Back to the Future

 

Children love to hear stories of when adults were children themselves. Often the stories are as difficult to believe as imagining that adults were ever children, even when presented with photos as proof.

A neighbor boy who used to watch my dad doing wood carvings in our front yard in summer once asked my dad what TV shows he watched as a kid. My father, who was born in 1921 and was raised in the ’20s and ’30s, replied that they didn’t have TV when he was a child.

Our neighbor, who wasn’t old enough for school at the time, couldn’t imagine what anyone would do without TV.

My father explained that when he was a boy, there were shows on radio like the ones on TV, only without pictures, so everyone could imagine what was going on from the sound. Imagination at that level – or perhaps at all – was probably beyond the boy’s understanding.

I had a similar experience with a student when I worked in schools. Said child couldn’t imagine a TV in black and white with only 3 stations. Worse, there was only one TV in the house. He wanted to know if the cable stations were in color, and was shocked to learn there was no such thing as cable at the time.

“What if everyone wanted to watch something different?”

“My parents had the final say on what the family watched. If you didn’t like it, you could go off and play with your toys. Or that might be your ideal time to do homework.”

Add to the fact that besides the shows being in black and white, the controls were all on the set itself, with no remote. In later years, those of us who were children at that time joked that we were the remote.

It got me thinking about how things have changed just since I was a child. Okay, it’s been a very long time since I was a child – last century, as the kids now like to say.

Many things we take for granted now didn’t exist then.

My parents, both born in the 1920s, were also born at home, not in a hospital. That was something my generation in America found peculiar. Married near the end of the war, they moved into a rural suburb of Philadelphia.

Our neighborhood was relatively newly built as year-round homes when they moved in. Our street ended at the end of our property, the only house on our side of the street. There were a scattering of summer homes on stilts that were only occupied part of the year.

There was a train station within walking distance along a not-pedestrian-friendly main road, which allowed my father access to his job in the city. In bad weather he drove our car to the train station.

The village was more built up by the time I, the third and youngest child, arrived. But there were still farms nearby. The people who lived behind us had a rooster and chickens as well as an outhouse, and there were water pumps scattered throughout the neighborhood for the summer homes.

When I was growing up, we had only one car, just like many of our neighbors. My mother didn’t drive. Thursday night after dinner, we all piled into the car to go to the grocery store to shop for the week. If my mother ran out of anything between shopping trips, she’d send one of us to the local corner grocer, considerably smaller than, and eventually put out of business by 7-11, Wawa and Cumberland Farms. In those days, a parent could send their child to the store for a pack of cigarettes, and no one thought a thing of it.

The milkman – and it was a man – delivered milk to the house, the dry cleaner came to the house to deliver dry cleaning and pick up the next week’s items, Charles Chips trucks stopped at their customers’ houses to sell tins of pretzels and potato chips – the only kind of chips anyone knew about at that time – and Freihoffers’ bread had a truck  that came around to sell the variety of types of bread they made. (I never heard of bagels as a small child, and didn't actually eat one until I was well into adulthood.)  There was also a traveling huckster who sold fruits and vegetables around the town. So, the many women without cars, many of whom didn’t have drivers’ licenses, having moved from the city, where trains, trolleys and buses were plentiful, didn’t have to worry about feeding their families or getting their husbands’ suits cleaned.

Amazon, along with several grocery store chains, now has a food delivery service.

But emergencies were something else.

In those days, 9-1-1 didn’t exist. Indeed, when I was a child, some people still had party lines instead of a private phone line while the telephone company built the post-war wiring and capability to give every home its own number.

But doctors made house calls. A mom without a car would have to rely on neighbors and friends with a car at the house to take them and their child to the hospital in case of serious injury. Most  people would only call an ambulance if someone were dying.

Our cuts and scrapes were treated with Merthiolate or Mercurichrome – as the names imply, containing mercury – and a bandage. We were then patted on the head and sent back outside to play. We were often told, if we came in injured, to stop crying, we weren’t dying.

Cuts and scrapes weren’t given more thought than to clean them up, stop any bleeding, and put a Band-Aid on it. This was especially true for adults.

One Saturday, my mother was playing badminton with my dad and my brothers – I wasn’t old enough to be included. It had rained the day before, so parts of the yard were muddy. She’d also been raking earlier, and the rake was still out, leaning against a tree. While playing, she slid on some mud and fell on the rake, gouging her leg.

She stopped to clean the mud off her leg, wash it and put antiseptic on the wound, followed by a bandage before she went back to the badminton game. A stupid accident, but nothing to make an issue of. No thought was given to getting a puncture wound from a muddy rake with heaven knew what mixed in. She had thoroughly washed the wound with soap and water, and it was bandaged, so she’d done what she was supposed to, as far as she knew.

In the days before synthetic drugs, the tetanus shot was made from horse blood. My mother was allergic to horses, so didn’t get tetanus shots. Now she had to get the shot before she died – early signs of lockjaw had begun – and to suffer the allergic reactions long enough for the shot to take effect before she could get any treatment for the allergic reaction. My mother was lucky to have survived.

Accidents that can now be avoided by the proper protective gear were common. Everyday things presented potential injuries beyond the lead paint on baby furniture.

One day I was telling a child I knew about how I broke my nose in the car at six. I was sitting in the back passenger side seat of a two-door car. My father had just dropped my brother off at Little League. My brother had been sitting in the front seat, but now it was empty. As my father approached the intersection, the light turned yellow. When he realized he wouldn’t make the light, he slammed on the brakes. I served as the crash test dummy, hurtling forward as the front seat back collapsed forward. And I landed nose first on the metal dashboard.

The wonderful 21^st century child I was telling about this wanted to know if I had my seatbelt fastened. I explained that in 1961, the only place seatbelts existed were in airplanes, unless it was an option for the very expensive luxury cars of the wealthy. Ours wasn’t even a new car. Nor were there locking seat backs in two-door cars. Or padded dashboards. I was lucky we were on a 35 mph road or I might have been thrown through the windshield. Alas, my pug nose turned into something I haven’t liked since.

Some of our toys wouldn’t pass muster now, either. I had a device called a Vac-u-form. It consisted of a rectangular metal base. The top was divided in half. On one side was a platform where plastic molds were placed; on the other side, was a heating plate. Above the heading plate was a flip arm where plastic squares were secured above the heating plate. The heat of this machine was similar to a burner on the stove. It would have cooked cakes much faster than the Easy Bake Oven that was popular at the time. But it wasn’t for baking. Instead a plastic square was heated above it for about three minutes, then flipped over onto the mold. At the same time a handle was pumped to create a vacuum, and suck the plastic into the shape of the mold. Then, after a few minutes’ wait, the plastic form could be removed and cut out. There were molds of boats, half ½” balls that were glued together to form a whole ball, and a variety of designs that could be made into decorative pins.

The directions to this item included a statement that an adult should supervise any child using this, but by the time I was 10, I was considered intelligent enough to use it unsupervised – although there was always an adult in calling distance. Other than a few melted plastics that weren’t mounted correctly and a couple of burns on fingers, nothing bad ever happened to me when using it. But it was taken off the market not long after it was introduced. I never knew anyone else who had one. Thinking about it now, this could probably be considered a ’60s forerunner of the 3-D printer.

Our unsafe world taught us that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Still, we of the generation of Rocky and Bullwinkle, the Flintstones and the Jetsons had plenty of room for imagination. Now, finally, the robot maids promised by the year 2000 might soon be in a mail-order store near you. 

 

People Are People

 

 Note: I don't know who wrote the comment for August, but it didn't make any sense. The comment was about being left-handed, and that somehow being a bad thing. I am proudly left-handed and it hasn't caused me any undue problems. In fact, I feel that it has made me better at problem-solving. However, the August post had nothing to do with handedness.  

 

“People are people, so why should it be you and I should get along so awfully…”

This Depeche Mode song has resonated with me since the first time I heard it in 1984.

I am a contemporary of Ruby Bridges. She is a year older than I. I admire her and her family, and am deeply sorry for the difficulties and outright horrors she experienced in school.

Even though she didn’t entirely believe it or live it, my mother taught me that you shouldn’t judge people based on race, religion, gender, ethnic background or, by my own extension, sexual orientation.

I know she didn’t live it. Every time I pointed out something my parents allowed my older brothers to do that they didn’t let me do, I was told, “That’s different; they’re boys.” It was never that they were older. All you had to do to qualify was to be a boy.

I assume she wanted me to be better. Whether or not she realized she had her own set of prejudices, despite what she tried to teach me, I don’t know. Perhaps she assumed that, just living life, I’d pick up the same prejudices she had somewhere along the line. I didn’t. I took to heart what she taught me. And I hated the “Do as I say, not as I do,” philosophy.

Of course, it’s all very well, coming from a lily-white neighborhood, where everyone on my block attended either the Catholic church or the Methodist one on Sundays to say, “Don’t be prejudiced,” or “I’m not prejudiced.” The idea is never tested; it’s only a theory.

My mother’s first-generation Scotts-Irish mother was Protestant, but since she had married someone who was a first generation but of Irish Catholic descent, part of the marriage agreement was to raise the children Catholic. That particular grandmother (I never knew her; she died the same year my parents married) did an excellent job of keeping her promise, and even had a good friend who was a priest. Granted she was Episcopalian, which some people jokingly refer to as “Catholic lite,” (no offense intended to any faith), which probably made things a little easier, given the similarities of the two faiths. (I’ve been both.)

When my grandmother was on her deathbed, her priest friend asked her if she wanted to convert. She did not, or at least she didn’t think it was honest to do so on one’s deathbed, considering she’d lived her life in a different faith.

I attended the local Catholic school. Two tests of what my mother said she wanted for me happened there.

In the first instance, I became a rebel at six by refusing to believe what the nun who taught our first grade class – impressionable 5 ½ to 7 year olds – told us in Religion class. According to her, only Catholics could go to heaven.

First of all, there were the tales of my Protestant grandmother, whom everyone said was a saintly woman. Even her priest friend said he wished he was as sure of his place in heaven as she was of hers.

Second, I could not believe in a God who created an entire planet of people, most of whom would be relegated to eternal damnation. It simply made no sense.

Fortunately, several years later, when someone in my class asked a question of a visitor to our class about why someone would be another religion when they knew it meant they would spend eternity in hell, the teacher was so upset and embarrassed by the question, especially since the guest in our class was of a different faith, that she told him he was wrong, and where did he ever get such an uninformed idea? The entire class proceeded to tell her that we had been taught that very thing by Sister Attila the Nun in first grade.

The teacher quickly, with all due apology, escorted our guest out of the room. After lunch, one of the parish priests came for a visit to disabuse us of such a notion. He told us that the church never taught that. So, I was back on good terms with God after that.

Two years after that first grade teaching, when the Civil Rights movement was getting into full swing – shortly before the JFK assassination – we had our first black family attend our school. There were three boys. One was in first grade, one in second, and one in my third grade class.

My third grade teacher thought nothing of doing what is now called peer teaching, but which had no name at the time. I was in the first reading group. Until that year, we only had three reading groups. But that year we had a fourth. It consisted of three or four boys, one of whom was our new black student.

Another student and I were assigned to help the fourth group with their English assignment, since the teacher couldn’t quite get through to them.

I had two of the boys, a boy who disliked me as much as I disliked him, and our new student. The first boy stood as far away from me as possible, and at one point said he understood the points of the grammar lesson, and returned to his seat. I continued to work with the new boy, and suddenly I saw his face brighten as he actually finally understood what I’d been trying to teach him. I was glad.

He looked at me and said, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry you!”

My reply was, “Well, I don’t think my parents will let me marry you.”

Stop right there. It isn’t what you think. Yes, it was prejudice – my parents’ – but not because he was black. I couldn’t imagine my parents allowing me to marry anyone from the fourth reading group!

I only learned that my parents expected me to pick up their prejudices several years later. When I was 12 or 13, the movie, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner premiered. The film ratings had only just started, and that film had an R rating, so none of us was old enough to see it. We were also too young to be allowed to date. However, my teacher that year used dating and that film as a pretext to gauge racial prejudice in our class.

She explained the premise of the film, and then asked would we date someone of another race. Most of my classmates who answered the question gave what I considered the lame excuse, “Well, I would, but my parents wouldn’t let me.” They wanted to sound aligned with the times (1967), I suppose. I don’t recall anyone saying they wouldn’t, but I imagine there were at least one or two who felt that way.

I had finally had enough of what I considered bigotry hiding behind adults. I raised my hand and told the teacher my parents wouldn’t have a problem with it, and told her what my mother had taught me.

I was proud of myself when I came home and told my mother. She was horrified. I couldn’t understand why. Her response was, “What will their parents think of us?”

Well, who cares? I thought what my mother had taught me was more aligned with Christian teachings than bigotry. As far as I know, there were no repercussions.

The “Who cares?” attitude came from years of being told, when I was denied the opportunity to do what everyone else was doing, “And if everyone else jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump in after them?”

I was always – and probably still am – considered a dork. I took in the strays, the kids no one else wanted. I didn’t always necessarily want them, either, but I usually stood up for them against what others were saying or doing.

Case in point, in our final year of elementary school, a new set of twins, a boy and a girl, were coming to our class. They moved in next to a girl in our class I didn’t particularly like. The new girl would be in our class, and the boy would be in the other eighth grade.

Well, this mean girl came in one morning filled with venomy gossip about the new girl. She already disliked her. She proceeded to turn everyone against this as yet unmet student: she was fat, she smelled, she had bad breath, she stood too close when talking to people, she wasn’t very smart, etc. This mean girl wasn’t exactly a confection of perfection herself, and it just made me angry that the new girl wasn’t even given a chance.

So, when the new girl arrived and everyone avoided her like the plague, I introduced myself and chatted with her. I think she was so grateful that anyone gave her the time of day that, from that moment, she clung to me as a lifeline. It didn’t matter that what the mean girl had said was mostly true. It was too unkind to turn people against her before they met her.

She wasn’t my favorite person to be around, but she was far better than the petty, self-righteous classmates who lived to make fun of others.

By the time I reached university, I had a whole new set of people to form an alliance with.

University was a seismic shift from what my life had been up to that point. I lived in a dorm that was, at the time, an experiment: a co-ed dorm. When I mentioned to my parents that I’d signed up for a co-ed dorm, their reaction was, “Oh, that’s nice.” The rest of my relatives were somewhat less than enthusiastic about the idea, immediately assuming sex and drugs and rock-n-roll.

“Your parents are letting you live in a co-ed dorm?!” (I was 18.)

“Well, I come from a co-ed family,” was my usual response. (I come from a very sarcastic family.)

Not satisfied with the fact that I wasn’t embarrassed by their questioning, my relatives and others would often try to drive their intention to embarrass me home further.

“I understand there’s a lot of sex going on in the co-ed dorms.”

That got old fast, along with asking if my roommate was a guy. The way the dorms were set up, either one floor was girls and one guys, or in the case of the L-shaped buildings, one wing was girls and one was guys. We had to have separate bathrooms, after all. It wasn’t Amsterdam.

So, I would explain that, no, people generally didn’t even date people from their own dorm, since that seemed almost like incest. That shocked them. I don't think they knew I knew that word.

One woman who wasn’t a relative decided to butt in on the discussion. She said she wouldn’t allow her daughter to live in a co-ed dorm. She lived in a no-visitation dorm, to which I countered, “I understand most of the women in those dorms are lesbians.”

While not very PC at all, I wanted to make a point that she was making unfounded judgements about me, my dorm, and what does or does not go on at college campuses.

I used to tell people I went from an all-girls’ Catholic school to a co-ed dorm. To everyone else, it seemed shocking. To me, it was simply a point of growth. But there was another point to be made. Of the first 10 people I met in college, half of them were gay.

It didn’t bother me. How could it? I grew up with cartoons starring Snagglepuss, the pink, theatrical lion, and Gene London hosting a children’s program.  My parents even watched Liberace on TV. Even though I didn’t understand as a child what the subtext was, I knew they were not like the people I knew at the time. They were different. And they were interesting.

One of the major interests of most college students is drinking. I attended college in Pennsylvania, where the drinking age is 21. At the time the drinking age in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, West Virginia and Ohio, the states adjacent to Pennsylvania, was 18. Penn State, the university I attended was in the center of the state, or as the brochures stated, “Equally inconvenient to all parts of PA.” Going to a nearby state wasn’t a possibility just for a drink since they were all at least 4 hours from the school.

But, there was a gay bar in town.  Except on the weekends, they didn’t card (for the uninitiated, that’s requiring proof of age identification with photo). So, I met several people and made new friends with a population I hadn’t been acquainted with before. And unlike the whispered comments of the ignorant, they didn’t have horns, didn’t try to “convert” me.

I’m sure I asked embarrassing and ignorant questions in my effort to understand who they were and how they were somehow “different.” My new friends were patient and gracious. They answered my questions, referred me to novels I should read to gain a greater understanding. And they weren’t different. They were people just like me. They included me in their plans. They didn’t care what my sexual orientation was, and I didn’t care what theirs was. “People are people.”

One of my roommates got “burned” by trying to date someone from our dorm who was a friend of mine. I tried telling her he wasn’t her type, so she assumed I wanted to date him. I hadn’t been given permission to out him, so I simply tried to steer her in another direction. When she found out he was gay, she not only shunned him, she immediately asked any guy I introduced her to if he was gay. Totally rude. Needless to say, I had more problems with roommates than with anyone else I encountered in college.

I defended a gay couple in my dorm who roomed together and minded their own business. I didn’t know them well, but I believed they had a place at the table. A bigot, who must have been very insecure in his own sexuality came around with a petition to have them thrown out of the dorm simply for being who they were.

He made the mistake of knocking on my door, and he got an earful of what I thought of bigots. I also told him if he ever bothered me again, I’d report him.

Naturally, he tried to spread it about that my roommate and I (the aforementioned burned girl) were lesbians. Anyone in the dorm who actually knew either of us or cared had a good laugh about that one.

I have continued to take people as they are throughout my life. I like them or not based on who they are as people. I’ve met many people of different faiths, races, genders ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses and political viewpoints who are simply lovely people, and just as many who aren’t. No one group holds the golden ring. People are people.

I may not have turned out quite the way my parents expected, but then, I never really did the things they expected me to do. And I didn't jump off the Brooklyn Bridge after my friends.

 

 

 

Overcoming the Status Quo

 

 

Double standards have always been a bone of contention for me. I’ve argued against boys being allowed to do things for no better reason than that they’re boys; likewise, I’ve walked away from any group that takes a “girls are better” stance. I’m not looking for # 1. I’m looking for equality.

No, I’m not saying guys should be participating in the Miss America pageant, or that women should be playing in the NFL, but if men want their own pageant, go for it. There is no gender limit on beauty. And if women want to play football, let’s organize teams. Some things, of necessity, need to be “separate but equal” rather than inclusive for the sake of safety.

Someone once called me a misogynist because I expressed a distaste for something that was uber-feminine, and I didn't care to participate. I am not. I have no issues with women and girls. I simply don’t wish to participate in some of the things I consider prissy.

When someone starts a sentence with, “Men are such…” and proceeds to a derogatory word, I have been known to snap, “Sorry, I can’t accept that from anyone who propagates the myth of PMS.”

That shocks some people. I’m not negating some people’s true pain. However, I have worked in all-women departments, and every time someone was in the mood for a candy bar or a pretzel (or both), the comment came back, “Oh, you must be PMSing.” How about, no, I was just hungry, and a candy bar appealed to me at the moment?

In that same department, the women seemed to enjoy announcing their periods to the room, as if they expected a prize. I once asked someone who did that, “Tell me, do you come out of the bathroom and announce which bodily function you just performed, too? That’s the same thing!” Personally, I don’t want to know. I don’t care to think about those things. At least when we had a guy in the department, that nonsense stopped. I was sad to see him go.

By the same token, I hate hearing guys refer to women and girls as “bitches,” or worse, the C word. It makes me wonder what barn they were brought up in that they were never taught that is unacceptable. Yes, occasionally an individual can act like a bitch, but the generalization is what I find repulsive.

I once went to see a comedian I wasn’t much interested in at a club. My friends thought he was fabulous. Once he opened his mouth, I thought otherwise. He couldn’t say more than two words without dropping an F-bomb. I’m no prude; I’ve been known to use the word quite liberally at times. But really, someone buy this guy a thesaurus. To add insult to injury, his jokes were entirely about women. If you were just learning English, you’d never know that. He never once used the word woman or girl. They were all bitches and c*&^s.

I can’t imagine that this guy ever had more than one date with anyone. I was so tempted to shout out, “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” but I didn’t. With his attitude, I couldn't imagine he had a wife to kiss.

The problem was, he wasn’t funny. Even if you substituted the word woman where he used other words, his “jokes” fell flat. I think shock value – which faded after the first five seconds – was all he had. My husband was with me at the time, and even he was offended by this guy.

I’m not miss prim and proper. The occasional vulgarity doesn’t bother me, as long as we’re not standing in a classroom full of children.

I find that people like that comedian tend to be the same ones who want to limit me because I have a second X chromosome.

It was enough that I had to struggle through my childhood trying to be allowed to do things without having outsiders trying to limit me as an adult.

My parents were definitely the chauvinists typical of their generation. That’s just who they were. While I was allowed to do some things with my brothers, I was prohibited from doing other things, even if other girls were allowed to do them.

When my brothers were between 5 and 7, there was a free gymnastics class for that age range, an attempt to get local children interested in gymnastics, I would assume. I couldn’t wait to be old enough to do that. It looked like so much fun. And of the three of us, I was the uncoordinated one. If anyone needed something like gymnastics, I was it.

When I turned 5 they had raised the age to 7. By the time I turned 7, they had discontinued the program. My parents made no attempt to find something similar for me, even though my brothers had organizations they belonged to, like Scouts.( And they’d participated in the now defunct gymnastics program.)

I was told there was no gymnastics around for kids my age. So, I turned to the next best thing: dance. My best friend was taking ballet, and she was younger than I was. I didn’t actually want ballet. I wanted to learn tap. No.

The first excuse I was given was that my mother didn’t drive, so I had no way of getting there (Let’s just ignore the fact that my best friend’s mother did drive and lived across the street). The dance studio was less than a mile away. It involved crossing the main street in our town, which I was allowed to do to go to the post office, and taking two back streets to come out on the road alongside the tiny shopping center it was in. I could have walked or even ridden my bike. No.

My brothers would have been allowed to do that much, which I pointed out. I was even allowed to ride my bike to my piano teacher's house in summer for lessons with my brother, and she lived farther away. Out came excuse number two: we can’t afford it. That was the excuse for anything my mother didn’t want me to do.

Scouts was the next thing. I knew lots of people who were in scouts. Both of my brothers were in scouts. I couldn’t imagine a reason my mother wouldn’t say yes.

She found one. No, I couldn’t join scouts. What do you want to do that for? (Oh, I don’t know, socialization? Learning to do interesting crafts? Camping?)

She wouldn’t allow me to join scouts because the only troop I could join that didn’t involve her driving was, according to her,  run by a group of women who sat around gossiping while the girls ran wild.  She didn’t want to get involved with that sort. To this day, I can’t imagine that’s the truth of it. What girls would stay? It sounded like some exaggerated tale she heard from a friend because someone they didn’t like was running the troop, and my mother ran with it. The irony was, after my mother learned to drive, and after I was in high school, she actually took over a scout troop when her best friend moved up to the next scouting level to be her daughter’s troop leader.

Then there was Civil Air Patrol. I could join that at 13. My brothers were in that. I was excited at the idea of finally being in something.

When the time came, I was excited to finally be a member of something. Yes, the older kids who were in charge of the various groups I was in had been in my position under my brothers, and used the situation to take their frustrations out on me. Yes, we had actual classes (after being in school all day) on airplanes, and flying, and things that didn’t really interest me, but I was waiting for their version of camping, SAR caps, which was training for going on search and rescue missions. Civil Air Patrol goes out on search and rescue missions, especially things involving plane crashes where planes and people are missing.

At the time, girls weren’t allowed to go out on Red Caps, which were the actual search and rescue missions, but they were allowed to go on the practice ones. This never made sense to me, but you do what you can.

For a year and a half, I attended my once a week meetings, the marching, trying unsuccessfully to learn left from right, the boring classes, just for a chance to go on a SAR cap that never seemed to happen. When one finally happened that wasn’t cancelled, it was the weekend I had to take my placement test for high school. Kids in public school don’t have things like that, but Catholic high school put people in tracks according to their academic level. So, I missed the SAR cap, since I couldn’t reschedule the test.

But that was okay. There would be others. 

There was a trip to Cape Kennedy scheduled. We would get to tour the facility, see the space ships and Mission Control, and everything else involved with space flight.

There were two weekends that they were sending people there, in the summer, so it wouldn’t interfere with school. I was set to go the second weekend.

The first weekend, something went wrong. I think it was either a hurricane or some serious storm, and the first trip was cancelled. Oh, how sad! I was glad I was in the second group, but I did feel bad for the first group.

I could have saved my empathy. When they told us about it, they also told us that they rearranged who could go on the second weekend. Only those who had been on the SAR cap were eligible, and this included people from the cancelled first weekend. They had a list of people schedule to go, and alternates for anyone who didn’t show up in time. Since I hadn’t been at the SAR cap, I was immediately eliminated. I was crushed. I tried explaining to the squadron commander that I had only missed the SAR cap because I had to take a high school placement test. Sorry, rules are rules. I, who never got to go anywhere, once again didn’t get to go.

The meeting after the second trip, the squadron commander came in to where everyone was assembled at the beginning of the evening. He was extremely angry. As it turned out, not everyone who was supposed to go showed up. And none of the alternates had shown up, so there were empty spaces. It turned out that if I’d gone to the airport they were leaving from, bags packed, I could’ve gone to Cape Kennedy. But there was no reason to suspect that would be the case, so I wasn’t there.

I was probably angrier than the squadron commander. He was the one who told me I couldn’t go. I had been eliminated even though I would have shown up no matter what, had I only known.

That was pretty much the last straw for me. I quit. I wasn’t going to put up with all of the slights and meanness of the older cadets for nothing. And when they asked me why I was quitting, I told them. I was kicked off the trip the weekend I signed up for, for no reason. I was tired of being the also-ran. My brothers got to do things. I did not.

At least when I went to high school, I was allowed to join some of the clubs I was interested in.  Because I was in Glee Club, I got to sing at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia at 15, long gown, opera gloves and all.

My mother still wouldn’t let me join the outreach club that worked in the poor neighborhoods near the school, since she didn’t want me “rubbing elbows” with “those people.” (What was it you taught me about not judging people?) I wasn’t allowed to join any peace marches, although she remained silent about the school having a peace moratorium over the Vietnam War, which was basically an assembly that took place by the flag pole in front of the school for about 45 minutes. That was a whole school event on the school grounds.

The one thing I did get to do that she wasn’t pleased about was when the glee club went to a school in, I think it was West Philadelphia, to join with their glee club and get to know each other, and teach each other songs that we performed. Our glee club took a school bus to the other school, in the middle of our school day – we were excused from class – and when we arrived we were welcomed. The school was in a black section of Philadelphia, and we were, while not segregated, a school from a white suburb. I think at the time one student at our school was black, and she wasn’t in the glee club.

It made no difference to any of us. The two glee clubs mixed together. We learned several new songs, and taught them a few that we were performing. Once everyone knew all of the songs, we had a performance, and had the best time. That afternoon was one of the highlights of my high school career, and one my parents almost didn’t let me participate in. Only the fact that our entire glee club was going allowed me to go.

Those of us who were in high school in the early 1970s were a tenacious bunch. We were determined not to let our parents’ prejudices stand in our way. Some of us, at least, didn’t want the efforts of people like Ruby Bridges to be in vain. We were outraged by the events at Kent State. We believed in the possibility of a better world, where color, ethnicity and gender wouldn’t be a barrier to anything. I just hope it wasn’t a dream to be shattered forever.