Tehran, Iran & The Ugly Americans

When I was a sophomore, attending Montclair High in New Jersey, my father, who was a labor negotiator for the United Auto Workers (UAW)/AFL-CIO, decided he wanted to travel and put in his application with the United States Agency for International Development.

After some thorough investigating (my father had been quite a rabble rouser in his youth), he was assigned to USAID’s Labor Division in Iran, and so it was that my mother and I boarded a flight with him out of New York on New Year’s Eve, 1961, for a two year stay in Tehran.

We moved into a home with a walled compound—on the outskirts of town where other state officials, oil consortium executives and military personnel lived — with a small in-ground swimming pool across the street from the U.S. Officer’s Club that had the biggest swimming pool I had ever seen; tennis courts (I watched the courts being built by men churning up the knee-high mud for the pleasure of us Americans to play at our leisure), where I learned the game from an Iranian professional; and a bar and grill where my friends and I would gather for hamburgers and cokes on the weekends and charge the bill to the military kid’s fathers.

We had a badji, a maid, who lived with us six days a week in a small stone structure behind our house, cooking and cleaning. She saw her children one day a week and when our tour of duty was over, she begged us to take her back to the States.

Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was in power which mostly did not concern me as I attended the Tehran American School (like all American students) and was primarily interested in integrating myself with the cool kids.

There was a hierarchy of sorts, but we all mixed. The oil families were the wealthiest; my boyfriend Tom’s family had many servants — a chauffeur for his family, his own personal car and chauffer, a house servant and a couple of cooks. My family, in comparison, had only one full time maid.

Next came the commissioned officers; my friend Lee’s father was on his way to becoming a full bull colonel and she lived as “modestly” as we did. The lowest rung were the kids whose fathers were non-commissioned officers. But Mike, Lee’s boyfriend, whose father was one of those, had quite an allure.

I played girls’ basketball, with girls’ rules; we played half court and were only allowed three dribbles before we had to pass. There were forwards on one side and guards on the other while two players were allowed to roam full court.

Well into my stay there, our coach arranged for us to play an Iranian girls’ team at their school. Prior to the game there was much international fanfare, as I believe this was a very unique event. I clearly remember the pageantry.

Their players were large and athletic and had been playing full court basketball. Needless to say, they wiped the floor with us.

I attended school, occasionally helping my friend Lee to cheat on tests; went to the prom with Bobby at an exclusive American hotel; snuck out of my house at midnight with Lee to meet our boyfriends and ride Vespas illegally through the back streets; and learned how to snow ski at Mt. Abali in my red rubber rainboots tied to the skis with rope.

Our two-year stay was cut short to one-and-a-half years when the State Department realized my father was attempting to unionize the Iranian drivers of the Carryall passenger vehicles. We left in the early summer of 1963 and in the fall he was transferred to La Paz, Bolivia.

When I read the news this morning that our insane monster of a president, illegally without consent of Congress, in cahoots with the Israeli criminal Netanyahu, let loose a reign of terror, killing god-knows-how-many innocent people, it took me back to those times. There’s a bit of a personal touch for me as I try to wrap my head around this unfolding horror story.