My first Harvey was my Driver's Ed teacher. Yeah. I was 14 years old and it was 53 years ago. I still get sick to my stomach thinking about that squirrely, ugly, macho little prick. He gave me shoulder rubs to make me relax and kept his hand on my knee while I was driving-- because I was a basket case whenever I took the wheel. Go figure!
It was 1964 and females were very much at the mercy of men. If I had told my parents, the creep would have been dead meat. My dad was a vet, a marine who served in the South Pacific. It never occurred to me to tell him because this jerk made it all my fault. He knew exactly how to play me. I felt that that my parents would be furious if I failed summer Driver's Ed after they had paid the whopping big enrollment fee of 15$! Yeah. It was a long time ago.
Mr. Montgomery--yes. I am using his name-- wanted me to drive with him after class, alone, for extra credit, so I would learn to relax. Something about spending even fifteen minutes alone with that guy kept me from showing up for his extra tutoring. So I failed. At the time I called myself lazy, irresponsible, wasting my parent's hard earned money. I cried about it. My parent's weren't angry --God bless them. They chalked it up to my being super-intelligent==yeah. They went beyond doting, to delusional. They figured I was the first intelligent person in the family, so had a right to being a little shaky in high stress situations-- the nickname came in college but I am a little shaky at times.
Some thirty years later my 14 year old niece was about to take Driver's Ed from this creep. I called my sister in law to warn her. Funny thing, even though she had gone to a high school across town, she still had heard of his reputation. A few years later he was fired for some dildo brained thing he said to a little girl. Her parents filed a complaint--I'm not even sure there was a name for a sexual harassment complaint back in in 1964 but this was 1980. And then all these other girls and women came forward. Some had proof their complaints had been ignored. The whole mess made the front page of the newspaper. This girl's mother must have been the 50th reporter because there were reports and complaints before, not mine because I was too young to realize, but others who were older, more enlightened. The school kept looking the other way until it had to fire him.
Mr. Montgomery was only the first of a lifetime of neck rubbing, preening, leering pricks. It isn't the sex. It isn't religion. It isn't politics. It is the power these pathetic little men crave. You will never convince me otherwise. Don't ever tell me the issue isn't worth the publicity. Don't ever call it no news. Nowadays it takes 25+ women coming forward to get them fired. It used to take 50+. From the stories I have heard from my grandmothers, I'm betting that one hundred wouldn't have made a dent in a man's reputation in the forties. --s6
