The Girls from Ames

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  It’s not surprising that she felt closest to Jane Gradwohl, who in her own way, as the only Jewish girl in the group, knew what it felt like to be a bit of an outsider. Jane and Marilyn were part of the eleven, but also in their own two-person orbit. They had met as ten-year-olds in a local theater production of Hansel and Gretel. Jane was cast as Gretel, and Marilyn was jealous and annoyed. She got over it.

  By eighth grade, Marilyn and Jane were confidants. They were a good match, too: Both were a little slower than the other girls socially, a little nerdier, more academic. Like others among the Ames girls, they came from families where matters of culture and the arts were regular dinner-table conversation. ( Jane’s father, the anthropology professor, got his Ph.D. from Harvard; her mom was a social worker.) So Marilyn and Jane, especially, felt comfortable talking to each other about classical music or ancient Greek architecture or silent movies. They sometimes felt like black-and-white throwbacks in a town teeming with Technicolor yawns.

  As their friendship blossomed, they both felt the need to mark their connection. Early in high school, they bought each other a matching star sapphire necklace. One necklace was engraved: “MM Love, JG.” The other read: “JG Love, MM.” They were always trading notes in which they gushed about their feelings for each other. Looking back at it now, they find the mushiness almost embarrassing. Jane has a scrapbook from high school, and glued into it is a Hallmark card Marilyn had picked out for her. Hallmark had written: “Our relationship is so strong because we are completely truthful with each other in every word and thought, and because we trust each other as equals in every aspect of life.”

  They had their own playlist of background music by Cat Stevens, Dan Fogelberg, Hall and Oates, Bread—each song reminding them of a shared laugh or an unrequited crush.

  Marilyn told Jane about the first boy to kiss her on her ear and her neck. “It felt so warm and tingly,” she explained. “I could fall asleep holding him. I really could.” Later, when the boy told her, “I don’t like you sexually, but we can be friends,” she cried to Jane.

  Jane and Marilyn, t hen and now

  There were times when the phone rang and Marilyn’s heart would jump; maybe it was the boy she was hoping to hear from. Invariably it turned out to be Jane on the other end, but Marilyn’s disappointment lasted just a moment before she’d perk up, because hey, it was Jane.

  The trust between them was total. Well, almost total. In one of Marilyn’s diary entries junior year, after she had scribbled on and on about how “I just can’t figure out guys,” she suddenly added an aside: “Jane, you’re probably reading this. Let me tell you. I DON’T GET ALL THE GUYS! Believe me! They don’t like me more than you!”

  Marilyn confided in Jane about Billy, the brother she never knew, but she didn’t talk much about him to the other girls. A part of her felt uncomfortable with the topic. She remembered what happened one day in elementary school. There had been a girl outside their group who knew the whole story of the car accident and the meaning of the pregnancy that followed. One day, the girl got angry at Marilyn for reasons no one can recall, and blurted out: “I wish your brother had never died, because if he were alive, then you wouldn’t be here!”

  Marilyn’s father was the sort of man who could explain what made kids say such things and why they needed to be forgiven for it. He was pediatrician to several of the girls in Marilyn’s group, and he served as a wise counselor to them. “When I was a kid, he was the smartest person I had ever met,” says Jane, “just a total renaissance man.”

  When Karla, Jane, Jenny and Karen were newborns, making their first office visits to Dr. McCormack, he talked about how mothers often held babies as if they were delicate objects. Then they would hand their babies over to Dr. McCormack, who flopped the girls from back to front, front to back, as if they were pancakes on the griddle. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s fine. They’re not as fragile as you think.” Some mothers were startled, but also relieved by his words. He enjoyed dispensing advice any way he could. Jenny’s mother was taken with the signs he’d post in his examining rooms. “Ant poison is dangerous,” read one. “Better to have ants than poisoned children.” She thought of Dr. McCormack one day when she discovered Jenny’s brother had eaten a cracker with ants on it.

  The girls went to Dr. McCormack all through their childhoods, and they have sweet memories of checkups with him. Karen appreciated the time he told her mother that kids needn’t eat all the food on their plates. Dr. McCormack was amused by the clean-plate-club fixation of parents in the 1960s. “Relax,” he told Karen’s mom. “Most kids end up getting the proper nutrition to stay healthy. Their bodies just know what they need. Offer them three square meals a day, but you don’t have to force-feed them.” When Karla went to see Dr. McCormack, her mother would marvel at how he never seemed rushed. He calmly answered every question. It was as if Karla were the only patient he’d see all day.

  He also made a point of being honest. In those days, many doctors believed that if they didn’t mention or acknowledge pain, kids wouldn’t feel it or focus on it. But Dr. McCormack gave it to kids straight: “This shot is going to hurt.” It was refreshing to find an adult who cared enough not to sugarcoat things and talk down to children.

  As a kid, Jane loved to play doctor. But unlike girls today, she never thought to give herself the role of the doctor. Instead, she’d always assign herself the part of “Dr. McCormack’s nurse.” She spent countless hours in her fantasy world of a pediatrician’s office, saying things like, “Yes, Dr. McCormack, I’ll take the baby’s temperature for you.”

  Some of the girls understood that Dr. McCormack was more than just a neighborhood pediatrician, but except for Jane, most didn’t know the full extent of his accomplishments. In the 1960s, he had invented a respirator that helped premature babies with underdeveloped lungs survive. Later, he invented a warming blanket used to transport sick infants between hospitals.

  He was way ahead of his time on social issues, too. He passionately advocated the idea of bringing sex education into Iowa school districts and even into preschools. He felt that kids at the youngest ages should be given information about their bodies and their feelings for the opposite sex. “Don’t teach children to feel shame over their genitalia,” he’d say, “or they’ll harbor that shame as they grow older.” He used words that made Iowans blush, but even those who disagreed with him, and there were many, would say they respected his passion. (The Ames girls’ parents tended to be pretty enlightened and never took issue with him.)

  Dr. McCormack was described by others as a “people collector,” because he was so engaged in learning about people, asking them to share the details of their lives. He looked for what was special in everyone, including Marilyn’s friends. He’d ask for their opinions about the hostages in Iran or about feminism, and he’d look at them like their answers really mattered to him. He also was good at offering advice that made the girls think. “When you grow up and have kids of your own,” he’d say, “always try to treat them a couple of years older than they are. They’ll rise to the occasion.” Marilyn once had a party and Diana decided to smoke a cigar. No one had told her not to inhale, and soon enough, she was wheezing and sick to her stomach. Marilyn ran up to her parents’ bedroom and got her dad, who grabbed his stethoscope and helped Diana through it. Whether Marilyn’s friends spent too much time in the sun or had too much to drink or had questions about menstruation—whatever—Marilyn’s dad was someone to turn to, and he was there for them without being condescending or judgmental.

  Maybe that’s why Marilyn, of all the Ames girls, was often the most willing to confess her sins to her parents. Her father just seemed able to put things in perspective. Once, during a Christmas vacation, Marilyn’s parents weren’t home and Marilyn had some of the girls over. Boys came, too, and soon it was a full-fledged party, with drinking and making out and too many kids coming and going. When it was over, Marilyn cleaned up perfectly. She made sure the Christmas tree
and decorations were exactly right. The place was spotless. And that’s when she noticed: There was a large ugly crack in the plate-glass window of the family room.

  She was horrified. She asked Jane what she should do. Should she confess to her parents that she had a party? Jane, a habitual good girl herself, argued for honesty, and Marilyn agreed. Marilyn couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t tell her dad right away. He was on call at the hospital emergency room, and she went to see him. “I did something very wrong,” she told him, and then it all came out in one run-on confession. “I had a party, Dad, with lots of kids, I’m so sorry, and something happened, the plate-glass window in the family room is broken, really, Dad, I don’t know what to say, except that I’ll pay whatever I have to pay to fix it.”

  Her father listened to her story without saying a word. Then he shrugged. “Well, I know you learned something from this whole experience,” he said. “I bet you won’t do it again.” He told her he’d see if their homeowners’ insurance policy would cover the damage. Just before she left, he gave her a hug and told her he loved her and appreciated that she’d been honest with him.

  As soon as Marilyn walked in the house and saw the window again, she burst into tears—tears of relief that this was off her chest and that her father had been so forgiving and understanding. Her older sister Sara asked why she was crying, and Marilyn pointed to the window. Sara took a closer look. “Well, what do you know?” she said. Turned out, this “crack” was actually a long strand of tinsel from the McCormacks’ Christmas tree that had somehow adhered to the plate-glass window. Maybe some kid had soaked it with beer and stuck it there. Whatever had happened, there was no crack in the window at all. Marilyn called her father. She called Jane. She also called herself an idiot for confessing so quickly and unnecessarily. She could have gotten away with the whole party! And yet, a good part of her was glad she had gone to see her dad about this. She had learned something about him, about how he’d react when she disappointed him. At the same time, he had learned something about her and her conscience.

  Hearing about how Dr. McCormack reacted to Marilyn’s lapses left the other Ames girls envious. Somehow her dad was a mixture of square and cool—sort of like Marilyn. In their own homes, some of the girls had to go to diabolical lengths to keep their parents in the dark about their activities. More than once, they’d impersonate their own mothers on the phone, to give reassuring explanations about what they were up to. Once, Kelly wanted to go to Iowa’s Lake Okoboji with Karla and two male friends. They planned to stay by themselves in a summer home owned by one of the boy’s parents. Understandably, Kelly’s mother wanted to know: “Will his parents be there?” Kelly told her: “Oh yeah, for sure. Just call Karla’s mom. She has the details.”

  Kelly quickly called Karla, told her to expect the call, and hung up. Two minutes later, the phone rang at Karla’s house. “Hello, this is Mrs. Derby,” Karla said in her best mature-woman’s voice. She proceeded to reassure Kelly’s mom. “Don’t worry about a thing. Kelly will be fine.” Kelly’s mother said she appreciated the call, and off the girls went.

  The girls knew Marilyn was too much of a Goody Two-shoes to try something like that. But they also knew that part of what attracted her to the larger group was her unstated urge to be in the vicinity of thrill-seekers. She was a funny mix: careful, reserved, prudish. And yet she had a longing for adventure. She also had a father who, given his eagerness to teach sexuality, seemed to be giving her more than a few green lights.

  The girls, of course, found that side of him fascinating and quirky. One day, when they were in their teens, he sat some of them down in his family room for a sex education speech. He used a pointer and diagrams on the chalkboard he kept there, and spoke so frankly that the girls blushed. They still giggle about it today. They have shorthand references for what happened that night: “Marilyn’s Father’s S-E-X Talk” and “The Day We Got Too Much New Information.” Cathy recalls leaving Marilyn’s house shaking her head and saying to the other girls, “Wow, what was that? Did that just happen? Did you hear what I heard?”

  Marilyn’s father was unlike most of the other girls’ parents in another respect. Not only did he understand the hormonal urges of teens, he also believed in accommodating them—within reason. There was the time Marilyn was setting up for a party, this one with her parents’ permission, and her dad offered a suggestion. “You need more than one couch over there by the fireplace,” he said. “Pull a couple more couches over there. You can’t have just one couple getting cozy.”

  Kelly’s father, the junior-high guidance counselor, oversaw sex education presentations at school assemblies. For years, teachers had made fumbling attempts at addressing the issues. Too often, however, they spoke cryptically, confusing the kids. Proof of that would come during the question-and-answer sessions that followed the talks. Once, a seventh-grader raised his hand and asked: “When adults want to have babies, where do they go to have sex? Do they go to a doctor’s office and do it under the doctor’s supervision?”

  Such clueless questions convinced Kelly’s dad that students needed more explicit information. He decided that Dr. McCormack was the man for the job. Dr. McCormack was happy to come to the school with his diagrams and slides. He spoke all about how sex was enjoyable, how feelings of love enhanced it, how using contraception was crucial. He delivered all the key words without flinching. “It’s healthy to have sex,” he’d say, and the kids paid close attention. By the end of his talks, they certainly knew they’d never have to go to a doctor’s office for supervised sex.

  For Marilyn, it was exciting being her father’s daughter, but it wasn’t always easy. For one thing, there were high expectations. Her older siblings all performed well in school. She felt she had no choice but to equal them. And she was always aware that adults she met could be the parents of her dad’s patients. Being “the doctor’s daughter” could feel like a burden, especially when some of the other Ames girls seemed to care more about good times than what adults thought of them.

  At the same time, Marilyn was enormously proud of the impact her father was having on his patients and community. One of Dr. McCormack’s patients was Jane’s older brother, who in tenth grade was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. Dr. McCormack oversaw the boy’s treatment and was a reassuring presence for Jane’s worried parents. A bond developed between the two families that remained in place for decades. Maybe it was because Dr. McCormack had lost a son—and his children had lost a brother—that he gave so much of himself to this case. Jane’s brother survived and is a doctor himself today, crediting Dr. McCormack as his role model.

  When they were young, both Jane and Marilyn knew that part of what they loved about each other was how comfortable they felt with each other’s family. They would invite one another on week-long summer vacations. They could raid each other’s refrigerator without asking permission, or lounge around each other’s house in their pajamas all day, or take over each other’s kitchen to cook whatever concoction struck them at the moment. Marilyn’s diaries are filled with detailed descriptions of meals she and Jane made together, often serving them to their families. Almost always, Marilyn ended her culinary tales with the same word and punctuation: “Yum!”

  It was reassuring to both girls to know that there were people outside of their immediate families who loved them and wanted the best for them. In fact, all of the Ames girls’ parents had a similar connection with at least one or two or three of the girls.

  Given her attachment to Jane and her family, Marilyn was curious to learn about Judaism. Jane’s father was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and unlike most Jewish-Americans, he had roots in the United States going back to the early 1840s. Two of his great-grandfathers fought in the Civil War, one for the North and one for the South.

  Jane’s mother, Hanna, was not American-born. She left Nazi Germany in 1937, just shy of her second birthday, and her family settled in Lincoln, where there were about five hundred Jewish families. Hanna�
�s family was lucky. Many other relatives, including her father’s parents, were unsuccessful in their quest to obtain exit permits and visas. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, they wrote increasingly desperate letters to children and cousins who had emigrated to the United States, Palestine, Egypt, Cuba and Argentina, seeking their assistance in surmounting the bureaucratic hurdles. More than a dozen of these relatives never escaped and died in concentration camps. Some fifteen hundred of their letters remained boxed up at Jane’s grandmother’s house, their pleas too painful to talk about. (In more recent years, Jane’s parents began translating the letters and presenting the family’s story in schools, helping to explain the Holocaust.)

  Jane’s parents knew each other as toddlers in Lincoln and began dating in high school. They married in 1957 and moved to Ames in 1962, when Jane’s dad was hired at Iowa State. There were only about twelve Jewish families in town then, which was a challenge. On the East or West Coasts of the United States, Jews could drop their kids off at well-staffed Hebrew schools. They could nod off during services in giant synagogues, letting the rabbis and cantors lead their services. But in Ames, Jews had to roll up their sleeves and get involved—reading the Torah, crafting sermons, taking turns teaching the community’s few kids at Sunday school, keeping Judaism alive. “If we’re going to be Jewish in Ames, we have to do it all ourselves,” Jane’s father would explain to Marilyn. “There’s no magical religious specialist to do it for us. But that’s good. Because it forces us to figure out why we’re here and what we believe. In Ames, we know who we are, because in a way, we’ve chosen to be Jews.”

  In the 1960s, some Ames residents had never even met a Jew before, and a few would say objectionable things. A town leader once announced at a public hearing that he had gotten a great price from a supplier. “I was able to Jew him down,” he said proudly, and couldn’t understand why a Jewish woman in attendance found his remarks offensive. Mostly, though, the Christians in town were welcoming and accommodating, and Jane rarely felt self-conscious about being Jewish. One big reason for this was that the other Ames girls seemed unfazed by her religion. Especially when they were young, it hardly even registered with them.