Our Mothers Ourselves

Chuck Yeager didn't have anything on Lillian Yonally.  Sure, Yeager was a record-setting test pilot, the first to exceed the speed of sound. But Yonally broke through a different barrier: gender stereotypes.  Yonally, a World War II pilot, was one tough woman. She served in the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP.  The WASP picked up the slack at home when all the male pilots went overseas...

Katie talks with Erin Brockovich (yes, that Erin Brockovich), who attributes her doggedness and fearlessness to her mother's  own unwavering determination, wrapped in a lifelong embrace of encouragement, love, and faith.  Erin's childhood memories are of unalloyed happiness and optimism. Betty Jo Pattee, born in Ponca City, Oklahoma,raised Erin and her siblings to see things through, how...

This week, Katie talks with Danielle Mika Nagel, Director of Mindfulness at Lululemon, about her mother, Michiko "Miki" Gorman, the first American woman to win the New York City Marathon, in 1976. Four decades passed before another American woman won that race. Gorman arrived in the U.S. from a small Japanese village in 1963, at age 28, took up running in her 30s, and never stopped. She...

For a Father's Day change of pace, Katie speaks with Dr. Talmadge E. King, Jr., a world-renowned lung specialist and Dean of the Medical School at the University of California, San Francisco. In the 1960s, Dr. King's father, Talmadge King Senior, born in 1922 in the segregated South, was recruited by the small community of Darien, on the Georgia coast, to serve as the city's first A...

Katie talks with Zeke Emanuel about his mother, Marsha. Marsha raised three incredible sons in the 1960s: Zeke, now a prominent physician and health policy expert; Rahm, President Obama's Chief of Staff and former Mayor of Chicago; and Ari, a famous Hollywood Agent. Instead of Boy Scout meetings and Little League practice, Marsha Emanuel took her three little boys to Civil Rights marches and...

Athena Linos , 68, a highly regarded  Greek epidemiologist, has been called that country's Anthony Fauci. She was born and raised in a small Greek village, the daughter of the town's baker. Athena succeeded in Greece's patriarchal society because her mother did all she could to see that Athena had a chance for academic achievement that had been inaccessible to her. All of Athena&apo...

Katie interviews Marya Stark, founding executive director of Emerge America, about Marya's mother, Helen, who lived for most of her life with a debilitating lung condition that left her with 25% of normal lung capacity.  Helen had nine children, and somehow managed to make each believe that that one child was her favorite. Katie and Marya dig deep into how Helen might have managed to pull tha...

Katie talks with art historian Peter Chametzky about his mother, the feminist poet Anne Halley, whose family fled Nazi Germany for the United States  in the 1930s. Halley's Holocaust poems are haunting and precise. Her "housewife" poems are by turns funny and searing.  Our Mothers Ourselves is an interview podcast that celebrates extraordinary mothers from all walks of life. Please...

UPDATED NOVEMBER 9, 2022 Katie interviews Dr. Shirley Weber, California Secretary of State whose mother, Mildred, raised eight kids in L.A. in the 1950s and 1960s, after she and her husband, David, fled a lynch mob in rural Arkansas in 1951. Mildred's philosophy of life: Keep your hand open in order to give. Dr. Weber , a retired San Diego State University professor, became a member of the Ca...

In this inaugural podcast of Our Mothers Ourselves, Katie Hafner talks with Ellen Fitzpatrick, a professor of 20th century U.S. history, about her mother, Mary. Mrs. Fitzpatrick was for many years a favorite math teacher at Amherst Regional High School. She majored in math at U Mass in the 1940s, and went on to raise six kids while working full-time. Widowed suddenly in 1975 at age 52, Mary Fitzpa...