The majority of them at that time were educators and we have from doctors, to some of them are just secretaries, it just depends, and our group right now is up to twenty-three women. We all have different educational backgrounds, some are teachers, some hold PhDs. [00:59:00] But we decided it was something we needed to do for our community, and it didn’t matter if you were pink, blue, or yellow, it was something for our children in the community that they could enjoy. Basically this organization, we teach them etiquette, we take them on college tours, we take them to plays. Because some of them have not even been introduced to any outside things that their parents would take them to.
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At the end of all this, we work with them for six months, we teach them a dance routine, which they do, and they all are dressed in white dresses. We have this debutante ball. We normally have [01:00:00] anywhere from 300 to 400 people attend. We end up giving scholarships also. Since I have been in the organization we have had, if I’m not mistaken, right at 500 debutantes go through. I was a debutante when I was in high school. I was able to get with an organization, my mom made sure that—my older sisters didn’t want to do it, but I said my girlfriends were doing it, and I thought it would be fun. I was a debutante in Wichita, Kansas. Also my youngest daughter, Rachel, was a debutante with this organization, Women in Community Action. We have a lot [01:01:00] of our debutantes, believe it or not, I think out of all those that have been debutantes, only about six or eight have not finished college, because we check up on them. We send them little notes during the year, how are you doing, sometimes we put $10, $15 in it to help them get a meal, or a soda, something like that. But anything to encourage the children to a better life, to get out there and be go-getters.
That’s the main part, that we want them to be educated, we want them to do well, and because we have so many families nowadays that—I don’t know how to say this nicely, but [01:02:00] remember how we used to have, maybe you don’t remember, but an older woman of the family like a grandmother, or what they used to call a “Big Mama”, that would basically tell you, you don’t do that. But now look at the kids with guns, and drugs, and our young ladies out on the street. We teach them how to dress successfully. You don’t wear the jeans that are below your hips. You teach them to come in with a nice crisp white blouse on with a beautiful navy blue suit, or something like that, or a black suit, and not short short skirts for an interview. We just try and help them
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out is what this organization does and that’s why I’ve been a member since 1989. [01:03:00] It’s wonderful. I enjoy working with the young ladies.
This year we’re going to start a new program. I found out that we could lay Christmas wreaths on the—we’re going to be doing Quantico Cemetery there in Quantico, Virginia, we’re going to lay wreaths on all of the headstones. And as you go by you say, “I appreciate your service,” and then you lay the wreath down. We’re going to do that this year, which we haven’t done before. But I think it’s important that they learn these things to appreciate the freedoms that we have here in the United States. I personally think everyone should live overseas for a year because they don’t play when it comes to—[01:04:00] they will arrest you in a heartbeat, they don’t care what your age is in Germany, they will put a fifteen year old in jail if they do something, it’s just we need to come back to the United States and appreciate the freedoms that we know.
I’m looking forward to working with these young ladies. We’ve already had two meetings and it’s a very nice group of young ladies. We have two sets of twins. We’ve never had twins before, so this is going to be new for us.
DELLINGER: Okay, thank you for sharing. Yeah, that sounds like very important work. You’ve been doing it for many years now, so obviously it’s been important to you. It sounds like it keeps you busy.
WOOLFOLK: It does.
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DELLINGER: [01:05:00] Well, so listen, I think we’re going to go ahead at this point and do our little transition here. I want to learn about your experiences and your thoughts about the COVID-19 pandemic, so we’ll jump into some questions here about that. Here in the U.S. we’re now almost at the end of our third year of COVID-19 being in existence. Do you remember when and how you first heard about the COVID-19 virus?
WOOLFOLK: Yes, it was on television. They had several doctors but they were saying this is for real, folks, this isn’t something you need to play with. My husband and I immediately [01:06:00] signed up—we went to the military, and we got our shots. I believe it’s important, I wanted to be able to see my grandchildren graduate and possibly even get married, so there were things I wanted to do in the future. If you didn’t believe what these doctors were telling you, and then we didn’t have very good news out of the Washington D.C. area at times, it was a joke at times, that I thought was very important, and people didn’t believe it.
I highly encourage my—in fact, my children, my daughter especially, the one that’s a registered nurse, she said, “You need to go now. You need to go and take your shot. This is not something to play with.” [01:07:00] Then we saw just in our church alone we have lost, gosh, the first year I think the count was like maybe twenty-seven people. And all of them were not elderly, they were young people that refused, and didn’t believe that it was for real. I still, when I travel, I’m masked, and a lot of times even now I go to the stores and I still have my mask with me. Because you hear someone coughing in the background you go, oh gosh. I don’t know if it’s a regular cough, are they spreading germs? [01:08:00] I try to be very cautious.
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I still have my sanitizer hooked to my purse, so I use a lot of that. I think it’s important that people—it’s not something to play with when it comes to your health. We would watch television because once they shut down everything you weren’t able to really—other than the phone—you didn’t communicate with people. Our churches shut down. To go to the grocery store you almost wanted to be gloved up, face mask, mask on, head covered, everything, because you didn’t know. I think we had some misinformation [01:09:00] from certain individuals, which I think was really wrong because it’s nothing to play with, not when it comes to your health, and you possibly getting sick and dying.
DELLINGER: I want to go back to something, when you mentioned that you and your husband went immediately to get vaccinated, you’re talking about in 2021 as soon as the vaccines rolled out?
WOOLFOLK: Yes, as soon as they rolled out.
DELLINGER: In 2020 when we all first started learning about the COVID-19 virus and we were seeing what it was doing to people, were you concerned about it making its way—the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Reservation, of course, is your homelands, [01:10:00] did you give that any consideration, and the people here in the Muscogee Nation?
WOOLFOLK: Yes, I did, because in speaking to Rebecca, we actually had a conference call with our family out of California, Texas, we just had a Zoom meeting that we said
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we’re not telling you how to—we don’t care if you’re republican, democrat, we don’t care what you are politically, but we want you to go out and get more—if you don’t believe this information then research it, you need to make sure that it’s for real and check with your doctor because I have a couple of uncles that I don’t know if they would be able to take it because of their illnesses. [01:11:00] We tried to stress to our family as a whole that this is nothing to play with and we wanted to be able to see them in the future. As soon as we were able to get the shots, I would say the majority of the family did.
We still have a couple that are hold-outs, I guess you could say. When we finally did the last couple of months, last couple six months or more, opened up things where you were having more functions in your home, they opted not to come because they hadn’t had the shots. They were invited, but they would have to wear a mask. Each person has their own beliefs in what they think is right or wrong and I can’t force that on them, [01:12:00] but I saw too much on television how these people were suffering, and how the hospital and—that’s why we lost, I think, a lot of our medical people within not only Creek Nation, and I’m sure it was just as stressful in Oklahoma as it was here in Virginia, because Becky was saying—at one point she said people are just dropping like flies because they didn’t take it, or they didn’t want to take it, or they hadn’t had the shot yet and they’d get sick, and they’d get put in the hospital.
Even today that’s why I think a lot of our professional nurses—my daughter gets calls every day, they want her to come back into the hospital. Right now she works from home for a pharmaceutical company, [01:13:00] but they want her to come back because they are so short. Now with this new virus that they have for children, and that was her
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specialty, she was at Walter Reed and she was in pediatrics, but they want her back in the hospital. She said that right now she wouldn’t go back. She’s still doing very well from home and just didn’t want to take that chance because too many—her and her husband believe that we haven’t seen—we’re going to get another wave this winter. I call them my HMO plan, they keep me informed of what’s going out.
My heart went out because how many elderly people did we lose out of our tribe? [01:14:00] Because Becky was always telling me just in the little small church that she attends there, Silver Springs, that people are getting sick. She would call me and say, “We just lost someone,” so it was all over, very sad. Becky was telling me that she was trying to get her kids to make sure that her grandchildren were vaccinated when they were able to because she had a couple young ones then. But they’re all vaccinated now. It’s something you don’t play with, and I think it’s very important that we take advantage of it, and especially when it’s free, [01:15:00] you don’t have to pay $900 for a shot.
And especially when you have the facility, like they do in Oklahoma, all the clinics for the Creek Nation people. I don’t see why people are not taking advantage of it. It’s not like you have to drive fifty miles to get a shot.
DELLINGER: When the lockdowns and the shelter in place orders began, what emotions did just hearing these words make you feel?
WOOLFOLK: Very depressed. It was very depressing because you didn’t know how long you were going to be locked down. [01:16:00] Not being able to see people or see your family especially, that was the hard part.
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DELLINGER: Aside from that, what impact has COVID had? And especially in the early days of the pandemic, what impact has it had on your day to day life?
WOOLFOLK: A lot. I don’t go as much as I used to. I’ve just in the last year and a half have really started traveling. Because I normally go see my grandkids twice a year, the ones in Orland twice year, to my grandchildren in Texas sometimes three times a year. In fact, normally I’ll [01:17:00] fly twice and then my husband will go down once a year, we’ll drive down. But we have not—not only that, our family reunions have been cancelled. My mom started this family reunion, oh gosh, probably fifteen, twenty years ago, and every two years we would meet at Lake Eufaula and stay at a campground Thursday, Friday, and then everyone left on Sunday. We have not seen family other than we try to get together on Zoom, a big Zoom meeting. We did that for the first Thanksgiving, for the first Christmas, because that was the only way we could see family.
It was very depressing because normally we have [01:18:00] people at our home for Thanksgiving and you couldn’t because you didn’t want to take a chance of you getting sick or them getting sick. It was a very depressing time for me. I had to try and—I did a lot more reading as far as just trying to get my mind set because everything you heard on the news was gloom. Nothing positive.
DELLINGER: Prior to vaccines, so we’re talking really the whole first year of the pandemic, what were your safety measures to try and stay free from the virus [01:19:00] both at home, and when you went into public settings?
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WOOLFOLK: Yes, definitely. In fact, I would make sure I was at wherever I was going to grocery shop when they opened. They normally had what they call senior citizen hours when we could come in and so you didn’t have to worry so much about—and it’s very, you know, they would spray down the carts in the grocery stores, plus I had my wipes that I carried with me, and I always carried plastic gloves. For a long time I had plastic gloves, a mask, and a shield that I would wear. I would have my list, I would go in, and try not to be in the—not let too many people in the aisle with me. A lot of times my husband would go with me and I would have him— [01:20:00] give him a list of go find this, this, and this, and let’s get out of here.
The stores tried to accommodate us but I just didn’t feel safe. Don’t let anyone start sneezing and coughing, man, I would get off that aisle in a heartbeat. I was afraid of people. I shouldn’t have been, but it was just one of those things that you go oh, are you spreading a germ, when he took the mask off did he cough on the cans. And I had a crazy system that nothing came in my house. I would buy things, I bought an outside refrigerator, always had one. Everything that had to be refrigerated was wiped down and put in that refrigerator. No cans, nothing came in my house. I had to wipe down everything and my husband, [01:21:00] he would say Linda, that’s really a weird system, but that’s what I did for a long time. Nothing came inside the house. I didn’t have company. His brother would come by because he’s local and an older gentleman, but we were able to get shots. We took him with us to make sure he got shots.
In the summertime they would sit outside in yard chairs and we’d be six feet apart or more. But it was rare if anyone came in my home. I just tried to be very cautious
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during that time because we didn’t know. One day [01:22:00] we would hear oh, you’re going to be okay, and then next day you go oh, no, we’re all going to go belly up here soon. It was a very confusing time for me because I didn’t know what would be the best way to do things.
DELLINGER: What is your knowledge and understanding about the COVID-19 virus including, if you will, the effect it has on the human body if contracted?
WOOLFOLK: If contracted the majority of the time was your oxygen levels. My daughter even, like I said my HMO plan in Texas, they sent us an oxygen thing, [01:23:00] oxygenator or something you can put on your hand that tells you how much oxygen you have. Because my husband previously had had a heart attack and so we were just trying to be cautious for both of us. We stocked up on the masks and all that, but what little information we got, good information was from my daughter that was a registered nurse, and my son in law that was a doctor, because they really kept abreast of what was going on. But it was really people were dying from the lack of oxygen it seemed like, a lot of people were.
DELLINGER: Have you or any family members been infected with COVID-19? [01:24:00]
WOOLFOLK: Yes, my one daughter in Florida. She tested—well, she had the sniffles, so she did a home test, and it said she had COVID-19. But she was the only one. She’d been
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somewhere, been out shopping, or at the grocery store, and she believes that’s where she picked it up, she wasn’t sure.
DELLINGER: You mentioned that you’ve lost members from your church, can you share what any of their experiences or symptoms were with the virus?
WOOLFOLK: I probably know of really three cases because I kept [01:25:00] real close contact with the three ladies. Mrs. Wilson, she died, was the last one to pass away, but she had so many other health problems, she had asthma, just a number of things was wrong with her, she had had a heart attack. It was really when she did—and she got it through her aide, she believes, and her family believes the same thing because the aide came down to come in and check on them, they started doing home visits at that time for some people, and she believes that’s how—her family believes that’s how she got it. She basically died from a lack of oxygen. She couldn’t breathe. [01:26:00] She was a very large woman so there was just a number of health reasons along with that one.
The second one, she was actually a cousin I guess you could say, a distant cousin on my husband’s side. She had MS, and then she developed I believe it’s called Lou Gehrig’s Disease along with that. That, number one, Lou Gehrig’s Disease is basically it shuts you down. She had gotten to the point where she had a feeding tube and she wouldn’t talk anymore, [01:27:00] she would only text me. Once she got that, it wasn’t even a month before she was gone, and it was because she couldn’t breathe.
DELLINGER: You mentioned that some—oh sorry.
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WOOLFOLK: No, that’s okay.
DELLINGER: You mentioned that some of the folks that have passed away from COVID at your church were younger people.
WOOLFOLK: Yes.
DELLINGER: Are you familiar with what ages these folks were?
WOOLFOLK: The youngest that I know of was something like seventeen, sixteen, seventeen.
DELLINGER: Yeah, that’s young. But unfortunately there were those cases around the country. This isn’t [01:28:00] an illness just for the elderly.
WOOLFOLK: No. No, in fact just recently they shut down a high school here in Stafford County. There were over a thousand cases where these kids all had tested positive, and they don’t know how that happened. I haven’t heard anything in the news about it other than they had to shut the school down. I think they were out more than three weeks, they were doing everything online. I’m not sure if they’ve gone back yet or not. Where do you get a thousand kids testing positive? I don’t know.
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DELLINGER: And that happened recently?
WOOLFOLK: Yes, it happened recently. Just in the last couple of weeks.
DELLINGER: Yeah, [01:29:00] for me that’s a huge eye-opener because we have for some time now been in kind of a lull, I guess I would say, of the pandemic, and I think that people are tending to forget that it is still out there, and that’s a perfect example of that. When you were vaccinated, which vaccine did you receive?
WOOLFOLK: Pfizer.
DELLINGER: Did you have any side effects?
WOOLFOLK: None. I’ve had three boosters, just got the third booster, and I’ve had no side effects.
DELLINGER: That’s great.
WOOLFOLK: Other than a sore arm where they shot you a little bit, but none. I was very fortunate because I’ve heard some people have come down with fevers, not feeling well, [01:30:00] but I was very fortunate. My husband had no issues either and he had Pfizer.
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DELLINGER: Being there in Virginia, have you been able to—throughout the pandemic, have you been able to keep up at all with the Muscogee Nation leadership has handled the pandemic, including the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Health Department?
WOOLFOLK: I have because I occasionally go out online, I get notification through Facebook, I also have the paper that comes all the time, and then I have Becky, so she keeps me informed of a lot of things. I go out on the website a lot just to read to see what’s happening [01:31:00] out there. It’s very interesting. In fact I told Becky, there’s part of me that I wish I were there because I would be more active in what was going on. Because I think it’s important that we take care of our people. Because there’s a lot that they can do, a little bit more than what they’re doing.
That’s why I told Becky, you need to get out there and you’ll hear all the grumbles, especially being out in the community every day. You have to make sure you keep abreast of what’s happening within our organization because at first, when I was getting the paper, it was just generic, who died, nothing really [01:32:00] exciting. But then I found their website, a couple of websites, and that’s what I do. I also get the information out here on some of the other tribes like Mattaponi, some of the things that they’re doing for their people. I try to make sure that what one tribe is doing and maybe—uh-oh, where’d you go?
DELLINGER: I’m here.
WOOLFOLK: Okay, hold one.
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DELLINGER: And I can still see you.
WOOLFOLK: Oh, you can? I can’t see you though.
DELLINGER: Did you turn your camera off?
WOOLFOLK: No. I don’t know if that would—this meeting is being recorded, no. Wait a minute. [01:33:00] There we are, okay. I think it’s important to see what other tribes are doing for their people and see if Creek Nation is actually doing the same things. I think some of the programs that you all have out there are awesome. I just wish I could be out there so I could get more. But I’m here.
DELLINGER: Yeah. (laughs) What are your thoughts about how the state of Virginia handled the early stages of the pandemic?
WOOLFOLK: I don’t believe they handled it as well as they should have. [01:34:00] I really don’t. And it was due to, I’m not going to lie about it, it was due to our president that we had because we get what comes out of D.C. flows right into Virginia, and sometimes he just needed to stay off the television.
DELLINGER: Okay. What are your thoughts about COVID-19 ever completely going away?
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WOOLFOLK: I don’t think it will. It will probably—not for a while. I think until we all get on the same sheet of music and everyone is given the shot, because I don’t care what you say, if you don’t have that shot, and you’ve been around other people that didn’t have the shot, and you all [01:35:00] are mingling, and a lot of people don’t even take the home tests, and those are free, I don’t foresee it leaving us any time soon. I really don’t. That’s why I’m in line when they say booster, I’m going, here I am, booster me.
I even take the flu shot, which I never took before. I didn’t like the flu shot because it would always make me sick. But I even take the flu shot now. Mainly because of my age and the people that I’m around are a lot of people—my husband’s cousins and things come by and they’re an older generation, so I want to make sure I don’t give them
anything. [01:36:00] Even though they may not always be shot up, hopefully I wouldn’t catch anything. I’ve only had the flu once in my life and that was when I was really young, I was probably in my forties. But I’ll never forget that, I was so sick, and that’s when I decided that would be the point that I would take the flu shot.
Not only that, you need to take care of yourself even with the pneumonia shots, especially if you’re older, or if you have a medical problem, you need to keep abreast of what’s good for you. Whenever I go see my doctor I always have a list of questions of things that have happened. Why did this happen to me, why did this happen? [01:37:00] I guess maybe I’m just nosey. (laughs) I don’t know. But I want to make sure that I’m doing the best I can for myself and my family. That’s what I was telling Becky also. She’s got a few medical problems, so I told her she needs to take care of herself. She’s really got young grandchildren, much younger than mine.
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DELLINGER: At this time do you feel like you’re engaging in a life that is more similar to what your life was like before the start of the COVID pandemic?
WOOLFOLK: No. I don’t go to—I used to go to New York once a year to see plays, [01:38:00] plus once a year a group of us, a bus load of women, we would go up and go shopping. There were a lot more activities that I was involved in that I don’t do anymore. Plus they don’t offer them anymore because it’s too risky. In fact, I took my first bus trip about a month ago. I went to Lancaster, Pennsylvania to see the play David. I was so glad there wasn’t that many people on the bus. The bus was not full. The majority of us had individual seats. I stayed with my mask on probably the majority of the time. And these were an elderly group. [01:39:00]
But no, I was constantly doing activities, going places. I don’t even go to Williamsburg. I haven’t been to Williamsburg in almost two years and I usually go down there at least a couple times a year. We just don’t do the things that we used to because there were—I had a group of ladies here that we just were all retired and we enjoyed doing different things. But it was nothing for us to drive to Charlottesville and go to a play or have a girl’s weekend. I participated in a lot of things. But no, I have not. And I miss that, I really do.
DELLINGER: We are down to our last two [01:40:00] questions.
WOOLFOLK: Woo-hoo, okay.
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DELLINGER: All right. For future generations of Muscogee who may find themselves trying to survive a global health and economic event such as the COVID-19 pandemic, what words of advice or wisdom do you have for them about surviving and living with such a catastrophic event?
WOOLFOLK: You have to make probably some different type of changes in your life. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t go to concerts and things like that, but even watching a football game the other day, I looked at the stadium, and the stadium was full. I mean, I don’t think there was an empty seat. [01:41:00] I said, wow, these are really some brave people, I’m not ready for that. But everyone is different. I would say they need to decide what is good for them, not good for them, for their family. But please get the shots, that will help, at least if you do come down with it, it may not be as severe as if you had not had the shots. We still have people on a daily basis, I look at the news around here between Virginia and Washington D.C., that are being hospitalized, and the numbers are rising with the COVID. It would be a wise thing, especially when you’re not having to pay for it, to get the shot. And if you’re leery of what the shot—I’ve heard several young people say no, [01:42:00] I’m not going to take it because it will do this or that to me, do some research, go to maybe even a doctor or someone that you know that’s in the medical field that you can trust, and get information. Maybe they can make you feel more comfortable in taking the shot. But it’s important.
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DELLINGER: Thank you for those words. In closing, is there anything else that you would like to share about your experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic?
WOOLFOLK: The only thing I found that I had to—the first year and a half I had to do things to inspire myself because it does get you down [01:43:00] because you cannot do the lot of the activities. At least I couldn’t. I wasn’t willing to go out and do a lot of the activities that I was doing before. You just have to be careful. I think eventually we will come back, but it’s just a matter of everyone doing their part by taking the shots.
DELLINGER: Very good. Mrs. Woolfolk, mvto, thank you so much again for taking time out of your day today and doing this interview with me. Thank you for sharing your experiences, your thoughts, and you continue to take care.
WOOLFOLK: You too. And thank you so much. It was nice meeting you. Thank you so much.
DELLINGER: Yes, you too.
WOOLFOLK: Okay.
END OF INTERVIEW
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