One of my mother’s family members was actually well off. He opened a shoe store, and then a second one, and before long he had 500 shoe stores in California. Family being what it is, this meant that an entire generation of nephews worked in shoe stores or shoe warehouses. During the Great Depression, having access to any type of job was a blessing. My father hadn’t done too well at the fruit stand he set up where the city ended and the orange groves began. That was at the corner of Fairfax and Third. The reason the fruit stand failed was because he would set it up, go gambling, and then come home with whatever fruit was left at the end of the day. He must have liked the oranges. As long as I can remember, my mother would squeeze the juice of three oranges for him fresh every morning. Not for anyone else. Just for my father. It was supposed to be healthful. Then he’d smoke four packs of Camels throughout the day. Things must have been rough. My father told me about standing in soup lines with the other jobless, hungry men in Los Angeles. Therefore, when shoe maven cousin offered him a job as a shoe salesman, he gladly accepted. As generous as the maven was, his young relatives still had to work for two weeks for free before they were hired for pay. This was a common thing at that time, and my father made a real effort to succeed. He did so well, he was asked to open and manage a shoe store in San Luis Obispo, which was basically a stop on the train route to San Francisco that also happened to have a Mission and two blocks of downtown. Of course, my mother had to work at the store with him. I don’t understand the dynamics of their relationship. She was miserable because he was mean to her but she loved him so much that one cousin who lived with them during this time said she would have carried him on her back if he’d asked. On my father’s part, he may have been mean to her but he wanted her with him everywhere he went. So, go figure. My mother was sad to be separated from the throng of relatives in Echo Park. There were no Polish Jews in San Luis Obispo, or so it seemed. They told the story of ordering sour cream with their bottles of home delivered milk and butter. Every week, they’d ask for sour cream and every week none would show up. Finally, after my father placed an annoyed call, they got their sour cream. It was a bottle of cream that was allowed to go sour, just for them. Within a year or so, my mother got pregnant with my sister. My father missed her at the store and talked her into hiring a live-in babysitter and housekeeper. A charming young Japanese American woman was hired and was part of the family for seven years or so, until she was dragged off to an internment camp for Japanese citizens during WWII. My father did his best to keep her with them. He wrote letters; he put himself up as surety, but nothing worked. How ironic that while our cousins in Poland were being put on cattle cars and hauled to concentration camps, Mary was put on a train for Manzanar. During WWII, a military camp was set up near San Luis Obispo to protect us against invasion by sea. The detail of soldier that was stationed on the beachfront to stand guard day and night lacked any of the comforts of the inland shelter that soldiers on base enjoyed. The businessmen of SLO decided to pool their resources and create a USO in town for the soldiers to enjoy. My father was president of this group. There are many things my father did during his lifetime that made him a hero to me in spite of gambling and other issues. Doing everything he could to keep Mary with us was one of them and it eventually had a good ending. The San Luis Obispo USO fight was another. You see, the soldiers who stood duty at the seaside were all African American. They were the men who were actually the first line of defense. Yet when they tried to enter the USO, they were refused admission. Once that was brought to my father’s attention, he launched his attack. He quickly scheduled an appointment with the Commanding Officer and asked if the man was aware of this unjust treatment. The Commander tried to justify it, explaining that allowing mixed race socialization would lead to fights among the soldiers. My father explained to the Commander that if this policy was not immediately changed, financial support would cease and the center would be closed to all military. No equal access, no more USO. The Commander relented and that was that. Were there fights? Probably. With Mary gone, and the war effort in full swing, my folks decided to leave the shoe store and return to Echo Park, which made my mother very happy. My father tried to reenlist in the Army but was told he was too old and of much more use to the country by riveting sheet metal to airplane wings. In fact, he was such an expert at airplane assembly they wouldn’t allow him to leave his job until the war was over. They could do that in those days. There were many things I learned from San Luis Obispo stories, aside from the fact that my father was a true champion of civil rights. One was that my mother was as bad a house cleaner then as she was when I knew her. They told the story of an earthquake that caused the wall of their rented apartment to separate from the floor by about an inch. That meant Ma didn’t need a dustpan; she could just sweep the dust into the new crack in the floor. A second was that my father must have had brain damage from too much riveting because as long as I knew him he was incapable of turning a television knob by himself and every single wall light switch he installed in our house was upside down. Leaving San Luis Obispo meant I eventually got to grow up in Echo Park, other than a brief stint on a chicken ranch, which I will tell you about later because it’s really funny. Best of all was after the War, Mary came to live with us in Echo Park. It was very important for a host of reasons, not least of which that meant my father could make my mother go to work with him every day and sell chickens.