As I mention in the page About the Story of Anne’s Life, I’m writing the story of my life here because I have been asked by many people to write the story of my life, and encouraged by many more others. Of course, having family and friends ask or suggest it has been the most compelling reason – most particularly my daughter, the wonderful and beauteous Jessica.
But many others have asked, encouraged, or otherwise influenced me to write my story. And many – if not most – of those have done so after reading the “about me” page at my original personal blog, Mange Merde.com.
(If you don’t happen to speak French – and, make no mistake, I don’t, but I can swear like a sailor in a few languages that I don’t otherwise speak – you can check out the Google translation of the term “mange merde” here, but be warned: it is very rude.)
Now, actually I rarely swear, but somehow swearing in a foreign language just doesn’t feel so unladylike.
Anyways, so that you don’t have to go look it up on that potty-mouth site of mine, here is what that original “about me” page says:
From street urchin to high school dropout to M-16 slinging truck driver to abused wife to single mother to Stanford Law School, CEO and policy maker, this is my story.
All pure, unexpurgated me.
I was born in the spring many years ago, in what was then a rough part of New York City affectionally known as “Hell’s Kitchen”.
I was born on an April morning, and so my mother wanted to name me “April Dawn”. My father nixed that idea, saying that with a name like that I could only grow up to be a stripper or a hooker. I suspect that he may have regretted that intervention when I instead became a lawyer.
Also, I was born at Bellevue hospital, which was probably a great portent of things to come.
My mother abandoned me at the age of 3 – by which I mean she dropped me off for a visit one day and never came back for me. I then went to live with my father, who did a spectacular job of caring for me, but had some issues of his own. And so I struck out on my own at the age of 11, finding places for myself to live until I got my first apartment on my own at the age of 16.
Along the way I had been emancipated by the state of Massachusetts, and it drove the principal of my small-town high school – one of four which I attended over the years – absolutely crazy because if I missed a day of school, I would just write myself a note, and they had to accept it.
“Please excuse Anne for having missed school yesterday. She wasn’t feeling well. Signed, Anne”
Half way through my senior year of high school I got rather sick. I was at that time supporting myself by working full-time nights in a nursing home, going straight to school in the morning, and then going straight to another part-time job after school. Maybe I wasn’t so much sick, as just very, very tired. Something had to go, and as I was supporting myself, it couldn’t be my jobs. So I dropped out of high school half-way through my senior year, and took my high school equivalency.
And, oh yes, I also joined the Army.
Now, my primary reason for joining the Army was to get the GI Bill, which we still had back then. I figured it was the only way that I had a prayer of paying for college.
While I was in the army, I met my first husband. We got married, and 10 months later our daughter was born.
My daughter is a wonderful person. Unfortunately, my then-husband had a terrible temper, and no problem with turning that anger outwards, to us.
So I left.
This, by the way, is why I have little sympathy for battered women who stay. That’s just bullshit. Yeah, I know, I’m going to piss off a lot of people by saying that, but if I could do it, so can they.
My motto has always been “you do what you gotta do”, and you know what? It works.
I single-parented my daughter, and pulled us both up by my bootstrap working as, among other things, a pharmaceutical sales rep, and an office manager for a dental office. I had enrolled in college, and so was single-parenting, working full-time days, and going to college full-time at night. Thank goodness for that GI bill!
During that time, I became heavily involved in fathers’ rights. How and why that happened is another story for another time, but I ended up founding a national fathers’ rights organization on top of everything else that I was doing, testifying at legislative hearings and holding support meetings for disenfranchised fathers.
It was also around this time that I discovered the Internet. Oh, it wasn’t the Internet as most of you think of it today. There was no worldwide web, there was no DSL. Commercial email services had only just started, and people connected to them with 300 baud modems.
But it was wonderful, and I became active on the new Internet services, ran forums, and set up a fathers’ rights BBS.
While I had not originally intended to go to law school, I was hooked from the moment I took my first law class in undergrad. So I declared a legal studies major, worked my ass off, made Phi Beta Kappa, and applied to law school.
In 1989 my daughter and I moved out to California so that I could attend law school at Stanford.
I’m probably Stanford Law School’s only high school drop out.
When I arrived at Stanford, one of the first things I did was to set up my fathers’ rights BBS, in my student housing, on my Commodore 128.
Once I had graduated and took the bar, I became one of only a handful of fathers’ rights attorneys in the country.
I represented single fathers (only) in private practice – reconnecting them with their children and putting them back in their lives – until 1998.
At that time two things happened – the first was that I hit the wall – I had completely burned out. Always representing the underdog – particulary single fathers – is a constant uphill battle, and is soul-destroying.
The second was having a son with one of the only men on the planet brave enough to make sure that one of the only fathers’ rights attorneys on the planet would never be able to represent them, by, you know, marrying them.
So I was really ready for a change. And I was on the phone one day with my friend Paul Vixie, who had at that time founded the first anti-spam organization, MAPS, and was crying on his shoulder about how I was closing my practice, and didn’t know what I was going to do next, and he said “Well, we’re about to get sued, and you are one of the few attorneys I know who really understands the Internet, so why don’t you come in-house for me?”
So I went in-house for MAPS as their director of Legal and Public Affairs, and that’s how I ended up in the anti-spam, email delivery industry.
I stayed at MAPS for a couple of years, and was then recruited to be the CEO of a new anti-spam, email delivery start-up which we eventually called Habeas.
I left Habeas when I was summarily relieved of my duties by the primary VC due to our religious differences.
He believed he was God, and I didn’t.
From Habeas I went on to be the CEO of the Institute for Social Internet Public Policy (ISIPP) (formerly known as the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy), where I am today.
In the course of my professional life I have had many amazing moments, and many great honours. For example:
I have been asked to consult with the California legislature regarding child support and spousal support.
I have been asked to speak to the California judges association about bias against fathers in the judicial system.
I have been personally invited by then Governer Pete Wilson to speak at his specially convened Focus on Fathers Summit.
I have been asked to teach at a local law school.
I have been asked by Senator McCain’s office to help them architect and author legislation which goes after affiliate spammers.
And I count among my business friends many amazing people for whom I have a great deal of respect, and about whom I still think to myself “You like me! You really like me!”, among them, in addition to Paul, being Warren Farrell, Tom Campbell, and Guy Kawasaki (the latter two whom I am lucky enough to have counted as my mentors – one of whom kept me sane during my theological questioning and subsequent excommunication from Habeas).
The list goes on and on, and so could I, but I won’t.
Because my point – and I do have one – is this:
Not bad for a kid from Hell’s Kitchen who struck out on her own at the age of 11, eh?
So to those very few people who actually believed that the whole of me was greater than the sum of the parts of my life: thank you. Your faith in me helped instill in me one of the most important ingredient in this life: the knowledge that I could do anything, if I set my mind to it.
And to those of you who thought that a girl with my background and history could never amount to anything – like my professor at university who, when I asked him for a letter of recommendation for law school snidely said “don’t get your hopes up”, well… this blog says it all.
Anne P. Mitchell Young, Esq.
CEO, President
ISIPP.comP.S. People often ask me what the Esq. means. In the U.S. it designates an attorney who has been admitted to the bar, and is licensed to practice law. A J.D. next to someone’s name means that they have graduated from law school, but are not admitted to the bar and licensed to practice law (or that they feel the Esq. is too pretentious because they are unaware of the different meanings). In Great Britain, the term Esq. designates nobility, typically one level below that of Knight, which is probably why some folks think that using it as an attorney is pretentious. Hey, the U.S. got its system of common law *from* England, so if you want to call me Lady Anne, feel free.
P.P.S. Along the way, I have picked up a couple of other mottos, to go with “You do what you gotta do.” In fact, I have three simple mottos – or rules, really – for life:
- You do what you gotta do.
- It is what it is.
- Make a difference.
The first two will get you through any situation. Really.
The third, well, I’m a big fan of Gandhi’s saying that you must be the change you wish to see in the world.
I try to make a difference in both small, and not-so-small, ways. The thing that I’ve done most recently about which I’m most proud to make a difference in a not-so-small way is founding this: http://www.DushanbeRelief.com/.
My mother and father met in New York City, where they both worked at the time. My mother got pregnant with me in the hopes that it would induce my father to fall in love with her. Her somewhat flawed logic was that he would love the baby so much, that he would love her too.
My mother apparently had many interesting ideas when it came to relationships. There is a story that once, during that time of the month, she arranged to get blood on the sheets of my bachelor father’s bed, so that his then-girlfriend would find it.
Lovely.
In any event, her plan half-worked: my father did love the baby so much. And so he did “the right thing”: he married my mother. However, it didn’t last long, much, I am sure, to no-one’s surprise except, perhaps, my mother’s.
When I was about three years old, my mother dropped me off for a visit at my father’s parents’ house. Well, it was supposed to be a visit – but she never came back for me.
It turns out that my mother apparently also had many interesting ideas when it came to child-rearing, predominant among them that it wasn’t really for her. She should have already figured this out before having me (and indeed, perhaps she had), as it also turns out that not only was my father not her first husband, but I was not, by a long shot, her first child. She had dumped the three children that she had with her previous husband on her own mother, and they were now all being raised by their father. There was also rumour of a child she’d had at 16, and put up for adoption, although I have no idea if that was true.
My grandparents lived in Yorktown Heights, a suburb of New York City an hour or so north of the city. I stayed at their house for a while, but eventually, and when it had become clear that my mother wasn’t coming back for me – ever, my father came to collect me as, while he didn’t much want my mother, he did very much want me.
Not that he didn’t have his misgivings, chief among them being that he was a single man, with a pronounced drinking problem, living in a basement “apartment” (and I use the term loosely) in a part of New York City affectionately known as Hell’s Kitchen, for good reason.
Now, by all accounts these days, Hell’s Kitchen has mutated into a lovely, upscale, clean neighborhood. But back in the early 60s, it certainly earned its moniker, being mere blocks from both Times Square and 42nd street.
This was my playground.
The “apartment” in which we lived was in the basement of a small apartment tenement on West 45th Street, between 8th and 9th avenues. To get to this basement you had to go down a flight of stairs that led from the sidewalk down to the basement door.
The basement had been divided so that as you walked into the basement, one area to the right of the door had been walled off into a section that I would guess was about 10 feet deep, by 40 feet or so long. This was the “apartment”. At the very front of it there was a window that allowed some small amount of light in, and through which you could look up and see the feet of passersby.
In the front section, where the window with the street view was, was where my father slept, and worked. My father worked as a translator of Russian technical journals, and so was able to work from home – or, really from anywhere, so long as he had with him a journal to translate, and a tape recorder into which to dictate his translation.
In the middle section there was a utility sink. My father had a hot plate set up on the work bench that was next to the sink, and that was our kitchen.
In the back section was a bed, and there was a curtain that could be drawn across to cut off the bed from the rest of the apartment, and that was where I slept.
We did not have a bathroom, but there was a toilet in the way back of the basement that we could use. It flushed up, which was pretty interesting to me, but it was dark and scary back there.
And of course, the whole thing smelled like, well, a basement. To this day, that smell of basement is very evocative for me.
Two of my earliest memories of that basement apartment are that, my father having little in the way of accessories for a small girl at first, I wore a t-shirt of my father’s as a nightgown, and that I had a painting I had painted with finger paints hanging above the bed, and I tried to clean it with a wet rag and, well, you can guess what happened with that water soluble paint.
This is how the entrance to that basement looks today – it seems that the basements along this row now all are probably genuine, finished apartments:
It gives me shivers now to realize that I was walking around this neighborhood by myself from the time that I was six-years old or so.
Before that, my father took me nearly everywhere with him – including into the neighborhood bars which he frequented. His favorite was “The Barcelona”, and you could often find me there, playing the juke box, and being the darling of the regulars.
This is the intersection of w. 45th Street and 8th Avenue, my old stomping grounds. It looks much the same to me now as it did back then. We lived one-half block up 45th Street.
The interesting thing about children is that they don’t come with any preconceived notions about “how childhood should be.” This was just how things were, and it never occurred to me to think that most children didn’t live in a basement, or go to bars with their father.
In fact, it wasn’t until years later, when a group of people at that time unknown to me threatened to sue my father for custody of me if he didn’t send me to a particular boarding school of their choosing, that I realized that not everyone thought my childhood was anything less than idyllic. But I’m getting ahead of myself, as that was after our moving to Vermont, our living in a condemned house, and my striking out on my own at 11.
For now, our heroine is very happy living in a basement with her doting, if somewhat unorthodox, father.
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