Commuting to College
1973 – 1975
My experience at Mount Holyoke College was not typical. I had left Wheaton College during the 1969 – 70 moratorium over the Vietnam War, soon got married, went to night school in the inner city of Springfield, Massachusetts.
A couple of years later, I decided I’d try a long shot. So I persuaded Dean Joan Ciruti, then Mount Holyoke College Dean of Admissions, who was also a professor of Spanish, to grant me an interview. She decided to take a chance on an unlikely candidate and I got accepted as a late sophomore. There were no “day students” at prestigious Seven Sisters Colleges then.
I felt like an outsider and detached as I commuted from home, working at the Campus Post Office between classes to fulfill a tuition pledge while also maintaining full-time jobs in Springfield as a legal assistant, life insurance policy administrator, and bookkeeper at my Dad’s men’s clothing store.
I’d study after classes when I could fit it in at my carrel in the Williston library. A home away from home. Since I didn’t live on Campus, I hardly knew any students well, except a couple in my classes. But. Since their lives revolved around the college’s residential houses we had little in common.
Although my time at Mount Holyoke wasn’t the usual, it gave me a foundation to go on to teach Spanish at Longmeadow High School, and then my career took a sharp turn when I became an international banking executive after leaving marriage #1 and moving to New York. But that’s another whole story.
The Side Trek 