In mid-October, 1962, a month or so after I started working at St. Paul, whose offices took over the entire second floor above a vacuum cleaner sales and repair store in a nondescript two-storey building on some side street, a US U-2 spy plane had discovered nuclear missile sites in Cuba, ninety miles off the Florida coast - - missiles capable of reaching that state and most likely others. President Kennedy had been in office just under two years. One afternoon, I had just returned from lunch when someone hurried into the office in a panic: he’d heard on the radio that Soviet warships carrying nuclear missiles were headed for the US. He held up a newspaper confirming the report and lay it on a desk and we all crowded around to read it. The report also speculated that if the US military took out the missile sites, Khrushchev would order a missile attack on us. This would not only be the start of WWIII, but the end of civilization as we knew it. Ever since I'd witnessed what my own parents, relatives, and their friends experienced during WWII, I pointedly avoided anything having to do with war: news, radio, discussions. I vowed I would never become involved with anyone having anything to do with the military or the defense industry, much less become romantically involved, marry or live with anyone who did. I had three boys, I would do anything to keep them out of the military. I did not want to hear, read or think about it.
Stunned, we sat at our desks; some up and left everything, hung up in the middle of a phone call, and walked out. The phones were ringing wildly. Branch Manager, Vice-President Trevor White, let us all go home. Women panicked, worried about their kids; anguishing over stores running out of food and supplies before they could stock up. Now that the possibility of war was figuratively at our doorstep, I honestly did not know what to do. I sat there thinking: If I went out and bought a lot of food and water to last a week or . . . ? how would I get it home? Besides, I had only enough money to get us through till next payday, almost a week away. I called Russ; he wasn't home.
I left and hurried to the kids’ school. When I arrived, the children were sitting quietly. They picked up that something wasn't right by the way we parents and the teachers acted. As I walked home with my young sons to our little bungalow, I reassured them that things were going to be fine. Everything seemed hushed as though the country were holding its collective breath, waiting for the big blast. I had no phone. Russ dropped by and we debated whether or not we should go over to his place so we’d all be nuked together. Eventually, between the two of us, somehow, we felt confident that nothing would happen; that the leaders of both countries were intelligent enough to realize the devastating impact the nuclear attacks would have on the entire world and would back off. People went back to work; days passed; threats lobbed back and forth between the leader of both countries. (We discovered years later, the military of both Russia and the US were pushing Khrushchev and Kennedy to go for it.) A week or so later what became known as the Cuban Missile Crises was over. Two years later, we’d be stunned again and devastated at the news of Kennedy’s assassination.
The Ambassador Hotel, aerial view.
The company moved into a brand new building a few blocks away from the old office, across the street and a half-block down from the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Blvd, so I could still walk to work after dropping my kids off at school. Never one to take breaks in a stale-smelling, airless room, I went out walking in the fresh air to explore the neighborhood. One of my finds was the famous Brown Derby restaurant, also on Wilshire; the hang-out for people in the entertainment business. Shaped like a derby, it sat back from the sidewalk - - a patch of lawn and tropical flowers in front. An awning covered the walkway. It probably looked groovy all lit up at night, but in the daytime? shabby - - brown paint flaking from the crown, yellow patches in the grass. I couldn’t imagine bejeweled celebrities dressed to the nines on the arms of tuxedoed escorts coming to this wreck. (A decade later, when the San Francisco branchof the Los Angeles Mutual Insurance Company sent me to LA for a training session, I had lunch with my boss and a couple of underwriters at the Derby, and treated myself to breakfast the next day - - alone - - at the Ambassador Hotel, on the company’s dime.)
The world-famous Brown Derby
Carol, who met her boyfriend for lunch but took coffee breaks with the women, told me they thought I hated them; they said I was a snob for not sitting with them, I didn’t and wasn’t - - I just liked time alone. Besides, like I said, the atmosphere in the break room stank. Dynamo Florence, short and stocky, let nothing get in the way of her coffee break. She’d be on the phone with an agent, but soon as the bell rang for break, she’d say, “Gotta go,” slam down the receiver in mid-sentence, and race off. I could only guess how much business St. Paul lost because of her. When it rained - - which was rare - - I’d take breaks either by myself so I could read or join Ruth and Bunker. Ruth lived with a woman thirty miles outside of LA. She showed me a picture of her house which sat surrounded by a lovely garden at the foot of some mountains in a remote area. Took her hours to drive in every day, she said, but it was worth it.
Bunker lived in the city. Besides being the company’s chief engineer and go-to guy for information, he also had a proprietary attitude towards the department’s huge, leather bound, map books. They were half-foot thick, eighteen by twenty-four inches and felt like they weighed a ton. Their linen pages were treated the way blank canvases are for oil paintings and were amazingly and beautifully hand-detailed in color with every structure on every block in Los Angeles and neighboring counties. The first time I had to consult one for rating information, I tried to slide it out of the shelf it was stored in, underneath the broad, waist high, flat surface, and lift it up. An underwriter who watched me struggle with the massive thing, wrestled it from me and dropped it on top. When I came back to my desk, Ruth told me that if I needed help next time, if a man is "too busy," she could do it. Sadly, because documents, manuals, forms, and maps were being micro-fiched and computerized, the company started tossing out these beautifully rendered map books. Outraged, Bunker told me and Ruth one day on break that he was rescuing the books from ending up in the dump. He carted them to his car on a dolly and hauled them home.
“Well, what the hell for?” Ruth asked, crinkling her eyes behind her cigarette smoke, and taking another drag.
"I rip out the pages and soak them in the bathtub for weeks to remove the glue-like sizing," Bunker explained, smoothing his breast pocket hanky. "The linen is the best quality," he went on, "Those books had to last decades. Once I soak all the glue off them, I dye them all these colors, cut them up, fringe the edges, and use them for table napkins.” Ruth choked, doubled over, cracking up, smoke coming out of her mouth in spurts.
“If that isn’t the damndest thing I ever heard of. I got better things to do with my time.”
“Yes, like driving two hours to and from work,” Bunker jabbed. I said I thought it was ingenious.
“You would,” Ruth scoffed. Bunker looked at me and winked.
The company sent Bunker out to size up new risks and slap safety recommendations on them. Ruth told me she'd seen him strut around a site in his finest clothes with property owners who argued with him, trying to get around having to comply with fire safety regulations. “Bunker may not look it,” she told me, “but he can be tough.” If I had to compare him with anyone, it would be David Suchet as Inspector Poirot.
Trevor White, probably in his early forties, had prematurely white-hair. I loved the name, hated the man. He threatened to fire me a couple of times because I had to take a day or two off when my kids got sick or had doctors' appointments. Ruth stood up for me; I get my work done. The agents who send us business liked me. "So back off," she told Trevor, echoing my exact take on the situation. One summer, he announced that we were way behind on getting renewal policies out, so had to work mandated overtime on Saturdays or risk being laid off. I couldn't afford to lose my job. I hired a sitter and came in a couple of times. It wasn't good. One morning, Ruth saw me sitting staring into space, trying to figure out what to do.
"What's wrong, doll?" she asked.
"I can't work Saturdays. School isn't open. I had to hire a baby-sitter and her fee ate up my overtime pay. It's not worth it, Ruth."
"Don't worry. I'll tell Trevor," she assured me, "I'll soften him up." Whatever she said to him worked.
Jo, an older woman near retirement, was Ruth’s buddy. She wore long skirts, loose blouses, and tied her stringy, dark hair in a knot at the back of her head, like Raskolnikov's pawnbroker. Jo sat way in the back of the offece. She had been with the company the longest so still had an oak desk. After the move, the company had replaced most of the wooden desks with modern Steelcase ones. One day, I heard Jo gasp and moan like she was having an orgasm. What the hell was going on? She came sweeping into our department ooohhhhing and aahhhhing. “Oh, everyone please come and see my new desk!” She’d been lying in wait for the furniture movers to wheel in her very own Steelcase on a carpeted dolly. Women, including Ruth, rushed over to Jo’s new desk, ran their hands over it, opened and closed the drawers. I was one of a few - - mostly men - - who stayed put. The whole scene was weird - - beyond me. Another time she came swanning into our department, “When you’re as old as me, your teeth just fall out!” she exclaimed, chuckling, holding high a bloody molar she’d just plucked from her jaw, a trickle of blood dripping from a corner of her mouth.
Chapter 6, Part Four: Demonized by a religious fanatic. Sign of the Cross displayed to ward off evil of unmarried pregnant new hire. Ruth changes her image, sort of. And the fate of the "breadwinner". Men - - married and single come on to me. A tragedy.
