Mazer Archives February 2023 | Out of the Archives: Rita Charette

As you may remember from our blog post in January, Bunny MacCulloch and her partner at the time, Rita Charette, decided to head West in 1959. Bunny documented their travels with her camera. I wanted to know more about Rita, as we only hear snippets about her life through Bunny’s letters, witty captions, and her camera.

Writing on the photo says “Rita, driving Bunny”.

I first came across Rita’s name while looking through the Mazer’s extensive subject files, under “Women in Biomedical engineering- See Rita Charette”. It had pictures of Rita working as a biomedical equipment technician at Cedars Sinai-Medical Center. It was inspiring to see her working as a technician in 1987, in what is still such a male dominated field.

The folder also contained an issue of the Southern California Women for Understanding (SCWU) newsletter. A photograph of a woman wearing overalls sitting in a field holding potatoes was labeled in black pen, “Rita”. What followed was a story about a woman who liked her privacy, who grew up poor, one of 11 kids, in a French farming community in northern Maine.

It was a part of a series in the SCWU newsletter where people would write in biographies or autobiographies to be published anonymously. The original photo of Rita in a potato field can be found in Bunny’s scrapbook. With this evidence, it would seem that Rita wrote this about herself. It was the last paragraph that struck me as her, reading:

“That day - the day of your wedding - was an unquestioned assumption. If you were getting your girlfriends to show you how their boyfriends kissed, if you took every chance to be with your gang of girls, if the idea of settling down and having kids didn't appeal to you at all, if you were really only interested in girls, girls, girls - well, you could get away with that for a while, but sooner or later you'd get married. Everybody did. You had to. Someday. BUT SHE ESCAPED! She escaped it ALL. When she left home at 17 with her first lover, imagine the culture shock. She spoke almost no English, was barely literate, had no skills, and worst of all had no idea how life was conducted among ‘the English'. But she was experienced at responsibility. She had pride and confidence in herself and her ability: tools her family had given her, tools so essential to success that their relationship to fact is totally immaterial. With these tools she has dreamed, educated herself, had ambitions and fulfilled them. She's successful in a field almost exclusively male. You think she's 88, or 98? Wrong. She's 48 and still growing. Practical and pragmatic. Loyal, kind, and true. Assertive. A super bullshit detector. Loving. The only thing is, don't ever talk to her about "back to Nature", OK?”

Rita in a potato field. This image appears in the SCWU newsletter, and the original is in Bunny’s scrapbook.

With this story in my head, I returned to the scrapbook, reading through Bunny’s own feelings and events for any mention of Rita, and looking at her with new eyes. Her life unfolded a bit more.

Sometime after Rita left home at 17, she joined the Women’s Army Corps. She was stationed at Fort McClellan, in Alabama, for basic training. In May 1959, Bunny first mentions Rita in the scrapbook penned in a postcard to her mother. It says Rita had been discharged, and was “a wreck over it”. She was hospitalized for two weeks due to an ulcer.

The text under the photo reads, “Rita the leader like always”.

In June, again to her mother, Bunny says there is more to the ulcer than meets the eye, but “anyhow, she [Rita] doesn’t care to divulge any details to anybody”. Rita was “quite broken up and felt her whole life to be ruined”. The two had left Anniston, Alabama with as much as could fit in the car that would take them to Los Angeles.

Before Rita was discharged, Bunny visiting Fort McClellan.

The two meet their friend Andy in Los Angeles, and then head to the Grand Canyon to take advantage of tourist season. Eventually they head back to LA. By September Rita is feeling like her old self: she bought a new car, a dark blue ’59 Renault Dauphine. In March the two move to Venice.

Text on the image says, “And then we moved to Venice… March 1960”.

In 1961 Rita graduates. The ceremony is at Venice High School. The only mention of school before these photos explain that Rita is doing more required reading than necessary and going through the course quickly, eventually wanting to teach or learn theory and circuit building. It doesn’t say specifically what she is studying, though it seems to be technical work. The years between 1960 and 1965 do not contain any letters, but are filled with photos of a happy Bunny and Rita travelling, buying a house, and opening a laundromat together. No more mention of jobs or education.

After the first scrapbook ends in 1965, we can only assume Rita continued to work towards becoming a biomedical equipment technician, and became the woman who “educated herself, had ambitions and fulfilled them,” and is successful in her field. Seen in the next scrapbook starting in 1974, Rita was already working as an equipment technician at Cedar-Sinai, and was enrolled at LACC for biomedical equipment training.

“Rita goes to San Diego to learn [about] WACS, sets up the WAC program at Cedars-Sinai, and starts moving up!” I tried to find more information about WACS at Cedars-Sinai, but couldn’t find a thing. It’s interesting to see Rita’s work carry over, and maybe heal whatever feelings she had about leaving the army. Or maybe this WAC stands for something completely different…

Most of the work people at archives do is piecing together people’s lives with photos and letters, unless people who have known them come forward to speak. It is intimate and rewarding to get to know people this way, knowing you are keeping people’s stories for the future, but there’s always something missing from the picture. It leaves room for imagination and you see your life overlapping with theirs. For me, now, whenever I pass Cedars-Sinai on my way into the Mazer I think about Rita, and how she wired the “whole damn thing”.

The writing on the photo says, “See that hospital? Rita wired the whole damn thing!!”.