One answer is WAR. The other answer is PERSONAL CHOICE. I’ll discuss Personal Choice first, because it preceded the other event.
The year was 1939, and I was a junior at Northwestern University, managing with the help of a scholarship and part-time jobs. My three sisters and a brother (all much older than me) had helped me get through the first year of university, and after that I was on my own. My friends in the Political Science Club and I had all decided that the summer of 1939 would be the last summer of world peace. We knew that Germany was gearing up for war, that Italy had already invaded Ethiopia, and that Spain was in the third year of its revolution against Franco. My friends decided to bicycle through whatever parts of Europe were still relatively calm, but my roommate and I decided to go to Yellowstone Park to work as waitresses. I was twenty-one, and restless.
Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, is a private Methodist school which attracts upper class young men and women, and I always felt on the outside of the social life there. After all, I worked for my fees and I was known as a “damned average raiser” because of my grades.
I met a graduate student in music, who was from Stockton, California and he encouraged me to transfer to the University of California in Berkeley. He said Cal was a middle class school where many students worked part time, and that I would feel more comfortable there. He offered to pick me up from Yellowstone at the end of the summer and drive me to Berkeley. I saw his offer as a positive omen, and sent off my credits to the University of California.
I didn’t say anything to my family about my decision. I simply told them I was going to work in Yellowstone Park as a waitress for the summer, and I’m sure they thought I would come back to Chicago and Northwestern. I am a first generation immigrant, and I was the first person in my family to attend a four-year day university. My sisters and brother had all worked during the day and gone to school at night. I’m sure my mother at sixty-two and my father at seventy-five were looking forward to their daughter graduating summa cum laude, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, but at twenty-one, I was thinking only of my own future.
It was unthinkable, in those days, for a young woman of twenty-one to go off alone to attend school two thousand miles from home, where there were no cousins or other relatives to keep an eye on her. It never occurred to me that I was doing anything unusual. I had been on my own for three years; I was supremely self-confident. In fact, I looked forward to going to a place where nobody knew me.
That decision, to leave home; to embark on an adventure with no backing except the three hundred dollars I had earned in tips, was a decision that changed the direction of my life. Arriving at Berkeley, I found lodging in a cooperative dormitory for women, located next door to a cooperative for men, and that was where I met my first husband. We were both seniors—he was in Psychology, and I was in English with an emphasis on Education. When we married after graduating, in 1940, and were both enrolled in graduate school, we expected to take our master’s degrees and move to a small town with a local college. We expected to get jobs teaching, and we also expected to raise a family of five children. We didn’t think about the war in Europe. Jim was very near-sighted and wore glasses with very thick lenses. We didn’t think he would be drafted, even if the United States joined the war against Germany.
That brings me to the second event that changed my life forever. WAR.
The date was December 7, 1941. Jim was working on his thesis, and I was teaching in an elementary school. He went off to work in a shipyard near Berkeley, building Liberty Ships at the Kaiser Shipyards, and was drafted in 1942. He ended up in the Navy, and I went to Washington, D.C. where I got a job working for the Office of War Information. Four years later, Jim returned on a hospital ship, and five years after that, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome became so acute, we divorced.
There is no going back, but we both created different lives for ourselves. Jim remarried, and so did I. Now in my ninety-second year, I have been a designer and owner of my own business, an assistant professor in the field of TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) and finally, an author of a published memoir, “Rhoda: Her First Ninety Years”, a memoir which is available on Amazon.com.
We never know how events will change our lives, but we are resilient and luckily learn how to adapt to the changes that affect us. We have strengths that emerge in periods of stress. The strongest lesson I learned was to take responsibility for my own actions, no matter how those actions and choices affected my life.


Rhoda Curtis
2324 Eunice Street, Berkeley, CA 94708
510-526-7799

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 28.06.2010

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