In January, 1962, my son and I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. We basically went with the clothes on our backs and what I could fit into a rusty Nash Rambler station wagon. I’ve chronicled that cross-country trip on another page, so I won’t repeat it here. But we arrived in January, which is typically a rainy month in northern California.
Destination San Francisco Bay Area
Our first destination was my friend’s rented house in Milpitas, California. Let me describe a bit about the San Francisco Bay area. The Bay ran down between two bodies of land – one on the east, one on the west of the Bay, and the Bay ended at an area adjacent to Santa Clara. Milpitas was east of the tip of the Bay. On the west side of the Bay were towns like Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto going up to San Francisco on Highway 101. On the east side, there were towns of Milpitas, Fremont, Hayward, etc. leading to Oakland on Highway 17. Both San Francisco and Oakland were both less than one hour’s drive away.
The average temperature for that area is 72 degrees year-round. Note the word average here. In January and February of 1962, it rained and rained leaving mud everywhere, especially in the back yard of my friend’s rental home. Thus began my life in California.
In exchange for room and board, I had agreed to housekeep, cook, and babysit her two boys, plus my own son. My friend, Sandy, was anxious to get back to work and augment her new husband’s income. He was struggling as a Life Insurance salesman. Sandy’s brother was also there. So that was the arrangement. I cooked for six, plus cared for the four-month-old baby and the two five-year-old boys.
No April Fools
Everything seemed to be going along fine until the first of April. Out of the blue, Sandy told me she was going back to Boston (her hometown) and taking the boys. Her brother disappeared about that time too. The rent hadn’t been paid for April and no one had any money. I had a little, but not enough to stay in the house, so I went apartment hunting and found a small studio apartment in Santa Clara.
I had no furniture, but somehow managed to get two twin beds, a small kitchen table and a couple of small bucket chairs for the living area. The way the studio was set up, there were louver doors between the kitchen and living room. In the kitchen, there was a nook for the table, but it was just big enough to fit one of the twin beds into it. That became my son’s bedroom, when it wasn’t the kitchen.
Owens Corning Fiberglass
I then started contacting Temp Agencies trying to get to work as soon as possible. Within a couple of weeks, I had a temp job working for Owens Corning Fiberglass. I was working for the Sales Manager and typing up his price sheets for the Owens Corning products. There were probably 30 different sheets. This typing was a bit easier. I only had to prepare one proof and then take it up to the printing room to have it printed onto colored paper. I also did letters for my boss and for another man.
Corningware from the company store was Christmas gifts for everyone that year. I still have mine and just saw an ad for eBay offering $2,000 for a piece like this. I think I need to sell mine.
Continuing On
We stayed in the studio apartment probably for a year, before we were able to move into a one-bedroom. During that time, I acquired two TV sets. I mention them here only because my arrangement was unique and one that all the techies told me would never work. One set had a picture, but no sound. The other had sound and no picture. I wired the two together and we had working TV.
We stayed in Santa Clara for a few years until time for my son to start school, when I was able to move to Sunnyvale and a two-bedroom apartment. All during that time, I stayed in touch with people in Milpitas and one day I saw a sign for new homes being built there. They had models open and I went through them. There was one I really fell in love with. It was a patio house.
What that meant was that there were two homes built together like a duplex, but the front of each home had a patio between the house and the garage. There was a solid eight-foot wall built between the two patios making each home private. And the patio had a nice brick fireplace. The back yards too were separated by a fence – very private. This little house had a living room, dining room, kitchen complete with a pass-through window to the patio, three bedrooms, and two baths. The price was $20,500.
Before Women’s Rights
I really wanted that house and I could afford the mortgage payments BUT I had to qualify for the mortgage. My credit was as good as my work history, HOWEVER, the bank balked. It seems they were not keen on giving a mortgage to a single woman (this was before the women’s rights movement) who could get pregnant, lose her job, and be unable to pay the mortgage.
HAH!! I had them there. A couple of years earlier I had had a hysterectomy. I could no longer bear children. All I needed, per the bank was a certificate from my doctor to that effect and the mortgage was mine. Can you imagine a bank asking for that in this day and age??? How far we have come.
We happily lived in our little patio house for a couple of years until I got the computer bug, got an offer for a free house in Maryland, put the house up for sale, and made my second cross-country trip to go to work in Washington, DC.