Cyndie Zikmund - Author



Creative nonfiction + real world wisdom. My beginnings were rough. My path was unlikely. Now writing the stories I once needed to hear.

Photo: Norma and Cynthia Zikmund

In the cold north, western meadowlarks sing sweet songs from spring to fall.

Many a morning is a race between chirps and her Lazy Susan call.

Aromas of coffee brewing, and bread toasting fill the air.

Still, I close my eyes, and pull covers over my head.

Her song grows louder, intent on prying the lazy one from her bed.

In January, after our state bird had flown south for the winter, the early riser sang her last song.

Mornings were blackened with pain.

I pined to smell coffee and toast, and hear her Lazy Susan refrain. 



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Listen to me read MORNINGS WITHOUT COFFEE here.

MORNINGS WITHOUT COFFEE was first published in the North Dakota Quarterly Review.

1970's DeVry Women

Pictured left to right, top to bottom: Ann, Cyndie, Linda, Nancy, and Sue. Photo by Brian. Digital reprint courtesy of Sue.

We left home for different reasons, mostly harsh circumstances. But we had the same intention when we chose DeVry Institute of Technology. We wanted to learn a skill that would land us good paying jobs. While some college coeds sought MRS degrees, we pursued financial independence.

Salesmen from DeVry in Phoenix, Arizona guaranteed that 90% of their graduates were offered at least $5 an hour upon graduation. Since Montana's minimum wage in 1976 was $1.80 and DeVry’s technician program could be completed in eighteen months, it was an appealing deal. 

The women pictured above were among the first group of females to enter DeVry and be trained as electronics technicians in the mid to late Seventies. Though no one told us we were trailblazers, the school stated that less than 3% of the students were women.

Deep down, maybe I knew. The only way to make a good wage in the 70’s was to get a man’s job. But I didn’t want to work in a dusty, sweaty construction job. I wanted clean, air-conditioned conditions. Since college wasn’t an option, DeVry made sense.

And so, I moved twelve hundred miles from my home in Montana and met a group of eighteen to nineteen-year-old women from states as far flung as New York, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, and Colorado. They too had left their homes for the dream of working in electronics and a new place in California called Silicon Valley.

Rather than fear math, technology, and electronics, I embraced the concepts. Technology was my ticket to a better life, I reckoned. These DeVry Women who became my lifelong friends had the same idea at a time when people balked at a career in computers.

In 1976, my Boolean Algebra teacher at DeVry drew the table below on the board. He called it an AND function.

When I saw his scribbles, I wasn't aware that my world was about to change forever. None of us had any way of knowing. It was one of the first Boolean Algebra classes taught at DeVry.

I barely passed high school but I was good at algebra. Reducing lengthy equations down to their simplest form was like solving a mystery. I never tired of it. And Boolean Algebra was more fun than regular algebra because the variables could have only two values, True or False. The basic yes or no logic was assuring.

Boolean Algebra was, perhaps, the highlight of my time at DeVry. The bonus was that it's also a basic building block for digital computers.

But, after we graduated from DeVry and got jobs in the male dominated electronics industry, work wasn't logical.

Being the first of anything has a cost. Most of the DeVry Women experienced some form of ridicule or bad jokes told at our expense by threatened male co-workers. I learned to smile and turn away rather than confront or, worse yet, cry.

Nontechnical women thought of me as nerdy and uninteresting. I couldn’t converse about fashion, shopping, or baking. So, maybe they had a point.

For all of its challenges, the electronics industry gave us five "1970's DeVry Women" a foothold in the world. From there, we prospered, two received engineering degrees, one stayed in semiconductors, one went into library science, and another became a nurse.

In April 2024, we gathered with spouses and family to witness the total solar eclipse in Texas. Cloud cover limited the time we saw the actual eclipse to only a few seconds. Yet, we rejoiced in sharing the experience with the friends we'd known since we were on the cusp of womanhood. And we pretended to see the complete eclipse from start to finish, like the dreamers we still were.

Photo: Extended DeVry tribe pretending to watch the solar eclipse in cloudy San Antonio, Texas.

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Thank you to Sue and Ann for providing feedback for this article. Who knew in 1976 that our friendship would endure fifty years? Ann probably did.

Birthday Season

In addition to July being our nation's 250th birthday, it's also the birthday month for Dave and for me a week later. This means that July holds at least two nice dinners out and two fun days dedicated to celebrating another trip around the sun.

May July bring tasty BBQ's, renewed friendships, and an appreciation for the life you've created with the people you've met along the way to today.





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