When my hippie husband decided to leave me and our 18-month-old son in a run-down trailer park with no money, I didn’t have a job or plan as to how we would survive. Since I only had a high school degree, I was only qualified for certain types of jobs—bank teller, clerk, manufacturing operator—and even landing one of those jobs proved elusive since no one in 1970 wanted to hire a single mother who might have to take time off when their child was sick. I quickly realized how desperate my situation was and how rapidly I needed to adapt and find a path forward.
I knew I needed more education to make myself employable, but I was now on welfare and few people saw welfare as a pathway to college. Being a natural salesperson, however, I was able to convince my case worker to allow me to use a portion of my monthly check to attend a local community college. I decided to take courses that would allow me to become a teacher, a natural fit for a woman, but in my second year, I started dating a radio station engineer and decided to take the first semester of the Electrical Engineering Technology curriculum to make myself a more attractive “catch.”
