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By Root 1073 0

Steve McCord said, “She was not a gum-chewing, blinky-eyed bimbo, a Mercer Island cashmere-sweater-wearing social dingdong.” To him, she seemed nonjudgmental and down-to-earth. She was one of the few friends to whom McCord, a year older and a friend from French club, was comfortable confiding his growing realization that he was gay—a fact of his life that, he said, his loyal, devoted parents believed could be cured. In the company of people she did not know well, Stanley Ann was reticent and loath to call attention to herself. Among friends, she was lively and more outgoing. She kept a low profile in class, but when ideas moved her, she spoke her mind. There was a seriousness about her that made Jim Wichterman, the social studies teacher, remember her a half-century later. She seemed interested in the material, interested in ideas. Neither overtly rebellious nor a joiner, she found her way eventually into that mostly male circle of academically high-achieving nonconformists outside of the force field that surrounded the star athletes. “There was this constant tension in her life,” Susan Botkin Blake told me. “It was this sense of needing to fit in and yet be apart.”

There were slumber parties, sock hops, ski trips, little drinking, no drugs, little dating, less sex. If there was any sex education in the school, no one I spoke with seemed to remember it years later. Maxine Box said that the students who had been on Mercer Island in middle school “had been told by a teacher, ‘If you ever sit on a boy’s lap, be sure to sit on a newspaper.’” Parking with your boyfriend and “petting” could lead to other things, girls were told. But who knew what those were? Talking to strangers was said to be risky, but what those risks were went undeclared. It was difficult to talk with your mother about sex, and many girls did not have their first appointment with a gynecologist until they were eighteen or older—or married. It would be another year or two before the birth-control pill was approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and many more before it was widely available in places such as college campuses. The only form of birth control teenagers seemed to know about was the condom. One of the brothers who owned the gas station where Bill Byers had an after-school job bought condoms on behalf of young employees, striding out of the pharmacy with a ribbon of condom packets over his shoulder like a bandolier, intending to be shocking. A Mercer Island girl unlucky enough to become pregnant before graduation faced an unhappy fate: Some disappeared abruptly, shipped off to live with a relative or to finish school elsewhere in anonymity; others hid their pregnancies, some marrying quietly before graduation. When one good-looking and likable jock impregnated an upperclassman, her sudden disappearance did not escape Stanley Ann and Kathy Powell’s notice. They were shocked, Kathy Powell Sullivan told me, that the girl had to be sent away and that the boy’s family had arranged it. Judy Ware, whose parents were Mercer Island bridge-playing friends of Madelyn and Stanley Dunham’s, told me that she became pregnant in her senior year. An abortion, still against the law and often unsafe, would have required making arrangements through intermediaries. Judy, anxious to please her parents, stalled before telling them she was pregnant. They arranged for her to be married secretly—no siblings, few photographs—some distance from Seattle. She graduated at five months pregnant.

Stanley Ann (left), age fourteen, at a slumber party, summer 1957

“We were growing up in that Leave It to Beaver, June Cleaver kind of society,” Ware told me. “We just weren’t very well prepared.”

The Dunhams were not, however, the Cleavers. They may have played bridge with the Hansons and the Farners, but they did not match any Mercer Island template. Steve McCord recalled an evening he spent with the Dunhams in the summer of 1959. A good student, he was not an athlete and never felt that he quite fit in. He would have preferred to have grown up on a farm or someplace where,