[00:00:00] Nancy Winniford: When you study history, don’t just study the battles and the kings and the presidents. My children loved hearing about what they wore, what they ate. What was the culture like at that time? What’s different now from then? What kinds of tools did they use that we don’t use anymore? Attaching a story to that is really important. Having them read something from the period and then saying, “Okay, Johnnie Tremaine is using that tool. What is that? Let’s find out.

[music]

[00:00:38] Gretchen Roe: Welcome, everybody. This is Gretchen Roe for the Demme Learning Show. I am so excited to welcome Mz. Grundy today. We’re going to have a wonderful conversation with you. Mz. Grundy tells tall tales, wonderful tales, fascinating tales of the wild country of Alaska. Then, we’ll also have the opportunity to meet her alter ego, Nancy Winniford. As we begin, I would like to welcome Mz. Grundy. Mz. Grundy, will you please introduce yourself?

[00:01:10] Nancy: Thank you. I’m Mz. Grundy Z. Leatherberry. I was born in 1857, which is a while back. I have stories, lots of them.

[00:01:25] Gretchen: Kick back and enjoy. Let us hear from Mz. Grundy. What do you have to tell us today, Mz. Grundy?

[00:01:32] Nancy: I’m going to tell you about when they wanted Mz. Grundy to deliver the mail. Don’t you see? Now, Mz. Grundy, I lived in this little town called Loon Chick. Loon Chick was very tiny. I was a mail-order bride. Me and Josiah was settling in. One day, they called a town meeting, don’t you see? I know I was supposed to be there at four o’clock, but I fell asleep, took a nap. Yes. When the meeting was over, Josiah said, “Mz. Grundy, guess what?” I said, “What?” He said, “You’re the new postmistress for Loon Chick.” I said, “What?” He said, “Well, you missed the meeting, and you were the only one not there, so they volunteered you.”

I said, Josiah, “I ain’t never done nothing like that before.” He said, “Oh, it’ll be easy. It’ll be easy, Mz. Grundy. All you got to do, you use the dog sled. You put the dogs on. You take them for a little spin around the neighborhood, and you pass out the mail.” Well, that worked right good. That worked right good until spring. The area where we lived, it was kind of a swamp, don’t you see? The swamp had these little clumps of grass, and in between there was puddles, so it would be puddle grass. Don’t you know, that was pretty hard to do a dog sled on. The dogs, they just rebelled. They didn’t want to go nowhere once the snow was melting away.

I thought, “I got to do something. Mz. Grundy’s got to do something,” because the mail’s got to be delivered, don’t you see? You know how you think, and you think some more, and, well, what are you going to do? Finally, an idea came to the mind, don’t you see? What I could do was put wheels on the sled. There was somebody down the way that had a baby carriage. Josiah borrowed some wheels, and he put them on the sled, don’t you see? Now, we hooked the dogs up. I had the mail in the sled, and I went, [whip sound] yee-haw. Them dogs, they took off. We were going to go like this, and I thought I was going to lose my teeth. I pulled them to us down.

I said, “This ain’t working.” I went back to the drawing board, don’t you see? I felt, well, we could do larger wheels. I could get some bicycle wheels, don’t you see? That would work. Josiah ordered some bicycle wheels. They was really big around, don’t you see? We thought that was going to work. We did. He hooked them onto the sled, a couple of wheels. Put the mail on, and we went, [whip sound] yee-haw. Well, no better, don’t you see? The poor dogs, they couldn’t handle it. I felt really bad for them, don’t you know? I thought, well, okay. Then it came to me. We needed a bigger engine.

Well, them dogs was nice, but if we could get something bigger. I went right to Josiah, and I said, “We need a bear trap.” He said, “What? What do you want to trap a bear for, Mz. Grundy?” “If I have a bear on the sled, we could go lickety-split, don’t you see?” Josiah said, well, Mz. Grundy, but remember, we was newlyweds, and he wanted to make me happy, right? He said, “Well, okay. I can build a trap.” He built a right nice bear trap, don’t you see? We put some righty-fine bait inside, and we went to bed that night, don’t you know? About 2:00 AM, we heard, [growling sound] and there were a bunch of banging around outside. We trapped ourselves a bear, and the bear trap was flipping back and forth.

That bear was pretty mad. I thought, “Well, that’ll work.” Went back to sleep. The next morning, the bear, he wore himself out. He kept that up all night, don’t you see? He was laying there [snoring] in the trap. I thought, “Now that’s good because this is the time to hook him up to the slide, don’t you see?” I got myself the sled and the mail. In the rains, in the snug, oh, to the trap, carefully opened it. No, Josiah, he had his shotgun ready, don’t you see? I hooked it up to that there bear. Then I went back onto the runners of the sled, don’t you see? I said, “Josiah, wake him up.”

He kicked that bear right in the high man, don’t you see? Boom, that bear woke up, and he was ready to go. All I had to do was tune, and he went lickety split. Hanging on for dear life, without the pack. I wasn’t going so fast. I’d just take the mail, and the people, they heard the noise because that bear was making all the water and the grass and everything go which way when we would go through. I was screaming too. [screaming] Then we would get to a house and a mailbox, and I would say, “Whoa.” I’d pull out the mail, and I’d put down the thing, stick them on, and off we go. Well, here we come to another house, and the guy is standing outside like this.

I just thought, well, that’s handy. I put the mail inside, and I closed it up. [growls] I don’t usually take several hours to do the mail, but that day, it only took 45 minutes.

[00:08:15] Gretchen: Oh, my goodness. The best part is I can certainly see that whole thing unfold before me. [laughter] That’s awesome. Well, thank you, Mz. Grundy. It’s wonderful to hear that story. I really appreciate it. [laughter] Oh, my goodness. Tell us, Mz. Grundy, how long have you been a character of Ms. Nancy’s?

[00:08:50] Nancy: About 50 years. Don’t you know?

[00:08:53] Gretchen: Wow. You all know each other real well, as we say here in the South.

[00:08:55] Nancy: We do. We do.

[laughter]

[00:09:01] Gretchen: Do you all always get along?

[00:09:03] Nancy: Yes.

[00:09:04] Gretchen: That’s great.

[00:09:04] Nancy: She’s the right person to Molina.

[laughter]

[00:09:09] Gretchen: That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. Do your stories change, or are they always– Do you have a group of stories that are always the same? Are you always learning more about Mz. Grundy? Or I should say, is Nancy learning more about Mz. Grundy?

[00:09:28] Nancy: Yes. The stories will change sometimes. Even for the audience, the stories will change depending on the mood of Mz. Grundy. Sometimes I’ll leave a part out of a story or add something in that pops into my mind, or something like that, because you have an active mind. I never was one for a script, although I do have outlines for the story so that I’ll remember what to say. I’ll often fill things in, or depending on how much time we have, I have certain sections of stories I can leave out.

[00:10:12] Gretchen: Mz. Grundy, do you go all over Alaska telling stories or–

[00:10:16] Nancy: Yes. I have actually even been out to the bush communities as far west as the mouth of the Yukon River. I went to three little villages out there, Kotlik, Emmonak, and Alakanuk. I’ve also been to Atmautluak, and Napaskiak, and Bethel. I’ve been to several places out there, and then Fairbanks, King Island, and Palmer. All the things on the road system that were easy to get to.

[00:10:54] Gretchen: I like what you said when we were preparing to talk. You said that Alaska’s a big state, but a small community.

[00:11:01] Nancy: Yes. It’s likely that no matter where you go, you run into somebody you know. [laughter] That’s the truth. We only have 770,000 people in this state, and so it’s pretty tight.

[00:11:17] Gretchen: For a state that, when you overlay Alaska, it goes from coast to coast over the continental US. That’s pretty amazing.

[00:11:25] Nancy: We have more coastline than the entire US combined.

[00:11:29] Gretchen: Wow. I did not know that. What other wonderful geographic things can you tell me, Mz. Grundy?

[00:11:37] Nancy: Like you say, it’s as far from Anchorage to the very end of the Aleutian Chain as it is from here to Los Angeles.

[00:11:47] Gretchen: Wow. That’s amazing.

[00:11:49] Nancy: It’s a very huge place, and there are several different climates here because of it. You can go to a barrow, and it’s quite chilly all the time. Even in the summer, a summer high might be 36 degrees.

[00:12:05] Gretchen: A summer high. Oh, my goodness. 36. Wow.

[00:12:10] Nancy: Here in Anchorage, it can get up. 72 is a real pleasant day. We did one summer have it go up to 90. We all thought we were going to die. [laughs] It was 90 degrees out, and everybody was panting.

[00:12:27] Gretchen: Oh, my goodness. I take it that Mz. Grundy didn’t have air conditioning in her day, but do you have air conditioning? Does Ms. Nancy have air conditioning?

[00:12:41] Nancy: Nobody in Alaska has air conditioning. Nobody expects it to go up to 90 degrees. [laughs]

[00:12:47] Gretchen: Oh, my goodness. That had to be abject misery.

[00:12:51] Nancy: Except maybe in Fairbanks, some of the interior communities do get 90 and above. They may have air conditioning, but see, 90 never lasts very long. [laughs] I think the time we had it lasted about a day and a half or two days, and then back to normal.

[00:13:13] Gretchen: Mz. Grundy, when did you first learn that you were going to be a storyteller?

[00:13:18] Nancy: 1975, 1976. Nancy was working at an education center, and they wanted a story. She dreamed up Mz. Grundy. Here I am.

[00:13:36] Gretchen: There you are. You’ve been around ever since. That’s pretty amazing.

[00:13:41] Nancy: I have.

[00:13:41] Gretchen: Mz. Grundy, what has changed most in your storytelling? We’ll discount the technology because we know the technology has changed wildly since 1975.

[00:13:53] Nancy: Yes, as a matter of fact. When the stories first started, they were about Mz. Grundy, but they were from the library. [laughs] When Nancy moved to Alaska, none of the stories from Ohio, which is where Nancy grew up, they didn’t fit no more. They don’t work. There’s just no catfish in Alaska. There’s other stories. There was bears. I had a couple of stories about bears, and I’m still able to use those. For the most part, the stories had to change. That’s when they started coming from inside instead of from a book.

[00:14:50] Gretchen: Did you and Nancy start research in Alaska to be able to tell your stories, or did you just learn as you lived?

[00:14:58] Nancy: I learned as I lived. In 2009, I was invited to several Bush schools. Mz. Grundy had her clink and tap on. You go to school, you probably ought to not just tell tall tales. You probably ought to tell something, oh, I don’t know, educational. [laughs] That is exactly what happened. I was thinking about it, and I had a book about George Carmack. George Carmack was one of the three men who discovered gold in the Klondike. I’d been reading it, and I thought, “This is a fascinating story.” Not so much the story. You have to tie in the gold and the rush and explain what that was.

The three men who started it were very amazing men. George was from California, and in the Marines, he met a bunch of gold miners. His dad had worked with gold when he was young, and he wanted to. When he got out of the military, he came back to Alaska. Eventually, he landed in a little place called Dyea, which, by the way, does not exist anymore. In Dyea, he met a trading post operator and ended up working for him. He had his little tent behind the building. The man said, “Well, a lot of these fellas around here you can’t trust. You just can’t trust them.”

One day, two men walked in, and he said, “Now, George, these are two men you want to get to know. They’re honest, and they’re true blue, and you’re going to like them.” These two men were from the Tagish Nation in Interior Canada. George and they formed a bond, became friends. They started packing for miners on the Chilkoot Trail. At the end of the packing season, because at that point, they weren’t going over when it was snowy and cold, they said, “Hey, George, we’re going back to the village. Come.” George was like, “Sure, cool.”

They did tracking and hunting and fishing. George learned everything he could from them. Then he got them set on fire for panning for gold. He taught them how to do that. They actually formed a partnership. That was a loose partnership until they discovered gold in the Klondike. That’s when it became a real, “Hey, we’re going to do this together, and it’s going to be us as a team always.” I just thought that was a fascinating story. There were antagonists in the story, and how they ended up dealing with them.

What happened in the end, fascinating story. I thought I could tell that at the schools. Here’s what happened. It worked. The teachers were like, “That was fantastic.” That was all good. [laughs] I’m glad it was fantastic. Recently, I put that on a flash drive. It’s a video. It’s a two-hour video. At the end, there’s a tall tale for Mz. Grundy, of course. Mz. Grundy tells the story of the Klondike and what happened with these three men. Then at the end, there’s that tall tale, a two-hour-long thing. You can find it on the website.

[00:18:57] Gretchen: Great. We’ll, of course, make sure that your website is included in our show notes so that people can find their way to that.

[00:19:03] Nancy: Thank you. That sounds very good.

[00:19:04] Gretchen: That’ll make a difference. If that launched you on exploring real stories of the wilderness, then where did you go from there? Did you find more things that you found compelling?

[00:19:18] Nancy: As a matter of fact, I did. I decided that this is quite a story. I decided to write books, starting when Mz. Grundy was 18 years old in Massachusetts and gets herself a job in the Dakota Territory. Book number one chronicles her travels from Massachusetts as far as Chicago. It’s in 1875. That’s when Mz. Grundy was 18. 1875. It just seemed like there might be things that today’s children would know. Let me give you an example. In New York City, there was elevated trains.

They was 10 feet off the ground, and it was just like a regular train, and it was almost like a continuous trestle that went around the streets of New York. Well, that, I thought, a child today might go, “What’s an elevated train?” You have no idea. We put in the book pictures of elevated trains with a little blurb in the middle that explains what it is. Now, if the child already knows what it is, they can skip the blurb, but they at least get to see the picture. If they don’t know what it is, well, that really helps them out. Then the story about Mz. Grundy continues.

[00:20:38] Gretchen: Well, I think it’s terrific that Mz. Grundy has the opportunity to weave her story into the history of the era, and that’s pretty awesome. That’s amazing. That’s amazing.

[00:20:52] Nancy: It is, and I’ve found that school kids really like to learn history that way. Here’s the deal. History can be really boring, especially if it’s all about battles and things that happened so long ago. You’re thinking, “How does that relate to me?” If you include a story with your history, a story weaves it in. I’ve had students tell me, “I don’t even like history, but I liked your book because there was a story attached to it, and I needed to know the information in the history.” Sure, I thought, well, we have a winner there.

[00:21:36] Gretchen: There you go, yes. Who knew that you were going to be able to influence a whole generation of children just because you were telling stories? That’s pretty amazing. Do you ever get tired of storytelling, Mz. Grundy, or is it just all part of you?

[00:21:55] Nancy: You know I love it. It’s one of my favorite things to do, and I love to see the children’s eyes and hear them laugh, and adults, too. We never grow fully up, and it’s pretty fun to hear a story. I think that we’ve lost something. We tell stories with video now, but a live storyteller is quite an experience. It’s a little different from seeing it on video. It is good to see it on video, particularly if you haven’t got access to the live storyteller. Live storytelling is really a great way to engage kids. As a matter of fact, I’m going to be doing that twice later this week. I’m going to be speaking to a homeschool group on Thursday and to an elementary school on Friday.

[00:22:54] Gretchen: You know what I think is really neat is when you tell a story as opposed to a video. In a video, you’re passive, but when I hear you tell your story, I imagine that shaky sled on baby carriage wheels, and I think, “Oh my gosh, that must have been horrific.” Then I see the bear in the cage and how mad he was until he wore himself out. That changes the character of the experience because I get to use my imagination and enter into your story, and that’s amazing.

[00:23:33] Nancy: That’s the best part, I think. I think we have such a video society, don’t you know, where kids can get on TikTok and see– This particularly drives Mz. Grundy nuts, about a 30-second video or 10 or 15, and that’s about how long their attention span is. That is not good. We should be engaging our kids with something interesting that lasts longer. Now, the combat video is divided into nine chapters, so you don’t have to listen to the whole two hours at once, but it’s important, I think. Kids today are on their devices a lot. My little grandson is, and so you have to do something that’ll get their attention. I just think storytelling is the way to do it.

[00:24:34] Gretchen: Mz. Grundy, what is the most beautiful part of Alaska for you?

[00:24:42] Nancy: I think we have a mining area that’s way up in a mountainous area. A couple of summers ago, we was up there, and there was a mountain lake that was a blue-green color from the glaciers melting into it. It was fantastically beautiful. It was high up, so you could see all over the valleys, and there was still snow on the top of the mountain, and then there was a little bowl where the lake was, and there was more mountains, and you could see every direction.

It was beautiful. Hatcher Pass is about an hour and a quarter from Anchorage, but it is hard to pick just one spot. If you go to Homeland, you have a panorama of beautiful mountains and glaciers, and Hatchimack Bay. If you go to Seward, you are in Resurrection Bay. If you take a boat out of Resurrection Bay, you’ll see all sorts of wildlife and glaciers and mountains.

[00:25:55] Gretchen: I did. When I met you in the spring, I got talked into driving down to Seward after we met, and I took a four-and-a-half-hour nature cruise in the Kenai Peninsula.

[00:26:09] Nancy: It was lovely, wasn’t it?

[00:26:11] Gretchen: I got to experience every kind of weather possible. We had sun, we had rain, we had sleet, we had a little bit of hail, we had lots of wind. It was everything.

[00:26:20] Nancy: That’s Alaska for you. [laughs]

[00:26:22] Gretchen: It was so fascinating. They were very respectful of animals, but we got to see everything from whales to seagulls. We went to a rookery. We even went to see the stellar seal hatchery. That’s not the right word. Where they give birth to babies. It was amazing. It was a fantastic experience. I know what you mean about the beauty of the water, because at one point, the water was so green and so fascinating. It didn’t look real. It was almost as though I felt that I had stepped into a cartoon.

[00:27:09] Nancy: If you get to see a glacier on calves and hear the thunderous noise, it’s amazing.

[00:27:17] Gretchen: I can see why you went from Ohio to Alaska, and then you never went back. Do any of Mz. Grundy’s stories involve Nancy’s trip on a bicycle? 2,000 miles on a bicycle is a lot of time.

[00:27:35] Nancy: No. We could hear from Nancy now if you like.

[00:27:41] Gretchen: Sure, that would be awesome. See, now you all get to meet the lady that I met in Alaska. I met Mz. Grundy, but I also met Ms. Nancy.

[00:27:54] Nancy: Nancy Winniford is very fun, too. [laughs]

[00:28:00] Gretchen: Yes, she is.

[00:28:01] Nancy: I love fun. I was a teacher before I started being a storyteller full-time. I had a student one time, and he was telling his mom, she reported this later, he was telling his mom, single women should not be teachers. She said, “Why?” He said, “Because, Mom, they haven’t had kids, and they just don’t know how to relate to children.” She said, “Well, what about Mrs. Winniford?” He said, “Oh, her, she’s different. She still has a kid in her heart.”

[laughter]

[00:28:39] Gretchen: I love it.

[00:28:40] Nancy: Best compliment I ever got from a student.

[00:28:43] Gretchen: Absolutely. You know what? That kid in your heart always comes

Through.

[00:28:49] Nancy: It’s great, isn’t it?

[00:28:51] Gretchen: It is really terrific. You told me that you took an adventure once upon a time and took it upon yourself to do a 2,000-mile bike ride. Tell us a little bit about that.

[00:29:03] Nancy: When I graduated from college, I moved in with a roommate. We started dreaming, wouldn’t it be fun to go on a bike tour? We’d read about it. We’d seen pictures of it. We started planning, but we had, let’s call it, limited money. We planned for about a year and a half because we worked at an outdoor education center. That was nine months out of the year. We did have summers free if we had enough money to not work.

We decided, well, we’ll just go in June, and we’ll come back in August. Then school will start, and we’ll be back at the outdoor center. We’ll just be really careful with our money. We did. We started from Cincinnati, Ohio. We made a very large circle through Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, then the Lower Peninsula, Michigan, and then back into Ohio. That was about 2,000 miles.

I was 23 when we started, and my roommate was 24, and we both had birthdays. I remember we did not look our age, and so we had people asking us, “Are you really adults?” We would pull out our driver’s license, which had no picture on them in those days.

[00:30:25] Gretchen: Oh, my goodness. That’s true.

[00:30:25] Nancy: We’d pull out our driver’s license. See, I’m 23. She’s 24. They would shake their heads like, I don’t know if that’s real or not, but they would give us a place to stay. [laughs]

[00:30:37] Gretchen: Oh, that’s awesome.

[00:30:39] Nancy: Our moms were very worried about us. [laughs]

[00:30:41] Gretchen: You guys were very brave.

[00:30:45] Nancy: We had only a couple of really bad experiences, and they weren’t even that bad. We had children weave in and out of us on their banana bikes on a very busy road, and one of them clipped my wheel and took out some of the spokes, and took the seat off of his bike. I grabbed him and pulled him over to the side of the road. Remember, this is 50 years ago. I said, “What in the world were you thinking?” We’d called the police. Then we had to wait for the police, but it was interesting. The policeman just called him over to his car. He never even got out of the car.

We couldn’t hear most of the conversation, but he did say, “If I ever catch you doing this again.” Then he had consequences that sounded pretty dire. The little boy’s like, “Okay, okay.” That was the first day of our trip.

[00:31:48] Gretchen: Oh, my goodness.

[00:31:49] Nancy: We were quite late getting to our campsite. We did have a 60-mile day where it was so hot I thought we were going to die. [laughs] That was pretty crazy. The next day, we could only make it six miles. We went to a state park and chilled for a day. Most of the time, people were so kind to us. I remember we were in a little town, couldn’t find a bathroom. Stopped in the post office and said, “Hey, do you have a bathroom?” She said, “You know I don’t, but have you? You look hot. Would you like some water?”

She gets us glasses of ice water. Then she’s telling us about their town. She said, “It’s late. Have you had lunch?” We were like, “Not yet.” “Oh, well, let me get you lunch,” she says. She went back in the kitchen, gets us lunch. She’s feeding us. Then she said, “Now you needed a bathroom, didn’t you?” We’re like, “Yes, we really need it now.” She told us where we could find a bathroom. There wasn’t one in the post office. Then she said, “But wait, wait, wait. I want you to write to me when you get all the way through Chicago,” because we had told her we were going to go to Chicago. She’s like, “Chicago, that’s scary. You shouldn’t be there by yourselves.”

She said, “When you’re all the way through, you send me a postcard and let me know you’re okay.” We did.

[00:33:09] Gretchen: Wow, how awesome was that?

[00:33:11] Nancy: There were just people like that. I remember we were at a rest stop in Battle Creek, Michigan. This huge station wagon drives up, and about nine children pour out. The couple come out, too. The guy comes over and he goes, “Where are you going?” We told him. “Where have you been? Where are you from?” He and his wife chatted with us for a while. Then they said, “We have a spare bedroom. Would you like to come stay with us?” We said, “Wow, that is very kind of you.”

We had people doing stuff like that all along the trip. Just super nice people. One lady, we were admiring her turkeys one day. We’d never seen turkeys up close. She came out with a pitcher of lemonade and gave us lemonade and chatted with us for a while. We honestly met people from all over the country. I had just finished college, remember. You learn, unfortunately, a lot of toxic things about the United States. I was pretty sour on our country until the end of that trip, and then I realized, those people weren’t telling me the truth. We have a wonderful country with wonderful people. They reached out to us over and over and over again. Everywhere we went, it was fantastic.

[00:34:24] Gretchen: Now you’re going to make me cry. The cool part about that is you planned that kind of a trip well in advance of any kind of technology to help you do something like that.

[00:34:33] Nancy: Yes, we did.

[00:34:34] Gretchen: A lot of that had to be on faith. As my mother would say, your guardian angel’s wings were clipped close. [laughs]

[00:34:43] Nancy: Yes, they were. We could only afford a long-distance call because they weren’t free back then-

[00:34:50] Gretchen: Oh, this is true.

[00:34:51] Nancy: -once a week. We would find a phone booth and call either my mother, her mother, or the gal that was subletting our apartment. They had to pass the news on. I only talked to my mother every three weeks. That was really hard on her. I guess I understand now that I’m a mom. At the time, I was like, “Mom, I’m fine. [laughs]

[00:35:09] Gretchen: That is really amazing. In closing, what would be the advice you would offer to families to take away from our conversation today?

[00:35:19] Nancy: I would say, and I did this with my kids, when you study history, don’t just study the battles and the kings and the presidents. My children loved hearing about what they wore, what they ate. What was the culture like at that time? What’s different now from then? What kinds of tools did they use that we don’t use anymore? Attaching a story to that is really important. Having them read something from the period and then saying, “Okay, Johnnie Tremaine is using that tool. What is that? Let’s find out.” Whatever the book is from that era, finding out can engage the child in the story more, but it also teaches them history. It teaches them a love of literature, of looking things up.

[00:36:12] Gretchen: I love it. I think that’s terrific, and I agree with you. When my kids were growing up, when we would study a portion of history, I loved to cook. I would be the one going, “Oh, what would they have eaten?” We have done some crazy things.

[00:36:31] Nancy: We did, too.

[00:36:33] Gretchen: My kids will eat anything. [laughter] I guess I taught them well. The best part was that they all know how to cook. Boy, does that come back to bless you when you’re an adult, and so are they. I want to thank you for this time today. It has been a precious experience.

[00:36:50] Nancy: Oh, this has been wonderful, thank you.

[00:36:51] Gretchen: Thank you for allowing Mz. Grundy to join us for a little while. Thank you, too, for coming to share with us because this was precious. Thank you. I appreciate it.

[00:37:00] Nancy: This has been wonderful. Thank you, Gretchen. I’ve enjoyed it.

[00:37:02] Gretchen: All right. Thank you. Thank you to everyone who allowed us to come into your living room today. I hope you’ve enjoyed our conversation. I saved this for the last conversation of the summer because I knew it would be one close to the heart and precious. Nancy took it well beyond what I anticipated that it would be. Thank you.[music]

[00:37:24] Voice-Over: Thanks again for joining us. We’re glad to be a part of your educational community. You can help us grow our community even more by rating, reviewing, and subscribing to the show wherever you may be hearing this. Don’t forget that you can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. We’ll see you again next time. Until then, keep building strong foundations for lifelong learning.

[music]