WALKIN', WRITIN', WIT & WHIMSY

If you’re a longtime follower, you know I love to stir the memory pot and share some tidbits from my past from time to time. 

Since beginning my blog in 2013, several times I have stepped back five decades to focus on highlights from 1969, 1973 and 1974.  Even writing the words “50 years ago” or “a half-century ago” gives me cause to pause – yikes!  I’m lucky to have photos memorializing many memorable events from years ago, so just a few clicks in my digitized photo albums and closing my eyes transports me back … in this case to 1976 and, I’ll have a few more photos from 1976 in my July 4th post where I’ll be remembering the Bicentennial, the nation’s 200th anniversary.

A little backstory first ….

A few years ago I posted about the year 1973.  I graduated from high school that year and, when I walked across the stage to accept my diploma, I had turned 17 just two months earlier.  I was the youngest of 613 students in our June 1973 class.

This pivotal year, 1973, brought many changes, some which began right after graduation.  Five close friends and I hung out together those last years of high school.  We were inseparable at that time, but soon after flipping our mortarboard tassels to the left side, three of us got Summer jobs as college was on the horizon and three of us became permanent worker bees.  Slowly our shared interests were gone and friendships began to unravel. 

I started working the day shift at Carter’s Hamburgers, a small 24-hour diner-type restaurant.  It was, by far, the best job ever for me as it brought me out of my shell.  I had been terribly shy until then.  At Carter’s I worked every Summer, school holiday/semester breaks and weekends until I graduated from Wayne State University in 1978.

In 1973 I got my first car, a ’73 Biscay Blue VW Super Beetle.  Amazingly, it cost only $3.00 to fill ‘er up!

Now, rewinding to 1976 – 50 years ago!

I started Henry Ford Community College in September 1973 and initially found it challenging since our city’s high school curriculum sure didn’t strain my brain.  It was an adjustment since I’d never had a job while in high school and now I was carrying 16 credit hours, factoring in a part-time job and, once I signed up to work on the college newspaper, The Ford Estate, I had even less hours of free time. Well, who needs a lot of sleep anyway – when you’re young that is.  Initially, my life plan was to become a veterinarian, but my math and science grades were not stellar; as I became more involved with the student newspaper, I decided that journalism would be my calling.

My earliest stint as a roving reporter, long before my blog.

Our newsroom became the home base for our staff of thirteen, along with advisor Louise Schlaff.  In between classes, we’d return there to eat, or study, but mostly it was where we spent countless hours working on our collective labor of love, the weekly college newspaper. 

I was one of several staff reporters, roving around campus and reporting on items of interest to fellow students.  One of my “beats” was The Gate Room where the culinary students put on a different ethnic meal every Friday to showcase their talents.  I sampled (but did not critique) fellow HFCC students’ weekly menu items, then wrote about and photographed the spread.  Another “beat” was attending student government meetings and interacting with our student reps.

The Ford Estate was produced long before computers were the norm.  We reporters banged out our news stories on non-correcting, manual typewriters, then, after cutting up those typewritten pages, we pasted them (“keylined”) onto large sheets of paper (“galleys”), along with photos taken by the staff photographer or the reporters themselves.  One staff member secured ads from local businesses and she also transported our “baby” to the printer every week.  Hot off the press, we distributed copies around campus, hoping no one lined their birdcages at home with our efforts.

At the onset of the school year we were just students comprising the newspaper staff, but soon became good friends and we always got together on weekends throughout the school year – Bimbos for pizza, beer and old-fashioned singalongs with the Red Garter Band every Friday night was a favorite hangout …

… and we enjoyed many Summertime concerts at Pine Knob. We always had lawn seats.

I always toted along my Kodak pocket camera to take photos of The Ford Estate gang. Here are the gals (minus me) …

… or, I’d hand my camera to someone else if I could.

The newspaper staff once had a charity event, a basketball game versus the student government staff. The gals were cheerleaders and the Coach. We posed with our advisor, “Owner” Louise Schlaff. I believe the gentleman in the yellow sweater behind Joyce was Dave Whitman, a local TV sportscaster that was covering the event.

It was all good fun – the losing team had to “eat” a copy of The Ford Estate.

In my last year I broadened my horizons further while at HFCC.

After two years on the newspaper staff, I decided to pursue other campus activities and next got involved in Associated Student Government as a representative of the student body.  I learned a lot about communication and interaction with local leaders as we were involved in various fund-raising endeavors for charity on behalf of HFCC. 

I was the Editor of the HFCC Student Handbook, a project which I also hoped would eventually be an asset in my “string book” which at that time was a scrapbook compilation of a person’s writings to date that was used when seeking a print journalism job.

While being the Handbook Editor might sound like a fun and wonderful opportunity, even something that would look good on my résumé down the road, it was actually a very painstaking project.  Think about how easy it is to type a paragraph with a justified right margin by simply selecting your text and holding down the “Control” and “J” keys – well, that little nicety was not available to me in the Summer of 1974.  Because I had a planned three-week vacation to Spain in August with friends of the family, I began the project as soon as school was out for Summer.  I figured I had plenty of time to write the Editor’s note, prepare captions and small paragraphs for all the on-campus photos, then lay out the Handbook for the printer. 

However, the snag in this project was I had to use a proportional spacing typewriter and this fancy typewriter was non-correcting and Wite-Out/Liquid Paper masking fluid could not be used as it would leave shadows.  So, my typing had to be perfect, plus line up with no ragged right margins.  I worked six days a week that Summer at Carter’s and went to the HFCC campus to use the typewriter on my day off and many evenings after I finished my 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. waitressing job. 

When I wasn’t slaving over the typewriter, I was at home writing copy and figuring out exactly how many spaces each character took … i.e. a “w” was wider than a “l” (three spaces versus one space respectively) for each sentence to align perfectly on the right side – grrr!  The keyboard was different than any typewriter I’d ever used and, if I was lucky and typed with one finger, one space at a time, I made fewer mistakes.  It was a nightmare to complete the Handbook. 

Taking a big bite out of the Big Apple.

One of the highlights of my three years at HFCC was participating in the National Model United Nations and representing Egypt in April 1976.  There were six of us in our delegation – three guys and three gals, plus our student advisor, Arthur Jefferson.  The event coincided with HFCC’s Spring break. 

In advance of the conference, our group of six got together as much as we could given class and work schedules, meeting mostly on campus, to learn everything about Egypt in advance of the conference. 

This newspaper clipping shows what we were tasked with learning to participate in the conference and what activities we would be involved in.

There was lots of cramming of facts and figures on our own, as well as quizzing each other relentlessly as the conference grew near.  Mr. Jefferson was HFCC’s foreign student advisor and had attended several NMUN conferences in the past, so he gave us insight and encouraged us every step of the way. 

We were in three groups of two; my partner Issam Faraj and I were representing the International Monetary Fund. 

The conference was from 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. from April 13th through 17th; on the 18th the awards were handed out. There were 130 colleges in attendance, some community colleges, some universities.  We had debate sessions with other delegations and were judged on our skills.  After each session, we had a catered lunch, then we had the rest of the day free to rest our brains and be tourists in “The City That Never Sleeps”. 

One NMUN session day was held at the real United Nations Building …

… where we met the real U.N. members at a cocktail party and we had dinner with the U.N. representative for Egypt.

We were excited to win the “Outstanding Delegation Award” (pictured in the newspaper clipping and a xeroxed close-up of the award is below):

When the conference was over, we got to keep our placards and flags that were at each of our seats. We had a party in our room to celebrate our award and all our hard work.

With the exception of Mr. Jefferson, none of us had been to New York City, so we made a list beforehand of all the attractions we wanted to visit and happily we checked off every item, including all the “touristy stuff” like taking the Staten Island Ferry to Ellis Island to visit the Statue of Liberty.

I know you’ll recognize the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in this photo of the Manhattan skyline taken from the ferry.

We all went on the ferry boat ride – this was Bill Postelnik, Jim Ghannam and me.

And there’s Lady Liberty on her pedestal at Ellis Island.

We wanted to go to the top of the Empire State Building to see the view from two different vantage points. (Hmm – smoggy much?)

On ground level we ticked off more items, like taking a horse and carriage ride through Central Park – this was Denise Walker, Bill Postelnick and Yours Truly.

I wish I’d taken a photo of Times Square at night, so I guess this will have to do.

A stop at FAO Schwartz toy store was a must, even though none of us bought any toys, but did a lot of oohing and aahing over their amazing toys anyway.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral was a bustling place … out front anyway.

As to “night life” … we saw one Broadway play, “Same Time Next Year” with Ted Bessell and Loretta Swit.

One night we went dancing at a discotheque (yes, disco music was the rage at the time and no, we didn’t get to Studio 54). We were celebrating my 20th birthday which occurred that week.

We wanted to watch the Easter Parade travel down Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday so the gals treated ourselves to a shopping trip at Macy’s where we each bought a “bonnet” … er, hat. 

This was my “bonnet” and I posed in the lobby of the Empire State Building shortly after buying it.

The six of us got up extra early to stake a good spot to watch the parade, then we feasted on the Easter treats we had bought for each other; it appears I needed a nap (or crashed after too many marshmallow Peeps). We were then off to get our award, before catching our flight back to Detroit.

All expenses were paid and we got two meals a day, a continental breakfast and as mentioned previously, a catered luncheon while we were “in session” but we were on our own for dinner.  We all wanted to go to an authentic NYC deli for pastrami on rye sandwiches with a huge dill pickle on the side, but admittedly, the rest of the week, the Statler Hilton Hotel was across the street from a McDonald’s, so after a busy afternoon/evening of sightseeing, a quick burger and fries was often our meal of choice.

It was a whirlwind trip and an experience of a lifetime.  When the trip was over it was time to settle back into college life and hunker down for finals as we all would graduate just a few weeks later.

My grandmother came to spend the Summer of ’76 with us and attend my HFCC graduation with my Associate of Arts degree in June. She liked posing in my cap and gown. 🙂

Nanny stayed through mid-August and then a co-worker and I went to visit her in Toronto for a week not long after she arrived home.  I’ll be writing about that visit and my grandmother in my annual Grandparents Day post in September.

It was bittersweet to leave HFCC, (the main campus is pictured below) …

… where I not only embraced learning, but immersed myself in extracurricular activities, something I never would have done while in high school as I was not one of the “cool kids” … so I was grateful my parents, (who paid my entire college education), encouraged me to extend my HFCC stay one extra year, but they were adamant I had to keep my grades no lower than a “B”/3.0 grade point average. I kept my end of the bargain.

Perhaps Mom and Dad remembered the first few years after we moved to the U.S. when I was routinely verbally and physically bullied by fellow students because of my Canadian accent or because I was not “one of them” or maybe they were just indulgent telling their only child to enjoy her college days before the drudgery of a daily job and/or the rigors of raising a family set in.

Yes, I am a pack rat. I am sentimental in that I save everything and all the images here, with the exception of the featured photo which was obtained through WordPress AI, were from my photo albums and scrapbooks.

Thank you for reading if you’re still here … it is appreciated.