Mark and Virginia Pulver of Greenwood, S.C., have been together for over 50 years. During that time, their military and humanitarian work has taken them around the world.
Before she married Mark, Virginia was crowned “Pork Princess” in her Plymouth County hometown in Iowa, which locals refer to as “Pig’s Knuckle.” Since then, Virginia has often used that fun fact a conversation-starter during her travels. Both she and Mark recently sat down with StoryCorps to discuss some of their adventures and the occasional cultural differences they would encounter, including at mealtime.
TRANSCRIPT:
Mark: So, you tell people that you were a Pork Princess just so that you can get their attention.
Virginia: That's right. I'm from Pigs Knuckle, Iowa, which, of course--
Mark: Which doesn't exist.
Virginia: --doesn't exist, but it's a small town. And, when I was in second grade, I remember seeing John F. Kennedy on television giving a grave statement about the Bay of Pigs. And I was so concerned about the Russians and the Bay of Pigs and, all the things that would go along with it. Little did I know that one day I would be in Ukraine and sitting across the table from an old man who had been at the Bay of Pigs, a Russian man, when he was 17, pretty far from home. And why were we in Ukraine?
Mark: We were in the Peace Corps.
Virginia: Yeah.
Mark: We went in the Peace Corps and they chose Ukraine for us.
Virginia: When we went to training, we were living in a town that was in the Chernobyl district. So, we weren't allowed to…there were foods we couldn't eat, because they were still not safe, even though it had been, I don't know, 20 or 30 years--
Mark: --it hadn't been that many years, but, yeah.
Virginia: It was International Women's Day when we arrived there.
Mark: Yeah, what International Women's Day is in most of Europe is the male spouses do all the housework and take care of the cleaning and the cooking. So, I ended up cooking dinner.
Virginia: For our host family.
Mark: I did the cooking and I know how to cook. It wasn't a problem. I went to the market and I found everything I was supposed to cook. Got a nice-looking chicken, got some mushrooms and some rice, and was gonna make a good meal. And I put that down on the table and they looked at it and they saw the mushrooms and they both got up and left the table.
Virginia: And we were kind of at a loss. And then we found out that you are not supposed to eat the mushrooms.
Mark: Mushrooms were still on the “forbidden list,” because they accept radiation rather quickly. The mushrooms, I got came from a church basement, so they were safe. But they'd never heard that, so they didn't expect that.
Virginia: But remember our host family? They were pretty interesting. He used to get up before dawn and go out and catch these fish for breakfast. And then we'd wake up to the smell of our host mother cooking—
Mark: Soup.
Virginia: Soup. It would be pre-dawn and she'd be making soup. So, we'd sit down to breakfast and there'd be a big old fishtail hanging over the side of the bowl or the head of the fish in the other bowl.
Mark: I got the head. Cause I was the male.
Virginia: Yeah, that was special. I just couldn't quite handle that. And I wanted to be polite. So, what I did was I would put a little plastic inside my waistband. And when she would go, when Tanya would go into the kitchen to get the coffee, I would slip the little head of the fish or the tail of the fish—
Mark: Whichever you ate.
Virginia: --whatever, whatever it was, I'd stick that in my pocket. I'm pretty liberal about what I eat, but, at dawn, and they were pretty ugly looking fish. And then later, when we were going to our training--
Mark: To class.
Virginia: --or classes, we had language classes and cultural classes, we would stop by the train station where there were lots of cats. Ukrainians love cats. And, so, I would squat down and leave bits of fish and stuff. And the women at the train station loved it. When we came to the train station to buy tickets, they would say, “Oh, you're the nice American who feeds the cats!” And, they would always treat us really nice.
