I have spent the last seven years since I retired reflecting on my life and experiences. And how those experiences have influenced the person I have become. I believe my parents had the most effect on the development of my personality.

My father worked hard his entire adult life as the Head Dispatcher for SEPTA for over forty years to provide for our family. He was strict and had high standards. He expected his children to achieve. He also had a short fuse, and woe be the person who behaved in a way that he disapproved of. My mother was a kind and loving person who never said anything hurtful to anyone in her life. At times she worked outside of our home, cleaning other people’s houses and cleaning the public school, and occasionally she did ironing for other people.

     When I was attending St. Mary of the Angel’s Academy, she worked in the employee’s kitchen at Wanamaker’s Department Store to help offset the cost of the tuition. She was in her early sixties at the time. She was a deeply devout woman and went to Mass every day of her life.

Every afternoon she could be found saying the rosary in her bedroom.

I was born into a family of four children, and I have a fraternal twin. Having six children was not an unusual size family when I was born in 1951. I had friends who had eleven children in their families. Since there was no reliable form of birth control at the time. And the Catholic church frowned on birth control.

I grew up two houses down from Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church and elementary school. I attended twelve years of Catholic School and eight years at OLPH Parochial school. And then four years at St. Mary of the Angels Academy. Which was an all-girl school located in Haddonfield, New Jersey.

For those of you who are not familiar with the Baby Boomer Generation, I have noticed over the years that many of us share similar characteristics. Characteristics were no doubt modeled by our parents. We have a strong and focused work ethic. We worked hard for everything we achieved, and it was not handed to us. We are not afraid of challenges.

     And even now, those of us who are retired engage in volunteer work. Before I retired, I took a class to learn how to teach English as a second language to people who migrated to the USA and spoke limited English. In addition, I taught Basic Skills to people who didn’t have the opportunity to finish high school and wanted to get a GED so that they were able to get better-paying jobs.

The Boomers learned how to be self-reliant and independent and have strong work ethics. We are self-reliant and confident and are not afraid to challenge any practices in our workplace. We had to learn to be competitive in our search for employment since there were so many people in our generation and, therefore, competition for employment in the workplace.

For those of us who wanted to attend college but whose families could not afford to send us, we set goals to do so outside the norm—for instance, going to junior college and going to school over time to earn college degrees. As for myself, I made the decision to attend college at the age of thirty-six. I had two children at home at the time. I applied to Temple Tyler School of Art and the Hussian School of Art, and Moore College of Art, which was a woman’s college. I was accepted at all the schools I where I applied.

      I made the decision to attend Temple University in Philadelphia because they offered me a full scholarship for the first year based on my portfolio. I graduated from Temple University when I was forty years old. My children were ten and seven at the time. It was a challenge to balance my role as a parent, wife, and college student. I often only had two or three hours of sleep at night during the week. And during the summer, I used to babysit the daughter of a friend of mine. I graduated in the top ten percent of Temple University with a 4.0 average and two degrees, Fine Art and Art Education.

When I  graduated from Temple University, I found that there were precious few teaching positions in public schools for Art teachers since public schools in the early 1990s were cutting back their budgets in Art and Music. After applying to every school in the three surrounding counties for almost a year, I decided that I was going to start my own school. We decided to move to a bigger home that could accommodate teaching art. And we found it in Pitman, New Jersey. The house was over 4,000 square feet and used to be owned by a Doctor of neuropsychology. He and his wife had passed away over eight years before that. And as you can imagine, the house was in need of a great deal of work since the house had remained empty for all those years. And so, the first thing we had to do was have a new roof on the home. 

I spent many months working and painting the doctor’s three patients’ rooms and preparing them for classrooms to teach art. I spent many years teaching students that came to my classes, both children during the day and adults at night. I taught classes in drawing and painting and the basics of three-dimensional art.

     It was fulfilling and challenging work. We lived in that house for twenty-four years. We sold it when we were preparing to retire to North Carolina. It was extremely difficult to leave our home since we had put so many years living there and improving it for years. This  Included a garden that I created over many, many years. We ended up selling the house to a younger couple that had two children. The husband was a lawyer who set up his office in what had been my art studios. I have to admit the day that we went to the settlement was one of the most difficult days of my life. I still miss that house and all the friends and neighbors that we had come to love in our twenty-four years in Pitman.

I believe that my personality and the influences that surrounded me growing up in the Baby Generation gave me the confidence and willpower to meet challenges in my life that were often difficult. Over my lifetime, I moved from my parent’s home to my own apartment when I was twenty. I moved to Florida when I was twenty- two to be near the young man I fell in love with. And eventually, we were married and moved to Santa Barbara, California, where my husband attended Brooks Institute to study Photography. We moved back to New Jersey when he graduated and bought a small house in Pennsauken, NJ, where we lived for fourteen years and had our two children, who are now adults.

And now here I am in North Carolina, where we moved to at retirement. And we didn’t know a soul here but made our home here all the same. I volunteered as a Guardian Ad Litem in the Smithfield Court House, representing at-risk children. And for the past seven years going on eight years, I have been volunteering at an animal sanctuary called Animal Edventure, where I have taken care of Macaws, Parrots, and Pheasants. I’m still going strong and don’t have any plans to stop at any time in the near future. I almost forgot to mention that I created WRITE ON, my writer’s blog on the internet, and have been writing and publishing a new story every week going on six years.

I don’t know what else I may do in the future but have no doubt I will continue to create and grow for the remainder of my life, for however long that may be. I will keep on, keeping on. Have no doubt—Susan A. Culver, artist, and writer.

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