From here on a lot happens and it's going to be difficult to remember everything, especially in the right order, so I may end out doing some unintentional backtracking along the way.
Also, I'm going to be judicious in selecting which documentation to show while I'm still writing under a pseudonym. Some of the details will also be intentionally omitted, although I've shown enough already that anyone familiar with the events discussed so far would know who I am.
As I write this I feel really crumby, but I don't have a fever. It may be that it's my fibromyalgia, especially since I didn't get my lunch meds till I got home at 4:30 and my body still hasn't caught up... certainly my pain is elevated right now.
***
I'm not sure in hindsight exactly what my thinking was, but somewhere in my junior year I was torn between going to Bible school and becoming a missionary after graduating or getting a master's in international policy studies and going in that direction. I was actually accepted into a prestigious policy studies program, but also into an equally prestigious Bible school, and decided to pursue the latter.
***
As many students can well appreciate I ended out taking out a couple of student loans to pay for my undergraduate studies. Once I decided to go to Bible school and the route of becoming a missionary, I became concerned with how I could pay those loans back. Remember, at this point I still don't have a lot of political convictions. So it seemed a logical thing to consider going into the military reserves with my Russian language background. I learned of a program that would pay for 11 months of training, including boot camp followed by further intensive language training, to go into military intelligence monitoring Soviet communications. I was just a hair from the final step of actually signing the documents when.... my parents returned from vacation.
Upon learning of this new tack, which I hadn't beforehand mentioned to them, my dad sort of went through the rough. Because he was such a mild mannered man it seemed that way to me, but it appeared to me more out of alarm than anger. At that time he told me 1) that he couldn't have anything to do with anybody in the military because of his job, and 2) "if it was just for the money" he'd pay my student loan for me.
After that I dropped it like a hot potato. I don't remember him ever getting so worked up about something I wanted to do, so it sort of shook me up and I didn't really question it. But I did need the money and the student loan still hung over my head.
At the time I didn't think about this, but in the years that followed I became angry that dad could pick a profession that limited what his kids could do. It was a selfish anger in one way, but I also wondered if there were other adult children of people in defense-type work (whether in the military or military industrial complex) who were stymied like me. I never could find a group like that though.
But I was also ambivalent, and remain so to this day even, about this, believing that dad didn't completely chose the profession he was in.
As I understand it, early on he wanted to be a pilot, but back then they had strict vision requirements and his vision wasn't good enough (it wasn't terrible, but he wore glasses). I'm not sure where his university management studies would have taken him, perhaps to Boeing anyway because of his interest in flight. But the Korean War interrupted his studies and when he ended out back in Seattle he got a job at Boeing. It wasn't too long after that when he met Mom.
Since he had served in the Air Force he was well placed to work in Boeing's aerospace (military-related) wing, and his capable service kept him there. I don't know of any qualms he might have had with his work, and I have every reason to believe that he believed it what he did, but whether or not he would have ended out in aerospace if the Korean War hadn't intervened, I don't know. I do know, however, that he was very fortunate to have made it through the big Boeing layoffs of the early 1970s (which I discussed in an earlier post), and I'm sure this was because he was a good worker.
***
Getting back to my life...
I worked all through my undergraduate years, and virtually all of my graduate ones too. I worked mostly in retail and restaurant positions, and my last job in undergraduate school was with Pizza Hut.
When I moved to go to Bible school, which was the same city where I had done short-term work with Russian emigrants the summer after my sophomore year, I was able to get a direct transfer to a Pizza Hut there. At least that gave me a little stability of income.
I'm going to leave off for now, but this brings us up to 1982-1985, the period I did my graduate Bible school studies (2 years of study, with a year in the middle when I was involved with other things).
~ Meg
