how i spent my graduation vacation

I have been asked to write an entry for a Vassar 50th reunion book that is meant to encourage others in my class to attend. Not sure this will do the trick. TMI? No ending. Any other critiques?

How I spent my Graduation Vacation

 Let’s see.

I went to Kauai for a year with Vassar alum Laura Broeksmit, lived on the beach, bartended and shucked corn. Then I decided I needed a real job, so I moved to the opposite place: New York City. There my Vassar degree (plus a contact with Time Inc's  Chairman of the Board) got me a job as copy girl at a startup called People magazine. I was promoted to copy editor when my boss decided that if I could speak Chinese, I could probably speak English. My Chinese was actually pretty bad, but what did she know.

   A couple of friends from Time magazine decided they would launch a weekly newspaper in Illinois. The copy desk was where women’s magazine careers went to die (along with researcher and photo researcher jobs), so I joined them as a reporter. Breaking up with the boss turned out to be another career killer, so in a year I was back in NYC. I wound up back at People as a writer, one of a handful of women at Time Inc. I was the movie editor and reviewer, which was odd, since I’d always loathed movies. The learning curve was steep.

   When I had spent enough time in screening rooms (and when a colleague was promoted to senior editor before me, since, the ME explained, “he had a family to support”), I quit. I had just gotten married and bought an unheated house on Block Island. I sublet my apartment to that same ME, and moved to the island, wintering in Jamaica. Without my income, we soon ran out of money. My husband (also ex-Time) took a job in Chicago where our daughter, now 40, was born. Then we ran out of money again, so back we went to NY, where that same ME hired me as a senior writer at Life magazine.

    What a gig! Climbing Everest, canoeing down the Amazon basin, going backstage at the Bolshoi in St Petersburg. And mostly writing about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. No celebs. OK, maybe a few. I stayed there for 15 years, retiring after the magazine went belly up yet again. Little did I know the whole company, along with most magazines, was about to go south due to something called the web.

   After that I teamed up with photographer friends to write intros to their books and do docs for Oxygen TV. I also got divorced and built two houses on our Block Island property, which I now rent out for the summer. Two decades ago, I was reintroduced to the Ozarks (where I lived until the age of eight) when I did a story on far-right white supremacists—we tried to warn you all those years ago. I bought an old gas station there.  Now it’s Block Island on the shoulder seasons, Ozarks in the summer, New York in the winter. Full circles.

  Oh, and I was spending a month in Kauai, too, until I was turfed out by Covid.

  The only Vassar people I’m in touch with are Laura and her husband Bill Downing, who was in the first cohort of male students to graduate. I know Georgia Hall’s family on Block Island, though I have not seen her in years, and Jamie Sunderland, also of Rhode Island. They both lived in Ferry House with Laura. I am also in touch with Danielle Beauchamp, with whom I became friends when her parents were very kind to me on a year abroad in Taiwan. 

 

With Danielle in Taipei, 1971

With Laura in Kauai, 1972

With Laura in New York, 2019, photo by Bill Downing