Seattle!

University Travel Lodge

We arrived in Seattle on September the 4th of 1977. It was a beautiful day. Going through Customs as we entered the country, we dealt with an immigration agent who was an old hippie with long grey hair. He went through the forms one by one and when he came to one particular form, the one that said that if there was a draft, I agreed to be drafted.  He took 10,000 pounds off my shoulders. Or at least if felt like that is what he did. Instead what he did was tear up the form saying ” we don’t have a draft in this country”. It turns out that just prior to our arrival, Jimmy Carter had cancelled the draft, which had an amazing impact on me. I had grown up with the idea that I would serve in the military for most of my 20’s and now that was gone as a consideration.

We went through customs and came out of the door to see Nicola, Terry and Jo along with Eric with a big bunch of balloons welcoming us. We got into Eric’s big green station wagon and he drove us to his home in Laurelhurst in the NE section of Seattle. We went on the Express Lane which was largely in a tunnel so I did not really get a glimpse of Seattle until we emerged and I could see lakes and water and green everywhere.

We pulled into their neighborhood and it was very clear that people were milling around, playing with Frisbee’s in the street, washing their cars, and so on…my impression was that the whole city was on vacation. I didn’t know that it actually WAS a public holiday.

Eric and June had a beautiful home in Seattle, with a wonderful view of Lake Washington and Mt. Rainier. They had invited friends, Bob and Marilyn, Beth and Marty, Gene and Rachel, who my mom and dad had met the previous year and we got adopted into the extended Seattle family. Eric and June had a spectacular view of the Lake and the Cascade range, and it felt really good to be here.

We lived in an apartment in the University Travel Lodge across from the University Village shopping center while my parents searched for a house.

I got a job painting the interior of a big old house in the University District with a woman in her 50’s named Virginia. She was wonderful. She had a southern accent and was married to her psychiatrist husband who practiced in the house. I hardly ever saw him. But Virginia and I talked and talked as we prepped and painted. She introduced me to a French Press for a delicious coffee blend she had concocted from this little coffee store in the U Village – Starbucks. At the time, there were two stores. One in the U Village and at the Pike Place Market. Who knew?!

I loved Seattle immediately. It’s a beautiful city, in a beautiful region, and there were no troubles like existed in South Africa. People were seriously chill by comparison. Terry and I hung out, we trained together. Terry was a top ranked cross country skier and was getting ready to head to the East Coast for college. It was really great to have my cousins in town.

Eric told me that I had to “show up for a test on Saturday” at an address he gave me and an appointed time. I didn’t know what it was, and it turned out to be the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or the “SAT”. and I had no idea what that was. I completed the test and scored well enough to secure my entry into the UW. I went to the college to register for classes.

My dad and I had an interesting experience that sort of illustrates what the change in culture was like for us. We went to buy a car and he and I were both amazed that every person we dealt with was a woman. South Africa was as sexist as it was racist….so the bus driver, the car sales person, the insurance sales person, the bank loan officer – all women. My dad and I actually talked about both that that was the experience and also that we were amazed by the experience of seeing women in those vocations.

My first day of school was the next day. The very first person I encountered on campus was a carpenter. She was a woman too and I realized what a different country I was in.

My first class at the UW was The History of the United States since 1940 lectured by Otis Pease. It was a brilliant class that gave me a context for the United States that I had moved to. You have to understand that in South Africa we had no American history at all. All we really knew was what we had seen in Hollywood movies. American history since 1940, the war years, WW2, Korea and Vietnam as well as the shifts in culture here at home with the Civil Rights moment and Title 9 made for an interesting introduction into the then current context.

I will say that I found the Seattle Times and Seattle PI to be very regional newspapers with little international or national news. Growing up in South Africa had made me hungry for news of the larger world.

I also registered for Math 101. This was a lecture delivered in Kane Hall…There were 1000 people in the class. It was really hard to get my head around a class that big – bigger than my entire high school. I made the point of sitting at eye level with the professor so that when I had a question, he would see me.

It was hard trying to get used to dealing with foreign grad students who didnt speak English.  In my Chemistry class, for instance, my first TA was from China and literally spoke no English. My second one was from Italy and barely spoke English. I almost failed Chemistry as a result.

I used the money I made painting Virginia’s home to pay for school and to buy a bicycle and I rode my bike to school every day for 5 years. It wasn’t a long ride, but it finished with a stiff up hill climb both ways. The campus was huge. There were 35,000 students there every day and lot and lots of buildings.

As a Freshman, I had to go see the Freshman Adviser….a meeting that had a profound influence on my life.

I don’t remember the name of the woman I talked to. She asked me what I was interested in? I said “sports medicine and computer science” she said “There are no jobs in computer science”. And that was that.

I mean this was 1977 and at the very moment there probably were not that many jobs in computer science…but she directed me to PT where there were presently 40,000 jobs open in the USA. I figured that because my parents were struggling to get settled. My dad was having a hard time finding work, and my mom didn’t have her license yet, it made sense to go into a career where I could get employment quickly, so I agreed with her assessment and made the decision to pursue the pathway to PT.

I can’t help thinking how differently my life might have gone if I had pursued computer science back then.