About
About Me
The three women who lived in Hell's Kitchen were my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother.
My great-grandmother was the daughter of German immigrants who arrived in this country in the 1840s. In her lifetime she worked as a barmaid, a shirt-maker, a building superintendant, and a midwife. She had six children, but only two survived to adulthood and only one lived as a grown, independent woman. My grandmother worked as a switchboard operator for midtown hotels all of her life, and had two children, my mother and my uncle. They lived in Hell's Kitchen until my mother was 15, when they moved to Queens for a better life. During the second world war, she operated a boarding house.
My mother was also a switchboard operator from the age of thirteen. My grandmother didn't believe in education and conned the school system into believing that my mother was continuing her education at a private business school as a substitute for high school. I believe that it was situations like my mother's that caused government to institute the requirement of working papers for people under 18.
My parents were a swing generation from working class to middle class. My father took some courses in college, but my sister and I were the first to get college degrees. We both went to Hunter College in the days when Hunter was still one of the top ten women's colleges. It's hard to believe, but we paid $24 a semester registration fee and were loaned our textbooks, in the same way high school and elementary students are loaned theirs.
The concept of virtually free higher educaton is not a new idea. It happened in New York City, and permitted thousands and probably millions of people to get an education and a start on a new life that was not imaginable otherwise.
Today, of course, the city universities and colleges are still a bargain compared to private education, but I am not sure if I could have afforded even a public education if I had to pay the tuition required today. I am grateful for the opportunities I've had and am a firm believer that free or almost free higher education is necessary for a free society.
More to come . . .