Larry, our daughter, Janet, and I moved to Alameda when Janet was only two years old.

Larry and I decided he should accept a position in Northern California for Kaiser Steel in Oakland. He had been working for Kaiser in Los Angeles as an inside salesman. It was a bit of a promotion, but more than that an exciting change for us. We wanted to branch out.

My Aunt Rose, who also worked for Kaiser (Engineers) in Oakland found us a sweet duplex in Alameda — just a short ride through the “tube,” the underwater tunnel to Oakland from Alameda.

After a bit, I decided it was time to look for a job — a part-time one at least.

I saw an ad for what sounded to me like the perfect job at the University of California at Berkeley, aka Cal. It was part-time so I could spend mornings with Janet at one of the many lovely little parks in Alameda, and the bus route ran right by my house. One of my neighbors loved Janet and begged me to let her take care of her while I was gone to work — should I get the job.

I found my way there for my interview, somehow. That giant campus was a bit daunting and had recently been a hotbed of controversy — primarily because of the protests that took place there against the war in Vietnam.

There was also a serial rapist running rampant on the campus at that time, but I’ll come back to that later.

The interview was in Cal’s music department with the director of the All-Male, fifty-member Marching Band, and the position was for a secretary. The director was a funny, kind man. We hit it off right away, and I was hired.

I was to share the job with another Mrs. Miller! She was older than I, and she wanted to cut back on her hours.

Mrs. Miller of the Afternoon was an English Lady and your stereotypical personification of a secretary straight out of a BBC mystery that would have taken place during WWII. She had graying hair which she wore in a tight bun. She was tall and sturdy with very good posture, and she did, indeed, drink her tea every morning and every afternoon.

There were other people in the department — a beautiful woman who worked with musicians in the singing area of the department. She sometimes brought her dogs to work — two elegant looking Salukis. She was a true bohemian with a touch of Hollywood, and she had what is called the artistic temperament. She and the dogs were a perfect match, sleekly moving through the hallways.

Carla was our student intern. She was hippie-esque; a big, happy, open and free-thinking girl. One day she brought in a newspaper for me to read. Later, she asked me how I liked it. I told her I loved all the positive, feel-good stories. I really didn’t notice who published the paper.

Very soon, she invited me to meet with a group she belonged to, not explaining too much about it, but if I liked that newspaper, she was sure I’d like her friends. And so it was that I joined her one evening in a small apartment in the Berkeley Hills.

The rooms were jam-packed with people working beads and chanting “Namyo Renga Kyo.” I was handed some beads, sat on the floor and tried to chant along with them. Soon, I got into the rhythm. In my mind, I was thinking, “What in the hell am I doing here”?

Carla’s eighty-year-old grandmother was there, too. My understanding was that she was there to support her granddaughter no matter how weird it got, and I admired her for it. You wouldn’t have found MY grandmother at any event like that.

Grandma hitched a ride home with us, and we dropped her off in front of a very posh apartment building across the street from Lake Merritt in Oakland. As soon as we pulled away from the curb, they all started trashing Grandma. One woman called her that “effin’ old bitch.” What business was it of hers to be intruding on Carla’s life or making judgments about it. None of those loving, generous, accepting people seemed upset by this outburst. I was speechless.

I counted it as an experience, however, and that was one of my first, tentative steps out of my comfort zone.

I rode to work on the bus in the afternoons. We passed through Oakland on the way to Berkeley and for the first time I belonged to a minority group. Everywhere I looked, on the bus, and on the streets, there were many, many black people but very few white people. I began to get a new perspective into what it felt like to be a member of a minority group.

One day, as our bus entered the Berkeley city limits, I noticed some disturbing sights. A Jaguar dealership had its windows smashed, as well as the cars. I noticed an exploded mailbox and several other storefronts. It was a high-end shopping area, and I guess the mailbox was “one” for the government.

The driver suddenly pulled over to the side of the road and said, “This is as far as I’m allowed to go today.” Well, gee, thanks for the warning. I walked the rest of the way through the infamous Sather Gate and on to campus.

President Nixon had promised to stop the bombing in southeast Asia, but it had begun again, and the protesters were back in action.

I met a few people who had been victims of the protests — an elderly woman who was an administrative assistant in the history department for one. She was overcome with tear gas and out ill for several days. Another woman was near a bomb when it went off and couldn’t hear for quite some time.

About a month into my job, another secretary was hired in our department. She was a young woman whose father was black and whose mother was Native American. She was beautiful and so open and friendly. We hit it off right away.

Someone suggested I try to find a ride home from the university rather than taking the bus. I looked on the notice boards on campus and found a carpool ride offer for a small sum of money.
The driver was a woman who was middle-aged and crabby and took no shit from anyone.

One day, on our way home, she looked at me and said, “How did a WASP like you get hired?” Truly, the people of mixed race should have had a better chance of getting a job than I did — especially at a university and especially at that time. “Equal Opportunity” and “Affirmative Action” were the new buzz words.

I told her I was not technically a WASP, even though I might look like one. I told her my origins were in Western Europe and that I was a Catholic — though lapsed at that time (and many other times).

She was a B-word, but we got along just fine. Hmmm. I wonder why?

She was menopausal — her own declaration — and was recently separated from her “asshole of a husband.” He had been cheating with his younger secretary. “Such a cliche’,” she said, but her middle name was definitely “bitter.” Later, she obtained a prescription for an anti-depressant, and the change in her was startling and seemingly over night. She was much nicer to me, but I found I missed the old crab.

Whenever I had to type a letter or any correspondence of any kind that included a reference to Stanford University, I was politely requested to substitute any other four-letter word that started with an”f” in place of the “ford” of Stanford. This was something Mrs. Miller of the Morning refused to do, so they saved those documents for Mrs. Miller of the Afternoon.

The rivalry between the two schools was, and is, epic.

One day I needed some copies made. The college apparently did not have enough money in the budget for in-office copiers, and so it was that I was sent to downtown Berkeley, on Telegraph Avenue, also famed as the birth place of the bra-less movement, to get my copies made — except that I didn’t get them made because according the very polite, soft-spoken, bra-less young woman who worked in the copy place, “Their machine is all fucked up.”

“Oh, okay. I guess I’ll come back later,” trying to appear cool, but honestly that explanation was a first for me. Much, much later, I adopted that very explanation whenever a copier I was using was, shall we say, not working correctly.

As for that Native-American/black girl I worked with in the office? I observed that she had seemed very pre-occupied and under stress for several days. I urged her to talk to me about what was bothering her, and she confessed she was pregnant, had had a big fight with her Latin boyfriend, and that she was not getting married, and that most likely she was getting an abortion.

All these new and strange worlds and viewpoints —  from Buddhism to protests to abortion, not to mention the freedom that these new people felt in expressing themselves — opened up to me a brand new world of friends and experiences and stories that I cherish to this day.

Getting back to that rapist on campus? One day, I heard a young student victim being interviewed on radio. She had been raped at knifepoint under a tree I knew well, “But,” she said, “you know, for a rapist he was quite the gentleman.”

This was my new world in the early 1970s.

The End