Linda Dulicai

About

I’m a Jersey girl.

My father was from Budapest, and my maternal grandmother came through Ellis Island from Munich. Cranford, NJ boasted a mix of neighborhoods, a river, where we went boating and swimming, and a variety of beliefs. We had Boy and Girl Scouts, cotillion( for manners and dancing), truck farms (where the food was picked on the spot) and a short train ride to Manhattan.

There were at least 4 languages spoken near our home. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have racism, subtle segregation, and political challenges like McCarthyism. It was also the days of duck and cover, a very bad joke at eighteen miles from NYC.

We were middle class. My father worked, my mother stayed home with all her other bored friends. It was post WW2. Women were removed from the workplace when the men came home. They founded every type of club you can imagine. They drank, gardened, played bridge, and took valium.

The kids were sent outside and told “don’t come home until dinner”.  We played, invented things, learned to swim and paddle a canoe. We read books. We bugged our siblings. I swam competitions from age 5 through high school. It stopped there. It was before Title 9.

I observed all of it. I was a girl. I was told “you can’t do that” a lot and asked, “why not?” often enough to spend time in principal’s office. I managed to get myself to a good college despite their “rules.”

Most of us grew up. I came of age losing friends to Vietnam, living through Brown v Board of Education, the assassinations, civil rights movement, women’s financial rights, Roe. We all thought it was finished, done, accomplished. We were wrong, naive.

Broad life experiences brought education and, hopefully, some wisdom. I hope. You can decide."