Buffalo NY, 1951...

I was purportedly born at 11:20 in the morning on June 29, 1951 at the Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo, New York.

Fillmore is distinguished in American history mostly for having ascended to the Presidency of the U.S. after Zachary Taylor died from a bellyache. It is probably a compliment to the intelligence of the voting public that Fillmore failed even be nominated for re-election and, when he did run again (four years later) as a member of the Know-Nothing party, was dealt one of the most resounding defeats in U.S. electoral history.  It seems a little twisted to name a hospital in honor of a member of the Know-Nothing party: perhaps the founders were thinking it would have been better for the nation if a hospital had been available to solve Taylor’s medical emergency and named the institution accordingly.

At any rate, I know nothing of the place and have no memory of the actual event.

Neither does my mother.

In 1951, having a baby was treated as a surgical procedure akin to having gallstones removed. At the onset of labor, "the mom”, with her well-thought-out and nicely pre-packed bag, went to the hospital. When delivery was imminent, anesthesia was applied and the medical team managed the unseen and invisible mysteries of birth while the father paced the delivery room. Finally the doctor steps out and says something to the father to the effect of “It’s a girl!” (or a boy or a lizard or whatever.) The mom is wheeled to her room and, when she recovers, is presented with the evidence of the birth – a tidy, clean, small red bundle of joy with a little bracelet made of pink or blue beads that spell out the baby’s last name.

Given the absence of any knowledge of the matter but lacking any evidence to the contrary, I assume that most of the foregoing occurred at my birth.  In addition to the incontrovertible evidence that I actually am here, I have a bracelet: 

It does not show in the picture, but the fastener on the end is a
lead fishing weight that has been crimped shut.

We do know that Papa sent telegrams to those who could receive them:

Hand-written in blue fountain pen ink on personalized stationary that is titled: Mrs. O. Lawrence Olesen, 2955 Hollyridge Drive, Hollywood 28, California

June 29 / 51 Dear Joanne: -- Gee !!! Now I have something to brag about and no competition = I am a Great Grandmother. Barbara, Jerry and I arrived at your Dad’s office to find things in a hub-bub – they had just received the telegram and was Dad strutting around telling everybody He was a grandfather. When I finally got the reason for all this excitement – I stepped up in front of this new grandfather and told him I was ahead in the game – I was a Great Grandmother! Of course, he was very gallant and said he would acknowledge I had higher honors. I’m sending a letter to Nancy Elizabeth Hendrick – I’m sending her a check to be placed in her name in the bank – and I hope all cash gifts will be added to it so as to make a nest egg when she is of age. I think Nancy Elizabeth is a dear name – Much love to you all – Affectionately Great Grandmother Alma C. Olesen

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Enclosed letter hand-written on the same stationary:

Dear Nancy: This is from your 84-year-old Great Grandmother. The telegram announcing your arrival sure caused plenty of excitement – and there is nothing to talk about except you. I am enclosing a check to be placed in your name in the bank until you are of age(18). I hope all cash gifts will be added to it from time to time and I also hope your Grandmother and I will get to see you before 1951 is over. With an affectionate Kiss on your cheek, I am Lovingly, Your Great Grandmother Alma Christine Olesen

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Papa also sent an air mail special delivery letter to his parents, who were staying at the family ranch where amenities such as electricity, flush toilets and Western Union service were completely absent.    A third letter, written on plain paper in Grandma Hendrick’s writing says:

Tuesday Eve About 4:20 Lee arrived under full sail all out of breath after running the entire distance down our road, I guess. Of course he was the bearer of important tidings or, at least, he supposed he was as he had a special delivery air mail letter open. Gladys rushed out and grabbed our bell and Paul cam rushing down from the upper spring to see if the house was on fire. Now our door is very nicely decorated with a big pink bow. I walked up to the spring to tell Grandpa the house wasn’t on fire – it was a girl instead of a fire. Of course, we’re all grinning broadly. I think its’ just swell and I know she will be just as cute as Marie. Marie has four little cousins now – Nancy, Jeanie, Laurie and Nancy. Gosh. the next should be a boy. Roy, I didn’t really appreciate your poetic ability before. A letter from Auntie Gladys arrived today too and it had the telegram inclosed so we were doubly notified. I’m glad the baby is here because she will be a month old by the time we arrive in Buffalo and we ought to be able to get a real good look at her – maybe Grandma could even hold her a minute. Anyway, Joanne, I hope you get along just fine and the way they do things nowadays, I suppose you will be home by the time this letter reaches you. But as Gladys said, what a silly time of day to have a baby. Babies never arrive in the middle of the day. Did you get the babies crib finished? Last you wrote there was still a coat of paint missing. And did the missing wheels show up? Its’ surely going to be tough on me. I have to leave one grandchild here to see the one in the east and then when I get all attached to Nancy I’ll have to leave and get back to Marie. I guess it will just mean that Grandpa and Grandma will spend all vacation traipsing back and forth. Grandpa just made the weighty observation that Nancy’s and Marie’s birthdays are both on the 29th. So easy on the brain if we can just remember the proper months.

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Fast forward – its 1989 and I’m expecting our first almost 40 years later.

In 1950, having a first child at nearly 40 years of age would have been very uncommon. No question, I’m ornery and don't necessarily follow the expectations of my family or anyone else, but in the time between my birth and that of my children, cultural expectations of women had undergone some major changes in the U.S. and my experience is not atypical.

On the street where we grew up in Santa Barbara, not one mom worked professionally beyond "Kinder, Küche, Kirche."  Daddies in our neighborhood were off to their jobs by 8, returning at 5:30 for dinner, but moms stayed home.

This does not means that the moms really stayed in their houses.

Far from it!  

Moms shopped, gardened, cooked, cleaned and carpooled kids all over town.  They held "coffee klatches" where, unbeknownst to the dads, strategic alliances were made or unmade and where all the serious business of the neighborhood was actually conducted.  Moms volunteered at the library, ran scout troops, served as room-mothers at school or worked as "Pink Ladies" for the hospital auxiliary.  However, as a general rule, women did not get paid for their labor:  Women's Liberation, EEO and "Equal Pay for Equal Work" were yet to come.  Mrs. Morgan provided in-home babysitting services to those moms who went out, but I believe she was the only woman on the street with earned income. 

The amount of work that volunteer women contributed to society in the 1950's and 60's should not be underestimated.  Many volunteer jobs were simply free unskilled labor, but others amounted to unpaid professional positions:  Auntie Elaine Iddings initially gained managerial experience running the League of Women Voters, a large volunteer organization that provides election-time voter information to the entire State of California and voter education services across the nation. While managing the volunteers at a local hospital (also without pay), she earned her masters' degree in hospital administration.  In the 1970's, when cold-war defense spending was cut back and Uncle Harry's engineering job eliminated, she leveraged her academic credentials, her organizational experience and her professional contacts to obtain a paid, professional-level position in the same hospital where she had worked so many years for free.

This was typical: if a non-working mom started going to work, it generally meant that the family was suffering hard times.   When, after my youngest sisters entered kindergarten, our mom started working and attending graduate school, there were nasty whispers among the kids at school: “Did you hear?  Nancy's mom had to go to work!” 

By the time I’d graduated from school, at least in our social class, it was expected that women would work outside the home.   This was particularly the case in California where the housing prices were very high and where it was very hard to buy a house on a single income unless the purchaser was a Silicon Valley Wizard, a junk-bond specialist or a drug dealer.

Having a child was even more expensive than owning a house, although there were many more options for child care available in the 1990’s than in the 1950’s.  Working full-time precluded co-op child care arrangements and good-quality, full-time childcare was extremely expensive.   Thus, despite considerable social pressure, I’d decided to do “the career stuff” first and not get married or have children until I was very sure that I'd be able to be completely financially responsible for the decision.

So I'd gotten married at a very late age, dealt with the issues of late-life fertility and was enjoying the experience of pregnancy about 20 years later than my Mom.  I wanted to be pregnant and it was terrific -- eating anything, enjoying the right of occasionally being irrationally crabby and having people open doors for me -- a pleasant custom that had become a casualty of Women's Lib!

For many, pregnancy means morning sickness.  I know that my sister Alison suffered mightily from it, but I did not.  Even if I had had morning sickness, I would not have sought relief for it.  In the late 1950's, new drugs were not tested for carcinogenic or mutagenic properties and approximately 10,000 children were born with severe malformities because their mothers had taken Thalidomide during pregnancy for morning sickness.  In reaction to the tragedy, the U.S. Congress enacted laws requiring tests for safety during pregnancy before a drug could receive approval for sale in the U.S. These regulations were in place by the time I was pregnant, but I clearly remembered seeing the horrifying pictures published in the early 1960's in Life magazine and took no medication of any sort -- not even aspirin -- while I was expecting.

Between 1950 and 1990, there were many other changes in the medical field. In 1950, prenatal testing was pretty much limited to examining the mother to determine whether she was gaining weight at an appropriate rate and whether she was anemic. In my mother’s case, the fact that she was carrying twins was unknown until the time of the delivery. The structure of DNA was discovered several years after I was born and by the time Elizabeth and Robby were conceived, genetic evaluation, prenatal testing and ultrasound imaging were commonly used to evaluate the health of unborn children. Within a month or two of conception, we knew the sex of both children. Being surprised by twins at the delivery was something that simply would not have happened to us.

The technology of anesthesia had also changed. In 1990, with the use of epidural anesthetics, childbirth had become a largely pain-free event where the mother remained conscious throughout. With the simultaneous medidical improvements and and the rise of the women’s movement, childbirth changed from private medical mystery to a sort of social event.  When Elizabeth was born, addition to me and the medical staff, Gary, my husband, attended the birth; when Robby’s was born, one of my very good friends was there as well, something that would have been inconceivable in 1951.

Not to say that there were not casualties in the transition!

In my first "real job", the guy I was working for and his wife had a child. This was the end of the hippie era and they decided to have a natural childbirth at home with a traditional English midwife. For reasons that I’ve never understood, part of the birth ceremony involved the midwife whipping up the placenta in a blender with garlic and herbs and those present consuming the concoction. While I did not disagree that it was natural -- our family cat had done something similar (less the garlic and herbs) -- it was very hard for me to look at Richard afterward in management meetings without thinking ‘OH YUCK! He ate a PLACENTA!”  In general, the man wasn’t very well-liked and he’d told me this in a sort of post-childbirth euphoric confidence the day after the horrid event, so I did not share the information with my co-workers, but I was very glad when he got transferred.

Odd ceremonies were not limited to those who opted for home birth!

When the mother is unconscious and the father trapped in a distant waiting room, the obstetrician is free of any obligation to be witty or sociable while delivering a baby. But when both parents are present and alert, there is a certain pressure to perform that probably wasn’t part of the obstetrical practice in 1950. After Elizabeth was born, Dr. McMillan, with all the ceremony of someone who is presiding at the opening of a bridge or the launching of a ship, offered Gary the chance to cut the umbilical cord. Gary, very sensibly, declined, but did get to witness the nurse putting on the babies’ wristbands and was able to go with the babies to the nursery, give them each their first bath before phoning all the relatives to let them know that the baby was ‘here’.

Elizabeth was born in the early afternoon on March 16, 1989; Robby shortly before midnight on November 30, 1990, both at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, California.  Neither of the kids' first view of the world was an operating theater, it was a "user-friendly" birthing suite.  Although a room looked more like a hotel room than an OR, they did have all the equipment for monitoring and conducting a birth -- not-so-cleverly disguised as furniture (how many armoires have you ever seen that have two-inch-thick cables running into the wall?)    They also had rocking chairs and a nice couch for the anxious father to nap on should he become more tired (and, presumably, less anxious) as the labor progressed. 

Elizabeth was born on a Thursday afternoon and Robby on a Friday evening. We knew the exact date and time of conception of both children, but the time that the child is born is determined by the child, not the mother.   Elizabeth had the good grace to show up about 12 hours before her "official due date."   By the eighth month of my pregnancy with Robby, the sonograms showed that he was very large.  Dr. McMillan thought that he'd be born early, so Mamma and Bompa drove down three weeks prior to his due date so they would be on hand to be able to take care of Elizabeth when we went to the hospital. It was all for naught!  Thanksgiving came and want and Robby just got bigger and bigger.  Robby seemed to be very comfortable where he was and we were beginning to worry that he might stay there until he reached the age of majority.   At my regular weekly post-due-date exam on November 30, Dr McMillan explained to me that we would give Robby “an engraved invitation to appear” on the following Monday if he didn't see fit to show up over the weekend. Maybe Robb was paying attention and maybe not, but I went into labor that same night and he was born only 30 minutes after we got to the hospital -- very shortly before the midnight hour that would have caused him to share a birthday with his great grandmother Larsen!

In 1990, smoking was no longer as popular as it had been in the 1950’s and a lot of our co-workers were women who definitely would not want to smoke a cigar. When Gary went to buy the traditional cigars, he had to buy a box of chocolate cigars as well as some real ones so he could offer both, lest people think he was a sexist pig for not offering one to the ladies or (worse yet) trying to give the recipient cancer.

Having found out with Elizabeth that a hospital stay was nothing like staying in a good hotel and being rather hopped up, I was more than ready to go home the night Robby was born, but Dr McMillan really objected because he "preferred to to have 24 hours supervision for all newborns". So, in both cases, we went home on Saturday.

But no snuggling in the car on the way home!

By 1990, seatbelt and shoulder harnesses were required equipment for adults in all vehicles. And children under 40 pounds and / or 4 years were required to ride in child safety seats. So, before we were allowed to drive away with either child, the hospital staff inspected our car, our seat belts, and the child safety seat.  They asked if we needed free lesson in its use (we did not, but it was nice to know that someone cared!), checked to make sure that it was installed in the car correctly and strapped the baby in for us.

And we all rode home safely together!