Carts Before Horses

November 29, 1999

CARTS BEFORE HORSES

Forget being prepared to be a wife and/or a mother. Growing up in a big family might help, but not enough. Being an RN would help with caring for an invalid DH but nothing would prepare you for 24 hour duty, or the emotional problems of watching a strong mind and body deteriorate, or of living with his deafness.

All my life I have been drifting into things I knew nothing about, sort of like feeling your way through one Halloween haunted house after another. When The Firstborn was nine she wanted only a marionette for Christmas. A marionette? All those strings? As a child I had seen Tony Sarg's marionettes in a window in New Hope, for my total preparation. I bought Edith Ackley's Marionettes, Easy to Make, Fun to Use and made a witch. Presently we were giving shows in the living room, charging 10 ¢ a ticket, taking the money to the local rescue squad, who graciously gave us a complete tour of the ambulance and all its equipment. Later I taught my sixth graders to make newspaper marionettes and wrote a small book on how to do it. As a librarian I turned a whole school into puppeteers. I have been a member of Puppeteers of America for ages, and now one of my close friends is a Texan I met at the Vancouver Puppetry festival in 1984. We play e-mail Scrabble® constantly and trade puppet news. She kindly made a home for 13 boxes of marionettes I couldn't bear to throw out.

Following my kids whither they listed got me into all kinds of adventures completely unrelated to anything in my background - working at a horse show registration table, judging oboe auditions, inoculating pheasants, giving a horse medicine from a coke bottle, learning about the Civil Air Patrol, hearing great jazz musicians from Louis Armstrong to Thelonius Monk and my favorite, Willie the Lion Smith. There was a man who knew how to hitch up his cart. Someone in the audience asked him if he had had any special training to be a jazz pianist. He rattled off an awesome list of degrees in classical piano from the great music schools and said his mother told him , "Willie, if you're going to do anything, do it right."

Never mind about how I bought a cow at an auction and then asked my wonderful farmer neighbor how to milk it. The kids were tired of powdered milk. Wasn't it logical to get a cow? After all, we had just bought a barn with 60 stanchions waiting.

Never mind about how I talked my employer into lending me money for my first Kelsey letterpress printing outfit, promising to pay him back by printing office forms for him. After all, I had seen a model of Gutenenberg's press at the 1939 World's Fair and had treasured ever since metal type of my initials, in 24 point Caslon. What could be hard about setting type?

In 1956 there was a drastic shortage of teachers, and I was therefore allowed to start with only a no-account AB in English from a great college, and no practice teaching. I remember the principal walking me to my first classroom door, saying, "The only way to learn this job is to do it. Good luck." Many degrees, certificates, credit hours and workshops later, I still think he was right. I will admit that I cheated and spent one entire day in the classroom of an experienced teacher who was using the same texts I was to have. I took verbatim notes and for the first several weeks my class was an echo of hers.

I left the classroom because of a day when I looked at a 6th grader's workbook and told him his answer didn't make any sense. He answered politely that none of it made any sense. I agreed completely, and decided at that moment to move to the library where if one thing bored a child I could offer him a thousand others. So, when soon after that the superintendent asked me to be a reading teacher, I asked for the library in a school that wasn't quite finished. "Are you qualified?" he asked. I said, " No, but I will be by September." That was the start of 17 years in the world's greatest job, and a summer of intensive learning.

Another day I was walking along a corridor after school, minding my own business, when a trusted friend popped out of his classroom door and hissed at me , "Come in here and act like a director. I've got a Federal Credit Union Examiner here and he wants to close us down because we don't even have a full Board of Directors." So I did. The meeting was interesting. I asked a lot of questions, was officially elected a Director and went home with a lot of stuff to study. 1970 or so. We had 175 members that day, in the county Teachers F C U (later School Employees FCU). I wandered through being a Director, President, Assistant to the Treasurer, finally Manager. The worst case of cart before the horse came when I thought I knew something about computers after a few months with a TRS80 and a few workshops, and talked the Directors into buying our own computer and dropping the outside data entry service. March, 1983. By this time we had 1000 members and a million dollars in accounts. We bought IBM's first attempt to get down to the level of really small business, the System 23. $10,000 for the machine, $5000 for the software, with a year of free phone tutoring from Salt Lake City. I had 6 months to get every account entered and everything balanced, and for once began to think I had tackled something impossible. I made it, but disaster struck when I laid out the work for January 1984, ready for closing, and went off and had a head-on collision. We learned then that no company should rely on a computer setup known only to one person. It was 30 days before I could get back to the computer and things were never the same. In June, 1985 DH had open heart surgery and the Credit Union had to find a new home.

In the carefree days before the computer, I worked at building Credit Union membership. I gave away daffodil bulbs, put out a newsletter, visited boiler rooms, met people in parking lots, health centers, supermarkets, restaurants and homes, to finish loans and deliver checks, stuffed every employee's mailbox in every school in the county, met administrators to explain the virtues of credit unions and the beauty of payroll deduction for saving ( values I still believe in, incidentally).

The reason Credit Union annual meetings have become dinner dances with door prizes and other inducements is that they must have a quorum of members to make things legal once a year, and the actual meeting of a well run credit union is so dull that no one would come just for that. We couldn't put on anything impressive, so we had to rely on friendship and food to get our quorum. We often had to comb the halls looking for loose teachers to drag in. I made most of the food, to insure that it got there. Besides the Blueberry Bread and the Pumpkin Bread the favorite was Janet's Spinach Dip. Probably few Credit Union newsletters carry recipes, but this one was requested.

The most satisfying cart before horse rumbled into my life when I offered vaguely to host, "someday" a computer room at our county Senior Center, unaware that they had a file of people waiting, not to drop in to use computers, but demanding instruction. The Center bosses kindly waited to tell me this until I was walking again after hip replacement. A few months later I started teaching 5 days a week, writing all the lessons. There is still no book for beginners that tells how to turn the machine on, and then what. Every time I consider making my 13 basic lessons into a book they become obsolete. In 6 years we have gone past 5 ¼ disks, A and B drives, DOS, dot matrix printers, Windows 3, and Win 95. We have Seniors with machines at home from 386 cast-offs to Win 98 whizzes. At the Center we are trying to teach whatever they need, with donated 486's and 1 Internet machine. We recruit star pupils and computer club members to teach, and now have a staff of 18 teachers or assistants. There are currently about 13 classes meeting, with about 80 students. We have had over 500 students since we started. Complete beginners are our big thing, with a waiting list of over 100 at the moment.

Since I ruled at the outset that there would be no food or drink near the computers, no recipes are related to these classes. Even faculty pizza parties have to be in another room. The only other rule we have is that husbands and wives may not sit next to each other at the machines. Without exception people laugh and then cheer at this. We learned that one spouse or the other always dominates and ruins any chance for the other to learn.

If I had waited to buy the pig until after I had built the pen, there would have been no pig. If I had waited to write the first Friendly Cooks letter before I advertised it, there would have been no one to write to. It was after the first few letters came that I had someone to talk to. If I see another cart with a horse plodding patiently along behind it, I'll probably climb right in.

Footnotes:
Ackley, Edith Flack Marionettes, fun to make, easy to use, J.B Lippincott, 1929 Out of Print
Puppeteers of America Membership information:
Membership Office
PO Box 29417
Parma OH 44129-0417

POA websites www.sagecraft.com/puppetry lots of links
www.puppeteers.org
Next national POA festival Talequah OK June 29-July 5, 2003. I'll be there doing a workshop on Puppets in Sunday School, speaking of carts before horses.

Stewart, Evelyn Newspaper Marionettes, reset on the computer from its original typing on wax stencils. 8 ½ x 11 paper 18 pages, photos.Available from the author