School Story
Back at Yale I put together a thesis proposal to work with a group of people who were learning about their Native heritage through
participation in the powwow circuit. The group was fraught with internal political divisions. And in the year that i was away my senior advisor was replaced by a professor who didn't believe it was anthropology if the people only spoke English. In the meantime i was asked by the Schagticote tribe in nw Connecticut for help in researching and writing their ethnohistory. I got a 1 year Connecticut Humanities Council scholar in residence grant. This work, too, was riven with interior and exterior political divides. To make a long story shorter, I never finished that project nor did I get it approved as a thesis. However, after I moved to Virginia I was twice visited by representatives of the tribe and I shared my research results with them, giving them a foundation for their federal application for tribal recognition.
I was only able to get a part time adjunct teaching position in Sociology at the local community college and the semester that I was offered 2 classes to teach I couldn't accept because I was making more money at minimum wage-and-a-half at Crown Books during the holiday season. I went to a crash secretarial training course, worked for two temp agencies, got a secretarial job with a defense contractor and rewrote my job description as a technical writer and editor, was loaned to the Postal Service, and then was offered a job as a technical writer and editor in the Finance Department.....and thus began a 30 year career at USPS headquarters. I had a wide variety of jobs including a detail to speechwriting and 12 years in the Historian's office, researching, writing, editing, and caring for historical artifacts.
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One of the funniest school memories was joining friends who had purloined some dining hall trays and sledding in the moonlit darkness down a hill they found somewhere near campus.