My grandmother, Sarah Nowak (nee Choate), was only 19 years old when she married her first husband Joe Mike McKinney in 1958. Joe Mike was an engineering student at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas, so Sarah dropped out of community college, where she was previously enrolled, and worked as a secretary to help pay for his tuition. Although women did not have careers, it was not uncommon for them to work while their husbands were in college. “It was common in our day for women to help their husbands through school,” she said. After Joe Mike’s graduation, my grandparents moved from Lubbock to Andrews, Texas, a small oil town where Joe Mike worked as a petroleum engineer for Exxon.…