It was a brisk March morning when she kissed Fido’s muzzle with an affectionate goodbye, left her suburban Pittsburgh home well before dawn to hit the highway, and had no idea what waited for her at the end of the 350-mile journey to New York City. But even if Sam could have predicted the upcoming bruise to her face, stint in jail, escaped pony, and incriminating byline in tomorrow’s newspaper, she would have done it all the same.
That’s the type of woman Sam was: reckless and resolute, emphasis on wreck. As Sam had been reminded at her father’s funeral, the family curse of losing everything seemed to be her birthright. And believe it or not, it all started with a parking ticket…
Chapter 2
The drive from the Steel City, where the three rivers ran brown and the air hung with smog, to the Big Apple, where skyscrapers pierced the clouds and bodies jostled like jockeys along the sidewalks, took all morning.
Road-weary Samantha Stanton sniffed, wrinkling her nose at the fragrance of gasoline and tire tread, with notes of travel sweat and anxiety. Opening the eggshell-blue train case on the passenger seat beside her, she spritzed herself with the Ô de Lancôme she’d stolen from her mother, then parked her dead father’s 1965 Chevrolet Impala SS smack dab in the middle of 54th street.
“You can’t park there!” a meter maid shouted as she waved her pink ticket booklet in warning.
Sam glanced up and down the street, where every square inch of parking was occupied in front of the entrance to the Ladies Home Journal headquarters. The middle of the street would have to do. She had bigger problems than a $25 parking ticket to worry about. Like punishing her father’s killer.
“Then ticket me if you must,” Sam dared, slamming the car door behind her. What did a parking ticket matter when her father was dead?
The cherry-red white-top convertible looked exactly like the midlife crisis purchase her father had intended it to be when he bought it brand new five years ago. His effort to chase youth and vigor proved fruitless, however. Months after he traded in his family-friendly, paid-off Ford Galaxie and signed the $4,900 muscle car loan at a whopping 12 percent interest that the steelworker couldn’t afford, he fell to his knees and clutched his chest in his living room watching Bonanza while his wife cooked chicken a la king in the kitchen not even twenty feet away.
One minute later he sprawled face down on the persimmon orange carpet.
Five minutes after that Sam’s mother rushed to his side, unable to find a pulse.
Within thirty minutes Sam consoled her weeping mother as the ambulance attendant wheeled his body to the back of the Cadillac Superior ambulance that reminded Sam of the nearly identical style hearse she knew would soon follow.
The funeral expenses emptied their family’s meager savings account, and by Christmas of 1965, a home foreclosure notice arrived in the mail. Death had become the gift that kept on giving. With hopes of saving her childhood home, off to the bank Sam went. As luck would have it, borrowing money was out of the question:
“You’ll need to bring your husband to cosign on a loan,” the banker had explained.
“What if I don’t have a husband?” Sam had a habit of questioning poor logic.
“What about an uncle?” the banker suggested. “Or a cousin?”
“I have none of those either.”
The banker offered only poorer logic in return: “I suggest you pretty yourself up and try harder to find a mate, miss.” But Sam knew that was a hopeless cause.
Past the point of desperation, Sam decided to do something that went against every fiber of her being. No, she didn’t solicit a potential husband or find a long-lost uncle, but instead accepted a fate much worse:
A job in the food service industry.
Her typist position during the day left her evenings open just enough to fit in a waitressing stint that went terribly wrong. During one night shift in particular, she came to discover that she was either too forgetful or too clumsy—or possibly both—to turn it into a career. Patrons didn’t tend to like wearing their beverages, or appreciate alfredo when they ordered a potato.
The last straw broke when Sam promised free soft serve to a table full of boys after a Little League victory game—not realizing the ice cream machine had broken hours earlier. When Sam asked the cook what she could offer the kids instead, she misheard his British-speak “eff all” as “waffle” and proceeded to order a round of waffles on the house… the bill for which came out of Sam’s final paycheck before she was promptly fired (and told to get her ears checked).
The $0.89 per hour cashier job that Sam’s mother had reluctantly taken at Gimbels department store helped supplement her Avon door-to-door sales, but it still wasn’t enough to make ends meet.
Sam never told her mother that she had applied to college and was one of two women accepted into their plant pathology program. Along with a full ride, too. The day Sam tore open the acceptance letter felt like the first day of the rest of her life… until she saw the foreclosure notice for the house, which her mother failed to hide. So Sam respectfully declined the scholarship and settled into her life of mediocrity.
It wasn’t a total loss when she accepted a typist position for Women’s House Magazine, a small-time Pittsburgh-based rag, because in a twisty unexpected way, it drew her back to New York City, to this very moment.
That singular event—the death of her father four and a half years ago—eventually came full circle, bringing Sam back to the city that never sleeps, in this busy street, in front of this towering building where nearly a hundred women waited for her on the Manhattan sidewalk. Just as zealous. Just as single-minded. And just as fed up with traffic.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” the meter maid announced as she slid the pink ticket under Sam’s windshield wiper.
Sam was already marching across two lanes toward the glass and chrome building where she would, for the first time ever, do something that would land her in jail. It was just shy of 9:00 a.m., but the city was already wide awake and abuzz.
A pulse of adrenaline—along with a horn beeping behind her—quickened her gait toward the pack of women. Radical Feminists, the media had pegged them, as if it were an insult. But it was 1970, and radical now held a whole new definition. And feminism was growing as fast as a hippie’s hair, if last year’s Woodstock music festival was any indication. They might as well have called them the Groovy Equalists, as far as Sam was concerned.
Despite the group’s muted colors of conservative thigh-skimming suits, their expressions conveyed the same defiant passion that Sam felt with each click of her platform clogs on the concrete.
A yellow checkered taxicab skirted around her, nearly knocking her onto the wide sidewalk while spraying her with last night’s rainfall.
She gave the driver a hairy eyeball. “Watch where you’re going!”
