My (then, soon to be) sister in law, Felicia, went back to school in the early 2000’s to get her masters in Adult Education. One of the assignments was to interview a close friend or family member for her “Adult Development” class. The following is a slightly edited version of the resultant paper.
Originally, there were comparisons and conclusions drawn from a book she had read, New passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time, by Gail Sheehy. As the academic conclusions are between Felicia and her intended (very restricted) audience I have edited them out. Also some edits were made for clarity and grammar. The pictures were added by me for inclusion here on my website.
My interviewee, Barbara Chambers and her husband of 45 years, Charlie, just got back from an amazing trip to the Galapagos Islands. This is a place Barbara always wanted to go. She is an avid “birder” and loves animals and nature in general.
Her youngest son calls her a “tree hugger”. I think that is a slang term for taking an active interest in preserving animal habitats and the environment. In any case, her son and I have been friends for more than seventeen years [they married in April of 2003]. I find Barbara to be extremely interesting and adventurous about experiencing life. It seems to me that she approaches most everything as an adventure. This is extremely different from my grandmother who is about the same age, but usually talks about her latest ailment.
Barbara spent most of her childhood in Ypsilanti and Kalamazoo Michigan. She started college right after high school. After her second year in college, her father said he could afford to send her away to college, so off she went to Colorado.
Barbara was ecstatic about the opportunity to see new places. While in college, she met an interesting engineering student. They dated and later married. After they married, he became much less interesting by quitting school. The couple moved to Michigan to be near Barbara’s family. Barbara’s dad gave her new husband a job. He pursued the female employees more than his career. Meanwhile Barbara started her career as an elementary school teacher. The marriage was anulled after seventeen months, and Barbara moved in with her parents.
Barbara’s dad became ill and the layman diagnosis from a friend was that he had suffered a heart attack. The friend suggested he move to a warmer climate to help his health. Barbara’s mother was a Christian Scientist and insisted her husband, who was not a Christian Scientist, not go to a “qualified” doctor. All medical diagnoses were either done by friends, acquaintances, or not at all. Barbara moved with her parents to Florida. Some time later her only sibling, younger sister Bette, moved to Florida as well. Her parents did not like Florida and eventually moved back to Michigan. Barbara and Bette loved it in Florida and decided to stay.
From Barbara’s sister Bette, “I moved to Florida with the family, 3 cars with 4 drivers. One car had the dog, one had the parakeet, and the third had a passenger. And we moved around at each stop. Barb taught, living at home, and l lived in a dorm at the U of Miami. When the folks returned to Michigan l stayed to finish my sophomore year and went back to Michigan. After graduating, l went to Florida to get a teaching job and lived with Barb.
Your folks met at a Stars and Bars Club for Officers before l arrived. Charlie then took off for his at sea duty. When he returned your Mom couldn’t remember who he was but did remember calling some guy Charlie Brown. So, the three of us started dating. I went with them often. When we moved into our 2 bedroom home in south Miami, Charlie started staying with us on weekends. They were to marry in June but when Charlie found out he’d make more money as a married officer, they got married in March!
Barbara got a job teaching elementary school and settled into living in Miami. While living there, she developed a strong interest in birds. Part of this interest came because she had a friend with extensive knowledge about birds. One night after coming home tired from vacation, Barbara dressed for bed, but the phone rang and a girlfriend called and invited her out. She was eventually convinced to get dressed and join them. On this particular evening Barbara, now in her mid-twenties, met a young Naval officer stationed in Key West, one Charles Chambers, Lieutenant J.G.. They got along right away.
Unfortunately and shortly after their first meeting he had active sea duty and they didn’t see each other again until a few months later. While he was away he wrote to Barbara. In fact they kept up the correspondence. Barbara and Charlie were married after dating for eighteen months on March 16, 1956.
After Charlie finished his tour of duty in Florida, Barbara and Charlie moved back in with his folks in the northern Philadelphia suburbs. Charlie later accepted a position as a civilian naval advisor doing Operations Research with the Center for Naval Analyses, Operations Evaluations Group in Rosslyn VA, just south of the Potomac River from Washington DC. They owned a home in Northern VA there ever since. However, for the next ten years and as a part of his job Charlie accepted “assignments” at various Naval bases all over the United States for one or two year stints – China Lake CA from 1957 to 1958. Norfolk VA in 1963, Kailua Hawaii 1966 to 1967, and again from 1973 to 1975. During that time, they had three children: Stephen in 1957, Bette in 1959 and Andrew in 1961.
Once Barbara became pregnant with Stephen, she stopped working until all three children were in school. Barbara describes this time as being a great opportunity to travel. Her children liked or disliked the moving based on the age they were when the move took place. Moving during the high school years was the hardest for her children. Charlie went out to sea during various times over the years. When Charlie came home, it was a big event for Barbara and the children to greet the ship.
Barbara’s dad died in 1961, when she was in her early 30’s. He did not have any insurance nor did he make arrangements for Barbara’s mother, Beulah, to understand the family finances. Ultimately, Beulah had to sell the family house and find a new place to live, and a job. The relationship between Barbara and her mother was amiable, but on a higher level than Barbara wanted. Barbara wanted to talk about big issues like her frustration over her mother’s Christian Scientist beliefs and her father’s death, but her mother wanted nothing to do with those types of conversations. When her mother died in 1987, it was a traumatic experience exacerbated by realizing there is “no other opportunity to understand how each other felt about things”. In addition, her mother died of an ailment that may have been curable. Barbara realized that, now in her 50’s that she became the “parent generation”.
Barbara went back to school in the late 1960’s to get a teaching certificate for Virginia. At the time, her goal was to be an aide. One day while she was studying, her daughter Bette and a friend showed up in the room where Barbara was studying. The two young girls just stood there watching her. Finally, Barbara said, “What are you doing?”
Bette said, “I brought my friend to see you studying.”
Ultimately, Barbara became a full-time teacher instead of a part-time aide.
In 1973, Charlie took another assignment in Hawaii. Over the years her children were developing, she discovered each of them had visual learning disabilities [dysgraphia and the like]. Knowledge about these kinds of learning disabilities was not well known in the 1960’s and Barbara spent a lot of time doing her own research. Some adults just thought her children were lazy.
In Hawaii Barbara had the opportunity to teach others about learning disabilities, specifically auditory disabilities. Barbara had not researched this type of disability, so she did so and began teaching. After moving back to Virginia in 1975, she did some substitute teaching. By 1976, Barbara was back teaching elementary school full-time. She taught “regular” classes for several years. In 1980, Barbara became an itinerant teacher for the “Gifted and Talented” program. As an itinerant teacher, she was in seven schools per week. My perception of the “Gifted and Talented” program was that those kids are really smart so they could not possibly have any learning disabilities. Actually, they have various disabilities also. Often these children are so smart and treated so differently that they develop social disabilities. By placing them in a class of other children with similar challenges, they feel more normal.
[Mom loved these classes and students the most. She often said that it was all she could do to keep ahead of them. She relished the challenge.]
In 1986, Barbara’s maternal aunt, Mary Houliston MacDonald, lost her husband. Barbara had always been close to Aunt Mary. When her husband died, Aunt Mary had no idea what assets she had or how to manage them. She was at a total loss about the assets at her disposal. Barbara took a one-year sabbatical from teaching to assist her aunt with adjusting to her new life. After sorting through all the stuff her uncle left behind, Barbara found her aunt to have considerable assets. Barbara and Aunt Mary setup a trust to assist women over the age of 40 with job and personal finance training. Aunt Mary wanted to help other women who ended up in the same situation she did. Since her mother had been in this situation, Barbara had been volunteering at a women’s group to assist women with their finances. Aunt Mary passed away in 2000, and Barbara is still a co-trustee to the trust they created.
[Eventually the scholarship fund was taken over and Barbara and her sister Bette lost control of the fund, but it continues to this day.]
After the sabbatical time had elapsed, Barbara decided not to go back to teaching school. All her children had completed college and her salary merely put them in another tax bracket and the monetary gain was not worth the time spent. Instead, she spent time learning more and more about birds.
In 1986, she started joining organizations like the Fairfax Audubon Society. There seems to always “to be a need for someone to organize bird counts” and other activities necessary to monitor the various species. Charlie’s last assignment before retirement was in Fort Walton Beach Florida from 1992 to 1994.
[Mom loved the opportunities available to her in the Washington DC suburbs. There were plays and music and interesting talks at local colleges and Universities, not to mention activities associated with her membership in the Smithsonian Museum. She had a rich culture to keep her busy, enquiring, mind happy. The Florida panhandle was, in comparison, a cultural wasteland (her words). Mom’s favorite joke was that the local library had been closed because someone had checked out their book.]
Instead of cultivating relationships with the other families transplanted there as she had done over the years, Barbara spent time taking classes on birds and meeting people with the same interests. In order to become certified to band birds, you must take many classes. Barbara became certified. Now in her 60’s, Barbara bought a kayak to be able to move around more easily to find bird nests. The places the kayak allowed her to go enabled her to prove the improbable.
There had been sightings of eagles in the area on several occasions. Most people believed the birds were only passing through, because eagles had not nested in the area for more than 40 years. Barbara put out a message to call her if an eagle is spotted. When reports came in, she got out the kayak and went exploring, looking for evidence of a nest. Eventually she hit pay dirt and proved that eagles were in fact nesting in the area. More recently, her involvement with birding has shifted from eagles to bluebirds. Barbara and Charlie are involved with creating bluebird trails all over Virginia.
In 1992, Barbara’s first grandchild was born. During the last two years she lived in Florida, she tried to get back to Virginia to see her grandchild as much as possible. Now her granddaughter lives within driving distance, so she sees her much more.
After asking Barbara to tell me her life story from age eighteen on, I asked what were the most significant events of her thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and seventies. I skipped the twenties (and I’m not sure exactly how or why) The most important events in her thirties were kids, travel via job transfers, and her husband leaving on a destroyer during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Her forties were the best decade – she went back to school, back to work, generally felt happy and productive through most of those years. The fifties represent a tough stretch marked by mental and physical changes, and reaching the point where interpersonal issues between wife and husband became rather difficult. Barbara pointed out that her fifties wasn’t all bad. She went to Europe for the first time and managed to quit smoking. Although both she and her husband quitting, smoking probably contributed to the interpersonal challenges. Barbara thought she might slow down in her sixties, but once the sixties arrived she learned banding, bought a kayak, and kept on pursuing her interests. In the seventies, she is reminded daily of aches and pains. In your seventies, “you have to learn your limitations and slow down”.
Comparing Barbara’s life to the rest of her generation, I see that Barbara has a love of adventure. Barbara didn’t always succumb to the constraints society placed on women when she was young. I believe this is demonstrated by her plans to attend college and start a career before searching for a husband. Because her birthday [July 4th] 1929 sits on the edge of the next generation, I looked at it as well. I actually see Barbara more in the “Silent Generation of 1930 through 1945. This generation produced Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Gloria Steinem, etc. These individuals were/are representative of what it means to have a social conscience, and changed the world for the next generations. Barbara stayed home to raise her children which was representative of all generations up to and including the “Silent Generation”.
Barbara lived out the rest of her life with her husband at the house her children grew up in, in Fairfax County, Northern VA. Spending most of her time with the Virginia Bluebird Society and advocating for parks and environmental issues and spending time with her grandchildren Samantha, Charlie and Maxwell in Richmond VA. She passed away in October of 2012 at the age of 83. Her husband Charlie survived her by 3 years and passed away in October of 2015 at (almost) the age of 87.
