Episode 151: Mary Lou at 94
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time, a 20th century woman looks back on a rich and complicated life…
“I had never wanted to get divorced. I thought it could be made to work. I thought I could find other diversions that could keep me busy.”
“AM-T: “So what did it feel like to be out on your own and totally supporting yourself?”
“Liberating…liberating! And I had the teaching job and I loved it. I loved it every day more and I never expected to.”
But she began her first job as a teenager in 1941. Decades of experience…coming up.
Mary Lou is 94 years old. She’s an old friend of my husband’s family and when I talked to her about her life several months ago she and her partner were staying with us for the weekend. She didn’t want to use her last name in the podcast.
I have said this before but I love talking to older women – actually anyone older, but for the purposes of this show I’ve always wanted to get more perspectives from women in their 80s and 90s.
Mary Lou was born into a middle-class family on the eastern end of Long Island, New York. The ocean was about 2 miles away from their house.
“My dad and mother got married when they were both very, very young – he and his brother were both in the mason contracting business. His brother moved away and he took over the contracting business. He was an excellent bricklayer but a very poor businessman.”
She says her father lost his business after the Wall Street crash of 1929 and things were very lean for a few years. He also drank a lot. She remembers before she was even a teenager she used to go into bars to pull him out and bring him home. She says her parents had a rocky relationship.
“…from the time I was 11 or 12 I’d say let’s get divorced for God’s sakes, let’s get divorced. My mother would say, ‘he loves me.’ What good’s that? But I also learned at that time no one was gonna take care of me, really. My grandmother I could rely on but I didn’t expect her to support me. But I knew that my parents weren’t going to do it. So I became very independent and very selfish actually.”
At the age of 15 she landed a summer job…but it wasn’t the typical job a teenager might get in a resort town, working at the movie theater, in a restaurant…or at the beach.
“I worked 5 and sometimes 6 days a week at the telephone company as a telephone operator…”
AM-T: ‘What was that like?”
“It was so much fun, I loved it. One other woman and I were trained that year, she stayed on for 40 years. I used it for college money…however, I liked the job so much, it was clean, and easy to do…”
And she kept doing it during summer vacations for years. If you’ve seen the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel you’ll remember Midge Maisel working in the basement of that department store as an operator…similarly, Mary Lou says she had a strict manager. If this lady thought Mary Lou had made any kind of mistake her heels would click swiftly across the floor and she’d berate Mary Lou then and there.
But as she says, she loved the job. It gave her her first real sense of independence.
“The money was good. My parents didn’t pay a cent of my tuition, I put myself through school totally.”
She went to college on Long Island – Adelphi University. During that time, this was during WWII, she worked as a babysitter for a local family.
After college…she started training as a social worker. It was one of relatively few professions open to women in the mid-1940s. Mary Lou remembers her first job in a town north of New York City, on the Hudson River.
“And I got a job for $90 a month. That was it. 90 bucks a month, in a school for neglected and dependent children. It was an adjunct to getting some training in social work. They gave me one child and they supervised me and my kid, I remember, the child was only about 8, and he was there because he had pushed his brother out of a tenement window and he had died, it was pretty heavy.”
During this time she was also going to graduate school for social work, commuting back and forth between school and her job. And she had a boyfriend situation to resolve.
“I had been going with a boy for 6 years, 2 years in high school and 4 years in college, we were planning on marriage but hadn’t finalized it to the point of where or when, and then I’d met my third cousin, and he had come to visit my grandmother, so I was engaged to two of them, I was engaged to two of them for about a year. Couldn’t make up my mind…
AM-T: “And they didn’t know about the other one presumably?”
“Oh they knew about the other one – they knew I was agonizing over which one to choose, to the point that one time I remember having them meet eachother, I thought if I saw them together maybe I’d make up my mind.”
Ultimately, as one of the boys predicted, she ended up with neither of them. But she did begin to have adventures of the kind that would mark the rest of her life. Her uncle gave her a gift of money, and instead of spending it on a washing machine, as a female relative suggested…she took off to Mexico…
[Laughs] “I stayed there for 6 months…that was quite an experience.”
She stayed with a friend who was living there with her husband. She says she rode horses, hung out with cowboys…and generally lived it up.
But eventually she ended up back in her hometown on Long Island, and worked at the telephone company again. That’s when she got the idea to go to New York City and become a dancer with Arthur Murray, who had a famous ballroom dance school.
“I mean I have some rhythm but nothing like what would have been required. So that’s what I was going to do. I wanted to live in New York, I was going to live in a woman’s hotel in New York. My father didn’t like that idea. He said you’ve gone to college for 4 years, and you should go into social work. And I said, you haven’t paid a cent for my education so you don’t have a say in it, Ote. I called him by his first name. I was rather disrespectful to him.”
But in fact her father won the argument – and she did end up going back to social work. She was in her mid-twenties now.
AM-T: “So at the time were you thinking, I’ll always work, or were you expecting to marry…”
“I expected to get married, all my friends from college were getting married…yes, the push was you had to get married. And I’ve thought about it a lot, because at the time I guess I had fleeting ideas…in fact when I was going to graduate school in New York, Columbia, I started taking law courses, because I had a teacher who’d been on the National Labor Relations Board during the law and he was fascinating, but it never occurred to me to stop and become a lawyer…never occurred to me.”
So few women were lawyers at the time, she had no role models. But marriage and motherhood were very much in vogue, especially now the second world war was over and all the men were home and wanting to settle down. In the late 1940s, Mary Lou went upstate to visit her brother who was studying to be an engineer…
“And he introduced me to my to-be husband, and it was a real adjustment to me. He was a Roman Catholic but he seemed to be a very good person.”
In case you’re wondering about that ‘but’ – at the time, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants like Mary Lou almost never married Catholics. It simply wasn’t done. As a teenager Mary Lou had played tennis one summer with a Catholic boy a few years older…
“…and my grandmother got very upset about it and said the time to start going with a Catholic is never.”
When Mary Lou got engaged to her future husband, her grandmother announced she would not attend the wedding. Mary Lou says she died a few months beforehand to avoid the whole thing.
“And I married him because, I wasn’t madly in love with him, you know, if you say ‘love’ – I found love at the age of 85…”
More on that in a bit.
“But I figured I was going to have a good marriage and a good life, and I saw he had possibilities, he was graduating from an engineering course. I thought he was more ambitious than he was…I mean I didn’t expect him to be the head of Hamilton Standard Propeller, but he was a good worker and he was a good man. And he was a very good father…ha! But I had joined the Catholic Church when I got married in 1950 and I didn’t use birth control and I had children…I had 7 pregnancies in 14 years, and that…and 6 living children, one miscarriage.”
After Mary Lou and her husband married they settled in central Connecticut. It was a conservative time. Women had flooded into the workforce during the War. Now the men were home and working again, and if you were a middle class wife, you stayed at home and tended to the children and the house.
“And we moved into a new house within a year after marriage, so it was settling into this house, having a garden, doing canning…raising children and bla bla bla. But I joined the League of Women Voters, and it was political. And I loved it.”
Mary Lou needed an outlet. She had an active, inquisitive mind. She was restless at home.
“I would get very bored, and as I say, the League saved my life. I think I probably would have gone nuts if I hadn’t had the League to do some thinking about. My husband was not political…a good man but he didn’t much care for worrying about the state of the world or anything like that. He was intelligent. I helped him get his master’s and we had a lot of fun doing that…but he wouldn’t go on and get his PhD. He could have had education paid for by his company…and I couldn’t figure that one out, why he wouldn’t want to do that. And it didn’t occur to me to go to school at that time, mostly I guess because I was pretty tired, for one thing I breastfed all my kids for at least a year, I’d read that breastfeeding helped you in not getting pregnant, which it did, for the first year at least, then when I gave it up I’d get pregnant again.”
During her fourth pregnancy Mary Lou says she got quite sick…and her subsequent pregnancies were very uncomfortable.
“I knew about contraception of course but I had made a decision to become a Roman Catholic and I thought the least I could do was keep that vow.”
But after her last child was born she felt desperate. She says she went to her doctor’s office.
“I walked into his place and I said, I’ve had it. He said, I never thought you’d ask. He suggested sterilization.”
Ultimately, she did get sterilized. She says her husband wasn’t pleased about it. He thought it was wrong.
But she felt free.
And that freedom opened up other opportunities.
Around this time, when her final son was still a baby, she met a someone at a friend’s party – a guy named Stan.
“And this man said to me, my son was 9 months old, he said what do you do? And I said tomorrow I’m gonna do peaches, the next day I’m gonna do apple sauce…he said what? I said well I have 6 children. He said you don’t have a job, a part-time job or anything? He was a teacher, and he taught also in night school. He was also Afro-American. I didn’t have a part-time job? No, it never occurred to me. I had too much work to do at home. You do peaches? And I went home and thought about it and thought, that’s pretty crazy. Because he said why don’t you become a teacher? And I said how do I do that? He said, you go to school part-time.”
AM-T: “But is this because he’d spoken to you and got a sense of your intellectual bent?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Well actually he said later he really liked my tail, you’re gonna have to edit this one, but that’s what he said. I couldn’t find my shoes and I was looking underneath the sofa…but he just couldn’t believe I hadn’t figured that one out. And he kept after me, and I said to my husband that fall, I think I’m gonna go back to school: ‘Oh you’ve got too much work to do, how can you do that?’ He did not want me to go to school, and then Stan would call me up and say aren’t you going back to school?”
In a minute, Mary Lou puts her newfound freedom to the test.
For several months Mary Lou dithered about whether to return to school. Her husband was not into the idea of her studying to become a teacher, but eventually she decided she was going to do it. But the first time she went to register, she couldn’t go through with it. She was so nervous she fled the line and went back home.
The following day she returned, and this time she signed up.
Her husband wasn’t thrilled, but he did agree to take care of the kids while she went to school at night.
“But I came home one night, it was one of the first classes I’d really gotten excited about…and I came in around 9.30 at night, and I said guess what I learned tonight? or something. And he said, be quiet. And I looked at the television, and he said, can’t you see I’m watching television? And I looked and there was a commercial. I was so pissed. I said, that’s it.”
She began to think about a separation then…
“I had never wanted to get divorced…I always wanted to make it work. I thought it could be made to work. I thought I find other diversions that would keep me busy.”
It was a few more years before Mary Lou and her husband actually got divorced. And remember, Mary Lou was the one who wanted the split but she was also the partner who wasn’t earning any money – or at least by the time they split up she was earning some money as a substitute teacher, but nothing that could support her and 6 kids. Meanwhile, though, she’d begun a relationship with Stan – the man who’d encouraged her to go back to school in the first place. Things were getting complicated.
“It was just a pipe dream that I’d be leaving him to find another man to live with who would help me raise my children. Because Stan the man was a very ambitious person, and it was his second marriage, he only had one child he was caring for…he’d left the first one right after she’d been born. And there was no way this guy was going to get married. And at the time in the 70s he would be jeopardizing his professionalism, because mixed couples just were not operating much at that time.”
So she had to make a decision…about her family. It was 1971.
“I gave it the old college try to think that I could support them and be divorced – that was one of the things, he didn’t want to get divorced, he offered me the job as his housekeeper. No, I wasn’t going to do that.
AM-T: “Meaning we have a sham marriage but it looks like we’re married…”
“Exactly, exactly, and at that point I just wanted out, I guess I just wanted to grow up. So we got divorced.”
And she gave him chief custody of the children – for the next couple of years she’d see them mostly during school vacations. The eldest was about 18, the youngest was 6.
Mary Lou went to Baltimore and lived with her brother – but Baltimore was where Stan was, too. Through him, she got a job teaching adults…
“And I loved it. I loved teaching the adults, mostly Vietnam vets, and women in their 40s and 50s working three jobs, and I learned a lot from them, mostly black, mostly very poor, and the GIs were stoned – I mean you know, it was a very turbulent time.”
But she felt she was thriving in the chaos. The aftermath of her marriage must have been traumatic for her children…but for her, the seventies were a time of personal growth…bursting out after feeling confined for a long time. Finding herself…and finding she enjoyed her job.
“So after I got my graduate degree in education I got a graduate degree in social studies…I was teaching social studies in Baltimore, in fact I was the first black teacher in the adult education program in Baltimore…”
AM-T: “The first black teacher or the first white teacher?”
“The first white teacher teaching black history, excuse me…the only reason I got the job was I had had one course in central Connecticut in black history, because at the time it was required…that blacks were…they were opening up the teaching system to everybody. But I had the course, so I had the paper…and the black women who were able to teach that history…and here I am a white northern woman teaching black history to veterans when they came home. I mean I think that was an insult. But I worked very hard at it, and I did a good job at it and so – that was the best job I ever had, teaching the adults and the veterans.”
After two years she found a job was open to her back in Connecticut, near her old town. So she said goodbye to Stan, and headed home.
She was near her kids again but she didn’t push to see them all the time. She was now working in the local school system, and she says she’d keep tabs on her kids by checking the register every day to see if they were all in school or if any of them were out sick. She says her ex-husband made clear to her that he was in charge now.
“And it was a moral situation too – I had been so bad, morally I’d done everything wrong, breaking the marriage and having an affair and so on. He saw black and white. Interesting thing was when I left him, he said, I’ll never get married again. Sure you will, I said, and I said about dating, why don’t you go with Joan? She was a friend of mine. He said I’ll never...well 6 months after I left, my oldest son said Daddy’s going out with Joan. I said, I knew it. She had 6 children but a couple of dead husbands. She went to the same church as he did. She called me when I was in Baltimore and said I’ll never marry him, Lou. I said be my guest, but I said, 12 kids, Joan? You better think twice.”
They didn’t marry, but she says Joan and her former husband did stay together until the end of their lives.
Mary Lou says to his credit, her ex-husband didn’t badmouth her to their children. She says she has a pretty good relationship with most of them today. She says she’s proud of them – that they’re all good citizens, kind, and responsible.
“And my oldest daughter now and I are estranged. And I think it’s because she felt that I really gave her father short shrift. And she’s probably right. But I think he was probably much happier with Joan even on a part-time basis than he’d have been with me. I used to make him nervous.
AM-T: “Why?”
“Well we’d go to parties and I’d get excited by people and I’d act stupid and we’d come home and he’d criticize me: ‘You did this, or you did that.’ I had no intention of doing this or that. You know.”
AM-T: “Well, he expected to be married to someone more conventional.”
“Exactly, exactly.”
AM-T: In 1950 when he got married things had become very conventional again after the war when so many women had gone into the workforce, and you were on the backlash end of that when women were expected to be home fulltime being perfect wives and mothers.
“The interesting thing is I had models. My friends in New York were working jobs and raising children but they only had two for instance. And Laura, my best friend, was working. She only had two. I think it was the quantity, not the quality, of the whole thing.”
At this point we switched venues – Mary Lou needed to get to the ferry to get home to Connecticut, but I wanted to keep talking so I turned on the tape recorder again in the car.
My husband is driving and in the passenger seat is Al, Mary Lou’s partner. I’m in the back seat with Mary Lou.
AM-T: “So what did it feel like to be out on your own and totally supporting yourself?”
“Liberating…liberating! And I had the teaching job and I loved it. I loved it every day more and I never expected to…it’s interesting, in 8th grade a guidance teacher had said you have 3 choices, you can be a teacher, you can be a nurse, or you can work in an office. I said, I don’t want to do any of those. He said, why don’t you become a social worker? That’s why I became hooked on social work. But I loved the teaching because the feedback from the kids was exciting…it wasn’t so in social work, social work was solve, solve the people’s problems, but the kids and especially the junior high when I was teaching, and then when I had my own classroom at the high school, the kids were not only my salvation, they were my teachers, and they amused me, I never had a day that I didn’t want to be in the classroom.”
She retired at 68 – only because she was losing her eyesight and needed to drive to work. Hearing she was likely to go blind at some point, she got on a plane and went to Paris that summer.
After her marriage, Mary Lou didn’t have another long relationship for quite a while. She met people, but no one special.
So just over a decade ago she decided to try something new.
“And then I went on the internet – I didn’t go on the internet immediately but 12 years ago I went on the internet. I was only on about a year. I only dated 2 or 3 people, nobody worked out, and I thought oh, the heck with this, and I was about to quit the whole thing when Al’s picture came up…and it was so…he was so attractive. He looked, oh, I loved that picture. He was so theatrical.”
Her eyesight was poor, but good enough, she was still emailing back then – the picture was black and white. Al had his head cocked on one side…he was wearing a cap…
“And just – oh, he looked adorable, and then he was a good talker. Turns out he was from the Midwest for crying out loud. At first when I talked to him I had no idea he was Afro-American.”
That first conversation went well. They kept talking…and then she flew from Connecticut to Chicago to meet him for the first time. She says she was smitten from the start.
At this point I’m trying to pin down when exactly it was that they met and how old everyone was – I know Al is about a decade younger than Mary Lou. And here I should say Al really didn’t want to be part of this conversation. He’s a man of few words.
Mary Lou: “Is it only 9? Didn’t I meet him when I was 85?
Ashley: Do you remember, Al?
Al: What?
Ashley: How old was she when you met?
Al: I don’t know…84.
Ashley: OK, give me something Al, what did you think when you first met her in person?
Al: Well I’m not in your interview. You can turn the interview off and maybe we can talk!”
Mary Lou: “He doesn’t want to divulge any information about himself – he might one day be president and they might dig up some dirt on him.”
Al moved east to be with Mary Lou and for the last year they’ve lived in a retirement community. Mary Lou says she’s still getting used to it after fending for herself for so long.
And after a lifetime of adventure and of fierce independence…
AM-T: “It must be nice to be with somebody at this point in your life…”
“It definitely is, and he’s a snuggler, it’s great, I love that. And he eats anything. He’s easy to be with…as long as I do what he says…”[laughs]
Mary Lou turns 95 this month. She says one of her daughters is taking her and Al out to celebrate.
That’s the Broad Experience for this time. I will post a couple of photos of Mary Lou under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.
If you have questions or comments you can always reach me at ashley @ the broad experience.com or on the show’s Facebook page, or on Twitter.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
“…And we have been together 24/7 for ten years, or 11, we don’t know which – maybe it’s only 9, who knows? [Laughter]…I don’t know.”