Theodore M.
A: She started out to be a forester, because she loved those mountain trips in the
West and we always had the forest rangers come in and talk. These were big
trips with the Colorado Mountain Club or Sierra Club, so she started out at
Westhampton College in Richmond, part of the University of Richmond, with
the intention of going two years there, followed by three years at Duke in
forestry.
Her first summer job, which she got herself, after we told her she would never
get a summer job with the Forest Service because there's too much
competition, was as a junior forestry aide out in the Six Rivers National Forest
in northern California, headquartered at Gasquet near Crescent City. You
should know about Crescent City because the Corps built a breakwater there
using tetrapods.
She worked there one summer after her freshman year, and when she came
home in the fall she decided that that was not what she wanted to do with her
life. First, she got a lot of poison ivy even though she'd had shots. She was out
there working with tree planting contractors, mostly Mexicans, and if you
didn't watch them closely, they would put the little trees in upside-down and
they didn't give a damn. They did not like being supervised by a girl. Also, she
didn't like working by herself even though she had a wonderful time while she
was there. So she decided to change her major to American Studies thinking
in terms of working in museums or something like that.
That led her to get a job at HABS [Historic American Buildings Survey] the
next summer, after her sophomore year. I never had to help her get a job. She
always got her own jobs. She had worked after her high school graduation too,
as a secretary at HABS, that's how she started. For her junior and senior years
she transferred to the University of Delaware where they have all those
museums, the
Museum and Winterthur and others. Delaware had a
good course in American Studies partly because of those museums.
This led her into the historic preservation field when she graduated in 1977.
She graduated in three and a half years and was a valedictorian. She had a
straight 4.0 average, both in high school and in college. She could have gone
back to finish out her 4th year with some advanced work and graduated summa
cum laude. But she decided to go to work, and she's at the same firm, Oehrlein
and Associates, ever since she graduated. They do a lot of historic preservation
work. Among their recent work is the repair of the Tomb of the Unknown
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