Martin graciously shared his space with me, as well as access to the journals and the lowdown on members of the department. When I finally ran it to ground, I found it in the Museum, every issue neatly on a shelf above the desk of Martin Wobst. I enrolled in European Prehistory as one of my first classes, and planned to write my class paper on German archaeology, but I discovered that the entire run of Germania, the main journal of German archaeology, had been checked out. Things hadn’t changed so much at Wellesley since I was a student, but they certainly had in Michigan! Riots! Pot smoking! Calling professors by their first names! Major culture shock. I met DeDe, a brilliant if somewhat erratic student with a fresh Wellesley degree, at a meeting of the Ann Arbor Wellesley Club, and in spite of the age gap (21 and 35) we bonded, and she became my cultural guide through the mysteries of UM. Languages would be no problem, nor was the GRE it turned out, but hiding my ignorance was harder under the steely gaze of Dr.
We had been living in Stuttgart, Germany, so there was a lot to figure out. In order to be accepted, I had to take the GRE as soon as I could study up on the new math, about which I hadn’t a clue. Then I had to figure out a way through the UM bureaucracy very quickly, because I had exactly 2 years to get everything done for a PhD (except the dissertation).
We bought a suburban house so I could qualify for in-state tuition and enrolled the boys in a nearby elementary school. I arrived in Ann Arbor with my husband and our three sons (ages 6, 9, and 10) in June 1967, where Hal enrolled in a two-year Allergy Fellowship at UM Medical School. nobody was an archaeology student unless Griffin said so), I seemed to have become acceptable enough to sit down with the Kaffee Klatsch, although everyone else around the table was employed in the Museum in some way. By the time I learned the ways of the Museum (e.g. Griffin had never heard my name when I appeared in one of his seminars and announced that I was an archaeology student. Jimmy Griffin thought I had sneaked into the museum by the back door, having been accepted into the Anthropology Department by a linguist and a cultural anthropologist. I did know that Margaret Mead was an Anthropologist, but I lived to tell the tale, with a PhD in hand by 1974. My story is one of those lost and bewildered student tales, but DeDe Brodkey and Martin Wobst helped me sort out the museum tradition and personalities in my first year, at which time I had never worked on a dig, nor had a course in Anthropology. I am buying coffee cups for two people, both alas no longer with us, who helped me negotiate the mysteries of the Museum at UM, as well as one with my own name.
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