Life without IBM
The last time I was on my own in Kansas
City was the summer of 1962. I was
starting a job with IBM and searching for my Kansas City woman. Now it was the early spring of 1966. My Kansas City woman, Kaye, and my wonderful
job with IBM were both gone. However, I had
done my work with the psychiatrist and felt like I could deal with the current
uncertainty. I would not allow myself to
feel defeated or anxious. I was
determined to start over and make better decisions than I had in the past. At least I would try, even though I wasn’t
sure I had all the tools I needed to do any better.
While an employee at IBM I had: 1) loved my
work as a systems engineer, 2) been very excited to participate in the advances
in computers, and 3) enjoyed the skills learned as a customer educator. However, I found that IBM’s corporate culture
did not provide an environment that allowed me to flourish as a person. Now it was time to leave all that behind and start
over.
First things, first; find a new job. There were still a few months on the Raytown
house lease that was in Kaye’s name. That
gave me time to find a new employer and determine where to relocate. I hired an employment agency which arranged interviews
with several organizations. I discovered
for the first time, but not the last, that having IBM on my resume made a good impression.
I received offers from all of the places
I interviewed except one which did contract work with the military. They required a background check. On their forms, I acknowledged having seen a
psychiatrist, and I assumed that was what kept me from getting a job offer. I even interviewed with St. Louis University
Medical School, but fortunately decided that it would be best not to follow
Kaye to St. Louis. I did accept a
similar offer that eventually led to a second career I loved.
My new job was in Kansas City, Kansas, so I found a duplex for me and my cat, Tornado, in Overland Park, Kansas. It was more spacious and modern than my first apartment. The upstairs had two bedrooms, a living room and kitchen/dining area with stairs leading down to a recreation room and one-car garage. I bought Kaye’s bedroom and office furniture, although it was early American, not a style I would have chosen myself. I furnished the rest of the duplex in a contemporary fashion.
I rented the unit on the left.
I happily returned to KU! I started my new position at the University of
Kansas Medical Center (KUMC or KU Med). I
was the very first programmer hired for the new research computing center,
called Computation Services. It was
located in Wahl Hall, the same building that housed the academic medical
science departments and research laboratories.
It was wonderful to be at the cusp of a new field for computer
applications.
I researched and gave seminars for doctors
on how in the future computers might be used to help them make better diagnoses
and improve care for their patients.
Seeing how slowly such grand visions have come to be true, if at all, I
have since viewed predictions about new technologies with great skepticism. How many years ago did we first hear about us
using self-driving cars?
I visited a large hospital in Salt Lake
City, Utah and saw how they were using computers in their clinical laboratory
and elsewhere in the hospital. Now, over
50 years later, I am amazed about how quickly I can see the report on my
computer from when my blood was sampled.
This is an area where computers have made a big impact.
Computation Services assisted the research faculty members and graduate students who needed to analyze their data. Depending on the amount of data and the complexity of the analysis required, we could provide the appropriate tool: 1) an electronic calculator, 2) the large Lawrence campus computer or 3) our small IBM 1130. For small amounts of data, an Olivetti electronic calculator was used. It had magnetic cards which held programs that instructed the calculator on how to process the data that the researcher typed in. Most of the calculations were for basic statistics, like the mean and standard deviation.
Two computers were located in Computation
Services. A Digital Equipment
Corporation (DEC) computer read the punched cards containing programs and data and
sent their contents thirty-five miles away to the KU campus in Lawrence using microwave
transmission. There it was processed on a
large computer, and the results were sent back to KU Med. Computation Services also had its own
computer, an IBM 1130. It was a
stand-alone small scientific computer with a large removable 15-inch diameter disk. Both the 1130 and the Lawrence computer could
process Fortran programs. The Lawrence
computer also had two software packages the researchers used, an early version
of BMD (BioMedical) which supported many kinds of statistical analysis and a
taxonomy package that was developed on the Lawrence campus. A researcher at KU Med used the latter to
analyze patients’ headache symptoms, form groups of patients with similar
symptoms and then label the groups with the type of headache.
15 inch diameter disk
Working in a research and academic setting,
it was no longer necessary to dress for success. I could be much more relaxed. My new boss, Alex, probably guessed that I
was a lesbian at my initial interview. In
turn, I suspected that he was gay. He
and I communicated quite well. The
guesswork was no longer necessary after I ran into him in a gay bar that I was visiting
with some of my friends.
As I sat with him at the bar looking over some
of the other women, Alex gave me some good advice: “Don’t be afraid to ask
someone out.” “The worst thing that
could happen is she says No.” I learned
to use that advice in other situations where I wasn’t sure what action to
take. I would consider a potential
action and imagine the worst possible outcome.
If I could cope with that outcome, I might take the action.
Alex invited me to visit his
apartment. I sat in an easy chair across
from him. When I looked down at the end
table next to me, I realized it was decoupaged with pictures of penises of all
shapes and sizes. I was stunned and
didn’t look again.
Meeting New Friends
The Radiology Department at the Medical Center sponsored a women’s basketball team, the Anodes. The team primarily consisted of women from the radiology department, but women from other areas were also included. The team played in a city league on the Missouri side of Kansas City. The rules at that time were very different from the ones today; there were six players, two forwards, two guards, and two rovers. Only the rovers could move over the centerline. Bounces of the ball were limited to two per player; the only other ball movement was by passing.
One of the women who worked in radiology,
Delores, was very nice to me. We started
hanging out after the games, and I asked her to move in. Having a companion was comforting, but on my
part, it was certainly a rebound relationship.
I soon decided that Delores was too fragile and dependent on me
emotionally. It wasn’t too long before I
asked her to move out. I hadn’t learned
enough to avoid getting too involved in the first place, but I had learned
enough not to keep a bad situation going.
IBM card sorter
There was a card for the tumor that was removed
from my father’s intestine when he had a colostomy operation in his 60s. I told Ruth about my father’s operation; she
pulled his card and was able to tell me that his tumor fell in the questionable
category, not clearly benign and not clearly cancerous. Did he really need the colostomy? Regardless, he lived with it the rest of his
life.
Another
of the team members helped me with a cat problem. Tornado entered a period of heat and her
yowling was driving me crazy. My team
member told me there were a lot of eager tom cats where she lived near a wooded
area. I took Tornado over there one
evening, thinking it would be a quick job with the scent she must be
emitting. However, when I was ready to
leave, Tornado was nowhere to be found, and I finally gave up and went
home. I went back the next morning and
found a poor tired Tornado, huddled under the branches of a juniper bush that was
protecting her rear end nicely.
She was very pregnant, and we wanted to
know how many kittens she had. I made arrangements
to take her to the radiology department at night where my friends took an X-ray
that showed all of Tornado’s five babies.
Tornado gave birth to her litter under the headboard
of my bookcase bed. I first moved them
to the closet and then to the downstairs garage where they enjoyed playing in
and on spare car tires. I found homes
for all but one, Tyger, who I named after William Blake’s poem “The Tyger.”
Tyger
Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests
of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Tyger was also a calico cat, but not as
colorful as her mother. Tornado, who had
always slept with me, now would not get on the bed when Tyger was there. I missed Tornado at night. It developed that Tyger burned too brightly
and seemed to be simple-minded for a cat. She was difficult to train to use her
kitty litter box and lacked the usual feline curiosity. I wondered if her
behavior was a side-effect of her fetus being X-rayed. I had both females spayed. Kaye took one of the beautiful black male
kittens to a friend of hers in St. Louis, and I was able to find homes for the
other three.
Ruth, another basketball team member,
worked in the Tumor Registry at KU Med. It
housed keypunches, a card sorter and an accounting machine. Descriptive data about each tumor removed in
the hospital was coded and keyed into a punched card. If information about a particular type of
tumor was requested, they could run all of the cards through the sorter
selecting only the cards with the appropriate tumor code, and run these cards
through the accounting machine to print the data on the cards. The information was used for following up on
a patient’s care and research. Today
there are worldwide tumor registries.
Scary Incidents Involving a Gun
One of the weirder things that happened during
my senior year at KU occurred when an old boyfriend, Rudi, called and said he
needed to see me. I hadn’t gone out with him for quite a while, but he was so
insistent that I agreed. I was beyond surprised when he drove his car out to
the Lawrence city dump where we sat in the cold. He kept trying to hand me a gun, asking me to
shoot him! I refused to touch the gun
and just kept talking with him as he cried.
Slowly, he revealed just hearing that his father had died. He had
unsettled issues with his native American Indian father, and now he never could
resolve them. I was finally able to talk
him down, and he returned me to my dormitory. It was an emotionally exhausting
experience, and I never saw Rudi again. It
was not to be my last traumatic experience involving a gun.
When Delores moved out, she rented an
apartment in an old house near the Med Center.
One weekend my ex, Kaye, and her new partner, Pat, visited me. I was now able to be a friend to Kaye. While they were there, I received a phone
call from Delores. I could tell from her
voice that she was in trouble. Kaye went
with me to Delores’ apartment. The door
was open, and when we entered, we found the gas stove on and Delores sitting
propped up in her bed. The hand gun that
Delores used to shoot herself in the chest was lying near her hand. She was not conscious. I couldn’t tell if she was alive or
dead. We called an ambulance. Kaye turned off the stove, and I moved the
gun away from Delores’s hand. A stern detective
showed up before the ambulance. From the
look he gave me, I wished I hadn’t handled the gun, leaving my prints on it. Fortunately, he was able to bring Delores to
consciousness. He asked her directly:
“Did you do this?” She replied, “Yes,” and
I gave a big sigh of relief. I also felt
very sad that I had caused her so much pain.
The bullet barely missed her heart, and she
survived surgery. It was a short walk
from my office in Computation Services to her hospital room, so I regularly paid
her a visit. For a year or two after
that, she occasionally called me. I was
kind but kept the calls brief. She
eventually went back to school in Lawrence in nuclear science, similar to the
area in which she worked in the radiology department.
My First Basketball Player Girlfriend: Ruth
Ruth had short blonde hair and was cute as
a button. I started dating her. It wasn’t long before Ruth and her dog,
Marcus, moved into the duplex. The dog
and cats got along, and I was very happy with my life. I learned more about Ruth’s background. She told me that even though Missouri did not
allow high school girls’ teams to compete, she was such a good player that she was
asked to entertain the half-time crowd at the boy’s games. She was only 5’3” tall, but was quick with the
ball and made amazing shots.
After she graduated from high school, Ruth moved to Kansas City to go to Secretarial School on a scholarship. She had a place to live with the Salvation Army. I heard a record of her playing the trumpet and was astounded to find out that she taught herself to play on a Salvation Army band trumpet. It was while she was working in the Salvation Army gym that the man who had the Peck’s Good Girls basketball team saw her play and recruited her for his team. It played other AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) business or commercial teams. At an AAU sponsored World Tournament held in Connecticut, Ruth had her first experience competing against a Russian player. I admired her ability to work hard and succeed.
Even though Ruth had not gone to college I
felt she had more talent than was being used in her tumor registry job. We were adding staff, and I urged my boss
Alex to hire her. I felt it would be wise
for one of our programmers to have experience working in a hospital and know medical
terminology. Ruth was also interested in
learning how to program computers. She
took one of the early programmer aptitude tests and didn’t score particularly
well. I attributed it to poor test
taking skills and having been taught math in a rural Missouri school. At any rate, we decided that in order to show
her interest in the job, she should enroll in a commercial programming class at
a trade school. She took night classes and
graduated from ECPI (Electronic Computer Programming Institute). Alex then agreed to hire her.
I Am a Manager?
My boss, Alex, also hired two other
programmers, Frank and Bud. Then he had
a big disagreement with his boss, a medical doctor at the Med Center. Alex quit, and I was appointed the manager of
Computation Services, a position for which I had no supervisory experience. I interviewed one man as a potential additional
hire. I felt he was not only better
qualified to be the manager, but even overqualified for my position. I did not hire him as I felt he would
immediately start challenging me for my job.
Another problem was that he used a wheelchair, and the hospital had no
accommodations for the disabled. The
hospital was a conglomeration of buildings separated by tunnels and stairways
that made navigation difficult. This was
many years before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which became law in
1990.
By now, the department was very busy
consulting and servicing faculty and students.
I was disappointed to learn that even though I took two graduate level
statistics classes at Kansas State, I was unable to advise the researchers
about which statistical test they should use to analyze their data. Therefore, I was very happy when a Department
of Biometry was created at KUMC in 1968 by Dr. Malcolm E Turner from Emory
University and staffed by another statistician, Dr. Khatab Hassanein. The definition of biometry I like the most is
“the analysis of biological data using mathematical and statistical methods.”
I wrote Fortran programs for Turner and
Hassanein as well as for other School of Medicine faculty and obtained my first
co-authorships. I enjoyed the challenges
my work presented to me. Dr. Hassanein’s
research involved some computations that were quite intensive. I started the program on the IBM 1130 before
leaving work, and it ran overnight, and sometimes over a weekend.
The microwave communication between the
medical center and the KU campus was also used to teach two graduate level
courses I took during this time. The
class in Computer Software Systems was taught by the Electrical Engineering
department. In it, I learned about the
complicated interconnections between hardware and software that were required to
make a computer function. Dr. Turner
taught a class in Biomathematics. It introduced
the concept of modeling a system, in this case, the human body, by using
mathematical formulas and computer processing.
The function of each part of the body, as well as the movement of
nutrients between the body parts, was represented by a set of formulas. Later in my career, I encountered modeling in
many other contexts.
Dr. Turner wanted to acquire another
computer system, a hybrid analogue and digital computer that would be able to quickly
process the formulas describing the models of the human body. We had discussions with salesmen, representatives
from the Lawrence campus computer center and related academic departments. Meetings were held at the medical
center. I noticed that the head of their
department sometimes fell asleep in the middle of a meeting and was told he had
narcolepsy.
I was the only woman in these meetings, and
my ideas were met with the usual condescension I often found in a group of
men. I would find an idea I presented earlier
and all the men disagreed with, repeated later by one of the men and accepted
as a wise approach.
I thought some of this treatment was
because I wasn’t adequately credentialed.
I joined the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the Data
Processing Management Association (DPMA), and became a Certified Data
Educator. Secondly, I became determined
to earn another academic degree, a Ph.D.
It seemed to be the only path that would give me the equal standing and credibility
I deserved in future discussions.
It was during this time that I also
experienced my first sexual harassment on the job. A computer salesman named John was talking
with me one day when he just leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. At the time, there were no procedures for
reporting such incidents. Needless to
say, I did not recommend his product.
Homes I Lived in with Ruth
Ruth and I rented a house in Roeland Park,
Kansas in 1967, the year most remember for the assassinations of Martin Luther
King (MLK) and Robert Kennedy. The riots
in Kansas City following the MLK assassination did not directly affect us. There was a pathologist at KU Med who was a
big conspiracy theorist about others’ being involved in the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. After these two killings happened in the same
year, I finally started paying more attention to national events.
The next year I became a homeowner by purchasing the Overland Park home of a faculty member at KUMC. It was a split level, three-bedroom house. The garage had been converted to a TV room. The lowest level had a partial basement where we set-up a ping pong table.
By owning a house, I was now on the path of building personal equity. Earlier in the year, I met with a saleswoman from Waddell and Reed and started systematically purchasing shares of mutual funds. Both of my parents invested their own money and encouraged me in this direction. My mother liked to say “The first payment everyone should make is to themselves.”
Ruth and I invited Dr. Turner and his wife to dinner at our new home, the first time I issued an invitation to a professional with whom I worked. They showed up with a bottle of wine, which introduced me to the proper protocol for such events, never having seen it growing up in Wichita. I did not like the taste of the wine. Over the years as I drank more wine, I learned that acquiring the taste for good wine takes time and experience. I was still at the Mogen David level.
Parents and Family
During the time I worked at the Medical Center my mother had one or two operations. I met her gynecologist, Dr. Kermit Krantz. His bedside manner was abrupt, but he was a brilliant surgeon, which was most important to my mother.
Ruth and I visited each other’s
parents. My parents, my mother in
particular, were not taken with her. Ruth
probably didn’t realize that my parents had the habit of “interviewing” every
friend I brought home. They thought they
were being protective of me, not realizing the effect it had on my friends. My father finally warmed up to Ruth
some. I felt that they didn’t give her a
chance.
Her parents lived on a farm south of Kansas
City raising cattle and growing feed. On
one visit, her mother was taking the garbage out to feed the pigs. I wanted to hear her call them, expecting the
usual “Sooie” call. Instead, she called
“Here Piggy, Piggy” just like you would call a kitten “Here Kitty, Kitty.” I was disappointed. She got lung cancer even though she never
smoked. Toward the end of her life, I
sat by her bed while she saw hallucinations.
Instead of going to the funeral, I stayed at the house sitting in Ruth’s
mother’s bedroom remembering how she would raise up her hands trying to touch
what she saw up there. Ruth’s snoopy aunt
and uncle came into the house and started looking around. When they found me in the bedroom, they
high-tailed it out of the house and sped off, not going to the funeral or
reception.
The First Step Toward my Second Career
Dr. Turner asked me to transfer from
the position of manager of Computational Services to teaching associate in the
Department of Biometry. I did not
particularly like any of the several statistics classes I had taken. My only F at KU was for a class in Applied
Mathematical Statistics that I stopped attending because I couldn’t stand how the
instructor treated me. During my classes
in the Theory of Statistics at Kansas State, I was not ever asked to apply the
theory to real experimental data. I
wanted to get a step closer to being able to answer the types of questions the
students and faculty asked me at Computation Services. By joining this department, I would have the
opportunity to interact with statisticians who were working with researchers
and learn what statistical tests they recommended for the analysis of different
types of data.
The Biometry Department was located in
an old house on the edge of the hospital campus. I shared an office with a young male faculty
member who taught the statistics classes required by the School of
Nursing. The departmental secretary and
I became convinced that when I was gone and the man with whom I shared the
office was seeing his female students, he was closing the door and trading sex
for grades. The Biometry secretary and I
conspired to give him pause about this practice. One day while he was teaching a class, we rifled
through his desk, found and confiscated his condoms. We believed he would put two and two
together, know that we were onto his game and stop it. Did he?
We never knew for sure, but hoped for the best.
Then a tragic thing happened. I was meeting with a representative of a
computer company when Dr. Turner came out of the bathroom, walked to stand
before the secretary’s desk and fell backwards, flat on his back hitting his
head. He was unconscious, so we called
for an ambulance. A nurse I knew on his hospital
floor later told me that he was taking enough Demerol to kill an elephant. He had been getting prescriptions from
several doctors at KUMC. Dr. Turner did
not return to the department, and the computer project he was pushing for was
dead. I assumed that he was admitted to
some type of rehab facility. It
disturbed me greatly that no one in the administration came to our department
to talk with us about it; they quietly swept it under the rug. That really made me angry. I decided to leave in protest about the lack
of concern shown to the rest of the department, and found another job.
A Step Off the Path
Early in 1969, I was hired to work for
a new time-sharing company (no, not the kind that has to do with vacation
ownership). This new industry was made
possible by the increased speed and capacity of modern computers. Previously, computers were only able to run
one program for one user at a time. Now,
using time-sharing computers, multiple users could run programs on the same
computer simultaneously. United
Computing Systems (UCS) was just starting to market time-sharing in Kansas City,
and they needed someone to train their sales and technical support staff on how
their products and services worked.
Undoubtedly, I was hired because of my
background educating customers at IBM. I
researched the concepts of time-sharing and learned how to operate a teletype, the
equipment the customers would be using.
It had a keyboard and printer, like a typewriter, and could be put into
a suitcase for transporting. I sometimes
brought one home, set it on the kitchen table, plugged the telephone receiver into
a holder (a modem), sent a simple program to the time-sharing computer, and the
results were returned and printed. The
teletype did not include a computer.
Teletype
I was not the only one from KU Med who
ended up working for United Computing Systems.
The administration closed Computation Services after I had transferred
to the Biometry Department. They merged
the remaining employees into the existing data processing staff who managed
applications like invoicing and payroll at the hospital. However, instead of staying at the hospital,
Ruth left and went to work for United Computing as a programmer. When they experienced a lull in sales, she
was laid off. Ruth was soon hired by
Baptist Memorial Hospital and developed the programming for their clinical
laboratory equipment. She expanded her
knowledge and experience in the area and made it a very successful lifelong
career. I was so happy that I had given
her the opportunity to enter the computer field.
I only enjoyed working at United Computing
for a while. My boss was very nice. On April 8, 1969, he took me to see the first
game the Royals played in Kansas City. It
was exciting to watch the Royals defeat the Minnesota Twins 4–3 in 12 innings at
the old downtown Municipal Stadium. At
work, however, it was becoming more and more difficult for me to see how a
device like the teletype with such limited capabilities would be successful,
especially in comparison to the work I had been doing with the computers at KU
Med. The time-sharing customers only had
access to a small library of canned packages and the ability to write BASIC
language programs. I put the material
together and taught classes for technical and sales staff, but rapidly lost
interest in the job. Also, I missed
working with researchers and learning about statistics. It got so bad that after driving to work, I
sat in the parking lot and found it difficult to get out of the car and go
inside.
Back to Biometry
Finally, I called Dr. Khatab Hassanein, and
he asked me to come back to work with him in the Biometry Department, which I
did. For quite a while, everything continued
as before. I learned about the types of
research biological scientists conduct and how important the use of the
appropriate statistical analysis was to properly interpret the findings. Khatab and I had always gotten along very
well. During many slow afternoons I sat
in his office, and we chatted about the state of the world. He told me what it was like growing up in
Egypt. He asked Ruth and me to his house
and his wife, also named Ruth, fixed us a nice meal. I particularly remember the stewed tomatoes
with okra.
He had always been affectionate, often
greeting me with a quick kiss on the cheek.
As far as I knew it was his country’s cultural behavior toward someone
you regarded as a sister. Then came the
day that he thrust his tongue in my mouth.
I reared back and let him know that I would not participate in his
behavior. He said: “because of your Ruth?” I replied: “No, because of your wife,
Ruth.” Of course, it was also because of
my Ruth, but I was not admitting my homosexuality to anyone outside my close
circle of acquaintances.
Preparing for Change
After that, the atmosphere in the department became frigid. Dr. Hassanein stopped asking me to sit in on any of the consulting sessions with researchers. I was frozen out of work, so I spent some time reading at my desk. The one book that stands out in my mind is Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Reading Frieden helped me learn how a feminist thinks. In addition, the idea of going back to school to get my doctorate, so I could consult with the research scientists myself, was becoming more firmly implanted in my head. When I was allowed to participate in the consultations with the research scientists, I liked what I saw the statisticians doing even more than what I was doing as a programmer. I wanted to be able to do their part of the job as well. However, to accomplish that, I needed a doctorate, and that meant I first needed to complete my master’s degree.
I visited the Linda Hall Library at the
University of Missouri-Kansas City campus to research the materials I needed to
write my report on “An Introduction to Queuing Theory Concepts.” Queuing theory is the study of the movement
of people, objects, or information through a line. A simple example is people lining up to check
out at the grocery store. It could study
how many lines and the number of express lanes that would be optimal.
I also started reviewing all the class
notes and homework assignments from the math and statistics classes I took
while at Kansas State. I was glad I
still had those notebooks. My major
professor scheduled my orals. The
faculty members at the orals could ask me questions about my courses or my
report. One last piece of research was
to find some jokes about queues that I could use in my orals. The jokes helped me defend my paper, the
report was accepted, and I was granted the Master’s degree in January 1970, almost
five years after completing the course work.
Problem on the Home Front
I had been with Ruth a few years when a
problem developed. One of the few times Ruth
and I went to Pete’s Pub, we ran into Marilyn, a woman who had been in a
relationship with a friend of Ruth’s.
Ruth had never been Marilyn’s close friend, but we invited her to sit
with us. It quickly became obvious to me
that Ruth was focused on and very attracted to Marilyn. We saw her at Pete’s Pub another time or two,
and I knew the attraction could not go very far because Marilyn was moving to
Phoenix. After she was gone, Ruth was
still so enthralled with her that she would go by herself to visit Marilyn’s
parents. I was fearful of how these visits
might further Ruth’s interest in Marilyn.
Ruth did not understand my concern and continued her visits. It was an emotional distancing from me that I
couldn’t deal with.
I discovered that I not only wanted a
relationship that was physically monogamous, but also emotionally so. I felt like Ruth was rejecting me for another
woman. I was so dejected that one Sunday
morning, I even put on a nice dress and heels with the thought of going to
church. I paused to sit and consider
this action, and I finally decided that it wouldn’t really do me any good to seek
solace in a belief system I didn’t share.
That is the last time I even considered going to church. I told Ruth
that I couldn’t stay in a relationship with her under these conditions. She wouldn’t budge, so we broke up, moving to
separate bedrooms. I was very sad as
Ruth and I had many happy, fun times together, and I was determined to maintain
a friendship.
Basketball and Softball
After Ruth left the Med Center, she started
the GDI (God Damned Independents) basketball team. The best player was Jo, who had learned to
play on her Iowa high school team. Jo
had also briefly played for the Raytown Piperettes AAU team. In the 1971 Kansas City, MO Parks and Rec
Class A League, with both Ruth and Jo on the team, we finished first. The team then played in a regional game at
Ouachita Baptist College in Arkansas. Their
7-foot Soviet player meant we didn’t have a chance; it was no contest. Coach Ruth knew what we were up against, because
she had been with the Peck’s Good Girls when they played a Russian team in an
AAU tournament. She knew we could never
win the toss up, so she sent me in to attempt the jump ball. Even though we lost badly, we received a
special invitation to the National AAU Women’s Tournament in Council Bluffs,
Iowa (probably because of Ruth and Jo’s previous AAU connections).
I was impressed to see the Governor of Iowa
in attendance to start the tournament and review the parade of teams. Iowa has an amazing history of supporting
women’s basketball. We played in a high
school women’s gym. Yes, the women had their own gym, separate from the one for
the men. The national establishment of women’s
sports in high schools and colleges didn’t start until Title IX was signed into
law in 1972. Even though Iowa was an
early supporter of women’s basketball, it wasn’t until 1993 they allowed high
schools to play with five instead of six players and full court access for all
players.
In the summers, the three of us played on a
competitive fastpitch softball team of really good players, also called the
GDIs. I say “we” loosely, as my main
position was bench sitter and cheerleader.
That meant that when I wasn’t assigned to play right field, my main duty
was to pat the butts and backs of players as they took the field. Ruth played 3rd base and Jo played
shortstop. We practiced a lot and
traveled to play teams in Missouri and Kansas, like the Oshe Meat team in
Topeka and a wonderful team in Bethany, MO.
One night, I was playing right field under
the lights against Oshe Meat. Their
biggest hitter, Kala, came to the plate.
She usually hit home runs that cleared the fence behind me. But this time, it was a high fly ball,
fortunately heading right at me and I caught it, surprising everyone, including
myself! I have re-lived that moment many
times, basking in the feeling of accomplishment and not letting the team down.
One of our teammates coached a girls
basketball team in a Wyandotte County Kansas junior high school. She invited some of our team members to come watch
a game. We were seated on a balcony
opposite her bench. A man sitting to my
left started calling us and our friend, the coach, names, like “queer” and
“perverts” in a loud voice. I kept
asking him to be quiet, pointing out that there were children sitting nearby. Eventually his wife got him to quiet down,
but I and the others were upset. I could
only imagine what my friend was dealing with on a daily basis while teaching
the children of small-minded rednecks.
Life with Jo
Since Jo was playing on our basketball and
softball teams, the three of us, Ruth, Jo and I started running around with each
other. I sold Ruth the house, crediting
her rent payments against the assessed value of the house; we split up the
belongings, and in 1970 I moved into an apartment with Jo. At the time, she was a P.E. teacher at a
local Catholic School. I became
attracted to her (she had the softest skin) and asked her if she wanted to move
in with me. That meant I was asking for
a relationship. She was skeptical, but
finally agreed to it. Undoubtedly it was
another rebound relationship on my part.
Apartment building
Jo and I frequented the Arabian Nights bar
(or what we called The Tent) and Pete’s Pub.
The Rail Room was closing as the land in that area was being bought up
for the development of Crown Center where Hallmark Cards would be located and
George’s bar was no longer operating. For
a period of time, Jo and I also visited a former coffee shop turned bar on
Broadway near Westport that featured female impersonators who primarily lip
synced to Liza Minnelli’s “Over the Rainbow.” I re-connected with Brenda Baby who had
graduated from KU with her Med Tech degree and had a new partner. Occasionally Skip Arnold and his partner,
Lee, were at Brenda’s. Skip entertained
us with his tales of being a white witch.
Jo and I attended NFL football watch parties
at our gay dentist’s house along with a male gay couple Jo had previously
known. On the home front, as before, I spent most holidays with my parents in
Wichita, not with my partner. In these
days before the internet, email and free long-distance calling, the usual mode
of communication was letter writing. I
regularly responded to both my mother and sister’s letters.
It was through the informal lesbian network
that I received word about a house being built in Merriam, Kansas. It was on a lot next door to the home of a
lesbian couple. I negotiated with the
builder, bought the house, and Jo and I moved there in September 1971. The house was somewhat modern in that there
was a cathedral ceiling in the living room with the adjacent kitchen walls open
at the top. There was a covered parking
area outside the kitchen with steps down to the fenced backyard. There were three bedrooms on the main floor
and an unfinished walk-out basement. I
used one of the bedrooms as an office.
We got to know the couple next door really well. They worked for Farmers Insurance and helped Jo get a job there. I adopted a stray cat that came to the house. Tabu was a beautiful black cat who was very affectionate, demanding my attention from the first night by insisting that she sleep between my legs. Now, I had three cats: Tornado, Tyger, and Tabu.
For a while, Jo and I had a good time
living there. We went to see popular
music groups and the controversial play “Hair” with its nude scene. I bought a Honda 250 motorcycle. Jo and I would put on our helmets and enjoy
riding out to the countryside along with Ruth and her new partner. I bought an organ and started playing for the
first time in many years.
The Last Job in my First Career
While still working at the KUMC, I began
teaching a computer class at night for the newly created Johnson County
Community College (JCCC) at their temporary quarters in Merriam. I enjoyed it and applied for a full-time
job. I was hired even though my new boss
told me that the IBM salesman lobbied for me to be passed over, telling him
that I was a lesbian. It reminded me of
the story I heard about the purchasing agent in California. I assume that IBM’s thinking was that since I
left them in questionable circumstances, I might bad-mouth them when JCCC was
negotiating to acquire the college’s data processing equipment. I was offered the job anyway. I finally left the Biometry Department and
became a full-time Data Processing Instructor.
In the spring and summer semester of 1970,
I started work at JCCC and took the required courses for my vocational education
certification. It was great to work at
the recently built campus as part of a new degree program, Associate Degree in
Data Processing. The first college president
was an ex-Marine who firmly believed in a culture that provided a good service
to the students. They were to be thought
of as our customers. It was required
that at the beginning of each course we provide the students with a list of
behavioral objectives describing what they should be able to do after
completing the class, as well as the grading system. Student evaluations were paramount. I learned I could not teach in the same style
as I had taught as a graduate assistant or the way my college instructors had
taught me. When I taught a class on
computer operating systems, almost all the students dropped the class after
just a couple of sessions. I had to
learn how to teach this different type of student.
I experimented until I developed the
techniques that worked. The day students
who usually came directly from high school were used to a lot of structure
being provided in their learning.
College eventually requires that the student be able to provide their
own structure. I used two techniques while
teaching the Introduction to Data Processing class to keep the students
involved in the course. First, I gave
them several different paths they could use to earn a grade. Of course, a certain percentage was based on
tests, but the rest of their grade might be through some combination of making
a media notebook or a presentation, writing a paper, or some other means. Second, if they didn’t like the grade they received
on a test, they could retake it, but were then required to obtain a higher
score to get the same or better grade.
All of this was meant to keep them involved and to not get discouraged
by a bad test score. It was the
philosophy: “If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again.” With some refinements, it worked. I became a much better teacher and most of
the students completed the class successfully.
The night students were very different from
the day students. I actually learned
COBOL by teaching a night class populated by students who were already using it
in their day job. They were enrolled
because they needed the college credit hours, and it was an easy class for
them.
There was much comradery with my fellow
teachers. We often met as a group at a
local bar for TGIF get-togethers. The
feminist movement in KC was also getting started. Through JCCC, I heard about a new local
organization for business and professional women called Dimensions Unlimited
and attended some of their meetings.
The End of Yet Another Relationship
In many ways, things were going well. However, there was a different underlying
reality. Human beings are not simple
creatures. One part of my life may have
been going well, while another was in the pits.
Jo and I had many good times together. Toward the end of our relationship, we both
knew it was not going to last much longer.
We named our time together after a current popular song, “Bridge Over
Troubled Water” by Simon & Garfunkel.
While we were living in the apartment, there
were a couple of events that signaled trouble ahead. Nancy, who played on our softball team, was a
Marine stationed in Kansas City. One
time Jo and I were at her apartment, and as I came out of the bathroom, I saw
her and Jo sitting on the sofa kissing. I
was not happy about that. Then Nancy
became possessed with the idea of seducing me.
Every time we were in the same room, she was always rubbing some part of
her body against me.
One time after a party at the apartment
where Jo and I lived, she stayed after everyone else was gone and begged me to
make out with her. I wasn’t attracted to
her, but felt like if I didn’t agree, she would just keep at it. She wore me down. I told Jo about it and asked her if she would
object. She would not say one way or the
other. So, I returned to Nancy and let
her make love to me. I didn’t enjoy it,
but, indeed, she did stop bothering me after that; I had given her the higher
notch count she was after.
After we moved to the house, we invited Gayle,
a woman we met at Pete’s Pub who was in the Air Force, to stay with us
awhile. The bedrooms were not available
so she stayed on the sleeper sofa in the living room. Her girlfriend came to visit from KU on the
weekends. I made a verbal pass at Gayle
once, and I remember she declined saying “I’m just another Jo.”
In 1973, I finally told Jo it was over, and
she moved into the other bedroom. Fairly
soon, she had a roommate, Shy, the woman I had seen playing the piano and
singing at the Gaslight Bar during my senior year at KU. It was shortly after that I discovered Jo had
all these new clothes. I asked where
they came from and was told Shy’s friends sold them discreetly out of the trunk
of a car. I suspected they were stolen
goods and was doubly glad I had ended the relationship with Jo. My ethics did not allow me to approve of Jo’s
behavior.
Casual Sex
One Sunday afternoon, I went to Pete’s Pub
by myself and sat with a couple of young men.
We were having a good time, and they said they were going to a friend’s
house to make out. They urged me to find
a woman to join me and go with them. I agreed
to try and approached a woman who agreed to be my date. We all drove to their friend’s house where
the men went to a back bedroom to have sex, and I and my “date” also did in the
living room.
Despite the superficiality of it, I was
proud of myself. I asked the woman if
she would like to go with me to Emporia, Kansas where I needed to spend a
couple of days to take a certification class in vocational education, and she
agreed. There was little for her to do
in the half days while I was gone, and despite my love making, I could sense
she was getting bored. There wasn’t much
about me in which she was really interested.
After we got back to KC, I drove by where
she worked in an art supply business on the Plaza. I parked and watched to see if she was coming
in or out. Looking back, it was a type
of stalking, although I never went in the store or followed her. The best I could say about her when my
next-door neighbor was “She has such a cute butt.” I think both her friends and my friends were telling
each of us separately that our relationship was not going to work. She stopped by my house one day to talk, and
I learned more about her personal history. I finally accepted the fact that she was a
young, single mother (whose children didn’t live with her??) with whom I had almost
nothing in common.
Why did I get involved with her in the
first place? Why was I going to the bar
and drinking? I usually felt socially
inept, unable to keep up with the repartee.
For me, drinking was a social lubricant. I felt more relaxed. It gave me the courage to ask her to leave
the bar with me and go to Emporia.
It seemed like whenever I was around other
lesbians, I felt a certain amount of sexual tension, like we were sizing each
other up. Having a few drinks helped me
deal with that uncomfortable feeling. I
did not drink to the point of being drunk as I hated the possibility of a hangover. I usually drank beer or Champale and probably
had built up the ability to hold quite a few bottles over the night. Also, I was a happy drinker and didn’t became
belligerent or nasty.
The last seven years were full of
changes. Beginning in Raytown, I had lived
in two rented houses, a duplex and an apartment and owned two houses. I had been unemployed, worked for KU Med,
United Computing, KU Med again and JCCC.
It was 1973. I was enjoying my
job at JCCC and lived in a house I liked and owned. I had a plan for my future but no one to
share it with. Ever since I lived alone
in Kansas City after leaving college, I was not comfortable living by myself,
always on the search for a new romantic partner. I had been with Karen 1 ½ years, Kaye 2 ½
years, Ruth 3 ½ years, and Jo 3 years. The
shortness of these relationships seemed to indicate I was either not choosing
the right partner or I did not know how to maintain a relationship, or both. It was obvious that I needed to put more
thought into which spices I chose.