Mater Gladiatrix

By Richard A. Marin

In 1946, while Rosy the Riveter was taking her shop apron off and setting down her wrench for the last time, Millie Uher got into a U.S. Army surplus Jeep and drove up into the hills southwest of Maracaibo, Venezuela. In this biography written by her son, we learn she was much more than a working mother. She was a woman of the world and a rare trendsetter that changed the world without design and perhaps intent. The development and education expert would live 100 years and break ground and gender barriers as an athlete in basketball, tennis, golf, and especially alpine skiing as she trekked the globe. She dared to go where others, including men, dared not go, living her life at full speed and never once touching the brakes. From immigrant’s child to global diplomat, from rural schoolchild to urbane single mother, and from first-generation high school graduate to Ph.D., this is the story of a traditional American girl who became a bona fide adventurer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jul 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483472164

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MARIN

Copyright © 2017 Richard A. Marin.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7215-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7217-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7216-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017910801

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 7/12/2017

Cover - Coins List:

1. Costa Rica - 1935 - 1 Colon

2. Danish West Indies 5 Bit - 1 Cent - 1905

3. US - 1828 - Liberty Large Cent

4. Guatemala - 2 Real - 1898

5. Russia - 2 Kopek - 1910

6. France 10 Centimes - 1921

7. US - 1853 - Liberty Large Cent

8. Canada - 1 large Cent - 1908

9. Brazil - 200 Reis -1871

10. Germany - 5 Pfennigs - 1924

11. China Qing Dynasty Qian Long Tong Bao 1736

12. Norway - 1/2 Skilling - 1841

13. Hong Kong - Queen Victoria Dollar - 1866

14. Cuba - 5 Centavos - 1915

15. Belgium - 5 Centimes - 1929

16. Germany - 5 Pfennig - 1820

17. Peru - 1 Sol - 1884

18. Italy - 5 Lira - 1872

19. México - 50 Centavos - 1906

20. Costa Rica - 5 Centimos - 1947

21. Spain - 10 Centimos - 1850

22. Italy 10 Centisimo - 1894

23. UK - one Penny - 1928

24. Germany 1 Reichmark - 1933

25. Denmark - 2 Ore - 1927

26. Switzerland -2 Rapper - 1893

27. Panama - 1 silver Quarto - 1955

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I have no choice but to dedicate this book to my mother. She raised me single-handedly, and whatever I am today is largely a function of her influences on me. She was much more than a working mother as we know the term today. She is truly a woman of the world and the sort of rare trendsetter who changes the world without design or, perhaps, intent. To make full use of my years of Latin training and to paraphrase Theophile Gautier and MGM, she epitomized Vitam Gratia Vitam (life for life’s sake). Her gender did not hold her back, and it would be fair to say it was irrelevant to her. She lived her life gender neutral or, more precisely, gender extraneous. I consider her Mater Gladiatrix.

I would also like to acknowledge Gary Reichard—a fellow Cornellian, neighbor, and provost of the College of Staten Island. Gary has encouraged me to write this story and has generously copyedited every page for me.

My wife, Kim, has patiently listened to each chapter rather than getting extra sleep. And my sisters, Kathy and Barbara—who lived every day and more of this—have indulged me this stylized and biased recounting.

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1     Back To The Salt Mines (Malzenice To Myers, 1892–

1922)

Chapter 2     The Roadhouse Years (Route 34B, 1922–1929)

Chapter 3     The Bubble In The Bump In The Road (Myers Corners,

1929–1933)

Chapter 4     The Way They Were (Cornell, 1933–1937)

Chapter 5     Tuckerman’s Ravine (Plattsburgh/Norwich, 1937–1945)

Chapter 6     Joining The Foreign Legion (New York City/Maracaibo,

1945–1946)

Chapter 7     The Maracaibo Mambo (Maracaibo To Caracas, 1946–

1948)

Chapter 8     Meeting Mr. Wonderful (Caracas To Maracay, 1948–1951)

Chapter 9     Maria Von Trapp (Maracay, 1951–1957)

Chapter 10   The Art Of Deception (Santa Monica, 1957–1958)

Chapter 11   Ithaca Intermission (Lansing, 1958–1959)

Chapter 12   Back To The Tropics (Turrialba, 1959–1961)

Chapter 13   Suburban Badgers (Madison, Wisconsin, 1961–1965)

Chapter 14   Snatchatory Rape (Poland Spring, Maine, 1965–1968)

Chapter 15   Circus Maximus (Rome, Italy, 1968–1975)

Chapter 16   Via Baccina (Rome, Italy, 1975–1980)

Chapter 17   The Lady Of Lagos (Rome And Beyond, 1980–1981)

Chapter 18   Video Poker Grandma (Las Vegas, Nevada, 1981–1991)

Chapter 19   The Cowboy Lullaby (Las Vegas, Nevada, 1991–2017)

Epilogue

PREFACE

MillieRiveter.jpg

Millie the Riveter

In 1946, while Rosie the Riveter was taking her shop apron off and setting down her wrench for the last time, Millie Uher, who had just learned Spanish in an intensive language program at 30 Rockefeller Center, got in a US Army surplus Jeep and drove up into the hills southwest of Maracaibo, Venezuela. Millie had a degree in home economics from the most notable and first American coed university and arguably the premier development-focused institution in the world: Cornell University. She had nine years of experience working for the New York State Welfare Department, helping the needy in rural upstate New York who had lived through the Great Depression and then the shortages of the World War II economy.

She then heard about the work of the Rockefeller Foundation, headed by Nelson Rockefeller, the eldest son of John D. Rockefeller, the billionaire oilman who had grown up in Richford, New York, fifteen miles away from where Millie and her immigrant family had lived for the past half century. This was not about welfare. She had never been out of the United States, or for that matter, the Northeast. This was not about exotic travel. Like everything she had done in her life, she impulsively set her sights, put her head down, and got where she wanted to go … with little or no thought about where it would all lead.

Millie Uher may not be recognized as one of the greatest women of the twentieth century. She lacks the profile of Eleanor Roosevelt, Gloria Steinem, Mother Teresa, Hilary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, or Angela Merkel, yet I believe she may have invented the modern woman and broken gender barriers before anyone knew to apply labels. And she did it with complete oblivion to any cause or mission. She did it because it was what she wanted to do and with no greater vision.

She was unaffected by the roaring twenties, skipped through the Great Depression, played golf and skied through the War, and was leaning in to the entire world long before Sheryl Sandberg was even born. I tend to hyperbolize when it comes to my mother. I can certainly be accused of exaggerating her impact on the world, but I will let you be the judge after you have heard her story. From immigrant’s child to global diplomat. From rural schoolchild to urbane single mother. From first-generation high school graduate to PhD. From traditional American girl to emerging market adventurer before the market was thought to have any emerging in it. It is the story of the twentieth-century American woman in ascendancy and transition.

My mother was always swimming against the stream. In other words, she is a person who leads an unconventional life. It is harder and harder to lead an unconventional life. When I asked her once why she made such a bold move as to relocate to Venezuela in 1946, she paused, glanced around, and finally said, I guess you’re old enough to know. Note to self, if you ever want to get the total rapt attention of your child (regardless of age), use this line. What she explained was a speedy decision and departure from the country to avoid further pursing a torrid affair with a married man.

My shock produced a comment that has forged the base of my image of my mother. I said, So you basically joined the Foreign Legion? Yes, my mother liked swimming against the stream.

All during my upbringing, one of the Bohemian artifacts that always found its way to some wall—usually on a hallway wall outside the bathroom—was a small framed poem that looked like the sort of thing one finds in a dusty attic or basement box. It showed a sleepy angler drifting in his boat on a summer day with the poem below:

Most any old fish can drift along and dream, but it takes a regular live one to swim against the stream.

When I researched this poem, I learned that the head of neurology at the Mayo Clinic had this same poem hanging over his desk. Apparently, it was a rallying cry to high-achieving college students who survived the Great Depression. When I would read it repeatedly while waiting in the hall for my sisters to get out of the bathroom, I would admire the sentiment. I did not even know what stream they were talking about, but it made me ready to swim against it.

What exactly is good about swimming against the stream? Perhaps the puritan ethic demands it. On the other hand, is it the contrarian nature we all swear will make us wealthy as Joe Kennedy? Maybe it is the primordial drive for the ancestral headwaters of the Columbia River where we all are drawn to spawn and die. The American dream is simply not available to those who drift along and dream—or at least not to women of the twentieth century who don’t swim hard against the stream.

CHAPTER 1

Back to the Salt Mines

(Malzenice to Myers, 1892–1922)

Family1.JPG

The Uher Family in 1919 (with Josephine)

John Uher, even at age forty-five, had the look of an old and hardened soul. He sat in his bentwood, cane-seated chair, balanced on the two back legs and yet sturdied by being jammed between the old wood stove in his kitchen and the window that looked out onto Myers Road. This was his spot. Since his dear wife, Catherine, had died of tuberculosis a few months ago, his life consisted of rising early, working a full day, sitting in his kitchen chair, and watching the world go by. His work involved some combination of his gas station (two hundred yards up the road), his roadhouse (across Lansingville Road from the gas station), and his fields (he had a complete farm, but he never cultivated it beyond the vegetable garden and a few acres of beans). He cooked his daily fare of hot dogs and spinach from that chair and drank his four-to-six Carling Black Label beers, which he opened with a Coke bottle opener conveniently affixed to the windowsill. He shaved his stiff and bristly beard every third day (stylishly rugged before his time) and went to Mass every once in a while at All Saints Catholic Church (also two hundred feet up the road on the left-hand side).

It was not an accident that the church was so close. John had practically donated the land for the church long before the concept of tax deductions came into vogue. He had done it for Catherine, and he was privately glad to have given her that solace to lean on in her final, painful days.

Ludmilla, bring your father another Carling, he bellowed into the dusty house. He kept at least two cases (all returnable crates and brown, well-worn, thick glass bottles conveniently part of the roadhouse official inventory) in his stone basement where the ambient temperature never varied much from the fifty-four degrees of any good root cellar. That cluttered basement was filled with John’s tools, stacks of crated bottles, and strange brewing tanks and flasks—not to mention several feral cats and (depending on the season) their latest litter of kittens. It was gradually taking on the look of the man now that the woman of the house was sixteen and was distracted by being the star guard of the Lansing High School girls’ basketball team.

Dad, I told you everyone calls me Millie, not Ludmilla, the spry, young five-foot-four point guard said as she skipped down the stairs and pivoted around the banister, practically vaulting through the dining room and into the kitchen. "Why don’t we get a Frigidaire like everyone else and then you … or should I say I … won’t have to keep fetching your beer from that nasty basement?"

John had sired seven children with Catherine and raised six (Pauline died, like so many children of the day, at six months) until little Josephine was tragically washed away and drowned one spring day in 1922 at the age of eight while trying to cross Salmon Creek. Now there was only Ludmilla and young Paul at home, the older siblings having all left home.

Ludmilla (decidedly not Millie to John) was the apple of his eye and always had been. Where her older sister Aggie was very buttoned up and serious, Ludmilla was a free spirit. She was a hardworking and bright student and an accomplished athlete. She dreamed and spoke of things that John did not always understand, but she did it in a way that captivated him and anyone else in the room. Whenever someone suggested doing something new and different, the first one to sign up was Ludmilla. When her cousin Betty asked her to learn tennis with her, it was a foregone conclusion that she would do so. Though tennis was a country club sport to be played on manicured lawns at Forrest Hills or smooth clay at the Cornell Cascadilla Gorge courts, it never occurred to Millie to feel excluded from its membership ranks.

When she brought her father his Carling, she did what she always did: she popped the cap on the windowsill (not bothering to use the opener), took a long swig, and handed her father the bottle. It would become her lifelong drink of choice. The bottle cap simply rolled under his chair and joined a week’s supply that would be swept up on Sunday afternoon. He feigned shock that she would drink beer at her young age, but was secretly pleased that she had so much moxie.

Dad, I want to talk to you about something, she said more seriously than he was expecting.

John was genuinely scared. Ludmilla was rarely serious with him and never asked him for anything. If she needed money, she found a way to earn it. If she needed womanly advice since her mother had become ill and died, she found it from schoolteachers or family friends. She was never a burden to John and was as independent as the feral cats in the basement. John set his chair on all fours, expecting the worst, as any good Eastern European would do.

I plan to go to Cornell after I graduate. Aggie says I can live with her, and I already applied and got into the Home Economics School with a partial scholarship, and I’m waiting to hear from the Anthropology Department. I can work in Ithaca and earn the rest of the tuition and money for my books. It will not cost you anything—I promise. Mom knew all about it and even gave me some money she had from some insurance policy.

This was so far from anything John had expected or understood that he was truly caught flat-footed. He remembered Catherine’s last words to him: Help Ludmilla and Paul become more than we were. I have already started that. He had never understood what that meant. He had left school after about fourth grade and worked with the dogged determination to leave Malzenice (a Czechoslovakian town just northeast of Bratislava) and go to America. While he shuffled through the line at Ellis Island, the stereotypical occurred. The Irish- American immigration officer (himself probably a well-established first-generation American) changed John’s last name from Uhrovcik to Uher. The drive to come to America consumed half of his quota of gumption, and the rest would be used to find his way out of the Cayuga Rock Salt mines off Lake Cayuga with the help of the Volstead Act. But more on that later.

Ludmilla, I am not your mother, and I do not agree with this idea. Why for you want to study more? You are smart enough and pretty. I see the boys look at you. Why don’t you get a job or help me run the businesses? Then, when you meet a nice boy, you can marry like your sister Agnes will, John said with a painful and purposeful expression. He loved and respected his daughter, but he was so deeply rooted in the Old World that he knew and had never left behind. He did not know what else to say.

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John was born in 1887 to a hardworking, but dirt-poor farming couple in Malzenice, Czechoslovakia, the artificially merged country where the haves were generally Czech and the drones were all Slavic. John was a smart boy who instinctively knew that his younger brother Joseph was right when he whispered at night in their loft room with the hay-filled mattress that they needed to leave Malzenice. While the gay nineties roared on in parts of the world, in places like Bratislava, the life of local farmers was as depressed as any time anyone could remember. People today generally know about the Irish potato famine, but few are aware that the same sort of blight devastated Slovakia and neighboring Slovenia in the late nineteenth century. The Czechs saw this as the problem of their poor country cousins and not something to take the edge off the good times to be had in lovely Prague.

John and Joseph were the casualties of these hard times. Their father had gone from being a hardened farmer to a bitter and abusive father and husband. Their mother was a kind woman who knew nothing but to stand quietly by her husband no matter what. John made the call, and Joseph never blinked. Even at eleven years old, John was, in a word, shrewd. He was like Jamie in the prison camp in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun; he knew how to scrounge with the best. If a tally had been taken (what would have been the point?), John contributed more than Joseph to their escape fund. Truth be told, Joseph was smarter than John was, but he always did what John told him. The hierarchy of family (and his brother was all the family he recognized at that stage) was one of the few traditions John clung to as his world turned upside down.

The boys made their way to Trieste, one of the most global and least bureaucratic cities in the world. Trieste had grown up as the pirate-infested Adriatic sister city to the regal and beautiful Venice. The most important feature of the city was that its history of contraband made it a primary turn-of-the-century jumping-off point to the New World for anyone with the price of passage, whether they were of age or had papers or not. Joseph and John had neither, but they did have the name and address of some older boys who had been recruited to work in America. In fact, they even had a letter from a salt company in upstate New York, offering them (in fact, their friend, but Slavic names are so similar) employment.

They could not afford the most basic of fares on the most basic of tramp steamers heading for New York. But fortunately, crew members on these ships often got waylaid in a fun town like Trieste, and finding last-minute replacements to step and fetch for-real crew members was always necessary. Joseph and John fit the bill and lived for the sixteen days of the trip like kings compared to what they were used to at home. This was no Leonardo DiCaprio voyage, but the food was better, the beds were softer, and the work was relatively light by their standards. In fact, they had no way of knowing that working their way across gave them a chance to avoid extended exposure to smallpox, typhoid, and TB