Circumstances were such that it was necessary that Ed be completely out of the picture. I wanted to be totally independent of him and not have to rely on anyone for the responsibility of my or my children’s life. I had to get a job. I applied at the Emporium and other stores; I answered ads for assembly-line work and for just about every job I felt I could do. You had to show your age on applications back then. And I, at 26, was “too old.” “They” wanted girls right out of high school; besides, I hadn’t worked full-time in seven years, and had children. “Kids,” they said, “get sick so you'll have to take time off.” Having three - - ages seven, five, and three - - simply multiplied the "problem." To tide us over, my father - -recently retired and living on Social Security - - opened a small savings account for me. Desperate, my only hope was Welfare.
We lived on the slopes of John McLaren Park in Visitacion Valley, a south-eastern part of the City, not far from the Cow Palace. One morning, the four of us trekked on dirt foot-paths through empty lots to catch the San Bruno Ave bus to the Welfare office, housed in a dismal, grey monster of a building (now a shopping mall), abutting the entrance to the Stockton Tunnel, on the edge of Union Square. The looks we got as we walked in, from welfare seekers and case-workers alike, said, “What are you doing here?” I picked up my fifteen (at least) page application from the counter and sat next to an older woman. She said that if I expected to get benefits, I had to look like I needed them. “Next time you come in here, try not to look like you’re goin’ shoppin’ at I Magnin’s.” I had no money except for the little my father gave me. We had nice clothes - - some I'd made but most were second-hand. Did we have to look destitute to qualify? I wore a skirt and blouse, heels, and a full-length black coat, earrings, and my hair up in a French knot. I dressed the boys in white shirts, pants, and jackets. The majority of applicants seemed beat down, weary, sickly. In shabby clothes, most slumped or leaned in folding chairs, eyes closed, or staring into space with vacant eyes at nothing. Children ran around playing, or hanging onto their mothers, screaming, or crying. Women of all ages (some grandmothers?) grabbed at and held them, speaking either soothingly or sharply. My boys watched, wide-eyed.
I lit a cigarette and concentrated on completing the form on both sides, then put it on top of a stack piled in a box marked “Applications” sitting on another counter. Behind a partition, under a cloud of cigarette smoke, caseworkers - -men in suits, or sportcoats, and ties and women in skirts, blouses, or dresses - - shuffled papers and stubbed out cigarettes in overflowing ashtrays. Every so often, a case worker would look up and call out a name over a din of typewriters and ringing phones. They'd hustle back and forth carrying thick files, guiding people into small rooms along the walls. I’d brought along Little Golden Books for the boys; I read the Chronicle while we waited. Finally, I heard my name and followed a round-shouldered, tired-looking man in an ill-fitting tweed sport-coat and shiny gabardine slacks. Holding both a lit cigarette and my forms in one hand, he opened the glass door of a room barely large enough for a desk and two chairs, ushered us in and shut the door. He sized me up, looked at the kids and said something like, “You don’t look like our typical welfare recipient.” He read my application, stared at me, sighed, and signed it; shoved it across the desk for me to sign. He handed me a form to take to yet another counter where I was given a book of food-stamps equaling about eighteen dollars for a month’s food, and a Welfare check - - I don’t remember for how much.
After a couple of months of reapplying in person every month and picking up my check and stamps at that dismal office, and having people cast the evil eye at us. I made another stab at getting a job. Again, with no success. I’d been writing to my sister and her husband in Springfield, Mass about my travails. Seems Springfield Life Insurance where my brother-in law worked was opening a branch in San Francisco. He knew the company president and the office manager out here. He wrote a letter of recommendation for me. I went to their new office on Montgomery Street for an interview, and, based on his letter and my previous experience at Met Life, was hired to work in the billing department.
I enrolled my boys in a state-run, pre-school program attached to Commodore Stockton Grammar School, in Chinatown. My oldest was in the second grade, my five-year old had just started Kindergarten, and the youngest, three, stayed in day-care all day. The fees for the program, which got its start during WWII to help mothers who went to work for the "war effort" while their men were overseas, were based on one’s salary. We got up at six in the morning, dressed, ate breakfast, and trekked over the trails to the bus for an hour's ride downtown, where we transferred to a bus to Chinatown. I'd drop my kids at the school, then walk down the hills to my new job.
My boss, white-haired and gruff, took me to a desk where a blond German woman about my age was punching away at a manual calculator as she scrutinized a yards-long tape the machine churned out while she flipped over stacks of checks. She barely looked up when he introduced me and told her she was to train me. Reaching out a hand, she grabbed an empty chair, wheeled it next to hers, and gestured for me to sit down, never taking her eyes off the tape or the checks. I threw my coat over the back of the chair, shoved my purse underneath and sat. Her acrid body odor made my eyes water. She talked me through the process of balancing check totals; she showed me tally sheets of hand written premium amounts and payouts I was to enter into the Ten-Key Add. She had written them in the European manner - - the commas where, in the US, the decimal points go and decimal points, commas - - e.g. for $1,295.00 she wrote $1.295,00. When I pointed this out, she spoke harshly to me in heavily accented English which I could barely understand. So I shut up. Of the many job training courses offered in high school, one was Office Machines (calculators, adding machines, Xerox machines, everything but typewriters - - a whole separate course), which I'd avoided like the plague and now was almost sorry I had.
I’d been on the job a week when I told my boss I had to have a couple hours off to take one of my boys to the doctor. He said, “I hope this doesn’t happen often or we’ll have to let you go. There’s too much work around here for you to be taking time off for your sick kids.” An older woman who sat behind me confided that she’d been working in offices for twenty years. “It was easy for women to get jobs back then. All the men got drafted. But lots of us got fired when they came back. I was lucky. I wasn’t married and I didn’t have kids.”
About a week later, one Sunday, Mom, my step-dad, Carl, and my father came by to see how we were doing. Synchronistically, presciently, my brother, Russ, his wife, Gayle, and some friends with a pickup truck and a camper, just happened to show up on their way home to Los Angeles from a trip to Canada. Though my parents and step-dad knew I'd separated from Ed, I hadn't said anything to Russ until then. His reaction was to take over our lives. Russ is one of these guys who can sell the proverbial refrigerator to an “Eskimo.” When he was seven, he traded a friend an Argyle shoelace - - one shoelace - - for an expensive pocket-knife (Mom made him give it back). He not only convinced me to move to Los Angeles, leave with him right then and there; he also convinced me and Mom that she and Carl, who lived in Sunnyvale, near San Jose, should take my boys until I got a job and a place to live in LA. It was a plan that I would not have ever, suddenly, decided on my own. My father reassured me that he and a neighborhood friend would take care of my household things. Mom and Carl packed their car with the kids' stuff and some small necessary items. We hugged each other, my boys and I cried. I promised I’d come back for them soon. We got in our separate vehicles and took off. I called my boss from LA to tell him I quit.
Next up: I land yet another insurance gig; my co-workers hate me; I rent a cottage near Echo Park, take Greyhound to San Jose to retrieve my boys. My boss Ruth is an amplified version of Rhonda at Met Life; I jeopordize my job when I call her "Medusa, of the Snakes."
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A treatise by a single mother of three on five decades of salaried work.
