Willowbee, Sally - interviewed by Rose Norman, 2015 January 23

Containers:

Digital-materials RL10066-SET-WILLOWBEES > Digital-materials digital-materials

Physical description:

0:52:58

Biographical / historical:

Born in Des Moines, Iowa (12-6-1946), Sally Willoughby (later Willowbee) moved to South New Jersey when she was in second grade. Her parents were Quaker peace activists. Her father, George Willoughby, worked for the American Friends Service Committee and the Committee on Conscientious Objectors. As he became more radical, he stopped having regular jobs and gave full time to peace work. Her mother, Lillian Willoughby, was a trained dietician. Both parents participated in many peace protests, such as the Indo-China peace walk, and became more and more radical, getting arrested and jailed at times. In West Philadelphia, they helped start a branch of the Movement for a New Society, a national/international movement, and founded The Life Center as the Philadelphia base for that branch. The Life Center organized communal living in twenty houses. They lived there from 1971 to 1987, and seven or eight of those houses are still community land trusts. Sally went to college at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. When she got out of college, she totally immersed herself in the non-violent peace movement, and she went to work with a group her parents helped found, A Quaker Action Group, in Philadelphia. She also helped start one of the first communes in Philadelphia, Any Day Now, which was for draft resisters and peace activists. She got involved with the women's movement, and helped organize one of the first consciousness-raising groups in Philadelphia. She began going to Sugarloaf Women's Village in the Florida Keys in 1989. While at Sugarloaf, she began creating what she called "a spoken book illustrated with slides," titled TRASHY WOMEN; From Plastic Bags to Heavy Metals, Women Who Make Art From Recycled Materials. It was about women artists (many of them self-taught) making art out of recycled materials (e.g., Rainbow Williams, Mary Proctor). Many (but not most) were Florida artists. In 2012, she wrote a book about outsider art sites near her home in Deptford, New Jersey, Found Artists: On Country Roads, Side Streets Back Alleys of South Jersey in 2012, see http://sjmagazine.net/2013/outdoor-art ), later developed as an exhibition and film. Her website is https://www.facebook.com/Quirkywords). Sally is the only Sugarloaf resident that we have been able to interview from its heyday as women's land in the 1990s. The main residents from that time (Jane Verlaine, Blue Lunden, Ruth Dreamdigger, and Vogel) have all died. She was also a member of the earliest attempt at a women's land group that we have found in a Southern state, the Peacemaker Land Trust near Hinton, West Virginia. It lasted from 1971 to 1973, and Sally was there in 1972.

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