I was raised with the understanding that I would never have to work outside the home. Looking beautiful and keeping a nice house seemed to be the only requirements for my life. Then my mother died when I was 10, and my father's alcoholism raged. The decline in our circumstances was slow at first, then sudden. I ended up living with other families and couch-surfing for years. I observed the harsh realities of not being able to support oneself. I grew up in a deteriorating factory town where some of my girlfriends became strippers to earn money. My first boyfriend joined the mob. Clinical depression forced me to face and then change my reality.
Financial institutions were exclusively male-dominated at that time. As a consequence of being raised by an alcoholic father, I had a predilection for alcoholic men. I ended up at Fidelity Investments, where I was the only financial professional without a college education. I became a stock analyst. And I found love!
The changes in finance and society have been enormous since the 1950s. The thinking and behavior of the past were bizarre. I lived and worked in the middle of it. I had just enough moral judgment, pragmatism, and luck to beat the odds.