Pearls: Women Who Radiate Success: Book I

By Fred Dawson

The 21 women profiled in this book were shaped by overcoming obstacles—similar to the way pearls are made.

The pearl is formed when an intruding substance, such as a grain of sand, slips into an oyster’s shell. The oyster’s reaction is to cover the irritant with many layers of a smooth substance (called nacre) to protect itself. The result is a beautiful, lustrous gem that the ancients called the tear of a god, or a dewdrop filled with moonlight that fell into the ocean.

These gems are rare and don’t stay hidden for long. They come in all shapes and sizes, from waters around the world, and they sport a variety of colors: white, black, grey, blue, green, copper, and yes—aubergine.

Author Fred Dawson has revealed this treasure trove of trial-tested female testimony to inspire those of us who have dreams to achieve or legacies to fulfill.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483556857

Book preview

Introduction

This book is a tribute to my mother, Marguerite June Dawson. She was a remarkable woman who, in my eyes, has a firm place among the 21 women saluted in these pages. It is because of my mother’s courage, character and determination that I became the man I am today: a successful businessman, a happily married man and a die-hard rock ‘n’ roll musician.

After a difficult marriage and divorce, my mother became the single mother of three boys—Don, Dave and me. I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, when the preferred role for a woman in society was that of the glamorous but subservient housewife—think June Cleaver—who gave up her own career to stay at home, take care of her husband, clean the house, push out babies and have dinner on the table when the king of the castle got home.

According to the archetype, June Cleaver did all of this hard, unpaid labor decked to the nines, hair perfectly coifed, in full make-up and wearing a lovely, silk A-line dress, high heels and a string of pearls.

This may have been the life my mother had aspired to, but it was not to be. Her marriage was rocky, to say the least, and the atmosphere at home was tense from the ticking time bomb that was my father’s temper. Anyone who has ever had sons knows that boys are noisy and boisterous, and if not for my mother’s love and interference we would have been in trouble much more often than we were.

In 1961, when I was 11 years old, my mother bought me a clarinet, which I sardonically call the last nail in the coffin of my parents’ marriage. I vaguely remember my father’s rage when he heard me blow those first strained notes—loud, ear shattering squeaks, honks and gasps that sounded like a goose being strangled. He told me in no uncertain terms that if I brought the instrument out around him, he would break it in half. I therefore practiced in the janitor’s closet in my elementary school. Later, I switched to the saxophone, and my life-long love of music was born. But that’s another story.

When my mother and father parted ways, my mother became the breadwinner of the household. In 1957, Mom moved us from Detroit to Newark, Del., so she could take a job as an assembly line worker at the Chrysler plant. She worked in an environment and an era that wasn’t exactly welcoming to females.

Every day, Mom took great care with her appearance before leaving for work. She always looked flawless—every hair in place, clothes ironed and crisp. Her male co-workers taunted her and played dirty tricks on her over the years, but they never broke her, and she never missed a day of work. Even though she’d often come home soaking wet or bedraggled from hours of taunting and practical jokes, she’d still rise the next morning, get all dolled up, and go to work. Because of her sacrifice, we boys had a secure home life, food, clothes and an overall pleasant childhood.

With this book, I celebrate my mother, wh0 died just four hours short of her 60th birthday, and four years after her retirement from Chrysler. She would have been 97 years old this year—2015.

Pearls: Women Who Radiate Success tells the stories of 21 remarkable women who have lived interesting lives, who rose to the top of their professions, and who are changing the world for the better.

I chose each candidate carefully. They didn’t have to be wealthy or famous necessarily, but wisdom, experience and the desire to make a positive impact on the lives of women mattered greatly. In this first edition of Pearls (the first of a series), I invited women who were close to home—i.e., women who live and work in the State of Delaware or in nearby Philadelphia.

It also mattered that these women were nice, likeable and caring people. As a result, every interview felt as though I was connecting with an old friend, no matter how high she had climbed on the ladder of success.

There are stories of overcoming obstacles, of hard work and vision, of loving and coping with loss, and of moving ahead in spite of the blatant gender discrimination of the last few decades, which has tapered off but still exists. My mother would have loved each and every one of these women.

For you, dear reader, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to these women, each of whom you’ll know well after the reading is done. I hope their stories inspire you, teach you and entertain you. They are written from the heart. Many hearts, actually.

Enjoy!

—Fred Dawson

Myrna L. Bair

A good leader is someone who has confidence in her ability and believes she is doing the right thing for the right reasons.

Biography

Helping women reach their full potential as leaders has been Myrna Bair’s mission, whether through legislative initiatives, direct leadership training, or personal example. Hundreds of women from all walks of life have benefitted from Myrna’s influence.

She first assumed a leadership role when she served in the Delaware Senate from 1980 to 2000. In her last 14 years in the Senate, she was the Minority Leader in a male-dominated political arena. During her Senate career, she co-founded the Department of Services for Children, Youth & Their Families (nicknamed the Kids’ Department), and co-sponsored legislation to create the Office of the Child Advocate.

During the 140th General Assembly, Myrna served on the Health & Social Services Committee, Executive Committee, Ethics Committee, and Legislative Council Committee. She has served on various commissions and task forces, including the Family Preservation Project, Children at Risk Implementation Task Force, Joining Generations Steering Committee, Family Law Commission, Homeless Task Force, Commission of the Courts 2000, and the Public Utilities Task Force.

Among her many awards, Myrna has received the International Women’s Forum’s Women Who Make a Difference Award and the State of Delaware’s Order of the First State. In 2001 she was inducted into the Delaware Women’s Hall of Fame.

Myrna serves as an executive steering committee member of the American Council of Education Network’s Office of Women in Higher Education, Delaware chapter.

Myrna’s Story

Myrna Bair is a breath of fresh air, especially if you’re someone like me, who appreciates people who are frank and without guile. She is open, funny, highly intelligent and unafraid to voice her opinions. And, she is a force of nature. If you’re going to take an opposing viewpoint, you’d better have done your homework.

In conversations with other women who have braved the political arena, Myrna is described in a variety of complimentary ways. Good to have in your corner. She had my back. Didn’t want to disappoint her. One of the most brilliant women I’ve ever met. Tough, but in a wonderful way. My best mentor.

Lunch with Myrna was memorable. She objected that the door to the University & Whist Club’s restroom was labeled ladies and not women, a remnant of the club’s previous men only membership policy. The way she voiced this opinion is difficult to describe, but it kept me smiling for the remainder of the afternoon.

She was born in Huntington, W. Va. Her father, Charles North, worked for the federal government, and the family moved often and all over the country. His last job was with the Interstate Commerce Commission in New York City. Myrna’s mother liked to visit New York but did not enjoy living there, and was very happy when her father took an opening in Indianapolis so the family could move back to the Midwest.

As a government family, we lived all over the place, and I never felt a sense of permanency. I’m very happy that during my own children’s lives we’ve lived in Wilmington. But as a child, I considered Huntington my family home. I was born there, and my mother was born there. It was always a nice place to return to.

Myrna says her parents didn’t have a huge impact on the direction she took in life or her beliefs about what she could become as a woman. They did, however, encourage her to get a good education.

My father was not around much when I was young because his job required constant travel. When my parents moved to New York, my mother found it difficult to meet people and she decided to go back to school. First, she earned her bachelor’s degree, then started working on her master’s in education. My father never had a chance to go to college, but he was bound and determined that I would. Science and math were subjects in which he was very interested, but hadn’t had the opportunity to study. It turns out that those were things I was fairly good at and it led me into chemistry.

Myrna’s mother grew up in a matriarchal family. Her grandmother ruled the roost with the proverbial iron hand. The women in the family were clearly the bosses, although none of them were into women’s issues, per se.

My mother’s great love was music, and she was an accomplished pianist. In every town we lived in she usually ended up playing the organ at the local church. I’m a total musical dropout. My mother tried to teach me, but it didn’t work. I did, however, develop a great appreciation for classical music. Otherwise, I don’t remember my mother being that much of an influence.

Myrna was an only child, and she didn’t like it. That’s why I have two kids! Being an only child can be lonely sometimes. I was always getting oriented to new schools, and I was either ahead or behind. And I always had to make new friends, knowing that within six months to a year we’d be gone. I never really stayed in touch with anyone I had met along the way, because we were never there very long. It’s a terrible way to raise a child. When I asked my mother why I didn’t have brothers or sisters, she’d say it was because she couldn’t have managed moving around the country with more children.

The numerous moves made Myrna reluctant to develop permanent friendships because she knew she would be moving on. Thus, her extended family became the focal point of her life, and she became close to her two aunts and uncle in West Virginia. They offered stability in an ever-changing world.

My mother’s brother had the most influence on me. He taught me the important things, like how to shoot a rifle and how to play poker. She grinned and winked at me as she said this.

Myrna went to the University of Cincinnati, earned a degree in chemistry, and then went directly to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. When she graduated from Cincinnati, she was one of only four women who received a degree in chemistry.

There was one young woman who was in chemical engineering, and even though we were in separate buildings, she would come and visit us just for companionship. When I graduated, I decided I didn’t want to work in industry, so I got a job teaching chemistry as an assistant professor at what was then called Beaver College (now Arcadia) in Glenside, Pa.

Myrna enjoyed teaching. At the University of Wisconsin she worked with Professor Harvey Sorum, whom she considers to have been an important mentor.

He was wonderful. He was nearing the end of his career and realized he didn’t really need to do research anymore, so he focused on teaching. He was a great teacher and I always considered myself very fortunate to have been able to work with him and be able to focus on teaching.

During her years at Wisconsin, Myrna met her husband, Tom, and the two married in 1966. Because Tom worked at DuPont, the couple eventually moved to Wilmington and bought a house. The station wagon was soon to come.

"My biological clock was ticking, so we knew that if we wanted to have children we’d better get started. It took a few years, so I did some very part-time teaching, the bottom of the ladder in terms of career, but I enjoyed it. When I started, they gave me one of the slower classes, and then they transferred me to their advanced degree students, although I didn’t want to leave the students who really needed my help. That was so much more fulfilling to me.

I had two football players in my class. These poor guys were really struggling. By holding extra study sessions with them I was able to help them pass the course and continue with their sports programs.

After having two children and doing some part time teaching in the junior high level, Myrna ended up involved in energy conservation efforts, having observed over time the rampant waste of energy resources in the U.S. As a scientist, the opportunity to investigate this problem and have an impact on the solution intrigued her.

By this time (the 1970s), the states were getting money from the feds to do energy conservation. America was far from being energy independent. If those tankers didn’t keep coming from Saudi Arabia, we were in big trouble. We also as a nation were very wasteful and there was not as much of an effort on conservation as there needed to be. It was the high price of energy that really forced conservation on American consumers. I went to work at the State Energy Office when it was created during the energy crisis, and then wandered into politics, or as some people might say, to the ‘dark side.’

While Myrna was pregnant with her son, she met a woman named Gwynne Smith, who at the time was considering running for County Council. She asked Myrna for help, and Myrna said, sure. She had never been involved in anything political before.

Myrna and Gwynne muddled through Gwynne’s first election for County Council. She came in second, but they learned a great deal. When Representative Dan Weiss left the house to move on to the Senate, Gwynne took his seat in the House of Representatives. She was there for 18 years. When Dan decided he was going to leave the Senate, Gwynne suggested Myrna run for the office. Myrna’s first response was, You have got to be kidding. But Gwynne wasn’t, and she persuaded Myrna to run. She was elected, and went on to serve for 20 years.

It is very important to her that other women run for office. Her advice for those who do:

"Do it right. First you have to pick a party, and then you gather your friends and family together and just do it. Too many people, even if they have an interest in the political system, don’t run for office. We need more good people in Dover, especially now, because this state is in a great deal of trouble financially. There are some very difficult decisions to be made and new ideas are needed.

In Delaware, once you’ve won an office it’s often yours forever. I don’t really believe in term limits, but some people just stay too long. Everything stays the same, or the same thing gets recycled.

Myrna said that she’s not sure whether love is the right word to describe her experience as a politician.

I did enjoy it, but it got to be extremely stressful. I left when I realized I wasn’t having fun anymore, and it was beginning to affect my health. I went to our party chairman and told him I wasn’t going to run again and the first question he asked was, ‘Who’s going to replace you?’ I suggested Cathy Cloutier. We grabbed her at a political event and told her she was going to run for the Senate. She was not too pleased at first, but she’s been there doing a great job since 2000.

Myrna’s most successful and most difficult project (because it took so painfully long was to create the Kids’ Department (The Department of Services for Children and their Families).

The Kids’ Department served children who were abused, neglected, had mental health problems or were in the juvenile corrections system. The department has four divisions: one deals with mental health, one with kids who have criminal records, and one for kids who have been abandoned, neglected, or abused. The fourth division is administrative.

"The governor at the time was Pete du Pont. He didn’t want a new department, so he was really angry with me for even suggesting that we create a new entity that had to be funded. He was governor during a very difficult financial time.

Pat Schram was the Secretary of Health and Social Services, and her mission was to not spend any more money and not do anything that required more state employees. When we told her what legislation we were going to introduce, she was very upset. My partner in crime was Senator Harris McDowell. We were truly the odd couple. He was an extremely liberal city Democrat, and in the old days I used to describe myself as a moderate Republican. Now I’m often considered to be a flaming liberal.

Myrna worked on creating the Kids’ Department for four years, and when Mike Castle took over the governor’s office, she was able to get the department started. It was a lot of work and a political struggle for the first four years and many years afterward. Looking back, she says she could have retired from office after that legislation was passed, but she felt there was much more to be done.

Kids were not being well served. You might as well have built a tunnel from Ferris School for Boys (a reform school) to Gander Hill (a prison), because that’s where they were going to end up. This didn’t make any sense, and it was the driving force for me. We were spending money for incarceration, but not spending money for remedies and support systems.

Myrna’s first serious bill was an energy conservation bill. The Republicans were in the majority in the House and Dick Sincock was the chairman of the House Finance Committee. She met with him and said, Okay, Dick, this is what I want to do, and she came up with a very complicated formula for funding schools’ energy needs. At the end of every year during those times, school districts were hurting because their energy expenditure exceeded the amount of money they were given by the state.

"I introduced the bill and got a couple of people to co-sponsor it. It was exciting—my very first bill. Sincock destroyed it at the committee hearing, and I was furious. Then I found out from the budget director at the time that school districts were deliberately underfunded to give them an incentive to conserve energy.

"Then I got involved in researching and actually writing the legislation creating the Kids’ Department. Castle was our savior there, because he believed in it. We had to wait until he was governor before we could move forward.

"It’s been a struggle getting the right people into the right jobs, but I think we are finally there. It wasn’t until the beginning of the Markell administration that it happened. Those people do a wonderful job helping protect and serve children. Previously, every time a kid died it made the headlines, because they died in very tragic situations, often at the hands of their own parents. That is why I also helped create The Office of the Child Advocate, which is based on the Rhode Island model.

"Creating the Office of the Child Advocate got to be very politically sensitive, and it took a terrible toll on me. I come from a long line of German immigrants who have high blood pressure,