00:00:00INTERVIEW WITH JANE LAND
MAY 29, 2020
MARY FOLTZ: All right. My name is Mary Foltz, and I'm here with Jane Land to
talk about her life and experiences in LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley.
And this is a part of the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Oral History Project. Our
project has funding from the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium. Jane
and I are meeting on Zoom because there's a pandemic going on, and today's date
is May 29, 2020. So, Jane, just first, thank you so much for agreeing to talk
with me today.
JANE LAND: Oh, sure.
MF: And to start, could you please state your full name and spell it for me?
JL: My name is two syllables long, so you have to listen carefully, it goes by
fast. It's Jane Land. Last name is spelled L-A-N-D, and first name is J-A-N-E.
MF: Thank you. And can you please share your birthday?
00:01:00
JL: June 28, 1950.
MF: All right, so prior to starting this interview, you and I talked a little
bit about consent for the interview, and I'll start by just asking you, do you
consent to this interview today?
JL: Yes.
MF: Do you consent to having this interview being transcribed, digitized, and
made available online in searchable formats?
JL: Yes.
MF: And do you consent to the LGBT archive using your interview for educational
purposes in other formats including articles, websites, short films,
presentations, or other formats that might become available?
JL: Yes.
MF: And do you understand that you will have at least 30 days after the
electronic delivery of the transcript to review the interview, to identify parts
that you might want to delete, or to withdraw the interview from the project?
JL: Yes, I understand.
MF: Okay, great. Thank you, Jane. So to start our discussion today, I'm
00:02:00wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your childhood?
JL: My childhood, it was a long time ago, -- I'll be seventy next month -- and I
grew up in the country. My father was a chemist. He had a PhD in chemistry, and
he worked for a large pharmaceutical company. And my mother had a library
degree, a master's in library science, but she was a homemaker until I was in
seventh grade. I had only one other sibling, my sister, an older sister. She was
six years older. She passed away a few years back. So I grew up in the country,
and it was a great place to grow up, and I think it had a bearing on who I am. I
00:03:00spent a lot of time outdoors, playing outdoors, and my friends that I played
with, my playmates, -- there weren't too many kids around -- they were all boys.
The family on a lot adjacent to ours, -- we had three and a half acres, and it
was rural, so everybody had some acreage -- there were four boys there so that's
primarily who I played with. We didn't have a lot of toys, so we invented things
all the time to play. And we traveled quite a distance to play. We had a creek
that was maybe a mile away, and we would ride our bicycles into town sometimes.
00:04:00But mostly, we played outside in -- at the creek and in the fields and in --
climbing trees, building treehouses, and building rafts for the creek to
navigate on the creek and dams on the creek and catching crayfish and putting
them in our pond that we would make. I can't think of all the ways in which we
invented things, but we have very few props, very, very few toys, so we had to
use our creativity a lot.
MF: So what part of the country did you grow up? Where was the closest small
city to your country home?
JL: I grew up in Northern Bucks County, Pennsylvania, so I was between... The
00:05:00closest town was a small town called Telford, which is actually in Montgomery.
And I lived just three houses from the borderline between Bucks and Montgomery
counties. I went to Pennridge High School and graduated from there in 1968.
MF: And culturally, what was it like in that area around Telford? What was the
community spirit like? What kinds of values were promoted in that country community?
JL: I don't know. I just know the immediate families that my parents socialized
with or had a connection to, basically neighbors. My parents were both educated,
my father more than my mother even. My sister went on to get a master's also in
biology. And a lot of the people they socialized with were similar middle-class
00:06:00families that the father had an education, mother may or may not have had an
education, often did but didn't use it. As far as political -- politically, I'm
not really aware politics went -- things that were talked about.
MF: I'm curious about your relationship with your parents. You described their
emphasis on higher education that they really believed in education. What was
your relationship like with your parents when you were a child?
JL: My father had to -- he had a job with -- at that time, it was called Merck
Sharp & Dohme, it later became Merck Incorporated. And his commute to work from
our home was maybe like twenty-five, 30 minutes. But at the time, I was eight
00:07:00years old, he took a job in -- had to take a job with the company in North
Jersey, so he traveled. He commuted about three hours a day, so I didn't see
much of my dad.
When he was around, he was -- he had a fleet of cars that he would use to get to
and from work. When one would break down, he'd have to grab another one and
leave it for the weekend when he could fix it. He was a very bright man and very
self-sufficient. He didn't have a lot of time to talk or spend with me, but I do
remember watching him do things a lot, watching him fix the cars and anything
that broke in the house, that kind of thing. My mother was I think a depressed
person and so I didn't have -- you know, she kept to herself a lot. So I pretty
00:08:00much had to learn how to be self-sufficient early on.
MF: So you described wonderful adventures as a child in the outdoors and making
rafts on the river. And you described a kind of self-sufficiency, a kind of
self-knowledge earlier -- early on in your life. What kinds of things were you
interested in beyond the outdoors as you were going through middle and high school?
JL: Well, you had asked about -- just mentioned something about education and
I... There was a lot of unspoken pressure I think to get a college degree.
Everyone in the family was educated. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my
life, and I struggled with that. I really was not keen on going to college
00:09:00because I had no idea what I wanted to do. I have a lot of college credits, but
I never got a degree in anything. [laughs] So I did start out by going to
college after I graduated. I went to Bucks County Community College for a year
and learned... I signed up for data processing. I had degrees in data
processing, which was the old punch card system, ones and twos on the punch
cards, and that was really boring to me. But as part of that, one of the courses
I had signed up for at Bucks County Community College was accounting, and I
learned that I liked accounting very much, so I changed majors to accounting.
00:10:00
But then after a year, I ended up getting married. This was during the Vietnam
War. I married a man who then ended up getting drafted into the service, and we
traveled. He was first stationed in Phoenixville and then we traveled to San
Francisco. When he was drafted, his -- after he finished basic training, he
became -- he was assigned the career of a medic. And since it was during the
war, medics was not a good occupation to be in. In times of war, they always try
to take the medic and the radioman out of commission, so -- the enemy that is.
So he signed up for more time and became kind of the equivalent of a M*A*S*H
nurse, a field hospital nurse, and... The only reason I mentioned that because,
00:11:00obviously, that was a mistake I made in my life, getting married to a man. It
took me a while to figure that out, but I mentioned it because I got the chance
to travel a lot. So I lived out in California for a while and got to travel
around the country.
MF: Well, I'm curious, how did -- did you -- how did you two meet, and how did
that relationship develop during that really tumultuous time of the Vietnam War?
JL: He was the nephew of a high school professor, a high school teacher that I
actually never had in high school. But he was -- Uncle John was a very -- a
freethinker, and as it turned out, a closeted gay man. But he was a very dynamic
teacher, and he would hold these -- he would have get-togethers with his
00:12:00students where they would come to his house and talk about all kinds of ideas.
Really a very, very good teacher who would really expand your horizons, get you
to thinking about different things in life.
So after I got divorced from my husband, I started searching for -- thinking
about going back to college. I did attend some college, some more college. I was
in Minnesota with my sister-in-law who had gone there for her master's degree. I
took some courses there, I came back to Muhlenberg, took some courses there.
Eventually ended up living in Bethlehem and attending Moravian College, and I
was getting a degree in social work. And then, one semester before I was due to
00:13:00graduate with a bachelor's degree in social work, I realized that that was not
what I wanted to do. I still hadn't figured out what I was going to be when I
grew up, what I really wanted to do.
I was talking with one of my psychology professors at Moravian, and when you
asked me to do this oral history with you, I did spend some time thinking about
what were the people and the things that influenced my life the most. And that
college professor, he -- a psychology professor, his name was Tony LoGiudice.
And I was talking with him about so actually getting depressed thinking about
spending the rest of my life being a social worker. Social work is a fine
profession, but it just was not going to be my thing.
00:14:00
And he said, "Well, you know I can give you some -- a battery of tests, and
they'll show what you have an aptitude for. I'll send them away, and they score
them, and then when I get them back, get the results back, we can sit and talk
about what you might do when it showed your strengths were."
So we did that, and we met. He said, "Your mechanical ability is extremely
high." I said, "Well, what would I do with that?" He said, "You could be -- well
you could be like -- you could be like an electrician or a carpenter or an auto
mechanic, something like that." I said, "Really?" and he said, "Yeah, you know
this is a really high score in mechanical ability and ability to analyze things
and investigate them, be able to apply logic to come up with answers," so I
00:15:00said, "All right." Well, I'm not good at science, so I don't know how well I'd
do at being an electrician, understanding the science of electricity. And at the
time, it was 1975, and there was a recession going on and so the construction
trade was really struggling.
I was doing very poorly, so that was a -- that would be a really poor career
choice because it'd be tough to make a living and so I chose mechanics. So my
next step was where to go to school to become a mechanic, how do I do that. But
I quit Moravian one semester shy of getting my degree in social work and one
year short of getting a minor I guess, you'd say, in accounting or a dual degree
in accounting and enrolled in Northampton County Community College. But before I
00:16:00did that, I went there. I was going to enroll there because they had an auto
mechanics training course. But this was 1975, and it was like, would they even
let me in as a woman.
So I talked to somebody in admission, and somebody said, "Well, why don't you --
I'll give you the phone number for the fellow who runs that training program,
and why don't you talk to him, see what he has to say whether he'd let you in or
not?" So this fellow's name was George Gerstenberg, and I called him up. He just
turned out to be a young fellow. He was not that far from my age, pretty close
to the same age -- this was in 1975 -- and told him what I was interested in
doing and why. I told him that after I had taken this test and learned that I
00:17:00had this -- realized that I had this ability.
I thought back in when I was going to Moravian, I worked my way through college
cleaning houses, and along the way for some reason -- these were often
households that had educated adults in them -- and the men were not very handy.
And the women would ask me if I could fix things and actually really insisted
that I try to fix things; I don't know why. This one woman asked me one day if I
could fix a lamp, and I said, "Well, yeah, I'm pretty sure I could fix a lamp
because I'd watched my father do it." She said, "Well, here, take this, go and
fix -- see if you can fix it and then bring it back." So the next week, I
brought it back, and I made the repair, and it worked again. She said, "That's
great. I have a mixer that doesn't work, you think you could fix my mixer?" And
I said, "I don't know about that. I have no idea about a mixer." She said,
00:18:00"Well, why don't you just take it home and try it, see what you can do with it?
It's not working, so if you can't fix it, fine, but if you can, it's broken and
I could use -- I'll pay you to fix this mixer." So I took it home, and I took it
all apart, and that's something I realized that I used to do when I was a kid.
My mother had a friend that had a son my same age, Doug was his name. He would
come with his mother over to our house to visit, and we would squirrel ourselves
away in my bedroom, and we would take things apart, so... [laughs] So it was
just simply by taking it apart, it was -- had a bunch of, I don't know, hair and
fuzz, dust stuck in it, and it just needed a good cleaning and lubrication
again, and I put it back together, and it worked. So I talked to George
Gerstenberg and he was like -- I was really surprised. He was like, "That would
00:19:00be terrific. It would be great to have a woman in the class." He said, "You'll
be the only one," but he said, "I welcome it. I encourage you to try that. I
think it would be wonderful." So because George thought it was wonderful, I got
an opportunity. I'm not sure I would have gotten that opportunity if he hadn't
thought it was wonderful back in 1975.
MF: This is a wonderful story that you're sharing now. I'm curious if you could
just talk a little bit about why you felt compelled to explore social work and
accounting prior to thinking about other things like mechanics like -- and auto
mechanic courses in particular. And I guess what I'm trying to ask is like
during that time period of the '70s, what seemed possible to you as a woman
00:20:00laborer? Did you feel that there were specific careers like social work that
were open to women and others that were closed? So I'm just curious why you were
-- you thought social work in the beginning even though you weren't really
enjoying the classes. So could you talk a little bit about that, the logic that
you had for the courses you were choosing prior to really finding this field
that felt really compelling to you?
JL: Sure. Well, accounting was simply by accident. It was a course requirement
that I was taking. It fulfilled some liberal arts requirement for a degree, and
I just discovered that I really liked it. I really liked working with numbers.
I'm not a mathematician, that's an entirely different thing than -- accounting
was just basically arithmetic, but I really excelled at that. And it's funny
that fellow Doug, that boy that used to come over to play, we would often play
00:21:00bank. We would play banker in the -- in my room, and we would do things with
money, and it was funny. But to this day, I still do volunteer work as a
bookkeeper for the church and have for several churches. So it wasn't really
anything conscious there. It was just something I found I really had a knack for.
One thing that I do realize is really instrumental in my childhood was my father
never said you can't do this, you can't do that, a girl can't do this, a girl
can't do that. He never ever said those things. And so in a silent way -- he was
a pretty quiet guy, in a silent way, he was very encouraging that there wasn't
00:22:00anything that I couldn't do that -- if I put my mind to it, which is pretty much
what he had done with his life. He was an only child whose father had died when
he was still in college and so he pretty much -- I imagine he'd been in the same
kind of circumstance where he just had the confidence, and he just decided there
wasn't anything he couldn't do. He was trained as a chemist, but he is busy
teaching himself how to repair automobiles and all kinds of equipment.
The water pump died, he'd be hauling it out of the well and replacing that. Just
anything that broke living in the country where there weren't many services or
people who were trained in services, you had to do it on your own. You had to
learn how to do it on your own, and that's pretty much what he did. So I think
just being around that even though I remember as a kid, I'd ask -- as I got
older, I'd ask if I could help because he was basically working all the time.
00:23:00
Whether it was going off to work for a paid -- for a salary or working around
the house, he was just always incredibly busy. So I'd ask if I can help, and
usually within sixty seconds or less of me then trying to do what he had told me
I could -- I should do, he'd be impatient and take it away from me because he
just didn't have the time. I realize that in retrospect. But I think that was a
huge -- an influence on me that he, in his silence, never gave me the idea that
there wasn't something I couldn't -- anything I couldn't do.
So when I went to college, I probably took -- I probably decided on a degree on
social work for the same reason that virtually everyone who goes into social
work and psychology goes into it for, which is their chapter one or their
00:24:00childhood had some major dysfunction in it. And then you were -- you went on to
college and enrolled in those two disciplines to try and figure out your chapter
one. And so it helped me just figure it out some and -- but the thought of --
and I enjoyed the courses. Along the way, I had to do a service project in the
community, and I ended up at Northampton County prison. There was a small
women's detention center there, and it was a very small area.
They kept them segregated from all the men because they thought that would be a
huge problem, and they basically had nothing to do. They were in this tiny area
and had nothing to do. So I started a program there. It wasn't hard to get them
to... I thought it would be really difficult to get the prison system to take
00:25:00any suggestion I had, but I think they were concerned about public opinion and
the press.
I started a program there where I got some sewing machines donated, and the
women had sewing machines. And they actually had some women guards I think who
had some sewing ability who then helped them learn how to sew as a career, as a
way to make money when they would get out of prison. And so I enjoyed that part
of social work, but it was not what I wanted to make a living out of, trying to
help people figure out their own problems. I had enough trouble figuring out
mine. [laughs]
MF: Well, now, I'm curious about -- you said you were drawn to social work to
figure out your chapter one. What did you figure out in the social work program
about yourself or your family?
00:26:00
JL: My mother lost her mother when she was -- I think it was ten -- ten years
old and so my mother -- I figured out that my mother was stuck at that age. She
had a trauma. There weren't many psychologists or psychiatrists back in those
days. People didn't go for therapy particularly if you lived out on the country,
so she pretty much was stuck at that age. And a lot of her life was tied to
that, so she spent -- so I think she was a fairly depressed person and I
didn't... I actually didn't see a lot of her growing up.
She was a librarian as I had mentioned, and she spent a lot of time reading,
00:27:00escaping. My father was a good man, but I think he was angry that his partner in
life was not being much of a partner. So he had a pretty bad temper. And my
older sister, she was six years older, and six years older is like a lifetime at
that age. I learned all this from social work and -- social work curriculum and
my classes in social work and psychology that she picked up the dominant
parent's behavior, so she had a very bad temper. So I spent my childhood trying
to stay out of the reach of depressed and angry people [laughs] and a good part
of my -- a good portion of my adult life too, so...
00:28:00
MF: So you described finding this career in -- entering Northampton Community
College. I'm curious, what was it like to be the only woman in that -- in the
classes for mechanics at Northampton?
JL: Well, the first thing I did was I didn't tell my family what I was doing. I
stopped going to Moravian College and enrolled at NCCC -- in Northampton County
Community College, and in that program. I went to the classes for several months
pretty much the first semester before I was in a situation where I had to admit
to a family member that I was no longer going to Moravian College, [laughs]
so... And there were several family members -- and this is beyond my immediate
00:29:00family. I can remember my uncle in particular sending me -- as he lived in
Illinois, him and my aunt, and my uncle sent me this scathing letter about what
a big mistake I was making not finishing my college degree in social work and
that the idea of being a mechanic was a really bad idea, and that I should
really reconsider what I was doing with my life.
My father was like, "Okay, great, and what will you do with it when you're
done?" I said, "Well, you know I hadn't gotten that far yet," and he said,
"Well, if you want to go in to business for yourself, let me know and I will
help you." And my sister who I had a terrible relationship with because she was
so angry also all the time -- she was -- had a very unhappy childhood. Because
00:30:00she had the same parents I had but also because she was -- she was very heavyset.
She had extremely curly hair that she couldn't manage back in those days, -- the
hairdressers weren't used to that -- and she also had terrible acne, so she -- I
think those things were all factors in our life that made her a pretty unhappy
and angry person. But I was surprised. She said to me when -- and she was the
one I had to admit. She kind of pinned me down in a conversation long distance,
and I had to admit to her that I wasn't going to Moravian anymore and told her
what -- I had to admit to her what I was doing.
I was scared that, uh-oh, now, I'm going to get in real trouble, and she
surprised me. One of the few times in my life that she supported me, and she
said, "You know, I wish my husband could go back and take something that he
00:31:00really enjoyed doing because he's not happy doing what he's doing." So I ended
up really different from my family. I didn't want to spend my life as an angry,
depressed person. I didn't want to... It wasn't a degree that mattered to me, it
was that I found something that I had a passion for, and I found that I just
loved mechanics. I just adored mechanics. I did well at school. I had so many
credits that I didn't have to -- I transferred all my liberal arts credits and
fulfilled all those -- that criteria and just was taking the automotive course
and still working to support myself cleaning houses.
I never finished the auto mechanics either. I did well, I think I was maybe
00:32:00first in the class, I can't really remember. But I took enough courses that I
got it, and I was confident that I could keep learning. And then I decided that.
The money was running pretty thin, I didn't want to take out loans, and so I got
a job as an auto mechanic and finished learning to be a mechanic by working in a garage.
MF: How did the other students in Northampton respond to you as the only woman
in that program? And then I'll continue that, like how did male mechanics
respond to you on your first jobs out of college?
JL: You know I don't remember anybody in the auto mechanics class giving me a
00:33:00hard time because George wouldn't have allowed it. But I was busy learning. I
didn't really care what they were doing. [laughs] I was busy learning, and it
was just -- I was like a vacuum cleaner, I just sucked it all up, I just loved
it. It was definitely my thing. I did well in classroom and well in the shop.
Probably the question that you're asking should be asked of the guys that I went
to school with. My guess is that they weren't... They were a little intimidated
by me, I would imagine, because we were all students, and it's one thing to have
another male student -- if you're a male, have another male student by yours
side, and you're learning. But to have a woman doing better than you were doing
00:34:00in school was probably hard for them.
I know for sure later on in life when I worked as a mechanic, that was one of
the things that I recognized. If I did well as a mechanic and as being a female
mechanic, it was really hard for men who weren't great at what they did to work
alongside a woman who did a better job at mechanics than they did. It was a
problem, and I realized that later on in my career, so... I first worked at a
place in Bethlehem that might still be there. It was called Dave & Wayne's. What
I did was when I decided that I'd had enough education and really couldn't
afford anymore and needed to get a job, I just went door to door to garages
00:35:00asking for a job. Now, I don't believe anyone hired me because they thought that
I could do the job at that time. I believe I was hired because it was a novelty,
and they thought it would be fun and that -- probably that they could like... It
would be fun to see me fail is what it would be.
So at Dave & Wayne's, I did okay. I think the biggest problem I had was the male
mechanics there would come over and want to talk, want to chat, want to flirt.
Sometimes, it was great that they'd come over because I could learn from them,
but the bosses did not like it. And so I was there maybe three months, something
00:36:00like that, and I got fired because I wasn't getting enough work done. I wasn't
getting enough work done because these guys kept coming over and [laughs]
interrupting me from working on a customer's car.
It was the only job in my life that I was ever fired from, and I was devastated.
It was not Labor Day. It was right before Labor Day. It was probably on a
Friday. I know it was on a Friday. It's probably the Friday right before Labor
Day weekend. Yeah, they came over to me in the morning and said, "We're going to
let you go, so you can finish out your day, and we'll give a paycheck and then
you can be on your way." So I thought about it for a few minutes, and I thought,
well, I've still got half a day to go look for a new job. I had to support
00:37:00myself. I mean, I'm sure my family would've helped me if I asked them, but I
didn't want. I wanted to be my own person. I felt if I was going to be in this
career, and originally I felt they weren't going to approve of it, I needed to
pay my own way.
So after about half an hour, I went to Dave and Wayne, and I said, "If it's okay
with you, I'll leave now," so they let me go. It's about eleven o'clock in the
morning, and I did the same thing all over again. I started pounding the
pavement, going to different garages looking for another job, and by the end of
the day, I had another job in a garage. I'm sure it was for the same reason that
I worked for Paul's Garage on -- in Fountain Hill on Broadway. I don't know if
that's still there. I'm sure he's no longer in business because he was older
than me but not by much. And I got a job there, I'm sure for the same reason,
00:38:00and actually, he used to work -- he started out his career working for Dave &
Wayne. I didn't know that at the time. And so I'm sure I was hired there because
I was going to be a novelty also. But Paul was -- he was owner of the garage,
and he had a part-time mechanic working there, a young guy named Jeff, and I
think that he was more -- a little bit more practical.
I think he felt that he could take advantage of me pay-wise -- that he could use
me to do a lot of work and pay me little and get away with it. So that's what
happened. I worked my butt off for him. I became really fast at what I did. He
taught me things. I learned how to do valve jobs on engines really well, so...
He liked the work I did on that and so I would do a lot of the valve jobs,
00:39:00engine repair, upper half of the engine on a lot of vehicles. I would do other
things too. I got my state inspection license while I was there, and I did a lot
of tune-ups, that kind of thing, so...
And you asked, how did men -- how did people feel about me being a woman working
in this career. I remember at Paul's Garage, the customers that gave me the
hardest time were women. Women play a part in discrimination also and
stereotyping also. So for the women, a lot of them looked at me and were like,
oh my God, I don't want a woman to work on my car, she doesn't know what she's
doing. I need my car fixed, I don't want it to be wrecked. And so those were my
toughest customers were the women. Sometimes, Paul would tell them, "Well, we'll
00:40:00get your car fixed, and we'll call you." And then after the car was all fixed
and working fine, then he would tell them that I had worked on it. He would do
things like that. He wasn't terribly supportive of me, but he was in the sense
that he gave me a job. You know, 1975 to give me -- to give a woman a job in the
garage was pretty big deal, so I have to give him credit.
MF: At this point, you were divorced. What was happening in your social life
during the -- that time in Bethlehem and then while you're moving into this new career?
JL: At that time, I got involved with NOW, became a member of a chapter in
00:41:00Bethlehem. I was just a member but trying to get plugged into women's rights and
find some support there, that kind of thing. So I belonged to that for a while,
and eventually, there was another chapter in Allentown. I don't remember if it
was called -- I think it was called Lehigh Valley rather than Allentown NOW. I'm
pretty sure that's Lehigh Valley NOW, and that's where I met Dixie White who was
an activist that I'm sure you probably know about. I know that; Liz Bradbury had
talked to me about that connection and finding my name in some of Dixie's
memorabilia once Dixie passed away.
So I learned the one thing that NOW was good for -- I've never been real big on
00:42:00being a member of groups. I'm just more of a solitary person who needs to do my
own kind of thing. But what I got out of NOW was a sense of connection and
sisterhood and some support in that way. And also, I met a woman named Sharon
who worked for PPL -- it used to be called Pennsylvania Power & Light -- and she
said, "You ought to apply for a job at PPL." I said, "Well, it's an electric
company, what would I do for them?" She said, "Well they -- you could be a
mechanic in the power plant." She said, "Or they have a garage where they repair
their vehicles, you could work for the garage maybe." So I applied there. And
you asked how men reacted to me working in this nontraditional field for women,
00:43:00I'm the only person that I ever encountered at PPL who had to go through four
interviews to get my job.
The job interviews were not about... Well, and first of all, they didn't just --
I didn't just put in an application, and they called me. I put in an
application, and I didn't hear from them in several weeks, so I called their HR
department, and they told me, "Yeah, we'll get to it, we still have your
application, we'll get to it." So I called maybe two or three times and so after
maybe three times of calling them, they brought me in for an interview. And so
the interviews were all about not my mechanical ability. Didn't ask me, how do
you do this, or how do you fix that, or what do you think would be wrong with
00:44:00the vehicle if this happened? Because some of the people who were interviewing
me weren't just HR people.
Most of the interviews -- I think maybe the first interview was probably the HR
department, and the other three were people who were in admin in the garage, in
the transportation department. And so they'd want to know things like, well, if
you're out in the field working on equipment, construction vehicle equipment
like bulldozers or digging trucks, whatever, and you have to go to the bathroom,
what will you do?
Those are the kinds of questions [laughs] they wanted to ask. Or what are you
going to do when some guys swears in front of you? I mean that's what those
three interviews were all about. I remember only them asking me one -- somewhat
00:45:00a mechanical thing, which was if you have to go out and fix a flat on a line
truck, how would you go about doing that? Because you're talking about a tire
and a rim -- an 1120-tire with rim weighs more than I do. So I told them how I
would use leverage and just like a guy would do. He's not going to pick up a
1020 [laughs] and throw it on to -- the studs on the wheel, so... So eventually,
I got the job.
I got the job in August of 1977, and I took the job with the stipulation that
even though I wouldn't have been entitled to any kind of vacation after just
joining the company, that I be given time off to go to the international women's
00:46:00conference that was held in Texas in 1977. I've been chosen as a delegate for that.
MF: What was that conference like when you went to Texas?
JL: That was pretty amazing. I was young though. I was twenty-seven at the time,
I wish that I had -- and just newly plugged into NOW and women's rights, and I
wish I had -- I could've appreciated it more because the women that attended
that... I got in as a delegate. Dixie White said, "Why don't you apply to be a
delegate for this?" and I said, "Okay."
So I did, and I wasn't picked, and this was a process that went on for several
months, maybe a half a year or something like that. She said, "Well, try again,
00:47:00but this --" She said, "If you want to get in since you're not really plugged
into the leadership, you're my friend and I'm a leader in NOW, but since you're
not really plugged into the leadership or haven't had any -- an active role in
leadership," she said "you have to find -- you have to be a minority. Why don't
you try being a specific minority, and maybe you can get in to fill a quota that
way with the conference?" I said, "Well, what minority would that be? I'm a
female and I'm white, what minority would be --?"
She said, "Well, you're a Quaker, so apply as a religious minority," and so
that's what I did, and I got chosen because I was a Quaker, which is a not very
well-known type of religion, so... And that's where I knew Tony LoGiudice from,
my psychology professor. That's how I ended up at -- being a Quaker was because
00:48:00he was also a Quaker and attended the Lehigh Valley Quaker meeting.
So I went to the conference, and it was incredible. Shirley Chisholm and Bella
Abzug, you name it, Gloria Steinem, they were all there. The conference was to
set -- it was run by parliamentary procedure and was to set what were the
important things that women needed to pursue to become equal citizens in our
country and in the world. It was really an international thing, and so... I
don't know; they picked out maybe 20 platforms of things that needed to be
worked on from an equal rights amendment to women having access to educa-- equal
access to education, equal acce-- equal pay for jobs. It was pretty heavy stuff. [laughs]
00:49:00
MF: Did you bring back some of those platforms to the NOW organization in the
Lehigh Valley? What were the major Lehigh Valley, the kind of platform issues
for the NOW organization here?
JL: I did not. I ended up not being much of a NOW member. I'm trying to think of
a way to say this. There was a lot of dissension about how things were going to
be run, and I'm a doer and not so much a talker, and so... They got rather
enmeshed in trying to figure out who was in power and where the leadership was
00:50:00going and so I drifted away from there pretty quickly.
MF: It's 1977 or '78, around there, you got a great job at PPL. Are you dating
at this time? Are you in the LGBT community at this time, and if so, what was
that like?
JL: Dixie and her partner [Carol?] were always on the lookout to find someone
for me to match up with, and I did eventually. I'm trying to remember how we
exactly met. Oh, I know. So I was working at Dave & Wayne's, and for the moment,
I can't remember exactly how I met Diane, but -- or maybe it was actually
00:51:00another woman. But this woman had a house on Carlton Avenue in Bethlehem where
she was -- and I got to know her and [Diane?], my first lover. [Annie?] had a
room on the third floor of this house that wasn't in use. It was actually the attic.
I needed a cheaper place to live to meet my expenses and so I talked Annie into
letting me make the attic a livable space and letting me live there. So I
insulated it and did some other work to it and ended up living there, and that's
00:52:00where I met Diane. She lived there also. She had rented another room. So there
were four women living there, Annie, Diane, me, and a woman from -- who was a
professor, a visiting professor at Lehigh University.
MF: So what was the community like? I mean that sounds great to have a house of
four women in Bethlehem. What was the community like in the '70s, the LGBT community?
JL: 1977, it was pretty closeted. You had to worry about losing a job, not just
losing a job but having... It was difficult to be out because you had to really
worry about how you were going to make a living because it was not -- it was --
people were pretty ugly about it back then. Diane and I ended up being partners,
00:53:00moved out of Anne's -- Annie's house and bought a home in Catasauqua. You could
go to Rosemary's bar in the Flatiron building in the east Allentown off Union --
very close to Union Boulevard, and that was it.
You found each other. You're gaydar helped you find sisters and brothers out
there in the community. You found ways to manage to hint at things that you each
would safely realize that you were both gay. And then you would see each other
00:54:00at each other's homes, do those kinds of social events, and go to the bar and be
able to dance and let loose there. And there were a couple of festivals around.
There was a good one called [Sister Fire?] down in Maryland every year, those
kinds of things.
MF: What was Rosemary's bar like? Will you describe what a night out at
Rosemary's might look like?
JL: Rosemary's bar was a good location. It was on this little -- literally on
this little triangle of land. It was pretty much the building, so you didn't
have to -- the wonder of the bar didn't have to share the building with someone
else. There wasn't a neighbor that could -- a neighboring business that could
complain about a gay bar being there. And it was a great place where you could
just go and be yourself. They have a deejay, a number of deejays, really good
00:55:00deejays. You could go and dance and drink and just relax and be yourself. And
Rosemary kept that bar going for a lot of years, and it's a pain in the butt to
run a bar and she was just -- you know, a lot of times back then, the bar owners
were really supportive of the community.
They would have special events and that kind of thing. It was like a home. Back
in those days, Diane and I used to have -- on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas
Day, we would have open house at our house. Any of the friends that we had, gay
and lesbian friends could come and visit and hang out at our house.
00:56:00
We put out the invitation every year because a lot of gay people could not go
home to their families with their significant other. Maybe they couldn't go home
at all even by themselves. They had been ostracized by their family, they had
been abandoned, turned away by them -- by their family, and they were not
welcome. So it was always a place where people could come to be together and
instead of being depressed about their family's treatment toward them, where
they could feel good on a holiday.
MF: Good. I don't think we talked about -- how did you come into a lesbian
identity? When did you start to get a sense of your sexual identity? Was it in
the '70s, was it earlier? How did that happen for you?
00:57:00
JL: I came out to myself in 1977. I realized looking backward that I've been in
love with my camp counselor, [laughs] in love with a girl that I met at Girl
Scout camp also, and just realized that, wow, I'm not heterosexual. Those
relationships aren't working out. Even when I was going to mechanic school and
working at Dave & Wayne's and also working at Paul's Garage, I still dated men,
but it wasn't doing it for me. And I realized when I got involved with NOW and
were around all these women that it was incredibly exciting because I realized
that this is who I was, that I was a lesbian.
00:58:00
MF: What was it like to live with in Diane in Catasauqua together when you built
that, that home together?
JL: Well, it was an existing home, and actually, we had lived also in -- we
moved from the South Side of Bethlehem to a row home in Allentown that we owned
with a third woman who was -- so the three of us on the house together. She was
much older. She was from Quaker Meeting also. So it's tough living, two people
together, let alone with three or four. So first we lived together, four women
and then it was three women and then we realized you just need to live with your
significant together because it doesn't work out too good. So we ended moving to
a town house in Catasauqua. And you had to be careful about what you were doing
that you didn't offend the neighbors.
00:59:00
It was still a fairly closeted situation, although the street we lived on in
Catasauqua, we had just picked it as a house that we liked well enough and could
afford, and it turned out, it was like lesbian heaven there. We had two women,
two gay women that -- oh, sorry, we had two lesbian couples that lived on that
street. It was just a circle, a town house circle, two lesbian households and
two gay men households on that street, and they were -- in this development,
there were three circles. On the other circles, there were also gay people, so
it turns out that there was a lot of gay people there. So we also had that
support that even though we weren't being really out in the neighborhood, we had
each other there, and somebody we could turn to or socialize with.
01:00:00
MF: Who knew that about Catasauqua? I've got to say like who knew?
JL: [laughs] Yeah. [laughter] Right, we didn't know. It was just an accident.
Well, I don't think it was just an accident; I think it was meant to be.
MF: So you're living in Catasauqua, you're working at PPL, what -- how -- what
changes in your life in the '80 s are you -- how do you sort of enter into the
'80s? What are the big things that are happening for you in those early years?
JL: Well, once I got a job with PPL in the garage, you start out as a handyman.
In garage is basically you're a gofer, you run for parts, you jockey cars
around. Pretty much that's what you're doing. You don't really get to do any
mechanical work. So I had gone from doing pretty much -- doing a lot of
mechanical work at Paul's Garage to being a gofer.
01:01:00
But I did that for a couple of months, and it didn't take long until I got into
the mechanics. They had a mechanics training program there, so... It was a
four-year program where you worked and you also went to school. And so once I
got started at being a mechanics, I had shift foreman whose name was Al Koch.
And when I think back -- when you ask me to do this, I thought back to who were
the people in my life that really made a difference, Al was another one. Just
like Tony LoGiudice and George Gerstenberg, Al Koch, my shift foreman, right
away let me inspect cars and trucks.
The transportation department, PPL was responsible for all the equipment, any --
everything up into cranes, all the equipment they owned or leased at the time
and did the repair work on. Al recognized that I had my state inspection
01:02:00license, which usually if you went through PPL's training program, you didn't
get a chance to sit for your exam and become a state inspection mechanic until
year three of your training.
He gave me the opportunity to do that right away. He was encouraging, but he was
fair. He didn't treat me differently than the others. He treated me a little
differently in the sense that I remember very keenly one day he paired me with a
guy named Jack, another mechanic there. And it was to do a routine maintenance,
lubrication, change oil, that kind of thing on a line truck, a digging truck
01:03:00that would dig holes to plant poles -- and to do the maintenance and also the
state inspection on it, so pull wheels to look at brake lining and that kind of thing.
Jack was not a very good mechanic. He hated working with me. He refused to speak
to me the entire time that we did the work on this vehicle, so I ended up having
to... All the parts of the vehicle that he checked over, since he wouldn't tell
me what the condition was, I had to do the whole -- I had to do his part of the
job also. And so when it was done, it had taken me twice as long as it should
have taken two people to do that job because I -- he wouldn't talk to me. And I
went to Al, and I said, "This is what happened." I said, "Please don't put me
with someone again." He said, "I understand, I won't, I won't do that to you
again. You're a junior mechanic with a state inspection license, I put you with
someone who was farther along in the program, but obviously, it was a problem,
01:04:00it made --" He didn't say all this out loud, but this was the gist of the
interaction we had that this was an embarrassment to this man, plus he wasn't a
very good mechanic, so he never did that again. So I did all my work on my own.
Very rare that I work with someone, it was extremely rare.
So Al was really good about that, really supportive. He protected me in that
way. When I worked on the garage, I would think of it this way. I looked at the
men that I worked with, and there were the guys who were like, it's no problem
that you're a female working on this job, and those became my friend, they're my
friends and good friends. And about a third of the mechanics, it was like, okay,
01:05:00so you're here, that's fine, no big deal, but we didn't become close. And then
the last third, they were the problem ones, they were the ones -- and it took me
a long time to understand this. It took me a while to understand this, a couple
of years, but I came to understand that those men that really hated working
alongside a woman or working with a -- or having -- the idea of having a woman
as a mechanic.
Those men were ones that were not good mechanics, they were not confident in
their skills, they didn't really understand mechanics very well, it was not
really their thing. And those were the ones that were -- gave me the hard time,
all the time. They were constantly threatened because... And I realized, they
might -- being in a situation where I do a much better job than they did and
then what did that mean about them. And so those were the ones that would
01:06:00sabotage my work where when I'd walk away from the vehicles and go to the
restroom or whatever, come back, they'd had poured transmission flood down the
carburetor so that when you start it up, it would smoke like crazy. They'd
change the -- loosened the distributor and changed the timing on the engine so
that the engine would backfire and wouldn't run, those kinds of things, so...
But then, there were the guys who realized that I could be helpful because I
have little hands and I could get in really tight spaces. Where when you're
working on the hydraulic systems of a line trucks, the digging trucks and the
bucket trucks, that I could get in these very tight spaces to get fittings
loosened or started again to get them threaded and all kinds of places that were
little places, so... But the one thing I remember when I first became -- started
to do mechanical work there, a lot of the guys were upset with me, and finally
01:07:00after a couple of weeks, the union steward, the shop steward took me aside and
said, "Look, you have to slow down. You're working way too fast, and you're
making us look bad, so you need to slow down," [laughs] so I did.
And, yeah, I have to say I always enjoyed working for a union. The union is real
-- really instrumental in me being able to keep my job. The union was a fair
enough union. It had its problems just like everything does in life, but they
were about keeping the union employees employed. And so there could be... Along
01:08:00the way, I wanted a place to change my clothes and shower just like the guys
did. You're filthy dirty, and you have to crawl into your vehicle and drive
home. They didn't have a locker room for the women. The first thing they did was
to take -- to -- in response to my request, the union stood behind me, but
management was not about to build one woman a locker room, and so what they did
was they changed my hours by half an hour.
So I would use the men's locker room at the beginning of the shift and at the
end of the shift. My shift was half an hour different, so I could use the
women's locker room. The union made -- meant that I was going to get -- I was a
mechanic trainee just like the other mechanic trainees; I got paid the same
amount they did. So I really appreciated working for a union. But I think that I
01:09:00was a pretty darn good mechanic. I'm not one to toot my horn, but I do think I
was a pretty darn good mechanic, and that's what changes people over time.
That's what changes discrimination.
So along the way occasionally, women would bid into the job of transportation
handyman, and it was always a mixed blessing. It would be nice to have another
woman there, but if they weren't putting out a thousand percent, then it was --
made my life harder. And along the way, the women that did come through, pretty
much all of them were in the category that they weren't really mechanics.
They didn't have the training or the inclination or the, yeah, aptitude for it.
And over time, it no longer became a problem for me because they did recognize
01:10:00that I was a good mechanic. And they'd say things like, "Oh well, you're
different." But I had plenty of people from other departments, like the linemen
would come in to drop off their vehicles, and they come up to me and say, "You
know you're taking the job away from a man. You don't belong here. You're taking
a job away from a man," and I'd say, "Well, who's going to support me? I have to
have a way to support me too. Why shouldn't I be able to have this job?" "Well,
you should marry a man and then there would be -- and then that job would be
there available for a man."
MF: Well, I mean, that has -- that kind of leads me to wonder about what it was
like to be a lesbian working at PPL during that time period. I'm curious, was
there homophobia in the workplace? What was it like to be at PPL as a lesbian person?
01:11:00
JL: Yeah, that was really tough. It was hard enough being a woman in a
nontraditional job, and then to be lesbian on top of it was really hard. The
whole time I worked in the garage, I was closeted, I was not out but every--
virtually everybody knew it. [laughs] Well, I don't know; it's kind of weird.
The guys who gave me a hard time, they seem to know it, they seem to pick up on
it. They guys who were my friends didn't exactly seem to pick up on it because
actually several of those friends along the way expressed that they had a
romantic interest in me in one form or another -- two of them did.
We managed to weather through that and not go in that direction without me
saying I am not interested in relationship with a man other than a friend. And
01:12:00we managed to maintain our friendships. Eventually after I left the garage, I
ended up in -- I was a mechanic for a number of years and then a job came along
as the parts person. They called it the transportation material handler. And the
fellow who was in that job, they needed to have a second person, and his name
was [Dave?]. He came to me and asked me, "Would you please apply for this job?"
I said, "Why?" He said, "Well, the pay is about the same, and I'm not a
mechanic, and you're really good at what you do. And there's some men that are
applying for the job -- going to apply for the job that I do not want to work
with, so would you please apply for the job?"
And at that time, I was getting really tired of the guys who would sabotage my
01:13:00work and so I thought, oh, maybe -- it was the same pay, maybe this would be a
good idea. It broke my heart to stop being a mechanic but I... And it was a hard
transition for me because I love what I did. I just was tired of the struggle
every day coming and having to deal with some men [laughs] who just couldn't
wrap his head around the idea that I would be -- as a woman, be working there.
It was a blow to their ego and so there was a certain number of men who it was
constantly -- they were out to get me, but like I had said before, not all of
them. But I decided I would do that. And so I became material handler and really
kind of became the parts manager, even though that was not a title, that was not
01:14:00my title.
Because the other fellow really wanted to just do the paperwork, pay the bills
for the parts, and this, that, and the other, and wanted me to be the one to
find the parts for all the equipment we have. And so it turned out, I ended up
loving that job. I could use my mechanical background to do that job, and I
could use my knack for accounting and my knack for problem solving. I would find
parts sometimes all over the world. I remember one time, I had to -- I ended up
pursuing -- looking, and I would read the diagrams for all the vehicles and all
the hydraulic plumbing and everything. We had a cable stringer that needed a
part, and the cable stringers were used a lot in dock work. You'd think, well,
what do you need a -- why would you go to...? I went to the manufacturer of this
01:15:00particular piece of equipment, and it was used for dock work, but it was also
used to string electrical cable, heavy -- really heavy cable.
I ended up talking to somebody in Italy to find this part. And I was equally as
good at doing that job if not better because I was -- I got to operate by
myself. I used my mechanical ability and also my problem-solving abilities, and
I felt I was really appreciated by the management there. In fact, sometimes, one
of the poor mechanics would ask me for a part, and I'd think, why in the world
would you want that part, and I'd ask him. I'd say, "Well, what's the problem
with the vehicle?" and they'd say, "Well, it's doing this or that or not doing
this or that, and I want this part." So I'd say, "Okay," and then I'd have to go
01:16:00to the foreman and say, "So-and-so wants me to order this part. This is what's
wrong with it, I don't think this is the problem, I think he needs this other
part instead." And the foreman would say, "Yup, you're right, go ahead and order
it." So that didn't make me popular with that third group of mechanics who
weren't competent at their job. But I was on a much more level playing field
because I was the only game in town. They had to come to me for their part. So
if you treat me too badly, you might not get the part you needed in the time you
need it. [laughs]
MF: So PPL today has an LGBT staff group. At that time, were -- did you know
other people at PPL that were lesbian or gay, or was it mostly like people knew
but didn't know or was it --
01:17:00
JL: No, you knew, you knew who the gay people were there. Your gaydar told you
who they were. You gingerly approach them and then they acknowledge they were
gay also. So in '95, they started cutting back on services, and they went
through the transportation department. Because of the union, I was -- the fellow
Dave who asked me to take that job as the parts person, he was there first, so
they cut back to one material handler in every garage, so I lost my job in 1995.
I went up to the service center, which was also on the same property and became
a dispatcher for -- a power dispatcher for repairs of electrical -- sending
people to repair electrical equipment for storms and that kind of thing. And
that's when I became out. I was actually outed by a lesbian up there who was not
01:18:00a very nice person and decided she would do that for me whether I liked it or not.
But in retrospect, it turned out to be one of the best things in my life because
I was just tired of trying to be closeted. And so that's when I got involved in
-- shortly thereafter, another woman, a lesbian there -- PPL announced they were
going to start diversity groups, and a woman activist there named Donna asked
that there be a gay group and so that was begun. And I ended up writing the
proposal for lesbian and gay rights for employees.
01:19:00
Because at that time, if you were a heterosexual employee of PPL , you got all
kinds of benefits for your family. And if you had -- you were in a gay
relationship because you couldn't be married, you couldn't get any of those
benefits. So the biggest argument I made in the proposal I wrote for all kinds
of benefits for gay and lesbians was you are -- it should be equal pay for equal
work. And that's what you say you have here at this company, but it's not
because all of the single people are subsidizing the married couples because
they get a huge advantage cost-wise of paying for the benefits for the rest of
their family. Whereas our lesbian or gay partner does not get those benefits and
01:20:00has to go out and buy them elsewhere.
It took seven years. I think it was seven years... I'm not sure about the timing
here whether it was -- it took -- I think it took seven years and maybe seven
years for management to get the benefits. It was either five years and seven
years or seven years and nine years. Management got the benefit first, employees
that were gay and lesbian that were management, and then it took two more years
to get the union to give us the benefits. And I still to this day cannot believe
that the union stood behind us. [laughs] It wasn't easy to get them to stand
behind us.
It was actually from the larger union leadership of the International
01:21:00Brotherhood of Electrical Workers who pretty much forced our local IBEW to give
gays benefits. Prior to that time, if your significant other in life died -- and
we had several of these situations. If that person died, you might not even get
the time off to go to the funeral.
MF: Not all of our listeners, especially younger generations, will be familiar
with the kinds of benefits that you were asking for. But what you've just
described is like the ability to attend a funeral, the ability to leave work to
go to a hospital if a loved one is experiencing illness. I'm sure life insurance
might have been something else. But could you describe a few of the benefits
that you really identified in that white paper and that you really fought for
01:22:00those seven years for all gay and lesbian PPL employees to have access to those
benefits? What were they? What did you really prioritize?
JL: Sure. The first benefit we got was a single benefit and what was the right
to go -- have the day off to go to the funeral of your partner. That was the
first one. And you had to declare that you had a relationship, and you had to
prove that you had that relationship by -- now, this isn't something that
anybody who was married had to do. They didn't have to turn in their marriage
certificate in order to get benefits.
They just had to say, "Hey, this is my wife or my husband, and these are my
kids' names, and these are their birthdates," and that kind of thing. But the
very first benefit we got was a funeral benefit and bereavement benefit. And
that was that you could have from the time you're -- just like the straight
people got, from the time your partner died if you had them registered as your
01:23:00partner to the time that the funeral occurred, you could have those days off and
then you had to return to work the day after the funeral.
I know in dispatch, there was someone who was in that case. Well, actually, in
that department, it was called -- the fellow held the job of system operator,
and his partner died. And because system operators are -- you must -- there
aren't a lot of them, and they had to be on the job 24/7, and they did a lot of
overtime just like the people in dispatching did, this fellow, they would not
let them go because they didn't have a replacement. And so I can't imagine, I
can't imagine how much -- how hard that must have been and how much that must
have hurt. I was amazed that the fellow hadn't even -- hadn't quit the company,
01:24:00but he weathered through it. There was nothing for us when we started, nothing.
When I say it took the seven and nine years, that was to get health insurance.
So we're looking to get health insurance, and you couldn't be married at that
time as a gay person. So you were looking to get that health insurance. I
remember there was one woman in the -- our group there at PPL.
The name of the group was called GLOW, Gays and Lesbians in the Workplace, and
[Tammy?] was her name. She would call her her wife even though they legally
weren't married, and her wife had two children. Actually, the two children were
born by artificial insemination in the time that they were together. And so
Tammy was a great poster child for our cause because we would occasionally be
01:25:00able to have a meeting with someone in higher management, and we would bring
Tammy in to plead her case -- she was great. And Tammy worked as a power plant
operator out in Central Pennsylvania, and she will come in.
She was a tough broad, but she would tell them, "It breaks my heart when my
children are really sick, and I don't have health insurance for them. And I must
try to take them to the hospital and get care for them, and I can't get care for
them really very well because I don't have insurance, and my partner does not
have insurance." And so eventually, the best that they were able to do was to
get her partner and the children who were her biological children, she had
carried them, on Medicaid. But still on Medicaid, the services were really poor.
And so she was one of the big factors that helped turn them around, but it was a
01:26:00lot of factors that -- a lot of work over seven years to try to get them to give
health insurance.
When you got health insurance, they made it clear that -- the legal department
at PPL made it clear that if you left the company -- well, let me not even say
left the company. If you retired and you're -- you went on Medicare then because
you're a retired employee, that your spouse would no longer -- if the spouse was
younger, they would be kicked off of the PPL insurance policy because you
weren't legally married.
So actually, the rights that I fought for, for all those years, I never ended up
using because my partner and now, my -- who's now my wife, Michele was eight
years younger, and she's self-employed. We looked at that and said, "You know,
01:27:00I'm going to retire, you'll get bumped off. You have a preexisting health
condition and you will end up not being able to be insured, so we're going to
have to continue insu-- you're going to have to continue insuring yourself
because I don't dare put you on this policy. Because, one, you'll be in your
late fifties when I will retire, and trying to find you an insurance policy
would be very difficult, that we could afford."
It was really already unaffordable, I mean, until I was able to get married --
till we were able to get married and then I could go back to PPL and say, "Okay,
now even though I'm retired, you need to put my wife on your insurance policy."
That was in 2015, not very long ago. [laughs] But by that time, Michele was
01:28:00paying twelve thousand dollars a year for health insurance as a self-employed
person. So when you say help younger people understand, this was huge.
Also, I was able to get a life insurance policy for Michele when I was at PPL.
That was huge because when you couldn't be married, you're talking about if one
of you passes away, the other one has to pay fifteen percent inheritance tax on
everything you have accumulated in your life together, and Michele and I have
been together thirty-six years, and we maintained -- early on, we got life
insurance policies against each other so that if one passed away, the other one
would have the life insurance policy to pay the inheritance tax on everything we
had built in life.
MF: So while you were working with GLOW at PPL, were you aware of other LGBT
01:29:00organizations in the valley that were working on similar issues? Or did you have
connections with other activist organizations in the valley?
JL: We did. Air Products was one we often -- that we were connected to, and we
would often talk with, maybe meet with here and there. They were ahead of us in
trying to get benefits, but in the end -- I'm not sure if they ever got benefits
in the end. The people at Air Products were -- all the people we worked with
were professional people, people with degrees, so they were considered
management employees at Air Products. So I think because of that, Air Products
acknowledged them earlier than PPL acknowledged our gay and lesbian workers. But
01:30:00I think because of maybe financial issues, the company was -- I'm not sure why
that Air Products seemed to struggle. You would have thought they would get all
the benefits before we did.
MF: Were outside of employee -- like industry-based LGBT organizations, were you
aware of social or health-based LGBT organizations in the Lehigh Valley? Or were
you involved with any other organizations outside of the -- outside of GLOW at PPL?
JL: On the individual level, I got involved with a community service group, a
gay community service group called AIDS Outreach. I didn't have the time to try
and dig out when I had actually all the -- when I started volunteering for them,
01:31:00but I'm pretty sure it was somewhere around '92, '93 maybe that I volunteered to
be a worker at AIDS Outreach. At that time, the AIDS epidemic had been going on
for some time, and it was getting activists. AIDS activists were getting their
stories out more and more in the press.
There was still a hugely negative sentiment around someone with AIDS. When I
started with that group, what that group did was I was, what they called, an
AIDS buddy. So they would pair a volunteer to be a support person for someone
who had AIDS that had come to AIDS Outreach for services. And so as an AIDS
01:32:00buddy, I was there to be the cheerleader, the person who would help when someone
is really sick, get groceries, to be an advocate for services, which might be
health services, all kinds of things. And when I started, I volunteered for that
job because I had read an article in the newspaper and I thought -- just it
moved me to tears. I thought it's hard enough to die, let alone die without a
single person in the world there to support you, to give you comfort, to touch you.
People were just scared out of their minds by AIDS. And AIDS Outreach not only
provided the buddy program, but they educated the public that it's like, you're
01:33:00not going to get AIDS from this person who has AIDS by touching him. You're not
going to get it unless you have a transfer of blood products or -- and that kind
of thing. You are more of a danger to that person who has AIDS and a compromised
immune system than they ever will be of you. If you're not having sex with them,
you're not swapping saliva or blood or semen -- I'm sorry to be graphic, but
that is basically a product semen -- and so you're not going to get AIDS, and
you're not really at risk at all. The first AIDS buddy I had when he was
hospitalized -- every time he'd be hospitalized, they had him in a quarantine room.
The people would -- or the nursing staff would come in and when they absolutely
01:34:00had to. They pretty much avoid coming into the room. They were scared to death
of AIDS and not unlike the situation we're in right now with COVID-19. But I
think in a lot of ways, it was even worse because there was the stigma of in our
country it was, you don't have this disease unless you're gay on top of it. So
you have this horrible disease, it also means you're gay and we don't --
society, for the most part, really ostracizes and does not like gay people at
this time in history. And so, I couldn't imagine trying to live with AIDS or die
with AIDS without a support system so that's why I got involved. It was hard
back then.
MF: For how many people were you a buddy during that time period in the early '90s?
01:35:00
JL: I worked for AIDS Outreach until the year 2000, and I had three AIDS
buddies. I was an AIDS buddy for three clients over that time. The first one,
his name was [Brian?]. It was early on, and there was -- they didn't have a
combination drug regimen at that time, so he did not last long. So it was maybe
a year that we were together. The second person that I was an AIDS buddy for,
his name was [Nick?], and I had him for a good number of years.
By that time, they had combination drug therapies, but again, they weren't the
greatest, and Nick was not -- Nick was -- well I'll just say it. Nick had
01:36:00drug-use problems and so that being a drug user and having AIDS was pretty darn
tough on someone's immune system. We were probably together for five years --
four years -- maybe four years, yeah, maybe like three to four years, I guess,
until he passed away. And then the last person I had was a woman who was a
heterosexual woman who had gotten AIDS from having sex partners -- male sex
partners that had AIDS because -- probably because they were drug users. I think
she dabbled some in it but not hugely in drugs. And she had four boys, and she
was the last client that I worked with.
01:37:00
MF: Did you -- in 2000... I guess my question is like, did that organization,
was that still -- organization still going strong into the early twenty-first
century, or did the volunteer structure change in that, in AIDS Outreach as an organization?
JL: I looked on the internet this morning to see if AIDS Outreach still existed.
It looks like it does still exist. I know they worked closely with the Lehigh
Valley Hospital to provide services for people who have AIDS. People are able to
live decently, decently well with AIDS these days, so the picture has changed a
lot. I stopped being a volunteer for AIDS Outreach in the year 2000. The last
woman, the woman that I had, her name was [Marie?].
01:38:00
The woman who ran AIDS Outreach is a wonderful person named Linda Lobach, and to
this day, I think of Linda Lobach every couple of months probably because she
had a great saying. She would tell the volunteers and all the people that work
for her that "When you're dealing with people with AIDS, AIDS is one thing, but
there's a lot of other behavior that enters into working with another human
being and trying to support them." When there was a problem, she would say,
"Take the AIDS out of it, and what are you left with? Is this reasonable or not
reasonable?" [laughs] And so I still use that little bit of wisdom and logic to
deal with a lot of things in life, take the whatever out of it, and what are you
left with? Yeah, this is not reasonable behavior. [laughs]
01:39:00
So I parted ways in 2000 because the last client I had, Marie was... She ended
up losing her four children because -- I often had to be the parent. These kids
would go without food. I didn't have to, but I wanted to try to help them.
Eventually, somebody reported her to a neighbor, or someone she knew reported
her to children and youth services, and they took her four kids away because she
was... She had AIDS, but take the AIDS out of it, and you were left with someone
who was doing drugs, drinking to excess at times, and basically hanging out at
bars to find men, and leaving her kids unattended, so... I thought that it was a
01:40:00good time to part ways.
AIDS Outreach had been -- to me and my way of thinking, had been established for
a very good reason, and that reason was getting lost. And it may have just
been... I don't want to discourage AIDS Outreach -- [cat purrs] Hi, Spanky. This
is my cat Spanky. [laughs] Say hi Spank. [laughs] Okay, Spanky, go play
somewhere. I don't, by any means, want to disparage AIDS Outreach. It was a
wonderful organization and did a lot of good work and probably still does a lot
of good work. And it may just have been the client I had, but I thought I'd had
enough. I needed to do something else, so...
01:41:00
MF: Well, we're nearing the end of the interview, and there two sort of areas
that I'd like to explore just a little bit further. I'm interested, you've
mentioned a few times about being a Quaker in the '70s. I'm wondering if we
could talk a little bit about your spirituality? I'm wondering if you could just
discuss a little bit about your emergence into the Quaker church and maybe the
evolution of your faith?
JL: Okay. Well, I started going to Quaker Meeting in the early '70s I guess. And
I mentioned my psychology professor, Tony LoGiudice went there, and that's how I
ended up attending a Quaker Meeting. He said that I might like this place. Maybe
01:42:00he recognized I was a lesbian -- that was years before I knew I was a lesbian --
I don't know. But maybe just because I was in a nontraditional -- looking to get
into a nontraditional job or probably because Quaker Meeting was a place that
allowed people to -- it was not dogmatic, a dogmatic type of religion.
They encouraged people to be freethinkers. You could believe in God, or you
could have eastern India -- East Indian background and religions. So you could
be of any kind of faith and be accepted there. There were people who were
agnostic or atheists. It was a hodgepodge of people that basically believed
there is a spiritual light within each of us that we can touch and nurture and
01:43:00share with each other. Quakers were early pioneers of endorsing domestic
partnership relationships. Before there was marriage, there were certain states
where you could go and be united in the -- as a domestic partner with each
other. So it turned out to be a good place for me.
MF: Are you still in the Quaker church, or was that your consistent faith
community through your adult life?
JL: I will always be a Quaker at heart. They worship and they don't... We have
01:44:00what's called an unprogrammed -- the one in Lehigh Valley was called an -- what
we called an unprogrammed Meeting where there was no minister. You would sit in
silence and meditate. When you felt that a strong urge to speak that you had
been given a message from -- a spiritual type message to share with others, then
you would stand and share that message. When I say I'll always be a Quaker at
heart, it is because that's the way I prefer to worship or to -- that's my
spirituality that speaks to me. I'm not a member of Quaker Meeting any longer.
There are no Quaker Meetings where I live now. The closest I could come is
Unitarian Universalist Church, which again is very supportive of gay people. Any
disenfranchised groups, both the Quakers and the Unitarian Universalists are --
champion rights of the oppressed or the disenfranchised group. They worship very
01:45:00differently and so I will -- I like the people at the Unitarian Universalist
Church. I share a lot of the same values with them, but their way of worshipping
is entirely different. They have a minister and a programmed service, and so...
That's not so much to my liking.
MF: It sounds to me like your faith -- the faith communities that you've been
involved in, the Quakers and now the Unitarian Universalist, have been really
affirming of both women and LGBT people. Like the MCCLV church in Bethlehem has
been -- in Bethlehem and Allentown has been really supportive of LGBT people.
Would you say that you ever struggled as an lesbian with your faith? Or would
01:46:00you say that your faith always confirmed the value of your identity, of your
sexual identity?
JL: I didn't have a religious faith until I was a young adult and did a bunch of
searching at different churches to try to find where I fit in. I did that for a
good number of years. So it wasn't until maybe like 1972 -- I would have been
twenty-two at the time, twenty-three, around there -- that I found Quaker
Meeting. So it's probably to my advantage that I didn't have much of a religious
upbringing because even not having a religious upbringing, I still struggle with
-- that I was a gay person and that this was wrong in society's eyes.
So there were some guilt but not as much as -- I certainly had a number of
friends who had been, say, brought up in -- maybe the Catholic church was one of
01:47:00the hardest ones. If you were brought in the Catholic faith and you were going
to be gay, you were doomed to struggle and struggle and struggle with what you
had been taught was wrong to do and try to figure out how to come out and be a
reasonably happy and well-functioning gay person.
MF: That certainly was the case for me being raised Catholic; it was a little
bit of a challenge. Okay. So since we're nearing the end of the interview, I'm
wondering if you could share the Michele story? Like how did you meet Michele,
if you could talk a little bit about this primary partnership in your life?
JL: Well, it's pretty bizarre. [laughs] Before Michele, before I met Michele, I
had two other lovers. The first one was Diane, and the second one was Janice.
01:48:00And Janice was with me a couple of years and maybe four I guess it was, and she
had two children. We all lived together, and Janice had been a straight woman
and then she decided that being a gay woman was what she wanted. And she did
that for four years and then decided she wanted to be straight again. So she
left me and I had the house still in Catasauqua, the town house.
I could make it financially on my own, but I had other, a couple of loans
because I had made some renovations to the house. I think I had a car loan out,
and I was really strapped for cash, so I needed to find a roommate fast. So I
asked my friend Dixie White. This was one of the people I said, "I'm looking for
a housemate that's going to be probably somebody who's a lesbian or possibly a
01:49:00gay man, but somebody that wouldn't be offended living with me, and I need to
find somebody fast."
So Dixie had gone to -- she put out the word to a couple of people. And this one
day, she went to the dentist, and the dentist, hygienist, or maybe it was the
office manager was a gay woman, a lesbian, and she said, "I have this friend
who's looking for a housemate." And so, this woman whose name was Gay [laughs]
took down my name and my phone number and said, "I'll keep that in mind." And so
as I recall, I think I have these details right -- Michele might confirm it when
you speak to her -- but Michele was a patient I believe and came in to the
01:50:00dentist's office and so Gay told her. And Michele had just lost her lover who
had gone and run off with some woman, other woman and so Michele needed a place
to stay. And so this woman, Gay who was a total stranger to me and not very well
known at all to Michele ended up putting us together. And Michele contacted me.
She came over to look at the house, and I was pretty traumatized at having been
left and I was pretty scared of... I just wanted a roommate to help me pay the
expenses and so I -- and so Michele had -- she smoked and while she was there, I
asked her if I could get her something to drink. It was during the day, oh
probably late afternoon, and I didn't expect her to say she wanted some type of
alcoholic drink, but she asked for an alcoholic drink. And so I was like, oh, I
01:51:00was a little scared, she wanted alcohol and she smokes, and I told her. I said,
"No one smokes in this house. I will not allow you to smoke, you'd have to smoke
outside." And she was nervous, had a couple of drinks and so I wasn't sure about
that. And so she said, "Well, let me think about it." And she called me back
sometime later and said, "I have decided that I don't want to become your
roommate," she said, "but I would like to date you." [laughs] So that's how we met.
MF: Well, what did you say? What did you say when she said that?
JL: So we started dating. It was tough because we both struggled financially
because neither one of us ended up with a roommate. We did that for about six
months and then she moved into the house with me. [laughs]
01:52:00
MF: That's a great story. [laughter] If you reflect back on your relationship
because you get -- been together decades, how would you describe your
relationship with Michele?
JL: Well, Michele is a psychologist by profession, so.. But you take the
psychologist out of it as Linda Lobach would say, and you're just left with a
person where you have to learn how to negotiate a lifetime together. Do we
fight? Sure, we fight at times over the years. It's gotten to be less and less
and less, but we both needed to grow, and we grew together. And so we have a
pretty solid relationship at this point. And we are a team. We've been together
01:53:00longer than any of her siblings and their relationships. Let me think here a
minute. All of Michele's siblings are divorced and have remarried or -- let's
see, are they all remarried now? Yup, they're all remarried. They've been
divorced at least once if not twice.
And so occasionally when they were going through the hard times in their
relationships, they would ask us, "Well, what's the -- what's your secret to
staying together all these years?" And we'd say one word, "Commitment." You want
to make a relationship work, you have to be committed to the relationship. When
you're having a hard time, you don't get to run away. You have to stick it out
and work it through, and it is no magic bullet. You're not going to be madly in
love with each other like you were at the first for the rest of your life. It's
01:54:00going to be a different kind of love that grows very deep because through thick
and thin, you stick together, which builds trust, which is an issue for a lot of
gay relationships. And you are there for each other and don't break that trust,
and you'll get through it, whatever it is.
MF: What did marriage equality do for you and Michele?
JL: Oh my God, it was huge. It was huge, just huge, and I'm surprised. We were
so shocked that we got the right to get married in Pennsylvania, the state of
Pennsylvania. It was 2014, May of 2014 when they passed that, and my
brother-in-law who lived in Texas -- my sister had passed at that -- by that
time -- my brother-in-law who never speaks to me called me. He's an extremely
01:55:00quiet guy, extremely quiet -- called me and said, "I just heard this on the
news." He was the one who told me that it had been passed in Pennsylvania.
Later that day, I got -- the phone rang, and I picked it up and it was -- I
didn't understand what I was listening to at first, but it was a conference call
with the gay... I can't even remember at the moment which gay group it was, but
they were having a conference call, the lawyers that had fought for these rights
and talking about what had happened, what had transpired, and what it meant. And
so when I say it was huge, we've always been married whether we could be legally
married or not. We've always been married in our minds, in our hearts. But it
meant that we no longer had to maintain huge insurance policies to try and help
pay for -- you know if one of us passed away, the other one would inherit it.
01:56:00
We didn't have to have these really complicated legal documents. We didn't have
to... We could be married, and Michele could be on my insurance policy at the
company I used to -- that I retired from. I mean that was the biggest one. What
did it mean to have marriage equality? Health insurance. [laughs] That's what it
meant, health insurance and the right to inherit without having to pay tax.
That's it in a nutshell.
You no longer had to produce documents, if one of us was in the hospital, that
said we had the right to see each other or to make decisions if someone was in
poor health, and we were in that situation a number of times. Doctors that would
fight with us, get out of here, you don't have a right to be here, huge.
MF: Did you have a ceremony together when you got married, or what was your
01:57:00marriage like?
JL: We got married at the Unitarian Universalist Church that we belong in --
belong to here in Athens, in the area, Athens and Sheshequin. Good friends of
ours from the church, Katie and Chris were the first couple in the county to go
to the courthouse and apply for a marriage license. Michele had to think about
it a day or two, what it might mean to be out as a psychologist in business for
herself. And she thought about it for two days and said, "That's it, I'm not
going to live in the closet, we're doing this."
We became the third couple to apply. And interestingly, the second couple to
apply in our county was from New York State where they already had marriage, the
ability to get marriage -- be married for a couple of years, but the county that
01:58:00they lived in in New York State were very close to the border. The clerk there
that would issue the marriage license was very homophobic and gave them a very
hard time and so they came to Pennsylvania to get their license.
So Katie and Chris were the first and Michele and I were the third applicants,
and our minister was just finishing up a sabbatical from the church. She came
back in June -- I think as of June the first and Katie and Chris and Michele and
I were all married at the same day in the same ceremony. We wanted to do it
quickly because we were afraid that the state of Pennsylvania would withdraw.
The legislation would be overturned, and we would no longer have the right, or
it would become a legal issue. So we wanted to get married quickly, so it would
at least make it tougher for them to divorce -- to divorce us, so to say, so...
01:59:00And our anniversary is coming up June the fourth, and Katie and Chris and
Michele and I still join together every year on -- if not that day, the closest
day that we can to it to celebrate that we were all married on the same day.
MF: Oh, that's just wonderful. Well, we are well over 90 minutes, so... I have
more that I'd love to talk about, but I feel like I really need to end the
interview. But before we do that, Jane, I just want to ask, is there anything
that we really -- that we missed today that you really felt you wanted to share
in this interview?
JL: Not that I can think of. I will share one story, and I don't know why this
just popped in my head. But when I retired from PPL by that time, I had -- it
02:00:00was a good company to work for, good benefits and good pay, so I kept taking
jobs that were there. I always considered the garage my home. That's really who
I am, really where I spent the most time, but I moved on to other jobs. But when
I retired, I had not worked in the garage. I retired in 2012; I had not worked
in the garage since 1995. When I retired, it was the guys in the garage who
threw me a party, and that meant the world to me.
MF: Well, it's clear that they agreed, too, that you really were a star in that
garage, and they felt really connected to you.
JL: Even the ones that gave me a problem when I worked there, after I was forced
to be out, I go back and visit periodically, they all become my friends. And so
02:01:00we all stay in touch till this day.
MF: Thank you for sharing that story. The way that I'll end our interview is
simply by saying, Jane, it's just really been an honor, a real privilege to hear
your story today. Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me and to talk
about your life.
JL: Well, thank you for inviting me, Mary. I'm a pretty low-key person. At first
I really didn't know if I wanted to do something like this, but I thought, oh,
let me be out of character a little bit and do it. So I hope it works out for
you, what you needed. Thank you for the opportunity.
MF: Thank you so much.