Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter twenty-four

The remainder of my college time seemed to fly by. I worked in the summer of my junior year and during Christmas break as a temporary secretary at the university. I had to type purchasing requisitions, which required six carbon copies. If you made a mistake, you had to start all over again since there was no way to correct the carbons. As awful as the job was, it allowed me finally to help with the financial demands on the family. Thus, in the fall of my senior year, my parents and I agreed that I could move into the sorority house. I’d live apart from them for the first time in my life. That Saturday in mid-September when we loaded up the car with my clothes, a new bedspread for my room, and several other personal items, it seemed like a huge step—despite the fact that the sorority house was located about five minutes from where my parents lived.

Of course, the distance seemed much greater. I felt a good deal of personal freedom and exercised it. There were some constraints because Daddy was so well known on campus. Yet I managed to allow tendencies toward procrastination to take full flight. Fortunately, the political science classes were much easier than music and I didn’t need to work as hard.

Early in the year, I learned that I needed surgery on my hand to remove a ganglion cyst, which meant that I couldn’t study piano for several months. I quit skating altogether and gained thirty pounds due to the lack of exercise and a sudden affinity for the International House of Pancakes. This time, despite the extra pounds, when I needed a date for the sorority formal, I didn’t have to rely on my father to find one. Rich Preston, the captain of the hockey team and my first real crush, took me to the dance. The night turned out to be a little tense, though, since the hockey game in which Rich was playing went into overtime while I sat at the sorority house waiting. I was relieved when my father called to say that the game had ended and that Rich was on his way.

I also used my expanded free time to become deeply involved in student government and service activities with the sorority, resulting in my selection that spring as Denver University’s Outstanding Senior Woman. (A few years before, the award had carried the politically incorrect title of Miss DU.)

Throughout this period, my parents and I were developing a new kind of relationship. We still met every Saturday night for dinner followed by the hockey game. And I found it useful to drop in on them during the week, bringing my laundry with me. We also established a pattern that we kept until the end of their lives: we talked on the telephone every night.

That fall, I started to think seriously about the next chapter in my life. Here, my parents and I were in complete agreement that at age nineteen, I was probably too young to do anything but continue in school. In any case, I had come to political science so late that I needed another year of academic training to pursue my interest in the Soviet Union.

I applied to several graduate schools to study politics and economics and was accepted everywhere except Penn State. Denver was on my list as a fallback, but I never intended to stay at the university. I wanted to go to Notre Dame, which offered a very good program in Soviet studies and encouraged a strong concentration in economics as well. We’d visited South Bend when I was a sophomore in college and I’d loved it. My parents wanted me to stay in Denver, but if that was not possible, they said Notre Dame was a great choice.

One afternoon in April, my father drove up in his red Ford as I came out of the sorority house on my way to class. He stopped at the corner and said, “I have something for you.” Daddy handed me the letter from Notre Dame graduate school admissions, which had come to my parents’ house. I took a deep breath and opened the letter. The news was good—I was in. Daddy started to get out of the car, so excited that he forgot to put it in park. After quickly securing the brake, my father, all six feet two inches and 260 pounds of him, leapt out and hugged me. I think he was prouder of me than I was of myself, and to this day that is one of my fondest memories of him.

After I was admitted to Notre Dame, I relaxed and enjoyed the remainder of my senior year. The spring and summer were dominated by the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s subsequent resignation. My friends in the sorority, unlike the music majors I’d left behind, were also riveted by the proceedings. We’d sprint home from class every day to watch the testimony on TV.

One of the jobs that I had taken on at the university was director of the student speakers bureau. We had invited Bob Woodward, the crusading young Washington Post reporter, to speak one evening in May, but he had to cancel on the day of the speech. I was angry with him, but my anger evaporated when later that day another student showed me a newspaper headline: “President Hands Over Transcripts: Initial Reaction on Hill Divided Along Party Lines.” For the first time, all 1,254 pages of the Nixon Watergate papers were to be made public to the Congress and the American people, and Woodward was intimately involved in working on the story. I subsequently related this tale to Woodward and reminded him of the trouble he’d caused in my life (not for the last time) when I was a senior at DU.

Finally it was graduation day, and as the Outstanding Senior Woman, a.k.a. Miss DU, I led the processional. My father, who’d been promoted to assistant vice chancellor that year, marched with the faculty not too far behind. The celebration was very nice but not very memorable. There was so much ahead. I was just starting my life. Thinking back, I’m reminded of that wonderful line in the Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford movie The Way We Were when Streisand says, “Commencement. What a funny thing to call the end.”