A Tale of Two Parents IV

There's some mystery about what my Mother did before she married my Father. After working as a clerk in a department store in Washington DC, she eventually ended up doing civil service clerical work, but I don't know what agency hired her. Between the department store and the civil service work there could have been any number of adventures. There could be as much as five years unaccounted for. There is even the possibility that my Mother was a WAC. The cemetery that has her ashes lists her as having been a PFC. I don't know who gave them that idea.

[Right: Did Mother have a
Star-Spangled Heart?]

What I do know about my Mother is what she looked like in those days, and I have a good deal of information about her later hopes and dreams, and a sense of the times tells me that her later dreams were entirely formed from the glamor fantasies that characterized 30s and 40s film and art.


Therefore, Mother's idea of the Good Life:



She trained herself to be sultry and innocent in turns, as necessary. She considered herself too smart to have to learn anything, that's what idiots do. Really clever people just trick the idiots into getting things done.

[Silky sultry Mother / Cottony innocent Mother:]


Her highest goal was to marry a rich man. When a rich man didn't come along, and the clock was showing age 34, the new goal was to marry a man with a promising career. Why not a budding Lieutenant with dreams of his own of being a General?