Vera Baker Williams Oral History from BMCM+AC on Vimeo.
Transcript:
Bostic: This is Connie Bostic, it’s October 3rd, 2008, we’re in the home of Linda and Ron Larsen in Woodfin, North Carolina, with Vera Williams. Vera would you tell us a little bit about your early life and how you came to be a student at Black Mountain College.
Williams: Yes I would like to do that, Connie. I was thinking about it while listening to my longtime friend from Black Mountain, Patsy, and it was very moving to hear another student, and her tell about her background. Mine was so different – I grew up in New York City, my parents were both radicals, I don’t know exactly what to call them. They were certainly in the direction of communist, they also had an anarchist component, they were very interested in progressive education, they were vegetarian for a while, they were doers in the community, and they were strugglers through the depression. I was born in 1927 and lived my childhood through the Great Depression… Hopefully not about to return. So, my route to Black Mountain was very different, and yet it was very odd – very odd. I went to music and art high school in New York, it was a public high school started by mayor La Guardia, and we thought we were just the cat’s meow, you know, all these music and art children from the various boroughs, and I took a great… I was an art student a visual art student, and I took a great interest in the great books. A brother of a friend of mine, [Took], had gone to St. John’s and taught there so when he would come back to New York City he would do sessions with us so we actually were trying to follow some of the program of the college in Annapolis and I wanted to go there. So I applied, and they said, “No, we don’t take girls, we’re very sorry.” I kept trying, I said well I want… They said we don’t have dormitories. It’s all right, I said, I’ll live in town, you know. No, that couldn’t be done… But they said, “Why don’t you go to Black Mountain College, where you can study whatever you want.” And one of their people, I can’t remember his name, but he taught a philosophy course at Black Mountain as well as taught at St John’s. I guess he came down maybe once a week, maybe not that often, probably… Anyway, they encouraged me to do that, and at the same time I had some knowledge of the college through the art people at high school. And so I applied – in order to go to college at all I had to get a grant, which I got from the Educational Foundation for Jewish girls, who also sent my sister to Tyler School of Fine Art, I mean she applied and they paid – they sent my mother to nursing school, they’re a wonderful organization – and once I got in they didn’t question what kind of college it was or anything, I got in and I got my fee reductions, which Black Mountain made exclusive of your scholarship or anything, and I was enabled to go. They gave me $500 a year. [Laughter]
Bostic: Wow.
Williams: And then I worked in the Summer, for the extra money, and it was very hard for my parents to send me any but they did send me a little along the way.
Bostic: Can you talk a little bit about what you studied at Black Mountain and who you studied with?
Williams: Oh yes, yes… I was very eager to do almost everything there was to be done. I uh… I came full of enthusiasm. I early on lost my interest in following the St. John’s program, not because I wasn’t interested in the subject matter, but there was such an active, vibrant life at the school and I had been an art student really since childhood. I had gone to a special art school, an experimental art teacher on Saturday mornings as well as I had gone to painting classes through the WPA at a settlement house in the Bronx, the Bronx House, which I consider was where I was educated rather than… I did go to public school but my education also went on after 3:00 at the Bronx house, which was a place where you could do art, and music, and athletics, and outings and all kinds of things like that. And I also in high school had gone to dance, modern dance, after school at the New Dance Group in New York. Of course New York, everything was – lots of things were free or very inexpensive then to do. So I was very eager to do everything when I got there – and you know I have come to realize that I also had a kind of almost literary romantic connection to a certain kind of education and also the fact that there was a farm there, and I too was a milk room person… That’s like the best kind of job to me, and I think that was because of having loved Heidi as a child. So the idea was… It is odd how these things develop. You think you choose them in this very rational way but I had this, you know, vision of being able to deal with the milk and the butter and so forth, which I did, I loved it. I did the morning milk room, lifted those heavy cans, and learned to make butter and cheese and lived on heavy cream, which was an ambition from childhood [Laughter]. Because as I had charge of the cream… I took drawing, painting, weaving, but I also took… I took a course in the Bible, which was… I had a chance to think deeply about the kinds of things – we read the first books of the Old Testament, I was raised in a nonreligious, almost anti-religious home, and so that was thinking about my… and I am Jewish, but I was raised with secular Judaism, to which my parents… My parents were not renouncers of Judaism, but we were not religious. I actually went to Jewish school as a child after school. So I was very interested in that, and I believe that was taught by Edward Lowinsky, even though that was not his field. But the school… The previous year they had undertaken – one of the faculty had undertaken to teach Moby Dick and discovered this ignorance of the Bible among the students, so it was thought that would be a good thing to teach. I may misremember who taught that, but I think it was Eddie. What else did I study… I had to, I think, do some remedial math work in order to be prepared to go into senior division. The school was divided into junior and senior division, and you had to be clearly able in certain areas to go on to senior division, and concentrate. I took… Did I mention weaving? Yes, I took weaving. Thread and string drives me crazy, but I loved the interaction of the colors and everything. I think the drawing class was marvelous. I learned to – we learned to do Bodoni lettering, which has affected me a lot. We learned so much that I have used all my life. There was nobody who taught printing, actually, but a few of the students revived this abandoned print shop, and we activated the presses, and then after the war we got a new press from the government, and I did a lot of that.
[Talking in the background]
Bostic: So you studied weaving with Anni Albers, and you took drawing and painting classes with Josef Albers
Williams: Yes, I took drawing and painting, design and color – I took all four subjects that he… I don’t even call them subjects – areas of art that he taught. And then when I worked toward my graduation he was my guy that I worked with.
Bostic: What was he like as a teacher?
Williams: He was a unique experience. He had no relevance to what you would learn about the psychology of teaching or anything like that. He treated people unequally, he was dismissive, he was heavy duty. I remember him getting a student to… This is hard – we had a model, and there was a student who wasn’t an art student but he wanted to draw, right. And he drew things that look a little bit shaggy. And I remember him asking this student, a young man, to come up by the model and, you know, certainly touch her with his eyes, you know, and say look at this, you know, wonderful young woman here, you know, and the kid was so embarrassed, you know, and he did things like that. But he was brilliant, and he cared enormously about you learning. He may not have cared about you in some sensitive way, though he had that aspect sometimes too, but he cared about his subject. He was just a powerful person with a great pedagogical imagination. And that’s, you know, that’s not very usual to encounter. He was a great artist, a colorist, and yet he taught a very… I don’t know about traditional, but a very specific, attention-paying kind of course in drawing, probably one of the best you could get, where you really got to look at what was in front of you, you know, and then we always all put our drawings down, this was downstairs in the studies building, and criticized them together. I remember him… We weren’t to have a big piece of paper with a little drawing on it that you could tack up and exhibit, no, we would have to cover the whole thing with, you know, drawing. We weren’t to show off, we were to learn. And that was wonderful, it was wonderful. And it was just very imaginative. And he cared about the visual aspect of everything, to the extent in which you might say it was a sort of aesthetic autocracy, what color anything could be painted, what lettering could be used on all the college work, you know, because from the Bauhaus there was this attention to every aspect of modernism, in printing, in… You know, even if you didn’t have much choice because the college was limited in funds, but in the choice of the tableware, everything was thought about, you know? And that is such an important part of being an artist, I think. And it applies to so much… such a large area of life. That was a big thing I learned there.
Bostic: What about other classes – the classes in subjects like mathematics. You said that you had a little problem there?
Williams: Yeah, and that was never a big interest of mine. It was… I think mostly I did that just to develop enough to go on, but I was very interested in… I read a lot, I always read a lot, I wrote, just for myself – I don’t remember taking any kind of a class in free writing or poetry, but I was very interested in all of that. I wrote stories, I wrote poems. I really have a kind of not very good memory of other things that I took, I think I took a course with Edward Levi in 20th century philosophers. I think we were going to read Marx, Bergson, Eddington… I forget who else. So I did that – I don’t think I completed that, but I was immersed in that, and then I came from a very political – in the best, I think, very broad sense – background, in which it was assumed in my life as a child that you were very interested in what went on in the world, that you were responsible, that things didn’t just happen to you, that you participated in change. That’s – I never said it that way, but you participated in change. In our neighborhood, for instance, in our neighborhoods we moved a great deal when I was a child because we couldn’t pay the rent. But wherever we lived were people struggling to pay the rent and being kicked out of their apartments, and my parents, along with other leftists in the neighborhood, would form groups and carried – when the bailiff came and took the furniture out, they carried the furniture back in. I remember going to demonstrations for penny milk. Penny milk was proposed for children who were deprived of nourishment, you know, and milk was being poured down the drains all over the country on farms and all, in order to keep the price up, and so it was thought, well, we could have penny milk, and we all went to protest and try to get penny milk. But it was just part of our life as children, we were very interested in the pursuit of… The loyalist victory in Spain, I remember standing on a corner with a tin can to collect money for Spain, and it was all just part of life. We were enthusiastic activists, and that carried over very much into life at Black Mountain College, the students helped run the college, students tried to raise money sometimes, this college closed early for a Christmas vacation because we had to have more money for coal and things like that, of course we had to – during the war we had to go and shovel our own coal, I think there’s a picture of me shoveling coal out of a box car. I was very enthusiastic about all that, all of it, I think.
Bostic: So the work program was really an important thing to you.
Williams: Oh, I loved it, yeah. I remember working on the farm, I remember painting the farmhouse and I’m making myself climb up on a ladder, you know, I’m scared but I did it. I remember I was very… Mary Gregory was my advisor, everybody had a student advisor, she was… She taught carpentry and all, I learned to use the lathe, I made a broom closet. [Laughter] It had very few right angles and it had to be racked into shape with great big clamps. I was interested in the wood shop, you know, I was interested any anything there was to do [Laughter].
Bostic: Who did you work with mostly in the print shop?
Williams: Oh, let’s see… Jimmy… I won’t be able to remember, but there were a few young men who had come after the war, after the we got the GI bill and all, and they had taken printing in high school, you know that used to – right, girls took cooking, boys took printing or carpentry, and so they knew enough to revive it, and I learned to set type, and for my graduation project, I did graduate, and my project was in graphic arts, even though we didn’t have an etching workshop or anything like that, but I studied, I was… I was, oddly enough, I had always – as a child I had painted very colorfully and loved colorful peasant art and all that I was exposed to, but I became very drawn to black and white, and to the Expressionists, and to woodcuts… So it was possible to do that with our small means, you know, and so as part of my project I designed as much of the college’s print concert menus – that’s not what they’re called.
Bostic: Programs?
Williams: Programs, thank you. I invented signage for the different events, I remember I was on the… It was an entertainment committee or something like that, for making decorations for events, I did a lot of that. I remember working with a student named Willie Joseph who was a passionate weaver, and we both invented these, like – decorating, you didn’t just get balloons, that was all connected, it grew out of design, you know, and your approach to color and to form and all of that. Gosh, you know, when you – it was just wonderful the way everything was connected, right? And then I was always very interested in food. I took a great interest in the kitchen, and eventually after I graduated, myself and June Rice, we no longer had a dietician who made the menus and so forth, so we offered to… We felt there was a certain lack of attention to nutrition or something – we were so arrogant, you know, these cooks struggled along to feed us and all, but we felt the string beans were overcooked and like that, [Laughter]. That we would make the menus… We didn’t know – we knew very little [Laughter]. The first cooked turkey I ever cooked was one of five, you know, for Thanksgiving, they were all done properly on one side and undone on the other, so we carefully faced them with the good side out, and the next, you know, further in the week we ate the rest of them – but that was a marvelous thing, you could try anything, you know, in vacation we had too much milk, you know, and we didn’t have a contract to sell it, so – I don’t know how I got this idea, I had sent for publications from the government about milk and making cheese and all like that, and so I found out you could make milk paint. So we made milk paint and painted the whole huge dining room with it. I think it was milk, whiting, lime, and something to keep it from smelling, turning sour and smelling nasty. And it was a pretty runny kind of paint but it covered – it was a kind of whitewash, yeah, and you know, here I was, you know, I was – what was I, 19 or something? Came from the city, [Laughter]. But I just did this, and they let you, you know, they let you do things, they let you make mistakes. I mean, a whole lot of progressive education, in my experience, because I went on to be very interested and start a school and be a cook at a school in a similar progressive tradition in Ontario Canada, where we also had a farm, and the whole thing has to do with the balance between how far you can go in unguided efforts, you know, to make your own mistakes and learn that way, but in a supportive environment that won’t let you, you know, do things that turn out to be dangerous or… So that’s that’s hard to know, it’s hard to know when you bring up your children, too.
Bostic: It is, it is. What about some of the people who came for the summer sessions while you were there?
Williams: Yeah, those were of course different than… Especially before the end of the war, because as Patsy said it, it was a more sober… Well, sober isn’t… I don’t know if that’s the right word – but it was smaller, it was confined, we were worried, there were very few… The sexuality that attends college life, and is important to it, is important to the energy and the spirits of people and all – was tamped down during that time, and then when the men returned and the population increased and all, it added to the life, you know. But, um, I think I’ve a little bit lost my train here…
Bostic: We were talking about the summer sessions…
Williams: Yes, but the summer sessions always added new energy, right, and I couldn’t afford to stay through every summer because I had jobs as a camp counselor in order just to get a chunk of change for coming, traveling down. But a couple summers I did get to stay, and the people who influenced me greatly were Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and the general… Oh no, more than that, Katie Litz, I think, who came to do dancing, and I was doing dancing with – I was very good friends with Elizabeth – Betty Jennerjahn, she and her husband Pete, and myself and Paul Williams, we had learned to play the recorder there, and we had a little quartet – we played baroque dances for Merce Cunningham, during the jig we just all broke out laughing, we couldn’t finish it, we were doing so badly [Laughter]. But, you know, none of us were music students, so that was – but Betty was very devoted to dance, and we all worked with Katie Litz. Somebody came to do theater, and she put on… The Intellectual Ladies, what is that in French… I forget… Tall woman, I don’t remember her name… But I designed the costumes for that and I was in it. I liked the theater very much. I did a little puppet show that I invented under somebody’s guidance, I don’t know – it was under somebody’s guidance, but I don’t remember it – in which I was the puppet. And I did a fairy tale that I had loved since childhood called little one eye two eye and three eyes, and I made a little tree with a silver apple. I mean you could just put your – can you imagine? You could just put your imagination into practice. It was like – it was very childlike in that way, you know, the imagination that children have if you let them pursue it and the playfulness – that was very much there in the middle of a lot of very serious struggle, you know, the struggles over whether we could try to do the beginnings of integration… While I was there a group including Bayard Rustin and Jim Peck, people who were actually badly beaten up eventually in the struggle to integrate into state transportation, came and talked and stayed overnight… We met them… There were two farmers who were pacifists, this was their alternative service, Ray Trayer… and I forget the other one, and there were these visitors from… One of whom actually came to the college and stayed afterwards, Ralph Becker from the CPS camp. So all of that was going on along with this work of the imagination, play of the imagination. Marvelous. [Laughter]
Bostic: And after you left Black Mountain you kept in touch with a lot of people who were there and established a community.
Williams: Yes we did, we became… I married, I forgot to say that, [Laughter], that’s a very major step in life. I married while I was at Black Mountain, we got married in the quiet house… Oh, I remember the night before, I remember getting my clothes ready, you know, I remember, you know, somebody saving me enough hot water for bath because it was never enough hot water, we would all run down after the work program and make sure we could get our bath in, or get washed, you know, and but I remember getting ready and ironing my skirt which I think I made, or somebody made it, but I had I had woven the fabric of my… I wore a little vest [Laughter], and I had woven that, you know, and we had heard a minister speak on the radio and he had a certain pacifist component, we were not of any particular denomination so we called him up and went to talk with him and he came out to perform the marriage in the quiet house and then Dr. and Ms. Dehn, who was visiting then, she didn’t live there, they made us a breakfast. And then we went on back to work. I remember even that martinet Albers said, “You… You really don’t have to work today, you shouldn’t be working today.” [Laughter] I don’t know if I – did I do justice to Josef Albers? Because I did tell some of his down- more autocratic sides and all, but I just really do want to stress that he was a magnificent teacher. And I have used the things I’ve learned, I learned literally learned, I remember learning them, all my artistic life. I really have. I have a book called “More, More, More Said the Baby” – I’m a children’s book writer and illustrator, and a book of mine, two of my books won Caldecott Honors, and one of them is very colorful. And the committee that chose me asked me if I had based it on color theory. And I hadn’t based it on color theory, precisely, but I had based it very much on my studies. I was very proud of that book because it employed so much of what I had literally learned in color classes, you know, and I’m not sure that you really… Many people can say that about their education, that they understand exactly how – or not exactly, but they they sense and can follow how the teaching that they went through and were exposed to, and the projects they did and all, led to their increasing abilities even many, many, many years later, because I didn’t I didn’t take up doing that until I was in my 40s. But we did – to answer your question – we did go… Toward the quite messy end of Black Mountain College, I have to say, it rather fell apart, the people… Imaginative, interesting, brilliant people were there but they did not have Albers’s and the earlier people’s ability to administrate. That was always a problem – it’s always a problem in a place where the administration is not separate from the ownership and the daily participation to keep something going. Institutions provide a screen from all the struggles, right, and we didn’t have that – every time there was a big struggle people left and sides were taken and like that. But at any rate, near the end we started to talk about what we would do next and my husband Paul Williams was involved in the college as far as money went, which he had from his family, and he had built buildings there, he was very interested in it – he had a basically pacifist Quaker nature, though he was not brought up that way, and negotiating nature, so we tried to figure out where we could go next and do more. People wanted to be closer to New York, John Cage, Merce Cunningham was involved – particularly John Cage – Mary Caroline Richards… Who else from the college… David Tudor, the Potters, the Weinribs, and we moved to New York… We then lived in the Boston area, we moved down to New York City and we spent six months looking for a piece of property, forming the bylaws of a new corporation, Patsy and LaNoue then get got involved with it, too, I don’t know at what point, and we found a place 30 miles outside New York City, in Rockland County, called Stony Point, and we bought 116 acres and we started to build what actually turned out to be a residential community with a strong emphasis on artists and craftspeople, though there were other people there, artists including musicians – greatly including musicians, because there were the… the early music group that Patsy was involved in, and LaNoue, and then there was the John Cage people, and they lived right across from each other, that was exciting [Laughter] – and then there was David Berman, there were other musicians of the whole group around John Cage, there was the pottery, and there was an enamelist, and we were able to put a lot of our ideas about children raising and community – very much an influenced we haven’t mentioned, Paul Goodman, who came in the summer, and was a highly argumentative person, polarizing person, but full of ideas, very interesting ideas that are now so much talked about – how we could have a both an urban and a country life, how we could be a community – he and his brother wrote a book called Communitas, we took courses with him, Paul and myself, and, I mean, he talked about things like how the chairs were arranged in a meeting and what it meant, or in a church, you know, if the chairs were all this way and we were all focused on somebody, or the chairs was around, you know, it just made you think about – where should the houses be? How should they face each other? What does this mean in terms of how people will talk to each other? And so forth… and Paul was very influenced by that, and I was too, and that all led into the community, and then Paul Goodman was on the advisory board for our… Not for the community, it didn’t have that, but I think for our school which we later started – a very disorderly elementary school. But it had – many wonderful things went on and… This is too much to talk about, look how old I am [Laughter], I mean, we’ve just been doing things for decades!
Bostic: So from Black Mountain, then, the people who went to The Land were M.C. Richards…
Williams: M.C. Richards, David Tudor, Karen Karnes, David Weinrib, Patsy Lynch Davenport and LaNoue Davenport…Uh… That’s all I can think of, other people thought of coming, Merce Cunningham did not want… Did I mention John Cage?
Bostic: You mentioned John.
Williams: Yeah. John Cage and I built a stone wall together. He lived on one… We shared a building, and neither of us had ever built a stone wall [Laughter], we started with small… We lived in Stony Point, in Rockland County, we lived on the side of a hill of stones and so we didn’t have to go very far to get them, but we started with smallish stones, and as time went on I was pregnant, going toward you know the birth of the baby, he was about to go on tour, you know, and the stones got bigger [Laughter], and we got about 2 feet from the ceiling… That was the end of the wall, so it ended in cupboards between his area and ours. I think you could hear every word we said through the cupboards [Laughter]. But he was our next door neighbor for a very long time. Patsy and LaNoue were our neighbors across… The houses were built around a kind of a square cut into a hill, so for a long time we lived very much with people from Black Mountain, it was kind of a continuation. M.C. Richards very much wanted to start a weekend college. We didn’t do that, it did not develop into an avowedly specific educational place. It was very educational sometimes, much… Both Black Mountain and the place we formed were more educational than you could bear sometimes. I would say that was their chief… Because life’s like that too, but because they were so open, you know, and honest in a way, you were subject to a lot of struggle – with self, with other people, with philosophies, and things that didn’t work, you know, and you – that was part of your education.
Bostic: Is there anything that you didn’t do at Black Mountain that you look back now, which maybe you would have done… A class you didn’t take or a party you didn’t participate in?
Williams: Not that comes to mind. You know, there’s always some regrets of that sort but no, not that I can think of. I participated in about everything I could. Josef Albers taught me to waltz. I remember him saying the man leads… But he did teach me to waltz [Laughter], and then we had…a couple years later we had a waltzing contest and Ted Dreier, young Ted Dreier, son of older Ted Dreier and I won the waltzing contest. I had been brought up kind of willfully by my parents as though popular culture didn’t exist in the United States [Laughter], we didn’t listen to popular music, we didn’t listen to the radio, and you know, and that was their choice – I mean we listen to classical music on the radio – so there were a lot, like, I didn’t know how to dance, even though, you know, everybody in my high school knew how, you know, of that kind of dancing… I had taken part in modern dancing, but I had never actually danced. So I got to do those things, you know, we went on Saturday nights we would run over through the mud from our dorms to the dining room holding our shoes and wearing our long dresses [Laughter].
Bostic: There was a time when you were involved with a women’s magazine. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Williams: I’m not sure what you’re referring to… I was involved with Liberation Magazine, I did the covers for many years, and that was a radical pacifist magazine. Dave Dellinger was one of its editors. A. J. Muste, a longtime pacifist activist, was on its editorial board, and a community called Glen Gardner… It was in Glen Gardner New Jersey, it may have had a different name, was where it was printed, and where Dave Dellinger lived, and they were trying to have a communal life there, too, and I used to go… We were close to them and I used to go down there, and I was able to work – it was a much larger printing press and all – but I was able to be very experimental about the covers. I did woodcuts, I did drawings. One year I think I did almost all the covers. The first cover I did was for an article that Paul Goodman wrote about when Wilhelm Reich died, and I had been interested in that, and they asked me to do the cover and I did that. The next one that I remember doing was when a little group sailed a sailboat into the Pacific to try to bollocks up the nuclear weapons test that was about to be held. I forget the name of that little ship, but I did a little sailboat. I had a lot of freedom about what to do. And then when the war in Vietnam was underway I did a whole series of covers including that. I was a longtime activist against war, against nuclear weapons, and I was able to express that on that magazine. As for the women’s movement I have been active in – I took part in a group called Women’s Pentagon Action, which – there was no war going on, this would have been in the ’80s I believe, and it was mostly on the east coast and we all as a group went to Washington DC, we were lent large puppets by the Bread and Puppet Theater and we made our own march through Arlington Cemetery and we tried to highlight women who had lost their lives in struggles with motherhood, with rape, elements that we felt were just neglected, and also particularly to grieve for, and to resist the amount of money and the amount of attention that was and now, more than even then, is being poured into war – which did not seem to be a pursuit of interest in family, children, and education. So I was arrested in that – we blocked the steps of the Pentagon – we wove them. We wove them shut with ribbon and the police cut the ribbons [laughter], and we threw more ribbons up. It was meant to be expressive of female interests and a way to make the protest – and the author Grace Paley wrote a wonderful statement. She took the ideas of everybody and she fashioned them into something called the unity statement, and a lot of us learned it – a lot of it – by heart, and we sat on the steps and chanted it. Anyway, many of us got arrested and I ended up spending – going back to [laughter] the south, to West Virginia, in chains, in a bus, to the federal prison at Alderson where I stayed for a month. So I had a new educational experience, since I obviously wasn’t going to be there, you know – and I don’t want to make light of, you know, what it would have felt like if I was going to be there for years, and if I had been treated really badly, but for a month it was remarkably enlightening. Because unless you get sent to prison you don’t know about it. And you still don’t know about it if you’re there as a white middle class woman with lawyers and with the press eye on you, you know, but you do get much more of an idea about it, right.
Bostic: You’ve had quite a lot…
Williams: [Laughter] I’m still having it! Isn’t it wonderful that now, you know, that we really live a long time, right?
Bostic: Yeah, yeah we can do lots of stuff! Williams: Yeah, but let’s, you know, just connect it back, you know. It’s been a wonderful life and between my parents and, you know, New York City and the Bronx and then Black Mountain I really lucked out. [Laughter].
Bostic: Thank you so much, Vera, you’ve been great – thank you.
Williams: Thank you.