Dad women and electricity

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

My dad (the kid in bib overalls) and I shared junk food in his kitchen one afternoon in the seventies. Dad had experienced the best and the worst his century had to offer.

I asked him about the biggest changes in his lifetime. The progress of women, he said without hesitating, and the spread of electricity.

As a young woman, my mom clerked in a department store. She once sold a brassiere to a world-famous aviator named Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. When I entered high school Mom went back to work, ringing up groceries, and got her own Social Security card. She showed it to me.

My parents spent their earliest years with little or no electricity. Old habits die hard, they never got used to calling our refrigerator by that name. It took them forever to get air conditioning. They didn’t approve of batteries.

More than a century after Dad was born, he has a boy in college who happens to be studying women’s roles and the need for clean electricity. If he were here, he’d celebrate by getting us another round of Eskimo Pies out of the icebox.