‘Phillips Oral History’ Archives
Phillips Oral History Project Nov. ’26
This month, Mary Ellen Kaluza talks about organizing a neighborhood credit union. The South Side Federal Community Development Credit Union that was organized for Lake Street and originally had been in a building near Abbott, across the street from Abbott. Abbott bought that property and the credit union had to move. It moved next to Robert's Shoes. I was a volunteer for that and eventually came to be on the staff. It was closed, that was during the Reagan years so the National Credit Union Administration got very conservative. Plus it was the savings and loan crisis. I can't even describe it. So banks and credit unions were closing. That was community-owned and it could have survived if there had been the will on the federal regulator's part. Then a group of us got together to organize a new credit union that went into the Arts Bar. That was the Wendell Phillips Community Development Federal Credit Union. We had to include the ‘Community Development Federal Credit Union’ [...]
Phillips Oral History Project: Oct. ’26
This month, Janis Lodermeier returns to talk about hitchhiking. A lot of people hitchhiked. Like hippier types, but then it started to get really spooky, not just in this neighborhood, just anywhere. It never was safe. I should not have been doing it. But I didn't have a lot of choices. And sometimes you meet up with somebody that was hitchhiking and it could be fun. Until it wasn't. And there were times I even told some people that I hitchhiked, that gave me rides, I said 'you should be careful too of who you pick up because they're crazy crazy people too.' Some of the rides were fun and…most of them were not memorable. I wouldn't remember and then they, it was just getting to the point where there were, it was bad most the time. my brothers told me 'you shouldn't be doing this anymore.' And stuff, but I would not recommend it. Times were different. You'd have to be plum crazy to do it now, for real. Even then it was just a brief period where it was all it was fairly [...]
Oral History Project: Sept. ’26
This month, Janis Lodermeier talks about having George Morrison as an art professor. When I was going to the U - I am not Native American, but the AIM Movement was very active right up here. The Native American Center was just built and the Native artist George Morrison, who did the beautiful mural, he was one of my art teachers at the U. He didn't pick me. I didn't pick him. It was just the luck of the draw. I did not know until years later, he was like a member of the Art Students League, I think in New York. He lived in Paris. He was…somebody… … I started not coming to class because the models, for that class, we had to pay separately, and they would frequently be standing out in the hall smoking, and then when they saw him coming down the hallway, they'd jump back up, and that really made me mad. It didn't seem to bother a lot of other people, but I thought… they're supposed to be up there. We're paying them to do that stuff, and so I started not coming all the time, [...]
