We first moved onto Rose Street in Bellflower near Lakewood Boulevard. Our landlord and her husband were in their 90’s. Once our roof began leaking. Her husband and his older brother decided to replace the roof themselves. We thought there would be a death up there on the roof. But the roof was completed, no one died, and the leaks stopped. Another time the bathroom faucet began leaking. Her husband made that repair as well. When replacing the water line to the faucet he did not bother to shut off the supply line. Water poured everywhere and beyond the bathroom out into the living room. He finished up and we had to dry our home out.
Once, as we were leaving the store someone had a puppy they were giving away. She was fluffy and cute, and she came home with us. We named her Scamper. She loved people and became well known with the kids around our home. We were known as Scamper’s parents. We later moved next door to an identical house but with a different landlord. We could simply remove our things from one house and place them in the same spot in the other house. Our new landlord had a rule about pets and Scamper was not allowed in the house. But he liked Scamper and looked the other way when Scamper made it into the house. He had a catering business, which had catered our wedding, and we often worked for him on his catering gigs to make extra money.
Kathy had a career in teaching. I needed to find a career too. I wasn’t particularly interested in college and my first inclination was to become an apprentice auto mechanic. My parents strongly discouraged this. Dad’s lack of formal education caused him to be treated with a bias that hurt. He wanted to be sure I didn't face similar biases and wanted me college educated. My skills at math became a strong factor in my choosing accounting. My mother had been a bookkeeper and encouraged me to investigate accounting. This proved to be a good direction for me, and I did well in classwork. After a few classes at Cerritos Community College, my education was completed in Long Beach at California College of Commerce. I rode a bike between home and school, crossing Signal Hill which had huge uphill and downhill rides. The round trip was about fifteen miles. I managed to get a full-time accounting job at Pacific Valves in the evenings while still attending school full-time. I got my first exposure to computers here. Working with a computer was an unusual experience back then. I realized right then that computers would become an important part of my career. I have stayed current in technology since. The job was ideal because they needed me there to process some documents and answer questions for keypunch operators (a lost term today), but the workload wasn’t full-time. They needed me to be there full-time but couldn’t keep me busy full-time. So, they told me I could do homework once my duties were completed. Not only did I have the perfect time and platform for homework, but I graduated from school already having two years’ work experience.
My accounting career has taken care of us and I developed some skills that brought me success. I was especially good with companies that had problems to solve. I would identify problems and take the problems on to help with future success, I would then move on to another job in another city. This was typically a four-year cycle. I have also learned that I am better at solving the problems than at running day-to-day operations. And then there was that pesky belief that I wasn’t as good as people thought I was and would be “discovered” if I stuck around. In retrospect, I believe my career direction in taking on difficult situations was probably a poor choice for me. While I was good at it the stressful demands would eventually affect my bipolar disorder. Kathy reminds me often that I can’t change the past. But I can’t help but wonder about the kind of mechanic I could have become.
Kathy had an elementary education major from BYU. The state of California would not acknowledge the elementary education major and issued her a temporary teaching credential until she finished a major that they would acknowledge. She chose a fine arts major and attended Cal State Long Beach to finish up. Certainly classes like "the history of rock and roll" helped her be a better elementary teacher. She took an art class that had a very different instructior. He had very specific tastes. Each student had to do assigned art work and when turned in the instructor would grade it. An F would count as 50%. But he often refused to even grade the art piece and gave a 0% grade, lower than an F. One time the assignment was to do a sculpture of a nude. This was a delemna for Kathy as this just didn't fit our religious standards. Kathy approached the instructor to ask what he was hoping to accomplish with the sculpture. He gave her the skill set he hoped to see applied. Kathy decided to do a sculpture of a boy fishing on a rock. She turned it in, expecting a 0. Actually, everyone in the class except her got a 0. Only her sculpture got a grade.
We wanted to be parents so very badly but for some reason pregnancies wouldn’t “stick”. There were several miscarriages and then difficult times between pregnancies. And then there were the questions at church about when we would start trying to have a family. We were asked by the Church to become foster parents to a teenage girl from a Native American reservation. She was with us for part of the school year. We were too young and inexperienced, and she turned out to be troubled. We were just not up to the job, and when we received a $200 phone bill caused by her phone calls she was placed in another home. After four years, Kathy became pregnant with Melissa and carried her full-term. We decided that Kathy would leave her teaching career to become a career homemaker, at which she also excelled.
While I was still in college, we decided to buy a house. As you can imagine, with a beginning teacher’s salary and my very slim salary, the budget for a house was very limited. Dorothy Benson, a longtime family friend from church, became our realtor. And she came through with a fixer on Artesia Court in Bellflower. It was tiny, with only 900 square feet. 300 feet of that square footage was an apartment that we rented out for $75 per month, half of our house payment of $150 per month. The house needed a lot of work. We replaced the electrical service. (Kathy’s father was a professional electrician.) We replaced the roof, carpets, paint, and landscaping. We created a laundry room. It was a cute little house when we were done. We bought it for $17,500 and sold it two years later for $30,000. When Melissa came along, we needed more room. By this time, I had finished school and we started house hunting again.
We found another fixer in Bellflower for $34,000. Someone had started a flip and ran out of money, leaving their project unfinished. We had to install a toilet in the house before the bank would close on the purchase. (There was no toilet when we bought it.) Its large yard was overgrown with ivy that was several feet deep. It had a huge avocado tree. Before the purchase closed they could never find the keys to open the garage door. The day after closing, the keys to the garage were magically found. The garage had been filled with several years’ worth of garbage. The owner had cancelled trash service. The garage was filled top to bottom, front to back. At least he hadn't been living there and it was only construction trash. We hired a dump truck that made several trips to empty the garage. After a lot of work, we made it into a nice home. We ended up selling it for $55,000 eighteen months after the purchase.
Kathy taught for several years in Watts but was burned out fighting with a new school principal who thought that only African American teachers were capable of teaching African American students. He took every opportunity to criticize and embarrass her. She had been excellent with the kids, but the administrator didn't want her in that neighborhood. She then spent two years working as a buyer for a manufacturing company. Then, when the pregnancy finally worked out, plans were made for her to change to a career as a homemaker.
I had found a job with a CPA firm in Bellflower upon graduation. I specialized in dairy clients. My relationship with management did not go well. Many of their clients had poor quality accounting work done in the past and I spent time fixing their books to meet nationally recognized standards. They did not appreciate the extra time spent fixing inaccuracies. After a year, I moved to Stauffer Chemical Company from which my dad had retired. His dad had retired from Stauffer as well. I enjoyed Stauffer and learned lots. After a few years, I was up for a promotion and a transfer to a chemical plant in South Carolina. I went to Delaware to interview for the position. They made an offer, but the terms of the offer were vague, and I did not accept. I later realized that I had ended my promotability at Stauffer. I went looking elsewhere.