8/17/97 
High school reunion recalls time of low aspirations 
By Linda Seebach 
 
Secretary, teacher, nurse. Those were the jobs young women expected to have when my class graduated from Valley Stream Central High School in 1957. 
     Having done slightly less conventional things myself, I had mostly forgotten how limited were the aspirations we absorbed growing up. But at our class's 40th reunion last weekend, it's one of the things we talked about the most. 
     We're even thinking about doing a survey of the class, if we can figure out how to word the questions so no one will be hurt. Did you go to college? Tell us about your family, your work. 
     Really, we're wondering: What did you do with your life? 
     Secretary, teacher, nurse. Good jobs -- essential jobs -- but not the only jobs there are. 
     Valley Stream is on the South Shore of Long Island, New York, the first stop in Nassau County on the Long Island Rail Road coming out from Brooklyn or Manhattan. Central High School opened in 1929, a three-story brick building which hardly looks different today (though a new wing on the back was added in 1960). 
     The population it serves seems not very different either. Valley Stream is, as it was then, comfortable but not wealthy. People tend to stay put. More people from the class of '57 still live there than in all the United States with ZIP code higher than 50000, and more than half live somewhere on the Island. 
     Central was a good school then, and it's a good school now. Its graduation rate is 98 percent, more than half of the students take Advanced Placement courses, and dozens of colleges come calling every year to recruit. 
     And 90 percent of the graduates do continue their education. 
     Not in my class. When I went to the guidance counselor to get the signatures required for my college applications, she told me to give it up. 
     ``Go to Katie Gibbs,'' she advised. ``That way you'll always have something to fall back on.'' (Katie Gibbs was a white-gloves secretarial school.) 
     But she didn't insist. No one actually barred our way; my best friend in high school, who was a year ahead of me, went to med school and now she's an executive in a pharmaceutical firm. But as far as I can remember, no one actively encouraged us either. Perhaps the teachers did, and I've just forgotten; many of them were accomplished women, and excellent teachers to whom I am still grateful. 
     Secretary, teacher, nurse. Not executive, professor, doctor. 
     If the families didn't have high aspirations, the children didn't either. I went to college because my father insisted on it. And even his expectations were somewhat constrained. He chose a college for me by going through Lovejoy's College Guide and finding the cheapest school within driving distance that had a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. I'm not inventing this; he was a lawyer, and he told me he'd always felt his career had been hampered because he didn't have that little key to wear. But Ivy League tuition? That was too much money to spend on a girl. 
     Today's Central does a lot of encouraging, for men and women both. The school is part of the huge social change that now sees more women than men going to college, and among college students, more women than men planning graduate work. 
     The shift has little to do with government action; it was attitudes, not laws, that had to change.  
     The women I went to high school with are not dissatisfied with their lives, whether they had jobs and careers or not. They cherish the richness of their families and their communities. And it's certainly possible that those who didn't come to the reunion, or the ones we can't find, had careers we just don't know about. (If you went to Central, any year, and you're not in the alumni assocation, please call or write!) 
     But they do wonder how their lives might have been different, if they were graduating now instead of in 1957. 
     Secretary, teacher, nurse. That's what they told us.