Episode # 20 - Castaway: Deb Gallagher

Deb Gallagher was born in 1954 in Boston, the eldest child of Camille Lombardi and Art Gallagher. Her working class family of six was filled with the raucous emotions, abuse, neglect, curses, and over-reliance on alcohol of an Irish father and a Sicilian mother. By age 14, knowing she was a lesbian, she had seceded from her family and lived, essentially, wherever and however she could. The order and predictability of school saved her and despite being ostracized for her orientation, she did brilliantly. Like many others in the late 60s-early 70s, she experimented with the recreational drugs of the day while working a series of minimum-wage jobs to support herself.

Throughout her teens, she listened to Boston’s WBCN and a classical commercial FM station on the 9-volt transistor radio her father had given her. She remembers hearing about the Stonewall Riot from Danny Shector, the news dissector (or was it Charles Laquidera?) on that radio. When she could, she would sneak into the Sunset Concerts on the Common, which is where her socks were knocked off by a BB King, Paul Butterfield, and Johnny Winter concert. She participated in radical political activities, especially anti-war demonstrations and a “woman’s liberation” group that had started at the state teacher’s college. (She never recovered from being rejected by the college’s SDS group because she was too young.)Then as now, she relied on music, literature, writing, and political activism for her emotional, intellectual, and spiritual survival. While in high school and again in college, she succumbed to the romance in all those road songs and hitchhiked across the U.S. and Canada--emerging richer for the experiences.

A teacher suggested she apply to Radcliffe or Cornell, but Deb’s first response was to guffaw—why not the moon? (She had kept secret her living situation.) She lived from paycheck-to-paycheck and couldn’t imagine how she would survive in those rarified, protected atmospheres (although she wished for the freedom to cloister herself in academia). Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” was her favorite album during this time.

She went instead to UMass Boston, a commuter, non-traditional college, where she could easily pay the tuition working her night shift job as a hotel desk clerk, sleep in a squat in Back Bay, write, and keep politically active. Her classmates were adults mostly; many were Vietnam War vets. She majored in politics. Something about understanding the acquisition and use of power resonated with her. She transferred to the Amherst campus so she could double-major in journalism and political science. It wasn’t exactly the scholar’s refuge she had fantasized. And time and experience had exacted tolls—she hated the dorm life and quickly moved to a cheap apartment that she shared with a traveler, Lynne, who first appeared in a tie-dyed green caftan and became her lifelong friend. Deb went to her first opera (“La Traviata”), with Lynne; they saw Andre Previn conduct the London Symphony Orchestra, Count Basie Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, and many others. They saw every Ingmar Bergman and Francois Truffaut film in the Five College area. Deb enrolled in Archie Shepp’s class in African-American Big Bands and spent a memorable bus ride to NYC in the seat across the aisle listening to Professor Shepp talk about playing clubs as they passed by. For grocery money, she wrote other students’ research papers, sold her read textbooks, and washed dishes at the dining commons. Deb was a stringer for AP, reporter for the college newspaper, and developed a taste for cheap scotch--neat.

After graduation in 1976, Deb moved alone to the North End of Boston and later to Somerville and Cambridge. Throughout her twenties, she sold textbooks at the Harvard Coop where she met Anna and worked unsuccessfully to organize a union. She worked as a copywriter and proofreader, as a truck driver, assembly line worker on the nightshift at Polaroid (and read lesbian books on her “lunch” break at 3:30 am), and at the Harvard Bookstore as a clerk, shipper-receiver, and eventually buyer. She loved her studio apartment in Harvard Square. She was terribly impressed by the Harvard writers and scholars. Their emanations excited and challenged her. She made cassette tapes mixing classical and jazz pieces for the store. A very good day was when someone asked her to identify a piece. She built her book and record libraries.

Concurrently, she worked in collectives for a number of radical feminist and lesbian-feminist publications and writing magazine articles, news copy for cable TV, short stories, and poetry. She spent her money on books, classical and jazz records, concerts, movies, and plays. She read her poems at coffeehouses and bookstores. This pattern of always working two jobs—one for pay and another for her politics—continues today.

By the mid-80s, Deb had left the bookstore and was working as an editorial assistant at Little, Brown & Company on Tremont Street in Boston with English majors from Ivy League colleges. She quickly considered law school but trained instead for a trade as an electromechanical technician. The thought was to support herself well while writing at night. A succession of high tech jobs in small data communications and telecommunications start-ups followed, each company failing when it could not find the right combination for success, or merged or was acquired when it had, but still disappeared. She listened to jazz and classical and to NPR—especially to Robert J. Lurtsema, Eric Jackson, and Ron Dellaciasa. And worked too many hours.

She had continued to write poems (and take classes—eventually writing her master’s thesis on a practical topic: “The Role of Ideology in Sino-Soviet Relations.” She capitalized on a need at work and began writing the company’s technical manuals and white papers. Quickly, that is all she did, and as long as a company lasted, it was very lucrative. In 1990, she was the manager of a sizeable technical documentation department for a developer-manufacturer of data communications equipment off 128. The only working class lesbian for a hundred miles. Typical interactions with other managers (all white men) included “What do your parents think about you not being married?” And another favorite asked by the vice-president of engineering in a management meeting, “Here’s my son’s social studies term paper, he needs to turn it in tomorrow.”

A headhunter found her a consulting position with a systems integrator start-up in Kendall Square. This company thrived, as did Deb’s bank account. She studied object-oriented programming and took many professional courses. She bought a condo. She drank single malt scotch. She traveled from project to project throughout U.S. and Canada, taught professional writing, accumulated stock options, and was promoted several times. She hated nearly every minute of it and hated hating it.

At Anna’s urging, Deb attended a two-year experiential program for mental health workers in Gestalt therapy. She credits the program with teaching her skills that she has used ever since to maintain her sanity.

When Deb became a parent in 1995 of a 5-month old girl through the messy miracle of international adoption, she described it as being hit by a very nice bus. (Molly, now 17, is completing her associate’s degree and considering early admission to medical school.) When Molly was a baby, Deb typically worked 12-hour days and was forced to travel frequently. She had bought a house with a nice fenced-in yard near Fresh Pond for Molly, but she could not figure out a way to support it and be the parent she wanted to be. She commuted to work on the subway—much like her parents and grandparents had done.

In her ninth year at the company, Deb was awarded a stipend of $2000 and a month’s sabbatical, which she parlayed into three months using accumulated vacation time. She rented a house in Bass Harbor and scoured the Portland classified ads. That fall, her sister and mother were diagnosed with cancer and her father died. Molly had had successful experimental heart surgery. By January, Deb had cashed in her stock options (just before the ’99 crash), sold her Cambridge house, bought a funky three-family a block from Casco Bay, and quit. A week later, she had a part-time, telecommuting writing-editing job with a company on Rte 128 for $40,000 a year, a 60% salary reduction that Deb considered the cost of blessed liberation. She listened to Molly’s Raffi tapes and to NPR during work hours.

Suddenly, life had become adventuresome again—homeschooling, waiting for books to come out in paperback before buying, treasuring my family of choice, being a landlord. Lovely, small, essential adventures growing Molly and relishing semi-retirement. Then, last year, Deb became the honorary parent of Rory, a remarkable 19-year old artist, bait slinger, and kayak tosser.

Since 2008, one of Deb’s joys has been volunteering at WMPG. She hosts and produces Lesbian Radio every week and savors substituting on any music show as often as possible and at any and all hours. She works at a non-profit housing agency, serves on two boards of directors--WMPG and Community, Inc. She watches old movies, meditates, and often howls in the wee hours on Portland’s Eastern Prom with Warrior Poodle (the Noblest of Beasts).