Confessions of a devious 12-year-old

It's everywhere. Read a profile, listen to a speech, mull over an interview. It is de rigueur for judges, like other public figures, to reveal details of their personal lives. Fine. But does this have to include our flaws, blunders and mishaps? I gather the purpose of this annoying trend is to shatter vestiges of the judicial mystique and to reveal that we too are imperfect. I think the unfortunate litigants and attorneys who appear before us knew this all along. To keep in step with this annoying trend of judicial revelations, I offer a stunning admission of my past life.

At the age of 12, I was a feminist. I didn't know it at the time, and that term was yet to be coined. There were no cell phones, no internet, no home television sets, and cars did not have seat belts and few had air conditioning. For today's 12-year-olds, such a world would be bleaker than Dante's lowest circle of hell. Sorry, it just occurred to me that most 12-year-olds and teens do not read books, lengthy narrative poems, or other works of art, especially those penned by dead white men. But you get the point. For today's youth, my world would be unfit for habitation. We read books and listened to the radio, and our minds created corresponding images.

But what did I know? We were trying to shake off the horrors of World War II. We marveled at the new automobiles, now available, including Kaiser and Frazer sedans. We no longer had blackouts at the beach. Many women who worked in defense and were an integral part of the war effort were back in the home as housewives, but with new attitudes. My mother, for example, like many other women at the time, were not what has been portrayed in essays and films as typical post-war housewives. In our home, we all chipped in with the housework. Dad and I vacuumed, dusted and helped with the dishes. We knew this was boring but necessary work and we did it, however reluctantly. I think this was common practice in many households. We thought it perfectly natural for women to have careers, however uncommon it was in those days. My aunt, for example, was a concert pianist. My mother did not have a career, but she was an avid reader, a member of a choir, and had a keen interest in the arts. These quotidian events provide a contrast by which you may measure the degree of deceit I practiced with consummate skill.

We lived in Hollywood, and just a few miles from the radio stations CBS and NBC that were located just east of the corner of Sunset and Vine. A half-hour walk from our house and I was there. I attended numerous radio shows including those featuring Abbott and Costello, Steve Allen, and a program for kids, "The Buster Brown Show" with Smilin' Ed McConnell and his green puppet, Froggy, who would pluck his magic twanger, and Buster Brown, who lived in a shoe with his dog Tige, and let's not forget Midnight the Cat. And there was "It's Fun to be Young" hosted by Jay Stewart, who later became the announcer on Let's Make a Deal.

The perceptive reader probably caught on that the show "It's Fun to be Young" was geared for kids. Before the show aired, Stewart would go out into the audience and ask who would like to be on a segment of the show. Along with other extroverted kids, my hand shot up. I was one of three or four other kids picked to be interviewed backstage before the show went on the air. Get ready for foreshadowing. One of us would be picked to serve as a judge to decide a problem posed by a celebrity.

We were told the problem ahead of time. The guest celebrity was the music director of the NBC symphony. His problem was whether he or his wife should get up in the middle of the night to let the cat out to do "its business." I wonder why they didn't have a cat box. Oh well. We gathered in a room waiting for the director of the show to interview us. I wonder if what I told the other kids, my competitors, was deliberate to eliminate them or if I was sincere. I suggested the director wanted us to be funny. I need not comment on 12-year-old humor in the 1940's or in other years. Most of them took the bait and they bombed out.

When I was interviewed, my comments were "sexist," a term then unknown. I made up something that went like this: "Of course the wife should get up and let the cat out. Her husband works all day rehearsing the orchestra. And what does his wife do? Maybe spends a few minutes dusting a lamp or a chair. And then she meets with her girlfriends for a two-hour lunch."

Yes, that's what I said on the air heard by a few million people, a fabrication of what daily occurred in my own home. Hope the statute of limitations applies. My parents were in hysterics. I received a gift, a bow and arrow set. The arrows had sharp metal tips that could cause serious injury. I shot them into the barks of palm trees in our front yard. Fortunately, no one was injured. I would have sued Jay Stewart and the network.