Travels With Mary

Mary and I traveled together frequently conducting teacher training workshops for the National Women’s History Project, attending project director meetings for our grant-funded projects and to attend educational equity conferences. Both being fun-loving and adventurous people, we always discovered great restaurants and found ways to have fun in any city, sometimes staying an extra day or two. In Oregon, we spent the night at the Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood and toured the Hood River valley. In Boise we went skiing twice (hitch-hiking to the slopes the second day when we discovered the shuttle did not run on Sunday). On a trip to New Orleans, we took a red eye flight so we could have maximum time, caught two Mardi Gras parades and ate at as many famous restaurants as we could fit in. We even had fun in Minnesota in the dead of winter.
One year the NCSEE conference was held in Oahu, Hawaii. Mary and I went a few days early and packed in as much exploring as possible. We lay on the beach and ate a plate lunch from a truck, took hula lessons at Wiamea Falls, watched the surfers on the North shore, ate pineapple at the Dole visitors center, climbed Diamond Head, visited the Aquarium, snorkeled at Hanauma Bay and body surfed at Waianae – all in two days before the conference began!
Another memorable travel adventure with Mary was the time we were hired by the Maine State Department of Education to conduct a workshop for teachers, to be held at a very fancy resort on the coast of Maine. On the way, driving from Portland, ME, we encountered a thunder storm so intense we had to pull off the road, but, by the time we got to the coast, the weather had cleared. We were each housed in a separate one bedroom cabin with a lovely view of the water. Fabulous meals were served in the resort dining room. (Lobster anytime you wanted!) The workshop was well received, as usual. From there we went up the coast and spent a few days exploring the legendary Maine coastline. It was on this trip that I discovered lawn sheep, and brought one home in my suitcase. We also brought home live lobsters which we cooked for a marvelous feast.
Another project that put us on the road together was gathering historical photos for the Women in American Life Video series that Mary and I produced for the NWHP. This was a project Mary and I worked on for several years, researching and writing the scripts, then doing the primary photo research on a long trip to D.C. and New York. We took with us an entire copy camera set-up with lights and several dozen rolls of film. Astoundingly, we were allowed to set up shop in the National Archives and Library of Congress where we copied hundreds of historical photographs. I would search for photos in the drawers to illustrate the script and bring them to Mary who was making photographic copies as fast as she could. We must have shot hundreds of pictures that way, using a special black and white Polaroid slide film, which we developed each night to be sure we had what we needed. Then we took the train to New York, where we visited the photo archives of the Associated Press and meeting with photographers who had covered the early women’s movement events on the east coast, a veritable treasure trove of material for the later years we were covering.
On a second trip for this same project, we went to Cambridge to do research at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliff, staying with a woman who had attended one of the NWHP’s teacher training conferences in Santa Rosa. To our delight, she taught Chinese cooking classes at her home, and we were able to attend one of them and share the feast. Research at Radcliff was excellent, as that was the largest women’s history library and archives in the country. We also drove up to Smith College to meet the archivist at the Sophia Smith Library, also a great collection of women’s history archives. On these trips we were able to look at the personal papers of Alice Paul and the Woman’s Party, whose office we also visited, as well as many other treasures rarely seen by the public. (I must say we were a little appalled by how lax the security was at the National Archives and Library of Congress. We were allowed to take anything we wanted out of the files and no one paid any attention to whether or not we put it back. We did, of course!) That was an absolutely amazing and grueling trip, but Mary and I had a wonderful time together.
My travels with Mary were some of the best adventures of my life and will always be my fondest memories of our 20 years of working together. - Bonnie Eisenberg