KW: I was going to ask you...you were a professor correct? At a community college?
BC: Yes, right. Ok, we have to jump then because I stayed home when my children were young and then they needed some substitutes at the high school in the sciences one year. My husband did not want me to leave: barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. I was not allowed to go working, but I somehow talked him into the fact that the kids were in school and I would go when they were all in school and I would be back when they were home and stuff and they were also older. You know one was a senior in high school at that point, so I went back and I substituted at that school for four or five years, but I could only do it for twenty days a year because I wasn’t certified to teach in New York state. So, then I went back to Syracuse University to get my...I didn‘t need another master’s I just wanted my certification but I had to enter into a master’s program and so I took just night courses. I was able to do that in two years. I was able to get all the stuff and then there was one more year I should have gone back for a seminar and then I would have gotten the master’s degree officially, but they wanted something like $1500 just for that privilege and I didn't have it then. So, I don’t have the paper that says I have a master’s degree, but I have completed all the coursework for their dumb master’s degree (laughter). And here I am back living where they are now, so I had a New York state certification and then while I was doing my practice teaching before that I just decided. It was in 1970 and I‘m telling you between the Vietnam War and the drugs high school teaching was almost absurd. The kids were all stoned. It was just terrible and even the colleges, Syracuse cut classes one day because the students were having a strike. It was all this stupid Vietnam War business and Cornell had to stop classes at spring vacation, they couldn’t even go on. This is the second year when I was getting my master’s degree in teaching, so it was really a nightmare. So, when I finally got this degree I tried to get a job teaching and there weren’t any local jobs around. I couldn’t move. I had kids in school, so I took a course at a new community college that was just starting and they were renting some rooms downtown. And I took this course there in botany because I had never had botany and I figured to teach biology I should know more botany then I do zoology, bacteriology. and biochemistry. So, I took a course in botany and while I was taking it they found out I had a couple of degrees in zoology, or rather three, and they wanted to know if I would teach there, so I interviewed for that and I got the job but not...just on the adjunct faculty. I had to turn down the full time job because my husband wouldn’t let me go full-time. So there you are...there’s the husband telling the wife what to do.
KW: What year was this when you started teaching?
BC: That was 1972, so I taught for five years. Two of those years I was full-time because I took over a sabbatical leave for people, but those were years toward the end and that was also my husband and I had separated and I was able to do what I wanted. And they had an opening for another faculty member and of course everybody expected I would get it but this other adjunct professor, he was very good and he was a good friend of mine and everything, but he had his Ph.D. and I didn’t, so he got it. But that was okay...but it wasn’t okay...I mean it changed my life in a way that if I had gotten it I would never have gotten remarried and gone down to Pennsylvania. But I did get remarried, the divorce went through, I got remarried to somebody I had met at Syracuse University and as soon as we planned our wedding he was transferred by General Electric to Pennsylvania. But I could not leave here because I had one child still in high school for two more years. So, two years later I married him and moved to Pennsylvania and lived there for twenty-seven years. And I just moved back here now because my husband died, but the teaching...I want to go back to that teaching business. It was on at college level, it was completely different than the high school. We did not have, I never had that discipline problem at college.
KW: Even with the Vietnam War?
BC: Yes, right. That was over pretty much by then, I think. That’s hard to say exactly what those years were. Maybe I didn’t start teaching until ‘73 there. I don’t know when the Vietnam War was over! Would you know?
KW: I think it was as late as ‘74-’75 because I know the bombings in Cambodia and Laos ran pretty late.
BC: Anyway, we didn't have that problem there and I had a lot of night courses and the night students were very dedicated. Most of them were nurses that had to get...for that period of time New York state wanted them to have their bachelor’s degree, not just their hospital degree. Some of them had gone to nursing schools in hospitals and they had to get their bachelor’s, so they would come back and they would take biology, I taught biology there, not the zoology. I taught biology, a couple of courses in the biology department, and then I also did some bacteriology there and one zoology course at one time, yes, one summer course. So, I had to teach and learn. I had to teach myself as well as teach there, so I mean I put a lot of study in those years to learn stuff. Really and truly, I learned it as I taught it.
KW: Did you enjoy...
BC: Oh yes I did, I did. I really and truly did and then when I moved down to Pennsylvania you couldn’t just walk into a college. They all had waiting lists of their own faculty members who wanted to get on full-time. They offered me a job in a public school for a part-time job in one of them if I got certified by Pennsylvania. Well, Pennsylvania wanted me to take eighteen more hours of their required courses, which were things like "The History of Pennsylvania" and “How to be a Principal", which I didn’t want to be. I mean these were some of the dumbest courses I ever heard, so I decided not to do that. I decided to go to work after I’d lived there about half a year with Don, with my husband, and I saw an ad in the paper but my last year in Syracuse when I knew I was going to move to Pennsylvania in another year, I took a course in computers, so therefore I was already knowledgeable about the computers they had then which were IBM punch cards, believe it or not. Fed the cards into the machine and that was my programming experience, so I got a job at a computer place. They did scientific computing, so it was up my field a little bit. It was called Shared Medical Systems and they did the medical system software for all the hospitals around the world actually, not just in Pennsylvania, for people that signed on and I worked there for ten years and I wrote manuals.
KW: Right, because you were a technical writer as well.
BC: Yes, I was a technical writer. When I first started there I was in marketing and then I went on to be a technical writer, so that took care of that. I retired when my husband retired from GE. He was about 67 and I was 63 when I retired, so I’ve been retired for a long time and my working environment there wasn’t male against female it was...I was the oldest person in the department. I was even older than the founders of the thing. They were all young kids that were taking these courses, they were majoring, you know, in computer science. We didn’t even have that major when I was in college, so that was a big difference.
KW: Right. That’s interesting.