Day 7

Day 7: Flight to Hawaii pursuing John Patrick McMenemy; then to California to Aunt Maries House, State Farm, Modeling, Meeting and Moving in with Pete WC: 1688

My military service came to an end in Philadelphia, and with my honorable discharge as a Sargeant E-5, I was free to go. I had become involved with another marine, John Patrick McMenemy, while working in the downtown computer facility. He was lower rank than me, and was under my direction during his training. He had come from Rochester, New York, and was sort of a Steve McQueen kind of a guy, without the star quality. We had dated, going to the Middle East nightclub down the street from my Italian row home. It was the place, remember, with the belly dancers, marvelous food and music. Anyway, I wore a gorgeous red dress the night he came to my home so we could walk down the few blocks to the club. Guess that night is when he fell for me.
After my end of service in Philadelphia (despite a $3000 bonus plus the rank of Staff Sargeant offered, I refused to re-enlist), I flew to Hawaii to join John Patrick.. he had already been transferred there months earlier. I had a chunk of pocket money from accrued savings and was eager for an adventure. Once I got there and he met me, I took a bit of time to find a job.. and landed one, doing data entry for a small company. John and I spent time together at the beach, and he came to my hotel room after the end of his shift at the base. I soon discovered what fool he was and wound up dumping him. He had gotten into several fights and gotten demoted to a lower rank. He suggested to me his plan for our future: he would go to college to become a marine biologist while I worked to help pay his way through it. No thanks ! His convenient little plan was basically to better his life at my expense.. then when he got his degree and a high paying job, he would probably dump me for a younger woman. I had seen that scenario played out by some couples I knew where the wife put the hubbie through medical school and then he dumped her for some cute little twenty two year old nurse. That plan of J.P.'s was the end of our connection. I quit the job, left the hotel with a bill outstanding, and flew back to California to see my Aunt Marie. I had enough money for either the flight home or the hotel bill.. one could not be paid.. I chose to take the flight.
It was good to be back in California. I applied for a computer operations job at State Farm Insurance Company, the same work I had done in the Marines, but they denied me the job because, as they said, “you are a woman, and that staff is all male; they tell some pretty raw jokes and you might be offended”, so I was denied a job so they could tell jokes. What a world ! I was in serious need of income, so I took their offer of a job in a data entry pool of all women. The job was inputting client information from their paper forms onto keypunched cards. It was keypunch entry, using keypunch machines, a typing machine that instead of printing, punched computer cards with little rectangular holes. These were fed into a reader machine, and the data thin printed out in massive reports of data. All the women were young and married but for myself and one other, Louanne Boynton. Louanne was native American, Blackfoot Indian ancestry. She had long straight black hair, was tall and had a great figure. At first we were a bit uncomfortable with each other, and she was hostile until she made me flee to the restroom and cry. She followed me in, and after apologizing, we became the best of friends. The other women spent most of their time talking about either trying to get pregnant or their just produced infant. It was very boring. Louanne and I, both single, were both under 24, and she had an aparment in Santa Ana. She said I could share the place with her, so I moved in. We both began to date, and went shopping and other things together.

After a year or so, I grew frustrated with the going nowhere job at State Farm and began to look about for something else. I saw an ad by Snelling & Snelling Employment Agency one day, seeking employment counselors. After meeting with the office manager of a new office opening in Santa Ana, I accepted the job. The pay was based on successfully placing job seekers in jobs. My compensation was the first month's pay the client earned in the job I had helped him / her secure. There was a signed contract spelling out that agreement. I followed the strategy set out by S&S: I interviewed the jobseeker, gave him or her background forms to complete with all their training, skills, and past jobs. Using that information, I made cold calls to companies that might need someone with that background. I simply went through the yellow pages, making calls to the companies and explainng that I had a candidate who had the kind of skills they required, and asking if they had any openings and if they would meet my client. The odds of a positive response was 3 out of ten to twelve calls. I then kept these openings posted in my jobs journal, for the present client and others on file as well, and for future reference. I was successful in finding jobs for a number of people.
Just about the time I first began the Snelling job, while I had been reading the classifed job advertisements, I saw an ad for an artist's model. I decided to call, thinking this would be a novel thing to do. The man said he was doing a series of oil paintings, of nudes, for suites of a Las Vegas hotel. He told me what time to come over to have photographs taken, which he would use as source material for the paintings. I agreed and went that evening to see him. He lived in Huntington Beach, on Maui Circle, on a corner. His phone voice had been warm and charming, and when I met him he was the most polite, kind, and courteous man I had yet met. Added to those qualities, he was stunningly handsome. His name was Norris John Peters. He told me to take a robe he handed me and go to the guest bedroom to take off my clothes and put it on, then come out to another room where he had his camera and light set up. He took several shots and when he was finishing, I made a comment that I hoped I had enough gas in my tank to get home. (By that time, I had finally learned to drive, gotten a license and actually had a car.) To my surprise, he gave me his gas credit card to use, saying I could bring it back a day or two later. That was a very kind and trusting gesture to a woman he had just met. It impressed me very much. I did return the card to him the next day, on a full tank of gas. The following week I had taken the Snelling job, and the office was going to have an opening party. I knew no one to invite as a date, and I thought of him. I called and invited him to the party, a pot luck event. Pete, as he called himself, made a pot of baked beans in a desco ware orange enamel bean pot. He was perfect. He wore a black shirt and sport coat with a white tie that evening. He was mostly Italian (Sicilian), with the look of Sean Connery and Omar Sharif, mixed into an incredibly gorgeous face. And he looked like a mob guy with the black/white outfit. We joked about it and all evening he introduced ourselves saying: “Hi, I'm Pete, and this is Baby”... It was really humorous. He had a great sense of humor and everyone was charmed by him. I was in love, fully and completely. He was 47, and I was 24. I knew he was the one, the big love of my life.
(Our marriage lasted 27 years, until his death at age 76.) He kept the oil painting he did from my photograph. I still have it, now ten years after he is gone. He carried the photo he took in his wallet all the years of our marriage. God, how I love him still.
I had been dating another man, Morris Brunc, and he asked me to marry him. I said no, and then told Louanne that this had been the second proposal in the past month. She said that Pete would probably ask also. I told Pete what she had said and he said it was a good idea. He asked me to move in with him, and after saying I had to think about it, said Yes immediately. He went with me to pack up my things at Louanne's and off we went to his house. From that day we were together constantly until we married in Mexico just about 6 months later.