You could almost ask, "What did you not do?"
Well, for one thing, nothing that broke the law. (wink)
When I was a child in the 1950s, unfortunately in a traditional family, I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. But little girls just did not have such ambitions, I was told. And when I said I wanted to join the Navy and serve our country because my father had been in the Navy (Annapolis, class of 1934), my mother and brother were aghast, telling me that good girls just didn't do such a thing.
That is why, when I got older, the surest way to get me to do something was to tell me not to do it. (However, be it said that this did not lead me into doing really stupid stuff.)
I got through college at Florida State University with a bachelor's degree in government and a master's in library science. I worked at a city library until, having become married in the meantime, my husband got a change of station and we moved. He was in the Coast Guard.
At our new location, there weren't any jobs for me. It was the early 1970s, there was a recession, and under such conditions, libraries are the first on the chopping block.
When my husband was released from active duty and went into the reserve, we moved back home. I had seen how interesting the Coast Guard was from all the things my husband had done -- some of them sounding downright fun -- that I wanted to join up. Unlike my mother and brother, my husband was all for it. He knew me well enough to know that I could certainly remain a "good girl" and still serve. So I enlisted in the Coast Guard Reserve as a yeoman and spent 15 years in the reserve. Along the way, I got a commission. I did not make it to 20 years and retirement because I developed osteoarthritis, and had to stand down. However, I had finally satisfied my desire to serve my country, and could thumb my nose at my mother and brother who, despite their original misgivings, were proud of me. There was also the added boost that my brother had been a Marine -- and I outranked him!
During the time I was in the reserve, I also helped the family out by taking jobs through temporary staffing agencies doing clerical work for various concerns, from a large city hospital to small businesses to one of the largest railroads in the country. Then I got extended temporary work with the Internal Revenue Service during tax season. I did that for a couple years, then got a permanent job with them. It was interesting enough, but the boss of the section was one of those civil-service fief-builders, and I was not interested in her self-aggrandizement. I decided to go to school and become a nurse, enrolling in a program of study at the local junior college. I spent a couple of exhausting but fascinating and rewarding years as a registered nurse, but then we had three deaths in the family in a relatively short period of time, and the emotional and physical exhaustion were too much. I burned out and had to quit.
I enrolled in a distance-learning course through the University of Toronto, a course of study adminstered by the National Institute of Genealogical Studies, of Toronto. I got training in American Records. It was a varied group of courses taught by certified genealogists or by people who were Ph.D.s in their field. I decided to study Florida's Spanish lineages, as no professional work had been done in that area, and I lived within day-trip driving distance of several fine repositories and archives of materials on the subject. However, realizing that my high-school Spanish from 40-odd years ago was not going to help me much, I looked into taking courses at a local state university, and ended up enrolling as a post-baccalaureate student with a double major in history and Spanish. I graduated in April of 2012, and then applied to graduate school. I got my second master's degree in May of 2015. I am now a historian studying Spanish colonial Florida, concentrating on St. Augustine and its province of East Florida during the years 1784-1821. Again, I have, in a way, satisfied a childhood wish. I'm a reporter, but a different sort of one as a historian. And I enjoy it!
Librarian, nurse, clerk, Coast Guardsman, genealogist, historian -- a varied career, indeed.
1 comment:
Who says you have to go down one career path your whole life! It sounds like you've done a variety of different things.
By the way, you and I share something in common. I worked 8 years for the local public library system for 8 years. I worked in the cataloging department at a time when they were doing things partly on catalog cards, partly on microfilm, and partly on computers.
And, I agree that libraries are usually the first to lose funding. In the 8 years I worked there, I believe we were in a hiring freeze 5 of those years.
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