NOTE: I made some minor revisions to this after fact checking it with her!
My company is soliciting stories of women who are important in our lives. I have been thinking more and more about how I'd like more people to know about my mom. So I'm going way out on a limb, but this is what I sent to them. I attached the picture I previously posted of her pregnant with me climbing up the crane, so I've attached some other nice photos of her to this instead.
This is my mom, Karen McPherson. I consider her a working class icon and definitely a feminist role model. I have a really cool mom and I think more people should know her story.
My mother moved to South Seattle with her parents from then-rural Ashland, OR when she was 13 years old in 1967. She had my brother Chris not long after in 1970 at barely 16 years old. She left high school in her sophomore year and struggled tremendously to make ends meet, living in the projects with her first husband.
Her first career move was to work for the brand new EPA doing inter-office communications work, which involved using punch cards and mainframe terminals to contact other EPA offices. But she would always be looking out the window from the tower she stood in downtown, seeing crane operators sitting in their cabins as new buildings went up all around her. She said "hey, that looks like fun," and went out and did it.
My mother joined the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE Local 302) in 1978. She and her colleague Anne were the first two women ever allowed into an apprenticeship, and after 6,000 hours of training, they became the first-ever certified women crane operators in the state of Washington. Over her 33 years in the trade, she worked in every type of setting on every type of heavy equipment, especially mobile cranes and tower cranes.
She was involved in the construction of the I-90 floating bridge that goes from the Eastside through Mercer Island into Seattle. This picture is from May or June of 1989 where she is nine months pregnant with me, climbing into the cabin, setting up retaining walls on the Mercer Island stretch of the freeway on that project.
She is one tough mother. This picture was taken less than two years after she suffered a major accident where the unsecured boom of another crane fell directly on her head and shattered several of her vertebrae, with doctors advising her to leave her line of work, and definitely to not try to have any more children. Neither of those things came true.
I can't imagine the hostility and lack of accommodation she endured in that kind of work environment. She constantly battled sexist crap, policing every single aspect of her existence. It followed her right up to her retirement in the 2010s. But all the while she worked really long and hard hours for months on end.
Anyway, I could keep going forever, but my point is this: My mom has an inspiring story of a strong independent woman coming of age in a time when society was helping people move into the middle class, purchase homes, and build generational wealth. She set the terms of her own life backed by working class union values. She didn't take shit from anybody in one of the most hostile work environments she could have chosen. She was the majority breadwinner of every relationship she was in. She's cool as hell. OK, thanks for listening to me ramble :)