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 good as was 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.
Return to the San Francisco Bay Area
If you are trying to follow this life saga, you will know that I stayed and worked in the Washington, DC area for about six years before returning to the Bay area. This time I thought for good. When I moved to Sunnyvale, I bought a mobile home close to Lockheed Missiles and Space where I got my next job, still in my new field of computer programming.
And I stayed in that mobile home through a series of job hops all withing the Sunnyvale area. I was happy there, gainfully employed, and close to family. But time marches on. My last job in Sunnyvale was with a company called Data Design Associates. After some years with that company, the owner went through some dramatic marital situations. He divorced his wife, who got 50% of the company ownership.
Maybe not quite 50% because each employee at that time had some equity in the company and there were over 100 of us. In any case, she had enough equity to sell her part to a competitive company called Integral Systems. The original owner bailed and Integral decided to close the Sunnyvale office and merge everything into their Walnut Creek facility. I suddenly was facing a two hour a day commute on the freeway or a move to the northern part of the East Bay. Housing prices in the Walnut Creek area were out of my reach. Decision time.
Leaving the San Francisco Bay Area Again
On a whim the previous summer, when accompanying my niece when she and her husband moved to Arizona, I bought a little retirement house on a golf course in Chandler, Arizona. I bought it as an investment at a great price with the plans to rent the house seasonally until I was ready to maybe retire in it. Faced with the job and housing dilemma in California, on a whim, I asked my acting boss if I could work remotely from Arizona.
People from DDA had been leaving after the merger with Integral and they were needing technical people to stay. I thought it was worth a try. They wouldn’t let me work from home in Sunnyvale, it was within commuting distance, but maybe Arizona. My boss came back with a “Yes, but I had to do it within the next week”. The date when the office in Sunnyvale was to be closed.
Somehow, I did it. Got everything packed from both my office and my mobile home, got a mover AND additionally bought a larger house in the golf resort in Arizona. Actually, I think it may have spanned a couple of weeks before I was moved in and settled down to work in Arizona.
It was 1992 and my Granddaughter was born back in California a week after I made the move. It was sad to miss that special event, but s*** happens as they say.
But Before the Ink Dried
Then, as they say, before the ink was dry on everything, there was another movement of the DDA portion of Integral. Integral sold the DDA products to IVIS, a group in North Carolina. It was two guys who had once worked at DDA and knew the products and had been doing custom installations and modifications as consultants. I was offered a job to go with the purchase BUT I would have to move to North Carolina. That was totally out of the question for me, so I was suddenly unemployed with two houses in Arizona.
The job market for computer people in Arizona was nearly non-existent. So, I went down and filed for my first unemployment payment. Because I had just moved to Arizona, that was a bit iffy. I started interviewing for jobs, but nothing was clicking. Then one day, I got a call from IVIS in North Carolina. They asked if I still wanted to work for them from Arizona. You Bet!! And that’s what I did until 2001, when IVIS ran into financial problems and I was laid off. I was 66 that time and decided it was time to retire.
Retirement
I sold the house on the golf course, bought 2-1/2 acres in the Queen Creek foothills of the San Tan Mountains and I’ve been here ever since. Not completely retired the whole time, but this is my final hometown.
When we moved out here to Queen Creek, it was very much a small ranch town. There were no grocery stores, only a couple of churches, a couple of schools, and very quiet country living. Since that time, the area has boomed. Continued as Arizona.
