Priscilla Ames Hildum

I grew up in North Plainfield, New Jersey, which in the '30s and early '40s featured much undeveloped land, including broad fields bordered with tall pines that were fun to climb.  A brook and woods stretched behind our house and beyond.  We walked to school at every level. Our freedom to roam in our end of town, where we knew nearly everybody, was almost unlimited and, as we observe often, totally different from the way our city grandchildren live.

My father's boyhood home was Montclair, NJ, where he finished high school at age 16. Unwilling to send him off to college so young his father instead arranged an apprenticeship with a carpenter lasting two years.  The resulting skills were apparent over the years in all sorts of projects that enriched our evenings and Saturdays and set for my brothers and me the example of making things.  He went from the Harvard education that followed to the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company and spent his entire working career there in middle management positions. My mother had prepared for teaching school but, unable to find more than a few substitute, one-day stands in the late 1920s, went to work in the Bell Telephone Hoboken office, managed by Robert Ames.  After plans to open a new office in Plainfield were announced, with my father as manager who would "take one of the girls," his boss observed that he had "taken the best one."

She had not much time to consider whether to continue working as I came along toward the end of their first year of marriage and was followed by three brothers.  Growing up, I helped a lot in those years of labor intensive house keeping, including running our 1936 dishwasher - enough that to this day I don't care to use even a new one.  My mother was very industrious and a consummate needlewoman.  Her projects of sewing, embroidery, crochet and knitting throughout those years when housework took so many hours still inspire wonder at how she found the time or energy.  Inspired and encouraged to work on similar projects, I could always count on her to bail me out of difficulties.  I loved school, did well there, and participated in practically every activity available - experience that led me in college to elect practically none. The Hildum family moved to North Plainfield in 1947 and Don came to our high school as a junior.  We were both members of student council and hall patrol and in several classes together and by senior year we were "going steady," although I don't remember that we ever used the phrase.

Don went off to Princeton and I to Swarthmore College, institutions close enough that I attended major Princeton football games, houseparties and assorted other events regularly, and he came out to coed Swarthmore's somewhat more sedate major dance weekends.  For two summer vacations I was Swarthmore's representative in the College Shop of Bloomingdale's in New York City, riding bus, train, ferry and subway for an intensive introduction to retailing.  Don and I married in July following graduation, advancing the date upon Hadley Cantrill's invitation to live in their Mercer Street house for the summer.  The Cantrills liked to have students there while they vacationed in New Hampshire.  We were three doors away from Albert Einstein, to whom, sitting on his front porch in the late afternoons, we waved on our walks home from the campus.  I "worked" that summer as the sole live presence in the Nassau Hall office of vacationing Secretary of the University Alexander Leitch, and Don assisted psychology faculty member Bud Kilpatrick in a U.S. Navy project involving perception.  Our next summer was spent in Princeton as well.  We lived in Bud's house while he and family were away and Don again worked on the Navy project and I in the Bureau of Alumni Records typing the old celluloid address labels that went on little arms into a rickety machine where they were flung into position for printing out the labels.

We were off to Harvard in the fall after graduation, he towards a PhD and I to the Graduate School of Education for the one-year MAT program that provided graduates of liberal arts colleges with credentials for teacher certification.  This was a relatively new idea and program at HGSE and there were some serious kinks that had yet to be worked out.  When the year was over, I did not feel especially prepared to face high school students on a fulltime basis and, limited to the Cambridge area while Don's studies continued, was rather relieved not to find a position in the surrounding area.  Instead, I went to work at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Education as a "grader" for the Written Analysis of Cases course.  While disparaged by students for our critical comments on their weekly papers, our group of graders found this all intensely interesting.  The B School sent us to sit in the back rows of the Marketing and Control classes, where I learned, among other useful things, the great concept of Present Value and still have the handout table going up to interest rates of 50 percent.  We met with the principals of the companies providing cases for the course, who briefed us on their companies and the relevant issues.  A productive day then for a grader was to complete 8 or 9 papers, an accomplishment I could regard only with wonder in later years as Don sat often with toppling piles of student papers to grade on weekends and into late evenings.

In 1956, with Don's doctoral course work and research completed and expecting our first child, we packed a UHaul trailer solid and towed it over the Berkshires out to Cleveland, Ohio, where he had accepted a position teaching Social Science at the Case Institute of Technology.  The Case community welcomed us warmly.  I joined the Cleveland League of Women Voters - a wonderful way to meet interesting people and connect to the issues and workings of the community.  The Cleveland Clinic had just opened a new wing based upon natural childbirth and promoted as modern, humane treatment of the expectant mother and family.  This made up some for the distance between us and our families - never after graduating from college did we have as much opportunity to spend time with our families as we would have liked or could have benefited from.  We launched ourselves into child rearing as best we could, determined to do a good job.

Two sons were born in Cleveland, which seemed more and more like home, but, as there were no nonengineering majors at Case, it could not be for the long term.  An invitation from a friend of graduate school days who was then provost at the brand new Michigan State University-Oakland, led to our move to the open fields of Avon Township, Michigan.   Don joined the Humanities faculty - Oakland in the early days did not have departments, which sometimes made it difficult for the chair of a hiring committee to project appropriate authority.  The Village of Rochester, in the center of the Township, was described to us as a town for retired farmers with a population of about 3,000.  It did seem like heading west in an earlier century.  I could look out my kitchen window at endless waving grass and hedgerows lining the old farm that was our subdivision with only a very few houses and loud winter winds.  This all changed in the next few years, as the area boomed with the growing university and business community.

Our third son was born a year after the move to Michigan, and I was immersed in the affairs of young boys, in cooperative nursery schools, as cub scout den mother, science project promoter, and prominently, chauffeur.  In support of a bond issue in the early '70s to install bike paths along major roads, I testified to having driven 75 miles on my peak day of that summer all within the town taking children to various activities.  A telephone call at Christmas in 1966 informed Don that he had been selected as a Fulbright lecturer at for the next year at the University of Ghent in Belgium, an exciting prospect for all of us.  The boys were 10, 8, and 5 when we sailed in August on the S.S. United States, as the Fulbright Association then required in order to provide proper adjustment time.  We found living quarters in a chateau in the country village of Merelbeke that the owner was converting to apartments and enrolled the boys in the nearby Catholic elementary school.  The Fulbright family preceding us had sent their boys an hour by bus to the English school in Bruges, but we liked to have ours nearby.  By Christmas they were all speaking very workable Nederlands (Dutch); one local friend said she wouldn't know that our 5-year old wasn't a Belgian boy, illustrating for me the value of learning languages early.

Until the boys' teen years were underway, I had not expected to have a career outside my home. At Swarthmore, a number of classmates were headed for serious careers, but others of us reflected a traditional expectation that home and community would be our center.  The outside activity that gave me association with thinking adults in the community and provided balance was again the League of Women Voters.  I worked on committees, wrote and edited publications, was president of the local league and served several years on the state board.  Friends of those years are still friends today.  We "observed" township board meetings and wrote reports; we conducted studies, held workshops, led meetings.  I volunteered for a township committee commissioned to study senior living accommodation in our area and ended up chair of the group, wrote the report and made the presentation to the township board.  That resulted in my appointment to the new township building authority, which was responsible for the building of a new township hall and provided totally new experience.  I served on this board for 25 years until moving away in late 2002, when a major expansion of the building was underway.

As the boys neared ages for decisions about higher education, I shifted focus to becoming employable again.  Three of the upcoming nine years would see two in college at the same time, and the MIT letter informing that our son, though admitted, didn't qualify for financial aid confirmed this course.  Many other institutions would serve as well, the letter continued---but not for Ted, whose firm choice was longstanding.  After a two-year course in Oakland University's Continuing Education Legal Assistant Program, I was waiting for their job service to kick in when the director of the program called to ask if I could come in to help out as she diverted to another project.  I did and in a short time became director of the L.A. Program and of our CPA continuing education programs and, before I left to be the provost's assistant, was briefly head of the Continuing Education department.

The Legal Assistant Program was ideal for women, who were most of our students then, entering or returning to the workplace in the late '70s and early '80s.  What struck me in the interviews with many of these women as we helped with program information, set up internships and job interviews was the real deficit in self-confidence that many projected.  This often seemed a product of family dynamics but also was surely a reflection of the times we were beginning to move away from.  I felt the program to be a real service in these lives - developing a particular competence and providing a step to more independence and self esteem.  Many students were, of course, quite confident, used to managing families, an array of volunteer activities and work outside the home, but this other group is what stays in my mind, and the updates received from time to time validated the feeling.  Also rewarding was that a position fairly new in the legal profession gradually became well accepted.

Added to the activity mix in the '80s were my appointment and subsequent election to the township library board.  During those 13 years, we achieved passage of a large bond issue to build a new library.  We acquired an ideal site downtown in what had become the City of Rochester after obstructive efforts of the township board that bucked every option we considered within the township.  And finally we oversaw construction of the nearly 80 thousand square foot, absolutely beautiful and serviceable building.  Somehow, I also became seen as organization treasurer material, starting first with a church music committee and then for, for 7 years, for the board of our 600-member congregation.  In that time, we also went through the process of building consensus for the project and then building a major $2 million expansion to the existing, Yamasaki-designed facility.

When I was at home enmeshed in the activities that come with growing children, I thought at times that I'd be totally unfit for professional work.  Projects were interrupted without mercy and hard to finish.  It turned out to be perfect training for university - maybe any - administration, and I became a competent juggler of needy projects.  In my 13 years in the provost's office, I was co-director of Oakland's 10-year reaccreditation report, and then - commingled: editor of the undergraduate catalog, director of commencements, visa specialist for new faculty, and responsible for many other necessary tasks that didn't seem to fall in any job description.  When asked what my job entailed, my stock answer was, "whatever they ask me to do."  In my several years of leadership in the association of administrative professional employees of Oakland, I led a study group that achieved some concession from the administration to move APs through their salary ranges.  Until that time salaries had never reflected increasing proficiency and performance, affecting women in particular since many had started at the university early in their careers and did not come with prior experience.  With 15 years of experience, one could still be at the bottom of a salary range.  The resolution was accomplished with goodwill and genial interaction of our group with the university president and we were quite surprised and gratified at the outcome.

I was fortunate to be working where Don did, and in his illness and afterwards our university friends and colleagues were of great support.  The boys, their long educations complete - including the MIT component and graduate degrees for all, were dispersed across the country, and family of my generation and the previous one were on the east coast.  The fact that I continued after his death to work in that congenial human environment doing useful work carried me through the next few years before retirement.

Exactly what the retirement plan would have been is largely conjecture.  It was to have begun with a long trip to Spain and Portugal with my college roommate and her husband, but an additional 3 months to ease in a new provost erased that plan.  I had been considering whether to attend the Denver/Aspen mini because Don and I had enjoyed several.  I also hoped to continue associating with the class and knew they encouraged widows to participate.  It was Bob and Clara Lamperti's invitation to share their condo in Aspen that tipped the scale, and they with John and Ernie Peak conspired to introduce Warren McCabe and me to each other at dinner on the last day in Denver.  It did not take a long time afterward for us plan a new life together.  We share outlooks on many aspects of life, enjoy joint activities and relish our life together.  Our children live in New Orleans, San Francisco, Portland, OR, and Cambridge, MA. - good locations for our frequent visits.  Currently, we volunteer in a needy multiracial elementary school in nearby Pontiac.  Over 90% of the families represented live below the poverty level, and many - Hispanic and Hmong - do not speak English.  Warren tutors in arithmetic and I in reading with third and fourth graders.  As treasurer (again) of the nonprofit organization managing this program, I've also had to master the reporting required for federal and state agencies.

Life has presented something interesting, something unexpected, with regularity.  Luck and good fortune have been with us more than not, and I am grateful.