[Marilyn]

I brought home a report card with a couple of C's on it in middle school. (I always made A's and B's.) Both my parents gave me such a tongue lashing. One of them said that no one in their family had ever made grades that bad, and the other one agreed that no one in their family had either. This is all that I can specifically remember, but they humiliated me about it for quite some time. I found out many years later that my half sister had made grades much worse.

In high school, my only C was in typing 2. Which my father made me take because since I was a woman, all I could ever be is a secretary or teacher so I had to know how to type.

I fixed him and got an engineering degree and went to work with a bunch of men. I must admit though that I am glad he made me take the typing. With all these computers, I can touch type as fast as I can think.

My parents were good parents. They did the best they knew how. Don't think they meant to actually hurt me. When I was born, my mother was 39 (born in 1914) and Daddy was 41 (born in 1912), so they were very old school.