Sacramento, California was a far cry from Vancouver, British Columbia. Here I found a city where the sun shined almost every day. It was very hot in the summer and mild in the winters. It was the first time I had seen palm trees. Sacramento was a city of parks and nice homes. It was a good introduction to what was going to be my adoptive country. Vancouver was a city I loved dearly. It had beautiful mountains, the Pacific Ocean, and the frequent rain that brought a lush green to all the landscape. I loved the smell of the cedar trees, the bounty of the fruit orchards, and lovely home gardens full of colorful flowering bushes and plants. Vancouver was a city I would always love, no matter where I lived.
The first thing I had to do was to find a place to live. I contacted Dr. Spurgeon, my employer, to let him know that as soon as I found a place to live I would be ready to go to work. I checked the local paper and found a room for rent. Visiting the home, I found that it belonged to an old Spanish American war veteran and his wife. I don't recall how much I paid, but it was a nice room. The old veteran's name was Pete. He had a well trained police dog. Several times coming home in the evening, the dog would not let me in the house. I would have to wait until the barking got the attention of its owner. Pete's wife was an invalid, and was very heavy. He often asked me to help him get her into a wheelchair.
I worked for Dr. Spurgeon for about a year. He was married and had a very young daughter. In the beginning, everything was great. I was enjoying my work and he seemed pleased to have me working for him. I had decided that I wanted to learn how to fly. Every weekend I would go out to the airport and take flight instruction from a great guy who was an ex flight instructor in the American Air Force. Flying became my love and I even thought about the possibility of a commercial license. When I took the physical exam for my license, I learned that I was shade blind, which precluded my getting a commercial license. It is not that I was totally color blind, but I was not able to tell dark blue from black, etc.
Things were not going well back at the office. It became clear that Dr Spurgeon had a drinking problem. He had become an alcoholic. Unfortunately, he expected me to be his enabler. I would have to purchase his liquor for him. This was not easy as I was still only nineteen and couldn't do it legally. He would insist that I go out with him to dinner. This became more than I could handle. His wife would call me and ask that I try to get some money for her as she didn't have money for food etc. I didn't drink and this man I had met in the Canadian Army had become someone much different. It became my job to get him home, get money from him for his wife, etc. His practice was going down the tubes. I decided that for my own sake I had to leave. He was not happy with that decision, but I was not going to get anywhere staying with him.
I just had to get another job. I decided that I had enough of dentistry so I applied for a job at the Payless Drug Store in downtown Sacramento. I ended up at the candy counter selling candy. It was about this time that my mother showed up. Pete was happy to rent us a second room and mother moved in. It was nice to have her with me. The war had destroyed our family and as we had all ended up all over the place, it was good to become reconnected. I was still flying every weekend but only for about an hour as money was short at the time.
I decided that I needed to find a better job than the candy counter at the Payless Drugstore. I was not sure just what I wanted to do. I got the Idea of going down to San Francisco and see if I could find something to do. As I got off the bus in San Francisco and was walking up Market Street, I saw a sign for United Air Lines. Their offices were at the corner of Post and Powell Streets. I decided to go in and see what kind of jobs they had. I guess they thought I was a little strange when I asked for the personnel department. They didn't have one. I spoke to the office manager and told him that I had been on several UAL flights and thought that United would be a great company to work for. We spoke for quite a while about all the jobs in the airline industry. He thought that reservations would be a good place to start and offered me a job. This was November 1946. I was to come to work in the reservations office at Post & Powell. There would be a training class in Chicago in December and I would have to participate in that. Two days later, I started work.
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