Marion Tanner quit high school and went to work when she was 16. That was in 1940. Both her mother and father were upper-middle class career professionals; a Freudian psychologist and a banking executive, respectively. Mom was one of the few women in the entire country working in a white collar profession, and she frequently took long trips to far away colleges, women’s colleges, encouraging young girls that, yes, in this day and age, a woman could overcome the power of the dick and make it in a man’s world. She did not say it in so many words, the times being what they were.
    Dad wasn’t at home most of the time. He stayed hunkered down in his office at Springfield First Savings and Loan, the Dollar Sign being his God. Marion was tired of coming home to an empty house and suggested to her parents on one particular occasion, that she get out on her own, you know, quit school and find a job. They, of course, were mortified. Education was a woman’s key to independence, lectured her mother loud and often. Marion thought about it for awhile and left anyway.
    In the summer of the year 2000, Marion was 76 years old. By that time she had worked as a waitress in a half dozen greasy spoons the length and breadth of the lower east side in Manhattan, ran a catering service in the Hamptons, riveted Hellcat fuselages at the Grumman plant in Bethpage during World War Two, and attended a junior college in New Jersey to ear an associate degree in journalism, but not in that order. She held a dozen jobs with newspapers from Fairbanks, Alaska to Fort