The Virginians: Visiting the relatives Part 3

 My father, Carroll Greer, was born early in the second decade of the 20th century, he was the fifth child, second boy of the family with three older sisters and one older brother (11 years later the sixth sibling, a sister was born). He was born in a bustling commerce town, Troutdale, in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia, born of the timber boom at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. 

His father Charlie Parks Greer was a businessman, an entrepreneur and also the first mayor of the Town of Troutdale, his mother Emma Sue Weatherly Greer, the daughter of a minister. His siblings from oldest to youngest were Mary born of the fourth of July in the first decade of the 19th century, Charlie, Edith, Mildred, then a decade after Carroll came Sue in the 1920's. 

My grandfather Charlie built two houses in Troutdale on top of a big hill overlooking the town. The larger of the two houses a Victorian with lots of detail was the house that he, his wife and children lived in, always referred to as "the big house". He also build a smaller, one story cottage for his mother-in-law great grandmother Weatherly which was usually referred to as the "little house." During most of my life time it was the little house that was maintained and used by the family for visits to Troutdale. I didn't even see the outside of the big house until my Aunt Mary moved into it in the mid-1960's. 

In posts to come I will write a lot more about my father's family and about the town of Troutdale, Virginia, because in the 1970's I made Troutdale the focus of my master's thesis in sociology, and the entire southwestern Virginia region the focus of my dissertation research in the early 1980's. Today, however, I will be focusing on the experience of visiting my father's family in Virginia while I was a child and a teenager. 

My parents, Carroll and Jo, were both Virginians and although I grew up in California (and was born in Florida), I always thought of Virginia as "home," and the place I was "from." The fact that my father, a blue collar machinist, worked for an airline meant that our family got to "go home" regularly during a time when air travel was not really an option for working class people, or even many middle class people. 

Only two of my father's siblings, uncle Charlie (with his wife Jerrie) and aunt Mildred (and her husband Chap French) lived in Virginia throughout my entire childhood. Neither Charlie nor Mildred had any children, which meant that they indulged us niece and nephews greatly when we visited. They both lived in Roanoke, VA which is where we would visit them every time we came to visit my mother's family. Visits to Roanoke also resulted in visits "home" to Troutdale which was further southwest, deeper into the mountains and rural. My Aunt Mildred owned the two family homes in Troutdale, her husband Chap had purchased them for her and she welcomed any family members who wanted to visit to stay there. However, Mildred primarily maintained the little house and that was where many of my childhood memories are centered. 

Carroll's youngest sister Sue left Virginia as a young Navy nurse during World War II and never returned, instead having a farm in Washington state not far from Seattle with her husband Frank  Schiller a Navy man she met during the war, so we visited them separately and less often. Sue and Frank had two children, Milton (whose first name was actually Frank) who was about six or seven years older than me and Susan who was exactly the same age (only 2 days difference). Milton (or Frank as the army called him) enlisted in the Army after high school and was sent to Vietnam in the early 1960's when Americans were primarily described as "advisors." He received technical training and his primary job was building and maintaining radio transmission towers. He got to spend a lot of time traveling around the Vietnamese countryside and did not experience much military "action." I can remember him visiting us while in uniform in San Mateo, since we were near the San Francisco airport that was the port through which most military came and went to Vietnam. 

His oldest sister Mary, who never married was a career woman, a nurse. Mary did nursing on horseback in the Appalachian mountains in the 1930's and became an Army nurse during World War II. After World War II she worked at an Army hospital in Hawaii for some years before leaving the military and moving to Washington state to live on Sue and Frank's farm in Washington. She stayed there until the mid-1950's. When I was four we drove north from San Mateo, through the redwood forests of California, through Oregon to Washington and visited both Aunt Sue, Uncle Frank, our cousins, and Aunt Mary there. By 1960, Aunt Mary moved to Roanoke, VA and we would see her when we came to Roanoke. Later in the 1960's Aunt Mary moved to Troutdale and lived in the big house. She stayed there through the early 1970's as well. It is in fact largely due to my Aunt Mary that I got involved in the research that I did in graduate school. 

Aunt Edith, who had also worked as a nurse for many years (including doing horseback nursing during the 1930's) was married to Frank Merker who was a psychiatrist who served as the head of VA mental hospitals and they moved around the country depending on Frank's postings. They had one daughter, Matilda, who was eight years older than me. Aunt Edith and Uncle Frank were at a VA hospital in southwestern Virginia (probably Western State Hospital in Staunton, VA) when I was really young, then they were at a VA hospital in Roseburg, Oregon. After that they were at the Coatesville VA Medical Center outside Philadelphia. When I was in graduate school my Uncle Frank retired from the VA, but went to work as the administrator for the Virginia State Mental Hospital in Marion, VA and he and Aunt Edith renovated the "little house" or "Mildred's House" where they ultimately settled. We visited Aunt Edith and Uncle Frank in all those locations while I was growing up. 

So I only had three cousins on the Greer side, two of them substantially older than myself, compared to the dozen first cousins on my mother's side of the family, not to mention the first cousin's once removed and all the second cousins. Moreover, given the age differences it wasn't until I was an adult that I really got to know two of them. I also didn't really appreciate most of my Greer aunts when I was young either. My Greer relatives were loud and querulous. They had strong opinions and liked to argue about things. I often felt that my aunts were critical of me as a child. A lot of those feelings were inforced or encouraged by my mother who had her own serious insecurities about my father's sisters. My aunts were more worldly and more cosmopolitan than my mother, they had spent more time working, three of them as nurses all working and traveling the world (Africa, China, Europe). They were also, all but Aunt Sue, older than my mother by more than a decade, as was my father. They were more outspoken, more open in their opinions, more blunt, more direct, all things that made my mother and her family uncomfortable.  

When we made our family vacations to Virginia, the trip to Roanoke was more of an adventure. It was a long enough distance that we had to find our own transportation from the Washington, DC area (or from Jo's family's home in the Tidewater) to southeastern Virginia. Several of those trips made substantial, long lasting impressions on me. Before the late 1960's when United Airlines and others started buying up commuter airlines to use for short trips, flying into Roanoke was not an option. The earliest trip I remember was by train. It was an overnight trip and we had a sleeping compartment. It was my first real train ride, and made a huge impression on me. Mostly though I remember being sleepy and how snug the sleeping compartments were, with their tiny washrooms. I was so young that the memories are mostly a pleasant, slightly incoherent jumble of motion, noise, lights, warm sheets, and sleepiness. My mother was softer, quieter, more "polite" in interaction, but when there was no one around but her children, especially just me, she had lots of negative things to say about people, including my aunts. I was an adult before I realized how sly, cunning, and sometimes outright nasty my mother could be about people behind their backs. 

A couple of years later when I would have been about six, we made the trip by bus, Greyhound Bus to be precise. This was not a very pleasant trip because I was suffering from some stomach "bug" and felt nauseous much of the time, but the memories are very vivid. This was 1957, in Virginia, when bus transportation was still segregated, waiting rooms, bathrooms, and drinking fountains were segregated as well. This was the first time I was old enough to notice this and question it. It was summer probably late July or early August and very hot and humid, since I was sick my parents were very anxious to get to our destination. The buses were very crowded and there was only two seats left in the "white" section of the bus. My father and mother wrangled with the ticket agent and then with the driver. I'm not sure how they managed it, but they allowed my dad and my brother Charlie to take the one seat left in the white section and my mother, myself and my baby brother Frank sat on the very back row of the bus with the Black women.   

One of the things that I remember clearly was that the seats at the back of the bus did not have cushioning like the seats in the front of the bus did. The seat was hard and uncomfortable. I remember the woman we sat next to, she was a little older than my mother, and so nice. She fussed and made over me because I was not well. She held my baby brother for a little while to give my mother a respite. When we came to the first stop on the trip, she recommended that my parents buy a cold soda, that the fizzies would help settle my stomach (she was right). Only my father got out at that first rest stop (and got the soda for me). 

Sitting in the bus waiting for it to start up again, I pressed my face to the window and looked at the station. One of the things I saw that I did not understand was that there were two drinking fountains, one said "whites only" and the other said "coloreds."  I did not know what a "colored" was at that time, so I asked my mother. Her response was to "shush" me and tell me to keep quiet, and she'd explain later. Which she did. She also later said that she thought me asking questions would offend the nice people around me who had been very kind. Thinking about it over the years I think she was wrong. But that was how my mother and her people did things, anything "unpleasant" was shushed and pushed down in public. That left me with the impression that "colored" was something very dirty and nasty and not for polite conversation. "Nice" people did not talk about such things. 

Later she (and my father) did explain, and did make it clear that she thought such segregation was wrong - which was why she was not just willing, but happy to ride in the back of the bus. My mother did not approve of the Jim Crow laws, believing them morally wrong, but she also didn't believe in "making trouble" in public.  My father's approach that this was not only something to talk about, it was something to oppose publicly, to make noise, to march and protest against and to vote for people who would change it. My parents agreed on values, but disagreed on tactics. I have struggled between those two different approaches my whole life. 

When we went to Virginia in 1963, June to be precise, my father rented a car. That was the first and only time we did that, and that year (which was after my mother's father had died) we went to visit the Greer relatives first. The trip was memorable because the rental car, unlike our car at home, had a radio, and we were allowed to listen to music in the car. The station we listened to must have been an "oldies" station since the two songs I can remember that were Elvis's "Blue Suede Shoes" (from 1957) and "If I Had a Hammer" (from 1962) by Peter, Paul and Mary and my brothers (10 and 6) and I (12) sang along, and then continued to sing those two songs even when the radio was turned off. 

We had taken many family trips from home in California by car. We'd been camping up the entire west coast of the US from San Francisco to Vancouver, Canda, and we'd taken many shorter trips all around California. But we'd never been on a family car trip before where we had a radio and it was magical. Instead of singing all the old songs (like "Bicycle Built for Two" and "The Old Gray Mare" that we always sang) with my parents on road trips we got to listen to and sing new songs from the radio. 

Our destination was Roanoke, where we would stay with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Chap French in their brick home on Maiden Lane, but spend time and often eat meals out with Uncle Charlie and Aunt Jerry who lived a few blocks away. I loved Aunt Mildred and Uncle Chap's house, it was probably built in the 1920's and may have been bought new by Chap who was a generation older than Mildred and her siblings. When I was a child I knew that Uncle Chap was not only my "uncle" but by marriage but also my "great uncle" by marriage as before he'd been married to Mildred, he had been married to my great Aunt Lila Weatherly French, one of my grandmother's sisters. Chap was quite elderly, smoked cigars and had long been retired from his successful business career. We children were to keep out of his way and not bother him. However, Aunt Mildred loved children, loved adventures and projects so it was always a pleasure to be around her. Aunt Mildred was the kind of person who loved hardware stores because she was always building things and fixing things. 

That particular visit in June 1963 was especially memorable because of the news. At that time (between about 1962 and 1967) our family at home did not have television. The television we had was broken, and my parents decided not to fix it, or get a new one, preferring to spend money on travel and experiences, etc. So having a television on was notable in itself. But the big international news of that month was the death of Pope John XXIII, and I can remember being interested in the extended discussion of how a pope was chosen. All things Catholic were of particular interest to Americans at that time because our President John F. Kennedy was Catholic. 

Roanoke was urban, but it was a very different urban from California. The neighborhood of Maiden Lane, had many characteristics that I would see years later in Oberlin, Ohio, Lexington, Kentucky and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that were holdovers from times when people had horses instead of cars, and when land values were much lower. Houses sat close to the sidewalk or street with little or no front "yard" and all had wide and deep front porches to sit on hot summer days and nights. They also had long backyards that ended at an unnamed alley. By the 1960's most of those alleys were paved, and they were used by the garbage or sanitation crews to pick up bags left in cans at the very back of the yard. Trees or bushes often marked the end of the backyard rather than a fence. This kind of arrangement is normal to anyone who grew up in cities or towns east of the Mississippi, but was quite exotic to those of us who grew up in the planned suburbs of California built in the 1940's and 1950's.  

Since the house was built in the 1920's in a city, it was built with electricity and indoor plumbing as integral. But the light switches were "funny", little push  buttons rather than the mercury flip switches with which we were familiar. The doors that locked all had keyholes on both sides, and in the morning one had to unlock the front door with a key rather than turn a latch. Aunt Mildred had a funny system of keeping the key to the front door (and backdoor as well) on little leather leash that attached to the door handle, so that if there was an emergency no one would have to go around searching for the key. 

Aunt Mildred and Uncle Chap lived in the very first block of Maiden Lane, the same block as a church (these days called The City Lights) that had a huge neon sign "Jesus Saves" that was on the corner of Maiden Lane and Wasena Drive, where Uncle Charlie and Aunt Gerry lived. One could easily walk from one house to the other, but we generally piled in all piled in a car to make the visit. Charlie and Gerry lived on a short stretch of Wasena where the opposite side of the road Ghent Park and the Roanoke River. 

Uncle Charlie had gone to college and studied engineering and surveying. I don't know if he got a degree or not. He had a long career doing surveying for Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W) which was headquartered in Roanoke. Charlie had lots of funny stories to tell about surveying railroads in West Virginia in the late 1920's and 1930's including one tail about having dinner with a large Hatfield family, during which he was proffered a huge plate of fluffy biscuits and told "take one, take two, take durn near all of them." Aunt Jerry was unusual of all my aunts, the only close female relative I knew who continued to work full-time throughout her marriage. Jerry was a librarian, with a degree in library science. She was at one time a head librarian. 

As I mentioned before, Charlie and Jerry, like Mildred and Chap did not have children. Jerry also wasn't particularly fond of cooking, so she and Uncle Charlie ate out a lot, mostly at cafeteria style restaurants. While I'm sure those existed all over the country including in San Mateo, I always associated going to a cafeteria style restaurant with Roanoke, as that was the only place I'd ever been to one until I was an adult. There were two very nice one's within easy driving distance and I can remember quite a few meals eaten with Charlie and Jerry at cafeterias. It was delightful as a child not to have to eat what everyone else was eating, but to be able to pick exactly what you wanted. 

Occasionally, Charlie and Jerry would take us out for breakfast at a sit-down restaurant. I can still remember the steaming, fragrant pancakes and the multiple kinds of syrup. Those experiences convinced me that breakfast was the very best meal to eat out, and I still believe that to this day. Which is why every week, my husband and I go out to eat for breakfast at our local, independently owned, family style restaurant, the Pine Mountain Grill. 

There's more to tell. But it will be another post. 

The Virginians: Visiting the relatives part 2

 When I was a child visiting my mother's people in the Tidewater was something I enjoyed very much, more than I enjoyed visiting my father's people in the Virginia mountains. My mother was the only girl and much doted on by all her brothers. I didn't really understand as a child how much of a special occasion our visits were, and how many of the things that I loved - like the huge multi-family outdoor feasts - were not typical, but held just because we were there. 

There were so many special little moments that I remember from our visits. I mentioned above the feasts. Every time we visited there was at least one, and often more than one large gathering that might include several of her brothers and their children, and several of the great Aunts (Sue) or great Uncles (Wallace, Tom) and some of their grown children. The food was always amazing. My favorite was the fried chicken. My great Uncle Wallace once asked me how much fried chicken I thought I could eat (I was about 5 or 6 at the time) and I told him "a hundred pieces."  He laughed and laughed. I've never really tasted fried chicken like that since I was a child, it was so crisp on the outside and so juicy on the inside. There was also ham, fresh corn on the cob from the field, potato salad, lots of fresh vegetables, beans, tomatoes plucked from the fields, biscuits that would melt in your mouth, and mounds of fresh butter on everything. The tables would be overflowing with food and we'd be outdoors under huge tall trees on a warm summer day. 

There were the times that we would play hide and seek in the cornfields with other cousins who were visiting. We weren't really suppose to do that, because we might damage the crop, but no one ever punished us for the games. When I was about six or seven, I had a fear of dogs, and my great Uncle Tom decided to help me with that by having me help him feed his beagles. He had so many of them (he kept them for hunting), and they were so soft and cute and friendly, and eager of course to be fed. I pretty much got over my fear of dogs that summer. 

The summer before my grandfather died (when I was eight), my mother and us three children stayed on for a long time after my father had to fly back home to go back to work. That was the first time we got more of a taste of the everyday rhythms of life there. Just before my father left we had gone to the beach, at the tip of the peninsula, so the body of water would have been the Chesapeake Bay. We had gone wading and I stepped on a broken beer bottle someone had thrown in the water and got two deep cuts on my right foot. So much of the rest of the time that I was there I had to stay still with my foot up while it healed. I learned how to go up and down the steep stairs of grandfathers house sitting on my butt, using my hands and one leg to push myself up, or lower myself down while my right leg stuck out straight. My grandfather had a big trunk full of old books brought down stairs for me to dig through and I spent much of my time reading. The best place to read was on the front porch in one of the many white wicker chairs, with their chintz pillow covers. From the front porch one could watch cloud shadows race across the fields of grain, or watch the slow approach of a curtain of rain. It was that summer that made me truly a reader and lover of books. 

As a child I preferred my mom's kin to my father's because with my mother's kin everyone was amiable, no one argued, no one talked politics or sounded angry, no one talked too loudly, everyone took care of us, and treated us as special.  It was not until I was an adult that I realized how much that was just a pleasant façade that glossed over a great deal of discord and disagreement, that tended to come out in underhanded ways. As an adult I also realized how much of southern gentility also was cover for a great deal of racism and fear of otherness.

These days I have only tenuous ties to my maternal cousins, as many of them, especially the one's that stayed down on the farm, have political and religious views starkly opposite my own. All but one of my mother's brothers has passed away, the only one left, uncle Tommy, is a great guy, but he is in his 90's now and probably will not be with us much longer. 

The next installment (when I get to it) will deal with my Dad's side of the family, also Virginians. 

Dream Themes

 I have sweeping, cinematic dreams with large casts and complex plots, but many dreams contain within them common themes that give voice to daytime fears and anxieties. These themes repeat themselves over and over in dreams with very different casts and plots. 

At the top of the list of themes, is the car that won't stay stopped. I'll be driving and come to a stop, even to park, but regardless of how hard I hold down the brake the car eventually starts to drift and roll very very slowly but inexorably into trouble. This theme happens so often when I am sleeping, that I sometimes have to remind myself that I have never actually had this problem in the waking world. IRL when I stop a car and put on the parking break it stays put. But in my dreams it's a different matter, it almost never stays put, and nothing I can do will stop it. So it drifts into people, other cars, buildings, streams and lakes.  I stopped having this dream for a few years after I retired, until Trump came into office then it came back. It disappeared again during the Biden years, only to reappear this year. In other words, this dream theme has clear connections to external situations, whether job related or political that cause feelings of loss of control and panic or anxiety. I had one of these dreams last night after learning what the new CDC guidelines for COVID vaccines were and realizing that we might have difficulty getting my husband vaccinated (I'm over 65, he is not). 

Another common dream theme is a house with too many doors to the outside and none of them will shut or lock properly. Commonly the door will be smaller than the doorway by an inch or two, so that the deadbolt or other locking mechanism does not connect with anything solid, just sits in the air gap. Or sometimes door frames are rotting and will not hold, or the doors or frames are severely warped and the hardware for locking does not connect. In the dreams I expend oodles of energy trying to jury rig some means of securing a door, but when I am successful, I suddenly discover that there is yet another door with outside access that will not shut or lock properly. I have never experienced this in real life, as far as I can remember. Every place I've ever stayed has had good solid doors and working locks.  Unlike the slowly drifting car theme, I have not been able to identify what events or conditions in real life are a trigger for this theme, although it clear seems to concern fears about boundaries and safety. 

There have been times when real life experiences have been transformed into dream themes of anxiety, fear, dread, worry, etc. In 1982-83 during my first full-time academic teaching position I lived in a rental house that turned out to have a leaky roof. Some months after I moved in, I had the occasion to go up to the attic to put some stuff in storage and noticed several big buckets placed around to collect drips. There was no standing water in them, so I didn't think much about it. However, that spring when we got very heavy rains for several days in a row, I was awakened one night by the sound of water. There not only were the buckets full, but they had overflowed and a literal waterfall was cascading down the attic steps into my the second story of my apartment. When called the landlords emptied the buckets, put them back and assured me that they would repair the roof "soon". After four more months of issues, I found a new rental, but for many years to come my dreams were haunted by the theme of water dripping from the ceilings. Nearly 20 years later my husband and I rented a double wide trailer whose roof also began to leak after we'd been there a few years. Needless to say anxiety still sometimes appears in my dreams as a leaking ceiling. 

So what about you? Do your anxieties, fears, or worries manifest in your dreams in predictable or regular ways? Share your experiences in the comments. 

The Virginians: Visiting the relatives Part 1

 My parents, Jo (mom) and Carroll (dad)*, were Virginians by birth and upbringing. The first time Jo left the state of Virginia was when she married Carroll and went to live in Florida with him. Carroll had spent much of his adulthood traveling and working around the country, first in nearby states like West Virginia and North Carolina, but then to California, Arizona, Washington and Oregon. But for both of them Virginia was home. It was where their parents and most of their siblings resided. So as a child, when we flew we flew to visit family in Virginia.

We always split our visits between Jo's people who lived mostly on farms in the Tidewater along the Rappahannock River, and Carroll's people who lived in the Appalachian mountains of southwest Virginia.  Carroll's father Charlie Parks died when I was too small to remember him. Jo's father James Tyler (called Tyler) was still alive for the first eight years of my childhood. The photo above is me with Grandfather Tyler in his home. So I remember mostly going to visit Jo's folks first. The Tidewater was also much closer to Washington, DC and it was easier for her family to come to the airport to gather us up.  

Jo was the only girl in her family. She had five brothers. There had been another girl, the first child born to Tyler and Lillian, but she had died within days of birth. The picture above is her with her brothers probably in the 1970's at my cousin Lucy's wedding (from left to right is Howard, Jo, Tommy in the back, John next to Jo, Charles, and James). Three were older than her, two were younger. James Tyler II (called James) the eldest was already married when she was a young girl. James was a farmer and lived a few miles from his father. James' children Franklin and Turk ( James Tyler III) were just a few years younger than Jo and felt more like brothers than nephews. Next in line was John, then Howard just a couple of years younger than Jo, and the brother with which she was closest. Then there was Tommy, who was eight years younger. Their mother Lillian died within days of Tommy's birth. 

Jo's father, my grandfather Tyler, could not see himself raising an infant or a young girl (she was 8), so Jo was sent to live with her Aunt Sue on the farm adjacent to her father's property. Aunt Sue already had two daughters one a little older than Jo and one the same age. Jo spent the years from age 8 to age 18 living with her Aunt Sue, and her cousins Mary Edna and Florence. Tommy was formally adopted by an uncle John and his wife, who had been unable to have children. John's farm was several miles away from Tyler.  The photo probably taken in 1949 around the time of my parents' marriage, shows Herb, Florence, great Aunt Sue, Mary Edna and Hub, the family in which my mother grew up. 

Jo had two other uncles (great uncles to me), who also lived within a few miles of Tyler, they were Tom and his wife Wade and Wallace and his daughter Nanny Florence who was Jo's best friend growing up. The photo below is great uncle Tom, great uncle John, grandfather Tyler, and great uncle Wallace, probably from the 1920's. 

When I was a child visiting mama's (Jo) family included seeing her brother Howard and his wife Mickie first. Howard was in law enforcement and they lived in Rockville, Maryland. Howard was usually the one to pick us up at the airport. Howard and Mickie had two boys, Randy was the same age as me, and Ronnie (who as an adult goes by Scott) was the same age as my brother Charlie. We would often spend a day with them in suburban Maryland, which was not much different from the California suburbs where we lived. Then we would drive down to grandfather's house in the Tidewater.  

For most of my childhood, in addition to my grandfather Tyler, we would also see my Aunt Sue and her husband Hub, her son Herb and her grown up daughters Mary Edna and Florence, my uncle James and his wife Wade, at least one of his sons Turk and his wife.  Sometimes Franklin would bring his wife and children, Stuart and Becky, in to visit at the same time. We would also see Uncle John and Aunt Alene and their children Johnny and Lucy, great uncle Tom and his wife Wade, great uncle Wallace and Nanny Florence, and great uncle John and his wife. Sometimes Jo's brother Tommy would come from Newport News while we were there and bring his wife Gayebrook and their three children who were the same ages as my brothers and I. 

This collection of dozens of relatives mostly living on farms all within a few miles of each other, seemed exotic to me as a child. I was growing up in a brand new suburb of San Francisco where all the houses were identical, and all the people in the houses were from somewhere else originally.  I did not realize at the time that it was my experience in the California suburb that was unusual, and not the reverse. Everyone I grew up with had parents who had migrated to California for work from somewhere else. Many of them had come from crowded cities in the east, a few from mid-western farms or towns, but we were all from somewhere else, and no one had aunts or uncles or grandparents living within easy driving distance. I began to understand how unusual my childhood neighborhood was when as a sociology graduate student I began to read studies of urban communities like Herbert J. Gans Urban Villagers.  I really understood it when I went to live in Johnstown, Pennsylvania where I had my first position as a college professor. But as a child, a world where dozens of one's relatives were close by and got together on a regular basis, where people lived in 200 year old farm houses, which did not all have running water, was very unusual and exciting. 

While my grandfather was still alive we stayed with him while we were visiting. His house had been built in the 1700's. It was a wooden house that sat on piers rather than a foundation. A less than stellar drawing of this house, based solely on my memory at 74 (I did it today) is above.  It was a two story rectangle, wider than it was deep. At some point, later than its original construction, a wide porch had been added across the entire first floor, and then even later had been screened in to block flies and mosquitos. It had a simple, but steeply pitched roof, the ridge ran horizontal to the front and back of the house, with a gable at each end. There were redbrick chimneys at each end of the house.  It had been painting white at one time, and the functional shutters on the windows had been painted green, but it was all faded during my childhood. My father was an avid photographer and there are many, many pictures from my childhood, but for some reason, not one single picture of my grandfather Tyler's house. 

The downstairs had two large rooms separated in the middle by a wide hallway that contained the steep stairs to the second floor. The hallway also held one of those gorgeous old carved wooden hall benches that had a large tall mirror, a seat to sit to remove boots, and many hooks for hats and coats. The hallway also had a single light bulb dangling and a refrigerator (probably circa 1948). Grandfather Tyler had the house wired for electricity in the 1940's but only downstairs, and only very minimally. There were dangling lightbulbs in the main living room which lay to the left of the entrance hall, and in my grandfather's bedroom which lay to the right of the hallway, as well as in the hallway itself. The electricity was used for the lights, for the refrigerator and for a large radio. The lack of electricity was quite the novelty for a child raised in the California suburbs. So was the complete lack of indoor plumbing. The house had no running water, no bathrooms, no sinks. 

My grandfather's bedroom was strictly off limits and I have no memories of ever seeing past the doorway. But the living room was the center of all activity and most of our time was spent there. It was quite large. On the front side near the windows were a couch and comfortable chairs. There was also a piano, out of tune and very tinkley that I was allowed to bang on whenever I wanted. My grandfather also had his desk and his easy chair and multiple bookcases on the rear side of the living room. In between was a large table and chairs for at least six people, where most meals were eaten. Also standing a couple of feet in front of the fireplace at the far side of the room, was a metal stove for heating with coal, with a pipe for smoke that went into the fireplace and up the chimney. We were only ever there in the summertime, so the stove was simply an object in the way of running and play. In describing all the things in the living room, it makes it sound quite cluttered, but it was a large room and there was plenty of space for small children to run around  and play. 

At the far end of the living room, opposite from the hall entryway, was a door next to the fireplace. That door opened into a small, ramshackle, wooden passageway that had a solid wall on its back side and open screening on its front side. It was narrow and often full of spiders - which I hated with a passion as a child. In the middle of this covered passageway were two doors, one a screen door opening to the front of the house, and opposite it in the solid wall, a wooden door that opened to the back. There was a small wooden deck on the backside where work like washing clothes  was done. That back door was also the access to the well in the back of the house from which all the water came, and to the outhouse, which was in ill repair and only used to dump the contents of chamber pots. No one wanted to sit in that outhouse unless you relished the idea of getting bit by a black widow spider. 

Every day a fresh buckets of water were drawn from the well by the adults (they didn't trust small children not to fall in!), and one bucket with a metal dipper was left in the passageway for drinking water. If one got thirsty while playing outside, one could just step through one of the outside doors into the passageway and grab a dipper of cold water from the pail. 

The passage connected the main house to a smaller building that was the kitchen. This is something that one can see in famous southern colonial times homes such as Monticello, a kitchen separated by some distance from the main house. As a child it was explained to me as being a fire precaution, and a way to keep the heat out of the house during the summer. Years later I also realized that it was a common arrangement in houses that were built during slavery to keep the slaves that brought in the produce, meat, etc. and did the cooking out of the main house.

The original owners of the house, built in the 1700's, had definitely been slave holders, not something I thought about as a child. I did know, probably more than most white working class children in the 1950's about slavery, and about Jim Crow laws. Jo and Carroll were very outspoken about how wrong the Jim Crow laws were, about how important voting rights and economic rights were and said on more than one occasion that one of the reasons that we did not live in Virginia near our relatives was because they did not want their children to be brought up with those prejudices. All the members of Jo's family referred to those of African American heritage as "coloreds" or used an even more distasteful word. We were quietly warned not to make an issue of it with relatives, but that we must never use those words and always use the "more respectful term of Negro." 

[Unfortunately, my parents did not realize that the absence of Jim Crow laws and formal, legal forms of discrimination, did not mean that there was an absence of racism in California. The racism was just more hidden, swept under the rug. In Virginia as in much of the south, Blacks and whites lived alongside each other, in the same communities, with laws like Jim Crow and other forms of custom regulating their interactions to keep them socially separate even though they used the same streets. In California, real estate practices, some legal, some just customary, isolated Blacks, and other races into separate neighborhoods from whites. Our California neighborhood, was in the 1950's almost 100 percent white. Only when I went to high school did I learn about the other neighborhoods in the city where the Blacks, Hispanics and the very large Chinese- and Japanese-American communities lived.]

The kitchen was a very simple box of a room, probably not much more than 12' x 12'. A huge black cast iron woodburning cookstove dominated the room. Wood had to be chopped to fill it, and bringing in wood from the woodpile was a daily task. My mother was a good cook, she made really tasty but fairly simple foods, and was adept  at using the wood stove for just about any type of food prep, including baking bread. The kitchen also had a good sized prep table and lots of cupboards and storage for dry goods and pots and pans. The big, galvanized steel wash tub, big enough for an adult man to sit down in was also stored in the kitchen. Bath time involved hauling multiple buckets of water from the well, heating them in huge stock pots on the wooden stove and filling the wash tub with hot water. 

The same tub, placed on the back deck behind the passageway was used for washing laundry. Laundry washing also involved heating water on the stove. Also we used a large corrugated  metal washboard, that one scrub clothes against to get out the dirt. Children could be give the task of "agitating" the laundry in both the wash and the rinse "cycle", with a large wooden paddle. We would pretend to be captains of boats paddling towards  adventure while we stirred the clothes round and round. 

The stairs to the second floor started several feet from the front door of the house and rose steeply across its depth. At the top the stairs opened on a narrow hallway, running to two large rooms at either end, one over the part of the living room and one over grandfathers bedroom. In addition there was a very small bedroom on the living room side between the stairs and the large bedroom. When we visited my parents, Jo and Carroll, slept in the room above grandfather Tyler, and my brother Charlie and I slept in the large room over the living room. When Frank came along he slept in a cot in the room with my parents. 

Both bedrooms had very large, ornate metal bed frames with soft, squishy mattresses, and actual linen sheets. There were wardrobes rather than closets, and bureaus where linens and clothing were stored. One of the most important features of the bedrooms was the multiple chamber pots under the bed. All bodily elimination had to be done in a chamber pot. The pots were cast iron, but covered with white ceramic. They each had a fitted lid to keep the odors under control until they could be emptied. I did not like chamber pots. They hurt my butt! But at least as a small child, I was not responsible for the emptying and rinsing of the pots. If one needed to go during the day time, one had to climb up stairs to use a chamber pot. My grandfather had two in his bedroom, but we were not allowed in there. 

My brother Charlie and I always had to share the bed at grandfather Tyler's house. We did not like this. We would fight and fuss, and someone would be yelling for my mother "he's touching me" or "she's touching me". Often my parents would lay a long bolster pillow down the center of the bed and tell us to stay on our side. This did not always help. 

The last summer my grandfather Tyler was alive, I was 8 and Charlie was 6 1/2. Charlie convinced our parents to let him sleep in the little bedroom in between. That bedroom was full of things, trunks with old clothes, trunks full of books, all kinds of amazing treasures. The little bedroom also had the trap door that opened to the attic crawl space where other wonderful things were stored.    

Summer 1959: My brother Charlie (7), Frank (not quite 3), grandfather Tyler, me (Sue 8 1/2), Jo (mom) behind, cousin Lucy (9 or 10 despite being smaller), and Aunt Alene wife of Uncle John, Jo's second oldest brother. We are standing in front of grandfather Tyler's house, you can see the sagging gate and the country road beyond the gate. 

There will be more memories tomorrow. 

__________

*When people were introduced verbally to Jo and Carroll, they almost always misunderstood which name went with which person. This amused my mother and made my father angry. It was one of the many things about which he was very touchy. 

Why I Tip Generously: Lexington, Chevy Chase, My First Marriage and the Feminist Tip

This is more stream of consciousness than an organized memoir.

I was thinking about going to breakfast tomorrow (Sunday), at the Pine Mountain Grill in Whitesburg, and how much I was looking forward to it. This is something my husband and I do every Sunday, we only miss it if the snow is too deep or one of us is seriously ill. Part of the pleasure of going is how nice all the wait staff are to us, how cheerily they greet us, and always try to seat us at our favorite table in front of the great stone fireplace. Even if we show up on a different day and time, there is always several workers who recognize us and greet us warmly and treat us so well. 

Part of the answer is to our treatment at Pine Mountain Grill is that we are both very respectful of people who provide us service, but it doesn't hurt that we established many years ago that we were great tippers. These days we try to tip 100% of the bill whenever possible. I started thinking, how and when did I start being a person who tipped more than customary, and realize it all began in Lexington in the 1970's. 

When I went to live in Lexington, Kentucky in 1975, one of my favorite neighborhoods within walking distance of student housing was called Chevy Chase. In particular, I loved the little shopping district at the point where East High Street took a sharp bend and became Tates Creek Road (both major spokes of the wheel that was Lexington), and Euclid Avenue ended and suddenly became Fontaine Road. 

The place was a tacky jumble of buildings, signs, and small stores and restaurants. There was the Tast E O Donuts, jewelry store, drug store, a used bookstore that one of my roommates haunted for paperback romance novels, a children's toy store, laundry-mat, and Jerry Spry's Hair Studio. Young men trained under Jerry Spry learned to cut hair using rulers and calipers, precision cuts they were called.

One of the most popular establishments in Chevy Chase, was Charlie Browns, a lounge and bar were on the first floor and restaurant seating was on the second floor. Interestingly Charlie Browns still exists and looks not much different than it did in the 1970's. As a poor graduate student I generally only ate at Charlie Browns when someone else was buying. Once in 1977, my best friend, Elise, from college had gotten married and her new husband was first cousins with the hottest weatherman in Lexington, Brad James. Brad, his wife, Elise, her husband and I the grateful friend, all went to see Star Wars (the original, didn't have a subtitle in those days) together and afterwards Brad treated all of us to dinner at Charlie Browns. Brad and his wife were really lovely, interesting people, and my friend Elise was always a great story teller so the evening was filled with great stories and good laughs and wonderful food. 

Not too long after that fun experience at Charlie Browns I had another one, that I remember a little less charitably. I had a crush on a male faculty member who was not many years older than me. One time he asked me out to dinner and took me to Charlie Browns. I don't actually remember anything at all about the meal, the conversation or anything else, except how it ended. This fellow gave a little speech about how the restaurant industry exploited its workers and paid them less than minimum wage, and expected tips to make up the difference, all of which was true, and restaurant owners should pay their workers more. But then this man used that as an excuse not to leave any tip at all, saying he wasn't going to prop up the capitalist class. I was deeply embarrassed and ashamed and if I'd had any money at all I would have left it as a tip, but I didn't. The only person who suffers when you don't leave a tip is the wait staff. 

Around the same time I remember reading an article about the "feminist tip", probably in Ms. Magazine one of the few subscriptions I paid for in grad school. The article argued that women were more likely to work breakfast and lunch in restaurants, while men were more likely to work dinner, as a result because breakfast and lunch were cheaper than dinner, women made much less in tips for the same amount of work. The article argued that while 15% was fine for an expensive dinner out, that one should pay 20% or 25% tip for breakfast or lunch. I took that article to heart, and when I started working full time and had income enough to start eating out regularly, I began making my minimum tip one dollar, this was back when breakfast might cost you $2.50 or less. 

My first (ex) husband, in the 1980's worked in the restaurant business, first as a waiter then as a chef; his mother worked as a waitress for decades. We often went out to eat together during our marriage, and I admired how they treated those that served them, and how they tipped. That marriage may have ended more than 40 years ago, but the lessons about how to treat restaurant workers and how to tip stayed with me. 

When my husband and I first started going out regularly for Sunday breakfast it was fifteen years ago and most of the wait staff at Pine Mountain Grill were students of mine. It was the semester that my introductory sociology class had two Tylers, and one of those two Tylers (whose last name is unfortunately lost to the fog of memory) worked the Sunday morning breakfast shift. He was a really good student, an A student, outstanding in the class. It was also about the time that people first started talking about raising the minimum wage to $15 (of course now it should be $20 or more for the same buying power). At the time breakfast for both of us cost just about $15, so I started giving $15 tip. I had two things in mind, that at least for one hour of the day, our waiter would earn $15 an hour and also, I thought that if I tipped well, no one would think that I gave him a good grade because of how he treated me as a customer (I know that last little bit is pretty convoluted, but sometimes that's how my brain works). 

Over the next six or seven years, I saw a half dozen of my male students take jobs on the wait staff of the Pine Mountain Grill, and we tipped them all the same, about 100% of the bill. As the bill rose so did the tip. Not long after I retired, I stopped seeing young men working as waiters. Instead middle aged women have taken over most of the breakfast waiting duties. I still tip 100% of the bill, even now when it's gotten to $25 for the two of us for breakfast. It will probably go up again soon, even if just to cover the cost of coffee which is skyrocketing with the tariffs. 

I don't expect everyone to tip the way I do. But I do expect everyone to tip, I don't care how your service was, or how grumpy your waiter was. You still should tip at least 15%.  If you can tip more than do so. But you should also lobby your legislators to raise minimum wage for currently tipped workers. You should vote for people who want to raise the minimum wage over all and especially for currently tipped workers. 

Becoming a Bookkeeper

 When I was working at Cherry Tree Aviation, my desk was in the center of everything that happened. Everyone who came in and out went by my desk. Most people (both employees and customers) hung out in the central lobby area because that was where the coffee machine and the cigarette machine were. One of the people that I got to know while working there was Peter (not his real name), who owned a plane that he hangared with Cherry Tree Aviation and went flying frequently during the work week (a perk of owning his own business). He was a very jovial fellow, like to joke and tell stories, liked by everyone.

When Peter learned that Cherry Tree was closing down and I was losing a job, he asked me if I wanted to come work for him at his small manufacturing company. He had a very small office with two people, a bookkeeper and an accountant. The bookkeeper handled all the accounts receivable and the order desk, while the accountant handled the accounts payable, and all the accounting issues like payroll and taxes. The bookkeeper was a young woman my age who was married and expecting her first child and planning to quit work about a month before her due date, which was coming up soon and he hadn't found a suitable replacement. Like John Pritchard, Peter had decided that I was probably capable of learning the job even if I didn't have formal office or bookkeeping training. 

Two weeks later I started work at Peter Works (not its real name). Most of the building space was taken up by the machine shop were their product, car and motorcycle headers, were fabricated by skilled machinists (like my father). At the very front of the building were two offices, the smaller of which was where the bookkeeper and accountant worked, and a slightly larger inner office that was Peter and his partner's. Peter was the idea guy, the one who talked to customer, made deals and designed the headers. His partner was an older, gruff fellow who was the one who turned the ideas into reality, he had engineering and machinist training and spent most of his time in the machine shop supervising and guiding the half dozen young men who fabricated the headers. 

For those who don't know headers are a fancy exhaust system (generally for cars pre-1980, but also for motorcycles) that help exhaust flow away from the engine and improve engine performance (increased horsepower and torque), so important for people who raced stockcars or motorcycles. Customers ranged from individuals, to small car and bike shops, to large distributers like JC Whitney in Chicago that had a huge catalog business of all kinds of car and motorcycle parts. [The image is of a set of headers designed for a small block engine Chevy car 1955 to 1957). Header design is specific to a car make and type, as the pipes must fit into tight spaces in an engine. 

It turned out that the bookkeeping was the easiest part of the job to learn. I was taught how to do double entry bookkeeping in paper ledgers and how to make daily reports to the bank on income and outflow of money. The hardest part of the job was working the order desk. I had a detailed catalog to refer to, but still needed to learn a lot of specifics about particular car makes and designs. It was necessary to know the exact size of an engine in cubic centimeters (ccs), and whether the engine had any additional modifications. If I didn't know an answer I had to track down one of the bosses and ask, but unlike the young woman I was replacing, I started taking notes, so that I would only ever have to ask a particular question one time.

I liked both parts of the job. I found working with numbers and details to be calming. Even the part where at the end of the day everything had to total up with no more than 1 penny difference was enjoyable. On the rare days that I had made a mistake the hunt for the missing  money to correct the error was challenging and fun. Talking with customers on the phone was also fun, most of the time. There was always some guy somewhere who didn't want to talk to a "girl" about technical stuff and would insist that I get him a man to talk to. Usually when that happened I would have Bob the accountant (often the only other person in the office at the time) take the phone. Bob was a good man, and a great accountant, but he knew nothing at all about cars or headers. Usually after the guy talk fruitlessly to Bob for a while, he'd be willing to do business with me, because I generally knew what I was talking about. 

Bob was an interesting character. He was a high functioning alcoholic, something everyone knew. But twice in the five months I worked there, he did not show up for work for two or three days in a row. The bosses would say "oh, Bob's gone on another bender," and nothing was ever said to him when he would show up again, sober and ready to work.

I particularly liked dealing with the small car and bike shops that would buy directly from the company. Over the months I developed friendly, bantering relationships with several of the men who ran those shops. One in particular I remember was a custom bike shop in Ohio. They ordered headers almost weekly and the owner was a funny and pleasant guy with an amazing voice. 

In addition to the headers we also sold t-shirts and bumper stickers with the company logo. Requests for those often came in the mail from teens and adults with five dollar bills for the t-shirts. It was my job to select the right size shirt, package it and mail it out to the client. 

There were only two problems I had working at Peter Works. The first I simply decided to ignore (and not tell my father about). The shop was not unionized, and about two months after I began to work there the International Machinists decided to try to unionize it. They began picketing the building during working hours. Now I was raised in a union family, and my dad was a member of the International Machinists, and I was brought up never to cross a picket line. It made me very uncomfortable (and as I said I couldn't tell my father about it) but I decided that I wanted to keep the job, so kept coming to work despite the pickets.  Part of my argument to myself was that Peter gave all the machinists raises, so that their wages were actually above union scale to keep them from organizing, and none of the workers were interested in foregoing those higher wages to sign a union card. Of course, Peter did not give out benefits like health care or retirement, but most younger workers didn't have the foresight to realize how important those were. The whole situation made Bob and me grumble, because our pay (mine was only $2 an hour) did not change, because at that time there were no unions for office workers to join. 

The UPS drivers who picked up our shipments also would not cross a picket line, but the pickets would leave as soon as the workers did at 4:30 PM, and the truck drivers were willing to make us their last call of the day, and show up after the pickets and the workers (including me and Bob) were gone. This arrangement with the truck drivers unfortunately made it easier for the second problem to arise. 

Small manufacturing companies without large capital investment often face a problem. To sell a product you have to make it, and to make it you need to buy materials (in the case of headers this is mostly steel), and pay wages of workers. This is acerbated by the fact that it often takes a long time, weeks if not months for small companies to get payment from their customers. To solve this problem banks would offer accounts receivable loan funding. Accounts receivable funding still exists, often from on-line lenders as well as established banks. How it works is that when a small manufacturing company ships product to a buyer, the bank will loan them about 80% to 90% of the value of that as yet unpaid shipped invoice. This means that for every item you ship out your door, you get money the next day from the bank to pay for new materials and current wages while you wait for your customer to pay you. When the customer does pay you, you pay back the bank for the loan plus small interest, and pocket the remainder (so less than 20% to 10% of payments coming in stay with the company, and the bank gets what they loaned out plus interest. This was why at the end of every business day, I had to send Peter Works' bank a report, the report had to include: bookkeeping summary for the day, a photocopy of all the invoices for products shipped out that day, and every few weeks a check for the money owed the bank. 

That year, 1974 was in the middle of a recession (the recession lasted 1973 through 1975) and it was made much worse by the Arab Oil Embargo that began in November 1973. Gasoline was not just much more expensive than it had been, it was also scarce. I had given up driving a car to work altogether in 1974 because in California one could only get gas every other day (depending upon whether your license plate ended with an even or an odd number), and waiting in a gas line could take hours that I did  not have. I bought a really nice 10 gear bike, a Peugeot, and rode the bike to work along the San Francisco bay. It was a glorious way to commute. But the difficulty in getting fuel and the overall recession hit companies like Peter Works heavily because they provided parts for vehicles that used oil products. 

Because of the International Machinists picket line in front of the factory, all our product was shipped out after I and all the other workers other than the owners had left. As a result rather than reporting shipping invoices the day they went out, I would find a stack on my desk in the morning when I came in, enter them into the books, copy them and add them to that days bank report. It was in my fourth month there that I slowly realized what was happening, and it took a phone call from one of our largest customers, a large retailer that carried Peter Works headers in their catalog. The call was a complaint about not having received a shipment of headers that had been ordered. I found that confusing, because I had recorded and reported invoices for those products, with shipping labels to them in the previous weeks. 

It took me a while to put the pieces together, but what was happening, was that after hours when only the owners were there, they were creating fake invoices and shipping labels for products that did not exist (they didn't exist because they didn't have enough money for the materials to make them). Through me they were sending false information to the bank and getting funding for product that did not exist yet in hopes of getting enough funding to actually create the product and ship it before the deception was discovered. I began to realize that I had been asked to lie to customers about their orders being produced and when they would be shipped, when there was little certainty of that happening. 

The knowledge of the deception and cheating took a great toll on me. I did not like having been used as part of this scam. While I did not report what was happening to anyone outside the company, I did immediately proffer two weeks notice. Those last two weeks there were the most uncomfortable working situation I think I've ever had. 

I don't know what the consequences, if any, to the company and its owners were. I do know that the company still exists today, located in a different city, under the same name, still making headers, which is why I have changed the name of the owner and the company. It was my first real brush with the corruption that exists in business, and a major factor in why I have come to distrust those who make large amounts of money through business. I have come to know many honest small business owners over the years. None of them because rich from their businesses. I tend to be suspicious of those who do. 

Working in Aviation: Cherry Tree Aviation

 

Writing about my experiences flying on company passes and about the role of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) in commercial aviation, gets me thinking about the eight months I spent working for a fixed based operator (FBO) at San Carlos Airport in California. I was a recent college graduate with a BA in sociology. My plans for graduate school had fallen through at the last minute because there was a recession and funding had been cut for the program I had been accepted into. My only option was to come home to my parents and start looking for work. 

Not one of my college professors had ever talked about the kinds of work that a degree in sociology might support. If they talked about anything it was graduate school, and at the time I didn't consider graduate school in sociology to be an option. Years later I learned about all kinds of jobs in local, state and federal government that welcomed folks with sociology degrees. But at the time, in 1973, I only knew to look for businesses. Luckily I had strong typing skills, so I went looking for jobs that would use that skill. 

Something that younger people don't realize is that in 1973, almost all jobs advertised in local papers were categorized by gender. There were two separate columns - jobs for hire male, and jobs for hire female. Rules were rigid and a young woman could not just go after jobs advertised for males. I was dogged, every day for two weeks, I got up, opened up the morning paper, circled all the jobs I thought I might possibly qualify for, then got in the car and drove to each and every location. Some required a call ahead and an appointment, but most one could just show up and fill out the employment form. Most employers gave you a typing test (which I aced), and many also gave a general knowledge test (which I also aced), but in the end, almost all of them hired a young woman with formal secretarial training over the young woman with a BA in sociology. In those two weeks I applied for at least 60 jobs. 

At the end of the first week, one of the places that I interviewed was a small aviation company called Cherry Tree Aviation at the San Carlos airport about 10 minute freeway drive from my parents home. The president, John Pritchard, of the company which was very small, interviewed me and liked me. He was particularly interested in the fact that I'd gone to Oberlin College. He had spent more than a decade working for the FAA at the big tracking station just outside Oberlin and knew the community and the college well. But in the end he told me they decided to go with a young lady who had formal secretarial training. And I went on to another week of job hunting.

 The second week did not provide any job offers either. I was not too discouraged, but rather, more determined than ever to start looking anew the next week. But that Saturday, I got an unexpected call from Mr. Pritchard. He said that the young woman they had hired had not worked out and was I still interested in working for Cherry Tree, if so I should come to work at 8 am on Monday. He told me on the phone that I might not have formal secretarial training, but he knew Oberlin College and if I was an Oberlin graduate than I ought to be able to learn anything I needed on the job. 

So the third Monday in June 1973, I started working at Cherry Tree Aviation. A fixed base operator was the workhorse of general aviation in those days. Cherry Tree Aviation did multiple things in the field of aviation.  First, the company had two pilots and two planes that could be chartered for a wide range of purposes. Second, they owned hangars that could be rented by individual plane owners to keep their planes, and they owned tie-down spaces (places outside to keep a private plane). Third, they had a professional mechanic who maintained their own planes but who could also do work for private individuals with planes. The mechanic was allocated a large hangar for maintenance use. Fourth, they rented space to even smaller, specialized aviation businesses: a parachute jump and skydiving school, a small flight instruction school (who had one plane and two instructors), and a two person helicopter company that did charter work. Fifth, they operated aviation fuel tanks and fuel trucks that scouted the field constantly looking for visiting planes to fuel. Sixth, Cherry Tree entered into a partnership with a man who sold planes, both new ones for Piper Aircraft and used planes. 

Technically I was hired to work for the aircraft salesman, a man who went by the name "Tom" Sawyer. That actually should have been a hint about the man's character. I was to be his secretary, do all of his correspondence, answer his phone, etc. I had a desk in the central  office area, where everyone gathered for coffee and conversation, and the other secretary for the company answer phones. As it turned out, there being a recession going on, plane sales were almost non-existent, and so I got called upon to do lots of other things for anyone who needed something done. Mr. Pritchard would ask me to help him come up with advertising campaigns, and have me work on promotional materials. The pilots would ask me to do paper work for them. Even then I often ran out of things to do. So I started volunteering to do things like learning how to move the planes around and to wash them. I would bring clothes to change into for that, from my "office dress". 

It was the kind of business where one could go many days in a row without anything much happening, and then something would happen and we'd have multiple requests for charter work. Much of the charter work we did would come without any warning. For example, we did charter ambulance flights for the military. It took me a long time to understand what was going on. This was still during the Vietnam War years, and it was not at all uncommon for young men who were tired of serving to go AWOL and run off into the rural areas of California. Then something would happen to them, they'd break a leg, or get sick, or get in an accident, and suddenly local law enforcement or hospitals would notify the military that they had an AWOL soldier or sailor in their jurisdiction. The military would hire us to go get their wayward men. Depending upon the severity of the illness or injury a nurse or maybe even two nurses would have to be hired for the flight from the local nurses registry. There would be a sudden flurry of phone calls and arrangements to be made and the main secretary would need my help to handle all of it. 

After I'd been with Cherry Tree for about six months, the Navy called us with a job to retrieve a man in a full-body cast (he'd had a motorcycle accident) from Chico. We were given several days to plan for this, and it was going to be on a Saturday, so the pilot asked me if I'd like to ride "shot-gun" with him, get to go flying on a beautiful day. It was a gorgeous day, the sky was so blue and it went on forever, there were no clouds anywhere and you could see great distances, that thing that pilots call CAVU (ceiling and visibility unlimited). I actually got a chance to fly the plane for a while, and do some simple slow banks and turns. It was an amazing day. We picked up the man and a nurse at Chico and came home. The man was quiet and said almost nothing. When the flight was over, and the man had been placed into a Navy ambulance and taken away, the pilot reached under the seat I'd been sitting in and pulled out a pistol. It turned out I actually was riding "shotgun" so to speak. He explained that while they had never had a problem, these men were in fact fugitives and might fight to get away. The only reason that he had decided it was safe to bring me, rather than the other pilot who was also former military and trained with firearms was that they knew the man was in a full-body cast and could barely move. 

Another kind of charter flight that we often did was for news organizations, TV stations and newspapers when there was breaking news and the reporters wanted to get there quickly. These also were things that often happened with little warning and involved an all hands on deck response. During my time at Cherry Tree Aviation there were several earthquakes in nearby parts of northern California, for which TV camera crews were eager to get footage. One time when the task of talking to the news departments and scheduling flights for crews, I made a rookie error. I put the camera crews from two competing network affiliates in one plane. No news center wants their aerial footage to be from exactly the same angle as that of their competitors it would seem. 

Not only was there a recession happening, but in October of 1973 an event occurred that rocked the small aviation industry, as well as many other industries that relied on oil from the middle east. On October 6, 1973 (the war started on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur and also was in the middle of the holiest month of the Muslim world Ramadan)  an alliance of Arab nations lead by Egypt and Syria made a surprise attack on Israel. The war lasted until a truce was called on October 25, 1973. One of the many consequences of this war was an embargo by Arab oil producing states against the U.S. and other nations that had supported Israel in the conflict. The oil embargo went into effect almost immediately. Supply of aviation fuel was dramatically cut and prices skyrocketed. Aviation fuel sales had been a major portion of Cherry Tree Aviations revenue. Suddenly, the company only had enough fuel for their own planes, and none to sell. Not only did they need to stop selling fuel, they needed to sell their fuel trucks and lay-off all the young women who worked the fuel trucks. 

A little side note here: selling aviation fuel at a small airport is a very competitive business, at least two other fixed base operators at the very small San Carlos field also had fuel trucks running around the field trying to sell fuel. John Pritchard had very effective, if highly sexist idea. All the other operators hired young men to run their trucks. Cherry Tree Aviation not only hired attractive young women (college age or just out of college), they also outfitted them in bright blue hotpants (the term in 1970s for tight, very short shorts). It worked, until there was no more fuel to sell. 

The oil embargo affected the companies income in multiple ways - including the cost of heating the building.  The decision was made to lay off not only the young women who ran the fuel trucks, but also several of the other workers deemed non-essential, that included the young man who had done all the janitorial work (which was picked up by all of us who were left), the accountant, and the young woman who was the main secretary (who had been there for months before me). Pritchard justified laying her off, instead of me, by pointing out that I was really Tom Sawyer's employee, not Cherry Tree's, but it was really because he had come to find me a far more useful, flexible and interested employee. Moreover, he knew I'd do things like wash planes and get dirty, and the original secretary wouldn't do anything outside the office. I was also paid less, minimum wage, which was $1.80 an hour at that time. Note that the President took a salary only equivalent to $2 an hour for 40 hours a week, despite all the work he did outside those hours. Only the pilots and the mechanic were paid more, because the company couldn't operate without them. I know what folks were paid, because my new chores included doing the books and the payroll. 

My job became more and more interesting, and more and more varied. Mr. Pritchard would often sit down with me or call me into his office to talk about the business and the problems that it faced. He talked a lot about the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). It was almost impossible for a small FBO to land a contract with the CAB for a regular "route" between two locations. Mr. Pritchard wanted Cherry Tree to start regular service between San Carlos and Reno, to take gamblers every weekend. We could do charter flights for people to anywhere, but the real money came from having regular flights, where one could fill all the seats and charge less per person. The big airlines also chaffed at the control of the CAB. The CAB limited the number of airlines and the number of transcontinental routes. Any large airline that was awarded one of the plumb transcontinental routes (like SFO to NYC or LAX to NYC) was also required to serve a number of smaller markets that often lost them money. The CAB guaranteed that every community that had an airport that could handle large planes would be served by the large airlines, even if they did so through subsidiary, regional, commuter airlines.  No city would get left behind, even if they weren't a money making market for the big airlines. But smaller air companies, like Cherry Tree, didn't get a chance at tackling those smaller markets either. 

Mr. Pritchard felt that the solution to Cherry Tree's problems was to be bought out by a somewhat larger aviation corporation. By December 1973, Mr. Pritchard had found a buy, and we became a subsidiary of a larger company. Now added to my work was writing reports of income and expenditures, activities and services and sending them daily to the "head" office. They took over accounting functions like issuing paychecks, all I did was report everyone's hours and the pilots' flight hours. I still had all my other responsibilities, manning the phones, scheduling charters, finding nurses for the ambulance flights, moving planes, washing planes, and being Mr. Pritchard's sounding board. 

I haven't said much about the man I officially worked for, "Tom" Sawyer. He was a slick operator, who craved to be much richer than he was. But he had not been very successful as a plane salesman, not for lack of trying, but simply because the market just wasn't there. Shortly before Christmas 1973, about the time that Cherry Tree was being taken over by the larger company. We became aware that Tom who had been a cosigner on the company checks, had cashed a couple of large checks (several thousand dollars each) with only his signature on them (not legal) and one of them had bounced. This was brought to our attention by the San Mateo County Sheriff who had come to arrest him for writing a bad check. Tom was not in the office that day, and none of us knew where he was. While the Sheriff was standing there talking with people, the phone rang and I answered it and it was someone from Pan American Airlines wanting to talk to Mr. Sawyer to tell him that his flight to South Korea was going to be delayed by several hours. We were able to ascertain that Tom was at the airport already waiting for his flight, so I gave the Sheriff all the information, flight number, gate number and the Sheriff talked to the airline agent to see if they could locate and keep an eye on him. Then off the Sheriff went to arrest Tom. I do not know how the story ended, other than Tom Sawyer was no longer associated with Cherry Tree Aviation after that day. 

Unfortunately, the sale of Cherry Tree Aviation to the larger company did not really help its bottom line. By Valentine's Day 1974, the decision was made to close the business down, and I lost my first post college job. Luckily I met a lot of people, who kept their planes in our hangers or used our charter services, through working there. One of them owned a small manufacturing company, Sanderson Racing Headers (which does still exist!) and needed a new bookkeeper. His current bookkeeper was pregnant and would be leaving the job before her baby was born. So I got signed up to work for Sanderson, before my job at Cherry Tree Aviation ended. 

Couple of little add-ons:  

One of the people who hangered his plane with us was a man named Stephen Bechtel, who drove the most beautiful Lamborghini (with a personalized license plate that said  STEEL) which he left in the hangar while he was out flying. I was in love with that Lamborghini. I didn't know until many years later who he actually was and all the things, many of them reprehensible for which Bechtel Corporation was responsible.

Cherry Tree Aviation rented space to a two person helicopter company called Golden Gate Helicopters. The company consisted of the owner/pilot and his secretary/assistant who could also fly. They did a lot of television and movie work, including work for the very popular show The Streets of San Francisco staring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas, both of whom I got to meet on a couple of occasions when they came down to fly out of San Carlos with the chopper. For one episode The Streets of San Francisco even chartered one of Cherry Trees Planes to be the "bad guy escaping" so the whole camera crew, etc. were at San Carlos Airport for that.