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After living through three winters in St. Louis, I fled south to Rollins College in Florida. Rollins had a term in France, and I attended the University of Grenoble. After graduation, I was part of my college roommate's wedding in New York. On an impulse, I applied for a job in Manhattan, got it and became an Assistant Buyer of ready-to-wear at B. Altman & Company, Fifth Avenue. For four years, I loved New York and my job, but I finally realized that all my earnings were spent on rent and that retailing had become less than soul-satisfying. My parents had moved from St. Louis to Chicago. They encouraged me to try Chicago for a while and the "while" has lasted 42 years. Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty had just been launched nationally. Chicago had seven Urban Progress Centers (UPCs). I was hired for a UPC in Pilsen, an area heavily Hispanic and black, as an Urban Life Advisor in charge of a team of 12 Community Representatives. I also went back to school. Mornings I studied at Northwestern University, to earn a master's in sociology and worked a night shift at the UPC. Then Martin Luther King was assassinated. Roosevelt Road, part of our UPC area, burned. Mobs headed for our Center to burn it too, but swerved west (for an interesting reason I'd share at the reunion.) The Center was saved, but I felt schizophrenic driving each morning to the ivy-covered halls of Northwestern, then spending the rest of the day on the angry streets of Chicago. Macro-concepts weren't helping make sense of it. I dropped out of sociology. At work, I got promoted to Program Planner. I wrote proposals for federal funding. I was assigned to write one aimed at preventing early teen girls from dropping out of school, a very serious problem in Pilsen. All previous proposals had been written for boys, so, as a budding feminist, I was delighted with the assignment and spent several months interviewing girls to determine what they needed to stay in school. They told me their sole goal in life was to get married. I wrote a proposal dealing with career alternatives to early marriage. Washington funded it. It came back to Chicago with one word changed --- "girls" had become "boys." I resigned in disgust. |