I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR

At long last a woman has been elected to the second highest office in the United States of America, but not yet to the presidency.  Hillary Clinton held out that hope on behalf of many of us, but her “sins” were magnified, largely, I think, because she was a woman.  Witness the excusal of even bigger sins by the man who was chosen over her by the electoral college.  Boys will be boys, but women still must be above reproach to be acceptable.

So many events of the last decade continue to remind me that, even though we thought we had successfully fought the battle for equal rights of women years ago, we are not yet there.  The “me too” movement gave voice to women’s victimization.  It encouraged me to speak out for the first time about my own rape nearly fifty years ago and to publicly name a serial sexual harasser years after his abuses were covered up.  The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reminded us of the important work she did to improve the status of women in this country—both through her legal work and as a role model.  And so, I am moved to write about my own experiences with the struggle to overcome and celebrate being born female.

Helen Reddy wrote in 1971 what, in many ways, became the theme song for my generation of women. 

I am woman, hear me roar

In numbers too big to ignore

. . . . .

Oh yes, I am wise

But it’s wisdom born of pain.

Yes, I’ve paid the price

But look how much I gained.

If I have to, I can do anything.

I am strong.

I am invincible.

I am woman.[i]

I credit my parents with my initial push toward becoming an independent, achievement-oriented woman, although they were sometimes a bit miffed at what they had wrought.  I also credit the models of my strong grandmothers.  My Grandmother Elizabeth, for whom I was named, overcame great hardships to perfect her piano and singing skills.  She left home in 1920 at the age of 22—unheard of in those days—to play the organ for the silent movie house in Newburg, Missouri and to teach piano lessons.  There she met and married a railroad man, Ben Bull.  They had four children, the oldest of whom was my father Joe.  Ben went out on strike with his union and lost his job, just before the 1929 depression hit.  Through all of their difficult times, Elizabeth was able to keep the family afloat by bartering piano and voice lessons.

My Grandmother Ollie left her much older, possibly abusive husband in Oregon in 1930, taking five-year-old Margaret, the youngest of her eight children and my mother, with her to Missouri.  Ollie had to put Margaret in a children’s home until she was able to care for her and some of the older children again.  Ollie worked as a waitress, a cook, and eventually ran a boarding house. 

My father went to college on the GI Bill after World War Two.  He became an aerospace engineer, eventually working on designs for the rocket engines that launched Apollo and Gemini spacecraft.  He always encouraged us kids to do well in school, helping us with homework when needed and praising us for good grades.  I don’t recall there ever having been a discussion of whether we would go to college, just where we would go.  Like my older sister, Melinda, I opted for Baylor University, located in our then-hometown of Waco, Texas.

While I had been an excellent student in high school, graduating near the top of my class, I was a less serious student at Baylor.  There were too many other things demanding my attention and energies.  My parents and I had many arguments during those years—about the Vietnam War, about our government’s policies, about what I was going to do with my life, etc.   I was an able opponent, but Dad would try to punch holes in my logic or accuse me of being naive.  I reminded him often that he had taught me to form my own opinions and encouraged me to be a critical thinker.  He just didn’t like it when I came to different conclusions from his. 

One of his financial threats was that he would only pay my tuition (I was working to pay for my room and board and other expenses) if I majored in something “useful” like education.  I reluctantly changed my major from philosophy and history to secondary education with a social studies concentration.  A few years later, when I applied to attend law school at the University of Texas, Dad was appalled.  “No man will ever marry you if you compete with them,” he declared.  I fell in love and didn’t end up going to law school.  Unfortunately, the love affair didn’t pan out either. 

Dad made the same argument a few years later when I started graduate school, working toward a doctorate in educational psychology.  However, mid-way through that degree, I did marry and that seemed to appease Dad for a while.  The marriage didn’t last long, but my career did.  After I married for a second time, this time to a more stable and suitable man, Scott Danielson, Dad could finally breathe a great sigh of relief.  He was especially pleased that Scott was an engineer and had some interest in aerospace engineering.  In Dad’s eyes, I had achieved the ultimate and married a successful man.

One Christmas vacation, when I was well into my career as a psychology professor at Moorhead State University, Dad, my two brothers, and I were sitting together in the kitchen of my parents’ house.  I don’t recall what prompted this exchange, but I made an initial observation.

“You know Dad, I’m the one of your kids who might have followed you into engineering, had you ever encouraged me to do so,” I began.  “I was good in math and science and might have made a good engineer.”

“You could have done anything you wanted,” he replied, somewhat off-handedly.

“No.  You made me get a degree in education.”

“I did not,” he firmly asserted.  “You could have majored in anything you wanted.”

“No, Dad,” I persisted.  “You threatened to cut off my tuition if I didn’t major in something useful like education.”

He repeated, “You could have done anything you wanted.”

“What would have been OK with you besides teaching or nursing?” I wasn’t going to let him off the hook.

“You could have done anything.”

“Just give me one example of something else that would have been OK with you, Dad.” I was baiting the poor man.

“Well,” he sputtered in frustration, “you could have majored in home economics.”

My brothers had been listening to, but not participating in, this exchange.  With this answer, they both started laughing.

“Oh, Dad,” I sighed. “You still don’t get it.”

My mother did not go to college until my younger brothers did.  She earned a nursing degree in her forties, the only one among her siblings to go to college.  Mother had left home at seventeen, going to California to work as a riveter in a defense plant.  After my parents married, however, she settled into the role of the traditional 1950s post-war wife, being responsible for child rearing, housekeeping, and cooking. Reading her journals after her death, I discovered that—even though she never would have said so in words—she suffered from the malaise described so poignantly by Betty Freidan in her book The Feminine Mystique.

Mother had dreams of doing something else, of being something more.  But it took many years for her to assert herself and pursue her dream of going to college and becoming a nurse.  In one of our conversations after I was a middle-aged adult, Mother remarked, “Had I lived in a different time, I would have wanted a life like yours.”

So, while my father pushed me and then pulled back, my mother was silently cheering me on.

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While I was a student at Baylor in the late 1960s, women were “protected” and held to different standards than the men on campus.  We lived in separate dormitories, of course.  There were curfews in the women’s dorms but not in the men’s.  We had to be in by, I think, ten on week nights and midnight on weekends.  The doors were locked precisely at that time.  If a girl was late and had to knock for admission, she received “late minutes.”  After accumulating a certain number (twenty maybe), she was “campused” for a weekend, meaning she could not leave the dorm.  Just to be sure everyone was in and accounted for, our dorm rooms were checked each night shortly after curfew.

Men could smoke on campus; women could not.  Women were not allowed to wear pants on campus.  When wearing shorts to PE or to play intramural football, we had to cover our pants with a raincoat.  Along with protesting the Vietnam War, during the 1969-70 academic year, we also lobbied for a change to the pants rule.  The thing that made this rule so absurd was that this was the era of the miniskirt, and women often wore skirts short enough to expose most of their upper thighs, but we could not cover those same thighs with long pants.  Finally, it was decreed that women could wear pants on campus, but only long pants and not blue jeans or shorts. 

Neither pants nor miniskirts were allowed among teachers, however.  When I started student teaching in the spring of 1970, my skirts had to reach the floor when I was kneeling, which I had to do once in front of the high school principal to prove that my skirt was long enough.  My sister Melinda became a teacher, but had to quit as soon as she started showing with her first pregnancy.  It was considered indecent for children to be exposed to a pregnant woman.

We found jobs in those days through advertisements in the newspaper.  Openings were listed as “Help Wanted: Female” or “Help Wanted: Male.”  The “Female” list included secretarial positions, waitressing jobs, medical or legal assistant positions, and other such stereotypically- female positions.  Even high-achieving women like Ruth Bader Ginsburg were discriminated against in hiring in the 1960s.  Unable to secure a job with a law firm after her graduation at the top of her class at Columbia Law School, she turned to an academic career instead, teaching first at Rutgers University School of Law and later at Columbia Law School.  Working with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) during the 1970s, Ginsburg successfully argued a number of sex-discrimination cases before the Supreme Court. [ii]

In the 1990s, I came across a research report on the “feminization” of professions.  Since I’m not writing a scholarly article, I will not go looking for the exact reference, but will share here the gist of the findings as I remember them.  Professions that were typically viewed as “female” paid less and held lower status than the “male” professions.  Females were primarily teachers, while most school principals at the time were male.  Doctors were male, nurses and technicians were female.  Attorneys were male and paralegals were female.  Through the late seventies and eighties, things began to change as women entered a broader range of professional fields.  But an interesting thing happened.  As larger numbers of women entered a field, men tended to leave it, and both salaries and status declined.  Two of the fields I recall being cited as examples in this research study were accounting and real estate.  While accountants used to be primarily men, by the 1990s, the vast majority were women.  As women began to enter the world of residential real estate, men tended to gravitate to commercial real estate.  There is significantly more money to be made in commercial real estate as compared with residential. 

The article also noted that the fields of law, psychology, and medicine were moving toward “feminization,” with its related losses in both salaries and status.  At the time, psychology was nearing a fifty-fifty split; I would guess that now the majority of psychologists are women.  There are more women entering law now than men.  In medicine, the number of total women has increased, but they tend to enter the lower-paid specialties of family practice, obstetrics/ gynecology, and pediatrics, leaving the more lucrative specialties of surgery and oncology to men.  Engineering remains a predominantly male domain (87% of engineers were men in 2019) even though women have made significant inroads in the last few decades.  

 Women have always made less than men, even when education levels and years of experience are entered into the equation.  The gender pay gap has lessened over the past fifty years, but it still exists, as women earn on average 81% of what men earn, according to the annual “Gender Pay Gap Study 2020.”[iii]

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During the 1970s, women began to find their voices and took up a variety of issues of discrimination.  Advocating to be able to wear pants on a college campus or being allowed to teach through a pregnancy were just beginning points for a vast movement against being second-class citizens who needed the “protection” and “support” of a man.  Women in large numbers fought for access to birth control, the right to make pregnancy decisions for themselves, the ability to enter into careers that had previously been limited to men and to be paid equal wages, funding for girls’ sports on par with that spent on boys’ sports, affordable child care, and many, many other issues. 

Many of my high school and college friends married soon after college graduation and began having children.  I did not date anyone that I wanted to marry, so had to find a career path in order to support myself.  It took a few years to figure out what I wanted to do, but I entered graduate school at the University of Colorado in 1973. 

In 1975, I agreed to marry John Sellers, a man I had first dated at Baylor and who had been pursuing me for several years.  It was a disastrous marriage for many reasons, one of which was that he was emotionally unstable and could be physically abusive.  Usually, his outbursts were scary (like the time he threw a glass which shattered against the wall inches in front of my face), but I ended up in the emergency room once after he slugged me in the face.  Fortunately, nothing was broken, but I did have quite a shiner for a couple of weeks afterwards.  The attending physician asked me if I had somewhere safe to go, and I said yes.  I went home, because after one of these outbursts, John was always apologetic and loving.  He cried when he saw my black eye and bought me flowers the next day. And, he promised he would never hurt me again.  A promise he had made several times before but could never keep.

As part of my graduate work, I took a psychology of women course, which was a powerful experience for me in several ways.  For example, I learned that mine was a classic case of the abuse cycle.  The abuser escalates toward an inevitable explosion.  Sometimes the victim collaborates in that escalation knowing the explosion is coming and wanting to get it over with.  Afterward the abuser is remorseful and loving and makes all kinds of promises—I’ll get help, I’ll stop drinking, I’ll never hit you again, etc.  Many women caught in this cycle are held hostage because of children and a lack of economic resources. 

In my case, though, we had no children, and I was the primary wage earner.  Even though he had earned a master’s degree in journalism from prestigious Columbia University, John had difficulty finding and keeping a job.  During our short marriage he had a series of jobs—apartment manager, maintenance man, school bus driver—but he had either been fired or quit each one after just a few months.  So, when an opportunity arose for me to take a paid school psychology internship nearly two hundred miles from Boulder, I jumped at it.  I did not invite John to come along since it was only to be temporary.  I stayed away longer, however, and took the action necessary to end our unhealthy relationship by filing for divorce in 1979.

Later in my life, I served on the board of the YWCA in Fargo-Moorhead and was particularly interested in the shelter it ran for women and children who had suffered domestic violence.  I also taught a psychology of women course whenever I could fit it into my schedule.  These classes had between seventy-five and ninety students, mostly women, and were empowering to both the students and to me. 

One year, several of the students in that class came to me with complaints of inappropriate behavior on the part of an esteemed male colleague in my department at Moorhead State University.  Since this man had tried to kiss me one day in my office, I readily related to their stories.  They were afraid to confront him, so I went with them to share their complaints with the president of the university.  He listened and promised to investigate.  The professor received a verbal reprimand and was told to stop such behaviors, but I don’t think he did.  The story I later heard was that this senior professor, who was one of the university’s few faculty of color, threatened the president with a discrimination lawsuit if any formal action was taken against him.

I also taught psychology of women when I was an administrator at Concordia College, a Lutheran liberal arts college.  The official position of the campus pastor was that homosexuality was a choice and a sin.  I asked my friend Kerry Lauer to come one day to share her personal experiences with my class.  Kerry had grown up in a conservative religious community in the southwest and had attended a church-related college where the campus pastor counseled her to ignore her attractions to women and marry a man in order "to be saved."  She took his advice, married, and moved to rural Minnesota to live with her husband’s family.  After several years of living in misery, she told her husband that she could not be the wife he deserved, that she had always preferred women, and that for both their sakes, he should divorce her.  He did, and Kerry was banished from the community in shame.

She eventually found a job, a community that accepted her, and a life partner.  However, she also pointed out that “coming out” was not a once-and-done thing, but a continuing requirement.  For example, every new doctor she visited would ask about her need for birth control; securing a loan for the purchase of a home caused some difficulty for two women; and new people who entered her life often had a moment (or more) of pause at learning that her partner was another woman.  My students were respectful and asked her good questions.  Kerry was very open about answering them.  After she left, we had a thoughtful conversation about Biblical teachings (you can do this in a Lutheran college) and the realities of human experience.  Hopefully, such conversations broadened my students’ world views and provided them with the information they needed to have such conversations outside the classroom.

Given that same-sex marriage is now legal, we tend to forget that until the 1980s and 1990s most states continued to have laws on their books that made homosexual relationships illegal.  So-called sodomy laws were still in place in fourteen states in 2003 when the Supreme Court ruled that laws that prohibited private homosexual activity between consenting adults were unconstitutional.[iv]

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In addition to teaching about gender issues, I also conducted some research on sex differences.  The first project was the basis of my master’s thesis, written in 1977.  I looked at a concept called “fear of success” as the explanation for why many women did not achieve what they were intellectually capable of.  In essence, many bright women opted-out of academic pursuits out of a fear that if they were too successful, they wouldn’t be liked or find a male partner.  Had I listened to my father those decades earlier, I might also have minimized my achievements in order to be more “acceptable” to men. 

My other research interest emerged from a finding in my doctoral dissertation research on mathematical problem solving.  I was studying the processes people used in solving word problems.  Contrary to the belief popular at the time (1980) that women were not as capable mathematically as men, I found no differences except on one very unique problem.  This word problem set up an impossible situation in which a number of coins equaled a given amount; however, the wording of the problem should lead to the answer that the conditions could not be met and therefore there was no answer.  Eighty percent of my male subjects came to the correct conclusion, but fewer than twenty percent of my female subjects did.  The typical man would set up the problem, solve it, get a negative number of coins and say, “there must be something wrong with the problem.”  In this case, they had no difficulty rereading it and saying, oh yeah, you can’t have this many dimes be worth more than this many quarters.  In contrast, the typical woman would set up the problem, solve the equations, get a negative number of coins, and say, “I did something wrong.”  She then either retraced her steps or gave up in frustration with her “inability” to do math.

The best explanation I found for this finding came from the attribution research of the time, that is, how people explain (attribute) their success and failure in various situations.  In general, when men were successful, they took credit for it (I’m smart), and when they were unsuccessful, they tended to blame some outside factor (hard problem, bad luck).  In contrast, women who were successful tended to credit outside factors (easy problem, good luck) and blame themselves for failure (I’m dumb).  I don’t know if more recent research would continue to find this sex difference, but I found it to be very disturbing at the time.

My goal in teaching psychology of women and in the mentoring I have done over the years has been to convince women that they are indeed capable and that they should pursue whatever goals they have for themselves without worrying about what others think of those goals.  I have never advocated career over family.  I think each of us has to find the balance in life that works for us.  But I do know that women who want to achieve parity with men in the workplace have to make some sacrifices and compromises along the way.

Thankfully, I found in Scott a life partner who wasn’t ever threatened by my success, and in fact, was very supportive of my career advancement.  (I will write more about that later.)  While we were never able to have our own children, we did foster several and, along with many other couples, had to figure out how to balance child care and rearing with career advancement.  It is hard.  Even more so for single parents shouldering that burden alone.  

In some respects, women have come a long way in the past fifty years, but we cannot let down our guard, and younger generations will need to continue to carry the struggle for equality and equity into the future.  I, for one, will continue to sing:  “I am woman, hear me roar.  I am wise.  I am strong.  I am invincible.  I am woman.” 

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[i] Helen Reddy, “I Am Woman.” Copyright Universal Music Publishing Group. 1971.

[ii] “Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”  Oyez.  Webpage of LII Supreme Court Resources,  https://www.oyez.org/justices/ruth_bader_ginsburg

[iii] “The State of the Gender Pay Gap 2020.”  https://www.payscale.com/data/gender-pay-gap

[iv] “Sodomy laws in the United States” and “Lawrence v. Texas.”  Wikipedia.

 

 

An Ozark Childhood

 

The years between eight and thirteen hold special memories for me.  They are the years that we lived in a beautiful small Ozark town in the southwestern corner of Missouri.  Our family was complete for those five years:  the fifth child, Peggy, was born a month before we moved to Neosho and the oldest, Melinda, left home for college the year we moved away.  Both of my parents had grown up in Missouri, so for the years we were in Neosho, we were surrounded by relatives—at least six sets of aunts and uncles, bunches of cousins, and our three living grandparents.  I was in third grade in Phoenix in 1958 when Dad accepted a job in Neosho, a small town near his home town of Springfield and Mother’s of Joplin.  

We lived first in an old white clapboard two-story house on the corner of West Brook and High Streets.  It sat on a grassy corner lot with magnificent old oak or hickory trees and was wrapped on two sides with a large porch.  The back of the house had a screened porch shaded by a huge tree which crashed onto the porch during a violent thunderstorm one summer.  The house sat atop a small hill that was good enough for sledding when we Arizona-desert children experienced our first snow.

There was one bedroom on the main floor of the house and three more upstairs.  The upstairs bedrooms all opened onto a large landing at the top of the stairs.  Our parents took one of the upstairs bedrooms, as it had a side alcove perfect for baby Peggy.  As the oldest, twelve-year-old Melinda had been promised a room of her own and first choice of the one she wanted.  She selected one of the second-story bedrooms.  Since David and Michael were small (five and three), they needed to be near our parents.  Thus, they got the third bedroom on the second story.  That left me, at eight, with my own room, but if I took it, I would be alone on the first floor.  I was terrified at the prospect. Melinda refused to trade.  No doubt she would have been terrified as well, but I thought she was just spoiled and being mean.  The solution my parents came up with was that I could sleep on the landing if I was too scared to stay in my own bedroom.  So, my bed was placed under the window there, and the landing became my bedroom. 

On the alley behind the house sat a massive triple garage—which was really more like a barn.  Since our family had only one car, we kids took the space over for theatre productions and circus acts.  We put on at least a couple of plays, directed by Melinda, and attended by family and neighbors.  The only circus act I remember was walking around on wooden stilts that Dad had made us.

The Bull children in Neosho:  Melinda (13),
David (6), Peggy (1), Kay (9), Michael (4)

        There were just six weeks left in the school year when we arrived in Neosho.  Melinda went to Neosho Intermediate School, and I was enrolled in Field Elementary School where, for the first time that I recall, I encountered Black children.  Two of the Black girls, whose names I don’t recall, became my best friends for the rest of that school year.  It turned out that the school boundary ran down the alley behind our house, and I had attended the wrong school.  The next year my little brother David and I walked up a big hill each day Central Elementary School. 

I think that all my classmates at Central were White, and I forgot about my friends from Field.  In fifth grade, all the children in Neosho went to the Intermediate School, where I again encountered my former friends from Field.  But in the intervening year, I had picked up the attitudes of my new southern Missouri friends and understood that it was unacceptable to cross the racial divide in Neosho.  So, I am ashamed to say, I ignored those two girls who had been so kind to me the year before, and that early display of my racism has troubled me for many years.

But race was not much on my mind in those years.  Having fun was.  Big Spring Park was just three blocks from our Brook Street house, and we spent many hours there.  Coming from the dry, brown Arizona desert, we were captivated by the grass and trees and hills and especially the profusion of flowers in a rainbow of colors.  There was a creek fed by a big natural spring and rushing over rocks through the park.  The creek fed a fish pond where, on occasion, children were allowed to fish. 

There may have been a playground, but I don’t remember one.  Running through the grass, rolling down the hills, climbing up the rocks, and jumping over the creek were fun enough for us kids.  One day while we three older children were in school, Mom let Michael go to the park alone.  He was almost four.  A man brought him home and scolded Mother for letting him wander alone.  She maintained that he was fine.  He knew the way.  After all, he had directed the man to our house.  He could take care of himself.

Neosho (population about 7,000) was a beautiful little town, sitting at the western edge of the Ozark Mountains.  In the spring, the dogwood and redbud trees were covered with white and red flowers.  In the summer, flowers bloomed in window boxes and yards, hence the town’s slogan of “Flower Box City.”  In fall the trees turned brilliant shades of yellow, orange, and red.  Even the winter snows were pretty and melted quickly.  And besides, snow meant sledding and sometimes no school.  Neosho was the only town we lived in growing up that had four distinct seasons, and I loved each one in turn.

Downtown Neosho was dominated by the county courthouse which sat in the center of the town square.  For a short while Grandma Ollie worked in that building as cook for the county jail inmates.  She made the best fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, and apple pies ever.  I recall going to the jail to eat lunch with her one Sunday afternoon.  Before we could eat, however, I had to help her serve the prisoners.  One growled menacingly at me as I handed his plate through the bars, and then he laughed, dissipating my fear at least a little.

There were shops, restaurants, banks, and offices on the streets forming the courthouse square.  The square was the-place-to-be both for adults shopping or conducting business and for teenagers meeting for “a coke” at the drugstore soda fountain counter.  (Coke was the word we used for any soft drink.)  The Neosho Public Library was half a block off the square and next to First Baptist Church.  I spent hours in both buildings which were constructed of massive stones. 

There was a section of the library that contained biographies written for young people, all bound in orange.  I became hooked on these biographies, working my way methodically through those orange volumes, one after another.  I can’t recall any specific books (except for one on Clara Barton), just days spent with those rows of orange-bound books.  They introduced me to a world full of future possibilities and probably led to my college major in history.

We joined First Baptist Church.  Mom sang in the choir and taught a Sunday School class of single young-adult women.  There is a photograph of these women gathered under the trees in our yard at the Brook Street house on a summer afternoon, mostly dressed in pink or tangerine sundresses with full gathered skirts, leaning over and eating slices of juicy red watermelon.  Several of them became lasting friends of Mother’s, exchanging Christmas cards and dropping by for visits years later.

We went to church every Sunday morning for Sunday School and every Sunday evening for Training Union (another “Christian education” opportunity), and we attended both morning and evening worship services.  On Wednesdays, Mother had choir practice, and I attended Girls’ Auxiliary (GAs), a sort of Baptist version of Girl Scouts but with an emphasis on the Bible.  We earned “badges” by memorizing Bible verses or passages as well as the names of the books of the Bible, in order.  We competed in “sword drills.”  When the leader commanded, “Draw your swords,” we raised our Bibles in front of us, held parallel to the floor with right hand under, left hand on top, and thumbs ready to open the book on command.   And then the leader would announce a Bible verse, such as “Daniel six twenty-two.”  The first one to find the verse and read it aloud, won that round.  I don’t remember Melinda being in GAs, but she might have been.  The boys were Royal Ambassadors (RAs) and, when she was old enough, Peggy was a Sunbeam.  The Baptists know how to involve everyone in Christian education programs.

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My parents purchased ten acres of woods outside of town and had three acres cleared for our new house.  When we moved out to Peterson Road, we lost the ability to roam freely through town. We had to ride the bus to and from school and get a ride from a parent (or Melinda, when she was old enough to drive) to go to events or meet friends on the square.  But we thought the new house was beautiful and very modern.  It sat on a dirt road with amazing bike-riding hills—pedal hard up one side and whoosh down the other, garnering enough speed to make it at least halfway up the next hill without having to pedal or dismount and push the bike to the top for the ride down the other side.  Fortunately for us, our house was at the top of one of the hills.  We got the bicycles our first Christmas in the Peterson Road house. Well, we three middle children did.  Melinda got a new bicycle seat for her old bike (a source of resentment for many years), and Peggy got a tricycle.

David, Kay, and Michael with our new bicycles

Once, I took three-year-old Peggy for a ride on the back of my bike.  As I was whooshing down the hill, her foot got tangled in the spokes.  I was going too fast to stop so I just jumped off the bike, leaving her in the road screaming and bleeding, the bike laying on top of her, and ran back to the house to get Mom.  Nothing was broken, but the mangled foot did require a skin graft.  I spent the rest of the summer being Peggy’s slave in penance for causing this horrific injury. 

The Peterson Road house was colorful, cheerful, and filled with sunshine.  The L-shaped kitchen counters were covered in bright orange Formica, THE kitchen color of 1960.  A double stainless-steel sink sat in the corner of the L, with a window over it looking out onto a large vegetable garden and our woods.  Mother insisted that she had to be able to look out while doing dishes, and the vegetable garden was a dream-come-true for her. 

Each summer Mother processed food from the garden, and Melinda and I often were called on to assist.  The basement shelves were lined with jars of tomatoes and pickles and jams, and the large box freezer held bags of sliced peaches and berries (picked from wild bushes that grew along Peterson Road), frozen peas and green beans, corn cut from the cob, and packets of meat, often from the half-a-side of beef my parents had purchased.

The house smelled delicious as Mom was both a good cook and baker.  There was a pig-shaped cookie jar on the kitchen counter, full of cookies made from scratch—peanut butter, chocolate chip, or oatmeal.  This is where I developed my lifelong addiction to cookies, not the boxed store-bought ones, but homemade or bakery cookies, soft and full of flavor.  When our mother died, the cookie jar was the only thing that all five of us wanted.  David got it because we agreed that his wife Robin was the one most likely to keep it filled with homemade cookies.

Mom also baked moist cakes and flaky, fragrant pies, and in summer, she made homemade ice cream to go with the baked goods.  She cooked the milk, sugar, and egg custard on the stove and then poured it into a stainless-steel container with a wooden paddle running up through the middle. The container of custard was set into a wooden tub which was then surrounded by alternating layers of ice and rock salt.  One of the smaller kids sat on a blanket on top of the tub to hold the crank in place, and the bigger kids or adults took turns turning the crank until the ice cream was frozen.  My favorite flavor was fresh peach: thick, creamy, only slightly sweet, and filled with chunks of icy peaches.

The kitchen window allowed Mom to keep a watch on us as we played in the large yard and the woods, often with neighbors or visiting cousins.  Those woods held endless opportunities for games.  Our favorite was cowboys and Indians.  We would choose sides, make forts, find hiding places for ambushes, and pass countless happy hours on summer days, going inside when we got too hot, for lemonade, Kool-aide, or a Popsicle.  Occasionally one of my brothers or cousins would find a snake and chase us girls with it, and we would run screaming into the house looking for protection from Mother. 

When it got too hot to play outside in the summer, we played school or grocery store in the basement.  Melinda always got to be the teacher, telling us what to do for our day’s work.  (It was not a surprise that she grew up to be an elementary school teacher.)  Mother saved food containers—cans, cereal boxes, milk cartons, etc.—for our store.  We seemed to have no trouble finding ways to entertain ourselves without computers, cell phones, or other electronic gadgets.  We had a black-and-white television, but were only allowed to watch it occasionally.

We didn’t have a dishwasher or clothes dryer in the house on Peterson Road.  I remember many nights of washing and drying dishes with Melinda.  Since she was older, she always got to choose what she wanted to do—wash—and I was left to dry, which somehow felt like a punishment.  Sometimes we would have pleasant conversation while we took care of this nightly chore, but more often we would argue and Mom would shout, “You girls! Stop it!”  We also learned the art of hanging clothes on the line, making neatly pinned rows of T-shirts and sheets and towels.  I still appreciate the beauty and symmetry of my clothes drying on the line on summer days.

We gathered around a large round dining table every night for a family dinner that my mother had cooked.  Like other children, we did not always like what she served, but we were required to eat at least a few bites of whatever it was.  David was a master at circumventing this rule whenever possible.  He was also a master of “the gag” as he made exaggerated attempts to eat his vegetables while trying to surreptitiously move peas from his mouth to the paper napkin kept in his lap.  This typically happened as he pretended to cough and cover his mouth politely with his napkin.  At the end of the meal, he quickly cleared off his plate, throwing his full napkin in the trash before he could be caught. 

Family dinners were a time for sharing stories of our days, reporting on something we had learned at school, or making plans for upcoming events or trips.  Some nights we thought our stories were hysterical, and Melinda and I would start laughing.  It was easy for us to get out of control and laugh so hard that we were crying and on the verge of peeing when Mother would send us to our rooms with orders to calm down.  As soon as we returned to the table and looked at one another, however, the laughter would erupt again, and again we would be excused. 

Friday nights were special as we got to have buttered popcorn and cokes while we played a card game.  A family favorite was Crazy Eights.  Whoever was the first to go out (that is lost) had to wash the dishes, and the next person out had to dry.  We all became very good and very competitive card players.  We also loved board games, and we kids would spend hours playing Monopoly or Risk.  When it was bedtime but a game wasn’t over, we would all agree to stand up together and walk backwards away from the game board.  We watched carefully to be sure no one could cheat by changing something on the board until we all returned, together, to resume play the next morning.

Most of the time we five kids got along well, but there were occasional disagreements or physical fights.  I thought that my mother’s occasional lament, “You kids will drive me to drink!” was “swearing,” as that was the strongest language I ever heard her use.  And when we misbehaved, she spanked us.  Sometimes she used her hand for a firm slap on the behind, but for more major infractions, she would tell us to “go cut a switch.”  The offender would go to the yard and cut a small branch off a tree.  Mom would test out the switch in the air to see if it whistled with sufficient zing; if not, a second branch was required.  In later conversations with Mother when I was an adult, it became clear to me that she wasn’t usually angry or being mean, as we had thought, she just had no other ideas for how to discipline her children.

The one clear memory I have of the reason for one of those whippings occurred one day when Aunt Nay, her daughter, and three granddaughters were visiting.  One of the little girls, Karen, was put down for a nap in Melinda’s bedroom.  Melinda had an awesome insect collection, which included a well-preserved five-inch-long walking stick.  I decided to play a little practical joke on Karen and laid the walking stick on the pillow next to her.  Then I went out to play.  When she awoke screaming, the adults went running to her.  I don’t know how Mother knew that I was to blame, but somehow she did. 

Mother called from the kitchen door, “Elizabeth Kay Bull! Get in here right this minute.”  Being called by my full name was a sure sign I was in BIG trouble.

When I came into the kitchen, she was holding the walking stick. “What is this?” she asked. I shrugged. 

“Go cut me a switch,” she directed.  After my whipping, I apologized to Karen and played with her the rest of the afternoon. 

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The Peterson Road house had a full basement.  While it was somewhat dark having only half windows at ground level, it was a cool retreat on hot summer days.  I don’t think the house was air conditioned, and summer days in Missouri could be hot and humid. Basements also were an important defense against the possibility of tornadoes.  The Peterson Road basement was infinitely better than the small, dark, spider-infested cellar we had had to retreat to during tornado warnings when we lived on Brook Street.  I remember thinking that I would prefer to be picked up by a tornado than sit in that cellar.  However, my parents didn’t give me that option. 

Within a year or so of moving to Peterson Road, my parents had partitioned the basement space into a family room, a bedroom for David and Michael, and a fallout shelter of sorts.  The Russian launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 made the threat of nuclear war very real.  The fallout shelter, then, was a perceived necessity.  Our family had a plan for how to survive in the basement if we came under attack.  Fortunately, we didn’t ever have to implement the plan. 

Dad was a design engineer at Rocketdyne, a division of North American Aviation that specialized in the manufacture of liquid-propelled rocket engines.  In addition to the manufacturing facility, there was an engine testing area where rocket engines were “live tested.”  Occasionally we would go out to watch the testing.  It was almost like watching fireworks as the fired rocket engine lit the night sky with red, yellow, and orange flames. 

I’m not sure we were aware at the time of the impact that Rocketdyne had on the small farming community of Neosho, but we learned later that this facility brought both economic stimulus and considerable intellectual talent to town.  When Melinda and I visited Neosho a few years ago, we learned from one of her classmates that the children of the Rocketdyne engineers had significantly increased the competition within the school system.  We also stumbled on a memorial to the men and women of Rocketdyne in Big Spring Park.  It says, in part,

Neosho’s engines powered Jupiter, Redstone, Mercury, Atlas, Gemini and Apollo launch vehicles into safe, successful missions, including the first landing on the moon.  The City of Neosho thanks you for your contributions to mankind and the United State Space Program.

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One of the joys of living in Missouri was being near relatives.  There were often family gatherings at our house or at one of theirs.  Cousins came for a few days or sometimes lived with us for months.  We made frequent trips to Springfield to visit Grandma Elizabeth and Grandpa Ben.  They lived in a small two-bedroom house that he had built in the 1940s.  When all the cousins were there, we kids camped on the living room floor, sleeping on feather beds.  Grandma Elizabeth was a piano teacher, and we played music on her piano and organ.  Grandpa Ben sat for hours at the kitchen table with his radio tuned to a St. Louis Cardinal’s baseball game as we kids ran back and forth and Grandma cooked and baked.

We spent many happy summer weekends at the trailer Aunt Nay and Uncle John had at Grand Lake in nearby Oklahoma.  Other summer weekends were spent at Roaring River State Park.  We might go just for a day of swimming in the rocky-bottomed Roaring River and have a picnic lunch or cookout, or we might pitch a tent and camp for several days. 

Fishing at Grand Lake.  Mom (left), Uncle John, Aunt Nay (right)
Kids: Kay, Cousin Janet, Michael, Melinda

The Neosho city swimming pool was outside of town at Fort Crowder, a former Army base that also housed Rocketdyne.  We took swimming lessons there.  I was on the swim team and synchronized swim team for a while.  I quit the swim team after being last in every race I entered, but I stayed with synchronized swimming. I was more graceful in the water than I was fast.

We often took two-week family vacations in the summer.  One of the most memorable was a car trip to California in the summer of 1962.  Aunt Lo had been visiting from Los Angeles and Mother and Aunt Nay decided to drive her home.  The three women and we five kids piled into our station wagon with its two rows of seats and a large cargo space we called the “backend.”  We took turns sitting or lying in the backend.  (Seatbelts had been invented by then but were rarely used.)  All of our luggage was piled onto a rack on top of the car. 

We drove 1,500 miles on Route 66 and Interstate 40 from Joplin to Los Angeles.  We had no air conditioning, and the drive through the Arizona and California deserts was miserable, with temperatures as high as 120 degrees.  Mother bought an air cooler somewhere along the way, put a block of ice in it, and hung it from the driver’s window.  The air blowing over the ice cooled us somewhat (the advertised benefit was 15 degrees).  The aunts placed a plastic dish tub with another block of ice in it on the floor on the front passenger side of the car.  With the air vents open, that also provided a hint of a cool breeze.  Aunt Nay and Aunt Lo kept rinsing wash rags in the icy water and passing them to us kids to hold against our faces.  When the rags warmed up, we’d pass them forward to be refreshed. 

We spent a night in a motel along the way.  Aunt Nay told us kids to lie down in the backend of the station wagon so that the motel clerk couldn’t see how many of us there were.  We always crammed lots of people into small motel spaces in order to save money on our vacations.

The miserable drive was worth it when we arrived in California where, in addition to playing with more cousins, we visited Disneyland and Chinatown, and drove north up the Pacific coastal road to San Francisco.  Aunt Lo had an avocado tree in her Los Angeles yard, and we picked a bunch of avocados to take home with us.  However, since Arizona border security confiscated all California produce, we had to eat them all before we reached the border.  I have a vivid memory of sitting in the backend of the station wagon with my siblings, eating cracker after cracker spread with fresh avocado, decades before avocado toast became a thing.

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My idyllic childhood hit a rough patch when I entered eighth grade.  First period I had history with Mrs. Hisaw. I remember her as being fat, old and terrifying.  She never got up from her desk or smiled or made a kind remark.  Her teaching method was to have us read something, a chapter in the book or a Weekly Reader, and then answer questions orally.  She went up and down the rows, and you had to answer whatever question fell to you when it was your turn.  If your answer was correct, she simply moved on, but if it was wrong, Mrs. Hisaw would publicly humiliate you for not knowing the answer.  I was absolutely terrified of her.  Most mornings, I was so anxious that I would be physically ill.  I threw up walking to the bus stop, or into my lunch bag on the bus, and one morning in Mrs. Hisaw’s classroom.

I don’t recall whether I made the connection between my stomach upset and Mrs. Hisaw’s class or whether I confided my terror of her to my parents.  What I do recall is the daily battle with my mother over eating breakfast.  She firmly believed in the power of starting the day with a good breakfast.  I would tell her I couldn’t eat because I would just throw it up, and she would say, “That may be, but you still need to eat breakfast.”  The day I lost my breakfast in Mrs. Hisaw’s class, the school nurse called my mother to come and pick me up, but Mother assured the nurse that I was fine and could stay in school.  The reality was that once I got past first period, I was fine for the rest of the school day. 

At some point that year, my mother and I initiated the following standard exchange.  After our daily battle over my eating breakfast, I would storm out of the house, slamming the door behind me.  Mother would call after me as I walked down the driveway to the school bus stop, “Have a wonderful day.  I love you.”  To which I would scream, “Well, I HATE you.”   Mother seemed unphased by this.  Perhaps, like many other mothers, she just shook her head and muttered, “thirteen”! 

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In the spring of 1963, Melinda prepared for high school graduation and for going away to college at the University of Missouri in the fall; I was looking forward to entering high school, but, more importantly, to finally having a bedroom of my own.  But it was not to be.  Mom and Dad went to Texas where Dad had a job interview with Rocketdyne in another small town, McGregor, about twenty miles outside of Waco.  He was offered and accepted the position, and we packed up and moved once again, heading south for another new house in another new city and state, more new schools, and yet another new chapter in our family’s life.  Maybe it was Waco, or Melinda leaving home, or the turmoil of the 1960s, or just my getting older, but the halcyon days of those Neosho years were at a end, and we were all about to change in very significant ways, as a family and as a country.  Childhood was over.  But, oh what fond memories I still carry of those years in Neosho and of the importance of my family in shaping who I was to become.

The Long and Winding Road to a Professional Career

 

Nearing graduation from Baylor University in 1970, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so made an appointment at the campus counseling center where I took a vocational interest test.  According to the results of that assessment (which I found recently in a file labeled “test scores”) my career interests aligned with these areas:  performing arts, law and politics, writing, numbers, social service, and teaching.  A second set of scores suggested the following occupations:  recreation leader, YWCA staff member, occupational therapist, guidance counselor, and airline stewardess. Based on these results, which career should I choose? Lawyer?  Airline stewardess?  Teacher?  Recreation leader?  With such divergent interests, was it any wonder that I had no idea what I wanted to do?

That test results file contained scores on many other tests, but, perhaps most telling, were my Myers-Briggs results.  (For those who are fans of the test, I scored as an ENTP.)  Some of the descriptors associated with my Myers-Briggs type are quick, ingenious, good at many things, logical, outspoken, resourceful in solving challenging problems, stimulating company, and apt to turn to one new interest after another.

And that last accurately describes my career path:  apt to turn to one new interest after another.

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According to my mother, I started babysitting younger children in our Phoenix neighborhood when I was just eight years old.  I’m sure that no one paid me to do so, but evidently I had a gift for entertaining and organizing, and the neighborhood parents were happy to have me take charge of their little ones.  By the time I was a teenager, we had moved to Waco, Texas where I was available to babysit most weekends—for pay—since I had very few dates.

My first job of record was during the Christmas season of my senior year in high school, when I worked in the gift wrap department of Cox’s Department Store.  Here I learned the art of wrapping beautiful packages, all to the detailed specifications of my supervisor.  According to my social security wage records, I made a total of $57 dollars on that first job.

Every summer we kids took swimming lessons.  My older sister, Melinda, and I earned our life saver badges and later our Water Safety Certification which allowed us to teach swimming lessons.  I did that at Waco’s Lions Park Pool every summer through college.  When I graduated from Baylor University, I went to work at a summer camp (Waldemar) in the Texas Hill Country.  I supervised a cabin of girls, taught swimming and diving, and worked as a life guard.  Waldemar had no swimming pool, but instead used a roped-off section of the Guadalupe River.  Lifeguarding there required watching out for water moccasins and getting all the kids out of the river whenever one was spotted.  I hated that part of the job!

Me (back left) with the girls in my Waldemar cabin, 1970

During high school, I took two semesters of typing, at my parents’ insistence.  My dad was always pushing me toward skills that would provide employment should I need it someday.  Typing turned out to be a very marketable skill.  For the duration of my college career, I worked twenty hours a week as the secretary for Baylor’s Business Law Department.  At the time, IBM’s Selectric typewriter was the newest and best thing, but the error-correcting feature of lift-off tape was still years in the future.  So, both speed and accuracy were important for secretaries.  Errors could be corrected on letters and manuscripts with White Out, but if there were too many white splotches, the page had to be retyped.  I prepared tests for the professors in my department using a mimeograph sheet.  Any errors on those had to be scraped off with a razor blade and then corrected before the master was attached to the drum of the mimeograph machine to make copies.

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In addition to taking typing classes in high school, I also took three years of home economics.  I made most of my own clothes and toyed with a possible career in fashion design.  I applied to Texas Tech University as the best place in Texas to do that.  I also applied to Baylor University, which was in Waco and was where many of my friends were planning to enroll.  I ended up at Baylor, I think, largely due to inertia.  I had no clear plan for what I wanted to do, where I wanted to study, or what to major in.  I got my parents to agree that if I went to Baylor (only about seven miles from home), I could live on campus if I paid for my room and board. 

My first major at Baylor was math.  I had always been good at math and enjoyed it, but I had a hard time thinking about spending my life working math problems.  I also enjoyed history so switched my major to that.  Later, after taking some philosophy courses, I decided that was my passion and changed my major again.  However, my father put an end to that by declaring one day that he would pay no more tuition unless I majored in something useful, like education.  His rationale was that “if something happens to your husband, you will need a job you can fall back on.”  The fact that I might not get married did not to enter his mind.  Or mine.

 I had no interest in teaching, but German sealed my fate.  Graduation from Baylor, at the time, required four semesters of a foreign language.  At the end of my third semester German class, the professor called me in to her office. 

“If you promise not to enroll for a fourth semester,” she told me, “I’ll give you a D in this course.  But if you plan to go on, I’ll give you the F you deserve.” 

I was terrified about my father’s reaction to a grade of D.  No way could I face him if I failed a course.  Besides, I hated German and had no interest in repeating the course or continuing beyond.  But I couldn’t imagine having to start over with French or Spanish.  The only way out appeared to be a degree in education.  This was the only Baylor major that required just three semesters of a foreign language.  Unfortunately, philosophy was not something one could get a teaching credential in.  Social studies was.  So, I switched back to my history major; picked up the necessary courses in economics, sociology, and political science; and completed the secondary education major. 

My student teaching experience was disastrous.  I was assigned to the football coach at Connally High School, which was located on a former military base outside of Waco.  His method of teaching history was to read the textbook aloud to the students during class, write the test questions on the blackboard the day before the test so the students would know what to study, and slam students against the lockers when discipline was needed.  When I was trying to teach a lesson, several of the male students would raise their hands and, when called on, ask things like, “Miss Bull, what are you doing Friday night?  Wanna go to a movie?”

There were so many women earning teaching degrees at the time, that after graduation, I had only one job interview for a teaching position.  It was at the high school in a small east Texas town (Palestine).  The person interviewing me looked at my transcript and said, “Good, we need a German teacher.”  It turned out that all one needed to teach a subject in Texas was three college courses in that subject.  If I was offered the position, it would be to teach several English classes (my minor) and one or two German classes.  I withdrew my application and left the interview.  My parents was quite unhappy with me. 

And so, I added a new job skill to my repertoire:  waitressing.  I learned the trade from a middle-aged career waitress at The Hickory Stick, a fancy steak restaurant in Waco.  Later, I worked at an upscale restaurant in Burlington, Vermont and then at a restaurant in Boulder.  I was good at the job—friendly, attentive, and able to juggle multiple demands simultaneously.  As a result, I made excellent tips, but the work was hard and uninspiring.

For two years in the early 1970s, I served my country, first as a VISTA volunteer in Pueblo, Colorado, and later as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco.  Both positions were in educational settings.  (I’ve written about these experiences elsewhere in this blog.) 

Between VISTA and Peace Corps and after returning from Morocco, I fell back on my secretarial, waitressing, or child-care skills.  I traveled.  I worked as a day laborer and as a temporary office worker with Kelly Girl.  I waited tables.  In Boulder, Colorado, I landed a job as a governess.  My employer, screenwriter Lewis John Carlino (“The Great Santini,” “The Mechanic,” “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”), wanted someone with a teaching credential so that he could take his children out of school and on location with him.  That sounded like a terrific job to me.  Unfortunately, when the time came, he decided it was much easier to leave me and the children at home while he traveled, so my teaching skills were never needed in that job.  Fortunately, I had had significant child care experience plus all those years of home ec.  Those were the skills I really needed for this job.  After only a year with the Carlino family, Lew lost custody of the children, who went back to live with their mother. 

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During my last year at Baylor, I had taken both the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), just in case I decided to go to graduate school or law school someday.  I actually planned to go to law school at the University of Texas after my VISTA year, but fell in love and foolishly followed a man to Lawrence, Kansas instead.

At loose ends when my job with the Carlinos ended, I talked with a professor in the School of Education at the University of Colorado (CU).  I told him I was interested in education but didn’t want to teach.  After asking me a series of questions, he suggested that I get a graduate degree in educational psychology.  That sounded promising.

Unfortunately, I had had no psychology courses; I had not even taken intro as an undergraduate.  So, before I could be formally admitted to the educational psychology graduate program, I had to successfully complete the equivalent of an undergraduate major in psychology.  While doing that, I worked as a secretary in several different CU departments. 

My most interesting position was with a famous psychologist named Raymond B. Cattell.  He had developed a number of psychological tests and a theory of intelligence that would become the basis of several tests I later administered as a school psychologist.  He had come up against the mandatory retirement policy then in place at the University of Illinois and been forced to retire at the age of seventy.  He did not feel that his productive years had ended and was anxious to continue with his research.  The University of Colorado agreed to provide him with office space if he moved his lab to Boulder. 

Dr. Cattell advertised for a secretary, and I responded.  One of his primary requirements was that whoever he hired had to be a good speller.  I was not, but I did know enough to recognize when a word looked wrong and use a dictionary to find the correct spelling.  Dr. Cattell used a Dictaphone.  I would put a headset on and use a foot pedal to play the tape recording of his words as I typed them.  If I stopped typing for too long (in order to look something up), he would call over the partition that separated us, “What don’t you know how to spell now?”  This was very intimidating, but giving him a typed draft with spelling errors in it was even more intimidating. 

After we had worked together for a while, Dr. Cattell recognized that I had other gifts.  One day he said, “You know that there is no correlation between spelling ability and intelligence, don’t you?” 

I did not but was relieved to hear it.  He went on to tell me that he was a founder of MENSA, the high IQ or genius society.  He thought that I might qualify and said he would be glad to put my name forward for membership if I wanted.  I thanked him for the compliment, but declined.  After all, it would be too embarrassing if I didn’t qualify, which I thought was highly likely.

My time with Dr. Cattell ended when I took a leave from graduate school to join the Peace Corps, but we continued to correspond for a few years after that.  When I became a professional psychologist, I ran into him occasionally at conferences.  He always acted pleased to see me, remembered our time together, and was very kind and gracious. 

After completing all of my graduate coursework, I found a paid school psychology internship in a rural special education cooperative.   The Northeast Colorado BOCES was comprised of twelve small school districts with its offices in Haxtun, a town of seven hundred people, one hundred and eighty miles from Boulder and near the Colorado/Nebraska border.  There was one other school psychologist—a woman from Ohio who had just completed her own internship.  Our territory, which we split in half, covered an area of approximately seven thousand square miles and had a total population of around fifteen thousand people.  I provided testing and support services for kindergarten through high school students and the special education staff in sixteen different school buildings.   My memory is that I tested well over two hundred students a year and claimed mileage reimbursement for about three thousand miles each month.  It was an overwhelming job, in a very socially-isolated community, but I received a rich experiential education.  I stayed for one more year after my internship was completed. 

In addition to being the only school psychologist to all of those schools, I participated in two important pilot projects while working for the cooperative.  The first was a summer migrant-education project.  The first summer a special education teacher and I drove up and down dirt roads between rows of sugar beets looking for migrant-worker families with children.  I recall sitting in the back of a station wagon with several small children who spoke no English.  I spoke no Spanish, but we managed to color, look at books, do some basic vocabulary lessons, and work on pre-kindergarten skills such as writing numbers and letters.  The second summer, we held a center-based program at one of our schools.  This experience peaked my career-long interest in ways to communicate with and assess children when language is a barrier. 

Children attending the summer migrant school, 1979

The second was participating in a federal demonstration grant to extend special education services to preschool children.  My special education cooperative was selected to be one of the pilot sites.  With a speech language pathologist, I went to homes to evaluate young children and determine whether or not they required special education services.  If they did, we sent an intervention team into the homes to work with the children and to provide parent education.  The state provided some training in preschool assessment techniques, and I learned others on my own. 

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The doctoral coursework was done, but completing a dissertation was hanging over my head.  The BOCES job had consumed all my time and besides was very socially isolating.  I moved to Denver where I could easily commute to Boulder as needed, but I continued working as a consulting school psychologist for several rural school districts around the state.  After a year of that, the Boulder school district hired me as a school psychologist.  I was assigned to three schools, which seemed like a very manageable job.   

I had joined a cognitive research lab at CU and was working with a group of faculty and graduate students on various memory and problem-solving projects.  For my own research, I chose to focus on mathematical problem solving.  I had joint dissertation advisors—one from the education department and the other from the psychology department.  Because I was working full time and trying to satisfy quite different major professors, it took me five years to complete the dissertation and earn my Ph.D.

Finally nearing graduation, I had two job interviews in the spring of 1982.  I flew to Pittsburgh to interview with a cognitive research lab at Carnegie-Mellon University.  My cognitive psychology advisor had used his contacts to arrange it, and he considered it something of a coup for one of his graduate students to be interviewed.  I also interviewed at a small midwestern university—Moorhead State University (MSU)—for a school psychology faculty position.  I was offered both jobs and was in a real quandary about which direction I wanted to go.  I knew that this decision would determine my career path for years to come.  I liked the city of Moorhead and the people I met at MSU much better than those at Carnegie-Mellon.  I thought of my choice as between being a small fish in a big pond (Carnegie-Mellon) or bigger fish in a small pond (MSU).  After much deliberation, I chose MSU.  My cognitive psychology mentor was furious with me.  In fact, he wrote me off as an ungrateful student and never communicated with me again.

Doctoral graduation from CU, August, 1982, with my parents

I had a very successful career in the psychology department at MSU, gaining tenure and working through the academic ladder of assistant, associate, and full professor.  In my second year, I was named director of the school psychology graduate program, a position I held for the rest of my time in the department.  Several of my accomplishments as head of that program may interest my readers with school psychology or special education ties.

I entered graduate school the same year that Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, was passed and mandated special education services in public schools thus launching the massive expansion of the field of school psychology.  A new professional society formed about that time—the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP).  According to information found on the NASP website, there were approximately 5,000 NASP members in 1978, the year I did my internship.  Now there are more than 25,000 NASP members. 

The school psychology program at MSU was among the first to be accredited by NASP.  While MSU had a two-tiered program in place when I arrived, I spearhead the addition of the Specialist degree; the first post-Master’s degree offered at MSU. 

During those years at MSU, I also was very involved in state and national school psychology organizations, holding several leadership positions.  At the 1988 NASP convention, the delegate assembly created the Nationally Certified School Psychologist (NCSP) system.  I was part of that delegate assembly, serving as West Central Regional Director and as chairperson of the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Committee.  In my CPD role, I was a member of the first NCSP board, and, with my committee, created the plan for what continuing education would be required to renew the NCSP credential.

MSU Psychology Department faculty dressed for
graduation.  (I'm in the gold robe.)

Given my preschool experience with the Northeastern Colorado BOCES, one of the courses I taught at MSU was preschool assessment techniques.  Thus, in 1986 when Public Law 99-457 extended special education services down to age three, I was uniquely positioned for a leadership role in implementing the law.  The state of Minnesota contracted with me and a few others to write state guidelines and provide training to teams across the state.  One outcome of our work was publication of a book, Assessing Young Children.  A second outcome was that several other states—Florida, Maine, and Arizona—hired me to either teach workshops or consult with departments of education on the development of their preschool guidelines. 

Finally, during these years, I became licensed as a psychologist in both Minnesota and North Dakota and set up a private practice specializing in children’s issues.  Without intending to, I became the area specialist in treating children who had been sexually abused.  I provided therapy to some children—my youngest client was three years old—and appeared in court on their behalf.  The majority of child victims were seen at Fargo’s Rape and Abuse Crisis Center, where I supervised three master’s level therapists.  It was important work but emotionally draining, and the problem was much more prevalent than most people would suspect.  In the few cases that actually made it to court, the children were occasionally believed, but too often, their reports were thought to be fabricated, and the adults who had abused them were acquitted.  For me, that was harder to endure than hearing the children’s stories had been.  I gave up my license when I moved into academic leadership.

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In the summer of 1994, I changed career directions once again, thanks to the encouragement of the outgoing and incoming presidents of MSU and a fellowship from the Bush Foundation.  I went to Bryn Mawr College for a summer program for Women in Higher Education Administration.  On my return, I was named the assistant academic vice president of MSU, and a couple of years later, the executive vice president of the MSU Foundation.  President Roland Barden was a wonderful mentor to me, both promoting me and encouraging me to leave MSU for the benefit of my career.

One of the duties of an administrator at MSU
was cooking burgers for public events

I applied for a number of dean and vice-presidential positions at universities across the country.  I had interviews at several, including Dean of Education at my alma mater, Baylor University, and Dean and Academic Vice President of Concordia College, a Lutheran college in Moorhead, located a few blocks from MSU.  I accepted the position at Concordia at least in part so that my husband Scott’s career was not disrupted.  At the time, he was on the engineering faculty at North Dakota State University in Fargo, Moorhead’s sister city.

I won’t bore you with the details of that position other than to say it was interesting and challenging.  Paul Dovre, the president who hired me, was a wonderful mentor and partner.  Dr. Dovre has an unparalleled reputation among private college presidents.  Like Dr. Barden at MSU, he supported and encouraged my growth, sending me to Harvard for a summer program and later to a Lutheran leadership program, both designed to prepare me for an ultimate college presidency.  Unfortunately, that dream was not to be realized. 

Dr. Dovre retired just two years into my tenure at Concordia.  The new president and I had a rocky relationship that resulted in my resignation at the end of another two years.  At the time of Concordia’s presidential transition, Scott had accepted a job offer as a department chair at Arizona State University.  We spent two years living apart before I joined him in Arizona.

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Moving to Mesa was both depressing and rejuvenating.  I spent the first year pursuing my dream of continuing an academic career, but I ultimately gave that up and decided it was Scott’s turn to pursue his career goals.  I taught a few courses as an adjunct professor at Mesa Community College and at Argosy University.  While I had always enjoyed teaching college and graduate students, the number of hours required for course preparation and grading were not worth the low pay that adjuncts receive.

So, I returned to school psychology in the Mesa Public Schools.  I was assigned to two elementary schools.  I had to learn some new tests, given my seven-year absence from the profession, and adjust to the differences in state rules and regulations, but I slipped back into the practice easily.   And, in many ways, returning to school psychology allowed me to do work I had always thought was important: helping to identify learning problems and working with teachers and parents to give children the supports they needed to learn and grow.  I often quipped in these years that dealing with the problems of kindergarteners was infinitely preferable to dealing with college faculty.

The school psychologist at Las Sendas
Elementary, Mesa, AZ, 2006

I ended my professional life back in administration.  For my last six years with the Mesa schools, I served as Coordinator of Psychological Services.  My favorite parts of that position were the opportunities to hire new school psychologists, to mentor those new to the field, and to help shape special education policies and procedures. 

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But even with retirement in 2015 the Myers-Briggs description of my personality from so long ago still rang true:   “apt to turn to one new interest after another.”  The first thing I did was enroll in the Master of Liberal Studies degree program at Arizona State University.  I took many writing classes and completed a book on my family’s history.  I am an active volunteer mostly working with children and other vulnerable populations.  I travel when I can and have recently taken up sketching and water colors. 

And who knows what the next new interest might be?