Flying - Part 2

 

In 1960 United Air Lines purchased its first passenger jets, the DC 8 made by Douglas Aircraft. The company through a huge party for all of the workers at the San Francisco Maintenance Base and their families. The party was held inside one of the huge new hangers designed for the jet aircraft. There was food and live music by The New Christy Minstrels. The acoustics inside the hangar were amazing, especially when the band got the entire audience to participate in a round of Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore.  The highlight of the party was the opportunity to walk through the new DC 8 and see all the new features of the aircraft. 

The plane was so large, much longer than a DC 6 or DC 7 propeller plane, and somewhat wider as well. The initial DC 8's had only two rows on each side with only two seats together, just like the propeller planes, but the isles were wider, and the cabins felt much more open. Even someone over six feet tall could fully stand up in most of the plane. 

There was one small catch: pass passengers (i.e., employees and their families riding for free) were barred from riding on the jets when they were initially put into service. The ban did not last all that long.

 As I wrote in the first installment about flying as the child of an employee, all commercial air travel was tightly controlled by the  Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), a federal government regulatory agency that determined which airlines got which routes and how much could be charged for the various levels of service. Airlines were not able to compete with each other on the price, as the price of flights was determined for all airlines by the CAB. The CAB kept prices high so that they would adequately cover all the costs of regular maintenance, up-keep, and all the labor of pilots, stewardesses, and ground crew. The lowest cost coach fare for a round trip ticket from west coast (San Francisco) to east coast (Washington, DC) in the 1960's was about $550. Adjusted for inflation that is the same as about $5,600 today (2025) which is substantially more than a person would pay for a first-class round trip ticket today. In other words, air travel was out of the reach of most Americans in the 1960's. Affluent people, business men, and air line employees were the only frequent fliers. 

What this meant in practical terms was that the new big jet aircraft that United and other airlines now flew non-stop across the country were frequently only partially full, and at some times nearly empty.  As a result the ban on pass riding employees on the jets ended pretty quickly. The airlines realized that filling those seats with employees on vacation looked better for business than having a sea of empty seats. Riding on a pass as an employee came with some rules and responsibilities, one of which was how one dressed. Employees could be barred from flights if they or their family members were not sufficiently dressed up, especially since it soon became common practice for employees to be placed in the first class section, as those seats were less often filled than coach class. So I was always wearing dresses and dress shoes while flying. When I was in college I sometimes envied my friends who were paying for their tickets because they could get on a plane in blue jeans and a sweat shirt, but I always had to be dressed up. 

Most of my memories of flying on jets are memories of flying first class and all that entailed in the 1960's and 1970's. This included not only family vacations from California back to Virginia to see relatives, but also my four years of solo travel while going to college in Ohio. Cross country first class travel was leisurely and luxurious. Meals in the first class cabin were served on real china plates with real silverware, actual crystal glasses, and sparkling white, cloth napkins. The food was served hot from china serving dishes on a cart directly to your plate. Often one of the entres was roast beef, where a large roast (enough to feed dozens of people) sat on a wooden carving board on the cart, and the stewardess would cut the amount you wanted from either the end the was more well done, or the end that was more on the rare side. When you were old enough (as I was in college) the stewardess would pour you wine in a crystal goblet from the several bottles available on her cart. The food was always delicious. 

The first year that my family and I traveled by jet was also in the first year that Dulles International Airport was open (it opened in November 1962 and we traveled there in the summer of 1963). The Dulles International Airport was the first airport specifically designed for jet planes, and only the second airport directly owned and operated by the Federal Aviation Administration (the FAA). It was initially authorized by President Eisenhower and took 12 years from authorization to opening. Eero Saarinen was the architect who designed its sweeping roof and modern lines. It was by far my favorite airport, so open and airy and modern. And it had the first "digital" clocks I'd ever seen. where the numbers were on cards that clicked over with each minute. 

The most unusual thing about Dulles was its "mobile lounges". Jet planes did not taxi up to the terminal building at Dulles, but sat out away from the building on the tarmac. Passengers would present their tickets at the gate inside the terminal and then be ushered into a large room with comfortable seating all around it. The room had many windows so that passengers could watch what was happening on the tarmac.  

One of my most memorable travel experiences happened at Dulles, to be honest I cannot remember if it was on our first trip in 1963, or a later trip in 1965, although I expect the latter. We were at the end of our vacation, tired and ready to go home. The plane was unusually full, so there was some question about whether or not we would be able to get on. Also unusual was that the president of United Air Lines, William Patterson was also on the flight. I can remember him standing and talking with my father in the mobile lounge. Patterson helped to make sure that we got on the flight, even though we had to be separated and scattered throughout the plane. There were five of us and they were able to seat my mother and my youngest brother together (he would have been 8 at the time), my other brother (12) and me (14) were sitting alone among strangers, as was my father. The plane was full, every seat filled even in first class. And something went wrong. 

I'm sure they told us what it was, but I don't remember it specifically enough, just that there was a crucial part that wasn't working. At first they thought that they could fix it. So they held all of us on the plane while the maintenance crews worked. That took a while. Then the word came that it could not be fixed, that it had to be replaced and the part had to be flown in from somewhere else. That would take some time, but it would take less time than it would to free up another jet and fly it in. It was summer time, and very hot and humid and on the ground, the planes own air conditioning system wouldn't work. 

Mr. Patterson took control of the situation. He told everyone what was going on, told people that he was ordering ground HVAC trucks to come and hook up to the plane, ordering more food and drink, making all drinks free. If anyone wanted to leave they would happily accommodate them, but to my knowledge no one left the plane. If they did they did so quietly without any fuss. The air conditioning got hooked up, the plane cooled off, the food and booze started to flow, and a really big party got going. No one got belligerent or angry, although some adults got quite tipsy and silly. There was lots of laughter and joking and storytelling.  We were on the ground, on the tarmac for four hours total before being cleared for take-off. In our family we always talked about the time the passengers got high before the plane took off. Can you imagine any of that happening today?

Unlike during the era of the propeller planes, the DC 6s and DC 7s, during the era of jet travel my family never experienced being "bumped" and only that one time at Dulles ever had difficulty getting on a flight. During my four years of college when I traveled back and forth between San Francisco and the Cleveland Hopkins Airport, I also never really had difficulty getting on a flight, and usually ended up in first class. However, my sophomore year, I decided that instead of going home for fall break I would go visit relatives in Virginia. That experience was very different. Planes from Cleveland to DC (or to other cities on the eastern seaboard like NYC or Boston) were very frequently full, and not easy to get on for a pass-passenger, even though such flights were far more frequent than the cross-continental ones. 

I set out for fall break in the early morning, and did not get on the flight for which I'd registered. I had to find a payphone, call and re-register to stand-by for another flight. This one in about 3 hours. Lot's of college students who were not children of airline employees also used standby as a way to get cheaper paid tickets, so many of my fellow students were stuck in the airport with me waiting for a flight. There was a young man, who was a couple of years older than me, a senior when I was a sophomore, that was also stuck waiting for an open flight to Chicago. We had worked together in the college cafeterias for more than a year, but had never had time for a long conversation. I think we probably talked on and off for a total of five hours that day, through several missed flights. 

He finally got one to Chicago, but I reached the end of the day without getting a flight to Washington, DC and I was panicking. I didn't have any way to get back to the college, not much money, and my next possible flight was the next morning. It looked like I might have to stay in the airport all night. I found a pay phone to re-register to standby for the first flight in the morning. The woman working in reservations asked me for a phone number for contact, and I started to cry. I told her, my situation, stuck at the airport with no place to go, and an amazing thing happened. She said that she worked there at the airport, and that I could meet her when she got off work, ride the metro-train into Cleveland and stay overnight at her apartment, sleep on the couch and then ride the train back in the morning with her for my flight.  

I remember her kindness, but I don't remember her name or even what she looked like, although I do remember her roommate - a very vivacious blonde. I remember the metro-train, how clean it was, how smooth and quiet it was. I remember the apartment, the couch I slept on and the poster on the wall. The poster was picture of a single large tree in the middle of a field with low hills behind it and the words "Let it Be" on it (the title of a Beatles song). I also remember how miserable it was not to have clean underwear, and how I never, once since that day ever went anywhere without a clean pair of underwear in my purse.  The next day, I got on the first plane and was on my way to visit with relatives - a story for another day. 

One last memorable plane ride: my very last one as a pass-passenger. I graduated from Oberlin College at the end of May 1973. I would not qualify for any more passes as an adult child, not in college after this my last trip, home after college. Unlike most of my friends, I did not go home immediately after graduation. The dorms were closed, but I was dating a man 15 years older than me who lived in town, and had moved in with him for a week. I had a couple of other friends who also lived in town, including a family that I had started as a babysitter for and become one of the family. I had ties to the town that went beyond the college and I wasn't quite ready to give them up yet. One of my friends, not the man I was dating, was a lawyer who who worked for the city of Oberlin as their local prosecutor, and he had plans to travel to San Francisco for a legal convention a week after my graduation. So part of the reason I delayed was so that I could have companionship, rather than fly alone which I had done for four years. 

On the day of our flight to San Francisco, the plane was not full, so I had no difficulty getting on it, but as was customary, the flight attendants wanted to move me to first class. My friend, Chuck, however, had a coach ticket and so I told I wanted to stay there, and someone else could get the bump to first class. This was only the second time I'd ever gotten to travel with a friend, and was really enjoying our conversation. I was a veteran traveler and Chuck had flown a number of times, but both of us were very much startled by the rather large bump and noise, almost like a small explosion, that occurred during our take-off. After we had gained some altitude, and leveled out a bit, the pilot came on the intercom and told us what had happened. At least one, and perhaps more of the tires on one of the landing gear had blown just as the plane lifted off. This presented no problems at all for us in our trip across the country, but could mean danger in landing in San Francisco. The decision was to continue on, alert San Francisco and take appropriate cautions on landing. 

The trip itself was extremely pleasant and unremarkable, I really enjoyed Chuck's company, we spent most of the time talking about shared interests and shared friends. But as we approached San Francisco, the pilot came back on to tell us what to expect. While everything might be okay, San Francisco was scrambling all its firefighting equipment and lining it up along the runway, just in case. The pilot warned us we would see not only fire trucks but also large numbers of ambulances, and that we would go through all the procedures of an emergency landing. In all my 22 years of flying I had never been through an emergency landing, although I knew after all those years exactly what to do. We had to take our glasses off, stow everything away, put our heads down and brace against the seat in front of us. Chuck and I expressed our appreciation to each other for having a friend to go through this with. 

The landing was the roughest I've ever experienced. Missing two tires on one side, lead to a very bumpy, rocky ride, but the plane stayed level, the fire trucks and ambulances were not needed, and we walked off the plane safe and sound. 

I have flown dozens of times after that last pass-passenger flight, but always as a paying customer. Moreover, plane travel has changed drastically since the 1970's. The CAB was eliminated in 1977. Airlines have been free to set their own rates, and also free to go bankrupt. My last trip by plane (probably my last ever plane travel) from Kentucky to San Francisco in 2013 was even first class, but it is nothing like it once was. 

Flying - Part 1

DC 6

As a child, I flew fairly frequently, not because my family was affluent, but quite the opposite, because U.S. airlines found that by giving their workers free travel they could pay well below the usual pay scale for various occupations. My dad was a licensed machinist, a member of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) union, who worked for United Air Lines (UAL) at their San Francisco main maintenance based from the time I was 6 months old until I was 25 years old (and he was 65).  

For the first fifteen years of my life, my father and all the other IAMAW workers for the airlines were paid substantially less per hour than machinists in other industries. The airlines argued that they provided workers and their families with free air travel, an untaxed benefit in those days, and therefore did not need to pay their employees more. This was successfully challenged by the Great Airline Strike of 1966, but that is a story for another blog post. This post is about what it was like to be a frequent flyer in the 1950's and early 1960's, as a pass-riding employee family and child. 

The earliest trip I can remember would have been when I was three and a half, when my brother Charlie was just over a year old. That meant that we needed three seats on the plane, two for mom and dad, one for me, and Charlie would have to sit on mom's lap. As an employee family riding on a free pass, we were always on "stand-by" meaning that we would call in, tell the reservations agent our intentions as the flight we wished to take, but have no actual guarantee of getting on that flight. We had to show up in person at the gate and wait until everyone else was boarded, and if there were enough seats left over we got on. If not, we stayed at the airport and waited for the next flight that might take us in the direction we wished to go. 

Charlie and me in 1954

The uncertainty meant that my parents had to plan for food, drink and diapers for Charlie. They had to be ready to take naps in the airport. Because we were low income we could not afford to buy things at the airport (or on the plane where meals were not free), so we brought our own food - sandwiches or sometimes cold fried chicken and lots of fruit. Sometimes we got on the first flight, sometimes we waited for hours, but we always eventual got a flight. 

The first plane I remember riding in was a DC 6 which had four propeller engines, two on each wing (see photo at top of post). Made by the Douglas Aircraft Company from 1946 to 1958, it was the primary work horse of U.S. airlines during those years. The body of the DC 6 is not much narrower than modern jets (excluding "wide-bodies") and there were only two seats on each side of the plane, so a family like ours that needed three seats was always in at least two rows and as the last comers, often not rows near each other. The seats on those small DC 6's were wider and more comfortable than what you find on today's jets. The isles were quite a bit narrower. 

The DC 6 did not have a highly pressurized cabin. It did flew at a much lower altitude than present day jets do. That meant many things for a child: amazing views of the world below the plane because we were much closer to it; skimming just above the clouds most of the time, but sometimes actually flying through clouds which always felt mysterious and fabulous; and a really significant change in pressure on take-offs and landings that was really felt in your ears. One of the tasks of stewardesses (yes, stewardesses, they were always young, unmarried women) was to pass out chewing gum to every passenger both before take-off and again just before landing. Chewing the gum would help people adjust to the changes in air pressure and relieve the pain in their ears. It was also a task that stewardesses were glad to hand over to a bright, cute blonde child who felt very grown-up going from row to row offering people gum. There were other small tasks that the stewardesses might give me to do, but the one that sticks in my mind the most is the handing out of gum. 

Not only did the DC 6 fly lower than today's jets, but it was slower, had less fuel capacity, and had much less range. In addition to the technical issues that limited range, all civilian air traffic was controlled by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) a government regulatory agency. The CAB controlled which airlines got which routes, how much they could charge for each route, and how many hours that pilots and cabin crews could work. In the 1950's the CAB limited airline crews to 8 hours of work per 24 hour period. NO overtime allowed. An airline that allowed a crew to work longer than eight hours, even if it was just a few minutes could be heavily fined by the CAB. So if one was traveling from one coast to another in the United States, one could not do so in one plane with one crew because it took too long. 

Now my family's trips by plane were always from San Francisco (where we lived) to visit my parents' families in Virginia, where we were from. In the 1950's those trips were never non-stop. The best flights had only one stop in a major hub like Chicago, but often the only flights we could get on were shorter hops, like to Denver or Salt Lake City, and then required at least two more hops to make it all the way to Virginia (to National Airport, now Reagan in DC, or Friendship, now BWI Thurgood Marshall, in Baltimore). 

Multiple stops and plane changes were probably irritating for paying customers, but they could be seriously problematic for stand-by flyers like ourselves. It was not uncommon to lose our seats to paying passengers at an intermediary stop. Sometimes that meant a few hours of sitting in a strange airport waiting for another flight, on rare occasions it meant an unbudgeted and difficult to afford overnight at a hotel. When I was six and our family had expanded to five members, Charlie was four and baby Frank was less than one, we had a trip where we were first "bumped" (removed in favor of paying passengers) in Salt Lake City. This was not problematic as one of mom's brothers lived nearby in Ogden. So we had an unscheduled but delightful visit for several days with my Utah cousins. Then come Monday we got a flight from Salt Lake to Chicago and got bumped again. The next flight that was at all possible was at least 12 hours away the next day, so all five of us including a wailing baby ended up in a very cheap Chicago motel room with no air conditioning in August. Not a pleasant memory. Luckily we found a flight the next morning and were in the arms of family again in Virginia. 

In my second installment I will talk about how the introduction of jets changed our experiences as pass riding passengers. 

Thanksgiving

 

Yesterday I received a diagnosis of invasive lobular cancer in my right breast. Suddenly a lot of disparate things about the last year fell into place and made sense. The odd pains in my breast, the fatigue that I just couldn't seem to shake, the lack of interest in food (even chocolate!), the slow and unplanned (but not unwelcome) loss of weight, weird blood test results that no one thought were particularly alarming except me, and the general sense of something being wrong or off. 

There had been other things to blame: I have rheumatoid arthritis and we've been messing around trying different biologics this year. I have diabetes and chronic kidney disease, and severe asthma.  I was sick twice for a month at a time, first with cold/bronchitis/asthma complications, and second time with Covid (my first time I think)/asthma complications. We lost our beloved dog Bob this year. We lost yet another elderly cat. My husband lost one of his two jobs and we had to rethink our family budget. Of course, there was always the bad stuff in the outer world to add to my sense of gloom: global warming, regional natural disasters, the total dumpster fire of American politics. 

Having a diagnosis of cancer is actually a relief. I knew something was wrong, I just didn't know what and couldn't get anyone to figure it out with me, until now. So on Thanksgiving, I am actually grateful for my diagnosis. I am also enormously grateful for my loving husband, who stands by me through everything. Grateful for all the friends that I have around the country who care about what is happening to me, and the kind and helpful neighbors I have nearby, who are always ready to give a helping hand. Grateful that we have the resources and the health care to take care of my cancer. 

The Writing Life

 

In April of this year I made a big leap from occasionally writing a sociological blog here on blogger that got viewed by one or two friends, to writing a sociological blog/newsletter on Substack. I did this to push myself to write more and to have a chance to reach a wider audience with the things I wrote. 

The result, so far, is that I am finding the motivation and interest in writing a couple of times a week, and am aiming for more as time goes by. As for readership, I currently have 20 subscribers and each post (which are all free) is read by not only subscribers but also additional casual readers. 

I feel like I am thinking clearly again, and having some small impact on the world again. 

I have discontinued my Sociological Stew blog, but plan to keep this one, Sunflower Roots, for more personal writing, memoirs, poetry, artwork and such like. 

If you are reading this and want to check out my Substack here is the link. There is no paywall, and the subscriptions are free (and always will be). 

https://reflectionsofasociologist.substack.com/

Everyone Has a Story

 Meditations upon reading Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.'s Gay Poems for Red States:

Everyone has a story. Everyone has pain. Everyone has fear. Everyone gets scared. Everyone has doubts. Everyone has obstacles. Yes. Some people’s obstacles and pain are objectively, measurably worse than others. Being unable to walk in a world built for walking people. Being black or brown in a society so deeply based on whiteness that white people never have to think about being white. Being LGBTQ+ in a world where every religion every society is grounded in the idea of male/female dichotomies and relationships.  Being non-Christian in a society that is drenched in the forms (if not the deep ways) of Christianity. These are objective obstacles. But they are not the only obstacles. They are not the only pains.

Everyone has a story that should be heard. No one story should be privileged over any other story. Giving others the right to be heard, to be seen does not silence other stories. Stories can co-exist. So much of what we see now feels like people whose stories have been privileged for hundreds of years, are feeling that somehow their story will be erased by new ones. They won’t be. The fear is baseless. We are all richer by having more stories, more flavors, more colors, more modes of being.

The best thing about hearing more stories, is suddenly discovering that there are many, many people out there with similar (and yet unique) stories. Women discovering “me too” was a revelation. Adults finding similarities to others childhood stories and realizing, ah, that’s why I was different as a child (previously undiagnosed neurodivergence, or PCOS, or gender dysphoria, or many other obstacles).

We learn about others from their stories. We learn about ourselves by being free to tell our stories and by seeing little pieces of ourselves, our emotions, our fears, our anxieties, in the stories of others. Our enemies have stories. We need to hear our enemies’ stories too. We have to know them as people with stories. We do NOT have to privilege their stories over ours, but their stories have a right to exist.

Everyone has a story.

A good society is one that is open to all the stories. 

 

How grooming for motherhood backfired

 

My mother Josie was the fourth of six children. She had two younger brothers, but she never had the opportunity to help with their care. First, her mother (my grandmother Lillian) was not well most of her childhood and she had little patience with supervising a child caring for another child. The family was solidly middle class and hired in home help with cooking, cleaning and child care. The help, as was true of many middle class southern families, was black women, who left their own children at home, to care for the children of white women. Second, my grandmother Lillian died, probably due to complications of childbirth within two days of giving birth to her last child.  

The baby, Thomas, was immediately adopted (officially) by one of my grandfather’s brothers. He and his wife were childless. Meanwhile my mother, just short of her eighth birthday when her mother died, was quickly farmed out to live (not officially adopted) with her aunt Sue whose farm adjoined her fathers. Aunt Sue already had three children older than Josie. As a result, my mother never had any experience with babies and small children.

Josie’s lack of experience with babies and children, left her unprepared for motherhood. She was absolutely terrified to bring me, her first child home from the hospital. She spoke of this fear she had several times to me when I reached adulthood. I’ve also found letters and diaries that she wrote at the time, the speak of the overwhelming fear of making a mistake that she experienced. Consequently, Josie decided that I, her daughter would learn about babies and small children and how to take care of them while I was young. Something that she told me explicitly when I was middle aged. Oddly enough, however, she did not do that by expecting me to share in the care-taking of my two younger brothers.

While I did not know her reasons at the time, Josie’s approach to teaching me how to care for babies and children, was to start me in the babysitting business when I was 10 years old. She essentially began grooming me for motherhood. My first job, completely arranged by my mother, was with the family next door to us. They had recently moved in and were composed of a young couple in their early twenties and a baby under 6 months of age. The couple went out to dinner or a movie, not sure which, and were gone for at most two hours. I stayed in their home with their baby sleeping in his/her (?) crib.  I remember the awesome sense of responsibility I felt for this tiny thing in the white crib. But I otherwise remember very little about it. I don’t remember if I had any trouble, if I had to call my mother, or if everything went smoothly. I do remember how nice it felt to be given a crisp dollar bill (fifty cents an hour was my fee).

My mother arranged a few more jobs for me, taking care of babies, in homes that were within view and earshot of our house – one of the advantages of growing up in a new suburb during the baby boom, lots of work for babysitters nearby. By the time I was 13, however, I was managing my own work. I was a popular babysitter, mostly for older children (2 to 8) because I liked playing games, singing songs, and watching kids TV with them. I began to work for families that lived several miles away (where either my dad or one of the parents would provide transportation before I got my license). I liked being with children. I liked the money I earned (officially still fifty cents and hour, but regular families often added a little extra). But most of all I loved being able to stay up late on weekends, and watch late night TV and late-night movies.  This was not allowed at home. At home we went to bed at 9, and the TV was never on in the evening.

In High School babysitting was a doorway to adult life, to money of my own, to being up late, to watching adult shows. While I liked children and enjoyed playing with them, that was secondary to the pay and independence babysitting afforded me as a teenager.

Continuing babysitting was not something that I had thought consciously about when I went away to college. However, when the directors of my dormitory turned out to be a young couple with an intelligent and interesting five-year-old, I volunteered to babysit. The dorm directors also had friends living within walking distance of the dorm that had small children and would refer me as a babysitter.

One family (let’s call them Goodfolks) in particular became regulars. Babysitting for the Goodfolks over the next four years offered me something that was the opposite of what I had found in babysitting as a teenager. They offered me a warm and welcoming family life and a respite from the “adulting” of college. I became part of the Goodfolks family, a bond that continued at least 15 years after I graduated. I would come back and visit them many times over the years as a family member rather than an employee.

I also continued babysitting as a source of extra income in college, and although I continued to state my fee as 50 cents an hour, the majority of families simply paid me a flat five or ten dollars per session depending upon the amount of work involved (more for cooking meals, getting kids off to school etc, less if I was just watching TV while the kids slept).

Then one summer I got a job as an au pair.  Another student who had worked for a wealthy family through an agency was asked by the family to find someone to work for them (they did not want to go through the agency again – I should have taken that as the red flag it was). She knew I did a lot of babysitting and recommended me. The family like my phone interview, and they liked my references. For ten weeks, I got an insiders view of the domestic life of the corporate elite. I spent most of my time in bucolic Greenwich, Connecticut. An easy train ride to NYC and art museums, although I only got two chances to go as my “day and a half” off, wasn't always honored (remember the red flag). The family also took me with them on vacation to Maine, and I have longed for the coast of Maine ever since.

Somewhere along the line, in college spending so much time with young families and their children drastically changed my own personal views about having children. It wasn’t that I came to dislike children, quite the contrary. But I came to be more and more cognizant of how hard it was to raise children in the modern world, and to balance family and career. I saw this playing out in the families for whom I worked. I began to question whether or not I wanted children of my own.

I made the mistake of bringing this up once with my mother while visiting during a holiday. That’s when I began to learn about how getting me started in babysitting had been her plan to groom me for motherhood. Now I was telling her that my experience made me question whether I wanted motherhood at all.

My babysitting experiences in graduate school expanded my doubts. In graduate school, I had a half dozen friends who were divorced, working (or grad student) mothers.  As a friend, I would look after their daughters (they all had daughters), to give them a break. Sometimes they paid me, sometimes they just fed me, sometimes I fed them. These weren’t jobs, they were expressions of solidarity among friends. They were also a telling insight what life as a single female parent was like, and how none of these women had gone into parenting with the expectation of becoming a single parent. 

Between all the years of experience with scores of children between 1 and 10, and multiple courses in development psychology and family sociology, I became quite the expert on childhood development and child behavior. I developed the confidence and knowledge that my mother had hoped for, but I also developed a healthy skepticism about my ability (and desire) to be a parent. My career seemed more rewarding. Some times too much knowledge is an impediment.

My first husband wanted children. His family was large and loving and very supportive. So we tried. But as fate would have it. I couldn’t get pregnant. The marriage ended within a couple of years before alternatives such as fertility treatments or adoption even became something to discuss. Had I gotten pregnant easily, then I would have become a parent, but I did not. I suspect that I would not have wanted to put in any extra effort to become a parent, even if the marriage had lasted. By the time I met my present husband I was already experiencing menopause, and he was not interested in having children.

Sometimes I think about my mother who passed away more than a decade ago, never having any grandchildren.  She was so anxious for grandchildren that she began grooming me at age 10 with babysitting jobs, but she never did anything to prepare my brothers for parenthood. None of us had children.

What Got Me Here

 

When I read Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild several years ago, it affected me as no other piece of writing had done before or since. There was one paragraph in particular that really struck me a chapter or two before the end of the book:

“What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done? What if I’d actually wanted to fuck everyone one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”

Except for the reference to heroin, everything in that paragraph struck against my mind the way a clapper does on a bell, causing my mind to reverberate for days, the vibrations echoing through my life in a way that changed the way I saw everything, felt about everything both past and present.

I had sex with a lot of men between the ages of 20 and 40. How many men? How much sex, well it depends upon whether you accept Bill Clinton’s definition (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman…Ms. Lewinsky”) or the definition of Bill Clinton’s detractors.  Until the late 90’s my definition of “having sex” was pretty much on par with President Clinton, but after his impeachment I found it necessary to revise my list of men I’d “had sex with” upwards by 3 or 4 names. And it wasn’t just the sex, it was the emotional attachments, the stalking behavior; the men, often friends, that I wanted to sleep with but couldn’t who sometimes got hurt because of my impulsive behavior. I am genuinely sorry for pain that I caused. Yet I’m still glad for the experiences, because they all taught me something. They made me into the person that has negotiated this wonderful yet turbulent, nearly 30 year marriage to my soul mate.

 

Getting Work Done is Hard These Days

The pump in our dishwasher died weeks before we realized what happened, what alerted me finally was noticing white hard water stains on the kickboards of our cabinets, where small, but daily overflows had been soaking in. Once we realized it on February 4th, we turned off the water and power to it and began hand washing. 

We had the plumbers come to diagnose whether we had leaky pipes or leaky dishwasher, and they verified our suspicion that the pump had failed.  I did some research on-line, decided on some highly recommended models and we went that weekend (February 12th) to Lowe’s to buy a new one. 

We did not realize the extent to which the pandemic had changed the way Lowe’s operated. We’ve bought appliances there before (most recently a new stove in 2021), where within a day or two a Lowe’s truck and Lowe’s employees would show up to install the purchased item, for little or no additional cost. Now Lowe’s contracts with a 3rd party installation company (which turns out to not be an installation company but a company that then hires 4th party local businesses/workers to do the actual installation). 

It was a week before we heard from the installation company, and then another two weeks before they could come and make the measurements (why they had to do this and could not trust us on the measurements I don’t know).  The (4th party) installer (a nice feller) told us for the installation contract (and payment), which Lowe's never did.  So I called them and discovered that because of an illness/accident the young man who sold us the dishwasher was out on leave, and no one really knew what was going on with our order.  It took 24 hours to find someone who could get access to all the documents and write up our installation contract, which added another $150 on to the original cost of the appliance (only 15% of the original cost but still unexpected). 

We had to wait again for the installment company to contact us with an appointment to actually install.  The first appointment we were given was March 15 (at this point we had been without a dishwasher since February 4). The day they were suppose to show up we got a call to reschedule, because the local (4th party) installer had one truck and it was broken, so they rescheduled for today March 21. 

First thing this morning the young man who was suppose to do the install called us from Lowe’s to tell us that the store had somehow misplaced/sold/lost/never gotten (??) our dishwasher and he had nothing to bring to install. He said the appliance department at Lowe’s would reorder the dishwasher and let him know when it came in and then we would get another appointment to install. 

This afternoon, someone from Lowe's installation department called us.  Now this is one of the things that really annoys me in all this. Lowe's has a department called "Installations" but they don't actually DO installations any more. They just contract with 3rd parties to do them. I realize that this has to do with protecting their workers from COVID or other things, and that it does provide jobs for small local businesses. But, often those small local businesses are overwhelmed with more than they can handle, and they don't get all the money paid by people, because Lowe's takes their cut first. And workers in small businesses don't have the same benefits or rights or opportunities that Lowe's workers do. 

The Lowe's installation department worker was very apologetic and promised to provide us with information within two business days about what happened to our dishwasher and when they would get one for us. But, in all likelihood, given how busy the  (4th party) installer is, things will be pushed at least two more weeks! Which means that we might end up with them wanting to install the same week that my husband has surgery. 

There was no ill intent or willful stalling involved here. Some of the problems arose because a key worker got ill, or a key piece of equipment (truck) broke down. These are things that happen. What is problematic is that current business practices involve skimping on redundancy in labor and equipment, there are few if any backstops. Ground between the demand by stockholders/owners for more profit and the demands of consumers for cheaper goods and services, the costs of doing business are pared to the quick. So it is not surprising that it takes one persons illness or one truck breaking down, to cause the hold structure to come to a stand still.

I Secretly Love Global Warming

 In recent weeks I have been thinking a lot about why we as a society are so reluctant to seriously fight to eliminate carbon emissions. I am an environmental voter. I look for and vote for candidates that take environmental science seriously, who appear to understand climate change, and understand that the only real solution is to dramatically cut emissions of green house gasses, and that our carbon economy. As an individual I purchased well insulated housing, use energy efficient heat pump, keep my thermostat at 67 degrees (60 at night) in the winter and wear extra layers. We bought Priuses more than ten years ago, and before that sought out the most fuel efficient cars possible. I recycle, reduce, reuse. Never replace items (including electronics) until they completely give out. As both and individual and a citizen, I try to be environmentally conscious about all my decisions.

But...you knew there was a but coming! But, I love having 60 degree weather the first week in January. I love that our winters here in eastern Kentucky are overall so much warmer and milder than they were twenty-five years ago. Yes, I absolutely know all the reasons why this is problematic. I understand how extremely mild weather in January, creates problems for plant life cycles, and how plant cycles can get out of sync with animal life cycles of hibernation, migration, mating and new generations. But I love it. My nearly 72 year old, arthritic joints love it.

I also know that we are not only getting warmer winters, we are getting hotter summers (which I don't like quite so much). Moreover, we are getting much frequent weather extremes, including the horrific flooding event that devastated eastern Kentucky in July 2022. I know all this. I know that the long term problems are going to be even worse. That the underpinnings of modern agriculture and modern society are threatened by climate change. Yet I still love these mild winters, I find myself cheering when I see that the NOAA three month climate predictions show high chance of warmer than usual weather this Jan/Feb/March. It also shows higher chance of precipitation, but as long as it's not snow...

All this suggests to me that the crusade against climate change has a significant problem, because I can hardly be the only person who intellectually grasps the problems of climate change, yet still on a personal day to day business enjoy its fruits especially in winter time. Which means that there are many of us, regardless of well we understand the problems created by climate change, might balk about making real  sacrifices in the comfort and convenience afforded by a fossil fuel economy that are really needed in order to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

New Things

    I started writing journals when I was 12. I had read The Diary of Anne Frank and decided like her to create an imaginary friend that I wrote to regularly. My friend was named Margie. Like Anne I wrote a lot about my feelings. Unlike Anne I did not do a very good job of describing what was actually going on in my real life. No one reading those "Margie letters" today would learn much about what life was like in suburban California in the early 1960's. 

    The "Margie letters" were written on binder paper, making it easy for me to write the letters during class periods when I was bored. I stored them all in a large three ring binder. I started in 1963, and continued that practice through my sophomore year in college. I still have the binder with all the letters packed away in a box somewhere.  They may have been cathartic to write, but they hold little content of interest to me as I aged.

    At the end of the summer of 1971 just before my junior year, I made a change. I purchased a hardbound record book, 12" x 8.5" format, and began writing a different kind of journal.  There was still a lot of internal emotional reflection, but I began to write much more about  the world around me, observations of the world, people, events, and activities. Writing in a bound journal seemed to me a much more serious undertaking than my "Margie letters" had been. It suggested permanence and the possibility that others somewhere in the future might read what I had written. 

    That December (1971) in my first bound journal I began what became an annual tradition that lasted for the next two decades: my firsts or new things list. Each December I would think back over the year and write down everything that I had done for the first time, every new experience I had encountered. In my twenties, thirties and even early forties, my lists of new things were quite lengthy. I traveled quite a bit in the U.S. visiting far flung friends and relatives, attending scholarly conferences, doing research. I moved from one state to another, from my parents home in California, to college in Ohio, a summer job in Connecticut, graduate school in Kentucky, professorships in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Kentucky. I worked a variety of jobs, went to graduate school, started a career, got denied tenure and started career jobs. I married, divorced and married again. 

    Then at some point in my fifties, I stopped doing this recording of new things. Part of it was because there weren't as many new things. As we age, we generally have fewer novel experiences, things we've never experienced before. Moreover, the new things I began to experience in my fifties and sixties were generally not fun things: hysterectomy, cataracts and surgery, developing rheumatoid arthritis, and type 2 diabetes. I got out of the habit not only of my annual new things list, but of journaling in general. 

    This year, however, was an eye opener. A very big "new thing" happened, not just to me but to all the people around me: a great flood that devastated vast stretches of eastern Kentucky. While this is not a "good" new thing, it is important, significant, and affected us in profound ways, even those of us who lost little or nothing directly in the flood. It has made me want to pay closer attention again, journaling again, even my year end chronicle of new things. 

    

Christmas/Holiday Cards

 Well I did it. I set out to send a Christmas/Chanukah/holiday card to every single person in my address book before December 15. I completed that task yesterday (December 8) and put the last batch of cards in the Jenkins, KY post office. Now oddly I'm feeling a loose ends.

When I retired I thought that I would have the time to get back to keeping up with correspondence, like I did in my twenties and thirties. Back then I wrote letters every month, had dozens of people that I corresponded with regularly. These days there's only two people that I correspond with regularly, and they (my brother and an old college chum) vastly prefer to use e-mail so that what I do for them. There are two or three others who e-mail a couple of times a year. My oldest friend from junior high prefers Skyping for communication, so we do that at least once a month. One sweet college friend is very good with cards and notes on all the major Jewish holidays. But no one writes letters like we used to do. 

So it all comes down to Christmas/holiday cards, which I had gotten lax about for the last decade or so of work life. But it turns out that having plenty of time in retirement, does not translate into have "wherewithal". I have struggled most of the past five years to just simply reply to everyone who sent me a card. So I made this promise to myself, and back in October ordered two types of cards, matching stickers and address labels, and set to work on the first of December writing cards. 

I've gotten to an age where I don't know if all the friends and family whose addresses I have are still alive. Most are in their 70's or older. The ones who spend time on Facebook I know are still there, but with some of the others our only contact is holiday cards. 

Facebook gives us an illusion that we know what is going on with each other. But I know I don't post much about what is actually happening in my life, and I suspect that most people leave lots of stuff out of their social media. All the details of life that we used to share face-to-face, or even in letters, gets washed over. 

I may never do this again, at least not at this level. It was expensive, and it took almost two weeks of working on it for several hours a day. At least I can say I did it once. 

Give me that old time mountain music

This past August 2021 marked the 85th annual Old Fiddler's Convention in Galax, Virginia. The Galax Fiddler's Convention is the oldest and largest music festival of its type, celebrating traditional mountain music. Galax is an incorporated "city" at the southeastern edge of Grayson County. My father was born about 20 miles away, in the small town of Troutdale, also in Grayson County. He grew up in Troutdale and other Southwest Virginia communities. As a child we frequently spent summers in Troutdale, visiting with Aunts and Uncles. 

Oddly, not once in all my childhood and adolescence of being around my father's family and being in southwestern Virginia did I ever hear traditional mountain music or even bluegrass or country music. I have concluded that this was a social class issue, my grandfather was a shopkeeper, a politician, battling to make his family "middle class" and above the "riff-raff". He once castigated my eldest Aunt Mary for her association with Sherwood Anderson (the great American author, who also lived in Troutdale in his last decades) because Anderson wrote scandalous tales about moonshiners and hillbillies in his newspaper, and my grandfather did not want his daughter associated with "ruffians". So my father and my aunts all listened to classical music and big band music, and never once that I knew of listened to traditional mountain music, bluegrass or country music.

It was not until I was a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Kentucky that I heard and fell in love with traditional music. My first introduction to it was in the winter of 1977-78, at a fundraiser concert for the union coal miners of eastern Kentucky and southwest Virginia who were engaged in a major strike against the Bituminous coal companies in Appalachia.  From that moment on I was in love with the music of the mountains. 

One of my most precious memories from grad school came during the August of 1978, while I was living and researching my master's thesis in my father's home town of Troutdale. A group of friends piled in the hay-filled back of a farm truck and drove to Galax for the Fiddler's Convention. Some of my friends were musicians and they also knew many of the traditional musicians in the region. While we spent a little bit of time in the arena listening to the contests, we spent most of that very long night wandering about the campsite, where dozens of small jams of musicians occurred. 

This video, from August of 2021, reminds me so strongly of that wonderful night and how much amazing music could be found just wandering from campsite to campsite. 

Being Political

My parents were fairly political, especially for a working class family. I doubt that they made many political donations when I was a child because money was very tight, but they discussed political and social issues a lot, wrote letters to their representatives, signed petitions and voted in every primary and election. I can remember going to the polls with my mother or father and standing along side them when they pulled the various levers on the big mechanical voting machines that were used in California in the 1950's and 60's. 

The issues that my parents cared about and talked about constantly with us included civil rights and racial equality, economic inequality and workers rights, and in the 1960's they were opposed to the Vietnam war. So it seemed only natural that when I started college in 1969, that I would march against the war, engage in sit-ins at a selective service office, and work for anti-war political candidates. 

The voting age was still 21 when I started college, but that did not prevent me from working for a political candidate. The house director for my freshman dormitory was married and her husband was the areas' elected Democratic representative to the Ohio House of Representatives, and I worked on his re-election campaigns in both 1970 and 1972, doing things like stuffing envelopes, and making phone calls.  

Back in the 1970's voter registration rules were specifically designed to keep college students from voting in the communities where they went to college (unless of course their families lived in those communities). So when I first registered to vote in 1972 at age 21 (the same year that the voting age got lowered to 18), I had to register from my parents address in California. Through an interesting quirk of the times, I actually registered the first time as a Republican. 

In 1972 Richard Nixon, whom I hated with the white hot passion of youth, was running for his second term. The local Congressman for San Mateo, Paul Norton "Pete" McClosky Jr. was a liberal Republican. I know, a liberal Republican seems crazy these days, and in fact, according to Wikipedia Pete McClosky switched to the Democratic Party in 2007. However, back then, such a thing was actually fairly common. McClosky stood up and opposed Nixon and the war in Vietnam, and decided to try and "primary" Nixon in 1972. So I and all my family registered as Republicans so that we could vote for McClosky in the primary against Nixon. Of course, that challenge was unsuccessful, and in the summer of 1972, I was "clean for Gene" and voted for Eugene McCarthy in my first presidential election. 

Between 1972 and 1975, I voted by absentee ballot as a Californian in every primary and election, but was not engaged in other ways in politics. Then I moved to Kentucky in 1975. As a graduate student living year-round in Lexington, and considered an "in state student" by virtue of my assistantships and researchships, I registered to vote in Kentucky.  

I still remember the conversations. All the life-long Kentuckians made it very clear, that if one wanted to have any real say in elections in Kentucky one had to register as a Democrat regardless of what one's political leanings actually were. Kentucky had been and continued for some decades still to be so dominated by the Democratic party that all the real political decisions for local offices, state offices, and federal representatives like senator and congressmen, were made in the primaries rather than the elections. We can still see the effect of that reality in Kentucky in 2020, where registered Democrats still out number registered Republicans, even though both houses of our legislature are dominated by Republicans, both Senators are Republican, and the state went overwhelmingly for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Yet in eastern Kentucky, most of our county and town leadership are still Democrats. Politics in Kentucky have always been "the damnedest." 

Professionally and personally I became much more interested in local politics in the late 1970's and early 1980's. As a sociology graduate student I was reading Floyd Hunter's Community Power Structure, John Gaventa's Power and Powerlessness, Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz Power and Poverty, Arthur Vidich and Joseph Bensman Small Town in Mass Society, and  Robert Dahl Who Governs?  All of which  used community politics and decision-making case studies to develop theoretical perspectives about the exercise of power.  I was doing my own research on political conflicts in southwestern Virginia (my father's home community). My dissertation focused on conflicts between local  communities and the U.S. Forest Service over recreational developments in the Jefferson National Forest region.   Also during that same time, I had a paid job as a research analyst over two years on a huge community survey of Kentucky municipalities. Personally I was also paying more attention to Kentucky's gubernatorial races and Lexington school board issues. Nonetheless, I was more observational than participatory during those years, limiting my participation to voting in every primary and election, but did not work for any candidates or make any donations. 

After graduate school during the 1980's, my first full-time professorial job was in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. I paid close attention to national politics. I raised money for Mondale and Ferraro, and helped the local democratic party plan a visit by Ferraro who did a press conference at the local airport. The idea of a female VP was intoxicating.  Four years later, I fundraised and worked for  Michael Dukakis who visited Johnstown on a cross country train stop. During the same years I donated to and worked for Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter, probably the last of the great liberal Republicans.  However, I am ashamed to say that I have no idea who was mayor of the city, or how the city was governed, and I paid little if any attention to who were my representatives at the state level, or even my congressional district. 

I didn't change much when after seven years in Johnstown, I moved to Wise, Virginia to teach at another branch of a great university (this time UVA). I put my focus on presidential politics, senatorial politics, and maybe on the governorship, but not much else. I did at least know who my local congressman was, but that was about it.  I was taken by surprise when my blue district "suddenly" went red, in the 1990's. 

This I believe is the great failing of liberals of my generation. We looked at the big issues we felt were important, such as the environment, civil rights, reproductive rights, and we decided that the best way to attack those was at the federal level and through the courts, rather than trying to fight in each and every statehouse. Most of us failed to think about the role of the statehouses in controlling access to voting, to defining districts, and setting the ground rules.  We never thought about a day when the Supreme Court would strike down major parts of the voting rights act giving free reign back to the states. The Republicans never made that mistake. They worked the local and the state offices and came to dominate state politics even in states where ostensibly the majority of voters were liberal, and elected Democratic presidents and Democratic senators. 

Part of the problem comes from the fact that many highly educated liberal voters of my generation (Ok Boomer), held jobs that often involved major moves. In academia, I taught at three different institutions. People in business and finance often had to make major moves to advance in their careers. Local politics is so much about who you know and how long you or your family have been in the community that it is hard for more transient residents to get to understand how it works. 

Moving to Kentucky for my final academic position (that I was in for more than 21 years), finally gave me the roots to get firmly involved. I know who all my county and community leaders are, I can stop them on the street and talk to them. I know who my representatives in the Kentucky legislature are, and feel free to chat them up when I run into them in the grocery store, or the local farmers market.  I know the people in my community, not just those that I worked with at the community college. I know the sheriff and many of the deputies and town police in the county (many are former students).  The local level is far more important than I realized when I was younger, despite the fact that as a community sociologist I should have recognized that. 

A Panic over Memory

One of the things about aging that scares me is that I will lose my mind the way my mother lost hers, becoming entirely delusional and thinking that it is the rest of the world that is crazy.  The day I wrote the material below (April 7, 2021) was one of those scary days. However, it turned out there was nothing wrong with my memory at all. Instead I had stuffed my drawer so full that several shirts, including the one that I was looking for had fallen down behind the drawers and then under the bottom drawer. My husband figured it out and rescued my missing shirts, and I calmed down. It is useful for me to remember this, so that I don't panic the next time something goes missing.

Yesterday was a difficult day. Early in the morning, I went to my dresser and pulled open the drawer with all my graphic t-shirts to get the newest art tee that I had purchased last week. It wasn't there. I pulled everything out of the drawer and it wasn't there. I looked in every other drawer in the bedroom and in the closet just in case I had hung it up. I searched all the laundry baskets, and went through the trash. I l looked on the shelves with the towels and in the containers where the sheets are stored. No art tee. 

Next I completely tore apart my office, moving boxes and books, checking the drawers where art supplies, tools, and medical supplies are kept. I looked in the sewing box and the art project box and the bag of knitting. Then it was on the kitchen, where I checked cabinets and drawers and shelves, trash beens and garbage. I went outside and pulled bags from the trash cans and searched them.  In the living room I shifted through all the blankets and pillows and baskets where things are stored.  

Then I involved my husband, and we checked his study and his closets, his laundry baskets, his drawers. He went with me and we went back again over the bedroom and all the dressers, pulled clothing out of all of them, both mine and his, unfolding and refolding every black t-shirt, to make sure it wasn't the missing one. 

At the very beginning when I first opened the drawer to get the tee, I had been certain that it would be there. As the day went along, I became less and less certain. I could remember the box arriving and opening it. I could remember getting the shirt out and showing it to my husband. He could remember me showing it to him. But now I was no longer certain that I actually could remember taking it in the bedroom and putting it in the drawer. 

Every few hours throughout the rest of the day, I would go through the search process again. There was no sign of the tee anywhere. It caused me to think that I had done something irrational like put it in the garbage. Even on the very rare occasions that I throw away any clothing, I always put it in the trash cans, not in the garbage - i.e., food waste and used cat litter. But since the shirt had vanished and I had searched the trash both inside the house and in the outdoor cans, I began to think that some how I had walked into the kitchen and thrown a brand new t-shirt in with the wet, smelly and disgusting garbage. This was so out of character that it was disturbing. 

But then a lot of disturbing things have been happening with my memory in the last few years. I have always had a poor memory. When I was in the first grade, my teacher Mrs. Davis, repeatedly told me, and not in a kind or kidding way, that "Sue Greer, if your head wasn't screwed on tight you'd forget that too." I was an absent-minded and disorganized child, but I wanted to do well in school and I was disciplined so I taught myself a whole host of tricks and techniques to remember and keep track of things. I lived by lists even when I was seven years old. As a college freshman I immediately realized that without a system I would always be looking for my keys and my id (essential if one wanted to eat). So from the time I was 18 I always had a clearly specified place for keys and other essentials, and always made sure that I left things in that place. To this day I do not misplace my keys because they  belong in one place and always go in that place.

Growing older is not for the timid, it is a scary country!