Typing Takes Us to the City
(This article was originally published December 8, 2022, in the Southern Spice section of the Times-Georgian)
“I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler” -- Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby
Photo/Unsplash
What makes a person a trailblazer? Must they be defined by their immigration to a harsh terrain or an undiscovered land?
My mom calls my aunt Barbara a trailblazer, a pathfinder, though she certainly never completed any of the stereotypical feats of one. My aunt doesn’t see herself as anything brave or special, though she did leave the hills and hollers of southern West Virginia at the tender age of 17 to move to Washington, D.C. My mom insists she never would have had the courage to leave if my aunt hadn’t paved the way.
Barbara Farley Mattingly (left) and Judy Farley Bice, southern West Virginia in the early 1950s. (Photo by Alice Farley)
A young woman coming of age in rural Appalachia in the 1960s, my aunt Barbara (and my mom and so many like them) had limited prospects for higher education or fancy careers. They had taken typing, shorthand, and accounting classes, hoping to do the “books” for one or another business in the center of town. If that didn’t pan out, well, working in a shop or bank would suffice.
But the Civil Service exam opened up so many doors for them. My grandfather drove my aunt to Concord College to take the test, and after she graduated, a girl who had already made the trek to D.C. came back and took the new girls from West Virginia back with her. When she was getting in the car, my grandfather gave her $200 and said, “You don’t have to go.” My aunt told me, “But really I did.”
My aunt’s first stop was Hartnett Hall, a boarding house for young women like herself. She said, “I don’t know how we did it.” She was scared and homesick, but muddled through. They lived on peanut butter, scrambled eggs, and not much else until that first paycheck arrived. Navigating the traffic, opening a checking account, finding work clothes, trying to find sleep amidst the sound of the diesel buses chugging along all night; so many challenges for a girl from a small mountain town.
The only bus she had ever taken before had been the school bus. She took a taxi for the first time after she and her friend Margaret walked 19 blocks in the wrong direction, in heels, to meet a friend for lunch.
She started work in the “steno pool” at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). From there, she was “picked” to be a part of the General Counsel’s office and stayed there from 1966 until her retirement in 1991. Here she met her husband when he was installing phones in her office and fibbed to his supervisor that the job was going to take longer than he thought.
Life in D.C. turned out to be pretty amazing. Barbara went to a Rose Garden ceremony in 1966 or 1967 at the White House during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s term. She saw fireworks for the first time July 4, 1967, on the Mall in front of the Washington Monument. She recalls being “so impressed.” It’s most likely the reason she still loves them to this day and insists we stay for the fireworks show every time we go to Disney.
By the summer of 1967, my mom had graduated and moved into the apartment my aunt shared with her friends. The Summer of Love in Washington was a sight to behold. Both of them would come home from work, grab a quick dinner, and go back to see the hippies in Georgetown, holding up their peace signs, smoking their pot up and down the streets.
Aunt Barbara and my mother spent a large part of their first paychecks to go back “home,” through gas money for carpool rides, train trips, or “puddle jumper” planes. Eventually the time between their visits back to West Virginia lengthened because they didn’t just settle into their new normal; they thrived. Typing took them to the city and to a lifetime of opportunities two country girls never thought they would experience.
Judy Farley Bice (left) and Barbara Farley Mattingly, 2002.
