Born in River Falls, Wisconsin, Mary Fox moved to Minnesota in 1982 to look for better job opportunities. She first moved to Bloomington, and now currently lives in Eagan. She has three kids, ages twenty six, twenty four and nineteen and is currently participating in a committee called ACMUI, teaching graduate students medical physics and working in radiation oncology. She describes herself as intense, hyper, and spontaneous.
My parents didn’t spoil us. They were great people and you work, you know, you were expected to help clean the house and my mom had a beautiful garden. It was huge and we always had to pull weeds. Whenever I was kind of crabby or worried, she said, “Go out there and pull weeds and you’ll forget all your worries.” So I’d say she was a big influence on me. My dad worked really hard and my mom [as well] and I think the worth ethics that they promoted, you know, I just, I don’t sit around now and I cannot sit and relax in my own house. I never watch TV; it just doesn’t interest me and I just always have to be doing something. They influenced me a lot.
I was sent away...
I was sent away to high school. It was an all girls school. At that time, River Falls was not a very good school. And they would get, you know, all 60 kids in the class into the auditorium and a guy would stand on the stage with a skeleton and try to teach you biology. So my aunt taught at an all girls school and my folks really wanted that for me, so I always say I was sent away. So I think just living away from home at such a young age made me really independent. You had to work hard to stay in that school because they demanded that you study because if you didn’t you were kicked out. So we had study hall twice a day. We had school till 2:30 pm, [and] we had to wear a uniform. Then we had study hall from 4:30 pm till 6 pm. We had to go to mass and then we got to eat. Then we had study hall from 7 pm to 9 pm and then lights out were at 10 pm. Lights out at 10 pm was when you started getting into trouble. We had nuns for teachers. I had a room my first year with 4 other girls, and you know, [I had to] be independent.
[After high school] I went to undergraduate in MN at St. Mary’s, which growing up in a small town, St. Mary’s seemed huge to me. [After St. Mary’s] I got into graduate school in Chicago. I cried all the way there because I was missing my boyfriend. When I got there I said to this roommate that I just met, "I need to go outside for a walk." So were walking and I hear like what I thought was waves or something and I said to her, “Gosh you know, I just gotta tell ya I hear something like waves or water or something.” She goes, “Well… it's probably the lake”, and I went, “What lake?” We turned the corner and you know it was Lake Michigan and I’m like (gasps) “Oh my gosh it looks like the ocean!” I never saw a lake that big and she thought I was the biggest hick that ever walked the planet. Then my boyfriend came to see me about, I think it was about eight weeks later and I thought he was the most immature person on the planet. I had grown up so much. I couldn't believe it. I wouldn't say I was in love with where I was, but I had grown up so much and it took a year. It took a year for me to really get to where I really felt comfortable there and I knew my way around and I had friends and I all of a sudden, I liked it.
[After college] I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was very adventurous and then I thought about the Peace Corps. They [the Peace Corps] guaranteed then that you would go to a foreign country at that time. So I was in the peace corps for two years. I was in two different villages, but you know the first village wasn't so great. The second village, I think because I knew better, I was much more experienced and I did better. Now I think it's a little different, so Africa was the country. They had me build fish ponds so people can grow fish and get some protein in their diet in Africa. They trained me for six months on how to do this. I was sent to this village all by myself. So here I was, this white girl coming into this village and I'm gonna tell these people how to get protein in their diet. That was a little challenging and I was 50 miles from anywhere and I don't have a car. Some people didn't listen to me, but I got a few people to listen to me. It was usually the guys that didn't wanna listen to what I had to say. Anyways, it took awhile.
I would say most people would have quit...
I got really sick too [in Africa while I was involved in the Peace Corps] about nine months into my time there. I must have eaten something cause all they have is basically a corn mush to eat, so their diets were terrible. Anyway, we grew some fish and that was very challenging and I ate something and got like deathly sick. So then I had to go to the next town and they put me in the hospital for three weeks and I got better. So it was kind of one of those things where I didn't give up. I would say most people would have quit and given up. I think it was definitely a character building experience. I don't really recommend it for anyone unless you're a really determined person and I just wasn't gonna give up. I didn't want to be a quitter.
You don’t take anything for granted...
The professor I had [while I attended Northwestern] was from India and he said, "Say how would you like to spend time in India and teach a class?" I said yes and Wayne, my husband, had no desire, so I went by myself. What was fascinating was that it was very dusty and dirty and here in America everything is so clean, so I could never drink the water. You had to be very careful. Anything and everything was in the road. Camels, goats, cows, people, cars. There we're a few cars, but they were honking all the time and it was just crowded. That's what it was just so, you just felt like you had no space. Though, I did enjoy it and I did some traveling. I went up to the Himalayas and the Taj Mahal, but the other thing that you don't like about India is that you're either very filthy rich or you're very poor.
So the rich have ten servants because it's so cheap and you can pay all these servants 20 dollars a month total, you know. They are all so desperate for food and we would eat off banana leaves and at the end of the night--I was not a member of the clean plate club--they would take your banana leaves and they would scrape it to a bowl and the servants got that. So most people didn't leave a crumb; not a fleck of rice did they leave because food was so precious. I would say, I would have liked to have someone to share it with. There's rickshaws and people pulling people around, you know. You know it was way different, way different. So yes, I loved it. It was interesting, but you don't take anything for granted. We have nice toilets here, you know, and you don't have that there and you know, we take all that for granted.
Minneapolis wasn’t cool…yet
After all those trips, I finally settled in Minnesota with my husband, Wayne. It wasn’t as cool as it is now. If you want to buy a home in South Minneapolis, I mean it, you can’t find a home in South Minneapolis. Everybody wants to live there. So the only place really, in my time living here, was to live in the suburb, especially if you wanted to raise kids. That’s why we bought a house in Eagan. I would say growing up in the suburb is pretty darn sheltered, uh bubblelife. You know, you don't interact. Eagan's getting a little more integrated but not nearly like the city. You can, don’t have to worry about, you know, locking your door every time you’re walking to out your house; whereas in Chicago you lock that door every single time. You don’t worry about any of that. [As for changes] the trees have gotten taller. The neighbors and us all had kids around the same age. They, there use to be umm about 50 or 60 kids in the neighborhood. And you know, they’ve all grown up and gone off to college. Now there is this kind of second wave of young, some young families in our neighbor, not a lot, but a few. So we do see little kids again.
As for work in Minnesota, I got a job at Methodist hospital and I worked there for almost five years. I became the director of the department, so I do physics work, radiation oncology, and cancer treatment. I calibrate all the equipment to make sure people are not getting overdosed or underdosed. There’s lots of things I do. The group of doctors that I worked with at that time, were approached by two other hospitals to start radiation oncology at their hospital. So then they asked me to help them run these other two centers. I left Methodist and just became the director of all these centers and now we have thirteen centers. I also do some teaching here at the U, yeah, medical physics for graduate students. I have a resident that is with me everyday that is learning on the job. And I’m a national expert. I mean, I’ve been called to different panels and things to discuss and try to write policy on different things. And I’m on a committee that’s called, it’s called the ACMUI, which is Academic Medical Clinical Use of Medical Isotopes. So yeah, that's what I do.
My dream would be...
Once I'm done working in a few years, I think we will move to our cabin up north in Minnesota, for retirement. I also like the city too, so sometimes I go, oh my gosh, living in the cabin? I’ll probably live in the cabin in the summer, then my dream would be to live in the city in November, December, and then January and maybe February. I’ll go travel south and just stay in different places for months. Then come back probably to the cabin or the city. We haven’t decided that yet. So it’s either gonna be the cabin, and then not all winter, but just maybe to get a break from the winter. Maybe a month, some warmth in different places. Like actually I had told Wayne that I want to buy a camper and we would drive to all the southern state parks in the winter, and just live in the camper. Yeah, but we’re not the type that’s gonna get a place in Florida, or Arizona and go to the same place every year. We’re not going to do that. We want to change it up and do something different every time.
Footnotes
Hyperlinks on ACMUI, The Peace Corps & Methodist Hospital
Image References:
- First image (Mary Fox)
- Second Image (St. Mary’s University-where Mary first went to college)
- Third Image from left to right (Wayne, Scott-son, Stephanie-daughter, Kathryn-daughter, Mary)
Story Facilitators:
Dana Ahlstrom
Brenda Xiang
Ebtisam Wais
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