During the 2008 presidential election between John McCain and Barack Obama, the media compared Michele Obama to Jackie Kennedy and Cindy McCain to Nancy Reagan. But the media missed that Cindy McCain and Nancy Reagan are both women of the West and Michele Obama and Jackie Kennedy are both women of the East.
I've found women of the West to be fiercely independent, courageous, and able to work side-by-side with any man.
My mother (daughter of my Granddad Frolli) lived in the communities of gold and silver mines of the Southwest until she was a teenager. At that time, mining towns were like the Wild West, and she was a part of it. As a young girl, she would ride alone (western style) into the surrounding wilderness, across the country with little flatland. Without a map or compass and no trail, the path back home was never a straight line, and on a few occasions, she arrived home well after dark. On one occasion her horse was startled and bucked; her head struck the horse's mane cut her forehead. She never fell off her horse and rode home a bit bloodied. The most concerning to her was when she ran across miners in the backcountry, and they would yell to her; she would spur her horse on keeping as a safe distance. No matter the challenges she faced riding, she never gave up the freedom it gave her.
When my Granddad Frolli was transferred to San Francisco, he felt it was time my mother learned to be a respectable young woman. She rode sidesaddle and attended formal dances and secretarial school. (Unlike her brother, she was not allowed to attend college.)
Granddad's efforts showed results on the outside, but inside, mom remained fiercely independent. She married my father, a first-generation Croatian, against her father's wishes. When my father was drafted for World War II, my mother was working at UC Berkeley's Radiation Laboratory. One day as the physicists sat cross-legged on the floor in a research hall, mom rounded a corner without seeing them and fell into the laps of E.O. Lawrence and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
When the Manhattan Project began, many staff members at Berkeley's Rad Lab transferred to secret government installations across the country. Mom was no exception. At age 22, she packed her bags and told her family she was moving East. She could reveal little of her plans to her parents, and even less to those she met while traveling. During WWII, a single woman traveling alone was looked upon with great suspicion. Mom did not recoil at the challenge.
She excelled in her role at Oakridge Laboratory in Tennessee. Despite many successes in her life, she forever resented not having the opportunity to attend college and launch a professional career.
I met my wife, Marion, during my first year in college. We lived in the same dormitory complex, so we ate in the same dining hall. We attended the same pre-calculus and calculus courses our freshman year and continued to bump into each other over the next four years. We started dating our last year in college. Marion graduated with a pharmacy degree; I with an engineering degree.
The following Christmas, I visited Marion at her parent's farm in Oregon. Marion had nine siblings. When they got together, they shared stories of growing up. Hoeing weeds in fields of green beans, picking the beans, and dragging the beans in a burlap bag when they were still too small to lift the bag. Raking from sunup to sundown during the harvest of filberts and hazelnuts at her grandparent's and parents' farms. I witnessed Marion caring for her two bummer lambs, and for her chickens. (Recently, a friend who had bought chickens for fresh eggs asked Marion how old chickens live. Marion's response: "I don't know – we never had a chicken die of old age.") I watched Marion hold her baby nieces and nephews and read to and play games with the older kids.
Marion is a woman of the West: smart and intelligent, fiercely independent, able to work side by side with me. She has helped me place concrete, deliver equipment, and inspect job sites.
Our son and three daughters were not raised on a farm, but in the construction business. Like farming, construction is a tough way to earn a living. The hours are long; the weeks are longer. There are opportunities for the owner's children to work in the family business at a young age.
I still have a newspaper photograph of our three eldest kids raking out the five baseball fields that we constructed. The rakes were much taller than our children. On spring break during high school, our eldest daughter and her brother shoveled dirt out the window of a building into our dump truck. Once the dirt was out, they shoveled gravel back in through the same window.
My eldest daughter was a Physician Assistant in general surgery. After a few years, she decided she was as qualified as the physicians she worked with. She is now a Radiologist in Pennsylvania. Our second daughter is a Physical Therapist working with Navy Seal candidates in California. Our youngest daughter is pursuing he dreams in the art world. In the past year, I had a heated discussion with one of my daughters. I still remember her words: "You taught us that we could do whatever a man could do." I stopped, agreed with her, and then supported her in an endeavor fraught with challenges.
Women of the West are like no others.