When Bea Weaver, a fellow technical writer/editor at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, and I became friends, I quickly found out she did not like details. She would always insist I tell her the end of a story before she would listen to the details. Then she actually didn’t want more information once she had the abstract. If I were to be with Bea now and say I was putting my autobiography on this blog bit by bit, detail by detail, she would insist on the abstract. So, here it is, written in the third person as if it were a blurb on the cover of a book to let the potential reader know what the book is about.
AN EXAMINED LIFE
The life of Joan Deerfield Stokie Brown Bence might be a test of the old adage, “You can take the girl out of the hills but you can’t take the hills out of the girl.”
When at 15, Joan asked her mother, Blanche, “How old do I have to be to leave home?”, Blanche replied, “Eighteen!” Joan wasn’t remembering at that moment that Blanche had gotten married when she was 15.
Joan had a fierce determination to get out into the world on her own, away from a culture she knew she didn’t belong in. She was a misfit because she loved reading and going to school. At 13, she had refused to smoke with her Appalachian girlfriends. At 14, she refused to drink alcohol at their parties. At 15, she found new friends to socialize with among her classmates at Southern High School in Baltimore to avoid pressures to become sexually active.
Joan did leave home at 18. She never expected nor asked for any advice or financial help from her parents. She had worked her way through business college with a job she loved as a waitress, became a secretary and then an airline stewardess before marrying at 22. She was a full time homemaker from 1951 until her husband, Air Force SMSgt Steve Bence, Jr died in 1977.
She has the temperament of a caregiver. Beyond caring for a husband and two sons, she watched over her mother-in-law until she died at age 89 and then her birth mother, Dorothy, whom she took into her home when Dorothy was 90 and cared for her until she died at 98.
Less than two months after Steve’s death, Joan became a 48-year-old freshman at Ohio Wesleyan University (OWU). She found her five years as a student with no one to think about but herself to be delightful. She graduated from OWU summa cum laude, Phil Beta Kappa, Mortarboard, outstanding student in the Sociology/Anthropology Department, and with a fellowship for graduate studies at The Ohio State University.
Not wanting to end up as a retired homemaker nor retired student, she took a job at age 55 as a technical writer/editor at a contract research organization, Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio.
Not wanting to remarry, she established companionable relationships with an odd assortment of males along the way. Four of the five major relationships fulfilled her longtime fantasy, based on “My Fair Lady,” to have a college professor transform her into a well educated woman. Those four men in her life were or had been college professors. They were probably as transformed by Joan as she was by them. Her favorite story was about the first of those men, the co-head of the English as a Second Language Department at OWU, serving an influx of mostly male students from OPEC countries, who said upon meeting her, “If you are going to be an educated woman, you have to talk like one!” He proceeded to teach her Standard American English as a Second Language to rid her of the Appalachian accent.
Decide for yourself as you read about Joan just how much of the hills remains in her.
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