July 14: Talking to Mom again

"When I graduated, I got a job at a state employment agency where I tried to help people find jobs. It was one of those government programs that really didn't do much at all."

Then she got a job as a welfare worker. She thought she'd be able to help people and she think she did in some aspects, but it wasn't easy. She had to go out to houses, where the people on welfare weren't happy to see the workers (they thought they were snoopers). She had one group of clients in South Philly and another in Southwest Philly.

She remembers visiting an Italian family with five or six kids in South Philly. "They were very poor, but very nice, very gracious to me."

She did the welfare gig for nine months, then she quit.

After that she spent a summer in Berkley, Calif., with some friends. This was after she had met Jamie, her first boyfriend. They would hitchhike into San Francisco, sit in at some classes, hang out, and she had a boyfriend with a motorcycle. "I didn't like him, I liked the motorcycle." They would take trips out to the ocean.

One time her friend, Angie, came to San Francisco, and they hitchhiked into the city for an exhibition where they saw a waterbed for the first time. On the way back, they needed one more ride, and a "Hell's Angel" pulled up. They didn't want to go with him. They ignored him. He looked mean. But he persisted, and he turned out to be the nicest guy.

Mom said she wouldn't hitchhike now. "I just think there are more creepy people around."

The other thing Mom remembers about Berkley was getting a terrible sunburn, and screaming when a man she was dancing with touched the area where she was burned.

One of the woman Mom was living with, Janice, had a cat with a urinary infection, which made it pee green on a beige carpet. That made them lose their security deposit.

They also went to Oakland during the beginnings of the Black Panther Movement and listed to a speech by Eldridge Clever. They also were tear-gassed in a park during a Black Panthers rally in Berkley. "I could feel a little bit of the effects, not that much, but I wasn't in direct line of the attack."

Speaking of marches, Mom and Jamie went to a peach march in Washington, D.C., which was very exciting.

In the fall of 1968 she came back to Philly and moved into an apartment in West Philly. She worked at a mental hospital in North Philly. The program she was involved in tried to get the patients out of the hospital and into the community. The staff would get together with the patients and have community meetings. "I remember some of the guys there, they were actively hallucinating all of the time."

One of the guys, Mom said, had been placed in the hospital for basically no reason, for having a little too much to drink one day. "I remember finding a place for him and visiting him at his new place." He went to live in a house with an older African American woman. "And he was so happy, he had a life again... I remembered his name for a long time.

"So I didn't keep that job for very long either."

Then she got a job as a preschool teacher with low-income kids in the bottom of a church in North Philly. "And it turned out to be a nightmare of a job for me." She was taken advantage of by the kids. She wasn't eating much. "So it was kind of a bad year."

One good thing, however, was that she had a friend that was close to a family called the Zippins. They lived down near the Art Museum in a small house. She would cook with the Mom, Sue, or just hang out and talk with her. "Actually, Don smoked a lot of marijuana."

She met them through her friend, Sarah. There was another friend of Sarah's with an old Cadillac convertible. She stayed at the preschool job for about nine months. And she had a terrible experience when she tore a boy's shirt, which almost got her fired.

So, done with that job, "Sarah and I decided to go to Mexico that summer (1970 she thinks)." They flew across the country to California. Then they went down the coast to Mexico and took a bus. There were huge water bugs on the buses. Which was just part of the adventure.

At one point she began talking to a man named Victor. But Sarah spoke Spanish more fluently, so she began speaking to Victor -- and they eventually got married.

They ran into a man named Gordon, who had a trailer attached to his truck, and he invited them to go down to Guadalajara, Mexico. One night they stopped at a restaurant, which made Mom very sick.

In Mexico City they stayed at a place for international students, which was pretty crummy. At the Anthropology Museum a guy followed Mom around and asked Mom and Sarah to a bar, where Mom experienced straight Tequila for the first time. She didn't see him again.

They visited the Aztec Ruins. They checked out some other historical places as well.

After Mexico, Mom went back to California and then to Colorado, where she enrolled in graduate school. Once she arrived, she realized she would need her teacher's certificate in order to become a school teacher. Instead, she enrolled in vocation rehabilitating counseling.

She learned a lot about disabilities. She had a few psychology classes. Not much significant happened.

For Thanksgiving that year, Mom went to her friend's house, where there were many extended family members. It was just a different experience from living in a city her entire life. Lots of cowboys. Lots of Westerners.

At the end of the program, she did a program at Fort Logan Medical Center in Denver. She lived with the parents of her roommate from Northern Colorado. They were very strict Baptists. She enjoyed talking with the husband, Wendell. Mom had the basement to herself — it was a great space.

One time Wendall's wife wanted to talk to Mom. She thought Mom was coming onto her husband. "I don't know if she and I ever were friends again."

At Fort Logan, she was part of a team effort to talk about patients. And that was when she met David Gruner, who was part of a group learning about transactional analysis, a type of therapy. Mom started seeing David, which led to Mom getting an apartment in downtown Denver. It was close to David's communal house, made up of a group of hippies.

Then the two of them moved into a convent next to a great Mexican family with several kids. Mom got a job working in a church, which was a helpline. People would call in with emergencies. "And I didn't really like it. I think I took it because I couldn't find anything else."

Toward the end of Mom's time there, she had the car accident in which she broke her neck. She was in the hospital for a few days, then she couldn't work anymore.

So that summer of '71 David and Mom drove to Ann Arbor because he got into the school of Social Work. They got a duplex on Montgomery Street, which is off of Washington. Mom bought a car with insurance money because it hadn't been her fault when she'd suffered the neck accident. "It was this gremlin, it was a ridiculous car, I don't know why I bought it." It had a cut-off back, kind of a poorly made station wagon. But it was heavy, which made Mom feel more secure after the accident, which had occurred when she was driving a Volkswagon Bug.

Mom, the vagabond, was in Ann Arbor, and little did she know it, but she was there to stay.