She got her big break in 1956 when she won the top prize on the quiz program, ”The $64,000 Question,” by answering questions about boxing. The first media psychologist, Brothers has been on the air since 1958. She had the first hot line and started a trend that has resulted in an association of media psychologists. Now in her early 60s, she is the mother of one daughter and a grandmother of four. Recently in Chicago following release of the paperback edition of her latest book, ”The Successful Woman: How You Can Have a Career, A Husband and a Family-and Not Feel Guilty About It” (Ballantine, $4.95), Brothers told writer Norma Libman how she learned to live with the death of her husband of 39 years, Dr. Milton Brothers.
A very important experience I had when I was 12 years old actually set my life on the path that it has been on ever since. I wanted to get a job but I couldn`t get working papers because you had to be 16. I found a job at a camp for problem children.
They knew I had no working papers. They knew I was a ”little” 12, but they were so desperate. They needed another pair of hands so they were willing to look the other way and bend the law and they hired me.
I took care of 14 boys who were 14 years old and all of them were in trouble with the law-robbery, mugging, rape, arson, you name it, these boys had done it. I didn`t have the courage to tell my parents that I was going to do this, so I told them that I had taken a job waiting on tables at the camp. They thought that was fine, that it would be good experience for me. It wasn`t till the middle of the summer when they came out to visit me-it was way out in Southhampton-that they found out what I was really doing and were quite shocked.
I took care of the boys in every way. I was their leader and I had no problems, except once. The boys all lived in a dormitory and in order to go to the bathroom they had to go through our room. I shared a room with another counselor. She was 16. And these boys were lazy and would never flush the toilets. So, one day I was sitting on the bed facing out into the room and the other young woman was facing in toward me. We were sitting and doing our nails.
Suddenly, all of the boys trooped in, naked with erections. Had I freaked out, I would have had endless trouble. But I went on painting my nails and as they walked through I said, ”Don`t forget boys, flush the toilet when you`re finished.” And I went on talking to this other counselor.
There was a long, long time that they were in the bathroom and a lot of ostentatious flushing and they all sneaked out and, no longer erect, left. And that was the last trouble I had the whole time.
But this episode was a turning point in my life that made me interested in dealing with people and dealing with people`s problems. It made me feel that I could deal with people.
Winning the ”$64,000 question” brought about the biggest change in my life. The program was the most famous and watched program of its time. I had always wanted to get into television, but couldn`t find any way until I thought of going on this show.
I watched it and analyzed it as you would analyze any problem. And I saw that the people who were being accepted for the show were all experts in an antithetical category. There was a Marine Corps captain who was an expert on cooking and at that time men didn`t say they cooked; it wasn`t considered masculine. There was an opera buff who was a shoemaker. They weren`t taking psychologists who were knowledgable in psychology. So I needed a category that was as different from me as possible.
I needed something interesting and I also needed something where I could learn all there was to know. You can`t learn all there is to know about music or art or literature, but you can learn everything about boxing, which I did. My husband and I had discussed it at great length and had narrowed it down to plumbing or boxing. We decided that boxing had more excitement and would be more likely to intrigue people, particularly the people who chose the contestants.
I worked on this for about six weeks, watching films, reading magazines, encyclopedias. I memorized everything. Then I wrote to the people from the program and sent them a picture. One day they called me and told me to come down and see them immediately. I said: ”I can`t. I just washed my hair.”
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They said, ”Put a towel on your head, get a cab and come down here. We`ll pay the cab.”
So I put a towel on my hair and got in a cab and went to see them. They threw boxing questions at me and then they said I could be on the show. So I said I wanted about six more weeks to memorize everything and they agreed to that.
From that moment I quit doing everything else. My mother came and took care of my daughter and I studied from 6 in the morning till 1 the next morning. I did nothing but study and put food in my mouth, and that was it. I learned the minutia, things that nobody in their right mind learns. Like the names of the referees at fights, what the Romans called a boxing glove, that sort of stuff.
When I won the $64,000 question and had the money, I decided I was never going to do another thing I didn`t want to do in my life. And I`ve been able to keep that decision. It doesn`t mean I don`t work hard, but it does mean I don`t do anything I don`t want to do.
My husband was very important in my life but to talk about his importance, I have to go all the way back to the day we met. I had been going to a farm up in the country with my family, as a child, for years and years. We would go with my grandfather and my mother and all the brothers and sisters and cousins and so on. We`d go every winter around Christmas time.
One time I had a cold and my parents sent me up with my sister to recuperate in the early fall. One day I was upstairs and I was reading and you know how you look when you have a cold: red nose, kerchief on your hair. And my sister ran upstairs and she said, ”I have met the man you`re going to marry.” I was about 17 at this point, and I told her to buzz off. But she said: ”No, no. Trust me.” So I went downstairs with her and I met Milton Brothers, the man I was going to marry.
He had been going to this farm all his life, but only in the summers. At this time he had taken an uncle up, who wasn`t feeling well, to recuperate. And I fell in love that instant. I knew I was going to marry him. I didn`t know how he felt at the time, until 35 years later, on a television show where they asked husbands and wives about things and they asked the husbands when they fell in love with their wives and he said, ”Instantly.” I never knew that. So we both fell in love instantly. And we married.
The day we learned that my husband had bladder cancer was a critical moment in my life, and the day he died (in 1988) was another turning point. The most difficult decision I ever had to make was whether to put on my husband`s record in the hospital, ”Do not resuscitate.”
I made the decision with his doctor, who is a wonderful woman. We agreed that as long as she felt that there was something that could be done to lengthen his life in a quality way, that we would not put those words on his chart.
It was not something we could ask him. When the end came, they did try to resuscitate him, but it wasn`t possible. It was in God`s hands. But I`m glad that I did everything that could be done in the situation.
Since his death I find myself far more sensitive to people, better able to understand their pain. When you understand pain intellectually it`s one thing. When you understand it emotionally, it`s another. I find I`m a better psychologist, but I`m also a lonelier psychologist.
I would like to let other people who have suffered such a loss know that you can`t, by staying busy, get rid of grief. I thought that the busier you were, the less you`d grieve. It doesn`t work that way. It only postpones; it doesn`t eliminate.
It`s like a fire walk. You start at one end of the coals and you can`t decide in the middle: I`ve had it, I`m going to stop. You`ve got to get to the other side. So you can be busy, busy, busy, but you still come home, you`re alone and it`s terrible. And you`ve got to go through it. There`s no way of postponing, eliminating or pretending. Eventually you`ll come out at the other end, but it takes a long, long time.
No one can give you a timetable for what it will take. For some it takes just a few months; for others it takes a year. For some it takes 10 years. If it takes you longer than someone else, it doesn`t mean that there`s something wrong with you. Each person has a different response to grief.
One of the things I`ve done is I`ve decided to take my grandchildren, one at a time, on adventures. Last June I spoke in Alaska and I took my grandson with me and after the speech we went to Barrow and we went on a dog sled ride and we got on a helicopter ride and went looking for grizzlies. We found grizzly bears, moose and bald eagles.
We got stranded in Kodiak and were befriended by bush pilots and they sat and told us stories about their adventures. We went salmon fishing. We met a man who investigates plane crashes and we went with him for one of his investigations, on a crash where no one was hurt, and we learned what they look for when they examine planes.
Now I`m planning to take my granddaughter to Paris for her birthday. First she`s taking French lessons so she`ll be able to speak French. So each child will get an adventure and it`s an adventure for me, too. And it helps me with my loneliness and gives me something to look forward to and puts some fun in my life.
The biggest challenge I`ve faced is being a woman in a man`s world. I`m still fighting it. But if you want to do something difficult you just have to do it. My sister, who is an attorney, wanted to go to law school when she had three children. The only way she could do it was by going at night and it would take six years.
I would tell anyone faced with a challenge the same thing I told her: If you do it, in six years you`ll be an attorney. If you don`t do it, in six years you`ll be six years older.