Saratoga News

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Laddie Davis tries on caps and gowns. She will receive her A.A. degree during the commencement ceremony at DeAnza College June 27.

Saratogan hangs in to earn her A.A. degree

Career at Lockheed caused a delay

By Chantal Lamers

It's been almost 53 years since Saratogan Laddie Davis walked across the stage to receive her high school diploma. A retired Lockheed employee, an award-winning writer and a cancer survivor, the 71-year-old Davis will walk across the stage on June 27 to receive her Associate of Arts degree in English from De Anza College.

After high school, Davis attended a junior college in Kansas, where she grew up. For three years during WWII, she worked as a schoolteacher and married. In 1959, after her marriage failed, she and her child moved to California.

"At the time I felt like I wanted to stay in school," Davis says. "But when I came to California, money was very scarce."

Davis was hired at Lockheed as a purchase-order typist and later promoted as a group leader of purchase orders. There, she met Mac McKirahan, to whom she's been married for 23 years.

"We met when we got into an argument," he recalls. "After that we became friends."

Throughout her career at Lockheed, Davis enrolled in work-related classes at De Anza and Foothill colleges.

When she retired in 1989, she couldn't understand the younger employees who seemed to let their lives revolve around their careers. "The job is not your life," she says. "It's what you do to earn the money to do the things you want to do."

Davis continued her education at DeAnza in her spare time but not with the intention of graduating. Although she thought school was interesting, she was worried about going back after so many years.

"I feel like it's been good for me to be around young people," she says, "and it is probably good for young people to be around me."

Her husband is amazed at his wife's energy. "I enjoy every minute of it," McKirahan says. "It's fascinating how she's always bubbling over with enthusiasm."

Two years after she retired, Davis discovered she had breast cancer. "That is so far behind me it's like it happened to someone else," she now says. After the removal of her breast, the cancer was gone, but the memories weren't. "For about a year I was really down," she said. "I didn't look at myself in the mirror or in the shower."

Through it all, she continued with her education. She also worked on De Anza's literary magazine, Bottomfish.

"We don't let these things interfere with the life of the mind," she says.

Her short story "Stolen by Gypsies" won first place in a national literary magazine contest this year. It was entered a second time in a national literary contest, sponsored by League of Nations, and it placed second.

Although the story was fiction, it was based on a real incident from her Kansas childhood.

"We lived way out in the country, but we lived on a main road," she says, conjuring up the scene.

One day, gypsies were passing through and stopped at her family's home. The story takes off from there, pretty much following her memory of the incident, except for a romantic scene she created.

She says the memory is a vivid one, and she is often reminded of the day--"especially when I see really pretty people who let themselves go to pieces."

The story in its entirety can be found on De Anza's home page at http://laws.atc.fhda.edu/documents/bottomfish/bottomfish.html.

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