What's Education Got to Do With It?

My mother quit school shortly after she entered the eighth grade, just two years after her fifth grade teacher punished her in front of her classmates for wetting her pants. The teacher had made her pull up her dress and stand in front of the radiator to dry her panties. Maybe this is the reason she was upset years later when the choreographer asked her to lift up her skirt during the dance audition. In addition, at thirteen, my mother would have been forced to attend school in shoes barely sustainable in the cold winter weather. The only pair she owned were worn to shreds. She grew tired hiding every day during lunch to avoid anyone knowing she had nothing to bring to eat. To be bullied by a teacher who refused to allow her to use the bathroom and then to be punished because she wet her underpants crushed her. Paper-thin shoes and nothing to eat then destroyed whatever was left of any desire she might have had to learn. No one bothered to follow-up her failure to show up for her classes. After all, the Great Depression was in full swing and many school systems ran out of money, child labor laws were ignored and kids who could find work left school. Many who couldn't find work -- over 23,000 of them -- traveled the rails and hitch-hiked along highways in search of work. By the time Mom was sixteen she had a job in a factory -- and new shoes.

At eighteen, Mom was trained as a riveter. Like Rosie the Riveter, she was one of the thousands of women (300,000 were employed in the War Department) who worked in shipyards and factories during WWII, producing ships, tanks, and planes as well as munitions and war supplies. Mom riveted planes at McDonnell Aircraft, working ten-hour days, six days a week for fifty-cents an hour. And she thought it was the best thing that ever happened to her. She had money! She had prestige! She had one day a week off! She had shoes!! And lunch!! Mom had grown to be movie-star beautiful with long auburn hair and an eye-popping figure that she showed off in fashionable tight sweater sets. Perched on platform shoes, her long shapely legs looked even longer. In the factory, she changed into her work attire and wrapped her thick hair up in the iconic knotted scarf, but one day, as she strutted through the factory on her way to the dressing room to change into her work overalls, she was spotted by a couple of military PR men. They approached her and asked her if they could take her picture and use her photo on one of the posters to help recruit other women to work in the factories that were busy grinding out aircraft and tanks for the war. Mom was so proud of that recognition, and my regret is that she was too young to have enough sense to save a poster for me to see. I bet she looked great!