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At first the men “resented us, partly because they had to kick the senior cadets out of these quarters so we’d have a private bath,”said one woman,“And they thought we’d get out of work.” But after the women swabbed the deck, chipped paint, helped in the galley, and got down on their hands and knees to scrub their assigned areas, “some of the ones who resented us most are our best buddies” (New Orleans States-Item, 1974). Women learned to cope with unforeseen difficulties. For example , no merchant marine cadet uniform was tailored to fit a woman, so special WAVES uniforms had to be ordered from the navy. At the precruise breakfast, Jacques Cousteau, whose Calypso had been tied to the port side of Texas Clipper , and Mary Moody Northen, the major donor to TMA, bid the cadets farewell. Cousteau had special words of encouragement for the women cadets. That voyage also was significant for the presence of the school’s first African American cadet, Joe Sybille, who was studying marine engineering (Voyager , 1975). It was also my first cruise. I had a two-person stateroom (one of the four smallest staterooms that lined the port passageway of the promenade deck) all to myself. All my books were crammed into desk drawers, inside one of the two narrow closets, and along a six-foot shelf inside the upper roll-down bunk.My classroom,the forward promenade lounge,was about forty feet from my doorway.There,for two hours a day,I taught forty-eight prep cadets how to write essays about their personal experience. But because classes were held only on sea days, the time between ports exerted an unbalanced influence on our schedule. For example, the first week out, classes met four days in a row (until the ship arrived at San Juan); the second week, classes met only twice (the number of sea days between San Juan and Sint Maarten).The Clipper proved a stimulating writing laboratory. Most of those eighteen-year-olds were outside of their hometown for the first time, on their own for the first time,and on a ship for the first time.When they wrote what-Idid -during-my-summer-vacation essays, the results were truly unique. I had all I could do to keep up with the paperwork. T exas Clipper had a stimulating piece of recreational equipment installed in its after bar: foosball, a table soccer game in which each team manually spins rods to make miniature players propel a ball toward the other team’s goal. While the ship was docked, its deck had a slight slant, which meant that the ball rolled uphill toward one goal and downhill toward the other. But the ball really made intricate gyrations when the ship was under way. Foosball hustlers learned to time their play to the pitch and roll of the ship.Upperclassmen,with a decided home-team advantage, managed to earn some spending money from prep cadets on friendly table wagers—until the preps learned the moves, too. During cruises, cadets and staff also crowded around tables in the after bar or mess halls for backgammon tournaments; card games like cribbage, gin rummy, or hearts; and board games, continued over a number of consecutive evenings, of “Diplomacy ” or “Monopoly.” Tenth Voyage: Women Cadets Regardless of what the federal government had said in 1965, Texas Clipper was no longer exclusively for training young men. The times had indeed changed. Among the 131 (65 upperclass and 66 prep) cadets on the tenth voyage were the first women cadets ever to sail on Clipper, although New York Maritime Academy had broken the gender line for the first time the previous year. Susan Jean “Sudi” Carter, twenty-four, was the first woman TMA cadet. Not only that, but the winner of the Houston Science Fair, whose prize included a scholarship to the summer school at sea, was female. The school quickly responded to the unfamiliar situation by recruiting three other high school graduates so that prep women could be segregated within the starboard suite and its veranda: four private rooms opening onto a semiprivate seating area.Ship’s officials checked routinely to ensure that male cadets visited only the veranda (never the rooms); after 10:00 p.m. even the veranda was off limits (Cromer, 2006). C h a p t e r 8 A Changing Role A C h a n g i n g R...

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