AC_1965_Web

172 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K T R E I C H L E R room smoothly reshaped our iden- tities. I mostly took humanities courses, somewhat cowardly on my part to stick with what I was best at—but wonderful courses. My hall was rich in personalities and IQ points and I enjoyed showing themYellow Springs. Nothing could have suited me better than the co- op plan: intense study on campus, then off and away, then back again. You learn about the nature of work and end up with credits, a great ré- sumé—and, far in the future, Social Security units just when you need them. And what a privilege to be dropped into a job, live it, and be extracted three months later like an undercover agent. My first co-op job was in NewYork City at the Schaller- RubinAdvertisingAgency (Mr. Rubin had a son at Antioch) where I was classified as a “Girl Friday.”Though the agency specialized in low-key unsexy pharmaceutical advertis- ing, the crisis and hysteria of the industry culture prevailed.Working the switchboard one day, with zero training, I accidentally disconnected Mr. Rubin from his psychiatrist and caused a stupendous meltdown; I had to call the therapist and apol- ogize (he was really nice). Another day Mr. Rubin sent me down to city hall to renew his driver’s license be- fore the annual deadline at 5 p.m. With no notice, I was dressed ut- terly inappropriately in a light faux leopard coat and thin black f lats. The temperature was below freez- ing; I stood in the long line for five hours, stepped inside the building, and fainted. In other words, I had the classic Antioch “learning experi- ence.”The TV series,“Mad Men,” set in precisely the same period, gives me flashbacks. Nancy Reimer and I (who were first-year roommates in Birch) lived on W. 75th Street with three other Antioch women and we had adventures there apart from our co-op jobs. For example, I also have flashbacks when I smell Scotch thanks to another Antioch learning experience: the Sunday afternoon David Vincent and I spent drinking a fifth of Vat 69 along with a great many smoked clams (clams are on the flashback list too). My next job was hard but fab- ulous: I was a nurses’ aide at the Denver Children’s Hospital and saw extraordinary things. A little girl who had swallowed lye and burnt out her esophagus was undergoing a series of surgeries to rebuild her di- gestive system but in the meantime, her mother had to put liquid food directly into her stomach through a metal trapdoor that opened with a butterfly screw. Complicating the situation, everyone involved in her treatment hated her. One day I went into the examining room to weigh and take the temperature of a baby who lay swaddled on the exam ta- ble while his young parents, white- faced, stood holding each other on the other side of the room. I pulled back the blanket and found an im- possibly tiny baby, so premature that his ears and nose were unformed and he did not yet look human. On another day, two girls were admit- ted, aged about 10 and 12, who had been born with bones that lacked mineral density: like the freak show guy whose body you could read a newspaper through, they were al- most translucent. Moreover, their parents, mountain people who dis- trusted doctors, had taken them for years to a chiropractor for treat- ment and now the girls, with their malleable limbs, looked something like pretzels. They were the talk of the hospital and a cloud of attend- ings, residents and medical students surrounded them as they made their way slowly and laboriously down the hall as if moving through water. My co-op paper described these cases but centered on a 10-year-old Indian boy named Ronnie Nez who was ad- mitted with severe asthma.He was a smart and lively kid yet one who was increasingly terrified. I spent eight hours with him and his mother as Ronnie struggled to breathe.When I asked the nurses what was going on, I learned that medical protocol is sometimes insane. In this case, Ronnie had just started seeing a fa- mous asthma specialist in Denver; this very important physician had taken him off all his medications to get a “baseline reading.”Tip top, except then the VIP took off for an exclusive golf weekend at a posh resort with instructions not to be disturbed.While Ronnie Nez gasped for air and his mother pleaded with the nurses for medication and the nurses gritted their teeth in rage and I helplessly looked on and tried to keep Ronnie calm, the residents on duty refused to breach the VIP’s cone of silence: “it just isn’t done”; nor would they override the braini- ac’s drug-withdrawal order by pre- scribing life-saving drugs. Finally I went home—Ronnie was to be ad- mitted and the head nurse told me the residents were finally trying to reach the specialist—but I slept un- easily. As soon as I got to the hospi- tal the next morning, I picked up the overnight census summary and read: Ronnie Nez, deceased. My second year at Antioch, my then roommate Susan Mandelbaum (now Bodenstein) talked me into doing AEA in India with her for the ’62–’63 academic year. Peter Grenell had just come back from India (see Barrie Grenell’s entry in this book) and this enabled Susan, who had a serious crush on him, to spend hours getting briefed in the C-Shop. Susan, however, then dropped out of Antioch so I went off alone with- out benefit of briefing to spend the year in Madras (now Chennai) study- ing Indian philosophy at Madras Chr istian College. My parents agreed because their dear family friends,Mack and Faye Greene, lived in Madras; Mack worked with the International YMCA in Madras; their daughter Sylvia, just slightly younger than me, became a good friend dur- ing the year (the following year she A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z