I was born on Christmas Day enough years ago to make me an early Baby Boomer, in New York City, New York, U.S.A., one of the twin daughters of Stephen Ripley, an American newspaperman and labour union organizer, and Kathryn Jane Smith Ripley, a Canadian foreign service officer, writer, and editor. A brother Stephen Jr. came four years later.

My mother, a Scottish-English-Canadian, spent her early married years as a classic 1950's work-at-home mom. After my father died at the too-young age of 57, she worked as a teacher, and then an editor for the U.S. National Education Association to support three children. From my mother I learned the fierce determination that enabled me to complete my Masters and Doctoral degrees while working full time and raising a family. She is now in her 90s and retired from her volunteer jobs at the Corcoran and Kreeger Art Galleries in Washington D.C. At the age of 91, she learned email so she could correspond more with me!

My father, an American of Irish descent, raised his twin daughters to believe they could do anything they wanted if they worked hard enough. He never had the chance to go to university but was far better read than anyone I have ever met, having read most of The Great Books on his own. My early memories of him include his being woken at 3 a.m. to take a long distance telephone call from a union colleague in the midst of negotiations somewhere across the country, rattling off the full details of some hugely complicated recent settlement they needed to know, and falling instantly back to sleep. My memories of him also include a soft-spoken gentle man who fought like a tiger for the rights of the downtrodden, and who possessed a devilish wit and a love of language (it comes with Irish heritage). My gifts from him include my love of learning, my sense of ethics and fair play, my Union heart, and an ability to sleep anywhere and any time.

When I was 10, we moved to Virginia, where I experienced great difficulty fitting in as a Southern Belle but did pick up some of their techniques, and developed what became a life-long love of reading about the American Civil War. I have written a novel that takes place during that time (I wrote it out of the passions and emotions of the 1997 York strike). My New York agent (I love saying that!) tried for six long years to find it a home, but apparently no one wants to publish a story with a Southern gay cavalry hero. I am contemplating self-publishing.

This picture of Civil War pickets in Virginia was painted in 1862 by Bierstadt.

There is an excerpt from my novel as used in my speech to the Atkinson Alum Association in 1997 after receiving their Teaching Excellence Award for 1996:  "Radicalization and Renewal."  The hero of my novel, a Southern boy who rides with J.E.B. Stuart, owned no slaves and abhorred slavery.

And here's me on the Civil War battlefields in Manassas, Virginia, a twenty minute drive from the Virginia town where I grew up after the age of ten.

I remained an ardent civil rights supporter even growing up in the South; marched, with my twin sister, with my father's union (AFL-CIO) in the 1963 civil rights march in Washington at the age of 16 and stood on the Washington Memorial grounds to hear Martin Luther King deliver his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. 

This is a Shimer classroom on the right. See the silver-haired man on the left? That's Shimer's former President, Father Don Moon, an Anglican priest and nuclear physicist. He taught his first course at Shimer when I was there and he was one of my professors. After leading the small group of professors who saved Shimer in the 1970s when it went bankrupt and had to sell the Mount Carroll campus and move to Waukegan, he spent more than twenty years as Shimer's President, rebuilding the school. He recently retired as President, but still teaches, and like all Shimer professors, he sits at the round discussion table with everyone else. There are no lecture halls at Shimer and there is no "head" of the table; all are enquiring scholars.

In 2005, Shimer moved again to new quarters within the Illinois Institute of Technology, calling itself "The Great Books College of Chicago". The move was for financial reasons and it seems to have worked; things are going well at Shimer again. Click here to read my Recruiting Letter for Shimer. In the 1990s I served on the Board of Trustees for Shimer, providing needed expertise in marketing as they prepared to renew their accreditation.

One of my students, fed up with York's huge classes (80 students in fourth year seminars at that time) asked me if I knew any schools that had small classes. I directed her to my web site to read about Shimer. She applied, was accepted, and went there on a full scholarship. In May of 2004, I went to Shimer to see her graduate. She studied law at the Sorbonne and learned French, and is currently working in Health and Safety in the diamond mines of Alberta. 

In November of 2004, the New York Times wrote a great article about this fantastic little liberal arts school.

I am married to Bert Christensen a retired small businessman and a self-taught computer expert who taught me web page design and who now in his retirement designs web pages professionally. We have a son Erik who was born in the middle of my doctoral programme. I guess I kind of figured that as long as I was working full time and going to school full time with full-time care of a four-bedroom house I might as well toss in a baby too. I've never regretted it; Erik brought a perspective to my studies and my life that nothing else in the world could have done. He taught me that the sun does not rise and set on the completion of an academic paper, and that there are more important things in the world than grades. This picture was taken at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where we went for several spring breaks after I went to a conference there one October and fell in love with the place. 

Here's what I replaced the Bull with, a 2004 Toyota Corolla: The Grey Ghost

and after 6 years in which I only ever had one tiny thing go wrong with my Toyota (the lock rocker stuck on the driver's door and they fixed it for free), I traded it in for a car I've wanted since it came out in 1989. Here is Beauregard (Gaelic nickname "gille beag ruahd"),with his convertible hard top in the process of lowering.

I have recently taken up tap dancing, something I've wanted to learn to do most of my life. It's a little harder being older but we are three adults in a class of only three and our teacher Miss Ana Pacanins of Toronto Dance Vibe is wonderfully helpful and understanding.

I play the harp and have recently taken it up again after a long absence. I worked a job I hated for five years to save the money to buy it. I started with money I was awarded in an out-of-court settlement of an equal-pay suit against a major Chicago stockbrokerage and every time I look at it, even when I'm not playing, I remember that I did something important and right.