50 Stories for 50 Years — Post 29 After plebe summer, after a full academic year of being told exactly where to be and exactly what to do, and after climbing Herndon, the Navy hands you a ship and says, “Run it.” Not entirely. Not alone. But it felt close enough. A tension is worth naming before this story starts. Throughout the academic year, we trained alongside our male classmates: same classes, same formations, same…
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Boston
Published August 10, 2026
50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 27 When I was a midshipman at the Naval Academy, I came to know our floor janitor. Everyone called him Boston. That was all I knew of him, that one name. Casual greetings turned into real conversations over time. We were responsible for our own rooms, waxed floors, and properly stowed items. Boston kept the hallways and restrooms shipshape. He could have been invisible, the way janitorial and…
4 CommentsThose Who Saw Us
Published July 20, 2026
50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 24 In my earlier posts, I’ve written about some of the coaches and instructors I had at USNA. Let me round that out with a few more of the professors I remember, the civilian ones, the military ones, the ones who noticed there were women in the room and treated us with respect. I’ve blocked out every calculus and electrical instructor I ever had. Mercy, probably. More about…
Leave a CommentThe Barn
Published July 13, 2026
Not every company had women in those early years. That made rooming complicated in ways nobody had planned for. Civilian colleges let you vet a roommate before you move in. We got assigned three to a room, and if the conflict turned irreconcilable, the fix wasn’t a room change. It was a company change. That’s how much weight a roommate carried. They weren’t just the people you lived with. They were the ones you formed…
1 CommentThe Quarter-Pounder Incident
Published July 6, 2026
An 18-year-old man requires roughly 600-1,000 more calories per day than an 18-year-old woman of the same activity level. The Naval Academy had not yet done this math in the mid-1970s. USNA served the Brigade, some 4,400 midshipmen, family style, averaging 3,500 to 4,200 calories a day. It was built for men who sustained heavy academic, military, and physical loads. The nutrition science of the era wasn’t what it is now, and sports teams got…
Leave a CommentJust keep swimming
Published June 29, 2026
50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 21 Swimming existed at the Naval Academy long before women did. That mattered. When I arrived in the summer of 1977, I already knew the water. Age-group swimming since I was eleven. Two-a-day practices in high school. The rhythm of yards and turns, and the particular silence of being underwater while the world above stayed loud. Of all the spaces at the Naval Academy, the pools were the…
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