College, a series of jobs that taught her how to write, and seven years as a flight attendant unknowingly prepared Liz to take advantage of an opportunity. Later, a box of letters found in the attic started Liz on her journey to become an award-winning author. Website: https://www.noordinarysoldier.net/
Transcription:
Intro 00:04
Welcome to Changing the Rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best lives and advice on how you can achieve that too. Join us with your lively host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.
Ray Loewe00:20
Welcome, everybody. And thanks for joining us here at Changing the Rules. We're lucky enough this morning, we're sitting in our brand new podcast facilities in Willow Street, Pennsylvania, we have our super engineer Luke Cagno sitting here at the board. And he's the person who makes us sound good or not. So, I have to kind of behave when he's around because he can do damage to me. And we have a great guest today. But before we get into our guest, let me remind everybody that the luckiest people in the world, and that's what this podcast is all about, are people who take control of their own lives, redesign them to meet their own specs, and live them under their own terms. And the name of our show, Changing the Rules, is all about the fact that the luckiest people in the world managed to handle rules really well. You know, all our lives we're thrown new rules. Were given them by our parents when we're born. The church comes in and gives us rules. The schools give us rules, our jobs give us rules. And the next thing we know, we have rules all over the place and rules do two things. They tell us what we can't do and what we must do. And Steve Jobs, the Apple guy, the big Apple guy, came up with a statement a while ago and he said, you know, if you're living your life under somebody else's rules, you're not living your life. So we have a young lady today who is certainly changing the rules. She certainly has a fascinating life. And the real interesting kind of summary that I'm going to start with is that she's going to tell you that her life, all of her life was preparing her for a unique opportunity that she didn't know was going to come. But when it came, she had all the pieces together based on her life so that she was able to take advantage of an opportunity. So Liz Williams, welcome to changing the rules. Say hi to everybody.
Liz Williams02:21
Hi, thanks for having me, Ray.
Ray Loewe02:23
Okay, so let's start a little bit with your background as you grew up, where and how many family members did you have? Tell us a little bit about your background.
Liz Williams02:33
I grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, which was a wonderful place to grow up. I had three sisters, two parents, my father worked nights, my mother worked a lot, and back in those days of the 50s and 60s, mothers didn't work that much. But she did work as a secretary. So I had two working parents, adored all my sisters. I lost my older sister, April, in 2008, which was a devastating blow but I still have two younger sisters. And it was a great place to grow up.
Ray Loewe03:05
Okay, so you had a relatively happy life growing up. And you went away to college, right? And where'd you go to school?
Liz Williams03:11
I went to Shippensburg State, which is a state college here in Pennsylvania, loved Shippensburg.
Ray Loewe03:16
And what did you major in?
Liz Williams03:18
I majored in urban studies, my father had died. The September I left for college, my father died. So I had to pick a major that I thought would be very, very practical. I picked Urban Studies, which was kind of an up-and-coming thing. City planning, that kind of thing. So that's what I picked and I enjoyed it. It was part geography, part political science. And I loved it, I loved all my college.
Ray Loewe03:47
Okay, and then you went into the workforce, and basically give us kind of a short version of what kinds of things did you do? What skills did you use in your jobs?
Liz Williams03:59
The first job where I worked for my County Planning Commission, which was Delaware County, and again, in suburban Philadelphia, I did a lot of actually going to meetings, local meetings, and so forth. And I realized when I was doing that, I love to write. That was the only thing about that job that I really liked. I found after about two and a half years, I was like no, I don't think this is for me. But I did love the writing and I never forgot that. One thing that I did do there that I enjoyed was we, myself, and the librarian there at the planning commission, they actually had a library in there because they had so much materials to store. We came up with a county library plan for the county and it was one of the early library systems. Up until then, local towns just had their own little libraries. But this was a county-wide system where you get a library card at one library and it's good for all of the libraries there. So we did the foundation for that. So that was something I was proud of there. But I would say after about three years, I followed in my older sister's footsteps and I became a flight attendant.
Ray Loewe05:18
Okay, now we're getting into excitement. Right? Okay, so the early years basically gave you the tools that you needed to write
Liz Williams05:28
Yes.
Ray Loewe05:29
And kind of taught you what to do, right? But also didn't give you any excitement in your life?
Liz Williams05:36
Not much.
Ray Loewe05:37
All right. So now you're a flight attendant, you're a woman of the world. So who did you fly for? Where did you go? What did you do?
Liz Williams05:45
I flew for Piedmont Airlines, which was based in Winston Salem, North Carolina. It was a regional airline for the South. It grew to eventually fly overseas. But I only flew for seven years, I'd had enough after seven years, but it was fun. I met great friends. I did get to see some of Europe, some of South America, some of the Caribbean, in my 20s, which was kind of unusual back then. Not that many people got to travel that much at that age, so it did make me meet a woman of the world, actually. And we flew for very little because we had discounts. Sometimes you'd fly for free. Sometimes you got moved to first class for nothing. So that was great. But as I say, after about seven years that kind of got tiresome too.
Ray Loewe06:37
Okay, so who did you meet on your flights that were interesting stories?
Liz Williams06:41
Oh, I had John McEnroe, once, who was truly rude. He wouldn't put his tennis racket in the overhead bin like he was supposed to, insisted on it going in the hang-up closet for the garment bags. And you know, I wasn't going to argue with him. I just wasn't going to get into it with him, because maybe he'd report me to the management or something, you know. So I didn't do that. And I had Lynda Bird Johnson, who was pregnant at the time. With her, I think it was her third child, and I never had children. So I never understood why you'd want to have three children. And so I actually said to her, are you pregnant again? It was rather rude, but you know, it just kind of came out. And I also had General Westmoreland on there who was very quiet, he had not done so well in the Vietnam War. And I don't think he was, you know, a very popular person. So he kind of sat to himself, but we all knew he was. But mainly, you know, the bulk of our customers were Southerners. And when I went to flight attendant training, I was from Pennsylvania, so I was the only one from the north and I was the token Yankee. I had never been referred to as a Yankee before and it was a little daunting, but you know, everyone was lovely. They weren't mean to me or anything was just an odd situation to, you know, realize that, oh my, they're different. And I'm different to them. And, you know, they still kind of think like that, but as I say, they were lovely.
Ray Loewe08:20
Yeah. So anyway, the first part of your life, you had a fairly happy childhood, you know, moving along got a good education and a sequence of jobs that taught you writing. And then you became more of a woman of the world out there. And then something happened. So let me read this for you. You're an author, you've written a book. And this is where we're going here. And the intro to your book over here is as a young man from a gritty Pennsylvania mill town enlists in the Army Air Corps, and heads to Hawaii, the paradise of the Pacific. There he and his buddies defend a O'ahu while it explodes and burns in the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the worst surges, his bombers squadron ships out to primitive Pacific outposts amid air raid, stifling heat, outbreaks of tropical disease. He clings to sanity through letters that he and his wife share. Letters found years later saved in the attic. A poignant event, wasn't it?
Liz Williams09:30
Yes.
Ray Loewe09:31
All right. And here's where your life came together in something that is significant, and I know it's truly meaning to you, so tell us the story and fill in the details.
Liz Williams09:46
You set me up terrifically here, Ray. After seven years of being a flight attendant, I actually well, it was probably after six years, I started working at a part-time job. Because as a flight attendant, you have a lot of time off, you probably only work three or four days a week. The other days you're off. So I started working part-time at a printing company locally there based in Arlington, Virginia. And I always excelled in English. And I knew that I had loved to write. So I thought, well, I'll do this part-time, it'll be fun. So basically, I was just finding mistakes. But that job led me to look more seriously at my career and find something in writing and editing rather than being a flight attendant. So I did. So I ended up working for well, in Washington, they were known as beltway bandits. They were trade associations or organizations that would have contracts with the federal government. And they would write proposals and so there was some proposal writing I did for a couple organizations, then I went to work for a trade association. Then I ended up working for the federal government, I worked for the General Accounting Office, which is now called the Government Accountability Office, and the Congressional Budget Office. And in those jobs, I basically wrote and edited reports that were read by the public, they were ordered by a congressperson to investigate or study a program that was already in existence. For example, healthcare for the military, or a welfare program, something like that, they wanted to see where taxpayers' dollars being used to the best advantage. So a lot of the people employed by both GAO and CBO, Congressional Budget Office, were auditors, or economists, or technical experts in some way. So they would collect the data to study these programs. And then the writers and editors such as myself would come along and, you know, make it a finished product, make sure it was organized well, make sure the message was right up front, make sure there weren't spelling or grammatical errors. Because those kinds of errors would undermine the report, they really had to be perfect. And I became a tremendous expert in grammar, I know everything about grammar. And I enjoyed that, it was in a way an organizational task, deciding what goes where, and how it should be presented. And I loved it. I loved my work in Washington, I really enjoyed it a lot.
Ray Loewe12:42
Okay, so how did this get to the letters that we found?
Liz Williams12:47
Okay, I did diverge a little bit.
Ray Loewe12:49
Well, that's okay.
Liz Williams12:50
Okay. Well, in the early 2000s, my mother downsized, and I helped her clean out her house, and she found a big box of letters from my father in World War II. And she said, do you want these? And I said, yeah, I do. Because by then I had become a pretty good writer. And I looked at them, I said, you know, that's going to be a book, I want to write a book and that's what it's going to be. And when I first thought of the project, I thought, well, it'll just be a straight nonfiction book, it'll just be letters. But when I started reading them, they were very substantive. My father was an excellent writer. And my mother was a good writer, too. Now, he had saved her letters that she wrote him and sent them back to her for safekeeping. So I had a very rich collection, I had both sides of the correspondence. And I started reading and I thought, you know, I think this is really a story, it's not just going to be a collection of letters. So the book turned out to be a war story, a love story, and my story of getting to know my father. Because as I mentioned earlier, he died when I was 18, I really didn't get to know him like you would get to know your parent as a young person. And in the course of my research, I discovered that my father was most likely a gay or bisexual man. So I don't share this with most of my readers because it's rather the climax of my book. And I refer to it as a secret most of the times I talk about my book when I give a talk about my book. But for your audience, Ray, I'm gonna go ahead and just say what it is because there are no WWII stories out there that I know of, that have a gay theme. And I have one. And I don't know for a fact the trail was too cold to really track down men who had known my dad as a young man to really confirm this. But the fact is, I asked my mother about it. I asked my older sister about it, who, as I mentioned, passed away. And she's the one that really tipped me off about it. She said, you know, I interviewed her for the book because she knew him better than my other sisters or myself because as I say, he died young. She said, you know, I think looking back, I think Daddy was gay. And as soon as she said that, I was having an epiphany. I literally looked outside through her window at the leaves on the trees and they became well defined. That was the nature of the epiphany because so many things made sense when she said that. How he was so fixated on the fact that I shouldn't be allowed to wear bangs, so fixated on our hair, what we wore. You know, he had four daughters. There's one other book that I know of on the market. It's called Fun Home, that a young lady wrote who she had a father who was gay. Now, she didn't know it as a child that her father was gay. But she became aware of it because actually, he kind of preyed on young boys, which my father didn't do anything like that. So she came from a lot of dysfunction. But her book became a Broadway play and won a bunch of Tony Awards. But it doesn't have anything to do with World War II. This does, there were, according to my research, at least 40,000 men in the military in World War II who were gay, there were probably more. They did conduct tests and screenings to eliminate those kinds of men, so they wouldn't get in the service. But obviously, they didn't succeed in eliminating all of them. And a lot of them served like my father with a lot of dignity and honor and sacrificed a lot for our country. I think that should be recognized.
Ray Loewe17:10
So here you are, all of your background kind of culminated in this opportunity. And when it occurred, you knew what to do. And the book that you wrote is No Ordinary Soldier: My Father's Two Wars. Right?
Liz Williams17:28
That's right.
Ray Loewe17:29
You won an award for your book.
Liz Williams17:32
I did. In 2018, I submitted it to, I think, three contests. And one of them I placed as a finalist, there was one all-time winner, let's say top winner, and then there were two finalists in the genre, which was military history that I entered. And the award was the 2018 International Book Awards Contest, which is a contest that Publishers Weekly does recommend that authors enter. So it is a reputable contest. And I was just thrilled by the award.
Ray Loewe18:02
So let's kind of think about this. Well, first of all, you have a book out there, and everybody should buy this book, right? Just because you wrote it, and it's available on Amazon.
Liz Williams18:15
It has five stars.
Ray Loewe18:16
And what we'll do is we'll put a listing on our podcast notes when we're done so that people can find this. But I think the thing that's really interesting about you is how your background enabled you to be prepared to do something. And, you know, from knowing you, I think you consider yourself one of the luckiest people in the world because you've taken this career that was diverse pieces. And you're a writer.
Liz Williams18:45
I am a writer.
Ray Loewe18:46
And that's what you are going to be from now on. So, cool. So do you have any closing comments before we sum up?
Liz Williams18:55
I just want to thank you very much for having me, Ray, it's been a pleasure.
Ray Loewe18:58
Well, we've been talking with Liz Williams. Liz is a person who has written a book, an award-winning book, and it's available on Amazon through Kindle anytime you want to read it. And it's a war story. And it's not fiction. It's true, but it's how do you describe it?
Liz Williams19:21
It's a creative nonfiction book. It's actually a hybrid. It's a combination history memoir, and what they call creative nonfiction. In other words, it's a true story, but I use creative techniques such as metaphors, similes. It's a good read. It's not boring.
Ray Loewe19:38
And you're gonna make it into a TV series at some point, right?
Liz Williams19:41
Ken Burns, if you're listening, I'm available.
Ray Loewe19:44
Okay, so thanks, Liz for being with us. You're certainly one of the luckiest people in the world and you found your way to doing what you really want to do. And thanks for being here. And Luke sign us off, please.
Outro 20:01
Thank you for listening to Changing the Rules. Join us next week for more conversation, our special guest, and to hear more from the luckiest guy in the world.