One obvious conclusion from writing my last long series of posts is that I had a career maze more than a career path. Jobs seemed to come along when I needed them, and for a long time they didn’t seem to have much in common with one another. In fact, at one point, I cleaned apartments when tenants moved out of my apartment house. So it may come as some surprise that the job I took next lasted for 25 years. And it came to me disguised as a one year job.

A friend was having a baby, and she wanted to stay home with him for the first year of his life. Then she wanted to return to her job. My daughter was now one and while I was teaching two evenings a week near our home, I did have time to work more. So I told her I would be glad to cover for her for that one year.

She taught in Portland, a half hour from our home, at a college I had never heard of, The Museum Art School, part of the Portland Art Museum. She taught a course called Humanities which she had created herself. I was, she said, free to teach whatever I wanted as long as it was in the humanities and wasn’t art history. The college had an art historian. There was also a full time faculty member whose background was in anthropology. Naturally, since as we know I was already an English teacher despite my vow never to be one, I decided to focus on literature. Beyond that, I didn’t have much of a clue, so I spent the summer figuring out how to structure a year long class which met for two sections a week, each one for 75 minutes.

And in September, I drove into town and met my first students. First, though, I walked past another classroom, looked in and saw a naked woman standing on a platform. This was certainly not the community college. When they say “life drawing” in an art college, this is what they mean. My semester in this unusual environment had begun.

Hearing about my work with Carol, another local attorney hired me to work on another class action case. This one was close to home, involving a group of women professors who felt they had been unfairly paid, not promoted and not tenured in a large multi-campus university system. It intrigued me and I was glad to have the chance to help prove the case.

Unfortunately, this attorney was very different from Carol. She had been incredibly organized, had a laser sharp mind, and knew what I needed to be researching. I felt clear about my work during the two summers I aided her. This man was incredibly unorganized, had a mind that wandered all over the place, and knew he needed help, but was unsure of what help that might be. While he was a seasoned attorney, this case, I believe, had gotten away from him as demonstrated by tall stacks of papers, notes and depositions scattered around his office floor.

I thought my first task would be to set up a filing system for all of this material, sort it by plaintiff and school. But he apparently liked his “piling” system better, and immediately took apart any efforts I made to systematize the information. After a few weeks, I realized that I was becoming as scattered and overwhelmed as the man I was supposedly helping. Not wanting to burn any bridges, I politely resigned citing increased work load at my community college teaching.

Sadly, Carol died very young and I never had the chance to work with her again. I decided to set down  my legal pad and pen and focus purely on teaching.

Another summer Carol hired me to spend several weeks with the Linn County  Sheriff’s Department. In this instance, she had been hired by the County to see if they should defend a charge brought against them for sex discrimination. I was to spend several weeks basically hanging out with the men(they were all men–a clue about the merit of the charge!) and see if they appeared to have a discriminatory view of women in the department.

I enjoyed them very much, since they reminded me of all my old rural neighbors and police I had taught. They were very relaxed with me and we had honest conversations. One time they even took me into the old jail cells which at that time were still part of the courthouse. It was very chilling to go through several locked doors to get inside, even though I knew it was just for looking, not staying.

At another time, they were gleeful about arresting a car thief. When I asked how they had captured him, they said they went to his house and found a bunch of stolen cars. I was astonished about his careless storage of the cars. They laughed and teased me about thinking crooks were smart. They assured me that most criminals were pretty dumb.

But they were very blunt about stating that they did not think a woman belonged patrolling the isolated far reaches of the county. They didn’t think it was safe. Of course, that proved the claim of sex discrimination. So, I had to report back to Carol that the County should settle and not contest the charge. I bid them goodbye, respecting their old school chivalry but aware that it no longer had a place in Linn County.

By now you have probably figured that for a long time I had to cobble jobs together, especially in the summer, to make sufficient income. For several different summers, this meant doing paralegal work for a Portland attorney named Carol Hewitt. Carol recognized that the research skills developed studying English literature and the people skills developed teaching adults would be useful in some of her cases.

The first case she hired me for was against Princess Crystal brought by a class action of some of their sales reps. Princess Crystal was an operation much like Tupperware and Avon at the time. Individual women(they were only women) sold crystal dishes and knick-knacks in a “party” setting in their homes. At each “party,” the hostess would try to recruit other women to host similar events. The hostess usually got a “free” gift for having the”party” and discounted prices on other items. When she recruited someone new, she also got a discount on future pieces and a percentage of the sales at the next event.

The details of their specific legal complaint are blurry to me, forty years on. I remember talking to individual women, however, to record their experiences. Carol had hired me to try to get specifics from each woman about her experience with the company. In general, women felt used by the company. They felt they had bought product so that they could have their own successful businesses. But, as in any scheme that requires recruiting new sales reps, they quickly ran out of people to recruit. Then they were left with a lot of crystal that they had no use for.

Princess Crystal settled out of court and the class action members were satisfied with the outcome. I became determined to steer clear of any such “opportunities,” no matter how much I needed the money. “Party Hostess” is one of the few jobs I never held in my peripatetic career history.

One of my successes is with the little girl pictured above who started talking once I started visiting with her six year old sister. My little brother had not started talking until he was three, so her quiet presence didn’t bother me. But I was delighted when she decided she could join in the conversations. Our family joke was always that my brother didn’t speak because he couldn’t get a word in edgewise with me around. Perhaps the same was true for Judy with her talkative older sister.

At another home, a six year old girl told me she didn’t like her nineteen year old uncle putting his hand down her pants. I managed to stay calm and told her I didn’t like him doing that either and I would take care of it. She lived with her grandfather and this uncle, so I was the only woman in her life. While this was before mandatory reporting, I sought out a clinician in the County Health Department for advice. Chillingly, he told me that “that happens a lot here. It’s pretty normal.” Knowing it was not all right with me, I spoke to her grandfather directly. He had the boy in the army the next week, and the little girl continued visiting with me each week, unmolested.

One of the real benefits for these children was access, through Head Start, to dentists, doctors and specialists. One of the children was able to see a pediatric neurologist for her seizures. Several had severe “bottle mouth” and had caps put on their teeth allowing them to bite and chew regular food. One needed treatment for scabies, as did her whole household.

At my most challenging home, a two year old opened the trailer door with a butcher knife in her hands. She had been trying to open a pop bottle with it. While Head Start wanted me to teach the mother about nutrition, I felt it was more important to take away the knife and move the poisons from under the kitchen sink. I am sure, in retrospect, that the mother was severely mentally ill, but at the time I just did my best to teach the older girl.

Fortunately, there was a job opening where I lived starting in October. I was hired right after my interview by the director of the two county Head Start program as a home visit teacher. Above is a local newspaper clipping about the program showing me and two of the children I was visiting. I am impressed with my 1974 plaid pants!

Since it was a pilot program, and since the director had just arrived from New York to live in the woods with her boy friend, she gave me free rein over structuring it. I first had to find 10 children to visit. This turned out to be extremely easy once I had found a first child whose mother was interested. That mom told me about another and so it went until I had filled my quota. The kids were scattered over a very large area, and it was impractical to to try get them in one place, so my driving from home to home was a workable way to deliver the Head Start program.

I had an old van which I filled with things I remembered liking as a kid and things I had used when I volunteered in the nursery school run by Helen Gordon when I was in high school. So I had puzzles, Play-Doh, lots of picture books, clay, paint, blank paper, construction paper, scissors and glue. I tried to vary what I brought each week so that the kids were regularly surprised by new material. And I had a surprise of my own that fall. During my unemployment, I had become pregnant. So as I grew in confidence, I also grew in size. And that gave the mothers and me a natural bond that helped us function as equals: me teaching them about kids, them teaching me about pregnancy!

Tomorrow I will share some of the specific interactions and successes I had with this program. Suffice it to say, it was a wonderful experience for all concerned.

I was employed part time now teaching at the community college, but I still needed a full time job. I tried in vain to find one, and finally acknowledged that I would have to return to elementary school teaching. I knew I wanted younger kids and wanted to work in the country, not the city. I saw that there were openings in our local school and went for an interview.

I met the qualifications to be hired and interviewed for the position of first grade teacher. The principal seemed most interested in my private life. He stressed that I would be expected to represent the district at all times. If I wanted to have a drink, I should do it in another town. As a married woman teacher my morals should be above reproach. This seemed odd to me, but I had no concerns about my behavior. Several days later I was offered the job.

I traveled with my mother during July, and returned home to learn from my husband that the offer had been withdrawn. No explanation given.  A couple of weeks later, a very unpleasant neighbor informed me that she had called the school and told them I had a “Negro”husband. She was gloating as she told me. I assumed then and now that the call had led to the job offer retraction.  There was nothing to be done, no way to prove it. I went back to looking for a job.

After teaching a couple of semesters in these rural campuses, an unexpected request came from my women students. Would I please teach them a class in women’s studies. They had clearly been following the general discussion in the country around women’s rights, including the 1973 Supreme Court decision allowing first semester abortion. But they had no place to talk about the issues circulating around them. Perhaps, they thought, if I taught a Women’s Literature class, they could enroll without alarming their families(mainly their husbands!) It would just be seen as another college class.

Astonished by this development, I told the main campus that my students wanted me to teach them this course. Immediately the main campus Women’s Studies teachers balked at the idea. They would, they said, gladly send one of their own instructors to teach. At this time, the main campus faculty were exactly the kind of feminists my students were afraid of, loud and fairly anti-male. The chance that my students would enroll in a class with any of these women was infinitesimal.

I went into town to meet with these women and told them the truth. They looked over my credentials(I had taken several women’s literature classes myself) and reluctantly decided I could teach one time only to the interested group.

Our group of ten met once a week, reading both fiction and nonfiction writings by women, both historical and present day. Women shared about violence in their homes, harassment on the job, struggles with having to work and take care of the home, and how isolated they had felt before they had met one another. It was, indeed, a one time event, but one I will always remember with amazement.

It turns out that the main reason the community college was going to begin to offer English classes in these rural towns was that there was a new need for them. Because of new laws, Sheriff deputies, town policemen(and they were all men), firemen  and practical nurses were now being required to earn their A.A. Degrees. Previously, these jobs had required only a high school diploma. Eventually, these jobs would require Bachelor’s degrees, but in the early 70’s a two year degree was sufficient.

So, despite my original theory, most of my students were not there by choice. The greatest challenge was the Introduction to Literature class. Fortunately by now I had lived in Columbia County for a few years and had an intuitive sense of my students. However, I had never taught adults, much less ones who were being required to further their educations to keep their jobs.

Fortunately we shared a general dislike for English teachers who approached literature as laden with “secret meanings” that only English teachers could interpret. I told them that their life experience was all that mattered when we read anything together. I taught them that literature had been written for regular people, not English teachers, and that I was just a fellow reader with more experience with literature, but not with life.

And class discussion was always lively and fascinating. Sure enough, their life experiences, now welcome in an English class, allowed them to share not only their understandings of the texts but also how some of the texts helped them understand these experiences. The firemen and nurses had an easier time with the poems, while the policemen gravitated towards short stories. Occasionally a policeman would share how the job had required him to bottle up many of his emotions and that talking about a story allowed him to share in a safe way. I was deeply moved, especially, by their experiences with family violence. One shared coming to a house where the mother was now dead and knowing the kids had watched the shooting.

I realized that I loved teaching English to adults, especially “nontraditional” students, and it became my life’s work.

One of my job interviews was with the local community college where there was an opening to run a volunteer program. While I was not a good match for that job, the interviewer began to talk to me about my skills. When he heard I had been fired from the Lab, he looked at me even more favorably. I guess their shenanigans had become widely known in the area. He asked me if I had ever considered teaching English.

Egads! The one thing I had said over and over when I was majoring in English was that I would never teach English. I loved reading and writing too much to risk teaching it to recalcitrant students. Remember, I had already failed at middle school teaching. But he was proposing something I had never considered, teaching English at the community college level.

I was dubious that my bachelor’s degree was sufficient for the job. However, after reviewing my credits from Harvard, the English Department at Portland Community College found me eminently qualified to teach as an adjunct in their far flung rural satellite campuses, including  two near me. Perhaps they had few takers for these openings since they were at night, 30 miles from the main campus. I was only a few minutes away from one and about 20 minutes away from the other, so it worked well for me. Even if(when!) I got a full time job, I would be able to teach at night. I gladly signed a contract for the fall term, one class in English Composition and one class in English Literature. I had no idea who my students would be, but I at least knew they were choosing to be there.

Or so I thought!