50 Stories for 50 Years — Post 31
Recently, at my 45th reunion, we were standing in line to get into the football stadium talking with my classmates when one of my male classmates asked me a question: “Did any of the women ahead of you help you out?”
A simple question. It didn’t have a fast answer.
For the first women at USNA, every step meant figuring out how to be a new first, another first. This small group of women stood as a visible answer to the question the whole institution was asking: now that they’re here, what do we do with them?
Being in the second class of women didn’t buy us a friendship with that first class. We were too few. In the earliest years we scrambled to fill sports teams, skill or no skill. We scrambled to feel part of the whole.
Gathering together cost us. It drew notice. It drew derision from a lot of the guys. A few times in those first years, the Academy gathered only the women for training. It was miserable to be there. It was worse coming back, facing the whispers about what the “girls” were up to. More than five plebes in one room, and we called it a mutiny. That’s what it felt like to gather in any real number.
But as I explained this to my classmate, I remembered Janice and Joan. They weren’t the only ones. Other women reached back too, in ways just as quiet, just as easy to miss. But these two are the ones I remember in detail.
I don’t remember how we met. Most likely at Officers Christian Fellowship, our weekly gathering for worship, where Joan played guitar and sang, her voice beautiful even in that plain room. What I do remember, clearly, is this: between our Thursday night OCF meetings, we’d each find our own way to the small and out-of-the-way Jewish Chapel. We’d pray there. Encourage each other there. Joan was always kind and gentle in her words. Janice was a woman of action; she encouraged me to be strong and courageous. The walls shut out the rest of Bancroft Hall. In that closet-sized room, we could speak openly about what we were facing and how God was working in it.
That room was my version of “spoon,” the moment an upperclassman drops seniority rules with an underclassman. Janice gave me the nickname Munchkin and made me a nametag with that name on it, one I wore on my uniform. (See my post The Wiz.) Those Thursday nights and chapel visits carried me through plebe year, through the worst of the restrictions.
Joan left during her youngster year.
Janice and I stayed close. The best gouge she ever gave me came at the end of plebe year: how to get on the football statistics team, the kind of thing you only learn exists because someone tells you. Because of her, I was excused from march-ons. I walked to the game early and reported to the press box, to my station. My job was to report the starting lineup, back before sports had much technology at all. I sat with a pair of binoculars and a clipboard, the Navy roster on one side and the opponent’s on the other, checking off starters as they took the field. In exchange, I got a front-row seat, a box lunch, and a few hours out from under the hierarchy, sitting alongside sportswriters and other midshipmen.
Some of the women from that first coed class have told me they regret not reaching out more to the classes behind them.
I hold no grudge. I only have admiration. I’m the one with the debt.
So yes. Someone helped me. Not only Janice and Joan. Every woman in that first coed class. Their presence in the hallway. In the dining hall. In the ranks during parades. That presence mattered enough to hold the rest of us together and to say: because of you, more will follow.