B'More Specific

Interview with my Mom for my Feminsim and Civil RIghts class about growing up in the 60s in Baltimore, MD and the U.S. in general.

I was born and raised in Baltimore Maryland and I lived in Baltimore, Maryland during the sixties. Maryland was a split state: northern, southern. But certainly in terms of sociology it was very much a southern state. I did travel north to Toronto, Canada, which was fully integrated, very cosmopolitan, and very diverse. And I never saw anything like I saw at home.

My mother was first a stay at home mother and then she became a secretary, which she did until she retired. My father sold furniture in furniture stores and then he sold things on a weekly payment system to poor people in the city.

I was a student in the nineteen sixties. I went to all public schools through high school. My parents lived it in the best part of the Baltimore County. I went to the best schools in Baltimore County, and they were very high ranked at that time. For college, I went to the University of Maryland part of the time, and I went to Towson State University, which was a private college, part of the time.

I remember that Baltimore was not integrated. Some examples: there was a place called Gwyn Oak Park (that was the place that Hairspray based the amusement park on) and that was not integrated. It did have Negro Day. In those times, Negro was the correct terminology. I'd never met any middle class blacks until I came to Washington, D.C. in 1984, and I saw my first middle class blacks. In fact, I never saw any blacks until I came to high school. I lived in a very white, Jewish community, and the only black people I ever saw were maids and elevator operators.

My mother was a stay at home a mother until I was ten. My mother greatly, and my father to a lesser extent, made it very clear that I was going to go to college, that I would not get married until after college, and that I was going to support myself and never need someone to support me. So that's why I went to nursing school. So I could take care of myself. My sister went to college to become a teacher. Both were traditional female roles, but we could support ourselves, and that was very, very important.

It turns out that I had wanted to be a nurse since I was a tiny, little kid, so it was perfect. On a nurse's salary, I couldn't support myself in a high style, but I could support myself. When I got to college, and when I got into actual nursing, I did want to go back to school and become a doctor, but issues of money and how I would support myself going back to school at a time when my parents would no longer support me were issues. As a matter of fact, when I got married, I asked my father-in-law if he would pay for me to go to medical school in exchange for a percentage of my future earnings. He turned me down, and I was really kind of disappointed because I was certainly smart enough, but he was the only person I knew that had any money.

I think there were still jobs that were classified as female. Women were just beginning to branch out into fields, untraditional women's fields, so I do think gender definitely played a part in the jobs that I looked to. Race played a tremendous part. Since I was white, there was nothing I couldn't do in a city like Baltimore. I have to tell you that being Jewish in a large protective Jewish community was very important and made me very safe from some of the outside influences.

I absolutely did not have friends of different races or classes. I didn't know anybody who didn't live in my neighborhood. They were all the same class. The big thing was that, maybe, they were a different religion, which was a big enough deal to them.

My synagogue was not integrated. It was Russian Orthodox. Women had very set rules: things they could do and things they could not do. And although I didn't go along with some of the practices like covering my hair, and not working on the Sabbath, I had a grandmother who made sure that I grew up truly, truly informed about what it was to be an Orthodox Jew. She never criticized to me for not being Orthodox, but she made sure I knew what it was to be. There were never any black people in the synagogue and the social activities that that I did were at the JCC and there were Jewish youth groups.

I remember Little Rock High School with vivid detail. I saw it on television. I don't remember what the details, but President Eisenhower said that he would federalize the Arkansas National Guard if they didn’t move out of the way and let these kids in. He sent the 101st Airborne down to Arkansas and did federalize the National Guard. I remember pictures of these kids sitting on this bus endlessly waiting to get in. I remember white people standing there, screaming obscenities and I thought, "these poor hapless children. They’re children!" I think the whole nation held its breath waiting to see if the governor of Arkansas would back down, which he did with great reluctance, and the children went to school. It was literally the National Guard marching up to the front of the school. It was that close. I found a terrifying because how would you kill over little kids going to school. And I remember the faces of the white people being so ugly, and I couldn't understand why they were so ugly.

The Montgomery bus boycott I do remember. Mrs. Rosa Parks. I remember thinking how far those people walked because it took over a year to be resolved or something. It was a long time. I thought how brave and courageous they were. I thought it was truly neat.

I remember Emmett Till's murder because the police did a lousy job. Even as a kid I could see the police did a lousy job on the investigation, and I thought that wasn't right. They needed to do a good job like they would do for anybody else. There were pictures of his battered, bloody body in all the newspapers, which was just heart wrenching.

I remember the Greensboro lunch counters. I remember pictures of people sitting there and being ignored. Lots of nasty state and local police were buzzing around.

And I also remember, and I don't know what incident it was, it was probably one of the Marches in Selma, Alabama. My future rabbi went to take part. A lot of the Jewish rabbis were sympathetic to the blacks, and they knew they were going to call out the dogs and the fire hoses. Fortunately the president of the temple knew some people in government, and he called frantically to make sure that his rabbi wasn't going to be killed or bitten to death by these ferocious dogs. Jewish leadership was very much involved in supporting the blacks' rights.

I do remember integration in my high school. It was much quieter and less exciting than anything that had been in the newspapers. It was the late 60s, and the black power movement was coming because people had sort of lost hope in doctor King, or lost faith. The black students, Stokely Carmichael, and his radicals were shooting and burning, which was really creepy, although not Baltimore, I think they were in Chicago. The thing about my school that most impressed me was that the Jewish, white kids were in the college prep courses. So again I was sort of isolated with the Jewish, white kids. And that's all I really knew. We had what's not fondly referred to as rednecks in our school, and they hated the Jews and the blacks. They were all in the secretarial classes because they were going to be secretaries. Some of them were getting married in high school, some of them were pregnant, which was absolutely a mystery to me. Why would anybody get married or get pregnant in high school? And at that time if you were pregnant, they didn't want you in school. They provided tutors at home. I remember the black kids used to link arms and walk eight across the hall so that nobody else could get by, as their statement. We also had an anti-Vietnam rally in front of the flagpole for one period. It was really an interesting time because young people were really into changing the world. Boycotts and rallies were what they saw the grownups do and so that's what they did.

During my first year of college, I accidentally ran into the National Organization of Women, which at that time was extremely radical. They had meetings during lunch period at college, so I used to sit in on them because they were interesting. One of the fights they had, and I thought this was so ridiculous, was they were getting a busload together for a pro-abortion rally in Washington, and they were arguing about whether men could go on the bus and support abortion. And I don't know how they ended the decision.

There was a black student union. They we're kind of starting when I was in college, but I was sort of oblivious to all that because I needed to get through school. Did not join any groups, I just sat in on the National Organization of Women and when they got to the part about if they were going to let men supports abortion, I thought, "You know ladies, you need every bit of support that you can possibly get. This is too ridiculous." And I didn't go back.

I was more familiar with Leave it to Beaver although I did see Father Knows Best. My impression of June Cleaver is that she wore these stunning silk party dresses and four inch high heels to supposedly clean the house. All she did was make meals and go to PTA meetings. And that her life was nothing like my life. It was so upper class. My mother wore plain suits to work or pants and a top. We got our own breakfast because everybody had to be someplace, started school at a different time, or had to go to work. It was never as orderly and gracious as Leave it to Beaver and certainly my parents were never as involved in my life and my friends as Beaver’s parents.

I listened to the music of the sixties: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, bubble gum, and psychedelic. I didn't like the way weird psychedelic stuff. Did my parents approve? I know they let me watch the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. I sat there and screamed the whole time. And my father just shook his head like "Oh god." They didn't object, but I didn't buy 10,000 albums. I bought a few. And I didn't listen to them blaring. I went to one concert: The Beach Boys and Chicago. People were passing joints, discussing if you've passed it to the right it was selling it, and if you pass it back to the left it was sharing and it didn't count. I also went to see Chuck Berry. He was very funny. And had great songs. It was like an all white crowd for a black performer. I do know that certainly on A.M. radio the black stations were separate from the white stations and there were very few crossover groups. If you were black you played on the black station, and hit on the black charts. It wasn't until Motown in the late 60s/early 70s that black music became mainstream American music.

JFK was assassinated at like 1:30 (EST) in the afternoon. It was a Thursday. Everybody just sort of went limp and dark. I went to my friend Terry Keynes house and all they did was show that and I remember saying to her, " does this mean that they're not going to have Doctor Kildare tonight?" which was our favorite show. The nation mourned. There was a palpable pain, a national pain because John Kennedy was truly the heart of America, the man that was going to make everything right. And there were lots of issues, not just racism, but we had Communism, we had the Cold War, we had the Russians loading missiles in Cuba 90 miles away from Key West. There were lots of problems. And JFK just seemed like he was going to be the one to make it all right thing and here he was gone. And then people argued about it, whether it was a conspiracy where the shots came from. There were mafia series, there were Russian theories, KGB theories, and there were Castro theories. And I thought it was really unfair that the guy who shot him was shot to death three days later. And so we never did find out and people still speculate on how JFK died. I wished really and truly a painful, because he died on a Thursday and was buried on a Monday and I mean it was agonizing. I mean the nation was an agony.

I do remember the assassination of Martin Luther King. Again it was like why. And then the rioting started. There were riots in Baltimore city. Baltimore was under military guard. We had dawn to dusk curfews imposed on us. A lot of my older friends missed their junior and senior proms because they were downtown and no one could go downtown in the evenings. What personally I most remember about the riots following Martin Luther King’s death was that my great uncle Benny had been a grocer in one of the older black neighborhoods for 30 years. He always gave credit to people. If you didn't have money, you didn't leave without food. You just paid him when you could. And he lived above his grocery store. His grocery store and his house were burned. They lost everything. And I felt so sorry for him. There were a lot of small Jewish grocery stores in inner city that had never turned anybody away. I knew they didn't. My grandmother had a grocery store, and she never turned anybody away. They gave people credit. And to have people turn around that you think would have a little compassion for you because you helped them out when they were in trouble, burn and destroy everything. That was very painful. I don't know that I understood. I understood the blacks' pain, but as a person who had relatives who had worked in inner city and given in the inner city for years. I found that so disheartening. And then there was the looting, which was totally unnecessary as I was concerned. We lived about a mile from one of the first malls that was ever built. And it was filled with tanks. We were kind of on the edge of the city line, just over the county there were tanks, and I was terrified. My grandfather in Toronto saw the evening news and saw the video from the nights because it went on for several nights, and he was so terrified that he wanted to come down and take my sister and I back to Toronto until it was all over. They got the worst of the worst on television, and it left a big gaping hole in Baltimore. It wasn't the white shopkeepers that suffered so much as the poor black people who had nowhere to go food shopping. I noticed that my house insurance reads not applicable in case of riots. So I don't know that anybody’s insurance paid them anything because these were civil riots. So even if you had insurance, I don't think you got any money. You were basically left with nothing. And I thought that was very sad of because the police can only defend so much. And the Maryland National Guard was called in. My uncle was in the Maryland National Guard. He was scared. He didn't want to go and face down somebody with a club and burning things and have to shoot someone. So it was all very terrifying and saddening. It just made doctor King's death that much sadder because there was so much destruction that went on afterwards. It seemed like it took a week for the rioting to stop.

My uncle, because he was in law school, and because my grandmother knew people, got seven years in the National Guard instead of going into the Vietnam lottery. It was an inconvenience. He was far luckier than the guys who didn't have mothers who could pull a few strings. I remember very much believing in the war, and I think the way the news was edited it always looked like we were just a step away from winning. And then when I finally found out that the United States and the south Vietnamese were not justified in the north Vietnamese, but the Cambodians, the Laotians, communist red China, Russia, and that we weren't allowed to cross over any borders to get them, they could retreat into their country and be safe. It became very disheartening. We lost like 50 or 60,000 people there. And today I think 1/3 of the urban street people are Vietnam survivors, who obviously have serious mental issues. I knew people afterwards who had started taking drugs during their tours in Vietnam and afterwards because the pain was so great. It took us forever to negotiate a settlement. I remember that Secretary Henry Kissinger was appointed by Nixon, and his big thing was to stop the war. First they had an argument about whether the table should be octagonal or rectangular and who was going to sit at it. And I remember a very poignant letter to the editor of Time magazine saying that they have had a big old oak table in their house where a lot of family discussions had taken place, and that he would be very willing to donate the table if they would just please sit down and figure out how to get this over with. And Miss Saigon, that's true. People were throwing their babies over the fence of the U.S. compound where they were loading the last helicopter with people to fly to safety. People who had worked for the U.S. got left behind and lovers of U.S. people who were stationed there got left behind. It was extraordinarily painful. And the Vietnamese babies who were half Vietnamese and half American were the lowest of the low. People hated them. And you could clearly see their features as being part American. They hated them, so there was no life for those kids in the new Vietnam. And I remember thinking, “These poor innocent children.” They had nothing. They had absolutely nothing. And Vietnam was still in turmoil even after the war ended. After the prisoners of war returned, they return to Edwards Air Force Base in California at 3:00 AM. So I sat up to watch and wait. First they had been evacuated to the big medical base in Germany for their initial treatment and debriefings. And I remember all the dignitaries lined up at 3:00 in the morning on the runway to greet them. And all these families were clutching the fence, trying to get in to see people they hadn't seen for years. And I thought, "What are these dignitaries there for except for their selfish photo-ops. These people want to see their families." And they wouldn't take the families to Germany to see their loved ones, as they sometimes do now, but they didn't do that then. And then I remember Richard Nixon gave a black tie dinner with the POWs at the White House. And I thought it was like so bizarre, I mean here are these people who have been locked in cages for years with horror stories beyond horror to tell, and they are at black tie party. It was like such a big thing. Was that going to solve anything? But they did get their black tie party. Henry Kissinger was hailed as a hero, which I think he was. I mean he worked really, really hard. Richard Nixon didn’t get much of the credit. He didn’t deserve much of the credit. Henry did the work. And then the POWs came back to their families that they’d been gone from for 4, 5, 6 years, and the wives had learned to manage on their own. I mean they had to, what could they do? And, you know, their kids were strangers to them. They didn’t really have a place in the family. The military wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. Some of them were ill and wounded and needed lots of treatment. And I guess one of the most famous POWs is Senator John McCain. I remember him coming off the airplane and his legs were ruined, and I don’t, to this day, know how he walks. Still today there’s arguments over whose names belong on the Vietnam memorial because they only wanted to count the people who actually died there in Vietnam. And other people said that people came home and committed suicide, people came home and died of their wounds, people had drug and alcohol related car accidents to get away from the pain, and that they too should be included. So there was a whole big fuss over who should get their name on the wall. I thought that was a little strange. And I remember one kid in high school who married a Vietnamese girl and brought her back. And his former girlfriend took a knife to her. And I didn’t know how these women were going to live in a country that had very mixed feelings about them. The military tried very hard to dissuade people from bringing wives home, but some people wanted their wives to come home with them. And to not speak the language, to have people hate you. And who knows what these guys that were eighteen were going to feel like in five or ten years, and you’d be left alone in a country with a couple of kids and have no support.

And the pain from Vietnam doesn’t go away. The pain from Martin Luther King doesn’t really go away. I highly recommend Hairspray because the story of the dance in Baltimore that was only for whites is absolutely correct to the nth degree. I used to come home and watch The Buddy Deane Show (basis for The Corny Collins Show) at 4:00pm. I think the station was WBAL in Baltimore. And they did have Negro day. And I remember thinking that the Negroes dance better. And then they were African-Americans. I mean the terminology kept changing. Every ten years the terminology changed. And then they went after African-Americans when people started explaining that they weren’t all from Africa. They had to go back to black. I mean like Colin Powell is not an African-American. He’s from like the Bahamas or something.

The world did change and blacks did get better and more opportunities. I still always seem to end up in places where white people are in charge and black people are secondary works. I don’t know if it’s because, I don’t know why. It just always seems to be where I end up. The only wealthy upper class black family I ever actually knew was the Mitchell family of Baltimore. They had lawyers in their family, they had judges in their family, and they had doctors in their family. They had nice, big houses. They actually built a hospital for the black community because blacks always got second-class treatment in the hospital. I mean they were segregated by ward. Even at Hopkins, where I worked as a nurse finally, they had just desegregated the wards. People still remembered the times when there had been segregation. There were never any black medical students or black doctors because they couldn’t find people who had enough chemistry and math to pass the entrance exams. And Hopkins is still struggling to find minority people who are willing to do that work.

I did read the Feminine Mystique. I did have a sense of the growing feminist movement. The bra-burning was ridiculous. I don’t think it ever really happened. I think the media didn’t know what to do. In retrospect, I think that my generation has come to the realization that you can’t be a good mother and you can’t be a high-powered business person all at the same time by yourself, that you have to hire somebody to take care of your kids. I know that there’s a real divide, at my life, between the people who stuck with their careers and the people who decided to stay home and raise their babies. I know when I go to cocktail parties no one wants to talk to me because I have no business lead. I have nothing to offer them. At the same time, I always felt that raising my own children was the most important job I could ever do. And I was never sorry that I took time off. I got a little bored sometimes, but I never wanted my kid raised by a nanny. I mean I had a Bachelors Degree in Science. I love my kids more than anyone in the world could love them. And sometimes I’d see the nannies and didn’t like how they were treating the kids. I thought, “Why am I working to let someone else take care of my kids?” and in nursing I didn’t make enough money that I would have so much money left over. I think, I calculated, that I would come home, after taxes and day care, with five dollars an hour. And I decided that I would just live a different life and not do that. I remember being very upset seeing babies out in the cold at 6:30 in the morning, being dropped off somewhere. I just thought that was heartless and cruel. And I found a group of friends who were staying home to take care of their babies and we like bonded. And the working ladies bonded with their groups. I don’t know if they were happier, more happy, less happy. Some people were lucky enough to have mothers and grandmothers, who could baby-sit for free. Or whose husbands got of work at 5:00 and made it possible for them to work. But I never did, not sorry, and I do feel discrimination against me.
I was pro choice from the beginning. I really believe that men, it was just killing men that they couldn’t control pregnancy. It was like the one thing in the world they couldn’t do was control it. And even ‘til today that’s why men come out against abortion because they’re just jealous. They can’t do anything about it. Birth control pills were a godsend for people with dysfunctional menorrhagia, but it was the first generation of women who could choose when to have their baby. I mean that was profound. Because before that there were backstreet abortions but people usually died from those. Coat hangers don’t work out really well. There were some doctors who performed them on the side quietly but they had to be very careful. And certainly poor, rural women had the least opportunity to get help if they didn’t want a pregnancy. There was a measles epidemic and I remember women flying to Sweden to have legal abortions because their fetuses had been exposed to measles, which can leave you blind and mentally retarded if exposed in utero. I read the women’s movement but I don’t think I quite bought into everything. And I certainly wanted to be a mother. My husband and I planned that I would be a stay at home mother. At this point in time you’re (Marni) eighteen, I’m not sorry. I’m just finally going back to work now, and your brother’s 12 and ½. And because it’s a part time job, with a schedule that matches his school schedule, I feel like I can do it. And if it wasn’t matching his school schedule, then I wouldn’t do it. I’m glad for all the equality, and I’m glad for Betty Friedan for starting the thought process, but I think she got a little carried away in her book. She definitely did get something going.