My job search in July 1963 took three weeks. After some false starts, I walked into the Berlitz School of Languages at 26 O'Farrell Street and applied for a job, though none had been advertised. I was hired to man the front desk as a sort of receptionist, schedule the lessons of the students, and so forth. The Directress, Miss Brunhilde Diemand, was on vacation, so in her absence I was hired by the Office Manager, Mrs. Marion George. It was my languages (and my own courage or effrontery) that got me in the door, but they had further plans for me that I did not know about.
I had only been at Berlitz for a month when, in August, I began to manage their San Mateo branch. While there, I also began to teach English, by the same direct method that we used for all languages. I also sold language courses, and I was extremely good at it, because I believed in the product that I was selling.
So, I was able to pay my share of the rent for the five-room flat on Andover Street. That location was on the south side of Bernal Heights. At the top of the hill (this was before they built the telephone microwave relay station), there was a famous area where young people went to park and "watch the submarine races." We liked to refer to it as Carnal Heights. I never parked there myself, perhaps because I didn't have a car.
I was becoming close with Cheryl (she whose mother had that apartment on Chestnut St. in the Marina). She was into Israeli folk music, taught me some of the dances, and then we went together to a folk dance group called Rikud Am (Dance of the People), which people tended to pronounce very Ashkenazically as "rick-a-dom." It was fun, and I loved the music.
Every day I took a SamTrans commuter bus down to San Mateo and did my stuff at Berlitz. On a Friday in November, Mrs. Belland, who worked in the office, called me from home (it was her day off), and said, "Beg, borrow, or steal a radio; the President has been shot." I hurried down to a drugstore and bought a cheap transistor radio. By the time I got back to the office, they were just beginning to announce that President Kennedy was dead. The news was stunning.
I made an executive decision that I really shouldn't have made without calling San Francisco, and closed the school for the rest of the day. On the SamTrans bus, the high school students from Millbrae, who had been let out early, got on the bus quietly, for the first time ever. In the city, I walked down Market Street, and everyone was silent. I had never seen it like that, not even close.
Being young, there was only so much of funeral music and caissons that we could take. We defended ourselves emotionally by buying 33-1/3 LP albums of Motown music, by Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and someone else. We played those albums all weekend, while radio and TV played funeral music.
The following Thursday was Thanksgiving, which Cheryl had kindly invited me to spend with her family. All of the conversation at the table was, of course, about the JFK assassination and the other killings that quickly followed. We didn't have much to be thankful for, except each other.
(to be continued)
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