KANSAS CITY HERE I COME, THEY GOT SOME PRETTY LITTLE WOMEN THERE AND I’M GOIN’ TO GET ME ONE
My New Home
The graduation ceremony at KU was quite traditional. In early June, 1962, I donned my cap and gown, walked from Memorial Drive through the Campanile bell tower and joined the procession down the path lined with spectators. I walked down the Mt Oread hill to the stadium where I received my diploma. My parents gave me their old Buick for a graduation present, but their monetary support was at an end. Now I was really on my own.
Graduation
Earlier, my
mother and I had gone to Kansas City to find and rent my new living space. I wanted one I could easily afford that was
not a long commute to the IBM office at 14th and Baltimore. Pickings were slim, but we found a furnished
room in a brick building built in 1925 near W. Armor Blvd and Main St. Between graduation and my first day of work,
I spent some time at my parent’s home in Wichita. It was quite a transition from living in their
modern home to the apartment.
My small abode
was quite basic. After riding the
rickety elevator up to the third of five floors, I entered a living room that
was furnished with a well-used but clean sofa and easy chair, and two standing
lamps. A hallway led to the other end of
the apartment where there was a kitchen on the left and a step-up dining area
on the right. There were two hallway
doors, one opening to the bathroom containing an old-fashioned clawfoot bathtub
with a shower attached. The other door opened
into a closet containing a chest of drawers, clothes rods and my bed, sitting
upright on its frame in front of double doors.
When I was ready for bed, I opened these doors into the living room,
pulled the bed around and lowered it onto the floor. There was no TV; I had a radio and
phonograph. These were the days before
PC’s and mobile phones; there was just a private landline. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of ways to
entertain myself or, hypothetically, others in this apartment.
On The Job Training
With IBM
I loved my job
with IBM as a Systems Engineer Trainee.
I had no idea what that meant when I was hired. I knew that I would be earning $450 a month,
which at that time was respectable, but not substantial (equivalent to $4500 a
month in 2023). I later found out that
the five women in my training class were paid $50 less per month than the 20
men. Some of my classmates would go into
sales, whereas I was on the technical track; my job was to support existing
customers and assist salespeople.
Computer Science
Departments were not common for several more years, so on-the-job training with
IBM was necessary. We spent the first
two months in the classroom: one month to learn about the equipment and a
second month to learn how the customers could use it. At this time, the Kansas City office only
sold unit record equipment. The unit
record was an 80-column IBM card made from smooth stock paper. The cards were 3¼ inches tall by about 7½
inches wide (12 rows and 80 columns).
Each piece of equipment read and/or punched the cards.
The card has an interesting history. The U.S. Constitution requires a census every
ten years. Experts said that unless
something changed, it would take 13 years to fully tabulate the 1890 census
because of the growth in the population.
Herman Hollerith invented the cards, as well as the tabulating equipment
that processed them. They were used for
the 1890 census allowing it to be finished in well under 10 years. Parts of the company Hollerith founded became
IBM.
IBM punched card
The first piece of equipment we learned to use was the keypunch. It had a typewriter keyboard, but instead of typing words on paper, it punched holes in the cards. It was a good thing my mother insisted I take a typing class over my objections. The cards were read by accounting machines, sorters, and reproducers; control boards determined what the machine did with the cards. The boards had holes, or hubs, corresponding to the columns of the cards, one set of hubs for input and another for output. The accounting machine boards had additional hubs for arithmetic operations. Wires with metal plugs at each end were inserted in the hubs to tell the machine what to do. My job was to learn how to wire these boards for each piece of equipment.
During the second
month of classes, we learned about the types of applications for which a customer
might use the machine, like sorting, billing, inventory, etc. My childhood work in my father’s floor
covering business, and my college classes in accounting gave me a good
background for that part of the training.
Another
Troubleshooter in The Family
Once I finished
training, my boss gave me daily work assignments. I was sent to customer locations where
machines were not performing correctly.
Once there, I often found one or more wires hanging loose on the board,
not plugged into any hub. I had to solve
the problem of where it should go. I
always hoped there would be documentation showing the proper wiring. If not, I had to study where the other wires
were going and from that determine where the loose wires were supposed to
go. I loved that challenge; it reminded
me of the fun my father must have had in the 1920s when he worked as a trouble
shooter at a rubber plant in Akron, Ohio, and his job was to solve operational
problems with the machines.
I couldn’t imagine what a job would be like where you did the same thing every day. I was called to a variety of sites: a small building out in the railroad yards, the Army College in Fort Leavenworth, or the billing tabulation room at Baptist Memorial Hospital. The invoices for the Kansas City Macy’s store were calculated and printed on an accounting machine. It required so many wires on the control board that they were packed inches high. When I responded to a call to go there, I found the board had some loose wires sticking out. It was like sorting spaghetti to get them reset properly.
I always enjoyed
listening to these mechanical machines as they were reading and processing a
stack of cards. In the case of the
invoices, there was one card per customer purchase. I could tell there was a mechanical problem
if the rhythm broke. I missed these
sounds when unit record equipment was replaced by computers a short time
later.
One day I was
troubleshooting at Union Station. I was
so focused, I actually peed in my panty hose, not consciously realizing I
needed to go to the bathroom. When I
became focused on a problem, I would be entirely in my head, unaware of my
physical being or surroundings. This
ability for intense focusing stayed with me and helped me solve problems my
entire career.
At my first
employee evaluation, my boss had little to say about the quality of my work,
but did have something to say about my appearance. When I started work at IBM, I knew I needed
to pay more attention to my appearance, so I started applying foundation to my
face and lipstick, but stopped short of using eyeliner or mascara. I always wore skirts or dresses like in college,
but nicer ones. Panty hose had just come
on the market and were a welcome replacement for garter belts and hose. I wore medium high heels. I thought I was dressed for success.
He still
criticized my appearance, particularly my handbag of all things. It was the only one I had, and I would agree
that it was ugly. However, I never
thought it would be a topic of discussion with my boss. With constrained disgust I replied that my
wardrobe would improve, starting with my handbag (as soon as I could afford to). I guess my job performance warranted no
comment. I found this superficial
approach was typical of IBM management.
I later heard about the conservative dress code for men. They were expected to dress with white
shirts, black ties, and dark gray suits.
Women’s clothes and accessories surely cost more than the men’s as we
were expected to wear something different every day. And to top it off, we were paid less.
My next training
session came soon. IBM was finally moving
on to marketing computers! The IBM 1440
computer with the 1311 disk drive was announced in October, 1962. Early in 1963, I was sent to the St. Louis
IBM office for a month to learn about its components, operation and
programming. It was a second-generation
computer that came with an assembly language called Autocoder, which was more
advanced than the SOAP language I learned in my class at KU, but still very
basic.
Women operating an
While in St.
Louis I was called into an office and told I was getting a raise of
$50/month. I was supposed to be
grateful, but felt like it was what I should have been paid all along. Were the men also getting a $50 raise so I
was still making less than they were? At
least they didn’t need to replace their handbags.
After that, my tasks
were even more exciting. I worked with
salesmen who were developing bids for customers who were upgrading from their
unit record equipment to a computer. I
analyzed the amount of data and the calculations they used in order to
recommend the computer components that should be included in the bid. That took more time than trouble shooting at
each customer’s location. I loved
working at the offices of the Country Club Dairy on Troost since I could go
down to their soda bar for a lunch of warm chili and a cold vanilla milkshake. Every time I have chili, I still wish I had a
vanilla milkshake.
I certainly
remember hearing about an important national event while working at a
manufacturing site in South Kansas City in November 1963. The news came over the radio that President
Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. It was a solemn moment for all of
us. Not much work was accomplished the
rest of that day.
All Work and No Play
Makes Jeanne a Dull Girl
So, how does a
young woman who has no friends in a new city go about finding them? I felt like my female co-workers found me
below their social standing. After all,
they were former sorority girls. They
certainly paid more attention to their appearance than I did, wearing very
attractive clothes and jewelry and having more stylish hairdos.
One winter day, a
co-worker asked me to go ice skating with her at Loose Park near the Country
Club Plaza. Unfortunately, we were not
aware that the pond had not been cleared for skating yet, and I fell through
the ice. The police came by, pulled me
out, and gave us (really me) a stern reprimand.
My co-worker kindly asked me back to her nearby apartment to dry out,
but we never socialized again. I guess I
failed that tryout.
The departmental
secretaries asked me to join them on a couple of their regular Saturday
afternoon outings. They would go to a
bar or two, listen to the music, have a drink and visit. Actually, I think they were looking for
men. My going with them didn’t last
long. One Saturday we were in the car
leaving a club, and in my slightly inebriated state, I must have leaned too
close to one of the secretaries in the back seat of the car. She pulled back and in a nasty voice asked me
“Are you queer or something?” That was
the end of me hanging out with secretaries.
My next effort to
be in touch with someone came about when my Wichita friend, Carol, gave me the
phone number for Nancy, one of our high school classmates who now lived in Kansas
City. Nancy was the girl who in high
school took me to a party where women were dancing with each other. At that time, I didn’t realize Nancy was into
girls, but later Carol revealed to me that she was.
Nancy invited me
to her house which she shared with two other women. As we were going down the stairs to the
basement, the Braniff flight attendant grabbed me and kissed me on the
lips. She then asked me if I had ever
done that before. When I told her I had
previously had a girlfriend, she immediately backed away and lost
interest. This was my first exposure to a
woman who enjoyed trying to bring out, or having brief encounters with, women who
they thought were straight. I no longer
qualified.
Back to
California
Not too long
after that, Nancy and one of her roommates told me about their plan to drive to
Los Angeles over a long weekend. I was
able to raise some cash for the flight back to Kansas City, and we all left
early on Friday. We drove Route 66
nonstop in a VW van. We rotated drivers
as one of us could sleep in the back of the van while another drove. At 7,000 feet above sea level, Flagstaff
lived up to its reputation as one of the snowiest cities in the United States
with a fluffy white display. Coming over the mountains and seeing the
lights of LA before dawn was amazing.
While visiting some friends of Nancy, I enjoyed watching the nude women
swimming in a backyard pool. At the home
of a gay couple, one of the men, who was the purchasing officer at his company,
told a chilling story about an IBM salesman who tried to blackmail him. If the gay man wouldn’t recommend IBM’s
products, the salesman threatened to tell his boss he was gay. Even though he refused to be blackmailed, it
was a cautionary tale. Could it happen
to me?
I was having a
good time. I was being exposed to more
gay people and events than I ever had in my life. The women all wanted to go to a particular
gay club Sunday night where the owner was a female drummer. I had planned on flying back to KC on Sunday
afternoon and, if I stayed in LA, I wouldn’t be able to go to work on
Monday. I couldn’t pass it up, so I stayed
to enjoy the club and drummer Sunday night, calling in sick Monday
morning. The owner was a cute butch who
was a very accomplished drummer.
Monday, I flew
back to Kansas City, my first ride on a jet plane. Previously I had only flown on propeller
airplanes. Until I learned not to eat the day of the flight, I always threw up
in the nice paper bags they provided in the seat backs. On the jet flight, the food smelled good; I
ate lunch and was amazed that I easily kept it down. There were samples of cigarettes on the food
tray.
My friends remained
in LA for a while before driving back. Eventually
they decided to leave KC and make LA their permanent home. I no longer wanted to live in California. I was learning so much at my job with IBM.
More Women to Meet
Back in Kansas
City, I was lonelier than ever. I visited
my German college friend, John and his wife.
Even though he had married, he still made passes at me. I kept up the friendship because I really
liked his wife. After they had a baby, I
lost interest. Babies? Ugh!
I spent some time
in my room reading the books I had acquired at KU. In the book Happy Birthday of Death by
Gregory Corso, I really liked the poem “Marriage.” I identified with the statement “How else to
feel other than I am” because it seemed to reflect my final acceptance of the
fact that it was women I loved, not men.
I tried to fight it for a year and a half, but then accepted that it was
women, not men, who I was able to care about romantically and enjoy
sexually. No more research was required
in that regard. In another part of the
poem, I substituted the word “relationship” for “marriage” in the lines “Ah,
yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible then marriage would
be possible.” This poem was written by a
man and not about gayness. However, I interpreted
the words in such a way as to give me validation and hope. I couldn’t possibly be alone in the
world. If I were here, then there was a
woman for me somewhere. I just had to
find her.
So, what else
could I do for companionship? Get a cat?
By the spring, I was getting desperate.
I turned to a different kind of research, from the previous “Am I gay?”
to “How do I find my Kansas City woman?”
I resorted to looking up clubs in the yellow pages and found an ad for a
drag club not far from where I lived on Troost Avenue, The Colony Bar (now torn
down and replaced by a condominium). It
took all my courage to walk in the front door by myself. Skip Arnold was the female impersonator. I will never forget the first time I saw him
pull down his top at the end of his performance to reveal his maleness. He was so convincing as a shapely female
singer that it was a real shock.
A young Skip Arnold
I saw a pleasant
looking woman sitting at the piano bar alone.
I went over and sat down next to her to have a drink. After striking up a conversation, I finally
realized “she” was a “he.” I then felt
out of my league, and hoped I hadn’t embarrassed her/him.
I was approached
by a friendly “for sure” female who invited me to join her and her
friends. Rita was a postal carrier. She told me about meeting the comedian Martha
Raye at the Colony Club. Many actors who
visited Kansas City in the summer to perform at the Starlight Theater visited
the club. Rita told me about other gay
bars in KC. The Rail Room across from
Union Station was primarily frequented by women. Pool tables and a bar were in the front,
booths and a large dance floor were in the back. On weekends the club was busy with both men
and women. If straight men entered the
front of the club, the news was passed back and we changed partners so that the
dance couples were all mixed male and female.
George’s bar was
south of town. This was not the actual
name of the club; rather, it was the owner’s name. During WWII, it was in an area replete with
military and defense establishments. The
building was pretty old, but George was friendly and the food was good. The gay women played pool with each other on
the one table up front. Occasionally
straight men wandered in and put down a quarter to play the winner. We could usually beat them and keep on playing. There was also a jukebox and large dance
floor in the back. It was kept busy on
the weekends when female bands were hired to attract the gay women.
It was at one of
these clubs that I met a woman with long blond hair who I called “Brenda Baby.” She was smart, going to school at KU with
plans to be a medical technologist. I
liked Brenda, but I was not attracted to her.
She was living in a motel that had been converted to apartments in
Lawrence, Kansas with a native American woman, Opal. Opal was the nurse at what was then called
Haskell Institute (now called Haskell Indian Nations University). She was a big strong woman who could win arm
wrestling contests with anyone, male or female.
Of course, I had to try … and lost.
I would drive to their apartment with a case of Champale, and we would
drink and party Saturday night away, always with a mixture of Indians and
whites. This continued until one night a
fight developed, probably between Opal and one of the men who made a pass at
Brenda. We ended up taking Brenda to the
emergency room with a cut on her face.
I Got Me One:
Kaye
During the summer
of 1963, about a year after I started work at IBM, Brenda introduced me to
Kaye, the first woman I partnered with for a few years. She was in veterinary school at Kansas State
University in Manhattan and working during the summer for a veterinary products
company in Kansas City. We spent a lot
of time with each other and started a physical relationship. We visited bars as a couple where Kaye liked
to play pool, dance the twist and sing along to the Peter, Paul and Mary song,
“If I Had a Hammer.” We had parties in
my apartment with some of the women we met for fun and games, like “Truth or
Dare” and “Spin the Bottle.” I was jealous
when I found Kaye in the kitchen making out with another woman. She didn’t seem to want a monogamous
relationship. Was this going to be the
story of my life? I made my presence
known, but since we weren’t actually living together, I didn’t challenge Kaye
about it.
I admired Kaye’s
initiative and ability to do things most women wouldn’t be interested in
doing. For example, she taught me that
we could make repairs to cars. She had a
Ford Falcon that needed a new engine.
With an ordinary set of tools, she was taking it apart while it sat in
the driveway of the house where she was renting a room for the summer. I enjoyed helping her work on the car. Her landlady finally objected (what must the
neighbors be thinking?), so we threw it back together. Kaye was able to drive the sputtering car to
the parking lot where she was working in order to finish the repairs.
Kaye had plans to
pick up a “friend” from Louisville, Kentucky and take her to Washington, DC. She asked me to come along. It was an uncomfortable trip for me. First there was the encounter with her upper
middle class Southern parents. They were
very proper, not like my parents, so I used my case of poison ivy to excuse
myself from going to the Country Club for dinner. Next, I found out that Kaye’s friend was
something more than just a friend, having previously been in a relationship
with Kaye. She acted as if she still were,
and Kaye asked me not to reveal our relationship.
Kaye drove the
three of us down the hilly, windy roads to southern Kentucky so that we could
take the scenic route back north to DC through the Smokies. She got two rooms in a motel, one for me and
one for her and her friend. She would
visit me with kisses and then go back to keep her friend “company.” Kaye must have needed liquid courage as she
navigated the situation. Since we were
in a dry Kentucky county, Kaye got the phone number of the local bootlegger at
a gas station, ordered a bottle of Kentucky whiskey and had it delivered to our
motel.
Finally, we
dropped off Kaye’s friend in DC, and visited some of her other lesbian
friends. That was the last I heard about
her friend. Kaye’s friends took us to a
lesbian bar in Baltimore called Snug Harbor or Snug’s. We had a good time dancing and playing pool
before starting the drive back west the next day.
Kaye returned to
school, I visited her a few times, and thought there could be a future with
her. If I had more experience, I would
have looked at how I had been jealous of her in my KC apartment, how she
treated a woman with whom she had previously been in a relationship, and would
have realized that it wouldn’t work out for us in the long run. However, with Kaye’s encouragement and my
naivete, I decided to find a way to join her in Manhattan, Kansas.
The Reasons We Do What We Do
I had not considered getting an advanced
degree before this. I didn’t know anyone
in my family with one. First, I had to
decide in which department I wanted to apply for graduate school at Kansas
State where Kaye was studying. Which
department could offer me an assistantship? With my undergraduate double majors in both Mathematics
and Sociology, there were many possibilities.
What was the major that had helped me get my job at IBM? It wasn’t difficult to decide on mathematics,
especially when I discovered that the person in charge of the academic
computing facility was on the mathematics department faculty.
I applied for a leave of absence from IBM
and for a graduate assistantship in the Math department. I told IBM that I
wanted the graduate degree in math in order to move toward the technical rather
than the business applications of computers. I didn’t mention wanting to join my
girlfriend. This early in the history of
computers, there were no computer science departments in Kansas. Because of my background with IBM, Dr.
Parker, the professor in charge of the academic computing facility, wanted me
to be his student. Both applications were
successful, and I made my way to Manhattan, Kansas to start the spring semester
of 1964. With the assistantship and
sharing rent, I needed no further financial assistance.
Manhattan is very different from Lawrence, Kansas. Lawrence is less than a one-hour drive from Kansas City, whereas Manhattan is almost a two-hour drive. Lawrence is on a hill, while Manhattan is flat and in a rural area of the state. Particularly in the winter, the landscape driving from Topeka to Manhattan resembles the surface of the moon, really bleak. Kansas State is a Land Grant rather than a Liberal Arts & Sciences University, and, in my experience, there is a greater emphasis on the practical aspects of topics rather than the theoretical, even in mathematics. That suited me fine.
I was assigned two tasks by my advisor: teaching students and consulting with faculty. I learned FORTRAN, my first high-level programming language, so that I could teach it. Of course, in the process of teaching it, I also learned it well. The elocution lessons I had taken as a young girl were good training for standing in front of a classroom and speaking to my student audience. I ran the FORTRAN programs for the students and faculty on the IBM 1410 located in the campus computing facility. I also had shifts operating the computer and its tape drives. I worked with faculty members who needed help with a research question that required a FORTRAN program be written to perform calculations on their data. Here is an example of a FORTRAN program, and a picture of a woman sitting at the controls of an IBM 1410 computing system.
FORTRAN language
programming
example.
This was my first experience as a
consultant. I enjoyed the process of
working together with the faculty members to clearly define the steps necessary
for their computer programs: input,
processing, and output. The inputs were
the data or variables that were measured, the processing was the calculations
to be performed on these variables, and the outputs were the results to be
printed. I had the patience for the
detailed work required, and it proved to be valuable experience for my future
career. My adviser told me that some of
the faculty had been difficult for him or other students to work with, but I
had no problems with any of them. I
guess I expected academics or scientists to be eccentric, and I just looked
past the differences and focused on the problem we were working on instead of
the personality. Above all, I was a
problem solver.
I completed the class work for my Master’s
degree in three semesters of mathematics courses along with two courses in
statistics, my minor. I studied
diligently. For each course, I kept one binder
for lecture notes and another for homework assignments. I did not always deeply understand the
theoretical portions of the subjects, but was able to memorize the material for
the written tests. The statistics
classes were about the Theory of Statistics and did not stimulate my interest in
the subject. My studying was helped by
living with two women who were also working on very demanding degrees,
veterinary medicine and doctorate in microbiology, so all three of us spent
most of our time studying.
Before I could be granted the Master’s
degree, I was required to complete a report and take an oral exam. Since I worked in the summer between
semesters and started full-time work immediately after the final semester, I
did not complete the report and get the degree for several years. Every Christmas my professor sent me a card
and encouraged me to do that.
Life
With Kaye in Manhattan
During the fall
before I moved to Manhattan, I visited Kaye and met her roommate, Marie. Although I was never sure whether Kaye and
Marie had ever had a physical relationship when they had attended a Catholic women’s
college in St. Louis, Kaye did share a bed with her in Manhattan. It became clear to me that Kaye would have
enjoyed a physical relationship with Marie, however, Marie was devoutly
Catholic and not having anything to do with that. Whenever I visited, Marie would use the bunk
bed in the back room, and I would take her place in the bed with Kaye. After I started graduate school, Marie moved
to the back room permanently. She didn’t
seem to mind me being there.
Our apartment was
located in an older house close to campus that had been converted to several
apartments (and since torn down for a parking lot). I got a lesson about what I could tolerate
soon after moving in. Kaye had two dogs,
a big cocker spaniel named Fofo and a long-hair dachshund. It was hard to keep them free of ticks. Until we had a weekend where all the tenants
in our house could arrange to be out of their apartments in order to set an
insecticide bomb, the ticks infested everything, sofa, chairs, bedding. During the night, I could feel them crawling
on my skin; I would wake up in the morning and go into the bathroom to examine
my body and remove any ticks I found. I
thought there were some things that were so disgusting that I couldn’t do them,
and then amazingly I discovered I could.
There were some
incidents in 1964 worth mentioning. We
always watched “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Sunday nights and on Feb. 9 The
Beatles appeared for the first time in the U.S.
I turned 21 in 1961, so in November 1964 I could vote for President. Kaye was from Louisville, Kentucky, and
politically conservative. Like most
Kansans, I was raised in a conservative Republican family. It was easy to follow Kaye’s lead and vote
for Barry Goldwater, instead of Lyndon Johnson.
Goldwater lost.
Kaye, Marie and I
welcomed the new year of 1965 in our apartment by having a few drinks on New
Year’s Eve. Kaye fell asleep, and I was
amazed when Marie made a pass at me. I
did not respond. After Kaye woke up and
we all headed to bed, I told her about Marie’s pass. I thought she would be upset with Marie. Instead, she just went into Marie’s room to
see whether Marie would also make a pass at her, something Kaye had wanted for
years. I don’t think she was successful.
We did take time
to have some fun. Kaye loved target
practice and fishing. We would take the
dogs out in the country and practice shooting her revolver. When I was younger, I had target practice
with rifles at summer camp.
The dam for
Tuttle Creek Lake (affectionately called Tuttle Puddle) near Manhattan was
finished in July 1962, and the lake was in the process of filling up. In the Spring, we went to a small stream
flowing into the lake and fished for crappie using our bamboo poles. When the fish were spawning, Kaye and I
didn’t even need to bait our hooks to catch one. Pan-fried crappies are so tasty.
Kaye and I did
take a couple of trips over school breaks.
We didn’t have much money, so our accommodations were quite rustic. We camped on our trip to the Grand Canyon. We laid our sleeping bags on cots under a
tarp which had one end tied to the open trunk of the car and the other staked
to the ground. We cooked breakfast on a propane stove and made sandwiches for
our other meals. Kaye’s revolver, which
we both knew how to use now, gave us a sense of safety. We often heard animal noises in the
night. We stayed one night on an Indian
reservation, and in the light of the next morning realized we had camped near a
horse’s carcass. We were so tired and
dirty that by the time we got to the North rim of the Grand Canyon, instead of
rushing to see the canyon, we got a cabin so we could take a shower.
On the way back
to school, we stopped at an Indian reservation in Arizona for a rodeo. I was amazed at how the Indians formed a long
line at one of the entry points instead of spreading out to use one of the
other available entries. It made me
wonder why. Was that an entry point
where they could get a free ticket, whereas we needed to use one where we paid? But they just waved us through. Had the Indians been conditioned to wait for
things in long lines, like they had been mistreated in other ways? I never knew the answer.
Another time,
Kaye wanted to attend a big rodeo in Ft. Worth, Texas and to visit a Catholic
priest who was her friend when she was in school in St. Louis. He had no problem with her being a
lesbian. She called him at the monastery
where he was living, and he asked her to stop by and see him. As per his instructions, we entered the
monastery through the kitchen. I had
never met a Catholic priest. He came to
the door with a grin on his face and introduced us to the kitchen staff as Mr.
and Mrs. Smith (Kaye’s last name). I was
amazed. Not knowing my name, was it his
way of introducing us as a couple?
A
Summer Interlude
The summer before our last year at Kansas State, Kaye and I rented a house in Kansas City near Loose Park. The park was a great place to take the dogs. Kaye would let them off their leases and they chased the ducks on the pond.
We went to the
bars a lot to play pool, drink and dance.
Before the bar closed, we would learn the address of the
post-party. Lots of us would go there
and continue to listen to music and have fun.
One time we were given an address south of the Country Club Plaza on
Ward Parkway. Kaye and I entered the
house where there were already other women, but there was no furniture and the
cupboards were bare. When the police
showed up, we all tried to hide. Kaye
and I chose to stand behind the drapes that were still on the dining room
windows. The police were so busy
escorting the other party goers from the house that they failed to notice our
shoes peeking out from the bottom of the curtains. After everyone was gone, we let ourselves
out.
Kaye worked for
the same company as she had the previous summer. I had a very interesting but demanding summer
job that IBM had arranged for me with one of their customers. At the time, Kansas City had a vibrant downtown
garment district. The customer had
purchased one of the new 1440 computers along with a software package for
garment manufacturers. Each customer had
to customize the software for their own needs, and that was my summer
task.
The programming
was in the Autocoder language, and it was a “buggy” process which required a
lot of testing. At first, the customer
didn’t have their own computer, so I had to reserve time on other customer’s
machines, and that time would often be late at night, when it wasn’t being
used. I would have to enter a building
and find my way through the dark interiors to the machine room. The largest was the old Sears mail order and
warehouse building built in 1925 at the southwest corner of 15th Street (now
Truman Road) and Cleveland Avenue. I would run my programs with test data,
discover errors, correct them, and keep going until there were no errors. It was a long, difficult process, but I
enjoyed it. I felt a great sense of
accomplishment when the programs finally worked correctly.
Between work and
play, I burnt the candle at both ends and ended up anemic, needing a vitamin
shot and received my first diagnosis of Meniere's disease with tinnitus. I learned that if I wanted to do my job well
and stay healthy, I needed to tone down my social life. I met a friend of Kaye’s from St. Louis when
she visited us in Kansas City. Barb was
originally from Wichita. When we were both home for the holidays, we connected
there.
Back
to Kansas City and IBM
In July 1965, after
I finished my course work and Kaye received her DVM (Doctor of Veterinary
Medicine) degree, we rented a house in Raytown, Missouri. We moved there with Kaye’s two dogs and my
beautiful calico cat that I named Tornado since her early behavior reminded me
of a Kansas tornado. Kaye was working
for an established veterinarian in Independence. One weekend she took me to see where she
worked. The business wasn’t usually open
on weekends, but while she was showing me around, there was a knock on the
door. Kaye opened it to find a woman
with a beautiful brown Doberman Pinscher.
The dog had danced around in some broken glass, and its feet were
bleeding badly. Kaye needed someone to
hold the dog while she stitched them up and thought I could do it. She was a very take-charge woman.
Doberman Pinscher
The dog’s owner
was still there, and I’m sure she wondered who I was. Kaye instructed me to put pressure on a blood
vessel while she stitched it shut. It
didn’t take too long for me to faint and fall flat on my face. When I was younger, I had earned the nickname
with my Camp Fire Girls troop of “She Who Faints at the Sight of Blood.” I hit the edge of the table on the way down, earning
a cut above my upper lip. Kaye walked
around the table, quickly dragged me by my feet into an adjacent restroom and
shut the door. I’m sure the dog’s owner
was astounded.
Kaye quickly returned to the dog, did some quick stitching, put the dog in a cage and ushered the owner out. She then went to the bathroom where I had my own bleeding cut. Before she could tend to that, we went back to the cage to check the dog. Both wounds, mine and the dog’s, were still seeping blood, but the dog came first. Kaye had to do a better job on the dog.
Here is how I
helped the second time so I wouldn’t faint again. I stood with my back to the table, Kaye
placed my hand which was behind my back where she needed it, and I applied the
pressure as she instructed. She could
now work at her own pace and did a good job of treating the dog. Since I couldn’t see the blood, I didn’t
faint. Afterwards, I bandaged the cut
above my upper lip, which left me with a scar I had for many years.
After returning to IBM in 1965, I was assigned to the education department which held classes for customers. First, I was sent to St. Louis for training on the 3rd generation of computers, the IBM 360 series that was starting to be marketed to business customers. I came back to Kansas City and taught a class in RPG (Report Program Generator).
One of the
attendees, Pat, seemed to take an interest in me, and I responded by giving her
some individual attention in the classroom.
I began to suspect that she was a lesbian. After the last class, I asked her if she
would like to go out for a drink. She
accepted the invitation. We went to the
Rail Room where all was revealed. It
turned out that she had been in a relationship with another woman, but was now
living by herself. My new “gaydar” was
working.
I
Make a Mistake
Kaye was very
busy with her new job and my relationship with her had been suffering. She was almost five years older than me and
wanted to be in control of everything, including in the bedroom. She also had started calling me “junior
butch” which I didn’t understand completely but felt like it was a put
down. I ended up secretly having an
affair with Pat. Like Karen and I had,
Kaye and I made love with our hands.
However, Pat was different, wanting me to stimulate her genitalia with
my tongue and lips which I later learned is called cunnilingus. It was messy, and I didn’t particularly enjoy
doing it, but it was what she liked.
Kaye and I started including Pat on our visits to Georges or the Rail
Room. Pat repeatedly asked me if I was
sure that I had problems with Kaye, which I affirmed.
Soon, I decided
that I did not want to leave Kaye and pursue a relationship with Pat. I was asked by my boss if I would like to
attend a two-week technical computing class in San Jose, California. The class sounded very interesting, and I
thought attending it would provide the distance I needed to get Pat completely
out of my system. It seemed like there
was always more than one purpose behind what I did while at IBM.
I went to
California where, of course, I was the only female in the large class. We were presented with a variety of problems
then tasked to write a Fortran program to solve them. My experience teaching Fortran really came in
handy. A miracle happened. Every one of my programs worked correctly the
first time. At the conclusion of the
class, they had a farewell dinner and ceremony and I was presented with a small
trophy, a “HERO” AWARD, which I keep to this day and look at with pride. My classmates were very competitive and
unfriendly except for one young man who liked to hang out with me at the motel
where they housed us in Los Gatos. When
I told Kaye about him, I could tell it made her jealous even though there was
no hanky-panky. I just appreciated one friendly person. Kaye knew I had once been with a man, and
wrongly believed I was with this one.
Half way through
the class, Kaye flew out for a visit. I
drove my rental car to pick her up at the LA airport and then to stay at
Nancy’s house, my softball friend from Wichita who was now living in LA. I knew something was different about Kaye’s
love-making, and I was troubled. I
should have acknowledged to myself that it was the way that Pat liked it, but
my conscious self just wouldn’t go there.
When I returned
to Kansas City, Pat and Kaye picked me up at the downtown airport (MCI had not
been built) and we stopped at the Rail Room.
They sat together in a booth with me alone on the opposite side. That made things clear. I was very upset, particularly when Pat
danced with me, running her hands up and down my back and smiling at me in a
very suggestive way. I told her to stop
because I wasn’t interested, but she just smiled, seeming amused.
We all went back
to the house in Raytown. Kaye and Pat slept
together on the pull-out sofa in the living room. I curled up in a ball on our bedroom closet
floor. I woke up in the middle of the
night, got a pitcher of water and poured it over them. If they didn’t know it before, they knew then
how upset I was. I had never experienced
such deception and rejection by two people at the same time, my partner and
ex-lover.
The following
weeks were very difficult. I went back
to work at IBM. Kaye started living at
Pat’s house, but kept vacillating between the two of us, saying she had not
made up her mind about which of us she would choose to stay with. She would visit and make love to me, and then
go to Pat’s to spend the night and make love to her. It made no difference when I told Kaye that
Pat had an affair with me before her. I
decided to force the choice by agreeing to a new assignment. A New York IBM facility requested that
someone from our Education Department be sent in January to work on documenting
the performance specifications for their new disk drive.
Before I left for
New York, I spent Christmas at home in Wichita.
Kaye’s friend, Barb, was also in town to visit her family. She contacted me and asked me to meet her at
the gay bar I had driven by while in high school called “Chances R.”
Here is a bit of
history about this bar. While visiting
my friend Carol in Wichita in 1962, I had met the beat poet Charlie
Plymell. A couple of months after my
visit with Barb, Charlie took Alan Ginsberg to this bar, and Alan later wrote a
poem named after the bar (dated 2/66).
I never did learn
how to deal with lesbians who were very persistent about making passes at
me. As we sat at the bar, Barbara kept
rubbing her legs up and down mine. When
we danced, she would hold me very close and suggestively move her body against
me; I did not like or enjoy it. However,
she kept making verbal suggestions. My
self-confidence was very low anyway because of Kaye’s rejection, so I finally
agreed to go to a motel in town where she made love to me. I didn’t enjoy it at all, but I assume she
was able to add me to the notches on her bedpost. She then proceeded to give a lecture about
sexual techniques, recommending use of a dildo saying that was her usual
method.
I thought back to
when I was at KU and wondered how women made love, and now I was told within a
short period of time about a variety of ways.
Were there more ways in my future?
I had not seriously considered the dildo method as I thought of it as an
artificial penis, and that idea did not interest me. Of course, Barb soon bragged to Kaye about
her conquest, driving the final wedge in our partnership.
The
Last Chapter With IBM and Kaye
In January 1966 I
drove to the Hudson River IBM location with my winter clothes, ironing board
and cat, Tornado, standing guard at the back windshield, growling at all
approaching cars. IBM had arranged to
rent a modular home for my stay that was very clean and modern. The work at the Kingston location didn’t pan
out well, and the news at home from Kaye was also not good. At work, every time I went to my boss’s
office to talk about my assignment, the one other woman on our team was sitting
close to him laughing at his jokes. That
was her way of doing her assignment.
Meanwhile, the computer technicians kept telling me that they really
didn’t have good data for me and otherwise avoided answering my questions. I was disgusted with the assignment, my boss,
IBM, and the general uncertainty about my life.
I just loaded up my car and drove away, not checking in with the IBM
people either in New York or Kansas City.
My days at IBM
were over, and I didn’t care. By the
time I got home I had a cold, was depressed and responded to the knock on the
door, by getting up from the living room sofa in my pajamas and robe. Since I hadn’t gone into work, my KC boss
came to me. We agreed I could just
resign with some severance pay.
I felt that I
needed help, so I made an appointment with a psychiatrist. He started our sessions by exploring my
relationship with my parents, a very Freudian approach. He urged me to try to understand their
behavior by exploring their backgrounds and limitations. I got to the point where I could forgive both
my mother and father for not loving me unconditionally, which is what every
child innocently desires. I learned that
people showed love in different ways and to look for the particular way they
expressed it. I think that some of the
most beneficial things I have ever done in my life were to learn how to accept
the limitations of others, to forgive myself and others, and to then go on with
life.
However, the
psychiatrist then started on my homosexuality.
It became obvious that he practiced in accordance with the current
professional guidelines as outlined in the DSM.
The final straw occurred when he asked me why the panty hose on one of
my legs was always tighter than it was on the other leg. I immediately flushed, thinking he was
implying that I wore a dildo or sock in my crotch that caused the imbalance, as
if I ever wanted to have a penis. I stopped
my appointments with him.
It was too bad
that instead of treating me as a sick pervert, he didn’t explore my former relationships
so that I might have learned something about how they went wrong. I was never taught what to look for in a
partner and how to evaluate the woman I was considering for a relationship. It
took a lot of mistakes and years for me to figure some of that out. Perhaps the fact that homosexuals were not
allowed to marry led to the assumption that our relationships were transitory
and not meant to last. Many of us have suffered
from the homophobia of others and have even internalized some of it within
ourselves.
I was relieved
when Kaye finally made up her mind and left with her new partner, Pat, for a
job in St. Louis. The distance, as well
as my new found ability to accept and forgive, allowed us to later reconnect as
friends. First, I indulged myself with
some self-pity, did some constructive introspection, and then I was ready to
pull up my socks and get back in the game of life.
