Our Start in Bellflower California
Moving just a city over from Lakewood we started in Bellflower, California where we learned to share chores, stories, and started becoming one.
Rose Street
We honeymooned in the Mammoth Lakes area. We went on hikes and explored earthquake faults. We enjoyed the countryside together. Then I suggested we play “horse” at the basketball court where we were staying. She destroyed me on the court. That set the stage where I knew she would never back off to stroke my manly ego.
After our return home, we moved into the Rose Street house near Lakewood Boulevard that we had rented from a woman in her 90’s. Then there were the realities of early married life and renting. Once, when our roof began leaking, our landlord’s husband and his older brother came to replace the roof. We thought there would surely be at least one death up there on the roof. But no one died, and the leaks stopped.
Another time, the bathroom faucet began leaking. The husband also made that repair. He did not bother to shut off the water supply when replacing the faucet. Water poured everywhere and generously beyond the bathroom and into the living room. Once he finished up, we spent the next several days drying out our floors and ridding ourselves of the musty smell.
Once, as we were leaving a hardware store, someone was giving away a puppy. She was cute and fluffy and came home with us. We named her Scamper. She became a neighborhood favorite, and we were known as Scamper’s parents.
We soon moved next door to an identical house but with a different landlord. We could remove our things from one home and place them in the same spot in the second house. Our new landlord was a long-time family friend who had a rule about pets not being in the house. We managed to sneak Scamper inside sometimes. Our landlord liked her and looked the other way when she made it inside. He owned the catering business that catered our wedding. We often worked at his catering gigs to make extra money.
Kathy had a career in teaching. I also needed to find a career. 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 his entire life. He wanted to ensure I wouldn’t face similar biases and wanted me to be college-educated. I reluctantly agreed. My mother, a bookkeeper, encouraged me to explore the field of accounting. This turned out to be a good career direction, and I did well in classwork. After completing a few classes at Cerritos Community College, I continued my education in Long Beach at the California College of Commerce. I rode a bike between home and school, which are about 12 miles apart, crossing over Signal Hill with its substantial sections of uphill and downhill terrain.
A year into my accounting studies, I secured a full-time accounting position at Pacific Valves in the evenings, allowing me to continue attending school full-time in the daytime. I got my first exposure to computers there. Even back in 1975, I recognized that computers would become an essential part of my future career. I have tried to stay current in technology since. The job was ideal because they needed me to process documents and answer questions for keypunch operators (a term that is no longer in use today). They required 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 timing and platform for homework, but I also graduated from school with two years of work experience already under my belt.
The state of California would not recognize Kathy’s elementary education major and issued her a temporary teaching credential until she finished a major that they would acknowledge. She chose make her music minor into a fine arts major and attended California State University, Long Beach, to complete her studies. Certainly, classes like “The History of Rock and Roll” helped her to be a better elementary teacher. She took an art class that had a strange instructor. Each student was required to submit their assigned artwork, and upon submission, the instructor would grade it. An F would count as 50%. However, he often refused to grade the art piece and gave it a 0% grade, much lower than an F, if it didn’t meet his objectives.
Once, the assignment was to create a nude sculpture. This was a dilemma for Kathy, as it didn’t align with her values. Kathy asked the instructor what qualities and skills he hoped she would accomplish with the sculpture. He gave her the skill set he hoped to see applied. Kathy decided to do a sculpture of a boy sitting on a rock, fishing. She turned it in, expecting a zero. Everyone in the class except her got a zero. Kathy’s sculpture got the only passing grade.
Artesia Court: Our first fixer-upper
It was a humble but a great start and our first experience at flipping a dilapidated home.
While I was still full-time in college, but working full-time, we decided to buy a house. As you can imagine, with a beginning teacher’s salary and the very slim salary from my job after school, the budget for a house was minimal. Dorothy Benson, a longtime family friend from church, took the challenge and became our realtor. It took some hunting but she came through with a fixer on Artesia Court in Bellflower. It was tiny, with only 900 square feet. 300 square feet of that was a garage converted into an apartment that we rented out for $75 per month, half of our house payment of $150. We had a big painting party with family and friends who helped us paint and get the little house ready to live in. The house needed a lot of work. We replaced the electrical service. (Kathy’s father was an electrician.) We replaced the roof, carpets, and landscaping. We created a laundry room. We painted and wallpapered inside and painted outside. It was a cute little house when we were done. We bought it for $17,500 and sold it two years later for $33,000. A very successful flip.
Kathy taught for three years in central Los Angeles. A new school principal came in her third year who thought that only African American teachers were capable of teaching African American students. He took every opportunity to criticize and embarrass her and the six other other non-African American teachers at his school. She had been excellent with the kids, but her principal didn’t want her in that neighborhood. She burned out from the fight and decided to work elsewhere after the year ended. She planned to return to teaching but needed space.
She worked as a buyer for a manufacturing company. She was a great buyer but felt out of place. There was a time, though, that they asked her to order 100 washers. She ordered 100 pounds of them instead. She was teased about that for the rest of her time with the company. That’s a lot of washers. They may still have some of that stock.
While living here, a body shop across the street put a 1963 Porsche 356 for sale for $3,600. I wanted the car, and Kathy thought I should buy it. But I didn’t buy it because I felt it was too small for me. In good condition, it would be worth well over $100k now. Maybe I should have just accepted being a little crowded. But with my history on cars I probably would have moved on to another car anyways.
While we were developing our careers, we wanted to be parents so very badly, but for some reason, pregnancies wouldn’t make it to the three-month mark. There were miscarriages and difficult times between pregnancies. Then, there were the questions at church and from family about when we would start trying to have a family. Four years into our marriage, Kathy became pregnant with Melissa and carried her to full term. Kathy decided to become a career homemaker, at which she also excelled.
Our little house would not hold three people, so we started looking. I had graduated from college by then, and we were able to afford something larger. Parenting was a role Kathy and I had long hoped for.
Beach Street: A bigger fixer
The first fixer upper went pretty well, why not try another?
As Kathy was winding up her career outside the home, I saw a 1964 Triumph TR4A at a car lot. I bought it and brought it home without discussing it with Kathy. She was understandably unhappy with the decision. I took it apart to restore it. Before I got it back together, I realized that I couldn’t afford the restoration on only one income, so I sold the car in pieces for much less than I had paid for it. I was still learning how to think “we” instead of “me”.
The Church asked us to become foster parents to a teenage girl from a Native American reservation. She was with us for part of the school year. We had never been parents and were still getting to know each other and our own newborn. We were not yet ready for the parenting job with a teenager, especially one who came with challenges. When we received a $200 phone bill (which was big back then) due to her undisclosed long-distance phone calls around the country, she was placed in another home. We were too inexperienced to parent her.
I specialized in dairy clients at the CPA firm that hired me when I graduated. My relationship with the firm management did not go well. Many of their clients had previously received poor-quality accounting work from the firm’s previously inexperienced accountants who had since moved on. I spent extra time correcting their books to ensure they met nationally recognized accounting standards (now GAAP). They did not understand or appreciate the additional time spent fixing past inaccuracies.
After a year, I moved to Stauffer Chemical Company, from which my dad had retired. His dad had also retired from Stauffer, so I became a third generation employee. I enjoyed Stauffer and learned a lot. 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 were so vague I didn’t recognize it as a job offer, and I did not accept it. And I was no longer in the pool for promotions. It was time to move on.
In Lakewood, Kathy and I both came from families with well-known leadership ties. We felt the need to move outside that umbrella to become our own family. We decided to try a move to Utah.
The story of Kathy & Ron Goodlad
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