My Footprint

By Marie Dicker Haas

Marie Dicker Haas knew how to make friends and keep them—and being connected to others was what she treasured most. In this memoir, her spirit shines through, as do her philosophies on life, which she developed over more than 90 years before her death in 2017. From her formative days growing up on Staten Island, New York, to her years at Cornell University, through the World War II years, and on to life as it unfolded, she writes with a thoughtful, creative style. She writes courageously of her loves, including the death of Sammy Greenwald during World War II, which she writes “affected me more profoundly than any other event I had experienced until that time.” He had been born next door, and he’d always been in her life. Years later, Marie eloped with a concert violinist who melodiously transformed her life for the next twenty-five years, and two children gave her the opportunity to experience one of her greatest joys: motherhood. She also shares lessons from her greatest challenges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jan 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781483488936

Book preview

My

Footprint

Marie Dicker Haas

Copyright © 2018 Marie Dicker Haas.

Editorial Producer: Maria del Rosario Martinez

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-8894-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-8893-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018909079

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 12/18/2018

PREFACE

I wish that Marie were here to write her own Preface. Regrettably, she is not. I, her husband Bernie, am writing it for her. My wife Marie had many skills, but first and foremost, Marie was a writer. Marie stated, My writing happens because it must. She wrote profusely. She made an outline of how she planned to organize her writings. In September 2017 Marie engaged journalist Maria del Rosario Martinez to assist her. Because age had taken its toll, Marie made very slow progress even with Maria’s assistance.

Following Marie’s death, I asked Maria to see the project through to publication. There was much to be done. For fifteen weeks Maria worked to prepare Marie’s work. It was a huge task which included compiling and revising over 300 stories, adding photos to several tales and writing the introduction of the book. Maria did the work with skill, understanding, and devotion.

Marie’s writings included several paragraphs to guide whoever might create a manuscript for publication. One paragraph responds to the question, How would I like my work to be seen?

Marie’s answer is, As a statement relating to my life experience; as an affirmation of my existence; (as) a statement of my philosophy of life.

Marie noted that her writings fall into several categories, one of which is Family Vignettes. Regarding this group she stated, I want to relate to my sons, granddaughters, nieces (two) and their families what life was like during my lifetime. I’m extending this answer to include Marie’s several cousins and many friends, especially those who participated in writing groups with Marie.

In answer to the question, How do you think others perceive your writing? Marie wrote, There have been readers who find my writing tender, moving, and universal in theme, …….

In creating this publication every attempt has been made to adhere to what Marie envisioned for her writings. I think that she would be very pleased with the result.

Bernie Haas

April, 2018

INTRODUCTION

There are times in life when one goes through changes and discovers that writing is a powerful tool to use to come out from the spongy soil to a solid ground. With advancing age, Marie faced a lack of energy, difficulty walking, and diminished eyesight. These factors together with facing emotional and spiritual quests were the triggers that prompted Marie to stop and look at where she was on time’s arrow. While growing older and embracing physical challenges, she intrepidly moved forward. At her 50th College reunion Marie experienced a rebirth. Traveling fifty years in time allowed her to feel sixteen again. Marie was reinvigorated. She resumed her piano lessons. She continued traveling both domestic and international. She worked on her photographic projects and most importantly Marie painstakingly began writing.

Pages and pages of morning writing papers, together with annotations, set the pace of Marie’s journey in her 70s. She joined writing classes and critique groups. She co-founded a writing group that has met weekly for almost 20 years.

Within the pages of her memoir shines the spirit of a woman who knows how to keep friendships for decades. Marie’s capacity to deeply connect with people from different ages and even living far from her is reflected in this book. Feeling connected with other human beings is the best there is in life.

It is also fascinating reading in some of this pages how Marie describes with great detail and knowledge an everyday wardrobe. Although Marie ended not liking the art of sewing, she still was able to make her grade school graduation dress with the skills of a professional seamstress. As sewing requires precision, dedication and perseverance, Marie was committed to achieve a high level of skill in anything that she did. For instance, cooking, baking, playing the piano, traveling, and ultimately writing.

In her writing Marie found the opportunity to connect with herself and to review her life honestly and openly. As Marie put it, her writing gave her a chance to examine my past in minute detail not skipping any of the darkness or blights encountered along the way. In her memoir Marie addresses truthfully her ‘food addiction’. Her struggles with food went from sought to get thinner thinking that losing weight will solve my problems through acceptance and compassion for myself and empathy for others. In the intimate tales in The Web and The Cocoon Marie shares how she no longer allows food to destroy [her] life.

Thoughtfully and courageously Marie writes of her loves. Her first friendship/love affair ended in anguish and suffering as she learned that her young man was killed in World War II. Years later, Marie eloped with a concert violinist who melodiously transformed her life for the next 25 years. My mind was not on analyzing my behavior and its repercussions because I was in love. Two children gave Marie the opportunity to experience her most joyful and desirable role; namely, motherhood. After she became a widow love knocked at her door again. Through maturity and commitment in a thirty-six-year second marriage, Marie was able to achieve self-realization and travel dozens of times.

Marie’s writing process accelerated when she found her own time machine. Knowing she was growing older, she unashamedly embarked on a profound writing journey where she was able to face fears, disappointments, resentments, freedom, spirituality, emotional significance, peace, and more. Her writing includes memories of her childhood, family vignettes, stories of dear friends, and reflections on aging. As Marie expressed, My aging body is just a camouflage. I am a powerhouse of creative energy. Writing gave her life purpose and closure. This entire book is Marie’s living testimony of her young and alert spirit which continued until her death.

GUIDED AUTOBIOGRAPHY

THE MAJOR BRANCHING POINTS IN MY LIFE

The death of Sammy Greenwald during World War II affected me more profoundly than any other event I had experienced until that time. He was 19. I was 18.

Samuel Block Greenwald had been born next door. I was a toddler when my family moved to a quiet neighborhood on Staten Island. My awareness of Sammy equaled my awareness of my mother, father and older sister. Sammy had always been in my life.

November 8, 1944, while driving a truck near the Hurtgen Forest in the ETO, Sammy struck a mine. He died and I, in my senior at Cornell University, lived on.

I had to learn to live in a world without Sammy. My father never discussed Sammy’s death with me. My mother’s words were only to remind me that she had lost her older brother from friendly fire after the armistice in WWI.

Any words my mother could have said would have rung hollow because six years earlier in 1938, my bond to her had been damaged. I lost my faith in her when she told me that our housekeeper, Bernice, had had an appendectomy when she really had had a little girl.

I had been sent to spend the night at Sammy’s house where Aunt Leah, his mother, told me the next morning that Bernice had given birth to a little girl. No one knew that a few weeks earlier, I had walked into Bernice’s bedroom to see her doing exercises in the nude. I had noticed her pot belly but had no idea of its meaning. My sister and I led sheltered lives and we had had – until that time - no experience about pregnant women and knew little of what was involved. When Bernice was clothed, I saw no difference in her appearance. Later, I overheard my mother saying to a friend that she realized Bernice had gained some weight. Bernice must have starved herself.

Aunt Leah, Sammy’s mother, with her quiet though direct English manner counterbalanced my fiery, opinionated mother. I kept trying to please my mother and struggled with this until I was 38 years old. Then my father experienced first heart attack in 1964. Somehow, during this crisis, my mother and I established better terms with one another. I had lived in Los Angeles from 1952 and in San Francisco since 1960 while my parents remained on Staten Island. They had sold the house on the hill and moved into a comfortable two-bedroom apartment with a view of New York harbor.

The year of 1952, Zelik and I moved with our son from New York to Los Angeles. Zelik, a violinist, worked in the movie studios. In 1960, we relocated to San Francisco because he now had a position with the San Francisco Symphony.

Following his recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Zelik introduced me to some long-lost friends from Berkeley who had read about Zelik’s up-coming performance. They had lost contact with Zelik 20 years earlier in Philadelphia where Zelik had attended The Curtis Institute of Music, and where Claire and Ed had grown up. Ed was a professor of math at Berkeley. The friendship resumed and our families shared many social occasions.

My belief in myself began to flourish once more because of my friendship with Ed.

Ed’s appreciation of some abstracts I had made from the writings of Marcus Aurelius reaffirmed that I had a brain.

My life, as a mother of two sons and wife of a violinist in San Francisco in the 60’s, had been an unrelenting struggle both emotionally and financially. Zelik was a European musician whose own life had been deeply affected by the Germany of the 30’s.

Zelik died of lung cancer in 1972. In order to support myself and our two sons I enrolled in a Medical Records course at San Francisco City College. While I was doing a term of work experience at St. Joseph’s Hospital a woman who worked there told me about a weight-loss group she attended. I had struggled with my weight for a lifetime and decided to try once again to solve this problem. During this time in 1973, I met Judy, the lecturer of this group called The Diet Workshop. Not only did I gain useful insight into my weight problem but Judy and I became close friends.

In the 30 years since then, I have successfully dealt with my weight. Judy and I enjoy a deep on-going friendship although thousands of miles separate us now.

IMAGE01.jpg

After Marie married Bernie Haas in 1981, the couple travel to France in 1982

Marie Dicker Haas

Day 244

2/2/04, 2/4/04, 2/20/04

MY FAMILY

In the years prior to World War I, my father’s family and my mother’s family ran businesses in Atlantic City.

My paternal grandmother, Rose Dicker, had a boarding house which was the main support for her family of six sons and one daughter. My paternal grandfather, Moritz, was sickly, never having recovered fully from the effects of the Blizzard of 1888. Their sons sold newspapers to earn money for the school year in Ithaca, New York where my grandmother, Rose Dicker, maintained a boarding house at Cornell University during the school year. This is how the family survived and how my father and his brothers were enabled to get a college education at Cornell. My father Harry graduated in 1914 and earned his law degree from Cornell in 1917

My maternal grandparents, Vera and Isaac Kritt, had a furrier shop on the boardwalk at Atlantic City for the summer season. The rest of the year, they operated a furrier shop in Baltimore. My mother, Bertha, had an older brother, Harry, and a younger brother, Albert.

One day in 1914, my mother’s brother Harry introduced his sister to his friend Harry Dicker who used to stand outside the Kritts’ store selling newspapers.

Harry Kritt and Harry Dicker enlisted during World War I. Friendly fired killed Harry Kritt in Germany after the Armistice in 1918. My father, Harry Dicker, fared better. The war ended before his Marine Corps unit saw overseas service.

Harry and Bertha’s courtship extended until April 6, 1919, when they married in Baltimore, in the living quarters above the furrier shop.

By this time, my father worked as a lawyer for the General Accident Insurance Company in New York City where they lived in upper Manhattan.

Harry and Bertha’s first child was born in 1920, I six years later.

In 1927, my parents moved to an apartment on Nicholas Place on Staten Island near enough the water so that my father could walk to the ferry terminal to catch the ferry to Manhattan.

They wanted to raise their family away from the hustle and bustle of the city proper. At that time, Staten Island was very rural.

The following year, Harry and Bertha bought the house at 404 Woodstock Avenue, which is the house I remember. The street car stopped at our corner. I lived there from when I was a toddler until I moved away following my marriage in 1948. My parents sold the house in 1952, and lived the rest of their lives in an apartment, near the ferry to Manhattan, from which they had a view of New York Harbor. My father, although retired at this time, worked as a consultant and was able to walk to the ferry for the 25 minute ride.

Except for my mother’s fiery outbursts from time to time, I would have to say that life was good. We all adored my father, especially my mother, who loved and respected him very much.

In the household, my mother’s word was final. On the rare occasion when I misbehaved, her punishment worked every time; she told me if I didn’t behave, she would make me be in my pajamas before supper. Then, my father would know I hadn’t been a good girl. I never was shamed by being in my pajamas when he would open the front door always at 6 PM. In our home, the saying was 6 o’clock is supper. The chimes from the clock on the mantel verified that.

• When I was about five and my sister Betty about eleven, our games became very noisy. Neither of us can remember what really went on. Our play was usually school. Betty, as the teacher, taught me the student. We had disturbed our mother, ill in bed with a very bad cold. Mother called us into her bedroom, and while we stood at the foot of her bed, my gentle, easy-going sister and I became a quiet, loving unit. Our mother’s words did away with sibling rivalry. She forbade us to ever quarrel or argue. She told us she was very sick. If she were to die, our father would have to continue working. He could not stay home to care for us. He would have to hire a housekeeper to do that. My sister and I would have to realize that no housekeeper would stay with quarrelsome children. We heeded our mother’s words and have been, even at our advanced years of 78 and 84, the closest of friends - sugar and spice because we differ in personality as much as two people can.

• Many of the family gatherings took place in our home. My uncles and aunts - many of whom did not live in New York City – visited us often. Holidays were family affairs celebrated with a bountiful table and warmth. My father and his brothers, three of whom were also lawyers, often argued loudly over issues on which they disagreed. Each tried to convince the others that his point of view was the correct one. They all yelled at the same time. They tried to out shout one another. I remember hearing raised voices, but there was such a close tie among the brothers that good feelings soon followed.

My mother’s parents would come for a few weeks at a time at least twice a year. My mother and grandmother argued often usually about some housekeeping matter. Once, on the first day of a visit, before she even took off her coat, grandmother asked for a ladder to be brought into the living room. Placing it near the fireplace, she found a kitchen towel and proceeded to clean up marks on the large mirror over the mantel. My mother hadn’t cleaned the mirror perfectly. Growing up, I heard lots of arguments.

There is no doubt that I was loved very much by my parents, sister, grandparents and other relatives, in spite of how loud voices could be at times.

My father was a very sweet and thoughtful man. At a service for him the night before his funeral, strangers came and prayed before his coffin. We asked them how they knew my father. These were people whose lives my father had help improve through his work as a compensation lawyer. A color guard from the Marine Corps performed a flag drill to honor my father and presented the carefully folded American flag to my mother. There was no doubt of the high regard in which my father was held in his community.

During the week after the funeral, while we were in mourning at my sister’s home, then on Staten Island, a limousine drove up. A group of men clothed in dark suits wearing the homburgs of that era, came to pay a condolence call. These were court officials and lawyers. The courtroom, where my father had appeared during his retirement work, had closed for the day out of respect for him.

After my father died, my mother used her fine sewing and knitting skills to make tiny outfits to dress dolls for distribution to children in the hospitals. She was known as the doll lady. A reporter from the Staten Island Advance, our local newspaper, interviewed her and published a picture of her and her dolls together with a story about her. Occasionally, someone, unknown to her, would leave a large carton of cloth and trimmings suitable for dolls clothes outside her door. Now a grandmother, she dressed dolls as she had done all those years earlier for my sister and me.

* material used from my story THISTER 9/15/00

IMAGE02.jpg

Bertha Dicker and her Project Dolls. September 1969.

Marie Dicker Haas,

Day 245

2/16/04, 2/20/04, 2/27/04

THE ROLE OF MONEY IN MY LIFE

I grew up in the 1930’s during the Great Depression, and learned that money was very important. My parents talked about it frequently.

The old coal furnace has to be replaced. Where will we get the money to pay for an oil burner?

I remember the day that my mother told my father that Uncle Joe, our family doctor, but not a blood relative, had sent a bill for $21.

Bert, my father asked my mother, how could you let it get so high?

It just happened. Both girls have been ill and besides taking them to the office, Joe came here on house calls.

At this time, the cost of a visit to Uncle Joe’s office was $2 and a house call was $3.

Sometimes, my sister, Betty, and my mother talked in heated voices.

Betty, you have a perfectly good blue dress to wear to the party Saturday evening, Mother said.

I wore that to the last party. I have to have a new dress, my sister answered her back.

Sometimes Mother held out and Betty would not get a new dress at the Sylvia Shoppe, where dresses cost $2.95 or $3.95.

Other times, Betty and Mother would go shopping at the Sylvia Shoppe when Betty came home from high school and show Daddy the new dress for the Saturday night party. More often than not, the dress cost $2.95.

During the Depression, my father, a lawyer, worked for the General Accident Insurance Company. Although, he had the security of a paycheck every two weeks during the 1930’s, he received two 10% pay cuts. Mother would adjust her household expenses.

Mother had live-in help. Elsa, our German housekeeper, received $60 a month, room and board, and every Sunday and alternate Thursday afternoons off. Elsa left us after a few years when she married.

My mother hired Mary, another German woman. Because of my father’s pay cut in the deepening Depression, Mary’s salary was $30. Within a very short time, my parents gave Mary’s husband, Albert, permission to live with Mary in her upstairs bedroom. Albert had work but he could not afford to rent a room elsewhere. When Mary and Albert left, Bernice came to work for us. She stayed for several years for the same $30 a month.

Mother took care of everything in the house. She shopped, cooked, washed, ironed, sewed many of our clothes, made curtains, varnished the hardwood floors and gardened. Although she had a housekeeper, there was more than enough work to keep both women busy.

Once a week, Mother would drive from Staten Island, where we lived, to Newark, New Jersey, to the Farmers’ Market. She was able to buy more food for less money than in local stores on the Island. She would stop to fill up the car with gasoline that cost $1 for five gallons. Before returning home, Mother would drive to the slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Newark and buy meat for the week. We grew up eating meals of brains, lung, sweetbreads, spleen as well as more traditional cuts of beef.

When Mother bought chicken at the live poultry market in Stapleton on the Island, she eviscerated the fowl herself. She saved a little money that way.

I remember driving with her to the pier at the foot of Victory Boulevard where a local fisherman sold fresh flounder for 3 pounds for a quarter.

Sometimes, at the German bakery near my grade school in Tompkinsville, my mother would buy large sweet rolls and crumb buns that cost a dime for three for our snack after school.

Mother taught my sister and me not to waste money. There was money for the things we needed, but no money for what she called foolishness.

The destination of our shopping trips to Manhattan on the Staten Island Ferry might be Wanamaker’s, if Betty and I needed shoes. Miss Claredon fitted our feet for years with long-wearing sharkskin-tipped oxfords and black patent leather Mary Janes for dress. Mother bought us good, sturdy shoes. She said she didn’t want her daughters to grow up with foot problems because of having worn cheap or ill-fitting shoes; money for shoes was money well-spent. She never bought us sneakers – they gave no support.

More frequently, our shopping trip was to Klein’s at Union Square. Shopping at Klein’s became an adventure because the store was crowded with racks and racks of clothes. The dressing room was one large enclosed space. I saw all sizes and shapes of women trying on the bargains available at Klein’s. My sister and I had to take off our dresses and hurriedly slip into the new dresses Mother hoped would fit. If a button were missing, my mother would buy new buttons and sew them on. If the hem had become undone, she would fix it. If there were a slight tear, she mended it. When Mother (a clever and talented seamstress) finished her repairs at home, no one could tell that the garment had come from Klein’s.

My father gave every paycheck to my mother. She managed the household finances. When it was time to pay the interest on the mortgage (before the days of amortization) or the real estate tax (you could lose the house if you did not pay up), my father and mother would confer at the dining room table.

My father always had money in his wallet. There never was discussion about where it came from but my sister and I believe that his expertise in compensation law enabled him to freelance (in addition to his regular job) for insurance companies which needed only occasional help.

In the summer of 1958, before I began my first teaching job in Los Angeles, my parents visited me, my husband and our two sons. I had bought a used Oldsmobile for $750 for transportation. During a moment when my father and I were alone, he gave me $500 to cover the cost of new tires, seatbelts and insurance – but I wasn’t to tell my mother. He wanted to be certain I would be safe.

Marie Dicker Haas

Day 246

2/29/04, 3/10/04, 3/12/04

MY CAREER

When I first started grade school, I asked my mother what school I could go to, to learn to be a mother. That was my desire and it fit in with our family where Mother was such an important person.

My father believed that it was very necessary that both my sister and I attend college. He believed a college education would be insurance that we would not have to be sales ladies, should our future husbands experience hard times.

My father’s mother, Rose Dicker, ran a boarding house in Ithaca, New York the location of Cornell University. This way she supported her family of six sons and a daughter. They would have the opportunity for college educations in their hometown.

In 1941 my sister, an economics major, graduated from Cornell, our father’s alma mater. That same year she married. After World War II, she worked in her husband’s sporting goods store, although she had stayed home until her daughters were of school age.

I graduated from Cornell in June of 1945 (a member of the wartime accelerated class of 1946). On November 8 in my senior year, Sammy Greenwald, a very dear friend of mine, lost his life; Sammy was a war casualty in Europe, at the age of nineteen.

His death affected me and I felt guilty that only because I was female I had not been drafted. My life lay in front of me while for Sammy, his life was over. It was only my sheer determination to graduate as planned that enabled me to complete my senior year. My major was chemistry.

After graduation, I returned home to live with my parents. That summer, the war ended. I looked for a job in the New York area for three months. In October, I began work in Bayonne, New Jersey, for Dodge & Olcott, an essential oil house. On the third floor of the factory, under lock and key, they made coca cola syrup. In the two years that I worked there, I never saw that part of the operation. My job consisted of analyzing pyrethrum extract for insecticide use. Chrysanthemum flowers from Africa provided the raw material. The New York branch of Dodge & Olcott dealt in floral extracts from which fine perfumes were made.

I lived at home with my parents and commuted from Staten Island to Bayonne by bus and ferry.

In my family, a job was what you did until you got married. Careers, as such, did not enter into the conversation.

After high school, I had voiced my desire to become a nurse. This did not meet my father’s approval. After college, I had thought about graduate work and had mentioned to my sister Betty that I might like to be a doctor. She asked me why I wanted to do all that hard work. I never thought further about it.

In March of 1947, I met Zelik Kaufman, a concert violinist, in New York City whom I married in January 1948.

I had no qualms about resigning from my job, because I was moving to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to begin my life as a married woman. The following year, we lived in New York once more. This time my life’s work included being mother to our firstborn son.

In 1952, the three of us moved to Los Angeles where my husband now worked for Paramount Studios.

In 1955, when Zelik’s job was eliminated, he worked as a free-lance musician but could not earn enough to support us. I enrolled at Los Angeles State College and obtained a teaching credential in three semesters. Our younger son was in nursery school and our older one was in elementary school. I worked as a teacher from September 1958 until June 1960.

During that summer, my husband took two auditions in San Francisco, one for the symphony and one for the opera and passed both. We left Los Angeles in September 1960 and began our life in San Francisco.

At that time, I tried to work as a substitute teacher. My two experiences at Hunter’s Point schools showed me that the difficulties involved were too much for me. I was in a new city with two young sons and a life that revolved around my husband’s schedule of rehearsals and performances. I was not interested in applying for a full-time teaching job.

During the next ten years, on occasion I would help out in an insurance office owned by my friends the Marques. In 1967, I worked at the Israel Bond office for three months when my friend, Dorothy needed assistance during the Israeli war.

After Zelik died in 1972, I returned to school once more because no teaching jobs were available. I enrolled at San Francisco City College in a Medical Records course and completed the program.

In 1974, I obtained a job in the Medical Records department at Mt. Zion Hospital, San Francisco, and worked until 1983 when I took an early retirement.

In 1981, I had remarried and two years later, decided that I had worked long enough.

Marie Dicker Haas

Day 247

3/14/04, 3/23/04, 4/5/04

GOOD HEALTH

No serious illness or accident has marred my health so far.

However, from the time I was ten, I began to be aware that my mother criticized me for being too heavy. I was plump. In pictures of me from that time, that is what I see. However, my mother had some idealized vision of what she wanted me to look like. It was her crusade to form me into that person. She failed. I grew up with guilt about the food I ate and the sense of failure that physically I couldn’t be the slim person she wanted.

Sometime during 1946, when I was forty, I decided I would try once again to find peace of mind regarding my overweight. I saw a weight doctor downtown in San Francisco, and received shots and pills. I lost a few pounds and gained them back. The expense could no longer be justified.

Next, I joined a group called TOPS, Take Off Pounds Sensibly. I hurt so much in those days. I can hardly relate how the issue of my weight nearly destroyed me. I did not love myself.

At TOPS, I lost 20 pounds in a year. I attended meetings regularly but after a while I stopped attending meetings.

I still hadn’t a clue about how to solve my problem.

I joined Weight Watchers for the first time. My stay there was very brief because in those days the rules and regulations were strict, beyond my ability to accept. You had to prepare non-fat milk from powder although skim milk, non-fat milk was available in the grocery. Why? Well, the answer was that in some areas of our country skim milk contained some fat. The lecturers went by the book. I bought the non-fat milk in the store and felt subversive. I wasn’t following the rules. Only French-cut string beans could be eaten at lunch. Regular cut string beans were for suppertime. Onions were a free food, if eaten raw. Because I was outer-directed, I found the Weight Watcher mountain too high to climb at that time.

In other areas of my life, I struggled to survive. I could not deal with the string bean issue. I still had no clue about the real problem and how to solve it successfully.

Although not a member of a weight group at that time, I still carefully monitored my food as much as I could. If my life was in control, I ate less. There was much turmoil, so periods of less were rare.

During this time, I was able to keep my food under control for a month or so by using a periodic candy binge. On the way home from grocery shopping, if I had about half an hour of free time, I would sit in my parked car and eat four or five candy bars. I can see myself buying the candy bars, returning to the parked car with its trunk laden with groceries. I sat in the car devouring the candy and then drove home. When I did this, I was able to monitor my food for another month.

A year earlier, I had been widowed. In the fall of 1972, I enrolled at City College of San Francisco to study in their medical records program in preparation for re-entering the