Banker

One job skill I’ve never had is looking for work.  In the fall of 1972 I went looking for work.  Mabel Wedlaw at the unemployment office sent me to Bank of America.  So I became a banker.  I had one other prospect also from Mabel for a company called Western Gear.  I took the B of A job.  It was a good job as a public relations representative, a writer for B of A.  It paid $9,000 a year, a good salary in 1972 and about $4,000 a year more than I expected fresh out of college.   

I wasn’t a very good writer and what I didn’t know at the time is that writing like any other trade is a skill to be learned.  I thought I had to be good at it out of the blocks and I wasn’t.  I was so uncomfortable having to do something I had no confidence in, I quickly got out of it and went into community relations with Bank of America.  Community relations was about talking to people; organizing people in taking action.   I learned how to do it as I went.  I don’t think I had a preconception of how good I should be. 

I transferred to Bank of America’s Urban Affairs Department and there I organized volunteer efforts that taught consumer finance in adult school, matched mentors for Job Corps participants and made connections between the bank and community groups.  I got to work for Joe Angello and I began learning how to interact with people. 

Before I got sober I had a tendency to burn myself out wherever I went.  In those days I was impressive in the start and poor in the long run, a flash in the pan.  My ambition took me to credit training just as my credit at Urban Affairs was running out.  I became a loan officer.  I really wasn’t very good at that.  I had some success opening a new office for the Walnut Fair Oaks branch as the agency manager.  After that it was downhill.  I found myself in over my head and after two years I fled Bank of America into commercial sales for a company that sold paper and rotary press forms. 

I made good money, but sales either takes a huge amount of self confidence or more often monster insecurities disguised as self confidence.  I had neither in sufficient amount.  I did a lot of birdwatching that year instead of selling paper.  One time the manager's wife came into the office and later commented to her husband, "For a guy who supposedly works indoors, he sure has quite a tan."  After a year I got back into credit and became the manger of mobile home financing operation for a medium sized independent insurance brokerage.  The credit market tightened up and I was struggling to make a living and after nine months I was lucky to get a job with City National Bank. 

By this time I had enough experience to actually learn to become a loan officer at City National Bank.  I enjoyed it.  Unfortunately, my alcoholism which had not served me well anywhere, got worse at City National Bank and my career was grinding down to nothing.  When I joined City National they were a small but dynamic Beverly Hills Jewish bank.  I started at Encino and after a year and a half I got myself the job of assistant manager of the Century City Office and failed completely.  There were challenges in the branch but I was not up to them.  I remember one time I had stayed up until the wee hours of the morning drinking wine by myself.  I came to work in the morning smelling of wine and still a little drunk.  Most of the time I was oblivious how others might see my drinking, but even I knew coming to work drunk was not a good thing.  

I was nearly fired, not for drinking but just incompetence, not measuring up.  My job at the bank was saved by a friend, a drinking buddy in credit administration, and I became a relief loan officer at various branches that needed someone temporarily.  I recovered a little and got assigned to a branch with an incompetent and tyrannical manager for whom no one else would work and I couldn’t do any better.  I got sober while working at the Sunset Doheny branch.  In AA they say you have to reach bottom before you can get sober.  In my career as a banker, Sunset Doheny was pretty near the bottom. 

Joe’s wife was from a well known and wealthy family and he rode their money.  The branch itself catered to wealthy Beverly Hills types, rock and roll bands and minor celebrities.  Cher without makeup or presence, looking like a washed out mouse, spent hours with our new accounts clerk who was a friend of hers.  Joe tortured his employees because he could and my customers were tattooed and pierced rockers in the days before that was common.    

In 1984 after 8 months of sobriety I left City National Bank and went to Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank in downtown Los Angeles.  As a career move it quickly proved to be the wrong place to go.  My first day instead of going to an office in headquarters as I thought I was, I was shown my desk on the branch floor, next to a retreaded B of A Vice President who I had known many years ago.  I thought I should have left the first day, but my pride kept me there.  DKB and its predecessor Japan California Bank had been in California 25 years taking care of the interests of its Japanese customers and trying to tap into the rich California market without any success.  They didn’t have a clue before and they didn’t have a clue after I joined them. 

The Japanese officers there worked hard to help their Japanese customers get into the California market, to take whatever technologies they were looking for, make quick real estate profits and generally take advantage of the American market in any way they could.  I stayed at DKB 9 years and after I left the orgy of buying eventually collapsed with the Tokyo real estate bubble and so did DKB, a zombie bank it was swallowed up by other Japanese banks who were only marginally healthier. 

I was still learning how to live a sober life when I joined DKB.  I quickly realized that being a token American officer in an organization that was lost was not the worst way to make a living.  I got a decent paycheck without very demanding work and I could put my energy and drive into learning to live sober.  At DKB they were strict about punctuality.  It was important to get to work on time and no one should leave before quitting time.  What I did in between, they really didn’t care.  I went to noontime AA meetings and long lunches with my sober friends afterwards.  My downtown AA community was my classroom for life and my evening meetings in South Pasadena were an opportunity to develop my leadership and community skills.

After the first year Yoshihiro Hayashi came to DKB from Tokyo and we became friends and I enjoyed working for Hayashi-san.  I felt like I was doing something and I learned how to work with the Japanese.  I’ve always enjoyed foreign environments and I learned a lot about collaborative work from my Japanese friends.  After getting used to that environment I much preferred it to the competitive American environment where people often seemed to work against each other.    

In 1990 I became the CRA officer for DKB.  CRA, the Community Reinvestment Act, was an obscure law that the first Bush administration revitalized as a way to put the pressure for economic development on the private sector and take the pressure off the Federal government.  Banks couldn’t operate without a satisfactory CRA exam, including foreign banks, who had no clue on how to develop business and lend in “disadvantaged” areas.  The meaning of “disadvantaged” at the time was people of color and areas where they were concentrated. 

DKB had no idea at the time that I actually had experience in working with community groups, and Latinos and African Americans. 

I went to meetings hosted by the regulators and consultants in the field.  I began to get a sense of CRA.  There was a regular circle of CRA people among the more sophisticated banks.  They didn’t have much time for the Japanese and Chinese who were mostly clueless.  They weren’t helpful to me at all with the exception of Bob McNealy, a very good man from Union Bank.  Slowly I began to figure things out.  I was lucky to link up with an old friend from City National Bank, Gordon Lejeune, who had become City National Bank’s CRA officer. 

In 1991 I was a member of the board of Casa de las Amigas, a women’s alcohol and drug recovery house and that year I became the chairman of their annual fundraising event.  I had a lot of help and guidance from people with experience and a wonderful committee and the fundraiser came off very well.  I learned a huge amount about organizing and got a great confidence boost. 

So at the end of 1991 when I finally had secured a seat on a CRA committee organized by the major banks, I was able to join Gordon on an effort to form a Community Development Corporation, one of the goals of the committee.  In March, we had a well attended public meeting with the all the banks and community groups from South Central Los Angeles to explore the way a CDC could be formed.  In April, the Rodney King verdict civil disturbance occurred.  In the aftermath from my work on the CDC I knew the players, City Hall, the banking community, their regulators and the community groups. 

The third day of the disturbance I volunteered to work for City Councilmember Mark Ridley Thomas and joined his office as a loaned executive for 90 days to work on the CDC.  Earlier Mark had given us his support for a CDC if I promised to follow through and make it happen.  DKB didn’t understand why they had to loan me to the City, but they were intimidated into going along with it. 

I spent 1992 and into 1993 working on the goals of the Community Reinvestment Committee.  We put together a coalition of banks that formed a CDC and got it off the ground in 1993.  I also worked with Bob McNealy on the same committee to get a Community Financial Resource Center opened at Martin Luther King Boulevard and Figueroa.  A couple of years later Bob and I were both screwed in succession by the executive director I pushed to hire.  She didn’t like the oversight Bob and then myself demanded on what became her own personal juggernaut.   

The director is still there but the CFRC is one of those organizations that in my opinion still gets funding but doesn’t do much other than promote itself.  The CDC was killed by Bank of America.  I didn’t realize forming the CDC was a back room agreement between Don Mullane of B of A and the City of Los Angeles during the Security Pacific “merger” talks.  After a couple of years the Southern California Business Development Corporation was struggling, it could have survived, and Don had succeeded as chairman and shut it down.  After the buyout was completed he had no further use for it. 

I also worked with Sister Diane of Esperanza Community Housing Corporation.  Esperanza built real affordable housing.  Esperanza and groups like it, built and rehabilitated housing in South Central Los Angeles.  They did great work that benefited the communities they served but it wasn’t much in comparison to the need.  Los Angeles needed real affordable housing and instead we got token affordable housing.  It’s always been difficult.  Do you take what’s doable or do you strive for more.  In the post-Reagan era we did the doable.     

DKB took credit for all of my work with the bank coalitions and community groups and received a satisfactory CRA. 

In 1994 I was ready to quit banking, my youngest son was graduating from high school.  For my own needs I no longer had to make the money I had been making but then I got a call from California Commerce Bank, a Los Angeles subsidiary of Banamex, the largest bank in Mexico.  Banamex had a serious CRA problem and needed help.  I was learning to speak Spanish and a year working for Banamex seemed like a great opportunity. 

I continued working with the community groups I knew.  I had an expertise in fundraising and building bridges between community groups and the banks.  I continued to work with Sister Diane and California Commerce Bank had a president active with Catholic Charities and I worked with Catholic Charities in supporting a Women’s Shelter.  I enjoyed working at Banamex.  I was well paid and when I went to the Bay Area, they kept me on working my own schedule and showing up when I needed to.  It was hard to give up a job where I made good money doing only what I wanted to do.  I stayed with California Commerce Bank until 1999.  I quit banking in October of that year and took a year off with the intention of looking for work in a completely different field. 

When the year was over I got a job as a consumer credit counselor, then a juvenile hall counselor and finally as a State Park Ranger.        

Three Wives

Cathy

When I first met Cathy, she was just gorgeous.  What an exciting young woman she was.  She was obviously smart, a bit zany, and had her feet firmly on the ground.  It was in 1966 and we still weren’t quite out of the thin tie 50’s mentality, but Cathy was at the vanguard of the 60’s.  My hair was short and my shirts were buttoned down.  Cathy was already on her own track.  She wore long dresses she made herself, wore her hair long and expressed herself freely.  She was an artist and loved books and movies.  She worked at Penny’s part time, was going to Mount St. Mary’s on a scholarship and came from a working class family.  She did all the cooking for her family and was a great cook.

I had never met anyone like her and she was crazy about me right from the start.  We were both out there, but we didn’t realize we were both pretty conservative.  Neither one of us used drugs.  I smoked marijuana maybe two or three times before I joined the service and I don’t think Cathy smoked her first joint until many years later.  Our friends were the artists of Loyola and some were smoking pot and using LSD but we were high on each other and high on life. 

Within a month or two I told her I loved her, which was quite true, and she loved me.  We were inseparable, a couple in the circle of friends I had at Loyola and with her family and their friends in the parish at St. Anthony’s in El Segundo. 

We were both working class Catholic.  Cathy’s parents were Midwest Germans and not that different than my Irish father and Ozark mother.  Both our fathers were in the aircraft business, doing almost the same job.

Being Catholic and from the backgrounds we were we didn’t talk about sex or our relationship.  We groped each other and made out until our hormones screamed, but our background and attitudes held us back from “going all the way.”  It was a different time and that was our culture.  It seems strange now, but it was pretty normal in our world.  The only thing to do was to get married. 

In May I asked her to marry me about the same time a classmate of mine from grammar school was killed in Vietnam.   So I went in the Air Force to avoid the draft.  When I got orders for England I came home on leave and married Cathy.  It was a great wedding, a quickly arranged event with family and friends pitching in.  Everyone was there, her parish friends and her parents’ friends, my childhood friends and family and all of our friends from college. 

It was a wonderful celebration and we had a wonderful honeymoon.  We drove to San Francisco and spent a week there exploring the City and mostly staying in our motel room.  We couldn’t have been happier.     

Our marriage was destroyed by our inability to talk about what was important, to be honest with each other and to face the disappointment of reality together.  It was also handicapped by alcoholism. 

We had a respite in the anguish of trying to live together when we joined Marriage Encounter in 1973 or 1974.  We renewed our intimacy and worked hard at being a couple.  Unfortunately Marriage Encounter didn’t address our two issues, alcoholism and true forgiveness.  Ten years later our marriage broke up on those rocks and we separated and then divorced. 

Susan

In July, 1994, I was introduced to Susan by Kathy Kenney, a woman I had met a couple of years earlier through work.  I was trying to recruit members of a work committee to form a Community Development Corporation.  The Federal Reserve Bank people told me I should meet Kathy Kenney in San Francisco.  She worked on the same things up there and they said she could advise me on contacts and people she had met in LA.  Kathy and I became friends.  Kathy was married and I think was a natural matchmaker.  

I had recently broken up with a beautiful but crazy woman in LA and I was getting tired of the roller coaster ride of the women I seemed to pick for myself.  The women I was most attracted to all seemed to be beautiful, intelligent and crazy.  I told my friends like Kathy that I was open to the idea of blind dates.  I had more confidence in my friends to pick good matches than I did in myself.

Kathy and another woman, Jan, took the charge seriously and did just that.  Jan’s friend was a wonderful woman but unfortunately not much attraction there.  And Kathy insisted I come north to meet a friend of hers, a work friend, who was just the right woman for me.   

Before I came up to San Francisco she warned me that Susan was the daughter of Rita, an LA City Councilmember and a former President of the School Board.  I had met Rita a few times and certainly knew about her, but I didn’t know her personally and I don't think before dating Susan I ever showed up on her radar.  

To me it made Susan all that more interesting.  I went up to San Francisco to a dinner party at Kathy's house.  Susan was there along with some other guests.  She is a Cal grad.  She had come up to San Francisco to go to school and stayed in the Bay Area and ended up working for Willie Brown when he was the Speaker of the Assembly.  She was political but outside her mother’s shadow.  I respected that; Susan was making it on her own. 

She had been involved in a number of issues and especially disabilities.  She knew Kathy through Kathy’s husband David who ran a nonprofit that served the deaf community.  Susan was in charge of disability services for Pacific Bell and on David’s board.  The phone company was under legislative mandate to provide services to the disabled and Susan’s job was to meet the mandate. 

My job was also based on a government mandate and while we didn’t work with the same groups, our worlds were overlapping.  We had a lot in common. 

She was an attractive woman, 36 when I met her, short like her mother with a manner and style that was strong and forceful, but she was charming at the dinner party and we agreed to meet again.   

She went on vacation to the Caribbean and our first date was in September.  I planned the perfect date, afternoon tea in the tea room at the Biltmore Hotel downtown and then dinner at La Serenata de Garibaldi, an elegant gourmet restaurant Mexico City style.   La Serenata was closed and we ended up at a very good Thai restaurant in Santa Monica, a favorite of a previous girlfriend.  Afterwards I took her back to her mother’s apartment on Bunker Hill and we stopped at the Water Court of one of the new towers and watched the water show, something new at that time.  We talked and told each other about ourselves.  It was a wonderful date and she was an interesting and solid young woman. 

Our next date was in San Francisco.  Susan’s considered herself a bit of a wanton woman, so when we got to her house we jumped in the sack immediately.  Unfortunately, I didn’t find Susan all that attractive, I’m not sure why, but I was able to get past it.  She was sincere but it all seemed very mechanical and forced.  It got better and Susan was a wonderful companion. 

After a few commuting dates back and forth, we decided I would move up to Mill Valley where Susan had a beautiful home on the side of Mount Tamalpais above Boyle Park.  Susan was interesting.  She was successful, doing very well at the Phone Company and sure of herself.  I could see why Kathy thought we were a good match. 

San Francisco was exciting.  I loved the City and the East Bay.  Marin and Mill Valley were beautiful but my fantasy of being Irish working class kept me from enjoying it.  But in a place where I didn’t fit in I had to admit, it was an incredibly beautiful spot.  Mill Valley is this once small town nestled among the redwoods on the south side of Mount Tam.  It had become a place for successful writers, lawyers and doctors.  For people from the City it was a place to visit on weekends and stroll the shops and galleries.  For me it was too expensive and too self consciously cool.

A year after we met, I proposed to her and in April of 1996 we were married.  I should have had some second thoughts along the way but I didn’t.  All of our friends thought it was a good idea.  Susan’s family liked it.  I liked them.  It seemed to make sense.  Susan’s lack of punctuality, she could leave me waiting for hours, her long work hours, and her inflexibility were all there, but she was a good person and she sincerely tried.  It seemed like we could do OK together. 

So what went wrong?  I think we set each other as a low priority.  We were busy leading our own lives and the other person either wasn’t cooperating or didn’t meet our expectations.  I became more and more irritated by Susan’s disregard for me and expectations that I would cook, clean and fold her laundry. 

In 2004 we found it easier to live apart, Susan in LA and me in the Bay Area.  Our excuse was our jobs, but it really was better for our relationship.  A long distance relationship where we only got together one week a month was better than living together. 

That changed in 2007 when Susan moved back in with me in my house in Mount Diablo State Park.   After a few months back together it was apparent we didn't like each other very much.  When my long smoldering friendship with Suzette turned into an affair, it seemed like it was time to face the music with Susan.  We separated in September, 2007 and divorced in June, 2008. 

Suzette

Suzette and I got married April 7, 2012.  We had been living together since July, 2009, nearly three years, we had been in a relationship since 2007, five years, and we had known each other since 2001, eleven years. 

Suzette and I first met 11 years ago when we both worked at Consumer Credit Counselors of San Francisco.  Suzette was 28 years old.  It was two years after she graduated from Cal.  She had a son, Arom, born in 1995 and was in a relationship with John his father.  They lived in Albany.  

We became lunch buddies.  She is and was a beautiful young woman, bright and full of life.  I enjoyed her youth, her humor, and her warmth.  After I left CCC we remained friends and every so often we would get together for lunch.  The first few times I told my wife but after that it didn’t seem quite appropriate to still be meeting a beautiful young woman for lunch long after we had worked together. 

When Susan and my marriage evolved into living in separate cities, Suzette and I got together more regularly for lunch.  Suzette emailed me to get together one time when Susan was going to be in the Bay Area.  I said in my reply that with Susan in the picture it was difficult to schedule lunch sometimes.  At the mere mention of Susan, I didn’t hear from Suzette for a year and a half.  I had broken the unspoken rule, neither one of us ever talked about our partners.  

Susan moved back up to the Bay Area and that wasn’t going very well when I received an email from Suzette.  When I hadn't heard from her for so long, I had guessed that maybe there was more to our friendship than what we admitted to ourselves.  In my reply to Suzette’s invitation to get together I said something about it.  In return I received a very surprising love poem.  And our affair caught fire.  We both had grown up Catholic so even a torrid affair took a couple of meetings before we held hands.  After all we had been friends for six years with feelings we never acknowledged and in all that time we never touched. 

By this time in my marriage Susan and I were mostly angry at each other.  I didn’t feel I was risking anything I would miss if I was discovered.  In July I told Susan I wanted to end our relationship.  She asked me if there was another woman.

As strong as my feelings were for Suzette at the time, in my own mind I wasn’t leaving Susan for Suzette.  My excitement about Suzette just told me it was time.  I wanted to end my relationship with Susan and Suzette gave me the energy and the immediate reason to do it.  So I said, “No.” 

Susan had been reading my emails and called me on it.  We separated in September when she could move back to her house in Mill Valley and we divorced in June of 2008.  Suzette and I kissed for the first time a month after Susan moved out; it was a memorable kiss.  I knew Suzette was a tease and it seemed that our friendship had an element of the dance of the seven veils to it.  

In October Suzette finally told her partner John there was someone else and he moved out in December. She told me it was something she had wanted to do for a long time.  Suzette did not tell her son about our relationship.  After that it seemed like we were still having an affair, only now we were keeping it a secret from Arom.   We never got into a normal dating relationship.  It was much more tenuous than that for over a year and as time passed she got more and more distant. 

And then in March of 2009 she told me she was pregnant and she wanted to keep the baby.  Shortly after that we went through a difficult four weeks while we waited to learn if our baby had Down’s syndrome.  She didn’t.  Suzette agreed to move to Angel Island to live with me.  Just before the move in July she told her son Arom they were moving to Angel Island and that she was pregnant.  At 14 Arom was not happy at all and in the coming year he did his best to make me pay for it.  I understood that. 

Suzette and I had planned to get married in August before the baby came.  But when the time got close things were too crazy and Suzette was overly stressed.  We postponed the wedding and concentrated on getting ready for the baby.    

Paloma was born October 12, 2009, I had a heart attack, May, 2010, and Arom moved to Florida to be with his dad in September, 2010. 

In April, 2011 we moved off the island to Oakland and in November I retired.  Living without Arom acting out around us made our relationship easier. And moving off the island made it even more so.  Wherever we went I introduced Suzette as my wife, including at the church we began attending, the Unitarian Church of Berkeley. 

I went to Kaiser one day for an appointment and they asked me if my spouse had health insurance.  I began filling out a form with the clerk with information about Suzette.  I said I needed to call her to get her employer’s address and her social security number.  As I was calling I remembered Suzette and I weren’t married.  I laughed at myself and thought I should fix that.  I went home to tell Suzette.  For some reason that afternoon she wasn’t talking to me. 

A month later I asked her to marry me.   We were married April, 2012. 

My Education

I started the first grade at St. Robert Bellarmine Grammar School in Burbank at the age of 5.  In those days Catholic schools didn’t have kindergarten and we didn’t go to public schools, even for kindergarten.  One of our classmates had gone to kindergarten and was always suspect after that.  Maybe he wasn't really one of us.  Our suspicions were confirmed years later when he transferred to Burbank HS in the 10th grade.    

St. Robert’s was a good place.  It had some odd characters.  The pastor, Monsignor Keating, lived in his own world, an amalgam of Catholicism, Americanism, and patriotic devotionalism.  He changed the name of the parish from Holy Trinity to St. Robert Bellarmine.  Bellarmine was a 17th century Jesuit Inquisition Judge.  Among the trials he was responsible for was Galileo's trial.  He is particularly hated by the English.  It seems he was the judge for a number of auto de fe’s of English heretics.  According to Monsignor Keating the Declaration of Independence was based on Bellarmine’s writings.  I took the Monsignor’s word for it.  I’ve never read Bellarmine. 

According to Monsignor the Inquisitor had been one of the foundational writers on political rights.  This was blended with the monsignor’s experience with the New York Fighting 69th.  The original Fighting Irish were a New York National Guard Regiment that distinguished itself in the Civil War, the Spanish American War and World War I.  Monsignor Keating for a short time was a stateside chaplain to them.  So we wore World War I uniforms, the girls wore nurses’ uniforms from the same period.  We were the Bellarmine-Jefferson Guards.  It was very complicated and included Cardinal Pacelli who had once visited Burbank and St. Roberts and then became Pius XII.  Pacelli is sometimes known as Hitler’s Pope.  A humanist inquisitor and a quisling Pope were icons at St. Robert Bellarmine Grammar School.  The nuns just went around it as much as they could. 

One of the assistants Father Granger had survived the Bataan death march. After that he became an Episcopalian seminarian and then converted to Catholicism.  I remember some of his ideas seemed a little different.  One of the nuns told us not to listen too closely to Father Granger, that his doctrine sometimes wasn't completely Catholic.

In the 7th grade it was Father Granger who gathered all of us all together in the church and gave us a lecture on one of the most horrendous of sins being committed by people like us.  He wanted us to know this sin was not only spiritual suicide but also a health hazard.  We had no idea what he was talking about.  I don’t know if it was then or later that we figured out he was talking about French kissing.  I think it was Sister Francetta who after this incident told us that Fr. Granger was just a little crazy.      

The nuns, members of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, tolerated Monsignor Keating and Father Granger.  The BVM's were an order founded in America and based in Iowa.  The order ran Clark College in Dubuque and Mundelein University in Chicago.  The BVMs were a progressive and open minded group of women, down to earth and practical like their Midwestern roots.  In those days they wore voluminous black habits with starched stiff headdresses, boxes around their faces and stiff collars around their necks, starkly white.  They wore heavy black belts under a layer of black cloth with large rosaries attached.  They were quite intimidating in this garb and when we offended their sense of decorum looked like battleships cruising toward you, a ruler or even a yardstick in hand. 

They taught reading, writing, arithmetic, history, church history and religion.  I don’t think we had any science classes and we did art but nothing frivolous except for etching.  I hated etching.  It made no sense to me and was just plain messy.  I liked the nuns.  I did well in school; I was one of the brighter kids and got attention for my performance. 

I think they did a good job of transmitting to us mid-century Irish American Catholicism, politically progressive, morally strict, with a touch but not too much mystery and devotionalism.  We believed in the Pope and John Kennedy.   

When I graduated from Grammar School it seemed important to my mother that I go to an all boys school.  My father was totally passive about everything in the family and left all the decisions about his children to my mother.  My father had been a player as a young man and I think between my mother and my older sister, there was some agreement that I was going to be protected from involvement with women.  Anyhow my mother chose St. Francis of Assisi High School in La Canada.  It was 12 miles away in La Canada in the days before freeways.  The boys in my class who didn’t go to the parish high school went to Notre Dame or Pater Noster which were both closer to Burbank.  The parish high school was a perfectly good co-ed high school where my sisters and most of my classmates went.   

I went to this Capuchin Franciscan High School completely out of the area.  My mother had read about Padre Pio, an Italian Capuchin priest with the stigmata. I read it too.  It seemed a little fantastic and far away.  At that time miracles seemed to me like snow, something that happened far from Burbank.  My mother liked the miraculous and there was a priest at St. Francis, Fr. Cyril who was reputed to have miraculous powers of healing.  Fr. Cyril was the principal at St. Francis and in the four years I was there I didn’t see any miraculous healings or even hear about them, but he was a good man, serious about his religious practice and vows and a strict math teacher. 

It seemed OK when I went there, but as the years passed and I realized what it was like in comparison to other schools, I found it less and less attractive.  It was a football school.  With only 400 boys in the school in my last year there St. Francis won the large schools Southern California Football championship.  The football coach was legendary and taught, if you could call it that, history at the school.  He also had the cafeteria concession and a number of other businesses connected to the school so that he was able to make a living that kept him there.  During football season he began his class each Monday with the statement, “Football players to the front, toadies to the rear,” and then would rehash the game on Friday excluding the rest of us.   

I didn’t play football and I didn’t like Jack Friedman.  The school was all about sports; academics were secondary.  Many of the teachers were also coaches.  Athletes were treated well and the rest of us were second class citizens.  I became an athlete later in life, but at the time, I lived too far away and because I had a November birthday I was smaller than my classmates in the beginning.  Add to that astigmatism, I couldn’t see the ball very well, and athletics were an ordeal for me where my poor performance was ridiculed.  I wasn’t an athlete and I didn’t fit in at St. Francis but I spent three hours commuting to get there each day. 

The school was in a wealthy neighborhood and took on the values and ethics of upper middle class La Canada.  I came from a pro-Union working class background and didn’t have much in common with my classmates and didn’t see eye to eye with most of my teachers who, mostly Irishman from rural areas, were seduced by the sophistication of wealth.  One of the priests was particularly taken with the fight against Communism and we read and studied the right wing literature he liked.  He liked to point out the insidious ways of Communist like the hammer and sickle hidden on the penny.  I went along with all that silliness for awhile.  I even read J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit.  By my junior year I had rejected all that crap, but that was much against the tide at St. Francis.      

When I had sons of my own I sent them to Loyola High School near downtown Los Angeles where they got a decent education along with athletics and arts. 

It’s funny, I was always one of the smart kids, but today as the social networks put me more in contact with my classmates from high school, I’m surprised that guys I thought of as thick headed athletes and others who didn't seem that bright went on to very successful careers, doctorates, MDs, JDs, and success in business.  They certainly aren't dumb and in retrospect maybe I wasn’t all that smart, smart enough, but not as smart as I thought I was.  I’m good in school; I still do well in classes, but . . .

Probably one of the most important contributors to my education was the public library.  The Burbank Public Library was outstanding.  It was well run and had a wonderful collection.  I started going to the library when I was in the first or second grade.  My first books were Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and through the years I worked my way into novels, history and current affairs.  Every week I went to the library for a fresh supply. 

From the first grade on I was a good reader and reading was my pleasure.  I enjoyed reading stories on my own.  I graduated from college as an English major, but really I was just continuing on with my first grade success.  I was a reading major.  I was good at it early on and I’m still good at it now.  I read well.  Of course, reading as much as I did it was inevitable that I would think about becoming a writer, but that didn’t really occur to me until much later. 

I wrote voluminous letters to my sisters away at college in the Midwest, but not much else.  I hated writing in school.  I never understood themes, starting sentences and all those rules.  It would have made sense it they talked about storytelling, but the standard instruction about writing a good paragraph left me cold.

I did my six months in the seminary and then applied to Loyola University.  My mother would pay for college as long as it was Catholic.  It was that conspiracy between my mother and my sisters again, to make sure I didn’t become a player like my father.  Somehow going to all male Catholic schools was going to make a difference.

I loved Loyola.  It was all about academics.  I didn’t seem to be the only smart kid around; everybody was smart.  I remember one young man, obviously brainy, still played the fool and I wanted to tell him, “It’s OK, the bullies and jocks aren’t in charge anymore.”

My freshman year I took English IA.  It was taught by Michael Duncan.  Mike had us write in a journal every day, anything we wanted.  I did the exercise somewhat, though at the end of the month I had to write furiously to turn it in.  Those were some of my first stories.  Mike liked what I wrote, gave me an A in the class, and I changed my major to English. 

After that I took the Survey of English Literature, the big hurdle for English majors.  The course went from Beowulf to Virginia Wolf.  At Loyola it was taught by Dr. Carothers, a wonderful gentleman. I barely passed it but I took a modern literature course from Dr. Erlandson, the department chairman, and I did well in that. Overall I was creditable as an English major.

Mike and I became friends.  That meant more to Mike than it did to me and when he tried to kiss me one time, that made me rethink his patronage but I was already an English major by then. 

I wrote my first stories at Loyola.  I published in the campus literary magazine.  I liked the stories.  Other people did as well.  That was the first time I began to see myself as a writer or dream of being a writer.  One of my best moments as a writer came some years later when in argument with one of Cathy's friends from college, her friend cited a story she had read to make her point.  As she described the story Cathy and I looked at each other and it was a story I had written.

I dropped out of college after my sophomore year.  It was a combination of a mid-college crisis and the military draft.  Uncle Sam didn’t want to give me a second chance to get my feet back on the ground.  He needed me in Vietnam.  I joined the Air Force and after training was sent to England.  It was pure luck.  My class from Keesler AFB drew the right number and we went to England for three years.  I went to night school classes at Chicksands Elementary school.  They were good classes.  When I left the Air Force in August, 1971, I had 60 units from the University of Maryland European Division

I started UCLA in September 1971.  One of my first classes was Pat Kelly’s Literary Criticism.  Pat asked the class how many of us were transfer students.  Nearly two thirds of us raised our hands.  In the group I became part of, it was a rare bird that had started UCLA after high school and stuck with it.  We were almost all transfers from somewhere.   

After my lackluster second year at Loyola University and my year of college credit from the University of Maryland I was a junior/senior transfer student.  I had courses in Shakespeare, Folklore and American Literature behind me.  I was an avid reader and a sometime writer.  It seemed natural I should continue on as an English major. 

UCLA was fabulous.  I took medieval courses from Ed Condren and Milton from Chris Gross.  Professor Dick taught Drama and Pat Kelly Literary Criticism.  The professors at UCLA were amazing.  They were original thinkers in their fields.  They were the authors of the articles in the journals on the library shelves.  Until I got my grades the first quarter I thought I was out of my league, but somehow I managed to ace all of my courses except for Milton.  Chris Gross was a young phenom in Milton at the time and all of the professors were excited that UCLA had landed him.  I just didn’t get Milton, I’m not sure why.  Thirty years later I finally read Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and loved it.  For some reason I couldn't get it before.   

My circle of friends were also an amazing group, talented young women and men.  Llon King was part of our group and there was a young Marine veteran who had been at Khe Sanh. There were Theodora Poloynis and other amazing women.  Even after four years in the service I felt liberated in public school.  I told people I finally made it to public school after the 15th grade.   I had a wife and two children and I was in a hurry to graduate.  I took four courses a quarter for four quarters.  I paid for UCLA with money I had saved in the service and we lived on $250 a month from the GI Bill. 

I took a course in Folklore that was taught by a young woman eight months pregnant who got up on desk and sang a cappella songs from Appalachia.  It was unearthly, ethereal and very beautiful.  We studied Gilgamesh.  I took Russian Literature in translation and a class in Celtic Literature from Pat Ford. 

In May, 1972 Nixon started mining harbors in North Vietnam.  For me it wasn’t the mining itself but just that we were still escalating the fight in Vietnam, a war we had already lost.  I enthusiastically joined the anti-War gatherings and protests.  Helicopters began circling the campus.  There was a feeling in the University that we were under siege by the establishment outside.

Jane Fonda and Angela Davis spoke at the rally on campus and they sounded like a breath of fresh air.  They made sense and it was the mainstream, the newspapers, and the rest of our world that seemed to be out of touch with reality.  My brief three years in England and exposure to another point of view, even though it was just the English establishment instead of the American establishment, made me sensitive to how much of the news is just business and government propaganda.     

The protests went on all week.  A few days into it there was a fire at Murphy Hall one morning.  Some protestors had set a mini-cart ablaze.  The local Fire Department was called and they refused to come without police protection.  There is a UCLA Police Department but they insisted on the LAPD.  Someone approved that and the Los Angeles Police Department came on campus.  They were confronted by about a 1,000 students.  No one at UCLA wanted the LAPD.  They were known for their brutality and heavy handed tactics.  The protest began to grow.  By noon, the LAPD declared UCLA an illegal assembly.  By three or four o’clock 10,000 students confronted the LAPD.  The police charged the students with batons and when that didn't work they drove their cars at high speed through the crowds.  Nothing they did could budge us.  We waited them out and at 5:30 that afternoon the LAPD left campus.  Within the hour the students disbursed and went on their way and the campus returned to normal. 

Many years later I was talking to an auditor at City National Bank.  Richard was a vice president and a very stolid member of the establishment at the bank.  It turned out he went to UCLA at the same time I did.  We compared notes.  We had been standing only a few feet apart from each other during the demonstration when the police cars were ripping through the crowds. 

I had been four years in the service but I had never seen anything like it.  The LAPD were crazed and full of rage.  The students were adamant and courageous.  The US withdrew from Vietnam a year later.  The War ended three years later in 1975. 

At the end of the spring quarter I went to visit the registrar and reviewed my record with a clerk at a window.  She said I had all my requirements and I just needed another 12 units to graduate.  I think there may have been some paperwork.  So based on what she said I quit going to school after the summer quarter.  I put UCLA behind me and hoped I would get a diploma one day.  Some months later I received one in the mail. 

UCLA was impersonal but what a great experience.  I loved it.  It was only one year there but I am a Bruin forever.  Go Bruins!

In Japan people get jobs based on where they went to school and when I joined Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank of California I was hired because I had graduated from UCLA.  But it wasn’t just the Japanese, I think everyone looked twice at that.  I’m not sure how much of an education I got in my short year there, but I had a great time.  It was an exciting year for me.  And it didn’t look bad on my resume.

Since UCLA I’ve taken classes: public relations, accounting, find yourself career classes, management classes, and writing classes.  Most were UCLA Extension classes but I also went to Glendale College.  When I became a loaned executive at United Way they sent me to a two week training at USC.  USC was great.  I did my POST (Peace Officers Standards Training) for Juvenile Hall at Evergreen College in San Jose.  The six weeks there was fun and taught us a lot.  The State Parks Ranger Academy was controlled by Monterey Peninsula College and I got credits there for 30 units or more.  Five months of classes 8 hours a day, five days a week turned out to be hard, hard on the bottom and hard to stay focused.

My last years as a Ranger I went to College of Marin and took math and science classes and did very well.  I told people I was a scientist in an English major’s body.  I was coming out.  My English major wife called me a nerd.  I bought a pocket protector like my father used to wear. 

Another influence in my education was the example of my father.  He spent his life studying as he called it; language, history and music.  He was a lifelong studier.  When he was in his 50s he started and completed an engineering program at UCLA Extension.  Like him I consider myself a lifelong learner.  All I know about nature, trees, plants, birds, animals, geography, I studied on my own.  I spent years studying and learning to speak Spanish. 

I still read, novels, history and current affairs, along with philosophy, foreign languages, and anything else I’m interested in.  I am particularly fascinated by ethnicity.  I suppose if I were to pick a college major today I would be a cultural anthropologist. Maybe I’d add some calculus and statistics classes.  I love knowing where people’s culture comes from, ethnicities, nationalities, religion, what culture is and what its foundations are.  I love cultural differences and similarities. 

I don’t trust institutions much, but I greatly admire scholars.  I was taught by some incredible scholars, I’ve known a few, and my son Ted is a scholar. My other two sons are artists.  I love scholarship. I consider myself a hedgerow scholar, undisciplined but enthusiastic.  

Best Friend

My best friend from the summer after the 8^th grade on was Rick Powell.  Rick and I went to the same grammar school, St. Robert Bellarmine in Burbank.  Rick was kind of a dorky guy, distinct features, when we were young he had a head a little too big for his body, gangly, not one of the cool kids, but a funny guy and kind of sloppy.  We wore uniforms at St. Robert’s and I think Rick’s shirt was always untucked and his hair always messed.  If you were one of Rick’s friends, he would let you slip your thumb and small finger into the indentations in his skull left by the doctor who delivered him. 

In the first part of the 8^th grade my best friend was Ray Ziegler.  Ray was kind of a rough kid, strong, very smart but an only child and hard to get along with, no social graces, even in comparison to other boys our age.   He lived in his own world but he was a good guy.  He also lived two and half blocks from me up the street and across the street from Mary Ellen Boyd. 

Mary Ellen was my unrequited love through most of grammar school.  In the 8^th grade Mary Ellen was the bandleader for our school band.  She was a strawberry blond, a big girl, not heavyset but just good size, always a shade taller than I was and she developed breasts early on, a very remarkable thing in the 7^th grade.  She was smart, she was pretty and I pined for her, though she never much acknowledged me.  I think I walked her home whenever I could which didn’t happen very often. 

Ray lived across the street from her and he told me he had actually played football with her and her friends in the middle of the street one time.  I started hanging out with Ray though I didn’t see much of Mary Ellen for the effort.  I think maybe I got to play football with the kids up there including Mary Ellen one time. 

I found Ray to be a pretty interesting guy.  His mother and father were divorced and he lived with his mother.  His father, an engineer at Lockheed, visited occasionally and took him places.  His mother wore tube tops, short shorts, drove a 1957 white Thunderbird and had Johnny Mathis playing on the phonograph all the time.

Ray had electronics, speakers and microphones and most interesting of all a tape recorder.  We took these things apart and put them back together.  He had a miniature camera that used miniature film.  I don’t remember any pictures from it.  He had really cool stuff.  Ray was a nice guy and we hung out together after school and played with his stuff, watched for Mary Ellen Boyd and went places together. His mother’s Johnny Mathis played in the background. 

Ray was friends with Rick and Rick came by one day.  I found out he was a pretty good guy, interesting and fun to be with.  Ray moved to Sherman Oaks when his mother remarried and we didn’t see each other maybe once or twice after that, but Rick and I began hanging out together. 

Rick and I had a lot more in common.  He had a little brother and didn’t seem to live in his own world the way Ray had.  He was actually pretty smart, not a dork at all.  Rick read as much as I did and we quickly began exchanging books and walking down to Thrifty Drugstore to buy more.  Thrifty’s had a large bookrack of paperbacks in those days.  The Powells had a pool in their back yard but there were a lot more interesting things to do than swim usually.  Rick had a great sense of humor and a real taste for adventure. 

One of the things Rick and I did together was to take the bus to downtown LA during that summer.  We would board the gold and white buses of the RTD, the Rapid Transit District, at Olive and Glenoaks and pay 62 cents to ride to downtown LA.  I remember the bus driver got pretty irritated one time when I paid most of my fare with pennies.  In those days there was no counting machine to throw them into, he had to take them and count them each one before he started the bus off again for our trip downtown. 

Downtown we’d go to the LA Athletic Club and swim in the pool.  I had never been in an indoor pool and it was fascinating to me to go swimming on the 5^th floor of a building downtown.  Rick’s father was a banker at Bank of America and a member of the club.  We’d go swimming and then we’d go somewhere else.  One time we took a tour of the Los Angeles Times when the building downtown had big presses running and linotype operators.  We went to the top of City Hall and saw Los Angeles from its tallest building at the time. 

After our day was over we’d go back to the Bank of America at the corner of 7^th and Spring Street, up to the 5^th floor, the executive floor, and squish across the carpeted offices.  In those days Bank of America still had open floors and no private offices even for the top people.  A.P. Giannini believed in accessibility and the spirit of A.P. Giannini was still strong at Bank of America.  Mr. Powell drove us home.  Mr. Quinn, the father of a classmate, and a lot of other Quinns, was the Manager of the main B of A in Burbank, but Mr. Powell was even more important than that.    

Rick and I stayed best friends all through high school.  He went to Bellarmine Jefferson and then Burbank High School.  I went to St. Francis up in La Canada.  I had a best friend at St. Francis but when I was home in Burbank, Rick was my best friend.  We learned to drive about the same time.  He had easier access to his parents’ car and we would drive around Burbank in a 1962 Cadillac, a brand new car, big with fins.  It didn’t impress the girls much but it was comfortable.  Neither Rick nor I had much success with the girls in high school. 

But we hung out together and we read books and talked about them.  We went to movies and we talked and we talked.  When I went to the monastery in 1964 I lost contact with Rick but there he was again a year later when I started Loyola University in Los Angeles.

Rick was a sophomore and I was a freshman.  We each had our own circle of friends.  He ended up joining a fraternity and was a party guy.  I joined the intellectuals and was a pseudo-writer type.  We still had a lot in common and hung out together sometimes just to be with an old friend.  I wrote a paper for him one time and one time he loaned me his car for a date. 

Rick told me he had used my story once to charm a girl he was trying to meet.  I worked for the phone company for nearly a year before I went to college.  I was surprised by that.  I didn’t think I was that interesting and I never thought of making up a life story.  I admired Rick’s creativity. 

When I went in to the service we didn’t stay in touch again but then I met Rick again when I finished UCLA in 1972 and joined Bank of America.  Rick was already a loan officer in the International Division in San Francisco.  We stayed in touch through Bank of America.  When I went up to San Francisco, we’d get together after work.  I don’t think Rick’s wife Maureen much liked me.  One of the things Rick and I did together was to drink too much. 

Rick went off to Canada and then Thailand with Bank of America and then came back to the US and left the bank.  He and Maureen moved to San Diego.  When he returned one time he and Maureen invited us to join them at Lake Arrowhead.  We drove up there with our kids and they were staying in this wonderful 3,000 square foot “cabin,” nicer than any home I’ve ever lived in.  Maureen’s father was a successful CPA and the cabin was his or someone closely connected to their family.  We stayed the weekend with them and had a great time.  There was a power boat that Rick and I drove towing the other one behind trying to learn to water ski.

The week before my family went up there we had had the flu and our kids had been very sick with it.  We had just barely recovered when we went up to Lake Arrowhead.  I heard from Rick later, that after we left Rick and his family all came down with the flu. Their week’s vacation at Lake Arrowhead was mostly going back and forth to the bathroom and dealing with sick kids.  Rick indicated that Maureen wasn’t too keen on us as friends after that.  Rick on the other hand teased me about it for years afterwards. 

After I got divorced and sober we began getting together again whenever I showed up in San Diego for the bank I worked at. I went down to see Rick and Maureen a few times.  Maureen and I got to be good friends.  She’s a good lady, but Rick and I didn’t seem to have the same rapport we did before.   One time we were in a restaurant eating lunch.  We noticed the waitress looking funny at us.  We were two bankers, middle aged and both in pinstripes, and without thinking about it we were sharing a dessert.  We explained we had known each other since we were five years old, my older sister had babysat for Rick and his brother, and that we were each other's oldest friend, like it or not.    

I like Rick.  He’s a good man.  He turned out to be much more like his father than either of us would have expected.  He did OK in banking but never reached the prominence of his father.  It was the wrong time for banks.  Rick worked for one small bank and then another in San Diego.  We fell out of touch again, though this time I’m disappointed to say we've lost contact.  Rick likes to have a few beers.  When I last saw him in the 80s he was running with the Hash House Harriers.  I’m not sure why we’re not still friends, I wish we were.  Rick and Maureen are good people. 

Juvenile Hall

After my year off¹, I went looking for work.  I didn’t want to be a banker.  In fact I didn’t want to be anything.  I told my friends I had a serious disability, a total lack of ambition.  I just wanted a job, something to do, earn a little money, something worthwhile, no big career, no mover and shaker job.  I had my day being a mover and shaker and I wasn’t very good at it.  I didn’t enjoy it while I thought I was doing it.  In fact I wasn’t really moving and shaking very much.  I was just being used by my employers to look good while they made money in the usual way. 

One of the things I had always wanted to do was temp work.  I saw temps come through the banks I worked at and some of them were very interesting people.  They’d come in, help for awhile, the good ones quickly became part of the office and then they’d move on.  I thought it would be interesting to try it, to see the inside of offices I’d never worked in before and then move on.  I told a friend I was thinking about it and my first temping job was as a receptionist for the nonprofit where my friend worked.   

I enjoyed it.  They got a kick out of having a former bank vice president at their front desk and I made a few hundred dollars a week for a month.  Then I signed up with a temp agency and did receptionist and filing work.  One time a little boutique brokerage went on a ‘training’ junket for a week and left me in charge of the office answering the phone.  I was surprised they left a temp by himself but they were satisfied and I had a good time. 

The rest of the time was more like work.  I was a receptionist at Sutro, the investment house, with limited coffee breaks and I had to ask permission to use the restroom.  It didn't hurt my ego to be deflated a little.  Then I was a file clerk at Solomon Brothers on the 40^th floor of the Bank of America tower, great view.  The young up and coming masters of the universe avoided me like a leper.  I think they could tell I had come down in the world and they were afraid whatever I had might be catching.  I did chat a couple of times with the boss about mountain climbing.  I had to work hard for my $10 an hour. 

For a short week I was a messenger in the mail room at Morrison and Forrester, a big law firm downtown.  I saw lawyers like medieval monks in their cells scribbling away at contracts instead of tomes.  It didn't look very exciting.  On one of my treks through the floors passing out mail, I stopped to talk with an old friend who was working there.  Years before, I hired Richard's firm to do some legal work for the bank I was at.  He was good.  We became friends.  We had both sunk from our former glory days.  He was a lawyer at Morrison and Forrester and I was a mail room clerk, but we were OK. 

I don’t think knowing an attorney helped my status as a messenger.  The mail room supervisor let me go when I sat in the wrong chairs, the ones reserved for supervisors.  I moved, of course, but without feeling the proper guilt.  I guess I smiled and let it show I thought it was funny.  I didn’t mean to be disrespectful but the concern for small privileges was a little overblown.  I didn’t take any satisfaction in that.  I know small privileges are much harder to obtain than large ones.  The mail room supervisor deserved respect.  I guess it was hard for me to give him the respect he needed and look like I meant it.      

My temp jobs were fun but I needed to make a real living and the temp jobs were hard work, physically demanding, and I didn't earn much.   

I needed a real job and it was time to start looking.  As a banker I had been the caring face of banks who didn’t care much.  I served on community boards, I had done the Lord’s work and the banks took credit for it.  For my part I got paid to do the things I enjoyed.  Fundraising was the easiest way to get on the inside of a community organization whose good favor we needed.  I liked fundraising; I was good at it and I wasn’t looking to make the big bucks.  I was a volunteer fundraiser with a talent for it.  I thought it would be challenging to become a professional.  I could work for someone who really knew their stuff and learn the trade.  It seemed like something that would be worthwhile. 

Looking for work is not my best skill.  In fact, I am miserable at it.  I had a few informational meetings that I arranged through friends or my wife at the time, Susan.   Nothing came of them.  I didn’t impress anyone.  I think my lack of ambition showed.  I knew I could do a good job fundraising, grunt work, but people seemed to think they needed someone more dynamic.  My opinion is a lot of dynamic people try to make long hours and drive look like substance.

I went on an interview with CORO that Susan arranged.  I didn’t impress the new director at all.  As it turned out the director didn’t impress the board much herself and a year later was gone, but I didn’t get a job with her.  I don’t think she wanted to supervise someone her father’s age and she turned out not to have much substance herself, so someone with real experience and substance probably wasn’t the person she wanted to have around.

I finally had a solid lead with the San Francisco Ronald McDonald House.  The McDonald Houses are a franchise in most major cities.  They are good organizations doing good work, providing housing and a family atmosphere for families of gravely ill children while the children receive care in the local hospital.  The San Francisco director was a solid guy.  McDonald's Corporation takes credit for Ronald McDonald Houses while they make healthy profits creating generations of obese Americans.  McDonald's doesn’t contribute much on the local level, mostly their name, a little organizational help and seed money.  Each house does its own fundraising.  

I liked the job, I liked the people.  By this time, I was also pretty desperate.   The decision came down to me and another candidate.  We met in a waiting room before the board interviewed each of us separately.  I didn’t know the lady who was my competition but I had met her sisters in spirit many times.  She was dressed in a hard suit, nylons, high heels.  She looked very professional but up close she was wearing a mask of makeup to hide her age and a helmet of lacquered hair. 

It was obvious to me she had lived a hard life on the edge, trying to make money in real estate, fundraising or anything else.  She probably had a very nice car but lived in an apartment that smelled like a cat.  She was a middle aged woman in pain, crusted in bitterness and still holding it together.  I knew this job was going to be a reach for her and one more shot at credibility. 

I could be totally wrong about her.  Maybe the board saw something in her I didn’t.  They chose the lady with the lacquered hair. 

Now I was even more desperate.   I went to a job fair at Fort Mason on my way home from some dead end appointment.  There were all these personnel types from small companies looking for dynamic self starters.  I was surprised to see Consumer Credit Counselors, CCC a nonprofit I had run into as a banker when they were new back in the early 70s.  San Francisco Juvenile Hall was also there looking for applicants.  The lady from Juvy wasn’t very enthusiastic but I worked to sell myself and she finally gave me an application to take home.  I left an application with CCC. 

I went home and filled out the application for the City of San Francisco.  I remember there was a filing deadline or some problem I ran into and I pushed my way into talking to a personnel officer and got everything done and put in place.  Many years ago when I was finishing up at UCLA one of my daydreams had been to work in prisons.  I’m not sure why, my early days in hospitals may have left me permanently institutionalized.  I found prisons, jails and juvenile halls fascinating worlds. 

I took the test to be a counselor at San Francisco’s Youth Guidance Center.  They called it counselor but it was really a guard at Juvenile Hall.  I daydreamed of doing work that I really wanted to do.  Consumer Credit Counselors was hiring and as an ex-banker I seemed to be attractive to them.  The people there were good, the personnel officer and the manager.  I told them I had put in an application at Juvenile Hall and that if I got the job, I’d take it, but they hired me anyway.  I think they knew better than me the hiring process at the City was more complicated than just putting in an application. 

I started to work at CCC as a consumer credit counselor on July 1^st, 2001 at $35,000 a year and benefits.  I needed that job.  It was good work, counseling people who were nearly bankrupt and helping them to dig their way out.  The banks weren’t as enthusiastic about the program as they had once been and the people who owned the franchise were eager to make a profit which they took in salary and benefits.  We did most of our counseling on the telephone and I hated that, but it was a job.  When I was able to help people I got a lot of satisfaction out of it. 

I met Suzette Anderson there.  She was a young recent college grad and very smart.  We became good friends and 11 years later we got married.  At that time Suzette was a bit of tease.  She was in a relationship and I was married.  It took another 6 years for our friendship to blossom into an affair and even as an affair it smoldered more than flamed. 

Meanwhile I kept my application going at Juvenile Hall.  I took the psych test.  My short stay in a psychiatric unit in the Air Force came up.  I talked to the psychologist at the testing site and he cleared me to work.  I took the physical and they did a background check.  When I took the test there were about 50 candidates.  Half didn’t pass the background check.  It’s surprising how many people with shady pasts apply for law enforcement.  I think it’s a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome.  Another big chunk didn’t pass the test, basic high school grammar and math.  So by the time they hired us, there were only four candidates. 

In December, 2001 I was hired as an on call juvenile hall counselor.  On call meant we filled shifts for people who were sick or on vacation. 

In mid-December we had a week’s orientation class.  It was taught by Dennis Cleary², the Assistant Director.  We learned about Juvenile Hall and how it worked, the kids we’d be working with, and some basic self defense and control moves that we would have to use sometimes.  It wasn’t much but it was enough to get us started. 

I worked my first shift New Year’s Eve, 2001.  The first few shifts in Juvenile Hall were with experienced counselors and it was easy, just do what I was told.  The population at Juvenile Hall was a little over 100 kids, not just troublemakers, but the very worst troublemakers in San Francisco.  A youngster didn’t get locked up in Juvenile Hall unless his or her crime was very serious, or they were a danger to others or everything else had been tried and no place else would take them.  We had youngsters accused of murder, assault, mayhem, and gang violence.  And then there were the host of kids who were in the system and just couldn’t stay in foster homes, group homes or any other programs and kept coming back to us again and again.  They ranged in age from 14 to 18.  The 14 year olds were small but had less self control than the older youngsters.  Some of the most violent incidents occurred on the unit for 14 year olds. 

Most of the time, most of the kids, were mostly good.  However, the kids were always on the lookout for a weak spot, a chance to take advantage or even to escape.  They needed constant watching and that’s what the counselors did.  A counselor was never alone with the kids in the unit unless they were locked in their rooms.  There were always two counselors, so if one was attacked, the other could sound the alarm and control the other kids.  Ideally there were three counselors, two to handle the kids hands on and one to stand back and control the situation until help arrived. 

More often than not it wasn’t kids attacking counselors as kids attacking each other.  A counselor would grab one, the other counselor the second kid and the third counselor would call for help.  Help was a shout on the radio of “Condition!” then the location and repeating it over and over.  “Condition B4! Condition B4! Condition B4!”   At that sound, the third counselor in each of the other units would run to the unit with trouble as quickly as he or she could.  Usually within two or three minutes, the room filled with an overwhelming number of counselors.  Most times it was an overreaction, but sometimes violence would spark violence and the whole room of youngsters would erupt in fights of long smoldering grudges, gang affiliations, and individual problems.  Anything could set it off.  Every condition had the potential to be a riot. 

Many of the counselors were huge; former college football players were common at the Hall and valued members of the team.  So once everyone was there it didn’t take long to calm the situations down, but the first couple of minutes could be difficult and if I was wrestling with a kid it could seem like forever until help arrived.      

Most of the counselors were incredibly good people.  All were college grads and the majority had been there a long time, five, ten, fifteen, twenty years.  On calls were vetted to see if they could make it.  If the supervisors and your fellow workers liked you, you were called to fill shifts until eventually they hired you.  If they didn’t like you, they didn't call.  The counselors were the kind of people who really cared about the kids.  They treated them well, they took care of them, and they liked their work. 

However, there were a minority of counselors who for one reason or another shouldn’t have been there.  They stayed because of the incompetence of personnel, the lethargy of the system, the union, and civil service.  There was one counselor who was very inappropriate with the young men, too close to them, bribing them with treats and gifts.  It just didn’t feel right.  He had been fired for this behavior, but he got a lawyer and fought it.  After a year he won his suit, was reinstated and given a year’s back pay.  He was there for good and it did no good to complain about him. 

There were other counselors who just played the system, one who was a pothead and liked to stir up trouble just because he could.  I’m not sure why they didn’t drug test us.  There were counselors who were too old or infirm to do the job, but just hung on, and counselors, who had twisted personalities, couldn’t handle kids, or were troublemakers.  They worked there because the pay was good and they could sit behind a desk and let everyone else do the work.  There was even a counselor who was a drug dealer and recruited kids in Juvenile Hall for his business.  He had very good political connections but he was eventually fired.   

My first week or two I worked with counselors who knew what they were doing.  The work was easy.  They were good people.  As an on-call counselor most of my shifts were swing shifts.  The regulars with seniority had day shifts.  Midnight shifts were an odd collection of burnouts and night people.  After the first few weeks I got thrown in wherever they needed me and without any seniority or clout more often than not it was with the counselors who were hard to work with. 

I continued to work at Consumer Credit Counselors.  I wasn’t sure I was suited to Juvenile Hall or whether they would take me if I wanted a job there.  My days off and holidays I worked at the Hall.  There was always a need for someone and I began working 40 hour weeks.  The pay was good and in March I quit CCC. 

The work at Juvy was great.  I loved the job.  For me it was unexpected but I even liked working with teenagers. 

When I went to work at Juvenile Hall they were still in the old building; new construction was being started behind it.  To get to the Hall I went through the Juvenile Courts Building on Woodside Avenue and down the hallway on the right, up a half flight of wide stairs and in through double doors that had to be buzzed open.  It was its own world.  Inside there was a gatekeeper who checked your purpose in being there.  

After the small narrow room there was a long wide corridor, plexiglass windows on one side and cinderblock walls on the other punctuated every 25 yards by double doors that were securely locked.  Behind the double doors were the units.  There were 7 units in Juvenile Hall, B1, B2, B3, up to B5 and then a girls unit.  B1 was 14 year olds, younger smaller kids.  B4 was 17 year olds, big kids and B5 was the maximum security unit, a unit for the very dangerous youngsters.  There was also a unit for non-dangerous arrivals.

B1 was the easiest unit.  The kids there were still very much kids and easily manipulated into good behavior.  They had to be watched closely because left on their own they had no sense of consequences and were capable of real violence on each other.  But for the most part they were small and easy to handle.  B4 was the 17 year olds and the kids there were generally calmer, easier to reason with.  It was the kids in between B2 and B3 that were the hardest. 

As a newcomer it was the kids in between that I usually worked with.  There were some good counselors, but that’s also where the counselors who were a problem worked as well.  Ms. Brown, the lead for B3 was an obnoxious evangelical Christian, grossly obese who played favorites with the kids, sat behind the desk and never moved.  When there was trouble she could always be counted on to make it worse, screaming like one of the kids making accusations and throwing out insults.  I could never figure out why she worked there, she seemed to hate the job and the kids. 

My day usually started at 3 p.m.  I’d go in, check the worksheet to see where I was assigned and who I was working with, the right counselors could make for an easy evening, the wrong counselors could make for a night of hell.  Usually it was in between.  If there were two of us who knew what we were doing we could compensate for the third counselor.  The supervisors tried to balance it out so no one had it bad all the time, but sometimes it just worked out that way.   

The unit was laid out in a line up from the doors, a 20 yard hallway.  At the beginning of the hallway was a door that opened on to a classroom, which looked pretty much like any classroom in a regular high school, a little more spare on decorations and a little more tattered.  

At the end of an upsloping 20 yards, the unit opened into a large room on either side.  On the right side was a dining room with a kitchen at the back and a serving slot between the kitchen and the dining room from where the food was served. 

At 5 o’clock the main kitchen delivered trays and pans of hot food.  It was institutional food, noodles, heavy gravies, nondescript meats, unimaginative vegetables, salad, and cobbler type desserts.  There was milk and juice.

On the right side of the corridor was a rec room.  The tables in the dining room were fast food restaurant tables with the seats attached that two people could lift and move to the TV side.  There were very few things in a Juvy unit that could be picked up and used as a weapon.  Things like buckets, brooms, and mops were kept in locked closets. 

After the rec room and kitchen the unit narrowed down and on one side was a bench for the kids to sit and on the other a waist high cage and behind it a desk with a chair and a telephone.  This was the counselors’ desk.  Notes, papers, and the daily log were kept there and anything the counselors wanted out of reach from the youngsters.  Behind it was a closet that could be locked where the sporks , a combination fork and spoon, and kitchen utensils were kept and a small bathroom that the counselors could use.

Before three o’clock the kids were locked in their rooms for shift change.  We’d check in at the desk, exchange information with the day shift, check the radios and the plastic sporks.  The sporks could conceivably be used as weapons; these and the metal ladles and serving spoons were counted at the beginning of shift, after meals, and at the end of shift. 

Further on the unit opened up to a large bathroom for the kids and hallways on either side and one straight back.  The rooms were on either side of the hallways.  In the straight hallway on one side was a shower room.  At the end of the right hallway there was a large closet with linens, towels, clothes and cleaning equipment. 

The rooms were reasonably large, with two iron bed frames bolted into the floor.  We put foam mattresses on the frames.  If the hall was crowded we sometimes put an extra youngster in the room and sometimes even two.  The youngsters liked this, the more kids the more it was like a party, so the kids who got put together were the kids following the rules, easy to work with, the kids who got along. 

All the cleanup, floors swept and mopped, toilets cleaned, food served and everything else we needed, the kids did.  Any reason they had to get out of their rooms was appreciated and cleanup was considered a privilege.  The kids who knew their way around Juvy watched their behavior to earn the privilege.  It was one of the many tools at our disposal to guide the behavior of the youngsters. 

At 5:30 we served the kids dinner.  Depending on the counselor and the kids, one counselor would work the kitchen and the kids would help.  Some of the better kids, usually kids who had been there a long time and knew their way around were very helpful and it paid off for them in time out of their rooms and other privileges we had to dispense.  And it was just easier to live there when we all got along, easier for us, easier for the kids. 

At first there was a lot of skepticism about my being in Juvenile Hall.  I was a grandfather, though most of the counselors there were close to my age.  I’m not big, 5’9” and I’m not a fighter. I’d rather talk, but after a while most people came to accept me.  The macho types who believed in being rough with the kids never did, but I got along.  I proved in a fight I could wrestle with the kids.  I learned it was a matter of just jumping in, like being a lineman on a football team.  When the quarterback called the number you jumped and hit hard.  If you knocked the kids off balance that was usually enough to end the situation. 

Some people were never going to accept me and that was fine.  The first real fight I saw I did stand flat footed for a few moments.  A large kid seriously attacked a smart mouthed youngster and bloodied his face.  I also learned a lesson in report writing.  The older experienced counselor worked with the other counselor to write a report that made me look like the problem, diverting attention from the other counselor’s mistakes.  Most people are stunned by violence, it’s unexpected and they don’t know what to do.  But after a while and with a little experience, I learned to respond to it.  I used my voice a lot more than muscle, but I learned to jump in when I needed to. 

I liked working in Juvenile Hall.  I liked the kids.  I talked to them, I teased them, I listened to their problems.  I treated them well.  Most of the time that worked very well with our population.  There were very few of the kids who seemed thoroughly evil or mean.  Most of them had a good side and most of the time that’s what I worked on.  I did learn never to trust the kids.  They were all schemers and like bank customers when I was a banker, friendship was fine but when it came down to it, they were going to do what they thought was best for themselves not caring who was in their way.   

There was one youngster, McKissick, I don’t know what he was in for.  Most of the time we didn’t know.  He was well over 6 foot tall, but very slender and gangly, not coordinated at all.  He was 15 years old, but his voice hadn’t changed and he had a real little kid kind of feel to him.  He had been put with other 15 year olds but he had been victimized by the more mature sophisticated kids and so he was put down in B1 with the younger kids.  He fit in and did just fine.  He was there for awhile and so he became one of the trusted kids.  He was cooperative and helpful and was a regular for cleanup and other privileges.

At one time he sprained his ankle and he had a crutch from the clinic.  Crutches were treated with great care in Juvenile Hall and when he wasn’t using his crutch it got locked in a closet.  The fear was he or one of the other kids could use it as a weapon before anyone could get close to them. 

The kids were locked in their rooms after meals, during cleanup, and during shift changes.  After the evening recreation they were locked up until the next morning.  A constant thing between the kids and the counselors was their need to use the bathroom.  It went on all day and all night.  Any time they were locked up it seemed the kids needed to use the bathroom.  The more I let them out the more they needed out.   I learned to pace their bathroom breaks, make sure everyone got one and then to ignore their whining.  If you absolutely must use the bathroom, piss on your shirt and we’ll give you a new one after shift change.  They very seldom needed to do that.  It took balance.  I let the kids out regularly to use the bathroom, when they really needed it and sometimes just because they wanted out, but it had to be controlled. 

And whenever the kids were locked up and a counselor was alone in the unit, it seemed like they all needed out.  If I was in there for a long time or there was a genuine need, I would call to another unit or a supervisor and someone would come and join me while we let the youngsters out and did bathroom breaks for the whole unit.  The rule was never to be in the unit alone with a detainee out.

It was particularly difficult on the midnight shift because all the units but a couple had single counselors and getting a backup counselor could take some time. 

One night as usual Mr. Peters was working the midnight shift in B1.  He had been at the hall forever and the midnight shift was his regular time.  Peters was about 5’3” and 120 pounds.  He was an older man, frail and small.  He had a good sense of humor, was a very nice guy, but he was one of the midnight people.  It was known that some of the counselors sometimes let the kids out by themselves.  They knew the good kids; some counselors were big enough to handle anybody and didn’t worry about being attacked.  It wasn’t the norm but it happened. 

That night Peters let McKissick, the good kid out.  McKissick nearly beat him to death with the crutch.  He left Peters in a bloody heap behind his desk, took his keys, and escaped the unit.  Sometime later someone checking the units found Peters.  Paramedics were called and his life was saved.  The police found McKissick on the roof of the building trying to find a way to get over the tall fences that surrounded the facility. 

Peters survived but he never came back to work.  McKissick was charged with attempted murder and was going to stay in custody until he was at least 25 years old or maybe longer.  I think kids locked up often dreamed about mayhem but we never gave them the chance.  Peters gave McKissick the chance.  His story was added to the cautionary tales that got told to remind us all to follow procedures.     

I watched counselors relax their guard because they knew the kids, because there hadn’t been any trouble for a long time or just because they were tired.  I always reminded myself, that Juvenile Hall was easy, and it was comfortable, but it was always dangerous. 

Occasionally filling in at B5, the maximum security unit was usually easier because the counselors knew their kids were dangerous and they were always vigilant.  They followed procedures carefully and almost never bent the rules. 

Most of the time I enjoyed going to work.  I enjoyed my shifts, I enjoyed the people I worked with and I really enjoyed the kids.  I got invested in them.  I found them funny and warm and I liked that they responded to being treated decently.  Besides the counselors, there were teachers during the day, some of whom were incredible.  There were nurses who visited the units with meds, mostly Motrin, and antibiotics.  There were a few kids on psychotropics but not many.  There were psych counselors, probation officers and lawyers.  In the evening there were whole host of volunteers, yoga instructors, mentors, community workers, rehab programs, music teachers, and art teachers.  There were also families.  It was a community, a community I enjoyed. 

Sometimes my stomach would twist in anxiety at going to work that I might be stuck with one of the counselors who made working there more dangerous than it had to be.  Ferrar was just such a counselor.  He spouted some sort of South American liberation ideology, read books at work and provoked the kids just out of sheer boredom and cussedness.  He’d get into it with a kid and jack the kid up until there was an incident and the kid was locked up in his room for days as punishment for having lost control.  The whole unit would be locked down and Ferrar could read his book.  Ferrar enjoyed power and he was unpredictable. 

Another counselor, Michaels, was just stupid and always trying to get out of work and lording it over anybody who he thought had less seniority than he did.  The kids took advantage of him and then reacted badly to his neglect.  He’d argue with them and working with him was always a problem. 

There was one counselor who was too old and decrepit to be of any use on the unit.  Another counselor was just a twisted personality and had some sort of weird sexual thing going and went sideways with the kids unpredictably.  There was another counselor who was into the plight of the Black Man and would provoke the black kids against the white counselors stirring them up with his own sense of victimization.  Most of the counselors were very good and decent people but the few who weren’t could be a real problem. 

One Christmas at Juvenile Hall I was scheduled to work the swing shift on Christmas Day.  I didn’t have much seniority.  It was my Monday as we call our first day back after two days off.  I agreed with Susan to go down to LA for Christmas with her family, but I had to make it back to work at 3 p.m. on Christmas Day. 

I did the Christmas thing with family and then I left early and rushed to the airport, making a plane for San Francisco.  I got to San Francisco with little time to spare and rushed to Juvenile Hall.  I made it there just before three.  I thought it was important to be there for the kids.  Holidays were hard for them and I knew they needed someone who cared. 

Weekends and holidays the sheriffs who manned the front door of the Juvenile Court Building were off and one of the counselors would be assigned door duty.  I looked at the duty roster and that’s what I got.  I had been burning with the satisfaction of my own altruism in rushing to be with “the kids” on Christmas Day and I spent the shift watching a door that was little used.  Juvenile Hall was like that. 

I worked on call for six months.  The usual thing was that an on call counselor just worked right through the limited hours that defined on call and by default became a provisional counselor working full time with benefits.  Personnel and procedures at Juvenile Hall were so bad, that this haphazard way of promotion had become the norm. 

I was used to doing things right, needed to have some definition and as I neared my 1096 hours of work in one year, I said something about it to a supervisor.  The next day I was told to stop working and go home until I was called back or until the next 12 month period started.  There were four of us in the same situation and the other three were laid off as well. 

I was told, don’t worry about it, they wanted to have me full time and the layoff would be temporary.  Of course being hired required budget, approval for hiring, and a lot of bureaucracy.  It felt like an astrological lining up of the planets to the right configuration.  Even if it happened it might be beyond the ability of personnel to take advantage.  The personnel office for Juvy was behind a locked door in the court house part of the building.  You had to ring a buzzer to get someone to come to the door.  That's where business was normally conducted, at the door and no further.  Often no one was there or they just didn’t answer the buzzer.  If I called on the phone I got an answering machine. 

I went home and started collecting unemployment.  I remembered when my mother collected unemployment during the 50s she knew she would be called back to work but she had to demonstrate she was looking for work to get her checks.  Apparently that wasn’t the case by the time I was collecting unemployment but I felt like I should look for work anyhow.  

One morning while surfing the internet I thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up.  The answer was easy, a Park Ranger.   It turned out State Parks was taking applications online.  

Susan, my wife, at the time, had worked for Willy Brown when he was the Speaker of the Assembly and she had kept up her contact with Willy and the people who worked for him.  She kept hounding me to let her call Willie’s office.  Willy was the mayor of San Francisco.  Finally after four months of waiting to hear from Juvenile Hall, I decided I would let her give it a try.  I called my friend, Dennis, the assistant director and warned him that Susan was going to call the Mayor.  I just wanted him to know where it was coming from. 

One thing a bureaucracy hates is scrutiny from an elected official, particularly the Mayor.  This fear can even overcome inertia.  Two days after my call the four of us were called back to be hired as Juvenile Hall Counselors.  

I went back to work, got a regular shift on B4 and enjoyed working at Juvenile Hall for another two years.  I didn’t stop my Ranger application.  I took the test with State Parks.  Juvenile Hall sent me and another counselor to Juvenile Corrections Officer Training through POST, Police Officer Standards Training, at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose. 

The training was great, six weeks all together.  We were in a class with Juvenile Hall Officers from Santa Clara and Monterey County.  It was a good course and at the end of it we were Peace Officers, unsworn and unarmed, but peace officers nonetheless.  Along with our class there was a class of Santa Clara Adult Prison Officer Cadets and a class of police cadets for San Jose and other Santa Clara municipalities.  One of the cadets was a retired math teacher.  John was 57 years old, a year older than I was, and he was doing well in the class and enjoying it.  Later when I was called to be a Ranger, John was one of my inspirations to go ahead and try it.    

I went back to work at Juvenile Hall as a Peace Officer and I enjoyed it.  But two years later when State Parks asked me if I wanted to go to the Academy, I said yes.  It was dangerous to work at Juvenile Hall, not because of the population itself, but because of the administration of it, because of incompetent counselors and because safety and procedures were secondary to bureaucratic inertia. 

I liked working outdoors.  I liked the idea of being a cop.  I liked being a Ranger.  But I missed Juvenile Hall.  There’s something comfortable about pastel walls.  And I missed the kids. 

 1.  In 1999 I quit California Commerce Bank and took a year off

^2.   I’ve changed most of the names of my coworkers in Juvenile Hall.  It can be dangerous and a little bit of paranoia is well founded working there.  Also it allows me to be more honest about some of the characters I worked with. 

3.  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2003/07/27/CM64815.DTL&object=%2Fc%2Fpictures%2F2003%2F07%2F27%2Fcm_badgirls_6.jpg
From the San Francisco Chronicle