"Upon graduation from Mount Holyoke College in 1955, I expected to..."

 
I'm Joan Winkel Ripley, people call me Wink on this campus. All my college friends and my high school friends call me Wink. When I graduated from Mount Holyoke back in 1955, I expected to be a chemist, because I was a chemistry major and I was sure that I was going to be a chemist, and I was for a while. But times were different then, and my husband to be was in the service because most men at that time had to be in the service. They had to serve in the Marines, the Army, the Air Force, or the Navy. Mills was a second lieutenant in the Army and he was transferred to Georgia. We didn't know if he was going to have to go to Germany or to Georgia. Now, at the time, I was working as a chemist at Standard Brands in the biochemistry department. If he was sent to, no , I'm sorry, it wasn't Germany, it was Korea. If he was sent to Korea, I couldn't have gone with him so I would have continued to work as a chemist, but he was sent to Georgia, and in Georgia there were no chemistry jobs. It was very backward and there was nothing available. This was during real segregation back in the fifties and everything was segregated. The buses were segregated; the schools were segregated; and there was no high school for blacks in the city of Columbus, Georgia. And we would say to the southerners, "Well, why don't you have a high school for blacks?" and they'd say "Well, the blacks wouldn't be able to do the work." And then we'd say, "But there's no place for them to go." And it was a circular argument and it was a very, very big learning experience. However, it was very good for both of us, and both of us have never regretted living there in the South. But I needed a job, and the only jobs that were available in town were for secretaries. If you worked for five and a half days you got paid thirty dollars a week. So, I wanted to get a better job, and I wanted to get an interview on the base, on the Post. But you couldn't get a job on the Post unless you had a Civil Service Rating. Well, they'd just given the Civil Service exam in chemistry, and it's only given every two years, so by the time I could take it, we would have been gone. So, I took the typist Civil Service exam and I got a very good rating on the typist exam and then I could get an interview. And I walked into the interview and the interviewer said to me, "Well, why would you want to be a typist?" And I said, "Well, I don't, but it was the only way I could get to see you." So he said, "There's and opening in human research and I am going to send you over there." I immediately though of cadavers all over the place and I was really scared, but I got up my courage and I went to human resources and it turned out it was a project run by George Washington University on basic training, testing basic training. So I became a statistician. Overnight I became a statistician! And I worked there until our first son was born, which was in 1957. And then we moved back to Westchester, NY and babies kept coming very rapidly. So, you asked, "What did I expect?" I expected to be a chemist, I expected to get married, and I expected to have a family., but I never expected that I would never work. But, I did have to stop working for a period of time. However, when it was time to go back to work, I couldn't go as a chemist without going back to school for probably three years. That was out of the question because I had all of these children to take care of and it was very expensive to go back to school. So, I opened a bookstore. And I've been doing that for thirty-two years, and I have forgotten just about everything I learned in chemistry, which is very sad. I do feel very bad about that, but I have learned a lot of other things that have filled up the old memory bank. What do I think-how do I think Mount Holyoke prepared me? I think Mount Holyoke prepared me academically better than any place I could have been. The atmosphere was terrific, the academics were terrific, the chemistry department was absolutely wonderful, and it gave me an environment of good friends,, great academics, and I couldn't have been happier to have been here during my college days.