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.