Barbara Salisbury:  

During my freshman year in college I became engaged to the son of a parking lot mogul and macher at the Jewish country club. We got married that summer and set up housekeeping in Boston, where my new spouse was a senior at Harvard. Our marriage didn¿t survive the stresses of growing up and we abandoned the effort after three years, during what was dubbed by Time Magazine as ¿the Summer of Love.¿ It was a magical time when having no money lead to adventure rather than desperation. I was finishing college at BU and raising my two year old daughter; living in a triple-decker near the BU Bridge with a succession of roommates including folk singers, Weathermen, mung sprout eaters, drug addicts, practitioners of the Alexander technique, and believers in Gestalt therapy, who lit candles and draped the walls with Indian bedspreads. My living room is described as the setting for a ¿women¿s group¿ meeting in Miriam at 34 by Alan Lelchuk. I graduated from college when my daughter was almost five and became a social worker in the welfare department after a failed attempt to make a killing as a waitress and save up for world travel. Three years later I met Prince Charming, a witty preppy who was trying to be a serious writer, and I realized that if I wanted to have a middle class standard of living, I¿d have to do it myself. And thus began my meteoric rise in the Welfare Department, from social worker, to supervisor, to training specialist. In order to meet the requirements for being a training specialist, I enrolled part-time in a masters program in public administration at Northeastern. After a year I took a leave to attend school full-time and a few months before graduation I came in to talk with the head of human resources about what I would do when I returned to work. Dukakis had just been elected Governor and Ralph Muller, a brilliant PhD student in Government at Harvard, had just been appointed budget director of the Department. Ralph planned to establish an OMB style budget office, with a team of analysts developing forecasting models and doing strategic planning. I was Ralph¿s first recruit. I resisted. I wasn¿t a ¿numbers¿ person. I squirmed. Working for Ralph would be hard work. I recommended others in my place. But in the end I relented. It was clear that this is where the action would be. I worked harder than I¿d ever thought possible and learned a lot. When Ralph beca...Expand for more