I went to San Jose State and studied education and music. In high school people would ask me what I thought about and I said I had three priorities: dancing, boys, and music. And dancing was the top priority. I just loved dancing to music. I remember that everything thought I was a terrific dancer and I always impressed the boys I was dancing with because I didn’t step on their feet.

I was in my first year in college in 1941 when the Second World War hit. The only boys we saw were the boys coming through. At San Jose State they had a lot of things going on for the visiting service men. It was a wonderful time.

I decided to go to San Jose State because my sister Hazel became a sister-mother for my family. She was 12 years older than I am and she guided me and Gariel. Gariel went to Dominican as a seventh grader and she was elected president of the school. President and she wasn’t even a catholic!

My sister Hazel asked me what I wanted to do and I said I wanted to be a red truck driver. She told me that wasn’t a good job for a girl. So I said I would find a rich man and marry him and then I can drive any truck that I want to.

She said I should have a fallback plan. She asked if I wanted to be a teacher, and I definitely didn’t. But she asked me to try and see how I liked it. She said the best school for me to learn to be a teacher would be San Jose State. And I thought that if I were a kindergarten teacher, that wouldn’t really be like teaching because I would just have fun with the kids. So I went into kindergarten primary. I did that for eight years.

My father died when I was fifteen and my mother died when I was sixteen. I was away at Dominican because my mother couldn’t take care of me.

I decided to take as many units as I could the first few years of high school and then spend the last year playing and having fun. It worked out beautifully because Dominican took me with fifteen units, the only thing I needed was a course in civics. So I took that course in civics and graduated at 20 from San Jose state. I married at twenty and had Mark at twenty-one.
I had some bad fortune but I made the most of my good fortune in those years.


1941: A Pivotal Year for Me

I became strong in that year.

I was with a whole new group of women that I didn’t know. They didn’t like me very much because I wasn’t Catholic, I wasn’t from California, and I wasn’t from a wealthy family. They made life miserable for me.

My father died in October, so my brother came and picked me and Gariel up and we drove up to Reno. And while I was gone, the girls went into my diary and read it and thought it was the funniest thing that they ever saw. That was such a trauma for me.

I told the head mother that I didn’t want to be the roommate for the girl I was with. She ridiculed me for being the hick. There happened to be another girl from Reno, Norma, who was a darling Italian girl and she didn’t like them either. So we became great pals and roomed together. The rest of the girls we just didn’t give a damn about. This was when I was sixteen. I had to deal with my parents’ deaths, being away from all of my friends and my boyfriend and it was quite a year. This was the year that hardened and taught me how to depend on myself.

The only thing was that Norma and I decided that we need to be grown up and sophisticated. So we started smoking. I was in a catholic environment, which I had never experienced before. My father had been the best friend of the Baptist minister while I was growing up. So we were really close with the Baptists.

So here I was: this little, freckle – faced Baptist plunked down in the middle of all these Catholics. Not only that I had to get up at five every morning and go to mass, where my knees got sore.

During the Second World War, I wrote a lot to the service men who I met and danced with. And I had some really good teachers in college. I don’t think there’s much more to tell about this time in my life.