Old Oregon
News of UO Alumni
Getting in the Game | Not by the Numbers
A Prescription for Retirement | Frisky Fruits and Voluptuous Vegetables
UO Alumni Calendar | Duck Tales: Bored
Getting in the Game
Young journalist embedded with Oregon troops in Iraq
Cali Bagby ’08 stood sweating in line outside the mess hall in Balad, Iraq, when the alarm signaling a mortar attack rang out between the vast concrete walls of the Army compound. “The door to the chow hall closed,” she recalls. “I had to get down in the dirt and cover my head with my hands.”
It was her first day working in a war zone.
Bagby had anticipated the danger—banked on it, even—when she signed up at age twenty-five, fresh out of college, to work as an embedded journalist with an Oregon National Guard medevac unit (C Company, 7th Battalion, 158th Aviation Regiment, based in Salem). But was she ready for war? In her senior year, she took photojournalism courses with Dan Morrison, a charismatic former war photographer and ex-Marine, who had told Bagby and her classmates, “There is no way in hell you can know if you’re going to like being a foreign correspondent until you leave the country.”
She would soon find out. She left for Balad “prepared to see horrible things,” she says.
What she wasn’t ready for was how little she’d actually be allowed to witness.
After the first alarm sounded, Bagby remained outside the Balad mess hall in the dirt for ten minutes, panic giving way to confusion. “Inside,” she says, “I heard soldiers laughing.”
She learned quickly. Mortar attacks came often, but the compound walls offered solid protection. When she flew over Baghdad in a UH-60 Blackhawk, military regulations required her to stay strapped into a back seat, stymied by a Kevlar vest and permitted to shoot photographs only in a tiny radius through the open door. She had to deal with a daunting amount of red tape to access hospitals, which complicated her desire to tell the stories of injured soldiers and civilians. Still, she persevered.
Bagby was no stranger to adventure. She’d risked her life ice-climbing, rock-climbing, and once spending a very long night alone in a makeshift wilderness shelter with dozens of aggressive spiders. Her essay “Climbing with the Guys: Trial by Fire and Ice,” published in The Washington Post while she was still an undergraduate, told the story of her role as the lone woman on an ice-climbing expedition. Soon after graduation, she had accompanied her grandfather—an orthopedic surgeon—to Bangladesh to photograph the hospital he’d cofounded to serve the underprivileged. She returned with a heart-wrenching slide show of amputees and a desire to do what she calls “bigger work than just getting through the day and getting married.”
But what might that work look like?
While she pondered this question, a friend, Major Geoffrey Vallee, the commander of an Oregon National Guard medevac unit, told her his unit was headed to Iraq. He invited the young journalist to go. At first, she said no, but she reconsidered, recognizing both the wartime need for “bridging the gap between Oregon citizen-soldiers and the community left behind” as well as the rare opportunity she had to “do something big” early in her career. Working with KVAL-TV in Eugene, she committed to producing multimedia reports—a combination of text, photos, and one-to-five-minute videos—about the unit during ten months in Iraq.
Immediately upon arrival in Iraq, Bagby sensed the difficulty of her mission. She was rarely allowed to leave the U.S. military compound. Internet access was limited. Some soldiers regarded her with suspicion and refused to give her information. Others insisted she write about their friends. “I felt like a fifth-grader at Valentine’s Day,” she says, “being forced to give everyone a valentine.”
She created multimedia pieces that blended stories of soldiers’ resiliency in the face of loneliness and stress with commentary on their emotional and physical wounds—pieces that still inspire parents, in particular, to send thanks. “They’ll write to me and say that it meant so much to see their son or daughter in a story,” she says, “to know that their sacrifice has been recorded.”
Some of her stories cause her to laugh self-consciously now. She filmed light pieces about soldiers making pancakes as an antidote to the chow hall’s limp vegetables and rubbery steak. But she also composed more serious reports about cleaning Blackhawks and practicing dangerous dust landings in the desert. One day, from a helicopter, she watched medevac soldiers attend to a horribly burned nineteen-year old Iraqi woman. Bagby shot a close-up photograph of the dying woman’s mother looking on. The stark image shows a deep sense of sorrow, but also a grim resignation, evoking the iconic Depression-era photographs taken by Dorothea Lange.
In August 2009, Bagby reported on twenty-two-year-old Specialist Jeremy Pierce, who lost his leg in an explosion, the first casualty of Oregon’s 41st Infantry. In her photograph for Oregonlive.com, General Paul Wentz places the Purple Heart on Pierce’s chest over a red, white, and blue quilt emblazoned with the letters “USA.” Pierce’s eyes are closed, his lips clamped shut as if to repress emotion.
Fifteen comments follow Bagby’s photo on the website—a dialogue among strangers, family, and friends pondering the meaning of service and sacrifice. Near the end of the commentary, Pierce’s wife adds her voice. “I would just like to say thank you all for your love and support. God Bless.”
Still, months in a war zone left Bagby increasingly disillusioned and depressed. Exhausted by the conflicts over her identification card, being one of few women in the compound, and struggling to make conversation in 110 degree temperatures with soldiers in the chow hall, she began eating ramen in her room and staying in bed.
“I had forty-eight hours to work on a story, then forty-eight hours off,” she explains. “After June, there were no missions—nothing to do, nothing going on, nothing to look forward to.” Many soldiers suffered from depression. “It was normal for everyone to spend their days off in bed,” she says.
The soldiers sometimes sought diversion playing Scrabble. “It felt like you weren’t just playing a game,” she says. “but doing something productive.” The familiarity of the wooden blocks imprinted with letters comforted her, even if she lost the game. “Sometimes you don’t get the right blocks. There’s nothing you can do,” Bagby says. “I’d rather play and lose than not play.”
Back in the United States after her tour, she was troubled by the thought that she’d not gotten the story she’d set out to record. “I was prepared to risk my life,” she says, “and I never did. I didn’t see anyone getting injured. I wasn’t in danger. I built up all this adrenaline for nothing.”
She holed up for several restless months at her parents’ home in Spokane, occasionally mustering the focus for a speaking engagement. Many times she sat down to write, but found herself unable to concentrate. “I didn’t know what to do next,” she says. Wary of committing to a nine-to-five job, she made plans to take a multistate bicycle trip. On a practice ride, she hit a bump and went flying.
Bagby staggered up from the sidewalk covered in blood and road rash. Soon EMTs were on the scene. She felt humiliated and pretended to be a hardcore war veteran, hoping to “save a shred of dignity.” The irony of the situation stung as much as the gravel in her wounds.
She returned to Eugene with a growing sense of despair and sought out her mentor, Dan Morrison. He’d recently gained permission to report for KVAL on a U.S. monitoring team along the Pakistani border, a rugged and unsecured area where soldiers lived in tents without electricity. Already, troops had sustained fatalities from IEDs (improvised explosive devices).
She knew she wanted to tell their stories.
“I’m coming with you,” she told Morrison.
She made arrangements to report for KVAL again and began the arduous process of negotiating visas and shopping for a Kevlar vest.
Morrison no longer refers to Bagby as his student but as his colleague. “Cali has a year of experience in a war zone,” Morrison says. “She knows what she’s doing.”
Morrison plans to stay in Afghanistan for six weeks. Bagby purchased a one-way ticket.
—Melissa Hart
WEB EXTRA
View Cali Bagby’s multimedia dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Not by the Numbers
On her own unconventional path, Jeanne LaDuke details the early history of women in American mathematics.
After three decades of research, countless hours in lonely archives, and sleuthing trips zigzagging across the country, Jeanne LaDuke, PhD ’69, and her writing partner, Judy Green, have coauthored Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940s PhDs, an insightful peek into the lives of the women who led an intellectual vanguard. LaDuke, who graduated with her own math PhD from the University of Oregon, is no stranger to the particular challenges and rewards of studying and working in a field often thought to be dominated by male minds.
“In the 1950s, just after World War II, the percentage of women earning PhDs in mathematics was very low, about 5 percent. For virtually all of us in the field during my generation, that was our background: Women were barely visible. The assumption was that was the normal state because that’s what we had lived through,” LaDuke explains. Yet she discovered that women played an important role in American mathematics. “One thing we hope for by setting the record straight is to show that this period in the ’50s and ’60s was not typical.”
In fact, 14 percent of the PhDs awarded in mathematics before 1940 were earned by women—this in a time when women were denied entrance to many of the country’s universities. LaDuke and Green detail the academic paths, careers, and family lives of these 228 women using college archives, census data, academic publications, personal diaries, and face-to-face conversations.
Like many of the women profiled in Pioneering Women, LaDuke didn’t come from a privileged background. While living in southern Indiana, she attended a rural grade school and helped take care of the family’s 300-acre corn, wheat, and soybean farm. During the evenings, she often stood in the kitchen at a large slate board her father salvaged from a falling-down schoolhouse, scratching out arithmetic problems while he scrutinized her multiplication and division.
Education was a family priority—both her parents attended college. LaDuke’s aunt Mabel taught high school math and brought the curious girl math puzzles whenever she visited from Chicago. “Someday,” LaDuke remembers her aunt telling her, “you will be able to do calculus.”
Her family’s strong support nurtured her love of numbers and ambition to attain a thorough education. Having intelligent and educated women as role models also shaped LaDuke’s view of the world. “It’s almost as if I didn’t know that girls weren’t supposed to do math until it was too late,” she says with a laugh. “Later, I was surprised if I ran into barriers. Then, of course, as I started looking back on things, and I had more historical sense, I became quite aware of the obstacles [facing women].”
Those profiled in Pioneering Women had a similar disregard for the limits their society imposed. In 1882, Christine Ladd-Franklin was the first woman to earn a math PhD in the United States—though Johns Hopkins University trustees did not permit the degree to be awarded because she was a woman (she finally received it in 1926). Olive C. Hazlett, who received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1915, wrote fourteen papers that she presented to the American Mathematical Society—placing her among the top 15 percent of the most published mathematicians, male or female, of her time. And Beatrice Aitchison, who earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1933, helped write a survey on women’s careers in the federal government that prompted President Lyndon Johnson to ban sex discrimination in governmental hiring.
While an undergraduate attending DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, in the ’50s, LaDuke spent school vacations with her roommate, Virginia (Walsh) Knight, MA ’62, PhD ’67, a math major from Portland. She and Knight hiked and camped around Oregon, and LaDuke fell in love with the state. “I was determined to come back at some point,” she says. LaDuke fulfilled that teenage vow in 1966 when she began her doctoral work at the University of Oregon.
“Oregon in the ’60s was really fun,” she recalls. “I found the University hospitable to all of its graduate students in the math department. The standards were high, demanding, but I felt a lot of encouragement and support. The faculty wanted us to succeed.”
Life beyond campus was rich, too. LaDuke took up snowshoeing, caught “a bit of a ski bug,” started jogging, and watched Steve Prefontaine compete at high school track meets. She also mixed with the motley cross-section of Eugene that congregated near campus at Max’s Tavern: fraternity brothers, attorneys, and members of the black power movement. And math graduate students assembled around the underlit bar’s wooden tables to study scribbled notes over pints. “It was very lively, and when we were studying for exams or orals, we would do math or pose questions or discuss things that would be helpful for the tests,” LaDuke says. “Not everything happened in the classroom or in a structured setting.”
Her work on Pioneering Women provided LaDuke some unexpected and gratifying experiences. When scheduled to speak at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1997, she looked up one of the women she was profiling, Margarete Hopkins, who earned her PhD from Wisconsin in 1935. LaDuke invited Margarete, then eighty-four and in ailing health, and the elderly woman’s daughter and granddaughter to her lecture.
Margarete played a starring role in the speech. “The granddaughter and daughter were utterly delighted. I list that among the most satisfying experiences in writing the book,” LaDuke says.
Margie Duwe—Margarete’s granddaughter, who was fourteen when she attended the lecture and is now a science teacher—credits LaDuke with recording her family’s heritage and validating her grandmother’s achievements.
“I knew my grandmother had taught math, and I knew she was very good at it. But I didn’t realize the extent of the story. Now, that history is written down,” Duwe says. Margarete Hopkins died a year after LaDuke’s Wisconsin appearance.
LaDuke particularly empathized with the challenges women math PhDs have had in finding good jobs, as she too encountered obstacles. Shortly after earning her master’s degree, LaDuke applied for teaching positions at two universities. A detail she considered irrelevant—that they were both men’s colleges—didn’t escape the hiring faculty. One school’s snooty response surprised her. “The letter said, ‘Apparently you don’t realize that this school is only for men, and we only hire male faculty.’ It didn’t occur to me that they wouldn’t hire me because I was a woman.”
Similarly, many of the women who earned PhDs before 1940 were refused employment because of their sex or funneled into less prestigious and lower-paying positions. Still, over long and productive careers they dispelled stereotypes about women’s inability to do math by their very accomplishments—teaching college and high school, writing books and scholarly articles, mentoring aspiring mathematicians, directing dissertations, and presenting talks at professional meetings.
Marie Vitulli, a longtime University of Oregon math professor, observes, “There have been women who made huge contributions in mathematics. Today, they’re some of the best in the field, as you would expect; however, there are still barriers.” One of those contributors is Vitulli herself, who serves on the executive committee of the Association for Women in Mathematics. “We’ve made improvements, but there is still a long way to go.”
After a forty-year teaching career, most recently at DePaul University in Chicago, seventy-two-year-old LaDuke has retired. Still, her influence continues.
She recently had dinner with a former student, a retired high school math teacher, who remarked on LaDuke’s impact on her life. “She claimed that I mattered,” LaDuke says, “that I was a role model.” Pioneering Women in American Mathematics pays homage to 228 other mentors and, in the process, to the career they made possible—LaDuke’s legacy in mathematics, education, and history.
—Catherine Ryan ’06
WEB EXTRA
To sample an expanded version of Pioneering Women, go here.
A Prescription for Retirement
Studying happiness in the golden years
January 1, 2011, marks the beginning of a new era in the United States, the so-called age of the golden boomers. What sounds like a lesser-known Edith Wharton novel or a noisy ornithological phenomenon is in actuality the nineteen-year span during which the 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 will celebrate their sixty-fifth birthdays and (if tradition holds) retire from the workplace. This massive generational transition has inspired a flash flood of literature: type “retirement” into Amazon.com’s search engine and you’ll be offered more than 14,500 titles.
When Dr. Frederick T. Fraunfelder ’53, MD ’60, plunged into that retirement-advice pool, however, he didn’t find the sort of aid he was seeking. Fraunfelder clearly remembered how his father, a Swiss musician who wrote some of the music for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, had a long but rather miserable retirement. “He had nothing to replace the sizzle he got from big-time show business, nor did he plan at all for the nonfinancial side of retirement,” Fraunfelder says.
Determined not to fall into a similar stupor, the doctor went looking for information on how to gracefully transition out of his own busy professional life. Most of the books he consulted, however, were only concerned with financial planning, and those that offered other advice did so only anecdotally and broadly: exercise, eat enough fiber, get plenty of rest. “I found nothing scientific that gave me a blueprint or a game plan,” Fraunfelder says.
But the doctor’s retired patients seemed to indicate that something else was at work, something even more important than 401(k) balances and vitamin D intake. Some retirees, he observed, transitioned easily into full, rewarding lives filled with friends, activities, and adventures, while others struggled with their postwork years and sank slowly into a fog of depression and poor physical well-being. What, he wondered, was the difference? What made some retirements more successful than others, and why?
Teeing off at the ninth hole of Portland’s Waverley Country Club golf course in early 2002, inspiration struck Fraunfelder and his colleague, Dr. James H. Gilbaugh Jr. ’59, MS ’63, MD ’63. The two became friends when Dr. F, an ophthalmologist and founder of Oregon Health and Science University’s Casey Eye Institute, helped treat Dr. G’s failing eyesight. “After many operations, I could see the big E,” Gilbaugh jokes. The docs share a passion for medicine and an interest in retirement, both academically and practically, but while Fraunfelder is a self-described “planner,” Gilbaugh is more spontaneous and intuitive. “We bounce off each other,” Fraunfelder says, “because we have totally different approaches to life, and we’re both equally successful.”
Their golf-course epiphany was at once simple and ambitious: they would use their training as scientists to try to systematically crack the happy retirement code. They would undertake an innovative scientific study of retirees’ own insights and experiences, gathering information on a huge variety of lifestyle factors, habits, and perceptions, and use the data to determine whether certain traits or actions could reliably predict a happy and fulfilling retirement.
What were they expecting to find? “We didn’t know,” Gilbaugh says.
They sent copies of a painstakingly developed questionnaire, called the Retirement Docs’ Survey, to more than 1,500 retired patients (average age sixty-eight). The data were sorted and analyzed by statisticians at Portland State University’s Institute on Aging, who were astounded by the results. “They said, ‘You guys have got data here on an age group that no one’s got,’” Gilbaugh remembers.
Out of the ninety-six traits investigated by the survey, data analysis revealed eight habits to be absolutely essential. Without exception, the happiest retirees were masters of all eight, and dissatisfied retirees had failed to cultivate one or more of these influential qualities. In other words, the docs had found the blueprints.
Those eight crucial traits aren’t terribly surprising: together they make up a road map to a good life at any age. Successful retirees plan for the future, and not just financially. They maintain a positive attitude, are accepting of changes and limitations as they age, and cultivate a variety of hobbies and leisure activities. They also work to maintain old friendships, create new ones, and nurture family relationships. A support group is essential, in whatever form it may take. “Pets are so much more important than I ever expected,” Fraunfelder says.
The doctors’ research revealed that the most central tenet of a successful retirement is (not too surprisingly) a passionate commitment to staying healthy and active. When the doctors were medical students, the common school of thought held that genetic factors were far more influential on a person’s overall health and longevity than their choices about food, exercise, and sleep. “Now we know it’s just the opposite,” Fraunfelder says. By the time a person reaches retirement age, genetic factors no longer play much of a role in one’s health, and longevity is almost entirely determined by lifestyle choices. “You’ve got to do something different at sixty or sixty-five,” Gilbaugh says. “It’s about lifestyle.”
Finally, the doctors found that successful retirees connect to something larger than themselves. They continue to pursue passions, working to leave a positive impact on the world they’ll eventually be leaving behind. And they possess some form of spirituality, whether in the form of organized religion or a more personal belief system.
Not coincidentally, the two docs organized the book they wrote on their findings, Retirement Rx (later retitled Retire Right in its paperback form), like a series of doctor’s office visits, each chapter explaining the significance of one of the eight essential traits, offering the latest research, helping the reader to diagnose whether a trait is present in their own life, and offering a prescription for development of thoughts and behaviors that will lead to retirement success. They also offer a shorter version of the original survey, now called the Retirement Docs’ Quiz, which is included in the book and available on their website, www.theretirementdocs.com.
More New England Journal of Medicine than Cosmo, the quiz isn’t like the just-for-fun ones you find in the pages of many magazines, but is a scientifically based test that provides statistically significant results. “If you take this quiz,” Fraunfelder says, “it’s highly predictive of how you’re going to do in retirement.” And while the doctors advocate beginning to plan and prepare for one’s retirement five to ten years before the cake is cut and the gold watch handed over, they believe it’s never too early—or too late—to start working on a wonderful retirement. “There’s no question,” Fraunfelder says, “you can teach an old dog new tricks.”
—Mindy Moreland, MS ’08
Frisky Fruits and Voluptuous Vegetables
Photographer delights in the sumptuous glory of gardens.
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Robin Bachtler Cushman ’90, MFA ’07, got her first camera at age ten. Her love of gardens and photography eventually came together in a career as a horticultural photographer. “I explore our gardens and farms—the plants, soil, and insects that work together to provide the produce that we consume. Their role is crucial to our survival—and our pleasure,” she writes, in the “artist’s statement” accompanying a show of her work, Nature Nurture, on display through September 17 at Lane Community College. Cushman has worked extensively for Sunset, Williams-Sonoma cookbooks, and other culinary and gardening publications. She’s contributed to more than forty books.
As digital photography was revolutionizing the field, Cushman decided to update and enhance her film-era skills, entering a UO master of fine arts program and studying photography with Associate Professor Dan Powell and fine art printing with Professor Craig Hickman.
“My horticultural photography paid my way through the MFA,” she says, while her studies “taught me to think critically, work creatively, and articulate my artistic research. The art department encouraged students from across art disciplines to research and develop our individual art practices within a collegial community. . . . Additional classes in the history of landscape architecture fed my interest in the nature-culture connection.”
Since receiving her MFA, she has taught several courses at the UO, including black-and-white photography, a freshman seminar on visual literacy, and, this fall term, a freshman interest group in which students will, among other things, explore photo archives in Knight Library.
“As an artist,” she reflects, “I see vegetables and fruits as visual delights that are as glorious and sumptuous as flowers.”
WEB EXTRA
See more of Robin Cushman’s work here.
UO Alumni Calendar
Go to uoalumni.com/events for detailed information
August 21
Freshman Send Offs
Northern and Southern California
August 28
Freshman Send Offs
Portland and Seattle
September 2
Fourteenth Annual Tailgate Auction
Eugene Hilton
September 11
Oregon Tailgate Pregame Party
Knoxville, Tennessee
September 25
Oregon Tailgate Pregame Party
Tempe, Arizona
October 30
Oregon Tailgate Pregame Party
Los Angeles, California
November 5–6
Fiftieth Class Reunion
Eugene
November 13
Oregon Tailgate Pregame Party
Berkeley, California
Bored
I distinctly remember the last time I told my parents that I was bored. It was the summer of 1960 and I was between the fifth and sixth grades. I lived in Santa Rosa, California, which was a working-class agricultural community surrounded by Gravenstein apple and plum orchards—not vineyards. My life was good—an early-morning paper route and then playing baseball with my friends on a vacant lot until it got too dark to see the ball. My mother was pregnant, hot and cranky with what would be younger sister number three of an eventual four. My dad taught sixth grade and took night courses to become a school principal. In the summer, he worked mornings seven days a week, weighing and punching tickets for row crops harvested by migrant workers. And I had to say I was bored. The next day after my paper route, I was directed by my dad to report to the bean fields.
This was a little tough for an Oregon boy who had spent his earlier years wandering the woods and fishing the streams around Sumner, near Coos Bay. If I brought a string of trout home, we had trout for dinner. I hung around “Old Boone,” who had a little shack at the crossroads where he cut and wrapped deer that hunters took out of the surrounding hills. Old Boone would give me hunks of his smoke-cured deer meat that had a wonderful taste. My father was the teaching principal in Sumner, which included the use of a four-room house on the edge of the school grounds. The dairy farms near the school regularly gave us fresh cream. No matter where in the world I am, the smell of cream brings back Oregon childhood memories.
By today’s standards, it must seem strange for a seven-year-old boy to wander the woods and fields without supervision. But it was the 1950s, so I guess the fear of atomic war made a wandering child, who would always come home when he got hungry, less of a concern.
I don’t remember many sunny days. Rain made it hard to fish, which I accepted before going off to do something else. It drove me to hide in groves under trees that kept me reasonably dry. But I wasn’t around when the doctor told my parents after sister number two’s fifth bout with pneumonia in two years that they would be burying her in Sumner if they didn’t get her to a warmer and dryer climate.
The moving process had wonderful Oregon memories for a seven year old. My dad chopped the heads off our chickens. I had to chase them and take them to my mom, who plucked their feathers. I was supposed to pick only one dog of four to take with us but I deferred to sister number one’s choice of Spooky, who lived through nine more years and two moves before succumbing to suburban traffic. Everything my family owned fit into a Studebaker along with a family of five. What never left was my desire to get back to Oregon.
I did not see TV until I was eight years old. Our party-line home phone taught me not to talk on the phone because every time I picked up the receiver it seemed two or more women were talking, and they wouldn’t stop for some kid. I preferred to be outside playing sports. I played football, baseball, and basketball but was not in an organized league until sixth grade. The only news I was aware of was in the sports section of the local paper. It was my “bean field” summer when I discovered the San Francisco Chronicle Sporting Green and coverage of college football. Oregon’s name would occasionally appear in print and my link to the state became a link to the University.
In retrospect, my desire to go to college, and in particular the University of Oregon, likely sprang from that link between college football and fond childhood memories of the state. I know it was more complicated than that because my father, a high school freshman dropout who eventually graduated from Oregon College of Education, also had a strong influence on me. He always worked hard and spent only what he earned. I also became a saver and a hard worker, and that began the summer of 1960.
Here is what I learned from the experience. First, never tell your parents you are bored. Second, I am worth what someone is willing to pay me. Since I was paid by the picked pound, sitting in the heat doing nothing meant I made nothing. So I picked and began to make money. Third, I learned some Spanish and to love frijoles and tortillas.
I was paid in cash every day. At a time when allowances for kids seemed to range between ten cents and a quarter a week, making real folding money put me in a weird position for a twelve year old. What to do with my money? I rolled it all up and stuck the wad in my clothes drawer. When my mom found it, she took me to a bank to open an account.
My mom asked what I was going to do with the money. I told her I was going back to Oregon. I meant the state. But my mom started bragging that her son going into sixth grade was saving to go to college at Oregon. It was an idea that connected with me and eventually led to my paying my own way to the University of Oregon, out-of-state tuition and all. I’d like to say that bean-picking money was part of the money I used, but life had more lessons for me. My first girlfriend in sixth grade required expenses beyond my paper route earnings, and my family cleaned out the rest in moving and home buying expenses when we moved to the East Bay, across the bay from San Francisco—not the Coos Bay area I would have preferred. However, for my life the dye was cast, and its colors were green and yellow.
Wallace E. McCormick is superintendent of the Norris School District in Bakersfield, California.
