Day 11

Day 11: The Souder Ave. property, five acres; tree bandits, starting college on GI Bill WC: 1826
At the Souder property I learned much about having a country land parcel. We had plumbed in water and electricity also, and used propane for cooking and refrigeration. It was about twelve miles to the small town of Perris, which had just over five thousand people at that time. It had been established in the 1800s and had been visited by some of the fast gun wild west gunfighters. The railroad line that ran through the area gave life to the town, and it grew from thej tade and people brought by the rails. The namesake of the town had been a surveyor and early settler in the area. The whole Perris valley was known for potato farming and there were several families who owned thousands of acres planted with potatoes. The Miner family was one of the leading potato growing families. Some of its children also went into various businesses, including real estate and retail. There was an elderly black actor named Clarence Muse, who had starred in the film “Carwash” years ago. He and his wife had an estate outside the city of Perris, with a nice home. They received guests from Hollywood often, and were present at many of the town social events. I met them, and they were a very nice couple. Wish I could remember his wife's name. Ah well, it may come to me later. There was an art show in the town, on the lawn of the city management buildings. One of my friends from art classes entered her painting, of a faceless figure.. not a very good work at all.. and I entered one of my works. She won a ribbon.. I got nothing. It just showed that there is no common sense to such shows.. the judges make their awards from their own perspectives which sometimes are hard to figure out.




During these years, we finally sold the Souder Street five acres and bought a small two story home in downtown Perris, right behind the Forestry Department building, on B street. It was just a short walk to the post office, library, town hall and city management buildings, as well as local stores. The downstairs of the house had been a basement / garage. We converted it to a downstairs den, first sealing the concrete floors to make them smooth and cleanable. We finished the walls with drywall and put in area rugs, a couple of sofas, two big soft arm chairs, television and other amenities. Pete put in a stairway up to the first floor, cutting a hole in the floor to allow it upstairs. The upstairs had walls covered in knotty pine, natural. We did a drybrushing of a driftwood finish on them to lighten the room up, put in two wing chairs upholstered in yellow floral print, and the usual livingroom sofas, tables, and lamps. The bedroom was just a short hallway away, with the bathroom also off the hall. The kitchen had a little dining alcove where we put a round table and a few chairs. The house was completely charming, and had a terraced landscape and a spiral concrete walkway down from the entrance at the top level. I planted ground cover that was silver blue in color and it cascaded down the slope from the top level of the house to the bottom side of the driveway below. There were giant pepper trees, drooping their branches over the yard, providing a nice shade. We had a black and white cat that had extra toes on his feet. We called him Kitten Katten, and we purred back at him all the time. For a short while we also had a dalmation, also black and white. I was still attending college, driving from Perris to the state university in San Bernardino.




Pete continued to do upholstery, and we lived in the Perris house for some years, until I had completed the associate of arts degree in fine arts at Riverside Community College. . Then we bought a dairy property in Colton, California. It was the original Blue Mountain Dairy, a fully functioning milking dairy, with the milking stanchions in a barn at the back of the big concrete floored processing plant, and with a drive through retail sales building up at the front of the property.The property was fenced with a rolling gate across the front. There was also a small studio apartment to the right side of the processing building, and behind the retail sales building. We painted and furnished the apartment to use to rent and when not rented, it served as a place for us to have lunch together when we were both at work at the property. I used the front sales building as a studio, and painted there daily while completing my bachelors degree. but he now also wanted to begin to move away from upholstery to building homes. I agreed wholeheartedly and he set about to build the first one, a resort cabin in Arrowbear, in the mountains near Big Bear. The plan for the first cabin was an A frame, with a sharp peaked roof and a loft inside. It was on a small lot, about 25 feet wide and 50 feet deep. The road to the cabin was dirt, a typical mountain road. I helped him with the insulation and the drywalling,( and on one night we got snowed in and slept in the loft in sleeping bags); it was a very romantic night, one I will always enjoy remembering. He put Tex 1-11 wood siding on the outside of it, and wrapped the pipes to prevent freezing and bursting in the cold winter. We sold the house pretty quickly once it was completed, within a month or so. Then he started on the second cabin, also an A frame. It presented a bit more difficulty. It appears the span of the building and the pitch of the roof would not support a heavy snow load, so Pete had to buy steel rods to run from one side of the house to the other, bolted, to hold the house and give it the strength to not collapse. The second cabin took a much longer time to sell, over six months. When it finally sold, Pete told me he wanted to move to Mexico, to build a new life there. I was at that time teaching in Rialto, California, at a middle school, in my first teaching position. I really hated to leave a job that had taken me two years to find, but my feeling was that I must go where my husband wants to go.. and the unknown was calling to me. I do have a love of adventure and trying new things.. the uncertainty has never frightened me away from a possible adventure. So we sold the house, sold allour furniture, and gave a 1967 Mustang car to his daughter Pamela. We also gave her a beautiful tile top table, and I gave her a “hope chest” I had custom painted with Egyptian figures all around and on its top as well. (Later we learned she had wrecked the Mustang.. and what she did with the other things will never be known.)




But before I continue about the move to Mexico, let me tell you about being hired to teach at Rialto Junior High School in Rialto, California. For two years following my departure from a six month teaching contract at a catholic high school in San Bernardino, I looked for another position. There were no art teaching jobs available, and a credential to teach art was all I had to offer. Finally, I found the opening at Rialto and landed the job. It included teaching classes of drawing and painting as well as one class of social science and one class of yearbook production. There was a small darkroom with enlarging and film developing equipment installed, and the main classroom was lined with cabinets to fill with art supplies. Then a surprising development popped up. The teachers in the district voted to go on strike, demanding a pay raise and better conditions. I had just been hired, it was only three or four weeks into the start of the school year and following logic, I reasoned that it would make no sense to walk out on a job I had only just secured after a two year search. So I decided not to go out on strike with the other teachers. That made me an outcast, and many of them disliked me for it. One teacher in particular was very angry with me, and pushed me aside one day as she walked past me in the teacher lounge. That was not a minor brush, because she was a rather huge woman, about six feet tall and over 250 pounds of hefty teacher.




I continued to work, walking into the school grounds through the lines of picketing teachers. All but one had gone out on strike. That one was me. All the others had been replaced temporarily by substitute teachers. Some of them were quite nice, and many very qualified and talented. I met and talked with some of them. The strike lasted about three weeks, and when it was over, that fat teacher hated me. She would not look at me nor speak to me. Then I read that there was a psychological strategy to win over someone who was that hostile. All you had to do was get them to accept an offering of food from you. Apparently, once a person takes food from you, it is impossible for them to hate you as much or to fail to at least acknowledge you after. One day there was a birthday celebration for one of the other teachers, with a cake and drinks in the teacher lounge. I arranged to be the one to hand out the dessert plates with slices of cake on them to each teacher. I handed one to the fat angry teacher; she took it and in the days that followed she actually became courteous to me. The strike hostility had died down, and the rest of the year went well. I took summer vacation, then the fall semester began again. That term, near Thanksgiving, Pete told me he wanted to move to Mexico. I had to arrange to resign, though I did not want to.. it had taken me so many years of college and then looking to find this job, and I was going to have to give it up for a future in Mexico that was uncertain. There was no plan in mind other than just the move. I pulled over to the side of the road on the day I resigned, as I was driving home at the end of the day, parked the car, and cried.