Millie, Irma and Claire
Mercy Hospital, New Orleans, Louisiana—Summer of 1964
Nearly five decades ago this month, Lyndon Baines Johnson signed landmark civil rights legislation. News reached our home in sleepy New Orleans in the famous sultry summertime. With the window unit air conditioner humming loudly in the background, the legendary duo, Huntley and Brinkley covered the momentous news. We turned the TV off to have dinner and I honestly don’t remember any discussion about it. The next day was a different story.
At 7 a.m. the next morning my mother, Millie Mundt, head surgical nurse at Mercy Hospital, reported for duty, along with her two assistant nurses, Irma Bevis and Claire Livingston. She opened the door of the refrigerator to find the same three lunches prepared by a cafeteria worker Becky—three lunches that awaited the trio every workday.
This time, though, they were labeled “Millie. Irma. Claire.” Every morning for years prior to this day they had been labeled by “proper” full names: Mrs. Mundt, Mrs. Bevis, Mrs. Livingston.
Obviously, the news delivered by Huntley and Brinkley had also reached Becky. Everyone was equal and on a first name basis! Chet (Huntley) and David (Brinkley) had liberated Becky. And she was immediately on a first name basis with the white women in the operating room. She may still only have been paid half of what they earned, but she was now a full citizen.
LBJ dramatically “signed away the south for generations,“ as Becky just signed the three first names of the white women she’d worked with for a decade. My mother recounted this story at dinner the next evening in a very matter-of-fact way—not hostile to the change, but more of a comment of the immediate impact of the law that had indeed reached the old south. As the “sensitive” ten year old boy listening to the story, all I could ask was, “did she really call you Mrs. Mundt all those years?” Sadly, the answer was yes.
I have to say that Millie, Irma, and Claire were three of the funniest women ever to walk on earth. I don’t think of them as prejudiced or narrow minded, but they were products of their environment. Their “happy hours” at our house were always zany fun with tired but witty women in scrubs. The most frequently recounted story being that they were once sipping cocktails and talking about what they were getting their husbands for Father’s Day and mother wasn’t sure what she was buying. Irma suggested to my mother that my dad might like a bonsai, and mother, confusing a bonsai with a bichon, replied, “I won’t have another animal in this house!”
Whereupon Irma and Claire lost it, and once mother realized what she’d said, she did too. Had she not been the boss, and arguably the most educated, it wouldn’t have been nearly as funny. Irma and Claire came together that Christmas to give her a bonsai, confined in a cage with a leash around the trunk. The bonsai lived a month. The story, forever.
Becky, on the other hand, lived on the other side of town and was never invited to those happy hours. In hindsight it just wasn’t a thought. That’s a sad commentary about segregation of the races in the south in 1964. At least Becky had a family who understood and shared the experience of prejudice, and while she would never really bust through the barrier in her lifetime for full acceptance and integration, she had a family that was on the same sad page with her and they coped together.
The gay way forward is very, very different. Gay people don’t have gay parents, and for most of us we not only don’t share our experience of being gay, we hide it. We each start out alone, isolated, afraid, and often feeling like damaged goods. By the time we come out and shed the shame, we have hopefully brought friends and family with us.
As we struggle for full equality in all 50 states, I wonder what Becky’s life was like that evening she learned that the President of the United States—a southerner—had signed national legislation that gave her equal protection under the law. Did she plan ahead of time to exercise her liberation? Was it premeditated labeling by first name, or a spur-of-the-moment, what-the-heck-I’m-equal act? And will an African American president ever return the civil rights favor? LBJ “evolved” and I’m convinced our current president will as well.
As the wildly popular book, The Help rises to the top of the bestseller list, and the movie nears release, we also approach the final frontier in civil rights. It’s not just white evangelicals, but African American preachers who stand barring the chapel door.
The homos could use some help from those who used to be “the help.” LBJ put a stop to the regional debates and state by state lunacy. Yet, we still find ourselves in an agonizingly slow state-by-state process. No sooner did we win our biggest victory in the Empire State than reports roll in that a clerk of court resigns because he refuses to sign two same sex names to a wedding license. Certain caterers won’t write two same sex names on a wedding cake. What would Millie, Irma, Claire, and Becky make of such refusals to simply write same sex pairs of names?
Last Friday, on Poodle Beach here in Rehoboth, two TV anchors, Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb, played drag volleyball with our campy boys. They may not be Huntley and Brinkley, but they’re with us, and our lives are made real because of them. And I’m increasingly hopeful that writing the names of two men or two women on a wedding cake anywhere in the U.S. will be as common as Millie, Irma or Claire opening a refrigerator door and simply finding their lunch.
Brent Mundt resides in Washington, DC, but lives in Rehoboth Beach.