The Odd Date

On September 11, 1973 Salvador Allende, the democratically elected, Socialist president of Chile was killed.  Suicide or murder, no one really knows.  I suspect the latter. Augusto Pinochet’s junta tortured, killed and abused the citizens of Chile for years. 

As a fellow socialist nation, the Swedes offered support for Allende’s followers.  The ambassador opened the embassy in Santiago and offered sanctuary.   And Chileans flooded into Stockholm.  And into my dorm.

One of the Chilean refugees landed on my floor at Valhallavagen 5.  We met, spoke and arranged a date.  I wanted to be a journalist.  He would be my interview subject.

On the night of the date, I was nervous.  This was not about him, but about money. I was living on a VERY tight budget—about $2.00 a day.  I became a specialist at walking everywhere, eating one good meal in the student cafeteria—it was always TORSK—which I now know is cod, and dining on omelets for dinner. 

Who would pay for this date?  At home in Los Angeles my male friends paid.  I still feel a bit guilty about that.  What was the protocol of a Chilean and an American in Sweden?

Our dinner was in Gamla Stan-the Old Town.  At an Indian restaurant.   After the curry in an old Swedish café we took the subway to a movie theater.  It was a French movie by Claude Chabrol. A French film with Swedish subtitles.  He spoke Spanish, I spoke English and we both spoke fledgling Svenska.

How many cultures can be incorporated into one date?

Later in the year, Allende’s daughter came to Stockholm and gave a speech at a huge rally.

Today the leader of Chile is a woman whose father was one of the tortured.  Go for it Michelle Bachelet.

Religious Irreverence and White Asparagus

In May of 1973  I left everything I knew and was comfortable with and boarded a plane bound, indirectly, for Munich, Germany. 

As this was well before cell phones, Skype, and email, to finalize the details of my arrival I went to the home of one of my good friends in Los Angeles.  He was Jewish and his mother’s family had been decimated by the Nazis.  But she spoke German and was able to confirm my trip details by phone. I boarded the flight with confidence that my boyfriend would indeed, meet me in Munich.

The plane landed in Paris and for some reason there was a screw up with my connecting flight.  This resulted in me being upgraded to first class on Air France.  I still remember the meal that included aspic and liqueurs.  The man next to me was intent on pointing out the Starnberger See and other Munich landmarks. 

My first night in Germany was spent in a Catholic rectory surrounded by priests.  One smoked a cigarette with his thumb and forefinger (and we all know what that means.) I was in Regensburg for the summer before heading to graduate school in Stockholm.

Early summer was in full Bavarian bloom and one day we drove out into the countryside for a meal. It was Christi Himmelfahrt---ascension.  Although my grandfather was a noted minister, but not Catholic, this holiday had passed me by.  I’m afraid that the visual I got of Jesus farting up to Heaven ( Himmel) was quite irreligious.  I still find the name of the holiday amusing.  Call me irreverent.

We stopped at a small inn and ordered lunch.  I had never heard of white asparagus, let alone eaten it.  It was quite special.  Every time I see it in a store, I buy it and remember that day.  But it’s never quite as good as it was that first time.  I have heard the same about heroin.

One day, many years later in my 20th Century America class, I was using white asparagus as an example of something that was a rarity and would be priced higher. Supply and demand.  The next day one of my favorite students brought  a gift jar of white asparagus that she'd found in her kitchen. 

Going to Grad School--Stockholm

When I left Regensburg, Germany the first time it was to head to Stockholm for graduate school in Sweden.  I was kindly given a sack full of sandwiches made of semmel mit wurst.  I caught the train to the north of Germany and had many hours to kill before I caught my ferry to Sweden.  Because it was the only film in English that I could find, I went to see DEATH WISH with Charles Bronson, a revenge killing film that was not my normal genre.   Then I boarded the overnight ferry. 

When I had lived in Germany, my boyfriend left for Poland for a month and asked his sister and husband in Munich to put me up.  To say the least it was awkward due to the language difference.  They were kind people and all went well.  One day the sister’s neighbor needed help moving and cleaning in her apartment.

I needed money and was eager to help.  After several hours of scrubbing, it was time for lunch.   I was offered a gin and tonic and iceberg lettuce.  That lettuce was at a premium in Munich at the time and probably cost more than I was being paid.  The gin and tonic also caught me by surprise.  I had never had one.

The neighbor explained that she had once dated an American soldier and that they drank gin and tonics.  And they had salads made with iceberg lettuce.

Several weeks later I was finally on the overnight ferry to Sweden.  My only ferry experience was in the San Juan Islands.   It was going to be a long trip so I went up to the bar and ordered a gin and tonic.

The next day as the ferry began to arrive in Nynashamn I was nervous about how I would get myself—and all my worldly goods (a suitcase, a down comforter and a backpack) to the dormitory I supposed to live http://open.salon.com/blog/silverlake in Stockholm.

As I watched the ferry approach the dock I was joined by two Swedes.  I asked them about transportation between the port and Stockholm.  They looked at each other and asked if I could drive a stick shift.  I said yes.

Within minutes I was driving a Porsche off the ferry.  Due to the stringent alcohol laws, the guys I met were cautious about their onboard drinking.   Grinding the gears a few times, and watching the ethereal fog rising from the lowlands, I drove to Stockholm in tandem with the second guy’s Porsche.  Those two guys were decent enough to take me to hotel after hotel (fully booked) and to the Youth Hotel (filled) until they found a bed and breakfast in the outskirts of Stockholm.

My money was short and I didn’t want to spend more than I needed.  I lived off of those sweetly given sandwiches for several days. Half sandwich at a time. 

The Best Job I Ever Had

The best job I ever had was pushing the APPLAUSE button for the television show Truth or Consequences.

I graduated from college in December and had four and a half months to kill before heading to graduate school in Sweden.  I moved home and the job search began.  My first job lasted one night.  I put cheese on frozen pizza crusts and waited for the delivery phone to ring.  As this was almost on the Sunset Strip, a night job and in the early swinging 70’s, my mother was worried for my safety.  I was worried for my sanity.  Four years of college led to this?

So I quit my job at Pizza Man He Delivers.  A few more days were spent reading the classified ads, which in those days were divided by gender.  The columns had male plumbers and female secretaries…. and the ubiquitous Girl Friday.

I finally went to an employment agency on Wilshire Boulevard and landed a job at Union Oil.  This paid $66 a week after the agency got their cut.  The salary was two dollars over what I would have gotten on unemployment.  All I had to do was Xerox every document that had ever passed through the company.  I’m not joking.  There was so much stuff to copy that they didn’t allow me to lower the protective lid.  I photocopied 8 hours a day so Union Oil could move into its new, modern building. To this day, I’m waiting for the permanent eye damage to kick in.

My lunch was invariably a can of V8 juice and cold hamburger patty to which had been added Lipton’s onion soup mix.  I tried to teach myself German from a small dictionary while I ate.  It was a lonely job, but I took satisfaction in knowing that I would be getting out and the other people I worked with were stuck there.

The mind-numbing boredom of the job soon took its toll.  On a day off, I ventured into the world where I was sure I belonged: a television station. 

I walked into the lobby of KTTV and immediately stood out.  The station had an ad in that day for a manual labor job.  I was the only female and the only Caucasian in the room.  A man swung through the front doors, asked me why I was there and in a swashbuckling move, took me up to the set of Truth or Consequences.  Three weeks later I got a call that someone had been fired and the job was mine.  All I had to do was seat the audience, push the APPLAUSE button, and generally act as a “page.”  The people who seated the audience for the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson were “pages.”  And the kids who hustled around the Senate and the House were “pages.’  I didn’t get the title, but I did the same thing.

After that I went to work at Union Oil for 8 hours and came home for a quick meal before driving to Hollywood and the set at the studio.  I loved my night job.  It was fun seeing the excitement in the faces of the people who waited in line outside.  They were thrilled to be there, and were often from far away places.  I remember noticing the vintage 1930’s era tie one old man was wearing as I collected the entry tickets.  I complemented him and he insisted on giving it to me. It was a beauty.

As I learned the ropes of seating the audience, I also learned how the whole “set-up-the –audience-to be- thrilled” worked.  Just as the audience was seated, a man—the one who hired me—would come on stage to “warm up” the audience.  He would do his shtick until he would hear a secret sound.  Known only to the staff, someone would utter a low moan into the sound system.  This was a sound no one would normally hear unless one was listening for it.  At this point he would introduce the official announcer for the program, Charles Lyon who would, in turn, finally introduce the now primed crowd to Bob Barker.

When my confidence grew, I realized the power I held in my hand.  On of my favorite amusements was to push the APPLAUSE button, watch the sign light up and hear the audience clap away like trained monkeys.  I soon realized that the man who hired me was a jerk…and that’s being polite.  One night I went to the sound booth, uttered the low secret moan and quickly returned to my place in the audience. He grandiosely introduced Lyon; the curtain opened and there was no one there.  But because I was pushing the APPLAUSE button the crowd was rabid and the man with the alliterative name was caught off guard.

During my months at that job I got to witness Olympic athletes, astronauts, fading stars and moviedom greats.  If there was anything involving a pie fight, I took home the leftovers.  But my favorite night came when I invited my parents and an out of town business associate of my father’s.  I taped off their front row seats with masking tape and seated them after the rest of the audience was in their places.  As my parents sat, I turned to my mother and said, “Mrs. Barker, Bob said he’ll meet you after the show.”  The women behind my mother were all a twitter.

When Bob Barker came on stage to pick contestants for that night’s show he unwittingly selected my parents.  I’m sure this was an employee breech of some kind, but I knew I was off to Sweden soon, so it didn’t really matter. 

My parents were separated and Barker told my mother that a young, good-looking woman would parade by my father in a room off stage.  “What will be the first thing he notices about her?”  My mother responded:  “Her bosoms.”    My father was secretly filmed as the woman sashayed by.  Then Bob Barker brought him on stage and asked what he had first noticed about the nubile young woman.  My father didn’t miss a beat.  “Her personality.”  For that he won a vacuum cleaner and was stopped at least once in an airport by someone who recognized him from the show.

The Pickle Factory

One lesson I learned very quickly was that no matter how much education a person has, if they don’t speak the language of the country they live in, they have little value.  And such was the case for me in 1974.  I was spending the summer in Regensburg, Germany and Deutsch did I nicht sprecht.

The summer after completing a graduate program at the University of Stockholm and the one before beginning another graduate program in Glasgow, Scotland I needed to earn some money.  The first job I found was in the cafeteria of the University of Regensburg.  I stirred huge vats of soup wearing a hairnet.  The men who worked there—with hair much longer than mine—did not wear hairnets.  When the summer session ended, so did the job.  And thus I ended up at the Hengstenberg pickle factory.

Every morning I would slip into high rubber boots, a khaki worker’s coat and put what can only be described as a babushka over my hair.  I bicycled several miles through the town, passing the home of Copernicus, to the factory where I stood for eight hours shoving raw cucumbers into jars on a line with other women.  To save money, I ate cucumbers for lunch.  Needless to say, the upside of this situation was weight loss.

For five Deutschmarks (about $2) an hour I joined the gastarbeiters from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia. We shared the common denominator of not being German. The few Germans who worked in the factory were not the brightest pickles in the barrel.

We all stood before a trough of cucumbers, which was regularly re-filled.  A conveyor belt would send the jars our way.  The person at the front of the row put in the dill springs and seeds and from there on we shoved and cajoled cucumbers into the jars.  We wore rubber gloves and in the six weeks that I worked there, I wore out the fingers and thumbs of several pairs.  Once, a woman far down the line found a jar that wasn’t packed tightly enough and threw it to the ground in anger. At the end of the line the jars were filled with brine. When I got home, a rented dorm room at the university I did not attend, I reeked of vinegar, dill, onions and brine and my boots were covered in cucumber seeds.

Having been an aficionado of sour pickles since childhood, I was greatly relieved to find that I didn’t care for the Hengstenberg variety.  I had heard stories of people who worked at ice cream stores or chocolate factories and been entirely put off.  I still enjoy a good pickle, just not the Hengstenberg kind.

One day I arrived at work to find that our routine had changed.  We sat on small crates and peeled onions for the day.  I learned that after a while one’s eyes stop tearing up.  The onions were for purple pickled cabbage.  The room next to the pickle line produced sauerkraut. 

Several weeks into the job, two new men arrived.  One was a student from Uganda and the other, a Sri Lankan, was studying for the priesthood in Rome.  We shared the common bond of the English language and the need to make money to subsidize our education.  We soon became friends and ate lunch together.  Once, the Ugandan came over to my station to say hello.  He was very dark skinned and the German woman next to me put out her hand and touched his arm.  She explained that she wanted to see if the color would rub off.  See what I mean about not the brightest pickle in the barrel?  The Ugandan was very gentlemanly and laughed it off.

On another occasion I was in the bathroom on one of our very limited breaks.  Several gastarbeiters surrounded me and asked “ Is it true that you are American?”  When I answered in the affirmative they looked shocked.  “Then WHY are you working here?”

I explained that it was a summer job, that I was a student and I needed to make some money, but didn’t speak enough German to get a decent job.  I then asked them about the homemade pita bread they brought in the lunches and the next day they brought me some.

I was able to kiss the factory goodbye after six weeks.  For all I know, they are still there.

A few days before I was to leave for Glasgow, my boyfriend found my application for the residence halls at Strathclyde University in one of his books.  He had never mailed it.  I left for Scotland not knowing where I would be living for the next year.

On a trip to Vancouver many years ago I found a jar of Hengstenberg mixed pickle.  I bought it and keep it on my desk to remind me to appreciate the job I have.