First Insights
The First Ladies of West Virginia is an exhibit at the Cultural Center that captures a moment from each woman’s inaugural celebration through doll-sized replicas that showcase their beautiful gowns. Pictured is the Gayle Manchin doll, dressed in a hand-made, scaled replica of the gown First Lady Manchin wore to her husband’s inaugural ball in 2004.
With the unveiling of the latest edition to the First Ladies of West Virginia doll exhibit in the Cultural Center, publisher April Pennell- Hendershot sits down with First Lady Gayle Manchin, the inspiration behind the newest edition, to discuss her life in the Governor’s Mansion, her own dolls growing up, how it feels to be a part of history and, of course, her fabulous shoes.
MV: With the creation of the doll and the realization that now you’re a part of history, is this a surreal moment for you? GM: Yes, that’s an excellent word for it—it’s kind of surreal. When Commissioner Reid Smith fi rst approached me about doing this, it was just kind of like, ‘A doll? Oh my heavens.’ As it progressed, it was like capturing a moment in time in your life that was a wonderful experience, and to think that that moment has somehow been captured in history is pretty awesome.
MV: If someone had told little Gayle that she’d one day have a doll crafted after her own image, what do you think she would have said or thought? GM: Dolls were a big part of my life because I was an only child, so my dolls were extremely important to me and they were very real to me. I had baby dolls and grown up dolls. I was before Barbie, but I had larger dolls dressed in pretty outfi ts. I guess I would have said, ‘Oh, that’s great’ because, as I said, dolls were very real to me. As an example of that, when I went away to college, I had always kept my dolls in my room, kind of lined up, that I was attached to and after I went away to college, my mom straightened up my room and changed it around a little bit and she had taken all the dolls downstairs to the basement. When I came in, I asked where were my dolls and she said they were in the basement. That didn’t bother me because I was away at school, but I went down to the basement and she had put plastic over them to keep them clean. When I looked at them it was like I thought they were going to suffocate and that was the fi rst thing that hit me—they can’t breath. Of course I said ‘Gayle, get a grip’, but that was my fi rst reaction because those dolls had been so real to me. In a way this doll maybe is more signifi cant to me because I saw dolls as such a signifi cant part of my life.
MV: Did you have a favorite doll growing up? GM: No. I had different favorites at different points in my life, but not one that was overall. But I will say that once I got attached to them, I never lost that attachment. I remember one of the dolls I had when I was younger—it was a ballerina because I loved ballet and I had dolls that were also (associated with) interests that I had. You have these dolls when you’re little that you drag around with you everywhere you go and they were stuffed with something that was like a beanie powdery stuff. (The baby doll) had gotten some holes in it so it was dropping crumbs all over the house and of course that didn’t set well with my mother, so the doll sort of disappeared one day. I asked what happened and my mother said,‘We sent her to the hospital.’ Well, she never came home. (She laughs.) My first tragic adventure—the doll that never came back.
MV: If the First Lady doll had one accessory or one thing that she would consider invaluable, what would it be? GM: Well, shoes are what I consider my main accessory. I’m a shoe lady. But I guess, and I did joke with Joanne that she didn’t have my mouth big enough on the doll, it would be my smile. I just have never seen a picture of myself or been in a situation where I would see myself when I wasn’t smiling that I didn’t take a double take and say ‘That isn’t me.’ I just associate myself with smiling and when I see a picture of myself where I’m not smiling—oh no, that’s not me, that doesn’t look right. So literally when I looked at the doll and said to Joanne, ‘No, her mouth isn’t big enough,’ what I meant was it just wasn’t a smile I associate myself with.
MV: When you were a young girl, what was your dream and where do you stand now in respect to that dream? GM: Probably the one thing if I could’ve been anything I would have loved to have been a professional dancer—a ballet dancer. I took all forms of dancing and took them from the time I was pretty young. I was better in modern jazz and tap but what I loved was ballet, even though I had to really work at it. It’s just like anything—some things come easier than others. Jazz and tap came really easy to me. But there was such a discipline to (ballet) and a beauty to it that that was probably my biggest dream—that I wanted to some day be in New York and be a toe dancer. I talked to my parents about that, that I thought I should go to New York and try to do that, and they said, ‘Well, we don’t. We think you should go to college and get an education.’ I guess somewhere in the back of my mind I thought I might still do that and then I met Joe and we got married and started a family, so somewhere along the line the realization hit me that I was not going to be a prima ballerina. It’s something that would have been a really great thing to accomplish, but I accomplished other great things. I have a wonderful marriage, three beautiful children, so you look at the blessings you have. But that would have been nice too.
MV: Did you have a mentor or someone to talk with to help you through the transition of being First Lady? GM: No, unfortunately because of the way things transpired, the fi rst lady before me was not here and that wasn’t possible. But I remembered Sharon Rockefeller. When I had seen Sharon before the election and they were doing some campaigning for Senator Byrd and I said to her, ‘One of the things I’ll never forget, Sharon, is that you captured the artistry of West Virginia in Cabin Creek with the quilts and started that cottage industry of women that never thought of what they were doing as a profession or a career, and you made that happen in West Virginia. What a wonderful legacy.’ You look at people like that that certainly, I think, set a wonderful example. In my lifetime, Jacqueline Kennedy (was a role model) because I was a senior in high school when John F. Kennedy was assassinated and I had watched her before as she did things in the White House, the way she was–the grace, the dignity. Then she went through this horrible tragedy—the way she dealt with that and she had two young children and she seemed to have such strength and strength of character through all that, so I looked at that, and my mother and my grandmother—all those women. When I speak to women’s groups, I tell them that we’re only where we are today because of the wonderful things that our mothers and grandmothers did that made it possible for us to be here and we need to keep that in mind for our daughters and granddaughters so that we make it even better for them. I have this great responsibility that anywhere I go I represent this state and I’m representing the women of West Virginia, so I don’t want to ever do anything that would be embarrassing or give the wrong impression or representation of the state. But it’s not like you have a book that you can just look up and say, ‘Well, in this situation, do this.’ The other thing that’s very nice is that there’s a wonderful network of fi rst spouses across the country and we have an annual winter meeting in Washington, D.C. As the governors meet on things they need to meet on, the first spouses meet and discuss and share successes and maybe notso- successes, so I have met a really wonderful support group.
MV: What is the one thing you want to communicate to the young women of West Virginia? GM: To believe in yourself. I think one of the things that concerns me today is I look at young women and see them in interviews on TV and read interviews in magazines, and I don’t think young women respect themselves enough. And if you don’t respect yourself, other people are not going to respect you. I would encourage young girls to put a great value on themselves because they are very important and their lives and their dreams are very important, and unfortunately in life there are many things that you can’t undo so you have to be very careful of how you treat your body, the decisions that you make that in some ways can affect your life forever. I just think that’s so important and young girls have to realize that. And the fl ip side of that is anything is possible. I say every day more things become possible. We have a woman running for president of this country and I don’t think people say anymore ‘Oh, we’d never elect a woman president.’ I just don’t think they say that and there was obviously a time when women couldn’t even vote. Every generation (brings) more opportunities, so I want girls to dream and believe in their dreams and know that they can be and do anything they want to, but you have to have that strength and determination to keep moving forward.
MV: When did you discover your own fashion sense? GM: I guess it was the time period I grew up in. For example, when I was in high school, we dressed. You didn’t wear blue jeans. You didn’t even wear pants too much unless it was a pants suit. For church on Sunday I wore a hat, gloves, heels. And my high heels go back a long way. My fi rst thought about high heels was that I couldn’t wait to get into high heel tap shoes. I knew that that next pair of tap shoes I outgrew, I’d get to go into high heel tap shoes and that was a good thing. It wasn’t just me; it was all the young women my age. We dressed to go to church and to most events—you talk about dressing up in your Sunday clothes but we did. There was a real difference in the type of clothes you wore to church, and even the clothes you wore to school. It’s not that they were real expensive clothes but they matched and you always thought about coordinating your shoes with your outfi t, your skirt with your sweater, and I think that’s probably how (my sense) developed, simply because that was the fashion at that time. Then when I went to WVU, the same thing—everything was very matched and coordinated and you dressed up again. When you went to ballgames, you wore suits, hats, and I know now I’m sounding like I’m a hundred years old, but you weren’t allowed to wear pants to class. If you did, you had to wear a coat and keep the coat on. And the only exception that they made was during fi nals week. Their theory was you act the way you dress and that was sort of a general theory back then. Even at home my mother would have probably said the same thing —you need to look your best when you go out because if you look your best, you’ll act your best. It wasn’t until after Joe and I were graduating and leaving that you really started seeing the fl ower children and hippies and fashion was changing drastically. It was doing almost a complete reverse. So I have always paid a lot of attention to what I had on. I’ve had friends say ‘I never see you in a sweat suit’ and I don’t do that very often because I didn’t grow up doing that and I think we are creatures of habit. I don’t know that it was like coming into a sense, because I’ve always dressed up a lot. I do like to be comfortable so I look especially for fabrics and things that are comfortable because once I dress, I’m dressed for eight or 10 hours.
MV: You sound like you’re used to always looking good. Does the pressure of the wardrobe ever get to you? GM: I don’t know that I’m used to always looking good, but I’m used to dressing up. I’m not a shopper; I don’t live to go shopping. I shop more because I need something or because something is coming up and I don’t have what I feel I need for that occasion. If I had a day that I had absolutely nothing to do and could do anything I wanted to do, I wouldn’t say I want to go shopping. I probably look at shopping like one of the things I have to do and I guess it’s kind of interesting because I enjoy looking good but I don’t enjoy the process you have to go through to get there.
MV: You have the most amazing shoes. How many pairs of shoes do you have and how do you handle having those high heels on all day long, every day? GM: First of all, in terms of handling, I have very high arches and I am much more comfortable in high heels than I am in others. In fact, when we go on vacation or I’m at the beach or somewhere where I’m in tennis shoes or fl ats all day, my calves hurt but I think it’s just because I have a very high arch and when I have on high heels, my arch is where it is most comfortable and then again probably because I’ve worn them so long that makes a difference. And it’s not that I have that many shoes. I am amazed when women talk about having hundreds of pairs of shoes or a closet full of shoes and I don’t, but I try to get a variety so that when I wear them they are kind of unique and people notice them but they don’t notice that I wear them a lot. If I am going to be out or we go on a trip like the winter meeting in Washington where we’ll have an outing to town or a store, I would not ever go to a store and not go to the shoe department. That would be one of my first stops.
MV: How has your taste affected the changes made to the mansion during the renovations? GM: I tried to keep in mind that this is not my house; I’m just passing through. I’m the caretaker for the next four years, so I tried to do things that were comfortable and soothing that were also true to the integrity of the house—the style of the house—but wasn’t something so far out there that someone would say ‘They expect me to live here?’ If you’re traditional, hopefully we’ve done things that will be comfortable and easy to live with. Joe said, after we fi nally got it done, ‘I really notice a difference now when we’re out somewhere and say we’re going home I can’t wait to get home.'
MV: How has being the First Lady changed you as an individual? GM: I’m probably more driven now. Before I became First Lady, I had a passion for certain things and was very committed to issues, but it was like over a long term. I’ve been an educator for years and issues around children and families have always been important to me so it’s always been an on-going thing. As the First Lady of the state, I feel really driven now that I have this window of opportunity to maybe really make something happen and now it’s not a forever thing, now it’s a ‘You need to get it done right now’ thing. One of the most frustrating things for me is that you can‘t move things as quickly as you want to, so I have this sense of urgency that time is going to be over and the work’s not going to be done. There are things that I would really like to see happen and I’m hoping that we can do some of that, so it’s a much greater sense of urgency about what I really care about.
MV: Is there anything that you would like the readers to know? GM: I guess the only thing I can say, and I kind of said it at fi rst about being overwhelmed, but I’m very honored and very humbled by this opportunity. I don’t know that I have done anything in life to deserve it but I’m just so proud to have the opportunity and what an experience of a lifetime. When you had asked me earlier about what I would tell girls and I’d tell any young person this— don’t ever pass up an opportunity to meet someone. If you’re given the opportunity to join a club or go on a trip somewhere, take advantage of all of those opportunities because you never know where you’re going to end up and you never know what experience is going to be the perfect precursor to what will happen or will maybe bring about an opportunity for later in life. Never pass up an opportunity. One of the first interviews I ever had, one of the reporters said, ‘What have you done that makes you qualifi ed to be First Lady?’ I started thinking about it and I thought, it’s everything I’ve done and how blessed I’ve been that I had a lot of opportunities growing up and a lot of opportunities in life to travel and meet people and I think all of that certainly defi nes who I am and I’m sure has made me more aware of things and better qualifi ed to handle certain situations. I guess above all else I just feel very blessed to have had this opportunity in life and I don’t think when we were campaigning that I truly realized the depth and breadth of it at that time.
