Undergraduate Adventures con't

A Brief Respite (a few years away from school)

After droppping out of Bowling Green and driving to San Francisco, my new husband and I presented ourselves on the doorstep of an old college friend who had been living in San Francisco for a few years. The couple with whom we had driven to California took the VW van and started back to Ohio. The plan was that they would sell the van when they got back and send us money.

When we arrived, we thought that Bill would be delighted to see us and that we could stay with him for a week or two while we found jobs and an apartment. Unfortunately, there were a few problems we hadn't thought about.

• San Francisco was going through a time of horrible unemployment. The dock workers were on strike, so all of the jobs around the ports were no longer available. Plus, the Vietnam War was ending and a lot of the men being discharged were landing in California and deciding to stay. Also, California was a heavily unionized state; there was even a ditch diggers' union! Finally, San Francisco was the place to be, and thousands of young people from across the country had left their homes and moved west. Even Bill's garbage collector had a master's degree! So finding a job was going to be a lot tougher than we had anticipated.
• The housing situation was a lot more expensive and harder to negotiate than it had been in the midwest. Most of the apartment rentals were not listed in the newspaper classifieds; potential renters had to go through rental agencies which charged a fee just to find out what places were available. Landlords also required a deposit, plus first and last months' rent and references on top of the agency fee. To make it even worse, San Francisco has limited housing available because of its location, making rentals some of the most expensive in the country.
• Bill had a girlfriend who paid the rent on their apartment, and she didn't want guests.

So instead of a happy reunion with our friend, we had to find a place to stay immediately. Since we had arrived on Sunday night, no rental agencies were open. Bill got the Sunday paper, said, "Here's a place you can rent by the week," packed us back into our VW and sent us to The Fellah Hotel.

We had a little trouble finding it because it wasn't on a street. It was on an alley off San Francisco's downtown in an area referred to as the Tendorloin, a charming collection of skid row hotels, hookers, bums, and runaway kids. For $25 we got a room with a sink in the corner, a nasty looking mattress on the floor, kitchen and bathroom priveledges to be shared with a lot of loonies, and a broom to sweep up the broken glass on the bedroom floor. Our friends dropped us off and drove the VW van towards Oregon, and we stayed behind, wondering what we had done. Welcome to San Francisco!

We were in the Fellah Hotel for two weeks before Bill decided to take us back to his place. He came to visit us, and after fighting off the panhandlers in the hall, he was sitting on our mattress sharing a cup of tea when something fell off the ceiling into his cup. That was too much even for him, so he helped us pack up our stuff and go back to his house. My husband and I both eventually found jobs, but no apartment. I managed a downtown photo store and he delivered sandwiches and sold Fuller Brush door-to-door. After a few months, Bill and his girlfriend decided to move down the coast and we inherited their apartment.

A year later we moved to an even better apartment in the Haight Ashbury near Golden Gate Park where we lived until we decided to move back to Ohio.

During our years in San Francisco, we met a lot of artists, musicians, and crazy people. We acquired a St. Bernard, a Chevy van, and a taste for exotic food. It wasn't easy, but it was certainly interesting. Eventualy, I decided to go back to school, so we packed up the Chevy van, loaded the St. Bernard, and drove back to Bowling Green where I finished my BA.

Post Script: The VW van never made it back to Ohio; it broke down attempting to cross the Rockies at Greybull, Wyoming, and as far as I know, it is still there.