Liz Colton - River Heroes

Partial Transcript: My full name is Elizabeth Colton, and I go by Liz. I’m from Asheville, I grew up here, and I’ll be talking more about wanting to be a writer and that’s meeting Wilma that way, and then I went off around the world literally for about forty some years, Peace Corps, UN, anthropology, foreign correspondent, national diplomatic correspondent with all the big networks, and editor of newspapers, and then Jessie Jackson's press secretary, and professor at Shenandoah University, and then all over the world and then joined the Foreign Service, and I worked all the hot spots in the Middle East, and South Asia. Now I’m back here writing, and speaking, and lecturing, and talking about diplomacy a lot.

Partial Transcript: When I was a little girl here in Asheville, in the mid-fifties actually, I was nine, ten, eleven, and I had wanted to be a writer ever since I learned to write at age six. And then at age eight, I had my first newspaper. I published it, and I delivered it early on in the morning over on Montford Avenue, and then we moved over to the Manor Grounds to a house called Possum Trot, and that's where we were living up on Cherokee Road. I had three newspapers for those years actually in the fourth and fifth and sixth grades. So everybody talked about it. And then I wrote a novel when I was ten, and I was writing all the time. And I had these newspapers, and I had one that was an international one. So when my parents met the Stokley's, Wilma Dykeman and Wilma and James Stokley, they actually met at the Clark's out in Hickory Nut Gap, now referred to as Sheryl's Inn, but it was a Clark House, and they met out there. It was about the time—I was thinking of the timing—it would have been around the time The French Broad was coming out. So I’m sure that my mother and father had said, well you know, our little girl wants to be a writer, and of course, in those days, you see there weren’t books—there were very few women writers, and I mean, there have been some famous ones of course in British and American as well, but there weren't books about them. There were always books about boys, and men who had accom—I read Knute Rockne, Ben Franklin, and all these, but they weren’t about the women. There wasn’t even—there was a magazine for girls called American Girl, but it was very boring. There was a boy's magazine called Boys’ Life, so I had all this kind of going in. I was the first girl ever to win a writing contest in the Boys’ Life writing contest. So I heard about Wilma Dykeman, and they were coming to our house, and I can remember it. I remember being there—I remember our porch, which is over a little stream like right here, up in the Manor Grounds off Charlotte Street, and I was—frankly I was just completely gaga. I mean, I couldn’t believe it that this lady was a writer, and she was famous, and she had books, and she was married and had a family and a husband who was certainly very supportive. So I just remember, and she was—I can remember this too, the fact was my parents used to say, well, our little girl was a writer and she has some newspapers and all. She could have just said, well, so nice to meet you or something, but no, she took time with me, and she talked with me, and sat down and talked with me, and she looked at my little novel that I had written, it was about thirty pages. She looked at my newspaper. She talked to me, and I always, even in those days, even as a little girl, I would ask people questions. So I wanted to know how it was to be a writer, and where she wrote, and they would tell stories and then later, over the years, she and my mother were only two years apart in age. My mother is still alive, but they became very, very good friends, and they had political interest in common, environmental interest in common. They didn’t use environmental necessarily in those days but interested in nature, in preservation and conservation, and The French Broad River. So we go used to go visit the Stokley's out in Newport, and that was a big deal for our family. My father, who was from Nashville, I was just telling Jim that we would see the Stokely Van Camp Trucks, and so as children we were excited. We knew these people who owned those trucks, and that was Wilma Dykeman's husband’s family. So there was just—I've been thinking about it, and it was just very exciting, and it really had a big influence on my life knowing her and getting to meet her and her being kind and considerate and interested in me as a little girl writer.

Partial Transcript: Well, I couldn't—I haven’t written all the books as I said, but I have certainly had—I—my mother at that point—had not sort of in a sense broken out per se. I wouldn’t say, but she had all these ideas. She wanted to be a diplomat, and she later went into politics in her late fifties. I think the idea of Wilma Dykeman that she had done this, she was a female and she was a writer, and she was independent in her writing. She wrote her books under her name. I went into the Peace Corps, and I remember thinking this actually. I was in the Peace Corps in Africa right after college. I ended up—I got married to a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, it’s terribly romantic and adventurous, and I took his name. That was kind of what was done, and he had—I liked and sometimes I think I married him for his name because it was a pretty name, it was a beautiful name, I liked it, but he—so I took his name, last name was Wolf, W-O-L-F. Every time I signed a check or a letter, Elizabeth O. Colton Wolf or whatever I wrote, but I would put Colton in there because as a child, I mean, from the age of eight, I had been writing under my name, Liz Colton or Elizabeth Colton, and it really was very upsetting to me to write this other name. It had nothing to do with him. It had nothing to do with the name, but I think that Wilma had a kind of an influence on me that she had retained her name in her writing, and so I talked to him about it. Then we came back from Africa, and went to graduate school, and so I started to use my name. I ended up having to go—well, we were married still—to go to court to—I said that I write. My name is Elizabeth Colton, and I had to legally get that permission, I mean that right in the state of Tennessee actually, in Vanderbilt at Nashville. So I think she had a big influence in that, that I wanted my own name, and I felt very uncomfortable. I had written since I was six, seven, and eight.

Partial Transcript: Growing up right here—I think for all of us, and I can imagine Wilma because she was of an even earlier time, to grow up here in these mountains, and with the woods, and the streams, and the rivers, and the hills, and mountains, and animals—I say for myself, I mean, my growing up in Asheville in the mountains of Western North Caroline has influenced me my whole life. That's what I tell people, and so I know definitely for Wilma, and it of course came out in her books. Before she was actually talking about the causes per se as causes, she was writing the books about it. I mean, reading The French Broad is just—it's all there. It's the story of these mountains and rivers.
So I think when—my sense, I don’t know for sure, but certainly I don’t think she was thinking of it as a cause per se when she wrote these books, she was just basically naturally interested. Then I remember when The Tall Woman came out, and again, that's just about mountain people. So it had such an influence in everything, and I think that it was natural for a lot of people like her, and other people who then moved into this environmental movement, which technically started a little later in the seventies or late sixties. Then it became like well, we have to do something to save this and preserve, this is—it’s part of our heritage, and it was kind of assumed that it was part of our heritage. We didn’t know we had to save it, and I'm sure Wilma didn’t have that idea. She just thought, well this is it, and then she began to realize that it was very important to be saving because there were encroachments and everything.

Partial Transcript: When The French Broad, her book, came out about the history of the French Broad in 1955, it’s kind of—was in a way, it was kind of revolutionary. Other people had written about The French Broad before including an ancestor of mine back in the nineteenth or mid-nineteenth century, but when her book came out in 1958, it really kind of—it said this is something that we should care about. This is a river, and I think a lot, but many people around here had taken it for granted, and they didn’t think it was—I remember reading articles about it at that time, and John Parris writing about it, who was the columnist at the Asheville Citizen Times, and other people writing about it, and I as a little girl hearing about it. It was kind of like, huh, well we hear about the Mississippi, and we hear about the Missouri, but we didn’t realize the French Broad was sort of up in those categories, and turns out in big categories of being so old. All of that was kind of exciting in the sense that it put the French Broad river, western North Carolina, east Tennessee, on the national and world map, which it hadn’t been for a long time.

Partial Transcript: Exactly. What—one of the parts of the book, or the effects of the book was to say, look at what man has done, and it has had a dramatic and not necessarily good or positive impact on the course—literally the course of the river. So I think, because it was putting the idea that this river was important, it wasn’t just our little river over here, it was one of the oldest in the world, it was very important, and therefore, we ought to think about what man, human beings have done, who have changed the course, and polluted it.
I mean, the other thing was growing up here, the river was so polluted that we never went in it, the French Broad River. So it had—her writing on The French Broad had a huge impact on what later became the cleanup of the French Broad. It was just trashed, and of course there was horrible stuff in it that had been put in by all kinds of companies, etcetera, and again nobody had been thinking about it, but it was damaged, and people said we just don’t go swimming in that river. It wasn’t like you don’t go swimming, so we're going to clean it up.

Partial Transcript: Well the sources were paper mills, again, and part of the thing, paper mills, lumber companies, agricultural companies, agricultural waste. There was such an idea of the—this was such a poor area, and so that these big factories that would come out, there was people who would be greeting them, I mean, I was much—they had already been here by the time I was a child, but the idea was that you didn’t criticize these companies because they were providing livelihood for all these people, and whether it was Champion in Kenton, or Inca, and then all the companies in Tennessee, and then the agricultural waste from the animals. So nobody would—nobody wanted to be too critical about that, or they didn’t even think about. They thought, well it's helping us, so people have a job, or can live, and eat food, or whatever. So it was kind of a shock actually.

Partial Transcript: Well, again I think that for western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee in this area, it had Wilma Dykeman's environmental messages, though originally not necessarily put there to be environmental messages. They were stories about the land, and the people, and the rivers. Then they became messages, but as somebody mentioned earlier, they weren’t hit you on the head kind of didactic in that sense. They were didactic in that they were lessons to be learned, but they weren't slamming people on the head. Her messages were told about the environment and about saving the land and the waters and preserving were told in the form of stories that became very effective. I mean, certainly The French Broad, the whole idea of that being a story, no one had thought of a river being a story.

Partial Transcript: Yeah. Wilma Dykeman was for me a real mentor, and she still is, and she probably, maybe, I don’t know, I mean, sadly I haven’t gotten to ask her, but she probably knew when I was a little girl, and when I was growing up that this was somebody, she had an influence on positively, and we liked each other, and of course, whenever she came to the house, or whenever we went out to Tennessee to see them, I would just sit around and ask questions, and look at—and I loved to go in her library. I mean, I went into everybody's libraries, but I loved to go and see, where she worked, how was it to write? Both she and James, Big Jim, I mean, both of them were writers, so that was an exciting idea that a husband and a wife were writers, and that they supported each other as writers, I thought that was terribly exciting. So her mentorship certainly encouraged me, but not just in writing, but in her being a role model as a leader, and as someone who spoke out on issues, on women's issues, and environmental issues, on regional issues. As I said, she and my mother collaborated a lot on these kinds of political issues.

Partial Transcript: Wilma Dykeman has left a legacy for a lot of people, and she has left a legacy I would say that, well, she is part of western North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee. The history of the—or the whole, I mean, the history of the rivers like long before history, the legacy of the French Broad, and the land, and the water, and everything. So she's left this legacy that I would say is going to last for years, decades, and generations to come, and for me as a person, as a little girl who had this experience of knowing her as a grownup writer, a lady who was a writer, and who used her own name, and managed her life as a writer with her own name, and with her husband, and her children, she did all of that, she did all of it, and a leader. I would say for me she will always be a very-very special person, and I think it's sort of interesting that it's too bad we never get to tell people, but I can tell her son what an impact she has had on me, and always will. I just admired her, loved her, and thought she was fabulous, held her on a pedestal, all of that is true.

Partial Transcript: I think she had a—what is different, in everywhere she touched, her impact, her influence, her writing has influenced every single bit of all the environmental movements, the writing of this area, the literary heritage of this area, all of that has been touched by Wilma Dykeman, absolutely.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, now she was a fabulous person, and I often think of it, how I wish—somebody wrote me a letter the other day, and I had forgotten about this. You might have heard Denise, I mean, not Denise, Noel King who is now the co-host on Morning Edition. I don’t know if you know, you've heard her? Anyway she wrote me a letter out of the blue about two months ago when she had just been named co-host. She had not even started yet, but she wrote me a letter, an e-mail. She found me through Twitter, and she thanked me because I had helped her. I had trained her to be a radio journalist. I had trained her—we met in Sudan, and she was just a kid stringer, and I was then not radio, but I had been radio and TV, and she was out as a stringer in Sudan, and I was diplomat, I was a press attaché. So I worked with her because I said, “Well, why don’t you apply for a VOA job I heard about?” I trained her, and I sat with her, and I helped her, and I forgot, this was a long time ago. She wrote me a letter now. So, I know that I wrote Wilma, I did write her as a young person about how important, you say the thank you, and—but I do wish we could thank people more.