The "golden year" of my childhood occurred at ages seven and eight, living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, attending second grade at Regent Square Elementary School nestled along the eastern edge of Frick Park.
That year, the 1965-1966 academic year, my mother was serving as Staff and Training Officer for the University of Pittsburgh Library System. After first grade in an extremely homogeneous elementary school near the West Virginia State Capitol in Charleston, I found myself dropped into a true melting pot of racial and socioeconomic diversity at my school, and a magical cornucopia of myriad cultures and ethnicities at my mother's workplace. Akin to Dorothy's arrival in Oz, my comfortably monochrome existence in Charleston suddenly burst forth into majestic polychromatic adventure in Pittsburgh. I was in paradise.
The University's Cathedral of Learning, a 42-story Gothic Revival skyscraper dating from the 1920s, was my Mecca: the University Library (and my mother) shared the tower with classrooms (including the Nationality Rooms), laboratories, faculty, staff and administrative offices, and practically anything and everything else one could imagine. As a seven- and eight-year-old, I was eventually trusted to occasionally take Pittsburgh's electric trolley cars from Regent Square down to Oakland after school. I loved navigating the elevators and hallways and common spaces of the Cathedral with throngs of undergrad and grad students, teaching and research faculty, staff, and whomever else was passing through. I felt very grown up, if slightly height-challenged (especially in crowded elevators).
I learned years later the "trust" that allowed me access to big-city public transportation was born of dire necessity, due to the difficulty my mother and other working mothers she knew had in finding and retaining qualified and reliable sitters for after-school hours. I recall having a string of pleasant but mostly disengaged adult companions that year. As an only child, I was well on my way to developing skills for safely entertaining myself, so to me, being occasionally left to my own devices after school was no big deal. I had a key to our apartment, and a very kind elderly retired couple across the back alley to whom I knew I could appeal in time of need -- or simply stop by to visit. In retrospect I can imagine the additional stress it must have imposed on my mother, however, often not being entirely sure where I might be, unless or until I popped into her office at Pitt, beaming after the trolley ride.
More to follow ...
