If you’ve read my posts A Gringo’s Christmas and Arriving in California, you have some hint about the adventures and misadventures of my father that may parallel the stories of many of his generation.
My father was born during the twenties and, like most of his contemporaries, served in WWII although, due to circumstances way outside his scope of knowledge, he never ended up overseas. What he did go through was, to me, a surprising journey around the country. Boot camp in middle Michigan, Miami Beach for air corps training, Kansas for navigation training on the B-26 and B-29, all by train with no foreknowledge of where he and his fellow soldiers were going. In fact his troop went from 30-degree weather in the middle of winter in Michigan to Miami Beach via a two-day train ride with no clue that they should change clothes because they weren’t told where they were going. Those were not luxury trips, and my father hated trains for the rest of his life. If you want a good book on that experience, read The All-American Crew by Russel Low about the adventures of his father and uncle training for and eventually serving in WWII. It’s quite a fascinating read about what our parents lived through, but we didn’t. Most Americans at the time had never been more than 50 miles from where they grew up.
For us boomers it was different. We grew up with the Interstate Highway System, and that’s how I ended up transplanted from Detroit to Escondido. My parents took my dad’s two-week vacations from the auto companies every year driving all across the country until we ended up in Escondido for my dad’s new job at Convair helping to engineer the Atlas missiles. By the end of 1972, we had put men on the moon and been back several times. All those tens of thousands of space workers in Southern California and Florida were no longer needed. My father had voted for Nixon (the one time he told me who he voted for) on the theory that Nixon was a Californian, so he wouldn’t destroy southern California’s aerospace industry. So much for my father’s political instincts. He got his layoff notice 2 weeks short of the ten years required for becoming vested in the company’s pension plan. So long and thanks for all the fish. General Dynamics, the parent company of Convair was known for such shrewd dealings. Unemployed engineers pumped gas and did whatever they could to get by.
That led my father to several less-stable jobs. One was as a technical writer with General Atomics on Torrey Pines while they were still in the nuclear reactor business and not in the drone business that they came to be known for later. Another was with Rohr, helping them design the rail cars for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). The first and most preposterous of his post-Convair work though is the one that shows off my father’s quirky view of the world.
My father was not one of those who took up pumping gas after his layoff, but since he couldn’t find any permanent positions, he went to a temp firm, what was quaintly referred to as a job-shop in those days. No benefits, but decent hourly pay wherever it might be available. That turned out to be the Rockwell plant in El Segundo. They were building the B-1 bomber, and they had a serious problem. Government contractors had a new mandate that their workforce reflect the appropriate demographic makeup of the community where they were located, and Rockwell couldn’t find enough Black engineers to meet the quota. Rather than be sued, they hired every dark-complected individual they could find who was remotely qualified. Being hired without real regard to their qualifications meant that many weren’t up to the job. They hadn’t really been trained to make up for their lack of experience. So Rockwell hired hundreds of job-shopping engineers to do the work their “real” workforce wasn’t up to. Since the job-shoppers were temps and not full employees, they didn’t count against the quota. My father ended up being one of the temps. This did nothing but reinforce the racial prejudice he grew up with and still harbored, as, I suspect, many of my generation’s parents did. (My mother-in-law, originally from Chicago, once used the N-word in front of me, and I had to tell her, “No one uses that word in my presence!” To her credit, she respected me for that and never said it again.) Regrettably, that was what people were like in those days.
That led my father to a dilemma. He didn’t want to move my mother and younger brother up to El Segundo for a 6-month job, and he certainly didn’t want to rent out the house they had just built overlooking the San Pascual Valley, but a daily 260 mile round-trip commute from Escondido to El Segundo was out of the question. He decided he had to commute early Monday and back to Escondido after quitting time on Friday. That meant he had to find a cheap place to stay Monday night through Thursday morning. He looked all over the local area and found one seedy motel that advertised $20/room (remember this was the 70’s). He asked the desk clerk to let him look at a room, and the clerk gave him a startled look, like nobody had ever asked him that before. He showed my father an empty room, and my father found it shabby but livable, so he went back to the front desk.
“I’d like a room for 4 nights, next Monday through Thursday,” he said.
“OK, that’ll be $200,” the clerk replied.
“What? The sign says $20 for a room.”
“Oh, that’s if you only want it for a couple of hours.”
Blushing, my father declined. He finally decided to just sleep in our Volkswagen Van in Rockwell’s parking lot. They had a gym with showers, so he could take care of his hygiene, and apparently nobody thought much of the van that didn’t move for the whole workweek. He must have carefully parked it somewhere inconspicuous.
That still left the problem of food since he could no longer have my mother’s home-cooked meals. He found a place with cheap prime rib dinners and ate there. Of course, there was a reason the food was so cheap. It was a strip club that made its money from getting the customers good and drunk. My father had given up drinking and smoking in the mid 60’s after a health scare, not that he was ever a big imbiber of either. Nobody told me what the health scare was. You don’t tell your kids everything either, do you? In any case the strip club couldn’t legally toss him out for not drinking (Apparently, they hadn’t invented the 2-drink minimum yet.), so he enjoyed his steak with glasses of water. He swore it was the steak that he enjoyed.
I can imagine that after 4 nights of steaks and strippers, he and my mother really enjoyed themselves on Friday nights. Yes perverts, I can only imagine it. I was away at college. Would you ask your younger brother about that? Didn’t think so.
Eventually, by the late 70s, Convair offered my father a job again. They pinky swore that if he worked another 10 years and 2 weeks, they would give him a full 20-year pension. (Remember pensions? No 401-Ks yet, just fixed benefit pensions.) I swore that he was crazy to take that deal after how they had shafted him before, but he did, and to my shock, the company actually did come through, and he ended up with his 20-year pension.
So, after reading that story and my adventure with my father in Baja, if you ever wanted to know how to raise a writer, it helps to have crazy parents. Of course mine looked perfectly normal next to my wife’s wild father and crazy mother. That may explain why she was a better writer than I am.
Eventually my father did learn why he was never shipped overseas. It had to do with a strategic change in tactics. The American Army Air Corps had decided against the advice of the British to do daylight bombing of Germany because bombing was not precise enough to really hit their intended targets at night as well as mistaken notions about the vulnerability of their bombing squadrons. They had no fighters with the range to provide support all the way to the heart of Germany, and when the Germans adjusted tactics to counter the daylight bombing, the Americans were taking as high as 20% casualties per mission. Such a disaster forced a rethinking on the American part, and the shipment of new crews to England was halted, leaving my father’s class of recruits in Kansas to train the next batch.
Musings of a Restless Mind 