View Suzy's profile

All Rise by
200
(303 Stories)

Prompted By Jury Duty

/ Stories

Sacramento County Courthouse

Unlike most of the writers here, I really wanted to be on a jury. I thought it would be helpful in my career as a trial lawyer, and I also thought it would be just plain fun! I know that may strike you as weird, but there it is. And I have actually made it onto three juries over the years.

I thought being on a jury would be helpful in my career as a trial lawyer, and I also thought it would be fun!

First, some background. In my 30 years of practicing law, I only had one case that almost went to a jury. While in criminal cases the defendant is always entitled to a jury, in civil cases this is not true. One of the parties has to request a jury, and has to pay a certain amount to the court in advance to have a jury impaneled. My case was a sex discrimination case, a woman who was suing the Office of the State Architect. I was representing the Architect. The plaintiff requested a jury, so I spent the entire weekend before the trial learning about voir dire and preparing my questions for prospective jurors. My husband, who had done many jury trials in criminal cases, was very helpful. Monday morning I arrived at court, all prepared, only to find out that the plaintiff had changed her mind and withdrawn her request. I was so disappointed! We tried the case to a judge, and I won. The judge found no discrimination. Still, it would have been fun to see how a jury would react.

The first time I was called for jury duty, everyone told me I would never make it onto the jury, that one side or the other would surely challenge me. But it turned out neither one did. The prosecutor figured I was on his side, because I was a Deputy Attorney General (hah!). The defense kept me because she “just had a good feeling” about me, even though the other lawyers in her office told her she was crazy. She was right, of course, my sympathies are much more with the defense. The defendant had been charged with embezzling money from the photo-developing kiosk where she worked (remember those?). I was elected foreperson of the jury. We ended up with a verdict of “not guilty” because there were several employees who had access to the money, so we could not find beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was the one who had taken it.

My second summons for jury duty came several years later. Once again both sides kept me on, but, unlike in the first case, I didn’t discuss it with them afterwards, so I don’t know what they were thinking. The defendant had been charged with making meth in the garage where he was living. The cops had found various chemicals there which led them to this conclusion. However, there had not been any testimony from anyone who had seen him making meth. The defendant testified (which is rare in criminal cases), and he seemed like a pretty dim bulb. I was able to persuade my fellow jurors to reach a “not guilty” verdict because, I said, “I’ve seen Breaking Bad, I know that there is complicated chemistry involved in making meth, and this guy isn’t smart enough to do it.” Maybe he put one over on us, I’ll never know, but even if so, I’d like to think we did a good deed, and he straightened out his life as a result of this acquittal.

My third time on jury duty was another criminal case, but I don’t remember what the crime was. Why not? you say. It took all of the first day of trial to pick the jury. After we were sworn in, we went home for the day. When we came back the next day, we were informed that the defendant had taken a plea deal. Apparently after he took a look at the impaneled jury, he wasn’t so confident about his chances of prevailing. .

Finally, a near miss. In this case I was one of the twelve in the jury box after the lawyers had finished questioning everyone, and had made all of their challenges for cause, and the challenged jurors had been replaced. We were sent out on the mid-morning break. While we were waiting for the elevator to go up to the coffee shop on the top floor of the courthouse, one of the jurors said, “well, I guess that’s it, we’re the jury.” I said no, not necessarily, and explained the difference between peremptory challenges (where the lawyer doesn’t have to give a reason) and challenges for cause. The peremptory challenges were still to come. The defendant overheard my explanation and reported it to the judge, whereupon the judge dismissed me. This was a big no-no, because the jurors are all supposed to regard each other as equal, and there should not be a situation where they look to one person as knowing more than the rest of them. So I’ve learned my lesson, and from now on I will play dumb.

Can’t wait until I get my next jury summons!

 

 

Try To Remember by
200
(303 Stories)

/ Stories

My first three years – now I need to make four more books

302 stories. Seven years. Probably thousands of comments on other people’s stories and replies to their comments on mine.

302 stories. Seven years. Probably thousands of comments on other people's stories and replies to their comments on mine.

For me the Retrospect experience has been divided into 2 eras, the Zussman era 2016-18 (starting as a beta tester with a confidentiality agreement, then being uncertain about whether I would still like writing when the site went public, and fortunately finding I did), followed by my own era 2019-22, when I took over the site with the able assistance of Laurie and Marian, later adding Barb. In the first era, I averaged 35 stories per year, because I didn’t always have a story that fit the prompt. In the second era, I averaged 50 stories per year, which means I wrote basically every week, except there must have been a few times that I either didn’t write, or just recycled an old story. [Note added 1/1/23: I just realized that we didn’t start up in 2019 until March 1, so there were 8 weeks with no stories. Mystery solved! I did write every week.]

At some point during the first year I got the idea of using song titles or lyrics for my story titles. Once I had that going on, I actually went back and changed the titles on some of my earlier stories. There are only about a dozen stories in my whole collection that don’t have titles consisting of song titles or lyrics. Sometimes other writers got into the act, either trying to predict what song I would use, or suggesting titles to me. For my story on the prompt Separating the Art from the Artist, I was planning to use “Take the Money and Run” since it was both a song and a Woody Allen movie. Then I discovered that John S. had alread used that title on another prompt, so I asked him what I should do. He suggested “Sympathy for the Devil,” which of course was perfect.  On one of my stories on The New Year, I couldn’t quickly come up with a song, so I published it as “Closing Out the ’70s in my 20s.” Then Betsy, in the comments, suggested “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” which, again, was a perfect title, so I changed it. (On the same story, John Z. suggested “Party Like It’s 1999” which was also great, but not quite as apt as the Cyndi Lauper song.)

Once I took over the site, it was a joy working with Laurie and Marian to brainstorm prompt ideas, then write the text and find the images to inspire everyone’s stories. We had conference calls on the telephone, and then later on zoom, but I have never met either one of them in person! When we considered asking Barb to join us, I did arrange to meet her in Whittier first, to make sure she was as great as she seemed (she was!). Once she agreed to be part of the team, we discovered her incredible creativity in thinking of prompts, and especially in creating the images to illustrate them. So many times I would say to her, this picture is great, but could you just make it bigger/smaller/a different color/crop something out/add something in — and whatever it was, she would figure out how to do it! Other times I would say this picture is copyrighted so we can’t use it, can you create something similar? And she would do that too! I felt like she was my personal genie, and when I wished for something, no matter how far-fetched, she would give it to me.

And what are my thoughts about the contents of this wonderful website? I have written many stories that I love and am proud of, and I have also read many stories by other writers that I love even more, so it is impossible to make a list of favorites. But looking back at my own stories, I do have some favorite categories. And while I link to stories in some of those categories, they are not necessarily my favorites, they are just good examples of the points I am trying to make.

♦ Stories or prompts by which I discovered commonalities with other Retro writers. This happened most often in the first year or two. On the My First Car prompt, Betsy and I discovered that we had both started out with Plymouth Valiants, mine a ’66 and hers a ’67. From the Camp prompt I learned that Betsy and John Z. had gone to Interlochen, as I had, which perhaps should not have been surprising since they lived in Michigan and that’s where the camp was. In too many stories to list, Charlie and I discovered overlaps in our radical experiences of the Sixties and Seventies.

♦ Stories in which I started out with one memory, but then remembered other things while in the process of writing the story. Also in this category are stories where I learned something new by asking my sisters for their memories of a certain event, or where I discovered relevant facts via online searches. When I was writing on the prompt Family Trips, I not only asked my sisters what they remembered about our 1957 trip from Interlochen back to New Jersey via Canada, but also plotted the route we took on Google Maps to try to figure out how long it took and how we got to each place (The Surrey With the Fringe On Top). In my story on First Time Voting, I was actually able to find online exactly what was on my New Jersey ballot in November 1972 (Power to the People).

♦ Stories that caused me to dig up old photos. I am not well organized with my pre-digital photos, they are in big plastic tubs, still in the envelopes they were in when they came back from being developed. But in a few instances, I was able to dig back and find some choice pix. My son playing Little League (Take Me Out to the Ball Game), my daughter drawing all over her bedroom wall with friends at her ninth birthday party (Fixing A Hole), my husband and I cutting our wedding cake on the dining room table (Glory Days). Also, when writing about my summer in Mexico (Summer of ’66), I was able to find my old textbook, schedules, and a comic book from that summer (but alas, no photos).

♦ While generally I frowned on prompts that were not of the “think back” variety, I am so happy that we did a number of pandemic-related prompts, so that I have my Covid diary of five stories written over the course of a year (Losing A Whole Year and the previous 4 stories linked to there). Likewise, on the prompt Good Trouble, I am thrilled that I wrote a story about going to Georgia in January 2021 for the runoff election (Georgia On My Mind). Some of the details I included in all of those stories are already fading from my memory, so it is nice to have them written down to help me when I try to remember.

♦ One story that had a profound impact on me was the one on the Favorite Teacher prompt, because writing it inspired me to track down my fabulous first grade teacher, and then we traded letters (You Have Made A Difference and Fairy Tale Endings). I feel so lucky that I was able to reach her while she was still alive, considering that she was my teacher 66 years ago.

♦ Exactly four years ago today I wrote Turn, Turn, Turn, reflecting on my first three years of Retrospect and how distraught I was about the fact that the Zussmans were shutting it down. It’s a helpful recollection of what I was thinking when I decided I wanted to become the owner of the site.

♦ And finally, I have to tip my hat to Story Wranglers, the story written by John and Patti that explained their idea in founding the site, and their reasons for closing it down at the end of 2018. I encourage everyone who cares about Retrospect to read it.

Computer Age by
200
(303 Stories)

Prompted By My First Computer

/ Stories

As it happens, I have been interested in computers since the early days. In college I took a computer course called Nat Sci 110 just for fun, where we learned a few programming languages, like Basic, Fortran, Cobol, and Snobol. The computer was as big as a room, and we used punch cards that we fed into it. That’s all I remember about the course, and I doubt that anything I learned then would be applicable to computers now anyway.

To help us become proficient in using a mouse, Solitaire was installed on all our computers.

After taking that course, I never gave computers another thought until they arrived at my office some time in the ’80s. First it was just the secretarial pool that had them, although they were called “word processors.” My assigned secretary was still using a typewriter at that point, but if a brief went to the pool instead, that was great, because they could make corrections easily on their machines, and then print out the corrected pages. In contrast, if my secretary had to make a correction, she used White-Out if she could fit the new text in the same space that the old text had occupied, and otherwise she had to retype the whole page, or if it caused a change in where the page breaks came, she would have to retype all the following pages as well. Needless to say, that was a real disincentive to making improvements after the initial draft was typed, although I did become adept at figuring out a new phrase that had exactly the same number of characters as the one I was replacing.

At some point, all the secretaries got computers, and later all the attorneys did too. It happened while I was on one of my maternity leaves, and I came back to discover that I had a computer in my office and I was expected to use it for some purposes, although not to type my own briefs. (That didn’t come until later – I continued to write mine in pen on yellow legal pads for quite some time.) That must have been in 1986, since my first child was born in 1985, and I took a year of maternity leave.

I do remember learning keystrokes to do various functions, and in fact there was a card that we placed at the top of the keyboard that told us what each F key did in conjunction with the Alt, Control, or Shift key. Later on we got mice, so we could click for functions instead of using the F keys. To help us become proficient in using a mouse, Solitaire was installed on all our computers. We had to practice clicking and dragging the cards to play the game. That was a lot of fun, and I’m sure we played a lot more than was required to master the mouse. At some point we also got Battleship and Tetris. Those games could keep us entertained for hours! Eventually I think they uninstalled them because people weren’t getting their work done.

When I came back from my second maternity leave in 1989, there was another innovation – interoffice electronic mail. This was an internal system that enabled us to communicate with the hundreds of other Attorney General’s Office employees in all four offices around the state, long before there was the internet type of email that we know today. Each person had a four-letter ID, consisting first of the letter of their office (S for Sacramento, F for San Francisco, L for Los Angeles, and D for San Diego) followed by their three initials. If someone didn’t have a middle name, they got an X in between their first and last initial. I remember needing my secretary to coach me a few times on how to use it before I got the hang of it, but soon it became much more practical than leaving a message on someone’s phone. (Phone messages usually meant just telling the person’s secretary that you wanted them to call you back. Not sure when we got voicemail.)

As for my first computer at home, that came a couple of years later, when my first marriage fell apart and I ended up moving in with the man who became my second husband. He had a desktop computer. It had a gray screen and the letters were green, just like the Featured Image. The first time I attempted to use it was to type a letter to my daughter’s teacher. I was just treating it like a typewriter, and if I needed to change things I just did it however I could. It seemed much more complicated than a typewriter, but I was proud of my creative solutions to problems like indenting paragraphs and adding or deleting things. (He wasn’t home to ask for help.) When he came home and saw my letter, he clicked on Reveal Codes (Alt F3), and started laughing at the convoluted way I had done things. Of course I soon became proficient at all things computer.

Later there was internet, with dial-up access that took forever and tied up your phone line while you were using it. But that wasn’t on my first computer. My google search suggests that internet for private consumers became available in 1995 (amazing – only 27 years ago!), and before that it was mainly used by government agencies (like my office) and scientists.


Thanks to Neil Young for the story title song, from the 1983 album Trans. It was apparently inspired by the fact that his son, who was born with cerebral palsy, responded better to a computerized voice than to a person when he was an infant.

Do You Know the Way to San Jose? by
200
(303 Stories)

/ Stories

I do not have a good sense of direction. I never have. From seventh through twelfth grade I went to a school in another town about twenty minutes away. (My mother always said that every place we needed to go was twenty minutes away. Looking at Google maps now, using city streets to get from my house to the campus, which is how we always went, confirms that it actually would take twenty minutes. In those days going into Manhattan also took twenty minutes.) Anyway, at some point my mother decided I should learn the route, so that if anyone else ever offered to drive me, I could give them directions. It took me months to learn the whole route, but I finally did it. There was nothing instinctive about it, it was all rote memorization. And it was all “turn left here, turn right there,” I never had a sense that this is just the general direction we need to go. Occasionally it was “turn left at the Esso station” or “turn right at the ice cream parlor,” which worked better for me than just street names.

I do not have a good sense of direction. I'm usually good with maps, unless I have them upside down. And grateful now to have GPS.

The one place I could actually do pretty well finding my way around as a teenager was Manhattan, because all the numbered streets and avenues made sense. If I was on 48th Street, for example, and I knew I needed to go uptown, I could walk one block and know if I was going the right way or not. If I got to 49th, I could keep going. If I got to 47th, I had to turn around and go back the other way. Most of the time I picked the wrong way, but at least I knew my mistake quickly! I also knew that the pattern on the one-way streets was Even-East, so I could orient myself that way. If it was an even-numbered street, the traffic was going east, and if it was an odd-numbered street, the traffic was going west. Of course that didn’t help me on the two-way streets. And down in the Village, where the streets had names instead of numbers, I was hopeless.

The New York subway, however, was another matter. You would think that would be easy too, if the signs say Uptown on one platform and Downtown on the other. But I do remember one time when I was going to or from my friend Amy’s house, and I got confused. I took a train in the wrong direction, and didn’t realize it until I was in the middle of Harlem. I had to get off that train and cross to the other platform to get a train in the opposite direction. Standing on the platform I couldn’t help noticing that I was the only white person in the entire station. I don’t remember if I was nervous or not – I might have been too clueless to recognize the potential danger. However, later when I told people what station I had been waiting in, they definitely freaked out. Oh well, I got where I was going, so it all turned out okay.

I could generally do pretty well if I had a map, once I figured out which way to hold it. That’s where it helps to know where north, south, east, and west are in real life, not just on the map. I remember being in Amsterdam by myself when I was nineteen, and looking on a map for wherever it was that I wanted to go. It appeared to be only about three blocks away from where I was standing. I started walking in exactly the opposite direction from what I should have done. Once I had gone the three blocks and didn’t see what I was looking for, I figured I must have been mistaken about the distance and I should walk another block. And another. And another. It never occurred to me to turn around. I finally got to where the street ended, having walked a mile or more. At that point I was exhausted, and I think I just took a taxi back to the hostel where I was staying. I don’t remember what I was trying to find, but I do remember the frustration of realizing I had walked so incredibly far in the wrong direction!

Nowadays there is GPS in cars and on phones. I use it for walking as well as for driving. Sometimes I have qualms about where the GPS is taking me, but I know I just have to trust it, because it has a much better sense of direction than I do.

And if you’re wondering about the song title title, I never got lost trying to get to San Jose, but for an amusing story about driving from Palo Alto (which is near San Jose) to Oakland, please check out Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

Smile a Little Smile For Me by
200
(303 Stories)

Prompted By The Dentist

/ Stories

My smile, thanks to braces

When I was growing up, our dentist was a family friend. He did all our dental work for free (“professional courtesy”) and, similarly, my father took care of all his family’s medical needs for free. He and his wife socialized with my parents, and were often at our house to play bridge. I think we called them George and Betty when they were at our house, but in the office we called him Dr. Kaye (not his real name). I was never scared to go to the dentist. I did have some cavities in my baby teeth and had to get fillings at various times, but it was no big deal.

No matter how exhausted or intoxicated I might be, I never go to bed without flossing my teeth!

I got braces when I was in seventh grade, but I don’t remember anything about my orthodontist. I only had bands on my top teeth, to correct an overbite, because my bottom teeth were fine. I have no memory of pain or trauma associated with my braces, except that it was uncomfortable to play the oboe until I got used to it. (Maybe I developed calluses on the inside of my upper lip?) If I hadn’t already been committed to the oboe, I probably would have switched to a different instrument.

I vividly remember getting the braces removed on a Friday in the middle of ninth grade, and going to a dance at school that night where I just couldn’t stop smiling. My mouth felt so wonderful. Two different guys were paying attention to me, one a junior and one a senior, something that had never happened before. I bravely asked the senior to the Sadie Hawkins Dance later that year, and he went with me. Other than that, I never spent time with either of those guys again. Still, it was a fabulous night!

It wasn’t until I was in my twenties and living and working in Sacramento that I discovered the flaw in my dental care. I had never looked for a replacement dentist after I left home because my teeth seemed fine, and the health plan I had through work didn’t include dental coverage. So why bother? Then, just before Thanksgiving 1979, when I was 28, my mouth started to hurt when I chewed things like meat. I spent that Thanksgiving with my parents and sisters in Colorado, but basically just ate mashed potatoes. Definitely time to find a new dentist! There was a young dentist who had his office in the same building as my office, and many of my co-workers went to him and liked him, so as soon as I got home, I called his office and made an appointment. He said my gums were inflamed and I needed to see a periodontist. Ugh! I went to one, and didn’t like what he said, so I went to another one for a second opinion. He said the same thing. My teeth were in great shape, but I was going to lose them before I turned 40 if I didn’t get the gums taken care of.

So I had gum surgery, where the inflamed parts were removed. It was painful and it was expensive! And I couldn’t eat solid food for a month! After I got sick of just eating yogurt and apple sauce, my friend Jane lent me her blender, and I blended up everything imaginable. I also might have put cocaine on my gums, which made them numb, since I had friends with plenty of access to cocaine, as discussed in a previous story.

So here’s the part about the flaw in my dental care. It turned out the gum inflammation was caused by the fact that I had never flossed my teeth. Apparently brushing wasn’t enough. Prior to that time, I had a boyfriend tell me I should floss, but he was so self-righteous about it that I ignored him, and besides, my dentist growing up had never told me to floss, so it couldn’t be necessary! But he was right, darn it! (He later became my second husband.) I blamed my childhood dentist for not telling me to floss. However, in writing this story, I googled “when did people start flossing their teeth?” (answer: 1815!) and then, more significantly, “when did flossing become common?” The answer to that second question was “starting in the 1970s.” So the fact that I wasn’t told to floss in the ’50s or ’60s wasn’t really his fault, I suppose. It would have been nice if he had been ahead of the curve (or if I had listened to my self-righteous boyfriend), but neither of those happened.

Ever since then, I have been a religious flosser! No matter how exhausted or intoxicated I might be, I never go to bed without flossing my teeth! And even after all that, I’m still not afraid of going to the dentist.

Stuck Like Glue by
200
(303 Stories)

Prompted By Retail Rewards

/ Stories

I have such strong memories of S&H Green Stamps – the look, the feel, and even the taste of the glue. We got them at the gas station across the street from our house (Shell) and also at the grocery store down the block (Acme). We would wait until we had a big pile of stamps and then sit around the kitchen table pasting them into the books that were distributed for that purpose. If we were putting in one or two individual stamps on a page we would lick them (the glue tasted terrible!), but more often we had a whole sheet, just the right size to fill a page in the booklet, and then we would use a sponge to wet the back. Most commonly I thnk we were putting in whole sheets.

I have such strong memories of S&H Green Stamps - the look, the feel, and even the taste of the glue.

Here is what Wikipedia says about them (I made the font green just for fun):

The stamps were issued in denominations of one, ten, and fifty points, perforated with a gummed reverse. As shoppers accumulated the stamps, they moistened the reverse and mounted them in collector’s books, which were provided free by S&H. The books contained 24 pages and filling a page required 50 points, so each book contained 1,200 points. Shoppers could then exchange filled books for premiums, including housewares and other items, from the local Green Stamps store or catalog. Each premium was assigned a value expressed by the number of filled stamp books required to obtain it.

This is what a page in the book looked like, with explicit directions about how many stamps to put on the page and where to put them.

I don’t remember ever going to a Green Stamps redemption center, but I do remember poring over the catalog to see what we could get for the amount of stamps we had. Then we would be inspired to collect more stamps, since the items we wanted generally cost more than the value of the stamps we had pasted in the book. The only thing I am certain that we got with green stamps was a General Electric toaster-oven. As a replacement for our old toaster, this was a big improvement! Bagels, in particular, always used to get burned in the toaster, but came out perfectly in the toaster-oven. On the oven setting, you could cook a TV dinner without having to wait for the regular oven to heat up. I’m certain we got many other things, I just don’t recall what they were.

An interesting discovery I made while writing this story is that Andy Warhol did a painting in 1962 called S&H Green Stamps, which is at the Museum of Modern Art.  Apparently he thought green stamps were as much of a cultural symbol as Campbell Soup cans.

Warhol, S&H Green Stamps

In recent years, I have gotten free flights from airline frequent flyer programs, free groceries from supermarket loyalty programs, and occasionally even a free 11th smoothie after getting my card stamped for ten (although usually I lose the card, or the place goes out of business, before I get to ten). But none of these can match the excitement I remember from collecting and redeeming green stamps!

No Matter What by
200
(303 Stories)

Prompted By Family Feud

/ Stories

Long-lost cousins, just discovered

A feud is defined as a prolonged or bitter quarrel or dispute. My family has not had any feuds that I know of, although there have been some estrangements. Those seem to me like two different things, one involving yelling, and the other involving silence. Maybe that’s an unimportant distinction, if they both result in the families losing contact with each other. [Note: after my oldest sister read this story, she informed me that there actually was a feud, not just an estrangement, so my distinction is irrelevant to this story. See the third paragraph for newly added details.]

My family has not had any feuds that I know of, although there have been estrangements, which seem like two different things.

We never knew any of my father’s relatives, except for his sister, my aunt Adele. We saw Adele regularly, and since she had no children of her own, she often brought presents for my sisters and me, although generally not anything we wanted. She would tell us about going to the weddings and bar mitzvahs of various cousins whom we didn’t know, because she kept in touch with everyone. My father had no interest in hearing about them. What I was told when I was a child was that after he became a doctor, all of his relatives expected him to give them free medical care, and he resented that. So he cut off communication with them completely. I don’t know if that is the whole story, and I probably never will. That is, unless I do one of those DNA tests, make a connection with people from that side of the family, and find out what their version is.

Update: I learned several weeks after publishing this story that there is much more involved, and there was a family feud with my father’s relatives. My father owned a pharmacy with his mother and sister, and he worked there for the ten years it took him to get accepted to medical school. My sister was told that this pharmacy at some point became jointly owned with some cousins, and that when he was in medical school they changed the ownership to cut him out without paying him for it. In his view, the cousins stole the family pharmacy from him, believing that he didn’t need his share any more since he was going to be a wealthy doctor. After that he wanted nothing to do with them and perhaps they felt the same way about him. Clearly it was a feud, and sadly, it never got resolved. I wonder if I could find the descendants of those cousins via a DNA test, but I don’t know if I want to or not.

On my mother’s side, I have two first cousins, both girls, who are about the same ages as my two sisters. All five of us were very close when we were growing up, but as adults there have been some difficult times. Without going into any details, there have been situations when one cousin or the other was offended by something that either I or one of my sisters did, leading to a period of cutting off communication. At other times, the two cousins, who are sisters, have been mad at each other about something, but my sisters and I have been careful not to take sides between them. Eventually, everyone starts talking to each other again, although without discussing whatever was the issue in the first place. Maybe not the healthiest way to resolve differences, but it seems to work.

Much to my surprise, I recently was found by some second cousins on my mother’s side, whom I had never even known about. This was not the result of any feud, but just the fact that this branch of the family moved to Georgia and stayed there. In those days, the distance between New Jersey and Georgia was insurmountable, and certainly nobody would have dreamed of making long-distance telephone calls. So the two branches just lost touch with each other. The fact that now, in 2022, my second-cousin-once-removed is living in Sacramento, has joined my synagogue, and introduced herself to me after services one night was mind-boggling. Her mother, my second cousin, just came to visit her, and the three of us got together. (Featured Image.) It was wonderful!

It’s almost enough to make me want to take up genealogy! There may be a lot more relatives out there waiting to be found.

 

Ch-ch-ch-changes by
200
(303 Stories)

Prompted By Changed My Life

/ Stories

There were two times when something changed my life dramatically,
and I link to the stories I wrote about them
in August 2016 and October 2017, respectively.**

The first was going to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago:
Universe ablaze with changes

The second was going to California for law school,
instead of staying in Cambridge:
Did You Ever Have to Make up Your Mind?

If I hadn’t gone to the Convention in 1968, I might not have become the political radical I was and am.

If I hadn’t moved to California in 1974 . . . I just don’t know . . .
it definitely would have been a different life.

 

There were two times, one in the '60s and one in the '70s, when something changed my life dramatically,

RetroFlash / 100 words (excluding footnote)


**Please read these two stories if you weren’t on the site back then, or you just missed them. They were on the prompts “Turning Points” and “The Road Not Taken” – both surprisingly similar to the current prompt.

Power to the People by
200
(303 Stories)

Prompted By First Time Voting

/ Stories

The 26th Amendment to the Constitution, giving 18-year-olds the right to vote, was ratified in July 1971. That meant that I could vote that November, at the age of twenty. Since I was registered to vote in New Jersey, but was a senior in college in Massachusetts that fall, I must have gotten an absentee ballot. It was an off-year, and there wasn’t anything memorable on the ballot, but I’m sure I wanted to vote anyway.

I turned 21 in August 1972, but it didn't matter any more, since you could now vote at 18, thanks to the 26th Amendment.

I turned 21 in August 1972, but it didn’t matter any more, since you could now vote at 18. So I was able to vote in the June 1972 primary thanks to the 26th Amendment, whereas without it my first vote would have been in the general election that November, when the presidential candidates were Nixon and McGovern. The primary was on June 6th, and my college graduation was on June 15th, so I must have gotten an absentee ballot again. However, in November I was an unemployed college graduate living at home, so I know I was in New Jersey to vote in person in the general election. I consider that first in-person vote to be my actual first time voting.

It annoyed me that the eighteen-year-olds got to vote in that presidential election too, since I had had to wait until I was twenty-one for a presidential election.

The featured image is as close as I could find to the type of voting machines I voted on in that first election in New Jersey. (A careful look will show it is from Connecticut, with Thomas Dodd and Prescott Bush running for Senate, but Connecticut is pretty close to New Jersey.) It may not be clear in the picture, but you could either flip one large lever that controlled the whole row, thereby voting for all the Democrats or all the Republicans, or you could flip each small lever individually, allowing you to decide on each candidate separately. I always liked to flip each small lever, even if everyone I was voting for was a Democrat. When you opened the curtain of the voting booth, your votes were registered and the levers went back to neutral for the next person.

In 1972, in the New Jersey presidential primary, only Shirley Chisholm and Terry Sanford were on the ballot. I don’t remember why this was the case, but I’m sure I voted for Shirley Chisholm, who got 67% of the vote. In the general election I voted for McGovern and Shriver, of course, although I was sad that Eagleton had been replaced by Shriver. I still have a McGovern-Eagleton button in my collection.

On my ballot was also Peter Rodino, running for a 13th term in Congress. He got 80% of the vote that year! He continued to serve until January 1989, twenty terms in all. He is best remembered as the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee at the time of Nixon’s impeachment, and watching those hearings, I was very proud that he was my Congressman.

Clifford Case, a liberal Republican (remember those?), was re-elected to the Senate that year. I’m sure I didn’t vote for him, but he wasn’t a bad Senator. However, that year was the last time the Republicans have ever won a U.S. Senate election in New Jersey.

Harrison Williams, the other New Jersey Senator, a Democrat, was not up for election that year. Ten years later he resigned from the Senate after he was convicted of taking bribes in the Abscam sting operation.

There were three measures on the ballot that November: a bond issue for improvements to highways and mass transit, a measure to allow bingo games for senior citizens, and a change in the terms of the Attorney General and the Secretary of State. I probably voted in favor of all three of them. The only one that passed was . . . legalizing bingo games for seniors.

And that is the story of my first time voting.

Material Girl by
200
(303 Stories)

/ Stories

I don’t remember ever having catalogues in our house growing up. I can’t imagine my mother buying anything without being able to look at it, feel it, and (if it was clothing) try it on. And living in the New York metropolitan area, anything we might ever want could be found at a store that was not too far away.

The maternity clothes in the local stores were too cutesy, as if they wanted to make the mother-to-be look like a little girl.

So I didn’t start thinking about buying from catalogues until I was pregnant, and all the maternity clothes in the local stores were dreadful. Generally in pastel colors, most commonly pink, and with little puffed sleeves or lace and frills. Too cutesy. It was as if they were trying to make the mother-to-be look like a little girl herself. I needed clothes I could wear to work. Suits or dresses like all women lawyers wore, but ones that just didn’t have a waist to them.

I was able to find appropriate lawyer-type clothes in catalogues, such as the ones in the Featured Image. (Bows at the collar, like the one on the gray dress, were very popular for professional wear in the ’80s.) Of course once I ordered from one catalogue, they all came pouring in. I got many nice outfits, some I was even tempted to wear after I was no longer pregnant.

Then when I had growing kids, who often didn’t want to go to stores and try things on, I discovered catalogue shopping for kids. Land’s End was especially good, because they had a very liberal return policy with no expiration. Your children could wear clothes for a few months, and then when they outgrew them, you could send them back and exchange for a bigger size. At some point the company must have caught on, and scaled back their return policy, but still, they had great quality clothes which could be handed down from one child to the next, to the next, without getting worn out.

There was a time that our mailbox was constantly filled with catalogues, and there didn’t seem to be any way to stop them. But eventually they stopped coming. I don’t know if it was specific to us, because we weren’t ordering anything, or whether companies just weren’t sending out catalogues any more because you could see all their merchandise online. Somewhere in my house there is still a credit from Land’s End, from returning something I ordered and didn’t like, but I have no idea where it is. Whenever I find it, I look forward to ordering something from them.

Now, I confess, I do sometimes buy clothes and other necessities from Amazon, just because it is so easy, and they almost always arrive the next day thanks to Amazon Prime. I don’t want to make Jeff Bezos any richer, but there are times when I just can’t help it.

<< Older posts