A Lady of Many Years Reminisces

 Lithub shows up in my email daily and I often enjoy reading about authors and books.  Yesterday's email featured Milman Parry and his original work about finding Homer's oral tradition.  I sent it on to our children because my Harvard job the first year of Jim's graduate work was in the Milman Parry collection at Widener Library.  I wrote to them of the difficulty of typing Serbo-Croatian manuscripts.  

Our son-in-law Michael wrote back about the tragic demise of Milman Parry at age 33 because of an accidental gunshot when he was unpacking a suitcase.  How could I not have known that?  In my vague recollection, I think I thought he was a much older man and don't remember anyone talking of that tragic death.   To me he was a mythical figure whose name was on the door.  I don't think his successors ever mentioned that sad ending to his life. 

Scott's Corner
Conservation
Area

But this brought back a flood of other memories that I will record.  I hesitated to write any more to our kids last night.   But maybe these memories are worth recording of a time when we were young and life was much different and certainly had different anxieties particularly of finances.

We arrived in Somerville, Massachusetts in the fall of 1972 for Jim's first year of graduate school at Harvard.   We had a six month old baby and some money in savings thanks to Jim's Fulbright year in Scotland and the fact that I unexpectedly worked that year as well--as a "assistant music mistress" at St. Leonard's School which sounds more important than it was.  I taught sixteen little girls to play the piano.

I needed a job that fall.  I remember applying at a convenience store down the road.  When I asked if they ever had robberies, they told me that it might not be the right job for me if I asked a question like that.  I agreed and did not apply further!  I think I remember being hired by Baskin-Robbins at a nearby shopping area but I know I was never trained or began work.   

My next move was to Harvard's employment office where I was told they had no part-time jobs available.   I still took a typing test and when I was finished, I had done well enough that suddently there were two jobs for which I could interview.  Should I credit my father for that skill?  I know he discouraged me from taking a second year of algebra in high school and encouraged a second year of typing "so that you could always get a job!"   I would not have become a mathematician but the feminist in me never quite got over that advice!

Professor Albert Lord (writer of the classic The Singer of Tales) hired me to work five afternoons a week in the office in Widener Library.  I answered the phone, typed manuscripts, and filled out forms.   One of my first days on the job, I dropped an IBM typewriter head and it broke!  (It might have been worth a week's wages) I was dismayed but no one got upset with me.  In fact, Professor Lord later told me that it was good to have someone with some intelligence working for them--even if no secretarial experience!  I used to have fantasies of going into the financial floors of Harvard with the forms which I struggled to complete and blowing a fan to scatter papers everywhere!

I lasted a year and then applied for a teaching position in the Newton Public Schools as a tutor of the "perceptually handicapped."  (what we now would call learning disabled or dyslexic)  I was accepted into the six week training program with no assurance of a job at the end. With great confidence and foolhardiness, I quit the Harvard job.  Much to my relief, the head of the Newton program told me after two weeks that he would hire me.  I had a good increase in my hourly wage and a job that I liked.  The training in that program was of value to me for the rest of my career when I tutored children privately and later taught many adults who had struggled in school.  

Strange how one notice can trigger so many memories!  I am indulging myself in recording them!

------------May 14 The biography of Milman Parry was reviewed today in the WSJ with more information about Albert Lord and his trip with Parry in Yugoslavia in the 1950s. I remember the names of the Slavic poets and seeing the metal discs with the tapes inside.