{"id":1467,"date":"2009-01-22T12:49:40","date_gmt":"2009-01-22T17:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=1467"},"modified":"2009-01-22T12:49:40","modified_gmt":"2009-01-22T17:49:40","slug":"more-inaugural-remembrances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2009\/01\/22\/more-inaugural-remembrances\/","title":{"rendered":"More Inaugural Remembrances"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In the continued spirit of sharing sentiments about the historic day on Tuesday, this afternoon we bring you (via Shira Tarrant!) the one and only Wendy Griffin<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 After a checkered past as a college drop-out, diamond courier, Off-Broadway actress, folk singer and cocktail waitress, Wendy received her Ph.D. at the University of California Irvine, in the interdisciplinary social sciences with an emphasis on sex and gender. Her book, Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Healing, identity and Empowerment, was the first scholarly anthology on Goddess Spirituality, and her scholarly articles in Pagan Studies are published internationally.\u00c2\u00a0 She is the Chair of the Department of Women’s Studies at California State University Long Beach and the co-chair of the Pagan Studies Group for the American Academy of Religion.\u00c2\u00a0 Her remembrance below gives me the serious chills.\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s Wendy! –Deborah<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1953, I went to Washington D.C. to see Eisenhower\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s presidential inauguration. I had entered a national contest for students and written in my \u00e2\u20ac\u015325 words or less\u00e2\u20ac\u009d essay with great enthusiasm. I remember my older sister saying smugly that she wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hold her breath until I won.<\/p>\n

But I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really surprised when I won; I expected to with all the confidence of an 11-year old white girl whose world had not yet been limited by her gender. It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t until years later that I realized my winning probably had more to do with being in the same class as the daughter of the corporate sponsor rather than my essay.<\/p>\n

Each of the 35 winning students got to take an adult along, and I choose my mother. There are special things about that trip that I still remember. I used my mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s movie camera and used up almost a whole reel filming clouds out the airplane window. I climbed the Washington monument and heard Spike Jones and his band play in a night club. I remember the inaugural parade and how cold it was. At the inauguration festival that evening, I used my own box camera to take photos of Marge and Gower Champion as they danced across the big stage. I was little for my age, so I managed to weave in and out of the crowd and squeeze in up close so I could get a better shot of John Wayne, who was my hero that year. Apparently I gave someone a push and stepped on his foot, because I was suddenly lifted up in the air and moved unceremoniously to one side.<\/p>\n

My mother later told me it was Vice President Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s foot I stepped on. She was mortified. Years later, after Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s resignation, she told the story with great pride.<\/p>\n

I came home and put together a scrapbook of my adventure. I still have it, 56 years later. But what I remember most about that trip never made it into the scrapbook.
\n
\nThe students whose essays had won the trip were selected from across the nation. None of them knew anyone else, except for me and the sponsor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s daughter. The group was largely middle class and all white except for one girl who was African American. She was just a couple of years older than I was and she had brought her mother along too. But Washington D.C. was still segregated in January of 1953. The hotel management took one look at her and her mother and refused to give them rooms. The trip organizers then refused to allow us to be separated and all the reservations were cancelled. It felt like we had to wait around for hours, but finally, we ended up going across the state line and finding a motel that would take us all.<\/p>\n

We had been looking forward to seeing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153history in the making,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as my mother said. She promised it would be something I would always remember. Well, the capital of our country gave 35 students an unexpected education.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, as I watched the inauguration of Barak Obama as the 44th President of the United States and the first African-American to hold that position, I shed a few tears. I hope my sister contest winner was watching too.
\n—
\nWendy Griffin<\/a>
\nwgriffin@csulb.edu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the continued spirit of sharing sentiments about the historic day on Tuesday, this afternoon we bring you (via Shira Tarrant!) the one and only Wendy Griffin.\u00c2\u00a0 After a checkered past as a college drop-out, diamond courier, Off-Broadway actress, folk singer and cocktail waitress, Wendy received her Ph.D. at the University of California Irvine, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1902,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[85,21733],"class_list":["post-1467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-politics","tag-racial-equality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1902"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}