December 16, 1964
This is the happiest day of my life! Bob has been accepted at Danbury State. I’m so happy for him! I went sitting at Os from 3:30 to 10:30 PM and got $4. H called and talked for an hour or so. She’s a swell little kid with a great big heart. I wish I had her pink cheeks and bright eyes. Speaking of bright eyes, I have two of my own to consider! I’ll close them for a while.
December 16, 2022
I will deal with H first. She was not, as one might interpret, a younger acquaintance. She was my age, a classmate who was several inches shorter than I was. She was a talker, the one friend who could be relied upon to call anyone she knew was babysitting and keep them on the phone for hours. It is no secret that I am not a telephone person. So when I say she “called and talked for an hour or so”, it means that she talked and I listened and occasionally grunted.
My brother’s acceptance at Danbury State Teachers’ College (soon to be rebranded Western Connecticut State College, or WesConn) was indeed a red-letter day in the Barraclough household. After years as a “high potential underachiever” in the educational jargon of the day, he was heading for high education, not Vietnam. Tuition at WesConn was $50 a semester, which was refunded if the student made the Dean’s List. Bob made the Dean’s List all eight terms, and eventually became a Big Man On Campus. (He was responsible for bringing the Doors to Danbury!) It was through his college experience over the next two years that I began to imagine my own future after high school. I had no college savings, and my parents never expressed any aspirations in that direction for me. It was possible in the 1960s, to live a perfectly satisfactory life with nothing more than a high school diploma. For an eighteen-year-old girl, marriage and motherhood were as likely to happen by time she turned twenty-two as a four-year-degree. Besides, I had no idea - none at all - what I wanted out of life. Watching how my brother’s world expanded, even at a small regional college, opened my eyes to so many unimagined possibilities.
I am trying to remember what the male-female ratio was at Syracuse when I applied there in 1966. Perhaps 5:1? At fifteen, one of the options I was considering was dropping out when I turned 16, which was not only legal in Connecticut but still rather common.
It’s amazing to hear what the world was like for you — what you’ve seen change!!!! Thank you !