This is an essay about the unfairness’s that life seems to have reserved for women. In nine years of writing essays, this is the fourth essay on these meaningful inequities.
As I set out to write this essay, lines from two songs come to mind. The first is from a traditional folk song called “The Waggoner’s Lad.” It says,

“Hard luck is the fortune of all womankind,
They are always controlled, they are always confined.
Controlled by their parents until they are wives.
And slaves to their husbands for the rest of their lives.”

The second thought that comes to mind as this essay is started is a line in the Eric Bogle piece called, “There Must Be A Reason For It All.” There is a counter melody sung by a tenor to Bogle’s baritone voice which holds, “Don’t blame me, I didn’t make it that way.”
In sum and substance, the unfairness’s that are visited upon women seem to be nobody’s fault. That’s just the way it is. I suspect that if men were to undergo the unpleasantness of menses, childbirth, menopause, hysterectomies, spinsterhood and being widows, there might be a more intense effort on the masculine side to even things up. But that is not the way it is.
In this essay, I propose to tell you about four women I have known who bore their trials with great good grace. The first one is Annette Anderson, a secretary who worked for AT&T in its Overseas Headquarters in New Jersey.
As I recall it, Annette was a divorcee with two or three children. Working in suburban New Jersey meant that she had to own and drive a car to get to work. After a time, the oil in the crank case of every car must be changed. I am more or less an expert on draining crank cases because I spent four years as a youngster working in filling stations when it was a practice to change the crankcase oil every 1,000 miles. In my career, such as it was, I suspect I may have drained as many as a thousand crank cases.
Usually, when I drained crankcases, I had a hydraulic lift inside the garage to raise cars up to chin level. When the plug is removed from the crankcase, there is a surge of oil that must be caught and drained into a barrel. It is a job that requires work clothes rather than dress clothes.
In Annette’s case, economic circumstances conspired to require a less expensive means of draining the crankcase oil of her car. She once told me that she lived on a dead end street. When it was time to change the oil, she would drive the front wheels of the car over the curb and park it so that the front end of the car was higher than the rear end. Annette was a pretty woman with blonde hair. She was also slender. When oil changing time came, she would bundle her hair in a scarf, don old clothes and wiggle under the car to unscrew the crank case plug. Her tool was an end wrench. She took a bucket under the car to catch the oil as it drained from the crankcase. When the oil had drained, she replaced the plug and wiggled her way, with the can with five quarts of used oil in it, out from under the car.
I have drained enough crankcases to know that Annette’s method was a primitive one. But with children to feed and secretarial salaries being what they were, this is what Annette had to do. As an old automobile mechanic, I considered Annette a bit of a heroine. I have not seen or talked to her since 1984. I hope she is well and now has enough income to take her car to a proper garage where the engine oil can be changed by a mechanic.
Now we have a case of Mildred Simon, a supervising force clerk in the Chicago traffic office of AT&T. Each day Mildred would arrive in the office around 7 A.M. and would count the tickets from the prior day’s traffic. Chicago was a big hub in the AT&T network, so there were many tickets to count. Mildred had two helpers for this purpose. The object was to make sure that each ticket was billable which meant that it had to be classified properly. There was also the matter of straightening out any handwriting mistakes.
Mildred Simon was always a most cheerful person. One way or another, I discovered that Mildred had suffered a terrible accident as a child and had lost both her legs. At this late date, I cannot tell you whether the legs were lost below or above the knees but in any case, the loss of the legs seemed to be hideous enough. Mildred sat in the back of the office and whenever any one of us walked past her desk to enter the operating room, Mildred would smile. She knew the loss she had suffered; she was just making the very best of it.
In back of Mildred’s desk was a bulletin board. After I had adopted a child while I worked in Chicago, Mildred was always on me to bring in pictures of my little girl so that she could post them on the bulletin board behind her head. Even after I left Chicago, I sent pictures of Maureen, the little girl, to Mildred. Here was Mildred worrying about my adopted daughter, knowing that to go home at the end of the day, she had to fight the buses and the subways in the loop district of Chicago. It was no easy task even with two good legs, but Mildred had to negotiate this ordeal with two wooden legs. When it comes to heroes, or heroines, I think of Mildred Simon. I have not seen her since 1955, but I think of her often.
The third person in this essay is Opal Audrey Carr, my sister. In the Great American Depression, it was necessarily for the Carr children to go to work at every opportunity. Opal was my senior by seven years. It meant that at an early age she took a job at Joe Gonnella’s saloon on North and South Road in Brentwood, Missouri, serving drinks and occasionally singing. Opal taught herself to play chords on the piano to accompany her singing.
In addition to all of the problems of the Depression that came to Opal, she was also the object of a domineering older sister. In the end, Opal moved from the house to escape the domineering by my eldest sister. As I recall it, Opal had at least two marriages that did not work out. On one occasion, I borrowed a truck and took it to her residence to move her belongings to another location.
While I was in the Army, Opal became associated with dog racing in Florida and in Arizona. As time went on, the family heard less and less from Opal, but we knew that she was racing her greyhounds. As it turns out, she lived in a trailer in Florida and died there before her 60th birthday.
Opal was a good, generous woman. Life didn’t treat her fairly and the Depression was another burden that she had to bear. I suppose that in Opal’s case, the line about “Hard luck is the fortune of all womankind,” applies in spades. I regret that I was unable to see more of Opal. She was always good to me.
And that finally brings us to Essie who was the wife of George Carr, my father’s elder brother. All things being equal, she was my aunt. She lived with her husband and three or four of her boys in a primitive farmhouse in Elizabethtown, Illinois. That town didn’t amount to much, with the feed store probably being the primary attraction on Main Street.
In any event, on the day before Christmas Eve in 1932, a telegram was received at our home in St. Louis by my father telling him of the death of his father, William Meredith Carr. My mother and my siblings had no interest in traveling 180 miles to sleep in Essie and George’s farmhouse. I was 10 years old and I was drafted because there was no school the next day during the holidays.
As I recall it, my father was driving his 1928 Studebaker which had been his car of choice for many years. The two of us arrived in Elizabethtown late in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1932. The farmhouse had no electricity or indoor plumbing. There was a well and an outhouse. Heat was furnished by the stove in the kitchen and by another potbellied stove in the living room. This was primitive living at best considering that it was a cold winter.
In the front room, as it was known in those days, there was a double bed which I assume was used by George and Essie. On this occasion however, my grandfather was laid out on that bed covered by a blanket. For a ten year old, it was an eerie feeling. Nonetheless Essie set about providing us with what was called a supper in the country, or dinner in the city. I only remember that Essie made biscuits that I thought were very nice. When bedtime arrived, Essie, still playing the hospitable hostess, made pallets on the floor in the kitchen which was probably a little warmer than the other rooms. My recollection is that I was cold all night with the covers pulled up over my head.
On Christmas Eve day, three of George and Essie’s boys had dug a grave for my grandfather. With the clay soil, and it being frozen, it was hard work. When the boys, who were much bigger and older than I was, returned from their grave digging, there was no bitching or griping. They were as gentle with me and my father as they could be. When I shook hands with those three farmers, I knew that I was shaking the hand of a workman, not a stockbroker. Their hands showed that they had worked at manual labor all their lives.
When Christmas Day arrived, I looked forward to returning to the civilized world of St. Louis. However, at breakfast, Essie knew that there were three other children of about my age. One way or another, Essie had a very small bag for each of us. In each small bag, there were four or five pieces of peppermint candy. Essie made it clear that she intended to recognize Christmas Day with presents for each of us. The peppermint, of course, was the present. That was 74 years ago, and to this day, I have never forgotten Essie’s generosity.
In 1932, in the Depression and in the country, there were no such things as dentists. When teeth arrived at the point where they were no longer useful, a strong man would tie a string around them and pull them. Essie, who was perhaps in her early 50’s, had only six or seven working teeth in her mouth. All her life she had worked hard and the labor showed itself on her face and on her body. Essie was no beauty queen by any stretch of the imagination, but the generosity in her heart knew no bounds.
On Christmas Day, Essie’s sons placed my dead grandfather in a homemade coffin and carried it to the front yard of the house to be placed upon a wagon pulled by two mules. The graveyard was about a half a mile down this rugged road which I hoped would not puncture a tire. Essie rode with me and held my hand. When we reached the graveyard, Essie’s boys and George gently lowered the homemade coffin into the grave. At that time, no one knew about the word cemetery. A graveyard was a graveyard, pure and simple.
One last thought. Essie and George and their boys lived in this primitive farmhouse which may have been a mile or two from what was known as the “hard road.” A hard road could be concrete or asphalt or even gravel. Getting to Essie and George’s house required negotiating the “unhard” road, which was nothing more than wagon tracks. All those exposed rocks could puncture tires in those days very easily. One way or another, we made it back to the hard road to start the journey to our home outside St. Louis.
I don’t recall seeing Essie after that burial, but she has always had a special place in my memory for her generosity on a cold Christmas morning in 1932.
Well there you have my thumbnail sketches of four courageous women who continued to smile and carry on even though life was stacked against them. When Eric Bogle wrote the line, “Don’t blame me, I didn’t make it that way,” perhaps he had Annette, Mildred, Opal and Essie in mind. I didn’t make it that way either, but good gracious, men have to do better to provide a level playing field for their women. Unfair treatment and inequities have gone on much too long.
E. E. CARR
December 10, 2006
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He’s quoted this particular stanza a few times now, not that that’s a bad thing. But I’m not sure the particular brand of hardship it captures is reflective of modern-day feminist problems, which perhaps have less to do with domineering husbands and more to do with more entrenched social norms and imbalances.
I wonder if the choice to keep the deceased at home (and having family members dig the grave) is a function of their economic situation, or if this was typical for the time period. I’ve heard that this was a pretty common practice in the states, with some homes even having rooms that were built to accommodate the holding and viewing of dead bodies. Maybe this tradition made that generation more familiar with death, because it was kept in closer proximity and normalized a little more — as opposed to sending the dead person off to a funeral home ASAP for embalming. This effect could be compounded by mortality rates and longer lifespans, since death becomes much less of a fixture in life, and kids can grow pretty old before anyone close to them dies. Compare to Pop’s family, where several siblings didn’t make it to adulthood; I imagine that all those kids must have been much more comfortable with death (vs their modern counterparts), since it played a larger role in their early lives.