Education

"Education is the key to dreams: developing them and fulfilling them,” Mom said. I knew she was right. I caught the college bug from her; I can’t say why my four older siblings didn’t. I may have been the first person in my family to graduate from college, but I wasn’t the first to attend.  My mother, Dorothy, tried three times at three different colleges. In her case, three strikes took her dream out.

 Education wasn’t too important to my mother’s dad, that’s for sure--especially for a girl, and most especially for his daughter. My mom was living on a small Missouri farm when it came time for high school in the fall of 1937. Her father said there wasn’t any need for her to go to high school; she was needed to work the farm. “Schoolin’s fer boys,” he said. Luckily for my mother, her maternal grandfather thought otherwise; he paid for a hired man to take my mother’s place in the fields during the school year. Free to pursue her dreams of education, my mom became the valedictorian of her seven-person class four years later.

 My mother Dorothy earned a scholarship to Carson-Newman College in Tennessee, which she attended along with some more support from her grandpa (much to her father’s distress).   But after one year, the scholarship ran out and her grandfather died. The twin blows brought Dorothy down, but she was far from out; Mom wasn’t through. She earned some money and got some help from her widowed grandma. She started college again, this time at Southwest Missouri State Teacher’s College in Springfield, a short drive from home. 

My mom loved her new roommate, a California girl also named Dorothy. They settled confusion by calling the roommate “Dee” and my mother “Max,” short for her detested middle name, Maxine. When Dee’s parents came to visit from San Francisco, my mother buttonholed them, begging the Burdetts for stories about their California. My mother had lived in Taft, California from age one until she was eight. She always wanted to return.

Unfortunately, Dorothy’s grandma and last benefactor did not survive that school year. Her choices were to go back to the farm or strike out on her own. Dorothy chose to set her course for California, the land of her dreams. She headed to San Francisco, where she figured she had a place to live and wartime jobs were plentiful. I heard this story again from Dee’s dad (who I called “Grandpa Burdett”) years later. He told my mother, “If you’re ever in San Francisco, you can come stay with us.”  Grandpa looked at me and said, “And you know, one day I came home from work and there she was, sittin’ on her suitcase on my front porch in San Francisco…”

 Dorothy landed a job as a “Winnie the welder” in the Kaiser shipyards, building Liberty ships. She made good money and used it start college for a third time, at the University of California, Berkeley, taking night classes.

 When the war ended, the shipyards started to wind down. Workers were laid off—women first. My mother couldn’t afford those night classes anymore. Then she met my dad. Six weeks later, they were married. Five kids in nine years killed her dreams of college forever—well, almost.

 In 1973, her youngest child (yours truly) went off to college.  My divorced mother soon found a new place to live, with her old college roommate Dee, also a recent divorcee. She moved to Palo Alto and got a new job: as the executive secretary to the director of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Mom finally got back to college, but in a completely different kind of way.