(The picture above: Graduation from Western State University College of Law in Irvine, California. To my left is my son-in-law Doug Vavrick and to my right is my daughter Kathleen Quirk.)

Funny, sometimes we experience what would be life-changing events, and we know that in an instant. Sometimes we don’t realize the effect these events have until much later. In my life, the latter led to the former.  

When I was in ninth grade, our teacher, Mrs. McLaughlin, had us do a four-year plan of the classes we would take so that we met the requirements for graduation. I filled mine with the required courses, typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping. Mrs. “M” pointed out that I had no college prep classes. I immediately commented that no one in my family would go to college. 

She replied that she hated to see a smart student not at least prepare for college. Smart? Me? No one ever told me that I was smart.  

So I did take typing and shorthand, but I also took Latin, geometry, and debate! That would be lifesaving for me as I eventually went to college. Without that, the most incredible life-changing event could never have happened.  

Many years later—in 1992, I was fifty years old. My daughter had just graduated from college (there was no doubt MY daughter would go to college) and was considering law school as her dad had. Law school? Wait a minute. Did I miss a turn? I wanted that when I graduated from high school. But I was talked out of it because I was a girl.  

At the time, I could be a secretary, nurse, homemaker, or teacher. My clerical skills were nonexistent. I worked in a hospital and could not become a nurse. No one was offering me the job of homemaker. I became a teacher instead. Here I saw skipping a generation from my dream.  

I was living in Orange County, California, and wanted my daughter to move there. I mentioned there was this private, for-profit law school down the street. “Let’s go in and get a catalog,” I said naively. I have always likened it to going into one of those pushy gyms where if you went in to get a catalog, you came out a member.  

Well, one of us did become a member. Only it was not my daughter. I was now, at age fifty, officially a law student. My life had changed forever. 

And the rest is history. All because of Mrs. McLaughlin.